The search king gives marketers more insights to work with—and more to do.
By Paul Demery
Secrecy was long the watchword at Google. But as it’s become increasingly dominant, and scrutinized, Google has gradually changed its ways, providing marketers with more information that can help them move up in paid search results and improve ROI in other ways.
For instance, Google is providing more transparency into how it calculates the Quality Score that determines the position of a retailer’s ad on a search results page, and more ways for advertisers to fine-tune pay-per-click programs.
“Google realizes that the more data they give us, the better decisions we can make, the more money we can make and the more money Google can make,” says Christopher Kenney, senior marketing specialist for VistaPrint Ltd., an online retailer of customized business cards and other office products.
That’s just what’s happening, as more marketers shift more of their search budgets to Google from other search engines, helping to drive up prices for positions on Google search results pages. That makes it all the more crucial for online retailers to pay close attention to changes in Google policies lest they fritter away search marketing dollars by not keeping up with the latest tips and tricks.
Prices rise
Google’s pay-per-click ad rates went up 14% in the second quarter of this year, when it accounted for 77% of search advertising spend, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier Inc. Google’s dominance of search ad spending exceeds its lead in search—Google accounted for just under 62% of searches by U.S. web users in July, according to web measurement firm comScore Inc.—indicating that many marketers believe they get better results from Google than from the major competing search engines of Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
CPA2Biz.com, an online retailer of products and services for accountants, says it gets 15-20% of its traffic from Google natural and paid search, roughly 10 times the traffic it gets from either Yahoo or Microsoft’s Live Search.
“Nearly 10% of our overall online sales are driven from Google traffic,” says Melissa Rothchild, vice president of marketing services at CPA2Biz Inc. “We continue to find Google a very effective site traffic referral source.”
Satisfied searchers
Google has always insisted its policies were aimed at delivering the best possible experience to end users, and those end users give Google high marks. The search leader scored 86 out of 100 in this year’s American Consumer Satisfaction Index, an annual survey by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, up 10% from last year. Yahoo, Google’s closest competitor in search, slipped 3% in the survey to a score of 77 while Microsoft remained at 75.
Google’s growing popularity likely means still higher pay-per-click ad prices, experts say. “Google has been increasing prices for a long time, and there’s nothing to indicate that they will stop,” says Kevin Lee, executive chairman and founder of search engine marketing firm Didit. “But clearly they care about the user experience and reward the marketer when the user experience is better. That’s useful to the marketer depending on how savvy they are in search marketing.”
VistaPrint is an example of an online retailer that is trying to be Google-savvy, and reaping the benefits. By taking advantage of the broader data Google now provides, VistaPrint was able to improve its return on search marketing spend during the 2007 holiday season—even when it had to pay more for each click on an ad.
VistaPrint’s results
VistaPrint reduced its cost per new order by 14% and its cost per customer acquisition by 12% during the holiday period, Kenney says.
“Cost per click for the keyword terms we targeted actually increased, but because we were able to drill down and truly optimize where our search ads were showing up, the overall numbers got much better,” Kenney says.
By using a mix of in-house analytics and Google’s management console for AdWords, the Google search ad bidding system, VistaPrint gets a better view into how its search campaigns are performing, Kenney says. “Google gives us a lot more reports to run, so we can see down to the keyword level how consumers are reacting to certain terms,” he says.
That came in handy, for instance, when VistaPrint found that bidding on its own name caused its search ads to appear when consumers searched for Microsoft’s Vista operating system, which has no connection to the products VistaPrint offers.
The retailer was able to fix the problem by working with the additional granularity Google allows in keyword management. “Now we can block out content related to the Vista operating system,” Kenney says.
Kenney says Google’s help with managing search data is a big part of what sets it apart from other search engines. In addition to its dominance in search volume, Google also offers the most complete and useful set of tools for analyzing that volume, he and others say. “Google offers both more search volume and more insight,” Kenney says.
Google provides more transparency than competing search engines, agrees David Szetela, CEO of search marketing firm Clix Marketing. “When we’ve got to move over to Yahoo and Microsoft to create and manage campaigns on their platforms it’s more painful because it takes more time,” he says.
Yahoo’s moves
Yahoo has opened up its search platform this year with beta versions of its Search BOSS and SearchMonkey programs, which let marketers inject images and deeper site links in search ads and better control ad rankings, says Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search.
It has also introduced a search marketing platform that, like Google, partly ranks paid-search ads based on relevancy as well as bid price. And it now offers a “Quality Index” that, like Google’s Quality Score, indicates the level of value Yahoo places on particular search ad material.
Kenney says the best recent development he has experienced with Yahoo is an improved ability to track the effectiveness of “assists,” or keywords that lead to the final keywords that convert consumers to buyers. “This helps justify where to spend your money even though certain keywords may not be getting credit for conversions,” he says.
Still, Yahoo “hasn’t made any major advances specifically for search marketers” to put it on par with Google’s performance, says Lee. Yahoo does, however, offer a sizable amount of search volume, even if a distant second to Google. The impetus behind Microsoft’s interest in purchasing Yahoo earlier this year was in large part an effort to combine Yahoo’s volume with Microsoft’s ability to provide and continue developing new search technology to provide advertisers more options in reaching consumers, such as with a greater level of demographic data, Lee says.
Microsoft continues to make advancements in search technology—i.e., it acquired Powerset earlier this year for its natural language search technology, and its adCenter service offers information on how to improve rankings. “Make sure landing pages and sites give end-users something to do on your site: purchase something, make a reservation, sign up for a service, etc.,” a Microsoft spokeswoman says.
In the meantime, however, marketers say they get the most value out of Google.
‘Broad match’
Google has enhanced its service for marketers with a program it calls “broad match” that places ads against search terms that an advertiser has not bid on, but that Google deems relevant to the marketers’ purchased keywords. These terms include misspellings, synonyms and related products.
Google provides reports on how the additional keywords perform, and VistaPrint has used them to uncover new keywords it should be bidding on, Kenney says. “We may find 50 new terms that perform well, and 50 that perform poorly. So we can concentrate on the good ones and block the poor ones.” Kenney notes that he has not seen other search engines offer a similar feature.
But the Google broad match program can create more work for marketers by forcing them to check that they’re not paying for unwanted traffic from people searching on terms unrelated to what the marketer sells, says Dave Rosenblatt, associate search director of MindShare Search, part of the GroupM division of WPP, a global marketing and communications company. The marketer can use Google’s search management tools to identify such terms and block them, but that can take time, he says.
In fact, data overload has become the biggest challenge for search engine marketers, says Didit’s Lee, who is a former chairman of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. “Marketers get so much information, they often don’t know what to look at.”
Checking the score
Overall, however, Rosenblatt says the extra work pays off in the long run. A good example is Google’s new Quality Score system that ranks a retailer’s search ad—and lets advertisers know how much they likely must bid to appear on the first page of Google search results.
For many retailers, managing the Quality Score Google places on ad content is their most important marketing task. Marketers have long complained that Google doesn’t make clear how it ranks search ads and how the relevancy of the advertiser’s content affects bid prices.
The new Quality Score program provides more information by ranking on a scale of 1 to 10, rather than as “poor, average or good,” as in the past. “Those terms were very vague,” says Kenney of VistaPrint.
Google is also offering more details on what might penalize a marketer and drop its Quality Score, says Kevin Amos, vice president of strategic planning at search engine marketing firm Impaqt. “It will tell you some penalties that, say, dropped a search ad rank from 6 to 2, though it’s still general information, such as you have duplicate content on your landing pages.”
Although that gives marketers more information to work with, it still requires them to dig into characteristics of web page and ad content and run tests to see what might improve their scores, experts say.
Still a guessing game
Once a marketer starts running multiple keyword campaigns for digital cameras, for example, she can check how Google is scoring each keyword, then check the attributes of each campaign—such as keyword phrases, ad content, click-through rate, landing page content, landing page load time—to see which of these attributes must be improved to boost the Quality Score.
But it’s still a guessing game, experts say, because Google still doesn’t let on which of an ad campaign’s attributes may be throwing off a score.
“A marketer may think a campaign’s landing page is relevant, but Google may not agree,” Lee says. “All the marketer can do is continue to run experiments with modified landing pages to see if they improve the Quality Score performance.”
Marketers with many Google campaigns will have to set priorities. “Maybe you don’t try to improve the Quality Score on a keyword campaign that only gets 200 searches a day, but instead focus on the campaigns with several thousand searches a day,” Lee says.
Google announced further changes to its Quality Score policies last month, including scoring an ad at the moment of the query, instead of based on historical data about the advertiser. That, Google says, will allow it to place more relevant ads—for instance, placing ads that Canadians tend to click on when the searcher is coming from Canada.
In another change, Google will give an advertiser an estimate of what it would have to bid to get onto the coveted first page of search results. That’s good for advertisers to know, but also will be good for Google, because it will tend to drive up pay-per-click ad prices, says Mark Simon, vice president of industry relations at Didit.
“With the transparency that everyone has been urging Google to display, marketers will now be able to see what the required bid needs to be to get first-page placement,” Simon says. “Of course, that will immediately create a more competitive marketplace based on advertisers pushing that first-page bid.”
Flash dilemma
Marketers must also take into account Google’s ranking policies when designing ads, balancing the type of content that will make ads and landing pages alluring with content that will push up an ad’s position and reduce its click price, Rosenblatt says.
A creative team may want to load up search landing pages with rich media content, for instance, but search engine spiders are not good at evaluating that content. That could push down an ad’s relevancy in Google’s eyes. Although Adobe Systems Inc., the maker of Flash rich media content, is working with Google and Yahoo to make dynamic Flash content easier to index by search spiders, the technology is new and unproven, Rosenblatt says.
Meantime, advertisers will have to manage trade-offs between creating rich media-heavy pages and having enough of the static HTML content that gets indexed by search spiders.
John McAteer, Google’s director of retail industry development, says marketers should focus on the basics. “Don’t make pages too heavy with content so they take too long to load, and make sure the page title matches the product offered on the page,” he says.
As marketers do that, he adds, it will help their pages with different types of content appear in Google’s universal search, which delivers multiple types of content, including maps and images, in general search listings. “Marketers have to make sure content is clear, which is nothing different from what they do today in search engine optimization,” McAteer says.
“The Google bot is looking for good landing pages, quick page loading and a good user experience. There’s always art and science to it, but it comes down to did a searcher click to visit a site and then go deeper into the site instead of bouncing back to the Google search page, so it looks like the searcher had a good search experience.”
More tools
Google is moving more into serving online display or image search ads as well as text search ads, and this year introduced a dashboard through the Google DoubleClick ad-serving system that enables marketers to see the effects of multiple search campaigns.
“We can see how our search campaigns are doing in terms we can act on, and we can also use them to see how we’re doing in other areas like comparison shopping engines,” says Josh Greene, director of online marketing for Discovery Communications Inc., an online retailer of science-related products including books and DVDs.
Google, which acquired DoubleClick earlier this year, released in August a new set of tools that provide marketers more control and insight into how consumers are responding to ads. The tools include:
l Frequency capping, which enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad, preventing visitors to sites in the Google Content Network from seeing the same ad too many times.
l Frequency reporting, which lets marketers see the number of people who have seen an ad and the average number of times it’s viewed.
l View-through conversions, which let marketers see how many people visited their web sites after seeing an ad.
Google has also been working more closely with retailers to help them learn how to use search marketing to increase store traffic. In a test conducted earlier this year with multi-channel retailer Recreational Equipment Inc., for example, REI ran display ads across the Google Content Network targeting consumers located near a planned store opening in Mountain View, Calif. Of consumers who clicked one of its ads for an in-store coupon, 24% redeemed the coupon in store, REI Internet marketing manager Natalie Crain says. REI is now using Google display to support all store openings, she adds.
Heading into Q4
Each new Google initiative raises concerns about its dominance. A timely example is its tentative deal with Yahoo Inc., which would run Google ads on the Yahoo site network.
SearchIgnite, a provider of search management technology, estimates that the Google-Yahoo deal could result in keyword prices on Yahoo rising an average of 22% if Yahoo pursues maximum profits. The Association of National Advertisers has warned the U.S. Department of Justice that the Google-Yahoo arrangement would control 90% of search marketing and limit marketer’s options while potentially raising prices for high-quality search ads. The federal government has yet to take a position on the deal.
While marketers never want to pay higher prices, they appreciate the new tools Google provides to track performance. “We see costs trending up this year, but we can still see a clear ROI because search is very accountable,” Greene says. “The big question is what our costs will be in December. If I want 10,000 clicks on a Google search ad in December, the cost is up in the air because everyone in the world might decide to make search their primary marketing focus. So the more tools we have to manage those costs the better.”
Regardless of how many new tools search marketers have or how transparent the search engines are, marketers still need to do their homework to make search marketing work, experts say. “It’s still an ongoing process,” Lee says. “You start out any ad campaign with a hypothesis on what will work, see how it works and learn from it, then go back and do it again.”
paul@verticalwebmedia.com
Click Here for the New Products & Technology Showcase
