November 9, 2008

2008 Election: Who Won Online?

Posted by Lisa Raehsler under online marketing, social media, social networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Obama's campaign Facebook page
Obama

We all know who won the election, but both Barack Obama and John McCain relied on online media and social networking more than in any past election.  Who formed the best connections and communities online? Did this really have an impact on the outcome?

Consider the following:

According to Pewinternet.org, a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the Internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views, and mobilize others.

Democrats are more active online than Republicans and are more likely to participate in online communities. They say they’re more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online, according to data released by Rubicon Consulting.

Perhaps the most interesting /disturbing of all to me is Google endorses Barack Obama.

Some Fun Numbers from the Internet

Google Searches: Obama-related search terms were used almost twice as much as McCain in the last 30 days, according to data from Google Insights for Search. Google has also has created a special 2008 US Election Trends page.

Website Traffic: According to compete.com, Obama’s website had twice as many visitors in the past year as McCain.

Link Power: Obama’s website has many more external links pointing to it than McCain’s website, according to Yahoo Site Explorer.

YouTube: Both candidates have YouTube Channels, but Obama’s channel has significantly more views:

Facebook: With more than 110 million active users, Obama had more supporters from this community.

  • Obama: 2.2 million supporters
  • McCain: 192,000 supporters

Even with this small snapshot of numbers from around the Internet, it’s clear to see the Web presence of Obama’s campaign has been significant and pivotal in the way it has rallied supporters and formed communities around the now president-elect.

And now, your moment of Zen:

Google hearts Obama

Google hearts Obama

 

July 30, 2008

Make Mine a Double: Google Double Serving in Content Network

Posted by Lisa Raehsler under PPC | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

I recently wrote a post about the great Google content network and the new super campaigns available for advertisers in Adwords. The new features, flexibility, and transparency are expected to make the content network much more efficient for advertisers.

Unfortunately, today I captured a screen shot of Google double serving image ads on the content network. Double serving is “Displaying more than one ad for the same company or person at a time”. Google has a policy against double serving Adwords ads.

How does this happen? I am told it can occur because of contextual targeting and site-targeting in one account. I’m surprised Google’s technology isn’t smart enough to recognize this and prevent it.

But on the other hand, if you wanted to do this yourself, it would be pretty simple to get double exposure? You would just have to set-up two different campaigns. One that is site-targeted, and one with keywords using the new placement feature to target the same sites. Right?

Well, enjoy the technical error folks.

Double dipping? Google serves 2 ads on one page

Double dipping? Google serves 2 ads on one page

 

July 22, 2008

Introduction to SEM and Online Display Advertising (for Mike)

Posted by Lisa Raehsler under display advertising, online marketing, search | Tags: , , , , , |
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My friend Mike told me, “Lisa the blog is really entertaining, but I don’t really know much about search marketing. I’m just a programmer.” True, Mike. I almost forgot… I was too busy geeking out to ask you what you wanted. The Mavens were spewing CTR and ad networks and we haven’t written a back-to-basics for awhile. This is important since most of the clients we work with are beginners themselves. Much too busy running major brands, they leave it up to the Mavens to handle. And we appreciate that.

So Mike, this one’s for you.

Mike

Mike

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of promoting a website through search engines like Google or Yahoo. Since there are millions of searches daily, it’s important that your website shows up in the search results when people are searching for you. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

When the search engines produce a results page (a list of web pages related to your search terms), they list the pages in order of relevancy, with the most relevant page appearing first, then the next, and so on. It’s desirable to appear near the top of these results to get the most traffic to your website.

There are paid and non-paid SEM tactics one would use to show up higher in the search engine results. You can see there are a list of web pages on left. These are called “organic results” (non-paid) because Google and Yahoo find these naturally while scanning the Web. On the right-hand side, you will see “sponsored links” (paid): these are ads that match up to your search terms.

Appearing in the search results, higher up on the page, using a combination of organic and sponsored listings is what search marketing is basically all about. See, that was easy. - Lisa

teacher

teach me the basics, please

Online Display Advertising

Online display advertising consists of using ad space on websites to reach a desired target audience. Sites may include web portals, blogs, casual gaming sites, social networks, instant message applications, widgets, RSS feeds, and more.

The most common type of display advertising is banner ads. Banner ads typically come in standard sizes such as 728×90, 160×600, and 300×250 which refers to pixel width x height and are most often animated through Flash. For an extra serving fee, banners can also incorporate rich media functionalities which include interactive elements such as banner expansion, data submission, and gaming. Other types of display advertising include things like site skins (wallpapers), fixed sponsorships, and video.

Online display advertising is an important consideration as part of a media mix due to the exciting array of targeting and messaging opportunities and the fact that people are spending more and more time online. -Sarah

We have already outlined success metrics for online display and SEM campaigns, but will be getting back to the basics in future posts, talking about pros, cons, and opportunities within the SEM and online display industries.

 

July 17, 2008

Online Marketing Mavens Jump on the Online Video Bandwagon!

Posted by Sarah Zielie under Video, display advertising, online marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
1 Comment 

Us Mavens are instrumental in educating various groups on our respective fields. Lisa came up with the stellar idea to video tape some of these sessions to post on our blog. Here is the first of the series. Check back often for more on Search and Interactive Media!

What is rich media?

Rich Media ads have an added functionality such as expansion, floating across the page, games, and in banner data submission. There are limitless things that you can do with rich media. Rich media vendors like to refer to it as “a micro-site within a banner”. Rich Media vendors are third party servers that will actually serve the ad and help us build it. They also help us measure interaction rate, time spent with the video and what people actually did when interacting with the banner ads.

 

July 10, 2008

Google Content Network and “Super Campaigns”

Posted by Lisa Raehsler under PPC, online marketing | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

The Online Marketing Mavens love content. There have been a lot of improvements lately on the Google content network. I can tell you from my recent experience, there appears to be some major glitches with Yahoo’s content network (for example, campaigns not even running).

Search engines are different from the content network. In search engines, the keywords we use indicate our intent- what we want to research or buy. In the content network, Google matches ads with the content on web pages. We’re reading the content, not actively searching for anything when we see the ads. This can be accomplished by (1) contextual targeting or (2) placement targeting.

(1) Contextually targeted ads are keyword triggered (it is the default automatic opt-in). Google will show your ads on web pages where the keywords appear on the page. This is not just a straight-up keyword match, but also based on fancy linguistic processing technology. For example, if you sell coffee, Google will match it to websites about drinking coffee and knows not to show it for the Java programming language.

(2) Placement targeting is much easier to grasp because you simply select specific sites you want your ad to run on. I want to run on nytimes.com or something. You can identify placements by domain name, demographics, topics, or categories.

Early in the content network there were several problems. We couldn’t tell what sites we were served on, and had little control. Consider the previous coffee example. Targeting the content network can be a problem if you didn’t want your ad along side an article about getting scalded by coffee. So this can be a problem for the sophisticated marketer.

Recent improvements have made the content network a much more viable option for advertisers. Now, we have more advanced options:

  • placement reports lists the sites where the ads show up
  • pricing options of CPC or CPM
  • controls to exclude sites or categories (ie, exclude user generated content or parked domains).

Just when you thought it was heaven on Google Earth, along comes another new feature currently in testing. My Google rep calls it the “Super Campaign”. Now the worlds of keyword targeting and placement targeting combine. In the Super Campaign, you can target both placements and keywords in the same campaign. In a perfect application, you could target shopping sites and use keywords related to only to coffee. Only showing up for shopping content about coffee.

You can see in the screen shot how this looks within the Adwords interface. Can’t wait for his to be widely available to test on new campaigns!

The Super Campaign could obviously lead to an entirely new approach to content targeting. Think about targeting health sites, but only with keywords for exercise (not healthy foods). Or general news sites and targeting certain type of news with keywords, only content about “gas prices”.

The possibilities are endless…

UPDATE 7-21-08: The new option appears to be available to all advertisers now. It’s accessible by drilling down to the AdGroup level in Google Adwords.

 

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