By Ryan Saviano, Paid Search Coordinator, Advertising Solutions
For today's SERF: Imagine the thrill of seeing your search results even before you finished typing your query. Impossible you say? Well then take this little gem for a spin.
Affectionately dubbed “The Real Live Search” by its creator, Long Zheng, this search engine utilizes the openness of the Bing’s APIs to display results in a real-time manner. In what was inspired by the “real timey-ness” of Google Wave, search results will update and change immediately following each character you type in any given query. The prototype engine displays results for natural listings, images, videos, along with related searches.
Now, this is nothing that will replace your current search engine. If nothing else, this little experiment with search is incredibly cool to play with. While searching for “resolution media”, I was surprised that our own Grant Parker shows up in the video results section. I suggest at the very least you give it a try. It’s actually quite refreshing from the normal, sometimes mundane, search experience.
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SERF RETURNS: Experience The “Real” Live Search
Keyword Creation Done Quickly
By Ryan Savaiano, Paid Search Coordinator, Advertising Solutions
Whether it’s been for a tight deadline, a quick forecast or even a last minute request, we’ve all needed to build out a list of keywords in a hurry. There are a plethora of tools and resources available to aid in the process of building out these lists, but I just wanted to offer a few sources and tips that I tend to rely on when I need a pretty substantial catalog of terms rather quickly.
Thesaurus: It’s a no brainer that to start off a build, you’re going to at least have a few core terms or a theme to which you’re going to be building around. I find a thesaurus to be extremely helpful when looking for different variations of certain words. This will help you get a start on expanding your base foundation. It will also give you ideas on what type of language different users may use. Living in the digital age, I tend to rely more on the thesaurus functions within Microsoft Word or even Outlook rather than a physical one.
Your Website: Content within your website or landing page is also a great way to gather ideas for certain keywords you might want to run on. Scan the page for key terms or phrases that consumers might be likely to search on. These will not only help expand your list, but will also help give an added boost to your quality score since they will be highly relevant to the landing page.
Keyword Discovery: Keyword Discovery has been a tool that I’ve relied on for quite some time. Boasting a catalog of over 4.4 billion keyword searches based on user panel data, their Global Premium database will return a variety of queries along with the number of times each term has been searched on by their panel. As with most keyword suggestion services, these figures should be looked at directionally rather than as absolute numbers. I find the service most helpful in discovering different modifiers that can easily take you from a list of ten keywords to a list of over a hundred. It’s also a great source for finding various negatives you might want to add to your account for better targeting.
Concatenate, concatenate, concatenate: Probably one of my favorite and most heavily relied on formulas within Excel is the concatenation function. It is a life saver when it comes to putting together a list of variates in a hurry. Simply enter the formula =CONCATENATE(cell#1,” “,cell#2) and drag down.
Google’s Keyword Tool: I normally turn to Google’s keyword tool at the end of my build, mainly due to it’s propensity for suggesting very broad or general terms. I tend to use it more for quality assurance purposes, making sure there aren’t any holes in my keyword list, but it can be useful for suggesting terms that you may have missed or haven’t thought of up until that point.
Using these various tools and sources, I’ve been able to create keyword lists of sometimes over 1,000 terms in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Now I understand that there are many more tools and services out there and that each advertiser may have his or her own way of building out these lists and that’s great. I think you should use whatever you feel most comfortable with. I just wanted to offer a few basic suggestions that I find helpful when I’ve needed to have a pretty sizable list of terms and needed them yesterday. Hopefully you’ll find some of these tips helpful and be able to utilize them on future builds.
Mispelings, err… Misspellings
By David Lamers, Paid Search Coordinator, Advertising Solutions
For all you advertisers who regularly pull search query reports, you’ve probably been amazed by the large number of misspelled queries. I’ve seen brand names chopped up or truncated into so many erroneous forms that it hardly resembles the brand itself. Fortunately, the search engine’s broad match technology is sophisticated enough to capture this traffic. Even though these users may be poor spellers, their intent is to find your product and (possibly) to buy it.
Don’t view misspelled queries as a source of unqualified traffic. Rather, view them as an opportunity for increasing your overall efficiency. For example, at the start of this quarter, I compiled a base list of common brand misspellings for one of my accounts using engine search query reports that spanned a wide date range. Using pivot tables, I was able to determine which misspellings continued to pop up over time. I then bid on these terms directly (phrase match) and kept the bids well below what we were paying for the broad match variant. The incremental lift in efficiency was substantial: the ad group averages 12 cent average CPC’s and 12 dollar ROAS. That’s a huge improvement over the 28 cent average CPC’s we’d be paying for broad match variants!
Moreover, having a guaranteed source of high ROAS week over week allows for more flexibility in other areas of the account. This is crucial in balancing out campaigns that may not be as efficient due to the nature of the keywords (e.g. keywords that are higher up in the purchase funnel). So, next time you misspell your client’s brand, don’t discard your error, embrace it and learn from it!
