Rumors are that the Google Superbowl ad in the 3rd quarter will be this ad on YouTube.

Rumored Superbowl Google Ad on YouTube

Whether it is true or not I though it would be fun to see how the search engine result page (SERP) is different in Israel. What is interesting is that although the search result is the same, you can see in the screen shot below that in Israel there are ads.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in Israel

You might think that there are ads only in Israel. However, if you do the search in the USA you can see that there are even more ads (see screen shot below). Google did not want to show the sponsored search ads in their ad. Could this be because it hurts the search experience?  The ad experience?

To be fair, if Google did include the ads and the clicks were on the ads, some may complain that Google was hinting that people should click on ads. And the ads might distract from their message.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in USA

Whether or not the ad will actually run it sure is creating a lot of buzz on the internet. The screen shot below shows just a few reactions to the Google Superbowl ad.

Google Superbowl ad reactions

Anyone who does web analytics knows how easy it is to make a mistake.  So it is not surprising that the New York Times published an article which can be misleading.

The NYT headline is “The Payoff of Ads on Search Engines” and reports on a study by Engine Ready that “visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results.”

Unfortunately this really doesn’t mean anything. There are many reasons for this:

• We are not comparing the same keywords
• A search ad keyword can represent a whole family of keywords
• A search ad keyword can be manipulated so that the ad will not show if an undesirable keyword is used with it

In order to have meaningful conclusions we have to analyze the same exact match keyword with the same positions. That way we will know if PPC is beating out the organic results. Actually, this may be interesting information but it really won’t answer the question of where should we be investing our resources.

SEO vs. PPC: What Should Companies Invest in?

In order to answer that question we should compare:

• The ROI of PPC vs. SEO
• The revenues of PPC vs. the cost of ads
• Managing the PPC campaign vs. the cost of running a SEO campaign

Even this is more complicated than it looks as not everyone buys something on the 1st visit.

A buyer could 1st come to the site through PPC and then come through SEO on the buying visit. So you have to decide which channel gets what credit

Or

The same person can buy the first time when he comes to the site through Adwords and then buys again a month later when coming through the organic results

Organic results can be better than search engine ads

You should probably be using both SEO and sponsored search  channels but you do need to decide how to divide your budget. Most companies under invest in SEO and SMO because it is more challenging and harder to predict results.

I was surprised that an Internet company would commission a survey without contrasting it to actual behavior. What consumers say and how they actually act are not always the same thing. That is why we have web analysis and other methods which measure actual consumer behavior.

While there is a place for surveying customers, I would have expected Linkedin which accepts online advertising to complement the survey with click through and conversion statistics. Hopefully they will include that in their next report.

Another problem with these kinds of surveys is that they generalize. What they report may not be relevant to:

• The segment you are targeting
• The product you are marketing
• Your target geographic location

These online surveys may be fun to read, but if you want to improve your bottom line, there is no substitute for PPC ad testing.

You now know why you should test increasing bids during unseasonably good weather–read the previous post if you don’t know why. However there are local exceptions. Yesterday I caught the middle of an interview on the BBC. The interviewee explained that whenever there is good weather in Iceland, people take time off from work. If this is the case–increasing bids may not help since no one will be online.

Good weather can influence the success of your Google Adwords campaign. However you may have to turn your strategy upside down in Iceland. Photo credit: Martino!

Further proof that localization should be part of your Google Adwords, MSN and YSM ad campaign strategy.

Another great insight from economics guru, Steve Levitt in his book Freakonomics.

With competition growing daily everyone is always looking for ways to improve Adwords performance. Can a bagel man help us here?

Steve describes how Paul Feldman sheds light on human behavior. Feldman sells bagels on the honor system and keeps meticulous records. He knows who pays and who cheats.

Improve your Adwords performance by
studying bagels. Photo credit: bitmask.

By analyzing his records Steve has found lots of good stuff. And I even found something that even Google Adwords Professionals don’t know-”Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. (page 49)”

When the weather is unseasonably pleasant try turning up your bids on Adwords and watching the money pour in. Your competition won’t have a clue. And if you really want to rake it in-develop an algorithmic solution that automatically increases bids whenever the weather warrants it-and sell it to all the Google Adwords Professionals.

Many companies are annoyed that competitors advertise with their brand names in their ads in the search engines. This is known as piggybacking. It is different than conquest buys where the advertiser uses trademarked names to trigger their ads but the brand name does not appear in the ad itself.

Most search engines like Google have policies against piggybacking but allow conquest buys in many cases.

Not all systems are perfect but from the example shown in the Wall Street Journal on this subject (June 4, 2008 European Edition) it looks as if the guilty piggybacking ad is using Google’s automatic keyword insertion feature. This is where the advertiser chooses keywords to trigger the ad and the exact keyword used by the searcher is inserted automatically in the ad by Google’s Adwords system.

Wall Street Journal illustration of Piggybacking. Does Adword’s automatic keyword insertion feature violate Google’s piggybacking policy?

So it seems that Google hasn’t been able to get its own automatic feature to abide by its guidelines. A case of the machine not listening to its human masters.

We recently checked to see if the companies (Marriot International Inc, InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, American Airliness and Northwest Airlines) in the piggybacking article still had the same problem. Turns out they do not. Could it be that the Wall Street Journal article somehow convinced the machine to stop the piggybacking?

Does Google lower site rankings which have links from sites which Google disapproves of? This doesn’t seem fair. That is why many people think it can’t be true, especially since Google’s web site states: You can make money without doing evil.

After all, we have no control over who links to us. It this were true, one of your competitors could easily provide a disapproved link to your site and lower your rankings.

What is Google’s main goal?

To provide relevant search results. If someone comes along and provides superior search results Google will lose its searchers. When that happens, there will loose the first half of their statement above: “You can make money…”. Therefore, we can conclude that Google will do anything they can to improve their search results. That way, they serve their own best interests and do what is best for their clients. Let’s not forget that their clients are the searchers–not website owners.

If Google concludes that they can improve their search results by lowering rankings for sites which have certain incoming links—what do you think they will do?