Posts Tagged ‘Online Advertising’

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AdWords for Video Now Open To All

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

Google’s AdWords for Video is the service that brings video ads to brands. Until recently, however the service was available only to large brands, but now Google has opened the service up to anyone and is particularly interested in finding small businesses to begin advertising with the service.

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YouTube offers advertisers two methods of payment. One is that the advertiser only pays if the ad is watched. Viewers are given an opportunity to opt out of an ad after a certain amount of time has ben reached. The second charging option for advertisers is to be charged only if the viewer watches at least 30 seconds of the video.

AdWords is also updating its service to help brands, especially the smaller ones that are not as experienced with the new formats. AdWords will offer an estimate of views given a certain set of advertisement parameters. The platform has also been updated to look more like the normal AdWords platform, so there is less confusion when adopting the new service. The final update is an ability to see what the viewer does after the ad is seen. If the user moves on to the brand’s channel and subscribes, then that is reported.

All of these changes will help the social media agency. Video is an increasingly effective and lucrative form of advertising. The new changes not only open up the service to many social media agencies but also allow brands to see what other actions of value might be related to individual videos.

Google AdWords for video is now open to small and medium size businesses

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Posted in Internet Advertising, advertising, google | No Comments »

Cross Channel Analytics Need To Be Implemented

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

While more difficult than the standard metrics for digital advertising ROI, Cross Channel Analytics are worth the added effort and cost. It is not uncommon for an ad on FaceBook to be clicked and then on the next few pages the customer is led astray while eventually making the sale. Few customers click on an ad and then make their way directly to the page where the sale is made but, traditional metrics measure that click and then measure a sale and draw a line directly between the two.

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Cross Channel Analytics measure the intervening steps between the sale and the initial click onto the site. The metric will measure research the customer doe, and the distractions that the customer has to fight through on the way to the sale. These metrics will also better allow the social media agency to know where a customer went astray and how to combat that distraction. This notion is Funnel Analysis and it is necessary to know how to refine early funnel and late funnel pages.

A more comprehensive analysis will also allow brands to identify unnecessary links within the funnel. The question is one of attribution, which links are doing the best work and which are the least responsible for getting the customer to a conversion. The social media agency needs to look into who can best provide these metrics. Until a more sophisticated set of metrics is employed the old metrics, clickthroughs and impressions, will still lead the agency astray.

Too Many Clicks Can’t be Tied to Revenue

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Posted in Facebook, Internet Advertising, advertising | No Comments »

AdWords Now Matches Misspellings

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

The social media agency has for a long time now been composing AdWords ads that account for misspellings and plurals in search queries. An update allows AdWords to now automatically match keywords in ads for misspellings and plurals, but advertisers will be able to opt out of the new changes.

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There are five areas the new changes will take effect within: misspellings, plurals, stemming (“single serve” to “single serving”), accent marks, abbreviations and acronyms. Google says these differences affect almost 7% of all searches. After a trial period with some advertisers, Google says there has been a noticeable gain in search clicks. The gain has been almost 3%.

The new format will take a few months to completely rollout, so advertisers have some time to figure out if they want to opt out of the new system. It will be the rare advertiser that does opt out of this update. This is good news for the social media agency not only because it may represent a 3% boost in search clicks, but it also means less work is needed when composing search ad campaigns. No longer will the agency need to anticipate errors in customer searches and instead the agency can focus on what customers want when searching.

Google will include misspellings automatically in AdWords keyword lists

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Posted in Digital Marketing, advertising, google | No Comments »

Time to Reevaluate Clickthrough Rates

Friday, April 27th, 2012

The debate over the value of clickthrough rates (CTRs) is heating up. Always looking for a new and better metric has been the firm comScore and now there is a new report to back up its argument. The new study contends that there is almost zero correlation between clicks and conversions. Instead of looking to CTR, the social media agency ought to instead look at hover time and ad viewability.

Clickthrough Rates

This new study only measures the metrics for display advertising. Even though there are other types of ads, display ads dominate the market so the flaw may not be significant to the study’s findings. The scope of the study is quite large: 263 million impressions over nine months and 18 advertisers.

An average of 31% of the impressions were never seen partly because they were below the fold. On some websites that number was as high as 91%. The study then measured four metrics on conversion rates. Clicks showed a correlation of .01, which is not at all close to significance. Gross impressions fared better but a still anemic .17. Viewable impressions was .35 and the top performer was ad hover/interaction at .49.

Of course, there has been mounting evidence for years, 2008 was the first serious criticism of CTR, and yet the click remains the measure by which prices and charges are given to advertisers. The social media agency may need to wait until TV-like metrics are finally deployed for internet viewers.

Clicks Don’t Correlate With Conversations

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Posted in Internet Advertising, Online Shopping, advertising | No Comments »

youMusic As The New Advertising Hot Spot

Friday, April 13th, 2012

The trend in music is a decline, rapid decline, in music sales and an upswing in music being streamed. As streaming becomes cheaper for the consumer and bandwidth also becomes cheaper, then this trend will only accelerate. Proof of the inevitability of this acceleration is Billboard magazine’s recent introduction of measures from the music streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio and MOG. Billboard only measures the on demand services excluding the randomizing services like Pandora and Last.fm. Social networks are also increasingly aligned with these streaming services. All of this is very important for the social media agency because these services rely on advertising to help subsidize the costs and in some cases provide free services for users.

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Increasingly these services are looking to advertisements for financial support. In 2011, these services took in $293 million from advertisers and only $171 million from user subscriptions. Spotify had limited its free trial period to 6 months, but after lower than expected conversions to its premium service, it opened up the free service to an indefinite extension. Accustream predicts the market will grow 78% in 2012.

Users want free music streaming and advertising is necessary for that. It is also useful for the advertisers because for a brief moment there is an almost undistracted listener and silent display ads can play almost continuously on mobile devices or on desktop clients of the music service. The other added benefit for advertisers is the accumulated data about user demographics as well as preferences and how those preferences might change depending on contexts. While still nascent, streaming music is and will continue to be a lucrative outlet for the social media agency looking to associate brands in users minds.

New Music Advertising

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Posted in Internet Advertising, advertising, music | No Comments »

Competition Among Online Advertising Raters

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Both Nielsen and comScore are working on metrics for online advertising, which will propel them to be the premier advertising ratings agency. What is happening in the hunt is something advertisers have never had before: competition. Both have campaigns geared towards measuring reach and frequency while accounting for demographic information. As of now it looks that comScore might have a superior measurement in its Validated Campaign Essentials program, but that will only make Nielsen upgrade its metrics.

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This is all very exciting news for the social media agency. Nielsen’s monopoly of TV ratings has led to some criticisms that there is not an accurate method to measure the reach of TV advertisings. The inaccurate measure then makes advertisers pay more for their ads than they return in sales. Not only does a good metric help digital advertisers, but competition among those metrics will help keep those metrics honest and protect advertiser’s ROI.

Until the latest updates from the different agencies there is one difference the social media agency needs to be aware of. Nielsen has access to FaceBook data and comScore does not. However, that is not a solid tip towards Nielsen as the nighttime viewing hours usually have many members of a family logged into a single FaceBook account. There are other differences among the different metrics, but for now that is the one of most significance to digital advertisers. As the competition heats up, then the firms will revamp and refine their approaches all making for a better environment for advertisers.

Online Advertising Intensifies

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Advertising, advertising | No Comments »

Paid Search Ads Redux

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

Last week Google released a report about the 89% in incremental gains a brand earns when it has paid search advertising. After that report Google was flooded with questions and it has now released some answers to those questions. Some of which are very instructive for the social media agency.

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The main question is about organic leaders in a search. If a website is the #1 result in a search organically, then is it still hurt when it cancels its paid search spending? Google answers that the question is based on a false premise. 81% of search results do not have an organic result on the first page. 66% of ad clicks occur when there is no organic result to be clicked on instead. While Google has not really answered the question, there are few times when the question actually matters. A brand should not make spending decisions on the hopes or suppositions that the question matters and should instead take the statistically likely method of maximizing its investment.

Even if a result is a highly placed organic result it can still benefit from paid search spending. When the organic result is number 1, half of the clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when paid search ads do not appear. When the organic result is ranked second to fourth, then the ad clicks are incremental 82% of the time. That number grows to 96% when the ranking is below 5.

While it is possible that a brand can dominate search rankings based on their organic rankings it is very unlikely. Even if a brand does have that name recognition, then it can still benefit from paid search ads. Social media agencies can choose to cancel it and try to strike out on their own, but those efforts probably do not return as high an ROI as paid search advertising does.

Google Answers Ad Questions

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Posted in Internet Advertising, advertising, google | No Comments »

Microsoft Updates AdCenter To Mimic AdSense

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Microsoft is changing AdCenter’s targeting to come into line with Google’s AdWords. After the update AdCenter will allow advertisers to target people in a certain location or if the search parameters indicate the person will be in the location. The location parameter can be quite broad but can narrow down to a specific city. The update is already available to some advertisers in the US and will be fully rolled out to everyone in the coming months. The other aspect of the update that brings AdCenter in line with AdSense is the advertiser’s ability to target the ad solely on location regardless of what query the user searched.

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An improved AdCenter will help Pay-Per-Click Advertisers by offering an alternative to AdSense. Even though AdSense has a larger publisher base, AdCenter is what resolves ads on Bing and Bing related sites, such as Yahoo!. There are also some interesting features through the AdCenter server like rotating ads displaying objects in full 360 degrees. Not only are there differing features but having more options also helps the digital agency better maximize its ROI by offering ads at a different price structure to different viewers.

AdCenter Ups The Ante

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Internet Advertising, Microsoft, advertising, google | No Comments »

Online Ad Spending To Pass Print Spending

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

2012 is expected to see more spending on online advertising than spending on print advertising. If that expectation holds, then it would be the first time that has happened. This change is not because of declining print advertising spending, but the astounding growth of online spending. The new study by eMarketer shows online spending gaining on TV spending, but not eclipsing it by the end of the study’s projections in 2017. Print and TV will still play an important role for advertising, but online spending is the only one showing significant growth.

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The message for digital marketing companies is that business is about to get really crowded. Consumers will spend more time online, so the inventory increases will have additional audiences to display to, however, there will still be increased competition for the digital agency. This makes the engagement and non-advertising side of online presence even more important. Building a strong brand presence now before the market becomes over-saturated is important. A strong FaceBook page is an example of a presence that can help combat the coming masses of digital advertising.

Online Advertising Soars

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Online Campaigns Significantly Boost In-Store Sales

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

While consumer-packaged goods (CPG) — small goods sold in plastic, usually non-durable goods such as soft drinks — are rarely sold online there is a significant boost to be had from advertising them online. New data from a joint study by comScore and dunhumblyUSA shows CPG brands seen online have a 21% sales bump compared to CPG products not seen online.

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Ad spending after the recession by CPGs is increasingly significantly. Emarketer expects the spending jump to be 35% among CPG brands. That should bring the sector representation to about 10% of all online advertising. The internet marketing agency can use this data to recruit CPG producers into their client rosters. This is also useful data for other clients, because it shows the importance of digital advertising as a touchpoint even if the advertising does not immediately result in conversions.

This data about touchpoints and engagement is also interesting because it measured display advertising only. Display ads are almost as passive as digital advertising can be and yet it is still capable of creating engagement and eventually conversions. Given the number of outlets for advertising and branding which do provide immediate opportunities for engagement, it is astounding there is not more money being spent. All of these new data points can be rolled into a comprehensive presentation as a way to recruit new clients.

CPG Sales Online

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Posted in Internet Advertising, Online Shopping, advertising | No Comments »

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