The New York Times ran an article yesterday about the increasing importance of measurement and data analysis in online display advertising. Titled, Put Ad on Wed. Count Clicks. Revise., the article is mainly focused on changes going on in traditional, Madison Avenue agencies. The rise of advertising exchanges (or networks) like RightMedia and DoubleClick, coupled with the increasing availability of demographic and behavioral data, is allowing media buyers to start taking advantage of the real benefits of internet advertising. All we can say is: It’s about time.

While Madison Avenue has slowly come around to online media, the rest of the world has been putting it to good use. The headline of the article has been the mantra of search marketers for at least a decade. The web makes advertising testable. Knowledge about which measage your customers prefer appears as fast as the clicks come in. With traditional marketing it might take months before the results come back. But as the NYT notes, “Online, though, advertisers get instant measurements and can make instant changes to a media plan.” Imagine that.

Not everything in the article was old-hat for internet marketers. They did bring up the relatively new consumer data aggregators BlueKai and eXelate who are quitely constructing profiles of individual consumers on the web. These firms have deals in place with major websites across the web which allow them to place cookies on those sites. By connecting the dots in the cookies, they can get a pretty good idea about your commercial interests (like if you are planning to travel, buy a new car, get a new job, etc.). They sell their data to the exchanges who use it to offer highly targeted advertising.

As long as consumers don’t revolt over privacy issues, which is a real possiblity, these techniques could be a major boon to display advertisers. The nice thing about search advertising is that consumers are telling advertisers what they want with their search query. No sneaky cookies necessary. Still, consumers may choose to give up a little privacy in exchange for more relevant ads. Madison Avenue sure hopes so.

The internet is one of the best places to find passive candidates. The trouble is, the internet is a very big place and the majority of the people out there browsing aren’t interested or qualified for the positions you have open. Yahoo’s new Smart Ads offering is meant to help solve that problem.

Smart Ads use Yahoo’s behavioral targeting capabilities to identify qualified candidates and then put your ad, dynamically generated using your current positions, in front of them. Smart Ads run on Yahoo properties, which covers a lot of territory. They also gather information from across all Yahoo properties to make targeting decisions. In the example Yahoo gives, a user has done searches for things like, “San Jose weather”, and, “sales manager salary”. The user has also filled in a profile which includes their current position as a sales rep. Based on this info, Yahoo infers that this person is a passive job seeker who might be interested in sales manager positions in the San Jose area. They then serve an ad for Verizon’s sales positions in the area. Here’s the info-graphic summary for you visual-learners:

According to a recent post by NAS Recruitment Communications, the answer is yes. The post quotes NAS Strategist Caroline Slomski, who works on their client’s PPC campaigns as saying, “Our clients seeking skilled tradespersons are pleasantly surprised by how effectively SEM can help them reach their hiring goals.” She goes on to say that click through rates on ads for jobs like welders and electricians are often higher than the average of 1% to 2%.

NAS cites the expanding use of the internet across all segments of American society as evidence that skilled tradespeople such as welders and electricians are as likely as IT professionals to be looking for work online. This finding jives with what we heard at the Detroit Jobs Expo last week, where we spoke to a laid-off autoworker who told us that he found his last two jobs online.

While we would like to see some deeper metrics such as application rates or cost per applicant, the report is certainly encouraging and sheds light on a great opportunity. Since few employers in the manufacturing space have realized that PPC advertising can be effective, the costs are even lower than they are in other sectors.

If you’d like to take advantage of that, just drop us a line.

How do you find the sites that your target audience is using? Google Ad Planner offers a good place start.

Ad Planner makes it easy to define your target audience using filters like gender, age, household income, education, and location. There is a convenient list of pre-defined audiences which you can select. In addition you may add ’sites visited’ or ‘keywords searched’ into your audience filters. As you ad or change filters, the list of suggested sites updates automatically. According to Google, the data used to drive the matching system comes from “a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research”.

Once your audience definitions are in place, it’s time to set some site filters. The site filter allows you to restrict your search to sites that accept advertising (of any form), or to sites within the Google Content Network (or both, or neither). You may also choose to see only sites from specific categories (you can choose multiple), as well as domain extensions. From there you can further refine your site selection by the type and/or size of ads they show.

With your filters all set, you should have a sizable list of sites that Google deems relevant to your target audience. What we’ve found, however, is that these lists tend to favor large, heavily trafficked sites. In some cases that is exactly what we’re looking for, but it’s often the case that we would prefer to find smaller, more niche sites. While it is likely that highly educated females between the ages of 25 and 54 who are in the medical field do visit usnews.com, a whole lot of other people do too. We need something a bit more focused.

One way to bubble up the niche sites is to sort the list by the Comp Index. The Comp Index reports the concentration of your selected audience relative to all users in your defined country. The higher the comp index, the more likely that an ad impression on a given site will be seen by someone in your target audience. The list can be sorted in a number of ways by clicking on labels across the top of the sites list, but there are also 3 preset sorting arrangements that are available in the upper right corner where the number of results is listed. Experiementing with those might reveal some winners.

From here you can pick and choose the sites your think are most valuable and then save your list into a media plan, or export the results to a CSV. You can also visit sites in the list, or expand listings to get more info. This is sometimes a good idea because the categorization is not always perfect. For example, a recent list we pulled up contained the site Mainstreet.com, a news site with a focus on business and financial stories. Google had it listed under “Astrology & Divination”. Close, but not quite.

So now you have a good idea of where to find your audience. All you have to do is get there.

Google recently anounced that they are finally pulling back the curtains on their Search Query Performance report. For those who are not familiar, the Search Query report allows you to see the actual user queries that triggered your ads. It’s very helpful for identifying new keywords to add to your campaigns, as well as irrelevant queries that need to be filtered out with negative keywords. Useful as it was, up until this week the report always held something back. Groups of queries were rolled up under labels like “150 Other Unique Queries”. Not very helpful.

Google has now anounced that all queries that recieve at least 1 click will be shown in the report. Technically, that’s still not everything, but at least Google is matching what many of us could already see in our analytics packages. In fact, we suspect that the increasing availablity of this data from outside sources is part of the reason for Google’s update. That and the fact that a request to your Yahoo rep can score you a very thorough list of user queries that triggered your ads (as well as which keyword was mapped to which query). It wouldn’t due to fall behind the competition, now would it?

An interesting article on TechCrunch highlights the recent decline in pay-per-click ad coverage. They cite numbers from Comscore which show that paid search click volume is growing much more slowly than overall search volume.

Comscore reasons that the difference may have something to do with the growing use of longer search queries. They suggest that advertisers may not be appearing for many queries because they are using exact matching and negative keywords to restrict the scope of their campaigns. While that explanation makes sense, TechCrunch has another idea: Many major advertisers have dropped out of the game. To prove the point, they provide a laundry list of retailers that have gone under or drastically scaled back in the last six months.

TechCrunch also cites numbers from Efficient Frontier, a marketing agency. Their numbers show that CPCs (cost per click) are down 19% year over year (and 13% quarter over quarter). While that must be disappointing for the search engines, it looks like opportunity to us.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a set of click measurement guidelines [pdf] yesterday. The guidelines were drafted in partnership with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and large number of other major stakeholders in the online advertising space (noticeably absent from the list of participants was Ask.com and its parent company IAC).

According to the IAB, the purpose of the guidelines is as follows:

• Define the technical life-cycle of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including provisions for identifying invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.
• Establish standard terms that will help streamline the buying and selling of click-based media.
• Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.

After reviewing the document, we found a few highlights to share with you. A note in the Click Measurement Definitions section helps answer the common question of how a search engine’s reported clicks might be different than the number of clicks/visits measured by the advertiser on their own site. The reasons listed include latency, user aborts, and 404 errors.

The document states that, “in general, pre-filtration Measured Clicks [clicks on the ad] should always be equal to or higher than Received Clicks [clicks subsequently tracked on the advertiser's site]“. This brings in the issue of filtration. Reported clicks from the search engines generally do not include invalid clicks that were removed by their filtering systems which creates another potential difference in clicks. Finally, the use of javascript and/or pixel tracking on the advertiser’s site may also play into the difference since some visitors may not load the code correctly or might have javascript or images disabled.

On that note, we thought it was good that the guidelines call for disclosure of the methods used by javascript and pixel tracking systems to count clicks and the limitations associated with those methods. This underscores the fact that while online advertising is much more measurable than offline ads tend to be, it is still not 100% accurate.

The section outlining proper counting methods was interesting as well. The guidelines provide for 2 methods: One-click-per-impression, which is self-explanatory, and Multiple-click-per-impression. The second method allows publishers to count more than one click on any given ad impression, provided that they establish a period of time during which a second click would not be counted (to prevent advertisers from being charged for navigational errors like double-clicks). We would like to see disclosure by ad serving organizations of which method they employ (some, like Google, already do - they use the multi-click method).

Importantly, the guidelines also state that invalid click filtration methods, as outlined in the document, must be employed by the ad serving organization in order for their clicks to be counted. While the major advertising platforms have strong track records in this area, our assumption is that many of the smaller players have some catching-up to do. That said, our experience has shown that the threat of click-fraud is generally overstated.

In any case, these guidelines seem to be a step in the right direction. We hope that publishers, media companies, and other ad-serving organizations will take note and take action to meet these guidelines and earn the trust of advertisers.

There has been some buzz recently around Google Profiles which, we are told, exist to help you better control the information that people find when they search for your name. In light of the recent speculation about Google’s true plans for the product, we thought it would be worth mentioning something we found this afternoon. While searching for a person (who shall not be named) we can across something rather interesting: A “Google Promotion” link across the top of the page.

Unlike most other Google-run PPC ads that we’ve seen over the years, this one did not follow standard ad formats. The background was blue, instead of the now-standard pinkish-orange. Rather than the usual ‘Sponsored Links’ the ad was labeled ‘Google Promotion’. Finally, and this is the part that makes us really jealous, the ad had 53 characters in the headline.

While this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, it is interesting to see Google getting a bit more flexible with their ad format (if only for themselves), as well as the direct promotion of the Profiles product.

When marketers think about Facebook they usually think about things like profile pages, getting fans, and maybe even making an app. Successfully implemented, those avenues can offer a very high level of user engagement and make a great addition to a company’s marketing mix. However, there is another way to reach the many millions of Facebook users which is often overlooked.

Facebook Ads

Facebook’s self-serve advertising system can be a great way to reach a uniquely targeted audience. The ads can drive traffic to a page or group inside of Facebook, or to an external site (such as your job listings). In addition, the ads can be purchased on a pay-per-click basis or the more traditional CPM pricing model. That makes it easy to get the results you’re looking for whether you are a direct or a brand marketer.

The key feature of Facebook ads, however, is not the pricing. It’s the targeting. Ads can be targeted by any, or all, of the following top-level criteria:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• Keywords
• Education
• Workplace
• Relationship Status
• Relationship Interests
• Languages

In some cases there are additional sub categories available. Education, for example, allows you to target all people who are ‘in college’, or to further refine that group by specifying up to 20 colleges by name. That seems ideal for a regional employer who’s looking for new grads from the top local universities.

The information used to target the ads comes from user’s profiles and, as in the case of location, other factors such as their IP address. These targeting options offer unique opportunities for employers and recruiters. The ability to specifically reach people inside of a target organization, such as a competitor, goes beyond the capabilities of a search engine or job board. The potential applications here are numerous and, we think, pretty exciting. So the next time you’re thinking about adding Facebook to your marketing lineup, don’t forget about Facebook ads.

If you’d like to talk in more detail about what Facebook ads could do for your organization, don’t be afraid to send us an email or drop us a line. We’d love to talk with you.

Reports continue to surface on the potential Yahoo/Microsoft deal. The latest came yesterday from Kara Swisher at Boomtown who has been following this drama for some time. Her latest report suggests that the current proposal would have Yahoo taking over search and display advertising sales with Microsoft running the backend tech.

While it’s too early to say whether or not this thing will actually go through, it’s an interesting possibility to consider. A deal between these companies would have significant implications for the search marketing business.

The current situation, three major search engines, each with its independent advertising system, is cumbersome. Logging into each system individually to make updates, changes, additions, and pull reporting adds significant time to the management process. As if the inefficiency of having three separate systems wasn’t enough, two of them are idiosyncratic and limited when compared with the gold standard (ahem, Google AdWords).

If a deal goes through, that situation could, theoretically, be improved. Consolidation of ad systems, if implemented well, would likely be welcomed by most in the industry. It would also be likely to have a favorable effect on both Yahoo and Microsoft’s bottom line. Currently, many advertisers don’t bother with one or both of those engines because they feel the time it takes to manage another system isn’t worth the incremental bump in traffic they would get (among other reasons). A unified system would provide more bang for the buck and less hassle overall.

We have to wonder though, if a deal went through, which system would they use? Microsoft’s AdCenter, Yahoo’s Sponsored Search, or something new? Historical precedent says that a new system would be probably be a poor choice. As we mentioned, neither company has built a truly great search ad system and there’s no reason to think the two combined would produce something better. If that’s the case, then Microsoft’s platform seems to be the most likely choice (based mainly on the above report that Microsoft would handle the tech side). Feelings are mixed on that selection in our office. Perhaps when the time comes to decide, they could make like Facebook and poll their users.