Beta Testing Adwords Demographic Bidding

February 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords, Search Engine Marketing

Do you know your customer demographics? If so then you could benefit from Google’s new Demographic Bidding campaign setting. Google began beta testing demographic bidding at end of January.

What exactly is the demographic bidding?

Demographic bidding is a way to choose your audience by age and gender. If you want your ads to reach women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help.

Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. For sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google AdSense can display your AdWords ads to the demographic groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to groups you don’t want to reach. You also can bid more for your preferred demographic groups.

Some Google content network sites offer demographic bidding, but many don’t. Your campaign is likely to have a mix of sites that do and do not offer demographic bidding.

How can you optimize your campaigns?

Here are some typical ways that advertisers use demographic bidding reports to optimize their accounts. Remember that increasing your bid for a demographic will likely increase the frequency with which that particular demographic sees your message. Generally, the greater the increase in the bid, the greater the increase in traffic. We recommend that you run each campaign for at least a week and check the data provided by the demographic bidding report before enabling bid modifiers or restricts.

Increase bids for groups that provide good value. If your conversion rate for men is four times higher than it is for women, you may want to bid more for those male viewers. Increasing your bid should make your ad appear more often to that audience. Additionally, if reaching a particular segment is very important for your campaign, raise your bids to increase the frequency with which that segment is seeing your message. To raise your bids this way, click the ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Make Adjustments’ column of the appropriate age or gender row. You can bid up to “bid + 500%” for any one demographic group.

Hide ads from groups with significant traffic and poor value. If your conversion rate is very low for the 18-24 age range, and they account for 50% or more of your traffic, you might use the ‘Make Adjustments’ feature to restrict your ads from appearing to that group.

As with all AdWords features, we encourage you to experiment, track results (with conversion tracking, if possible), and then make changes based on what you learn. The demographic bidding report is one more way to focus your ad spending on the users that give you the very best results.

Here are some screen shots of the new feature.

Here is what it looks like after you have made your demographic choices. Notice the color match bids that give you a total additional percentage you want to bid for that demographic.

I will update this post as results start coming in. I do expect to see an improvement in some of my clients campaigns especially those that know what their customer demographics are.

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Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion | U.S. | Reuters

February 1, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion | U.S. | Reuters

Look out Google:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Technology giant Microsoft Corp said on Friday that it had offered to acquire Internet media company Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion in cash and stock.

Microsoft said it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above the company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.

“We have great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

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Hearst-Argyle Television and Google Agree on Reseller Agreement

November 29, 2007 at 10:31 am · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords, Search Engine Marketing

Hearst-Argyle Television and Google Strike Reseller Agreement

This deal as of yet hasn’t caught a lot of peoples attention. It did catch mine though and I expect to see a lot more deals in 2008. In order for Google to expand it’s reach as fast as the predicted local search spending is expected to grow then it is going to have to rely on resellers to connect local companies that do not have the manpower, skills or time required to advertise online.

The press release points out:

“Boston, MA-based research firm Yankee Group recently projected that local search and Internet ad spending will grow from $1.9 billion this year to $9.3 billion in 2010. According to research by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc., more than 50% of U.S. small businesses believe they can use the Internet for sales, marketing and customer support.”

And to think I am busy now… 9.3 billion in two years is mind boggling considering the amount of work that is required to reach your market effectively using PPC advertising. Running a PPC campaign is not a set it and forget process. You have to do just as much leg work as you do with any other type of advertising sometimes more. But the payoff (ROI) can be huge if you do it correctly.

A lot of accounts that I see waste a lot of ad spend by not managing the accounts correctly. Bidding on terms that they think are relevant when there in fact they hardly ever bring in a conversion. I always take the position of let’s see what is working now and improve upon it. That gives me an idea of the campaign is performing and what should or shouldn’t be looked at in the clients other campaigns.

Back to the press release. Of the 2010 projected spending over 25% of that will be wasted. Yes you read correctly, WASTED. Why ? Simply too fast of growth to keep up with the learning process in order to stay competitive. Especially when you take Google’s ad quality score algorithms that seem to be changing on a monthly basis now. Example, one client I have just witnessed his campaign minimum bids increase and his conversion rates drop drastically. Why? It seems Google didn’t like the landing page we were using. Even though it had a good CTR ratio, and excellent conversion ratio. We used this page for several months after having the exact same problems just a couple of months earlier. We are now faced with having to make new landing pages again for the third time in six months. The saddest part is every time we abide and make the necessary changes we are forced to do it again.

To get back to my point, do you think that all these new small businesses that are not web savvy (remember I have been online marketing for 10 years) are going to be able to keep up? That is why I know a VERY LARGE percentage of that projected growth will be wasted. It simply isn’t feasible.

There is a silver lining though. Those that do not have their campaigns fine tuned will still see a better ROI than what they get with traditional advertising. I just hate to see all that money go down the drain on poor performing campaigns.

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Pharmaceutical Marketers to Spend $2.2B on Online Ads in 2011

September 19, 2007 at 7:53 am · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

Pharmaceutical Marketers to Spend $2.2B on Online Ads in 2011 - MarketingVOX

Online advertising spending by the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry will reach $975 million in 2007 - a gain of 19 percent over 2006 - and surpass the $1 billion mark in 2008, or a gain of 22 percent year over year, according to eMarketer, reports MarketingCharts.

The pharmaceutical category will account for 4.5 percent of the total US online ad spending in 2007, down from 4.9 percent in 2006, according to the forecast; but by 2011 the category is forecast to reach $2.2 billion and account for 5 percent of US online ad spending.

This begs the question, exactly which pharmas spend the most in regards to online marketing? Is it all Viagra or are other durgs seeing a good ROI online?

Hop on over to MarketingVox for the complete story.

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