Google Brings Out The Crowds for Sponsored Breakfast Forum
First up was Esurance, a provider of online quotes and comparisons for auto insurance. They currently spend between 25-40% of their budget on SEM, and their presentation served as a basic overview of AdWords best practices. Among there observations were:
- Be careful with AdSense. Their experience showed that there is a great volume opportunity in content targeted listings, but lower potentially lower conversion rates unless you target correctly.
- Employ negative phrases.
- Mine your keyword list .
- Don't get in bidding wars with your competitors.
- Optimize your landing page. They've seen up to a 30% improvement in yield from their campaign by targeting the landing page to the matched phrase.
- Understand SEM in the context of the larger campaign.
- Optimize to the total customer lifetime value.
This last one has been the source of some controversy lately as some in offline media question the obsession with R.O.I. Their point is that measuring immediate conversions only is a shortsighted view.
The next presenters were clearly designed to feature Google's local targeting features. The company, Table for Six, is a local San Francisco Bay Area dating service recently featured on 60 minutes. Brad Finklestein, Director of Online Marketing, said that most of their marketing budget is focused on print and radio. But, online marketing is a growing part of their mix, particularly with Google's Local Targeting features. Using local targeting they were able to target more broad phrases like "dating" and still ensure they were reaching a local audience. Currently 72% of their online leads come from SEM.
The sponsored breakfast was exactly what you would expect, some very successful case studies of companies effectively using AdWords. But, given the popularity of the service, it was just the kind of message the packed house was ready to hear.
