Clix Marketing PPC Blog

I strongly advise all Google AdWords advertisers to read and heed this excellent Search Engine Land article by Andrew Goodman. It describes a relatively new factor, Account Quality Score, that can make or break new and/or inherited AdWords accounts. This one kept our company baffled and busy with an inherited account last summer, and caused us to burn way too much time and money.

Look for a slick new version of the Google AdWords Editor to be released today or tomorrow.

Google released today a concise and comprehensive guide to all of their advertising products, along with info about other Google products that advertisers should know about. Oriented toward ad agencies, the guide is useful for anyone interested in the breadth of Google ad solutions; download it here.

This just out from Google - a way to see “examples” of sites that accept Adsense advertising:

Our advertisers have often asked: ‘What kinds of web sites make up the Google content network?’

To help answer this question, we just re-launched the Partners page on the Google content network microsite to include a more comprehensive set of examples of where your ads can appear. After all, the content network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of web sites, from information and news sites like About.com and the New York Times, to blogs like Ask the Builder. And while it’s not possible to individually name all the sites in the content network, the revamped Partners page is meant to better demonstrate the variety of sites available. Below are some features of the new Partners page:

• Sites are organized by category. This will help you browse sites by categories that represent your target audience, such as Finance, News, Entertainment, Technology, etc. For example, if you sell herbal teas, you might browse through the Health & Fitness or Home & Garden categories to see examples of related sites. Or, if your target demographic is female, you can try the Women’s Interest category.

• Once you find a site that’s relevant to your product or service, you can use placement targeting to target your ads to that site directly. We recommend you use the Placement Tool to determine whether a specific site is available for targeting, and to identify other relevant placements to target. Further, if your campaign is already running on the content network, you can see the sites where your ad has appeared by running a Placement performance report.

• For those of you targeting users in other countries, a drop-down menu lets you browse partner sites in countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

(Click on the image for a full size version)

So while the simple question “Where will my ads appear?” may not be the simplest to answer, we hope the new Partners page will help you better understand the variety of sites available to you to help you meet your advertising objectives on the content network.

If you liked my previous SEW Experts Content Advertising column on using software tools to create great Google AdWords keyword-targeted campaigns, you’ll love today’s installment describing a tool that will help you find sites that are perfect targets for your placement-targeted campaigns.

The past few months have been a roller coaster ride for Google’s stock price. The main culprit was a series of Comscore reports, starting in January, that implied Google search volume was heading south. Many analysts interpreted this to mean Google’s Q1 2008 revenue from paid ad clicks would be disappointing. Subsequent Comscore reports seemed to confirm this.

Then Google released the Q1 2008 financial results, and all hell broke loose. Advertising revenue was up over 40%, surprising analysts and especially Comscore.

Research firm AdGooroo released data a few days before Google’s earning announcement, claiming that the number of Google advertisers had increased significantly in Q1, which seemed to bode well for Google ad revenue. This data seemed to correlate to/predict Google’s ad revenue improvement — certainly more so than the somber Comscore data.

So what happened? Was Comscore’s data flat wrong? Wall Street seemed to think so; Comscore stick price has dropped 8% over the past few weeks.

Comscore sought to reclaim credibility via this blog post last Friday and this one yesterday. The main points:

1. Comscore’s reported data was U.S. paid click data, which didn’t take into consideration Google’s stronger non-U.S. ad revenue growth.
2. Comscore’s reported paid clicks did not include paid clicks from the Google Network (site publishers in the Google Adsense program), as well as paid clicks from other sources reflected in this table:

Comscore ate a little crow by admitting they should have been clearer up front that their initial reports did not include 70-85% of Google’s total paid clicks. They also promised to keep working on their ability to measure/estimate the number of contextual paid clicks.

I think there are a few more caveats and deeper observations in the data reported by Google, Comscore and AdGooroo. Here goes:

1. Google’s first quarter paid click revenue growth has historically been less steep than its previous fourth quarter. This is due to the fact that there’s significant seasonality in the paid search advertising biz, due to Christmas shoppers. To illustrate this: while Google Site Revenue increased 10% in Q3 2007 over Q2 2007, the increase in Q4 2007 over Q3 2007 was 14%.
2. AdGooroo’s data seems to imply that Google advertising revenue will continue to grow strongly. I believe advertiser revenue increase could lag the increase in the number of advertisers, since advertisers tend to spend more over time as they optimize their ad campaigns and enjoy increasing ROI.
3. Google’s paid clicks are increasingly profitable. As Comscore points out in its most recent blog posts, average click CPS (costs-per-click) have increased, probably due to the implementation of Google’s AdWords Quality Score efforts. Comscore also alludes to another factor that I think will become increasingly significant: more ads appearing on more Google-owned web sites, like Gmail, YouTube, Google groups, etc., as well as via other Google ad-delivery channels like Feedburner. Google pays no TAC (Traffic Acquisition Cost) for these placements, as they do with Adsense publishers.

Here are a few examples of the last observation:

As I detailed in this blog post, YouTube has become a potent force for advertisers, who can place ads on the YouTube site pages, and also right within videos themselves. YouTube is the 6^th most-visited site on the internet, with 68 million unique visitors per month. Advertisers pay a tiny fraction of what they would need to pay for an equivalent broadcast or cable ad with equivalent reach. And YouTube InVideo ads can be targeted such that they are relevant to the context of the video.

(Side note: the acquisition of YouTube may have inspired Google to snap up other hot “internet channels” like MySpace or Facebook - Social PPC anyone?)

Another example: advertising within Gmail. When a Gmail user reads an email, Adsense ads are displayed and the ads are relevant to the content of the email being read. For example, here’s an email that pertains to real estate:

And here’s one pertaining to camping equipment:

A last example: ads displayed by Google-owned Feedburner, which places contextually-relevant ads right within RSS feeds:

This last example underscores a strength Google is exploiting - a move that Microsoft has been reticent to make: ad-supported applications. Google ads might soon appear adjacent to documents in their “Office-alike” applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar - ads that are relevant to the document content. Since the applications are free, users might not mind the intrusion of ads (though certainly there are privacy-protection issues that would need to be addressed). Google doesn’t need to worry about cannibalizing the revenue stream from paid applications - a concern that has probably kept Microsoft out of this obvious game.

The list of Google-owned web sites is big and growing bigger. More and more of them will become channels for targeted content and targeted ads. Good news for advertisers - and Google shareholders.

Update: Google bristles at Comscore.

Today’s installment of my SEW Content Advertising column features an easy method for creating keyword lists for Google content campaigns - read it here.

The Wall Street Journal just released a nice comparison of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo revenue and profit data. Click on the thumbnails for larger views; there’s an interactive version here.

Some observations:

• Yahoo’s fortunes seemed rosy in the 2.5 years after the Overture acquisition. They owned the search advertising space right up until the collision of Google’s superior AdWords UI with the rather disastrous Panama rollout. Wall Street noticed.
• Interesting that the launch of Microsoft adCenter isn’t included as a milestone. The launch didn’t affect the MS stock price, but it would at least fit the context of the graph.
• Impressive revenue per employee multiples: Microsoft = $690K, Google = $987K. Clix revenue per employee is almost as high as Microsoft’s - yessss!
• What makes up $3.94 billion of Google non-advertising revenue?!?
• Looks like Christmas 2007 shoppers boosted Google traffic by a huge amount - and they stayed post-Christmas.

Today Google announced one sign that they’ve already been working to assimilate DoubleClick technology, even in advance of this week’s finalization of the acquisition. Google Ad Manager is essentially a “self-serve ad server” — or an expanded version of Adsense — that lets site publishers alternate manually-sold ads with AdWords-driven Adsense ads.

It could be a great tool for middle-tier site publishers who can afford the resources to sell premium ad placements but want to make sure every space is “monetized” at all times by serving Adsense ads when premium ad inventory is low.

For AdWords advertisers (especially ones who have been following my SEW Content Advertising series) this is good news and further evidence that the click inventory coming from the Content Network is growing faster than inventory from the Search Network.

Here’s the Ad Manager announcement:

Earlier this week, we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick. Together, we’re now focused on building a full suite of products and tools that help publishers of all sizes improve productivity, manage their inventory, generate additional revenue opportunities and save time so they can focus on what they do best — creating great content and delivering an exceptional experience to their users.

First, let us address the options that publishers have when it comes to selling and managing ad space on their websites. Some publishers use ad networks like Google AdSense to fill their ad space. Still others employ a direct sales force to manage and sell their ad inventory with solutions like the DoubleClick Revenue Center, and partner with third-party ad networks to fill in any unsold space. Regardless, it is a challenge for publishers to effectively manage their available inventory and ensure all of their clients’ campaigns serve on time without a sophisticated ad management and ad serving solution.

Today, we’re announcing a new tool for publishers with the beta launch of Google Ad Manager. Directed at addressing the ad management and serving needs of publishers with smaller sales teams, Google Ad Manager is a free, hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user experience with Google speed and a tagging process so publishers can spend more time working with their advertisers and less time on their ad management solution. And by providing detailed inventory forecasts and tracking at a very granular level, Ad Manager helps publishers maximize their inventory sell-through rates.

Google Ad Manager effectively complements the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which is focused on publishers with larger sales teams. We’re excited to add DART for Publishers to our suite of products, and we’re committed to the continued development and enhancement of DoubleClick’s offerings. Today’s announcement demonstrates this promise, and at the same time furthers our goal of creating new opportunities for publishers of all sizes. Dozens of publishers have been using Google Ad Manager successfully in early trials. To hear what those publishers have to say check out some Ad Manager success stories or take a product tour to learn more.

As we are still in beta, Google Ad Manager is available to publishers by invitation only. If you’re interested in learning more about it or would like to be considered for the program, visit the Google Ad Manager site. Existing DoubleClick customers are not affected by this announcement. As we expand the Google Ad Manager beta program, we will be in touch again to include additional publishers and offer updates on our progress.

Two big announcements from the Google AdWords team this afternoon:

1. Category Exclusion. Now Content Network advertisers can exclude huge swaths of sites that shouldn’t display their ads. This is yet another powerful way for advertisers to focus their ad efforts on sites that will convert. I’ll be analyzing this move in an upcoming installment of my SEW Content Advertising column; meanwhile, see the official description below.

2. Landing Page load time will now be considered a factor in Quality Score. This one’s fascinating. For those who didn’t attend my PPC Summit Quality Score presentation this week: there are several (many?) Quality Scores, and the one related to landing pages has been one of the least impactful. But now, landing page load time will be a factor - which underscores the main point of my presentation: do the right thing for your site visitors (a.k.a. potential customers), and your quality score will be fine. With this move, Google is saying, It’s a bad idea to force PPC ad respondents to wait too long for the landing page to load.” Great advice for all PPC advertisers.

Here are the Official Descriptions:

We’ve updated the Site Exclusion tool to give you more control over where your ads appear on the Google content network. It’s now called the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and it allows you to exclude certain categories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.

If you find that you’re repeatedly excluding many sites of the same type, either to optimize for the content network or to further control your campaign’s exposure, using category exclusion can be a simpler way to control your ads’ visibility. Category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the content network: keyword-targeted or placement-targeted.

Here’s how category exclusion works: when we use our contextual targeting technology to scan a page in the Google content network and determine relevant ads to show, we also check to see if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types available for exclusion. If there is a match between a category you’ve excluded and the page’s classification, your ads won’t show on that page. We classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you’ve excluded.

Before using category exclusion, it’s important to consider the following points:

• All sites in the content network are already required to comply with Google’s AdSense policies. Several levels of review are in place to detect that pages in the network comply with these guidelines. However, some advertisers have requested the ability to avoid additional types of content that don’t meet their advertising goals, and we’ve released category exclusion in order to provide this control.
• Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusions. Keep in mind that a low clickthrough rate on content network pages is not necessarily an indication of poor performance, especially if your goal is to maximize ROI. Further, your ads’ clickthrough rate on the content network does not affect your quality score, minimum bids, or position on Google.com or other pages in the search network.
• While webpages are categorized to the best of our technology’s ability, excluding a category does not guarantee that you have excluded every related webpage. If you see that your ad has shown on an undesired webpage, you can exclude that page by adding the URL through the tool’s Sites tab.

Category exclusion is our latest tool to give you increased control over your content network campaigns. If you are looking for additional insight and flexibility when advertising on the Google content network, we encourage you to check out CPC bidding for placement targeting and Placement Performance reports.

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As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.

Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

When are we making this change?
In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

To learn more about the upcoming change, please see this article in the AdWords Help Center.

Our friends at Engine Ready released two phenomenal goodies today: this list of negative keywords that you can (and should!) use in your PPC campaigns right now, and AdFlint, a cool tool for brainstorming variations in PPC Ad copy.

Out from Google today is this nifty Google Ad Formats and Options document that lays out their advertising options in a series of visual grids. It includes some references to capabilities I haven’t seen referenced widely, like In-video Ads - advertisers can append ads to the bottom 20% of a YouTube video window. There’s also a teasing reference to the still-in-beta Contextual Category Targeting that will let advertisers restrict their Contextual ads to sites that fall within specific defined categories.

A few nuggets I hadn’t seen before: a reference to the ability to target Feedburner with contextual ads (embedded in RSS feeds?), and a mysterious line that seems to indicate that YouTube is targetable via some kind of combination of Search and Categories. Will AdWords advertisers be able to target ads based on searches performed within YouTube? Cool!