Google announced today their trademark protection policy in many countries will be updated to be in line with the policy in place in the US and UK.  In this instance, Google will only investigate trademark protection if a company feels a competitor is being misleading.  So in practice competitors are able to bid on one another’s brand names, but can not include competitive brand names in their ads, or try to ‘trick’ consumers into clicking on their ad instead.

Advertisers have until the 14^th September 2010 to lodge their complaints under the existing policy, after which time the new policy will apply.

Australia, New Zealand and most Asian countries are not affected, although each country can have a unique policy.  Click here for a full list of affected countries.

We continue to urge all advertisers to ensure they have applied for proactive trademark protection in their relevant country.

Google announced this week that they had released a new open beta in the UK and Canadian markets for ‘modified broad’ match.  To me this is good news.  The launch of expanded broad match almost two years ago brought some definite problems for well built conversion-focused campaigns.  Yes, expanded broad match allows Google to capture terms you haven’t considered, but it also had some interesting matches.  We had one example where a brand term in one of our accounts was matching to a very generic head term – blowing out the brand reporting & CPC, & more importantly having our ads show on something we definitely didn’t want to target.

We resolved that by lowering our max CPC significantly, running multiple match types and reviewing negatives, but it does need ongoing careful consideration.

Broad match is fantastic for:

• A new account launch where it enables you to capture terms you may not have considered in your research (as much as we’d all like our research to be all-encompassing, there will always be new ideas in search query reports)
• When running multiple match types to cast a ‘wider net’ on an ongoing basis, as long as search query reports are routinely checked, useful terms included in the account and irrelevant terms added as negatives
• People are typing in longer and longer search terms and it can be next to impossible to include every single combination in your account

The new modified broad match proposes to allow you ‘greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match’ according to Google’s blog on Tuesday.   Their handy diagram explains…

Source: Google Adwords Blog:  New keyword targeting feature for advertisers in the UK and Canada

Whilst our colleagues in Canada and the UK will have the first chance to play with this, it should offer a slightly more controlled broad match experience and we look forward to testing it here.

While every year for the past five has been heralded ‘the year of mobile’, will 2010 take the crown?  I don’t think it’s quite time yet, but it is time we all sat up & took notice of how consumers are using search on mobile phones.

There are two ways to target paid search ads to consumers using mobiles:

1. Users on WAP-enabled mobile phones (eg BlackBerry and the host of internet-enabled standard handsets)

2. Users on smart phones with full internet browsers (eg iPhone)

Given WAPs stabilisation &/or decline I’m going to focus on high-end devices with a full web browser.

Your AdWords campaign automatically opts you in to target mobile devices with full browsers, however there are some key differences in the ads being displayed:

• Mobile device search results show 2 paid ads at the top of the page, followed by approximately 10 organic results & snippets, followed by 2 to 3 paid ads at the bottom.
• If you utilise the full character limit allowed (the same as desktop search), your ad will actually fit over 4 lines rather than 3, hence pushing your competitors further down the page.

Given a rank of 1 – 2 is much more critical on a mobile platform to ensure visibility and share of voice, slightly different optimisation techniques should be applied.  We recommend setting up a unique campaign targeting the mobile platforms, which enables you to employ the most appropriate optimisation strategies, utilise your creative character limits, send consumers to a mobile-device-friendly landing page (WAP or no flash!), and also importantly target your creative message to consumers on the move.

Whilst search volumes on mobile devices are still small (less than 1% of desktop from the data we’ve seen), they are growing.  Google Australia has outlined some impressive growth charts over the recent Christmas period.  Now we can only wait for telco providers to make data plans more accessible, and search will be revolutionised!

Oh, and if you are targeting mobile devices from the one Google AdWords campaign you can now see a breakdown of traffic by device (desktop v. mobile); go to Filters and views > Segment by > Device.

Outrider are very proud to announce that Melinda Heffernan was crowned Miss Earth Australia 2009 at a ceremony in Sydney on Saturday night.

Miss Earth is a beauty contest with a twist: the foundation of the event is to search for a spokesperson who will encourage others to clean our Earth and make our presence sustainable.

Entrants must have a working knowledge of environmental issues and be able to talk about pain-free solutions that can be taken at home and at work to reduce wastage of resources and encourage sustainability.

Melinda will now compete for the title of Miss Earth International in the Philippines in November, an event watched by 170 million people worldwide.

This is Melinda’s first beauty contest and she’s excited by the prospect of representing her country for such a worthy cause.

Here are some pictures of the event as Melinda gets crowned Miss Earth Australia 2009. We’re all so proud of her!

Melinda Heffernan crowned Miss Earth Australia 2009

Miss Earth Australia 2009 Winner - Melinda Heffernan

The Miss Earth Australia 2009 Contestants

The next steps for our SEM Consultant is to head over to the Phillipines and show the world what she’s got as Miss Earth Australia and potentially Miss Earth International! Go Mel!!!

Today I attended Digital Now Australia 2009, pulled together by GroupM and Google.  The seminar series focused on digital but predominantly  social media, mobile and a little search.

Firstly I was so pleased in the shift in priority digital has made.  When I joined the digital industry ten years ago we were struggling to communicate that media consumption was shifting, and media budgets should follow.  To be fair, targeting, aside from the type of web site your ad appeared on, was limited, and Google was a babe in arms.  Times, and consumer behaviour, have changed!

Today 70% of marketers in the room were already investing in paid search.  Around 30% were already investing in social media in some form.  And it’s not just the Dells, AMEXs and online players of this world.  Marketing representatives from Coca Cola and Canon were also on the panel of experts.

So aside from me being impressed with the fact that digital is now a major channel, what else did I learn?

I learned that, according to Jonathan Stinton from tns, Australia is a country of voyeurs.  As a nation we’re much less likely to contribute to a blog but will happily and avidly read them.  The older we are, the less likely we are to contribute.  The one stand out and surprise for me was that apparently 31 – 44 year olds were the most likely to use Twitter. 

I learned that, along with being voyeurs, Australians like official information.  It varied by industry but consumers like to know that they can trust the information they’re being presented with.

I learned that, while multi-tasking by watching TV and playing online, 61% of people predominantly focus their attention online.

I learned that both the UK Royal Family and the Vatican have official YouTube channels.

As a search marketing professional I didn’t learn, but was happy to hear reported, that 73% of search is stimulated by offline.  Research showed that both brand and category searches increased during periods of high TV and offline media, and so companies can benefit from up-weighting their search campaigns whilst they have TV in market, and also when competitors do, to take advantage of the growth in category searches.
 
I’ve learned that the mobile industry is convinced that 2009 is actually the year of the mobile – that the addressable market in Australia is in the vicinity of 15.5 million handsets and there have been more than 200 mobile campaigns in Australia this year.

I learned that PayPal has a mobile payment platform.

I learned that you should consider having a Dark or Crisis site that comes into play when a crisis happens.  American Airlines used this during the recent plane crash on the Hudson River, which Fergus Kibble of Hill&Knowlton used as a show case to outline the role of digital media as this story unfolded in a space of 4 hours (during which time American Airlines uploaded 3 press releases to their web site, streamed a statement from their CEO and reverted to their Dark site.  Oh and there were at least 30 Facebook groups dedicated to the pilot).

And I learned that a bakery in the UK is doing a first class job of using social media to drive business by sending out a tweet when their buns are freshly baked from their ovens.

So we need to take care when building fantastically fresh participatory campaigns and work harder to ensure they appeal to a country of voyeurs; we need to strongly align search with TV and offline media; we need to experiment with mobile; we need to plan to ‘lose control of our brands the right way’ (to steal from Fergus) and be prepared to quickly, openly and humanly respond to social media commentary on our brands; and we need to have a real objective and plan when dealing with Twitter.
 
A couple of things to think about?

We all know paid search is a great direct-response mechanism.  We can very effectively place a product right in front of a consumer at the precise time they’re looking for a solution.  But what about effecting consideration further up the funnel?

There’s been lots of discussion about search being able to brand-build as well.  For me this is a moot point.  Having your brand appear against highly related searches time and time again will most definitely build your brand.  We’ve done work with various clients where restricting the broader terms in a campaign has resulted in reduced brand searches (and also seen brand searches grow as we’ve expanded campaigns).

However both these elements are very much pull strategies: how many advertisers use paid search to create a need in the first place?

Creating a need is what advertising agencies spend lots of time and money trying to fine tune – how to communicate to a consumer that they must buy your product because right here is a solution to that problem you may or may not have considered.

Needs-creation is prevalent across all other media – a quick trip to the homepage of smh.com.au asks me to save a life, to end my meal with a desert and coffee, to create a photo book or get a better interest rate.

Search can be used in the same way.  Sure, CTR won’t be as high & this can affect quality score but as long as both you and the client are aware that these particular terms are working to a different metric then search is a valid and cost-effective tool in driving early consideration for a product or brand.