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First Quarter Paid Search Builds on Fourth Quarter Swell

q1-12_gpssa_fnl.pdf

Spending on paid search advertising was up 1% from Q4 ’11 – a deceleration in growth from the sizeable amount of spending

that occurred in the second half of last year. We expect sequential growth to remain in the 1 – 4% range for Q2 ’12, and then gain momentum again in the third and fourth quarters. Advertisers in all verticals are expected to benefit from one-off drivers such as the Summer Olympics, the U.S. presidential elections, and the European Football Championships, while the PC industry, in particular, is poised for enormous marketing pushes on behalf of Windows 8 and the flurry of new laptops, desktops, and Ultrabooks set to debut with it.

Google’s Markup for Multilingual Content: rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

POV_google_markup_multilingual_content_fnl.pdf

Last month, on Dec. 5, 2011, Google announced it was rolling out a “new markup for multilingual

content”. The purpose of this is to help multilingual/multi-regional web sites better target audiences

and assist users to find the most relevant content based in their location. In other words, if a user

performs a search on a Google local domain, Google seeks to direct the user to the most relevant

page based on geographic location and assumed language.

Google Search + Your World POV_google_search_plus_your_world_fnl.pdf
On Jan. 10, 2012 Google released “Google Search Plus, Your World” to improve the search experience by integrating social data from your Google Plus account stream and your “circles” to the organic search results, among other features. Google is transforming itself into a search engine that understands not only the content but the people and their relationships. Google describes the three elements of the update as Profiles in Search, Personal Searches, and People and Pages.

Fourth Quarter Provides Strong Finish to 2011 Paid Search Trends q4-11_gpssa_fnl.pdf
Spending on paid search advertising was up by 7% in Q4 ’11 from Q3 ’11. This is after a sizeable increase in spending in Q3 ’11. Holiday season spending in the consumer electronics sector, as well as continued investment in business analytics and information management solutions, drove the modest growth. Q4 ’11 paid search spend was up 28% from Q4 ’10, which was a strong quarter a year ago.

The Covario SEO Audit Score™ Industry Rankings - The Pharmaceutical Industry Report_SEORanking_Pharma_102811.pdf
We wanted to find out how the top pharma advertisers are deploying their online budgets in the current environment of relatively low investment in online marketing channels. Using the Covario SEO Audit Score, we measured the SEO Health of key landing pages for the largest pharmaceutical advertisers. These landing pages are associated with the category-defining keywords for the pharmaceutical industry, as measured by Google’s keyword estimates in its Keyword Tool. The Covario SEO Audit score allows us to infer the adherence to SEO best practices of all pages associated to an advertiser’s portfolio of profitable keywords by measuring the SEO Health of category-defining landing pages.

Google+ Branded Pages POV_Google+_Branded_Pages_111811.pdf
On November 7th, Google officially announced Google+ pages for businesses, opening up a series of new questions for advertisers and SEO professionals across the globe. Covario has analyzed its current features and offers a point of view as to why brands should create a Google+ page, what to expect, and what should advertisers and SEO professionals be doing.

Flash and Burn: Adobe Signals End to Flash for Mobile, Ceding Interactive Web Development to HTML5 POV_flash-mobile_111711.pdf
Adobe, longtime developer of Flash technology for desktop and now mobile platforms, announced the end to development of the Flash Player for mobile. The reason is simple. Apple iPad and iPhone have such strong penetration in the tablet and smart phone markets, respectively, and their lack of support for Adobe Flash is turning developers away from using the system in mobile and Web development.

Side Out – Google Changes Selected Paid Search Results by Eliminating Side Bar Ads POV_Google_Side-Out_110811.pdf
Like a volleyball player on the beaches of Southern California, Google is calling “Side Out”! In addition to the new “recency” algorithm changes that are impacting SEO results, Google announced a phased rollout of a new paid search format that changes where paid search listings appear on desktop and mobile search results pages. The rollout is slow—searchers may or may not see the changes during their casual perusal of their favorite phrases. But it is coming, or at least, being tested. The new format will impact CTRs, pricing, and effectiveness of paid search programs. The point of this POV is to describe our views on what the importance of this change is.

Extra, Extra, Read All About It: Google Launches New Organic Search Algorithm to Emphasize Breaking News! POV_Google_Organic_Algorithm_110911.pdf
Google is very busy these days. In addition to the recent changes announced for how paid search advertisements will be listed, Google also rolled out a major change to the way organic search listings are ranked—the new Freshness Algorithm.

Google Introduces New Encryption Process for Organic Search Queries: Results May Vary POV_Google_Encrytp_Process.pdf
Google announced that starting October 18, 2011 a new privacy protection process for organic search analytics. Organic search queries executed by those consumers logged into Google products will no longer be available to web analytics systems (including Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, Coremetrics, etc.). Why is Google implementing this? What is the impact of this on search marketers? Download to learn more.

Does Facebook Like Your Brand? fb_wp_102011.pdf
A White Paper on brand presentation for top global advertisers, best practices to improve, and how Facebook search works. The success of Facebook in attracting consumers is undeniable, and its importance as an advertising platform is growing. Advertisers know this—they have spent the last 3-4 years constructing Facebook pages, testing advertising on Facebook, and trying to figure out how to engage customers on the platform. Agencies are aggressively investing in building practices to help advertisers execute strategies on Facebook.

Business Case and Strategy for Executing Mobile SEO Programs in Large Advertisers wp_mobile-seo_101211_fnl.pdf
Is 2012 the year when mobile hits the big time in the US and most key advertising markets? For search advertisers—mobile advertising, both organic and paid—has been “next year’s opportunity” for years. Investment continues to be muted, limited to web development projects—where SEO considerations are often secondary to creating basic functionality. On paid search, Covario sees that mobile represents less than 5% of overall all paid search advertising spend. However, with Google’s recent decision to buy Motorola, the interaction of mobile technology and advertising is being integrated and solidified.

Third Quarter Paid Search Rebounds from Second Quarter Lull q3-11_gpssa_final.pdf
Spending on paid search advertising is back. Spending on paid search advertising was up by 26% in Q3’ 11 from Q2’ 11. This is after a reduction in spending between Q1’ 11 and Q2’ 11. The strong growth this quarter was powered by “Back to School” spending in the consumer electronics sector, continued strength in the personal computing market, as well as strong spending growth in Asia Pacific. Q3’ 11 paid search spending was up 24% from Q3’ 10, which was a strong quarter a year ago.

Paid Search Slows In Second Quarter – But on Track for Yearly Growth report_q2-11_gpssa.pdf
Spending on paid search advertising was down by 11% in Q2’11 from Q1’11. The reduction in growth is the result of a couple of key factors. First, most high-tech and consumer electronics advertisers with whom we work have fixed budgets for the first half of the year. Particularly in the consumer electronics vertical, where we saw higher than expected spend rates in the first quarter, particularly in January and in the U.S. This is due to an extended holiday sales period for computing devices, telecommunications equipment, etc. Growth in Q1 was abnormally high, causing a necessary pull back in the second quarter given the fixed budgets most advertisers have. Second, macro-economic factors are hitting spending in Europe. We are seeing a true drawdown in the region in economic activity.

The Google+ Project: A New Social Network Populated by People, Run by Android pov_google_project_fnl.pdf
What is Google+? What does this mean to advertisers? What does this mean to the competition – Facebook, Twitter, Skype? We will attempt to provide our customers with insights to all of these questions – realizing that this is still very new and much is yet to be learned.

The Covario SEO Audit Score™ Industry Rankings seo-audit-score-industry-rankings.pdf
The patented Covario SEO Audit Score™ was used to provide a comparative measure of how bellwether companies in various industries achieve brand awareness through organic search – i.e., how they fare against their competitors and which ones are putting in the work to do well.

Money Doesn’t Buy You Love. At Least not on Twitter twitter-report.pdf
Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, offer advertisers unique insights into how consumers think about their brands. Nearly every major advertiser in the market is monitoring constantly the “buzz” about their brands – specifically on these top two platforms, where the volume and richness of the brand conversation is unparalleled.

How Does Integration of Social Media Marketing (SMM) Enhance a Company’s Online Marketing Strategy? smm-integrated-marketing-strategy.pdf
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an important aspect of a company’s overall online marketing strategy. Social Media provides an easy access platform for communicating with customers and prospects. These communications can take on many forms, including a customer or prospect’s sentiment towards a brand, the brand’s ability to meet their unmet needs, philosophical alignment with a company, and perceived level of client service and support.

Google “Likes” +1 google-likes-plus-one.pdf
On March 30, Google released yet another innovation to the search results page called “+1”. The purpose of the +1 button is to allow Google users to show which links they like or don’t like.

Instant Gratification Spills into Search google-instant.pdf
Google introduced a new capability to its search engine results page this week, a functionality called “Google Instant”.

Paid Search Spending Enters 2011 With a Bang global-spend-analysis-2011-q1.pdf
For the first time since 2007, spending in Q1’11 was higher than in Q4’10 of the preceding year. Covario saw an overall increase of 6% in global paid search spend over Q4’10, and 26% over the previous year. Covario continues to recommend customers increase spending between 15-20% this year to maintain market share.

Paid Search Roars into March Like a Lion: Update on Q1 Global Paid Search Spending global-paid-search-spend-2011-q1.pdf
At the end of 2010, we expected the paid search spend of our clients to increase by 15-20% in 2011. More specifically, we said that spending would increase by 10-12% in the Americas, 20-25% in EMEA, and 30-35% in APAC. Well, it turns out, we were more than a bit conservative.

Content Farms, and Link Buying, and Dubious Cures – Oh My! The Google Algorithm Changes and What It Means for Large Advertisers google-algorithm-changes.pdf
Over the past three weeks, there has been a spate of discussion in the search engine market about the reduced quality of Google’s natural search results. The discussion has centered around three key issues.

Covario's SEO Audit Score v3.0 covario-seo-audit-score-v3.pdf
For Advertisers leveraging search engine optimization (SEO), having a data-driven understanding of how investments in SEO will drive online results is a difficult problem. The reactions of the search engines (Google, Baidu, Bing, etc.) seem unpredictable, and often are – being driven by changing algorithms from the engines, competitive changes, and the ever-changing context of the world wide web. Covario helps advertisers improve the predictability of the RIO of their SEO investments through the development of the Covario Audit Score.

Q4 2010 Global Spend Analysis global-spend-analysis-2010-q4.pdf
Paid search spending slows in fourth quarter 2010 - Digital agency recommends advertisers budget a 15-20% increase for 2011.

If Attribution Modeling is the Answer, What was the Question? attribution-modeling-answer-question.pdf
Gartner Group, the syndicated research firm, published a classic research report in the 1990’s called “If SAP is the answer, what was the question?” The report was about how the concept of Enterprise Resource Management (ERP—where SAP was the leader) had become a catch all term for a series of programmatic workflow issues facing large enterprises. If the system didn’t work — buy some ERP software.

The Power of Long Tail SEO for Large Enterprises long-tail-seo-for-large-enterprises.pdf
The "Long Tail" is heralded as a revolution in retail and publishing, and is also a great way for large B2B advertisers to increase search engine optimization (SEO) visibility for their many web pages and brands. SEO experts Mike Gullaksen of Covario and Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts share strategies to leverage the long tail to increase SEO visibility.

The Value of Bidding on Branded Terms the-value-of-bidding-on-branded-terms.pdf
What is the value of continuing to bid on branded terms? At some point in time any company running a paid search program will be asked the question as to why they are bidding on their own brand terms. The most common rationale is that the brand term will show up in the organic search results, so why should you pay to have an ad show up in the paid search section as well?

Q3 2010 Global Spend Analysis global-spend-analysis-2010-q3.pdf
Paid search advertising continues strong growth in third quarter 2010. Google Instant drives immediate return for search platform.

Q2 2010 Global Spend Analysis global-spend-analysis-2010-q2.pdf
Paid search advertising strong in second quarter 2010 – continue to expect double-digit growth for the year.

Q1 2010 Global Spend Analysis global-spend-analysis-2010-q1.pdf
Paid search advertising starts 2010 with a downturn – Google continues to dominate globally, but loses share in APAC to Baidu and Yahoo.

Building a Digital Center of Excellence building-a-digital-center-of-excellence.pdf
There is no dispute that digital advertising is an accepted and key aspect of the media for nearly any advertiser nowadays. However, building a highly scalable digital practice is a challenge – and a necessity – for large advertisers that span many geographies and many product lines. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Adobe Systems, Samsung, Disney and others all have this issue.

The Health Plan for SEO the-health-plan-for-seo.pdf
The great debate in the Unites States over the past year has been improving our ailing health care system. And, in the past year, the big discussion in many marketing quarters has been improving the ailing health of websites. In April, Heidrick and Struggles did a study with 11 Chief Marketing Officers for large U.S. corporations. Even in the depths of the Great Recession, CMOs said that their number one objective for marketing in 2009 and 2010 is "new customer acquisition" (closely followed by "customer retention"). Traditional marketing concepts like "improving brand" fell to the bottom half of the list.