Pete Robins, chair of the IPA digital media group and managing partner at agenda21

As the media industry continues its unrelenting shift towards online content and usage, there have been innumerable changes in the way advertising is planned, bought and sold. Anyone who entered the industry a decade ago has witnessed a time of huge and fascinating change. Our industry’s job is to be one step ahead, to seek out new opportunities and hence its evolution has been fast. However, there have been challenges. One of the most significant aspects of the changes witnessed is the shift to technology to place online advertising and its potential impact on brand safety.

Online advertising is no longer a marginal activity carried out by forward thinking brands; it has become an integral part of mainstream advertising. A quick look at the IAB/PwC figures for 2011 shows total online spend is up 14.4%, with online display up 13.4% to £1,128m, and as spend increases we are seeing the digital advertising ecosystem grow to encompass more operators and specialist services.

The rise of real-time bidding and, especially, impression-level targeting has had an impact on the buying process. The potential cost and performance benefits of this technology make it extremely valuable, yet automation also brings a degree of risk. Agencies have the task of protecting their clients’ investments and reputations by choosing both relevant but also safe destinations for each ad. What both media buyers and their clients need is to be reassured as regards the capability of technology to deliver confidence in the buying process as a whole. It has become increasingly apparent that a set of industry wide, best practice standards are needed to ensure everyone knows the rules and can be held accountable. The UK digital advertising industry was quick to recognise this need and has responded by establishing the Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG), facilitated by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), with the express aim of securing a safer environment for online advertising placement.

IASH were one of the first groups to take this on board and it is fair to say their aim in encouraging best practice amongst advertising sales houses has been invaluable. However, as the digital advertising eco-system has evolved it became apparent that a new body was required to encompass the wider range of organisations involved in online ad placement. The last few years have seen the addition of Agency Trading Desks, Demand Side Platforms, Ad Exchanges, Supply Side Platforms and real time operators within the trading space. IASH needed to evolve and sit with these new platforms in order to continue to deliver reassurance to the market. To establish a set of individual guidelines for each new facet of the industry would not be realistic; a set of overarching trading principles that reassure planners and buyers that sufficient safeguards are in place to protect their positions and ensure an appropriate destination for their ads is achievable. ABC, as an independent body governed by the media industry, was the obvious choice to help facilitate the work of the DTSG, which has now been meeting regularly since 2011.

The DTSG is an independent body, and will have its own governance structure, to ensure it represents the whole digital advertising eco-system and responds to needs across the industry. Like IASH, the ethos of the DTSG is not about enforcing new compliance regulations; it’s about making compliant trading achievable and transparent. The work of the DTSG is being rolled out over the coming months, and IASH will be phased out over the same time period. The new group is open to organisations from right across that ecosystem, and is made up of individuals representing nine different organisation types involved in the trading and delivery of online advertising. New principles have now been established, and the group is working to build agreements with trading partners and a verification programme to demonstrate compliance with the principles.

Last November we talked about two new match types that Google are bringing out for PPC advertisers within Google.

Since then these new match types have been rolled out and are coming out of their beta from Mid-May.

A recap on near exact and near phrase match types

When opted in to either near exact or near phrase match, Google will  also show an adevertiser’s ad when someone searches for close variants of their exact or phrase match keywords. This means that advertisers can broaden their reach to customers who search for close variants of their keywords, while still having more precise control over which search terms trigger your ads – in comparison to broad match.

Quality Score

In regards to Quality Score, Google will use an advertiser’s exact or phrase match keyword, and not close variants, to determine your Quality Score and first page bid estimate. This means that when a close variant of an advertisers exact match keyword shows for their ad, it won’t affect your Quality Score or first page bid estimate.

How to manage this

Google have now updated the settings on all accounts, so when an advertiser goes into their campaign settings they will see a new option which is called ‘Keyword matching options’ which allows you to opt in or opt out of these new match types (default is an opt in.)

Our thoughts

1. We’ve spoken to Google about this and there are a couple of points to note…In the future, we think that Google will be doing away with exact and phrase match all together and that these new near exact and near phrase match will become the only options. If this is the case, then there is an argument that the sooner an advertiser adopts these new match types and starts optimising them accordingly, the better it will be for them.

2. From our initial tests, we have not seen these new match types having a great effect in the amount of traffic that advertisers will receive in comparison to what they were getting previously on exact and phrase match. One of the reasons for this is due to Agenda 21 clients having extensive keyword lists, so the majority of the keywords that these new match types would map to have been covered already, hence only the minimal effect of these new match types.

3. Negatives will still be at the previous match type. So if you negative exact match a term, this is acting purely as an exact match, not a near exact match negative. However, we imagine that if Google does roll out these new match types and do away with the current exact and phrase match, the negative match types will be updated as well.

Our suggestions

As per our article back in November, we still have concerns around these match types for top generic terms (such as ‘credit card’ and ‘credit cards’) as these top generic terms should be controlled closely. We see this new match types working well for longer tail search queries and an advertisers brand terms, where you will see a minimal uplift in traffic in the future.

We will be monitoring this closely over the upcoming weeks and will keep you posted with any further findings.

Read the comments of our co-founder Pete Robins talking about private ad exchanges. What is your view? We want to hear from you:

The industry has called for more education about private ad exchanges to increase uptake, following news that Collective has launched the first real-time private ad exchange for premium video programming in the UK.
Ad exchanges promise to deliver a more effective and efficient way of buying and selling advertising online. Real-time bidding (RTB) on exchanges enables the buying and selling of single ad impressions in real time.

Despite the huge promise of exchanges, they have been held up by a nervousness among publishers, which fear losing control over advertising on their site. The introduction of private ad exchanges could ease these worries though as they enable premium publishers to connect only to the advertisers they choose.

Pete Robins, Agenda21 founder, linkened ad exchanges to eBay. “You might say, ‘I’m going to sell this watch and the minimum price I want for it is £30’,” he said. “If no-one bids for it at £30, you don’t sell it, but if people want it, then you might sell it at £50. But with a private exchange, you might say I still want £30 but I’m only going to let certain people bid because I don’t want it on the open market. It gives you more control.”
Robins added that private ad exchanges offer advertisers and media owners an increased level of protection, but as they are in their relative infancy, people will need to be patient because there will be an initial element of trial and error.
“Nobody has the answer just yet,” he said. “People obviously want to monetise as much of their inventory as possible and buyers are becoming much smarter about which bits they want and the different prices that they’re prepared to pay. You’ve got people on both the buying and selling side actually genuinely wanting a market place where you’re paying and earning the right price for the value of the media you’ve got or you want to buy. The understanding of how to do that with the technology has advanced a lot in the last year.”
However, he also warns that it is imperative to have the right people in place for it to be successful. “Even if you’ve got the best technology and best inventory, if you don’t have the right people or processes to know how to run it then it’s not going to work,” he said. “And those are really difficult to find because it’s such a new part of the market.”
To read the whole article click here

agenda21 and our client-Sporting Bet were recently mentioned in Marketing Week’s Digital Strategy supplement on Real-time bidding.

One of marketing’s biggest problems has always been that, until recently, the very last stage in the buying process was out of the brand’s hands. A company could plan its campaign to the finest detail, but once media space was bought, it had very little say about which individuals ads were shown to and precisely when.
Real-time bidding (RTB) is changing this. The practice, which enables brands to select an audience and bid for each impression online through automated auction systems, puts companies back in the driving seat because they can use the viewer data to offer them a fitting individual message.

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) mobile and networks manager Amit Kotecha says that while his organisation is not currently measuring RTB as a portion of the overall advertising market, it is planning to open a counsel for the practice later this year. It will give practitioners and interested brands a forum to discuss the opportunities of the latest development in online display.

“It’s the really hot topic in display for the year ahead so we’re going to be doing a lot of education work,” he says. “It’s a very small proportion of overall online display but it’s going to grow significantly because everyone stands to gain. Publishers should maximise their yield and advertisers can push forward with the most cost-effective and best-targeted campaigns possible.”
Sportingbet digital media and operations manager Jacklyn Low says she has been working with Agenda21 to look into this area. Although, like many brands, it will look at which website a potential customer is on and examine recent anonymised browsing history, it has also built up models of how its most lucrative customers behave.

This modelling allows the brand to look forward at the life-time value (LTV) of a potential ‘punter’ and base a bidding decision on looking forwards as well as back. Like any bookmaker, Sportingbet is most keen for its message to be put in front of keen gamblers. A person who only places a single bet a year, normally for a big occasion such as the Grand National, is far less attractive.
“Life-time tracking of current customers allows us to identify the potential LTV of prospective customers and consequently how much we bid for an impression,” Low says. “We can identify people who have previously been to sports sites, or target them contextually while they are there. We can also use data that shows what people search for, including the sports content and the keywords they use.

“A lot of this data is given away by the cookies on people’s machines, because we can see where they have been and their surfing behaviour,” she adds. “We can also infer their age and demographic, depending on their behaviours. Between this, bought data and supplier technology, we can build up substantial personas.”
To read the whole article click here

Read below article by nma quoting our Head of Natural Media – Monique Slater.

Brands must ramp up their Google+ strategies to capitalise on Google’s evolving personalised search service, according to agencies.
Their comments follow the news that Google is integrating its social network Google+ further into its natural search results with the service Search Plus Your World (nma.co.uk 10 January 2012).

The service, which features natural search listings alongside photos and posts from an individual or brand’s Google+ Circles and Picasa accounts, is rolling out across google.com for logged-in users.

The move has triggered a backlash from Twitter, which believes the changes give Google’s social network an unfair advantage in the natural search listings, while harming the effectiveness of Twitter’s real-time information service. It released a statement saying that the changes will be “bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

The new service is the latest step in Google’s ongoing personalised search strategy, and has therefore not come as a surprise to agencies. However, they believe the news will force a shake-up in the market.

Agenda 21’s head of natural media Monique Slater said the changes are “frightening” for SEO agencies, which will have to fundamentally change the way they optimise websites. She said the past few years have seen social media results gradually integrated into Google, with the result that agencies have become adept at optimising social assets including Facebook pages, Twitter communications, websites and videos.

“Although we have known this is coming, it is still probably the largest change Google has ever made to its results, and the fact Google+ now dominates search results when the personalised service is switched on is a worry,” she said. “Brands must start using Google+ more and understand more about the Circles functionality, and not mistake it as being identical to Facebook. It’s very important brands become more active on Google+ now.”

To read the whole article, click here

Our very own Hannah Amess was one of the eight judges at the
IPA’s first Media Owner Awards (the MOA) ceremony on 15^th November,
which are designed to showcase best practice from online media owners and to
raise the digital standard. Hannah played an imperative part in reviewing and marking
every award submission together with other judges.

We are very happy to have seen our client  Save the Children being shortlisted together
with the MSN for their royal wedding campaign.

Go online and check it all out for yourself here: www.ipamoa.co.uk/Home

Matt Holland, head of PPC, agenda21

Google’s latest innovation for PPC advertisers is coming soon as they are offering new match types for advertisers. The new match types will be ‘near exact‘ and ‘near phrase‘ match types which will be in addition to the Broad, Broad Match Modified, Phrase and Exact match types.

From the 14th November Google will be running this new beta test match types that will slightly broaden the reach of Exact and Phrase match keywords with syntactic variants including; plurals, misspells, acronyms and abbreviations but not synonyms.  The idea being that this will be for advertisers who wish to increase their coverage and volume on Exact and Phrase match keywords and help them find incremental traffic with minimum effort.

Personally, I look forward to these match types from Google as it will be easier for advertisers to extend the reach of keywords without having to build out massive keyword lists whilst still maintaining a level of control that is not offered when using Broad match on keywords.  However, advertisers still need to be wary of how they use these match types on high traffic generic terms. For example if you now Near Exact match on the term ‘credit card’ you will also show for the term ‘credit cards’ which as can be seen below receives 110,000 searches a month in the UK where as ‘credit card’ received 22,000 local monthly searches according to Google’s Traffic Estimator.

However, this is the desired effect that Google would be looking for, as by introudcing these new match types it will increase Google’s revenues from PPC advertisers in two ways:

1. Advertisers will now expand their reach on to new keywords increasing the amount of auctions that an advertiser is enter in too.

2. Advertisers being introduced to these new auctions (due to the increase in reach from their keywords) the existing advertisers who were on these keywords (such as credit cards) will see more competition come in to that auction which will result in an increase in CPC’s.

It remains to be seen as to whether these match types will be an option that you can negative match by, which would allow advertisers further control over their keywords and the auctions that they enter into but we will let you know more about this if/when we find out more.

If you have any questions/comments about this latest innovation from Google, please get in touch with us. We’d like to hear your comments as to why you think Google have called these match types ‘near exact’ and ‘near phrase’ rather than exact/phrase match modified?

Matt Holland, head of PPC, agenda21

Recently Google updated the number of campaigns that advertisers can create within a Google AdWords account. There wasn’t a lot of fanfare about this latest change from Google, so we thought we’d bring it to your attention.

The new Google AdWords campaign limits are:

• 500 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns)
• 20,000 ad groups per campaign
• 5,000 keywords per ad group
• 300 display ads per ad group (includes image ads)
• 50 text ads per ad group
• 3 million keywords per account
• 300 location targets per campaign
• 300 excluded location targets per campaign

Mon Slater, Head of Natural Media

I caveat this with stating SO FAR, but the results we have seen have been well, meh.

To recap, a few weeks ago SEO’s, including myself were up in arms about Google’s search team making the announcement that they were protecting the personalised search results by not providing organic search keyword data to anyone who was logged in to a Google Account.

Google said; “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users….What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.”

“To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token “(not provided)” within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that “cpc” paid search data is not affected.”

But after a few weeks what does it mean? We have seen little impact on all of our clients traffic with under 1% of keywords delivered to the site through organic search as “not provided” in analytics. Click on the image below to see a larger chart.

Less than 1% of traffic has been affected

This may change over time, and may well be different for varying sectors. The more people in the industry that share the data, the more we will know.

Saiful Ahmed, media manager , agenda 21- blog

Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are currently very much in “favour” and especially with large agency networks who are investing heavily.  Many of their clients are being persuaded that agencies can play both gamekeeper and poacher but do advertisers really benefit ?  Our view is that the agency networks are desperate not to miss out like they did with search and are over selling the benefits of DSP’s to clients.

DSP’s are still experiencing the same problems as the ad networks were having 12-18 months ago – tracking, control and transparency. Although really the key benefits of deploying the services of a DSP’s  is to drive traffic to the advertiser’s site, at which point re-targeting is then used to convert potential customers. However, the problem is that this model isn’t scalable or sustainable and prospecting for new customers is essential, therefore all other digital media strategies and outlets are required.   Also without putting in place an attribution model, advertisers could be placing too much value on re-targeting much the same way as happens with paid search.

Any future problems that we envisage with the DSP’s are to do with government ruling on cookie-based data, although as an industry adopting the ‘informed consent’ approach gives the user the option to opt-out (as long as they are made fully aware they are being re-targeted from cookie-data). Conversely, we should remember that users can always opted back in if they feel certain cookie based information, like remembering your last purchase or login details’ is a handy function to have in this time poor society.

Another question advertisers should also be asking is how many DSP’s are they using ? There may be only one specifically on the media plan but ad networks use them, Google content network uses them etc etc  We recommend avoid using the services of more than one DSP as you’re competing in the same ad exchange marketplace and will probably end up competing against yourself and inflating the rates.

So agencies and media owners need to be more transparent about the advantages and disadvantages about DSP’s.  They clearly have an important role to play moving forward but they are only part of the much wider digital ecosystem.

Join our conversation on Linked-in to discuss it further; we want to hear from you.