What’s Next for Web Ads? NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Jim Cramer made an interesting observation about Web ads on CNBC last week — they stink. Cramer made the point that Web companies that are dependent on basic banner ads and other display ads are seeing their business just evaporate.
Paid Search Clickthrough Rates Up Year Over Year. US companies spend more on search than on any other online ad format. This year, eMarketer predicts that US search ad spending will account for almost half of total online advertising spending.
The Virtuous Circle – The Role of Search and Social Media in the Purchase Pathway (Research from GroupM Search). The consumer journey toward purchase has in many ways become like a virtuous circle, with more new media drivers, such as Google and Microsoft, and misdirection, via consumer opinions on blogs and Facebook, making the beginning and end of the path less apparent to advertisers. As a result, brands are unsure where the cycle began, and how best to motivate consumers to engage with their brands during and after the purchase path.
A Shortcut to the Grail: How Semantic Search Can Boost Internet Marketing for Small Businesses
By Colin Jeavons, CEO, Vertical Search Works
As with any business in the information age, marketing has become a more and more specialized discipline. Long gone are the days when companies would just put up a billboard or record a radio advertisement, and expect the compelling copy to make the sale. Even within the Internet age, there has been an evolution–the indiscriminate pop-ups of the early World Wide Web era have evolved into the current search advertising market, which predicates itself on complex algorithms meant to divine the most effective results.
Effective Web marketing relies on cutting waste; business owners can no longer afford for their marketing to cast wide and survive on the scant percentages that are converted by a national ad campaign. The “Holy Grail” of marketing, therefore, targets the people most interested in buying your merchandise/booking your service at the moment of peak interest.
For the search marketing industry, targeting has taken many shapes. Ads are placed by their relevance to a keyword within a search session; by behavior type when tracking cookies are involved; and by demographic in the cases of hyper-local ads.
Semantic technology is an additional tool starting to come into favor. For small business owners, who feel pressure to utilize the most effective marketing solutions in the most cost-effective manner due to limited resources, semantic search-based advertising, especially on a pay-per-click model, is one of the best ways to quickly target receptive buyers in the most effective fashion.
As we say in Britain, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; semantic search-based ads react to their surrounding content more like a human than a standard keyword search ad, meaning that a conversion- someone visiting the site because of an ad- is more likely.
On top of that, a semantic-search engine is more likely to display what is already on the user’s mind. This all adds up to a compelling package for the advertiser- if someone is on a food Web site, a semantic search package will ensure that they see ads in the food or cooking sector, and likewise with their search queries.
The pay-per-click model is especially attractive to small businesses because it is completely scalable–businesses can set a cap, and only pay when their prospects “come into the shop” by clicking on the ad.
A small-business owner looking to enter into a semantic-based marketing campaign needs to be aware of a few things going in. First, they need to get a sense of where their campaign will go- how many people will see it, what type of content will it accompany, etc. After they’ve reviewed the publisher list, and made sure that it matches their targets, they need to double check their hosting agreements- a truly effective semantic search campaign will draw clicks, and much like a “group coupon deal” participant running out of inventory, a DNS crash makes the advertiser look worse than if they were invisible. My company, Vertical Search Works, has had a few clients stop a campaign because the traffic boost within the first week was running them close to a site crash.
The semantic search market is just beginning its rise, much like keyword search did in the late 90s and early 00s. As it becomes more widespread, small business owners and marketers will see its effectiveness, and semantic search ads will be a necessary part of every company”s marketing mix. Companies that take advantage of it now will be miles ahead of their competition.
Why do I need to focus on campaign tracking? What metrics should I focus on?
Many marketers and/or small business owners often overlook the importance of web analytics or only focus on one metric–sales conversions–which doesn’t paint the entire picture or highlight the key benefits of running an ad campaign. Successful campaign tracking provides business owners and marketers the opportunity to identify strengths and weaknesses to help improve ad campaigns and focus throughout the year.
To get a holistic view of your online ad campaign it is essential to not only look at sales but to also focus on: page views, page views per visit, time spent, bounce rate, and visits to purchase.
Campaign tracking will help you to identify your best sellers and help you find out where your converting traffic is coming from. You can also identify patterns in how people move from being searchers to prospective consumers to consumers.
Buzz About VSW
Spotlight on Success
Foodies Get Search Engine Organizing Results In Categories, Images. Vertical Search Works (VSW) officially launched Friday its semantic search and advertising platform VS4Food, a search widget for publishers. Search on a food-related query and the search engine returns results from both the publisher’s and other related Web sites. The platform organizes results into categories and serves up images along with the text, as well as image and text ads…
Home Décor Express
VSW Client since July 2011
“Other paid search services are just like throwing money into a black hole. On top of the obvious gains that we see in order volume when our FeatureLink ads are active, Vertical Search Works really stands apart for its service, execution and problem-solving.”
– Bert Shlensky, President of Home Décor Express
