SMX Advanced – Paid Search: The Giant Focus Group
Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget
Speakers:
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager, Google Inc.
James Colborn, Product Manager, Search Strategy & adCenter Go To Market, Microsoft
John C. Kim, Senior Director, Advertiser Product Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing
Paul Vallez, Director of Product Management, Search Marketing, Ask.com
John
- More search tools developing to improve user experience.
- Search formats and types are changing
- Best of breed is still king
- Off-browser search could explode
- Ranking and matching based on personalization and community factors
- Organizational silos becoming the norm
- Increased bifurcation of advertisers into sophisticated and unsophisticated advertisers. The advanced advertisers are becoming more advanced and the simple advertisers are becoming more simple.
- Advertisers have not more time for experimentation and new tools
- Needs are more fragmented and customized
- More focus on interaction effects and advanced analytics
James
- adCenter Labs is system to feed opinions back to Microsoft.
Tom
- Looking for feedback on what we can do better
- Outside the box ideas are great. Even those that don’t have anything to do with search marketing
Paul
- Our focus is to make sure you have the right sort of efficiencies to work with our system, and to make sure you have access to the right data.
- Is vertical granularity too much?
- What’s the right interface? API or UI?
Jeffrey – The concern about trademarks has been clear the last two days, especially the uneven enforcement. In the days of personalization, day parting and so forth, are there plans to offer trademark holders better tools to determine infringement?
Paul – It’s a very difficult problem to solve. We’ve mostly addressed it manually.
John – It’s an asset management issue, not a trademark issue. There needs to emerge a set of ways for advertisers to manage their trademarks, and for agencies to ensure that they don’t infringe on others.
James – How many would like more clarification on how trademark works at Microsoft? (A third or so raised their hands.) That suggests that there’s room for better understanding.
Tom – If you own a trademark, and your concerned about others using it in ads, there are ways within AdWords to apply for restrictions on the usage.
Request – On the AdWords Editor, it crashes on an account with millions of keywords, but if I move half my keywords to another account, I lose all my history. On the Yahoo side, could we have more account people that specialize in particular areas. The support level just isn’t there. Do you see that changing.
John – I can’t speak to the number of people on your account, but you have to have the right people on your account.
Request for everyone but Google – Impression share is important to me. I’d love to get this from all the engines.
Comment – Excluded keywords are your friends. They reduce my costs, but they also reduce your wasted impressions.
Request – I’d love to have a testing mode where I can do specific geo searches.
Frederick Vallaeys, Adwords Product Evangelist, Google – There’s an ad preview feature that may give you what you need.
Comment – Testing international ads is also difficult from the U.S. Not ad preview, but live ads. We also have large, million keyword accounts, and would like to reorganize accounts, but can’t do so as we loose history. We’d like some way to do this.
James – What data do you want?
Comment – Anything that tells me how I’m doing against my competitors. Right now I have no visibility to this.
Comment – I’d like to see custom reports from MSN.
James – That’s within the interface today.
Comment – Seeing results in different regions can be achieved with parameters in the URL string with Google.
Comment – Keyword history of conversions by position is needed. For MSN, getting lost in the UI can be an issue. If you want to import things, you need two spreadsheets. For broad match on Google, it would be useful if you would rename it to the actual extended match it is. An acronym database would be useful.
James – We have that in MSN.
Comment – Yeah, but Google doesn’t. The Google newsletter should address what has changed. It feels like a sales letter.
Request – Wish you could change ad text without losing history. Would like to see something similar to Google Editor on Yahoo and MSN.
Request – When you account goes under manual review, and ads pause, the system tells you you’ve exceeded your daily budget. That’s neither correct nor useful information. A correct error message would be great.
Request – I’d like to have more visibility to why I’m receiving click discounting. This is more for managing upwards. My management thinks the campaign is being mismanaged.
Paul – We do click discounting at Ask because we have an automated system that detects click fraud, so we try to take away the incentives.
John – The whole point of click discounting is to make it easier for advertisers.
Tom – All of try to make sure the price you pay for clicks reflects the value you receive. There’s a balance between being as transparent as we can be, and not providing information that could help others game the system.
Jeffrey – At click fraud sessions at SES, there’s been discussion of sharing information between networks on bad actors. If someone gets knocked off one engine, they just go down the street to the next. Can you share this sort of information?
James – There certainly are areas we can learn from others. We are all working on standards with the IAB.
Paul – I would like us to share the info.
Comment – I would like to get more international tools. A keyword tools, for instance.
Question – For Yahoo, why don’t you open up the ability to differentiate between singular and plural?
John – This has come up before. We’re trying to balance more tools and granularity with the complexity. It was an effort to make things easier for advertisers. This does seem to be a need, however.
Request – On the API, we like to keep our internal database in sync with what is on the systems. An XML system to download information is critical.
Question – I’ve fallen victim to restructuralization of my reps. I don’t want to begrudge their advancement, but I’ve spent a long time building a relationship with a rep. Can you guys prevent that from happening? The transition period seems to be for formality’s sake.
Tom – That’s great feedback. Some of that will happen as people get promoted. All of your account history is maintained, and there’s a lot going on with the transition behind the scenes.
John – I’d like to meet after the session to discuss this.
Paul – We’re going to stop promoting people at Ask.com. (laughter)
