Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’

What is comparative advertising? Comparative advertising is where companies like to pit their product features next to other well known competitors in an effort to differentiate their product. You have probably seen this in a table format with product features listed along the right with check marks showing which product holds which features. This is usually occurs when either the company sees particular features they hold to be a competitive advantage, or simply because their name is not as strong as the other leading competitors.

So this brings up a few questions to consider.

1. Should I do comparative advertising? What are the pros and cons?
2. Are there any legal ramifications for using competitor names and what are the legal considerations for the claims you make about your competitor’s product?

Let’s briefly tackle them here.
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Setting up SEM Campaigns
One of the most overlooked aspect of running a SEM campaign is how important the structure of the account is for both management purposes and for performance. There are numerous factors to consider when deciding how to structure your account.

How can I make my structure tight?
What type of keywords am I targeting?
How should I best group my keywords?
Is targeting by product type more important? Geo-type?
How does creatives factor into all this?
Do I need to split out keywords with good history vs ones with bad history?
How does keyword combinations affect content campaigns?
Should I structure search campaigns differently from content campaigns?
How do I factor in budget constraints and budget management issues?
What landingpages do I have for use?
The list is endless…

Tip of the Week
Today we’ll throw out one tip to consider when organizing your accounts after you have collected some data. After you have collected a good sample size you probably are starting to get a better idea on what keywords are performing. If you have cast a good enough umbrella of keywords you would easily find some surprising performers as well as surprising duds. So how can you sort through all this data for management purposes?
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It is easy for everyone to think that Google owns the search market. If I want to be on search, I need to be on Google simple as that. Well it isn’t so simple when it comes to international markets. Though Google has a strong grip on the US market, this isn’t always the case in other countries especially when compared to the local search engines.

Who are the players?
Some of these engines are familiar. Yahoo Japan owns more than half the market of Japan. They also have a strong grip on many other international countries. However you will also find country specific engines such as Baidu in China which owns about 60% of its market. Naver in Korea also owns over 60% of it’s market. Yandex in Russia owns little less than half it’s market. Seznam controls nearly 65% of the Czech market.

How is it that these search engines are able to compete with the likes of Google?
They know their market. They have the competitive advantage of targeting a local market and studying on their behaviors, their use of language as well as their preferences. They have worked on their technology and algorithms specifically catering to their local audience. Google unfortunately due to their sheer size and international presence have a more difficult time focusing on their individual markets. For example did you know in Korea, the more busy and complex the page is, the more authority the site is given by it’s users? This goes completely opposite of what one should do in the US where simplicity and targeted pages are key to a good conversion.

Foreign Laws
Another aspect is foreign laws. Local engines like Baidu are well aware with the regulations and as a local pioneer has a lot of say and influence. Large engines like Google have a hard time dealing with all the various laws especially as many countries favor local companies as opposed to foreign competitors. Many of these search engines were started before Google and has firmly established themselves as the market leader.

Google however has put a lot of investment in trying to target these local markets and it is Google’s hope that continued investment and effort will eventually entrench them deeper into these markets.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM

News Corp owned Fox Interactive Media (FIM), which owns social MySpace, has surpassed Yahoo! as the owner of the largest share of display advertising in the US according to comScore data.

In June, total display ad views on FIM sites was over 56.8 million views which makes up 15.9% of all display advertising in the US. Yahoo! sites served up 53.1 billion display ads in the same month for a 14.2% share. Top display advertisers on FIM include University of Phoenix & Deutsche Telekom while the top Yahoo! display advertisers are Netflix & Nextag.

Concerns at Yahoo?
This new data shows a change from May when Yahoo had 15.9% share and FIM had a 13.5% share. With Yahoo!’s stocks dipping below $20, there has been many concerns regarding whether Yahoo! will be able to maintain or grow their advertising business. Yahoo! has been under much pressure to show shareholders that their advertising business will continue to grow and remain strong after turning away a $47.5 billion offer from Microsoft.

Good News MySpace
FIM’s growth in the advertising business is good news for their social networking property MySpace which makes up nearly all of FIM’s display advertising revenue. However there continues to be a struggle for advertisers to generate revenue off of social networking sites as these ad medium has generally had a poorer conversion rate compared to other online marketing tactics.

MySpace has reported that their fiscal fourth quarter revenue grew 23% year to year to $225 million due to search and advertising gains. They also noted that their ability to “hyper target” in delivering ads to specific group of consumers has contributed to this growth.

Display Advertising
Forrester projects that $2.78 billion will be spent by retailers this year. That would make display advertising over a third of all online marketing which is projected to be $8.2 billion according to Forrester. Search Engine marketing makes up $3.63 billion and email marketing is third at $1.25 billion.

AOL, Microsoft & Google sites round out the top 5 display advertisers in terms of total market share followed by well known web properties Facebook & Ebay.

Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 5.5 billion display ad views (1.7% share) largely due to its promotional campaign for Live Search. The University of Phoenix, an online university came in second with 4.7 billion ad views (1.4%) followed by Experian Interactive, United Airlines, Verizon, and AT&T all at 3.8-3.9 billion ad views (1.2%).

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM

Google has launched their own web browser today with the promise to better handle complex web programs and video rich content. Google had mailed a copy of a promotional comic book prematurely. The comic book can be found here. It was immediately followed by a post on Google’s blog site confirming the rumor that quickly spread across the web. The browser is called Google Chrome. It is considered “a fresh take on the browser”. Their plan is to make all of Chrome’s software code open to developers similar to Mozilla’s Firefox format.

This launch follows a recent update to Internet Explorer 8 as well as Firefox 3. It also follows a recent 3 year partnership extension between Mozilla and Google. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera being the main players, Google enters a very highly competitive space.

Google continues to produce different softwares and applications with the intention of having them fully integrated with one another. With office applications, desktop search, a new browser, email, google earth, Android among many other programs there is definitely a long term goal of providing an all-in-one fully integrated solution for their consumers. Most likely it will also be free of charge.

Call it another shot at Microsoft. Microsoft needs to figure out a strategy to counter this movement or they will continue to see their market share erode.

Thoughts? Please comment!

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM