Speakers:
- Todd Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO, Buzzlogic
- Jay Sears, SVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc.
- Jason Weisberger, COO, Federated Media
Blog Statistics
- 65 million Americans read blogs
- 60% of those readers access blogs to explicitly get an opinion
- 65% of online “power shoppers” say they always read consumer generated reviews and spend more than 10 minutes engaging with UGC before they buy.
- 3.5 billion brand-related conversations per day
Who is directing traffic and attention to a particular post?
Who is the influencer linking out to for information?
What do these linking patterns tell me about consumer behavior?
Super engaged audiences are now going to targeted content via social media. So if an iPhone is being blasted in a conversation about how it doesn’t work with corporate email then blackberry would find it valuable to advertise on that page.
There’s been a lot of media fragmentation over the past few years, with page views in the top 3 portals declining while total internet growth in page views is up 21%.
With that being said, media spend is lopsided with over 50% of media spend going to those big destination sites.
Scale vs. Control includes the need of a common denominator to bring scale. Other important factors are demographics, behavior and targeting based on “social nets”
Control can mean a lot of things:
- Pricing & reliable volume projections
- Content adjacency (what type of content is my ad going to run against)
- Brand Association (if you have any brand based considerations you want to be in a brand safe environment)
Contextual is not search
- Readers are not searching for you
- More like banner or print advertising
- Blog readers are in research phase, not buying phase
Never run content while running on the search network at the same time. It should be a separate campaign.
Algorithms look at the keywords and the ad copy and then picks a theme for that category in one of 594 themes. No more than 30-50 keywords per ad group. The lesser the better.
More on the structure of content campaigns
Match types are irrelevant (except negative)
Individual keyword bids are irrelevant
Negative keywords are necessary
Ad Copy Differences
Ads need to stand out
Yell, don’t whisper (your not punished for low quality scores like with search network)
Be more competitive – e.g. free shipping
Test, test, test
Ad Position Differences
Magic positions for search are 1-3
Magic positions for content are 1-4 since avg. pub runs ads with 4 spots
Watch Google placement performance reports. It shows which sites your ads have appeared on as well as the metrics that you’re used to seeing in your keyword reports.
Sample Strategy
- Setup separate content campaign
- Run performance report
- Use site exclusion to eliminate poorly performing sites
- Move top-performers to a CPC placement targeted campaign
- Rinse & repeat
Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.
