Before I was Search Engine Marketing, I was buying ad space like just about everyone else. I was buying ad space, I was paying CPM, and I was advertising with banners. I have a love-hate relationship with those days…
Theeeennnn, PPC Advertising came around. It was invented by GoTo/Overture in 1998 and it was the first time we’d pay *per click* on Search Engine ads. At the time, they went with the most obvious approach; Like when we paired the space on websites with opportunities to place banner ads, GoTo matched keywords with the opportunity to bid on them. In other words, each “keyword” mapped itself with a list of search queries. For example, a keyword could be mapped like this:
From this “keyword mapping” came the notion of “head keywords” and “tail keywords” [barf]. In fact, I’m going to give 99% of the credit to the Overture Inventory Tool. It was our friend and business partner. I spent so much time on that thing. I would point to the top keyword (or group of keywords) and call it the “head” and the remainder was the “tail”. I would then take note of the words that were related to my target audience and the ones that were not.:
Once I got this data, this was the game:
Step 1. Build Adgroup(s) for “Head” word(s)
- Test ads
- Pick best performing ad
- Bid keyword
- Re-bid if/when performance changes
Step 2: Build Out “The Long Tail”
- Keyword tools: use whatever “proprietary” and non-proprietary tools to do so
- Spreadsheets: form a dirty relationship with the concatenate function
- Web logs: analyze the queries that actually bring users to the site and add them to the keyword list
It was fun. It was easy. It was boring. With the right offer, it felt like we were printing money…
Google Changes the Game.
Google launches Adwords in 2000 and takes GoTo’s model and makes it worse. It was a CPM Model and the details aren’t worth discussing.
In 2002, they re-launch Adwords with a CPC Model based on CTR and Bid Price. It was the first step in “Bid Jamming” going out the window. But this was of no interest to me. What excited me was when Google added different ways to target.
Over the years, Google has made lots of changes and, to me, the least important is the new interface (which I will rant about in a later post). The important features are:
- Match type (broad, phrase, exact, negative and all the ways you can play with them together)
- Geo-targeting (my FAVORITE!)
- Dayparting
- Bidding by “Network” (Google.com vs Syndication)
After all these changes, how do we continue to discuss the “Long Tail”. We can break up the landscape in any shape we want. We can target keywords in any manner. Google has made it one big advertising landscape, but people are still stuck on “keywords”. How do marketers look at the “head word” and not break it up with dayparting, geo-targeting, etc!? How do marketers look at keywords and call them “long tail words”; didn’t those words come from a root of data before adding them to the account?
HOW DID WE GET STUCK IN 1998!?
…. But while we’re stuck here, why don’t we listen to Billboard’s top song of 1998 “Too Close”, by Next : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHH23QYX9Yc . One of the Five Mill, Inc contractors, who will go unnamed, has noted it as: “The most genius song of all time. It made #1 and it’s a whole song about a guy with a boner on the dance floor” (I noted only a hint of sarcasm).
[This is my segue to the "Five Mill Tree Method".[ segue: a fun word to say and a really awkward word to type... not unlike "awkward". Ironic, me thinks.]]
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