ComScore explains Google's drop in click-through rate

ComScore have come out to explain a little more detail behind the release from a few days ago which announced the decline in clicks on Google's paid search ads.

It seems that the reason for the decline in clicks is down to improvements made by Google to increase the click quality (such as only making text clickable instead of the entire ad unit).

One has to wonder whether a letter from Google has triggered this deeper analysis of the issue...

Anyway, with the recent news that click fraud is rising rapidly it's timely for Google to remind us of these improvements. It will be telling to see the Click Forensics data for the 1st quarter 2008.

Demographically targeted Adwords

Google has announced the launch of demographic targeting for Adwords. This will enable you to show your paid search adverts to more targeted customers and thus drive better qualified traffic to your site. Very useful!

This involves site owners sending Google anonymised user data so that Google can then track these people and serve targeted ads. Surely this has to raise questions for data protection? That said, it is immensely useful to any retailer with data on their visitors!

Innovation in PPC

We all know how notoriously difficult paid search is to get right in a highly competitive marketplace. Take car rental, loads of players, very high bid prices and some really proficient PPC campaigns. Need a what to stand out from the crowd? Take the lead from Sixt of Germany then, they've done something very clever with ascii art to make their adverts stand out from the crowd.

This is genius, and they experienced a 40% plus increase in clicks on the campaign! Something that could be applied to many industries!


This campaign has just won an award, more details here.

Facebook may end up carrying Google adverts

Part of Facebooks game plan seems to have been to create an illusion of openness while at the same time ensuring that their platform is actually closed to anyone who could tread on their toes in the areas that drive their revenue. Now admittedly they don't have much revenue right now but that is going to change very soon with all the new advertising options available to brands who want to be promoted on the social network. So with this increasing revenue should come an increasingly closed approach as they try to prevent others from stepping on their toes. Right?

Well, it seems Google may have a way in to the Facebook platform, and it may be something that Facebook can't do anything about.

Bring forth OpenSocket; a Facebook application that allows you to run any OpenSocial application on your Facebook profile. Now, as OpenSocial gains traction I can very well see developers looking for ways to monetise their efforts on this new platform. Of course, with Google at the helm one of the obvious options would be to carry Adsense adverts on your OpenSocial app. So that is how Google can potentially make advertising revenue out of Facebook without striking any sort of deal.

Will this happen? Well, I'd imagine Facebook will try to block Google ads from appearing, but if a lot of developers start using OpenSocial the demand to allow this may be overwhelming and actually more in Facebooks interest to allow this than to try to block it.

Some good tips for travel PPC

Tripadvisor have released their figures from a survey called their Traveller Trends Survey. Out of the survey comes some predicitions for 2008 trends that we should all expect to see.

One of the aspects of this (the link above has much more detail) is the TripAdvisor TravelCast. It's a barometer of what’s hot in travel destinations. TripAdvisor engineers have developed a proprietary algorithm that looks at several criteria, including changes in search activity and postings throughout the TripAdvisor site. The TravelCast then predicts the rising stars in travel.

The destinations that are showing as increasing in popularity and expected to be the biggest next year are:

TripAdvisor TravelCast Top Ten World Destinations for 2008
1. Jerba, Tunisia
2. Makandi Bay, Egypt
3. Phangnga, Thailand
4. Kovalam, India
5. Sabaudia, Italy
6. Asilah, Morocco
7. Ko Phangan, Thailand
8. La Plagne, France
9. Yangshuo, China
10. Kotor, Montenegro

TripAdvisor TravelCast Top Ten U.S. Destinations for 2008
1. Sunny Isles Beach, Florida
2. Kitty Hawk (Outer Banks), North Carolina
3. Seward, Alaska
4. Kailua, Hawaii
5. Blue Ridge, Georgia
6. Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania
7. San Marcos, Texas
8. Paso Robles, California
9. Rockport, Texas
10. Copper Mountain, Colorado

Now, this is great insight for online (and offline) travel providers who bid on keywords on search engines. If you are active in pay per click and these destinations match some of your offerings then you should seriously consider looking at the data (clickthroughs, bid positions, bid amounts etc) to see if you can do anything else to get more clicks on these terms. If they are going to be so hot next year it may be worth diverting some of your paid search budget into these destinations over those that don't perform for you currently. Insight like this is highly valuable, especially when it comes from such a big community as TripAdvisor.

Google Adwords goes mobile

Google (GOOG) are getting quite subtle in announcing new products developments these days. They've added a new FAQ to the Adwords Help Center which discusses search adverts appearing on mobile devices. I'm surprised this didn't get shouted about on the Adwords blog...

They're going to be running ads for free on mobile until 19th November, so your ads could be on the small screen right now. Of course you do have to have a mobile viewable landing page linked to from the ad for it to work (which is something I'm glad Google have done so they aren't displaying pointless ads).

You'll be able to opt out at that date.

Facebook planning the ultimate ad targeting network

So I surmised previously (here and here) that some enterprising person may work out a way to scrape Facebook profiles to gather demographic and behavioural data which could then power an ad serving platform. I also asked whether Facebook is just a data gathering exercise...

An article in the Wall Street Journal has been published talking about just these ideas but it turns out that its Facebook who are planning a new advertising system using the data from profiels and the users activities and interactions on their social network.

It's aiming for the holy grail of ad serving tools, to allow it to predict what products and services users may be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned them. Now that would be powerful!

Apparently this is top priority for Facebook workers now. They've got the audience, they've now got outsiders creating apps and building momentum for them now they just need to monetise all that activity.

If they get it right and can make this the most targeted ad platform around, keep their audience and get buy in from advertisers then they will have sealed their fortunes. This has the potential to be Adwords for a social network, and if Facebook can become the communications platform that some think it will then this will be massive!

Note: of course this could all result in a horrible backlash for Facebook if the users decide that using their personal info to target them with ads is unethical...

Jakob Nielsen on banner blindness

Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he's undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.

The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who's got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.

It's something I've always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a 'book online and save' message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!

Google sued over trademarked keywords

Now American Airlines has sued Google for allowing other advertisers to use it's trademarks as keywords in pay per click advertising. The airline accuses Google of selling the right to use American Airlines' trademarks and service marks or "words, phrases, or terms confusingly similar to those marks" to competitors who then direct searchers to their own web sites.

This isn't the first time Google has faced such a lawsuit. Geico sued Google for the same reasons some time ago and lost, and apparently other cases are on the backburner.

This confuses me a little... We use Google extensively for PPC advertising and our highest converting keywords are our brand terms (as you'd expect). Every so often we find a rogue affiliate or competitor bidding on our brand name and we always report this to Google and they remove the offending adverts for us. To enable this kind of response we had to register our brand terms with Google. They don't really police it actively but they do take down offending ads when asked.

So if the above is possible, why don't American Airlines just ask for them to be taken down? I'm guessing that they expect Google to do this automatically and to not even allow the ads to appear in the first place. To enable that would be a hugely complex and time consuming development for Google and a fundamental change to the Adwords system. I'm guessing Google would rather not have to do that. But if American Airlines lose (like Geico) then surely Google should not be taking down our competitors ads (as it's not been deemed illegal)?

Who knows! What I do know is that brand keyword advertising is very lucrative, it returns excellent ROI and is any search marketers meat and drink. Any threat to the way brand term advertising works could have a massive impact on Googles Adwords revenue. If lawsuits like this keep cropping up it is possible Google could ban advertising on trademarked terms for all to stem the tide of subpoenas, that would make PPC a much less attractive proposition!

Google Adwords going behavioural

Gigaom mentions an experiment by Google into behavioural targeting for it's Adwords product. It's an attempt to increase the relevance and offer a more tactical solution to existing customers.

I'm looking forwards to seeing the next installment as this would be a hugely powerful tool for us. We're big users of Adwords and anything we can do to increase relevance for our customers will be massively helpful in increasing our ROI.

Travel Adwords campaigns going north??

In recent weeks our Adwords campaign has increased in cost a fair bit. This is without any major changes to the campaigns, all of which have been running nicely and costing very similar amounts month-on-month. The conversion rate hasn't dropped much but the cost has increased a lot!

I'm wondering what's causing this? Has competition increased that much in the last couple of months that we should be seeing this kind of increase? Or is our agency missing a trick and not optimising the campaign to their usual effectiveness.

I'm going to deep dive the data over the next week or so to see if anything has gone awry, but I'd appreciate any insights from anyone who has any ideas or experience (especially from the travel industry) of the same?

Froogle no longer...

Google has renamed it's Froogle price comparison product search tool to Google Product Search. The reasons are supposed to be because the brand (Froogle) never took off.

I reckon there's more than just a name, the results from Product Search will be integrated into normal search and I'd expect to see a much broader selection of products available now. Could this be the first step towards Google launching the long awaited Troogle that the travel industry has been so scared of? I reckon Google Travel Search is only a short way off, I'd expect it to be a direct competitor for the TravelSupermarket and Kelkoo types but without the CPC costs and funded by adverts from Adwords. Integrate it with Maps and the Plus Box and it could kill the other price comparison sites off very quickly (if they wanted to).

Google buys DoubleClick

So Google have finally staked their claim to the display advertising world through the acquisition of DoubleClick. Google have been active in display for a while but without the tools and penetration to allow them to really take the market by storm (at least except for the bloggers who use Adsense). The acquisition of DoubleClicks advertising business will allow Google to offer full service display advertising to the largest of brands in the future.

This makes Google hugely powerful in the online advertising world. Word is that one UK based travel company will now be seeing approx 80% of it's online spend go into Google's coffers (Adwords and banners combined). Throw in the moves into classified, radio and TV and Google have it almost sewn up!

Microsoft (and also Yahoo) have said that they believe that the acquisition will stifle competition and turn Google into a monopoly. I tend to agree with them (for once), although I'm sure there are some sour grapes involved as MS were looking to buy DoubleClick themselves...

It's seeming like Google have bought DoubleClick to prevent anyone else doing it and to jump start their display arm. This gives them a huge head start on the other players by giving them an established technology and a long list of customers.

News also out today that Google have signed another radio ad deal, this time with ClearChannel in Calif. The offering is becoming very attractive to advertisers, consider being able to optimise ad display across multiple media and channels at the click of a mouse through a single supplier interface. Perhaps you can weight your spend against different media depending on the performance. It also could give marketers the opportunity to pull back their budget from the media buyers and deal with it in house as I'm sure Google will develop a raft of tools to allow campaigns to be more easily managed across multiple media.

Google Checkout launching in the UK

Google is launching it's Checkout payment solution in the UK at last. It's been in the US for a while and although it hasn't taken over from PayPal it is making good headway. This has been partly helped due to the fact that they are not charging fees for merchants at the moment.

It's an easy to use payment solution which stores your credit card details so you don't have to retype all the time. It's also been integrated with Adwords which is a really good move, imagine click to buy from the search results in the future, that could be a really powerful tool for advertisers!

Bid on trademark keywords? Not in Utah...

This from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation):

A Bad Idea From Utah: A Ban on Comparative Advertising
March 30, 2007

The Utah legislature has quietly passed a dangerous law allowing trademark owners to prevent their marks from being used as keywords to generate comparative ads. If this law takes effect, a company like Chevrolet couldn't purchase "sponsored link" space on the Google results page when a user types "Toyota" as part of a search query--at least if the latter term is registered in Utah as an "electronic registration mark."

As Martin Schwimmer notes, Utah's own General Counsel warned the legislature that the law was likely to be found unconstitutional given the burden it would put on interstate commerce. To comply with the law, a search engine that received a search request would have to determine whether a user was located within Utah and, if so, check the search terms against Utah's registry of trademarks to prevent the unlawful triggering of advertising. The cost to search engines would be staggeringly high: "Literally millions of search requests from locations worldwide each day would be subject to verification of location."

Aside from its constitutional flaws, the law is just bad public policy. It undermines the fundamental purpose of trademarks: to improve consumer access to accurate information about goods and services. Trademarks are just shorthand terms that designate the origin of a product. Comparative advertising uses those shorthand terms to provide more information about the trademarked product and competitive products. That's why comparative trademark use is clearly protected under federal trademark law. If it weren't, Pepsi wouldn't be able to tell consumers that more people think Pepsi tastes better than Coke, and Apple wouldn't be able to make fun of Microsoft on national television every night.

The good news is that, given the constitutional problems, the law is likely to be challenged in court. But it's too bad the Utah legislature didn't heed its own counsel's advice and save Utah taxpayers the cost of defending this anti-consumer legislation.

Now, as far as I know Google will stop people from bidding on a trademarked term if they are notified of the fact. I have instigated this myself in the past when we've found someone bidding on our company name. So quite why these lawsuits are happening is beyond me, I know Yahoo etc don't apply the same controls over trademarks but with the bulk of the paid search market poured into Google I question the point of trying to ban it (also find it hard to imagine how it could be policed purely for Utah).

Google makes it's TV ad foray official

Google announced on Monday that it is partnering with EchoStar to sell commercials over the DISH satellite broadcaster's 125 national programming networks, an early indicator of how the Internet giant plans to use its $10.6 billion online ad business to conquer television.

Under the deal, advertisers will use Google's AdWords automated auction interface to bid on ad spots. Advertisers can upload their TV commercials and select the desired time of day and channel, as well as choose regional or national area coverage. They can also target the ad based on a show's demographics.

Google also confirmed it has been testing a similar advertising effort with Astound Broadband, a small cable TV operator east of San Francisco that serves about 23,000 Concord and Walnut Creek, Calif. Astound has been testing TV ad sales with Google since the fall, the companies said. Cable set-top boxes track which programs a household watches so that targeting systems eventually could match the kinds of shows the household prefers with ads for products and services that would suit their interests.

Google seem to be becoming more about advertising than about the sharing and transfer of information. All they need to do now is buy Doubleclick, expand the TV trials to the rest of the world and get print and radio working better and they'll be the biggest ad network on the planet!!

Google trialing cost-per-action

Google is trialing cost-per-action adverts on publishers sites in the U.S. I've been expecting this for some time as a natural progression for Adwords/Adsense to move to a similar model to affiliates. This will help advertisers avoid click fraud and see more of a return on investment.

More details on the trial are on the Googleblog.

Google Earth gets Adsense

Google Earth is now becoming yet another bastion of advertising in the online world. You can now view Adsense adverts attached to pushpins. Google AdWords customers can now place sponsored local ads inside Google Earth. The new feature lets advertisers place contact details and a logo on a map marker in the 3D environment.

Google emailed it's customers saying:
'Advertise on Google Earth
If you've created Local Business Ads in your AdWords accounts, they'll now appear on Google Earth in addition to Google Maps. Advertising a hotel in Lake Louise? A neighborhood cafe in Paris? Google Earth users across the globe can zoom in on your business. Don't forget to add a customized icon to make your ad stand out.'

A sensible edition you might think, but as Earth is much more about leisure than actually being a tool for finding locations it may alienate some users (although I'm sure it won't deter the majority).

Google Adwords Quality Score revealed

At last Google have published some information on their Quality Score for Adwords which is used to calculate advertisers minimum bids. Well worth a read for all you Adwords advertisers.

It does make things clearer but (of course) doesn't give away enough to let you know how to play the system.

Google in your pocket...

News today in the Guardian that execs from Orange (the mobile company) have visited the Googleplex to discuss the possibility of a tie-up between the two companies to offer a Google based mobile phone. The idea apparently is to bring the full internet to people's mobile phones using Google software and services as a starting point.

A collaboration of two such well recognised brands could be just what the mobile web needs to really penetrate into people's lives.

The 'Google Phone' would apparently be created by HTC, a Taiwanese manufacturer of smart phones and PDA's. It would use Google software such as the ongoing work on technology to compress data to manageable sizes for download to portable devices. Of course I'd also expect to see an integration of Google's Adwords thrown in to the search for good measure.

As long as this effort is an open platform and not the usual walled (or semi-walled) garden approach of mobile operators to date it would be a huge leap forwards for the mobile web. Google's been on board for a long while offering search to operators portals etc but to have them developing applications to make the mobile web more accessible and usable can only be a good thing!