Here is a by-no-means-definitive list of common PPC phrases that are used in the world of search engine marketing:

Adcenter – MSN’s PPC marketing platform, which shows ads on Bing and Microsoft properties.

Ad Group – A specific set of keywords associated with a related ad or group of ads. It is possible to have multiple ad groups in a campaign.

Adwords – Google’s Pay-Per-Click platform, which shows ads on Google, AOL, Ask.com, and multiple custom search engines.

Average Position – The average placement position of your ad over all its impressions. It normally takes several weeks for your average position to rise to the top in Adwords, even with high bids.

Bid – How much you are willing to spend on a click. A bid can be a “default” bid on a group of keywords, or a specific bid on a single keyword.

Broad Match – A type of keyword matching that will show your ad for the widest variety of terms deemed relevant by the search engine. In general, broad match keywords give a higher volume with a lower conversion rate.

Campaign – A set of ad groups. Even though each ad group can contain different keywords and ads, the campaign has a daily budget, geographic targeting, and other settings which will be effective for all the ads in the campaign. Once the campaign’s daily budget is exhausted, all the ads in the campaign stop appearing for their relevant keywords.

Channel – In content match, one of the websites where your ad is showing. You can choose specific channels or sets of channels, so you can choose to be on Facebook, or on certain sections or demographics where your ad is likely to get better results.

Click Fraud – Clicks from fraudulent activity. Some fraud comes from competitors intentionally clicking on your ad. Other fraud involves using automated tools to collect commissions for clicks (via channels like Google Adsense) or to exhaust your daily budget.

Content Bid – The default bid for a set of keywords on the content network. Note that this should be a fraction of your search bid.

Content Matching – The placement of PPC ads on websites. Ideally, these sites should have content that is relevant to the service offering of the company running the ad. Google runs content matching on its “content network.”

Contextual Advertising – Essentially the same thing as Content Matching, given that your ad is triggered by keywords in context on a news, article, blog, or content page.

Conversion – A desired action taken by a website visitor. With PPC, it is relatively easy to measure conversions on form fill-outs and purchases, but it is more difficult to quantify dollars earned from phone calls triggered by online ads. Search engines track visitors for up to 30 days, so your conversion may not happen until a subsequent visit several days later.

Conversion Rate - The percentage of times your ad resulted in a form fill-out, sale, or action. To calculate conversion rate, you take the number of actions divided by the number of clicks. A typical e-commerce conversion rate may be 2.5%, but a form fill-out conversion rate could be 10-20%. A very low conversion rate indicates problems.

Cost Per Conversion – The dollar cost associated with the conversion rate. If you had 100 clicks for one dollar each, and had a 5% conversion rate (5 conversions), your cost per conversion is $20. The formula is essentially the dollar cost divided by the number of conversions.

CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you. Because bidding is based on many factors, this amount is generally expressed as an average of multiple clicks. When applied to “advertising” it is synonymous with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Creative – The text of a PPC Ad. In Google, the first line of your creative is 25 characters, the second and third lines are 35 characters.

CTR – Click Through Rate. The actual number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions.

Day Parting – Setting your ads to appear at certain times of day, or certain days of the week. Many B2B customers will day part so their ads run during business hours when they can answer the phone.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion – The placement of a variable field in ad text that will show a searcher’s actual search phrase (within limits) in the body of the ad.

Exact Match – A keyword setting that only lets your ad show up when a precise keyword is searched upon. In Google Adwords, brackets are used for an exact match, so a keyword like [vegetable man] would only trigger an ad when that phrase is typed in with no words before, after, or between those two words.

Geotargeting – In a campaign, setting your ads to appear in a certain city, state, or country. Also called Local Matching.

Keyword - A word or phrase that triggers an advertisement. Keyword matches can be based on broad match, phrase match, or exact match. Negative Keywords can be used to keep ads from showing for the wrong searches.

Impressions – Number of times your ad is served up, either as a search match or through content placement.

Landing Page – The web page that the display ad or keyword “lands” on when an ad is clicked. If there is not a specific page assigned to an individual keyword, the landing page is determined by the “default URL” in the ad.

Negative Keyword – A keyword that is used to determine when an ad should not be shown. For example, if you have a campaign about computer keyboards, but don’t sell wireless keyboards, then you would add “-wireless” to your list of keywords. Anyone typing in “wireless keyboards” would not see your ad because the negative keyword excludes it.

Phrase Match – A keyword matching type that only shows your keyword when someone types in the specified phrase in a search query. With phrase match in Google Adwords, quotes are used around the keyword, so a phrase match designation for “dog food” would trigger an ad when someone typed in a search for “best dog food recipe.”

Position Preference – A setting that specifies the desired position of your PPC ads. Note that this can sometimes keep your ad from showing.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click. A model of serving ads where you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.

Quality Score - A somewhat complex formula used by search engines to decide whether your keywords are relevant to the landing page, how much trust your campaign has, and the click through rate on your ads. Changing an ad can change its quality score, so it is usually best to copy the ad and edit it, then pause the old one when the new one has gained its own quality level. There are also geographic and bidding factors.

ROI – Return On Investment. There are various ways to calculate the value of a PPC campaign. Normally it takes at least a month to ramp up a campaign and gain a quality score, and more time to determine buying patterns and seasonality. PPC ROI can be tough to track beyond the simple cost/benefit analysis, but if clicks are not resulting in profitable sales, then improvement is called for on the site and in the campaigns.

Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo’s PPC platform, previously known as Overture, previously known as GoTo. It shows ads on Yahoo! and Altavista.com.

Some of the more advanced features of PPC management have not been touched on in this glossary, given that a tutorial would be a better spot for showing people all of the features available in Pay-Per-Click. Google offers video tutorials for its Adwords product which are highly recommended for any DIY PPC enthusiasts. The world of PPC management can be very expensive, and anyone who is in charge of an account (or a liaison to an agency) should be cognizant of the different aspects of pay-per-click, and their relative advantages or pitfalls.

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I know when you read “choose your own ad,” you were hoping you’d be given the choice between commercials for Swiffer and Burn Notice. (What? You don’t stop whatever you’re doing to watch Michael Westen or join in with “Baby Come Back”?)

Falling short of that, YouTube’s test feature is still okay, I guess. YouTube’s new test lets users choose between one single pre-roll ad (usually 30+ seconds) or four 15-second commercial breaks dispersed throughout the clip. But will there be any choice? Back in December, Hulu reported that 88% of its users chose a two-minute pre-roll instead of 30-second ads interspersed throughout a half-hour (23-minute) program.

The test will only show up for selected users viewing long-form professional content. YouTube will also be asking its users what they think:

YouTube product manager Phil Farhi said that soliciting viewers’ opinions would help the company “find the right advertising formats”; the brands themselves would also benefit if YouTube ends up providing real-time data on which ads most users were volunteering to watch.

YouTube has long been searching for those “right” advertising formats: first it was the InVideo ad layovers, then it was AdSense-monetized video players. Then the real genius began, with Click-to-Buy and Sponsored Videos. But it’s still coming, including post-rolls and a branded homepage.

Anybody else reminded of the Edison quotation? You know:

I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.

So what do you think—how many attempts is it going to take? Or will this one be the winner?

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The data below shows the whole picture

While the data obviously shows a significant difference in whether various ads are recalled the big question is why? Are iPhone users smarter ‘smartphoners’? Are they just more able to process the data since they tend to skew a bit younger and are more accustomed to the pace of information flow (unlike myself who happily suffers from severe ad blindness)? Are they seeking the information in a different way thus making them more prepared to receive and recall the ads? There are a ton of questions that can be raised from this kind of data and obviously affect how marketers slice and dice the market place to reach this particular kind of ad sponge.

eMarketer does raise a good question though

But are iPhone users a viable demographic target? After all, Nielsen estimated that only 5.9% of US households owned or rented an iPhone in Q3 2008.

While appearing to be smaller what isn’t reflected in that number is the influence factor. iPhone users tend to be opinion leaders. I use a BlackBerry Storm and I do suffer from iPhone envy. Now, I have been known to give an opinion from time to time but as far as factors such as popularity and coolness the iPhone has all others beat pretty bad right now.

Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb wonders

With the impending release of the Palm Pre and the large number of Android phones in the handset makers’ pipeline, it will be interesting to see if these numbers will look similar on phones that are able to offer comparably compelling experiences

So Pilgrims let’s hear it. What makes the iPhone user more ad worthy? Is the reason due to the cool quotient or the ‘I spend too much time staring at screens’ quotient? As always your opinions are welcomed since we figure that more than a few influencers stop by here from time to time.

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Some agencies are doing this better than others by letting real people tell real stories.

Instead of going for a celebrity endorsement, Visa Europe opted to go with Brooklyn-based artist Bill Shannon as part of their Life Flows Better campaign. Bill was born with avascular necrosis, a degenerative hip condition that destroys the joints of a bone. Despite this, Bill has made dance his unique art form by dancing on skateboards and crutches.

As Visa themselves mention when talking about Bill and his involvement in their ad:

“Bill Shannon is for real, he isn’t gliding along on wheelie shoes and he isn’t a stunt man. The beauty of Bill’s movement is as inspirational as it is mesmerising. The fluidity of his dance moves meant that it didn’t take us long to realise that he was the perfect embodiment of Visa’s flow campaign.”

So, Visa are saying that it’s real people who matter. Real people, doing real things. Real people doing inspirational things every day through normal events.

And it’s working for them. Feedback is extraordinarily positive about Bill’s involvement. Profits are up 35% since the Life Flows Better campaign began in earnest. Visa is being seen as a card for people. People that are also customers.

Make your customers feel like people and they’ll talk about your product. Doesn’t seem that hard, does it?

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- The right metrics are critical

- It’s not just about direct response

- Need to measure offline as well as online behavior

- Post-buy measurement of delivery of media plan

“A lot of good changes occur in the toughest times because it causes you to question what you’re doing.”

Online advertising: $20+ billion in the US - $23.4B in 2008, 8%. 20% to direct mail, 12% newspapers, 23% TV (distribution, cable, broadcast combined), 6% radio, 5% Yellow Pages. Total: $296.8 billion.

“If anyone thinks the Internet is going to replace TV… In 08 the total amount of time spent watching television in the US grew by 4%. That growth alone was greater than the total amount of time spent watching online video.”

In Q4: search was 47% of online ad spending. Display ads totaled 33% including banner (21%), rich media (7%), video (3%), sponsorships (1%). Q1 08 display grew 27%, Q4 display SHRANK 4.3%. Banners, Video went up, rich media, sponsorships down in that 4.3% drop. “Advertisers are shifting from the more expensive display formats to the less expensive display formats.”

Cookie Deletion

Measured Yahoo and DoubleClick cookies

- 30% of Internet users delete their cookies in a month – corroborated by Belden, Jupiter, Nielsen

- These deleters do so an average of 4 times a month – user can be counted as 5 unique visitors

- Rate of people deleting hasn’t grown, but people who do delete do so more often

Massive decline in display ad click-through rates

• July 07 study: 32% of people clicked a display ad, 68% didn’t click
• Concentration of clickers – Top 6% of clickers account for 50% of all clicks
• Recommendation: only use clicks to evaluate direct response ad campaigns, or search
• Clicks don’t reflect campaign’s sales impact, or brand building

Search Study

• 25% buyer conversion from search
• 92% of buying that occurred was offline – that’s what needs to be measured
• If you’re just measuring direct impact of a click, you’re likely understating the ROI by factor of 6X

Post-Buy Analysis Summary

• 8% hit target with >5 frequency
• 61% in US but not target
• 19: Frequency <4
• 12% Outside US

Big value proposition not yet taken advantage of: big global brands have yet to run global campaigns through one buy. Internet’s the only medium to reach the world.

Holistic Impact of Online Ad Campaigns

- 200+ studies by comScore assessing impact of paid search and online ads on online, offline sales

- Display ads don’t just increase site visiting: trademark searches continue to see lift over four weeks after exposure to an ad

- For making a purchase (retail only): search and display exposure combined: 173% lift

- Incremental impact on retailers’ offline sales per 000 exposed: search + display = 119%, search only = 82%, display only = 16%

- Higher reach of display ads often helps lift sales more than search – reach of display 10x what you get with search

- 82% of online campaigns comScore has measured have generated average lift of 18% in CPG sales in retail stores

- Short term retail CPG brand sales lift from online advertising matches long-term TV impact

Check List

- Cookie deleting is reality

- Display ad click-through rates are minimal

- What must be measured:

• post-buy of media plan
• immediate/latent effects
• search display ad campaigns
• online/offline behavioral impact

Discovery

• Even with no clicks or minimal clicks, online display can generate substantial lift in site visitation, trademark search queries, lift in online/offline sales
• Higher online sales lift found for search ads vs. display, but when combined synergy provides even more lift
• ONline ad offers lower cost, better targeting, interactivity, sales impact

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Regular readers of Marketing Pilgrim may be familiar with my disdain for predictions of how an industry will grow 5 years from now. These prognostications are educated guesses at best and wild eyed speculation at worst. Though they can be fun to gawk over they often times look ridiculous when seen through the rear view mirror of reality. The following chart shows just eMarketer sees the growth of US mobile advertising spend for the foreseeable future.

The numbers offered in this study contend that the big jump in adoption of mobile advertising will occur between 2010 and 2012. Of course, this is anyone’s guess as to real numbers but the growth should be significant even if it falls short of these predictions.

In this case, I have to lean toward thinking that this part of the Internet industry really does have potential v. just good PR. I know how my mobile usage has gone up exponentially since I got my first Blackberry in 2007. Add the iPhone into the mix at about that same time and the platform has been created for real opportunity with mobile everything. The report points out that the convergence of smart phones, network upgrades and richer content are a perfect storm of sorts to give this industry real momentum.

Other questions broached are:

• How will mobile advertising fare in a down economy?
• Can marketers count on smart phones to expand mobile’s reach?
• How will changes in mobile usage patterns affect marketers?
• What will be the affect of mobile video?
• Which ad-funded business models will take off?

So what’s your take on mobile advertising? Hype or reality?

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Web ad spending hit $23.4 billion in 2008, up 10.6 percent over 2007. Fourth quarter 2008 revenue growth was more conservative at 2.6 percent; total online ad spending for the quarter was $6.1 billion.

While that 10.6% growth is down from the whopping 26% growth seen in 2007, it’s still pretty darn good–and shines a bright spotlight on just how badly the newspaper business is doing with its migration to online formats.

Breaking down online ad growth, we see that search grew 20% and performance-based ads rocked the house with an impressive 57% share of all ad spending.

I’ll leave you with one stat that left me scratching my head

[David Silverman, partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers] cited video ad spending as a significant growth category. Video advertising revenue rose from 2 percent in 2007 to 3 percent of overall online ad spending in 2008.

So why did Google just shut down its video ad units?

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Google recently announced the release of Google Ad Manager consultant program, which will provide advanced ad serving support and professional services.

Google recently announced the release of Google Ad Manager consultant program, which will provide advanced ad serving support and professional services.

As we all know that Google Ad Manager was released last year as an ad serving tool. Now, Google needs more professionals to attend to setting up and trouble shooting problems of a large number of publishers and webmasters who are using this tool.

Till now, people used to take help from the Google Ad Manager forum to solve their problems. However, with the introduction of this program users can now take full advantage of their experience using Google Ad Manager. Some of the basic services offered through this program are Ad Trafficking, Consultation, Training and Advanced Support.

Four companies are currently listed as certified consultants. You need to contact Google to become a certified Ad Manager consultant.

If you don’t know much about Google Ad Manager then try this quick tutorial.

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Twitter Launches Text Advertising

Twitter recently added another feather to its cap with the launch of house advertisements. At present, these advertisements only link to Twitter Search or the Twitter Widget. Although, test are still going on for possible third party advertisements in the future. Last year, Twitter Japan, came out with display ads.

According to Evan William, Twitter CEO, “The strongest revenue potential of the firm would come from charging for commercial use by brands. But it’s clear that the company will experiment with a number of different potential streams - we think Twitter search has tremendous revenue opportunity.”

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Over the past 11 days 532 readers have cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list.  Equally interesting was that out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fall into the category of Social Media Marketing. See the full list below along with other statistics about where voters came from as well as info about the readership of Online Marketing Blog.

The question we asked was, “What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?”  Here are the top ten tactics selected:

• Blogging (34%)
• Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
• Search engine optimization (28%)
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
• Email marketing (17%)
• Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
• Pay per click (14%)
• Blogger relations (12%)
• Video marketing (10%)
• Social media advertising (7%)

See results for the full poll of 45 different digital marketing tactics here.

Other stats and observations about this poll:

All 45 tactics received at least one vote, even “no holds barred spam”.   Email marketing rated higher than PPC which is surprising given the budgets spent on PPC vs email.  Some tactics are much easier to implement than others, or less expensive, which may explain a few of the top choices, such as Twitter.

Corporate web sites don’t rate in the top ten tactics. Does this mean the death of company web sites? At least in their current form it does. Some companies are succumbing to the social media perspective to extremes, like the Skittles site which has been simplified to a page of search results from Twitter on the Skittles name. Others are adding social features to their company sites to compliment existing messaging and functionality. I suggest somewhere in the middle is where many companies will end up by 3rd or 4th quarter this year.

For promotion on Twitter, we generated a unique URL through Cli.gs, which offers some handy statistics as well as URL shortening. See the image on the right for the traffic to the Cli.gs URL, promoted exclusively on Twitter and the countries that traffic came from.

Overall, there were 36,144 visits to the Poll blog post over 11 days. Visitors came primarily from: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and spent an average of 2 minutes and 27 seconds on the poll.

The breakdown of traffic sources for the poll include (stats from Clicky):

• Direct 13,010
• Search 12,198
• Links 5,335
• Social Media 4,654
• RSS Reader 652
• Email 295
• Ads 3

 The large number of visitors compared to the number of respondents resulted in about a 1% response rate. For a one question poll, that’s low and undoubtedly, the large number of options (45 digital marketing tactics) may have been overwhelming. 

Feedback on the poll ranged from (”3 tactics is not enough” to “There are way too many options to choose from” to suggestions for additional tactics including providing APIs and livestreaming content. 

By now, most companies (we hope) have their 2009 online marketing plans in place. Does this ranked order of tactics mean you should change up your online marketing mix? The answer is that digital marketing tactics should match the needs of the situation, company resources, the target market and end consumer preferences.  The proper tactical mix for an online marketing program could be anything from the 45 tactics listed in the poll and still be successful as long as they support a valid strategy.

Some companies are prepared for digital and social media marketing programs and many are not. To get “ready”, companies need to develop strategic plans and get up to speed on both best and worst practices.  This TopRank Reader Poll on Digital Marketing Tactics indicates a strong interest in social media marketing. Whether those methods of reaching and communicating with customers reconciles with existing marketing plans or not, companies would do well to allocate resources to some level of ongoing education, testing and development of expertise in the social media space.

Were the results surprising to you? Right on? We’d love to read your feedback and discussion. While future versions of this poll will actually be a multi-question survey, we’d love to get your feedback on making it a better tool for you.

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The PlusBox in search results:

Expanding the listing:

In order to have your listings show the PlusBox, you’ll need to have your products submitted to Google Base and be part of their beta test.

Another way to make your Ads stand out is to support the use of Google Checkout across your site. As you can see in the examples above, Google checkout subscribers have an additional Checkout logo displayed next to their listings that help to make them stand out from the rest.

Google Blogoscoped has a nice image showing the evolution of the checkout badge over time:

If you’ve had experience with either the PlusBox or checkout badge please let us know what you think in the comments below!

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