Eustondigital blog

Archive for July, 2009

Can you afford to see my adverts?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

In a move that is gong to incur that wrath of privacy campaigners, Google is planning to look at people’s credit scores before deciding which adverts to show them.

This addresses one of the key issues faced by marketers of luxury items, in that they need to know the person they reach can afford the products that they are advertising.

A Google spokesperson confirmed this week that they had been working with research firm Compete on whether it would be possible to add credit score targeting to adverts on the Google content network.

Google might be allowed to identify consumers with good credit, based on information they submitted when applying for credit cards online.

This information would be made available to advertisers on an aggregated basis so they could better reach their target market.

“Let’s say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO [credit] score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter,” a spokesperson said. “We can provide the advertiser with a list of websites on our Google content network that index against this segment.”

However, any move to make use of this data could be met with fierce resistance by groups wishing to preserve online anonymity.

In November 2008 NebuAd – who target users based on their web surfing habits, information purchased from ISPs – were sued by web users of felt their privacy rights had been violated.

And of course here in the UK behavioural targeting company Phorm has run into resistance whichever way it has turned, and is yet to launch at all.

Would you mind being targeted based on your credit worthiness? Do you sell an upmarket product and not want to waste your advertising on people who can’t afford the product? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: google
Posted in PPC, Search Engines | 9 Comments »

Put your Business on the Map

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Do you run a business, or are you responsible for marketing a website for your business or someone else’s? You may or may not know, but thanks to Google Maps and some information lifted from the Yellow pages, there is already information about you that is appearing in the Google search results.

You may yourself have seen this. When you search for a particular sort of business in a specific place, you are often presented with a map along with a list of providers who fit the bill.

Here’s an example:

These maps really grab the attention of anyone presented with them. To start with, because they are a visual representation they stand out from all the other text on the page. Second, since they provide specific map based information to someone who has searched for a specific business type in a local area, they are likely to be extremely relevant to the searcher’s query.

These listings are compiled from a database called ‘Google local’, or ‘Google Business Center’. Since people are finding information about your business in this way, it makes sense to take control of those listings, and to expand or improve them.

Here’s a link to the Local Business Center.

The first thing to do is make sure the information is factually correct and up to date. However, you can provide additional incentives for people to both look at your listing, and then follow that up by looking at your website or visiting your physical shop.

These extra incentives might include photos of your business or a relevant topic, your business hours, and coupons or money off vouchers.

Google have put together a video that shows you the sign up process, and the benefits of the local business center.

Check it out and then start editing (or creating) your listing!

Let us know how you get on by leaving a comment below.

Tags: google local business center
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »

Searches up, clicks down

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: PPC
Posted in PPC, Search Engines | No Comments »

Do we like Bing?

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Research from Hitwise UK out this week shows how well Microsoft’s the new search engine ‘Bing’ is getting on in the UK. We all know how well the US has taken to it. But whilst Americans are bombarded with a $100m advertising campaign for the new engine, over here we’ve had to be content with a few niche press releases.

The UK stats show that following the official June 3rd launch Bing’s market share grew significantly. If you exclude Google US and UK, Bing was the third ranked search engine, making up almost 11% of the UK market. After the launch hype, traffic has declined although the average length of visit has grown to over 8 minutes.

And what are people looking for on Bing? Well the top search term for the week ending 6th June was ‘facebook’, which made up 3.94% of all searches.

Branded terms (those that include a company or product name) make up the other big numbers (as usual), but despite that there are 5 generic terms in Bing’s top 100.

More of a concern for Bing is that a significant proportion of its ‘downstream’ traffic – those websites that people visit after having been on Bing -were other search engines. This suggests that people tried Bing our before returning to their favourite search engine.

And another concern for Bing is who they are stealing market share from. Most people visiting Bing came from MSN UK- another of Microsoft’s search engines. There’s obviously not a lot of point in building a brand new search engine if the only people who end up using it were previously customers of your other search engine. Microsoft would clearly rather convert users from Google and Yahoo.

Here’s a graph showing UK visits to Bing, from Hitwise.

Have you tried Bing yet? If so, what do you think? And how does your website rank well in Bing’s Search Engine Results Page? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in PPC, Search Engines | 5 Comments »