Ad Spend Consolidation

When I searched for “desktop” on Yahoo! I noticed the following two ads in top section position 1 and 3.

“HP Desktop with Intel® Technology
www.hp.com Get free shipping and an all-in-one printer with select HP desktops.”

and

“Desktop Computers from the HP Home Store
www.hpshopping.com Shop HP desktops from $249 and save up to $150 in rebates from HP.”

The first one took me to the page

http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/computers.html?jumpid=ex_hphqglobal_coreSEM/computing

while the second one took me to

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/store_access.do?template_type=landing&landing=desktops&aoid=33323&kw=desktops

It appears, the main HP guys and the shopping division of HP guys are not collaborating and so bidding for the same keywords which could inturn unnecessarily increase the cost.

Whether my above observation specific to HP is true or not, the main question is, large organizations with several divisions responsible for promoting different LOBs may end up spending money on ads individually unless there is a centralized policy. This is no different from the classic Purchasing Spend Consolidation. Instead of goods or services it’s ads (another way to look at it is the keyword ads as a service).

Your ad should promote your site, not store.yahoo.com

Searching for Gerber on Yahoo! gave me the ad

“Gerber Knives 25-51% off of List
Free shipping on over $99. Select from the full line of Gerber…
store.yahoo.com”

Clicking the ad took me to

http://store.irawoodinc.com/geleblcoso.html

So, why not use irawoodinc.com? It’s all about building the brand. But ofcourse, for people who prefer to shop only from known/popular websites, using store.yahoo.com may be useful. Even in that case, it is probably better to use irawoodinc.com/yahoostore or something like that.

I think Yahoo should start displaying ads from Yahoo! store customers with a different look just like how Google does for it’s checkout customers. It’s probably just a matter of time.

Keyword Ad Alternatives

While certainly Google and Yahoo! (Overture) popularized keyword ads (text ads), this industry is still going to expand with various different business ideas. I just came
across today into Adbrite which matches content publishers with advertisers.

Ads cost cents. What about advertising cent ads?

What if you have a product or service that only costs a few cents (ofcourse you make it up by volume or by monthly subscription)? Sometimes, the most simple things end up being complicated.

When I searched for “international phone calls”, I saw an ad like

“International Call
Many countries below 5¢/min.
Sign-up and get 473 free minutes
www.KeepDialing.com”

How hard could it be to create such an ad? Not much, till I reached 5. The next letter, ¢, doesn’t exist on my keyboard! I have seen a lot of other ads, where people explicitly spelled out “cents”. But I think showing it using ¢ is much cooler. Anyway, all I had to do was search on the web and then copy and paste it! For those that are writing computer programs, the utf8 code for cents symbol is \u00a2

Coverage by Time vs by Channel

With limited ad spending dollars, one has to carefully decide what’s best for them. Once the decision to bid for a word for a particular price has been decided, the remaining thing to decide is to how much money to spend per day. For an ad budget that’s fixed, the higher the bid for the words, the fewer PPCs per day, which inturn decides the coverage of the ad for each day.

I think there are two possible coverages. One is the number of times to get an ad displayed per day. The other is the number of various sites to get the ad displayed.
In other words, you can think of this as advertising always on CNN but many times a day vs displaying the Ad on CNN, Fox, SciFi, Oxygen and a bunch of other channels but less frequently. Each may have it’s own advantages, but at the end it depends on the target audience. TV channels are more targeted towards a certain type of audience (those who like watching Sports, News, Food Network etc). But, it’s different with Online Advertisement. Whether a person is a sports guy or a news guy, they both could go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN. There is no way to simply segment the search audience by the Search Engine. So, in the absence of such segmentation, it may be worth while to divide the dollars across multiple channels.

Your Ad may be getting truncated!

Continuing on my observations of Ads, I noticed that Yahoo! truncates the text of the ads displayed on the side. So, unless you are lucky enough to be able to bid for the first two side spots, which are also displayed on the bottom of the page, be ready to see your ad text truncated. Searching for sunglasses showed the following on the side ad

“Sunglasses at EyeSave.com – Save 60%
Great prices on authentic brand name sunglasses: Ray-Ban, Bolle,…
www.eyesave.com”

while the same ad displayed at the bottom of the page read

“Sunglasses at EyeSave.com – Save 60%
www.eyesave.com Great prices on authentic brand name sunglasses: Ray-Ban, Bolle, Serengeti, Maui Jim, Gucci, Gargoyles, Smith and more.”

As can be seen, the side ad is truncated while the bottom ad shows in full.

So, it’s important to keep the text of the ad limited to just a few words (not too few, but not too long). Next, have the key message at the begining and the rest of the space for any add-on message.

Case sensitivity in Ads

Just realized that Google allows case senstitive display Urls in their ads while Yahoo! and MSN don’t seam to. Searching for “gold chain” shows Goldspeed.com as the display url for Google, www.goldspeed.com for Yahoo! and goldspeed.com for MSN.

Allowing case sensitive display URLs will let the advertisers reinforce their brand name. For example, SHOP.COM and not shop.com

Hit the GYM and Increase Online Traffic

In my previous post I briefly talked about adverting on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. And there are atleast 500+ more PPC services at payperclicksearchengines.com

So, how to choose where to put the dollars? Is it better to advertise in one site? Two sites? 500 sites? The key to that lies in the fact that roughly 80% of the search traffic goes to just 3 web sites as per

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451

So, just concentrating on the top 3 websites, namely G(oogle), Y(ahoo!) and M(SN), it’s possible to reach out 80% of the search audience.

Advertising on Google, Yahoo! and MSN

With the huge success of keyword based advertising on Google, Yahoo (through acquiring Overture) and MSN also started doing the same.

Google calls their ads as “Sponsored Links”
Yahoo calls their ads as “SPONSOR RESULTS”
MSN calls their ads as “SPONSORED SITES”

Google displays ads at the top of the search results and at the side.
Yahoo displays the ads at the top, side and repeats few of the side ads ad the bottom of the page.
MSN displays the ads at the top and side.

The ads displayed at the top are like premium ads. They are located very strategically. Those placed on the side, again gets higher attention based on their relative position from top to bottom.
The more strategic position the ad is in, the higher the premium.

One thing interesting I noticed with MSN however is, when I searched for “computer desk”, it displayed two ads for the same company on the side. The first ad was

“Discount Computer Desks
Shop now and save up to 60% on top brand name computer desks.
www.furniturebuzz.com”

and the 3rd ad is the same! In case of another search, eBay showed up second and third with two different ads!

So, it’s not really clear if MSN is trying to do a favor to provide better coverage or maximize their profits. Or is it simply a bug? Or an option.

Paypal vs Google Checkout vs Yahoo! Stores

Paypal’s transaction fee as listed here
is definitely much higher compared to Google Checkout’s fee listed here.

While PayPal has several years of lead time, the thing that would be working in favor of Google is the advertisement. For Google Checkout enabled sites, the ads will be marked with a cute little shopping cart (which surprisingly is entirely html code and not an image!). Given that identity theft, security and other concerns prevent consumers from ordering from any smaller websites, this is a way for these stores to explicitly tell their audience that they have a big partner working for them! Infact, I bought on Yahoo! Stores a few times because the product offering was cheaper than at other online stores and because I was giving my payment information to Yahoo! and not some smaller company.

First and foremost PayPal needs to reduce it’s transaction fee lower to make sure not to let Google take share away from it. But a 33% reduction (from 3% to 2%) is quite significant and could have a bigger impact to eBay’s revenues.

One reason why Google had to enter into this market is also the fact that they have to expand beyond PPC (Pay Per Click) to PPA (Pay Per Action) and that can be better tracked for transactions performed through Google Checkout.

While Yahoo! provided people to create stores online and offer payment service, Google is using adverting as a vehicle to promote the payment service.