Bing Wants to Be Big Search Engine on Campus

Dorm decor, fall school fashion, and search engines? Microsoft wanted to show young women that its Bing search engine is worth checking out, so when it threw down the gauntlet last week encouraging people to test its search engine against Google's, it worked with HerCampus.com to get the word out to influential collegiate women.

Bing's social marketing team, along with Waggener Edstrom has been working with HerCampus since early summertime to make the search brand more acceptable and relevant to college students. But the Bing branding that took over the site for the Bing It On challenge last week was a continuation of a more integrated effort.

"Search engines aren't sexy," and marketing a search engine to college women is "difficult," said Windsor Hanger, co-founder, president and publisher of Her Campus Media. Hanger founded the online magazine for college women during her senior year at Harvard in 2009. HerCampus has 200 campus-specific sites across the country from Amherst College to University of Washington.

This summer, Bing hosted exclusive parties for influential women on campus in New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. "They wanted to get fun, popular, trend-setting college women to come to these search engine parties," said Hanger.

But not just anyone could come. Bing and HerCampus ensured party goers were part of the in-crowd by requiring they request an invite through Facebook Connect. Women with enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers were allowed to pass through the velvet rope. The social media connection made sense as Bing aimed to promote its new social features.

"We wanted to make sure there was exclusivity to the party, and wanted the right people - we wanted influencers," Hanger said.

In addition to the parties and a splashy site homepage take over on HerCampus last week, the site featured posts about the Bing It On challenge.

Simply go to bingiton.com, type in five random search queries (Ryan Reynolds? Fall internships? Jimmy Choo boots?), and compare the two side-by-side results windows that appear. You won't know which list is Bing's and which is Google's.

"We deliver marketing messages in an authentic way to our national and segmented audiences," said Hanger, noting that advertisers send the HerCampus copy points and its student writers help convey those messages in ways that are relevant to college-age readers.

While today's HerCampus sponsor is online shoe retailer JustFab, the Bing relationship isn't the site's only tech advertiser. In July, HerCampus held a conference for all of its writers in New York, and Intel branded the event to promote its Ultrabook technology. The processor maker has run several campaigns with the site publisher, said Hanger.

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Microsoft Bing Goes Toe-to-Toe Against Google

In its latest campaign, Microsoft is launching a blind "taste test" of sorts pitting Bing against Google. Bing It On is a side-by-side search engine comparison in which consumers conduct a search that turns up two sets of results. They then select a winner. At the end of the five rounds, they see which search engine they chose for each of the five queries.

A video posted to the Bing It On site depicts random people on the street identifying Google as their preferred search engine, then choosing Bing's search results as better and more relevant.

The search engine survey was conducted by San Diego-based Answers Research using a sampling of nearly 1,000 people, ages 18 and older from across the United States who used a major search engine in the past 30 days. The respondents were not told any company was involved.

Of the participants, 57 percent chose Bing, 30 percent chose Google and 12 percent saw no preference in the results. The survey had a margin of error of 2 percent.

"Google is such a habit, people don't think of the choice of engine they're making," said Bing Director Stephan Weitz. "People have told us they prefer Bing's results at a 2 to 1 margin. We encourage everyone to take the test for themselves to see if they agree."

Today Microsoft is launching the Bing It On sweepstakes which offers prizes including a Microsoft Surface tablet, Xbox 360 with Kinect, Windows Phones and more, just by tweeting. There will also be in-store activations in various Microsoft stores through the upcoming Windows 8 launch. Bing also has launched a tweet campaign.

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Facebook Takes Another Step to Compete in Search

Facebook announced late last week the addition of personal search history to the Activity Log, allowing users to view and delete previous searches.

The seemingly innocuous change hints at Facebook’s plans to enter the search realm, as promised by founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month.

“Search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of answers,” he told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt. “It’s not just like ‘I’ll type in something and show me some relevant stuff.’ It’s, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.’ When you look at it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have: ‘What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the past six months and liked?’ ‘Which of my friends and friends of friends work at this company I’m interested in … so I can talk to them about what it’s like to work there?’”

Analysts have awaited a move by Facebook into the realm of web search since the reigning leader, Google, announced its own social platform. Both are in the position to collect massive amounts of social data and employ it in personalized web searches, though each are starting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Google has long dominated web search and only in the past year has begun personalizing search using higher intent social data with Search Plus Your World. Facebook, on the other hand, grew into the largest single source of social data and are now beginning to act on their interest to compete in web search and the lucrative ads industry (outside of their own space).

They’ve been experimenting with features within the Facebook platform that Google has already mastered on the web, like the real-time search ads API they rolled out in August. This summer also saw the launch of Facebook’s real-time bidding and retargeting capabilities.

The addition of personal search history to the Activity Log is another step forward for Facebook in their quest to steal a piece of the search marketing pie from Google and current competitors. Zuckerberg’s appearance at TC Disrupt left little to debate as to whether or not search is part of their grander plan. He told interviewers of search, “...at some point we’ll do it…. That’s one obvious thing that would be interesting for us to do in the future.”

To access personal search history, go to the Activity Log and click on “Search” in the activity sorter (the activity sorter is a dropdown menu with “All” as the default label for the button). Facebook reminds users that no one else can see their search history; this is private, between the user and Facebook. Search history looks like this:

 

The new search history feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.

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Google Q1 Earnings Up As Shift to Enhanced Campaigns Nears Full Transition

Google reported nearly $3.35 billion in net income on $13.97 billion in revenue, during the first quarter of the year. Excluding the Motorola Mobility business, which accounted for $1 billion in revenue, Google’s revenue from advertising and its other businesses grew almost 18 percent from the previous quarter and 20 percent year-over-year.

Paid clicks rose just 3 percent from the previous quarter, but jumped a steady 20 percent from the year prior. Average cost-per-click rates declined 4 percent on an annual and quarterly basis. Meanwhile, traffic acquisitions costs climbed 15 percent from the first quarter of 2012 to $2.96 billion but as a percentage of advertising revenues the cost remained flat from the year prior at 25 percent.

Google is nearing the end of a full-scale transition from separated advertising channels, campaigns and strategies to a more converged multi-screen platform it calls Enhanced Campaigns. More than 1.5 million campaigns have already upgraded to enhanced campaigns, and the company expects to have all of its advertisers moved over to the new platform by the end of the quarter.

“We’re slowly moving a huge advertising system and ecosystem on a dime,” says Google chief executive Larry Page on the company’s quarterly earnings call with investors.

Separate campaigns for desktop and mobile “makes arduous work for agencies and brands,” he says. “It means mobile opportunities often get missed.” Google wants to simplify advertising for its customers and enable brands to focus on their campaigns and message,” Page explains.

About 95 percent of Google’s clients are already managing campaigns across screens, adds Nikesh Arora, senior vice president and chief business officer at Google. “Our clients are hungry to advertise where consumers are,” he says.

Page also highlighted the momentum that Google is making in voice search, an area where he sees huge opportunity and expects to see a lot of innovation but not one that he worries about placing ads in anytime soon.

“The reason we’ve been successful at advertising is because we view that as another source of information,” he says.

Although much of Google’s business is built around capturing people’s time and attention, Page sees even more opportunity around improving the overall experience and effective use of technology.

“I think that computers are now a pretty big part of peoples' lives and I think that's increasing as it gets more useful,” he says. "More importantly, the usefulness of your engagement is going to increase.” More meaningful engagement can make for better business results and happier people, he adds.

Page also took a more defensive stance on Google’s ongoing investment and efforts in non-core businesses like self-driving cars.

“Companies can tend to get comfortable doing what they've always done with a few minor tweaks,” he says, but incremental steps will never be enough in the long run, especially in technology.

“The best people often want to work on the biggest bets, and there's not much competition because no one else is crazy enough to try,” he adds.

"Someday we will all be amazed that computing involved fishing around in our pockets and purses,” Page continues. "We are still at only one percent of what's possible. We are really just getting started."

Google ended the quarter with almost $50.1 billion in cash and 53,900 employees.

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Microsoft Renames AdCenter Bing Ads

Microsoft will rebrand its advertising arm as part of a deeper partnership with search firm Yahoo.

The name for the partners' collective advertising offering will be the Yahoo Bing Network, according to a Microsoft blog post.

Bing Ads will replace the Microsoft platform formerly known as adCenter. This rebranding already has been launched on the adCenter landing page.

Bing Ads, like adCenter, will be offered to businesses wishing to place advertisements in search results, or what will now be known as the Yahoo Bing Network.

The Yahoo Bing Network is comprised of 151 million unique searchers in the U.S. who are likely to spend 24 percent more than the average searcher, and likely to spend five percent more than Google searchers in the US," noted Tina Kelleher, Microsoft community manager, in the blog post.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year search partnership in July 2009, shortly after Carol Bartz took over the chief executive post from Jerry Yang. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft's Bing powers Yahoo search, while Yahoo heads up the search advertising strategy.

Yahoo reported in April of last year that the partnership had caused its business financial difficulties. Recently, some have questioned whether new chief executive Marissa Mayor would keep the agreement going.

This article was originally published on V3.

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What Else Are You Telling Google When You Hit the Search Button?

Paid search is an incredibly effective marketing channel because the user explicitly tells the advertiser what she is looking for. The searcher's query is matched to an advertiser's keyword, enabling that advertiser to deliver a specific response to the declared need.

However, the search query itself isn't all that Google takes into account when determining which ads to show. Every time a user performs a search, she is also sending additional information along with her query, whether she knows it or not.

Device, location, and past behavior are just a few of the secondary signals leveraged by Google to improve customer experience. Savvy marketers can further target their advertising by understanding and utilizing these signals.

Target by Device

While Google's Enhanced Campaigns update drastically changes the device targeting options available to advertisers, the searcher's device type (computer/tablet/smartphone) and operating system are still factored into ad serving. Quality Score (and thus cost-per-click charged to advertisers) is calculated separately by device for each keyword. AdWords' reporting still allows advertisers to segment all performance metrics by device.

For an advertiser leveraging app extensions to link her ad, Google ensures that the correct version of the app shows up based on the device's operating system (Android or iOS). Advertisers can also designate ad copy and extensions as "mobile preferred" in Enhanced Campaigns. Those ads will be shown in response to searches on a smartphone.

Target by Location

Google is extremely adept at determining a user's location, and advertisers can leverage this secondary signal in two ways.

If an advertiser is targeting a large area, she can find additional opportunities by segmenting this audience via AdWords location targeting. By cloning campaigns and targeting high- and low-value geographic locations separately, advertisers can allocate budget differently between these audiences and even provide customized messaging to each.

Enhanced Campaigns also offers new geo-targeting features that allow advertisers to modify keyword bids based on a searcher's location. Advertisers can even adjust bids based on a searcher's proximity to a physical location.

Target by Past Behavior

I can't count how many times I've received a panicked email from a client saying, "I've been searching all morning, and now suddenly our ads aren't showing!"

Many advertisers don't realize this is an intentional and beneficial AdWords feature that keeps low-value impressions from negatively impacting click-through rate. If a searcher repeatedly enters the same query over a short period of time without clicking on an ad, Google assumes that the ads aren't relevant, and stops showing those ads to that user for a short while.

Google has another similar and often misunderstood feature. If a searcher clicks on an ad and then quickly clicks her browser's "back" button, Google sees that as an indicator that the ad's landing page didn't provide the searcher with what she wanted. An option may appear below the ad, offering the searcher the option to block all ads from that advertiser. Once again, this feature is a benefit for advertisers, removing wasted impressions from uninterested searchers.

Google is currently beta testing Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. This feature allows advertisers to cookie visitors to their site and then leverage this cookie data to later target these visitors when they perform a search on Google. There are many ways advertisers can use this feature, such as serving specialized ads to searchers who have never visited the site or serving different ad copy to searchers who have recently visited but did not convert.

Google has access to an array of additional user information via Google Accounts, but it is utilizing caution about using this data in order to avoid privacy issues. It remains to be seen if and how Google will leverage this opportunity in the coming years. In the meantime, advertisers should ensure they understand and leverage all current secondary signals in their paid search marketing.

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What if eBay Is Right and Paid Search Is Worthless?

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By now, everyone in the search marketing industry has read either the full study recently conducted by eBay about search, or has at least seen some of the coverage of the report. For those too busy focusing on transitioning to Google's Enhanced Campaigns, the highlights are this:

EBay conducted a study that found that for its own brand terms, paid search was ineffective and a negative cost versus simply relying on organic queries alone.Further, eBay found that on generic terms, the value was questionable at best.

This research has garnered mainstream coverage in the trades, leading more than a few C-suite executives to question their own investments with Google. And for that I say, "Thanks, eBay."

Just as the idiom goes that no publicity is bad publicity, so should it go that no questioning of media value is a bad question. For years we have worked with brands to measure the influence of paid and organic search in tandem and isolation. We've measured paid and organic versus TV, social media, and all other forms of digital media. It's what you have to do in this interconnected consumer world.

So, I applaud eBay for doing the work and determining that for its brand search doesn't hold the value. But, take a moment and name the largest competitor to the following companies: Coke, Apple, Nike, Ford, and eBay. I bet the first four were much easier to answer than eBay. In fact, you could make the case that there's only one eBay and it fulfills a very unique space with minimal direct competition.

Which is one way of pointing out that while search may not work for eBay, it's also not struggling to achieve digital shelf space on Google or any other search engine. The biggest point of contention for eBay was around branded terms. Anyone in this space knows that branded terms for a well-known company with minimal competition represent a small fraction of total search investment, likely as CPCs in the pennies, not dollars. So, while eBay has started a public discussion of the value of search, it's very difficult to suggest many brands could take the same approach. One of the most underrepresented facets of paid buying, even with strong organic placement, is the competitive click share prevented by presence. Since eBay does not run the threat of this, organic can do more lifting with minimal repercussions.

It's obvious that eBay uses search in the purest form: direct response, down funnel conversion. Brand building is not part of the equation, and as such, every word has a value. And when the cost exceeds the return, it ceases to be of interest. In that, I wholeheartedly agree with eBay. While eBay has suggested it is swearing off branded keyword buys, it's still active on PLAs and with non-brand keyword buys.

Here's the thing. Search works, but only if, as a brand, you know what it's worth to you. Too often brands allow outside influences (competitors, corporate vanity of presence, top-line revenue) to shape their buying strategy. Just as damaging is taking what eBay has published as anything more than one unique company taking a curious public position around corporate buying choices. It's not dissimilar from GM's declaration of Facebook failing it.

Brands need to understand what search is worth to them. Accepting this study as gospel is no more palatable than accepting the long-standing Google view that if it's delivering, you should just keep writing checks. There's a proper brand point of investment in search for any company, just like any other media channel.

The truth is it doesn't really matter if eBay is right for anyone but eBay. Whether eBay is an anomaly or spot-on is far less important than knowing: What is your paid search value point? And are you constantly evolving your measurement to ensure you know the worth at all times?

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COMMENTSCommenting policy comments powered by Disqus ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Copeland is chief executive officer of GroupM Next, the forward-looking, media innovation unit of GroupM. Chris is responsible for curating and communicating insight-focused media solutions across established and emerging platforms. Leveraging his multi-year experience with emerging media companies, Chris is tasked with stewarding GroupM Next in partnership with agency leadership from GroupM's four media marketing and marketing service agencies (Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare).

Guiding the Predictive Insights, Technology, Education, Research, and Communications teams at GroupM Next, Chris is responsible for overseeing the amplification of insights into opportunities that directly benefit the business of GroupM agencies and their clients. GroupM is the world's largest media investment management group and the media holding arm of WPP.

Chris was selected to lead GroupM Next after nine years of leading the search marketing practice within GroupM. Among his accomplishments include the development and integration of the global search marketing offering for GroupM agencies, GroupM Search, which manages $1.3 billion in search billings globally and has grown to more than 1,000 search marketing strategists serving 40 countries.

 

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