CPC determined by visit history

I seem to be having a t-shirt flavoured Gmail AdWords week. This is Google's targetting system; I clicked on one and so now their system is tempting me with more t-shirt goodness.

This could be my favourite AdWord of all time.


The site in question can be found selling Engrish t-shirts here. Don't go clicking on the poor site's AdWords campaigns.

The ad reads:

Engrish.com can help you with our pleasure. Let's shopping t-shirts!

The t-shirt AdWord which first caught my attention this week was for Torso Pants. I liked the site so much that I bookmarked it using my Google toolbar. I'll buy something later.

Here's a thought; I bookmarked Torso Pants via Google. Google continues to show me AdWords for Torso Pants. If more people actually used Google's bookmarking feature then I, as an advertiser, would want an AdWords option which let me decide whether or not to show my ads to people who had already bookmarked me.

I might decide - they know about my niche store already; I don't want to ad serve them.
I might decide - I want to remind them that I'm here; I do want to ad serve them.

In fact, you can take that concept and simply throw away the Google bookmarking feature. Wouldn't it be a good idea if you could set CPC based on whether the searcher had been on your site recently, some time in the past or never before?

Disclaimer: I'm heavily NDA'd by Google but, at the time of this post, I've never talked to them about CPCs determined by visit history. If I had knowledge of CPC/visit history features then I wouldn't be blogging this!

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Google at the Great B2B Marketing Debate

On Tuesday I was at The Great B2B Marketing Debate hosted by the B2B Marketing magazine and Mardev. The topic was "Is SEO eclipsing pay-per-click for lead generation?"

This was one of the events that I end going to because I must have said "Hey, that looks like a fun debate" and then a few days before the event itself someone in our marketing department tells me that a) I'm going, b) I'm speaking, c) They require a written speech ahead of time and d) I'm for the motion.

It just so happened that a few days before this event I was in New York. Umm. Anyway; I hope that the speech I put together was good enough to interest most of the audience and as it happen - we won the debate.

I wasn't really for the motion. SEO and PPC are different and simply have different strengths and weaknesses. A good blog post which explains this would be Lisa Ditlefsen's SEO is like buying a house whilst PPC is like renting. Lisa Ditlefsen just also happens to be the B2B Marketing Newcomer of the Year.

So when I say we won the debate and then say it was Lisa and myself arguing for the motion then I hope the bigger picture starts to fall into place.

It wasn't an easy debate to win (and not just because we were arguing for the purposes of the debate - not because either one of us thought PPC is loosing traction) as we were up against Simon Norris a co-founder of Periscopix and Stuart Small the Business and Industry Leader from Google UK.

What caught my attention at the start of the evening was the attention that Google was giving it. You don't tend to see Google at many events in the UK - not even the big trade shows. I was surprised to see six other Googlers on the attendee list at the start of the night. In truth I don't think all six turned up (Christmas shopping on Oxford Street was too tempting, I bet!) but Google did sponsor the event and provide quite a lot of reading material.

I jotted down some quotes from Stuart which I'd like to share:

• For every 100 searches - 20 of them are a PPC click
• 20% of searches are unique - that's not seen in the last three months
• Google Checkout buttons increase clickthrough rates

It's not a surprise that the (still relatively rare in the UK) Google Checkout button increases clickthrough rates but perhaps slightly more surprising to hear Google pushing that so directly at business decision makers.

I was interested by the three month time limit on what defines an unique search though. Three months is clearly the time which Google keeps data for analysis on search queries (though Google Trends or the AdWords Traffic Estimator chart further back).

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HMV moving into social media

Early next year (or thereabouts) we'll see HMV launch a social media site.

We have some clues from HMV's e-commerce director Gideon Lask

We've been in extensive dialogue with our core music and film suppliers, to identify cool and exciting content that we hope to include when we launch next year.

The way people discover and consume music and film is changing, and we need to reflect this in what we do.

HMV staff will be the first to explore and report on the site, along with a small number of hand-picked public users who will be identified by Cake.

Agencies LBi and Cake have helped develop the site. I've had one journalist ring me up and really wanted me to dismiss this as another "me too" project. I didn't agree. I suspect that line of questioning comes from Lask saying;

There are so many details we're still finalising - we're not even sure how best to describe the concept, and we haven't settled on a final name.

Although it remains to be seen whether the social media site is successful I wouldn't dismiss this as a "me too". HMV needs to look at the way people find and discuss music these days and this is exactly how they do it. I'd love to see it. I don't think I know anyone in Cake otherwise I'd be pestering them!

If the site is successful then it should help offset HMV's poor PPC strategy which is heavily reliant on burning through tokens and database queries to update bids in line with their inventory. That's a short term strategy and means HMV's clicks are more expensive than competitors. It also means they don't get to use current hits (inventory pending) to drive traffic to the site. A better strategy would be landing pages which cross-sold should the keyword title not be currently available. Not only would that let HMV benefit from the fickle fashion in music but would allow them to bid more cheaply.

So, we've got HMV making a stab at social (there's an irony in a company called His Master's Voice engaging with the voice of the socialnet) but doing badly in PPC. We also have Zavvi (ex-Virgin Megastories) leaving themselves open for annihilation on the SEO front. 2008 will be an interesting year for Entertainment retailers and affiliates!

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Zavvi, Zavvi, Zavvi, oih!

Affiliates start your engines. Race!

The Virgin Megastores chain has been sold - to itself. Branson sold all the UK and Irish megastores to a management buyout team.

Here's the SEO angle. The new team is going to rebrand the stores 'Zavvi'. If you quickly pop over to Google and do a [Zavvi] search you'll see that the number one position is up for grabs. In fact, the whole of page #1 is going to be a land rush.

It'll be interesting to see if any of 'Zavvi's' mainstream competitors - HMV, CDWOW, etc, risk a brand bidding strategy. It's not very ethical but I doubt Zavvi will get the trademark paperwork done in time for launch at Google. It's more likely we'll see affiliates brand bidding and that's a different kettle of fish.

Update: I don't think they have the .com. The .co.uk was registered on the 5th of this month by "Broomco".

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Will MIVA cope on GaydarNation?

Just skimming today's press releases and found one from Giuliana Rubinia over at MIVA announcing that they've secured a deal to place cost-per-click content ad units across the GaydarNation portal and sites.

It's an interesting deal. As you might expect, Gaydar's sites are strongly themed. They're an example of what some people call an "uber-theme" or "site-theme".

You can imagine that the contextual network search engines would try and place "holiday", "cheap flights", "hotels", etc, etc, ads on any article about booming tourism in London.

What about on Gaydar?

Would ideal solution for search engine, publisher and advertiser would be for adverts for gay holidays to be contextually matched to London tourism content on Gaydar?

What if that match comes at the expense of "flight" adverts? Or "London sightseeing" adverts? Or "car hire"?

The question is how much should the Gaydar site's theme influence the topic of any given page.

MIVA beat Yahoo to this pitch. The larger the advertisers inventory then the easier it is to explore answers to the question above and use click analysis to help decide. Certainly Yahoo would seem to have a much larger inventory than MIVA.

Trevor Martin of QSoft (who own Gaydar) has said that MIVA showed good understanding of the brief and were willing to customise the look and feel of their ads to match GaydarNation.com's design.

Well done to MIVA for the win. Let's wait and see how well they do in targeting adverts to the site.

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