Interesting study by Jeffrey Glueck, CMO at Travelocity, who said the "Portfolio Approach" to Paid Marketing, contrary to conventional wisdom (of the Search Engines and SEM Firms that make their money from Search Advertising) does not work and only 2% of paid-search conversions fall into the category where the searcher originally clicked on a non branded term (like house plans, country house plans, craftsman house plans, etc).

In fact, even in cases where the 2% clicked on a non branded term - most of those ended up returning later and clicking on a branded term when they converted.

"…only to click and convert on a branded term at a later date.  Travelocity now credits non brand phrases as being responsible for only 4% of each booking, meaning 96% of Travelocity's booked trips are the result of branded key words."

There's a lot of research to back this up ….. but many marketers might not want to look that closely at it.

"…He cited a Nielsen NetRatings study that showed half of all searches on Google and Yahoo are comprised of 100 terms — and that half of those terms are brand terms. He went on to cite another study from marketing-services agency 360i that found buying brand words typically accounts for just 5% of a marketer's total search spend but that those brand words drive 80% of the profit from search. "

Note to myself: Let me see if I got this right.  Say I'm a B2B or B2C business that has a "brand name" … people in my audience have some notion of who and what my business is (we hope).  Suppose I spend 10K a month on a portfolio keyword approach. Since the products I do sell via PPC end up being, 96% of the time, my own Brand name… were I to cut my spend down to say…..500 a month and only advertised on keywords that had my name on it ….I'd probably end up with more money in my pocket at the end of the day.

Amazing.

It fits in perfectly with the experience I had with architectural firms like The House Designers - when I was handling them - typically they'd spend a fixed sum a month and most of the time when a person came and bought - the keyword they used was their brand name, or the name of an architect associated with the brand.   Against all evidence - they continued to insist the Portfolio approach worked better - which it clearly did not, in their case.

I have the data for 1 year to prove it, but I have no plans to publish it at this time. Yet, I saw the same thing on other sites that I worked with, and this was not just PPC traffic, but Organic Search traffic as well. 

The great majority of traffic from Search Engines to most businesses is on the name of the business or, in the case of home plans, house plans and floor plans, the name of the chief architect, the name of a travel resort (when it was a travel site or destination country).   That's just the way it is.

The implications … pretty much …. in the majority of cases (I won't say "every case") you make more money, more conversions if you just advertise on your own brand name and forget about all the other keywords your bidding on.

Again, that goes against Conventional Wisdom…. but looks who determined those rules?  The people that have most to gain - The Search Engines and high end PPC Marketing firms.

Besides, I think Organic Traffic and Link Traffic are better for converting off of non-branded keywords … but that's just my opinion.  But I have first hand knowledge  in terms of the Architects …and I can prove it if I had to.

I have 0% experience with Quigo, though I've known about them for a long time; the New York Times article about Quigo published today paints Quigo as a much hotter and sexier alternative to  Google AdWords/AdSense.

Google, in this article by Louise Story of the Times, is painted as smug, an agent against change in an industry segment, PPC, that it dominates.  Google is reactive (not proactive) adding some of the elements of the Quigo system; but generally has been against individual control of advertising spots by the advertiser.  For  PPC, it almost seems like Google has more in common with Yahoo and it's own interests, than the advertisers it's supposed to be serving with these ads.   At least, that's the way it reads to me.  According to the Times story:

"…Here is how this contextual advertising has traditionally worked: Google and Yahoo post ads on hundreds of thousands of Web sites, but both operate as blind networks — they do not tell advertisers which sites their contextual ads run on. Instead, the advertisers buy keywords for ads across Google and Yahoo’s vast networks of Web sites, including the home pages of big media companies and the smallest of bloggers. "

"…Quigo, by contrast, gives advertisers not only the list of specific sites where their ads have appeared but also the opportunity to buy only on specific Web sites or particular pages on those sites. It also allows media company sites like ESPN.com and FoxNews.com a chance to manage their own relationships with advertisers."

Google is reacting by giving up more information:

"…In the next few months, Google’s advertiser reports will begin listing the sites where each ad runs, Ms. Malone said. She added that advertisers on the Google networks would soon be able to bid on contextual ads on particular Web sites rather than simply buying keywords that appeared across Google’s entire network. "

Control of where an ad appears directly relates to branding, as well as being a factor in the effectiveness of an ad:

"…“Because traditional networks are blind, I’ve always assumed that many of the places where your ads come up are on B- and C-level sites,” Mr. Klein said. “With Quigo, you know it’s on ESPN.com, not Joe Schmo’s sports blog. It’s a premium site, and you’re willing to spend more money.”

To me, the Quigo article is not really about the technical innovations or features that Google may or may not implement in the near future that match Quigo's - it's about Google maturing and acting less like the innovative company it was - the one we all fell in love with and more like Microsoft, IBM and HP.

Think about it - Google could have been much more transparent about Search in general - yet it chose not to be.

Some of the reasons for a lact of transparancy are valid and others, maybe not.

Marketingshift has a post - Contextual Search Is Relative - claiming indirectly related contextual ads are more effective than directly related contextual ads by 200% - 500%.  According to John Gartner of MarketingShift:

"…But often the ads that might generate the highest volume of clicks are indirectly related to the content or keyword at hand. There have been many studies saying that click rates are lower when they talk about the exact content of the page — for example, reading about skis may not generate the highest yield for ski boot ads."

Makes sense.  Think about it - if you already have the information on the main text of the page -why do you want to see the same kind of stuff as advertising? 

Wouldn't you rather see something that goes along (indirectly related but complementary) the publishers' content rather than something competing with it?

Probably, the reason for the MarketingShift post is the recent announcement that Mamma.com will use ClickSense to help improve Contextual Advertising on Momma.com. 

I'll be curious to see a "before/after" case study on contextual advertising on Momma.com - see if the ClickSense technology does increase advertisers CTR.

I just heard from Pat McCarthy of Conversionrater and Right Media that RMX Direct is launching on this Monday (btw, I'll be at the AlwaysOnNYC next Monday-Wednesday also).   In fact, you can take a tour of RMX Direct  here.

I looked at the case studies and found something right away that was interesting -"…Jonathan likes RMX Direct because it functions as both an auction platform and an ad server. "

I'm not really involved with Paid Advertising that much, although one of the companies I work with, Green Media (whose blog, biggreenblog, I also post to), is a client of Right Media and uses RMX Direct for some of their clients.  I also spoke with Pat McCarthy briefly during TechCrunch 8 a couple of months ago.

I'll release the details for the RMX Direct Launch next week.  BTW, Right Media has offices here in NYC, at 212, 5th Avenue (not far from where I work, in Chelsea). 

I heard about the Miva Monetization Center Launch last week but could not annouce it, at the wish of Miva.  Pat McCarthy has a good post on the news about Miva.  According to Pat:

"…What is Miva doing to innovate? The first thing is providing the inline ads that look like dotted hyperlinks but show an ad on mouseover. These ads are effective from what I’ve heard on click-through rates, but many users and publishers find them annoying and intrusive. No matter what you think about them though, providing publishers with the option to use them is at least one thing they offer that Adsense and YPN aren’t offering."

I was not able to attend the WebEX meeting today and I also see others announced this news yesterday.   Here's the info I got before hand.

"…On Tuesday, January 16, MIVA will be announcing the MIVA Monetization Center. Also known as MIVA MC, the new offering is designed for Web site owners looking to tap into new uncharted revenue generating opportunities and is available now. I wanted to see if you were interested in setting up a time to speak to MIVA.

MIVA MC lets publishers of all sizes place pay-per-click ads on their
site, either next to site content and/or on the search results page.
MIVA then sets itself apart from companies like Google by letting owners also include InLine Pay-Per-Click Ads within the content, giving each another powerful way to deliver revenue generating opportunities without inundating their visitors with additional advertisements which can, in the end, overwhelm the visitor."

I was about to go to bed (it's 3 AM already) but I just had to turn the key one more time - Johnathan Mendez's post of Branded PPC got me to think about Nordstrom.com, which he uses as an example.

Using SpyFu.com, I determined NordStrom.com is spending about 68,000 dollars a day on PPC, yet 90% of that spend is on just 77 terms! 

62,019.74 per day are spent on 77 terms where over 100 dollars per day are being spent.  Only 68,500.81 per day is spent on the entire keyword list of 5329 keyword phases that SpyFu.com extracted.  Again, I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but they're believable.

And if you can do what I just did - you can figure out what's important to a company, based on what they're spending money on -and that's insight and the basis for a competitive strategy (see chart below).

One more thing - the data SpyFu.com pulls might be several months old (which might limit the effectiveness of using SpyFu.com to get the latest info on a competitor's PPC strategy); don't expect these extracted terms to be the same one's that Nordstrom is running now.

Do woman click on PPC ads more than men?  I could not pass up posting on this - even though I don’t have any data to prove or disprove this assertion presented by SeoRoundTable.

"A small case study, very small case study, posted at DigitalPoint Forums shows how a person who has Google AdSense on three different sites, has the highest click through rate on his ads on the site that is most tailored to women and girls.

(1) Woman tailored site has 40% CTR with 200 uniques a day.
(2) Cell phone site has 1% CTR with 500-600 uniques a day.
(3) Unknown site has 2% CTR with 1200 unique visitors a day.

He concludes that women are more likely to click on contextual ads.

Depends on the ads and the audience - it’s not that much brain science here; need a lot more data to say, one way or the other, that woman are more likely to click on contextual ads than men.

But let’s say that woman do click on contextual ads more than men, would that be a bad thing?  I think woman might like to shop more than men, and if we accept that, then they are probably clicking of contextual ads more than men.  That’s just a guess though - I have no proof.

What if your search ad is really what converts a searcher and the landing page only confirms the impression?   According to Johathan Mendez that is what actually happens - and he’s got the case studies to prove it.

First - you conversion happens on the ad, not the landing page.

"The best way to leverage this interest is to reinforce the messaging in the ad on the landing page. Obviously the user liked what you said enough to click through. Make sure you bridge that second or two of page load with reinforcement of the original messaging. A second or two in the flow of a user experience is more than enough time for the user to lose focus or become distracted. Again, many tests have validated the effectiveness of messaging reinforcement (not only on the landing page, but throughout the conversion funnel)."

The title (keyword) first line, description all need to be just right. 

I bring this up because I look at content and effectiveness for my clients, esp my corporate clients.  In one case I was asked to produce all the metrics that would determine the success of a promotion on the week(s) that it ran.  Each promotion fell into a predefined category and each occupied a position in the corporate portal page.

Our contention is that the type of ad would make the difference, or the position on the corporate portal would make the difference - but at the end of the day it’s the content that makes the most difference between the effectiveness of an ad and it’s click through. 

I have a real problem with the PPC Contextual advertising going on at AOL.  Maybe it’s not really AOL’s fault - maybe it’s what ever is behind the algorithm for PPC Contextual Adverstising.  Look at this (below).

I did a nude study this afternoon at my studio space, Brooklyn Artists Gym, and sent a .jpg to an artist friend, Amy Crehore.  But look at what happened …… it totally worked against what I was attaching to my email - unless the ad is saying my model should lose weight.

I thought the whole thing was funny - but it’s also showing the weakness of this form of adverstising - esp when there is a picture being sent as part of the email.  Here’s a couple of additional examples of how messed up this is:

Maybe the algorithm for PPC Contextual Adverstising is so bad….it’s good!  I mean, it’s kinda in the ballpark - it’s showing the backside of my model!

I guess AOL or whatever runs the contextual search program - thinks my model should go on a diet!

By the way, I’m not really a figurative painter - I sorta just paint again, mostly to work on issues I found I could not work out any other way ….. and I like to think of myself as both a web analyst and an artist in the same moment.  If your interested in my Art Thoughts and the shows I view, visit my www.ArtNewYorkCity.com blog.

I found out about Jonathan Mendez’s Blog after he replied to one of my posts about LonelyGirl15.  I think Mendez is saying there’s a lot of money left on the table because of poor landing page optimization with PPC and that you need the right platform and methodology in order to optimize in the first place. 

I think that’s true and way too many businesses take short cuts because they think they know what customers want, and usually, they’re wrong.

I love the chart above, it represents customer segmentation - what you need to determine as your optimize your landing pages for PPC is what audience responds to them in the first place?

"Since about half of all online ad dollars go into paid search, landing page optimization can reap tremendous rewards. The very nature of search marketing affords us the opportunity to deliver contextual relevance in ways that were unimaginable to marketers just a decade ago. Also, these search-focused strategies transfer to other forms of user-controlled media or pull marketing, which should be gaining more attention in your marketing plans. "

Consider how far you can go with optimization - much more can be done that most people  ever imagined.  One of my architectual house plan clients spent several thousand dollars a month for absolutely 0 conversions, most of the time.  I could not talk them into doing anything major to address this problem as…they knew it all; you can do is bring a horse to water - you can’t make it drink if it don’t want to - better not to work with such a client and I no longer do.

But here’s what you could do with PPC Landing Page Optimization according to Jonathan Mendez. 

Keyword – If the visitor’s search query included color specificity the product landing page will display the color match product image and have supporting copy for the color that matches the user query.

Geo - It’s the middle of January. As a clothing retailer I show down jackets and snow boots on my homepage to users from Maine however I show polo shirts and loafers to my users from Florida.

Referrer – Visitors from the comparative shopping engines will land on product pages optimized with additional product options matching their category interest since these visitors are likely still in the consideration phase.

Stage - A customer that purchased shoes will be shown socks and belts should they return to the homepage within 30 days of their purchase. Should they return after the season changes (if they live in a seasonal climate) they’ll be show the season’s newest shoes.

An often-overlooked one…

Language – My visitor used a Spanish language search query or came from a Spanish language site deliver so her landing page will be in Spanish.

The technology exists - imagination, skill and money are the limits.  But consider this: were the client I left stopped, put some of the 0 conversion money into PPC landing page optimization (as I set up for them, but they walked away from it), such as what’s mentioned above - they’d have been way ahead today.

"After you’ve discovered the high impact segment you want to optimize that’s when the fun begins. Through the wonder of JavaScript (the bedrock for most of the next-generation web applications), delivering relevant messages through targeted content delivery on your landing pages as exemplified above can be implemented quickly and easily".

With the right approach most of this is not that hard to do - even with a small budget. Again, it takes some progressive thinking to take advantage of what technology can offer.

I run into this a lot with artists, who are not enabled for this type of optimization in most cases (they don’t run PPC most of the time).  In a way though, much of what Jonathan Mendez’s approch to PPC landing page optimization could also help a landing page to buy an artists’ prints, or to order a book. 

I don’t say it’s a perfect fit - a lot of money is being left on the table because landing pages are not being optimized.