Keyword-less search marketing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gaining more advertisers by lowering the barrier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new models such as cost-per-lead for comparison — and product listing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search marketing experience.

Google Boost — a new initiative being piloted in the US — further automates the process for local businesses; it uses information from Google Places to automatically display ads against relevant searches.

Mobile and local

Mobile and localised services have been the talk of the marketing world for some time, and with the phenomenal success of group-buying, and increasing interest in check-in services (like foursquare) and click-to-call ad formats in AdWords, 2011 is  the year to incorporate these tools into your marketing strategy.

New opportunities for Yahoo! and Bing

By this summer, the Yahoo! and Bing Search Alliance will be up and running in the UK. With the combined audiences of Yahoo! and Bing on a single platform, marketers will have a much more compelling reason to seriously consider a multi-engine strategy. There will also be the possibility for some quick wins for marketers who are first off the mark to extend their campaigns onto these platforms, due to lower competition and Bing’s historically strong conversion rate.

AdWords remarketing and behavioural targeting

Google’s AdWords remarketing feature has brought retargeting to the masses; many marketers who hadn’t previously used retargeting found this a nice little earner last year (for relatively little extra effort). The wider exposure of this technique and developments by rival technologies have, however, put the spotlight on the ethical responsibilities of advertisers.

Another feature currently in AdWords beta is the behavioural targeting element for display — called “interest categories” — which enables advertisers to bid on specific audiences. This is probably the closest indication of what keyword-less paid search will look like in the future.

Better automation

Quite a few of the tools Google released in the past year allow for a greater degree of testing and automation. I expect this development to continue, helping advertisers go from managing campaigns manually, to efficiently scaling their campaigns without the overheads of third-party fees.

However, some features have turned out to be more beneficial to Google’s bottom line than to the advertisers’. The extended and session-based broad match is a prime example of this. Some advertisers saw it as an easy way of getting extra clicks, but the consensus of the SEM industry seems to be that it just reduced ROI.

Traditional ad formats in Facebook?

Facebook has been an interesting proposition for a couple of years and is now a natural part of many consumer campaigns. However, there are still a lot of advertisers waiting for Facebook to allow more traditional ad formats for branding purposes (instead of the current direct response focused formats).

To sum things up for 2011, I expect to see:

• More automation tools from the search engines
• A continued push by Google for display advertising
• Additional innovations to reduce the focus on keywords

* Magnus was recently featured on Pitchdigital in The digitisation of media in the 21st century

The policy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ireland and Canada.

Furthermore, as a consequence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuitton in the European Court of Justice and also French High Court that allowed competitive trademark keyword bidding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other markets such as the UK.

Both policy changes are planned to come into effect on 14 September.

Read the full press release.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an important signal of “quality” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. Therefore the higher the CTR, the more relevant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge advertisers per click, their revenue increases.

The following chart outlines the main factors that determine the quality score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This quality score is then used in an algorithm that determines click-cost and position.

Due to this, it’s very possible that an advert appearing in top position is paying less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course maximising their revenues by the higher number of aggregate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more complex for advertisers, consider the following scenario: an advert with lower CTR is converting very strongly on the website, as it effectively pre-qualifies the traffic. In comparison a high CTR advert for the same campaign converts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to filter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the landing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to calculate the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depending on objective.

In practise, it’s difficult to make this type of direct comparison on a live campaign, due to the ever-changing nature of competition, quality score, positions and costs. However, from experience, typically for b2c the benefit of a higher quality score from optimising ad copies towards CTR (with resulting lowered CPC and higher position) outweighs the alternative, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.