Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com In this session, the presentation were a combination online examples how all the paid search engines offer different tactical options in Geographic targeting, SEM Campaign best practices and the importance of Editorial Reviews and Trademark policies. The most interesting key points were that Bidding on Trademark terms in Google does affect the Quality Score as well as Yahoo Panama’s matchdriver which takes misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations and directs them to a primary term. Now, that we have a brief overview, I will now go the key talking points. The session started off with Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com. He spent a lot of time focusing on the many different options on Geographic targeting in Google, Yahoo and MSN. He also walked the audience through the Google adwords target audience settings, as well as the details of Google offering Geo targeted campaigns in 200 different countries with Local targeting is 27 countries. He also went through some examples of Geo targeted ads, Radius Targeting, Multi-map options, Location Targeting Options where users can targets customers in an area whose shape you define. Ad Diagnostic tool. Ads show in different results based on where you live. Brad then continued to talk about the geo targeting options that MSN and Yahoo offer where MSN supports 200 countries, Local targeting is 4 countries (US, Canada France & UK) and Yahoo Panama supports 23 countries, DMA and State Targeting. He also talked about blocked continents, map or text regions, zip code search, and the one of the most interesting points that each country has different editorial guidelines. Kevin Lee, Exec. Chairman, Did-it.com Next up to the podium was Kevin Lee and really nailed it on the head when he said Paid search is targeting humans, not clicks or impressions. He focused on that driving qualified search to interesting prospects is what matters. He walked the audience through the interfaces that the engines offer. Going though the different Matchtypes available on the engines and mentioning the importance of Yahoo’s extended broad match and MatchDriver which tries is figure out what the searcher is looking for. He also talked about that MSN is experimenting with stemming and that MSN as well as Google prefer that you add plurals to the campaign separately. Kevin also went into detail about why we need to use match types to determine search intent and to use exact match to maximize quality score. He mentioned best practices such as to mix and match the different match types to maximize SERP coverage; Encouraged users to utilize analytics to look for seasonal, weekly and daily trends track everything such as the time of day, day of the week, geographic, etc… He closed his presentation highlighting on that scale & efficiency of SEM campaigns equals a good strategy. Mona Elesseily Internet Marketing Strategist, Page Zero Media Next up to the podium was Mona Elesseily and she focused mainly on search engine editorial review process, as well as Trademark policies. Mona highlighted on the that even though Google MSN and Yahoo have automation in place to speed up the review process, Ads to do not just automatically go live on the engines without some sort of review She also focused on Yahoo in particular still continues to random sweep all accounts to catch editorial infringements and is still performing “case by case” manual reviews. Mona then discussed the Trademark issue, She mentioned that grammatical errors, superlatives and use of the trademark name do trigger problems. In Google, a user can bid on trademark terms, however not in ads/Creatives and that some trademarks are placed on a “block list” for immediate notification. One of the most interesting points in the presentation what that even though users can bid on trademark terms, it is very likely that it will affect your quality score. In my opinion, this is welcome news for companies who are in bidding wars with their own affiliates, competitors and partners because it makes it has the potential to free up the real estate for the trademark search terms which are generally the most profitable for them.
Session Coverage Provided By: Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.
