Actionable Insights - A Covario Blog » Paid Search Advertising

Who Did the SOPA Blackout Really Affect?

Jeff MacGurn — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:05:46 +0000

On Wednesday, January 18th tens of millions of users (and possibly more) found themselves without access to some of the internet’s most popular websites, and others found themselves witness to very public corporate protests. Most of the media coverage of this event was geared toward these sites, companies and people protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its political fallout. However, we were much more interested in whom this Blackout affected and how it affected them. So we went to putting together the data to understand just what the SOPA Blackout really meant and who it affected.

At first glance it seemed like it might be an easy thing to do, but we quickly realized that gathering this data would be much more difficult with the sites hosting it being blacked out. Therefore, we narrowed our analysis to some of the most popular sites that were blacked out in protest: Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist and WordPress.

For demographic data we focused on a number of sources; including ComScore and publically released data from the respective sites listed above. We were most interested in geographic breakdowns of the users of these sites, which proved to be quite difficult to come by. As a proxy for the geographic distribution of users of these sites we leveraged Google Insights’ brand search data. We felt that brand searches should provide a decent proxy for the users of these sites, and while it may not be exact, the variances between Google Insights and what the truth was (which were, for the most part, inaccessible) would be small. Perhaps not surprisingly, for each of these top websites, the geographic distribution skewed highly to the West Coast and secondarily to the East Coast with the Midwest seeming to be least affected.

But geographic distribution of users didn’t seem to tell the whole story, so we also began to comb sources for information on the behavior of users of each of these sites in an attempt to place that information in context. In an effort to convey this information, we thought an Infographic was the most appropriate medium, so below is some of the data we pulled together regarding the Blackout of these four sites – Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist and WordPress – and who the Blackout affected.

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Who did the SOPA Blackout really affect?
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Who Did the SOPA Blackout Really Affect?

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Fourth Quarter Provides Strong Finish to 2011 Paid Search Trends

Charles Gaylord — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:16:48 +0000

With the close of 2011, it is now time to update our quarterly paid search spend analysis of key trends across the globe in search advertising, and update advertisers on Q4’11 performance:

Spending on paid search advertising was up by 7% in Q4 ’11 from Q3 ’11. This is after a sizeable increase in spending in Q3 ’11. This holiday season, spending in the consumer electronics sector, as well as continued investment in business analytics and information management solutions, drove modest growth. Q4 ’11 paid search spend was up 28% from Q4 ’10, which was a strong quarter a year ago.
On a full year basis, growth in 2011 for paid search was up 21% over 2011 spending—just north of what we expected at the beginning of the year, when we predicted 15 – 20% growth.

The chart above shows how spending has increased since 2009. Ad spend for our clients has been normalized such that Q1 ’09 equals 100%.

North America, powered by the U.S. and Canada, saw strong spending growth in the quarter, which was up 11% quarter-on-quarter and 18% year-on-year. Growth annualized was 10% for North America—the bottom-end of our 2011 forecast range from the beginning of the year.
In EMEA, growth was down 8% quarter-on-quarter, but up 9% year-on-year. Overall, paid search spend growth for the year was 22%, which was slightly below our 2011 forecast. We attribute the deceleration in spend to the general macro-economic slowdown in the region.
APAC continues to be where the major growth opportunities exist for the high-tech industry. Quarter-on-quarter search spend growth was up 8%, while year-on-year growth was up over 100%. With a 97% annualized growth rate, we are seeing continued investment in Japan, China, India, and the ANZ economies.
On a global platform basis, advertiser increases in spending on Google were up 8% from Q3 ’11 and up 27% year-over-year, while spending on Yahoo-Bing was down 1% from Q3 ’11 and down 18% from a year earlier. Spending on Baidu, which commands the majority of market share in APAC given its dominance in China, grew 19% quarter-on-quarter and 185% year-on-year.

For the first time since mid-2010, the 2 – 3% quarter-on-quarter CPC inflation has subsided, at least temporarily. Changes in consumer behavior, combined with more effective advertising strategies and improved matching algorithms, are key factors in this trend.

Actionable Insight:

Paid search spending in 2011 was up 21% from 2010. For 2012 we recommend that global advertisers plan for budget increases of 18 – 22% for paid search, with a regional breakdown as follows:

18 – 20% growth in North America
15 – 18% growth in EMEA
40-plus % growth in APAC

All of this information and more is available in our latest report – Covario’s Q4 2011 Global Paid Search Spend Analysis, which is now available on our website.

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Fourth Quarter Provides Strong Finish to 2011 Paid Search Trends

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Football, School, and Growth in Paid Search Spend are All Back

Craig Macdonald — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:59:49 +0000

NFL football players and team owners are back to playing, children are back at school, and paid search marketers are back to buying keywords, according to Covario’s mid-quarter global search advertising spend analysis. Our projections suggest spending on paid search is on the rebound in third quarter – growing at 28% year-over-year and 22% over the second quarter of 2011.

The quarter-over-quarter growth is not a surprise. The second quarter was very weak, as we saw a reduction in paid search spend due to uncertain economic conditions – with huge pullbacks in EMEA and the U.S. However, when the second half of 2011 budgets were handed down to our agency and to our customers in June, we saw spending spike up as anticipated.

The third quarter usually is a strong quarter in consumer electronics and high-tech (where Covario has a large concentration of clients), as students gear-up for school and people make tech purchases for the fall. Year-on-year growth is consistent with our beginning of the year projections – between 15-20% annualized. If Q3 spend continues as projected, we are on track for a 20% full year growth over 2010.

In North America:

Google continues to dominate spend. It commands 78% of the spend in the region, with the Yahoo-Bing alliance representing 16% of the spend and Facebook the other 6%. Growth on Google is up 24% from the same time last year, while spend on Yahoo-Bing is down 20% from a year ago, but up 24% from last quarter. And Facebook spend is up 130% from last year.

In EMEA:

Growth on Google is up 40% from last year, and 17% from last quarter. Google continues to command 95% of the spend in the region. Though we see large growth rates on Yandex (the Russian search engine), the amount spent continues to be small compared to other markets. This is key – as we see the largest degradations in spend in Q2 in the EMEA region – due to pull backs from slowing growth rates.

In APAC:

Our projections show the China-based search engine Baidu with 52% growth over Q3 of the previous year, while Google is growing at 35%. Yahoo is growing – mostly in Japan – though at a slower rate. Growth rates in APAC are expected to be 35-40% this year and we are on track for this accelerated growth rate.

Source: Covario (Projections for Q3)

Overall, projected impression growth is slower than spend growth. Impressions are up 16% from the second quarter, and up 22% from last year. Impression growth is highest on Google and Baidu (25% and 35%, respectively over the third quarter of 2010). The trend in CPC increases continues as well. Overall, CPCs are up 5% globally from last quarter, with Google CPCs up by 7%. This is the result of ongoing increases in bidding on “generic keywords,” which on average are higher priced; increases in the competition in the auctions; and continued improvements in conversion rates on paid search spend due to ongoing work in landing page optimization.

We are putting together our end of quarter projections, which will be available the first week of October. We are also gathering information regarding 2012 budgets and will provide our projections for next year at that time.

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Football, School, and Growth in Paid Search Spend are All Back

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Who Pays for Social Media Advertising? The Answer Will Surprise You.

Craig Macdonald — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:19:52 +0000

Yesterday, Alex Funk, our Lead Media Specialist here at Covario, and I, presented a webinar on how search and social media work together. The webinar was run on Search Marketing Now (SMN) network and had about 200 participants – most of them search practitioners from various advertisers across the US. During the webinar, we asked two poll questions, the answers from which were quite interesting.

The first question we asked was “who manages paid social media programs?” There is an ongoing competition amongst advertisers over who should do this. Should paid social media – buying ads on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – be done in-house or by an external agency? And if it’s an external agency, is it the PR agency, the display agency, the paid search agency, etc. The results of the poll question were these:

57% of respondents say this is done in-house. This is a high percentage and is likely due to two factors. SMN audience can skew toward smaller companies who do not have the budgets to justify agencies expenditures. And, social media is still relatively new and budgets are relatively small – so they may be managed by the social media team in-house.
Of those outsourcing to their agency, 24% are using their search agency. This supports our hypothesis that Search Agencies will ultimately control the execution of the social media budgets – because media on social media platforms is very much like bid management on search. It can all be done through the bid management system, it has similar dynamics from a metrics standpoint, and can be directly compared to the search programs from a performance standpoint.

Source: Covario, Inc. July 2011. (n = 86)

Second, we asked “from where does the budget for paid social media programs come?”. Our goal was to see whether the budgets are independent, coming from search, coming from display, coming from PR, or other. The results here surprised us. Our hypothesis was that social media budgets were independent, and/or coming from the display budget. That is not what we saw.

40% of the respondents said that budgets are independent. We thought the percentage would be higher. We have heard from our advertiser customers that in 2011, they were establishing specific social media budgets on masse – as opposed to last year where they were adjuncts to the search and display budgets or testing budgets. 40% is healthy, just a little lower than we expected.
42% said that the social media budgets are coming from their search budgets, and only 10% said the budgets are integrated into their display budget. That was a big surprise.
PR budgets are often tapped to support paid social media buying, which is slightly less than display budgets – 8%. Mobile is only 1% of the budget supply.

Source: Covario, Inc. July 2011. (n = 87)

This is a key issue. It means that search marketers are driving the execution of the programs and that the budgets for social media are either being integrated into the search budgets or are independent. If they are part of the search budget, then this puts search and social media performance in direct competition with each other and search marketers in the position of arbitrating where the spend will go. It also shows that our hypothesis that search marketers are winning the majority of the assignments in advertisers to run social media execution largely is coming to pass.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: Paid social media programs are managed in-house for 60% of the advertisers surveyed, however, if the programs are outsourced, they are outsourced to the search agency.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2: The budgets to pay for paid social media programs increasingly are integrated into search budgets (putting them directly in competition with search performance) or are stand-alone independent budgets. They are NOT coming from display budgets, at least not in this survey.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #3: Search marketers need to focus on creating the integrated metrics and campaign tactics for managing paid search and paid social since the responsibility for allocating the integrated budgets is falling on them.

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Who Pays for Social Media Advertising? The Answer Will Surprise You.

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Google’s Anti-Trust Issues: What Does This Mean to Advertisers

Craig Macdonald — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:08:12 +0000

It was announced last week that Google is going to be investigated for anti-trust issues by the Federal Trade Commission. This action joins the already underway investigation of Google in the EU (U.K. excluded). Clearly Google’s success, like that of IBM and Microsoft before them, is attracting all sorts of unwanted attention. What are the issues and what do they mean to advertisers?

The complaint is that Google uses its market position to create an unfair marketplace. Search is such an important source of revenue and traffic for retailers, publishers, travel companies, and nearly all advertisers with a Web presence and Google is the provider of nearly 75-80% of this traffic in the U.S., and 95% in Europe (according to studies done by Covario), that this concentration of power is considered a major risk to the advertisers. The complaint does not detail the specific competitive issues for paid search versus natural search – however both areas are of concern to for this investigation.

For Paid Search:
There is no doubt that Google commands the lion’s share of the market – in Europe particularly. Anti-trust suits are brought when market power leads to monopolistic pricing. The interesting issue with Google is that its ability to enforce monopolistic pricing is very limited given the way its system works – the auction allows the advertisers to set pricing – and Google, for the most part, stays out of it. They are quite transparent when it comes to how they determine Quality Score –and advertisers who do not benefit from this understanding either have not put in the work, or are simply unhappy with the result. They are bidding on irrelevant keywords, which hurts quality score, which raises price – those are the publicized rules of the auction – play or don’t play.

This issue was under hot debate in 2007 and 2008 by the U.S. Justice Department, and Covario was asked to comment at the time. Google does have some subtle ways to impact their ability to monetize inventory – but nearly all of these processes include feasible consumer benefits as well. Take Google Instant. Our belief is that it has two goals. One, it provides useful suggestions to consumers, from which they find value. Two, it also helps create more clicks for paid search which increases revenue for Google (see Actionable Insights blog). Is that monopolistic. It is impossible to make that claim, as the auction makes the ramifications of this process completely transparent and the impact is one that the advertiser can control.

Our position then, as it is now, is that there is no anti-trust case in paid search due to the way pricing is set in the market for paid search keywords. Google acts as market facilitator, not market enforcer.

For Natural/Organic Search:
The argument here is slightly different, and this is where we believe the anti-trust case in Europe and the U.S. will focus. Google has one objective for natural search – to return relevant answers to the consumer. It will be this concept of what relevancy means that will determine how this investigation goes. Relevancy is a debatable standard and the relevancy goals of the consumers (represented by Google) and the advertisers (represented by themselves and the U.S. Congress in this case) are going to always be at odds.

Google makes all sorts of changes to the underlying natural search algorithm. Panda was the most recent significant example – which was designed to address reductions in the quality (read relevancy) of search results due to programmatic processes being run by large advertisers that Google considered against its standard of what constitutes relevancy.

Two things can happen – the process can play out and the governments in the U.S. and Europe can find that Google is or is not creating an unlevel playing field. If found to be unlevel field, then the remedy might be that the government(s) will regulate what relevancy means, and take that out of the hands of Google. Or the government(s) might force Google to disclose its algorithms and algorithmic changes more fully so that advertisers’ can see what is going on more effectively than they can today and enforcement of abuses by Google may be reduced.

Again, our point of view on this is that Google is going to be a more effective arbiter of their algorithm and relevancy than the government, and that any action that would allow information to be disclosed that allows advertisers to game the system against those with truly relevant content is bad for advertisers, bad for consumers, and bad for the search industry. Google is incented to be good at this, and to put the needs of the consumer above the needs of the advertiser. Google provides a service to the market – it organizes information more efficiently than anyone else out there right now, and makes it available to consumers and to advertisers. And they should be allowed to do so unfettered.

Advertiser should expect that the ability of Google to continue to innovate through acquisition of other technologies and companies will slow. The EU and the U.S. Congress are putting in place the same types of scrutiny that IBM and Microsoft before them have faced. The Yahoo search alliance from two years ago was the first casualty. The furor over their acquisition of ITA is the latest example. Advertisers should expect more of the same – which will create a more fragmented market over time.

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Google’s Anti-Trust Issues: What Does This Mean to Advertisers

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Expected Slowdown in PPC Spend Hits Home in Q2

Craig Macdonald — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:00:38 +0000

Now that the second quarter is half completed, it is time to see if the torrid spending on paid search that major advertisers executed in the first quarter is continuing. Spending in first quarter was very strong – up 6% over the previous quarter (Q4 of 2010) and up 26% over the previous year. First quarter spend was powered by huge increases in Europe and Asia.

So far, the short answer to whether spending is continuing at the previous rate is … “no.” Continued slowness in spending in the Americas is now being met by slowdowns in Europe as well. Asia continues to grow rapidly. The following is a regional and global review.

On a global basis – spending on paid search looks like it will be up only 6% from the same quarter last year, and down by about 20% from the first quarter. Growth year to date is now at 16% annualized – right in our beginning of the year projection range of 15-20%.

Spend on Google is on track to grow 10% over the second quarter of last year, and will be down from Q1 spend levels by a more muted 15% from the first quarter. Growth in paid search on the engine is up by 17% year to date.

Bing-Yahoo spend is down sharply on a global basis from a year ago – more than 30%. The only good news for the alliance is an uptick in spend in Europe. However, Bing-Yahoo accounts for less than 5% of spend in the region.

Looking regionally, Asia-Pacific spend continues to be where the growth is. In the second quarter, growth is trending up more than 50% from the previous year. Google spend is up 39% from second quarter a year earlier. Baidu spend is also up by 45% from last year.

This is contrasting with the Americas, where spending is heading down by 7% from the second quarter of last year. And while Europe spend will be up by 21% from last year, this is off of the first quarter where spending was up 45% from the same period in 2010. And it appears that European spending will be coming down in second half of the year – due to financial issues effecting major economies in the region and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar due to the mounting debt crises in Greece, Spain and Italy.

We are also seeing a large increase in spending on secondary and regional search engines. Spending on Baidu is up very strong from last year – 65%. Also, we have seen modest gains on Yandex in Russia – occurring concurrently with its recent IPO here in the U.S. We do expect additional spending on Yandex, which represents 65% of our customers’ spend in Russia (with the other 35% being invested in Google/Rambler). The capital raise should push improvements in the platform, which is becoming the defacto standard in this key growth market for many large global paid search advertisers.

The easing in paid search spend growth has also driven an easing in a one year trend we have been tracking – cost per click (CPC) inflation. CPCs stayed constant between Q1 and Q2 on a global basis – except on Google! Google CPCs continued to inflate – by 4%, due to ongoing improvements in the way Google is monetizing inventory and continued competition for keyword prices. We expect this to continue throughout the year – particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

Our recommendation to our customers remains the same: Budget for 15-20% paid search advertising growth for 2011. We see no reason to change our forecast and direction at this point.

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Expected Slowdown in PPC Spend Hits Home in Q2

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A Proposal for a New Taxonomy and Measurement Framework for Digital Marketing

Russ Mann — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:50:53 +0000

Forrester Research has the best ad spend prediction model out there, and most advertisers, agencies, investment analysts and tech companies use Forrester estimates as the gospel. However, as the digital marketing industry has evolved, the lingo and taxonomy has created a new opportunity for re-definition.

For example:

- What really is mobile marketing?

Is that a small banner ad on top of a mobile app you see on your phone? Why isn’t that a “display” spend?
Is it spending on a paid search ad that will appear higher on a mobile device than on a PC device? Why then isn’t that “search” spend?
And what is a mobile device? Smartphones obviously are. Tablets are said to be. But then isn’t a laptop a mobile device?

- Similarly on search spend- how much of that is paid search spend versus SEO spend, which are often considered two very different media types.

- On the social spend estimates- most “social spend” until recently was either banner ads or text ads on mySpace and Facebook, fan page spend, or possibly applet/game spend. For the banner and text ads again- should that be classified as social spend or display spend- or mobile spend by the way- if it is a banner ad unit showing up on a social publisher on a mobile device.

- And a great new confusing element will be video:

Is the whole video itself an ad?
Are we talking about pre-roll, post-roll, interstitial video ad units?
What about popover display units?
What about the display and search ads around the videos?
How about in-video product placements?
What about social video? On mobile devices? That are primarily found through Google searches?

I think you get my point. What we really need now is a new taxonomy of digital marketing, one that will help advertisers, agencies, publishers, analysts and others sort out where money is being spent and where to invest next.

An initial proposal would be to cube the media spend model into three dimensions: publisher/publisher type, ad unit type, and viewing device.

- Publisher types might be broken out into categories such as: content publishers and networks (Yahoo, WashingtonPost, Wall Street Journal), search/directory publishers (Google, Bing), social publishers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), and other yet to be determined publisher types

- Ad unit types would be things like the “impression”-based IAB standard display ad units, the Google/Bing text ad units, as yet to be defined and standardized video ad units, and any new ad units as they become popularlized. Earned media listings such as SEO would need to be broken out. There might also need to be an entire category of “expression”-based units such as UGC, Ratings and Reviews, Tweets and Posts that advertisers, agencies and adtech software providers spend serious money on creating, but not through buying impressions. This spend certainly deserves a line item.

- Viewing devices would probably be broken down into: desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, dumb phone, smart TV (IP/internet-enabled TV), cable/satellite TV (which is now getting digital ad unit insertion capabilities).

Across this matrix, we already know that certain publisher types favor certain ad units on certain viewing devices. Facebook is more display ad units on a smartphone and tablet device. Google tends to be more text ad units on PC, laptop and smartphone devices. YouTube and Hulu, as primarily video content publishers, tend to have more display and video ad units on laptops, smartphones, tablets and soon internet-enabled TV.

So a spend and effort matrix broken down by publisher type, ad unit type and viewing device type is Covario’s initial contribution to the discussion on how to create a new taxonomy for predicting and deploying marketing spend and effort.

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

A Proposal for a New Taxonomy and Measurement Framework for Digital Marketing

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Yahoo ‘Re-imagines’ Search

PJ Fusco — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:49:20 +0000

Yahoo rolled out Yahoo Search Direct this week, its boxed-up user-friendly rival to Google Instant search. Yahoo contends that its service is more focused on providing searchers with actual answers, while Google’s version of instant results is focused on the same-old 10 blue links. Whether Yahoo Search Direct will change how users actually search remains to be seen.

Yahoo Search Direct compiles its top 30 search results from two different back end systems. The first system generates likely query matches and the second amalgamates content from Yahoo’s repositories and partners. Yahoo further refines these results to provide users with the top 10 most-likely-to-be-relevant results in the lower left portion of the user interface and the top 3 “most clicked” results on the right side of the user interface (shown below).

Right now, Search Direct is live on search.yahoo.com and other U.S. Yahoo search properties, but not yet on the homepage of yahoo.com. Search Direct is predominantly organized around sports, news, TV, movies, local, finance, shopping, travel, weather, and trending search themes.

The new search interface builds on Yahoo’s attempt to remain relevant in the lucrative search market by focusing on quickly delivering answers rather than links. Whether this is search re-imagined or not depends on potential inroads Yahoo makes into growing its share of the search market.

Actionable Insight No. 1:
Yahoo Search Direct uses an algorithm distinct from Microsoft’s organic search algorithm. If your content is well-ranked in Bing, similar results do not necessarily translate to Yahoo Search Direct. If you are not currently on page-3 or better in Yahoo’s search results, make sure your search engine marking team is focusing on growing relationships with Yahoo content partners.

Actionable Insight No. 2:
Yahoo notes that rankings can change moment by moment because Search Direct is dynamically driven. Take advantage of breaking news and search trends by ensuring that your social media marketers are focused on making the most of crowd sourced click-throughs from Yahoo-friendly social media venues.

Actionable Insight No. 3:
Yahoo notes that when expressed on tablets or mobile devices Yahoo Search Direct could take very different forms. Make certain your mobile media content renders in an optimal manner for both browsing and searching from Yahoo Search Direct.

References:

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Whose Data Is It Anyway? Why Owning Advertising Performance Data is Essential in Today’s Hypercompetitive Market

Craig Macdonald — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:23:48 +0000

Over the past few years, shifts in marketing spend from offline to online have provided marketing with a wealth of performance metrics across media properties. The recent recession has further redistributed marketing spending to favor those methods that are proven to drive the desired results and subsequently optimized. The resulting major change in spending has spurred the offline advertising industry to further develop and disclose their own set of metrics. With all this new data on marketing, we are now seeing companies that have marketing measurement systems throughout the enterprise, financially outperform those that don’t. Despite this linkage of company performance to marketing measurement capabilities, most companies do not actually own the data about the largest percentage of their marketing spend – their online and offline advertising.

Across the world’s most successful companies, external agencies are selected to strategically outsource online and offline marketing programs – but few realize that in the process, they no longer control their own data! In the bowels of Donovan, MediaPlex, Doubleclick, and Atlas licensing agreements there exists a contractual clause that provides the contract holder with the exclusive rights to access and use advertising spending and performance data. The licensing for these systems is quite clear – whoever owns the license, owns the data. And most advertisers rely on their agency to handle the ownership of this technology license thus giving control of the data to the agency. This creates the unintended consequence that all of the data necessary to understand performance of campaigns, creative, publishers, brands, business units, and region – i.e., the key intellectual property around what makes online and offline work for an advertiser – is not owned by the advertiser.

Why is this an issue? There are several reasons:

Independent, Auditable Performance Evaluation. Without legal ownership of the ad serving and measurement data, the advertiser is held captive by the agency for performance reporting and analysis. Want to know how a campaign is performing? Ask the agency. Want to know how much is spent in a region on a media property? Ask the agency. Want to audit the agency? You can’t. Want immediate answers to where your marketing budget is being spent or how your just-launched campaign is performing? You’ll need to wait as the agency extracts the data, transforms it, interprets it, and then delivers it in a Power-point presentation to the advertiser. An informal survey of our advertisers suggests that this process takes 2 – 6 weeks for most inquiries. This is hardly a way to operate marketing in an environment where flexibility and the ability to react quickly are key traits of marketing success and company growth. Marketing can’t capture the opportunities of 24 hour feedback cycles using the existing processes. Within the most sophisticated advertisers, groups called Media Operations or Marketing Analytics, have been created to establish sophisticated analytics skills and, in so doing, are beginning to take control over this data, yet still outsourcing much of marketing to their agencies. In so doing, they insure an independent source of data on marketing performance and are better able to gain access and insight into marketing results. This cannot happen without legal ownership of the key data collection systems used in both online and offline marketing performance tracking.

Marketing Innovation. As new marketing techniques emerge, organizations need the flexibility to select specialized partners or leverage in-house capabilities to test these techniques. In a recent example, a global technology company wanted to leverage Doubleclick retargeting strategies for its display campaigns. Retargeting is essentially the process by which visitors to a site, who leave before making purchase, are identified by the networks for subsequent banner ads that specifically target them to reattempt their previous failed purchase. Their agency didn’t agree with this approach, wasn’t interested in running the test, and was unable to provide complete access to their Doubleclick account. The advertiser decided to purchase the Doubleclick license directly from Google – at the same price as the agency– and was able to evaluate the technique themselves. The results were clear, immediate, and generated significant revenue, since retargeting is quite effective in their business. Given the amount of innovation taking place in interactive marketing these days with mobile ads, ad exchanges, behavioral targeting, video, and improved integration of display and search data, constant testing is a necessity to drive optimal performance and meet business goals.

Freedom to Switch Agencies. If an organization wishes to change agencies, and they have outsourced the ownership of the ad measurement system to their agency – switching agencies results in the loss of critical past performance data. This is simply unacceptable in the current environment where historical performance data is an essential element for budgeting, planning, and executing all media. A new agency must have access to this data for them to have a chance at improving results – which is the fundamental reason for changing agencies in the first place.

Covario believes that advertisers should take ownership of advertising measurement licenses because ownership of this data is critical for innovation, agility, and maintaining strong, auditable financial controls. Doing so is not hard and typically does not cost more – usually the advertiser pays the same amount directly to Atlas (Microsoft), Donovan Data Systems (Donovan), or to Doubleclick (Google) as the transfer cost they received from the agency.

The benefits are many: complete access across all internal and agency teams to this critical data, faster turn-around times on information and analytics, and far more freedom to consolidate data across all media types: search, display, video, social media, and all forms of offline media.

With nothing to lose and so much to gain, there is no reason why an advertiser should not own their own performance data.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Whose Data Is It Anyway? Why Owning Advertising Performance Data is Essential in Today’s Hypercompetitive Market

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Paid Search Roars into March Like a Lion: Update on Q1 Global Paid Search Spending

Craig Macdonald — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:42:52 +0000

At the end of 2010, we expected the paid search spend of our clients to increase by 15-20% in 2011. More specifically, we said that spending would increase by 10-12% in the Americas, 20-25% in EMEA, and 30-35% in APAC. Well, it turns out, we were more than a bit conservative. Through the first full week of March, and projecting to the end of the quarter, the high-tech and consumer electronics advertisers that make up the majority of our paid search client base are increasing paid search spend at a healthy 26% rate globally. Here is the breakdown by region. (The bars are indexed against the Q1 2010 quarter spend amount.)

The Americas is growing 11% over Q1’10
APAC is up 56% over Q1’10
And EMEA, the big surprise, is up 53% over Q1’10

In addition, we looked at the paid search spending trends quarter-to-date by search platform

Google continues to show strong growth. 34% over Q1 last year.
Baidu is also growing quickly – at 45% over the same period a year ago.
Yahoo is holding its own – growing at 4%.
Bing, however, saw a decline – with our clients spending approximately 14% less than same period in 2010.

So, unlike a year ago when we saw a huge dip in spending in Q1’10, this year we’ve witnessed spending down versus Q4, but up well above the same period a year ago. (Note: this is part of why the percentages are up so high; last Q1 in 2010 was very slow from a spending standpoint.)

Despite the roaring start to 2011, we stand by the original global projection for the year. (Why? Might thing we should up our yearly forecast.) And for advertisers budgeting for search programs, we recommend using our guidelines to ensure consistent market share in search programs.

Click here to download this Actionable Insights blog on Q1, 2011 Mid-Quarter Global Paid Search Spend Report.

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Paid Search Roars into March Like a Lion: Update on Q1 Global Paid Search Spending

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