Paid Search Spend in th...

You are invited to partner with DM Confidential on many of the high-caliber programs that serve the customer acquisition industry. DM Confidential offers a wide range of resources, from publications to award programs to networking events to webinars. DM Confidential offers limited sponsorship opportunities online, in print and in-person, so please reserve your space early. Memorial Day is just around the bend, which means the summer travel season is too. AdGooroo uses this time of year to offer a glimpse into paid search spending in the travel category so far in 2013. The company reports that there’s a downward trend happening and that Google might be to blame. Paid search spend in travel descends According to AdGooroo , paid search spend in the travel category on U.S. AdWords from January through April totaled $238 million, which is down 19 percent from the $295 million in spend in the same time period in 2012, and down nearly 25 percent from the same time period in 2011. Source: AdGooroo With the same downward trend happening during the summer months of previous years, AdGooroo forecasts that paid search spend in the travel category from May through August will amount to $242 million, which would reflect a 19 percent dip from the same period last year. The culprit It would appear that travel marketers are just reining back their paid search spending, but AdGooroo says that’s not what’s going on here. “For instance, we found 217 advertisers in the travel category on U.S. AdWords in Q1 2012 and 228 in Q1 2013,” writes Gregg Hamilton, senior vice president of research and analytics and business development at AdGooroo. Then what about the ability of travel sites to better retain users that previously had good experiences? Maybe. AdGooroo says that a more probable reason for this downward trend in paid search spend in the travel vertical is Google – more specifically, the search giant’s spending on their own travel marketing campaigns. “After all, the decline in PPC spend began in 2011, a year in which Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder launched (in September and August, respectively),” Hamilton writes. “It would not be a stretch to conclude that the presence of these new Google features in the first SERP results — the travel equivalent of their Product Listing Ads in that they display a provider AND a price — may be poaching large amounts of clickthrough traffic (and thus PPC spend) from the paid ads on the page.” Top travel PPC advertisers in 2012 In 2012, Kayak was the top travel PPC advertiser, according to AdGooroo. It was followed by Priceline, Orbitz, TripAdvisor and CheapOair. Here are the full rankings: 1)   Kayak: 883 million impressions 2)   Priceline: 699 million impressions 3)   Orbitz: 670 million impressions 4)   TripAdvisor: 663 million impressions 5)   CheapOair: 629 million impressions 6)   Expedia: 595 million impressions 7)   Booking.com: 538 million impressions 8)   Travelzoo: 469 million impressions 9)   BookingBuddy: 353 million impressions 10) Hotels.com: 349 million impressions Top travel keywords in Q1 2013 “Enterprise” leads all travel keywords in the first quarter of 2013; in the same quarter last year, the term was No. 4 on the list. “Cheap flights,” last year’s top term, is No. 2 on the list, followed by “hotels,” “travelocity” and “cheap tickets.” “US airways” (No. 11), “rental cars” (No. 17) and “cheap hotels” (No. 21) all saw big jumps in popularity in the past year. “Disney” (No. 20) dropped eight spots from last year, the biggest decline of any of the top 25 travel keywords in Q1 2013. Source: AdGooroo According to comScore , the “Travel – Car Rental” site category received 7.7 million unique visitors in March, up 19 percent from February. AdGooroo notes that “enterprise” has a “remarkable” a 12.1 percent click-through rate (CTR). However, “expedia” boasts a CTR of 29.5 percent, the highest of any of these terms. Hamilton puts this in perspective by saying that nearly one-third of the time a paid ad for Expedia is displayed on a Google search engine results page (SERP) it gets clicked. The average CTR was 8.1 percent. “Vrbo,” which stands for “vacation rental by owner,” is a term that marketers should note. It ranked No. 51 in Q1 2013, up from No. 78 last year, which may spotlight a trend. Meanwhile, searches for “airlines” turned up 10.6 ads per SERP, the most of any term; searches for “greyhound” turned up fewer than one ad per SERP. AdGooroo also notes that “vacation packages” was the term with the most bidders (259), while “greyhound” had the fewest (four). Kenshoo’s “Global Search Advertising Trends” report for the first quarter of 2013 found that global paid search ad spending rose 15 percent year-over-year, driven by a 24 percent increase in U.S. search ad spend. It also found that the average global CTR was 1.7 percent, up from 1.0 percent in the first quarter of 2012. By Jason Hahn The post Paid Search Spend in the Travel Category Is Down 19% so far in 2013, Thanks to Google appeared first on DM Confidential .

Target’s New Cartwheel ...

Target recently launched a new digital coupon app called Cartwheel that is supposed to make shopping more social. It begins with a great idea; personalized digital coupons but from there, the wheel gets a little wobbly. Here’s how it works. First, you have to log on to the Cartwheel site and sign-up using your Facebook login.  You must have a Facebook account to use the program and that seems like an unnecessary hurdle. The point is to get more people to shop at Target, right? But if I don’t want to give you access to my Facebook account, then I’m out. Hmmm. . . Once you’re in, you’re presented with a grid of themed, coupon flipcards. If you don’t see what you want, you can use the search box to find coupons on a specific item or browse more than 20 coupon collections such as Baby Essentials, Pet Love, Men’s Must-haves, etc. It’s a lot to take in. Here’s a row dedicated to Memorial Day BBQ’s. When you click a card it flips over. Now you start choosing buttons. The “add” button puts the coupon into your Cartwheel. The “share” button posts the offer to Facebook (sorry Twitter, no go). The “details” button shows the expiration date, rules for redemption and how many others have redeemed this coupon. Right now, all of the offers I could see ranged from 5% to 10% off an item. Not bad, but not stellar, either. You can use each discount up to 4 times unless otherwise noted. What makes this a better deal is that you can combine Cartwheel deals with manufacturer coupons and Target’s Red Card discount as well. That’s what us couponers call double dipping. That’s also how you turn a good deal into a “I got this for free” deal. Target limits the number of coupons you can load per trip. They give you ten slots to start, six a day after that. To unlock more spaces you have to earn badges (*rolls eyes*) by shopping and sharing and following the red brick road. Now it’s time to go redeem your coupons and that’s where it gets a little tricky.  All of your current offers get combined into one bar code. The foolproof way to go is to print the bar code page while you’re still home and on the website. But printing just feels wrong – these are digital coupons after all. If you like to live on the edge, just go to Target and shop. When you hit the checkout, call up the app on your phone. Not the Target app, from what I can see, Cartwheel doesn’t show up on the store app. You have to log-in through Facebook and pull it up on your browser. (Not sure if you can get there from the Facebook mobile app. . . ) Do Target stores have free Wifi? Find Cartwheel, login, find your page, find your bar code, show the bar code to the cashier, wait for her to say, “huh, I’ve never seen this before, let me call my manager,” hand her more coupons wait for her to stop being confused by two sets of coupons, pay for your order and you’re done. Easy! Target could simplify the whole process if they just included the Cartwheel barcode in the Target app. (Feel free to correct me if I’m not getting this right.) As for the forced social sharing in order to get more coupons – that could work. Women have been known to dumpster dive for more inserts, so what’s a little sharing between friends if it means an extra 10% off hot dog buns. Target, I’m giving you a “A” for effort but a “C+” for execution.

Google Starts Using Com...

Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire yet: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your own photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently returned the right results. This search is built into Google+, but you can also use the regular Google search and use the query term [ my photos of xyz ] to find the right images. That’s a huge step forward for photo search in Google. As Google rightly notes, “searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual.” I know I’m anything but diligent about tagging my photos, so this new search feature actually allowed me to find random images I had uploaded to Picasa Web a long time ago. As Google’s Vic Gundotra noted when he announced the new features for Google+ Photos at I/O last week, Google wants to help its users manage their photos. “Organizing photos is often a hassle,” he said, but oddly enough, the company didn’t announce this search feature at I/O and instead waited a week before launching it.

Chrome For Android Gets...

Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now disappear as you scroll down. Also new in this version is a somewhat simplified search experience: searching from the omnibox, Google says, will “keep your search query visible in the omnibox, making it easier to edit, and show more on your search result page.” The company has been experimenting with a similar feature in the desktop version of Chrome. It essentially turns the omnibox into the Google.com search form instead of switching to the URL for your search and then replicating the search interface it on the search results page. On the desktop, this always throws me for a loop, but given the space constraints on a smaller screen, this will probably allow for a few more lines of search results to show without the need to scroll down. Other new features in this update include support for client-side certificates (something that’s often needed to connect to enterprise intranets) and tab history support for tablets (so you can use a long press on the back button to bring up your tab history. What About iOS? The iPhone and iPad versions of Chrome, the company today announced , will also soon get voice search. This update should launch in the next few days and will allow users to ask questions like “what’s the weather in Rome?” or “How many miles from San Antonio to Dallas?”

Foursquare Introduces ‘...

As Foursquare evolves , it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks out new venues for you. In its blog post today, Foursquare “dares” you to get “super specific” with your searches. Basically, the company is saying that they have enough data to find any place that you could imagine. One of the example searches is: “A cheap sushi place that’s nearby and open now, but that I haven’t been to yet.” Again, this is a search performed based on all of the data that Foursquare has collected over the years, but its first move into a more conversational search experience. Companies like Google are jumping on this bandwagon as well. When you perform a search like the one suggested above, you just get results as you’d normally expect. Foursquare is processing these inquiries surprisingly fast, which means that you’re likely to settle on a place quickly: The interesting part comes with the new filter options, where you can hone in on a venue based on whether you or a friend have checked in before, by price, if the venue has a special or if you’ve saved it to check out later: I feel like with this dynamic search and filter options, Foursquare has made the jump to become a true utility that might even cancel out a Google search or a Yelp deep-dive. That’s a pretty bold thought, but when you think about how much data Foursquare truly has, a lot of things that we haven’t even seen yet are possible. The filter options makes all of this data more manageable and of course, usable, to get you to try out more places. It’s also an incentive for more businesses to adopt Foursquare’s offerings, such as specials. If people start filtering their searches in the way that Foursquare suggests, then it behooves these restaurants and bars to have multiple specials lined up and ready to go. Think of it as a highlighted ad in Google search.