Many retailers neglect to advertise on brand terms. Some overlook this opportunity, and others figure that if they are placed first naturally, there is no reason to pay additional money for clicks on these terms.

In my experience, I’ve found that even if you are the top naturally placed site for your brand terms, it still makes sense to advertise on these terms. Here are a few reasons why:

First- Online shoppers vary in the way that they shop. Some shoppers are just naturally more inclined to click on an ad than on a natural listing, just as some shoppers will only click on natural listings. It makes good sense to make sure that your site is represented in both areas.

Second- The price per click for brand keywords is generally very very low. Your site will always be the most relevant result for your brand term, so Google will usually determine your cost per click at just a few cents.

Third- Conversion rate on these terms is significantly higher than other terms. Generally if someone is looking for your site specifically by name, they are ready to buy something from you. These are very qualified buyers. Overall, in the month of January, my top five clients had an average conversion rate of 6.75% on their brand name campaigns.

In addition to the three main reasons that we’ve already discussed, there are other benefits to bidding on your brand terms. When you bid on your brand terms, you will, more often than not, be placed in the number one position for pay per click ads. In this spot, your ad can utilize sitelinks, and send already well qualified traffic to exactly the page they are looking for.

Also, often times your competitors will be advertising on your brand terms as well. It’s good to make sure that your official site is represented among the competitors.

Finally, often times shoppers are reassured when they see your site represented in both the paid and natural search areas. Being represented in both areas creates a perception of reliability and credibility for your site.

When you set up your branded campaign, set it up as a campaign separate from other keyword targeted campaigns. This way you’ll be able to get an accurate picture of what you should budget for this campaign, and also the exact return that it is producing for you.

When you create your keyword list, select your site name, and then all the different combinations of words that someone might use to find your site, as shown in the table above. It is also good to create ad groups for popular areas of your site with your brand term and those site areas as qualifiers. For example, in the above table the site is a Gardening Products site, and one keyword suggested is “MySiteName Flowers”- that keyword and others like it can go directly to a flower related page. This helps your qualified shoppers get to exactly the page they need to in order to convert.

Google has always placed an emphasis on transparent advertising practices, their search results are only as relevant as the ads on the page. This keeps the quality of their search results high, leading to users to find value and return to search again and again. Deception is not tolerated and heavily penalized in any capacity. For instance, an ad that tries to fool the user on what website they are clicking to is not able to run on Google’s network.

By having to include sub domains in the display URL Google is making another move towards transparency in their advertising and allowing users to be well aware of where they are clicking. This is also consistent with Google’s recent step up of tactics to combat advanced affiliate networking which the search engines find as barriers between users and content. By having to display the sub domains it will be harder to hide landing pages on large domains.

Utilizing sub domains on hosted sites may have some advantages to advertisers, but Display URLs are set to a limit of 35 characters. If you remove the top level domain (“.com”, “.net”, etc.) you now have 31 characters left to list the sub domain, domain, and any other text to bring relevance to the page. Every character in an ad counts and now having to list sub domains will limit opportunities to capture search traffic.

Google has valid reasons for updating their policy. The move strengthens the value of the search results and combats those who try to interrupt the path searchers follow to the content they are looking for. Any drawbacks to optimizing the display URL are greatly outweighed by the accuracy and transparency it provides.

A greater impact will be felt if the policy is expanded to all landing pages that include sub domains, going beyond hosted domains to also regulate private domains.

Google’s Announcement Here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/01/policy-adjustment-for-display-urls.html

Click-to-Call Ads will dramatically change the way that mobile search will be utilized. The last two years have promised that they would be the year that mobile search would “breakout”. Unfortunately not much was done to enhance the experience and paid search never made a big splash. This newest addition to AdWords may make the difference. Now when someone performs a search on their mobile device, ads will show the phone number for that local businesses associated with their search. This will be a huge advantage if you are a local business as the person simply can click the number on the ad to call your business directly.

The Lead Form Extension is ideal for, you guessed it, lead generation campaigns! Much like the Product Extension option within AdWords, this new Beta extension presents a drop down at the bottom of the ad. The drop down will display a simple lead form to fill out while keeping the user on the search results page. There will be the ability to choose field options for the form for the business’s particular needs. The trick with this new feature is that it requires you to be in the number one ad position for targeted keywords.  Will paying top dollar for the number one position be worth it? Time will tell if people are responsive to the lead form but my opinion is that this is will be successful on a case by case basis. With everything in search it really comes down to examining your industry and weighing the pros and cons while keeping your budget in mind.

These are just two new features for Google AdWords in this extremely young new year. One thing is for sure. Google is not resting on their laurels of being number one. The Yahoo! and Bing merger should mean more and more advanced features from all engines in order to keep advertisers invested in their products.

Bing

The biggest news of 2009 has to be Microsoft’s long awaited and highly touted release of Bing. Not only did it gain immediate attention, it also showed tremendous sticking power and can even be said to drive the rapid pace of search engine development (or “Decision Engine” as MSN refers to it) throughout the year. Despite its clear position on top of the search market, Google felt challenges coming from Bing – both with its relentless appeal after a much celebrated launch, as well as with the merger between Microsoft and Yahoo to form a viable alternative to Google’s supremacy. This sparked a series of developments to Google’s SERPs & Sponsored Results that can be described as playing catch up.

Google SERPs

Google’s SERPs grew more and more personalized throughout the year, culminating towards the end of the year when they made the switch to 100% personalized search for all users, regardless of being signed in and local privacy settings. Google also added many new perspectives to their SERPs including a slew of filtering options including time filters, as well as real time search results comprised of Twitter posts, RSS feeds, and Facebook Statuses for timely search topics. They also made efforts to incorporate multimedia and other elements beyond website links into the results.

All of these Google SERP changes seemed eerily familiar of another engine, the fore mentioned decision engine Bing. Though Mountain View scoffed at any comparisons, when 2009 came to a close the two engines looked and experience was very similar.

Google Sponsored Results

The Sponsored Results began to take on a shape all their own with the incorporation of different data elements to compliment the standard 4 lines of text. At first addresses and locality was established to provide relevance between the advertiser and searcher. Then, additional links became available for some advertisers when their ads show up in certain positions, allowing businesses to tout different pages that can capture more intention than just what is displayed in the ad. The biggest advancement for Sponsored Results in 2009 was the marrying of product feeds with advertising. For some retailers, Google allows the direct display of solely product information in the Sponsored section. For most advertisers, a collection of relevant products appear as a link below the ad, which can be expanded to show up to 4 different products, including their images and prices. As multimedia expanded in the SERPs, so did they in Sponsored Results. Now searches for upcoming movies and other relevant items will have ads with embedded YouTube videos.

A lot of these features stay just above the fine line of making the ads too gaudy and still deliver a positive user experience. They are positive advancements that do not take away from the advertising and compliment validating paid traffic. That said, there is still a lot of work to be done to measure these different elements and their effectiveness analytically. These hybrid advertisements need the same performance insight that standard ads have, similar to the maturity that came to Content Network reporting, before they can be fully relied upon to drive a store’s marketing campaign.

Google Acquisitions

Google didn’t just spend 2009 looking back at the competition and refining their present search experience. They also spent resources (i.e. cash!) to cement their position as THE online advertising provider as well as looking forward to new markets. In ’09 Google acquired two advertising companies: AdMob and Teracent (lest not we forget the huge market share they gained with DoubleClick in 2007). This allowed for a more robust content network that can be precisely targeted, as well as a good foot hold in Mobile Advertising (with AdMob).

Yahoo & Microsoft Merge

As was already mentioned, Yahoo & MSN chose to merge their search share in an attempt to offer a viable second offering to Google’s advertising network. Though 2009 did not see the execution of the merger, the industry has lauded the move in anticipation of tougher competition between the search companies, with more benefits for advertisers. Though many benefits of the merger will be felt on the management side of PPC, eCommerce sites can expect to see more consistent performance coming from those engines, and a more uniform approach to PPC advertising as a whole. What will wait to be seen is the impact on the quality of search results being offered on the engines, and how that will effect click through rates and other search advertising behavior. In other words, will Bing’s engine improve Yahoo’s performance?

While 2009 saw many changes to the PPC landscape, ECI clients rest assured that they stayed on top of the latest advancements, though did not waist valuable resources with fruitless new gimmicks. Nearly all of our clients are tracking revenue that is generated by PPC traffic and having the campaigns managed for maximum profitability. Their search ads display product feed information, links, and other data (as it became available) to help qualify their paid traffic.

We are all excited to see what 2010 will bring, and ready to leverage our experience to our clients’ benefit. As we look out to the horizon we see more channels opening up and a growing adaptation of devices beyond the computer. We are ready to make sure your Online Store is ready to capitalize on these behaviors as they become viable!