SES London 2008 – European Search Marketing Case Studies
February 26th, 2008 by Simon HeseltineThis session, headed by Mike Grehan has 3 presenters talking about European Search Marketing through a selection of case studies.
The first presenter to be called to the podium is Andy Atkins-Kruger who is covering PPC campaigns previously run for Icelandair.
The competitors in this marketplace are mostly big, inflexible ‘dinosaurs’. Icelandair is more nimble, flying their marketing campaigns under the radar (pardon the pun).
The biggest initial success for Icelandair was as a result of centralizing their campaigns, running it all through a single agency, which resulted in a reduction in costs and increased performance while also reducing response time.
Things that you can usefully benchmark
- CPA
- CPC
- Keyword set ratios – performance
- Keyword success types
- SE performance
- Landing page types
- Demand to population – share of voice
When examining the different locales, it was noticed that German had a longer tail than English – hence next year will see a very large increase in keywords for the German market.
Tips for PPC success
- Make sure your tracking is great
- Do regular long tail uploads
- Look at your negative keywords
- Don’t assume, measure and examine the results: i.e. Cheap flights isn’t always the best keyword
CPS ranked by country
- Germany (most expensive)
- UK
- Holland
- France (least expensive)
Next up Andrew Girdwood on the Hilton.
Hilton spread throughout the world, so the initial challenge was to identify the appropriate communication channel. With such a large brand, they were able to have 3 way meetings with the Search Engines to discuss strategies for the brand.
The campaigns were expanded to targeting 64 countries worldwide from five. Copy & landing pages were created in 10 languages. Used local language managers to understand regional variances of campaigns. Must have a strong campaign structure (brand and generic split into own campaigns to allow budget control) Good quality landing pages
The new structure enabled then to optimize and manage the needs of 250+ hotels across the globe. In addition to Google Maps, also added in Yahoo travel & MSN adcenter (demographic targeting worked well).
Problems: Servers moved to states. Duplicate content on multiple websites. Some IT outsouurced to India. Not able to view the source code before it went live. Development windows fully booked for 2 years. Press releases in nearly a dozen languages
Local business ads – 75:1 ROI and massive incremental growth
Tips:
- Don’t translate – localize
- View the SERPs with the right IP geography
- Understand how Google works (internal structure / divisions)
- Make yourself available to all stakeholders
- Understand each locale as well as you can.
Last up Jaron Schaechte, coming from the project management side of things
- 65% of projects fail to deliver on their objectives.
- Geographical differences are huge.
- USA – SEO 2008- Unversal, blended, local
- UK / Germany / Holland – SEO 2006 – Leading in Europe
- Scandinavia – SEO 2005 – SEs are still working on local language
- Eastern Europe – SEO 1999 – Strong competition and expansion – grey hat still works
- Think sequential and iterative, not parallel (unless you have massive resources)
- Methodology, QA and tools are critical.
- Understand the local search market -
- Google does not handle Finnish well.
- In the Czech republic – Seznam & Atlas are the main players (Google 20% market share).
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