This Week in Relevance

We have examined historical campaign data as a first step in the effort to better understand the dynamics of adCenter’s version of Quality Score.  To recap, the open questions we focused on:

1. How does (position normalized) CTR affect the CPC that you pay in adCenter?
2. How much influence does quality of landing page have on CPC (and position)

We reviewed performance data over the course of a 6 week period from Jan-Feb 2011. The Ad Group observed has KW destination URLs so we were not able to extract any signals regarding ad landing page influence on CPC & position in this setting. As a bit of additional context, the makeup of the campaign we observed is as follows:

* 3 unique creatives running against 150 KWs in the same ad group

*The campaign had been live for several months and received considerable traffic prior to the time period  reviewed

*For the period reviewed each ad received several hundred thousand impressions

For the period reviewed, key data points were as follows:

Observations:

We have certainly been intrigued by the results. While it appears there is some correlation between CTR and avg position, we are surprised a delta of the observed magnitude – against considerable volume – did not result in a bigger delta in avg position.  Even more surprising is the near flat avg CPC for each creative and the division of impressions within the ad group. Based on what we have observed here, it does not appear adCenter values CTR in the same way AdWords does when awarding CPC discounts.

Even if adCenter is not discounting CPC based on CTR there is still clear value in conducting ad testing and optimizing campaigns toward creatives with high CTR. Logically a user is more likely to click on an ad with a higher CTR than a lower CTR. Therefore, the more impressions that are sent to higher CTR ads, the more volume the ad group should accrue. That said, if the true campaign success measurement is ROI, CPA or another metric influenced by a conversion, you will obviously want to take any relevant metrics into account as well when making your ad optimization decisions.

It is important to call out that the KW profile of the ad group may have colored the result we saw to some degree. Specifically, ad group contains high & low volume KWs and both brand & non-brand keywords.  Obviously we do not have data detailing performance of specific KW-Ad pairings to understand these dynamics  have controlled for these factors in our follow up testing .

Our more controlled test referenced here is currently running but not accruing as much data as we would like to make an definitive call on results.  Stay tuned as we work through some ad serving issues with AdCenter.

In summary, to this point in our investigation our 2 primary conclusions are as follows:

* Large ad CTR deltas  do not necessarily result in corresponding CPC & Avg Pos deltas

* Advertisers should be cautious about relying on adCenter for adwords type ad optimization (against CTR) at this point

Stay tuned, we are looking forward to analyzing results of our follow up testing and will be sharing our observations.

Advanced or Needs Sophistication? You make the call.
In Josh Dreller’s recent piece on advanced PPC copywriting techniques, he calls out Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as a commonly used technique for scaling great copy across a search marketing campaign. In fairness, Josh calls out potential pitfalls of this approach, but we feel that marketers can actually get into quite a bit of trouble when leveraging this approach too broadly as the below example shows – hate to kick a wounded animal when its down, but for the query “oil spill disaster” we see this ad:

Oil Spill Disaster
Stay Updated On BP’s Gulf of Mexico
Response Efforts. Learn More.
www.BP.com/GulfOfMexicoResponse

Clearly BP’s strategy to influence the flow of information surrounding the spill is a sound one, but they’d probably prefer not to echo the public’s sentiment that it truly is a “disaster.” This is just one of many DKI pitfalls – we’ll explore more in later issues.

UPDATE:

BP has now changed their ad on the term “Oil Spill Disaster” to a static Title — great move on their part, starting to understand the potential pitfalls of using DKI.

Location, Location, Location
Wired offered a piece this week on the growing momentum behind Zip+4 targeting online, which would add an incredibly powerful tool into marketers’ arsenals. However, as the amount of data available explodes, the tools and technology required to accurately message to and engage these audiences grows as well. We like the sound of that challenge!

Search Meet Social, Social Meet Search
For years we have heard the somewhat trite but always buzz-worthy phrase, “social drives search.” Finally, with the launch of the “Like” button, Facebook may actually be unlocking the true underpinnings of that phrase. The folks at Business Insider take an in depth look at Facebook’s social search aspirations, and while it is still very early, there are definitely some promising (and relevant) results driven not by crawling algorithms, but social ones.

Relevance Doesn’t Just Matter When You’re Paying
Search Engine Land published some great tips on how to use PPC Copy and relevance scores to drive SEO copy (Page Titles and Meta Descriptions). A simple reminder that relevance should drive every marketing copy decision that we make, not just the ones where there is a monetary penalty for not doing so. We also love the test and learn approach!

Start Thinking About Longer Queries
A new study from ad network Chitika provides some interesting insight into query length and its effect on SEO volume and conversion rate. We all know that query strings are getting longer as users get more sophisticated in their searching, but this study ties actual value towards optimizing meta content towards longer queries. Additionally, in the context of the above story, search engine marketers should be using results like these to help drive their campaign content.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of This Week in Relevance brought to you by DataPop, a Los Angeles based startup seeking to execute on the vision of “right message every time.” We launched this blog because we feel very passionately about ad relevance and want to educate the community as well as ourselves on a topic that continues to grow in importance across the digital advertising world.

Know Your Searchers
Search Engine Land’s PPC Academy Column offers up some tips & tricks for ppc creative writing. Particularly interesting for those focused on relevancy, the suggestion to tailor creative to the perceived intent of the searcher:

“If they’re just looking for information, your ad should reflect that—you’ll have a quite different ad for people ready to buy and simply browsing for the best”

Looking at every keyword in your campaign as a unique target customer will help drive messaging that actually resonates.

Answering one of SEM’s Oldest Questions with Relevance
Razorfish’s Professional Ranker offers some advice to those aiming to answer one of paid search’s oldest questions: How does one achieve higher click volume, while simultaneously decreasing CPCs? The answer, of course, includes a tip of the hat to copy testing and sound keyword-ad categorization.

Managing an Efficient Content Network Campaign
While content traffic network can certainly be valuable, the insights and levers for managing campaigns differ considerably from search. PPC Hero offer some great ideas on how to structure relevant – content network specific – ad groups and filter domains & individual URLs where Google’s network algorithm is not matching your ad groups to relevant publisher content.

The Media Post’s Raw Blog with an early perspective on Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program.
For a bit more color, Twitter details their initial thoughts on “Resonance” and how it does/will impact cost for advertisers in their ad platform FAQ. Whatever you want to call it, delivering high quality ad experiences is becoming a requirement to participate and perform in key marketplaces.

Ranking Ads with Little or No Click History
Looking to pair some light reading on relevance modeling and classification algorithms with your morning espresso? If so, “Improving Ad Relevance in Sponsored Search” prepared for the 2010 WSDM conference by the Yahoo! Labs team is for you. The paper details many of the data points and formulas that influence how the Yahoo! sponsored search platform determines ad relevancy. Section 5.3, “Ranking ads with low click history” (page 365) may be of particular interest to those managing long tail campaigns and/or frequently testing new creative constructions – specifically that the relationship between query and display url or query and ad title is used when no click history is available.