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In his second post this month, Dave explains what the next change to the Google AdWords trademark policy will mean for brand owners, and why some etailers could benefit.
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In the first of these two posts on brand searches, we discussed how important navigation brand searches are to some businesses, and how important it is to evaluate brand and non-brand search traffic separately in your Analytics package as it makes it easier to track traffic from your major non-brand keywords.
In this second post, I want to move the focus onto the September 2010 Google Adwords ad text trademark policy change for the UK and Europe. The main change is that Google will now permit the use of competitor brand terms within the creative itself – this was previously prevented for trademarked terms Google was aware of.
It’s important to review the implications of this to your paid search account performance and to be aware of how different competitors within your market react. We believe it increases the need for use of quality brand reputation management services. If you have a range of resellers of your product or service it’s particularly important to review your strategy as the number and type of paid search competitors may increase. We saw that previous changes permitting bidding on brand terms had a very different impact in different markets previously. Although there were fears of an increased bid competition and PPC costs a relatively small bid spike occurred and most believe a similar situation will occur this time around.
Although the 2010 announcement has caused a fair stir, our view is that it’s really just an evolution in policy, you could say a “storm in a teacup”. There was arguably a more significant change in 2008 when Google permitted bidding on brand terms in these markets for the first time (reported on by Hitwise), i.e. specifying competitor brand terms as keywords to trigger ads. This was rolled out to a further 190 countries last year. The trademark bid change in 2008 saw up to 20% increase in click costs, and although this change may give a similar effect through competition, this approach has been in the US for sometime and has not generally caused bidding wars.
Talking to our paid search account management team on the practical implications, they point out a benefit in the way Google evaluates ads through quality score; the inclusion of brand terms in creative will help improve quality scores and increase ad clickthrough rates which will bring costs down for some advertisers who couldn’t previously use brand terms within the creative.
Whatever the consequences of the recent Google Trademark policy change, it’s a timely reminder to brands of the importance of paying close attention to managing the returns from crucial navigational searches.
In the first of two posts, Dr Dave Chaffey explains how many consumers still rely on navigational brand search queries to find sites, and why marketers should start to look at brand and non-brand searches in isolation.
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With the importance of navigational searches incorporating a brand name as a shortcut to company or it’s services, it’s crucial that companies pay close attention to how they’re managed. This means making sure your agency or internal paid search specialists report separately on search performance for brand search terms. It also means that you need to review the implications of any changes in policy to use of brand terms within paid search advertising and in particular Google Adwords which as you’ll know accounts for more than 90% of UK searches.
In navigational search or brand searching behaviour, searchers aim to go direct to a known company site by typing in the site or brand name. Alternatively they will type the site or brand name and append a qualifier such as a product name to the query. This shortcuts the site navigation and may make up for shortcomings in the sites own search engine or navigation.
Research by Atlas and Hitwise shows that navigational searches may account for over half of all searches and the figure is higher for well-known brands or companies who are not effective in tapping into the non-navigational searches… Certainly it’s one of the KPIs we review when auditing search marketing for a company paying particular attention to the proportion of brand search clicks for paid and natural search. I’ve seen cases where branded search can account for 80 to 90% of all clicks when insufficient attention has been paid to generic and long-tail search terms.
Of course attracting converting visitors at a lower cost is more straightforward for brand search terms, so it’s essential to separate out reporting into brand and non-brand to review performance for the more challenging non-brand terms. I’m surprised how few companies do this in top-level reports, yet it’s straightforward to setup within an analytics package, for example, a Google Analytics custom advanced segments.
In my next post I’ll be discussing how the latest change to the Google AdWords trademark policy could mean brand owners paying even more than they currently do for their navigational traffic.
This may seem an odd thing to say, as many in the Internet marketing world and other geek environments were early adopters. But, the point is that, until now, Joe Schmoe UK wasn’t playing on Twitter as such. Facebook…yes, we’ve all watched things go viral there, but Twitter really was the haunt of, apparently, a few (million) sad people.
However, this weekend in the UK, Twitter took off with the bingo-ites and the TV addicts. And all because of an offline media source called the TV.
As X-Factor took to the air this weekend, many people, who perhaps have previously ignored the value of Twitter as a global real-time ‘news’ media, discovered its potential for instant feedback, commentary, and resource sharing. The limitations of Facebook friends versus Twitter hashtags is hard to ignore and Twitter’s trending topics this weekend showed, we think, an influx of newbies on Twitter that could bode well for advertisers, social media marketing agencies, businesses and entrepreneurs.
The use of autotune on contestants’ microphones is apparently the cause for the big discussion, but it has led to a wide audience for Twitter in the UK. And it’s expanding far beyond a single TV programme and Stephen Fry now. Whether or not the general UK TV audience can master the intricacies of hashtags and netiquette has yet to be seen, but companies looking to target specifical UK demographics may do worse than hanging out on Twitter every Saturday evening until Xmas…..
And expect to see tweets appearing at the bottom of your screen on all and every ‘live’ program shortly to involve everyone in Martha Lane Fox’s Race Online 2012 campaign.
Not content with using search queries and click tracking to determine your interests (along with a wealth of other factors), Google is now looking into bring information about the position and activity of your mouse cursor on screen into their calculations, even when no clicks have been performed.
In a new Google patent (filed back in Feb 05 but only just approved) with the catchy title “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring“, Taher H Haveliwala (author of the Topic Sensitive PageRank paper whilst at Stanford) outlines how this will work:
“a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones.”
In other words, by tracking when your mouse hovers over certain areas of a page, and for how long, Google is able to retain this information and use it when choosing the order of results for search queries that are relevant to the content you hovered over.
Time is an important factor here. By factoring in the length of time that you hovered over an area on a page, Google is hoping to be able to distinguish genuine interest (slowly and deliberately moving your mouse over results whilst choosing what to click – as if running your finger under a line on a printed page) from the rapid directional mouse movements and long-periods of latency that most likely make up the majority of your mouse’s day.
This is of particular importance to search results pages where small amounts of searched-for information (e.g. a price, single feature, postcode) can be gleaned from an organic snippet, meaning that users have less need to click through to the resulting page as they have already found what they were looking for. However, the mouse hover has, it is claimed, established a link between the user and that piece of content, which can then be used to tune future searches later.
So, does non-click mouse behaviour really describe intent? The patent was filed back in Feb 2005, long before many modern eye-tracking methods had been honed. Recent evidence from Acuity (eye tracking solutions) suggests that mouse movement has little co-relation to where a users eyes are looking on the page at a specific point in time – around 10% of all people “mark” places they are looking at on a page by moving their mouse to it.
Once again this is an example of pure clickthrough data being supplemented with richer attention-led data, which if it proves nothing else shows once again that Google believes that by putting consumers interests first it can generate a win-win scenario for users, internet marketing professionals/website owners … oh, and Google.
Over the next few days, users around the world should see a new look to the Google image search, making it easier to see up to 1,000 images at once, small and large previews, easier navigation, and hover windows.
Google’s image search was launched in 2001 and now indexes over 1 billion images of multiple types. Over the years, there have been many additions to the search, including search by type e.g. photo, line drawing, face, and colours. You can read all about the previous developments and the new changes for image search on Google’s blog
In addition to this, Google is using people power to tag all the images on the Web with the Image Labeller game http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ This pairs you up with an unknown and anonymous partner to compete against each other in tagging images with the most relevant keywords possible over a period of 2 minutes. You are awarded points for matching your partner’s tags and these are recorded within your Google account. If you have plenty of time on your hands and feel like helping Google, this can prove quite an addictive pastime! One thing’s for sure, with Google claiming around 1 billion pageviews a day for image search, it will continue to be an important part of any search engine optimisation strategy.
According to the global click fraud index, 15.3% of all clicks in Q4 2009 were click fraud attempts. But how do you recognise when your budget is being swallowed up by clicks which will only ever cost you money, and could cause you to be blacklisted by the search engines?
Your analytics are the most important tool in your anti click fraud armoury and you should be monitoring them closely.
1) Look for increasing numbers of clicks from geographic areas where click fraud farms are known to operate or where you would not expect interest in your product. Most click fraud farm operators use cheap labour, so if you are seeing an increase in links from third world countries, this could be an indication.
2) Check the IP addresses and URLs where your clicks and links are coming from. Your advert may have been recyled onto a link farm, specifically set up to generate cash from showing only ads which the express purpose of generating money from clicks. These are low grade sites and as fast as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc act to close them down, new ones spring up. The IP address shows whose connection is being used and a large number of clicks from a specific IP address range may indicate the presence of a premises being used to employ people just to click on ads. You can check where an IP address is based using IP Lookup, eg http://www.whatsmyip.org/iplocation/
3) Watch for any abnormalities in your campaigns. So, for instance, if you suddenly see a raised clickthrough rate for a particular ad group, did you also see a corresponding rise in sales or responses to your calls to action? If not, then see if you can discover whether there has been media articles or similar which could account for those terms to ‘trend’. If there is a genuine reason for the rise, then you should ask yourself why the extra traffic did not respond to your calls to action! It may be a good time to tweak those pages so there are a higher number of conversions.
4) If you have reason to believe you have been the victim of click fraud, then contact the search engine in question and ask them to start an investigation. The search engines are trying extremely hard to combat click fraud, and will reimburse an advertiser if click fraud can be established. They may also be able to advise on further ways to prevent it happening to you, and how to recognise it.
Click fraud costs you money, so save yourself from becoming a target by monitoring your stats and making sure it doesn’t happen to you. You can find out more about how to tackle Click Fraud in Pay Per Click Marketing book.
ClickThrough staffers Adrian, Rob and Sam joined 4,500 other people in running the Sport Relief Mile at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham (one of hundreds of Mile events that took place across the UK) earlier this year. We couldn’t be prouder of them.
Fellow runners included our favourite local singer Beverley Knight, and heptathlete Louise Hazel (second heptathlete in the country last year, fact fans).
This photo was taken after the run; irritatingly, Adrian, Rob and Sam appear to have taken it all in their stride, although that might also be because they know the money they raised will make the a big difference to disadvantaged people both here in the UK and across the world.
A short Google blog post on Google Analytics has announced the development of a global browser plug in to OPT OUT of user data being fed to and tracked by Google Analytics. This has sent a few shudders running down the spines of website owners and agencies with clients who rely on analytics to produce the stats that are often used to define success and failure for a campaign.
But should that really be the case? Should the option to remove your visit to a website be a cause for concern for internet marketing agencies and websites? We have talked about it in the office today…..
“The announcement that Google is going to allow consumers to opt-out of Google Analytics is another example of Google living by their informal corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil”. However, there are also two good business reasons why this makes sense for them.
Firstly, users who install plug-ins tend to be more tech-savvy, and are, it could be argued, more likely to be working within the digital marketing industry. The removal of these heavy-users of the web from stats could even improve the quality of the data, as it removes some of the traffic they generate each day purely by doing their jobs. The fact that Google’s own browser, Chrome, supports plug-in such as this gives Google another selling point to help tempt users over from Internet Explorer.
Secondly, there is a bigger game afoot. Google is rolling out retargeting functionality; this allows AdWords advertisers to target consumers online who have previously visited their website, but didn’t convert. This is a form of behavioural targeting, a technology that has is being looked closely at by regulators on both sides of the pond, mainly due to concerns over the handling of consumer data and privacy. The market is looking to Google, the biggest online advertising buying point, to show how responsible they are with consumer data, and this move to empower consumers to opt-out of Analytics tracking is part of this. If Google can show they are able to self-regulate, law makers will be less likely to impose an onerous regulatory framework. By acting responsibly, both Google and consumers win.”
John Newton
Head of Digital Marketing, Clickthrough Marketing
“Google is making this move voluntarily, before they are asked to do so more forcibly by regulators. Currently Google controls 90% of the UK search market, and 62% of the Analytics market. That means 55% of the time Google knows both the searches consumer perform to find websites, and what those same consumers do on those websites when they arrive there. Never before has one company had such a powerful dataset on online consumer journeys, and Google recognise the responsibility that comes with this. I expect some webmasters will revert back to the raw log files to get the full picture of how people find and interact with their site. You might also see a slight uplift in the usage of other free Analytics packages such as Yahoo! Analytics and Piwik.”
Christian Garrington
Director of Digital Strategy, Clickthrough Marketing
So, in general, we feel it is a good thing regarding quality of stats, unless your taregt audience is a) naturally paranoid about online security issues or b) heavily techy and likely to install new plug ins at the drop of a hat or c) un-fans of Google generally. Also, it should bring new opportunities in the future.
However, it may raise problems for agencies in particular who will need to explain to clients why the stats begin to see an increasing drop as the plug in is promoted, tweeted about, discussed in forums and so on. These may be places your clients don’t naturally visit or see, so the drop may seem to them to reflect on your actions as a marketer.
It would be wise to make your clients aware of this plug-in before it becomes available so that they are prepared for a drop. In most cases, it is likely to be minimal anyway as the users who may install the plug in are the above three groups we identified above.
It might also be a good idea to highlight the positives to your clients – better targeting for non-converting visitors, higher quality stats, the option to use other packages (although it is likely that there may well be regulation which affects all anayltics packages at some point) and also, of course, your extensive in-house talents with raw log files if there is a problem.
Now where did you put that data analysis expert whose skills seemed so yesterday when Google analytics was launched?!
After the announcement last year that the 3 major search engines would adopt the canonical tag, it seems that Bing and Yahoo may be about to support it too, though not to the cross-domain level that Google plan to.
This tag helps solve the duplicate content issue, particularly prevalent when multiple URLs point to identical content eg when tracker URLs are used, or dynamic pages are created from search criteria.
If you are going to use it, make sure you don’t try to come up with methods to con the search engines and follow the guideliens carefully on its usage. It could help your SEO immeasurably, especially for top landing pages rather than similar product pages that just make your analytics task that much harder.
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Whilst Google may not really need to advertise as the brand name is inextricably linked to ’search’ in most of the world’s minds, it is interesting to see their contribution to the SuperBowl ads this weekend.
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Google have been hitting the news with negative headlines recently, so perhaps the motivation to advertise at such a major event is no great surprise.
It is also great to note that you do not need to make hugely expensive ads to get a good reaction. Screenshots and a musical sound track alone add up to a neat bit of advertising that must barely figure in the Google expense budget!
