Now, finally, the Internet is poised to save us from irrelevant advertising.
Search advertising offers better response rates and better ways to track
whether ads are reaching the right people. Search advertising is revolution-ary in that it discards blanket advertising in favor of precise targets, con-trolled costs, and meeting a pull medium on its own terms.
All Internet advertising, even the blanket type, contains an advantage over advertising in most other media: It invites the viewer to take action immedi-ately. Clicking an ad takes consumers to the next step in their relationship with the advertiser. At that next step, some type of conversion is possible — a sale, a registration, a bookmarked site, or some other behavior that “cap-tures” the customer in a sense. Besides this dynamic quality of online ads, search advertising makes four distinct and earth-shaking improvements on blanket advertising:
Search advertising is positioned on results pages of search engines, where the customer is looking for the advertiser.Well, perhaps the customer is not literally looking for you,but he or she is looking for something.The searcher is in a pulling mood — in the mood to consume information, products, and services. If the advertiser provides relevancy to that person’s search, the heavenly marketing match is made. And the chance of a response is much greater than when a blanket ad wrenches a viewer out of a passive state.
Search ads are aligned with keywords and appear on results pages for those keywords.So, as long as the advertiser chooses keywords appropriate to the message, and the searcher uses keywords appropri-ate to the search goal, relevancy is guaranteed. Compared to the built-in irrelevancy of blanket advertising, this degree of match-up between advertiser and consumer is groundbreaking.
Search advertisers pay only for responses.The advertiser pays each time a searcher clicks the ad. When that treasured click happens, the advertiser receives a qualified lead — somebody who searched for some combination of keywords and chose to click an advertisement that promised relevancy as good (or better) than nonsponsored search results. Contrast this method with the old-media system in which the advertiser pays for sheer exposure. In the online universe, exposure means paying for impressions— the number of times the ad is displayed, even if nobody clicks it.
Search advertising offers detailed, multifaceted, hands-on control of the advertising campaign.Google is particularly strong in this depart-ment. Advertisers can micromanage their accounts, measuring perfor-mance and enhancing their efficiency on a minute-by-minute basis. I hasten to add that such obsessive management is not necessary in search advertising. But the ability to control the campaign as it proceeds represents one of the great advantages over broadcast and traditional print advertising, in which you purchase a campaign and either it works or it doesn’t. Tweaking, adjusting, and resculpting the campaign in mid-stream to makeit work is part of the search advertising system.
Let me be clear. Google didn’t invent search advertising. Google didn’t even invent pay-per-click (PPC)advertising,which has supplanted pay-per-impression sponsored links on Google’s pages. But Google has refined the game consid-erably, improving the basic parameters of search advertising.
Google is involved in PPC competition with other search engines, and to some extent they leapfrog, one improvement after another. Generally, though, Google has taken the lead in innovation. In particular, the following three fea-tures are highly valued by Google advertisers:
Minimum payments. As I describe later, search advertisers bid on the value of the keywords associated with their ads. Those bids determine the ad’s position on the results page and the top amount the advertiser pays when searchers click the ad. However, Google uses a complex for-mula to determine the lowestamount the advertiser must pay, per click, to maintain position on the page — and that is the amount Google charges. All this is clarified later. The point here is that Google stream-lines expenses by charging the least possible amount for advertisers to compete effectively for position on the page.
Success breeds success.Unlike other PPC systems, Google factors an ad’s success into the cost of keeping that ad in a high position on the page. Position is partly determined by bid amount, but a very successful ad with a low bid on a keyword can place higher than an unsuccessful ad with a higher bid on that keyword. Success is measured by clickthrough rate,or CTR. Here again, relevancy is the name of the game. Google cares so much about providing its searchers with relevancy on the search results page (in results listings andadvertisements) that it rewards rele-vant ads with discount pricing for high placement.
Conversion tracking.Getting a searcher to click your ad is the first step;
making a sale is the next step. The sale can be whatever the advertiser wants from the customer; the desired action could be a simple site regis-tration or signing up for a free newsletter. Whatever you want the cus-tomer to do on your site after clicking through your ad, Google helps track your success, or the conversion rate.
All this and more is bundled into the Google AdWords keyword advertising program. If you’ve used Google, you’ve seen AdWords in action. Figure 6-1 shows a Google search results page with two AdWords ads, matching the key-words cold climate gardening.
Broader searches (on the single keyword gardening,for example) return pages with eight ads in the right column. In some cases, Google places ten ads on the page: two above the search listings and eight in the right column.
Figure 6-2 shows a search on the keyword baskets,with AdWords ads above and to the right of the index listings.
Figure 6-2:
Up to ten ads are displayed on any results page.
Figure 6-1:
AdWords ads are displayed in the right column of search results pages.