Adwords
Google Algorithm Busts Chinese Car Theft Ring Entirely by Accident
Source: http://gizmodo.com/google-algorithm-busts-chinese-car-theft-ring-entirely-895334541
Every sci-fi movie about inventions rising up to take over the world is built upon one unchangeable seed crystal: the moment when the technology does something its inventors never predicted. As The Verge reports, that’s exactly what happened to Google engineers in 2010, with a truth-and-justice twist — Google’s AdWords software exposed a Chinese car theft scam.
10 valuable Google Analytics custom reports
Source: http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/62271-10-valuable-google-analytics-custom-reports-2
Track the effect of (not provided)
Google’s decision to encrypt search referral data means that many sites now have a lot less to work with when tracking SEO keywords, and Econsultancy is no different.
In fact, as with other IT and tech related sites, we have been hit harder than others, to the extent that more than 40% of our organic search referrals are (not provided).
The rise of (not provided) on Econsultancy.
With this encryption spreading to Firefox and iOS6, this trend is set to continue.
Thanks to Avinash Kaushik’s custom report, you can moan about the impact to other marketers, backed up by accurate data.
Google https Change Impact
Time of day report
This one comes from Dan Barker, who answered my Twitter question about tracking posts by publish time with a fully formed custom report, thus saving me loads of time.
Using this you can see which days of the week are most popular, and use the data to experiment with your publishing schedule:
GA time of day report
Time of day report for ecommerce
This one also comes from Dan Barker, and does much the same as the previous custom report, but is aimed at ecommerce sites.
It shows transaction metrics on top of the traffic stats by time of day and day of week.
Time and ecommerce report
Better AdWords
This report was suggested by Brian Clifton in the Google+ discussion on this post. I’ve added this to replace the Google Images traffic report, which doesn’t work.
This combines Adwords acquisition data with revenue data under one roof, and saves you going back and forth between different reports.
Better Adwords report
Keyword analysis
This report looks at your most popular keywords (minus the ones that Google isn’t telling you about) and shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time.
Other tabs also show engagement and revenue metrics.
Keyword analysis report
Non-branded keywords
This report strips out the branded keywords and shows visits, goal completions and revenue.
You’ll need to go in and edit the report to exclude your own branded keywords. In this case, I’ve excluded ‘econsultancy’ but I should also remove the various spellings and hyphenated versions:
Non-branded keyword report
Browser report
This report shows how different browsers are working for your site in terms of visits, revenue, bounce rates and purchases.
It’s also a good way of picking up potential problems. If bounce rates are especially high for one kind of browser there may be an issue with the way your site looks in Internet Explorer, Safari etc.
Browser report
Should I go mobile?
This one is from Lens 10, and aims to answer the question above.
You can judge from metrics such as pages per visit and goal completion rate and decide whether a mobile site is ready. The answer is very probably yes for most sites.
Should I go mobile? report
Referring sites report
Thanks to Anna Lewis from Koozai for this one, which shows referring sites alongside goal completions and conversion rates.
Referring sites report
Link analysis report
This one, from SEObook, helps you to see which of your inbound links are sending the most valuable traffic, showing visits, goal completions and more.
Link analysis report
Do you have any other useful custom reports to share? Please let us know below…
This is why Google’s profit margins are going down
Google Just Created A Gigantic New Mobile Ad Marketplace (GOOG)
Google has integrated AdMob, its mobile advertising service, into AdWords so that anyone buying web ads through AdWords can now also buy them on mobile devices served by AdMob, according to Jonathan Alferness, Google’s director of product management/mobile ads.
The move essentially turns the web and mobile ad markets into the same, massive market. It adds 350 million mobile devices and 300,000 mobile apps to the AdWords universe, on all types of devices. Previously, AdWords reached 2 million web sites accessible by computers.
The move comes hours after Facebook did something similar—providing turnkey access to mobile and desktop, display and news feeds ads through its ads API. Taken together, it appears that Google and Facebook envision the web and mobile ad marketplaces eventually fusing into a relatively seamless whole.
Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, told Ad Age he believes that the AdWords/AdMob conjunction will scale up the mobile market dramatically by applying Google’s main ad revenue engine to handheld device platforms.
On mobile, available inventory has thus far outmatched the demand for ads against it, depressing prices dramatically (especially at Google). A new influx of mobile advertisers from AdMob might raise mobile prices, but by directly pitting web ad inventory against mobile inventory it could also lead to lower average prices across the board.
Please follow Advertising on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
On your mark, get set, GOMC!
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-your-mark-get-set-gomc.html
Professor registration for the 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) is now open.
GOMC is a global online marketing competition open to professors and their students in any higher education institution. Professors sign up for the contest and then serve as guides and mentors to their student participants throughout the competition. Over the course of three weeks, student teams are tasked with developing and running a successful online advertising campaign for real businesses or nonprofit organizations using Google AdWords. In the process, they sharpen their advertising, consulting and data analysis skills. (Note: student registration will open on January 31, 2012 and students can only enter if their professors have signed up already and must sign up under their own professors).
After running their online advertising campaign for three weeks, students summarize their experiences in campaign reports, which they submit online. Based on the performance of the campaigns and the quality of the reports, Googlers on the GOMC team and a panel of independent academics select the winning teams.
The global winners and their professor will receive a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The regional winners (and their professor) will win a trip to local Google offices, and the social impact award winners will be able to make donations to nonprofit organizations that were part of the GOMC competition.
Last year’s challenge had 50,000 participants representing 100 countries, and this year we expect even more. For more information, visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge. Professors, here is a chance to help your students sharpen their marketing skills and make a global impact!
Posted by AJ Pascua, GOMC Team
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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
Google Blimp Ads! Awesome!!! Google Adwords On A Giant Screen
launches in May!! gotta get some before they are gone – click here to sign up http://www.google.com/adwords/blimpads/
talk about awesome branding opportunity
large advertising for small text ads
It is April 1, 2011, folks
Google is also hiring autocompleters – sign up right away
Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks
Summary
Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)
Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)
Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)
Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.
Comparison of click-through rates for search ads versus display ads
As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.
I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.
http://apps.facebook.com/netflixr/
- visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix
http://apps.facebook.com/musicsamplr/
- visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/
- create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/visualfriends/
- visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)
http://apps.facebook.com/myfavethings/
- social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want
But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.
What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).
detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads
Ideas for Facebook
In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.
1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 – displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.
2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.
3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories - when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.
4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.
Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?
By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.
Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud
Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”
“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/
Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?
Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising
Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/
Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful
April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm
Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.
First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:
This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.
Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:
Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.
The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:
Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.
From AllFacebook:
Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.
And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:
Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.
Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.
Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?
We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.
CCA – cost of customer acquisition
how do we judge the relative merit and effectiveness of different types of advertising? By finding a common parameter that can be used to compare “apples to apples.” We argue that cost of customer acquisition is a great candidate for such a parameter.
For example, if television advertising cost $50 million to produce and air, and 1,000 people came to the acquisition website, and 10 people applied for and received credit cards then the CCA — cost of customer acquisition would be $5 million ($50 million / 10 people who got the credit card). Of course television advertisers would claim that the “impressions” from TV would have “branded” millions more people and they would eventually get a credit card from the company. That’s possible. But for the purposes of this exercise, if there is no absolute end-to-end tracking, we don’t count it. Because, for example, many other possible scenarios can also occur, like the person saw this ad for a credit card but ended up getting a card from a different bank, they saw and remembered the ad but they already had several credit cards from the company, etc.
With “online” we can easily see lift in search activity around the time that brand/awareness advertising is in-flight. This is one of the best indicators of interest — the person saw the TV ad, and was inspired enough to go online to do more research to inform their own purchase decision. Modern consumers will typically search and then click through. In rare instances, they will type the URL, but it is usually the domain name, not the special URL — domain_name.com/special_url — just because of pure laziness or simply because they forgot the /special_url portion.
Now let’s look at a print example: a print ad cost $5 million to produce and traffic in targeted magazines. About 1,000 people came to the website and 10 people ended up purchasing the advertised product. So the CCA is $500,000 per customer acquired. There may be more people who saw the ad and eventually came in to buy a product. But again, there is a problem of attribution.
Now a final example from “online” marketing. Search ads were run using Google Adwords and a $1 CPC (cost per click) was paid. Of those people who clicked through 1 in 20 purchased a product. So it took 20 clicks at $1 each to achieve 1 sale – so the cost of customer acquisition is $20.
OK, so what about prodycts not sold online? We can use a proxy which has a known conversion to sales. For example, once a coupon is printed from the website, from historic data the advertiser knows that 30% end up using the coupon – i.e. redeeming with a purchase. So, again, if we used a $1 CPC and 1 in 20 ended up printing the coupon and 30% of those “converted” to an offline sale, the CCA would be $66.67 ($20/0.30).
So to recap
Television – $5 million CCA
Print – $500,000 CCA
Paid Search – $20 CCA
Paid Search + Offline Sale – $67 CCA
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
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Prototype Web Services
- drag2share – quickly share news items by drag and drop on email addresses
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- SharedMost – what links on ANY webpage are shared most?
- Signatory – sign and date a document and verify it hasn't been altered since that exact time.
- WebTeleprompter – just what it says it is
