RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Displaying Search’ Category

Getting Full Value For Your Inventory: A Buyer's Perspective

"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Displaying SearchToday's column is written by Tim Ogilvie, CEO of AdBuyer.com, a demand-side optimization platform.

Jonathan Mendez wrote a good post on his blog several months ago entitled “The True Media Value Delta”.

In that post, he shared a highly profitable display campaign where an education advertiserwas paying only 25% of the “true value” to the publisher. They were pocketing the rest as profit while the publisher was getting rooked.

But there’s something missing from this equation. Are advertisers truly getting a free ride with display advertising, making 75% margins on their buys as standard fare? In an auction-driven marketplace with lots of arbitrageurs ready to fill gaps, why haven’t prices risen in the same way they have in the search marketplace?

The answer lies in the cost of exploration. Jonathan’s example is like staring at a gushing oil well and concluding that the wildcatter was printing money.  A fuller picture would reveal a trail of dry holes in the ground that didn’t yield any oil. Each failed experiment costs money but doesn’t generate any future profit. The burden falls on the gushers to make up for these losses.

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Finding the Right Fit for Attribution

Displaying Search"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today's column is written by Nick Talbert, Director of Product Marketing, Eyeblaster, a campaign management and advertising technology company.

Search and display budgets decisions made within their silos will only yield non-scalable results. Attribution decisions need to be channel agnostic and these decisions must follow consumer behavior for the category of products.

For instance, for someone with rather large feet, finding shoes is often a chore so I tend to avoid shopping for shoes until absolutely necessary. While browsing the web, I happened to see a particularly engaging ad from Zappos.com about sneakers. So, I ventured to Zappos.com (without clicking on the ad) to casually look around. I moved from page to page within the site, exploring options to adorn my feet and in the end, I simply ran out of time due to prior engagements. However, my newly attained desire for shoes still sat unquenched and it didn’t dissipate once I left the site.

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We Need To Simplify

"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Displaying SearchToday's column is written by Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency.

Have you stopped and looked at our portion of the industry lately? Have you seen how confusing it really is? Imagine you are a paid search media manager with a few years experience, you are good at what you do and you control sizable budgets for your clients. You get the call that says, 'hey, we want to do some display'......

The search marketer is going to do one of 3 things.

First, if they work for a full-service agency they are going to bring in their display colleagues. But if they don't, they are going to either say they don't offer display, or they are going to shoot for what's familiar to them.

The world a search marketer lives in is the engines + data + bidding + reporting; that's what they know and that's what they are comfortable with. It's about quantifiable evidence and near real-time optimization decisions. They spend their lives competing in auctions and their creative is nearly all text based.

As a display industry we talk a great game when it comes to exchanges and DSPs. We talk between ourselves about how display now works like search, and how display has become an auction based RTB environment. We pull in data from vendors like BlueKai, we make bids on platforms like MediaMath, Triggit or DataXu (to name just 3 of the ever growing number of 17 DSPs I have listed to date), we overlay the social graph from people like Media6Degrees and look to gain value from search intent data any which way we can. We produce reports by the dozen that say display + search is a 1+1=3 model. And we have completely lost sight of how to actually define a network vs an exchange given most are acting as both.

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It's Not All About Data

"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Displaying SearchToday's column is written by Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency.

A Fortune 100 retailer client recently told me that he has never witnessed so much change in display media than he has seen in the last year. And for those marketers who have been paying attention, this is a very true statement.

With the rise of the exchanges, the economic decline and a subsequent push to ROI, an increasing number of 3rd party data providers and a raft of new technologies such as social targeting, dynamic creative, dynamic landing pages, DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) and more, it is no surprise this is happening.

And the common thread that weaves these together is an increasing reliance on data.

Search marketers clearly understand data-driven marketing and know that it is a critical component in achieving an ROI goal for a brand. Search and analytics data has helped define media programs for some time, and new techniques even use the data of social connectivity to identify new audiences for clients. Data is essential to this evolution in media.

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The Cross Channel Influence on Conversions

Displaying Search"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today's column is written by Suman Basetty, Director of Product Management at Efficient Frontier, an online performance marketing company.

Sophisticated online marketers want to know how their display and search ad spend are influencing each other, their conversion rates and, most importantly, understand how to distribute their ad spend across these channels to maximize returns.  In order to answer these questions, marketers need two things:

  1. A centralized tracking system across both search and display.
  2. The ability to apply the right attribution model and optimize across both channels.

Tracking systems like Atlas and DART to some extent tried to solve the first problem.  However, in order to solve the second issue, marketers need the ability to bid their display ads up or down (in conjunction with their search ads) based on how the ads are directly and indirectly affecting the conversions.

With the recent surge of display inventory becoming available in biddable form (at impression level in many cases) optimization across search and display can now happen.

The graph below shows an example of distribution of registrations to an advertiser’s website from multiple channels and illustrating the number of registrations with prior search and display ad interactions.

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Make Your Advertising A Cost Of Sales

Displaying Search"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today's column is written by Tim Ogilvie, CEO of AdBuyer.com, a demand-side optimization platform.

“We sell. Or else.” -- David Ogilvy

The best thing a marketer can do for their business and their career is to transform their advertising expense to a Cost of Sales.

This isn’t just accounting jargon. There are only two ways to improve profit: increase revenues or reduce expenses. You will make more money, as a business and as an individual, if you’re on the right side of this equation. It’s why salespeople are usually the highest paid employees. Revenue creation gets rewarded. Expenses get outsourced to Bangalore.

Businesses need raw materials to create revenue. Every time a product is sold, the cost of the raw materials that is directly associated with that sale is called the Cost of Sales. Indirect expenses – like accounting and legal fees – are needed to run the business, but are only loosely connected to the top line. Advertising has historically been one of these expenses: fuzzily connected to results and often the first thing to get chopped in a recession. But internet marketing has changed the game, allowing virtually every advertiser to connect advertising dollars directly to revenue creation.

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Media Exchanges Are Creating A New World For Search Marketers

"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Displaying SearchToday's column is written by Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency.

The average search marketer doesn't rate display very highly. They operate in a very ROI-orientated world based on hard facts and close to 100% accountability. They see display as fluff, and place little credit on what they see as a view-thru-reliant world lacking in the same level of accountability that they are held to. But the increasing awareness of newer buying models created by the exchanges is making search marketers reassess.

Their brand clients are adding to this pressure; the ongoing macro-economic situation has forced brands to look hard at how they invest in digital; ROI goals are King, branding goals less so. SEM budgets have been the big winner from this situation, but can only continue to be so up to a point. As a full service digital agency that specializes in serving fortune 500 brands, iCrossing has long standing SEM programs that have reached their maximum spend level (whilst still maintaining an ROI goal). And so when the client calls and says they have more budget, where is that money to go?

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Putting Display in Search Terms

"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today's column is written by Justin Merickel, VP of New Product Development and Marketing at Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing solutions company.

Displaying SearchThe other day a group of us at Efficient Frontier gathered in a conference room to discuss display optimization. We met to dig into the comparative ROI for various audience segments, including site-driven retargeting and 3rd-party purchased segments. One of our lead engineers developed an interesting analogy that mapped audience targets to search term types. The search term to audience segment analogy is an interesting way to think about relevance and tactically design portfolios of targets for display campaigns.

Before jumping into display, let me set up the analogy by talking about term types in search. We tend to think about search terms in three buckets: head, torso, and tail. Head terms have mass amounts of queries but are less specific in query intent, torso terms have decent query volume and some specificity in intent, while tail terms tend to have little volume but have very clear intent. Additionally, in search marketing, we typically isolate brand terms into their own category.
With that in mind, the display to search analogy goes like this: retargeting is like search brand terms, 3rd party data buys are like search torso and tail terms, and site or content targeting is most like search head terms. Let me play it through with you in more detail.

Site retargeting typically delivers strong ROI but is limited in scale. The only value question clients ask is what percentage of retargeting conversions would have occurred without the influence of ads. Luckily, the question of incremental value for retargeting is a fairly straightforward one to address with testing.

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Roadmapping The Ad Exchange For Search Marketers

Displaying Search"Displaying Search" is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today's column is written by Tim Ogilvie, CEO of AdBuyer.com, a demand-side optimization platform.

Many search marketers want to expand into the display ad exchanges but aren’t sure where to get started. Auction-based pricing looks familiar, but there is a dizzying array of targeting options and vendors. We’ve developed a three-phase “roadmap” for these search clients, allowing them to get some early wins while laying the foundation for significant scale.

Phase One: Launch & optimize a re-marketing campaign.

Re-marketing is a great opportunity for an early win. The audience is tightly defined and represents your lowest hanging fruit: customers that have already expressed interest in your products. Use this sandbox to understand the nuances of buying on each of the exchanges, measure and optimize your creative assets, and determine the pricing that will meet your performance goals.

If you’re not reaching your goals with re-marketing, don’t move on to Phase Two. Continue to improve your creative and landing pages, or adjust your goals. But if you can’t make it make it profitable here, don’t try to make it up on volume.

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