Red Bricks Media’s News Blog

We may never be in the rock and roll hall of fame, but we’ll settle for the next best thing – the viral marketing hall of fame. Each year Marketing Sherpa honors the year’s top ten viral marketing campaigns, and Red Bricks Media’s campaign for client THQ joined the ranks of the top ten for 2008. Other winners this year include General Mills and Columbia Sportswear.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s article on the competition, “these top 10 campaigns leveraged peer-to-peer pass-along to achieve amazing results in a range of demographics and audiences – hip-hop music fans, hardcore gamers, breast cancer survivors and activists, philanthropists, Portuguese soccer fans and more. Some campaigns mixed big budgets, great strategy and wide exposure. Others created entertaining content and watched it sail.”

This competition, which is free to enter, awards winners with a write-up in Marketing Sherpa and the eyes of thousands of marketing professionals who read this publication on a weekly basis.

“The rise of social networking and user-generated content is feeding and enhancing viral marketing. Many marketers want to take advantage of these new trends but aren’t sure how,” said our CEO Ed Kim. “At Red Bricks Media, our approach is to have a solid strategy in place and really understand your target audience before you try to launch a viral campaign.”

by Ryan Hailey, Campaign Operations Manager

The Comparison Shopping network, like any other media channel, certainly has some costs, barriers to entry, and common pitfalls and errors that would make an otherwise seemingly profitable marketing channel…well…not so profitable. In order for a CSE campaign to be successful, it is necessary for a company to analyze all its facets and weigh the costs and potential benefits of self-managing versus delegating CSE management. We’d like to share some insights gained by researching this rapidly growing market.

An Emerging Market:

Comparison Shopping Engines are becoming the largest online business-to-consumer medium. They allow consumers to quickly compare prices, access product information and reviews, and make purchases within a few clicks of a mouse. New studies have shown that 60% of online consumers use a CSE prior to making a purchase. CSEs are also responsible for over one third of all e-commerce sales ($54.3 billion in 2007) and have more market share than auction sites and shopping portals combined.

The top four independent CSEs: Bizrate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla and NexTag now own over 61% of the shopping search market, according Hitwise. Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping, and MSN Shopping combined own less than 15% of the market. These independent comparison engines obviously have differentiated themselves offer a better user experience.

The CSE Landscape:

There are dozens of comparison shopping engines, each trying to differentiate themselves from the rest. Some tout themselves as delivering the lowest priced product matches, while others find a niche that deliver only certain kinds of products, whether it is electronics, baby gifts, or healthcare goods.

Many advertisers who lack the necessary time and resources to examine the entire CSE market tend to opt into only the largest ones, such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, and Bizrate. While these well-known engines do represent a big chunk (roughly 60%) of the comparison shopping market, advertisers who choose only the major CSEs are missing out on a sizeable portion of the market. This is a common faux pas that advertisers make when they manage their CSE efforts in-house as opposed to outsourcing management to online marketing professionals.

In order to maximize potential revenue and product/brand visibility in the CSE market, advertisers must survey the entire CSE landscape. Once this is done, the advertiser can exclude comparison sites that don’t suit their campaign’s motive and choose those sites that do.

CSE Pricing:

When surveying the CSE landscape, pricing models should play a very important role in the decision of which CSEs to opt into. There are three pricing models that shopping engines use: Cost per Click (CPC); Cost per Order or Cost per Acquisition (CPO/CPA), and free, and it is also worth noting that many of the larger CSEs require a minimum investment or deposit that varies between sites.

Cost per Click is the most common pricing model, where advertisers pay for every time an ad is clicked, and is also the most similar to typical Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Some CSEs that follow the PPC model charge a fixed cost-per-click rate for each product type depending on the margin, whereas others allow competitive bidding, which gives the advertiser the opportunity to build out a CPC optimization strategy.

The CPO/CPA pricing model, used by Shop.com and Jellyfish, is also very attractive since it is basically a risk-free investment; you are only charged when the consumer purchases the product.

The last and most popular pricing model is the “free” model. Only a few CSEs use this model, including Google Product Search and TheFind.com. Their profits are derived from selling ad space on their results pages. A common strategy for advertisers that are just entering the CSE market is to start by launching campaigns only on the free portals. This will allow the advertiser to gauge the competition and see how aggressive to be. In the end, however, opting into as many CSEs that suit and help achieve campaign goals is typically the best practice.

Campaign Development and Product Categorization:

Shopping engine placements are contextually pertinent because they’re delivered, along with other related products, on a keyword basis. Product ranking in the search results will be determined by how well a merchant’s keyword search term matches the keywords related to a product’s title, description, and other relevant information provided in the product data feed.

Choosing the right keywords in the product titles and descriptions definitely helps with achieving higher placement. For advertisers that are already managing PPC or SEO campaigns, a CSE campaign can simply be an extension of that, since you already have a developed keyword universe.

However, a new level of complexity is added when bidding at the product level rather than at an ad group or keyword level. A common pitfall in managing CSE campaigns involves product categorization. If an advertiser mis-categorizes its products (i.e. toys, electronics, clothing, etc), they can drastically harm the campaign by either paying too high a CPC or risk not having their product listed. To ensure products are listed and are in the best position possible, advertisers need to optimize their data feed.

Data Feed Management and Optimization:

The largest challenge in CSE management lies with uploading relevant information to different comparison engines. Only a few CSEs, known as “crawlers,” will actively search retailers’ websites and gather information to upload on their comparison site. All others require the advertiser to format and manually upload relevant information via XML.

Relevant information is generally consists of developing and maintaining variable fields, such as keyword-driven product titles and descriptions, file headers, display and destination URLs, product categories, price, model number, UPC, manufacturer name. This must be done for each separate comparison engine and every time product information changes, so it becomes an incredibly tedious task when managing multiple CSE campaigns.

The solution is using a third party Data Feed vendor such as MerchantAdvantage, Quigo, or SingleFeed. Each Data Feed vendor’s offering varies slightly, depending on the size, depth, and dynamics of the product catalog. Pricing schemes and CSE compatibility also vary between the vendors. We use Data Feed tools to centralize data feed management across multiple engine upload formats, meaning the advertiser only needs to enter all information once.

The Data Feed tool formats the information and uploads it to all CSEs. Data Feeds require frequent modification and many companies do not have the resources to invest. But, if an advertiser ultimately decides to have a full-scale CSE campaign, finding the right Data Feed tool is essential for success.

Many sellers make the mistake of relegating Data Feed management to the in-house IT Department since they deem it a technical process. The problem is that the information that goes into the feed is marketing material. Some very useful blogs and websites that contain valuable information about Data Feed Management and Optimization are: www.loveyourfeed.com, www.csestrategies.com, http://wordpress.com/tag/comparison-shopping-engines/.

Campaign Management and Testing:

In starting out a CSE campaign, advertisers should be able to get their feet wet without huge costs or time constraints. They can manage a CSE campaign manner similar to most PPC campaigns.

A majority of CSEs follow the CPC model, allowing the opportunity to bid on a product of keyword level. Users can remove underperforming products just as they would pause keywords in a PPC campaign. Advertisers need to frequently evaluate their campaign in order to understand consumer behavior in search as well as industry trends. This is in part why sellers turn to advertising and industry professionals for CSE management.

Advertisers should also take an active role in landing page development and testing. Each landing page serves as a sort of home page, making not only the case of why to buy the product, but why they should buy the product from you. Advertisers can also test by changing product descriptions, discounts, and special offers. Most of all, advertisers need to be constantly evaluating their campaigns to maximize CSE potential.

The Price Factor – Barriers to Entry:

While price can be a large factor in your CSE ad placement, each engine uses its own particular algorithm for ranking and displaying search results. Each also has different criteria and charges for participating merchants. Most of the major search engines use product price as a common sorting focus, followed by store rating and reviews, popularity, relevancy, and placement bids. In fact, about 70% of click-thrus on comparison sites are not on the seller with the lowest price.

It would be prudent to say that upscale sellers may have a more difficult time seeing positive results in their CSE endeavors. However, they still have the opportunity to advertise any niche products they may have and look for areas that aren’t covered by their competitors.

Sources:
http://searchengineland.com/070504-105037.php
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628428
http://www.comparisonengines.com/
http://www.csestrategies.com/
http://www.loveyourfeed.com/
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/07/24/feed-optimization/
http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com/comparison-shopping-listing-guide/
http://multichannelmerchant.com/webchannel/affiliate/marketing_shopping_around_0101/
http://www.seobrien.com/2006/10/comparison-shopping/small-businesses-rejoice/
http://www.revenuetoday.com/readarticle.php?name=Comparison+Shopping+Engines+Drive+Sales
http://www.channeladvisor.com/comparison_shopping/summary.html
http://www.hitwise.com/

by Scott Tieman, Marketing Strategist

I suspect that many marketers sweat the “Launch” phase more than any other. They’ve seen other marketing efforts tank after tons of planning and want to get it just right. The bad news is that like with a book, the opening chapter of a paid search campaign sets the stage for what’s to come. Mess it up and the rest isn’t worth the bother. The good news is that it’s harder to mess up than most marketers expect. This post (and subsequent ones) will help you get your campaign on the right track from the start. Today, I’ll focus on marketing objectives.

As with any performance driven marketing campaign (and, regardless of media, I hope ALL of your marketing campaigns are performance driven), the first question to ask is “What are my marketing objectives?”. They come in all shapes and sizes, but I’ll generalize them as awareness, lead generation, and sales. Awareness is primarily the realm of brand marketers vying for more mind share, lead generation the realm of acquisition marketing, and sales the realm of acquisition and retention marketing.

Whenever we accept a new paid search client, I always hear the same thing. The client wants to focus on sales & leads. Period. The biggest misconception about paid search marketing is that it is ONLY a demand capture tool. This couldn’t be further from reality; it also functions just fine for awareness and demand generation.

Take awareness as an example. Marketers, depending on category, could pay upwards of $30-100 CPM for banner ads. True, banner ads are rich media and that’s got to count for something compared with bland, short form text ads. But, HOW MUCH MORE? For simplicity, say you pay $1 per click on your text ad. Also assume your click through rate (CTR) ranges from 0.5-5% for a given keyword. Finally say your ad shows 1,000 times over the course of a month. After some fairly simple math, you are roughly paying $5-$50 CPM. Already, this is significantly lower than the range I’ve spelled out above. Don’t forget that a lower CPC would drive even more cost savings.

Let’s take it one step further. The example above (assuming the CTR I spelled out) drove 5-50 people to your site. Each new qualified person is an opportunity for further brand education, lead generation, or sales. With paid search awareness campaigns, you will rely on your website more for the heavy lifting. That’s what you want. By comparison, typical banner ads generate clicks at a rate of 0.1%. Thus, you’ve spent significantly more money to drive only 1 person to your site. With paid search campaigns, you’re getting awareness AND traffic. Now doesn’t it seem like a better investment to put your awareness budget into paid search marketing rather than banner ads? Wouldn’t you prefer that your site do the marketing rather than a skyscraper ad?

In my next post, I’ll further explore this topic of marketing objectives. There’s lots more to say. Stay tuned.

By Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

I’ve sequestered myself in the deepest recesses of the Red Bricks Media web laboratory this week, poring over mountains of data, reading exhaustive summaries of research from all over the world, and mixing beakers full of consumer behavior patterns, all in hopes of achieving that perfect alchemy known as Predictions for online marketing in 2008.

So without further ado, let’s get down to brass tacks.

1)    Social networking will continue its meteoric rise and touch more people in more places in 2008.

While “socialnetworkitis”—the fatigue from keeping up with all the social websites we belong to—is a real concern, any rumors of social networking’s demise are greatly exaggerated, and I’ll tell you why.

There are approximately two things that make the web interesting: content and people, especially people you know. So it stands to reason that social networks, whether Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, or another as yet undiscovered network, will continue to attract zillions of eyeballs and provide unparalleled levels of “stickiness” to their users.

The difference in 2008? You create the content these social networks profit from, so expect to see new websites that pay users for their participation. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but if Web 1.0 meant paying to use something, and Web 2.0 meant you were free to use something, Web 3.0 may just mean you get paid to use something.

2)    StumbleUpon will become a household name in 2008, as more people will stop googlin’ and start stumblin’.

StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering, an automated process combining human opinions and machine learning of personal preference, to help you explore a rich, vast variety of content you would never see otherwise, and rate it with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down via an easily downloadable toolbar.

It leads to unexpected discoveries, and dare I say it: Fun. There are myriad features that make it even stickier, but StumbleUpon has single-handedly rekindled my love of the web.

3)    Twitter, while not for everyone, will continue to influence the influencers and make waves in 2008.

I mean it: Twitter is not for everyone. But for those who crave direct, brain-to-keypad-to-audience interaction with people they like, respect, look up to, or are just plain curious about, Twitter can be an experiential revelation, unearthing information, news and opinions literally as they are happening. Companies and others are catching on to this new info-delivery platform, and people are making a living from it.

4)    Advertising on video sharing sites and mobile devices will increase, but consumer noses will turn toward the sky in response. If you’re still in doubt, read this prescient manifesto for more on why.

Today’s consumers are not a TV generation. Video advertising is interruption marketing, and consumers don’t play that game anymore (TiVo anyone?). The same goes for mobile ads, except it’s an even more personal invasion of privacy and space.

Smart marketers, responding to the challenge, will come up with new, innovative ways to engage and “go steady” with the audience beyond sticking ads in their face. It’s already happening. While motion picture product placement has been going on forever, video and video game product placement is increasing, and mobile apps (widgets) that engage and help the audience will become more of the norm on mobile phones.

5)    A backlash occurs against obsessive, exhaustive communication, connectedness, and the glut of “gadgetry.”

It’s only a matter of time before people stop IM’ing the person two feet to their left, rest those stiff, fatigued Blackberry thumbs, remove the Bluetooths and iPod earbuds, and engage in old-fashioned, face-to-face discourse with other human beings.

Don’t forget that ultimately there is a reason they call it word of mouth marketing, because the real marketing gets going when face-to-face conversation is flowing.

These are my modest marketing-related predictions for 2008. Now back to the lab.

Red Bricks Media has appointed Dan Weiner the new Managing Director of the company’s New York office.Prior to Red Bricks Media, Weiner held product and marketing roles at Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Idealab, and Priceline.com. In his most recent role, Weiner was Vice President of Sony BMG’s Online Media Network and was responsible for deploying new ad networks across the company’s hundreds of artist and label sites and developing compelling marketing offerings around its content and artists. He also launched a range of new content delivery and community tools, including the industry-leading Musicbox video network.

CEO Ed Kim is enthusiastic about Weiner’s leadership. “Dan is the perfect person to lead our New York office. He’s a creative and experienced professional who has pioneered online tools and properties for some of the world’s top media and web companies. I am confident that Dan will lead Red Bricks Media East to provide the same innovative marketing solutions and outstanding client services that characterize our other offices.”

Weiner is equally enthusiastic about his new role at Red Bricks Media. “I’m very excited to be joining the incredible Red Bricks team and building on their success in New York and the East,” he comments. “With the rapid emergence of nontraditional digital tools and channels, Red Bricks’ unique mix of rigorous performance marketing, great design, and technical depth offers a chance to develop ground-breaking new ways for marketers to reach and engage with consumers.”

Contact Dan at dweiner [ar] redbricksmedia.com.

by Peter Vaughan, Copywriter

“Email marketing is so dead.” Have you ever heard that before? With response rates coming in around the 1.12% mark, email has become a sore subject for many marketers (I display a can of spam on my desk to show my solidarity). The game has gotten tougher, the consumer has become annoyed, and clients are dropping vendors left and right.

However, this is no time to panic. The emergence of the social web has expanded the possibilities and created a shift in the consumer/marketer relationship that favors interaction – everyone wants to be in the know, everyone wants to participate and everyone wants to be famous. Yes, even email has a place in the YouTube, Facebook, Blogging, widget-crazed, crowd-control world of web 2.0 – you just need to know what you’re doing.

The keys to email success in Web 2.0:

Personalization, personalization, personalization – The golden rule.
- Break up your audience into groups and create messaging that speaks to each segment. Thorough market research will pay off in the long run.

- Use an experienced media planner who knows how to rent the right list at the right price.

- Track click behavior and follow up with custom, exclusive offers that drive conversions your consumers began but didn’t complete in a previous round.

2. Content is king again, but don’t overdo it – everyone has ADD

- Make sure your email design is easy to scan and includes non-invasive (text-link) CTAs in the body and again in the P.S. line. Hard CTAs should only go in mastheads or next to product shots.

- For sustained, content-focused newsletter campaigns, use teasing summaries and link to the full article elsewhere. This keeps emails short and drives traffic to your web properties.

- For hard-sale, product-oriented emails, think mail-order catalog. One catchy headline mixed with a product matrix works wonders (ever gotten an Apple iPod email? Those guys are good).

3. Create a relationship, encourage sharing, and sell “the social”

- User-generated content, out-of-the box offers and total transparency are the big winners in today’s web – it’s time to start leveraging email in the same fashion. If you can’t create content to entertain your audience, let your customers do some of the heavy lifting instead, and incentivize them with exclusive offers.

- People want to share things with friends that makes them look and feel cool. Of course, you do need a cool creative team (RBM!) to come up with creative ideas. Pairing sales emails with some light, interactive content is a recipe for success.

- At the very least, consider the magic phrase “send to a friend.” This encourages viral activity which can produce amazing results. Third-party vendors picked up an email offer we designed for Seagate’s FreeAgent hard drive line (purely through word-of-mouth) – our little product email became the top referrer to the FreeAgent site.

Ok, so I broke a rule – this newsletter article is a little content-heavy. But I would like to hear your thoughts and talk further about Red Bricks Media’s approach to email marketing in the web 2.0 landscape. Email me at pvaughan@redbricksmedia.com any time, day or night.

by Beth Morgan, Media Director

During the Web 1.0 boom it was all about the eyeballs. Content was king, and publishers scrambled to fill the Web with information and amusement that would lure people in. Now that we’re seeing the second rise of the Web, content is still king. But it turns out that, as has been common all throughout history, people are less interested in what someone else tells them than in what they and their friends are thinking and doing. Giving people the power to produce their own content and customize their own experiences, essentially democratizing the Web, has brought over 100 million new users to the Internet in the U.S. alone.

Which brings us to the most uniquely people-powered advertising vehicle the world has ever seen: paid search.

Pay-per-click is different from every other mode of advertising out there because the publisher only makes money if someone finds the ad relevant and interesting and clicks on it. The amount that the advertiser bids for each click does figure in to how often an ad runs and where it is placed, but an even bigger factor is how tempting and clickable an ad is. The people are in control! If you as an advertiser fail to interest your target market, they will not click on your ad—and even if you’re willing to pay a small ransom on every click, the engines might choose to not run it all.

So what does this mean for advertisers? Essentially it means that you must re-adjust the way you strategically think about your paid search campaigns, because things you’ve learned about how marketing works might not be true for search. Some examples:

1) Your ad might not show up every time you look for it. With traditional pay-per-eyeball advertising—TV, print, banner ads, etc—you agree to pay a set amount to advertise at pre-determined times and places for a set length of time. If you pick up a magazine or look at a website during that time frame, you will see your ad.

With paid search, though, the engines are unlikely to run your ad with every search, especially when you first launch a campaign. They are constantly running their mix of advertisers through a massive algorithm to determine, essentially, who earns them the most money. Proven advertisers are going to be given more credit than new ones. They’ll mix your terms in slowly, and then more and more if your ads are successful.

2) You might not WANT your ad to show up every time you look for it. Think about it: are you running ads because you want people to see your neat-o copy, or because you want to sell stuff in a cost-efficient manner? Paid search gives you great real-time data about how your ads are performing, which allows you to get rid of keywords that just aren’t working for you. You may think a certain keyword is absolutely vital to your business, but if those Empowered People don’t agree and don’t click on your ad, the price that Google charges you to keep your keyword in a high position may be more than it’s worth.

3) You don’t know ahead of time what you’re going to pay. Budgeting for traditional marketing is easy: you get X dollars to spend, you buy X dollars worth of placements, and then you look at the stats to see if it was cost-effective. Costs in paid search, though, are both variable and hard to estimate ahead of time. You could have $100,000 set aside for search, but if no one searches your terms or clicks your ads, you might end up spending only $2,000. Google and Yahoo do not provide any easy way to determine what kind of cost per click you might see before you actually launch your campaign. In addition, although Yahoo provides historical search counts on keyword terms, Google (which tends to have more searches) does not, so predicting the volume of traffic is also difficult.

4) If people are clicking on your ad, you’re hitting the right market. Because pay-per-eyeball advertising is so expensive, it is vital to examine where and when ads are running to find the places and the times that yield the best results. Day-parting is a savvy way to make sure your ads are hitting your target when they are present and paying attention.

With paid search, though, people declare themselves as potential customers not by visiting a website or listening to a radio program, but by actively searching for a term relating to your product. If they’re really interested they’ll click on your ad and visit your
site. This means that unless you have conversion data that shows visitors convert differently at different times of the day (which might very well be true), day parting isn’t a vital part of search strategy. You think your customers don’t wake up before 9am? Then they won’t be searching and clicking before 9am. Once again, the people decide when your ads run.

5) Rigorous and regular ad copy testing MUST be a part of your program. When I was traveling through Europe in college, my group would frequently be met at train stations by hordes of people from competing hostels, waving brochures and pictures to try to lure us back to their establishments. Paid search is pretty much just like that. At the very moment a searcher declares their interest in something, they are met with dozens of contenders clamoring to satisfy that need. Since Google and Yahoo both give better placement (and often a lower price) to ads that get more clicks, it behooves every advertiser to experiment to find out what will work best. Headline, call to action, benefits statement, even display URL—the smallest things can have a big effect. You also want to track results right through to conversion—ads that produce big clicks don’t always convert the best, and that’s the ultimate goal.

So as you can see, with paid search your potential customer is in a unique position to determine when and where your ad runs and even how much it costs. It’s a dynamic and powerful system, but also far less predictable than other forms of advertising. Figure out how to please your customer better than the competitors, and you will be rewarded with a brilliantly cost-effective marketing channel.

by Sharon Crost, Account Director

Red Bricks Media made a splash at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in April 2007, providing thought leadership at two widely attended conference sessions, and sponsoring a local networking party during the conference week. SES is the leading conference and expo in our field that brings together thought experts and major players in the world of search. SES conferences are held throughout the world, and the New York conference generally attracts more than 7000 attendees each year.

At our first session, Beth Morgan teamed with our client Elyse Thibault from Hearst Corporation to share ideas in Big PPC for the In House track. Beth gave some best practices and examples for how to avoid “bidding against yourself” when several divisions within an enterprise need to bid on the same keyword terms. What are two of her top ideas to bring success to the entire enterprise? The first is to centralize - develop great cross-enterprise strategy, communication, and organization to see the big picture and manage the campaign effectively. The second idea is to think BIG. Scope out an
integrated plan right from the beginning of a campaign, and this will enable consistent growth within an enterprise. Elyse from Hearst attested to these ideas by giving some examples of her success working with Red Bricks Media.

At our second session, Sharon Crost presented her search marketing insights to a standing room only audience at the Advanced Advertising track. Sharon’s presentation was focused on getting more ROI from PPC campaigns. She talked about the allure of PPC, and the serious pitfalls to avoid when developing campaigns. She shared six strategies:

1. The Poor Shopper’s Effect:
* Pitfall: Paying too much for what you can get cheaply
* Strategy: Siphon expensive keyword terms to your SEO efforts. This will reduce what you have to pay for terms and increase ROI.

2. The Laryngitis Effect:
* Pitfall: Losing your market share of voice.
* Strategy: Expand your campaign universe further than your competitors

3. The Coin Toss Effect:
* Pitfall: Choosing between “head’ terms and “tail” terms (highest volume terms and lower volume terms)
* Strategy: You don’t have to choose; bid both types strategically.

4. The Rudolph Effect:
* Pitfall: Isolating PPC from the rest of the marketing mix
* Strategy: Integrate PPC to light the way for the other marketing disciplines.

5. The Beginning Golfer’s effect:
* Pitfall: Selecting the wrong performance driver (traffic, revenue, etc.)
* Strategy: Conduct testing to select the right driver

6. The New Love Effect:
* Pitfall: A click doesn’t always last forever
* Strategy: Refresh, renew and revigorate your campaigns.

On the second night of the conference, Red Bricks Media hosted a networking event for New York locals at the trendy Amalia lounge. The event attracted clients, prospects and colleagues who wanted to find out more about Red Bricks Media’s strategies and successes. Overall, it was a great exchange of ideas in a great setting.

Other big buzz at this year’s SES NYC surrounded consolidations of big players in the industry (Google acquiring Double-Click, rumors of Microsoft partnering with Yahoo or Ask), trends in local search, and the continued growth opportunity in both PPC and SEO strategies. If you are interested in more SES, the conference comes to San Jose August 20-23 and will provide continued opportunities for learning and sharing in the exciting world of search!

We’re proud to add Pearson Education, CBS5, Fujitsu, OKCupid, IndieVest, and the Oxygen network to our rapidly growing list of clients. These clients continue to add to our strengths in media and publishing as well as important markets such as technology and computing.

“We are excited to continue to win this business of the most discriminating marketers,” said Ed Kim, CEO. “Companies that are looking for more from their internet marketing agencies are taking a second look at Red Bricks Media and liking what they see.”

As a full service interactive agency, Red Bricks Media is taking on integrated online marketing campaigns that go well beyond our original roots in search marketing. Please visit our website to learn more about all of our capabilities.

by Andy Leinicke, Media Strategist

Last fall, Yahoo released the first version of its new ad serving software called “Panama”. In its literature and website, Yahoo never refers to this new upgraded system by this name, although everyone else does. PPC advertisers have been anticipating this much-rumored about event for some time. Previously, the Yahoo ad server wasn’t quite as flexible as Google’s. It also lacked functionality in terms of the customizable reporting and creative testing that makes Google so easy to optimize.

As of March of this year, Yahoo still hasn’t migrated all of its accounts to Panama. My representative (he has asked to remain anonymous) has informed me that the migration is happening on a case by case basis. If you want to migrate a legacy account to Panama immediately, the best way to do so is to have a Red Bricks Media account manager contact Yahoo. Yahoo manages the process internally.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS
Advertisers can expect a host of new advertising features and benefits in the new system. Campaigns are organized in a hierarchy very close to Google’s. This new paradigm has several advantages. For one, the new interface seems custom built to import campaigns from Google. Also, much like Google, ads and destination URLs (landing pages) can now be tested in a/b splits within a single ad group. Until now, advertisers were forced to wait for test results from Google and then propagate them throughout Yahoo. This method required blind trust that the practices are equally valid in each engine.

Navigating Panama campaigns is now faster and more intuitive than before, and the quick-loading graphs and charts make analysis faster and easier.

Yahoo’s Old Platform:

Yahoo’s New Panama Platform

Panama now allows viewers to quickly assess click, cost, and cost per action (CPA) trends.

QUALITY INDEX:
Unlike the old Yahoo software, the new Panama system uses a quality index to calculate minimum bid requirements for text ads. This index roughly correlates to Google’s Quality Score, which has been occupying Ad Sense uses for nearly a year as they try to makes sense of how if favors or doesn’t favor ads. In an unusual twist, Yahoo beat Google to market with a display feature that lets advertisers know Quality Index on a keyword by keyword basis. Recently, Google followed suit.

There’s a lot more to write about Yahoo Panama’s many features, from Geo-targeting to more discrete budget controls. Suffice it to say, though, that we have great hopes for Yahoo’s new service and look forward to increased performance for our upgraded campaigns.