Surprising Data On Natural Born Clickers
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Here’s an interesting study on Natural Born Clickers by Starcom, Tacoda & Hitwise (via SEOmoz blog). Natural Born Clickers -- or NBCs -- click on online advertising the most, and what the data shows about them is surprising. Heavy clickers: Account for 50% of all display ad clicks, but only 6% of the total online population. Skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44. Skew towards households with an income under $40,000. Spend 4 times more online than “normal” clickers – but their spending does not proportionately reflect this increased usage. Are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career service sites.
Will this study have a negative impact on the paid display ad industry? Will more targeted methods of attracting customers like organic SEO get a boost? Only time will tell – but it’s certainly food for thought. Labels: advertising, Adwords, seo
posted by Valerie D'Orazio
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More Ad Money Going Online
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Online advertising is a growing business. According to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “U.S. Internet advertising revenue rose 25 percent in the third quarter to about $5.2 billion,” signaling a new record for the industry.
Why the jump? Gavin O’Malley from Online Media Daily explored the topic in an article posted on Tuesday. In it, he quoted Nick Brien, worldwide CEO of Universal McCann, as saying, “ ‘If this happens for another year, significant clients will want to walk,” because all of them are “just waiting to increase their online spending to 50% or 60% [of their total budgets]’"
McCann’s clients are not the only companies dissatisfied with traditional avenues for advertising. In fact, many are “discontent due to increasing viewer fragmentation, disruptive technologies, and the resulting decrease in ROI.”
The truth of the matter is that each year, more and more people find themselves increasing the time they spend online. This shift is only natural.
However, marketing execs might soon reach a different frustration with the fact that ads online do not seem to stick in the same way as TV or radio spots. Josh Quittner and Jessi Hempel of Fortune asked readers on Tuesday to name 3 memorable ads they saw online. I couldn’t do it and chances are, neither can you.
Their article went to point out that Google is one of the few companies that has succeeded in creating a thriving ad platform online. Facebook is trying to follow suit, but only time will tell whether their interesting idea of users sharing ads with one another will work.
The bottom line for us is that all things related to marketing (if not all things in general) are expanding their footprint online. Yet, it’s not as simple as regurgitating traditional media campaigns online. The Internet is a different medium, after all, and it demands a little ingenuity.Labels: advertising, Adwords, new media, Web 2.0
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
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Google's Advertising Paradox
Friday, October 19, 2007
So here's an interesting notion: Google has built its empire on its Google ads yet Google itself, probably the most famous brand of our time, does not and has not ever invested significantly into its own advertising.
So in the olden days, before we "googled" everything, how did we find out about Google? Why did we use it instead of Yahoo or Alta Vista (remember them?!)? From what I can recall, it mostly started by word of mouth. I heard about Google from the mother of the children I used to baby sit. She told me that a silly little thing called "google.com" is the best search engine! "Google?" I asked. "Really? What a stupid name."
But the name stuck in my mind and when I came home that night, I gave Google a go. To my surprise, Google was fantastic. I told all my friends about it and we, along with the rest of the world, have been googling ever since.
I imagine that this was the experience most had and what lead to Google's sprint to the top of the search engine food chain. The AP's Michael Liedtke pointed out in an article on this topic that rather than throwing money into frivolous advertising, Google put its dollars directly to its actual business, which involved perfecting the art of search.
"This advertising aversion has freed up money for engineers, computing hardware and other resources that fuel Google's search engine while leaving plenty of profit to keep shareholders happy and lift the company's stock ever higher."
Google serves as an example for many aspects of business. Its unique approach to marketing, however, is worthy of exploration for any professional in this industry. The key lesson from this particular advertising model, or lack there of, is that quality will always overcome being bombarded with a company's message.
Back when I was baby sitting, literal word of mouth had much more longevity. Before I heard about Google, I would have to actually ask my friends' opinions of things in order to gain perspective on them. Now, all you have to do is go online and you can get the opinions of millions.
The bottom line is a company's main concern, in its beginning stages especially, needs to be the quality of its product or service. Once that is perfected, they can think about giving us a call. Labels: advertising, Adwords, Google, Internet, Marketing, Public Relations, search
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
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Putting Your AdWords into Stealth Mode
Thursday, July 06, 2006
With the recent Yahoo settlement of the click fraud case, the flurry of follow-up news is coming out, including a study just announced by Outsell, Inc. Their survey states that 37 percent of marketers reduced their click-based advertising, and that the money paid in fraudulent clicks is about $800 million... compared to the $7 billion size of the industry, that's a sizable percentage if it is to be believed.
Are you planning to cut back your paid search spending? Perhaps we can recommend an alternative. If you want to get high-quality click through and conversion, advertise on keywords other than the obvious "benchmark terms" known by you and your competitors, then switch from broad matching to narrow matching. In this way, you keep running your PPC campaigns, but they go into "stealth mode" in the long tail of search.
But how do you choose such keywords? Well, Connors just happened to develop a tool for natural search engine optimization which is proving to be an invaluable asset in improving AdWords campaigns when you import the natural search keyword list. How is this possible? Your cost per click is driven down in Google as your relevancy is deemed to be improved. This is why you have to remove terms that are underperforming in order to "fine tune" your campaigns. We have HitTail users reporting campaign improvements doubling, from 3% to 6% click-through. Using your long tail keywords in your paid campaign appears to trigger off some sort of "relevancy" magic that both improves performance and drives down campaign cost.
So, use HitTail for a few weeks, and export the natural optimization keyword lists using HitTail's new export tool. Plow them into your AdWords campaigns. Switch from broad to narrow matching, and watch your PPC campaign go into stealth mode, and confound your competition who probably doesn't have the time or resources to monitor on more than a fixed list of well known benchmark terms.
This of course has the secondary advantage of helping you start to fix your state of natural search results. The same terms that will fine-tune an AdWords campaign are often excellent subject matter for new blog posts, which will in turn improve your natural search results and further reduce your exposure to click fraud risk by simply making a larger portion of your clicks into the free variety. It's a form of hedging your bets.
And this answers the two notions that have been nagging at the back of the minds of online marketers for some time: is click fraud happening on my site? And isn't doing well in natural search a better online initiative? If you answer Yes to both of these questions, then the time is perfect for you to check out the new HitTail tool that is advancing the state of online marketing.Labels: Adwords, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Yahoo
posted by Mike Levin
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Gauging AdWord Dependency
Monday, April 17, 2006
Many marketing publications appear to be covering the April 2006 study from iProspect Search Engine Marketing Studies including keyword research regarding the first three pages being the most important. The most recently publication I noticed picking it up was eMarketer (this morning), despite the news being over a week old. I believe this hunger for the study is due to marketing managers the world over gauging their dependencies on their AdWords campaigns. If they were to go off of AdWords, how much would it cost them in terms of traffic, and how easy would it be to win back the traffic through the free alternative of natural or organic search?Labels: Adwords, SEM
posted by Mike Levin
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Advertising Credibility
Friday, November 18, 2005
How many Google AdWords do you need? What ad placement can get you the most results? Or should you scrap your advertising efforts entirely?
Advertising is continually growing, especially in the online space. And for good reason. Advertising can be very effective when done well. And in advertising, you get the exact amount of exposure that you pay for and you know where and when it will run. But this is not the only approach and, in fact, may not be the most credible source for consumers.
Ads can say whatever you want them to. But the audience isn't necessarily going to believe it. Consumers have become very skeptical of advertising and while it can be very effective, it can also have more than a few pitfalls. PR, on the other hand, creates messages that come from an outside source. It is considerably less promotional and the results are always a bit uncertain, precisely because of this. However, articles are trusted more and they cost a whole lot less for the same exposure. This is also true for SEO, where the top 10 search results are so vital and the paid keywords so often passed over.
This isn't to condemn advertising. However, I contend that the best and most complete marketing campaign takes the limits of advertising credibility into consideration and augments these ads with solid PR and SEO efforts that can add validity to the messaging. Your campaign will be the better for it.Labels: Adwords, Google, pr, seo
posted by Jessica Ek
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Search Engine Optimization is For You
Thursday, September 29, 2005
One of the huge benefits of team blogging is that we can play off of each other and make the interplay that usually takes place in email take place on the corporate blog, and use that demonstrate our smartness, and create new opportunities by attracting search traffic on the subject-matter. Case-in-point: every day, we send out a flurry of emails on developments in the Search and SEO space. There's news like Google making the WiFi download available, and opening the huge facility right around the corner from our office here in New York. But there's also controversial articles 7 Ways To Know That Search Engine Optimization Isn’t For You where we could counter every point. Together with the iProspect and MarketingExperiments report, it's almost enough to make one paranoid that there is some attempt to knock SEO going on.
Now I know that the type of work that goes into SEO and SEM is dramatically different. But they are different specialties and different segments under the marketing umbrella. There's room for both. I somehow get the vibe that people who run pay-per-click campaigns are not entirely comfortable with the emerging industry of SEO growing up, adding accountability, metrics, ROI and precise tracking that is as good (or in our case, better) than the tracking URLs within the AdWord world. If you take the time to maintain a website, then you should be receiving all the natural search engine traffic that is your right, based on the quality and reputation of your company, products and services. While we believe that PPC is a valuable part of the marketing mix, we feel that turning a blind eye to SEO is leaving money on the table. No matter your situation, search engine optimization is for you. Talk to us to find out why.
Oh yeah, the point here is that you should blog the news here instead of email, becuse Blogger will send the entire body of the blog post in email to the entire SEO team anyway—links and all.Labels: Adwords, Google, search, SEM, seo
posted by Connors Communications
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PR and SEO
Friday, August 26, 2005
Greetings Connors Blogging Team and the world. This is our first post onto the Connors Blog Site, and I'm using it by way of introduction, and challenging the team to jump in and participate in blogging here. We have dozens of interesting and engaging discussions here at Connors Communications every week, which would be much better unleashed onto the Internet, and leveraged to achieve some level of blogging celebrity. We talk about very leading edge issues, as we are determined to associate the emerging field of search engine optimization (SEO) as a natural extension of the Public Relations industry. We use better-than-best practices, because when it comes to the build-vs.-buy question, we often build, enabling us to accomplish feats that are unimaginable with Analytics packages alone. So why are PR and SEO connected?
Public Relations deals with getting publicity where paid advertising cannot, usually at a lower cost, and almost always where the defenses of media-savvy consumers are lowest. When you think about it, good PR gets you editorial coverage in the media channel's main attraction. On TV, it's the television programs and not the commercials. In print, it's the articles, and not the advertisements. Effective PR is about enhancing a company's pure reputation through effective word-of-mouth, influencing those who influence many. So it should be no surprise that Connors views the emerging field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a part of the growing field of Public Relations.
In other words, Public Relations is to Advertising what SEO is to Search Engine Marketing (namely Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, collectively known as SEM). With paid advertising, your ad runs only as long as you run the campaign. When you stop paying for the coverage, the effect goes away. It is a clear deal, for your marketing dollar, and comes with certain guarantees. PR on the other hand doesn't give such guarantees. Reporters may or may not pick up your story.
I believe that a well executed SEO campaign can be more effective than the equivalent SEM campaign, and is money better spent. There are dozens of reasons, but the most poignant is that the effect of SEO is permanent, and benefits compound over time. As paid keyword campaigns become more competitive and expensive over time, the reason behind the organic approach will become more and more clear. We encourage you to follow our Blog to see how it develops.
Team? By the way, one of the most effective ways of incorporating blogging into your day-to-day procedure is incorporating blogging into Microsoft Word with Blogger for Word. That's how I published this first post, link and all.Labels: Adwords, blog, Connors Communications, Google, pr, seo, Yahoo
posted by Connors Communications
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