Gillissa News » search marketing

Merchant Centre Changes

rwood — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:19:26 +0000

More is afoot in Google’s recent increase in editorial checks and quality controls in their Merchant Centre.

We’ve been saying for a while that things are bubbling under with the GMC. Affiliate listings are being purged, product submissions being reviewed (we think) much more closely and a lot more detailed checks are being done on product entries.

The latest changes have just been announced to Electronics product submissions, where starting in the first months of 2011, they are making some changes to how products in the Electronics category may appear in Google Product Search. In order to aid the user search, Google are stating that suppliers of data then include at least two of the following three unique product identifiers: MPN, Brand, and EAN.

While these attributes will not be required for the feed to process correctly, if you don’t include them, chances are that your products will not show often/(if at all).

So, forewarned is forearmed. Get that data into your product database now and included in your submissions now. Natch, Feed Manager is already submitting this if it exists for any client and the longer your products are submitted including the data, the better the long term benefits to your listing.

Continued Search Marketing Growth

mhiscock — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:40:16 +0000

Recent search marketing figures released have indicated worldwide spending on internet marketing will reach £40.6 billion pounds, almost a 12% increase on the previous year, according to figures released by eMarketer.

As you may be aware, online advertising has grown to such an extent in recent times that its expenditure outweighs the more traditional forms of advertising; television and radio. (A topic discussed in the previous Gillissa blog post ‘The Growth of Online Advertising’)

With these increased spending figures, Jared Jenks, author of the worldwide spending report, quoted “These rates will be unmatched by other media”.

In accordance with the forecast from eMarketer, Efficient Frontier found that the UK’s search marketing sector grew by 10 percent over a twelve month period, indicating the trend of search marketing prospering within difficult financial times has continued, whereas other forms of advertising have not been so profitable.

However, CPC (Cost-Per-Click) rates were significantly reduced when compared to the same period the previous year, though CPC rates did rise again in the final quarter. Such an analysis seems to imply that the search marketing sector is certainly making headway in working its way out of the recession.

In accordance with this perception, Efficient Frontier suggest that a major increase in search advertising spend in the United Kingdom is imminent.

With search marketing’s continued prosperity, and its new found status as the number one method of advertisement, it appears that any predictions of future growth for search marketing are accurate.

Furthermore, the team at Gillissa have certainly noticed a surge in impressions and traffic this year, evidently coinciding with the continued popularity of online advertising. (Except for the time period during the World Cup, especially when England were still in the competition!)

Yahoo Search Marketing And Microsoft Ad Centre Transition

mhiscock — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:55:08 +0000

Recently, Microsoft and Yahoo announced their intention to create an ad/sales partnership, involving the transition of advertising customers from Yahoo’s search marketing desktop to Microsoft’s ad centre.

As regular users of both search marketing tools, the team at Gillissa believe this will be effective, fundamentally because it will be easier to manage two desktop tools rather than three!

Though the date of the transition is a long way off and unclear, there are a few factors to be wary of if you are an advertiser on Yahoo or both advertising channels.

Due to the nature of which the accounts are built on Microsoft and Yahoo, significant changes to the methods used for Yahoo were inevitable.

The two major factors to be wary of involve keywords and adverts.

Currently, for Yahoo, advertisers have a 40 character threshold for advert headlines, whereas Microsoft sets a maximum of 25 characters. This could see Yahoo advert headlines cut off at the 25 character threshold, which could make the ads ineligible to display.

Even more importantly, Yahoo does not incorporate similar keywords as individual terms, unlike Microsoft and Google, who both classify singular and plural versions of words, as well as misspelt variants, as individual terms to enhance your advert reach. This therefore means that your Yahoo keyword list needs to be revised and expanded in time for the transition.

All in all, this should see the combined Microsoft/Yahoo search marketing tool use similar advertising principles as Google, making it easier to manage across these advertising channels.

Tips On Account Security

mhiscock — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:39:22 +0000

Creating and setting up a meticulously structured Google Adwords account can be a very long process. Ensuring that your keywords, ad groups and campaigns are accurate and relevant to what you want to sell is critical and therefore needs thorough assessment.

So, with all this in mind, the prospect of unauthorised personnel obtaining access to your Adwords account and jeopardising all your hard work is unthinkable.

However, unauthorised access to your Adwords account is very much a reality without undertaking some precautionary methods. Though some of the following points seem obvious, it is essential to always be aware of the risks, whether through phishing, malware, or unauthorised logins.

Below are a few prevention tips to keep your account safe:

Phishing Prevention

1. Don’t reply to, or click links within, emails that ask for personal, financial or account information.

2. Check the message headers. The ‘From:’ address and the ‘Return-path’ should reference the same source.

3. If on a secure page, look for “https” at the beginning of the URL and the padlock icon in the browser.

4. Use strong passwords. A strong password should be unique; include letters, numbers and symbols; and be changed regularly.

Malware Prevention

1. Keep your computer’s antivirus, spyware, browser and security patches up to date, and run system scans regularly.

2. Exercise caution whenever you’re prompted to download an email attachment, follow an instant-message link, install a plug-in or download an unfamiliar piece of software. Remember that crimeware can be disguised to resemble anti-virus software. Always research a company’s reputation before downloading its software or visiting its website.

Unauthorised Login Prevention

1. Secure and encrypt your wireless network.

2. Don’t leave your computer unattended. If you’re using a public terminal, make sure that you log out of all your accounts before you leave.

3. Assign a separate login to each user. Don’t share logins and passwords.

Change to Feeds To Shopping.com

rwood — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:29:56 +0000

We’ve been advised by Shopping.com that they are changing the number of mandatory fields for products from 3 to 9 with effect from 1st July 2010. These are now all required for a feed:

Image (Minimum size 150 x150 pixel)
MPN or UPC (certain products only)
Brand
Merchant SKU
Description
Product Name
Product URL
Product Price
Shipping

No massive showstoppers for most e-store owners as these are fields which are almost universally contained within an e-store by product. MPN might present a problem if you don’t have the data, although this only affects products in Consumer Electronics and/or Media.

If you are already a Feed Manager customer this need not be a concern; your shopping.com feed will be updated in line with their new listing instructions.

However, if you are submitting a feed to shopping.com independently, you’ll need to take action in the next couple of weeks to prevent problems with your listing.

What Changes From CPA to CPC?

mhiscock — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:37:26 +0000

As is always the case at Gillissa, we have been working on making improvements to all the accounts that we manage, based fundamentally on the needs of the client.

Recently, one client altered their needs, so that clicks were of paramount importance, replacing the previous necessity of a set cost per acquisition (CPA).

In accordance with this, we changed some of the campaigns in the account from CPA bids to CPC (Cost-Per-Click) bids.

A CPC bid refers to the amount that you are willing to pay for a click on your advert when the advert appears on Google or partner sites. A maximum CPA bid is the amount that you would be willing to pay for a conversion.

Consequently, we noticed a significant change in the performance of the involved keywords over a set time period.

The general trend in changing from CPA to CPC was a surge in impressions, clicks, click-through-rate and to an extent, conversions.

However, coupled with these changes was a surge in overall cost and cost/conversion.

Therefore, the bidding preference you implement can have an enormous effect on your campaign and how well it performs, emphasising the importance of structuring your account thoroughly to ensure you maximise your success.

Global Search Continues To Prosper

mhiscock — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:31:57 +0000

A recent report by comScore has indicated a tremendous growth for search marketing, perhaps correlating in a significant boost to search engine marketing.

Between the twelve month period of December 2008 and December 2009, the global search market grew by 46%.

In fact, an estimated 131 billion search queries were carried out from the home and at work by people aged 15 and above.

This undoubtedly illustrates the level of interest in internet searches and the massive potential that search marketing holds, by enabling the advertiser to reach an audience of this magnitude.

In terms of countries, the United Kingdom was the fourth largest search market in the world, behind the United States, China and Japan.

In terms of search engines, Google retained the position as the outright market leader, handling 87.8 billion searches (accounting for 66.8%).

Again, in relation to December 2008, this year saw a 58% increase for Google.

Google Wary Of Rogue Advertisers

mhiscock — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:12:47 +0000

As discussed within the previous blog post ‘Shop Safely This Christmas!’ the team at Gillissa outlined our discovery of an illegitimate advertiser using Google Adwords to advertise within the sponsored links section of Google’s webpage.

As a result, we notified Google of our findings and they dealt with the matter accordingly.

However, there are numerous rogue advertisers still operating on Google Adwords.

Recently, Google have outlined their desire to step up efforts to remove rogue advertisers and act more aggressively to prevent any repeat appearances within the Google Adwords system.

New technology enables Google to ‘blacklist’ all rogue advertiser domains, and subsequently ban them from Adwords account-creation level permanently.

Google spokeswoman Deanna Yick stated:

“We want users to have a high quality, relevant and safe experience when getting information from our ads”.

Indeed, removing rogue advertisers will enhance the user experience, as well as making the Adwords playing field more fair and viable for the legitimate advertisers.

Yick added “We constantly review and improve our quality systems and are now doing even more to protect users by being stricter with offending advertisers”.

Though Google claim that rogue advertisers make up a small minority of the Adwords total, it is without question that the Adwords experience as a whole will improve as a result of Google’s increasingly strict strategy implemented.

Search Marketing: An Increasingly Popular Method Of Marketing

mhiscock — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:53:55 +0000

There was encouraging news for search marketing as a whole, based on a recent report devised by search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.

The statistical data provided claimed that retail clients spent 17% more on search engine markets in the fourth quarter than in the same period for 2008.

This is probably relative to the fact that Efficient Frontier also reported a ninety percent increase in retail-related search queries.

Though there was such a significant increase in searches, conversions did not follow such an impressive positive trend within the same period of time.

Evidently, in such harsh economic times, people are searching online for retail bargains, and, based on the conversion levels reported, such bargains were not found.

From the acquired data, Efficient Frontier provided a trend, indicating that they anticipate 2010 to see advert spending growth somewhere in the region of 15-20%.

In addition, further research shows that Google increased its share of total search spending for the final quarter of 2009.

Google accumulated 74.5% of total outlay, Yahoo 20.4% and Bing 5.1%.

These values were almost identical when relating to capturing search advert clicks, ultimately confirming Google’s status as the runaway leader in the competition for leading search engine.

Online Advertising Prospers In The Recesssion

mhiscock — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:45:24 +0000

The recession currently experienced within this country at the moment is undoubtedly having a negative effect on all aspects of the economy.

The consumer is tightening purse strings during the harsh economic climate, meaning that sales figures are generally in decline in comparison with recent years.

Unsurprisingly, this is the case with overall marketing spend; which fell this quarter again, for the ninth quarter in a row.

Reported by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), overall advertising spend decreased by seven percent in the final quarter of 2009.

However, this quarter saw online advertising spend increase by over eleven percent.

Whilst advertising as a whole continues to struggle within the economic climate, online advertising evidently prospers.

In terms of economic recovery and the marketing sector, online advertising is certainly leading the way.

The IPA reported further that the positive growth of internet advertising is exceeding expectations, whilst search marketing remarkably accounts for almost half of the total spend on all forms of advertising.