Search Sense

In 2008 growth kickers go and as of January 1st 2009, Google Best Practice Funding is completely gone and in Spannerworks’ view about time too!

I’ve been having conversations with Dara Nasr (agency manager at Google) over the last few months, about a great many subjects, not least Best Practice Funding (BPF). When Google introduced the scheme as a replacement for straight forward agency commission, they had high hopes for it. They had recently launched the Google AdWords Professional (GAP) training and hoped that by setting minimum criteria of GAP qualified staff, spend levels and growth incentives it would encourage the industry to train, grow the search channel and generally improve their services and use a broad range of Google products.

It has however, been fraught with difficulties including:

* media planner/buyers back loading campaign spend, breaking the spirit of the scheme in order to sneakily obtain the growth incentives,
* search agencies using their best staff to retake the GAP exams on behalf of others in order to remain qualified or simply to brag,
* lazy media planners not really taking search seriously and fully rebating the BPF to clients, simply to hide poor performance,
* small agencies just about competing by using the rebate to maintain profit instead of creating and charging for added value.

Spannerworks welcomes the removal because we have diverse marketing programmes that make use of Social Media, Display, Paid Search, Natural Search, Usability, Web Development and more.

A strategic, value adding, global agency like Spannerworks doesn’t work with major brands like Coca Cola, Abbey, COSMOS, Sears, Travellocity, Hilton and more by being lazy. It’s hard work, joined-up thinking and powerful, integrated campaigns for us with amazing technology and service.

So even though Google has reduced the qualifying spend levels for 2008, which means there’ll be a little more rebate next year and although we have benefited from top tier rebates from Google for years now, we say thanks Google for helping create a level playing field that allows great service to shine.

It is the right thing to do, so Google folk, ride out the undoubted media storm, complaints, accusations of money making - you have our whole-hearted support. Hey, if Google went further and opened up by sharing data, research, search volumes, that’d be a truly level playing field and really quite something!

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

What a month… June has certainly kept the Spannerworks team busy. Our 10th anniversary celebrations started with a fantastic client party on Tuesday night in London. If you were there, thanks for coming and we hope you had fun. You can spot yourself in the snaps taken on the night on our Flickr page.

Spannerworks’ 10 years of experience means the team is in demand. June seems to be the month of choice for marketing events and the speaking invitations have been flying in…

Antony Mayfield, our head of content and media, nears the end of his summer roadshow with presentations at the Revolution Forum, NMK Forum, PR Week Summer Forum and yesterday’s Econsultancy What’s New in Online Marketing conference. You can also catch Antony at the upcoming IAB Engage for Branding conference on 26th July 2007.

Paul Doleman, our Head of Paid Search and CTO, has been sharing his knowledge at webinars and online marketing events for the finance world. Joined by our Head of Natural Search, Nilhan Jayasinghe, together they are teaching eager audiences how paid and natural search campaigns can and should work together. 

You also may have seen us at this week’s NMA Online Marketing Show. We exhibited and our Head of Business Development, David St John Tradewell, gave a seminar on universal search. Our stand was very busy and we look forward to catching up with everyone we met. 

On top of all of this, we are really excited to launch our Social Spaces programme this week. 

Phew. We’re all off for very quick nap before we leap in to the next ten years…see you there!

When most of us hear about digital and the music industry it is usually connected with downloads, declining CD sales or itunes. The recent news that all album tracks are now eligible for the singles chart caused a bit of fuss for the Arctic Monkeys last week, and is the latest in a long line of press around the subject.

However, we think there is another side to digital marketing that labels should be paying attention to.

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One of the first things I did when I arrived at the office this morning was search for Pizza!

Not because I’m on a high carb diet or I perversely eat an American Hot for breakfast, but because I was testing Google’s Voice Local Search and wow it worked first time and gave me results in under 2 seconds!

It worked from a busy, noisy street on my mobile when I asked Google to text the results to my mobile.

It also worked from my office when I wanted the results read aloud and also to be connected to the business identified.

So that’s it then - goodbye Yellow Pages, get a shave 118118 guys.

Is it now time for mobile operators to tear down the WAP decks, demolish the  walled gardens and just let Google and others serve search results anywhere we want them.

I’d love to hear what you think.

I believe it was time to do this a year ago and the actions of mobile operators have inhibted growth. Surely they can figure out some other way of monetising the sure to explode mobile traffic, rather than the archaic data pricing that currently exists.

Cheap broadband turbocharged mainstream search.

Voice activated mobile/local search without constraint if coupled with data tariff changes would send mobile search into orbit.

Earlier this year Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting an advertising platform which connects advertisers direct to radio stations. Accordign to Google, they’ve been working on the integration of dMark into AdWords, which is now complete. They’ve started the beta test with a select group of US advertisers, and expect to rollout soon.

Through an online interface, advertisers will have the opportunity to target specific audiences by location, station type (taste) and by day and time.

 They’ll also have access to comprehensive reporting which will be a first for radio.

The August survey conducted by MarketingSherpa reveals a lack of concern for click fraud from nearly 4000 marketers and recommends three actions - read more here.

The survey posed the question “why aren’t more marketers are concerned about fraud”:

I’d propose it is down to four key things:

• Ignorance - folk aren’t aware of the size or even the very existence of the problem.
• Trust - trust in media owners (Google, YAhoo, MSN) ability to take action overrides concerns.
• Good staff - they have appointed a good agency or have staff tackling the issue head on.
• Powerlessness - the feelings of inability to do anything or the issue’s complexity act as a barrier to action.

Only 9% of marketers were worried it would get worse and 20% said it was a non issue - oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I can boldly state if you are playing in financial services or bidding on terms with a value of £3.00 per click or higher then you most definitely have been a victim of click fraud. The high prices and competitive markets act as a honey pot.

The primary search engines (Google, ASK, MSN and Yahoo) do try to eliminate invalid clicks and have very sophisticated technology and teams to do this. The but is and it is a very BIG BUT, is that search engines do not have access to conversion patterns of your customers from a variety of channels or access to large quantities of post click data.

So whilst the search engines are excellent at trapping most robot activity and dodgy affiliates pre click and automatically refund your marketing spend in most cases, beyond the click it becomes trickier. However, it need not be a “fact of life” as the respondees to MarketingSherpa’s Click Fraud survey seem to believe. Nor do the “Second-Tier” search engines (AOL, Miva, Mirago, WebFinder, etc) need to be a no go area, they just need more skill to manage.

MarketingSherpa recommended three actions:

• track conversions by source
• review contracts for protection
• invest in fraud prevention services or software.

I’d agree with them all, but throw in some more detail and one or two actions of my own.

Tracking: If you don’t monitior it you can’t catch the fraudsters. Good tracking technology and services are the CCTV of the internet. We at Spannerworks use three different types of fraud detection/prevention software and have data analysts ready to assess the information obtained. Our clients get real money benefits from this and we are thinking of launching the service for a wider audience.

All you web server log files will contain IP information - if funds don’t exist to buy tracking software then perhaps your friendly neighbourhood IT guy can help extract this information for you to identify unusual traffic sources.

Contracts: Don’t just examine contracts with search engines to see if you’re covered for fraud, but consider using a third party which is incentivised to bring you customers and not just clicks. Look for shared risk models or deals based upon cost per action. Pay differenetial pricing for clicks based upon the quality of the traffic (especially important with second tier engines and if using content networks).

Invest in services: Sounds good to me, especially if it’s a Spannerworks PPC service with fraud prevention, but hey I would say that. Seriously though, getting access to data from a wider network, so you can spot unusual activity when compared to an industry trend is sound advice. Even just talking to your trade body may help.

Spannerworks are very active combating fraud through our Aperture technology, the IAB (Internet Advertisers Bureau) and directly with the search engines.

Tails and Timing: Aggregate those low cost, highly targeted terms as a a strategy to reduce the threat of fraud - also makes it easier to spot. Consider week / month parting strategies to cool and heat up campaigns when the click quality changes.

I’ll end by saying fraud is more serious than spam email, because the cost is real money - every click, every month. Like spam email it is also time and hidden costs - a triple whammy.

So don’t sweep fraud under the carpet, take action now and stop your competitors, dubious affiliates or others stealing both your time and money - do contact us if you’re interested in hearing more.

Pistols at dawn? Not quite, but Google threw a hissy fit at SES 2006, San Hose. (more…)