Google AdWords Turns 15: A Look Back At The Origins Of A $60 Billion Business

AdWords turns 15 this month. The official birthday is October 23, but Google is celebrating the milestone today. Google’s not much of a stickler for exact birthdays, though; the company marked AdWords’ 10th birthday on November 8, 2010.

AdWords indisputably changed the trajectory of online advertising with its self-serve keyword bidding system and propelled Google to become the multi-billion-dollar business that is now the cornerstone of the holding company Alphabet. In 2014, Google reported ad revenues totaling more than $62 billion.

The Launch of AdWords

AdWords came out of a roughly month-long beta with about 350 advertisers in October 2000. With the launch, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and CEO, said of the new ad product, “AdWords offers the most technologically advanced features available, enabling any advertiser to quickly design a flexible program that best fits its online marketing goals and budget.”

AdWords was actually Google’s second advertising program. The first, called Premium Sponsorships, launched just months before, in August 2000. A direct sales team sold the premium sponsorship ads on a CPM basis. The premium ads appeared in the top spot in the search results, while the AdWords ads ran in the right rail. In a matter of a few years, the AdWords self-serve system subsumed the premium program.

The Simple Days Of 20 Million Searches

Not only did AdWords debut in a time when desktop reigned, Google was a significantly smaller engine then. In 2000, Google said users were conducting more than 20 million searches per day on google.com. Fifteen years later, the search engine handles more than three billion searches per day. More than half of those searches now come from mobile devices.

And of course now, advertisers can run campaigns on YouTube, the Google Display Network and Google’s mobile app network, AdMob, all through the AdWords interface. Google reported $16.8 billion in ad revenues across its platforms in Q3 2015, up 13 percent from the previous year. Google doesn’t break out how much of that ad revenue comes from search, but it’s a significant majority.

The Current Search Landscape: Yahoo-Google?

Overall, search advertising accounts for half of all internet ad spend in the US, which topped $27.5 billion in the first half of 2015, according to the IAB. That includes search ad spend on Bing and Yahoo, but Google maintains nearly 64 percent of search share on desktop and almost 90 percent of mobile in the US.

Bing achieved profitability last quarter, according to Microsoft, thanks in large part to Windows 10, but the search engine has very low market share on mobile. That’s where Yahoo hopes to make its mark with Gemini, though Yahoo is also now looking to Google (again) to supplement monetization on both mobile and desktop queries if regulators play along.

Challenging Display Environment

While Google has managed to remain dominant in search, the company has faced mounting competition on the display side, in particular, with the shift to mobile and rise of both social app usage and investment in native display advertising. Facebook has overtaken Google in display revenue share, according to eMarketer. Facebook is expected to hold 25 percent share of display ad revenues in the US, compared to Google’s 13 percent share in 2015.

Transformative Changes: Google Shopping & Enhanced Campaigns

The two biggest changes to AdWords in recent years were the transition of product search to the paid version of Google Shopping in 2012 and the transition to Enhanced Campaigns in 2013, which effectively made mobile a must-do for advertisers. Product listing ads now make up a significant portion of retailers’ search spend on Google, and Goldman Sachs estimates roughly 20 percent of Google’s ad revenue now comes from mobile. (If you think we’ve overlooked a significant update, let us know.

In 15 years, Google has grown its AdWords advertiser base from the 350 that came along for the beta to more than one million

10 Ways to Make Your Website Content More Relevant (and Rank Higher)

It’s absolutely critical that brands achieve relevance. One of the primary methods for accomplishing relevance is to create relevant content.

Unfortunately, an aura of mystery surrounds the concept of relevance. It’s misunderstood as a stylistic thing, flair, or something that some writers “just have.” In reality, relevance is more scientific and systematic. You can create relevant content by understanding what relevance is and developing a process to achieve it.

The major upside of relevance is that you can accomplish major ranking uptick by creating relevant content. Here’s how to do it.

1. Start with a customer persona

There’s no such thing as content that will be relevant to everyone. Relevance is completely audience-dependent.

Part of the reason why relevance seems mysterious is because it is often viewed as a static entity – something that you can attain or achieve. In reality, relevance is a dynamic force. It is born in the identity of the user and responded to in the content of the marketer.

Relevance is more of a conversation than it is about cool design, a trendy logo, a stylistic flair, or the right colors.

That’s why you need to create a buyer persona or a customer persona. You need to understand your users before you can ever hope to be relevant to them.

• The persona can be as detailed as you want, complete with pictures or a snazzy design.
• A persona should capture the basic essence of who is buying your product, and why they’re buying it.

The fact that your customer may drive a Honda Accord or have a blond 5-year-old nephew is not important by itself. The important things are the motivations and problems that the customer is experiencing.

Only by understanding who the customer is can you address his or her problems, his/her questions, his/her concerns, his/her interests, and enter into his/her world. Relevance begins with knowing.

If you’re lucky, you already have a persona somewhere buried deep within your marketing materials. If you don’t have a persona, create one. It will be well worth your time.

2. Understand user intent

Yes, we have to insert a boring SEO point here. We're doing so not because we're obsessed with SEO, but because we're aware that search intent is the starting point for successful SEO.

Many SEOs and marketers think that the first thing they need to do when starting “SEO” is to make a list of keywords.

This is a mistake.

How are you going to come up with this list of keywords? You don’t simply pull them out of thin air. You strategize your keyword list by intuiting your user’s intent. You come up with that user intent by knowing your users – the persona described in Step 1.

Don’t put the relevant content cart before the horse.

User intent is the horse – the drive behind keywords. Here’s the definition: 

The user intent of a keyword is the goal of the user typing the search query, and it typically falls into three categories: Do something, know something, or go somewhere. In fact, there’s often more than one intent per query.

Thankfully, there is a predefined set of three main things that a user searches:

• Do something – commercial queries: “Buy a lawn mower online”
• Know something – informational queries: “2015 gas lawnmower customer reviews”
• Go somewhere – navigational queries: “Craftsman website”

As you develop your keywords through research and analysis, you must pay close attention to the nature of the queries – their intent. That way, you can understand what your users want, and how to create relevant content for them.

3. Create a list of keywords

Remember, relevance is all about the user. If you’re going to get the user to click and engage with your copy, you need to use the right words/queries.

You’ll have to do a little SEO – not anything advanced or voodooish, but the basic idea of using the right words in the right places.

Here’s how Search Engine Land explains it:

Just use common sense. Think about the words you want a page to be found for, the words you feel are relevant from your keyword research. Then use them naturally on the page.

SEO is really about user experience. It’s delivering the right content for the right users, and making sure that they have a positive and rewarding experience.

Yes, you’ll need keywords.

How do you come up with these keywords? Ask:

• What are you selling? What is the nature of your business? Create a list of keywords that describe your product (navigational and commercial queries).

• What problem is the target customer experiencing or what solution does the customer want? Create a list of keywords that describe that problem and solution (informational queries).

As you develop this list, be aware that there are different types of keywords. The ones that will generate the best traffic are long-tail specific keywords.Broad keywords are called head terms. Unless you’re Apple, Amazon, or Wikipedia, you’ll have a tough time ranking for these terms.

4. Do SEO

Now, it’s time to put these keywords into play on your website. I used the heading “Do SEO,” which sounds elementary. Allow me to be specific.

Any successful optimization involves putting the right keywords in the right places. Each page on your website should be targeting a specific keyword. Your home page should be targeting the most important keywords. All the supporting pages on your website should target the supporting keywords.

Here is how to use your keyword:

• Use a variation of the keyword in the page title.
• Use a variation of the keyword in the H1 header.
• Use a variation of the keyword in the content itself.
• Use a variation of the keyword in any image alt tags.

Those are the four most essential elements of on-page SEO. If you use your keyword or some semantic variant, then you’ve “done SEO.”

How does this play into relevance?

Simple. Remember, the users are looking for some thing; they have an intent when they search. They type a query that matches that intent. If your website is successful at targeting that keyword, then you will rank in their query.

You have to “do SEO” to be relevant. What good is your website if it’s not relevant enough to rank in the search engines? You have to be relevant not just for users but for search engines too.

5. Put keywords in your meta description

The meta description is a bit of code in your web page header that displays in the search engine result pages, and tells users what the page is all about.

Meta descriptions don’t directly boost SEO. They speak to the user. If a user searches “top lawn mower reviews,” it sees a list of results with meta descriptions for each site.

What makes a user click on a result? There are several things:

• Relevance of the title
• Relevance of the website URL
• Relevance of the meta description

If the meta description is relevant, it probably contains one of the keywords or phrases that the user seeks. If it doesn’t contain the keyword itself, then it should at least describe the nature of the keyword.

6. Write meta descriptions in a sizzling hot style

Not only should the meta descriptions contain a keyword or related word, but they should have great style.

Remember, when you write a meta description, you’re not trying to game the search engine; you’re inviting the searcher to check out your website.

This is where the rubber of relevance meets the road. Style does play a part in relevance. If you can use the limited space in your meta description to nail the searcher’s problem, match her intent, and score her interest, you’ve won.

As an example, let’s say that a user is looking for a way to share her videos with friends. She types in “online video sharing.”

What does she see? This meta description. It entices her to click because it tells her how the link will help solve her need and precisely matches her intent. Plus, it contains a call to action.

7. Create a compelling summary or objective statement

When the users click from the search engine results page to your site page, the first thing they see needs to establish relevance.

Stylistically, the best way to show relevance is through a big fat headline. State the page’s objective in a few quick keywords or lines. This is where you bring the whole idea of the page into focus.

It doesn’t matter whether the page is a blog, an evergreen content page, or even your home page. You can accomplish relevance instantly by creating a summary headline.

8. Solve a problem

Now to bring the page directly to bear on the user’s interest, what kind of content should you create?

The idea here is simple. Solve a problem.

Find out what condition or problem the user is experiencing, and solve it. That’s what great content marketing does: It assesses the user’s need and creates a solution.

And that’s how and why it becomes relevant.

The user’s problems become fodder for your keyword focus, and then for your content marketing strategy. As you solve users’ problems, you’ll become good not just at ranking in the SERPs but also in dominating – creating content that is laser-focused on users.

Users will love the content because it solves their problems … because it’s relevant.

9. Make sure it is timely

Relevance has a chronological angle, too. You can’t expect to be relevant just by trying. You must ensure that your content matches current events, whatever those may be in your niche.

There are two angles to establishing relevancy with timely content:

• Use your blog and social media strategy to post about and write about current events.

• Use your website’s content pages to create evergreen-style content. Content can’t always be timely, but it can be timeless.

10. Make the content as long as it needs to be

Relevant content is also comprehensive. You’re solving a problem, remember. Create solutions that meet a need, no matter how long that might be.

We’ve created content that is the length of a novel – 50,000 words. Some of the content is less than 140 characters. The goal is for all of it to be relevant.

Conclusion

Relevant content isn’t just about being a good content creator. It’s about the mechanics, too.

Being a stellar writer doesn’t automatically make you relevant, but it sure does help. As you pursue relevance in your content marketing, keep the foundation firmly in mind. And then unleash content that meets your users’ needs.

How do you create relevant content?

Engagement vs Reach, Which Gives the Best Return on Investment?

Ads are how the social media giants make their money and rightly so since social media is all about interactivity and engagement with content. Engagement is measured by cost per action (CPA) which is an exact measurement of how many ad dollars it costs for a user to go to a different website and purchase something or register for an event. In other words, how much does it cost to make a sale. While this is certainly an important metric to track, it has been proven by a 2011 Nielsen study that engagement “showed no connection to sales lift.”

If engagement doesn’t boost sales, how does a company or marketer keep track of the effectiveness of their efforts? After all, we know marketing does work because it does boost sales. But if it’s not the engagement that boosts sales, what does? The short answer: simply reaching people boosts sales. Rather than pushing for engagement from the entire audience, which can inadvertently alienate certain people because they do not share the same experience or knowledge, putting out a message that is easy to understand and explain will reach more people with better end results.

So what’s the takeaway? Engagement and reach are both important but it is common to get caught up the engagement numbers and focusing exclusively on those numbers and disregarding the rest. Both play a role in lowering the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) but, especially in the early stage of life for a company, reach is just as important as engagement. In fact, focusing exclusively on engagement can actually limit the scale of the audience. Check the graph and you will see how reach encompasses engagement but engagement does not encompass reach.

Don’t get us wrong, engagement still matters but for efficiency, marketers are better off optimizing their paid buys towards creative reach and looking to interactive metrics as an indicator of higher quality creative. Those interactive metrics are called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and they can be from something like email subscriptions or Facebook likes or something more subtle time spent on site or time spent on key pages. Measuring these performance indicators are good for staying up to date on the success of your marketing efforts.

So remember the importance of reach and don’t forget about tracking engagement through all of the different KPIs and continue improving those incredible marketing skills of yours!

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Solely Rely on Social Media Marketing

Social media provides a great way to raise brand awareness for your company, or market a crowdfunding campaign. The caveat is- you can’t rely on it and here’s why:

1. Publicly traded social media platforms have one thing in mind- profit.

If you feel that Facebook organic reach has plummeted, you’re right. Since the company went public, and now offers publicly traded stock, Facebook’s primary focus is on generating profit. If you want to gain a large following on your Facebook Fan Page, you’ll have to pull ads to get it. There are other ways to increase engagement, such as, creating contests, or engaging content- but you’ll see the margins of organic reach continue to decrease as social media platforms feel pressured to increase profit.

2. You don’t “own” your social media profiles.

You don’t “own” your fan page, or social media profile page and run the risk of losing it. There are many rules, especially rules of engagement specific to each platform. If you don’t follow these rules, you run the risk of losing your social media profiles. The rules are set up so that each user follows “best practice” guidelines, and creates a better user experience.

3. Social Media marketing does not constitute a diverse strategy.

If you’re thinking of getting on all the social media platforms- that’s great- but it still doesn’t constitute a diverse marketing strategy. You’ll need to tie-in email marketing, create landing pages, and provide a way for prospective customers to get more information about your product.

Your marketing strategy should include more than just social media. The more diverse your marketing strategy is, the more prospective customers you’ll reach, within a reasonable timeline.

Best Practice Email Marketers Need Not Apply

Every time we're asked to deliver a presentation on “best practices in email,” it makes us  sigh. The reason is simple: Most of the best practices out there are fairly generic and low-impact. They include tactics such as:

• Create a preference center.
• Allow people to opt down (they may not want all your email).
• Use cascading style sheets (CSS) to create responsive emails.
• Employ more triggers.
• Create a welcome stream.
• Have a double opt-in.

They’re all good practices, but we're not sure they are best practices. All of the above are fairly generic and speak to check-boxes in some theoretical or codified maturity model for email practices.

But we have yet to meet an email marketer who was measured on a maturity model or their adherence to best practices. Much of what we have learned can be distilled into a few tenets:

• Math is your friend.
• Go beyond the email channel for segmentation and reach.
• Creative matters.

Let Math Carry Some Of The Load

As direct marketers, we depend on math to make our living. It’s pretty simple: Campaigns and programs either work or they don’t.

The only way to determine success is math, which in the best case measures a program’s influence on sales or actual sales directly attributed. So if we all have to rely on math to make a case for success, why are we so reluctant to use it in the actual marketing execution?

Today, a lot is done manually that doesn’t have to be, including:

• Content testing. Use multivariate testing to determine the winner. A/B tests are nice and easily compare two or a few things.

A/B tests are very manageable from a setup perspective and sometimes are the only available option, even with some major email service provider (ESP) platforms. But to really get to the bottom of things and use the best creative combinations, you need to use a number of variations, not just a few.

Whether you favor a Taguchi-related method or another statistical model, the best practice is to use available services, such as 8 Seconds, to handle the math and determine the winner.

It is email. You could do it yourself, but why? It’s like being taught how to calculate standard deviation — nice to know, but there’s a function for that, and it’s more important to know how to leverage the results, not perform the calculation.

• Scheduling a campaign. My absolute least favorite best practice is a determination on which day is best to send a campaign. There is no best day or time to send a campaign that works for every company for all recipients. Many companies send nearly every day already and see positive returns from each send.

There are several good reasons to launch a campaign at a specific time. Among them are a very short sale window (same day) or when customer service is open, which is especially important if you’re doing some sort of account summary email because it drives a lot of call volume.

But for the most part, emails aren’t that time-sensitive, nor do they drive that kind of call volume. Let send-time optimization take over the decision of when to send email to someone within a specific campaign.

Many ESPs have some sort of send-time optimization technology. Use it. It’s generally worth it as long as it’s easy. If your ESP doesn’t offer it, AudiencePoint is an alternative.

But one can go further. There are several companies that utilize enterprise-level decisioning on when to send a campaign to an individual based on all the data available to them.

• Subject lines. Why are we still coming up with a single subject line? As an industry, we still don’t spend enough time on the words that draw people into our emails.

Subject line testing should be a part of every campaign. If it’s not, you’re bunting on the campaign. It’s just not that hard to do.

Add to this the machine learning that’s now available. Using a company like Persado, one can have 16 subject lines generated automatically, whose results drive a 17th new subject line designed to drive opens.

Segmentation Should Draw On More Than Email Data

A lot of email segmentation is based on data from email campaigns, such as opens and clicks. It makes sense; if you don’t have an integrated marketing database, this is the only available information — and it’s better than nothing.

But it’s not a best practice. True best practices in today’s world of advanced analytics and technology include:

• Using offline transaction data. If you know that someone recently transacted in a store or tends to buy from you on a particular cycle, that information should trump any arbitrary deliverability rules regarding inactivity.

It’s true that they may not use the email address that you have for them, but shouldn’t you take a shot?

If you’re concerned from a deliverability perspective, use a cleansing service to test the mailability of that address to reduce risk.

• Using site data. This is not 101-level segmentation, nor does it refer to the use of site behavior triggers that seem to be all the rage these days (and that are great for their intended purpose). Many companies have connected their site data with that of known customers and prospects — but have done nothing with it.

The best practice is to deliver dynamic content using site behavior data to select who is in a campaign or what someone sees in an email. Doing this requires delving into your data deeply and understanding the relationships between the known data and site data.

But once applied, the rewards can be twofold: more revenue with better efficiency in selection.

• Using environmental data. One of the easiest opportunities for email marketers is to leverage environmental data to personalize the message. By leveraging one of many available services (e.g., Movable Ink, LiveClicker, PowerInbox), the email marketer can determine operating system and relative location (via IP).

Whether the application is to show a local map, reinforce a local sports team, adjust creative for weather, show a particular app bazaar or some other treatment, environmental data drives insights into mass-buying patterns. Maybe we haven’t gone to bat for the budget to use it, but it allows us to leverage location and technical capability to provide an advanced message.

Forget Email

We all like email. Yay for us. But during my career, I have found that as much as 60+ percent of your list can be inactive with your email program for a year or more, yet still be likely to interact with you on the Web.

The best practice today is to use that email list for targeting and lookalikes in other media and channels; the most common are Facebook, Twitter and Google.

The basic point here is that you can create reach and frequency on your subscribers outside of email. It takes a lot to do it right, like ensuring the security of personally identifiable information (PII), avoiding creative fatigue and nailing measurement, but it’s a huge opportunity to connect with your customer base.

The Presentation Layer

Math and technology are great, but you need to bring art into it, too.

No matter what goes on behind the scenes, people react to what is being said, sent and presented to them. That comes in the form of words and images.

The words and images you select matter. Their placement matters, as well. The best practice is not the “reverse Z” nor keeping everything above the fold. Those are helpful guides.

The best practice is being clear on what you want someone to do and making sure that the creative facilitates that action. I wish it were as simple as “make your emails responsive” or “use the same navigation as the website,” but it’s not.

Companies that want to increase their revenue from email need to gain insight on what makes people buy versus what makes them buy from that brand. That needs to be applied to email and matched with an individual’s stage in the purchase funnel.

Best practices are important, but ultimately, we all do what we must to hit our business goals. And in the case of email marketing in the 21st century, that means thinking beyond what currently amounts to mediocre practices.

The most successful email marketers are redefining what’s best, using more innovative tactics to drive better results for their clients.