APT provides you more information about your search campaigns than you’d have otherwise. But some advertisers mistakenly believe APT reveals more than it actually does.

I’d argue the problem doesn’t rest with Google, but rather with advertisers’ mental models of search results pages (SERP s).

OK. APT lets you see a “clean” search results page for a given keyword, Google domain, display language, country, and geography. For example, say you are a US Google advertiser based in NYC. APT lets you check out your local ads in different regions nationwide without leaving your desk.

Some paid search advertisers (or their managers) search on their own company’s terms regularly (sometimes obsessively) to check the position of their ad relative to their competition. Google does report daily average position data, but that dry stat doesn’t reveal competitors’ ranks, and doesn’t provide the visceral satisfaction of “making sure myself that our ads are where they should be” by pulling up the “actual” SERP.

But manually searching your own terms from one computer to check your own ads may not tell you the full story.

I mentioned the geography issue above — sitting in NYC, you shouldn’t (and wont) see your San Francisco campaigns.

Also, Google adjusts ad serving based on IP click-through rates. If a given IP or (perhaps even user) shows a statistically significant anomalously high or low CTR for a given ad, Google may stop serving it.

An example: a major retailer with a strong focus in the (sorry for the obfu) widget category spends large sums advertising the single word term “widget” on Google. As a result, their managers often search for “widget” to check their ad and their competitors’ ads. Obviously, they seldom click their own ad. Because the CTR on this high-impression ad is effectively zero from within their corporate IP range, Google stopped showing their ad to searchers at the corporate HQ building. This caused some valid concern (”Why aren’t we showing up?!?”) until explained.

Enter the Ad Preview Tool.

“Hallelujah !”, advertisers rejoiced, “a way for us to get to the ‘true’ SERPs, cleansed of geo effects and individual history effects and all other Google muck. Like the platonic simplicity of GoTo’s CPC-displayed-on-SERP approach. Now we can keep an eye on on ads’ true rank (and adjust bids to hang in position three). Hallelujah!”

Beyond the parenthetical bid-to-position stupidity (B2P nearly always trashes advertiser profits ), the problem with the prior paragraph is the notion of a true or pure or absolute SERP.

Because in 2008, my SERPs often aren’t your SERPs.

Google knows too much about me. Where I live. What feeds I read. What I’ve searched on before. What certain terms mean to me. Fast: what is a bass? For you, fish or instrument?

Google also varies SERPs to test new ads. Google burns a small fraction of impressions “over-serving” baby ads so as to determine their QS to price ads “correctly”. I’d wager this sampling is essentially random over time, users, and data centers. Again, this leads to some differences in SERPs between users.

Which brings me to my main point:

There is no such thing as a platonic or “true” universal SERP for a given phrase.

SERPs vary to some degree by user, by time of day, day of week, by geography, by IP, by Google data center, by user search history. Who knows, maybe by Google market cap and phase of the moon. What is certain is that there are many many factors involved.

Sure, if you set an outrageously high maxbid, say $25 or $50 for “widget” (this time not obfu, just generic) and don’t set a campaign budget cap and do have a well-known brand name (thus high CTR) and do have OK ad copy and do have fair prices on your merchandise and and decent selection and do have reasonably usable site, then yes, with very high probability you’ll effectively “own” position #1. And that would hold for just every user and every SERP in your geography. (Dell takes this approach for many computer terms.)

Dominating the top may or may not make economic sense, may or may not make branding sense, but you can get there if you want. Just spend enough. OK. In the case of one advertiser determined to outspend all others, yes, the “true” SERP will always have big-spending-advertiser in the first position.

But that atypical. Usually several savvy big-spending advertisers jointly share the top of the page, jostling up and down a slot or two based on bidding algorithms, management ego, whatever. As positions vary by bidding and are filtered through user geography and user search history, there’s no “true” PPC SERP in this case. And I’ll argue that that is OK.

“But wait,” you may be saying, “doesn’t APT reveal the True SERP?”

I think not, as APT also filters on the user data (here “user” means APT user, the advertiser). Let’s watch this in action.

I turned off cookies (FFox: Tools >> Options >> Privacy >> Uncheck “Accept Cookies From Site” box), logged out of Google, deleted existing cookies (FFox: Tools >> Clear Private Data >> Check “Cookies” box >> Clear Private Data Now”) , closed all browser windows, and then opened a new browser. Clean as a whistle. I then went to https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool directly.

In the tool, I specified “plumber” as the keyword, searching on “google.com”, language “English”, country “United States”, “All regions within this country”.

One would expect APT to return national search results for “plumber”. After all, that’s what I asked for, and there are no cookies involved. Here’s the result page.

Despite my request, the page is clearly geo-targeted for my town, beautiful Charlottesville VA. Half the paid ads are local ads: position 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8. So Google uses IP data, which we’d expect.

(Aside: I feel sorry for the guy in position 10 who missed the concept of local targeting. Errr, C’ville is 750 miles from Grand Rapids, friend. Here’s a sympathy backlink:Grand Rapids plumber )

How about trying APT with hiding our true IP? Turn off and purge cookies, close and restart browser, activate Tor , and back to APT

Hello from Austria! That’s where I came out of the onion, it seems. OK. Complete the form (”plumber”, “United States”, “google.com”, etc). and submit:

APT doesn’t like anonymous proxies. Banned! Couldn’t use APT for about a day. (Unless I was logged in with cookies on, then it would let me through.)

So let’s wrap this up. My suggestions:

• Don’t get hung up trying to determine the universal “true” SERP for a given search phrase. It doesn’t exist.
• Realize my SERP might differ a bit from your SERP for the same phrase at the same time.
• Realize even your SERP for the same same phrase might vary a bit when you re-query in a short interval.
• If you want to know where your ads are on the page, rely on Google’s average position stats. Averages are powerful summaries of the whole population of observations. Use them.
• If a term is performing above your economic hurdle and it isn’t already at the top of the page, spend more and move that ad up! (And then ask yourself why your bidding system allowed it to get out of position…)
• On the other hand, if a term is performing below your economic hurdle, lower your bid! (And again ask why your bid system overspent on it…)
• Do use APT to monitor your local campaigns in different geographies.
• Don’t use APT to monitor your national campaigns.
• To avoid getting banned, avoid the sneaky stuff (using automated scripts to scrape APT, using anonymizing proxies, etc)

Happy Monday, all!

Bonus tip: our Google reps confirmed that the natural results on APT are “authentic”, too. A small SEO tidbit there…

Addictomatic builds a one page summary of results from 18 sites including Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Technorati, YouTube, Google Blog Search, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.

No login required, and you can bookmark or email the resulting page.

Relevance? You might use Addictomatic to monitor key competitors, key vendors, or key clients. You’d just save or bookmark the URLS, letting you could check out the current news on them when you wished.

Here’s how Addictomatic describes this process:

Search. Personalize. Bookmark. After you search, you can personalize your results dashboard by moving around the source boxes. When you’re done, bookmark the page and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search.

Sure, you could monitor all these sites for your keywords of interest using RSS feeds. RSS would be more comprehensive. You’d have to read or dismiss every result. If you skipped reading for a while, a backlog of results would build up waiting for review. Most feed readers present their items in list format, rather than in newspaper columns-and-box story format. These attributes of RSS readers aren’t necessarily good or bad. Sometimes they’re want you want, other times not.

Like glancing at page one headlines of the newspaper, Addictomatic gives a one page summary for your specific search term, right now.

Link: Addictomatic

From Techcrunch back in October:
Google assigns dollar value to search results

From SEL back in April:
Google Showing Ranking Scores On AdWords?

From Search Engine Journal, same event:
Google Leaks Quality Score Variables (Pscore, mCPC and thresh) in Search Results

Hattip: SEOBook

Running too quickly, I assumed MSFT was funding the refunds.

Free money promotions are always a win for the stores when the free money comes from somewhere else. — rkgblog

Nope, it is a rev share arrangement

While most search advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their ad, participating merchants will pay Microsoft a fee each time a customer completes a sale through Live Search Cashback. The fee will be a percentage of the retail price, and when the purchase is complete, Microsoft will return the fee to the consumer in the form of a cash rebate, the company said. The rebates to the customer, in effect, come from the advertisers. — washpost

So it is not “free money” to retailers. It is retailer money going to consumers via Live discounting. Sigh.

Sorry for that mistake.

As it makes no difference to consumers who’s footing the bill, I’ll stand by yesterday’s argument — that Microsoft can’t buy user adoption with cash.

Discountistas will finish their transactions at Live to get the discount, but IMHO will stick with their fave search engine for most chores.

Heck, I’ll predict some clever programmer whips up a Firefox plugin to automate that: “Click here to install the Seach On Google Buy From Live FFox button!”

What about the retailer angle?

An industry buddy sent me this email yesterday:

If I only pay a percent of what is sold and that percent leaves a little for me why not let Microsoft advertise my stuff as much as they want. There is little risk on my part. (I know there are lots of other issues, like limited supply, cannibalization of other channels etc.) Still, if I know my advertising cost is never more than a fixed percent of sales that means I can do a LOT of advertising and be guaranteed profitability.

Dave’s right, there’s no risk, but there is the issue of control.

Suppose I go into a restaurant and, when asked for my order, I respond “Bring me something delicious!”

That might work out really well. In a good restaurant with a good waiter, my ambiguity might yield wonderful meal I’d never have thought to order myself.

On the other hand, a misguided waiter might assume that everyone loves liver as much as he does. Or a less-than-scrupulous waiter could bring me the scrod — not because it is delicious, but because nobody else ordered it and it is starting to go bad.

Rev-share is like letting a waiter pick your meal.

By turning over control to the rev-share partner, the retailer focuses on the end (”get my stuff sold”) rather than the means (”here’s what we need to advertise”).

Rev-share partners will naturally push what is easiest to push — your sale items, your loss leaders, your low-margin merchandise. (”I recommend the scrod tonight.”)

So one issue with rev-share advertising is lack of control: the retailer cedes the marketing strategy to a third party who may be working towards a different goal. This issue of control may or may not matter that much.

One other thought.

A downside of MSFT Jellyfish CashBack (indeed of all cash-back programs) is that it trains consumers to shop by price. By doing so, it helps further erode the role of retailer brand in online shopping.

“Never start shopping at Retailer.com,” consumers learn. “Always start at Live.com.”

Search marketing is an incredible advertising channel. Truly game changing, and wonderful for online stores.

(And by now, regardless of you feel about it, search is utterly unavoidable for retailers — you simply have to be in the game, and be playing well.)

I believe in search. I built my business around it. The channel is amazing, but the channel ain’t perfect. One dark cloud on the horizon: search engines atomize retailer brands.

From the American Heritage dictionary

Atomize

1. To reduce to or separate into atoms.
2. To reduce to tiny particles or a fine spray.
3. To break into small fragments.
4. To subject to bombardment with atomic weapons.

SERPs reduce your brand to list of SKU pages, laid out in short vanilla snippets, presented right alongside similar snippets from all your competitors.

Your brand, misted into tiny particles.

Your brand, nuked.

Hmm.

Consumers increasingly regard the search engines as stores.

According to NRF, consumers name “Google” as the ninth most popular e-commerce site online (!) Think about that. All four of the major engines made the list of Top 50 online stores. That, Dear Reader, is disturbing.

Programs like MSFT Cashback only further this troubling trend.

One interesting metric to watch is the fraction of repeat customers who return to your store directly, versus the fraction of repeat customers who come back to you via paid search, affiliate, comparison shopping engines, etc.

Strong online brands have a high rate of direct-to-site return buyers.

Think Amazon, Zappos, Overstock. Many consumers go to them to shop directly, avoiding Google infomediation.

Are you watching your direct-to-site return buyer rate? Are you testing any strategies to improve it?

This ramble is getting long, so I’ll stop before tumbling into another rant about discounting as a promotion strategy. Happy Friday, and a good weekend to everyone out there!

Update: Spot-on post by the illustrious Andrew Goodman on this. Worth checking out over at Microsoft-Google Price War Already Insane-o

In the first half of her talk, Carrie presented industry stats from this year’s State Of Retailing Online report (SORO). Online retail is growing, search spend is growing, retailers send a lot of email, all the expected trends.

The second half of Carrie’s talk was more reflective. She apologized in advance for sounding overly Californian, then put up a slide of a woman doing yoga with the enigmatic title “Search Is.”

Her presentation was far more eloquent and insightful than my rapidly typed notes below suggest. Here my notes:

“Search Is.”

No missing word there. Not “Search Is…” but simply, in the eastern sense, “Search Is.”

Search is a market force, and for online marketing, search is the market place.

You may think search prices are crazy, but it is a marketplace.

Pushing against that force may not be the best way to optimize search.

To grow on any sort of scale, search is one of the only vehicles left.

The value has been squeezed out of affiliate and email.

It isn’t fair to compare affiliate and email to PPC as the former two are fixed costs — even if fixed percentage costs — rather than auctions.

Search is the only place to get the growth.

When consumers in a survey were asked “Where do you shop online most”, Google came in eighth (!!).

Too often Google searches a retailer’s site better than retailer’s themselves.

You can find “batman toddler crocs” at Zappos via Google, but not via a site search on “Batman” on Zappos itself.

Search. We can lament the high costs, but there is not much choice but to play along.

Retailers don’t like not to have choice.

Not having choice frustrates us.

GM committed to putting 50% of entire advertising budget in online within next three years.

A portion of that will go into search.

50% in three years. That is insane fast change.

But it is right, it is good.

Yes, it drives costs up.

But it is what it is.

Search is like Interchange fees — you don’t like paying those fees to VISA, but if you don’t take VISA, what are you going to do?

Without VISA, you don’t have a retail site.

Why? Because consumers want to use credit cards.

Consumers want to use search.

Lehman Brothers report:

Correlation between Google Gross US Revenues to US E-Commerce Growth: .96.

Correlation with Yahoo Display Ad Sales and US E-Commerce Growth: -.04.

From ICSC report, top two sources for new customers online are PPC at 35% and SEO at 18%.

Those are both search, and paid is twice organic. Take note.

Forrester data shows today consumers spend 28% of their total media time online, but only 8% of media spend is online.

Think about that.

Search is.

The price may not be great, but the price is fair.

Because it is the market.

If it costs too much, get out.

It is your choice.

Search levels the playing field.

Being a bigger company can be a disadvantage.

Bigger companies have higher fixed costs to cover.

Pure plays spend 10% of revenue on marketing, versus 5% for multichannels (SORO).

So you see pure plays being more aggressive in their advertising.

The Dali Lama says “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”.

[who] from Moosejaw says [inexact quote, paraphrasing] “I don’t mind if half my customers come from Google. If that’s how customers want to find us, that is what customers want.”

Search is.

– Carrie Johnson, Forrester Research
Shop.org Marketing Workshop, Scottsdale, AZ, 4/8/08

Carrie graciously agreed to an interview here on her views on the evolving role of search in online retail.

I’ll try to get links and exact stats and quotes for the cites above from her too.

Here’s the video:

video link

Here’s the page of links mentioned in the video: rimmkaufman.com/nemoa2008

This talk does not have any grand unifying theme. Rather, it is a random grab-bag of Marketing 2.0 ideas related to online retailing that I find cool. The intended audience was catalogers, so some of the topics or suggestions may be less novel to folks hanging out on the cutting edge of the blogosphere.

I recorded the talk and optimized the Camtasia recordings for Youtube. Boof — some sections were just a smidgen longer than YouTube’s 10 minute rule. So instead I put them on Yahoo’s JumpCut. That’s why the video looks like five sections spliced, and why the image quality isn’t great — it seems optimizing production for YouTube is less optimal for JumpCut.

Pagerank sculpting?

In a nutshell, pagerank sculpting is placing no follow tags on internal links on your own site. The idea is to funnel Google page rank away from unimportant pages (for example, your privacy policy, linked from each page) and to reduce the number of superfluous links on each page (for example, the image SKU link right next to the product name SKU link), so more PR goodness ends up on important pages, like SKU pages, which you want to rank well in natural search results.

Good idea or bad idea?

In the “dangerous and a waste of time” corner, we find Shari Thurow, who today on SEL advises you’d be wise to avoid sculpting. Her arguments are (1) spiders should experience exactly the same site as humans, (2) the nofollow attribute is a dangerous substitute for proper information architecture, and (3) SEOs will likely abuse sculpting so Google will likely soon ignore it anyway.

In the “OK but low importance” zone in middle of the ring, we have Adam Lasik from Google, who says sculpting is OK but advises the benefit isn’t worth much time (see Lee Odden’s video interview with Adam Lasik, question is at 5:32). Also there is Google’s Matt Cutts, who according to SEMOZ, describes on-site no-follow as way for

webmasters to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity… other mechanisms also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out)… There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery… The nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

In the “you betcha!” corner, we have Stephan Spencer rebutting Shari in a Sphinn comment today by noting his team has used the technique successfully for clients.

According to our tests, there are plenty of occasions where [sculpting] can be a valuable tool… If you have an ecommerce site and the category pages contain 3 links to every single product page — the product name as a text link, the product image thumbnail as an image link, and the words “View Product” as a text link — you could nofollow the image and “View Product” links and funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually-relevant product-name-based text links.

GrayWolf makes the interesting observation that if the engines really knew to skip boilerplate links, then Apple and CNN wouldn’t rank so highly for “contact us”.

I’m not a SEO guy, and I am not speaking from data, but Stephan’s arguments resonate, and the Google guys aren’t blackhatting the method. For kicks, we may try some sculpting on this blog. SEO-savvy retailers might want to consider this approach. Let us know what you learn!

This can speed up routine tasks, or make difficult tasks possible.

Because it operates inside the Windows copy buffer, it works across just-about-every Windows app. (Sorry Stephan — the tool doesn’t support the more enlightened.)

We’ve included some sample filters for using RKG Duck to wrangle URLs and extract interesting strings from content. The real power is adding your own filters.

In the spirit of open source, if folks come up with interesting filters they want to share, email us or post them in the comments below. Of course, we’ll give you credit and a backlink for sharing. I think it’d be cool to have a public shared resource of useful little filters…

Links:

• SEL post
• YouTube demo
• RKG Duck homepage

From my article in this month’s Catalog Success, fourteen important ideas for paid and natural search as we start 2008:

• Social media.
• Markup.
• CSS.
• Blogs and RSS.
• Google’s Universal Search.
• GA & GWO.
• Brand vs. nonbrand.
• Broad match and content.
• Profit, not position.
• Long-Tail term bidding.
• Comprehensive term lists.
• Rational ad groups.
• Quality score.
• Personalized SERPs.
• Conversion: the ultimate PPC battleground.

Catalog Success article: 14 Hot Ideas in Free and Paid Search For 2008

Restructuring your site URLs is the single biggest killer of SEO I’ve seen.
– Christopher Alan, SEO Manager, Expedia

Great presentation from Chris from Expedia on SEO — I will see if he’d allow us to post his excellent slides here.

His comments on restructuring/changing URLs on a site relaunch really resonated.

As we announced back in January, we’re relaunching our corporate site, and we’re in the process of handling the changes in URL.

As we continue our (glacially slow!) series on using WordPress as a CMS, we’ll discuss changing urls en masse in SEO-friendly fashion in the next week or so. That will coincide with the relaunch of our small corporate site, only 8 months delayed — the cobbler’s kids has no shoes!

Snapshots from my Seattle trip: