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Digital marketing firm, Q Interactive, has announced the launch of a display advertising network that offers predictive behavioral targeting. The service is powered by Q Interactive’s proprietary targeting technology, the TrueConversion Engine, and uses a combination of offline data and online self-reported geo-demographic, behavioral and transaction-based data to predict which consumers are most likely to respond to an ad.

“Most behavioral targeting in the marketplace is really just contextual re-targeting — delivering a female-oriented ad to consumers who have visited a women’s lifestyle site, for instance,” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive. “This approach is not much more advanced than an ad exec in the 1950s placing a detergent or diapers ad in Family Circle. What differentiates Q Interactive’s behavioral targeting is that it’s proactive rather than reactive; we use a wealth of online and offline data to proactively predict the consumers most likely to respond to a given ad.”

Related Reading:
Behavioral Marketing 101: Defining the Terminology
The Three Dimensions of Behavioral Targeting
Targeting Search Ads By Demographics & Behavior
ISPs Collect User Data for Behavioral Ad Targeting

Search marketers deal with landing pages everyday in their work, but not all landing pages are created for paid search campaigns. Many landing pages, or sometimes entire sites are created for offline advertising on television, radio, and magazine ads.

Should these landing pages be tested as well? I talked to Google Website Optimizer’s Tom Leung to get his thoughts on how testing can influence offline campaigns.

Leung said there are two ways that tools like Website Optimizer can be used in offline campaigns:

1. As already mentioned, to test landing pages created for traffic coming in from offline ad campaigns.
2. Using paid search or display ad campaigns to make informed decisions on creatives designed for offline ad campaigns.

The second point really got my attention. Leung expanded by saying that SEM’s can use landing page testing as a “bargaining chip to get a seat at the table with other marketers in your organization.”

This information gained from testing is highly useful to marketers planning offline campaigns. As a search marketer, you can use testing and analytics tools to be the one in their department or agency who knows the most about a target audience. That knowledge is highly useful to your colleagues, and can help you work more as an integrated team.

Even though offline and online campaigns can generate interest from consumers with different expectations, at the very least, testing can rule out things that don’t work. An image, text, or highlighted feature that just doesn’t resonate can be discovered through landing page testing. Marketers can test these factors in a paid search or other online ad test, and use the results to develop creatives for offline ads.

Online ad tests can also be used in advance of an offline-to-web ad campaign.

For offline traffic driven to landing pages, you can use those preliminary tests to narrow down the number of landing page options for the initial traffic driven from the offline ad. When the offline traffic begins to arrive (and you’re expecting enough traffic to run a test), you can test the first visitors. You don’t want to test more than 1 page per 100 conversions. Multivariate testing should generally be reserved for large, national campaigns.

WiderFunnel Marketing used Website Optimizer for Tourism BC’s TV-to-Web ad campaign for HelloBC.com. According to a published case study, the campaign targeted the Los Angeles and San Francisco markets. Tourism BC experienced a 52% conversion rate (filling out a web form), up 7% from the previous year.

Even though search marketing has been gaining ground for years, SEMs still may find themselves struggling to lend their insight to traditional marketing methods that have been around for decades. Landing page testing is not just a must for SEMs in their own work but can be a strength to participate in the greater strategy at hand.

What do you think about landing page testing and integrating marketing campaigns? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

With the Democratic National Convention starting today in Denver, I thought it would be prudent to see which search engine is handling the highly anticipated event the best. Of course, Microsoft rocked the Olympics and outpaces everyone in mapping Georgia, but who’s got political game?

Microsoft proved again that it’s on top of current events, but it’s AOL that takes the cake in my book. First, AOL makes use of its design as a portal to serve up content on the homepage, which eliminates searching for today’s biggest US story.

Then, AOL makes use of its news and content networks to provide relevant links in its search results. Something that caught my eye is a link to News Video. I would have thought YouTube would dominate online video for the conventions, especially considering their involvement in the debates. But YouTube left a lot to be desired, while AOL News Video served up relevant, organized video.

AOL Homepage

AOL convention search results

AOL News Video results

YouTube results

Ask.com didn’t have to do anything different. Their usual results, which includes a right sidebar with images, provided a nice offering of convention-related content.

Ask.com search results

Microsoft’s Live.com could have made use of their new design, making the image of the day related to the convention. But they still have an Olympics-themed image up. Still, a search provides the latest convention news results at the top, and I like how their links to image, video, and other types of search are below the search box instead of on top. That helps users find what they’re looking for even better. Searching for video via Live.com brings up results from AOL, YouTube and other sources such as the AP. The videos are organized like image results, which makes for quick browsing - probably quicker than AOL or YouTube. However, some of the videos are from past conventions.

Live.com search results

Live.com video search results

As I was writing this, Yahoo changed its results. Before, it showed News Results about halfway down the page, now news results for the convention are at the top. This puts it on par with Microsoft. Yahoo does take slight advantage of being a portal to provide content right on the front page so no searching is involved. But today’s headline is the new Dancing With the Stars cast and whether Kim Kardashian’s foot injury will prevent her from participating.

Yahoo convention search results

Google offered nothing special. They both provided News Results, but placed them about halfway down the page.

Google results

Yahoo front page

But don’t take my word for it. Do some searching of your own and then leave a comment giving your vote for best search engine for Presidential politics.

We live in the computer era, and modern businesses have access to many more different means of communication than businesses used to have say 20 years ago.
In the beginning people thought that comput…
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types of business correspondence in the contemporary office

Zillow, a vertical search engine aimed at the real estate market, has announced the launch of Showcase Ads, geo-targeted ads for realtors and other real estate advertisers. Within a given zip code, advertisers can buy 25, 50, 75, or 100 percent of the ads, giving them the ability to target just the local areas they are interested in selling to. Showcase Ads will have a different pricing structure than Zillow’s other local ad offering - EZ Ads.

“Zillow is committed to offering local professionals affordable and easy- to-use tools to get in front of our large audience of consumers interested in real estate and buying and selling homes,” said Greg Schwartz, vice president of ad sales at Zillow.com. “We strongly believe that the more targeted an ad can be, both at a national and local level, the more useful the consumer will find it and the more successful the advertiser will be.”

Related Reading:
Vertical Strategies in Local Search
Zillow Lands ex-Googler and Zestimated $30M Follows
Zillow Adds ‘Owner-Generated’ Content
Zillow Announces ‘Zillow Labs’
Zillow Partners With Yahoo!
Zillow Adds Birds-Eye Imagery

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Do the Beijing Olympics have you thinking global? If so, you may be considering whether or not to offer your site content in another language.

Google understands and they have offered up three points worthy of consideration when making the decision to go multilingual.

Site Structure

First, you need to decide if you want to feature other languages because you want to target another country (geo targeting) or because you simply want to reach an audience that speaks a specific language. If geo targeting is the case, then you may want to set up your content on a country-specific TLD (top-level domain, i.e. co.uk).

If you’re focused more on just the language, Google has these two tips:

1. Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
2. Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.

Webmaster Tools for Geo Targeting

In Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can set geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains, if you choose to host the multilingual content on your original site.

Content Organization
When it comes to organizing your content, Google says straight out of the gate that the same content in two or more languages is not considered duplicate content.

Moving on from there, keep navigation and content on a subdirectory or subdomain to one language. Mixing up the languages could confuse the googlebot.

What are your tips for creating multilingual sites? Share them in the comments.

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