Efficient Frontier dans la Presse Français

Parlez-vous Francais? Si oui, lisez cet article de James Beriker, le président de Efficient Frontier, dans Le Journal du Net. C’est tres intéressant sur notre activité en France et nos ambitions en Europe.

Click arbitrage on Facebook

I saw a neat bit of click arbitrage on Facebook earlier this week. I saw this ad for Stevie Wonder concert tickets (he’s listed as under my favourite music). Without thinking I clicked on the ad and was directed to… a page of Yahoo sponsored links.

I wonder how long it will take for Facebook to fill up with ads like this; it could easily alienate its users.  It took Google a long time to introduce measures to stop arbitrage and low quality ads.  How long will it take Facebook?

How not to Excel with ad copy

I read with amusement a couple of weeks ago Bill Hartzer’s article on advertisers who bid on ‘keyword‘, simply because they’ve included the header row when they copied stuff out of Excel. Here’s another example of the dangers of Excel that I found on Yahoo for ‘private medical insurance‘:

Whoops! Using a formula to create customised ad copy is a great idea, but you’ve got to watch for mistakes. The #NAME? error usually happens when you misspell the name of the formula itself.

Walmart SEM

From this week’s NMA, an article on Google’s BPF withdrawal:

“[Google] admitted loopholes had been exploited… [some agencies] had used the discounts as bait in the pitch process.”

And for some, the discount was their pitch - as seen this week at Adtech London!

Google’s Conversion Optimiser

Google have just released the Conversion Optimiser, a simple tool to autobid campaigns to a CPA target. I think this is Google’s first step into true, closed loop bid management; by that I mean bidding to an ROI target, rather than a position (see Position Preference), cost (see Preferred Cost Bidding) or to maximise traffic (see the Budget Optimiser).

If you run a small campaign with a simple objective, then the Conversion Optimiser is probably worth a go. Particularly if running an AdWords account is only a small part of what you do and of course, like most of Google’s tool, it’s free. However, if you run a big campaign with complex objectives then let me offer a few reasons why you should think twice before you try it out.

1. You have to use Google’s tracking and by doing so you’re letting Google know exactly what their traffic is worth to you. That helps them price it accordingly!
2. CPA targets work at an adgroup level, not a campaign level, which restricts volume of acquisitions. You still need to manually calculate different CPAs for different adgroups to maximise your volume. This is not a trivial problem to solve.
3. Google’s conversion tracking doesn’t allow advertisers to weight multiple conversion metrics. So if you have one thing for which you’ll pay a £10 CPA, and another which is £20, it can’t balance off between those demands.
4. It’s CPA only; it won’t work if you optimise to another strategy, such as ROI, net margin, profit etc.
5. It’s only as accurate as Google’s calculations. Anyone who uses Google’s traffic estimator knows that the numbers can be wildly off, which is why at Efficient Frontier we build our own traffic estimation models for every client.
6. It doesn’t work on Yahoo or MSN.

Goodbye and good riddance to Best Practice Funding

The most predictable announcement in Search Marketing leaked out earlier today, when Google announced that they are to end their Best Practice Funding (BPF) after next year.

The BPF was introduced in 2006 after Google scrapped the 15% agency discount. It was brought in with the right intentions: partly as a parachute payment but mainly to incentivise search marketing within agencies and to provide them with funding for skills and technology. Unfortunately it’s been horribly abused by some advertisers and agencies.

Too much business is won by the size of an agency’s BPF %, and not by the quality of the services that they offer. It’s been holding back the whole sector. The BPF turned out to be a subsidy that could be used to hide poor service and inadequate technology. Like any subsidy, it distorted the market and retarded progress.

My only complaint is that Google has kept it going through 2008; it should have been scrapped at the end of this year.

GCSE Search Engine Marketing

GCSE results came out today, followed by the annual debate about ’standards’. Governments often choose a metric to determine whether services are improving; political opponents accuse them of manipulating the metric instead of improving the services.

The IAB/DMA have finally come out with their search marketing best practice charter, and I expect everyone in the class to get an A*. The only step a company might have to make is to put on the school uniform by joining the IAB, DMA, Sempo or Abba. Guy Phillipson, IAB’s CEO said the code of conduct will “set the bar”. Only danger being that you might trip over the bar on the way in.

There’s so many useful things that these trade bodies could be doing to develop the SEM industry, but this isn’t one of them. The charter just reads like a ploy to get more people to join a trade body and get the sticker to prove it.

P&G’s strange view of online advertising

I was astonished when I read an interview with Proctor & Gamble’s Marketing Director, Roisin Donnelly, in NMA. This was the part that really knocked me back:

“A big barrier [to spending more online] is measurement,” she said. “We know how to measure TV, we know what the ratings are. Online has been slower to set up measurement systems, even though ISBA is working on it now.”

It would be a lot more accurate to say:

“We have a wild stab in the dark when we measure TV, we know what the ratings are, give or take 75%”

TV measurement is laughable compared to the data that comes from online. I understand that there’s still nothing like the telly to deliver massive reach, but don’t pretend that the numbers that come from the BARB panel are in any way accurate.

Chris Lake from e-consultancy does a great job presenting the case for the defence.

Roaming mobile data charges

I’m writing this post as I hurtle through the Kent countryside on a Eurostar bound for Paris (and ultimately to Angouleme on a TGV). My laptop is connected to my T-Mobile MDA Vario II which is giving me a respectable 230kbps. It seems faster than the Vodafone data card we use in the office.

However, the moment I get to la belle France, I shall be closing the laptop and reading some traditional (but very good) media*. Why? Because T-Mobile’s roaming data charges are obscene. I subscribe to the Web’n'Walk Plus service which allows me to download up to 3Gb, all for £12.50 per month. When in France, T-Mobile will charge me £7.50 a Mb for data. That’s right - £7.50 per megabyte. If I downloaded 3Gb at that level it would cost £23,040!

I was at an E-consultancy round table a couple of weeks ago when it was asked whether 2008 would be the year for mobile advertising and search. Unfortunately all the control and innovation needs to come first from the networks and the handset manufacturers. I still think there’s a long way to go.

BTW, there’s a old chap sitting across the aisle and all he’s done so far is send text messages. Bloody pensioners, why are they always staring at their phones? They should have a newspaper and a book to read like I do!

* The Guardian, the Financial Times, Gullivers Travels and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Ad Exchanges Are the Future

There’s a great article on Clickz by Eric Picard called ‘Ad Exchanges Are the Future‘. Eric works for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. He has written a very clear description of what’s wrong with the current trading practices in media buying (outside of search) and how that’s going to change in the next 5 to 10 years.

The opening paragraph of his article states:

Advertising is one of the last significant business markets that remains opaque, manual, archaically complex, and requires a large relatively skilled set of humans to perform each transaction. It’s a market ripe to embrace technology for automation, liquidity of inventory, pricing transparency, and simplification of business process.

Extremely well put.