But do not mention the content farms

This February has been a month of drama for the search industry. It started with Google accusing Bing of cheating at a search panel at the start of the month. Google followed up the lively panel discussion by publishing a lot of screenshots explaining why they are convinced that Bing was using their search results as a ranking factor.

The write-up on how they did this is pretty comprehensive, but just briefly: they planted artificial queries and set sites to rank for them within their own live directory. They then used the queries and clicked on the links they planted there with computers running Windows, Internet Explorer and with the Bing toolbar installed. It was published on Google’s official blog after the talk, and found its way into the USA’s mainstream media, in a severely abridged form. Bing responded shortly after as well, and put their case forward on their own blog.

In the discussion that developed around this very public fight, kilobytes of text were used to list which search engine came up with what. Google’s copying of Bing’s left column and infinite image search scroll were mentioned, as was Google’s universal search. Issues like whose content Google was incorporating into their own product, sometimes against the owner’s wishes, emerged too. Google’s original statements regarding their own manual control over a site’s position in search emerged, and their original statement “we do not have the capability to manually change it” was brought up.

In all the excitement however everyone seemed to forget what the search panel was expected to be about: content farms, and poor quality content funded by AdSense. The discussion about search quality that permeated the search and Internet marketing community seemed to be forgotten. Even the long running debate over whether or not Google was favouring their own products, such as YouTube and Google Places, was forgotten for a little while.

Adapted from BrisbaneOnlineMarketingMeetup.com – Purported SocMed / Digital Marketing Gurus

1. Artificially inflating the value of traffic and impressions from brand-focused campaigns by
   • removing direct response metrics from campaign management or
   • believing it is something it is not
2. A word I made up

In the late 1990s the Internet was going through its first real bubble thanks to a combination of optimistic venture capital and a high perceived value of impressions. At the time, companies like Yahoo! benefited from this immensely as advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. Even at an inflated price, banner impressions were still cheap compared to TV or other broadcast media and no distinction was made in the mind of the advertisers.

Over ten years later large portal sites no longer dominate the web. Search and social media have taken their place (though Portal sites and Search Engines are not all that different), but advertising for branding online is still a factor.

Advertising for branding is different to direct response campaigns. The metrics for measuring return on investment (ROI) are different for each type of campaign. Competition between direct response and branding ads in the same query space will favour the campaign with larger margins and cheaper goals. Direct response campaigns for low margin sales based on hard ROI targets don’t usually have these.

There are a number of ways that a branding campaign will differ to a direct response campaign in a way that can raise the cost of traffic, and these include (but are not limited to):

• CPM campaigns versus CPC
• Conversion value not limited to a single sale
• Pricing based on costs of broadcast media
• Completed goal action is simpler than a sale

Like most media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and online display advertising benefit by providing products to maximise return on advertising inventory.

Networks like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made changes and acquisitions to cater for brand advertising. These include, though are not limited to, YouTube display advertising, display networks like Adsense and advertising tools such as the option to advertise above the fold on sites using Adsense.

By default, Content Network bids will be on all advertising space on the site, both above and below the fold. To display above the fold, below the fold placements need to be excluded and bids made for placement on the whole site need to be beaten.

On the Adwords blog post explaining this change it was stated that:

Our goal with this release is to give brand advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and make the Google Content Network an even more powerful, controlled environment for running high performing brand campaigns.

In practice this will increase the perceived value of one form of placement over the other. A direct result of this will be a concentration of market participants, and allocated budget competing for one of the two kinds of placements. The above the fold placements will be seen as the more valuable of the two, and as a result, the average cost per click will rise. Many advertisers will diversify their campaigns and bid at different levels on both above the fold only placements and whole site placements for as long as they see value in doing so.

Content Network Above and Below the Fold

There is also a shift towards using online advertising in branding campaigns. With a greater perceived value in search and display advertising for promoting brand building content, the value of certain traffic sources has been inflated. Google Adwords has talked about branding and search marketing a few times already. By selling advertising on branding value and separating the value of an ad from an incremental per sale return increases the amount of money that most organisations can justify internally on paying more for impressions and clicks.

By leveraging different perceptions of value created by these changes to the Content Network, Google Adwords is increasing competition and consequently their margin per click. Separating cost per click from the profit margin on conversion for some markets in the minds of advertisers will also raise the perceived value of impressions and clicks on both search and websites.This trend will increase the actual value of traffic in a market where there is very little competition among suppliers.

Ironically it was Google with their entry into the market that created that first shift towards linking cost of traffic to profit from sale. The introduction of Analytics and Adwords along with using Adsense to grow their inventory were the main drivers in this shift for most marketers new to advertising online.