The AdGooroo Blog

April 16, 2008

Google gains advertiser share relative to Yahoo, MSN

Search Engine Advertiser Update – Q108
April 16, 2008

The number of companies advertising on the top three search engines increased considerably in Q1. Both January and February saw strong growth in the overall number of search engine advertisers, followed by modest growth in March. This represents the first significant sign of expansion in advertiser activity since last May. Most of this was due to a large increase in the number of active Google advertisers.

The trends in advertiser share which persisted throughout the latter half of 2007 largely reversed themselves in Q108. The biggest gainer this quarter was Google, who increased their advertiser share from 72.7% to 77.0%. Yahoo ended a long winning streak with its first decline in seven months, dropping from 34.5% to 30.1%. MSN held its ground, increasing slightly from 11.1% to 11.4%.

Despite this short-term shift in fortunes, Google lost ground to its two major competitors over the trailing twelve months. We estimate that MSN has increased its year-over-year advertiser base by 11%, Yahoo by 5%, and Google by only 4%.

While suggestive, our advertiser counts are estimates only and should be interpreted in light of other data. These figures represent the net effect of both new advertisers and advertisers lost through attrition.

Charts:
1. Share of Advertisers by Search Engine
2. Monthly Change in Advertiser Count
3. Relative Advertiser Count vs. 12 Months Ago



Download PDF with all charts and tables (free registration required)

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April 7, 2008

Court rules that use of trademarks in AdWords copy is infringement

A court has recently ruled in favor of the plaintiff in an ad copy infringement case. The plaintiff, Storus, sued Aroa for using their trademark, "smart money clips," in the title line of one of their AdWords ads.

Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand points out that not only would it have been easier to petition Google to pull the ad, it would have been much cheaper as well (Eric Goldman at at Technology & Marketing Law Blog estimates the losses at between 1-5% of the total legal fees.)

Original case
Full article at SearchEngineLand

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March 31, 2008

Build 6.2.38 released

A new update has been pushed live to the site. This release addresses many known issues:

All Reports

Campaign Alerts
New express users with UserIDs greater than 10,000 not getting any campaign alerts.

Campaign Data Integration
Some AdWords data missing for certain keywords. Affects only SEM Insight Users with multiple AdWords integrated groups, where the same keyword is included in more than one group.

Natural Advertiser Comparison Report
Incomplete data shown for the second advertiser selected for comparison. All the keywords displayed for the first advertiser, but only some keywords shown for second advertiser.

Natural Advertiser Detail
New SERP link icons added for ASK and AOL.

Natural Executive Overview
This report was incorrectly set to show all keywords found (instead of just the keywords in the current group). This was misleading because there was no check box to turn this feature on/off.

Natural Missing Keywords Report

Inbound Linking Report

PPC Missing Keywords Report
Report was generating a fatal error for groups with AOL or ASK.


PPC Executive Overview
Fatal error when you click on the “click here for detailed group report” link

PPC Group Report

Keyword Research (by URL) Report
Export to excel showing wrong advertiser name in the header when you export multiple successive reports.

Upgrade Account
Bulleted list being rendered too far to the left.

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March 28, 2008

Free MP3: "Top 5 Ways to Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates"

What if there was just one change you could make on your site that could increase sales by 22%?

A simple change that would cost you next to nothing and would increase your ROI across every AdWords ad, every banner, and any other marketing channel you use?

Chances are, there are not just one of these changes - but many.

In this free MP3 download, Stephen Tournquist, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, and Richard Stokes, President and Founder of AdGooroo, talk about several areas you can improve on your site including:

Download the materials here:

Audio (MP3, iPod/iPhone compatible)
Slides and case studies

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March 14, 2008

Ask and AOL data now available

We are pleased to announce the addition of Ask.com and AOL to our SEM Insight and Trademark Insight services.

Subscribers will now be able to access a total of six search engines from their AdGooroo accounts:

SEM Insight customers:

These new search engines can be added to your account via the "Manage Keywords" page. You will not receive data from these search engines unless you explicitly tell us to monitor them.

Trademark Insight customers:

Data for these new search engines will automatically appear within your reports. No further action is required.

We hope you find this a valuable addition to your AdGooroo account. Feel free to contact your account representative with any questions or comments.

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March 10, 2008

A new look for AdGooroo!

As you may have noticed, AdGooroo is sporting a new look today!

As we continue to grow (AdGooroo has recently crossed the 1,000th client mark), browser compatibility and page load time have become important issues. To address these needs, we've embraced CSS/XHTML as our design standard. Our new website should provide a more consistent user experience to both our Internet Explorer and Firefox users, faster page load times, and much better readability.

Did we mention that it looks a lot better, too?

Of course, while we've spent countless hours proofing pages, there will undoubtedly be a few bugs which might have crept past us. Please let us know of any problems you may find on the site by emailing us at techsupport@adgooroo.com.

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October 30, 2007

Find and Fix Common Campaign Problems


AdGooroo runs 35 diagnostics on your campaign every day.

Have you ever stepped away from your campaign for awhile, only to find unexpected problems when you returned? Most search marketers have experienced the frustration of finding that their ads have stopped running for valuable keywords weeks or months after the fact.

Wouldn't it be nice to have someone looking over your shoulder, doing the tedious work and watching your campaigns like a hawk? Someone who sifted through all of your keywords, only told you when you had a problem, and never missed a beat?

AdGooroo's new PPC Alerts feature is designed to do just that.

Imagine Running Over 7,000 Tests a Day on Your Search Campaign!

Every day, this service analyzes your performance data, running 35 diagnostics against your campaign. Each diagnostic has between 4 and 6 variations, making over 140 distinct tests in all. These are applied to every keyword, every search engine, and every region in your search marketing campaign.

For a small PPC campaign running just 50 keywords on Google US, that's over 7,000 tests a day... far too many for even the most dedicated and ambitious search manager to ever keep up with. To put it in perspective, if you could run the same test in by hand in Excel in three minutes, it would take you 14 days (without breaks or sleep) to complete just one set of tests!

How It Works

The heart of this magic lies in the data we collect about your online advertising.
We start with your coverage and rank data, gathered directly from the search engines using our proprietary technology (Coverage and rank are two important statistics which indicate how often end users are seeing your ads).

Next, we import your daily campaign data directly from your search marketing account. Specifically, we look at statistics such as the number of clicks and impressions you're receiving, your total costs, clickthrough rates, and how much you're paying for each visitor.

With all of this data in hand, we then proceed on to the next phase of statistical analysis. Here we look at the performance of each statistic over the prior 30 days, to see if we can detect trends in the data.

If we find a trend, we look for two things: a direction (up or down) and a confidence interval. An example analysis for Google's Average Position statistic is shown in the following graphic:

This graphic shows both a statistically significant trendline heading down as well as the upper and lower 95% confidence bands around it.

AdGooroo Trend Analysis on Avg Position

From this chart, we can conclude several things:

In contrast, the following chart illustrates a critical alert. On this, you can see the clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword has been dropping rapidly over the past 30 days. The search engines consider advertisers with high CTR to be more relevant and reward them with cheaper bids and higher rankings, so it's vitally important to your success that this negative trend in CTR be fixed as quickly as possible (and in this particular case, AdGooroo would flag this as a critical alert to let you know to take action quickly).

AdGooroo Trend Analysis on Daily CTR

Availability

AdGooroo Express users now have full access to this functionality. We're finalizing the changes to the account management pages to allow SEM Insight users to integrate with multiple search engines and countries and expect to make this fully available by the end of 2007 (In the meantime, a sub-set of the alerts are available). We encourage all subscribers to take advantage of this valuable technology to further increase their advantage over the competition!

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October 29, 2007

New Features Added To SEM Insight

We are happy to announce upgraded features to our SEM Insight Pro product!

The following features are offered to SEM Insight customers at no additional charge and are designed to provide added value to the benefits you are currently receiving from your AdGooroo subscription. We hope you find them useful and appreciate your continued use and support of AdGooroo.

Advanced Alerts

AdGooroo will now perform 35 tests daily to diagnose potential issues with your campaign and alert you to their status. These alerts range from low CTR's to new competitors entering your market. These alerts will be readily accessible on your homepage and are color coded in red, yellow and green to instantly inform you of issues and their related priorities.

Keyword Research Report

We have streamlined the Keyword Research report, combining the old Popular Searches and Competitors Keywords reports into one report and making it more easy to navigate via a tab on your homepage.

Google AdWords Data (COMING SOON!)

We are finalizing a feature that will give you the option to import your AdWords account data and sync it on a dally basis in your AdGooroo account. This will give you access to new reporting, advanced charting options, and the ability to view your AdWords program performance side-by-side with your AdGooroo performance data. Look for this announcement in the very near future from AdGooroo!


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August 21, 2007

William Blair Partners With AdGooroo for Study of Search Engine Advertising Industry

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--William Blair & Company, in collaboration with search engine marketing intelligence agency AdGooroo, today published proprietary new research examining the search engine marketing (SEM) industry, looking at trends among the marketers that drive this $20 billion industry.

In an effort to assist investors and industry insiders interested in gaining a deeper understanding of search engine marketing, the Media and Marketing research coverage team at William Blair has partnered with AdGooroo to provide a new perspective on the industry through the lens of the advertiser. Data was culled from AdGooroo's database of keyword advertising to glean insight into industry composition, industry growth, market share, seasonality, and company-specific trends.

Continue reading "William Blair Partners With AdGooroo for Study of Search Engine Advertising Industry " »

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AdGooroo Adds European, Latin American Markets

AdGooroo Adds European, Latin American Markets to Search Engine Marketing Intelligence Service
SEM Insight Now Monitors Web Sites from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Mexico, Brazil

SAN JOSE, Calif, August 21, 2007 - AdGooroo, an international leader in search engine marketing intelligence, today announced it has begun monitoring Web sites in five western European and two Latin American countries for clients of its SEM Insight product.
AdGooroo clients now can monitor keyword-based online campaigns and competitive activity in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Mexico and Brazil.

Previously, AdGooroo clients could use SEM Insight to monitor sites based in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Japan.

"The addition of major European and Latin American markets dramatically increases the value of our SEM Insight product to international marketers, advertisers and their agencies," said AdGooroo VP of Sales and Client Services Tom O'Grady. "Today's advanced search marketing campaigns require the application of sophisticated tools throughout international markets to help advertisers understand key competitive intelligence measures,"

Marketers and their agencies use SEM Insight to monitor a set of user-identified pay per click (PPC) keywords. SEM Insight provides access to a detailed list of competitors advertising in those keywords, campaign statistics, ad copy, and more. Customers can find competitors' keywords, improve their ad copy, benchmark their programs against other sites and gain a high degree of strategic insight.

SEM Insight enables users to rank and analyze search marketing program performance by many different variables.

About AdGooroo

AdGooroo provides online marketers and agencies search engine marketing tools that deliver actionable insights to help them rise above the competition and build a long-term competitive advantage.

Based in Chicago, AdGooroo provides competitive intelligence to search engine marketers through its suite of products, including AdGooroo Express, SEM Insight and Trademark Insight. AdGooroo products leverage access and automation to provide paid search, natural search and trademark monitoring insights, shedding light on competitors' keywords, ad copy, campaign statistics and more. Top agencies and big brand advertisers leverage AdGooroo's keyword search tools and other unique products for search engine marketing success. For more information, visit AdGooroo.com.

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August 6, 2007

Publicis Agencies Partner With AdGooroo For Search Insights

CHICAGO, August 6, 2007 - Publicis Groupe, (NYSE: PUB), the fourth largest communications group in the world, today announced that it will partner with premiere search engine marketing (SEM) intelligence agency AdGooroo to further strengthen its data resources. AdGooroo will provide Publicis Groupe entities such as SMG Search, Digitas, Moxie Interactive and Publicis Groupe Media (inclusive of Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia) with unique search query and trend data that will enable them to more closely monitor consumer trends.

Continue reading "Publicis Agencies Partner With AdGooroo For Search Insights" »

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July 20, 2007

French and German Markets Now Available

We have expanded our coverage in Western Europe.

AdGooroo has added 2 new markets, Germany and France, to our SEM Insight product. Users now have the ability to monitor campaigns and competitive activity in 7 countries:

We will continue to expand our market coverage this year, as demand for global markets becomes increasingly important to our client’ search strategies.

-The AdGooroo Team

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June 29, 2007

Panama's great, but you can't track ad copy with it...

Yahoo's new Panama platform lets you track keyword performance or ad copy performance, but not both...

At the date of this writing, Yahoo is in the middle of rolling out their Panama advertising platform. While Panama includes many compelling additions that make Yahoo a much more attractive advertising medium, it is still very difficult to track Yahoo conversions, especially if you have a large number of keywords or plan on doing ad copy optimization.

This is primarily because Yahoo does not currently offer a method to automatically tag your destination URLs with the keyword phrase that the search engine user typed in.

Consider the tasks you need to do as an advertiser with a modest number of keywords (say 10,000) in order to properly manage a campaign on the Yahoo platform. First, you need to upload all of your keywords, assigning each to an ad group (same as Google).

Next, you need to manually tag each of the destination URLs with the keyword. This is because Yahoo does not provide an automated way to do this (Google provides the {keyword} tag). This is a considerable amount of work, but it can be done with some creative use of Excel.

However, if you want now perform ad copy testing, you are stuck. This is because each destination URL requires a custom tag to track the individual ad performance (in Google Analytics, that tag is "utm_content=1", where 1 is replaced with the version of your ad). Because Yahoo does not allow you to run multiple ads at the keyword level, you now have to choose between not performing ad testing, or performing it at the ad group level (which means you can not track keyword level performance).

So at this time, the only way to track keyword level conversion rates and perform A-B split testing on different versions of ads is to assign one keyword per ad group... hardly a scalable solution.

However, if you are willing to live without A-B testing and are also content to not use a third-party analytics tool to track your keyword data, then Yahoo does provide a means to track conversion data directly within the Yahoo interface.

Here are the steps required to do this:

That’s it. You should start seeing conversion data in your account from this point on. This data will allow you to start optimizing your Yahoo bids. It will not allow you to conduct A-B split testing however.

If you're supportive of Yahoo and are possibly looking to reduce your dependence on Google, call your Yahoo rep to ask them to add this feature. Hopefully we'll see it soon...!

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June 23, 2007

How keyword length and ad position impact CTR and CPC on Google AdWords

June 22, 2008

Download PDF (11 pages)

Of the many factors impacting campaign return, cost-per-click (CPC) and clickthrough rate (CTR) are among the most important. For this reason, it is vital that professional search marketers understand their relationship at more than a superficial level.

In a study conducted by the AdGooroo research team in early 2008, we attempted to measure the exact relationship between cost-per-click and clickthrough rate. More importantly, we measured how these critical campaign metrics were affected by the length of the searcher's keyword phrase as well as the average position in which the ad appeared on Google AdWords.

The end result of this study was a proprietary index (the “AdGooroo search index”) which illustrates how these relationships change across the entire range of ad positions on Google.

We demonstrate how to combine this index with standard website metrics, such as conversion rate and average order size, to reliably predict the optimal average position for both broad and niche keywords.

Our model can also be used to predict those rare situations in which advertisers can aggressively outbid their competitors for top positions while maintaining profitability.

Finally, the index can also be used to reliably predict how a keyword ad will perform when historical data is unavailable or insufficient, such as when setting up a new campaign or managing keywords which receive only a few clicks per month.

Tables and Charts:
1. Change in average cost-per-click by keyword length and average position
2. Average cost-per-click versus keyword length
3. Change in average clickthrough rate by keyword length and average position
4. Clickthrough rate versus keyword length
5. Predicted profit for broad keywords
6. Predicted profit for niche keywords



Download PDF (11 pages)




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May 5, 2007

The Importance of Landing Page Alignment

Why great web design doesn't always pair well with good search engine marketing results.

Those of us who've been doing AdWords for awhile tend to underestimate the importance of landing pages on PPC performance. Perhaps this is because it's a relatively new twist on the PPC algorithm (this change was implemented in July '06), or perhaps it's just because we spend most of our time working on keyword expansion, ad copy optimization, and bidding strategies. But whatever the reason, it is clear that Google has made this a major factor in their algorithm.

Case in point, I have been recently working with a search marketer in the travel industry who has been trying to expand the focus of their site from one particular destination to a global travel portal. The regional site does well, generating between 60-100 clicks per day at an average CPC of only $.12 and a margin of about 30%.

This particular marketer realized if he could duplicate the same success on a global scale, he stands to generate huge revenues (and profits). His company created a brand-new design focused on a global market. Realizing that this could quickly become an enterprise app, they chose to rearchitect the site using .NET technologies and AJAX.

The new site is amazingly informative and far more usable than the old PHP site they were running on. Test users agreed that it was a big improvement over the old site.

However, Google didn't.

The company ran three test campaigns, including an exact duplicate of their previous PPC campaign. The average CPC rose to $.30 and traffic declined to less than 10 clicks per day (across three cities, not just one). The new site is a complete bust. Regardless of the fact that it provides a great user experience, it doesn't comply with Google's ideas of what makes a great site, and so it doesn't get the traffic.

So while there was no way to predict this in retrospect, it appears there are a few significant differences in the structure of these pages that are to blame:

So my recommendations to this company were to remove the cool AJAX functionality, figure out ways to reduce the page size to less than 100k, and remove as much hidden binary data from the underlying HTML as possible. Finally, the next version of the site should be tested to ensure that a Googlebot will see visible text on the page which reflect the content of the site's PPC ads.

This example should serve as a reminder to everyone that you should be wary of trying to make up for bad site design decisions with great SEM marketing - sometimes, it just doesn't work.

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