Google Brand Advertising
Posted by Marco Corsaro @ April 28th, 2008 in Display Advertising
Whilst today the main objective of search engine marketing campaigns is still “direct response” (e.g: driving sales, subscriptions…), I am a great believer that the next big area for growth will be the deployment of branding campaigns.
Google must have realized this well before I did and they have been working on two main fronts:
- Finding the right formula for allowing advertisers to deploy successful branding campaigns
- Investing in market research to demonstrate that online advertising can be used effectively for brand development
I have to say point 2 is easier to demonstrate rather than finding the right formula to achieve number 1.
Looking at some Google/Comscore research, Google has demonstrated that users do expect leading brands to appear on top of the search results.
This demonstrates that companies should not only buy keywords related to their own brand terms but also expensive “generic terms” that very often do not produce a positive ROI but which are still relevant for the business and reinforce the brand building exercise.
To further explain this we could say that cosmetic brand Clinique should be on top of the sponsored results for terms like “cosmetics” even where the ROI produced buy buying traffic from this keyword is below target or even negative. But search is only the tip of the iceberg and the opportunity for brand building using companies like Google is way bigger than that.
Traditionally, brand building is a very visual and engaging activity and can hardly be replicated into a “text advert”. This is why Google is now pushing an array of solutions that go beyond pure text adverts.
Some of these solutions are:
- Banners (abiding to all guidelinesprovided by IAB) distributed in Google Content Network.
- Gadgets: an “intelligent” and interactive type of banner that allows for streaming real data and developing a “Microsite” into a banner. Gadgets can be used in the Google Content Network but can also fulfill a viral campaign as they can be used to customize the iGoogle page (www.google.com/ig) or embedded by webmasters into their sites.
- Videos: as most of you now Google has acquired YouTube and can offer a number of advertising solutions on the channel.
I will develop in future articles how brand building can be executed using Google Gadgets, YouTube and The Google Content Network.
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Comments
Tanya Ferrell
April 28th, 2008
Online advertising can definitely be used for brand development. And using SEO to rank higher for generic keywords is surely to help out with branding efforts. But I think trying to brand via CPC/PPC within sponsored results poses two problems: 1. Generic terms are usually very competitive and can cost a lot. 2. Unfortunately, a growing percentage of people don’t trust sponsored results.
I’ve seen a few of Google’s banner ads on their content network though, and I think they’re brilliant.
m.barreto
April 29th, 2008
thanks for your comment, Tanya!
Yes, I agree with you and yes, unfortunately there’s still quite a lot of skepticism regarding the Internet industry. However, the whole concept behind the visual/graphic implementation for brand building solutions could actually help fade out this lack of conviction…