Join Big Small Brands founder Jen Barth and Formic Media for an interactive session which includes tips, best practices, and real-life example/lessons learned on…

• Your Creative Identity: What does your name, logo, and creative identity say about your business today?
• Your Brand Voice: Elements to consider when selecting the tone — and type — of your content, both on and offline.
• Gaining Customer Insights: Tips and low-cost tools for researching and exploring user needs — on a shoestring budget.
• 5 Tips for Brilliant-Branders-to-Be: The 5 essential steps to consider when creating or growing your small business brand.

Our Branding seminar featuring Jen Barth of Big Small Brands will be an educational Lunch & Learn event from Noon to 1 p.m. at the Formic office. Food and beverages will be provided. Register now to save your seat!

Date: June 13th, 2012

Time: 12 p.m. (Noon)

Location: Formic Media Inc., 300 NE Failing St. Portland, OR 97212 (just off MLK, 2 blocks North of Fremont St.)

Cost: Free

URL: http://www.formicmedia.com/seminars

Phone: 503-517-9059

eMarketer Research 2011

So, with the incredible increase in popularity and usage, what has Tumblr done to monetize its rapid growth?  Not much until this past week.  Tumblr’s CEO David Karp was quoted just a month ago saying, “we’re pretty against advertising,” which is a stance he has held since the company’s inception in 2007.  However, Tumblr announced last week that they are officially rolling out “sponsored products,” which according to Tumblr aren’t “ads” – though they will cost advertisers $25,000 for placement.

What to know about Tumblr’s sponsored products:

• Tumblr will be offering two advertising products, one on its curated Tumblr Spotlight page, and the second on Tumblr Radar, a sidebar box that appears on the user dashboard.
• Ads will not appear on individual blogs.
• Tumblr will identify the sponsored posts with a stylized “$” next to them, so users know that they are viewing an ad.
• Advertisers must be “approved” by Tumblr.
• Advertisers must be willing to pay $25,000 for placement.
• Advertisers’ ads must adhere to the “visual nature” of Tumblr.

Below is an example of what a Tumblr Spotlight ad will look like.  In comparison to ads on other display sites, these spotlight ads are fairly inconspicuous and don’t seem to interfere with a user’s experience with Tumblr.  In fact, some Tumblr newbies might not even notice an advertising presence, as these placements blend into the “visual nature” of Tumblr so well.

Tumblr Spotlight Ad

While the advertiser qualifications are steep, as Tumblr evolves these products the door could be opened for small business owners with smaller budgets to get in on the action.  Think your business will benefit from Tumblr’s new ads, or are you planning to test them out?  Let us know in the comments below.

Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change.  Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.  After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks.  Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.

One can only assume that this move comes from Google in a maneuver to increase clicks on ads for less savvy users who manage accounts in-house and have more of  a set it a forget it mentality when it comes to account management.

Even now, when an advertiser chooses to rotate ads evenly over time Google provides a friendly warning:

Your ads may not perform as well with standard rotation.  Optimized ad rotation is recommended for most advertisers.

For active advertisers who are always testing creative and landing pages, the new 30 day limit shouldn’t hinder most accounts.  However, if you have a low volume campaign which needs more than 30 days to collect enough data to make a statistically significant decision on any A/B test you are running, you will still be forced to make some sort of change to the ads in order to keep the test rotating evenly over time.

What are you thoughts on Google forcing their hand on ad rotation options?  Are they just trying to force people into click optimization so they can increase their bottom line?

Date: May 9th, 2012

Time: 12 p.m. (Noon)

Location: Formic Media Inc., 300 NE Failing St. Portland, OR 97212 (just off MLK, 2 blocks North of Fremont St.)

Cost: Free

URL: http://www.formicmedia.com/seminars

Phone: 503-517-9059

Google researchers conducted more than 400 studies on the effect of “search ad pauses” and found that:

• Over 89% of traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic search results when ads are paused.
• Results are similar across verticals, among the broadest sample of consumers, and regardless of industry.
• 9 out of 10 visits to advertiser sites would never happen in the absence of related search ad campaigns.

The analysis is based on studies conducted on 446 advertiser accounts between October 2010 and March 2011.

Though the research is Google owned and conducted, Google has been transparent about this fact and provided detail about how the study was conducted and its findings.  Google also stated in their most recent study that “while these findings provide guidance on overall trends, results for individual advertisers may vary.”  The research findings do not guarantee matching results and should be experimented with to determine individual incrementality rate and associated ROI.

As a follow-up to the 2011 study, the Google Research team recently released a new study reporting the impact of organic rankings on ad click incrementality:

A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlights the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when the ads are turned off. On average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic search result. We find that having an associated organic search result in rank one does not necessarily mean a low IAC. On average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, compared to 100% of the ad clicks being incremental in the absence of an associated organic result.

According to Google Research, the follow-up analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies found that:

• 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results. All ad clicks in these situations are incremental.
• On average, for advertisers who appear in the top rank organic slot, 50% of ad clicks are incremental. This means that half of all ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when search ads are paused.
• For advertisers whose organic search results are in the 2nd to 4th position, 81% of ad clicks are incremental. For advertisers appearing in organic position of 5 or lower, 96% of ad clicks are incremental.

Google Research 2012

In addition to the incremental traffic lift that advertisers may experience while running paid ads, there are other factors to bidding on keywords that you already rank for organically (such as branded keywords).  You can read my full post on this subject here.  In general, having both paid and organic placement on the SERP can help a company simulate authority, protect a brand from competitors and own the top of the SERP.  Additionally, not all searchers click on organic listings.  Google makes over 90% of their revenue from clicks on paid ads, so people are definitely clicking on them!  It’s important for a company to be visible to 100% of searchers, not just the 70% that click on the organic results.

So, how does this recent Google research affect your decision to run paid search campaigns?

As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users. Over the next few weeks, many of you will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe. You can also navigate to https://www.google.com directly if you’re signed out or if you don’t have a Google Account.

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools. This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic. If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.

In the internet marketing world this meant that extremely useful, highly relevant keyword data would appear as “(not provided)” if someone was logged into their Google account, performed a search and was brought to the site through an organic listing.  At first, in November, it looked like this was affecting approximately 8.875% of web traffic.  Then, reports started rolling in with people claiming numbers as high as 30%.

Yesterday, things got worse for internet marketers spending any time hoarding over Google Analytics data.  In his blog, Christopher Soghoian, a security and privacy researcher, announced that Firefox was jumping into the game of Google encrypted search:

A few days ago, Mozilla’s developers quietly enabled Google’s HTTPS encrypted search as the default search service for the “nightly” developer trunk of the Firefox browser (it will actually use the SPDY protocol). This change should reach regular users at some point in the next few months.

This is a big deal for the 25% or so of Internet users who use Firefox to browse the web, bringing major improvements in privacy and security.

I’m in no way a mathematician, but if we *guess* that 10% of data was “(not provided)” before Firefox jumped on board, and that Firefox user account for 25% of Internet users, we can back into what we can expect to see.

10% encrypted already (of this 25% were already using Firefox), so 7.5% plus 25% (32.5%) of all Internet users; ergo a *rough estimate* of what our “(not provided)” data will look like in the coming months:

Site Visitors: 10,000 per month via organic search

Pre-encryption: You saw 10,000 visible search queries per month in Analytics

Google logged in account encryption (November 2011): about  9,000 visible search queries per month – 1,000 encrypted queries

Firefox and Google logged in combo (the very near future):  about 6,750 visible search queries per month – 3,250 encrypted queries

And for those that like data visualization:

(axis starting point intentionally increased from zero for dramatic effect)

Again, take it for what it’s worth based on estimates from my own experience and those published on the web, but OUCH – Thank a lot Firefox…

Date: April 11^th, 2012

Time: 12 p.m. (Noon)

Location: Formic Media Inc., 300 NE Failing St. Portland, OR 97212 (just off MLK, 2 blocks North of Fremont St.)

Cost: Free

URL: http://www.formicmedia.com/seminars

Phone: 503-517-9059

The install took forever, this is both due to being a 2 gigabyte file, as well as a fairly slow install process(could be attributed to my computer).  Obviously it wasn’t going to be fast with all of the goodies that Adobe has packed into their flagship software!

On my first opening of Photoshop CS6 I crashed to desktop.  On my 2nd attempt I was successful, and could view the glorious makeover of the interface.  Mind you I am still currently using CS4, so this was a huge step up for me.  Immediately you will notice the interface is now dark gray(and looks freaking sweet).

Some of my favorite new features:

• New crop tool.
•  Expanded video editing options
•  Auto recovery – Yay!
• Ability to search for specific layers – Let’s be serious, nobody organizes these until we’re sending them off, this is great.
• Dotted lines in Illustrator now get the same vector tools in Photoshop – This may seem trivial, but dotted lines are a PITA to make in CS4.

Overall, I absolutely love this build of Photoshop.

First, the bad news.  With the launch of Timeline for brand Pages, one feature no longer available is the option to specify a default landing tab for pages.  It was very common for Page owners to create a custom application and tab in the previous version of Pages. By selecting it as the default landing tab for non-fans, you could require them to “like” your Page as well as promote special offers or contests.  With Timeline, fans and non-fans alike are going to have to actively click around the new app tiles below the Cover photo, which they might not. That sign-up form or contest might get less traffic then before.

New Location for Additional Apps

Page admins can still make custom apps, but will have to highlight them in different ways.  It appears that you can edit the small thumbnails that appear for apps, so marketers should find ways to make those stand out. Also, special content and posts can be “pinned” to the top of your Timeline for 7 days.  This pin will stay above all other content. In the end, all this really does is create a greater emphasis on quality content instead of “like-gates.”

Now, some good news.  Marketers have always been able analyze the performance of their Facebook Pages with the great Insights tool, but competitive benchmarking as been limited to just public data of Likes and People Talking About This for other Pages. Yesterday, Facebook also announced expanded public Insights data for Pages. As you can see below, there is still the two standard metrics but also a graph of those metrics over time, their most popular week, city and age group as well.

New Public Insights

These new public Insights can be accessed by clicking the Likes tab on any Page. Pages that focus on a location will also have three additional metrics including for tagged Photos, most visited week and the highest number of check-ins in a single time.  This public Insights data will help marketers better analyze their competitors. Although not announced yesterday, reports indicate that Facebook is also working to release real-time Insights for Pages.  This would be a significant improvement over the 48 hours time lag currently in Insights.

Finally, some more neutral news. Also announced yesterday was an expansion of Facebook’s Premium advertising options. The new “Reach Generator” ad distribution platform is designed for the significantly large brand pages (think Coca Cola, Ben & Jerry’s, Nike). With direct, fixed pricing Reach Generator will distribute a Page’s storied in one of 5 locations: Page Post, Right-hand Side, News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Logout page.  That’s right, Facebook has officially announced mobile ads and has also added ads to the page you see when you log-out of Facebook. While great for large brands, this simply means more ads for Facebook users to see.

AdWords Adds Placement Exclusion Lists and List Suggestion Features

At the beginning of the month, AdWords added “Placement exclusion lists” and “list suggestions” features.  Placement exclusion lists allow advertisers to create lists of placements to exclude from campaigns, similar to negative keyword lists.  These lists can then be applied to multiple campaigns within an AdWords account.  The list suggestions feature shows advertisers where they are using duplicate negative keywords or placement exclusions and provides an opportunity to group these easily into lists for use across multiple campaigns or ad groups.  Both of these features aim to make negative keyword and placement exclusions more manageable.

Read more about the updates here.

AdWords Adds Enhanced Sitelinks

On Valentine’s Day, AdWords gifted advertisers with Enhanced Sitelinks.  Sitelinks have proven time and again to be a factor in increased ad performance for advertisers (30% higher CTR on average for advertisers).  According to Google, in their testing of ads utilizing Enhanced Sitelinks, those ads showed a “significantly higher” click-through rate (CTR).  Enhanced Sitelinks work by integrating ad text into related Sitelinks, providing an ad that closely resembles Google’s organic, jumbo sitelinks.  For ads to be eligible, they must show above Google’s organic search results (top 1-3 positions), sitelinks must be enabled on that ad and your account must contain active ads closely related to those sitelinks.

Take a look at the example provided by Inside AdWords on how the new Enhanced Sitelinks are applied to an ad:

Read more about the update here.

AdWords Launches “AdWords Community”

Essentially, Google’s new AdWords Community is an updated version of the previous AdWords Help Forum, just launched on a new platform.  The new “official AdWords Community” can be found at this new URL: http://www.en.adwords-community.com/

Anyone visiting the old AdWords Help Forum will see this yellow banner at the top of their page, though advertisers can still peruse old, archived forums.

AdWords also highlights these three main improvements:

1. Easy Navigation: The main AdWords Community page has an easy navigation bar divided into four main sections:
2. Contact Google: The AdWords Community is here for you, as is our Google Support team. Click the Contact Google button in the upper right corner if you want to get in touch with us directly.
3. Online Now: Wondering who else is posting now? On the left hand side you can see all users who are currently online. Check out their profiles, read their posts and give stars to every good answer!

Read more about the update here.

AdWords Adds Automated Rules to MCCs

In an effort to make campaign management more efficient for advertisers managing multiple PPC accounts, AdWords recently added support for Automated Rules within an advertisers’ My Client Center (MCC).  New Automated Rules can be added directly from the MCC dashboard from the Performance or Budget tabs.

Read more about the update here.

AdWords Adds “Suggested Image Ads” Feature

Google’s Display Ad Builder has been around for quite some time, but this month they rolled out a new feature that basically builds the ads for you!  While advertisers will still want the flexibility to customize and create their own display ad creative in many cases, this new feature helps advertisers more efficiently build ads and quickly launch a display campaign.

According to Google, “the Display Ad Builder now automatically creates suggested image ads, using the existing text ads in your campaign.”  The only thing an advertiser needs to do is:

1. Click on the suggested ad that you like best.
2. If necessary, customize any fonts, text, or colors that need tweaking.
3. Then incorporate the ad into one of your ad groups.

Read more about the update here.

adCenter Updates Location Targeting (now similar to AdWords)

Microsoft adCenter announced this month that they will be rolling out updated Location Targeting features starting with the US, UK and France, and then moving to all advertiser accounts in the coming months.  This will bring adCenter’s location targeting settings in line with AdWords’ targeting settings (the adCenter blog even notes that these changes will make their settings similar to AdWords’ settings).

The location targeting changes are listed below, as described on the Microsoft adCenter blog:

1. The “market” (distribution channel) is being removed as a targeting option and replaced by the industry standard “language” and “target location” as individual targeting inputs.
2. With this change, you can receive more relevant volume from your target location without additional work, you will also be able to target users that are physically located in your target location areas, and/or have intent to do business in your target location areas.
3. Location options include all countries that speak the selected language, bundles of certain countries, a single country, a single state or territory, or a single city.

Read more about the update here.

So, which update do you think will be most beneficial to advertisers in the coming months?  Let us know in the comments below.