About dlouden
Derek’s career in interactive marketing began at Temerlin McClain in 2004 where he planned display media for American Airlines and the Texas Department of Tourism. It was working on these clients that Derek was first exposed to the world of search engine marketing and he hasn’t looked back since. The data intensive SEM world appealed to Derek’s analytical side and when he started to figure out how to lower the cost per mile of his drive to work, he knew this was the field he was meant for. At Click Here, Derek analyzes his clients’ businesses and crafts PPC marketing plans to drive bottom line success as efficiently as possible. With experience across a vast range of clients, Derek has crafted search strategies for almost all of Click Here’s clients. Employing some of the most advanced tools available, Derek ensures that his clients remain competitive and are always moving towards their goals.
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Times Are Changing (Again)
Looking back over the past few years, a lot has changed about the typical search user. How, where, and why users search has changed as the result of new technology along with increased comfort and confidence levels. Growing interest in social search, mobile search, and video search are all quickly making this service an increasingly salient part of everyday life. Gone, even arcane, are the days where you had to consult Mapsco to find an address. Now this information is at your fingertips on your iPhone or Blackberry. You no longer have to read a restaurant review in a newspaper or magazine to find out if it is worth going there. You can simply put the question out on Facebook and chances are good you have got some friends that have been there who can offer a personal recommendation. If that fails, services like Yelp and Foursquare can help orient you. It is this increase in comfort level that has raised expectations among search users as to the results they should be receiving.
For the longest time, search advertisers were restricted to communicating all of their product or service’s benefits in 70 characters (with spaces) or less. This text was supposed to convince a user that clicking through would lead them to the solution for which they had been so diligently looking. Clicking on the text link promised a richer experience with images and video where the user could delve into the level of detail they desired. In the past 6 to 12 months, this has begun to change. Search engines are beginning to realize that in order to continue monetizing clicks in a world of increasing search savvy, they’re going to have to offer more before the click. This realization has ushered in new forms of sponsored search listings in the form of maps, images, video, and social media feeds. These new ad formats allow search users to consume this content directly from the search results page, without clicking through.
New Ad Formats
For the past few quarters, Google has offered limited beta tests of new ad formats to some of its advertisers. My feeling is that these new formats will begin to appear in other forms on Bing and Yahoo! as well to the extent they haven’t already. These ad formats include (shown below) video, maps, comparison shopping, and lead generation forms that will help provide a richer search engine experience.
Video
This ad format allows the user to click on the ‘+’ to reveal a video player where the advertiser can include a video clip such as a commercial or movie trailer.
Product Comparisons
These new ads will allow users to browse information for different product offerings from directly in the ad unit without navigating away from their current search. The example below demonstrates how this could be used for a mortgage company.
Maps
By syncing up with an existing listing on Google maps, advertisers can now ensure that searchers find their physical locations from the in-unit map provided below.
Product Feeds
Retailers that manage large inventories can utilize the product feeds feature through Google Base to push out up-to-date price and product information for items in their online store.
Additional Detail
The screenshot below shows what these units will look like in the context of the search results page once expanded.
What’s Next?
The future of these new ad formats will be determined by two complimentary forces. The first is the extent to which advertisers are effectively able to increase the success of their campaigns with these new ad formats. This will in turn drive demand up or down for the new ads. Since these ads, at this point, come at no additional cost to the advertiser, it is hard to believe that advertisers will not see some lift in performance. The only real restriction with Google at this point, is that the ads are only displayed in the 1st position which reserves them for only the highest performing ads and keywords. In my opinion, this is the only thing that stands to limit their exposure since these positions are typically occupied by ads with the highest CTR to begin with. The second force driving the success of these ads is Google’s ability to convert them into generating additional ad revenue. Google probably recognizes that new online advertising opportunities appear every day and as online experiences become richer, they will have to increase their offerings in order to keep pace.
How to Take Advantage
As previously mentioned, these new ad formats are tested as beta releases at Google’s discretion with the most successful ones being released publicly at a later date. Any opportunity to test these ads should be taken seriously as they can help you learn a great deal about your program with little or no risk. So what can you do to make sure you’re well positioned to take part in a beta test and are ready when new formats hit the market?
1) Make sure you have assets available and organized. This includes online video assets that you can use for video search results or well cataloged product images that can be used for product feeds. Preparing ahead of time can help you to move more quickly when a test opportunity presents itself.
2) Update your local business center listing. This is something every business should do, regardless of whether you are advertising online or not. The best part about it is that it is free. Ensuring that your information is up to date will not only make your business available in Google maps and on mobile device map searches, but it could put you closer to the front of the line as Google is making choices for who to invite into tests.
3) Put additional thought in what information you want to know from your customers. This exercise will not only help you to understand how the online experience you offer should be crafted, but some of the Google ad formats include online lead generation forms where users can submit information directly from the ad unit. Use this opportunity to learn about your customers so you can leverage this knowledge in other efforts online and off.
The Future
As comfort levels increase, users will continue to demand more from their online experience. The new ad formats being offered by search engines represent an excellent, low-risk forum in which marketers can participate in helping create these types of rich experiences while at the same time making your online dollars work harder.
It’s not every day you hear something described as the “challenge of the age”, but that’s what the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was recently quoted as saying about Social Search. With the recent explosion of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, a whole new world of opinions, reviews, and sentiments is being unleashed on the web. Each of these tweets, status updates, blogs represents a huge opportunity and challenge for marketers seeking to harness the collective power of internet users to further their company or brand.
However, an awareness that this social material exists online is only half the battle. The proliferation of different social media outlets has also led to increased fragmentation. Rarely is this material contained in a single location where users can browse all of it at once. Even if there was, new sites are constantly emerging which makes keeping an updated repository a formidable challenge. Enter Social Search. Social Search is simply the way to empower people to find the information they seek that’s embedded in all of these various social media outlets from one central location.
Being no small task, it becomes more reasonable to start calling the collection, organization, ranking of all this social activity a “challenge for the ages”. This is where Google, Microsoft, and a number of other players who are working to create a real-time resource for finding all things social about anything that interest you.
Currently, social search features exist in several beta programs such as Google’s Social Search (below). In Google’s ‘experiment’ searchers will have the opportunity to filter search results by blogs, forums, and the ‘social’ option. Results from a user’s search will include content from users’ friends and contacts (from Gmail, for example).
Another example is what Bing is starting to do by incorporating Tweets in their search results along with dedicated Twitter search capabilities (below).
As more of this material becomes indexed and ultimately more findable, marketers and advertisers will be presented with the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. There are three things that marketers can and should be doing to capitalize on the social media opportunity:
- Companies should focus on getting their customers to tell the right kind of stories about their experiences. By making it easy for users to share their good experiences, marketers help give their consumers a voice. By increasing the number of brand mentions by users, the potential for a brand to show up in other social searches increases.
- Brands should actively engage with users of social media. Companies are starting to leverage Twitter as a customer service tool to help distraught customers find a solution to their woes. This two way dialog helps to humanize brands as entities that want their customers have the best experience possible.
- Companies should be actively listening to what their customers are saying. While this might seem like a basic suggestion, many companies are unaware of the 100’s of Facebook fan pages, unofficial blogs, and countless Tweets that might be out there about their brand. Each may hold priceless information about how brands can become better and satisfying their customers. By paying attention, companies can centralize their efforts to more effectively control what’s being said about the brands.
Social media could be called one of greatest collaboration tools in the history of mankind. Ensuring that brands actively engage in using this method of communication will help them to stay connected with the customers for the long run and ultimately help drive their success.
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