Being an innovator might not necessarily mean you will be successful. In order for an innovative product to catch on, the market should be ready for accepting the product and you need to have the marketing arm that can push the product.

Yahoo was the first major search engine who got into behavioural marketing by acquiring BlueLithium (an online advertising network) back in 2007. The idea was to join behavioral targeting with advanced data analytics to improve campaign optimization over an advertising network for performance-based display advertisers while enhancing the value to the publishers.

Some visitors convert the first time around; however, many will visit your site once and may never come back. The way Behavioral targeting (BT) works is that visitors to your site are tagged by a cookie, which contains no personally identifiable information. Ad retargeting allows you to continue to advertise to and remarket those visitors while they browse other relevant websites utilizing uniquely customized banners created to fit your retargeting campaign.

Not only does retargeting builds brand awareness, but also helps direct marketers by improving conversion rates. As visitors are presented with multiple advertisements from your business, they begin to recognize your brand. Brand recognition earns trust and leads to higher conversion rates.

Search retargeting adds a layer of relevancy to banner served to searchers after they leave your site. This advertising technology recognizes users’ intents based on their original search queries. This theoretically should increase the value of search marketing ( SEM ) by increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Through this behavioural targeting technology, advertisers can reach a target audience with display ads that are highly relevant to the way users search. For example if Visitor X comes to your site and browses for DSLR cameras but leaves without buying, you can use search retargeting to track Visitor X and serve and remarket DSLR cameras to him/her after s/he leaves your site with targeted ads with a 20% off offer.

As with any other marketing campaign, to effectively utilize behavioral search retargeting, strong creative related to landing pages and search terms are crucial. Developing special offers and unique messages help entice and lure back visitors to your site. The challenge is for the search retargeting to work well you need to have enough traffic volume on your pages.

After almost a year of testing with, Google finally joined the list of companies who offer online ad retargeting by introducing their new Remarketing feature. Now, Google AdWords allows its advertisers use remarketing to reach their audience on sites within the Google Content Network based on their past interactions with their websites.

Now search marketers can then remarket to those visitors who reach their sites by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network. You can set up your remarketing campaign through the new “Audiences” tab in Google AdWords interface.

Google Remarketing Feature - Audience Tab

The way it works is that you put a piece of code (pixel) on your landing pages, website, or YouTube channel, which will let you later show relevant promotional ads to those audience who have visited those pages, as they browse sites within the Google Content Network.

The beauty of this remarketing feature is that you can run multiple remarketing campaigns at the same time based on audiences’ behavior. Remarketing allows businesses to reach those users who are more likely to be receptive to their text/banner ads and achieve a higher ROI.

One of the less frequently used yet useful reports provided by Google AdWords is Reach and Frequency report. If you advertise using placement-targeted campaigns, the Reach and Frequency Performance report helps you see how many users saw your placement-targeted ads and how frequently they viewed them over a period of time.

To generate this report, Google calculates data by estimating the frequency of your ads from a sample data and then extrapolating it to a full set of impressions to determine their estimated reach. The report also includes a metric called cost-per-head. The cost-per-head is the average cost for you ads to reach an individual audience.

This report will only go as far back as January 1, 2007 and does not include search network. Reports are available for daily, weekly, and monthly time periods, as well as for the cumulative daily statistics (summary).

The Reach and Frequency report lets you know how many unique visitors (IP addresses) you have reached, and how many times your ads have reached them. The report provides stats on two main metrics: reach and frequency.

In order to increase frequency you need to narrow down your targets, and in order to increase your reach, you need to broaden the networks your ad is showing on.

You can use frequency capping setting to limit the number of times your ads appear to the same unique user on the Content Network.

Frequency Capping Settings for Content Network

Display Ads were among the first form of online advertising. Since marketers started utilizing Internet as a platform for promoting their products/services, banner advertising became popular. The rational was that if they can target websites that attract the same audience as theirs, they can reach their target market through contextual advertising.

Banner ads have been traditionally priced on a CPM model. However, as visitors got more and more exposed to banner ads, they started developing banner blindness. As a result banner ads click-through rates (CTR) have been in decline. Low CTR rates on banner ads together with their CPM pricing models and traditionally low conversion rates has made them less attractive for direct marketers. Nevertheless, display advertising has been a popular choice for brand marketers as they have been able to benefit from the brand exposure banner ads generated for their brands.

With the market slowdown in the recent years, marketers have been urged to be more careful with their marketing dollars. As a result we were seeing a decline in the growth of web banner advertising as their effectiveness was under question.

When AdWords introduced Placement Targeting advertising, Google started changing the name of the game. There were two main benefits to Placement Targeting.

First, as an advertiser, you do not have to just stick to ad networks and commit yourself to the buy with no exact knowledge of where your ads were showing up and not being able to pull out of a site if it was not performing well for you. With Placement Targeting advertising, you can start with a small budget, hand pick the sites you would like your ads to show up on, monitor their performance, adjust your bids to control your exposure and stop running ads on websites that are not performing well.

Secondly, you do not have to stick to the CPM pricing model anymore as Google AdWords allows you run ads in AdSense content network on a CPC basis very much like search network. Running banner ads on a CPC model has made banner advertising much more cost effective. You can get a large number of impressions at a very low cost.

Of course there are some limitations to running Placement Targeting ads. You might not be able to get prominent ad placements on your favourite sites. The benefits ripped from CPC banner advertising by marketers is coming at the expense of web publishers as they see their ad revenue potentials are in decline on the Internet as more advertisers move to more cost effective CPC pricing model.

With more talks about the attribution models and the impact of display advertising on search engine marketing campaigns; it seems that banner advertising is getting a boost again. After acquiring DoubleClick, Google seems to push out various tools which help pump new blood into the display advertising industry.

Traditionally AdWords was providing conversion tracking based on the clicks on the banners. By introducing View-through conversion reporting, Google provided advertisers with the ability to track the indirect impact of banner ads.

Impact of Display Ads on Search Engine Marketing

Campaign Insights can provide data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

According to eMarketer, Facebook will surpass MySpace in terms of ad revenue this year, with Facebook expected to bring in $605 million in ad revenue compared to $385 million that MySpace is expected to nab.  With such a phenomenal growth in audience and engagement metrics, there is no surprise many online marketers have their eye on Facebook.

Omniture and Facebook announced that they have teamed up to provide online marketers with tools that help them with media buying and optimization on Facebook making Facebook a stronger marketing channel.

The outcome of this partnership, which builds on the Facebook’s wealth of social media data and Omniture’s analytics capabilities, includes an automated media buying process as well as a single dashboard to plan, deliver, measure and optimize advertising campaigns. Utilizing Omniture’s toolset, marketers can compare Facebook Ad campaign metrics alongside their other media channels.

This tool empowers online marketers to better engage customers/prospects on Facebook and promote the most relevant content, marketing messages, products and services.

Omniture clients will also benefit from this new partnership as it helps them generate reports specifically designed to understand the effectiveness of their Ads for Facebook elements such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Google recently re-introduced its Click to Call ads feature. With the wide spread use of smart phones and the growth of mobile search, Google has decided to take another look at Click to Call advertising concept they introduced a couple of years ago. At the time, the focus was mostly on the desktop where calling was not as easy and maybe that is why it was shelved for a while.

Searchers are provided with two options: they can either click to call your business or click and visit your URL. When people search Google using their mobile phones, it is much easier for them to have a voice call with a business using their mobile phone than doing so on a desktop. Now it is possible to make it easier for prospects to reach you by adding a location-specific business phone number in Google ads. Searchers can click to call you the same way they click to visit your website. Google doesn’t charge users for clicks to place calls though the users’ standard carrier rates apply.

The best part of this is that even if you have multiple business locations, because mobile ads can be served based on user’s physical location, you can serve the ad with the closest store location.

You first need to add location extensions to your Google AdWords PPC campaign. You can then give each of your business locations its corresponding business phone number (this can be done in Google Local Business Center). AdWords will display the business phone of your nearest location to where the user is.

Location extensions are available for ads within Google properties such as Google and Google Maps, and some Google Search Network sites and work on mobile devices with full internet browser (e.g., iPhone, Andriod). Currently Click to Call does not appear in the Content Network or on AdSense for Mobile apps, but that might change. The cost of a click to call to your business is the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

You can review how many calls you’ve received for each Keyword, Ad Group, or Campaign in the Campaigns interface within AdWords by selecting segment button to choose between website visits and phone calls.

Watch video on Click to Call.