Two things caught my eye in the news today:

1) Yahoo is reporting that man has eaten a 15 pound hamburger:

A related search turned up some interesting facts.  A regular 100 gram hamburger patty has 259 calories and 16.3 grams of fat.  Now, I’m no math expert, but it seems to me that 15 pounds of the stuff contains roughly 17,612 calories and 1,108 grams of fat.  That’s more than a large movie theater popcorn.

 2) Google has launched a new WYSIWYG Display Ad Builder:

Yes, this is far more on topic for this blog.  But, come on, that hamburger was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? 

The new Display Ad Builder comes at an interesting time when the perceived value of online display inventory is on a huge upswing.  Typically a branding move with expected low rates of directly resulting conversions, banner ads are nevertheless coming back into vogue. 

In my opinion, this is only further evidence of the declining value of vanity websites for commerce.  Let’s face it, most internet users are past falling for a fancy web design, a flashy animation, or a sparkling logo.  They want information.  For small businesses in particular, the more concise that information is displayed the better.  Look at Google/Yahoo to see that this is true.  Up to 50% of a search results page for most every local business search is occupied by local business ads.  That’s because this is primo inventory.  It gets clicked (makes the search engines money) and converts (makes the advertiser money, too).  That’s partially because it is so local in nature, and specific to the search query.  But, it is also because the resulting pages are well formatted for conversion— prominently featuring the phone number, email address, etc.  Vanity websites typically aren’t so well formatted for conversion, that’s for sure.

So, with less emphasis being put on developing fancy websites, more budget is becoming available for other marketing.  There are only so many explicit searches happening for “Seattle Electrician”, but there are literally thousands of contextually relevant sites where a banner ad might display to get some extra eyes on your business.  It may not convert all that well, but it may have long term benefits including driving up your CTR and conversion rates from other media.

And, don’t forget, Google has long been looking for ways to better utilize all of this available inventory.  Content match has had a terrible reputation— mostly because advertisers failed to understand the idea of it being “CPC-priced CPM inventory” rather than more typical click-to-conversion trackable traffic. 

So, what do you think?  Would you use it?  Google’s betting on it and will do everything in their power to help you get around any roadblocks preventing you from trying.  Too cheap to pay a graphic designer?  Try the banner builder.  I did, and it is pretty cool.

Google Display Ad Builder

This morning, while catching up on reading everything I missed over the 4th of July weekend, I happened upon an interesting story about gas prices across the country.  A site (certainly appearing to be a MFA (’made for Adsense’) appeared on Digg because it had mapped gas prices by US county, and put up a cool heatmap illustrating the range of prices:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This got me to thinking.  It did strike me that this map seemed remarkably similar (swapping red with blue) to another color map we have all seen (over and over again) this election season.  You know the one, red states and blue states:

On first glance, this looks like grounds for a conspiracy theory.  Blue states, on average, have higher gas prices.  But, there is sure to be a lot more to it.  Blue states are: typically higher in population density, have more of the country’s larger cities, might impose larger taxes on gas stations, and are generally located on the coasts and not in the center of the country.  These are all factors that could account for the prevalence of red and orange on the gas-prices heatmap in so many of the “blue” states.  There are certainly a few things that don’t make any sense at all— Illinois (blue) is Orange on the heatmap, while neighboring states like Indiana (red) is Yellow, and Missouri (red) is Green. 

Take that for what you will.  I’m going to leave it to the political blogs (for either party) to argue if there’s an issue there or not.  That’s not what we’re here for, we’re here to discuss internet marketing.

So, I decided to see if there were any noticeable similarities in the price of clicks for keywords associated with “gas prices”.  I loaded Google’s Traffic Estimator with the same geoqualified keywords (gas prices, gas stations, etc) for each of the 50 states and District of Columbia.  I analyzed the results in Excel, and found some interesting things. 

I assigned estimated CPCs of $0.00-$0.25 a score of 1 (for low), CPCs of $0.25-$0.50 a score of 2, CPCs of $0.50-$1.00 a score of 3, and CPCs over $1.00 a score of 4.  That gave me the opportunity to make my very own fancy map (thanks to tamu.edu for the utility), a heatmap of Gas Prices CPCs in Google.  There were some surprises, like the high competition in Georgia and Texas:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Then, I gave Gas Prices from the heatmap similar scores: Green got a 1, Yellow got a 2, Orange a 3, and Red got a score of 4.

Lastly, I averaged the scores for Blue states and Red states to see if there were any noticeable trends:

Politics	# of States	Avg of CPC score	Avg of Gas Price Score
Blue	20	2.75	2.21
Red	31	2.65	2.10
Totals	51	2.69	2.14

In conclusion, it appears that there isn’t much ground for a conspiracy theory, afterall.  Both the average CPC scores and average Gas Price scores that I calculated seem pretty consistent when viewed in aggregate.  There are aberrations, but they don’t favor either the red states or blue states, and virtually cancel each other out when viewed in total.

So, I guess in the end we are all in it together.  We’ve got high gas prices, and internet marketers in both red states and blue states are paying for the increased competition they create. 

For anyone that doesn’t live under a rock, buildup to November’s presidential election has reached a fever pitch in all media.  Television commercials, whole-page ads in newspapers and magazines, as well as incessant news coverage (yes, I’m lumping that in with other commercial media) are impossible to avoid or ignore.  

This year, the most successful candidates are finally near fully embracing (although, perhaps still not fully understanding) the internet as a truly leveragable media outlet.  Of course, the internet has played a growing role in the past few presidential elections.  Here are some internet memories of elections past:

• 2000 - Ralph Nader gets good viral buzz
• 2000 - Bloggers and the other “free” media make election irregularities more widely known than previously possible
• 2004 - Support rallies for Al Gore organized through meetup.com
• 2004 - Blogs rule
• 2000 & 2004 - Anyone heard of a little political action committee called MoveOn.org?

So, what are the candidates doing online to promote themselves so far this time around?  Here are a few of the biggest candidate internet marketing pushes of 2008 (so far):

• 24% of people report regularly learning something about the election from the internet, up from 13% in 2004 (and compared to 40% for TV news)
• Perhaps this is why the average age of voters continues to decline (arguably creditable to a more informed, more motivated voting-age populace).  In Illinois (where I live), Barack Obama wins the 18-24 age group nearly 2:1 in the democratic primary versus Hillary Clinton
• “Yes We Can” is released as a musical remix of Obama’s motivating speech, tops Youtube ratings and inspires some humorous parodies (including one called “No You Can’t“)
• A ClickZ column points some of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the primaries to lower Google Adwords spending (the same article suggests that candidates relied much more heavily on search distribution than content network placement)

So, now the primary season is finally over and we have our major-party candidates.  What will the internet change this time through?  Hopefully, a lot.  I expect to see much more as the national election season gets underway. 

Don’t think that the internet will be a big factor in this year’s contest?  Barack Obama sure does, his campaign is hiring internet marketing professionals.

 

Today, Google sent an email to at least some Adwords advertisers that on May 20th, 2008, a new feature will be available for beta testing. 

The feature is a new match-type called “Automatic Matching”.  It will be installed on existing Adwords accounts already in “enabled” status, regardless of their current match-type selections.  Selected advertisers have the option to actively ‘opt out’, but this will require editing the campaign settings to uncheck a new checkbox (which will be prepopulated as ‘on’) in each account.  Will this be able to be set by API call?  At this point, it remains to be seen.

Automatic Matching looks to be the next evolution of Broad Match.  In this iteration, Google will use theming learned from landing page spiders, existing keywords and ad copy (all factors in the current Quality Score algorithm) to expand upon the matching of keywords to actual search queries. 

In addition, Google claims Automatic Matching will adjust itself  based on performance.  This means that the system will spend more where click through rate proves to be highest.  And, according to Google, will aim to generate costs per click (CPCs) equivalent or lower than the ad group’s current averages. 

All very interesting.

So, what does it mean?  This is a logical step toward Google’s goal of Adwords becoming capable of truly supporting self-service advertisers.  Assuming that the system works as intended, and assuming that it works when rolled out on a large scale, Automatic Matching could potentially reduce the need for long keyword lists and time-consuming research and lengthy keyword ideations.  If so, it would be a “win-win” for both advertisers (advertisers could increase their coverage without extra time spent on their account) and for Google (Google gets to monetize a larger percentage of search queries from broad match-types than exact match).

Only time will tell how the new feature will actually behave.  I, for one, will be keeping a very close eye.