I was taking a look at my RSS feeds and noticed a blog posting by Michael Gray titled: Rankmaniac. It sounded like a strange word and immediately reminded me of many other SEO contests. Yet, after looking into it, this one is a bit different.
Instead of just winning a prize, it’s actually a homework assignment for Luis von Ahn’s class, Science of the Web.
Still, it’s always interesting to get a glimpse at different tactics people use with SEO, online marketing, etc.
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Yesterday, Google announced more changes to the way the calculate your quality score and how they show ads. There have been good points made on the PPC Book and on SE Roundtable about this so I’ll just sum them up the biggies.
The 2nd one seems like it could be big news. Previously, if an advertiser bid high enough to start overtaking some of the top positions, but didn’t yet accumulate enough CTR history to show up in the yellow bar, all of the ads would only be shown on the right side (reducing clicks for everyone). Now, Google is saying that even if the ad ahead of yours doesn’t have a high enough CTR to show up in the yellow bar, but your ad does, you may end up getting shown ahead of your competitor - in the yellow bar.
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Recently, I wrote an article about Google cutting costs and trying to increase revenue and it looks like Google is taking one more step to give their income statement a boost. Google updated their policies to show that beer is now acceptable to advertise for as long as it meets the local regulations.
Don’t promote unacceptable alcohol products.
Restrictions on the promotion of alcohol vary based on local regulations and type of alcoholic product:
- Ads are not permitted to directly promote hard alcohol and liqueurs. This means that hard alcohol cannot be promoted in ad text or be the purpose of your site (occupying a significant portion of your site).
- Advertisements for beer may target countries where such ads comply with local regulations. However, beer ads may not target India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Malaysia.
- Advertisements for champagne and wine are allowed everywhere that such advertisements comply with local regulations.
- Since we consider beer, wine, and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption by adults, ads promoting these products will be given a Non-FamilySafe status.
- Please note that some jurisdictions may enforce any of these additional regulations:
- require government permits for the advertisement of alcoholic beverages,
- prohibit advertisements for beverages with a certain level of alcohol content,
- and/or require certain disclaimers in advertisements for alcohol beverages.
It is the advertiser’s responsibility to comply with all local laws.
Related Posts on the Web:
Google Opens Up Bidding on Beer and Champagne
Google Opens Door to More Alcohol Ads
Google Now Allowing Ads for Beer, Wine & Champagne
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Yahoo’s in trouble - at this point, everyone knows that. Throughout this entire year, they’ve been playing a mating game with all of the top search engines (Microsoft, Google and now AOL). They first were in some talks with Microsoft that kept falling through. With Google, they seemed to have a fairly finalized deal to serve Google ads on their network which was estimated to bring in an extra $250-400 million in revenue for Yahoo, however, the deal seems to be dead in the water due to government intervention. Now, there is word that Yahoo and AOL execs are talking with each other about a possible deal between the two companies.
An AOL/Yahoo deal could be the push Yahoo needs to become a truly competitive force, but a merger alone would only mend some of their problems for the short term. A deal could give Yahoo additional traffic that is better quality than many of their current partners and would also be taking some traffic away from Google that would help bring the two market share percentages at least a little bit closer together. However, both AOL and Yahoo have been losing users over the last few years and while a deal would give Yahoo a short term boost, there would still need more to be done for Yahoo to get completely back on its feet.
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It seems that Google is testing (I’m hoping they’re not just playing favorites) a new feature that is allowing Blue Nile to display 3 products with descriptions with a drop down link on the PPC Ad. It is giving them an extra line of linked text with the ability to bold face keywords and when clicked, completely shifts organic listings below the fold or very close to it. This could give a big edge to Blue Nile by either saving them a cost of a click or by getting them more clicks since they’re more noticeable or even give them an increased conversion rate.
So for these search results, you can get 3 paid ads, followed by 3 organic (one being wikipedia), followed by 3 Froogle (Google Product Search) listings, followed by the rest of the organic. Or, if you expand Blue Nile’s ad, you’ll get 6 paid ads instead of just 3.
First found at SE Roundtable.
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I’ve been thinking about this topic for the last few months and have been dealing with it ever since I’ve started in this industry. I was going to hold off on writing about it, but a post from PPC Blog got me to go ahead and just post my thoughts on the subject.
While managing paid search for large, well known brands who receive lots of very efficient volume from their brand terms, I’ve always been annoyed by affiliates and even competitors bidding on “my” (client’s) brand terms. Some clients seem to take action right away with these partners, either taking away commissions or outright kicking them out of the program while others seem more lackadaisical about it and just give out multiple warnings before really taking any hard stance against the affiliates who are breaking the t’s and c’s.
PPC Blogger’s opinion is that he’s completely against it and that many of the reasons given to him in support of brand bidding, even for a select few affiliates, are flawed. He points out that the logic is usually flawed because of ignorance, trust in tracking and affiliates, brand ownership, lack of control and a higher CPC caused by your affiliates competing against your brand.
I’ve always agreed with his stance for pretty much those same reasons, although it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been thinking about it from a slightly different angle for a select few cases.
As a side note, I haven’t had the opportunity to ever test this theory, but I think it at least would warrant testing.
First, I feel very strongly that you should never openly allow all of your affiliates to bid on your brand. Due to lack of control, ability to monitor and possibility of a negative influence on your brand name, I don’t think anyone should have an open policy on their brand terms.
A second issue, that isn’t mentioned in PPC Blogger’s post is the display URL and destination URL. For these, you should not allow any of your affiliates to use them for the above reasons, but also because they can overtake your own ads and can end up having a negative affect on your quality score in Google. I believe Amazon actually allows their affiliates to use direct linking and many times I see ads that are poorly written or inaccurate.
Who Would I Allow to Bid on Brand Terms?
What I would allow would be to allow brand bidding for a select few affiliates (probably only 3-5) that, not only are high performers, but also trustworthy. The high volume aspect is not only because it is a reward, but also because they have put a vested interest in your business. While there are times when they can easily switch their site around to market for another brand, giving them this extra bonus can help solidify the relationship and get them to work harder for you. Being able to trust them is also crucially important so that they aren’t breaking the guidelines you set for them.
Why Would I Allow Brand Term Bidding?
If your industry has many big name brands who are all bidding on each other’s brand terms, then even though most of the searchers are still going to your site, you’re losing some to the competition. As you know, if you’re in position #2, you will get a lot more clicks than if you’re in position #8 or not even on the first page. Since Google (specifically) only allows advertisers to have one ad displayed (for good reason), you’re competitors can show up right below you, sometimes in the yellow bar, and take away clicks and customers from you. If they’re in the yellow bar, this also shows that they most likely are having a high enough CTR to be up there in the first place which is an even greater threat.
If you allow your affiliates to bid on your brand terms, making sure that they don’t set their bids too high (increasing your CPC too much) and don’t show up ahead of you, then you should be able to create an ad blockade against your competition. If you’re able to have your official site in position #1, with affiliates in positions 2-5, then you stand a much better chance of keeping your competition away from your current or potential customers.
This is also where the trust factor comes into play. You’ll need to be able to trust that the affiliates you choose to bring into this program will abide by your rules.
Rules and Guidelines
When Not to Use This Strategy
This strategy isn’t for everyone. If you don’t have any competition on your brand, then there’s no point of adding competition. If your brand isn’t very big, then adding a lot of competition may cause your own CPC to rise too much making it not cost efficient in the end. Also, like the E*Trade example, if your company is very strict about it’s brand or has to abide by certain external guidelines, then it may be too difficult to use.
Conclusion
This is mainly just a theory I’ve been thinking about recently that I believe could give a performance boost to a company in a similar way that being shown in both the organic listings and the paid listings can (can’t find the reference).
The biggest factor in terms of overall performance is whether or not the increase in costs caused by your affiliates will efficiently lead to a net increase in customers. The next biggest factor, brand reputation should be covered if you have partners you can trust and manually approve their listings.
There are actually some companies that seem to be doing this, conduct a search for Time Warner Cable. I’m assuming it’s effective for them - or maybe they just aren’t tracking very well, but either way, if Comcast or Verizon tried to start competing on the term, it’d be pretty tough for them to get any worthwhile volume out of it without having a very high CPC.
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I received an email today from one of the affiliate managers I work with letting me know that they’ve received complaints about our site infringing on a few companies’ brands. What was it that we were doing so wrong? Making false claims? Bidding on their brand terms? Inaccurately portraying the brand? The answer: none of these.
What’s even worse is that these aren’t companies’ competing against the company I’m an affiliate of, they are companies that offer products through the company I’m partnered with. I’m trying to market their own products and bring them new customers, but they don’t want us to mention their name or use their logo on our site. The information in question provides background on the company, has their logo and has a call to action - all being used to provide the user with extra information and to market their products. There are several companies in this particular industry, many of whom we have no relationship whatsoever with. On the site, we also provide information about the companies we don’t have a relationship with so that, just like for the companies we do market, our users can get a overall picture of what’s out there.
I realize that since there is a partnership, that they can make rules within the agreement saying we can’t use any of their trademarks on the site. That’s not the issue I have. The issue to me is… why would you really want to? Basically, what these companies are saying to us is that they’d prefer us to not say anything about them on our site, but still try to get our users to become their customers. First, why would a user want to go and do business with a company when they’re not told who that company is. Secondly, why would a company want to remove information that can be helpful to generating a sale? To me, this is like trying to sell a Pioneer TV to someone without mentioning the words Pioneer or having any photos of it displayed, while at the same time, the rest of your site has information about Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, etc. How easy do you think it’d be to sell that Pioneer?
What does all of this result in? Well, I’ll first be working with my AM to try to enlighten these companies as to how asinine their legal teams are in the hopes that they’ll allow us to leave our pages on the site the way they are or make any needed changes instead of just completely taking them down. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go ahead and make a new site (for a different affiliate program) using those pages not allowed on the current site that I’m using to promote these companies, but will be marketing their competitors instead. I’ll have the information about these companies, as it’s perfectly legal* to have, but when the user is ready to buy the product I’m promoting, I’ll be informing them of all the benefits that their competitors can provide if they buy that same product through them instead. I won’t be doing it in any deceptive way, but rather the same way other companies are marketing products.
In the end, the only companies who are losing out are the ones trying to keep my hands tied by having ludicrous restrictions.
* since this post talks about law, I should probably note that while the link I provided is to a site maintained by a lawyer, I personally am not a lawyer but have seen that coke, pepsi, apple, burger king, etc. etc. all use competitor trademarks in their commercials and I’m positive their competitors aren’t saying, “sure, go ahead and tell people you’re better than us.” I also make no claims of the validity of anything that is written here and none of this should be taken as legal advice or guidance. Your results may vary.. some restrictions may apply.. pricing and participation may vary.. not available in all states.. professional driver closed course..blah blah..
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Yahoo! reported revenues yesterday of $1.33 billion, $40 million below analysts expectations. It also is cutting it’s year end revenue targets, but the bigger news is that it’s cutting it’s workforce by 1,500 by the end of the year, or 10% of it’s employees.
With so much bad news coming from Yahoo, I would think they’d be trying to focus on any good news they have. The lack of saying any more about their deal with Google besides saying that he wans to get it going “as soon as possible” leads me to believe that it isn’t going too well for them.
The biggest problems I’ve seen with Yahoo, from an advertiser’s perspective, is their quality. They’re more strict with their advertisers on some aspects such as their minimum bids and their keyword policies while they don’t seem to care that their search partners are providing incosistant and usually negative traffic quality. They’ve increased min bids on high performing keywords to the point where they become unprofitable, they’re inconsistant with how they review landing pages for keywords and their overall quality has gone down hill.
I’m still rooting for Yahoo to do something with the market share they have left. I’d love to add more spend to my campaigns and decrease my overall percentage spent on Google. Yet, until they’re able to make better improvements, they’ll likely continue to bleed. I also know that there are going to be at least 1500 more people mad that Yahoo didn’t take Microsoft’s original offer.
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Rand Fishkin asked some important questions about why paid search gets most of the ad dollars allocated to it. Reading the comments is even more interesting to me because they’re mainly from the viewpoint of SEOs rather than PPC folks which puts a different angle on the questions.
First the questions:
Some points taken from the comments:
My thoughts…
I think there are many different reasons for PPC getting more spend than SEO. For one, when looking at larger companies, they’re doing both and a scaled PPC campaign can costs millions per month while I haven’t heard of any SEOs spending millions per month (please correct me if I’m wrong).
Secondly, even in the eye-tracking graphic, you can see that the first listing is a paid listing and that (along with bolded words) is where people’s attention gets drawn to. Today, there are usually 3 listings above the organic restults which take attention and clicks away from them.
Third, control. Paid search allows lots of control over your listings. For any high volume terms, most of the time the organic results point to either the home page or general pages whereas with paid search, you can pretty much point to any page you want and change it anytime you want.
Fourth, volume. Quoting Rand, “SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic.” This might be true, but if you aren’t #1 or worse yet, not even on the 1st page, how much traffic are you getting? Short answer: not 75%. With PPC, you can usually compete for top positions or at least be shown on page 1 listings for highly targeted keywords. I’d also like to see data on conversion rates, etc. before really caring how much traffic is sent to a site.
Finally, like at least one of the commenters from the original post, I believe that SEO spend isn’t as trackable. You might be able to track what you, as the SEO are doing for the company, but for a large advertiser like Apple - that is mentioned in the news, on TV, has offline advertising, has fanboys, haters, and even fanboy haters, uses product placement and much much more - all of which helps SEO for the keywords they’re targeting AND not targeting, how are you going to attribute for that spend in your numbers? Even when the company releasing a new product helps SEO efforts from all the media, bloggers, etc. talking about it. To be fair, this also happens in PPC, like when a company advertises a promotion on TV, traffic and conversions go up while conversion rates decrease, but the overall effect isn’t as great.
Overall, if politics were completely left out of the equation, each company should always be putting as much money as possible into the areas that are bringing in the best overall ROI for their strategy. If SEO is showing that it’s doing the best, max out your allocation as much as needed until your ROI or at least goals are at the same level as the next highest channel. If that channel is PPC, put whatever budget isn’t needed into PPC and so on. Both SEO and PPC require skill and expertise to be carried out most effectively and both can and should be utilized to grow a business.
If you’re a new website that needs traffic now, start with PPC while keeping SEO as a long term effort (including making sure you’re correctly utilizing on-page SEO factors). I disagree that any company should PLAN on decreasing PPC as SEO takes hold, if anything, you should be increasing both.
If you’re a poor college student starting from scratch, then do what’s free(ish). Use SEO until you can acheive some volume, scale it with PPC and read above for “new websites.”
In the end, I’m left with 3 new questions (partly from above):
Oh, and for the other 2 questions asked by Rand. I feel that the two will most likely never be on par with each other in terms of spend as PPC is a cash cow and both will continue to grow. I think SEO has a greater opportunity to perform during a downturn in the economy, but so does PPC. There may end up being a catch 22 with SEO and a downturn - when business is suffering, you need results right away or else you may not have a business a year from now. For businesses that can afford it, both will end up being one of the last lines to be cut from ad budgets, or at least should be.
and below is some added content from comments that is worth mentioning…
Two good posts within the comments:
For PPC, it is reasonably easy to track spend (at the engines) and most in-house PPC people are full-time (and therefore allocable to PPC). Do the journalists at the NYT count as SEO resource? Arguably they should if they are creating content that people link to. What about the developers who put together Amazon’s affiliate program? I think if you count these forms of ‘SEO’ in the spend, it would be much higher.
In summary, I think two things (that haven’t been mentioned above) then conspire to push PPC spend higher than SEO - the ongoing expense nature of it (for large brands, the ongoing investment in ‘pure’ SEO (i.e. that isn’t content creation or development) can be relatively small if they have got their house in order) - and the allocation problem - it’s easy to tell what is PPC spend, but unless your SEO spend is entirely to an agency, it is hard to work out what should count as ‘SEO’ spend…
Paid search is so attractive and recieves the lions share of the budget because it is so much simpler and so much easily scalable compared to SEO. Scale is what turns businesses into big businesses. SEO, as many of you know, is much more difficult to scale across a business’s many pages, products, offers, websites and business units. Bid more on the stuff that produces positive ROI and less on the stuff that brings negative ROI, right? That brings up another reason why paid search is so much more attractive: trackability. It is quite easy to understand paid search and have a good idea on what is actually happening and what is being paid for. Selling paid search is also easier and simpler than SEO as is outsourcing and stopping it: hire an agency, install their tracking pixel, and wait for the sales to start rolling in. Not happy with their service? Cancel and hire another agency. You get instant results that you can report to your board of directors.
On the other hand, SEO is difficult for some people to understand because it is multi-faceted. Some people think it is simply an IT play while others believe it is just about content. And link development - well thats even more difficult to understand. I have personally seen many huge ecommerce and lead generation companies turn away from great SEO opportunities because of inability to manipulate and alter their website. Perhaps if this was different, the data would be as well. But IT being IT and politics in business always being there, we are faced with a situation that does not always lend itself very well to SEO-based website changes.
Now about the skewed data - I dont know what the numbers are actually reporting exactly but I have a feeling that it is only reporting direct amounts paid to either SEO agencies or internal SEO salaries. I dont think it takes into account the possibility of huge expendatures into IT. Currently, my agency and I are in the middle of a campaign with a Fortune 50 company that needed to completely revamp their un-optimized website(s). The amount they are paying us as a consultant pales in comparison to the internal IT investment they are taking on. I dont believe the stats above represent these types of costs which would greatly swell the SEO investment noted above.
Another good post made by seemingly the only one I felt is managing PPC campaigns just as much or more than SEO campaigns.
Let me tell you about the conversion lift that PPC brings to SEO and vice versa - One company was making roughly $100k/mo from SEO 1 year ago. That seemed to be steady as they ranked in the top 10 for well over 1000 high quality terms. Enter PPC - within 3 months, their new income was at $400k/mo at an expense of $200k/mo on PPC. PPC contributed to doubling their ‘net’ even though the second $100k/mo net was more expensive than that provided by SEO. Their entire net increase could not all be attributed to PPC. We had return visitors, and we noticed that several who clicked on paid search ads would come back via an organic route and vice versa. I would say the doubling of net came because of the natural lift that each (PPC AND SEO) had on the other. Of course, without that added reach and traffic from PPC the SEO may/may not have increased two-fold within 90 days because PPC let us target 10,000+ new keywords/combinations where the company did not have quite the exposure that SEO was currently bringing to the brand/site - coupled with ‘owning’ more real estate for the 1000 or so terms they rank well for.
At the very least, I would never turn off PPC when a client gets top rankings via SEO - the added lift can be incredible. You just have to learn what combination gives you that ROI lift/brand lift. When I say combination, I mean which ad text compliments the organic listing, what position is positive vs negative, when is there a real ROI, etc. It’s all in the analytics. :)
Bottom line for me: SEO is not better than PPC. PPC is not better than SEO. PPC is not easy ‘out of the box’ beyond the surface. SEO is definitely technical. They NEED to work together because they MAKE YOUR CLIENTS MORE MONEY, MAKE YOUR COMPANY MORE MONEY.
Related Posts on the topic:
Original Post
Why PPC Gets the Brass Ring
Why Is There So Little Spending on SEO?
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Slightly deceptive title, but while they’re not in trouble of going bankrupt or anything, I’ve got a feeling in my gut that Google is either feeling the pain of the economic downturn or is just trying very, very hard to protect themselves from it. Yes, they just released very positive earnings yesterday showing better than expected revenue and profit. I’m also expecting 4th quarter to beat expectations too, especially if they go ahead with the Yahoo deal.
However, there has been news and statements made by the company that makes it seems as though they are trying very hard to keep profits up to par with investor expectations. Below is a short list:
Overall, I think all of these changes are for the better for investors and advertisers. Growth rates might be slowing, but there is still strong growth in search. Analysts have previously said that since Google’s revenue is so reliant on search, it could cause financial trouble for the company, but I think their excellance in search is actually what’s keeping them growing faster than most other companies. They might start feeling the pain of a poor economy and have some financial trouble, but it will be much worse for their competitors if it does happen.
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