Recently, YouTube announced they are allowing advertisers in Australia to buy search keywords for their videos. I never realized YouTube had the option of Pay-Per-Click ads for videos posted there. Apparently, they’ve been offering this service in the U.S. for a year now. It’s quite a brilliant idea for internet marketing since more people are apt to click on the ad because it’s a video over clicking on an ad that is just has text.
The two major advertisers who use this service are Mitsubishi and Holden who have been doing it in the U.S. Other popular advertisers are automotives, entertainment industry and packaged goods. It’s a clever way to get more hits on videos. How it works is that the advertisers buys popular search keywords that relate to themselves and then their ad for their video pops up when someone types in those keywords. When someone actually clicks on the video ad, then advertisers pay for the click.
With these YouTube pay-per-click ads for videos, it is starting to blur the lines between what is advertisement and what is entertainment. Because of this, I think it’s easier to get more clicks through YouTube, then through a regular search engine. To make it even more effective, if your company actually produces a pretty fun video that can turn viral, plus with pay-per-click ads of it, it would eventually get so many hits that it would probably organically show up in the results and you no longer have to pay for views. It’s quite the clever way to be creative and use YouTube’s paid search to promote it.
So it’s a pretty effective tool to use. The only downside that could happen with it is that a negative video about the company could show up in the organic search results right next to the paid advertising video from the same company. It might deter the message from the paid video. A YouTube spokesperson did say that advertisers can add keywords to their campaign that they don’t want to show up for. So that would probably solve that problem. Overall, it sounds like a great way to get a company out there in the web community.
Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie and by eating a little of TV’s pie, as well.
In my blog entry, “Google debuts ‘stock market’ for display ads,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.
According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.
They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.
Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.
Google’s foray into YouTube might be the key to grabbing some of the TV industry’s advertising sales. In the United States, TV receives more ad revenue than any other medium. Google’s ad-sale growth has fallen from 56 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008 down to 3 percent in the second quarter of 2009. It’s still growing, which is remarkable since we’re in the middle of a recession, but Google wants to stop the downward trend.
Can Google pull it off? They seem to be fighting a war on three fronts. They’re trying to hold on to search-ad dollars, which have fallen because of the recession, while also jumping into both display ads and TV-like ads. I won’t count them out because they might just have the resources and patience to do it. We’ll keep an eye on what happens.
Talk about a captive audience. The government of Finland says it’s a human right to have access to the Internet, so companies must provide Internet with a speed of at least 1 megabit per second. Doesn’t that seem a little strange? You can read about this in the CNN article, “Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland.”
Apparently, it’s not an unalienable right to own a car or a house, but somehow it is an incredibly important right for every person to be connected to the Internet. To me, that just seems like faulty logic. In reality, we can all work hard to gain access to new tools, like cars, cell phones or the Internet, to make our lives easier, but there is no guarantee we’ll get those things without effort.
Ninety-five percent of Finland’s 5.2 million citizens are already connected to the Internet. This law makes little difference to the vast majority of the population. However, officials say they are trying to not only bring Internet access to rural areas, but also increase the speed for everyone to at least 100 megabits per second by 2015.
I’m all for creative solutions to problems, but this seems like overkill. Websites are certainly getting more complex and social-media sites like YouTube and Twitter require fast connections to constantly download new information in real time. But the invisible hand of competition can certainly balance supply and demand and lead to better services than a government mandate can.
What if it’s unprofitable for Internet providers to build connections to the 5 percent of Finland not currently covered? Maybe the government would have to subsidize those companies if they were in trouble of going bankrupt. That can create a vicious cycle of companies depending on government funds to stay afloat.
If you ask me, this whole thing is silly. I don’t have the right to a fast Internet connection. I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, according to the Declaration of Independence. I also have many other rights enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. But luxuries or necessities like the Internet or food, respectively, are not among them.
Google could soon change the rules of keyword Internet marketing with the debut of its new Google Caffeine search engine. Right now, Google is not doing a good job of searching through social-media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. So the company is working on a new version of its popular search engine that will add them to the mix and shake up other sites’ rankings for certain keywords.
The online marketing firm 360i released a study a little while back in a blog entry on Digital Connections, entitled, “6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a ‘Caffeine’ Boost.” In the post, SEO Group Director Mike Dobbs and SEO Analyst Martha Mukangara noted some pretty surprising findings.
They included 40 retail keywords in their study of the differences between the first three pages of regular Google search results and Google Caffeine search results. The 40 keywords are made up of 10 major brand names (keywords), 10 retail head terms (single keywords), 10 retail torso terms (two-word phrases), and 10 retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases).
They pointed out six ways the new search engine will dramatically affect online marketers’ strategies. For instance, 15 percent of all first-page rankings were different for the 40 keywords used in the study. Amazingly, the single keywords and two-word phrases saw 50 percent of their first-page results change with the new search engine.
The reason for this big change is the fact that Google Caffeine is focusing more on keyword relevance and it’s steering away from blogs and wikis in favor of social media, video, music, photo and other sites previously outside of its search capability.
Since single keywords are so general, they will face more competition from these new sites being allowed to vie for top ranking. Longer phrases, with four or more keywords, will benefit from the new system because they will be drawn from a smaller pool with a focus on how relevant they are to the searcher’s needs.
All of these changes could have serious consequences for ecommerce marketers. At the end of the article, the study’s authors give the following advice to them:
Marketers will need to keep a close eye on their own set of keywords and determine how results change if a switch-over does takes place… [I]f your keywords shift in rank, you will need to refresh your strategy and focus in on any results drop-offs, or take advantage of subsequent wins.
What an interesting topic. Be sure to keep coming back to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for the latest updates on Google and Bing, as well as other major search-engine trends.
Recently, a couple in Minnesota got married in a church. No big deal, right? This is an every day occurrence. Yet, through the use of social media outlets, beginning with YouTube, more than 20 million people have watched them walk down the aisle. Or I should say more appropriately “dance” down the aisle.
The bride and groom along with their bridesmaids, groomsmen, and ushers, performed a dance routine while walking down the aisle of the wedding. The dance was humorous and unique as they did it to Chris Brown’s “Forever.”
Traditionally, this dance would have been shared with family and friends, but then probably stored away and forgotten about. But with the help of utah social media marketing, the groom was able to post this video onto YouTube to store it on there and share it with whoever came across it.
Posting the video on YouTube was the beginning of what I like to call the “social media domino effect”. Soon, people were bookmarking, tweeting, retweeting, Facebooking, digging, and blogging all about it. Then the traditional media outlets caught on and wrote stories, interviewed the couple, chatted, and aired the video itself.
Eventually, the newlywed couple became a hit with almost 21 million views and was a hot item to interview on television networks. In this case, utah social media marketing garnered the couple their 5 minutes of fame. All it took was the posting of a video and the on-line community did its work.
It seems like nowadays, it’s fairly easy to get anything of yours out into the public to get your 5 minutes of fame. Clever ideas, videos, and pictures can now circulate worldwide and be shared with anyone who has internet marketing access. Fame used to be reserved to those who were politicians or made it on the big screen. But now anyone can have their moment of fame, thanks to social media!
