Wiener, book, and blood Target on-the-go customers with Google Mobile Ads

Posted by tom klein February 15, 2008 at 2:30 am

While search engines can certainly get you a lot of answers, your customers aren’t always sitting in front of a screen. If you’re a restaurant, coffee shop, or movie theater, how do you fish where the fish are?

Google Mobile Ads can help connect you to people who are searching while they’re on the go. This capability is so much like regular search ad placement that it’s easy to forget that it’s really a distinct offering. For example, if you go to google.com on your iPhone, you now see a page built specially for you. When you use the well-known Google search, you will find, in addition to search results, text search ads. You can make sure that your ads are included in these search results by indicating so in the same Adwords platform used for standard search ad placement. One simple click and now your ads are served up specifically to mobile search users.

The prognosticators forecast that US mobile search (ad) revenue will exponentially increase each year, from $83 million in 2007 to 3.8 billion in 2012, of course driven by a lot more mobile searching and a lot of ad placement by advertisers like you. If you’re selling an appropriate category of products or services (e.g., tire repair, coffee shop), now’s the time to make sure that your ads are available, wherever your buyers might be.

The popularity of mobile search is pushing companies to create mobile-friendly sites. Newer mobile devices, like iPhone & Palm Treo, were designed with mobile in mind and can view both mobile-enabled and standard sites.

Mobile search ads represent two great tastes in one great ad vehicle. First, because ads are served when users are searching, they are at some kind of decision point. Second, because the search is happening on the road, users aren’t just contemplating, they’re likely ready to make a deal.

eMarketer: Global Finding Its Way Google Mobile Blog Google confirms huge search traffic from iPhone

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Talking heads See the potential of video search at Viewdle

Posted by tom klein February 8, 2008 at 2:30 am

The video image search that you see on the web today isn’t really searching – it’s just pulling images based on tags or filenames. In other words, it’s not actually searching the video. If you have a lot of video to monetize, what can you do?

The answer might be a search tool like Viewdle. It’s a facial recognition platform that makes it easy to index, search, and then monetize video assets. As you’ll see on their site (and their example using video from Reuters), Viewdle presents a way for you to search through video and pull out people based on facial recognition. Looking for the best video image of Paris Hilton or Elton John, here’s an easy way to find it. It’s not the best tool for finding a video of Eudora Welty just yet.

As everyone has learned from the success of Google, search can be a powerful vehicle for monetizing content. By attaching this search tool to your content, you might find new revenue.

This system combines facial-recognition visual analysis technology along with other search techniques to automatically look “inside the video” and identify true on-screen appearances. For video search, facial recognition is just the start. Next step, can you find the scene where the random guy is brushing his teeth?

The long tail of the Internet has taught anyone who has video content that good times are on their way. If people will pay $3 for a 15 second ring tone, what will they pay to search and find their favorite line from Gone with the Wind?

Fatal recognition system What celebrity do you look like?

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Light my fire Manage complex search campaigns with SearchIgnite

Posted by tom klein January 29, 2008 at 2:30 am

So you’ve slowly turned yourself into a pay-per-click advertising jedi knight. However, success can breed a new problem – complexity. Namely, thousands and thousands of search terms to manage, located across several different ad / search networks. Consider adopting a PPC management software application like SearchIgnite.

This web-based tool lets you manage your keyword driven campaigns across several different search engines. As your pay per click campaigns grow, they become just too big and complex for you to manage everything in your head. With a keyword management system like this one, you can make bid adjustments and track ROI in one centralized location. In addition to centralized management, there are additional features that support dayparting and keyword-level conversion metrics.

If you would like for success to breed more of the same, think about how search advertising tools can keep you from being spread too thin.

In addition to managing your own account, this system includes features that would allow an agency (internal or external) to manage multiple client campaigns within a single interface and login.

Creating and placing search ads makes sense for just about everyone, given that so many buyers start their buying process at the search bar. They also tend to return over and over again, narrowing their search, until they’re comparing prices on a specific product or service.

MSN, Google, & Yahoo on SearchIgnite Platform Search marketing update

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Who goes there? Target buyers with vertical search tools like Roost

Posted by tom klein January 28, 2008 at 2:30 am

While most people start the buying process with Google or Yahoo!, these tools aren’t the right ones to use for many categories of things. Accordingly, they’re not always the right place to put your advertising, either.

Take homebuyers for example. When it comes to targeting them, you’re better off advertising with Roost. This real-estate search engine provides comprehensive listings (not yet nationally), including for-sale-by-owner listings. Search results feature photos, mapping, and summary information. In addition, users can adjust results using sliders, a handy tool for narrowing results by price, location, or even year built.

Roost makes money by hosting a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivering traffic to them. One thing for sure, Roost search users are definitely interested buyers. When it comes to going to the next level of search advertising, have you explored what vertical search tools exist for your industry?

Vertical search engines represent the real competition for Google and its ilk. Or, maybe just acquisition targets. No one knows what to do with 10,000 search results. These vertical tools get you just the information you want.

The question to consider for a vertical search tool - are there enough users to make advertising or a relationship interesting. Because Roost is a startup and not yet a national site, it won’t have many users. Still, you don’t have to sell too many houses to make some kind of advertising worthwhile.

Search 2.0 – What Next? Specialty search engines

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If I only had a brain Reach a niche with text ads using IndustryBrains

Posted by tom klein January 25, 2008 at 2:30 am

When it comes to placing online ads, Google is the kingpin. However, not every site carries ads from their network. If you’re looking to reach a more targeted niche, where can you turn?

You can use your noggin’ and try IndustryBrains. This ad placement and management system works much like Google’s, but its network is focused on premium vertical publications – sites like GolfWeek, Motley Fool, BusinessWeek, USA Today, PC World, and Morningstar. First you select the website(s) and sometimes the specific pages in the site that work best for you. Then, you place a bid for what you will pay for each click through. Finally the system places your text ad based on its relevancy and performance.

When you’re ready to add some highly targeted sites to your ad placement strategy, this is a great place to start. Alternatively, if you know for certain that you target is reading the Motley Fool, why not just go straight to the source?

The big difference here, compared to many ad networks, is the ability for an advertiser to choose just one site, or even just one page on one site where an ad will appear. It can be a powerful tool for reaching a hard to reach target.

Just placing an advertisement doesn’t mean you’re done. It’s key to “connect the dots” from an ad, to a landing page, and then ultimately to some sort of conversion. You don’t want to pay for ads if your site isn’t ready to carry the ball.

Writing targeted ad text IndustryBrains owns tech publishing

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