PardonMyFrench

comScore Shows Google's Nearly Impregnable Search Fortress

comScore released its August 2009 search numbers and while a lot of people, especially Microsoft fanboys, will be jumping for joy as Microsoft gained core search share by 0.4% to 9.3% and Google dropped by 0.1% to 64.6, I for one don't see the joy.  In fact, comScore's report show's Google's dominance is quite secure and for the moment quite safe.  

You see the numbers that everyone reports is a comScore metric called core searches which is basically searches off of the main search site like Google.com.  However, as any Google fanboy (like me) will tell you, Google is much more than searches off of Google.com.  It includes Gmail. Google Docs, Google Books, News, and of course a little known site called YouTube.  And, that's where things get very interesting.

Look a little lower in the report and you'll see something called Expanded search which lists out all search activity including video and search activity on the non-core sites.  It is this report which shows how dominant Google's search strategy is and why Microsoft has a long, long way to go to catch a giant.

1. Google isn't just 7x larger like the core report shows; all Google properties versus all Microsoft properties is TEN TIMES LARGER THAN MICROSOFT.  Why do you think Google gives you all of those products for free?
2. YouTube while losing some share in August is the second largest search property around.  YouTube is so large that it is 28% larger than Yahoo and twice as large as Bing.  Think about that for a second, if Bing is hugely successful they'd have to knock of Yahoo and YouTube before Google even blinks.
3. You can look at the rest of the sites on the list, but they are so small it really doesn't matter much but they are interesting.  For example, eBay and AOL losing share and Facebook is growing quickly probably driven by their huge growth. 

Yes Bing is an exciting product.  Yes Microsoft is spending $100 million in advertising to boost their search but right now all they have generated is a little buzz and some excitement.  I haven't noticed a blip in the amount of paid search advertising that I've run for clients and I've tried.  I also doubt Google has noticed a blip in their search activity.  In fact, I bet Google is more concerned with expanded search and in that case, Google is STILL growing.  Microsoft isn't even close right now.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Fight The Smears versus The Birthers

(Just a fair warning  - I AM NOT A BIRTHER)

The other day while working on an online advertising campaign for one of our clients I came across the following text ad from FightTheSmears.com.  It's obviously an ad trying to debunk the theories that President Obama is not a US citizen.  However, I found this ad interesting on a number of fronts...

1. It is September 2009 which is almost a full three years before President Obama's reelection.
2. I found another ad in Google's Content Targeting network which suggests either a tactic to massively expand out the campaign and/or garner dirt cheat impressions.  Notice I wrote impressions and not clicks.  Text ads in Google's Content Network woefully under-perform and I always recommend to not waste your time with them.
3. They are also running paid search ads to intercept people looking for this information, but what I find very fascinating is that the Google Search Trends on this topic is slowing down and appears to be limited to a few states in the South and West.
4. The actual text ad I grabbed was an in-text video overlay on top of a YouTube video about a California Small Business Owner ripping into her Congressmen at a Town Hall Meeting on Obama Care.  It takes a little more effort to put this ad inro your AdWords system so clearly this is something they wanted to do.

Is the Obama Administration really that concerned about the birther theories that they will run ads almost 3 years before a massive amount of people will care again?  If you ran the trends back to fall 2008 you'll see that the peak was really October 2008 which of course was right before the election.  However, they are spending time, energy, and money to really blast this message out via Google's Content Network and YouTube.  The in-text video overlay clearly shows that they are ok with a very loose targeting and even though it is really out of context (ObamaCare versus Obama's Birth Certificate) they are getting an impression view of the message.  

Then again there is always the flip side that could be happening.  That's is since the Trends are slowing and it appears that most of the significant traffic is from the South and West, wouldn't they be better off just leaving this alone?  Aren't they potentially fueling the fire by keeping this alive and being defensive?  Heck even risking that the impressions that are being served will leave the reverse message in the viewers mind since the ad isn't really in the right context?

BTW  -  just to drive you readers crazy, is it possible that Obama is ok with the wrong message? Perhaps they think that by keeping it out there that they are making the extreme right side of the Republican base seem a little crazier than normal.  Perhaps by responding in this matter they can keep the issue alive, driving a wedge between potential independent voters who may not want to be associated with birthers?

Unless Obama has data for my last theory, at this point I'd recommend shutting this campaign down.  It really makes them look defensive on an issue that has lost steam.  Then again, I wouldn't be surprised that they have polling data to support my last theory.  At any rate, it is clear that the Obama Administration will be a never ending campaign and unlike past administrations the next election will always be front and center.  That's certainly a change from the past.  

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google Becomes Bing Only on Chrome?

I went on this morning to research a new client for a meeting I have later on this morning.  I typed in the keyword "energy drink" and low and behold the search results in Google are now very Bing like.  I was surprised to see the new left hand margin this morning which now includes the ability to filter based on time (much welcome) and related searches.  See this screen shot:

It didn't take Google very long to launch a competitive view similar to Bing which either means they have great spies at MSN or their engineers work at lightning speed.  On other searches, Google now includes a section called "All Results" which tries to further refine your search results.  The one thing I'm still waiting for from Google is search previews on the natural search results which I've read somewhere they are testing.

Also of interest is that I tried the same search with Internet Explorer and Firefox and I DID NOT see the same type of new search results.  It seems to be only available with Google's browser Chrome and of course I'm not sure if Google is just testing it out now.

So, for you Chrome users enjoy the new search layout.  If you are an AdWords advertiser you should start thinking about how to reorganize your search to make sure you are buying the "related search" terms for your best performing words.  That's what I'm instructing people to start working on today.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Bing versus Google on Local Search Results

My wife just walked into my office and asked if had the number to our local Long Valley, NJ PNC bank.  So like the smart mouth I am sometimes I said "You know there's this thing called Google" and then I gave her the phone number.  As she walks out she says "I use Bing!" which was an awesome reply. So out of curiosity I went to Bing and then to Google and typed out the exact same search queery "pnc bank long valley, nj". And do you know what I found, Bing's results were organized better.  See these screen shots:

Now we'll look at Bing. Right up at the top is the Long Valley branch phone number.  Now it is hard to find it on their local map, but I know it is Long Valley because of the NPANXX combination (908876).  Of course at the bottom is the Yellow Pages listing.

Now let's pop over to Google and here's their screen shot.  At the top is the main PNC Bank page with some links but nothing there about branch locations and historically those bank branch locators take too many clicks to get the answer.  #2 result is Yahoo's local listing where the phone number is which is what I originally gave to my wife.  #3 is a job listing and #4 is Google's local listing with a much easier to read map and the phone number.

It is almost like Bing knew I just needed the local branch phone number and not everything else.  Google correctly listed the most relevant search for PNC Bank at the top but put the local listings at the bottom which is not quite the order for a local search.  Anyway, Google is still #1 for me but Bing offers a good product - Yahoo and the rest are not relevant.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Anyone Else Confused By Yahoo's Latest Search News?

I saw this article today in Reuters titled Yahoo to Compete with Bing Despite Microsoft Deal and I'm pretty much confused.  It was only a short time ago that Yahoo made a deal with Microsoft which caused Yahoo's Carol Bartz to declare "we have never been a search company."  Now the company that was supposedly never a search company will be doing the following:

• Will collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end
• Microsoft will license Yahoo's search technology, allowing it to integrate certain aspects of it into Bing. Microsoft's advertising search product, AdCenter, will also replace Yahoo's equivalent product, Panama.
• Microsoft sends ads along with its answers to queries, Yahoo may or may not use all of them, depending on a complex formula.

OK so I guess the company not doing search will license the "smarts" behind the search and the ad buying platform, but then Yahoo will decide which ads are more relevant to the actual search?  Confused? Me too, but it does remind me of AOL and Ask.com arrangement with Google.

You can go direct to Ask.com and buy from them or you can rely on Google to show your ads in Ask.com's results.  This gives Ask the ability to slot direct advertisers first, but to me this arrangement seems suboptimal for Yahoo.

Sure they can slot other people and use their sales team to sell cross product deals which keeps them in the game, but the only way I see Yahoo's ability to scale across the long tail of advertisers is to "subcontract out" all of the other search advertisers to Bing.

I get that, but why all the hoopla around the Bing deal?  Why announce you were never a search company?  Why say you are now in the game when giving up the technology aspect of search and the long tail of advertisers to Bing?  Seems like the Yahoo ship is rudderless to me.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Grading Paid Search Marketing in NJ Governor's Race - A C-, Inc, and a B+

Taking a look at online advertising between NJ Governor Jon Corzine and Republican challenger Chris Christie illustrates who kind of has been told what to do and one that could care less at least in July.  First, Jon Corzine.

Corzine in my opinion gets a C-

Granted I'm as guilty as a lot of folks who were trying to track exactly what I was doing for McCain's advertising in 2008, but like everyone else then, I don't care too much.  Corzine grades out to a C- and it would have been lower except his challenger Chris Christie gets an incomplete.  As I've pointed out in earlier posts, clearly the Cozine campaign has either been briefed or given an internet marketing playbook, but they are slowly finding out that they will be the text book case of what happens when you try to market like Obama but lack his charisma and loyal following. 

The Corzine campaign is running paid search ads but they seem to hit their max budget quite early in the day.  They seem to only have a few variations running on a few obvious set of keywords and every click goes to their home page.  The keywords don't seem to expand into NJ issues like property taxes, economy, unemployment, environment, schools, etc.  This is very basic search marketing advertising and they look like they have a summer intern running their campaign right now. 

They do seem to be running some truly tasteless banner ads through Google's content network which of course take some liberties in how they promote how much good Corzine has done for this state. 

Here are some sample text ads promoting Obama's visit to Rutgers; not only did this give the summer intern a chance to vary the ads, it once again highlights the only way Corzine can win which is the over promote ties to Obama.

Chris Christie gets an Incomplete

I've yet to see any advertising or search advertising online.  Perhaps after labor day they will explode on the scene, but I have low hopes.  The campaign knows how well McCain's online advertising did (don't forget we won the Primary after being left for dead and faced with a much more well funded campaign) so to ignore it seems terribly Political Advertising 1.0.   I would have given the campaign a F but perhaps they are relying on other groups to pick up the slack for them like....

RGA and Other Independent Groups Get a B+

I've been really surprised with the work of the Republican Governor's Association and other independent groups who have been constantly advertising in the state.  They buy paid search ads on a variety of subjects and also run a lot of display ads that set the record straight on Corzine's failed tax and spend policies in NJ.  One of my favorite's has this line - Jon Cozine Watch What He Does not What he Says.  These groups get a B+ for the efforts in the state.

That's it in the middle of July.  A C-, and incomplete, and a B+.  Not a stellar showing for a post-2008 race and a state where it is very expensive to run TV.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Microsoft's Search Target with Bing is Yahoo Not Google

I saw a bunch of links over the weekend that was touting some small minute gain of Microsoft in the US Search market due to Bing.  Most of these posts promote the $100 million in advertising Microsoft is spending and the rave reviews Bing receives for usability as a reason for Google to worry.  I think these articles are just ways for people to take a shot at Google or folks that really want to cheer for an underdog.  BTW - here's a good synopsis of the recent search postings courtesy of MediaPost.

I've worked with Microsoft for about 10 years.  I also spent a while at AT&T so I know how big monopolist companies think.  Sure would Microsoft like to knock down Google?  Of course.  Do I think that's their short term target?  No.  It is Yahoo.  Here's why...

1. Microsoft tried buying Yahoo and was turned away.  That was the classic telcom move from the 90s.  Don't spend the money buying share, spend the money buying the competitor right above you.  When Yahoo turned them down, now we see what MSN's plan B was.
2. Google has way too many intertwined products that all types of users benefit from.  Google has free tools for publishers, advertisers, and consumers.  Some like Google Docs and Google Reader cut across multiple user types.  Basically thinking about wars fought without computers, Google is an entrenched opponent dug in on a giant mountain - it would require too many battle fronts to take them on.  However,
3. Yahoo has little defenses.  Seriously, how many Yahoo products do you use?  Sure they still have a dominant web presence, but they don't work together that well.  You use Flickr?  Is it integrated with their products?  Do you advertise with Yahoo?  Is their display advertising inseparable from their search?  Do they have intertwined products that all types of users want or use?  Yahoo with its new CEO is a company in disarray right now and their search share is clearly within MSN's reach.
4. Microsoft needs Google to protect them.  Huh?  Yes protect them from the Federal Government.  Let Google be the dominant force in search and let them take any potential heat.  MSN would rather play the David to the Google Goliath and stay out of the Federal Government's anti-trust cross hairs.

Yahoo is the search company in deep trouble because of Bing.  Yahoo once lost their lead in search to an upstart named Google because of internal struggles and an unwillingness to invest in their search platform.  I'm afraid it will happen again.  Microsoft clearly has Yahoo in their sight and Bing was the plan B when buying Yahoo fell apart.  Steve Ballmer will get his revenge on Yahoo.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google The Great Money Equalizer

I just finished a fun interview with Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy Forum and I used one of my favorite lines which is Google Is The Great Money Equalizer.  I also touch on this subject in my keynote next week in London for Econsultancy's Future of Digital Marketing conference.

Basically the idea behind this is that Google puts so many tools at your disposal there is no reason a smaller marketer can't take on and compete with a big marketer.  I perfected this while at Harrisdirect when we competed with the big players like Schwab and Fidelity and one could argue that we did quite well with Senator McCain's Primary and General Election campaigns.  Anyway, here's why Google is the great money equalizer:

1. Keywords - everyone's keywords are different and depending on your strategy you may or may not choose certain words to bid on or you might even focus just on long tail words.
2. Quality Score - Google rewards your smart, relevant campaigns with good Quality Score so even though you might not have as much money as your competitor  you can out Google them.
3. Free Conversion Tracking - using Google's own tools you'll know how effective your marketing is and once again if you are setting and meeting your own conversion goals, you can be smarter on how you use your marketing dollars.
4. Click to Play Video Ads - have a commercial you are running or perhaps that's too expensive?  You can add click to play video ads on Google's content network where you can have your ad watched for free and only pay per click when they go to your website.
5. Geo-targeting - zipcodes, states, MSA, major cities, or even hand drawn targeted areas, you can dominate a target market for no additional costs.
6. Behavior Targeting - even though Google is not as major of a supplier of Behavioral Targeting as say - Yahoo or Ad Networks, you can use age, income, gender, demos to reach a specific audience.  Throw in content targeting off your keywords and you can finely target for no additional money.
7. Placement Targeting - Again for no additional fees you can hand select sites where your ads appear and then get good placements based on an ongoing auction process.  Are you just looking forward to buying crap impressions on MySpace?  Have no fear you can usually get on that "site" for about 10 cents per 1000.
8. Self Directed - You can turn your campaign off and on or even increase it all with the click of your mouse.  No more calling into an account exec who won't honor a 24 hour cancellation clause.
9. Google Surge - Dominate your competition in a short, contained burst across 80% of the internet.

That's why Google is the great equalizer.  Where else can you get service like that for no increased rates and no commitments?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Dear Google - I Still Have Two AdWords Pet Peeves

About two weeks ago we were involved in some primary races in PA which of course meant a heavy dose of using Google for marketing.  In fact, ALL down ballot races should run Google for marketing.  Anyway, we were supposed to map our Google ad buy to targeted areas in the state.  One of our selling points is that with Google you can target down to a zip code level so we could do an even better job of mapping the targeting strategy than the TV buy.  The sales pitch went this way...

• DM - of course you can target to individuals, but counties and zip codes are also used
• TV - you are usually buying at the MSA level
• Print - county for local levels and MSA for statewide races
• Search - anything right?

Well it wasn't as easy as you'd think.  Sure if the client gave me zip codes I could have loaded them up, but they didn't have them.  What they did have was County targets, but Google doesn't allow for county targeting.  You of course can hand draw for Congressional DIstrict targeting, but try doing that for more than one district. 

It took me about 8 hours to map the buy using the major cities in each county that they wanted to target.  It was a major pain in the seat, but I told the client we could do better targeting than TV.  Sure it was better targeting but without County targeting it took forever which is very un-Google like. 

I don't understand why Google doesn't supply County targeting?  For that matter, I don't understand why Google doesn't supply some population estimate when listing cities.  It would seem so matter of fact to include counties if Google is trying to grab a piece of the local marketing mix.

And, while I'm on my rant, I can't wait for Google to ad click to play video ads into the desktop AdWords Editor.  Once I set the targeting up for this buy, it would have been nice to copy and paste the ads into different ad groups. However, we had to manually load each click to play video ad, ad group by ad group.

Anyway, still a huge fan of Google of course.  AdWords is the best marketing tool available today and even the small marketer can act like a big advertiser with little to no money.  I just wish they'd make a few more targeting tweaks to really go after local targets.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How To Run a Google Surge aka a Google Network Blast

My favorite ClickZ reporter and Jersey City native Kate Kaye has been on a roll lately when it comes to writing about a seldom used, yet increasing in popularity tactic offered via Google called a Google Surge or a Google Blast.  First she wrote an article about the New York Congressional Race in which the Democrats used a Google Surge, then she followed up with a profile of the Yes on Proposition 8 race, and a blog post naming me (yes yours truly) as the inventor of the phrase Google Surge.

As you can see in the comments I left, yes I did started calling it a Google Surge but it had nothing to do with McCain's strategy of supporting the Iraq Troop Surge; it was simply a surge in spending and the first time I employed it, it was during Bobby Jindal's campaign for LA Governor which he won.

Since Jindal's campaign I've used it several times including the RNC during the 2008 Presidential Race, McCain's campaign during both the Primary Season as well as the General Election season, and in my own race to gain a seat on my town's Board of Education (just ask some of my neighbors who couldn't log on to their PC without seeing one of my campaign ads).  Since the cat's out of the bag (thanks Kate), here's some more details on how and why you'd use a Google Surge.

  THE INS AND OUTS OF RUNNING A GOOGLE SURGE

1. I didn't invent this process at all and never claimed to have invented it.  All I did was listen to my Google Sales Rep years ago that told me I could have my ads run across Google's search and ad sense networks.
2. A Google Surge can work because Google's network reaches about 81% of the internet according to comScore's February traffic rankings.  Google ranks fourth behind Platform A (AOL and ad.com), Yahoo, and ValuClick. 
3. However, Google makes it very easy and transparent to buy across their ad network as opposed to the other three ahead of them.  You can turn it off and on, switch your creatives out on the fly, use their conversion tracking, and adjust your cost bids by site or overall.
4. The only real catch with Google is that you are buying this Google Surge on a CPM basis not on your typical CPC purchase tactic.
5. The amount of money you are spending on a Google Surge is not for the timid advertiser, but you can of course geo-target and time of day target it.
6. Google supplies you with the site list and you can adjust it.  That makes any Google Surge a proprietary strategy unless of course you don't change the site list.  I ALWAYS DO. 
7.  The site CPMs also need to be adjusted, but don't forget you are dealing with 1000s of individual sites so it really takes dedication and knowledge to make the changes.
8. You need to make sure running a Google Surge aligns with your campaign's goals.

Anyway, I have other tricks of the trade for running a Google Surge, but the most important thing for you to remember is to work with your Google account team when setting something like this up.  As my version of the name implies, this will definitely cause a surge in your daily spending.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Our Search Work for John McCain Wins Best Tech Award at AAPC

This year's AAPC (American Association of Political Consultants) conference was an extraordinary event.  Connell Donatelli and Campaign Solutions (basically Becki Donatelli's political companies) won a ton of Pollie Awards for our political and public affair marketing work.  I'm pretty sure nobody has come close to winning abound the 40 awards we got this year.  The one I'm most proud of is the award we won for best use of new technology for the search marketing work we did for Senator McCain.

You long time readers know my involvement in the campaign in the search marketing work, but in my zeal to promote the work I often didn't think I gave enough credit to some of my team members.  It really was remarkable work that a small group of us did all of Senator McCain's work in addition to the RNC's.  We spent millions of dollars for both McCain and the RNC and that was just in the last 10 weeks of the campaign - you folks out there in corporate America would be jealous of the marketing.  Some of my favorite memories.....

• Meeting with Rick Davis as part of the Straight Talk America PAC and listening to early Presidential conversations and political tactics; none of those meetings would have occurred if it wasn't for Becki Donatelli.  I also wouldn't have had the drive or the experience if Becki didn't share her knowledge with me.
• Ryan Waite and Jason Johnson were the creative geniuses behind some of our best banner ads and creatives that we ran.  Most specifically, the hippie Hillary ad that superimposed Hillary's head on a hippie body.  That ad as I remember had click rates north of 2%.  The other famous ad we ran was One Man Video which was a flash ad with 5 seconds of Senator McCain leaving as a POW; the great thing about that ad was that it included video inside standard flash size limits.
• Jackie Huelbig whom I've known for many years was our ace reporting genius who probably had the toughest job around - she had to put up with relentless requests from me and Becki when we had to know yesterday what the results of our search campaign were and how much money we brought in the hour before.  Jackie was also the one that helped me clean up a lot of the ads and loaded up the hundreds of video and display ads into Google AdSense.
• And finally, of course the campaign that pretty much gave me free reign to do what we needed to do; I can only remember one ad that was rejected and that's because I thought it was controversial enough during the Michigan Primary that I wanted a check.

This video that Ryan produced for our AAPC award is a great summary of the importance of our search campaign.  It features Peter Greenberger from Google,  Rick Davis McCain's Campaign Manager.  Friend and former RNC eCampaign director Cyrus Krohn.  Give it a watch - it shows how a well run search marketing campaign can handle rapid response, email and donation generating tactics, all while bringing much needed branding and traffic to issue pages. It really was an awesome experience.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Why Is Yahoo Advertising Its Search?

A couple of days ago I started seeing Yahoo search banners on the internet and while that did cause me to think for a second, why?  I thought, well at least they are using banner ads.  I've seen banner ads for their search platform as well as targeted to media buyers.  Again a little odd, but they should reap what they sow, right?  Then on the way home from my office building in Union NJ I heard a radio ad for Yahoo Search and that caught my ear.  Not because the ad was so creative, but the fact they were using offline marketing for search traffic.

Of course everyone remembers Ask Jeeves, but that was a lifetime ago. Why spend offline radio dollars?  I'm guessing a TV campaign can't be far behind.  TV and Radio are good vehicles for branding, but I'd think that my brothers and sisters at Yahoo would argue that banner ads can do just as an effective job (I still believe TV is kind for branding and imagery).  Theoretically, there would be only 2 real reasons to use offline marketing to drive search activity

1. Educate new search people to increase share
2. Reach out to active internet searchers to rebrand their product to get share

#1 is hard to do because Google is so dominant that you could make the valid argument that Yahoo should let Google educate the new folks and then they "graduate" to Yahoo's "better" product (quotes because I'm not saying they are better, just what a marketer would say).  The other one is just to generate pure searches.  Then I started thinking, well how much could they spend to get more search traffic. 

So I looked at their past few quarters of search revenue and then used comScore to get quarterly search volume and search share.  As you can see from the chart I pulled together, Yahoo generates 5.85 cents for every search in Q3'08 and this was up from 5.82 cents  in Q2'08.  So for you Every Day Math whizzes, 1 million searches would generated $58,500 in revenue for Yahoo.  Guessing some more, let's assume that in order to get a campaign like this approved, you need to have a return on advertising investment of 110%, so that means for 1 million searches they'd have to spend no more than $53,000.

Yahoo isn't running an advertising campaign for $53,000.  So, for giggles let's guess they are spending $2 million in advertising this month.  OK, too low?  Let's go HUGE and say $10 million.  $10 million spend at no worst than a 110% ROI means $11 million in search revenue or 188 million searches; worst case scenario.  Think the ROI is too low, let's go crazy and say 300%.  $10 million spend gets you $30 million in revenue.  $30 million gets you 513 million searches.  Now you are talking serious search traffic growth which maybe moves their share of searches temporarily up by say 1.5%.

Hmmm, that seems like an odd bet to me.  Of course I don't have any real numbers, I don't know their ROI on advertising for search.  I also didn't factor in search churn or cross selling numbers to other Yahoo products or banner sales.  So my numbers are just guesses, but I go back to my original question which is Why Spend Offline Advertising Dollars Promoting Your Search Product?  Seems desperate to me and a waste..but what do I know.  I only worked on a Presidential Campaign that frequently had to do extraordinary things with little marketing dollars...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Confessions from a Google Junkie on Google AdSense's Political Advertising Policy

I got a real chuckle out of this post that Google had to make on their Inside AdSense blog called Political Ads on AdSense Sites.  A chuckle because Google waited until November 7th to make that post which revealed nothing new.  They could have made it years AGO but waited until their revenue dropped down to almost nothing before they made this post.  Basically Google reiterated their policy and reminded blog owners that there are competitive filters in their AdSense for Publisher tool system.  That's why you NEVER saw Obama ads on my site. 

You can read more details on my experiences with Google AdSense in the posts called Go Run Google's Content Placement Report Now, How Reliable is Google's Content Network, and Yet Another Reason to Love Google. However, let me shed some light on the subject for you in my....

CONFESSIONS FROM A GOOGLE AD SENSE JUNKIE:

1. Obama as well as Romney ran a ton of money through AdSense.  The McCain campaign (which I ran the online advertising for as part of CDI) used it a lot as did the RNC (me too) but we focused more on search advertising.
2. Running ads on Google AdSense is a great way to stretch your ad dollars and offers demographic as well as content targeting that allows the small advertiser to act like a large advertiser.  Also, because it can be credit card based and self-servicing you can move the dollars around at lightning speed.  Hence the reason why political advertisers used it.
3. While Google offers up some major sites in their network like WSJ and CNN the vast majority of the impressions come from blogs and secondary sites.
4. I very rarely recommend using text ads in AdSense programs and instead focus on flash and video ads.  I NEVER run text ads when I'm buying on a CPM basis.
5. Google does a great job filtering the content on their partner sites but does a HORRIBLE job understanding the tone.  So that means while you have a site that bashes Republicans Google doesn't know that and might have run RNC, Romney, or John McCain ads.
6. #5 also includes sites that had a URL like www.IHateRepublicans.com
7. I used Google Alerts via a RSS feed to see when people complained about the ads.  Depending on how pressed for time I was I commented to let people know how to filter the ads or I removed them from our Google program.  By the end of the campaign we had thousands upon thousands of site exclusions.
8. We also ran reports in Google to see where the ads actually ran and then we subtracted sites out.  This was particularly important during the primary season when every few hours a new Ron Paul site showed up.
9. While some people think it makes sense to competitively advertise when a reporter, site, etc makes negative comments, that wasn't a strategy we employed.  In politics it was a major problem if our ads appeared on a site that was bashing us and besides, we didn't have enough money to advertise on negative sites.  I'm sure Obama's team didn't care or had a strategy as witnessed by their ads on Townhall and Drudge.
10. Finally, there was a time when we ran McCain ads that said "Surrender is Not an Option on Iraq" and they ended up on The Daily Kos.  That wasn't something we planned to do.  Kos turned on Google AdSense and we didn't have them excluded because they were new to Google; plus it wasn't like I was reading The Daily Kos to see them go live.  As soon as we found out we turned the ads off.

We did what we could to avoid running ads on sites where they didn't belong.  It wasn't a strategy of ours and while Google could do a better job filtering for political tone, you as a site owner should have used the available tools at your disposable to remove ads you didn't want running.  That would have been far more productive instead of just complaining about them or making a post that says "click those ads."

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

SendTec Aims for Me and Mortally Wounds Itself Instead

SendTec decided last night to fire off a reply to my past posts that corrected their inaccurate observations and questionable use of data to "prove" their points.  I found their reply strange because it fails to address my major points and instead dives into a micro overview of my posts.  Unlike other search marketing agencies and luminaries who have spoken with me (Kevin Lee and Danny Sullivan) especially after I have corrected them, SendTec decides to roll around in the gutter with their response.  So I need to explain this to them once again...

1. I work for an agency Connell Donatelli who has years upon years of experience in the political world.  We've been running Senator McCain's online advertising from the very beginning.
2. What this means is that we have data, results, and experience so when you try to nitpick that we don't know how to use the keyword insertion tool properly you make a grave error.  Did you ever stop to think that we tested this years ago and have data to back up why we do things?  Nope.  You'd rather assume we don't know what we are doing.
3. When you speak about pay per click costs, did you ever stop to think about what our objectives are?  Don't you think it is in poor taste to comment on tactics when you don't understand the client's objectives?  Would you ever just make gross assumptions when it comes to how a client does things without understanding the client's goals?
4. Why do you think it is fair to comment on another agency's work?  Didn't you break an unsaid rule in the agency world by publicly commenting on another agency's work?  Would you publish something like that for DidIt's largest client?  I am defending my agency's work.
5. Have you ever worked in the political world and for that matter a Presidential Campaign?  You don't have any experience so when you make comments like "I think they should do this" or "now is the time" what do you base your observations on?
6. Your use of state data to prove your point is still horribly wrong and then instead of backing off you try to defend it.  If you knew anything in politics you'd realize that your choice of states to prove your point was off base.  I'd suggest a course in political science or two for you.
7. You aren't furthering the industry.  Unlike HitWise and other information sharing organizations you are a SEM agency.  You are doing this for self-promotion and to try and get a larger share of the budget.  If you were actually trying to "further" the industry you actually would have tried to interact with me when I've pointed out your inaccurate statements and gross assumptions without firing off a personal attack.
8. You make assumptions as to our role in the campaign and how we get our budget.  If you'd have ever spent any time searching (you know "the Google") you would have found articles and posts going back to the primary season which demonstrated what our role has been and how we get our funding.  Instead of doing that, you again made inaccurate assumptions.
9. In all of my posts defending my agency against your attacks I never once accused you of supporting one candidate over another.  You used my lack of referencing you in the WSJ article as proof which again you couldn't have been more wrong.  I didn't mention you because you added nothing (positive or negative) to the article and probably played the role of 3rd party in the article after other folks that the reporter called wasn't available.  You protest too much, so I'm beginning to think that you do have some political motivation.
10. I've made the posts on my blog and on Twitter to give people who truly want to learn and observe an opportunity to see what has been actually going on.  The information is there on my site for you to actually see what's been happening but you refused to view it or acknowledge it.  If you were really interested in pushing the "industry" forward as you claim, then why have you ignored the obvious information?  Instead you post false assumptions and make wild guesses and when I go to defend I'm personally attacked.

It is time for SendTec to move on and focus on whatever your core competencies are.  Clearly it is not trying to attack someone that has been quite open and vocal about sharing information about political search advertising.  BTW - did you catch The Washington Post article on political search called in Targeting Online Ads, Campaigns Ask: Who's Searching for What?   Curious as to why they didn't include SendTec.  SendTec should just stop "reporting" on the political search campaigns.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Watching Joe The Plumber on Google Trends

So I of course heard about Joe The Plumber a lot earlier in the day, but I wasn't sure if it was something that would be needed or wanted in our search campaign.  However, as soon as Senator McCain mentioned it during the October 15 debate with Senator Obama, we knew it would be hot.  Well as I write this post it is the 3rd hottest search term on Google and coincidentally it is behind two other debate topics "congressman lewis" and "repudiate". 

Anyway so within minutes after becoming a debate topic we put it into the search campaign sending it into our Rhetoric versus Record landing pages.  We were the only one there for about 90 minutes and then the advertisers started.  Now you have the RNC (!) and a host of others (see below) but I can't find an Obama ad and I checked in multiple states (correction - I saw an Obama ad about 1AM but that was just as I was going to bed and when I checked at 9AM their ads were gone).

Above is the first Joe The Plumber Google ad and then a screen shot of the other advertisers that quickly jumped on board including a travel company, Superpages.com, and Plumber directories.  The advertising competition around Joe The Plumber keywords is now very very fierce but I wonder if some of these advertisers have th budget to hang in there.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S.  Regarding the Barack Obama text ads when they are live (the ads curiously shut off multiple times per day which is odd considering they have a ton of money) mention "Joe The Plumber's Tax Cut Calculator" and take the clicks to a tax cut calculator landing page.  I find this extremely strange because Joe's point was that if he did upgrade his business he'd be in a different tax bracket and then would get hit with Obama's tax increase.  Sending clicks to this page seems like a bait and switch.  Here's the video...

 

MediaPost and SendTec Should Just Stop Reporting

This morning while I'm on my way to DC for meetings I got an alert in my email that the "non-search marketing geniuses" at SendTec once again put out curious data on search marketing on the Presidential campaigns.  Oh, and of course MediaPost had to report on it in their Red, White & Blog blog which was unfortunately launched 1 year too late.  Anyway, here's the data (I wouldn't call it information because that implies some analysis of the data) that is perplexing...

• A total of 150 keywords were searched in 14 states (equaling 2,100 total keyword possibilities)

• Obama’s search team bid on a total of 268 bids (12.7% of the total)

• McCain’s search team bid on a total of 208 bids (9.9%)

• The top 10 Swing States (OH, NM, PA, FL, NV, MO, MI, NH, VA, NC) had 1,500 keyword possibilities.

• Obama’s team bid on a total of 188 bids (12.5% of them).

• McCain’s team bid on a total of 179 bids (11.9%).

• Among four “secured states” (IL, NY, TX, IN; 2 for Obama, 2 for McCain) there were 600 keyword possibilities.

• Obama’s team bid on a total of 73 bids (12.1% of them).

• McCain’s team bid on a total of 28 bids (4.6%).

They also then talked about bidding on the search term "That One" which Senator McCain used in the previous debate. 

As I said on the Search Marketing Expo panel on Tuesday, it is time for all of these so called "search experts" to stop guessing as to what we are bidding on and commenting on why we aren't bidding on certain words. 

For example, while the term "That One" was one of the hottest search terms according to Google it doesn't necessarily mean it had significant traffic that Obama wanted to bid on it.  I'm sure like I did they saw that term and decided not to bid on it for their own reasons.  There have been plenty of terms that I've seen that I've chosen to ignore.  Also, picking 150 keywords out of the air and then doing some calculations on it is a complete waste of time.  Both teams at this point have their own strategies for words they are buying or not buying and randomly selecting them is useless. 

Plus, their calculations above are totally misleading but worse appear to be sound.  Here's why.  The amount of search traffic varies by state and just multiplying the random 150 words by the number of states to come up with your base is one of the most moronic calculations I've seen put out by someone who claims to be a search marketing expert.

LOOK MAYBE YOU GUYS DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SEARCH MARKET?  DO YOU REALLY THINK THE INTERNET POPULATION IN NY IS THE SAME AS NH?  LET ME GIVE YOU A MATH LESSON.  BY NOT NORMALIZING THE POPULATIONS IN A STATE YOU GAVE THE SAME WEIGHT TO THE TERM IN EACH STATE WHICH IS A COMPLETE FALSEHOOD.

You can't even measure our search campaigns properly.  Do you even know what a John McCain ad buy looks like anymore? Why would you even look in a state like NY?

SendTec and MediaPost should just stop trying to figure out what the two campaigns are doing when it comes to Search Marketing.  As I said at the Search Marketing Expo (you can read posts here, here, and here), the campaigns are far more sophisticated than you observers give us credit for.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S.  Since SendTec was so "kind" to send traffic my way allow me to correct some more falsehoods published in that "article". 

1. I didn't mention you when I commented on that WSJ article because your comment added nothing (positive or negative) to that article. 
2. While you can only make weak observations about what we should or shouldn't be doing and then try to show your "knowledge" in the industry, I have the data and the results to prove what we are doing and why we are doing it; that includes what we think is expensive for a click and why we don't CAPS the keyword insertion
3. You seem to forget who worked on this campaign from day 1 and that search has been a critical component from the very beginning.
4. My post above didn't accuse you of being politically biased but you chose to write about it as if I did.  This demonstrates that a) you were probably too sensitive about that subject b) makes you look guilty when it comes to having a bias - you protest way too much
5. Finally, we are not having a debate.  I have access to the data and the results; you can only observe, nitpick, and try to self-promote yourself.

SendTec and MediaPost Still Clueless on Presidential Search

Back in January 08 I wrote a post called SendTec and MediaPost Clueless on Presidential Search in which I proved how utterly clueless these two were in their analysis on how the then Presidential Candidates were using search.  Imagine my surprise when in my email box this morning I saw a headline from MediaPost called Candidates Flip Flop (Search Strategies).  So, I'm thinking when I saw the posts hmmmm, I guess people are seeing more aggressive paid search from Obama which I expect.  But, no.  These two (SendTec and MediaPost) screwed up again.  Here's what these two non-searching geniuses wrote

"Search marketing firm SendTec found the Obama campaign capitalized on the Mississippi showdown with McCain by bidding on debate and issue-related keywords including "debate winner," "presidential debate," and "economic crisis." And ads and landing pages were designed to direct viewers to watch the debate. McCain, by contrast, didn't try to build a similar search campaign around the debate."

Gee whiz that's funny.  SendTec found Obama paid search around the debate but didn't find any around McCain.  Hmmm I wonder what we spent all that money on?  I wonder what I was doing late into Friday night and early Saturday morning?

SERIOUSLY SENDTEC.  DID YOU REALLY THINK WE WOULDN'T HAVE PAID SEARCH ADS AROUND THE DEBATE?  PERHAPS YOUR DATA IS WRONG AGAIN!  PERHAPS YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE TO SEARCH?  PERHAPS YOU ACTUALLY NEED TO LEARN TO USE GOOGLE?

Oh, then SendTec followed up on this one too "Besides "economic crisis," neither bid on terms related to key issues including Iraq/Iran, war, bailout plan or Wall Street."  Wow, SendTec thanks for the "analysis".  Why don't you try a new line of work.  As for MediaPost, well perhaps you should try digging in a little deeper before you are so quick to put out a story so you can have an article with Obama's picture in it.

On the same day this "story" came out in MediaPost a much more thorough and accurate picture of the current state of Presidential Search came out in AdAge.  The article called McCain Winning Search-Ad Race by Abbey Klasssen uses well researched examples and several sources of data to measure the impacts of search on the Presidential race.  It even included a few painful comments towards the bottom, but as a whole a balanced article; even if my quotes didn't make it in the end.

SendTec really should just try a new line of work or at least check in with Google or better yet try Googling a little more before publishing such wrong conclusions. 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

McCain Countdown - 42 Days to Go

Worked a lot today, but took a break to attend a Washington Township Board of Education meeting where Everyday Math - Connected Math caused quite a commotion.  I got back from the meeting and went to work again.  Have I ever told you how much fun it is to design a search campaign around Joe Biden?  Remind me to tell you after the election, but the campaign I just put up are awesome.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Nice Plug from Marc Ambinder on McCain's Search

Hey, I love it when a well known and sometimes described as all-knowing political reporter comments on our paid search marketing for John McCain, the RNC, and other Republican clients.  It is quite a little feather in the Connell Donatelli cap.  Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic made a small post that got a lot of us fired up today.  Titled Scoring the Tech Innovation, Marc wrote this

"Seems that the Republicans can lay claim to first mastering a total of two: using Google ads to drive traffic to John McCain's website. "

While that little sentance doesn't seem that big of a deal to you non-outside the beltway folks it is a huge deal.  Marc is widely read by political types, especially within both campaigns.  Even though there has been a ton of articles written about McCain's paid search going way back to before the primary season, I can't help but believe this article in the Wall Street Journal is what got people paying attention.  The McCain campaign has ALWAYS been a big believer in paid search activity and even though the media liked to pay attention to competitor's display ads and social marketing we quietly began kicking people's butts in paid search a long time ago.  Now because of this we are working on a ton of search campaigns and Connell Donatelli dominates political paid search.  It just seemed to take a little while for the media to catch up with us.

Oh the stories I will be able to tell after we win the election.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

(P.S. - that's a picture of my two good friends Cyrus Krohn eCampaign director/internet guru and Peter Greenberger ace political director for Google outside McCain HQ at the Xcel Center.

So The Marketing Pundits Finally Figured Out That McCain's Search Is #1

Ever since the Wall Street Journal published an article that demonstrated for the nation our marketing prowess when it comes to search engine marketing, there have been a number of articles and blog comments.  Jonathan Mendez' recent article called McCain Wins Landslide Over Obama in Search Engine Marketing Election was particularly interesting as well as a post from Danny Sullivan.  Nielsen has been reporting our increased banner ad buy and of course proving that we are kicking serious butt in the search engine world. 

I'm glad people are finally taking notice of the truly remarkable work we are doing and have been doing for the Senator's Campaign from Day 1.  We really have been working together - the entire agency, the senior staff, and the eCampaign team.  Sure I make the ads, the keywords, and handle the organization and optimization, but there are tons of people involved and the highest levels of the campaign get what we've been doing and what paid search can do for a political campaign.

Paid search marketing is the great equalizer between budgets.  As long as you are smart, have experience, understand how to optimize your campaign, track back to goals, and have a great understanding on how the search engines work you can out market your opponent even when the opponent has more marketing dollars.  Then when you add marketing dollars to an already proven model, the your opponents won't even know what hit them. 

I always wondered what took people so long to actually track this.  We've been running paid search ads since Day 0 for the Senator's campaign but I guess people finally decided to take a look at reality instead of just believing the hype.  The campaign has been a big believer in search engine marketing from the very beginning and not just recently.  Finally, when you think we should be doing something but don't see it there is probably a political reason for it or a budget reason for it; believe me we know how to run a modern search engine program.

It should be fun over the next 54 days.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

WSJ Proves Again That McCain Has The Best Search in Politics Ever!

I loved reading in today's WSJ how McCain Seems To Have Obama Beat in One Arena - that arena as you already know readers is in search marketing.  I'm snickering as I read the article again especially these points:

• So-called ambush ads are typically reserved for Web-savvy marketers such as General Motors and AT&T. The newest believer: a 71-year-old presidential candidate.
• But Sen. John McCain is in some ways outsmarting Sen. Obama when it comes to Internet marketing. One example: As of Wednesday, a Google search for "Joe Biden" or even just "Biden" resulted in a prominently displayed ad labeled "Joe Biden on Obama" that links to Sen. McCain's site.
• There, a video begins playing that shows Sen. Biden criticizing Sen. Obama during the Democratic primaries. The move mimics the "ambush" strategy that advertisers often employ: buying a competitor's term so that an ad for the buyer's own product appears when a consumer searches for the other brand.
• As a result, Sen. McCain's ad takes the top spot alongside search results, while Mr. Obama's ad appears lower in the results.
• Sen. McCain's team has been the aggressor in other ways, too. In recent days, it has bought search ads tied to key terms such as "U.S. economy" and "housing crisis," which take visitors to Web sites outlining Sen. McCain's plan on those issues.
• In July, the McCain campaign had 15.1 million sponsored link impressions -- the number of times that an ad is downloaded onto a computer screen -- compared with the 1.2 million for the Obama campaign, according to Nielsen Online

Now while I like to point out how savvy I've been on this, today in a moment of humility is not all about me.  Connell Donatelli with the McCain eCampaign team works really well together.  I received briefing papers, the video ads, quickly built landing pages that track through, and a little freedom to build out the search campaign.  It was live within hours Saturday morning while my munchkins were watching Saturday morning cartoons. 

These ads were some of our best ones and I snickered when I realized how good the whole thing came together - now The Wall Street Journal backed it up with good quotes and research.  The only thing they got wrong was the "in recent days" comment because we've been aggressive for months; someone like the WSJ finally decided to stop believing the Obama internet hype and look around a bit.

Anyway, I can't go into any more detail,  but it was fun to read that article this morning while having breakfast...Oh one final note that my wife just pointed out - is it a coincidence that the WSJ mentioned that ambush ads are typically reserved for Web-savvy marketers such as AT&T, when the main person running the search campaigns (me) is a 10 year AT&T veteran?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How Google Dominates Online Politics Part 2

Interesting day today.  I received a call from a reporter from OrthoNewsline who wanted to discuss using search campaigns in the Dental business.  Really.  No joke. 

During the interview I said something that really reminded me about a recent National Journal article called McCain Buys His Way to Top of Google and a second one called Online Campaign Ads Come Into Their Own.  What I said was that search marketing and in particular Google, is the great equalizer when it comes to advertising spend.  So instead of being outspent by a large advertiser, Google provides you with advertising tools so you can operate like the big spender without the actual money.  And, if you know what you doing you can actually out market the big spender without the dollars. 

That's in direct opposite to that first National Journal article that said McCain buys his way to the top.  We didn't do that; we did it by using tools, having dollars, and measuring results.  This quote from McCain eCampaign Director and personal friend of mine Mike Palmer puts it straight "We obviously have limited resources in this campaign as compared to Barack Obama, so we have to spend in the most effective way," said e-campaign director Michael Palmer. "We found that form of advertising, where you are getting people who are already looking for something, is a very cost-effective way of getting those people to our site and getting them to do the things we want them to do."

Why is Google the great equalizer?  Because you can't buy your way to the top and a smaller budgeted advertiser can be very competitive if they do the following:

• Think through your campaign and develop well thought out groups of keywords
• Build relevant and creative text ads for each group of words
• Send those text ad clicks into very relevant landing pages with clear calls to action
• Use available tools and your own creativity to build the keyword list; use Google Trends to capture the hot searches and Google Insight to see how people search.
• Add post-click tracking tags to the actions on your site that you want to track
• Set your budget based on objective
• Use ad scheduling, geo-targeting, ad optimization, and other search tools Google provides for free
• Opt into Content if you can; use the site targeting and demo targeting
• Optimize based on your results
• Use click to play video ads to showcase your own commercials and if you pay per click on those remember they watch the ad for free

I have so many other tips and history that if you want more detail click here.  This is why Google is the great equalizer and that no advertiser, Dentist or Presidential Candidate should ever run marketing campaigns without putting significant dollars towards Google.  You don't have to buy your way to the top, you just have to out market your opponent on the way to the top.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Reading Some Moronic Posts Regarding Buying Competitive Names

I saw a post this weekend from some moron saying that the McCain campaign is unethical because it buys Barack Obama's name.  Then I read some of comments and for the most part they are accurate save for one person who thought a competitor shouldn't be allowed to buy a brand name.  For you search morons out there allow me to explain under the Google rules....

1. Google won't allow you to buy a trademarked name
2. If you somehow sneak through when you turn on your competitor name buy you will eventually get caught and have it shut off.
3. Political names (or personal names) are not trademarked.  Sure the occasional name is trademarked but I have yet to find a politician's name trademarked.
4. If you are able to buy a competitor's name you won't be stealing traffic and it is never a "no no".
5. Simply stated you buy search terms because you are trying to find someone looking for information.  So if someone is searching for say "Derek Jeter" they are obviously looking for information on baseball, Yankees, shortstops, and of course Jeter.  If you have a competitor product why wouldn't you want to put a message in front of that person?
6. Buying a competitor's name in search is the equivalent of lining Coke and Pepsi up in the soda aisle.  You know the person is shopping for soda so why not put your message there?

Buying a competitor's name is good business practice when you are allowed to do it.  It fine tunes the traffic and intercepts someone with a relevant message.  You are not stealing traffic and it certainly isn't unethical.  Grow up.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

McCain's Paid Search Marketing Campaign Still A Mystery To "Experts"

(In the interest of full disclosure I'm Chief Internet Strategist for Connell Donatelli Inc the company responsible for Senator McCain's Online Advertising.  I personally take an interest :-) in the Paid Search Program)

Sorry I didn't respond to this article sooner, but I was attending possibly the greatest Springsteen Concert since the Nassau Coliseum shows from 1980-1981.  3 hours 16 minutes, 30 songs, fan requests, on and on and Blinded By The Light, Incident, Spirits, Rosie, and 5 songs from BTR. 

Anyway, this article in Politico called McCain's Internet edge: Ad Price while on the surface seems positive, is short sighted and shows once again that self-proclaimed "internet experts" have no clue when it comes to online advertising and particularly search marketing.  Here's what has me perplexed as to the general understanding of search marketing in this arena:

• advertisements targeted to users searching for “John McCain” on the Internet cost nearly twice as much as those targeting users searching for “Barack Obama.”
• Google sells ads in a constant, nearly instantaneous auction in which advertisers bid on individual search terms.
• But Republican new media consultant David All thinks one reason for the price difference may be that the McCain campaign itself is bidding up the price of “John McCain” related ads.
• “It’s a free market, and John McCain’s campaign has said very publicly that they’re investing resourced into online advertising,” says All.
• The high prices, though, could be evidence of a problem for the McCain campaign. Because of the vast interest in their candidate online, the Obama camp simply may not feel it has to bid as highly for ads on “Barack Obama.”

The main problem with the article is that even though it mentions quality score, it purposely tries to paint a picture that bid cost is the major factor for determining the cost an advertiser pays and backs it up with a quote from David All who thinks McCain is bidding up the price of John McCain.  And, it plays into that there could be problems for McCain because Obama doesn't have to bid as high (totally inaccurate).  David's quote could not be possibly more wrong and shows a complete lack of understanding of how paid search works especially for Google and demonstrates the overall lack of experience in running online advertising campaigns.

Now I can't go into specifics into the McCain search campaign, but allow me to enlighten you search novices especially the ones in the political industry.  If you really want a detailed explanation see this post I wrote called My Tips for Setting You Google Ad Prices.  Basically your maximum bid price is NOT the most important factor in your paid click price; it is relevancy and quality score.  If your ad and landing page are very relevant to the words you are buying and you make brilliant ads, you are rewarded by Google with a higher quality score and YOU PAY LESS PER CLICK.   The reverse also works true. It also works that way for Obama and McCain.

The McCain campaign or ANY OTHER ADVERTISER does NOT need to bid up the price on their branded keyword.  If they have experienced online marketers they will PAY LESS per word than someone else.    

Bidding up prices on keywords is a poor strategy for any marketer especially the ones that own the brand name.  You don't need to bid up words, especially if you have back end metrics like ROI or conversion into sales.   You should be setting your bid prices based on hitting your metrics not "how much you pay for a click".

The only advantages that McCain's search campaign has over everyone else is that we are experienced in search marketing (I've personally been doing some form of search marketing since 1998), we have very relevant ads, we enjoy high quality scores, the landing pages will always be relevant (McCain name is ALWAYS on the landing page), and we measure the campaign based on ROI. 

Bidding up your own branded keyword is not a good strategy.  As is guessing what is really happening behind someone's search campaign when all you are really trying to do is get face time in the press.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

BTW - check out the celebrity quiz over at the RNC. http://www.gop.com/CelebrityQuiz/

Love The GOP Toolbar

I know I'm catching up on lost time, but I really love the GOP Toolbar.  You can easily have it installed and it puts a great political toolbar in your web browser, plus uses Yahoo search.  According to this WSJ article every time you search or make a qualifying purchase you add donations into the GOP.  Sure it might be pennies at a time, but if you make a lot of searches during the day it can add up.  Obviously the payments are as a result of search bounty payments and bounty purchases, but so what?  At least someone is benefiting from these payments instead of them being wasted.  Plus, it helps Yahoo with their "battle" with Google for searches.

I think these micro payments has been available from Yahoo for a while and is very similar to the new cashback search plan from Microsoft.  The only problem with these programs are that they are trying to take search activity from Google which is very difficult.  Plus, these are nothing new - back in the dark ages of the internet you could have won money from your searches if you used iWon.

The GOP toolbar is a wonderful concept and I hope it spreads.  It gives the GOP a wonderful opportunity to push messages out very cost effectively and generate donations from simple things like searching.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Lessons Learned In Web Marketing While I've Been Gone

So I starting blogging today after being on a vacation since my Dad died.  To be perfectly honest I didn't really feel like writing anything.  I had no ideas in my head and ignored reading a lot of my news feeds. 

It gave me a chance to figure out why I've been writing this blog for the past few years.  It definitely isn't due to the ton of traffic or the cup of coffee I generated every few days in advertising revenue.  Anyway before I answer that question, I thought you'd like to see some numbers and what I think of them.

DATA OBSERVATIONS AND MARKETING TACTICS LEARNED FROM A BLOGGING VACATION

1. The number of RSS subscribers increased from 81 to 99 even though I made no new posts.  This means that more people are using RSS feeds to get their news rather than email or cruising by websites.  You need to stay focused on RSS as your outbound communication platform and not email.
2. My site visits averaged out to about 100 per day.  While this is low for me, I didn't have any new posts.  The vast majority of this traffic came from articles that I wrote that appear very high in search results.  These include politics, online advertising, AT&T, and Ballistic Coins.  Don't forget when you write your headlines that catchy titles may be creatively cool, but direct search engine friendly ones help you with traffic.
3. My number of Twitter followers has grown to 234.  In fact I get one or two new subscribers everyday now.  You can't run a blog now without cross posting and directing traffic to it via Twitter.
4. I started playing around with FriendFeed but forgot all about it.
5. Understanding what people do on your site, where they come from, and what they click on are very important.  For example, I found it interesting to know that someone decided to look to see when I mentioned Barack Obama in posts on my site.
6. Whatever happened to my del.icio.us link posts?
7. Does anyone use technorati any more?

Basically in the end I write this blog as what it was originally intended for.  A web log of what's going on with me.  I do get a kick out of when people come up to me at events and call me out as PardonMyFrench.  It does help me demonstrate that I do know a lot more about online marketing than just online media buys and search marketing.  People can easily find me on the internet and it helps me control my own spin and build Google Credibility.  Seriously it is fun for me and is my voice.  That's all it ever was and it feels like I can speak again.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Google's Peter Greenberger Throws Props To McCain's Paid Search Campaign

While having meetings in Crystal City a savvy sales person (don't get excited that doesn't mean I will cut a deal with you) sent me a link to the latest Kate Kaye article on ClickZ called Clinton Needed More Search: Q&A with Google's Greenberger.  As always you can read the article for yourself but here are my highlights and then commentary.

1. He argues savvy search advertising contributed to the success of both Barack Obama's and John McCain's primary season wins by helping them build supporter lists.
2. Through sponsored links in search results, the McCain and Obama camps have driven users seeking information on the candidates to their official Web sites to register for newsletters, volunteer or to donate money.
3. The McCain campaign was the savviest among the Republican presidential primary campaigns. We think it's not a coincidence that the two savviest primary campaigns with Google are the winning ones.
4. Even in the darkest days of the [McCain] campaign... they never stopped spending on Google AdWords... There were times, corresponding to the political polls, when maybe interest waned in his campaign, but he was ready to capture interest.
5. We saw the use of video and I would highlight the McCain campaign for being ahead of the curve on that...

OK, so why did Peter (and I agree with him) believe that Clinton needed more search?  Pretty simple.  People look for almost an infinite amount of keyword combinations and no matter how savvy you are at SEO you can't possibly optimize for those combinations let alone direct people into new or updated landing pages.  For example, if you were trying to get people to sign a petition for a summer gas tax holiday perhaps you'd buy keywords to send searches into your page instead of either a) letting someone else steal your message or b) letting the searchers fend for themselves via the organic listing.  Notice how the page itself isn't listed on the first page of organic results.  You need a paid search campaign for that. 

#1 is correct, but I'd add in that we get $3 - $4 in donations for every $1 we spend online.  It just isn't about building lists and capturing searchers; we balance generating money for the campaign with other activities.  As Peter said we were ahead of the other campaigns when it came to using using video advertising and while I like to pat myself on the back for that, some times when you have a great TV/media team and when you have money challenges, you do what you can for the limited dollars you have.  That meant click to play video ads on the internet.

The article that Kate mentioned (darkest days) includes quotes from me about our online advertising just when the campaign was switching the team around.  I gave that interview in Crystal City that week and I told Kate that the campaign was more charged than ever and it wasn't doom and gloom.  We just had to focus on the early primary states and focus on the Senator.  During that week I was just formulating ideas for how to approach the primary states and hinted as much in the interview "Whether he's buying keywords specifically to counteract the negative press and commentary about the campaign, however, he wouldn't say specifically. "There is a strategy that I'm' working on….I wouldn't call it trying to counteract negativity," he said"  I can't tell you exactly what we did because that was just a warm-up act for the big show.  BTW - we are in the midst of a new approach right now.

Anyway, I thought the article by Kate was very insightful and Peter Greenberger was pretty much on the money with his interview.  One of the things that amazes me is how far we've come since I started with Connell Donatelli 30+ months ago.  I've met a lot of great people and I'm getting the chance to work on a Presidential Campaign which was unfathomable a few years back.  It still amazes me today to see how many people are now working on the campaign.  And it all started because my Yahoo account executive Adrienne Skinner set up a lunch meeting with Becki Donatelli in the summer of 2004.  I still can't believe that I actually do this for a living.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

I'll Pass on Google Health

So Google Health is now out into a public beta based on several blogs I read including the Official Google Blog in the post called A peek into our search factory.   Here's the Google announcement:

In terms of new products, we made Google Health publicly available. It offers users a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage their medical records and health information online. How many of us have touched, or even seen, our medical records? In this day and age of information, isn't it crazy that you don't have a copy of your medical records under your control? You could use those records to develop a better understanding of your health and ultimately get better care. It's your data about your own health; why shouldn't you own and control it?

There are other great aspects about Google Health which you can read for yourself.  Me?  I'm sticking to keeping this information off the internet. 

Google does a good job of outlining their Privacy Policy and actually making it easily found.  I would have liked it a little more if they actually showed examples of what types of advertising you might see on their platform and on their partner's platforms.  Again I'm assuming you'll see targeted ads based on keywords in your health information and perhaps you'll find that useful.  I think they could have gone a step further to explain to the people that actually need this level of data tracking what types of ads they'll see.

However, this is one Google product I won't test and won't be using.  Some things are better left on your desktop or your home and this is one of them.  I believe that doctors and pharmacists went to different types of schools, spent more time in school, and then onto residencies that they can actually do a better job of filtering the information for me.  Even today, save for paid links it is extremely hard to navigate through a Google search results page to find the right information.

I don't want my information stored on the internet no matter how big and powerful Google gets that they can protect the information.  My medical history thankfully does not change that often that I need constant updates and I can figure out on my own when I need a refill (if you take daily pills you can see when you are running low).    The selling features from Google include the following (my comments to the right):

• Organize your health information all in one place (can't I do that now offline or on my desktop?  Does it change so often that I need instant access to it)
• Gather your medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies (don't you ask for it now if you can?  If you do, do you need it instantly on an on demand basis)
• Keep your doctors up to date about your health (I'm sure the doctor's can't wait for this especially if they can figure out a way to charge for it)
• Be more informed about important health issues (served up based on your information?)

I really believe Google has the best intentions with this and will protect your privacy to the best they are able to.  Take away my office and store it on the net.  Give me Gmail and I'm happy with it.  Google reader is great as is the search product itself.   These are all trade-offs I'm ready to make for targeted ads, but when it comes to medical records I'll pass.  Perhaps as I get older and need constant health updates I'll change my tune, but for now, I'll keep what I'm doing offline.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

My Tips for Setting Your Google Ad Prices

About a week ago Google made a post called How auctions set ad prices which I thought was very important for you to take a look at.  I would have posted a little sooner, but I was slammed with work last week.  Let's take a look step by step and I'll give you my personal tips along the way.  I figured what's a little online marketing secrets revealed between friends.

1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.  OK, here's where a little art and a little science starts and helps later on when they get to quality score. 

• First you need to come up with your strategy for how you'll organize your words.  Don't just stick them in a single ad group -create multiple groups and organize your words.  This is probably the most important tactic for you.  ORGANIZE YOUR KEYWORDS INTO GOOD GROUPS
• Second, you need to figure out what your daily spend is based on your goals
• Third, use Google's keyword tool as well as other ones to come up with your base of keywords by ad group.  Make sure you use another keyword tool otherwise the words will look like your competitor's words
• Build your text ads by ad group.  Make sure if it warrants, to use the keyword insertion tool
• Start your basic maximum bid at the ad group level to what you can afford.  When Google determines your Quality Score you'll know what to do next

2) Google matches search queeries with keywords - Don't forget long tail words (think three or more keywords); these will probably convert better for you but at much lower volumes and hopefully cost.

3) The list of ads are ordered by bids and Quality Score.  This is where things get a little tougher and separates the search children from the search adults.  Google lists 6 ways it makes up Quality Score so let's examine them but quickly

• Historical click rates on Google's network (which you may or may not have anything to do with).  This will be one of the reasons why you need to pay the mythical $5 CPC bid for an extremely relevant campaign.
• Other relevancies factors again that contribute to a higher CPC which probably upsets you
• Relevancy of keywords in your ad group (see step #1)
• You account's CTR history (that is your quality score changes over time)
• Historical CTR of the display URL in your ad group (see step #1)
• The quality of your landing page.  Make sure your pages are relevant by your ad group

4) Google ranks the ads
5) Once a user clicks on an ad the advertiser is charged the minimum CPC over the advertiser right below it based on bid and quality score.  You can try and optimize these bids by hand or get a bid manager to automatically adjust your bids multiple times per day based on your goals.
6) There are actually two auctions Google runs.  One for the shaded bar on the top left of the page and one for the links on the right hand margin.  To get listed on the top you must have a high quality score for a particular keyword; the top shaded area will cost you more than your normal #1 place.  According to a blog post back in August 2007 your maximum cost per click will be considered to get you in the shaded region.  So what does this mean to you?  You will pay close to your maximum bid and when I personally tracked my best keywords over time I did see a significant increase in actual CPC for my #1 placements.  Basically you must know for sure whether you want that #1 for a certain word; you might be better off with a lower placement at a much lower cost.

That's it.  Enjoy your search tips...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google for Senator McCain

A couple of good stories from the past two weeks that I'd thought you'd enjoy.  I was too busy with the Board of Education campaign and now that it is over, I'm catching up a bit. 

About two weeks back I was down in DC/VA for meetings and the first night I was there I went to a McCain fundraiser with folks from Campaign Solutions, Connell Donatelli, and the campaign.  Towards the end before we scrambled for dinner, I walked up to a true internet legend former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.  Whitman knew about our phenomenal Search ROI and was very impressed with it and that gave me a personal boost knowing how large eBay's search campaign is.  I can't get into much more about what we talked about, except I asked for this picture with her.  Yes I'm in a suit....

Next up was an interview I gave for Mother Jones magazine called Googling for McCain. Believe it or not, I'm always very nervous when I give interviews, but this one scared me the most.  Not because of the magazine, but because the reporter wanted to profile me.  It seems a friend of hers had some McCain campaign ads running on their website and she wanted to know how they ended up there.  So instead of being content after finding out it was Google, she contacted Peter Greenberger who runs politics for Google and then wham - over to me.  I've had a few jobs in between AT&T and Connell Donatelli, but all and all an interesting article.

Finally, iCrossing came out with another study on Presidential Paid search campaigns and guess who came out on top?  No it wasn't the Obama campaign, it was the McCain campaign (surprise).  Kate Kaye from ClickZ had a flattering post on the analysis called Clinton: Bitter About Search Ads? where she looked specifically at paid search instead of lumping in SEO and SEM as some other sites did.  Kate highlighted that we spend about twice as much as the other campaigns put together and buy a lot of issue related words.  According to iCrossing, "McCain is also the only candidate with paid coverage on competitors’ names in addition to his own, including candidate keywords hillary clinton, barack obama, obama, and clinton," and since some of you remember that we have been quoted as saying we generate $3-$4 dollars in donations for every $1 we spends proves once again how remarkable of a job the entire Connell Donatelli, Campaign Solutions, and McCain eCampaign are doing on paid search.  Everybody works on this marketing program and it shows how integrated we really are.  Finally, I enjoyed that Kate called me out as "this guy" in the article.

Anyway, that's it for now.  You have some good reading and a cool picture of me with Meg Whitman.  Of course after that iCrossing study, we'll need to step it up some more.

PardonMyFrench,

Eruc

More on Microsoft's Bid for Yahoo

I read this article this weekend in Business Week called Will Yahoo! Feel the Love? and I found it very interesting.  The article basically focused on two important aspects of any merger - people and product.  Here are a couple of very relevant points from the article:

• "If I was Google, I'd be thrilled.  I can steal a lot of top talent out of Yahoo" said Norm Fjeldheim
• "Virtually all of the deals from Hell are done by companies that are collapsing into each other's arms like defeated prize fighters" say Robert F Bruner author of Deals from Hell.
• "Google is the single biggest threat Microsoft has ever had" said david B. Yoffie
• The company (Microsoft) is hoping to bring together Yahoo's research and development staff  who've done innovative work in online advertising auction theory and data mining
• "We're the better technology (referring to Microsoft's  adCenter versus Panama)" said Tarek Najim Microsoft's adCenter general manager

Those 5 bullet points outlined the challenges Microsoft has and that's assuming that Yahoo agrees to the deal which is looking less likely at this point based on this other article found on Business Week.  Yahoo has been losing key staffers and management now for almost a year, but there are some very talented people still left like my good friend Richard K.  I wonder how they would feel if they were kept on by Microsoft.  Sure there will be a lot of duplication in staff positions but based on my experience the acquiring company has the leg up on key positions; plus as mentioned in the article the cultures are really different.

Yahoo! well is still that company with the purple chairs, fun loving people and Microsoft is very business like.  Microsoft's attorneys are slow and methodical as is their sales staff.  Speaking of sales staff Microsoft's has always been multi-layered and I could never tell what the chain of command was; for me it was my account person (ex - Dave M whom I like a lot) and then their head of media Joanne Bradford.  Seriously, I can't tell you how many different layers of upper management I've had over the years with Microsoft.  Every few months the new Account VP would want to meet their clients (always a good practice) but I grew tired of the meets and greets because the people would get changed out.  Personally, I can't see how the employees will merge together.

The article referenced Yahoo's data team and I've always been fond of them.  The problem with them going forward is how many of the data folks stick around with MSN's more conservative privacy policies?  Remember I grew up in a data and analytics group in the old Bell Laboratories at AT&T and at the end of the day the data was only as good as the people that managed it and the people who analyzed it.  An old boss of mine in BOA named Rich L once said "information is what smart people do with the data" and keeping those smart Yahoo data geeks around will be a problem for Microsoft.

Finally Microsoft's Najim is 100% accurate when he says that adCenter is better than Panama.  I've had my problems with Panama from day 1.  Panama increased my costs and I saw my conversions drop.  Microsoft I've always been a fan of when it comes to ROI and conversions but sadly there isn't enough volume on Microsoft.  Other than MSNBC there really isn't much traffic and that of course goes for search.

I do think Microsoft has to make this move to compete with Google.  However, they have huge challenges ahead if they are counting on key people remaining through the merger.  When E*Trade acquired Harrisdirect one person told me that historically 90% of acquired employees don't last a year.  I don't know the source and it could only be anecdotal but based on my experience I certainly believe that number.  Sure you can pay people with retention bonuses but they only last as long as that contract.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

MSN Bids $44.6B for Yahoo - The End of Yahoo and an Overture Rising?

Sorry for the quick post on this huge subject which I first learned about in the online version of the WSJ in the article called Microsoft Unveils $44.6 Billion for Web Ad, Search Rival Yahoo.  I have so much work to do today for Super Tuesday including motivating volunteers, but I'll give you my quick thoughts.

• Yahoo continues to have challenging times and they are laying off people.  See this article from the Wall Street Journal.  It looks to me like the changes that Jerry Yang put in place while they might be the right tactical fixes, Yahoo seems to be caught in a riptide and needs a completely new direction.
• The search industry is led by Google which holds a huge lead in search followed by Yahoo and then MSN.  It reminds me of the telecom industry back in the 90s.  The only way to compete with the top dog is for the smaller players to get together and compete.  That's why I wrote a while back an article called MSN to Yahoo: An Overture in The Making?  A rule of thumb for me in the search world is that Google is where all the action is, MSN conversion is off the charts but no volume, and Yahoo has lower conversions but volume is big.  Combining them makes a lot of sense to me and still does.
• Yahoo's obvious push into the Ad Network with their RightMedia and Blue Lithium purchase makes MSN even larger and able to compete with Google's content network.
• Yahoo had (yes I wrote that and stay with me for a sec) great customer service and was able to weather the customer satisfaction storm when key management left like Wenda.  However with these key management departures selling Yahoo might be a little easier now especially with a depressed stock price.

I don't see MSN letting go so easily and wondering what Google will do next.  Any product changes or personnel changes that Yahoo had in the works will be derailed.  Yes I know they will tell you that they will keep their eye on the ball, etc but remember I lived through AT&T acquisitions and consolidations and then the eventual buyout of Harrisdirect.  People care about their jobs and their lives and they are not robots.  Guaranteed that any product timelines that were undoubtedly pushed to their limits will slip because well people will care about their personal lives and may not be charged to deliver a product that won't be needed.

MSN pounces when they needed to to compete with Google.  Yahoo to me looks finished, but perhaps a resurrected Overture could compete on the search side with Google.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google's Demographic Bidding Helps Little Spenders Market Like Big Spenders

Yes - this is not a political post.  I know some of you readers are excited by that.  Last night Google announced that they are testing Demographic bidding in their content network and there are quite a number of features that get me reasonably excited; however, my enthusiasm is not as high as some recent changes like their new geotargeting tools.  Anyway, here are the highlights:

• Google allows you to bid on specific demographics like age and gender on certain sites in their content network; that's pretty cool
• Google (if you are in their beta) allows you to run a Demographic report to understand the profile of your ad buys and this helps you fine tune your bids by not only including CTR and bid data but conversion data too
• You can also eliminate certain demographic groups from seeing your ads which is also another great feature.

OK, so why am I not doing cartwheels?  Well it is only limited to their content network and not search.  Plus, it is limited to only a few sites that look to be mostly social networking sites and quite frankly other than MySpace and Friendster (who still goes there?) I didn't recognize any of the URLs listed in their beta test.  Plus, while I've grown to like Content Targeting you need to understand how it works to get a good flavor for the process of getting your ads shown, the type of inventory available, and also your ROI in content.  Finally, as we've seen with their CPA bidding process, this really is just a beta and you probably won't see huge results until Google expands the site offering.

In a nut shell, I love that Google is extending their Content network process to include demo targeting.  When this feature is rolled out with more inventory it will help the small budget advertisers act like a big budget marketing firm.  Remember, this feature as is everything else with Google is part of the price of admission (next to nothing!!). 

Think about it.  With Google you can run banner ads on the internet on a cost per click basis using sophisticated demo targeting that other websites would charge premiums for their use (yes some still charge you for each targeting select you make).  Not so with Google who puts the power of sophisticated marketing at the finger tips of small business marketers.  Thank you Google!!

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

What Is The Right Amount To Spend on Online Advertising

While reading this article found over in MediaWeek called Only Tentative Web Ad Spend During Primaries I kept thinking to myself what is the right amount to spend of your advertising budget on interactive. Before I continue with that train of thought, I want to write that the article itself is well informed. I do however get tired when people write as I myself have in the past "that candidates and their consultants are “creatures of habit” when it comes to media strategy. But, he theorized, when the brand is a living, breathing person, TV may remain preferred."  While that might be true for some it is no longer the norm, however it gets to my original question which is what is the right amount to spend on online marketing?

Now before you just jump in and start shouting percentages, let me lay down the rules.  First, this is a budget from scratch.  You can't optimize last year's budget because in politics it might not exist.  You might be a new campaign with new issues, new opponents, new followers, etc.  Second, search marketing does not count.  You are already planning on putting aside significant dollars on search and will maximize it.  Third, there are no real case studies that tell you if you spend $X on display ads you will move Y% of voters.  Fourth, free (except for campaign support) techniques like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and etc are not coming out of this budget.  Finally, as shown in this now dated AdAge study (I'm sure there is an updated one but I'm too lazy to look for it), the private sector is on average putting aside 5% of their advertising dollars on the internet.

So marketing genius, how much do you allocate to online advertising?  Seriously.  10%?  25%?  50%?  All of it?  What do you do?  What is the number you would recommend and how do you justify it to the campaign manager and the candidate?  What's your argument?  This is the same discussion that everyone has, political or private sector.  It isn't that much different except there are probably little to no benchmarks to justify your number.  Do you go after the Direct Mail budget?  Sure that sounds like a great idea to me, but believe it or not a certain demographic still responds to DM (you can guess the demo).  How much TV do you need?  I have my answers but what do you think?

Circa 2004/2005 at Harrisdirect we were running a ton of online advertising (17th largest in the US).  And as most industries do, the competitors were all studying what each of us were doing with our ad budgets.  It was then that I ran into an acquaintance of mine from TD Waterhouse named Stuart and he ran online advertising for TD.  Stuart said to me that they were reviewing competitive advertising spends and specifically the % of offline versus Internet for the sector firms.  That %, no surprise, fluctuated within an acceptable range for all the competitors except for Harrisdirect which showed a huge amount of online with little offline.  He thought it was hysterical because clearly our strategy was unique.  Personally, I couldn't tell him that his data was wrong and besides it helped fuel the legend of our online spending.  Even in the financial sector there are "norms" for spending, but those fluctuate based on brand, strategy, tactics, target market, and etc.

So I ask you once again, wanna be political marketing consultant or marketing critic, what is the % of dollars that you would allocate towards internet advertising and why?  How do you determine the % in your firm today.  SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS THE RIGHT ANSWER?  Why is it only "tentative" web ad spending?  Why isn't the tentative spending the correct amount (it isn't and really wrong when you look at search).  Here's a hint for you.  Whoever wins the nomination and whoever wins the Presidency will have spent EXACTLY THE RIGHT % EVEN IT IS ZERO.  You may not agree with that statement, but unfortunately it will be true.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S. I'm off to South Carolina to work on SC GOTV for Senator McCain's campaign.  Hopefully the next few posts will be showcasing an online veteran in a retail politics world.

Hillary Clinton Joins Paid Search Advertising Game

Well it is about time Senator.  Welcome to Google Paid Search Ads!!  Glad you finally figured out that search marketing is a great opportunity instead of just a few tests. One question.  What took you so long? (I actually have an idea...)  Just a reminder, McCain rules in paid search :-)

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

SendTec and MediaWeek Clueless on Presidential Search

On such a great day in Politics I had the non-pleasure to have someone forward me this article in MediaWeek called Dems, Reps Fall Short on Search.  Reading the article it is clear that SendTec and Janel Landis have no concept on how to look for search ads, what works in search politics, and they didn't bother to even research articles that have been written by more reputable publications and companies like:

1. Newsweek
2. CNN
3. Wired
4. Boston Globe
5. Rimm-Kaufman
6. iCrossing
7. Wall Street Journal

What gets me so fired up is when so called "search experts" run a few queries at a couple of times and then draw a conclusion that says "these guys don't get search".  That's just wrong.  If you don't see us running ads on certain words it is because they a) don't perform b) too expensive or c) doesn't make sense. 

Come on people, you have to try harder than this and too assume that real search marketing isn't occurring because political campaigns don't get it is wrong.  Perhaps before someone publishes an article on what the Presidential campaigns are not doing, they should try using search to find articles that have already been published that proves they are wrong.  Sheesh - SendTec definitely needs search help.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Rimm-Kaufman Proves Once Again That McCain's Search is #1

The Rimm-Kaufman group published a study the other day called Search and Politics 2008 and they get this study correct unlike past ones where I was very critical.  What usually gets me fired up is when some knucklehead blogger spends 10 minutes running some search queries and makes erroneous conclusions regarding the extent of politicians running PPC ads.  These wanna be search marketers are very often wrong and have no basis for the "advice" they dish out for free.  This version of the Rimm-Kaufman study is not only more than directionally correct but provides me with a basis for confirming what I've always believed the competition is doing online.

• Less than half of 2008 presidential contenders are using paid search advertising
• Even fewer are advertising searches related to key campaign issues.
  
• More Republicans are using paid search advertising than Democrats.
• Google (YouTube) is a major advertiser on political queries.
• Political campaigns (except McCain which is my observation) lack sophistication as paid search advertisers.

Also towards the back, they offer 6 basic search techniques that the novice search marketer should pay attention to.  Obviously this is search 101 and applies to political marketing but as I personally can attest to is not a full proof plan for running search campaigns; as a colleague once told me marketing politics is not like selling cds.  The 6 search techniques are:

1. Spend ad dollars on search:  Personally I have a minimum spend for local, state, national, and presidential campaigns
2. Advertise on your own name:  Sounds like a no-brainer but it is also a defensive strategy to help combat any "George Allen" problems.
3. Advertise on issues plus your own name+issues:  This is where the faint of heart often bail out.  This is way not as simple as it sounds and where non-political advertisers  fall short.  Not only can you spend a ton of money here you can also get little back in return if you don't know what you are doing.  You must have a well thought out strategy for buying issue words and need someone with some experience.
4. Advertise on Google, Yahoo, MSN
5. Advertise on other candidate's names:  Again not a simple strategy with similar pitfalls to #3 above.
6. Choose good landing pages:  This is where many campaigns fall short by sending clicks into a homepage or a generic landing page.  You need multiple landing pages to not only help with conversions but relevancy too.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the Rimm-Kaufman study and other than our brilliant McCain search campaign, I liked getting some confirmation as to what our competition is doing.  Rudy's team has a good search strategy while everyone else if they have even figured out how to spell "PPC" are still just playing around.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Yet Another Reason to Love Google: Content Improvements

Today Google posted this article over at the AdWords blog called Google content network tips: Part 1 - Recent improvements which goes over some recent changes to their content network.  The highlights for me were:

• Reach.  According to comScore Google's content network reaches almost 70%.
• Transparent reporting of where your ads ran and where conversions occur; this is done at the URL as well as domain level
• Cost per click bidding when you use site targeting

Now those are all fine and dandy, but what gets me fired up lately is more to do with the transparency coupled with the flexibility.  When running ads I can see where they show up in their network and if one particular site is performing well I can drop it into a site targeting campaign to make sure my ads run there.  That also gives me flexibility to move in and out of "deals" with these sites.  And, that's extremely important when you don't have a ton of cash to test and learn.

Just today a great article ran featuring one of my accounts on a well known National News site.  I called my rep to see if I could buy ads just around that article for about a week and they wrote back and said "sure, but our minimum amount is $7500" which immediately canceled the deal.  I went into Google to see if I could buy that page but sadly it wasn't available and the majority of placements on this site in Google's network were text only.  However, it reminded me how lucky we are that Google provides such visibility and flexibility.

Following up on the visibility was a call I had today without another ad network.  As I wrote a few days ago, I'm not afraid of using ad networks and if done properly they can be very effective (comes from running like $150 million in online ads since 1998).  The major problem I do have with them and this includes Yahoo's partner network is the refusal to provide visibility into where the ads run.  These networks are afraid that you might go direct which is really ridiculous; case in point see Google that provides the visibility yet is showing tremendous revenue growth.

The drawbacks with Content are:

1. You need smaller groups so Google can do a better job targeting your ads
2. You need display and video ads to really take advantage of it; especially video where you aren't charged for someone watching your video but when they click (unless you bought on a CPM basis)
3. You have to watch your spending and optimize often because Google can really push through a spend.
4. The Whack a mole problem with unwanted sites, even though Google has made improvements
5. And finally, my biggest issue with Content are that many of the placements are not premier and some of them if you don't pay attention are text only.  There is nothing that irks me more than paying high rates for a text ad.

BTW - one final word to the wise.  Google is letting you buy on a CPC basis in their site targeting, but like other techniques it may not be to your benefit.  You need to pay attention to CPMs, CPCs, and of course CPA no matter how you pay.  If you are smart sometimes a site bought on a CPM basis can have an extremely attractive CPCs and the CPM will get you more visibility.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Newsweek Searches for A Candidate and Finds Our McCain Search Program

Newsweek has a great article in this week's magazine called The Search for A Candidate and it basically goes into an analysis of the search campaign that we at Connell Donatelli Inc run for the McCain for President campaign.  Highlights from the article include:

1. "The national polls don't reflect it, but in one sense John McCain is the clear front runner in the presidential race: he leads in search-engine ads."  Personally I'd rather see McCain leading in the polls and winning states with a smaller Google buy.
2. "Those who've figured it out are cleaning up: McCain's people have stated that for every dollar they spend on this form of advertising, they bring in three or four bucks in contributions."
3. "Right now they're getting the words dirt-cheap," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a think tank that helps Democrats. "It's amazing how many people don't buy their name and the name of their opponents. That's a no-brainer."
4. But only a few have realized that buying "competitive words"—meaning your opponents' names —can be even more effective. "It's a tactic, but not nefarious," says Eric Frenchman, a McCain consultant active in buying search terms. "Buying competitive words is a key to getting people information." Frenchman says that such ads often "convert"
5. "Here again, McCain is busy; his people say that at various times they've bought 10,000 different words"

I think that was the most we've seen yet of anyone digging into political search campaigns.  I don't think that keywords are cheap right now in fact I believe cost per clicks are going up.  Besides a change to Google's algorithm which impacts how much you pay to be in the top position, there are more than just campaigns that are bidding on the candidate's name.  Just look to see who shows up on the search results.

Finally, I'm also glad that Newsweek quoted me regarding buying competitive words.  I've written and said over and over again that it isn't some nefarious trick to steal votes or web traffic (stealing traffic that doesn't convert is a waste of time).  Search is built around people looking for information and if someone is searching for a competitive name, why wouldn't you want to have your ad there too?  That's why super markets have a soda aisle and put Coke next to Pepsi.  If you are looking for soda, why wouldn't you want to look at all the choices.  I wish more bloggers and marketers would pay more attention to this tactic.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google Sheds A Little Light on Minimum Cost Per Clicks

Hey, if you read one of my posts this week (besides the Politico one from yesterday), this is it.  Google via their Inside AdWords blog sheds a little light on a common misconception revisited regarding the minimum cost per click bid.  I'll get into why I wrote sheds a little light later, but basically as is the case with most big companies this AdWords post is more about the average minimum CPC cases not some unique ones which I've personally wrestled with.  Ahh before that, some highlights from the post...

• The minimum CPC is not related to the number of competitors but the quality score of the ads/keyword.
• If you think there aren't really competitors perhaps the ads were turned off when you looked or they are geo-targeted.  Google directs you to their Ad Preview Tool which I personally use quite often to see how my ads compare to competitors, how it looks, and who else is bidding on the words.
• And Google explains that they would rather NOT show ads for every keyword especially if it could potentially detract from the overall search experience.

OK, now for a reality check from someone that has bought tons and tons of words.  About 9 out of 10 times what Google wrote is very accurate which shouldn't surprise you.  However, I've run into enough examples where it is a Google glitch which of course requires tons of screaming and emails before you see any results. 

One client recently whose name had no advertisers on it (I know what Google wrote, but we looked and looked multiple times per day over a week), but we couldn't get our minimum CPC below $5.  The ad had the person's name in it and the click thru went to a landing page and/or home page hosted at the clients site.  That url had the clients full name in it at a .com URL.  Of course we were buying the clients name which is where the $5 CPC problem came into play.

Google's answer of course was quality score and relevancy, but as we pointed out to them it was impossible to get any more relevant and there was a glitch in their system.  I think what finally got to them was when I wrote "an ad that only repeated their name over and over again couldn't be more relevant".    Eventually something was triggered in their system that put the bids into the correct range or maybe it was just dumb luck.

That's happened more often than what you would think and especially comes into play when buying someone's name.  Even buying my own name directed to this blog has a minimum CPC of 20 cents for me; I could probably do more to fix the ads but it serves its purpose.  There is one bright spot if you can't get your Quality Score up and really can't find a glitch, at least the ads will run in Google's content targeting network.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Trademarked Names in Google Ads - Not a Liberal Bias

I saw this post over at Google's Public Policy Blog called Our Advertising Policies and Political Speech and I thought to myself, oh boy here comes the same old tired responses from less informed people that Google somehow has a liberal bias.  You can read the post for yourself to get more details but basically Google rejected an ad placed by Senator Susan Collins' re-election campaign which had Moveon.org in the ad.  Of course this becomes a big deal, but really if Moveon.org has their name trademarked they have every right to protect that trademark and have Google or any other search engine reject the ad.

As I wrote in a post recently called Listen Search Marketing Newbies, Buying a Competitor's Name Is Good Practice you need to  understand how to circumvent these trademarked issues and when you can buy the name.  It is good marketing practice to buy competitive names and I've been doing it for a lonnnnggg time. Google will let you buy the name, you just can't have a trademarked name in your ad unless you have permission; Yahoo will most likely reject even buying the keyword and MSN will certainly disavow it.

As you can see from my post referenced above, I'm buying several versions of competitive names, in addition to the the name referenced in the Google post.  When I can, I put the name in the text ad and when I can't, I come up with other strategies.  Even if you can get a competitive name in the ad, that doesn't mean you won't have to pay a high CPC due to lack of relevancy, so you have to ask yourself why you need to purchase this type of keyword.

Regardless of what your strategy is, I do not believe for one second Google has a liberal bias.  Never have and hopefully never will.  I don't know where that started from, but my guess is that it has to do with Google Bombing or the perceived lack of use of the internet by Republicans.  Right now I see more use of paid click ads on the Republican side than the Democratic side and I for one know one campaign that spends a ton of time and money on the internet. 

Personally, I think the Republican base skews older and that our base is less likely to use all available online tools and when the other side embraces technology more than the other, people will scream "liberal bias" when all it is more use of the internet.  Good for the Senator for trying to buy Moveon.org, I'm glad to see such aggressiveness; however, when the search engine rejects it, please people (NOT REFERENCING ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE CAMPAIGN) don't scream liberal bias.  It shows a serious lack of experience. 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google Pumps Up The Volume on Video Content

Google today announced that you as a site owner can now access video content via your Ad Sense program.  For more details see this press release from Google and the AdSense blog post called Introducing Video Units.   As a content owner I love the idea of having someone power some content especially on days when I'm super busy or just to enhance the link posts that gets done during the day.  According to the post you can customize the content or let Google pick it for you and of course Google will insert ads so maybe you can earn some cash.  If you own a site or blog, this is like manna from the sky.

As a marketer who relies heavily on Google, I think the ad insertions are actually a decent idea.  This shouldn't get confused with the video ads that get inserted into the content (see the Introducing Video Units for the two ad units). 

What is interesting is how much control do you have on your advertisements when they are placed on this content.  I've often shied away from CGC especially video because I don't know where my ads will get placed.  However, I'm sure Google will tell you if you don't have a problem with content you shouldn't have a problem with the new video content.  Do the content placement reports show the actual site they run on or does it show up as YouTube?  Can I opt out of having my ads placed on a certain video type or a certain video creator?  Don't know yet.

From a content owner, I'm very excited by the video content units.  As a marketer, I'm definitely on board for running ads through it, but as with any content plays the more visibility you have the better you understand your marketing campaigns.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Listen Search Marketing Newbies, Buying A Competitor's Name Is Good Practice

I've been getting a kick out of all the search marketing newbie comments I've seen regarding this National Review Online article called Candidates Bet On Each Other Through Google ads.  Sure the article came out like 2 weeks ago and when I first saw it I thought about making a post, but decided not to.  Pretty much the reason was Christian Ferry, John McCain's deputy campaign manager, answered the critics who think that because we are buying Barack Obama's keyword in Google we "believe in the power of Barack Obama", which couldn't be further from the truth.  Christian said "It's based on what's going in the news cycle [that is] relevant to the 2008 cycle."

Now I won't go into the actual reason behind buying a competitive candidate's name because that's a proprietary strategy and Christian already answered the ridiculous statement for everyone else who has blogged on that story.  Some other idiotic comments I've seen online are "stealing votes", "taking away donations", "stealing web traffic", and etc all which of course are blatantly wrong and show a level of search marketing experience  just one step above someone that just figured out there is a site called Google.  So using an example back from my telecommunication days, let's see why it makes sense to buy competitor's names.

1. Search engines according to Wikipedia is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.
2. So, if someone is typing MCI into Google that means that a) they don't know the URL b) they are obviously interested in researching information on MCI
3. If someone is looking for information on MCI, why wouldn't AT&T want to have an ad pop-up on the side?  That's called relevancy people and maybe it isn't as relevant as returning an MCI ad, but it is pretty damn close.
4. I've found in the telecommunications world that buying your brand name, your competitive brand name, and the service you offer are the order of relevancy you'd want to buy accordingly on.
5. That's why companies fought to protect their trademarked brand names from having competitors buy their name to have ads running next to it.

That's just simple search marketing 101 and it works when you buy your competitor's name; that's why every marketer would do it if they were allowed to do it.  People are looking for information and you'd like them to know that you have a product that might meet their needs.   That's it.  Simple.  Not hard and I'm not writing that's why we are buying those competitive keywords, but I just thought all you wanna be search marketers should know that it doesn't mean we think someone is worthy or we believe in their power or we are trying to steal traffic.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How Reliable Is Google's Content Network?

That's something that I keep wondering to myself now and wondering if any of you readers have the same concerns.  Before I jump in with the some comments, let me just state upfront that I love Google from a marketing as well as a personal level and I firmly believe that every marketer needs to have Google in their advertising mix.  That mix also includes content targeting.

It used to be that you wanted to avoid content because you had no visibility unless you used a bid manager and most of your fraud probably originated there.  Now more and more clients are seeing good results now, plus as Google will point out to you, their network reaches about 80% of the internet.  So besides getting great reach, you also get a tremendous amount of flexibility to get your price via their auction system as well as shifting inventory around from publisher to publisher if you use their site targeting platform.  (site targeting is when you hand select sites but for this you pay on a CPM basis for now).

So for a tremendous amount of my clients I recommend buying sites through Google even if it is via site targeting.  You see unlike going direct to a publisher you can advertise on their site and then move the inventory around among publishers with a click of a button.  However, I wonder how much the sites like that flexibility?

I've run into quite a number of sales execs lately that are starting to get concerned about the inventory going through Google and quite a number of them have said they are going to recommend shutting it off.  While I think this behavior is a little self-serving, what's a sales guy to do when Google does a better job of selling inventory? Even though Google is probably not trying to get rid of your sales force, you have to start to wonder if sites get upset when you don't go direct to their sales team.

The other aspect of content that is very interesting is how good is the inventory you are receiving.  If you are just going the content targeting route and letting Google select your sites, you probably are less concerned where it appears on the page or whether it is a text, display, or video ad.  However, if you are paying on a CPM basis even if it is low, you want better positions and more display/video impressions.  One of my biggest pet peeves is paying a $3 CPM for a text ad.

I wonder how much pressure a sales team is under if their advertiser's are going through Google?  Are they getting credit for those sales?  If not, I wonder how long it takes for a good sales executive to get those campaigns shut off or at least shut off for clients that they consider A-list.  It used to be back in the day, you couldn't run some text ads placement on a site unless you advertised with directly with a site.  I wonder if we're going back to the future on that one soon.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

McCain's Online Ads Continues to Lead All Presidential Candidates in July

Nielsen Net Ratings published a report that looks at the Presidential candidate's online activities; you can find the report on this link.  MediaPost had a nice summary and focused mostly on online website visits, but yours truly was more interested in the online advertising activity.  And guess what?  John McCain's online advertising is still the biggest and the best out there.

According to Nielsen's report, we were the only ones that ran any display advertising in July, but I find that a little odd since I've seen ads for at least one other candidate.  What I love even more is that we are leading all candidates by almost twice as much in search activity as the next guy proving once again that we have mastered Google and that we rely on our search campaigns to get the word out on John McCain and where he stands on issues.  I wonder why more campaigns don't use search and instead continue to pour money into TV, print, and DM when search is so much more relevant, more cost effective, and quantifiable.  Oh well.

BTW - as you can see from the table, McCain's nearest search competitor had decent impressions in July, but as I wrote the other day, I can not find any Romney search ads any more.  So if you assume the July numbers are reasonably accurate, that's a huge falloff in impressions.  My guess is that they either cut back their spending and max out early in the day or they have some new retooled strategy that minimizes online advertising.  Strange.....

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Yahoo's BlueLithium Is Simply About Expanding Their Content Network

Yesterday Yahoo announced that they are acquiring the 5th largest ad network BlueLithium and of course a lot of the press are digging in deep about what this means for their behavioral targeting ad buys.  Reuters reported that Yahoo buys behavioral ad firm for $300 million and then one of my favorite news/bloggers Kara Swisher reported Day 50: Yahoo takes a $300 million little blue pill that could make consumers even more paranoid.  Reuters wrote in that article, "bolsters Yahoo's existing behavioral ad-targeting efforts with its 250 million-strong base of Yahoo Mail users and Yahoo Travel, an analyst said.  And,  "This really gives us the ability to (deliver) more relevant advertising to consumers not only on the Yahoo network but also off the network," Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo Publisher Network, said in a phone interview."

Me?  Sure the behavioral targeting will happen, but I've always believed Yahoo knows more about your web surfing behavioral than anyone and that includes Google (maybe that won't be the case going forward, but hold that thought).  Yahoo has been tracking your web surfing behavioral for as long as I've been working with them (1998) and I've used them to build responder and cloning models.  They really don't need anyone's help with modeling and targeting, but they do need help with more traffic.  Allow me to explain what I mean by  that using Google as the example.

The reason Google may have better behavioral targeting in the future (ignoring whether they are hiring smarter people which I have no insider information on) is because the majority of searches occur on Google.  They then provide you with all sorts of free goodies like Gmail, spreadsheets, homepage, YouTube, gadgets, maps, etc and etc so that you spend more time on their products allowing them to mine your data.   So, what does Google do with that data?  Well besides  potentially giving you more personalized search, they use your behavioral data to improve their targeting of ads while you are surfing on their content network.  You get it right?  Tons of traffic, more of your valuable time, translates into better data on your behavior and that allows Google to target better ads.  Now, lets look at Google's content network.

Back in the day, I wouldn't have turned content on in fact I would have stressed to you to turn it off.  That's where I found click fraud data, lower conversions, and unless you used a bid manager you had no visibility where those clicks were coming from.  Not any more.  Google has added a lot of tools and visibility so that content can work and that means Yahoo has a problem.

Yahoo's model in the past has been search ads as well display ads on Yahoo's properties; sure Yahoo has a text ad content business but with no visibility.  Google has now moved to be the largest search ad channel bundled with huge reach (80%?) on their content network.  And, as opposed to Yahoo's current model the rates can be as low as your CPC or CPA rate you want to pay.  Yahoo's display model is based on CPMs and on their properties, only. 

That's is until the BlueLithium purchase.  Now Yahoo can start to compete more with Google on the content side of the business and if you add in their past purchase of RightMedia you can see the pieces of the puzzle being put together.  It isn't about getting better at behavioral targeting, it is about extending Yahoo's reach beyond their core properties.

If I had to make a bet, I'd think that Yahoo isn't done yet with buying more networks.  I think they can out maneuver Google by getting even bigger on the display side of the business and that more than makes up for their shortfall on search traffic.  Yahoo needs to get even bigger now...

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Searching for Romney's PPC Ads

I know I have been pretty blunt about people doing a few searches and then drawing conclusions about an advertising spend, but I seriously haven't seen any Mitt Romney search ads in quite a long time.  Perhaps they cut back on their spend and are now hitting a maximum budget early in the morning or the reverse  which is they can't spend enough while people hit their search results.  Maybe they are revamping their campaign and taking a pause, but it seems very odd to me.  It isn't like they don't have the money since he loans his campaign money from his treasure chest.  Anyone else notice this?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

At Least I Have A Few Friends Left at Yahoo

Wow, the change in management at Yahoo continues.  It makes you wonder what they are thinking when it comes to who is responsible for the problems that ails them

The NY Times article called Yahoo's New President Oversees a Shakeup offered some insights into the new team, but the two that were much more informative were found over at BoomTown called Hey Kids! Let's Put On a Yahoo Reorg and More Reorg Fun:  Sue Decker's Entire Memo to Yahoo.  If you are short on time just focus on the BoomTown posts because Kara really nails it and the memo she posted is just plain business reorg speak; the kind I used to read at AT&T that would make you ask your boss "now, who do we report to?"  The biggest news of course was that Greg Coleman is leaving which means another Yahoo Exec is out the door. BTW - Kara added another post about translating Sue Decker's company wide memo.

I have to be blunt, I just don't get the big changes on the sales side except of course that someone needs to take the blame so it might as well be the sales team.  I've always believed and still believe based on my experience that the Yahoo Sales and Account team is top notch.  The problem isn't that they don't know how to sell, it is probably the product they are trying to sell and a lot of that has to do with perception in the marketplace. 

Let's say you are putting a marketing plan together to sell, oh I don't know, mutual funds to consumers.  You don't have much money but have about $100K for a month.  What do you do?

1. First stop is search, right?  And you are going to go where?  Google.  Why?  Well they have 55% or so in search share.  Is that the Yahoo Sales team's fault?  No.  That's due to other Yahoo Executives who sat around and made no updates to the Overture platform and watched Google take over.  Right now if you are like me, you see Google dominating, MSN converting with little traffic, and Yahoo somewhere in between.
2. So when you sit down with Google and tell them you have like $30K to spend in a month you get some attention from their Finance sales team, which by the way, happens to be awesome (hi Chris Rippey).   Google will provide you with plenty of support for your PPC campaign, but also upsell you on using their content network to run banner/video ads, radio ads, and of course hand selecting sites based on your target market.  Google will tell you that you can reach like 80% of the internet through them.  Throw in Google analytics and an easy to use platform, and bang you start thinking about sending over $50K to them. 
3. Next, you call Yahoo's Finance team and as you know from reading my posts, they are the prime online real estate for this target market.  That sales team is also pretty awesome (hi Ann Reilly) and you get a great plan for reaching your customers with behavioral targeting unmatched as well as content; however, that is all within Yahoo's portal.  Before you forget, they also bring in their search team but now you have to balance how much you are spending there versus Google; my guess is about 25%.
4. When you dig a little deeper, you realize that unlike Google you can't run display or video ads through Yahoo's content network and also unlike Google you have no clue where your ads are running unless you pay to use a 3rd party bid management solution.  Is that the Yahoo sales team's fault?  Don't you think it would be easier to compete with Google if they matched the creative and visibility?
5. Finally you want to take advantage of all of that social marketing activity, but you don't know where to go.  So you call Google and Yahoo.   What you find out via Google is that you can use their content network to run ads on specific blogs and Yahoo goes over Yahoo Groups which unfortunately for you, you've never even seen a post there so you have no clue what it is about.  Yahoo does have Yahoo Answers which is an awesome product and one you really want to take advantage of.

For me Yahoo's problems are not around sales/the sales team but in unique product offerings and support tools.  Yahoo Finance, News, Answers, and their home page are truly great products and user experiences that can easily be sold.  Google will tell you that you don't need to go anywhere else because they can provide everything to you that you need for your online campaign.  Not only that, it is easy to use and very cost effective. 

When you dig a little deeper,  Google's strategy to use their content network and search results to deliver actions for you that are for the most part transparent is a huge problem for Yahoo.  For little money per day and a couple of banner ads that you can pay an intern to build, you can have ads running on major sites with simple tools that gives you the visibility you need to evaluate your campaign.  That's a product problem for Yahoo that hampers sales, not the other way around.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

What Happens When You Mix Google, a Dwarf, and a Vacuum Cleaner?

Thanks to my friend Ryan, he turned me on to popurls a few months back and when I need a break I check it out (sadly I don't have a blogging career).  In the middle of the day this article called Dwarf's <insert term for male private part> stuck to vacuum cleaner was one of the top Diggs of the day.  Basically Captain Dean the Demon Dwarf was supposed to appear in a circus with a vacuum cleaner attached to his member, but he had some problems with glue and the vacuum and had to be taken to a hospital (honest Dr, this was part of my act). BTW - why do these crazy things always happen in England.  Anyway the article is funny, but what really makes it are the Google ads found at the bottom of the page.  See this screen shot.

Now, you readers know how much I love Google and I am starting to grow to love the reach and targeting abilities in their content networking, but this is too funny.  Serving up vacuum cleaner parts ads tied to the content in this article is really funny.  On a somewhat serious note, Google actually did a decent job matching 2 out of the 3 ads to the content in the article (guy has problems with his vacuum cleaner breaking down); what I don't understand is how Google decided to map a newspaper print quote ad to the article. 

Anyway, funny stuff and if my Google friends keep funniest content matches this has to be near one of the best.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

I Like Being Quoted in Wired Regarding Mastering Google

I don't know if you read Wired, but I was quoted pretty heavily in the article called Which Presidents Have Mastered Google?   You can read the article yourself, but what I liked about the article was that Sarah used a variety of sources and searches to show who really understands search marketing; unlike the AdAge article that I ripped on a few days ago which didn't reference the following sources.  Wired pulled in the iCrossing Study, Apogee Web Consulting's Richard Ball, Peter Greenberger from Google, some searches on her own, and quotes from ME.

I do firmly believe that the real game in Google for politicians is to not only buy versions of the candidate's name but to focus on issue words and content targeting.  The only issue with issue targeting (did that on purpose) is that it takes some time to see a return on your investment.  And, in order to be more efficient you need to really focus on how Google charges for clicks and hone your marketing strategy.  I can't go into details, but believe me we have it down to a science and that's because I've been running search marketing campaigns for a LONNNNGGGGG time.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric