Report: US Search Ad Spend Rises 12 Percent YoY In Q4 2013; Smartphone CPCs Drop

IgnitionOne released its fourth quarter Digital Marketing Report today, showing that the paid search market in the US continues to grow. Search ad spend rose 12 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2013. In part as a result of the later kick-off to the holiday shopping season this year, December ad spending was up a significant 27 percent over 2012.

Though overall ad impressions fell 16 percent year-over-year, clicks rose 5 percent and click-through rates jumped 25 percent in Q4.  IgnitionOne posits lower impressions are a result of “top of page innovations” including new ad extensions and image ads that “leave less room for ads”. Roger Barnette, IgnitionOne president, added by email, that extensions are “decreasing the overall number of ads that are showing up for any given search and thus lowering overall impression volume. It’s actually one of the advantages of utilizing these tools, not only do CTRs improve but it pushes the competition further down or off the first page.” Barnette also noted, “One thing I’ve noticed a lot is for exact brand searches there is often times only one ad that shows up on the page, which is a recent change.”

Advertisers Placed Lower Premium On Smartphone Ad Inventory: CPCs Fall YoY

Despite a 251 percent increase in impressions and 306 percent increase in clicks, smartphone CPCs actually fell by 13 percent in Q4 compared to 2012 among advertisers in this data set. Tablet CPCs rose 22 percent year-over-year on the more modest gains of 27 percent in impressions and a 49 percent increase in clicks year-over-year. Here again, the CPC increase for tablets is likely a result of the tethered tablet and desktop bidding instituted with Enhanced Campaigns. In contrast, while advertiser participation on mobile has increased with the roll out of Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers have actively discounted their mobile bids in relation to desktop/tablet.

Ad spending growth for tablets remained strong with a year-over-year increase of 82 percent. Smartphones spend saw exponential growth of 253 percent. The mobile share of spend in Q4 was 63 percent tablet, 37 percent smartphone.

Google Product Listing Ads Perform Strongly In The Holiday Shopping Season

As other reports have also shown, advertiser investment in Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) increased substantially in Q4 compared to 2012, when Google converted to Google Shopping to a paid platform. Spending on PLAs increased 618 percent, impressions grew by 380 percent and clicks were up 312 percent year-over-year.

Still, PLA adoption has grown substantially, but traditional text ads still account for the bulk of advertiser account activity. For advertisers running PLAs, the ads accounted for 10 percent of impressions, 13 percent of the clicks and 16 percent of the total spend.

“It has been over a year since PLAs were introduced to digital marketers and this quarter has proved that the ad product has come into its own,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “Both marketers and consumers have found value in these ads, shown by the increase in spend as well as the increase in click-throughs compared to standard search ads.”

PLAs by their nature, appeal to consumers deep in the purchasing funnel. The ad units were particularly effective during the holiday shopping season, according to the report, with click-through rates 74 percent higher than text ads during the week of Thanksgiving and 95 percent higher on Cyber Monday. On smartphones, however, IgnitionOne found that PLA click-through rates were 38 percent lower than smartphone text ads.

Yahoo Bing Network Held Steady

The Yahoo! Bing Network maintained share in Q4, up a tick from last quarter’s 22.6 percent to 22.7 percent of spend versus Google’s 77.3 percent share.

WMT: Google Gets Personal With SEOs?

Christmas morning, I got something I never expected: a personal email from Google. And it truly felt like a gift!

Right out of bed, I had my 3 cans of Red Bull and checked my messages, as usual. Initially, I wasn’t surprised to see that I had an email from Google. I figured it was an automated message about profile linking or something like that. But I was wrong.

The email was actually from one of Google’s Webmaster Trends analysts. He was contacting me about a rankings situation — in smartphone rankings — for one of my brand’s domains! But don’t confuse this with Google’s recent announcement about the addition of smartphone specific crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. That has an automated approach and is something else entirely.

What I’m talking about is a personal email I received from Google telling me I had a redirect issue that was hurting my mobile rankings. Take a look at the actual email below.

Have you received an email similar to this from Google? Perhaps it is part of a new initiative or process, but I haven’t heard anything about it.

In general, the email seems to be more manual than automated, or at least semi-manual. How so? First off, the email contains a personal signature. What’s more, notice that the message includes an actual “reply-to” email address rather than the usual wmt-noreply@google.com. These factors lead me to believe that this email was the result of someone at Google having an alert triggered and then personally reaching out.
With that said, I think it is important to note that the domain mentioned in the original email gets a considerable amount of traffic (~25K unique visitors a day). In other words, that kind of volume may have helped to trigger the email.

If this is part of a bigger initiative, I doubt that smaller players will get the same level of service. That’s a shame, because when I got Google’s note, I immediately thought of my good friend, Todd.

Last year, Todd had a problem with the indexing of his product details pages after a redesign. It caused his sales to nosedive, and he almost had to shut down his e-retail business as it relies heavily on organic traffic. If Google had informed him about the issue, it could have saved him a lot of trouble.

A Gift That Keeps On Giving

While I’m both happy and thankful for Google’s personal outreach to me, I’m hoping that it is part of a larger initiative, as I think it could greatly benefit the SEO community. After all, one of the biggest challenges SEO professionals grapple with is the implementation of our recommendations!

When we tell brands and their development agency that they need to change their coding and the way they handle mobile redirects to avoid a rankings loss, they rarely say, “Sure thing!” Instead, they usually come back with some quote that counteracts or challenges our recommendations.

But if Google sends out personal emails alerting webmasters to problem areas/situations, SEOs will have actual documentation from Google that will back up their recommendations. How awesome would that be?!
Getting clear and direct guidance from Google in the form of these Webmaster Trends emails will be even more important as technology continues to evolve, because the complexity of organic recommendations will only increase. This additional complexity has led to a lot of guesswork by SEOs, especially in regard to the impact of one variable on another.

But the guidance Google sent in the above email eliminated the need for guessing and spelled out the problem: a broken redirect will hurt your mobile rankings. As tech continues to evolve, SEOs and brands would greatly benefit from such direct and clear guidance from Google.

Overall, I hope the email I received from Google wasn’t an isolated event. I’d love to see Google’s Webmaster Trends analysts reach out to SEOs more and provide clarity into the complex technical issues that have large-scale impact like the one above. In the end, such outreach efforts could truly be the gift for SEOs that keeps on giving.

Google Preps “Hotel View” Interior 360 Imagery

Call it Google “Hotel View.” According to the Associated Press (via Fox), Google is photographing hotel interiors as part of an effort to enhance its travel content. Perhaps even more interesting, says the article, is that the initiative is being run not under the umbrella of Google Maps but through Google Wallet.
It’s not clear whether that last statement is accurate, however. Google has been slowly rolling out more and more interior photography for local businesses over the past few years. This may simply be a logical extension of that effort.






According to the AP, Google is making the push with major hotel chains and hotel management companies. Radisson and Best Western are the only two participating chains explicitly mentioned in the article, although Omni and Marriott are identified as participating in Google Wallet (through their loyalty programs).

I did a set of relatively random hotel searches in several cities and found interior imagery for a number of different hotel chains, suggesting Google already has a great deal of this in place. Above are two examples of the interior hotel photography from a Best Western in the Chicago area and a Hyatt in San Francisco.
TripAdvisor has traditionally been my “go-to” source for interior hotel imagery (from guests rather than the official hotel photographs). If consumers become aware of the availability of these images on Google, it may boost hotel-related search traffic specifically looking for these types of pictures.

Google’s Hotel Finder remains limited and not very visible to consumers. It doesn’t appear that Google has yet integrated these new 360-degree, interactive images into that property.

Postscript: I received some clarification from Google. The program is being run through Google Maps (not Wallet) and it is part of the interior photography program Google has been doing for a couple of years.