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It’s speak­ing sea­son at the Ban­ner search team, and over the next couple of months we’ll be speak­ing at con­fer­ences in Lon­don, Stock­holm and Oslo.

First out is SEM Kon­fer­ansen in Oslo (14−16 Septem­ber). Here we’ll run a couple of ses­sions with a main one-hour event ded­ic­ated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Fol­low­ing this we’ll con­tinue our Nor­dic jour­ney and ven­ture across the bor­der to Stock­holm and the world-renowned SMX (28−29 Septem­ber). With no-less than three speak­ing ses­sions penned in it’ll be a busy couple of days.  We’ll be dig­ging into the Google qual­ity score and how to integ­rate search and dis­play advertising.

Back in Lon­don we’re run­ning a retar­get­ing ses­sion at the always-excellent A4UExpo (12−13 Octo­ber). This is the premier UK event for affil­i­ate and per­form­ance mar­ket­ing, and a bril­liant oppor­tun­ity to under­stand more about this excit­ing mar­ket­ing model.

If you’re plan­ning to attend any of the above events, please write a line in the com­ments as we’re always happy to catch-up over cof­fee in-between ses­sions. Oth­er­wise you’ll surely find us net­work­ing in the bar.

Google has announced that it is chan­ging its ad policies to allow advert­isers to use third party trade­marks in their ad cop­ies, even without approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­pon­ent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­nic­ate the brands they sell or support.

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.

Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The reason is simple – never before have pro­spects so clearly told advert­isers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­im­ise this opportunity.

The concept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effect­ively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find cam­paigns that were all point­ing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely lim­ited internal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that someone arriv­ing from a spe­cific search such as “product x specs” will not imme­di­ately see the product they are expect­ing, and pos­sibly just hit the back but­ton in frus­tra­tion and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Secondly, even if they are determ­ined enough, and decide to give the site a second chance, they still have to find their way through via internal nav­ig­a­tion and search func­tion­al­ity. This leaves them vul­ner­able to get­ting lost, frus­trated and ulti­mately giv­ing up, and return to their search engine of choice for a bet­ter match to their ori­ginal query.

Simplist­ic­ally, there are two levels of seg­ment­a­tion when it comes to keywords and land­ing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Cat­egory, Product, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, com­pare, com­plain, trouble shoot

At the first level, advert­isers will send cat­egory searches (e.g. “print­ers”) to a cat­egory page, and product spe­cific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the product page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the second level, the advert­iser will util­ise the search mod­i­fi­ers to bet­ter under­stand what the con­sumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y spe­cific­a­tions”) will send traffic to the cor­res­pond­ing sub page or sec­tion of the land­ing page.

While this might seem like com­mon sense and straight for­ward to imple­ment, there are a few things to con­sider. The second level of seg­ment­a­tion increases the com­plex­ity of the cam­paign by quickly mul­tiply­ing the num­ber of indi­vidual land­ing pages. These indi­vidual land­ing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, access­ible and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, advert­isers can expect hap­pier site vis­it­ors and improved con­ver­sion rates.

Even if search has matured incred­ibly over the last few years, both from a tech­nical point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coördin­a­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all levels of the organisation.

Earlier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Huddle. This was an intim­ate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was roun­ded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the latest devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­ment­als right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gible dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his exper­i­ence of man­aging inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­por­ate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­it­ate increased own­er­ship and sub­sequent coördin­a­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­res­en­ted by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent innov­at­ive fash­ion. With the object­ive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selec­ted part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­no­logy as it was about com­mu­nic­a­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­no­logy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest factor to suc­cess is still the people driv­ing it.

With search engines char­ging for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­ic­ally being con­sidered a dir­ect response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s little need to optim­ise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity factor to determ­ine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if object­ives are sales, leads or traffic.

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.