Fairfax Media are the largest integrated metropolitan, rural and regional magazine and digital media company in Australasia. Fairfax Media has publications and websites throughout Australia and New Zealand.

In October 2010 Fairfax Magazines, a subsidiary of Fairfax Media, engaged First Rate to plan and implement a Paid Search Christmas Campaign. Benchmarked against the successful results from the previous year, First Rate was challenged with the task of increasing sales and revenue by 20% for the campaign period (Nov – Dec).

As the result of First Rate’s paid search optimisation efforts and input from Fairfax Magazines’ Online Manager and Marketing Manager, the paid search campaign achieved a 188% increase in sales, 53% decrease in the cost per magazine subscription (CPA), and an ROI of 1,460%.

Click here to download the case study

Related Posts:

• Insurance – Google Analytics Case Study
• Fatso Conversion Rate Optimisation Case Study – CRO
• metservice.com SEO Case Study
• metservice.com SEM Case Study
• E-Commerce SEO Case Study – Online Shopping New Zealand

There are many different ways to re-target Internet users: According to their search activity, their interaction with your ads (ads viewed, clicked or not displayed to them) and their behaviour on your website.

In this post, we will talk about the last one only, i.e. site retargeting.

Site retargeting allows us to show ads to Internet users that have previously visited your website. Ads are displayed across the site network offering the retargeting solution for the time-frame you set, or until Internet users are not in the targeted audience any longer.

Some of the main retargeting solutions are:

• Criteo, arguably the world leader and 100% specialised in retargeting
• Large advertising networks such as Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! advertising, Value Click, Specific Media, etc.
• Google, specifically Google Remarketing.

Founded in 2005, Criteo was the first to offer a retargeting solution based on a performance-based CPC model. The main advantage compared to other solutions is its ability to manage dynamic ads with a real time CPC bidding system: After visitors have left your site (for example an apparel e-commerce website), they won’t see just a generic ad but instead a personalized ad based on what they’ve seen on your website. The ad content can be customised down to a product category (shoes, pants, handbags, etc.) or to several product pages (like sunglasses, high heels, leather purse, etc).

Below are some examples demonstrating this capability:

Note: When choosing a retargeting solution, you have to make sure that its network is relevant to your audience (demographically and geographically). Unfortunately, Criteo isn’t available in New Zealand in the absence of any publishers’ network

But, of course, Google retargeting is available in NZ.

Well, Google doesn’t allow dynamic ads (yet) but its huge network of publishers (Google Adsense) as well as its flexibility will counter-balances this drawback. And no doubt the Googlers are working hard to further improving the ad formats.

So why should you use Retargeting?

Site retargeting is particularly suitable in the following situations:

• You have a conversion process on your site (purchase, signups)
• Your products require an engaging conversion process (high information need, comparison, quotes, assessment etc)
• Your products encourage impulsive conversions (low price products, fashion products/brands, bargains, etc)
• You have ROI or CPA oriented KPIs
• You want to increase the number of new clients
• You want your current clients to be more active (increase in visits, time and pages per visit, increase in repurchase rate, average basket, etc

To get the best out of your retargeting campaigns, you will have to qualify your visitors into several audiences according to you main objective (eg. more purchases or signups). Some common audience segments are:

• visitors who converted, i.e. your clients
• visitors who abandoned the conversion process (during the signup / purchasing process)
• visitors who visited any specific page (a product you want to push, a video demo, etc)
• visitors who didn’t convert

Whilst it wouldn’t be very useful to retarget people who have already converted on your site (email marketing is best for that), targeting the last three audiences in the bullet point list above will help you improve your conversion rate. In addition, it will also help you understand your visitor’s behaviour better.

How does retargeting improve the conversion rate and ROI/CPA metrics?

By retargeting people who already know you and your products, you have a second opportunity to attract them (often at a lower cost than the first visit cost) and to invite them to convert for a product or service which we know is of interest to them.

Indeed, there is little point in retargeting people with the same ad than the one they have seen before visiting your site the first time. Thus, to be successful, retargeting ads should be personalized according to visitors’ behaviour on your website, e.g. show the same range of products that the visitors saw on your website or better, show the last product they saw or added on their shopping cart before leaving your site.

By doing so, you will not only target people who already demonstrated an interest in your site but also spur them on with what they most likely appreciated in the first place. Consequently, your conversion rate will likely be much greater than any other display channels targeting your prospects.
And since the bidding model and the placements are the same as other campaigns running on the Google Display Network, retargeting campaigns will often end up with a lower CPA and a higher ROI.

How to measure retargeting campaign performance

Some people criticize retargeting campaigns because they don’t see the added value of retargeting people that already cost you some money from other advertising channels (sponsored links, display ads, TV commercials, etc.). This is because they actually analyze each traffic source in a compartmentalized way instead of analysing the overall performance. Thus when assessing the different digital advertising channels, you shouldn’t use the “last click model” to attribute conversions to each supporting channel (i.e. the conversion is 100% attributed to the last ad that has been clicked on). Instead, you should analyse performance through the “halo effect”, i.e. assessing each channel according to their contribution to the final conversion.

The problem is that few websites have the right analytics tools to track their conversion paths. Hopefully the new cross-channel tracking feature for Google Analytics will be soon available for everyone.

So, the best thing to do for now is to assess your retargeting campaign performance through metrics from your returning visitors segment and from the overall traffic as well (the conversion rate being the most important indicator to look at).

How can retargeting campaigns be further improved?

Retargeting campaigns can be optimised at different levels:

• Ad relevancy:

Does your ad content match the scenario you are targeting? – Don’t show lingerie to visitors interested in sneakers…it could work though!
Is your creative appealing? Be specific, exclusive and use call to action. Don’t use text ads as they will be barely seen, resulting in a very low Click Through Rate and almost no visits from your retargeted audience.
Is your ad accurate enough? Google doesn’t offer dynamic (product) ads, so perhaps you should choose between promoting your best products or product categories.

• Ad targeting:

Are you retargeted audiences coherent and not too small? Check your tag settings to see if you are rejecting some visitors you shouldn’t be and if tags are implemented on the right pages.
Is your ad displayed on relevant websites? With Google Adwords, you can combine audience targeting with keyword targeting to not only display your ads to the right audience but also on the right place and thus significantly improve the chance of conversions.

• Ad frequency:

Set up frequency capping to not over-expose your ad to a unique user. You don’t want to upset them!
In addition, you can customise the number of days that visitors will be retargeted. The default duration is 30 days but it could be much lower according to your specific business needs.

Finally, a couple of months ago, Yahoo! released interesting research about ad relevancy. It shows that:

“people spend 25% more time fixating on ads that are personally relevant to them versus those that are not”

and that:

“time to first fixation increases by 15% when ads are contextually relevant.”

Thus site retargeting combined with contextual retargeting appears to be a very powerful advertising solution to reach these two levels of relevancy and thus generate high conversion rates.

At First Rate we can help you retarget the right person at the right time at the right place. So do not hesitate to contact us for a no-obligation quote.

OTHER SOURCES:

• Power of Relevancy, Yahoo! and Innerscope Research – April 2011

Related Posts:

• Why Online Marketing is like Herding a Flock of Sheep

Deal sites, offering discounted prices on goods or services, are based on the concept of collective buying whereby a group of interested buyers enable the collective buying power to demand a greater discount of an item or service for offer.

How deal sites essentially work is an advertiser fronts up with either a product or service at a discounted rate, for example, a movie theatre offering a 50% discount on movie tickets. The ‘deal’ is put in front of an audience – some of which will take advantage of the offer. Although the deal is on offer for people to purchase, it is not actually available to give out until an ‘activation point’ is reached – the activation point being a minimum quantity sold before the deal is given out. Often this is determined by the seller. This is where collective buying comes in.

How Does it Work?

Using the example of discounted movie tickets – if the activation point, set at a minimum of 500 tickets (units), was not reached (i.e. only 470 tickets were purchased) before the deal expires then the deal is cancelled. All those who purchased the deal would not be charged therefore making it a no deal deal. If, however, the activation point is reached then buyers will be charged and the deal is given out. From the advertiser’s perspective, having an activation point helps to ensure that the deal offered is more likely to return profitable.

But what about the deal sites – how would they profit from the movie ticket deal..? As you may suspect, normally they will charge a commission on each discounted ticket (unit) purchased which normally can be anywhere between 20-50%. Often this negotiated between the seller and the deal site which can be determined by a number of factors including; extent of the discount (larger discounts are more exciting to users driving more traffic to the deal site therefore lower commissions), good or service on offer (i.e. high demand product vs. low demand product), company profile (i.e. big corporate national vs. small town private) in addition to other factors.

With the number of deal sites cropping up in all sorts of verticals and niches, this post focuses on what advertisers (dealer) should know when engaging with a deal site.

Summary of Findings

For the purposes of this post we selected five of the more popular New Zealand focused deal sites and reviewed their advertiser pages. Below is a table that summaries our findings.

• Frequency: how often are deals rotated.
• Email list: does your deal go out to an email list.
• Q & A: does the deal site offer a question and answer feature for the promoter and interested buyers to communicate.
• Cost: what types of cost can the advertiser expect? For example negotiable commission (Com) costs.
• Share: does the website allow people to share the deal via their social networks such as Facebook (FB), Twitter (#) and/or email (@).
• Promote: does the deal site promote deals on Facebook (FB), Twitter (#), and/or email lists (@).
• Website link: does the deal page include a link to your website.
• Map: does the deal site include a map to your business location(s).
• Activation point: is this required for all deals.
• Gifting: deals can be gifted.

How they Promote Themselves

We contacted each of the sites with a raft of questions requesting information an advertiser should know. Unsurprisingly, each deal site has its own USP to entice sellers to run the deal with them. The following provides a brief summary and a closer look at each of the deal sites in question and highlights any potential risks and unique benefits of each (Information provided by each site, First Rate has not independently researched claims - Ed.).

Grabone.co.nz

• Launched in 2010 and owned by IdeaHQ, Grabone is operated by the same group who also manage New Zealand web properties sella.co.nz, flicks.co.nz, getfrank.co.nz and adhub.co.nz.
• Prefer to disclose information directly to client.

Treatme.co.nz

• No reply.
• Operated by the same group who manage Trademe.

Spreets.co.nz

• Spreets which are primarily aimed at urbanities looking for fun and unique experiences in their location are owned by Yahoo! 7 which allows them to showcase daily deals on the homepage of Yahoo! Xtra.
• There are no costs involved in running a Spreets promotion. They simply take an advertisers feature and market this to their members and share in a percentage of the revenue that’s generated. This means there is no risk to the merchant meaning the advertiser pays only for results.
• The client setup involved is minimal. The Spreets editorial department writes the ad copy and sends for approval.
• Customer service was good. Feedback to our questions within 24hours by email including a phone call and sent a deck of slides for the Yahoo! Xtra homepage audience stats.

Yazoom.co.nz

• Brand Developers Ltd (trading as Yazoom) are New Zealand owned and operated. They are also the company behind the “TV Shop” of which they claim to have 1.6 million active shoppers. With no upfront costs, larger advertisers can benefit from TV coverage over 4 channels (One, Two, TV3, and Prime) ranging between 15-20 advertisements nationwide between 5pm-8pm. An advertiser’s offer is promoted to TV shop customers.
• If the promotion is unsuccessful and no purchases are made, Yazoom do not charge – making it cost free to the advertiser.
• Offer a team of writers and designers to build your campaign at no charge.
• Yazoom administers and manages all coupon sales, receipting and securing all monies and provides advertisers with details regarding purchases and clearance codes at no charge.
• Advertisers are assigned account managers to provide on-going consultation during the promotion.

Grouponnz.co.nz

• Prefer to disclose information directly to client.
• Groupon is the largest of its kind valued at $6.4 billion and projected to generate $3-$4 billion in revenue in 2011. They have only recently established their presence in New Zealand. From an advertiser’s perspective, however, we did not hear back from them.

Tips for Advertisers for NZ Daily Deal Sites

• If you’re going to offer a deal – make it a ‘big deal deal’. People aren’t interested in small deals, or even ‘good’ deals. People these days want big deals. The better you can make your discount the more interested and motivated people will be to take advantage of it.
• People interested in your offer are going to ask questions. Therefore during the life of your offer on the deal site make sure you have someone dedicated to being online to answer all questions in a timely manner. Unanswered questions can equal a lost customer.
• It’s important to note that the deal that you offer is only the beginning. When people purchase your deal on offer and walk into your business, whether you’re a movie theatre, restaurant, or goods store THIS is your chance capitalise on your promotion and up-sell to your new customers. Of course if they have a good experience with your business this too will encourage them to come back.
• When promoting your deal make sure there are minimal restrictions on the deal – or in First Rate CRO speak – “improving the ease to conversion”. Quite simply, make it as easy as possible for people to click the “buy now!” button. This one is more for the deal sites than the advertiser.
• Finally, it is imperative that the advertising campaign performance is measured, quantified and put in context of all marketing activity. What does the cost per sale look like compared to other channels? What about repeat sales from this channel? How many customers were added to the email database post campaign? As always, a tool like Google Analytics will help answer these sort of questions.

Advertiser Questions

Below is a list of questions an advertiser should ask before engaging with a deals site. First Rate recommends starting with these in addition to the information presented on the website when screening deal sites.

• How long does the deal last for?
  • When does the deal start and when does it end (time)?
• How much will running the deal cost?
  • If it is activated?
  • If it is not activated?
  • What payment structures do you have in place?
  • Is there a setup fee?
  • Is there a success fee?
  • On average, what % of deal vouchers are purchased but not used?
• Who will see my deal?
  • How many people on your email list?
  • If you have a Facebook page do you post deals to it? – How many people do you currently have on your Facebook list?
  • If you have a Twitter account do you post deals to it? – How many people do you have following you on Twitter?
  • On average, how many unique people are visiting your site deals daily?
• How does one moderate the Q & A section of the deal page?
  • How much control does the seller have to moderate the questions from interested customers?
  • What options are available to the seller to moderate the questions i.e. answer back, delete questions etc.
• Can you provide an analytics report on how well the deal performed?
  • How many people viewed the deal page?
  • How many people clicked through to the purchase page?
  • What percentage of people submit their payment details?
• What types of payment does your site offer?
  • ie. credit cards, debit cards, bank transfer, Paypal etc.
• What unique benefits does your site offer that will help better promote my deal?

Related Posts:

• Top Daily Deals Sites – New Zealand Market Research

YouTube is becoming more and more popular not only as an entertainment website but also as an advertising platform. With Google AdWords you can easily target YouTube users even with a small budget and with techniques you already know from AdWords. Let’s have a look at the most common ways your business can be promoted with YouTube advertising.

Basically there are two approaches to advertising on YouTube:

• Promoting your video content (YouTube Promoted Videos)
• Promoting your website through text, image and flash ads. Ads can appear inside videos and in content as well.

Advertising Video Content (YouTube Promoted Videos)

Promoted Videos are a good way to let YouTube users know about your videos without paying too much per click. All you need is to have an AdWords account and some video assets to advertise on.

Promoted Videos in Search

As one might expect, search advertising on YouTube is most cost effective. With wisely selected keywords and relevant ad copy you’ll get a high click-through rate and well targeted traffic. If you haven’t yet, you should probably start exploring YouTube’s advertising capabilities.

See where the Sponsored Videos appear in YouTube Search.

As YouTube Search is a part of the Google Search Network, Google Search has to be turned on along with the Google Search Network.

The basic principles of ad ranking are the same as in Google Search and that is – briefly said – the Quality Score multiplied by the price you are bidding for a particular keyword.

Promoted Videos in Content

Besides YouTube Search, Promoted Videos can be displayed in YouTube content pages. Most commonly on video pages on the right side next to the video.

Of course, the Google Display Network needs to be turned on in campaign settings. From managed placements you have to select YouTube.com or desired YouTube categories in which you wish your videos to appear.

Good to know

• Don’t expect the search CTR to be as high as it is for your Google Search ads. The reason is that YouTube ads have usually lower relevancy to the search query due to the fact that search queries on YouTube are not usually of a commercial nature. In this respect, you may wish to review an earlier blog of ours: To What Extent Does Google Match Search Results to Commercial Search Intent?
  But of course there are things you can do to help increase your CTR: Try to maintain relevancy of the ad headline to the search query – exactly as you would do with Google Search campaigns. Also, choose the video thumbnail carefully if possible. Testing different thumbnails will help you to achieve high click-through rates as well.
• If you have a lot of videos to promote, you may find it a bit messy to search for their URLs. A good idea is to create your own YouTube channel. You can make your work easier by typing the name of your YouTube channel and then select from the videos as shown below:

Promoting Your Website in YouTube Content

Besides search advertising on YouTube, you can also make your ads appear in content. If you don’t have any videos to advertise, or simply want to get more traffic from YouTube, there are a lot of placements which you can target with various formats including text ads:

What you need is to turn content network on and select YouTube as a managed placement. Let’s have look at where ads can be shown and how to run them there.

Text overlays inside videos

These are common AdWords text ads showing in the bottom part of a video. Up to 3 text ads can be shown in the overlay. If you want to make sure your ads will be displayed in videos, add YouTube.com (or specific YT categories) to your display campaign managed placements.

InVideo image overlay

Image overlay is displayed in the bottom part of a video as well. The size is 480×70 and – contrary to text overlays – there can be only 1 ad shown at once but it can be accompanied by a 300×250 banner showing next to the video.

InVideo ad with accompanying banner next to the YouTube video.

To create an InVideo ad go to New ad -> Display ad builder -> Video -> InVideo Static Image

Video ads

InStream video ad is a short (typically 15 second) video ad played inside a YouTube video. If the video is longer than 10 minutes, the video ad can last up to 30 seconds. 300×250. An accompanying banner can be used as well.

To create an InStream ad go to New ad -> Display ad builder -> Video -> InStream Video Ad

Banners

As the Text InVideo overlays, banners aren’t a special YouTube format. It’s a common image ad and can be shown on the YouTube video page next to the video player (in the same place where InVideo companion banner is shown) and various other placements. The most common banner format you shouldn’t forget to make is 300×250.

The Placement Tool helps you to decide which other formats you may need to develop in order to be visible for a particular category.

For each YouTube category, the Google Placement Tool shows available ad formats and the number of impressions you can get.

General tips and best practices

Usually it’s a good idea to create a separate campaign for your YouTube advertising especially for Promoted Videos. Clicks from Promoted Videos are in fact the video views (i.e. these clicks aren’t leading to your site) so it’s not desirable for these to be mixed with other clicks in your AdWords campaign.

To get the most of the price you paid for a promoted video view, it’s very useful to have every video properly described and tagged. You should also think about ways to get the user to view another video or – depending on your objectives – your website.

There are a few tools which can help you in building out your YouTube campaigns:

• The Youtube Keyword Tool provides data about what keywords are popular on YouTube but you can also use the standard AdWords Keyword Tool for inspiration.
• Try the Google Contextual Targeting Tool as well to get some ideas about which themes could be good to focus on.

YouTube Insight can help you monitor things such as video views, demographics and subscribers.

There are also very interesting statistics which tell you what part of the overall video traffic is generated by advertising. You can then work out if there’s some synergy – i.e. if your advertising influences natural traffic to the video.

Do you need help promoting your business on YouTube? We can assist not only with YouTube advertising but also with complex SEO and SEM strategy. Contact us for a no-obligation chat.

Related Posts:

• Recent Google AdWords Ad Changes and Improvements
• AdWords Quality Score – Why Should You Hire a Pro?
• Reaching Automotive Consumers Online with Google Advertising and Online Video Ads (YouTube)
• Google Advertising – Optimisation Tips from First Rate

2. Pause Poor Quality Score Keyword

The example below was used for an account wide automated rule to monitor poor quality scores keywords.

Ideal for –

• Large AdWords accounts with 1,000+ keywords.
• Accounts with tight CPA / CPC constraints.

3. Pause Non-Converting Ad Group or Keywords

In order to get the most out of your AdWords spend, it is essential that an account optimizer is continuously monitoring the performance of individual Ad Groups and Keywords, such that CPC bids are made against keywords that are converting, not against those that do not convert.

This rule will help you identify Ad Groups that are converting at below the minimum threshold, after it has reaches a statistically significant data level. The number of clicks required will depend on the search volume of the Ad Group and the length of the period the data is gathered.

The Ad Group rule below was an example utilized by First Rate to identify poor performing Ad Groups that did not meet the minimum (1-per-click) conversion rate of 12.5%, after it has reached 400 (statistically significant) clicks per ad group.

Note: Using this method will avoid automatic pause on Ad Groups that have low volume of clicks per month.

Ideal for –

• Accounts with tightly themed Ad Groups.
• Accounts with high search volumes.
• ROI driven AdWords Accounts.

4. Pause Poor Performing Ads

Continuous Ad testing is by far one of the most effective ways to drive improvements to your AdWords account, and the speed of which you can change your marketing message on search engines is what gives this medium (one of) its competitive edge.

With the new AdWords Automated Rules, it gives an experienced Search Marketer an added tool to monitor ad test performance and make swift updates once the test has been completed.

The rule below is applied to an Ad Group, under-going a step-wise Ad tests with the goal of improving the Ad level CTR above 1.5% – the previous best performing Ad CTR. The rule will pause the ad that does did not achieve the minimum 1.5% CTR and notify me once the test has been completed (500 impressions per ad). Once a new ad has been added, you’ll need to update the CTR to the new best performing Ad CTR and continue testing.

Ideal for –

• Accounts with a large number of Ad Groups / Product Types.
• Keeping track of all Ad Testing experiment currently running and ensure Ads are being systematically updated.

5. Promote Converting Keywords

It has been generally accepted that increases in Ad Position will increase the number of visitors to your website and that conversion rate of the website is a constant from a given channel (i.e. Search Engines).

The rule below is set to find keywords that have been converting in the last 14 days, that is currently at a low Average Ad Position (below 3.5), and increase the bids gradually (by 5% increments) until it reaches an ad position between #3 & #4.

Ideal for –

• Accounts when an increasing competition is pushing down your ads.
• Optimised accounts with good ROAS to allow for increased CPCs.

If you have found another useful rule, please email us or make a comment below.

Related Posts:

• Google to Update Ad Quality Scoring
• Your SEM Competitive Advantage
• AdWords moves landing page quality goalposts
• How to Report on Actual Adwords Search Keywords in Google Analytics Reports
• Organic Search, E-Commerce and Page Load Times