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Bango published a white paper “Mobile Advertisement for Newbies” written by Peggy Anne Salz of msearchgroove.com. After an introduction about the current state of the mobile advertisement market the author names the reasons for which she thinks mobile advertisement will be a huge success in the mid and long term (high penetration). She cites Diana LaGutatta of Nokia Interactive who says that mobile “click-through rates are consistently higher than online.”

The following paragraphs introduce advertisement networks and show a few examplary implementations including an implementation of Google Mobile Ads. Last but not least Salz examines campaign analysis by means of admob and bango.

All in all a very interesting whitepaper that gives both a deeper insight into the mobile advertisement market and real instructions on creating and measuring the mobile success.

Andreas Pfister

It was announced that new Google Content Network features are going to be available soon. As it is written on the Official Google Blog these enhancements will be frequency capping, better reach and frequency reporting, and view-through conversions.

It seems that Google is focusing strongly on the Content Network for the last few months. In May 2008 they announced that the Content Network is now open for third party publishers. In July they updated the way campaigns are structured. Now it is possible to have both keywords and placements together in one campaign what offers new possibilities in terms of targeting and Bid Management. This change should also result in higher relevancy between the ad and the placement/context it appears in.

When you look into the pertinent forums you can see that many advertisers have abandoned the Google Content Network in the past because of its poor performance (CTR, ROI). I also think that many companies and even Marketing Agencies are short of experts for this type of campaign which has to be structured completely different than a Search Network campaign. Let’s hope that now with all the PR and the new features more advertisers will give the Google Content Network a shot. And last but not least.

Make it relevant and targeted!

Andreas Pfister

Pew Internet & American Life Project published a Search Engine Use study that is available for free on their website. It shows that the percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day is rising steadily, reaching 49% in 2008.

The use of search engines therefore is the second most popular daily activity behind “checking email” (60%) and ahead of “Checking News” (39%).

The study also reveals the differences that exist between certain demographic groups in terms of education, income, age, gender, and broadband use which is quite interesting.

Another helpful (and free) study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that is worth reading!

Andreas Pfister

Google today launched a tool called Google Insights for Search that provides information about users’ search behaviour. This release follows a number of tools that are targeted on delivering information to advertisers and marketers.

First there was an important update of Google Trends in June that allows you to compare the popularity of search terms. The update of the Keyword Tool was the next step. Now it delivers the approximate search volume for each keyword that is searched; definitively useful information. The Google Ad Planner also belongs in this category of tools that help to estimate the search volume and advertisement spend although it is designed for the Google Content Network.

Google Insights for Search is the latest tool in this series. It helps advertisers to understand searcher behaviour. Like Google announces “… you can type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.”

Barry Schwartz shows the capacities of Google Insights for Search with some examples in his article on Search Engine Land.

Andreas Pfister

The Yahoo! team published a weather report on the Yahoo! Search Blog saying that some changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms will be rolled out over the next few days. “As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

This change comes after a recent update of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Console as written in the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog. Within this update you find some minor enhancement that are nice but do not solve the main problems of the Yahoo Search Marketing: A non-transparent and unreliable process of keyword and ad text approval and the lack of a tool like Adwords Editor.

Andreas Pfister

As announced by Google the landing page load time is going to be a Quality Score factor in AdWords from mid-June on. Since this week the load time is displayed on the Keyword Analysis Page.

To see it click on a campaign, then on an ad group, then on the “Keywords” tab. Click the magnifying glass icon next to any keyword and then the “Details and recommendations” link to launch the Keyword Analysis page. Also available there an overview of your Quality Score and ad visibility by pointing your cursor over the icon.

So take care to provide fast loading pages!

Andreas Pfister

This way of advertisement exists on the YouTube US site since August 2006. Now it is also available on the Spanish site: Placement of Google Video Ads on the homepage. The first 300×250 pixels video banner can be found there today. The ad lasts for one minute and shows the making of of a Repsol motorbike spot.

This video is not like other video ads in the Google Content Network but like YouTube announced in a press release in 2006, “… the new Participatory Video Ad is a user-initiated video advertisement with all of the YouTube community features enabled. Consumers can rate, share, comment, embed, and favorite advertising content that they find interesting, informative and entertaining. Rather than interrupt a consumer’s experience, we have created a model which encourages engagement and participation…”

By clicking on a certain part of the ad the user is directed either to the video’s page on YouTube or to the advertiser’s destination URL. It would be interesting to know how expensive this ad placement is. But Without any doubt this is an effective form of advertisement and many views are almost guaranteed.

Andreas Pfister

I was wondering what the best strategy is to structure ad groups in Google placement-targeted campaigns. What do you think is the best practice to compose/build ad groups?

Imagine a client that offers several products, let’s say running shoes and more elegant sneakers. He wants to implement different ads/banners for both products in one content campaign.

There are three possibilities to structure the ad groups:

1. Use the categories of the placements where the ads are published in:

i.e. you can have specific ads per category:

e.g. you have the ads for the running shoes just in a general sports category/adgroup (websites providing sports news etc.) and the ads for your sneakers just in a general fashion category/adgroup (websites about fashion and trends). This categorization follows the categories, given by the Google Placement Tool.

Disadvantage: You cannot have distinctive ads for your running shoes in any of the “fashion” sites.

2. Use the categories of your products or your website structure:

i.e. if you have specific ads per product/service:

e.g. you want the ads for your running shoes to appear in the sports subsection of a newspaper site and your sneakers ads in the fashion subsection of the same newspaper. Therefore you have the sports section in the running shoes ad group and the fashion section in the sneakers ad group. Also it is possible to have the same placement in both ad groups with the distinctive banner (competing).

Disadvantage: You have many sites/placements in one ad group and could lose overview.

3. Combine the products with the site categories:

If you really want to promote different products/services you could structure the ad groups according like this: e.g. adgroups: running_shoes_fashion, running_shoes_news, running_shoes_health, sneakers_fashion, sneakers_news, sneakers_women etc.

In my opinion the third solution is the best one. It may not be worth it to apply this strategy to all campaigns but you are on the safe side with this and you do not lose the overview like with the second solution where you could have hundreds of placements where you promote your products on.

Andreas Pfister

Like Google announced on its Inside AdWords Blog the loading time of landing pages is going to influence the quality score and with this the minimum bid price of a keyword from March on. Like it is explained in more detail in the AdWords Help Center, there is just a distinction between slow loading pages and pages “where no problems [are] found”.

According to Google the reason for this step is the improvement of user experience, what in my opinion makes sense. Not just because long loading times will be avoided. Most users are using the Web search to look up information which is usually text-based. If the website publisher wants to provide rich media content he will have to take make sure that page has a short loading time or he has to give the users the opportunity to chose by offering a link on the landing page.

Probably this measure will also improve the overall quality of landing pages because it forces publishers to concentrate on textual information instead of fancy animations or graphics.

Andreas Pfister

Yesterday I attended the second day of the Online Marketing España congress in Madrid. Two of the five speeches I heard were about behavioral targeting. Both Brendan Condon, Managing Director of Advertising.com International, and Tim Brown, Senior Director Display Advertising of Yahoo! were both talking about how to target the right audience and what great effects it has in terms of conversion rates. And both showed impressing numbers and statistics. Condon explained the correlation between ads placed on the same page, like video and banner ads and later retargeting what was - although quite basic - very interesting. Looks like the future of online ads has to consider behavioral targeting to be more cost-efficient.

This article in the New York Times tells the story of a AOL penguin who is “behaviorally targeted”. Funny approach AOL!

Andreas Pfister