Every business faces the difficult challenge of determining where to best direct its digital marketing spend. Figuring out which platforms will be the most profitable for your business depends on your target audience, your budget, and how people find products and services like yours.
But there are some overall strengths and weaknesses to each of the major digital marketing platforms, and your brand should consider them before determining how and where you allocate your digital marketing budget.
Why Is Google Redefining Phrase And Exact Match?
I have no idea. This isn’t the first time Google has deprecated functionality, for example, last year they retired Device Targeting. In both cases though, Google retired targeting features that if used, resulted in substantially more complex account structure.
Ultimately it’s a Google AdWords world. We’re just living in it.
eBay has been one of the largest advertisers on Google, but that might not be the case for much longer. It decided to do an A-B split test to determine how many of those clicks they would have eventually seen even without those paid placements; even going so far as to go dark in 30 market areas to provide a control. In a study conducted with eBay Labs along including fancy degree holders from Berkeley and U. Chicago, it showed that it only made back about 25 cents on the dollar spent.
The study shows that brand ads – and by that they mean ads that focus on the brand names of the products to be theoretically purchased, rather than “branding” ads – can be efficiently effective for potential new users to the retailer, but tend to be unnecessary for those who are already familiar with the retailer. eBay, more than most, would suffer from a high familiarity ratio, thus making its relative efficiency low.
One thing the full version of the study appears to miss, however, is that very high clickthrough rate experienced by an ad due to a specific brand reference that is common to the search term may have another financial benefit to the advertiser: increasing the “quality score” of the ad campaign, and thus reducing the expense of other clicks in the campaign.
eBay bids on a universe of more than 170 million keywords. It spends more than $50 million a year on online advertising.
Dispatches From The Front 