In a surprise move, Google has changed it’s U.S. trademark policy today.  The move was announced to agencies under NDA but the information was leaked to the press and they moved the time table to today.

The details can be found here.  In a nutshell, Google will allow some use of trademarks in ads within the US, which meet certain criteria.  These include:

• Ads which use the term in a descriptive or generic way, and not in reference to the trademark owner or the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term.
• Ads which use the trademark in a nominative manner to refer to the trademark or its owner, specifically:
  • Resale of the trademarked goods or services: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term. The landing page of the ad must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the goods or services corresponding to a trademark from the advertiser.
  • Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark term from the advertiser.
  • Informational sites: The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site must be to provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term. Additionally, the advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark owner.

We were told that if you have ads in your account which were previously disapproved for trademark policy and that comply with the aforementioned criteria, you may submit those ads for re-review and eligible ads would begin showing in the US starting June 15.

I have received so many links to Tuesday’s New York Times article on click fraud “Per-Per-Click Web Advertisers Fight Costly Fraud” from people that my inbox is full.

Pay-per-click advertising is on the rise.  As reported in the article, this is the only form of advertising that grew during the economic debacle that was 2008.  The attraction of this highly measurable form of advertising is more keen now than it ever has been, as companies shift their marketing dollars to the most accountable form of advertising.

It’s no surprise that the lure of those dollars attract the nefarious, with 17% of all clicks in 2008 deemed fraudulent per Click Forensics, according to the article.  The search engines are trying to keep up. They continue to improve their click fraud algorithms and do catch a fair amount of it.  It’s not a perfect science, however, and while they do offer credits for fraudulent traffic, it is still incumbent upon the advertiser to defend themselves.

While click fraud is a serious problem, it is rarely reported on accurately. Click Forensics and other panelists at the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC last year reported that much of the click fraud that Google and Yahoo experience is in their content network. Reporters are typically blind to the difference between the content and search networks and don’t distinguish between the two. Click fraud is also a pet topic for reporters since it sounds exciting.

As an agency, we have been monitoring click fraud for our clients since the day we opened our doors in 2003.  That’s possible because we track the performance of every keyword and monitor every click.  The data we receive are analyzed every day for patterns and activity that constitute fraud and we use those data to champion our clients with the engines.  We have had countless thousands of dollars returned to clients.

Is click fraud a problem? Absolutely. Is it going away? No. And so we constantly keep vigil and protect our clients.

(If you do not track your own PPC campaigns, then let me urge you to do so ASAP and to analyze the data you obtain.  There is an outstanding standalone tracking service called ConversionRuler that you should check out.)

Google has been testing ads with headlines that exceed the 25 character limit when using keyword insertion.  Last week Google made available the following explanation:

“You may occasionally notice an ad that exceeds our character limits
(typically, 25 characters in the title and 35 characters in each ensuing
line). This sometimes happens with ads that use keyword insertion.

When a keyword-insertion ad appears on a search result page, the AdWords
system inserts the keyword that triggered the ad into the ad text. If the
keyword is too long, and would cause the ad text to exceed our character
limits, the ad’s default text would be used instead.

In rare cases, the system may insert a keyword that causes the ad to
exceed the character limit by one or two characters. There’s no guaranteed
way to exceed the character limit, so we don’t recommend that you tailor
your ad text to attempt this. It would likely make keyword insertion less
effective for you, since the AdWords system will almost always use your
default text in place of a too-long keyword.”

Should you be interested in creating an ad group with keywords that push an ad to 26 or 27 characters using DKI (dynamic keyword insertion), while ensuring that the default ad was suitable for the keywords in the ad group, do follow Google best practices (tightly focused keywords in an ad group) and do measure your results to ensure the ad is converting and providing profit for you.

Company: Financial Services Firm

Overview: We had been consistently hitting the client goal of a 5:1 Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), but knew that his margins and the non-linear relationship of ad placement to volume created an opportunity for increased profit. We asked that he relax his strict ROAS requirement.

Result: By moving to a 4:1 ROAS his per-transaction profit dropped, but his aggregate profit almost doubled as we found substantially more volume.

In a bid to strengthen its delivery of the right ad to the right person, Google has launched a new feature for its content network, Interest-Based Advertising, that will allow advertisers to reach users who have displayed interest in their vertical or who have visited their website in the past.  Therefore, the ad won’t be shown simply based on the user’s immediate interest.  More ad exposure for the advertiser and delivery of ads of greater interest for the user.  That’s the theory.

In an age where cookies have less stickiness than any time before, it will be interesting to see how well this can be executed.  Advertisers have certainly been clamoring for it for a while.  Amazon makes great use behavioral targeting by thrusting products related to past purchases and searches under the visitor’s nose on their site.  To quell the privacy firestorm that this is likely to spark, users have the ability to remove or add interest categories (600 so far) to tailor the ads they see, or they can completely opt out (through cookies or browser plugin).  That, too, will be interesting to see in action.

For additional, useful information visit these links: Google and Search Engine Land

So, you think that sale was the result of the customer clicking on an ad after typing in that keyword?  Think again.  Chances are that the customer has been to your site before, quite probably on a different keyword, a different ad, and quite probably after having been subjected to outside influences.

A friend of ours runs ConversionRuler, a tracking and reporting service whose motto is, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”  Truer words were never spoken.  Without measurement you stand the chance of missing patterns of behavior that can have huge consequences to your bottom line.  Patterns that demonstrate conversions occurring after multiple trips to the site by a visitor who initially arrives on a generic keyword, comes back after more research through a targeted keyword and leaves, ponders, decides to act, and returns to your site by typing in your domain name.  You would only know this if you tracked your traffic.  And not just your PPC traffic, but your organic traffic as well.

Gathering these data is the first step in a more strategic and efficient marketing program.  From such data comes information on things like user behavior.  From this understanding come strategies to be tested in order to generate more profits.  And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Company: Online Retailer

Overview:  The client had a new e-commerce site for retailing consumer products and was looking to drive sales while keeping cost-per-sale under control.

Result:  After a thorough audit of available search terms and search activity a campaign was crafted to quickly gather data and begin a performance-based campaign.  In this case, there was enough data to begin building a statistical model and getting the client profitable on major product lines within two weeks and on secondary products within six weeks.  The campaign in aggregate was profitable from day two.  Cost per sale was cut almost in half from week two to week four while sales volume increased 528% for the same period.

Company:  Financial Services Firm

Overview:  The client had been using Pay-Per-Click marketing, but had no process for assessing success other than gross revenue.  In addition, the campaign had become too difficult and time consuming to manage internally.

Result:  A model-based approach to optimization, daily management, and a creative approach to correlating online metrics to profits resulted in a 245% increase in lead volume and an increase in ROI from PPC marketing from 85% to 548% in the first 8 weeks.

Working Planet is now firmly ensconced in our newly remodeled space in Wayland Square on Providence’s East Side (pre-move in pics above).  A big thanks to Thurlow Small Architecture for designing such a perfect space, and to Site Specific for the build-out!

One of the great things we love is the use of recycled materials for our partitions.  Being a few blocks from so many great coffee shops and restaurants is not bad either, but that’s part of the many pluses of being in Providence.

A typical mistake that we see involves dayparting, a method of controlling ad exposure or pricing by time of day, or day of the week.  This can be a powerful tool for making a campaign more efficient, but it’s amazing how often people get this wrong.

Dayparting needs to be analyzed based on when the initial clickthrough from the ad occurred, not when the conversion happens. Probably the best example of why this is important came up recently with one of our clients.  The client wanted to pause his marketing during non-business hours, the seemingly reasonable explanation being that his sales people couldn’t respond to leads during off hours.  We pointed out that his audience is made up of executives and high-net-worth individuals who do research off-hours when they have the time, but finalize the sale during business hours.  We showed him that a whopping 60% of his business comes from leads where the first visit (research phase) happened at the very times he wanted his advertising to go dark: nights and weekends.  Needless to say, his marketing has stayed on during those times.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for this type of logic to be used in creating dayparting rules, and many of the tools out there simply can’t tie the conversion back to the initial visit.  We expect this to change as the market, tools, and understanding of user behavior continue to improve.