Companies who don’t even advertise online are now using digital marketing tools to shape their offline marketing campaigns. A client of ours was recently preparing a national radio campaign advertising their new service. They run these radio ads once per quarter and while discussing their possible use of the web we suggested they do some keyword research before writing the script of the radio ad to see exactly what words and phrases their target audience were using to describe their products and services.
This told them two crucial things
1. What words were being searched for most often right now by their target audience (google keyword research tool) and more importantly
2. what words were trending into use and what words had become tired and were trending out of use. (google trends)
This allows them to align themselves with the phraseology and terminology of their audience as it changes, and helps them to appear as leaders to their market. It also allows them to get a jump on search engine optimisation and start being found for these words before their competitors.
When we set up the digital marketing institute about 2 years ago the field we are in was typically called “online marketing”. With some keyword research we saw that the phrases online marketing was static (usually the first sign of a coming decline) in terms of it’s usage where as the phrase “digital marketing” had made huge leaps and even if it’s growth slowed significantly it would still pass out online marketing as the phrase to describe the industry.
Language is not fixed it evolves and changes over months and weeks. Think of a cartoon in the newspaper, it’s funny today but in a few weeks time it looses it’s context and relevance.
The following article comes from the latest version of AMAS’s State of the Net publication. The State of the Net can be downloaded from the AMAS site.
2010 marks a watershed for digital advertising in Ireland, with the publication of the first study from IAB Ireland/PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Digital advertising was worth €97.2 million in 2009, or 10.3% of the Irish advertising market. With advertising spend suffering a 20% fall in 2009, digital is proving to be more resilient than other categories.
Search – predominately Google AdWords – was the dominant format, accounting for 46.2% of online advertising spend, followed by classifieds (27.2%) and display (26.6%). A variety of formats, including email, sponsorships and affiliates, are included in the display category. Property, recruitment and motoring were the biggest spenders, accounting for 45% of digital advertising spend.
Why is this study so important? Many large advertisers, notably global brands, tend not to commit budgets without industry-recognised data. And that’s what they’re getting – the reconstituted IAB Ireland is part of a network of similar industry bodies internationally while Price-waterhouseCoopers uses a tried and tested methodology across all markets.
Equivalent IAB research in other markets has accelerated the growth in online advertising, at the expense of traditional media. More mature markets, such as the UK and the Nordic countries, are reporting online advertising market shares in excess of 20%. Expect the next IAB Ireland study, for the first half of 2010, to start plotting that growth curve.
If you are interested in the digital marketing and advertising sector in Ireland and abroad, sign up for one of the many courses that the Digital Marketing Institute offers.
Google’s latest innovation for Gmail, called ‘Priority Inbox’, is aimed at those who are overwhelmed by email.
For many users, particularly if you are signed up to lots of automated newsletters and email updates from companies, it can be overwhelming to open up their email ina morning and sort the wheat from the chaff.
Learns email habits
Google’s Priority Inbox attempts to learn your e-mail habits and then decides which messages are most important to you and places these at the top of your email list.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred” and “Everything else”.
Priority Inbox is essentially an automated way of doing what many already do (ie setting up manual filters).
Google Software Engineer Doug Aberdeen, explains thethinking behind Priority Inbox(which is currently in beta) as follows: “Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply.”
Aberdeen says that, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important.”
“So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it tonot only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this”bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is likeyour personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
One of the better Google video’s that I have seen (and I show as many folks as possible) is one delivered by a guy called Hal Varian who is Google’s Chief Economist. The video introduces viewers to the wild and woolly area of the AdWords auction. You can watch this Google AdWords video below.
Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad’s performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.
Google recently launched their Google Certification Program (to replace Google Advertising Professionals program). To provide professionals who had previously taken the program time to transition over to the new program, Google is running both programs side by side during a six month grace period which ends in October 2010. To retain certified status and continue using the badge within your marketing collateral, Google AdWords professionals MUST meet the requirements of the new program.
What’s the difference between the two programs? With the Google Certification Program, Google is offering updated learning materials written by Google experts. The company has developed four, separate in-depth exams on AdWords management called Fundamentals, Advanced Search, Advanced Display and Advanced Reporting & Analysis. The exams are designed to prove proficiency in these areas and are being widely adopted by employees of search marketing agencies. To gain qualification, exam takers must pass both the Advertising Fundamentals exam and one advanced-level exam.
In addition to this, Google has also launched Google Partner Search, a directory to help advertisers find agencies to manage their campaigns. Currently, all Google Advertising Professionals who have opted in are part of Google Partner Search, but this will not be the case by the end of October. If you have an employee that already qualified under the old program, this is a great time for them to update their skills through the Google Certification Program. Digital Marketing Institute runs training courses that enable AdWords professional to take the Google Exams. Call us on 01 271 1888 for more details on these Google AdWords training courses.
Are you a business in Europe using Google Ads to build visibility about your products and services or to drive traffic to your website?
Then you are going to find the announcement this week made by Google of interest.
Google have just announced that they are changing their policy to allow European advertisers to buy and include keywords in your Google Ads that have been trademarked by other companies.
This change comes into effect on 14 September 2010 and extends changes that were made in Britain and Ireland in 2008 – though this has been possible in the US since 2004.
Up until now, brand owners have been able to file a trademark complaint with Google to stop third-party ads from being featured alongside the results of a trademarked name.
The New York Times reports that “brand owners, led by the French luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, had argued that only they or authorised sites should be able to buy and use such trademarked terms in searches, so as to protect their brand value.”
It goes on to comment that “Google argues that selling brand names as ad keywords to multiple bidders helps consumers because it allows them to find product reviews, sellers of second-hand goods and other information. It stressed that the new policy would not extend to the actual display text in search findings.”
This is clearly a good move for Google and will boost their revenues for Google AdWords. I am wondering however what the impact of Facebook advertising being highly targeted and the growth of people using Facebook has been to Google. Have you moved some of your online advertising from Google to Facebook in the last year?
Google has released a new Google AdWords Reporting feature in Google Analytics. With this update, users now have access to 3 new reports, 10 new dimensions, and more AdWords metrics.
Three Brand New Reports
Three new reports give you the ability to dig into all aspects of your AdWords campaign performance.
Day Parts Report
If you want to know the best day of the week for your ads or the best hours of the day for your campaigns, then can now see your ad performance broken down by day of the week and by hour of the day using the Day Parts report. The Day Parts report can help you find the most profitable times of day for your ads. Then pair it with the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords to automatically adjust your bid to capture the right traffic at the right time.
Destination URLs Report
What are your best landing pages? The Destination URLs report lets you dive into the performance of each of your Destination URLs. You can break out performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Apply a secondary dimension like Keywords and see your top Destination URL/Keyword pairs.
Placements Report
The Placement Performance Report in AdWords shows you the performance of your ads on the Google Content Network. With the Placements Report in Google Analytics, you can get rich post-click performance data about your campaigns and find the best sites to target your ads. Or, either exclude the sites that don’t send you engaged traffic or identify the top performers to create a targeted display campaign.
10 New AdWords Dimensions
Dive deep into your AdWords performance using 10 new AdWords dimensions. For example, try Match Type to see performance between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match. Love the search query report in AdWords? Segment by Matched Search Query to see exact user queries that triggered your ads and post-click performance.
Clicks Tab in Campaigns and Keywords reports
The Clicks tab brings your AdWords performance metrics into Google Analytics. From the Clicks tab you can get an overview of AdWords performance at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Keyword level. Combined with Goals or eCommerce tracking you can see a complete picture of your AdWords performance.
How to Get Started with the New AdWords Reports
To start using the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics you need a linked AdWords account. You also need to make sure that Destination URL auto-tagging is turned on. Start from your AdWords account, select the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. To access the reports from Google Analytics, select Traffic Sources, then AdWords.
You can see the new reports in action in this video:
Google has announced the AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE. This tool helps you to optimize your AdWords account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. As part of our ongoing effort to improve the AdWords experience, Google is this new tool and inviting advertisers to participate in the beta programme.
AdWords Campaign Experiments is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.
Today, the most common way to measure the impact of these types of changes is to do a simple before-and-after analysis. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during or between the before and after, including holidays, weekends or changes to end user behavior or advertiser behavior.
Different ways of using ACE
Use ACE to experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad group or placement changes. You can test and measure a variety of scenarios including:
The incremental impact of adding new keywords to your campaign or changing keyword and ad group-level bids
The value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
The change in volume by using different keyword match types
The value of using an ad group default bid versus keyword-level bids
Without relevant, compelling ads, you could be missing out on valuable sales. But you don't need to be a professional copywriter to succeed with AdWords.
Great ad text starts with these three tips:
1. Include keywords in your ads: For each ad group, check that your ad content closely relates to the corresponding keyword lists. You can even try placing keywords in ad titles and descriptions - if part of your ad content matches a user's search phrase, that part of your ad appears in bold! So, get to understand how Dynamic Keyword Insertion works!
2. Improve conversions with a strong call-to-action: Phrases like 'Buy Now', 'Sign Up Today', and 'Order Easily Online' encourage immediate action and inform potential customers of what they can expect from your site.
3. Test your ads: Sometimes it's difficult to know which version of a particular ad will appeal to your target audience. The solution? Run similar ads within an ad group, trying different call-to-action phrases and various titles. Depending on your settings, AdWords can rotate your ads, analyze their click-through rates, and automatically adjust to show the highest-performing ad more frequently.
Google has announced that it is to stop using Microsoft Windows internally in the company operating system, amid security concerns related to the attack on its network late last year.
Microsoft has never been a friendly face inside the Googleplex, but Google's engineering-driven culture and need to test its software on a variety of systems usually meant that at least some portion of its employees preferred the Windows environment. Some Google employees will still be able to use Windows machines, but they will have to get special permission, according to the report.The Financial Times reported late Monday that Google has begun telling new employees that they are no longer able to request Windows PCs, giving them the choice of Mac or Linux systems. Google has long offered its employees their choice of work operating system but will no longer do so, The Financial Times said, after an attack on Windows and Internet Explorer 6 resulted in the theft of Google intellectual property, believed to be source code, late last year.
Later this year Google will begin directing employees toward Chrome OS systems, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CIOs attending a Google seminar on cloud computing in April. Google believes the browser-based operating system will be "inherently more secure" than alternative operating systems, Schmidt said at that event.
“Ian Dodson of WebKitchen is someone I've been working closely with for the past few years. Ian first impressed me, not just with his expert knowledge of his space but with his sound business insights..."
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Companies who don’t even advertise online are now using digital marketing tools to shape their offline marketing campaigns. A client of ours was recently preparing a national radio campaign advertising their new service. They run these radio ads once per quarter and while discussing their possible use of the web we suggested they do some keyword research before writing the script of the radio ad to see exactly what words and phrases their target audience were using to describe their products and services.
Google’s latest innovation for Gmail, called ‘Priority Inbox’, is aimed at those who are overwhelmed by email.
Google recently launched their 
Google has announced that it is to stop using Microsoft Windows internally in the company operating system, amid security concerns related to the attack on its network late last year.
