But retargeting does not stop there. In a previous post, I described how smart marketers can use search retargeting as another way to attract more customers. Search retargeting, by showing ads to in-market shoppers who have searched for related keywords in the search engines, expand the poll of potential shoppers dramatically. You can now target customers, whether or not they have visited your web site.

Recently my new employer (Chango) unveiled 5 additional types of retargeting. It would not do any justice to go through those without showing the fantastic infographic they put together.

Brand marketers will typically work on a set of goals that promote, reinforce or protect their brand. SEM is only of the things they work on and therefore their primary interest will be to ensure alignment between SEM and the overall brand campaign. They will place stronger emphasis on overall brand positioning and experience. This will result on more emphasis on creative’s and off-site engagement metrics (Click-Through-rates).

They will also be strong proponents of defensive SEM, where they will ensure that the brand is prominent in search results in response to competitors’ and media campaigns. Look at the BP SEM’s brand campaign as an example. Brand marketers are becoming more sophisticated around measurement particularly on integrating SEM and on-site engagement metrics. But their forte remains corporate and creative alignment.

Finding the right skill-set

Educational marketers are a sub-set of brand marketers. They understood that the brand promise can only be fully executed when customers experience intangible benefits that help do better in their life or job. This is particularly true in a Business-to-Business environment. Comscore is great example of a company that has been able to leverage their unique data pool and make it available to potential customers. They will use SEM a bit differently.

By bidding one educational keywords (‘online case studies’), they will be able to reinforce their brand positioning and drive qualified traffic to their web site. Skills for educational marketers and similar to those required in the Communications world. Those include the ability to promote added value content combined with on-site content publication.

Performance marketers are the most common breed in the SEM world. Their goals are clearly customer acquisition. In the B2B world, this starts with lead generation. The ability to engage customers all the way through from a search engine (or publication) to contact us mechanism is paramount.

They often look at a broader variety of metrics that encompass the multiple stages in the sales funnel. Ultimately the will look at Cost-Per-Acquisition at their primary performance indicator. They will then compare the C.P.A. against incremental net margin to assess the pay-back time of a particular campaign.

Performance marketers should relentlessly challenge themselves in improving creative’s, web site experience and acquisition at the keyword level. They understand data more than anyone else and are comfortable with it.

All in all, there are definitely some common skills required whether you are a brand or performance marketers. Good SEM marketers should understand creative alignment, be able to leverage data all the way throughout the sales funnel and have a relentless appetite to challenge existing campaigns.

He gave the example of Value City Furniture – they saw $168 cost per acquisition fall to $29, and .93 percent conversion rates that rise to 6.93 percent within one month.

One of the things which is not well documented is whether the search re-targeting feature will still be available as Yahoo! search capabilities are folded into Bing AdCenter. I would assume it won’t since bing has not expressed any interest for it (neither has Google).

But this does not mean the industry is giving -up. In fact multiple vendors such as Criteo, BlueKai and Chango offer some type of search retargeting tools. I met with Chango a few weeks back and was quite impressed by their capabilities.

This is their sales pitch: ”Chango™ works with Media Planners and Search Marketers to deliver new customers by targeting dynamic display ads to users based on their recent search activity on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and more”.

What does this mean?

In essence, Chango tied-up with multiple data centers which provide their search queries to them. Those data providers can be smaller ad networks, large web publishers, comparison sites and search toolbars.

Chango then lets brand advertisers, agencies or Search Engine shops serve ads related to those user’s queries. The users have previously indicated an intent and more likely to interact with those ads.

The latest and brightest in search re-targeting

What’s particularly exciting about Chango is their ability to manage the end-to-end process. As opposed to let’s say BluKai, Chango manage both data collection and ad serving through real-time bidding. They currently work with ad exchanges such as Double Click, OpenX and AdMeld.

If  you have experienced with display ads, you probably recognize the benefits of more targeted ads. Search-re targeting goes beyond broad demographics data and on-site behavioral targeting that many agencies use to buy media. This is a great improvement.

Because search gets the lion’s share of a digital marketing budget, it might seem like the most likely candidate for a cutback — after all, there’s usually so much of it. But marketers might want to think twice before jumping to that conclusion, because it may very well be a blind leap of faith.

Targeting search vs facebook

In the last year alone, the only thing more impressive than Facebook’s growth has been the buzz around it. Users, page views, estimated value, and a Hollywood blockbuster all seem to point to “the next big thing” — something that all marketers should want to be part of.

In reality, Facebook marketing offers a very different value proposition from search marketing, and results-driven marketers can still get a much better return our of search than they can out of social.

Article by Guillaume Bouchard from Search Engine Watch

Read the full article here

1. Are we using the right information architecture?
2. What title tags should we be using?
3. What is the right content to display?
4. How do we make sure we optimize our customers stories for the greatest impact?
5. How can we make it easier for interested parties to link to our site?

Our own views coupled with customer research should inform most decisions. But when in doubt, we like to challenge our thinking by using search tools. After all search engines collect valuable data on how customers search for information.

The Google AdWords tool for instance highlights the popularity of queries for a particular keyword and suggest other related terms.

The choice of our domain name ‘semvalet.com’ was primary guided by our brand positioning, i.e. we are a no frills, no non-sense digital agency that specialize in helping businesses and other agencies succeed in Search Engine Marketing.

But we did leverage the Google Insights tools as well. When we compared queries for PPC  and SEM,  we have found SEM to be more popular:

When it comes to page titles and content optimization, we used a similar approach. We had  a bit more room to maneuver. SEO best practices indicated we had 80 characters for title tags, 160 for meta tags and a dozen meta keywords.

For instance we hesitated for some time before adding pay-per-click into most of our tags, h1 and h2. But it turned out this is still one of the best understood term to describe what we do, at least based on the popularity of the queries in Google AdWords.

As to our customers, we simply realized that as a start-up, being able to display big company names would definitely help getting us additional traffic. We worked closely with College Hunks Hauling Junk to create a high impact case study. You may not know them, but there are very prominent in Small Businesses magazines.

And we did not stop when the web site was launched. Like any start-up, our product offering saw a few adjustments. We expanded our services to agencies. As we created more customer segments, each of them had to use a different set of content to provide the most relevant user experience.

For agencies in particular, our guts are telling us they will expect a bit more sophistication in terms of semantics that we use on the web site. For instance, they understand the concept of Paid search while end customers typically think ‘google advertising’.

What we have yet to crack for the next release is whether we should be using the term ‘outsource’ or ‘subcontract’ or maybe both. In this case since agencies are a smallwer world, we can’t simply rely on Google AdWords tool. Other techniques such as Google analytics, polls, performance of our LinkedIn ads or analysis of Google search terms will help us refine our content strategy.

We are certainly not saying Search tools are the only way to optimize content, but we think they are a good start.

The next release of semvalet.com is planned next week. We will work hard on content over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

Bing and Google War

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

Article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land

Read the full article here

The group of images highlights those top image searches with the use of images, how novel. When you click on an image from that page, you are taken to a Bing image search result. From that page you can narrow down the image search with the various tools on the page.

Bing updates the landing page daily.

Here is a picture of the new landing page:

Bing new homepage

Article by Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land.

Read the full article here

Brand and Social Media

In my opinion, its fair for brands to get skeptic about social media, because of two reasons:

1) There is a lot of uncertainty involved

2) Brands have their image at stake.

Imagine all that marketing talks, discussions, strategies and competition that would’ve gone in all these years to build the brand. One fine morning, social media comes up and you’re talking about change. Change to such volumes that it could even put the brand at threat.

So, brands have all the right to get doubtful about social media. And its fair that they might not understand it in the first go, but education can helps it all.

Brands, have always been following the old-school marketing techniques. They’d extrapolate their ideas and techniques to social media, and expect it to work the same way. They would fail miserably. But that’s when they would either realize that they’ve done something wrong, or realize that this isn’t going to work.

Article from Daily SEO Blog

Read the full article here.

From Google’s perspectives, it is fine to bid on your competitors brand name and products. In May 2009, they made it possible for your competitors to bid on your company name and use your brand terms in their text ads. In September 2010, Google expanded this practice to Canada, U.K. and Ireland. The same day, they also made it possible for most advertisers worldwide to bid on your company name (but not include their brand terms in the text ads). This is currently being challenged  by the European parliament and US companies like Rosetta Stone.

There are some limitations, which Google highlighted below:

”Ads using the term in a competitive, critical, or negative way will not be allowed to run with the term at issue in their ad. Additionally, we will not allow the following:

- ads that do not lead to a landing page that clearly facilitates the sale of either the goods and services corresponding to the trademark or parts or components related to the goods and services corresponding to the trademark

- competitive or critical information about the goods and services corresponding to a trademark

- ads that do not lead to a landing page which provides substantive information about the goods and services corresponding to a trademark”

The above rules are of course controversial for market leaders like Rosetta Stone that have established generic brand names that are associated with a category wide product. Google would argue that customers looking for Rosetta Stone products are looking for a language training program, not necessarily Rosetta Stone’s.

Google trademark policy is also not drawing clear boundaries. Right now, it seems any company can bid on any competitors’ name.

Stealing our customers away

In my experience, Google’s argument that their trademark policy is an attempt to increase customer experience is biased. There is clearly some financial benefits in having competitors and resellers bid on the same terms. Due to the nature of the AdWords auction, more bidders will automatically drive Cost Per Click (CPC) up.

Don’t get me wrong, I have seen instances where bidding on your competitors brand name or products work. This is especially true when your competitors is not using any paid search advertising. But unless your competitors are not running any analytics, they will notice the drop in traffic and sales. And very quickly will start creating ads that not only aim to recoup loss traffic but also take your own customers away.

Only Google is the long term winner of those short sighted strategies for advertisers.

In the old days where competition was weak and paid search very costs effective, most advertisers focused on educational or transactional keywords. Brand keywords (‘your company name’ or ‘yourcompanyname.com’) were mostly left out of the paid search campaigns. We just assumed those brand terms would perform effectively by themselves in natural search.

This is changing. Increased competition, decreased share-of-voice in search engine results and rising Cost-Per-Click make it more than ever important to bid on your company name. Here’s why:

1. Negative suppression … or how to prevent competitors to steal your company’s name

With Google’s update to their U.S. trademark policy in May 2009, it is now possible for your competitors to bid on your company name and use your brand terms in their text ads. In September 2010, Google expanded this practice to Canada, U.K. and Ireland. The same day, they also made it possible for most advertisers worldwide to bid on your company name (but not include their brand terms in the text ads). This is currently being challenged  by the European parliament and US companies like Rosetta Stone.

But it looks like most regulators are fine with this approach as long as the ads using brand names do not confuse customers. In summary, those policies are unlikely to change for now and you may want to get head of the game by bidding on your own keywords to protect this valuable sponsored results real estate

2. Real Estate opportunity … your web site first

Talking about real estate in search engines results, research has shown that customers do expect respectable companies to come-up in the top results of the Google, Bing or Yahoo!

Customers may think that your company is relevant to the search query or you are prepared to pay for the privilege of being on top of the results. And so should you, even for brand terms like your company name.

With the explosion of digital assets optimization, all sorts of links such as Twitter feeds, YouTube videos or Google news may come-up in the search engines results pages before your web site link appears. You want to offer customers the opportunity to go to your web site where you can manage relevant and targeted content.

3. Share of voice … every pixel matters

As mentioned above customers are now seeing multiple links and messages that are related to your company name. The more positive messages about your company name, the better.

Especially when those brand term references (‘your company name’) occupy real estate above the fold.  Below is an illustration of customers looking at search engines pages. There are definitely some great benefits in terms of brand recognition of being in the areas that receive most attention.

Don't fold when in trouble with competitors.

4. Hallo Effect … SEO and Paid search benefits

Some research I have seen in the past indicate that having both a strong SEO link and sponsored results ads can trigger a 10 to 15% increase in CTR for both of them. This supposedly can be related to the fact that once you have gained the share of voice battle, customers are simply more willing to click.

5. In-site control … get customers to where they should be spending their time

SEO links are determined by a complexity of factors. And so is the selection of which link will appear under which brand terms. It’s not always easy to influence Google or Bing’s assessment of each page.  By bidding on your company name, you will be able to redirect customers (or other stakeholders such as reporters) to the right section of your web site. By using Google site-links in your text ad, you can even offer a selection of pages each customer or stakeholder type can go to.

All in all bidding on your company name makes more sense than even from a competitive, branding, performance and content control standpoint. If you don’t, competitors will most will.