Google made an announcement recently that they will be changing their policy with regards to trademarked keywords bidding. Beginning 4th June 2009, Google will no longer monitor or restrict previously trademarked keywords for ads served to users in South Africa.

Up until now trademark owners could enjoy a monopoly on trademark terms in South Africa by asking Google not to let any other party target its trademarks as keywords. The new bidding policy will impact the costs and strategies of advertising a trademarked brand through Google's AdWords program. 

For some brands this may result in significant increases in costs. What this effectively means, is on previously trademarked brand keyword terms, there will now be an equal opportunity for all advertisers to bid on these terms. Brands, thereby, no longer have exclusivity on trademarked terms on Google.

Acceleration Media has developed an approach to counter these affects. To read more on this approach, download Acceleration Media’s strategy in combating these changes below. 

Acceleration_Media_Google_TradeMark_Policy_Changes_May 2009.pdf (264.52 kb)

A Media Planning Tool helps you or your outsourced media planners to integrate all your planning needs into one system and automate them. All site selections, RFP’s, proposals, Media Schedules and Insertion Orders are created through the system.

This saves time by cutting out the numerous emails, phone calls and faxes usually involved in negotiations, proposals and pricing. Since the publisher must complete all proposals in full before submitting them, there is less chance that certain information the agency needs might not be there.

The system cuts down the possibility of error when proposals are manually captured into a spreadsheet. It also frees up the media planner’s time so that he or she is able to focus more on strategy and planning rather than on admin.

It sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often this crucial step is omitted. Without clear objectives, the planning process becomes directionless. This is not merely understanding who your target market is (an important part, of course) but how you want them to interact with you and how you will measure this. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, enter that competition or make an online purchase? What are you doing to help them achieve these objectives? How easy is it for clients to interact with you?

To get a handle on ROI from an online marketing campaign, you need to know what it will cost you and how effective it is/was. Knowing the costs of an online marketing campaign is relatively easy; calculating its effectiveness less so.

Different companies measure effectiveness in different ways. Some say that effectiveness is determined by increases in sales volume (that is, obviously, the most likely response), but others believe that effectiveness is gauged by the number of leads generated by a marketing tactic or program.

It gets messier yet - other metrics abound including number of press releases or pieces of mail, number of new customers, number of web hits or visitors, awareness changes (or the extent to which people are more aware of your product), impressions (number of articles in the press multiplied by the potential readership of each publication), content analysis, recall measures, and on and on and on.

• Test various combinations of creative size, color, copy and layout to get the best response
• Increase the weight of the combinations that are most successful in terms of the response metric used to measure the success of the campaign (click-through, sign-ups and etc.)
• The offer on the creative should be compelling enough to draw people in

Remember, media planners cannot make changes to creative.  It is therefore important to ensure there is a good relationship between planners and creative designers to continually increase response rates on campaigns.

So many online marketers invest heavily in putting together stunning creative and placing their ads on the most popular Web sites, yet don't give a second thought to the page a user will arrive on after he or she has clicked on an ad.

It's a good idea to experiment with different landing pages to see which of them are most successful in driving the behavior you want from your audience. All too often users simply end up on your company's home page, left to their own devices to find information about the product advertised in your ad. Does it work best to direct a user to a page that offers detailed product information, or to send the user to a registration form? Which headlines and body content work best out of a set of options? These are questions that are worth asking and answering through experimentation.

There is no golden rule about how often one should optimize campaigns. Test optimization frequencies to determine the best timing for your campaigns. If you are currently optimizing placements on a monthly basis, start optimizing twice a month. If you are optimizing every fortnight, start optimizing weekly. Metrics can be improved by optimizing more frequently, so go ahead and try it out for a couple months/weeks to see if it produces significant results.