Updating adCenter Bids - Quick and Easy Tips

Part of keeping your campaigns running smoothly involves monitoring your adCenter reports for signals that something needs your attention. One of the most obvious red flags is when you see your position slipping lower than you would like it to be. In order to keep your positioning competitive, you should be updating your bids to keep pace with other advertisers who are bidding on the same keywords you are.

Determining which keywords could benefit from bid updates is a fairly simple process of pulling a report and sorting the data in Excel. If you’re an Excel-savvy search marketer, then you’re most likely already following the best practices below, but I wanted to provide a brief walk-through for those who could use some pointers.

Step 1: Pull a Keyword Performance Report in adCenter

After you sign in to adCenter, click on the “Reports” tab. The default setting is for a Keyword Performance report set to a summary view. Feel free to modify the View and Date Range values to suit your needs:

Step Two: Export the Report

After you run the report, below the graph that appears you’ll see a link to “Download CSV” in the top right hand corner of the data grid. Click on it to export the data into Excel:

Step Three: Apply Filters to Sort Your Data

Once you have your report in Excel, click on the column title for “Avg. Position” to highlight that cell:

With this cell highlighted, on your keyboard, hit Ctrl+Shift+L and you’ll see that your column headers now all have a button with a down arrow in it:

Clicking on that button in the “Avg. Position” column will give you a list of options for sorting that data. Select “Sort Largest to Smallest”:

If after completing this step there are items in the top half of the sheet showing in a position lower than you would like them to be, these are the terms that could use a bid boost.

Lowering CPC with Match Types and Negative Keywords

As the holidays approach, you may find that your cost per click (CPC) has begun to increase on some of your keywords – this is fairly common whenever there is increased competition for popular terms.

To help mitigate this seasonal increase in spend, there are a couple of strategies you can employ to help lower your CPC. Two of the most effective methods for lowering CPC are to bid across all match types as well as to include negative keywords.

Bidding Across Match Types

If you’re unsure of what the differences are between Exact, Phrase and Broad match types, I would recommend reading through Lauren Taft-McPhee’s post on the topic before continuing on as I am going to assume these concepts are familiar to you.

Bidding aggressively on Exact match only is a great strategy for keeping your traffic highly targeted and relevant.  If, however, you're finding that your impressions aren't as high as you'd like them to be, you should expand your bidding to Phrase match, Broad match, or both.  Doing so can help lower your overall average CPC as competitive pricing can sometimes be lower on different match types. 

Using Negative Keywords to Qualify Traffic

Let’s assume that you’re a travel agent whose campaign goals are to generate leads for the holiday travel season. Unless you’re running a branding campaign where maximum impressions are the goal to get your agency’s name out there wherever and whenever you can, it would be wise to incorporate some negative keywords into your campaign to keep your ads from appearing for holiday-related terms that have nothing to do with travel.

For example, if you’re bidding on the keyphrase “holiday travel”, you wouldn’t want your ad to generate clicks from someone looking for Billie Holiday CDs, or lyrics to “Holiday” by Madonna, or from someone trying to find out the name of the theme song from the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation (“Holiday Road” by Fleetwood Mac).

One would think that your obviously travel-related ad copy would be enough to discourage unqualified traffic like the above examples, but you’d be surprised how many clicks you could generate from online window shoppers. To keep your ads from displaying for unrelated terms like these, you could add negative keywords like “Billie”, “Madonna”, “Fleetwood Mac”, “Lampoon” and “road”.

You’ll notice I didn’t include “National” or “Vacation”… both of these are travel-related keywords and could conceivably bring in relevant traffic. Neither may have anything to do with holiday travel, but hey… you’re a travel agent. Would you complain if you were able to book a vacation for a family of 5 heading to Disney as a result of someone who saw your “holiday travel” ad? Of course not!

Outside of using these two strategies to lower your CPC, you also might want to settle for a lower positioning during the holiday season as it can keep your costs better aligned to your budget, while still bringing in enough traffic to meet your goals. Good luck!

If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.

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Finders, Keepers…How To Find Your Ad!

Do you struggle trying to find your ad on Live Search?

Are you unsure if it is live?

If you know it’s not live, are you uncertain how to troubleshoot the issue?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, we can help!

We have created a page on our advertising site, with you in mind, which has great information to help you find your wandering ad, including an ad-finding tutorial and checklist.

It also contains great information about ensuring your ad gets approved by Editorial and also regarding ad copy writing techniques.

Keep It

In order to keep your ads where you want them to be, I would always recommend to my clients that they follow the below steps in order to stay in the optimum position. To remember these steps, think;

“Keep All Keywords In Optimum Position And U’ll Succeed!”

Optimisation Tips

· Keywords which are under-performing should have negative keywords associated to them or if underperforming over a long-term basis, should be deleted from the account.

· Add negative keywords (at campaign, adgroup or keyword level) if you do not want your ads to show for particular broad or phrase match keyword searches.

· Keyword match-types (exact, phrase & broad) are important. Always remember to bid on all 3 match-types. If this is not possible, we recommend that at the very least you always have Exact match.

· Increase bids to keep your ads where you want them to be on the engine.

· Only use relevant keywords and ad copy. This will prevent your ads & keywords from being rejected and will improve your CTR.

· Pick out under-performing ads and replace them with better adcopy to increase CTR.

· Always remember to also check that your ads are all approved on system and that you are not losing impressions from rejected ads. Click here for some great tips on boosting your Editorial knowledge.

· Use dynamic text in your ad title and description. Here is a useful article, written by my colleague Libby which can help you understand how dynamic text insertion works.

· Successful accounts always include a branding campaign/adgroup with relevant branded keywords and ads.

These tips will help improve your account’s performance leading to better CTR and positioning on the engine.

Happy Optimising!

Get Social: Join us on our Facebook Page & follow us on Twitter: http://Twitter.com/adCenterBlog

Is a Competitor Bidding on Your Trademark?

Having a popular, well-known brand can be a real asset to any search marketing campaign, you know it… and so do your competitors. While Microsoft Advertising’s editorial policy on trademarks requires all advertisers to agree that they will not infringe upon the trademarks of others, enforcing this policy is challenging.

What do you do when you discover that your competitors are bidding on your trademarked terms or are using them in their ad copy? Well, there are steps you can take to shut the competition down for those particular keywords, but only if they truly are infringing upon your trademark rights.

Follow this simple check list to know if you’re in a position to take action!

Is your competitor a reseller of the products and/or services of that trademarked brand?

If your competitors are authorized by the trademark owner to sell the products/services offered by that trademark, then they are within their rights to bid on those trademarked terms. If you own the trademark and you know for a fact that the competition using your trademarked terms does not have the authorization to do so, then you should proceed to the next criterion.

Is this competitor’s site dedicated solely to information on the trademarked product/service?

If the site owned by the competitor in question is only providing information about the trademarked products, but does not in any way sell or enable the selling of said products, this is not in violation of Microsoft Advertising’s policy on trademarks. Although the owner of this site may technically be considered “competition” in terms of your search engine marketing campaign, in reality, they could actually be helping you by providing the information buyers are looking for before making a purchase (hopefully from you!).

Is the term in question a “dictionary” term?

For example, if I own a window washing company and I’m bidding on terms having to do with “windows”, doing so does not put me in violation of Microsoft’s trademark for their operating systems.

If you’ve gone through this checklist and still believe that your competitor is violating your trademark rights, there are steps you can take to let us know about it and have your concerns addressed. Start by visiting the Trademark Concern Page and review the “Notes” section for additional information on steps you should take before taking action. On that page you will find links to submit your trademark concern either online or by mail.

Additionally, for those of you hungry for more editorial information, check out Jason Yormark’s post about the adExcellence tutorial on Editorial Guidelines.

If you have any questions or comments on this post, please visit the adCenter Forum

Get Social: Join us on our Facebook Page & follow us on Twitter: http://Twitter.com/adCenterBlog

Integrating Search & Display at SMX London

When I was at school we were still using chalk and blackboards to communicate so typing has never been my strong point. I’ve never understood how some folks are so talented that they manage to blog live from conferences and not manage to sound discombobulated. I prefer to have a think about what’s been said and place the words on the page in an orderly fashion. With that in mind the next few posts may be out of order as I sit here thinking about SMX London this week and reflecting on the wide variety...(read more)

adCenter Fall Upgrade: Campaign Management Updates

Our upgrade includes several new features in the campaign management area of adCenter. We're excited to share these features and improvements because they've been requested by customers right here in the community – we're pleased to deliver what you need to help make managing your adCenter campaigns easier and more efficient. With this upgrade, you can now pause and resume your ads and keywords, which has been a request we've heard from many customers. The ability to pause and resume...(read more)

Increase CTR Using Keyword Insertion with Default Text

Last month my colleague Libby Thomas wrote an introduction to Dynamic Text Insertion. You may remember she mentioned that a study has shown that inserting the exact keyword into a paid listing improves CTR by 38% on average.

Keyword Insertion

With adCenter, the easiest way to include the search term is through {keyword} insertion. This function allows you to drop the term from the search box straight into your ad. But what if inserting the keyword would take you over the 25 character limit for titles or the 70 character limit for descriptions?

Default Text

You can define default text for use with {keyword}. The default text is then used in your ad whenever the ad would otherwise exceed character limits. You can also use default text with {param1}, {param2} and {param3}.

If your ad title is "{keyword} in Stock Now" and one of your {keyword} variables is "Mountain Bike Parts," the resulting ad title, "Mountain Bike Parts in Stock Now," would exceed the character limit for ad titles. As a result, your ad would not be displayed.

However, by using default text in your ad title, you can keep your ad text within the allowable character limit. If your ad title is "{keyword:Bike parts} in Stock Now" and someone searches by using your keyword "mountain bike parts," your ad title would be displayed as "Bike parts in Stock Now”.

So now that you know how to use Keyword Insertion with Default Text, why not give it a try and see how much your CTR increases?

Thanks for reading,

Phil

Search and the Art of Fly Fishing: Optimizing for Your Customers’ Buying Cycle

Search engine advertising is about moving your customer from search page to landing page. It’s about selling the click but selling it to the right person, the person likely to buy your product, service, subscription, or information. It’s about the customer, a fact that some advertisers seem to overlook.

I’m a fan of fly fishing; I’m just not any good at it. I once took a class and was unable to catch anything in a pond stocked with hungry trout! Still, I appreciate the artistry required, the intimate familiarity with the trout’s lifecycle and environment. Trout rise to different insects as they hatch at different times of the year, even different hours of the day. A fly offered at the wrong time or with the wrong presentation is likely to be ignored. There’s a lot of similarity between fly fishing and search engine advertising.

Present me with an ad that doesn’t acknowledge
where I’m at in my buying cycle and
I’m likely to ignore it. I’m a trout!

Your customers have a buying cycle. It begins with recognition of a need. It may be a vague, undefined need but it’s a need. Take my experience on Cougar Mountain.

Cougar Mountain has been described as Seattle’s backyard wilderness; 3,000 acres of wetlands, meadows and forest on a very old mountain. After walking a trail on Cougar Mountain, my ankles ache and I realize that my Converse tennis shoes, although fashionably retro, are probably not the best footwear for a mountain. I need something better.

Researching a solution to my need is the next step in the cycle. It’s likely an iterative step as I become more informed about alternatives. Maybe I begin searching on general keywords like “hiking boots,” then recognize what I really want are “hiking shoes,” and finally “light weight hiking shoes” as I define the features important to me. I begin comparing specific brands of hiking shoes. And finally, I begin shopping prices for specific models. Each iterative step has its own set of keywords different than the one before. Each step requires different ad copy to remain relevant.

Early in my buying cycle, an ad that prominently features “Hiking Boot Reviews” would likely appeal to my ignorance. I don’t yet know what I don’t know. When I realize there is something called a hiking shoe, an ad that includes “Hiking Shoes” and “Buyer’s Guide” might attract my attention. Once I’ve determined my short list of hiking shoes, then an ad that includes brand, model and a special offer might get me to rise to the fly. Present me with an ad that doesn’t acknowledge where I’m at in my buying cycle and I’m likely to ignore it. I’m a trout!

Your Customer As Organizing Principle

It’s common practice in search advertising to create large ad groups of loosely related keywords, write a few static ads, and finish with an ad that dynamically inserts the keyword phrase into the title or body copy. It’s easy. When your campaigns include thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords, easy becomes very attractive. It’s the equivalent of fishing with dynamite.

“…speak to the dog,
in the language of the dog,
about what’s in the heart of the dog.”
Persuasive Online Copywriting
Bryan, Jeffrey Eisenberg

Dynamic keyword insertion increases click through rate, no question. The searcher sees their keywords reflected in the ad and perceives greater relevance. Searching is a goal-oriented activity driven by relevance. So dynamic keyword insertion increases click through but compared to what? Loosely organized ad groups with irrelevant ad copy? Not surprising.

Instead, organize your campaigns into smaller ad groups of closely related keywords focused upon your customers’ progression through the buying cycle. Pitch your ad copy to the questions and concerns of your customers as they move from acknowledgement of a need through fulfillment of that need. Quoting Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Persuasive Online Copywriting, “…speak to the dog, in the language of the dog, about what’s in the heart of the dog.” (Somehow, paraphrasing with “speak to the fish, in the language of the fish” doesn’t seem as impactful.)

And yes, it’s more work than fishing with dynamite. It requires finesse, timing, a deep understanding of your customers, and probably far fewer keywords. Think there’s no cost to those millions of long tail keywords if no one clicks them? Think again.

UK Search Spend Up 28% – How Does This Affect You?

The IAB has announced today that UK internet advertising spend in the first half of 2008 grew by 21% compared with the same period the year before. Online advertising now has a healthy 19% share of the UK’s total advertising budget with marketers allocating £1.7B of their budgets to online channels. PPC lead the way as advertisers showed a great deal of confidence in the medium: “Paid-for search continues to lead the way, growing by 28% year-on-year and was worth £981 million in the first half of...(read more)

UK adCenter Team Speaking at A4U Expo in London

Myself and Tor Crockatt will be giving some PPC tips at the Affiliates 4 U Marketing Conference in London on Wednesday 15th October. Tor - who gives great talks on PPC Research - and I will be joined by Dixon Jones from Receptional and we’ll be discussing: Practical PPC Strategies for Better ROI at 11am! Do register below and hope to see you there.... https://www.a4uexpo.com/london/register.php Cheers Mel...(read more)

Dynamic Text Insertion - Introducing adCenter’s Superhero

Following on from Kate's advice on how to manage your PPC campaign during the "downturn", I'm going to add another secret weapon to your marketing armoury to help you squeeze even better ROI out of your adCenter Search Ad activity.

Arguably one of the most important criteria for a search ad is to be as targeted as possible. According to a study by Advertising.com, inserting the exact keyword into a paid listing improves CTR by 38% on average.

There are two main ways of making this happen:

Keyword Insertion

Admittedly the easiest way to include the search term is through {keyword} insertion. This function allows you to drop the term from the search box straight into your ad. Although this is really convenient, there are disadvantages which can seriously impact your CTR. For example, the keyword might run over the character limit or it could contain poor spelling or incorrect grammar which will result in your ad looking messy and unprofessional. This will reflect badly on your website and brand.

Dynamic Text Insertion

But worry not, help is at hand. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Dynamic Text Insertion. This adCenter function utilises the placeholders {param1}, {param2} and {param3} and can help to transform your account. Unlike {keyword} insertion, Dynamic Text Insertion is versatile whilst remaining scalable and simple.

How does it work?

Dynamic Text works in a very similar way to {keyword} insertion but instead of instructing adCenter to pull keyword data you can direct it to pull data from a pre-determined source which you have created.

- If submitting keywords via a spreadsheet – Dynamic Text should be placed in the ‘Dynamic Text {param2}’ column

- If submitting keywords via Microsoft adCenter click into the relevant ‘campaign’ and ‘ad group’ and then once you’ve reached the ‘keywords’ tab, click on the ‘edit keywords’ button.

- Alter {param1}, {param2} and {param3} as appropriate. The ‘Bulk Edit’ function can be used by ticking next to the keyword parameters you wish to edit and then clicking ‘Bulk Edit’.

- {param1} is typically used for destination URLs as it offers more characters with which to ensure the link is as detailed as possible. {param2} and {param3} can be used to include as much of the keyword and other engaging information (e.g. price points) as possible. The bulk editing function makes it really easy to update your dynamic text when required.

Why should you use it?

adCenter’s dynamic superhero can rescue your campaign. In the example campaign in the diagram above, the keywords are all very similar (‘cheap hotel paris’, ‘family accomm paris’ and ‘room single paris’) so would naturally be collected in a ‘Paris’ ad group. However, there are nuances between each keyword that indicate very different user intent – one searcher’s focus is cost while another’s is family. You can reach all of these different users by using dynamic text insertion to tailor your ad to them personally.

So let adCenter’s dynamic keyword insertion save your day by implementing it now!

Thanks for reading,

Libby

Tips on Preparing Your SEM Campaigns for the Online Holiday Shopping Season

Personally, I don’t understand the people who consider Labor Day weekend to be the start of the Holiday shopping season, but they most certainly are out there -- my sister-in-law is one of them. She starts thinking about the Holidays right after Memorial Day weekend, carefully adding to her shopping list of possible gifts as she thinks about them throughout the summer months so that she’s ready to go once Labor Day weekend hits. It’s a level of Holiday Season anticipation that I’ve never encountered before, not even when I was a Santa-loving child myself. This is also the sister-in-law that, when I was just dating my husband and we spent Christmas Eve at his parents’ house, woke us all up at 5am to start opening presents... even though she’d kept us up until 1am watching “A Christmas Story” over and over again on Christmas Eve. Did I mention she’s 34 years old?

Anyway, holiday-happy relatives aside, the point of this post is to urge you, dear advertiser, to make sure your PPC campaigns are firing all cylinders for the trickle of holiday traffic that begins now and grows to a fever pitch as the month of December approaches. I just did a quick check on the “Research” tab in adCenter for the keyphrase “christmas gift ideas” and found there were 241 searches on these terms last month, as well as some historical data that shows over 1,000 searches on this phrase during September of last year, peaking at 11,802 searches during the month of November. December was only slightly lower at 11,369 searches.

Here are 6 tips to help you make the most of your online advertising efforts this year:

1.) Create new SEM campaigns specifically for the Holiday Season

Rather than going through your current campaigns to add keywords and ads with holiday-specific content, it’s far easier and more efficient to create holiday-specific campaigns that you can activate just for the holiday season, and then pause once the holidays are over. You can re-use these campaigns year after year, saving yourself a lot of time and effort in uploading specialized content, only to delete it all once the holidays are over. For more information on setting up holiday-specific campaigns, you can look over my previous post on creating specific campaigns for Mother’s Day that explains the concept in greater detail.

2.) Make sure your budgets are large enough to keep your campaigns live

The Holiday Season is infamous for gobbling up your advertising dollars quicker than any other time of year -- you don’t want to check in on your campaigns and find that they went into budget pause either early in the day for campaigns set to divide across the month, or else near the end of the month for those set to spend until depleted.

3.) Set aggressive bids

The largest budget in the world isn’t going to do you any good if your bids are set too low for the keywords you’ve selected. Increased competition for popular keywords and holiday-specific terms tends to drive bids higher during this time of year. I would be remiss in my duties as an SEM professional if I didn’t take this opportunity to direct you to the adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007 to help you estimate what competitive bids should be. Yes, it does require Excel 2007, but there is a free 60-day trial version available for you to test drive (and use the Add-in with).

4.) Expand your keyword list

Building on the current theme, all the money in the world allocated to your SEM campaign isn’t going to bring in any business if you don’t have a wealth of relevant keywords to help trigger your ads. You may think that you’ve exhausted every keyword possible by wracking your brain for ideas related to your products and services, but chances are there are some you’ve overlooked. I can’t stress enough how useful the Add-in is for building your keyword lists, but if you’d like a quick fix view of potential terms, you can always enter in some key phrases on the “Research” tab in adCenter. You may also want to explore some of the keyword generation features on the adLabs site.

5.) Offer Holiday Season Perks

Ad copy that features eye-catching offers like “free shipping”, “overnight delivery” and “free gift wrapping” will entice buyers to click on your ads. Just make sure that the landing pages in your campaign validate this claim somewhere on the page or else you may run into editorial disapprovals. For more tips on ensuring your ad copy is optimized for top performance, you can refer to Shefali Singla’s post, Constructing an Effective Call to Action for Your Ad Copy.

6.) Use Dynamic Text in Your Ad Titles

Coupling holiday offers in your ad text with dynamic keyword insertion for your ad titles makes it so shoppers who see your ads will not only see ad titles matching the keywords they searched on (increasing the likelihood that they’ll click on them), they’ll also see all the cool things you’ll do for them in appreciation for giving you their business. If you do opt for utilizing dynamic insertion, be sure to upload the keywords for your new Holiday campaign as you would want them to appear in your ad title, i.e. with the first letter of each word capitalized. For more information, you can read more about this in my previous post, Tips to make sure your dynamic ads appear as capitalized in adCenter.

If you have any questions or comments, please visit the adCenter Forum.  The forum is a great way to connect with other PPC marketers, as well as to give feedback and offer suggestions on what you'd like to see in future adCenter releases.  Microsoft employees monitor the posts in the forums daily, so you can be sure that your questions will be answered.

Good luck!

Tina Kelleher

Microsoft adCenter Media Specialist

How to Seduce the Cash-Strapped Shopper

How do you stand out to the ‘credit crunched’ customer? The growth of online sales has slowed down in recent months as a result of the current financial climate. The Creative Services team believes creative ads could be the saving grace for your search campaign.

Online Growth Slows Down

The IMRG Capgemini Index shows that UK shoppers spent just over £4.8 billion online in July. This meant a year-on-year financial growth of about 15.2%. A slowdown compared to the 75.6% year-on-year growth reported in January this year.

Communicate Credit Crunch Defying Deals!

As your online ads and offers are so easy to update at no extra cost, it’s worthwhile ensuring your campaigns are targeted to the current situation.

Creative, smart ad copy will boost your CTR, brand awareness and visibility at any time and will make you stand out from the competition. When growth slows down it is even more important to keep a competitive edge.

One of the reasons why online sales still are still growing in contrast to the high street where sales are down*), is that the internet is the place to be to pick up a bargain. People are looking for discounts and to compare prices to ensure they get the best deals. Shops and online services respond with attractive offers.

A 5-minute spot check on some of our advertiser’s websites shows that great offers are definitely out there: ‘free delivery on everything’, ‘2-day delivery times on electrical goods’, ‘reserve online and pick up in store against online prices’, ‘buy one get one free’ and ‘5 year interest free credit’.

The challenge is to ensure these deals are reflected in your ad copy and that the ads appeal to someone who is likely to be looking for a deal instead of indulgence and luxury.

Here’s how:

· Ensure your deal is mentioned in your ad but be careful not to sacrifice clarity for creativity. Stay clear and to the point as well as being imaginative.

· Describe your product or service in an appealing way. Think about how your product, service or deal could appeal to more shrewd searchers (if appropriate). Think of using words such as ‘affordable’, ‘low-priced’, ‘pre-season-sale’ and ‘early bird bonus’.

· Think how your offer or service may actually help your cash-strapped customer.

Save money, save time (you don’t have to rummage through racks to find a deal) or offer alternatives (self-catering cottages as opposed to opulent hotel rooms).

· Use tempting adjectives.

Here are some powerful examples:

The Creative Services team will give you more tips and insights in the weeks and months to come!

Read our previous blog on how to prepare your search campaign for the Christmas holiday period.

Thanks

Kate

*The IMRG Capgemini Index reports high street sales are down by 0.9 % year on year compared to July 2007.

Shortcut for navigating your accounts, campaigns and ad groups in adCenter

I wrote about this back in May but wanted to remind you about the navigation links in adCenter, in case some of you may not know they're there. These are horizontal links right underneath the Microsoft adCenter logo on the top left-hand side of the UI. When you're moving around in your campaigns, you can click the green arrow next to the ad group or campaign in the horizontal navigation list, and additional navigation links will appear in a drop-down list. You can then navigate within the...(read more)

Snakes and Property Ladders - How to Optimise Your adCenter Property Campaigns During the Credit Crisis

Hi my name’s Chris. I’m based in London and work with Kate in the UK Creative Services Team.

With recent headlines being dominated by stories lamenting the current state of the UK economy and speculating on what this might mean for years to come, now seems like an appropriate opportunity to consider some of the implications that the so-called ‘credit crunch’ has been having on the UK property market – and the possible ways advertisers can take advantage of the situation.

Credit where it’s due

Perhaps a good place to start will be to look at some of the developments that have been taking place in recent months. It’s clear that there is a palpable degree of uncertainly, perhaps even turmoil, being experienced by many of the world’s leading financial institutions that has had a very real knock-on effect for some members of the adCenter community.

  

It was around about this time last year that the term ‘credit crunch’ made its way across the pond and since then some of the facts and figures that have been published all paint a fairly grim picture. Just this last week, a spokesperson from HSBC hinted that the next few months would be “highly challenging” for the industry, an opinion that was also expressed by the Bank of England. In fact, the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” went a step further and suggested that the impacts would be even more far-reaching than first thought, with businesses small and large already feeling the strain. Further still, statistics published by Halifax and Nationwide – two of the country’s leading mortgage lenders – point out that mortgage applications as well as approvals have consistently been falling month on month.

  

To buy, or not to buy?

So what has all this meant for the property market and how could there possibly be anything positive to come out of this?! By and large the same number of people are still interested in buying or renting properties, but are deterred by the current wider financial climate. Various financial institutions suggest that the demand for housing purchases still exists, but the now obvious difficulties in securing the finance for buying one has seen a trend in potential buyers engaging in a prolonged and more comprehensive property search to get the best possible deal on any prospective purchase.

Which is actually pretty good news because the majority of the extra time spent searching is generally taking place online!

Looking into the future...

As the graph below shows, there has actually been an increase on property related searches across the adCenter network over the last year, with the peaks and  troughs all occurring at the expected points in time. Of particular note is the traditional summer peak, which sees a considerable level of traffic and clicks for property searches. Ensuring that keywords and ads are up to date and that bids are set as early  as possible will help to stay competitive at this time. This has been largely driven by a greater degree of interest in the rental market since August 2007, although keywords for property purchases and sales have only decreased marginally and still attract high levels of impressions and clicks. A large proportion of these additional impressions have come as a result of terms towards the tail being searched for more frequently. Therefore it is still good practice to place emphasis in both of these areas, paying particular attention to longer keyword strings that incorporate place names and property types. In the last year there has been a marked increase in the number of impressions being driven by such terms, so including these in a campaign will help to drive traffic in a cost effective way.

A little trick for those who are solely involved in property sales/purchases could be to ease worries about prices by focusing on service and creating a great customer experience in order to mitigate any financial worries potential buyers or sellers might be anticipating. It may be more difficult to offer advice on whether now is a good time to buy a property, but it is noteworthy that doing so is evidently still seen as a wise way of investing and as such more attention is being paid to the idea of purchasing a foreign property, with countries like Turkey, Spain and UAE proving very popular indeed. Once again, this has been partly responsible for driving growth since the worries over the UK market began to arise.

This trend has been part of the reason why click-through rates have remained stable during the ‘slump’ in the UK, with people still exhibiting an interest in property purchases and/or investments by clicking on appealing ads for foreign property. The increased use of negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches, especially where popular location names are used, alongside dynamic text insertion are also tactics that have been used to help maintain a healthy CTR and keep the vertical competitive. All in all, despite the external factors and understandable apprehension that now exists, there is still an audience that wishes to research, view and rent and buy properties, with the initial port of call often originating via some form of online medium.

This is made even more evident when looking at the swathe of ever popular web-based property-related services that are becoming available. Well worth a mention is the property search engine Globrix which scours a list of UK estate agent websites and allows potential buyers or tenants to find properties that meet their exact requirements. Applications of a similar nature have also been seen appearing across social networks, helping to offer an alternative to the traditional ways of buying and renting property. In essence, it could be a valid argument to suggest that for property companies, a strong digital presence may indeed be an effective way of managing costs and maintaining a strong level of ROI versus the more traditional high street based companies.

So although it appears that the property market might continue to take a bit of a bashing for a little while yet, but if confidence in the economy can be restored then normality might not be as far away as some may fear.

Thanks for reading, hope to see you again soon!

Chris.