Paid Search

Thinking of joining a successful and fast paced PaidSearch team? Want to work with some of the world’s biggest brands? See yourself creating cutting edge media campaigns and developing a career full of potential?

If so, you might be asking; “just what does make a good Paid Search professional?”. Well in the paid search team at iCrossing we look for eagle eyed, creative thinkers, who know the numbers, have a way with words and most of all are ambitious.

If this sounds like you, then you might also find these tips on securing a job in PPC a bit handy.

• Know our work.

In the Paid Search team, we love being told how good our work is. Check out the case studies on the iCrossing site and find out why our passion for Paid gets recognition. Be ready to discuss what interests you about the clients and campaigns the agency you’re applying to work on.

• Develop a hunger for ROI.

If we love anything more than accolades, it’s ROI. The beauty of PPC is that we arguably have visibility on more metrics than any other channel in the industry. This means our clients expect tangible results and strict targets. Developing a passion for the figures, will keep you one step ahead.

• Think about the future.

Show that you not only see yourself developing your career in PPC but that you have a vision for where you see the industry and yourself progressing.

• Be prepared to get schooled!

Bringing an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and demonstrating a willingness to learn is vital to making the cut and progressing within the team.

• Be prepared to school!

Part of what keeps us at the top of our game, is constantly challenging each other. This is not to say that we are competing against each other but demonstrating instances where you have gone against the grain and helped to improve a process or best practice, will go a long way.

Google + has recently been launched in an attempt (so it seems) to declare war on Facebook.

If you use Google, you already have your mail, calendar, documents and photos together. Google Plus adds to this and is essentially the potential replacement for Facebook in the sense of sharing.

So what does this mean for display?

First off when you set up your account you are given the option to opt out of targeted advertising. This would suggest that Google foresee the “Plus” platform as an opportunity for the search giant to deliver targeted display advertising to users.

What will also be interesting is how this incorporates the display acquisitions of AdMeld, Invite Media and DoubleClick. Potentially they will use these platforms to deliver more scale to their “Plus” platform. The use of +1 essentially shows that people are interested in recommending things they like; this kind of environment is possibly more welcoming to targeted display advertising.

Read more…

Google announced last night the roll out of their new Plus One (+1) button. This has got the digital community buzzing about what this means to search and brands.

The button now appears at the end of the web listings on both Paid and Natural results. You can see Google’s video around the product here:

Plus One – what are the implications?

• The first thing to understand is that this has only been released on Google.com, for English searches and only when you are logged in.
• iCrossing US offices are monitoring the impact of this and as we have further information around this further insights will be shared.
• “The primary benefit is that search gets better. It gets better in the user interface immediately, and we’ll look at it as a potential signal to improve search quality as well. I find social search extremely useful, especially with the recent updates. This change continues the evolution of social search, and it’s a natural progression to improve the search experience,” said Matt Cutts. Read more…

When browsing for a new pair of specs yesterday, I noticed that Google seem to be trialling another visual tweak for their ads in a bid to boost click-through rates.

Following a return to the yellow background, punctuated and non-punctuated extended headlines it looks like spaces are now being added to display URLs. It appears the presence of a space is determined by whether the keyword being searched is in the display URL or not.

I quite like this one, as it goes, it seems to add an extra degree of legibility to the listings.

Anyone else seen this?

Image Search advertising is a relatively new ad format from Google. Very simply, it enables you to pair an image with text and appear for related searches by user on Google Images.

The 2 current methods available to serve an Image ad are reservation & auction based, with the latter far the more stable and easier to implement.

Although probably not suitable for many clients, the format may have credible potential for those whose products and core KPIs have a direct relation to the images being viewed.

Using my own experience of Image Search, a good example of where an image ad would have been appropriate was about 4 months prior to a holiday my family and I were planning in Thailand. At the time I hadn’t purchased a flight or hotel. Read more…

After years of a largely unchanged creative format, 2010 saw an unprecedented year for the diversification and development of Paid Search ads, with the way led – unsurprisingly – by Google’s Adwords platform.

My intention is not for this to be an Adwords ‘how to’ – you can research Adwords’ nuts and bolts on the many excellent industry blogs.  Moreover, I hope to provide an overview of two of my favourite and most impactful PPC developments of the last 12 months and highlight how they can and should be having a beneficial effect on your campaigns.

In the second half of the article, drawing upon my experience of running large-scale and successful paid search campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, I’ll share my thoughts on two of the key mind-sets and approaches required for delivering brilliant paid search.

We’ll kick things off with a look at what’s proven to be one of the most popular and successful additions to Adwords ad formats in recent years…

Read more…

The February 2011 edition of Revolution covered an article looking at online brand building activity through search at the expense of display according to a recent survey carried out by communications firm Rocket.

Natural search ranked top  with 32% of marketers citing it as the most effective marketing channel for online brand building. As highlighted by iCrossing’s CEO, Paul Doleman, this higher figure is no surprise as SEO offers a trusted source in online brand building with consumers trusting the natural search rankings more for research purposes than paid alternatives. Not only is this content derived from the brand but we must also consider user generated content, reviews and network contacts as key branding aspects highlighted through natural search.

Coming in second at 28%, paid search. Seen as a key response tool, paid search is increasingly being used in creative ways to compliment brand building activities – check out Ann Summers. Likewise, online PR and email marketing sitting in the middle spots at 22%, can drive brand through targeted campaigns to specific demographics with targetted messaging. What is more surprising is the position of display and social coming in at the bottom of the pack.

Much of the focus at the moment on social, everyone’s talking about it. As outlined by Rocket’s MD, Pete Hendricks, ‘social media pretty much matches search engines in terms if traffic nowadays [...] but some brands don’t see social media as such an effective medium for brand building as there is much less control.’ the age old question of ‘what is the ROI’ maybe a concern for some but surely, in branding terms, social media done well is invaluable which makes it’s low position surprising. Instant consumer reviews, interactions and improved customer service can be the instant gains from social but dedicated resources and management are required to benefit from such rewards. Read more…

A month after the launch of Bing I made a quick analysis of its transition from its previous incarnation as Live Search to its rebranding as Bing in this blog post. The initial reaction was generally positive with retail clients benefitting from an improved conversion rate despite the higher cost-per-click.

Since then Bing has had a year and a half to prove its worth and, with the  ‘Search Alliance’ on its way to the UK this year, now seems a good time to revisit  the stats and ponder whether Bing can make the next step up and seriously position itself as an alternative if not a threat to Google.

This time I’ll compare MSN PPC data for a whole year before the Bing launch with the 18 months following Bing’s launch in June 2009. Add to this some help from our industry peers and trusted partners and we are able to draw some interesting conclusions.

(I should first acknowledge that product lines, strategies, competitiveness, inflation, the economy and other factors all change over time so this should not be considered as gospel, more of a guide)

Looking first at the retail sector –

• We have noticed a sizeable increase in CPC, up to 61% more depending on the product with only one area experiencing a drop – of 11%.
• This leads us to cost per order (CPO) which is up on the whole, due to the higher CPC and a similar conversion rate.

Now to travel  – Read more…

Towards the end of 2010 all SEO’s were talking about Google Preview and Instant Search. Now it’s the turn of PPC’ers to throw their opinions into the ring.

When searching on logged into Google and searching on www.google.com I have started to see preview now being made available to paid Ads. See below:

And Read more…

Two of the most recent changes to Google’s ad formats are making us ask questions about their value to users. Google built Adwords on the back of their goal to provide the highest quality, and most relevant ads to searchers – but recently, we are not sure about some of the new changes.

Lower Case Domain Names

On the premise that ads with the domain name written all in lower case generally have a better CTR, and to standardize the appearance of all ads, Google now force all display URLs to show in this way. We have always generally found the opposite, especially if your domain name has more than one word.

Look at the SERP below. I think it’s really hard to read that domain name – it took me a couple of tries to say it out loud. Surely that doesn’t help users? If it read something like GraysAndOsbourn.co.uk I think it would be a lot easier.

Perhaps there is some benefit gained in the way the file extension is capitalised and highlighted. This could add relevance to ads and increased the importance of optimised display URLs. Read more…