Efficient Frontier Insights

Google Changing its EU and UK Trademark Policy

Yesterday Google announced that it will modify its Trademark policy on the 14 of September 2010. How is this likely to affect search marketers, you might ask?

What is changing in Europe?
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As of now Google has been monitoring trademarked terms so that no one apart from the brand owner could buy those terms as keywords. On the 14 of September Google will no longer monitor this.

As a result, advertisers will be able to buy their competitor's brand without having to fill in an exception request. While buying trademarked terms will be allowed, using those trademarked terms in the adcopy won't be permitted.

What is the likely effect of this change
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• Your brand CPC might increase during the first weeks. With time the Quality score should play its role and allow you to keep a fairly low CPC on your brand keywords
• Based on how appealing your competitors ads are, it might lower a little bit your CTR
• Advertisers that are not currently buying their brand will now need to buy it otherwise competitors might take sales from them

What is changing in the UK?
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While buying trademarked terms has been possible for a year now in the UK, it was not possible to include trademarked terms in the adcopy. On the 14 of September, selected advertisers will now be able to include trademarked terms in their ads. Advertisers will only be able to do this if they have sufficient content on their site regarding the trademarked term that they want to buy.

I would encourage all search marketers to keep a close eye on their brand performance on Google before and after the 14 of September 2010. If you have any questions please feel free to send me a tweet @efrontier or @efrontier_fr

Olivier Lemaire
Account Director, France

Celebratory Cup Cakes at Efficient Frontier Innovation Summit – London

 
Last week, Efficient Frontier hosted its 2010 Innovation Summit in London.   It was a long anticipated event after the original event was postponed due to the Ash Cloud flight chaos.   The purpose of the event, which was attended by more than 70 clients and industry luminaries, was to engage with our UK clients in discussion on improving their digital marketing performance.

As the name of the event would imply, the theme of innovation was front and centre as speakers and delegates alike reflected on how the challenging economic times of the past few years has increased the pace of innovation in the digital marketing industry.
 
David Karnstedt, Efficient Frontier’s CEO kicked off proceedings by pointing out the large gap that still exists between online spend and consumption – some $50 billion per year -  representing  a significant opportunity. 

David was followed by Mark Howe, Country Sales Director, Google who presented Six Pervasive Trends in the Internet, covering timely themes such as Social, Local, Personal, Commerce, Mobile and Enterprise.
 
Our own European Client Services Director Jonathan Beeston then took the stage to moderate his Power Panel of brand advertisers. Special thanks goes to Mark Howe, Graham Donoghue, Managing Director of moneysupermarket.com, Nick Rudge, VP of Marketing at Holiday Cottages Group and Roland Mueller-Buchner Head of Marketing at TUI Germany for sharing their thoughts about the recent economic downturn, their experiences and what might be in store for the future of performance marketing.
 
After celebratory cup cakes marking Efficient Frontier London’s fourth birthday, Google’s product managers presented fascinating best practices on post click strategy for web conversions and wowed delegates with some seriously cool mobile innovation demonstrations, including voice search.
 
Efficient Frontier’s VP of Marketing and New Product Development, Justin Merickel was next up to present on the company’s progress in search innovation and expansion into new business areas. Stand-out innovations included product feeds for automating frequently performed campaign management tasks, as well as the ability to dynamically change numerical values in creatives without causing Google to consider the creative as new. The customised cross channel reporting templates were also a well discussed topic, as were the updates to the Efficient Frontier multi-channel algorithms.
 
One of the core themes to the day was Efficient Frontier’s move into the display exchange marketplace. After hearing from Laurent Cordier, Google’s EMEA Director for ad exchange and display partnerships, Justin talked about how Efficient Frontier has built the first integrated Search and Display management and optimisation platform by integrating with the largest ad exchanges, including Yahoo!’s Right Media and Google’s AdEx. He went on to cover real-time bidding capabilities and seamless reporting and attribution spanning search and display.
 
Signing off the day we were privileged to hear from special guest speaker Richard Eyre, Chairman of the IAB who presented his thoughts on innovation and change as the recession recedes.

If you would like a copy of any of the presentations from Efficient Frontier’s Client Innovation Summit, please get in contact via twitter @efrontier.

Merinda Peppard | Global Marketing Manager

Where were the head honchos at SMX Advanced London?

This week was a busy one for online marketers.  Google’s annual Zeitgeist attracted diverse speakers such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Howard Schultz and Sir Tim Berners-Lee who spoke to a crowd of Europe’s leading CEOs and CMOs.  Over in Munich performance marketers gathered for the a4u Affiliate Marketing Conference.  And on the doorstep of Efficient Frontier’s London office, SEM practitioners flocked from far and wide to SMX Advanced.

SMX London attracted an enormous number of industry folk from continental Europe and also the US to take part in the event.   No doubt this underlines that search conferences are just as valuable for networking as they are for learning.

Jonathan Beeston, Efficient Frontier’s search guru, spoke on two panels. His first session “PPC Logistics”, covered structuring accounts in a scalable fashion through a multitude of dimensions. Importantly to Jonathan’s presentation was the illustration of Efficient Frontier’s advanced campaign management features including;

• Dynamically creating keywords from product feeds
• Using feed columns as dynamic parameters for use in account structure creation, mapping
• Automatically creating ad variations tailored to the ad group them
• Integrating with Google Live Ads to dynamically update ads with NO impact on QS

His session, Making Sense of All the Numbers began with the principle that “Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all” and drew some controversial but substantiated conclusions;

• Don’t worry about click assists. They form a small part of all conversions.
• Do not use last event attribution models for sales funnels that are long and multi-point.
• Use multimetric regression models and multi-point attribution models to estimate the value of long tail keywords.

If you would like a copy of the Efficient Frontier presentations by Jonathan Beeston, please get in touch via twitter @efrontier. We now look ahead to SMX Advanced in Seattle where our own Dr. Siddharth Shah will present Targeting The Search Funnel on Day One and on the Mad Scientists of Paid Search Panel on Day Two.

Merinda Peppard, Global Marketing Manager

Is Bing about to Bang? – Data from our UK Search Engine Performance Report

In addition to the Q1 2010 U.S. Search Engine Performance Report, we also produce a UK version which looks at spend data from a sample of our UK advertisers. Similar to our friends in the U.S., spend for UK advertisers grew a healthy 21% when compared to Q1 last year. Overall return on investment (ROI) in search is up 6% YoY as consumer’s return to purchasing with a more favourable economic outlook. Consistently, the increase in query and click volume is another indicator of this strong consumer demand.

The Efficient Frontier report also appears to be in line with the IPA Bellwether report, published last week, which agreed confidence was up in the sector.
 
The news this quarter focuses on Bing. As we wrote back in October, the big Bing marketing push we saw in the U.S. really affected their share in a positive way. This quarter, Bing made a splash in the UK via various UK advertising mediums including TV.  Although on a smaller scale than in the U.S., Bing did gain spend share this quarter from Google while Yahoo! remained flat. Bing also saw the highest increase in impressions and clicks QoQ out of the search engines and saw a 9% increase in click share on last quarter. Bing spend share in Q1 2010 increased to 4.7% which represented YoY and QoQ gains of 9%. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Also in this quarter’s UK Search Report, we have included an international spend chart for the first time due to popular demand. Although we produce a separate U.S. Search Engine Performance Report, it is interesting to see spend comparisons for different markets together in one place. Looking at Efficient Frontier’s International Customer Index, the market share split between the engines shows Google still dominates when coupled with its Content Network in UK, USA, France, Germany and Australia. Yahoo! has maintained dominance in Japan against Google Search.

We are just as enthusiastic as our U.S. colleagues about the positive Q1 trends we are seeing and we also increase our SEM growth prediction for 2010 to 20%.
 
The Q1 UK Search Report can be downloaded from our website and the full press release can be found here. Comments gratefully received!
 
Merinda Peppard
Global Marketing Manager

UK Search Engine Report: Q4 2009

 

In addition to releasing the Q4 U.S. Search Engine Performance Report yesterday, we also released it's sister publication for the UK. The UK Report covers trends for the sector based on data from our UK Customer Index. Highlights from the quarter include:

• Sequential Quarter on Quarter (QoQ) growth is up 27% and Year on Year (YoY) growth is up 16%. 
• Click through rates on all engines increased year on year (YoY).
• Google’s share of clicks rose two percentage points to 86.9% and while Google’s share of spend rose one percentage point QoQ to 87.6%, Yahoo! gave up one percentage point in spend.
• Bing held relatively stable at 3.3% share of clicks in Q4 vs. 3.7% in Q3. Bing also remained steady at 4.3% share of spend.
• UK also expects 15-20% range in SEM spend growth for the full year of 2010 (based on current economic conditions).

Download the full report here for more analysis.

UK Search Engine Performance Report Released

This week our UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q1 2008 was released. Google is by far the dominant search engine in the UK, with 85% of search engine spending in Q1 2008. Its ROI by increased by 14% since Q4 2007, despite a small drop in CTR from Q4 07 to Q1 08.
 
Q1 2008 showed a difficult quarter for Yahoo in the UK, with a CTR decline of 38% and a subsequent decline in ROI of 6% versus Q4 2007. Much of this decline might be attributable to Yahoo's expansion of its partner syndication network into high volume, lower quality sources of search traffic, as seen in the US and explained here. MSN increased its share of search slightly from Q4 07 to Q1 08, to account for 3.5% of UK search spending in Q1. MSN also maintained its lead as the engine with the highest ROI in the UK.

With the exception of Japan, Google captures the vast majority of search engine advertising spending in the major global markets in which Efficient Frontier operates.  Europe is the most Google-centric, with Google accounting for nearly 96% share of search advertising spending in Q1 2008. In the United States, Google accounted for 77% of search spending, while 93.5% of spending went to Google in Australia. Despite Yahoo’s dominance in Japan, Google gained 6.2 percentage points of search spending in Japan from Q4 2007 to Q1 2008. It's no surprise that in Q1 international markets accounted for 51% of Google's revenues.

Global SEM Breakdown: Mostly Google

Today Google is expected to report "stellar earnings," according to a Forbes article published this week. In Q3 2007, Google reported that 48% of its revenue came from outside the US, which leads the author to conclude "even a recession should not impede Google's growth." This week we reported that Google accounted for 77% of search spend in Q4 07, and captured 97% of the additional search marketing spend added by a fixed group of US clients this year. Analysis of data from our international client base shows that with the exception of Japan, where Yahoo dominates search, other markets lean even more heavily toward Google than the US.

Google search and content covers more than 85% of the marketplace in Australia, UK, and Europe. MSN adCenter is not operating in Australia, and has a presence in only some European countries.

Efficient Frontier CEO Ellen Siminoff recently wrote about the global opportunity for SEM in MediaPost's Search Insider. Google may not be able to take the majority of search share in China and Japan, but it seems as if world domination might be in its future, making "don't be evil" an increasingly important motto.

Just How Dominant is Google in European Paid Search?

If you ask any European search marketer about the differences between the European market and the US, the first thing they will most likely say is "in Europe, it's all about Google." Indeed, Hitwise UK data shows that Google accounted for 85% of UK search query volume as of October 2007.

The breakdown of search engine spend for Efficient Frontier Europe also shows this dominance - in October 2007, nearly 88% of our UK client spend occured on Google Adwords or AdSense. The other European countries in which our clients are advertising (France, Spain, Italy and Germany) show an even greater trend toward Google, which claims 94% of client search spend in those countries.

Although Google dominates in Europe, just as in the US, it's important not to discount the other engines in your international campaigns. That additional 15% of search queries not performed on Google can add to your bottom line, and provide good learning opportunities. MSN offers demographic targeting and high quality traffic in the UK, and Yahoo! Search is improving the quality of their traffic with site exclusion and CPC discounts. However, given the growth of Google's paid search share in the US, as I showed in this post, it makes me wonder how long it will be before Google reaches 90% share in the UK.

On Monday at SES Chicago, Efficient Frontier President James Beriker shared this data along with best practices for EU campaigns in the "Search Around the World: Europe and Latin America" panel . Marty Weintraub covered the session here.