2009-12-22 23:10:00frank
關鍵字廣告
一個最近開設網路公司的朋友和我說過這關鍵字廣告的運作方式，廣告主要去標購關鍵字廣告出現的位置，廣告是否出現在關鍵字搜索的第一頁是很重要的，所以要隨時留意自己的廣告否仍在第一頁。因為出現的位置與投標的金額有關，所以當有一定的廣告主投標金額超過你時，你的廣告就會被擠到第二頁了。
如何花最少的錢，讓自己的廣告留在第一頁就是一項學問。關鍵字廣告的前幾個大都是大公司，用高價取得，在很長的時間內都是出現在前幾名，就像我們在電視上看到的廣告還要你上網搜尋某某關鍵字，這種廣告都是花大錢的做法。一般的中小企業，實難仿效。
關鍵字廣告的平台會提供種種資料，廣告主(經紀)必須要分析這些資料來讓廣告的成本效益提升。這十分科學，也是一門藝術。有些像是在下棋一般，除了廣大的潛在客戶／消費者的行為需要去分析，同時也要考量其他競爭廠商，因為他們也有同樣的資料，銷售著相同或類似的產品，也想讓自己的廣告顯現在搜尋的第一頁。
關鍵字廣告的規模有多大呢？在美國是110億美元，而這項廣告從0到今的110億美元也不過十年的光景。關鍵字廣告得成長雖然已經趨緩，但是仍不斷地有廠商投入。許多廣告業界的從業人員覺得：這種廣告是最有效率的廣告方式。
關鍵字廣告的標售過程基本上是黑箱作業，外人無從得知，僅能相信其商業道德與操守，競標的過程中是否有人為(平台業者)操弄，不得而知。在美國就有一間TradeComet的公司對Google提起不信任的訴訟。
在美國Google是為廣告主帶來網頁流量最多的平台，所以這一篇紐約時報報導的主角Tiny Prints公司有90%的關鍵字行銷費用都是花在Google上的。
22-Dec-09
The Science of Managing Search Ads
By MIGUEL HELFT
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Cyber Monday had gone swimmingly for Tiny Prints.
Despite the economic downturn, customers streamed into the Tiny Prints online store on the Monday after Thanksgiving, called Cyber Monday because it is one of the busiest days of the year for Web retailers. They snapped up the company’s custom holiday cards at roughly twice the rate of a year ago.
But in the following days, Ed Han, the chief executive, and his team made a risky bet in search of higher profits. Hoping that traffic and sales would stay up, they pulled back on the Google search ads that had helped drive visitors to Tiny Prints.
The gamble backfired. Just as Tiny Prints pulled back, competitors appeared to spend more aggressively to display their ads when people typed “holiday cards” or “photo cards” into Google. By the middle of the week, sales growth began to taper off and a bright holiday season suddenly appeared a bit less rosy.
“We knew we had made a bad decision,” Mr. Han said. Tiny Prints reversed course, but it took the company, which is privately held, more than a day to recover — a critical amount of time during the heavy shopping season.
For most people, Google and other search engines are essential tools to navigate the Web. But the workings of the text ads, the blurbs that peddle goods and services on the search results pages, are largely hidden from Web users.
For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age.
“It is critical,” said Ellen Siminoff, the chairwoman of Efficient Frontier, which helps companies manage their search advertising campaigns. “You have to have data and be able to analyze it. It’s a bit like playing chess, but you are blind to what your competitors will do.”
Many industry insiders say search engine marketing, as the practice is known, is one of the most effective forms of advertising ever devised. In just a decade, it has grown into an $11 billion business in the United States. It accounts for the vast majority of Google’s $22 billion in annual global sales.
Google’s service, called AdWords, dominates so thoroughly that some advertisers have felt at the mercy of the company, and complained that they had little control over the complex advertising system. One company, TradeComet, filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of artificially increasing its advertising rates.
But by and large, businesses find search advertising effective and continue to flock to it, albeit at a slower rate than in previous years. As growth has tapered off over the last year, Google has stepped up its outreach efforts to help midsize companies like Tiny Prints use its tools more effectively, hoping that will encourage those companies to spend more.
“It’s good for our business and it’s good for their business,” said Claire Johnson, vice president for online sales and operations at Google.
Like many other businesses, Tiny Prints also buys search ads on Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. While results are “very attractive,” the traffic coming from those sites is small compared to referrals from Google, Mr. Han said. As a result, Tiny Prints spends nearly 90 percent of its search marketing budget on Google, he said.
Mr. Han said that Tiny Prints, which specializes in high-end custom-designed greeting cards, had been working at perfecting its search advertising for the last two years. Its three-person team, veterans of Walmart.com and eBay, has become expert at poring over spreadsheets and sifting through the data about visitors and shoppers on the company’s Web site. During the holiday season, they monitor ads and traffic patterns hourly, and meet daily with Mr. Han and other executives to adjust budgets and strategies.
During one of the company’s daily budget meetings in mid-November, Anna Fieler, the vice president for marketing, said, “We are on a trajectory to overspend on search.” She then added, “But we are delivering on revenue.”
Search ads are bought from Google through an auction, and businesses pay Google only when someone clicks on their ad. An ad’s position on Google’s search results pages depends on Google’s secret formula derived from bid prices, the rate at which users previously clicked on the ad and a “quality score” determined by Google.
Since not all clicks turn into purchases, the trick for advertisers is to make sure that the amount they bid, multiplied by the average number of clicks needed to make a sale — the cost of acquiring a customer — does not exceed the profit derived from that sale.
But that can be easier said than done.
Early in the holiday season, for example, most people are window-shopping, so few clicks turn into sales. Tiny Prints is forced to pay more than $50 to acquire each customer, leaving little room for profits on an average order. Relying on spreadsheets of buying patterns from previous years, Tiny Prints search marketers make the case to Mr. Han that their cost of acquiring a customer is on track.
“We are seeing day by day that it is starting to dip,” said Isabelle Steiner, the director for search marketing said at the meeting in mid-November. “I’m projecting that by end of month, we’ll be spending $35.”
Based on those assurances, Mr. Han then gave the team the green light to increase spending on search ads. But Mr. Han brought up another point: competitors could disrupt the plans if they suddenly started bidding aggressively on the same keywords as Tiny Prints.
“What if Hallmark comes in on Saturday?” Mr. Han asked, referring to the Thanksgiving weekend. “Do we have a plan to react to what competitors might do?”
The plan, Ms. Steiner said, was to monitor the site around the clock.
A couple of weeks later, the vigilance paid off.
In a spot check squeezed between a birthday party and her own Christmas shopping, Ms. Fieler was welcomed by a screen of red alerts indicating that the Tiny Prints ads had fallen off the first page of Google search results for important keywords.
“We were then forced to make and implement a new plan to react to the competitive environment real-time,” Ms. Fieler said. “It was very tricky trying to balance not overpaying by participating in the frenzy with getting the impressions and clicks we needed to drive the business.”
By mid-December, with the bulk of the holiday shopping season behind them, Mr. Han and his team were looking haggard. In addition to late-night discussions of bidding strategies over instant messaging, they had pitched in to help wrap and ship orders.
Mr. Han would not disclose the company’s sales. But he said that by and large, the ad campaign on Google, which drove more than 20 percent of revenue, had been a success.
“Of the eight most important days of the year, we got seven exactly right,” Mr. Han said. “On one of the days, by our standards, we fell on our face.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/technology/internet/22search.html?ref=technology
The story was taken from The New York Times. The copyright remains with The New York Times Company. The author of the story and The New York Times are not involved with, nor endorse the production of this blog.
如何花最少的錢，讓自己的廣告留在第一頁就是一項學問。關鍵字廣告的前幾個大都是大公司，用高價取得，在很長的時間內都是出現在前幾名，就像我們在電視上看到的廣告還要你上網搜尋某某關鍵字，這種廣告都是花大錢的做法。一般的中小企業，實難仿效。
關鍵字廣告的平台會提供種種資料，廣告主(經紀)必須要分析這些資料來讓廣告的成本效益提升。這十分科學，也是一門藝術。有些像是在下棋一般，除了廣大的潛在客戶／消費者的行為需要去分析，同時也要考量其他競爭廠商，因為他們也有同樣的資料，銷售著相同或類似的產品，也想讓自己的廣告顯現在搜尋的第一頁。
關鍵字廣告的規模有多大呢？在美國是110億美元，而這項廣告從0到今的110億美元也不過十年的光景。關鍵字廣告得成長雖然已經趨緩，但是仍不斷地有廠商投入。許多廣告業界的從業人員覺得：這種廣告是最有效率的廣告方式。
關鍵字廣告的標售過程基本上是黑箱作業，外人無從得知，僅能相信其商業道德與操守，競標的過程中是否有人為(平台業者)操弄，不得而知。在美國就有一間TradeComet的公司對Google提起不信任的訴訟。
在美國Google是為廣告主帶來網頁流量最多的平台，所以這一篇紐約時報報導的主角Tiny Prints公司有90%的關鍵字行銷費用都是花在Google上的。
22-Dec-09
The Science of Managing Search Ads
By MIGUEL HELFT
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Cyber Monday had gone swimmingly for Tiny Prints.
Despite the economic downturn, customers streamed into the Tiny Prints online store on the Monday after Thanksgiving, called Cyber Monday because it is one of the busiest days of the year for Web retailers. They snapped up the company’s custom holiday cards at roughly twice the rate of a year ago.
But in the following days, Ed Han, the chief executive, and his team made a risky bet in search of higher profits. Hoping that traffic and sales would stay up, they pulled back on the Google search ads that had helped drive visitors to Tiny Prints.
The gamble backfired. Just as Tiny Prints pulled back, competitors appeared to spend more aggressively to display their ads when people typed “holiday cards” or “photo cards” into Google. By the middle of the week, sales growth began to taper off and a bright holiday season suddenly appeared a bit less rosy.
taper n. 1. (物體的一頭)逐漸變得尖細[the S] 2. 逐漸減少;逐漸變弱[the S]
3. 細蠟燭;(點火用的)紙媒,燭芯[C] 4. 錐形物;尖塔[C] 5. 微弱的光
a. 1. 一頭逐漸尖細的,錐形的 2. 分等級的
vi.[(+off)]
3. 細蠟燭;(點火用的)紙媒,燭芯[C] 4. 錐形物;尖塔[C] 5. 微弱的光
a. 1. 一頭逐漸尖細的,錐形的 2. 分等級的
vi.[(+off)]
“We knew we had made a bad decision,” Mr. Han said. Tiny Prints reversed course, but it took the company, which is privately held, more than a day to recover — a critical amount of time during the heavy shopping season.
For most people, Google and other search engines are essential tools to navigate the Web. But the workings of the text ads, the blurbs that peddle goods and services on the search results pages, are largely hidden from Web users.
blurb n. 吹捧性廣告(或簡介、短文);大肆宣傳
For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age.
inundate vt. 1. 浸水;泛濫 2. (洪水般的)撲來;壓倒
analytics n. [數]解析學;[邏]分析論
gamesmanship n.1. 制勝絕招 2. 花招,小動作
analytics n. [數]解析學;[邏]分析論
gamesmanship n.1. 制勝絕招 2. 花招,小動作
“It is critical,” said Ellen Siminoff, the chairwoman of Efficient Frontier, which helps companies manage their search advertising campaigns. “You have to have data and be able to analyze it. It’s a bit like playing chess, but you are blind to what your competitors will do.”
Many industry insiders say search engine marketing, as the practice is known, is one of the most effective forms of advertising ever devised. In just a decade, it has grown into an $11 billion business in the United States. It accounts for the vast majority of Google’s $22 billion in annual global sales.
Google’s service, called AdWords, dominates so thoroughly that some advertisers have felt at the mercy of the company, and complained that they had little control over the complex advertising system. One company, TradeComet, filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of artificially increasing its advertising rates.
But by and large, businesses find search advertising effective and continue to flock to it, albeit at a slower rate than in previous years. As growth has tapered off over the last year, Google has stepped up its outreach efforts to help midsize companies like Tiny Prints use its tools more effectively, hoping that will encourage those companies to spend more.
by and large 總的說來
outreach vt.1. 超越 2. 伸出 3. 擊敗 vi. 拓廣;延伸
n.1. 擴大服務範圍 2. 拓廣;延伸
outreach vt.1. 超越 2. 伸出 3. 擊敗 vi. 拓廣;延伸
n.1. 擴大服務範圍 2. 拓廣;延伸
“It’s good for our business and it’s good for their business,” said Claire Johnson, vice president for online sales and operations at Google.
Like many other businesses, Tiny Prints also buys search ads on Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. While results are “very attractive,” the traffic coming from those sites is small compared to referrals from Google, Mr. Han said. As a result, Tiny Prints spends nearly 90 percent of its search marketing budget on Google, he said.
Mr. Han said that Tiny Prints, which specializes in high-end custom-designed greeting cards, had been working at perfecting its search advertising for the last two years. Its three-person team, veterans of Walmart.com and eBay, has become expert at poring over spreadsheets and sifting through the data about visitors and shoppers on the company’s Web site. During the holiday season, they monitor ads and traffic patterns hourly, and meet daily with Mr. Han and other executives to adjust budgets and strategies.
pore vi. 1. 注視,凝視[(+at/on/upon)] 2. 鑽研,熟讀[(+over)] 3. 默想,沈思[(+on/upon/over)]
vt. 使注視得;使專心閱讀得
vt. 使注視得;使專心閱讀得
During one of the company’s daily budget meetings in mid-November, Anna Fieler, the vice president for marketing, said, “We are on a trajectory to overspend on search.” She then added, “But we are delivering on revenue.”
Search ads are bought from Google through an auction, and businesses pay Google only when someone clicks on their ad. An ad’s position on Google’s search results pages depends on Google’s secret formula derived from bid prices, the rate at which users previously clicked on the ad and a “quality score” determined by Google.
Since not all clicks turn into purchases, the trick for advertisers is to make sure that the amount they bid, multiplied by the average number of clicks needed to make a sale — the cost of acquiring a customer — does not exceed the profit derived from that sale.
But that can be easier said than done.
Early in the holiday season, for example, most people are window-shopping, so few clicks turn into sales. Tiny Prints is forced to pay more than $50 to acquire each customer, leaving little room for profits on an average order. Relying on spreadsheets of buying patterns from previous years, Tiny Prints search marketers make the case to Mr. Han that their cost of acquiring a customer is on track.
“We are seeing day by day that it is starting to dip,” said Isabelle Steiner, the director for search marketing said at the meeting in mid-November. “I’m projecting that by end of month, we’ll be spending $35.”
Based on those assurances, Mr. Han then gave the team the green light to increase spending on search ads. But Mr. Han brought up another point: competitors could disrupt the plans if they suddenly started bidding aggressively on the same keywords as Tiny Prints.
“What if Hallmark comes in on Saturday?” Mr. Han asked, referring to the Thanksgiving weekend. “Do we have a plan to react to what competitors might do?”
The plan, Ms. Steiner said, was to monitor the site around the clock.
A couple of weeks later, the vigilance paid off.
In a spot check squeezed between a birthday party and her own Christmas shopping, Ms. Fieler was welcomed by a screen of red alerts indicating that the Tiny Prints ads had fallen off the first page of Google search results for important keywords.
“We were then forced to make and implement a new plan to react to the competitive environment real-time,” Ms. Fieler said. “It was very tricky trying to balance not overpaying by participating in the frenzy with getting the impressions and clicks we needed to drive the business.”
By mid-December, with the bulk of the holiday shopping season behind them, Mr. Han and his team were looking haggard. In addition to late-night discussions of bidding strategies over instant messaging, they had pitched in to help wrap and ship orders.
Mr. Han would not disclose the company’s sales. But he said that by and large, the ad campaign on Google, which drove more than 20 percent of revenue, had been a success.
“Of the eight most important days of the year, we got seven exactly right,” Mr. Han said. “On one of the days, by our standards, we fell on our face.”
Noah Berger for The New York Times A designer at Tiny Prints last week. Gamesmanship and data analysis are critical to successful search advertising. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/technology/internet/22search.html?ref=technology
The story was taken from The New York Times. The copyright remains with The New York Times Company. The author of the story and The New York Times are not involved with, nor endorse the production of this blog.