Coffee break with clients: Swanson® Chicken dips into click-to-play video

In part 4 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Kaylyn Miller, Associate Search Director at MEC, who shared with us how her team incorporated click-to-play video ads into a recipe campaign for Swanson® Chicken, a division of Campbell Soup Company. The video campaign was established to distribute a new cooking video during two key dipping occasions - New Year's and Super Bowl. The campaign ran for six weeks, starting in mid-December and concluding at the end of January. During our interview, Kaylyn shared the following:

What were the goals of using click-to-play video ads?
We were tasked with distributing the Frank's® Red Hot® Buffalo Chicken Dip recipe, made with Swanson® Premium Chunk Chicken. We were already successfully directing users to print the recipe using paid search. However, we knew that keyword targeting could be a powerful tool for video distribution as well. Our goal was to use contextual targeting on the Google Content Network for cost efficient video views. Knowing that this strategy worked well for clients in the entertainment industry, we were striving to keep playback rate and cost per view in line with Google’s entertainment benchmarks.

How did you set up and execute the campaign?
We began by looking at the most relevant ad groups from our paid search campaign, including buffalo chicken dip, appetizer and dip, chicken recipes, New Year's recipes and Super Bowl recipes. The ad groups were then modified to include broader keywords to effectively target the Google Content Network. From there, additional ad groups were created, such as hot wings, cooking videos, easy recipes and general recipe words to obtain greater reach.

Three distinct starter images were created for the video - Everyday, New Year’s and Super Bowl (images below) - based on the events of a given week. We used the best practice of making the starter image a YouTube-like still, instead of a display ad, to increase consumer engagement.

Click to view images - Everyday, New Year's, Super Bowl

How did the click-to-play video campaigns perform?

The campaign's performance exceeded our expectations. In the 6 weeks it ran, the click-to-play video campaign received more than 34,000 video views with 42% of the videos viewed to completion. In addition, this was a good test for us to see how CPG would perform since there aren’t many benchmarks for this category to-date. We saw a lower cost per view and higher play rate than Entertainment industry benchmarks, a space where we assumed users would be more engaged.

In addition to success found through video viewing, we also found success in on-site engagement. While recipe prints are the main goal of the paid search campaign, they were secondary for the video campaign. We were pleased to find that the consumers who were engaged in the video carried that engagement over to the site. The download rate associated with video plays was 203% higher than the stand-alone paid search campaign, keeping the cost per recipe print in line with the search averages, despite the more premium CPCs found in the video campaign.

What did you learn from this campaign?
This campaign validates that click-to-play videos can supplement paid search to expand reach while maintaining consumer engagement for a client.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
We may have used a portion of the search budget to drive traffic to sites where the video was being distributed by our Social Media and Display teams, but most likely the video wouldn’t have been promoted through keyword targeting.

For more information on click-to-play video ads, visit the AdWords Help Center. For more information on how to prepare this recipe for your next dipping occasion, visit buffalochickendip.com.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Coffee break with clients - AAA and Razorfish improve user experience with Ad Sitelinks

For part 3 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Ryan Van Horn, Account Coordinator at the digital agency Razorfish, who shared with us how his team used Ad Sitelinks to improve the user experience on branded search queries for the travel services and insurance company AAA. Here's what Ryan had to say:

What was the primary campaign/product you were marketing for the client?

AAA’s main focus is to drive consumers to sign up for AAA Membership service. In addition, AAA has several other metrics that are considered when determining the success of the program, such as travel bookings and user interaction with their maps services.

What was the client's goal?

Essentially, AAA wanted to improve the user experience on branded search terms. Consumers identify with the AAA brand in different ways. For some consumers, AAA is synonymous with roadside assistance, while others may associate AAA with insurance or discounts when traveling. The client wanted to find a solution that allowed the messaging on branded terms to convey the different services offered and to understand which message converted better, ultimately informing future testing opportunities.

What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?

Ad Sitelinks have allowed the team to tailor ad copy that encompassed the various AAA services by leveraging four additional links below the main ad copy. The links allow us to send consumers deeper into the AAA website and direct them to the most relevant landing page.

Can you describe the implementation process?

We chose the four services deemed most valuable by the client - Membership (join), Travel (bookings), Discounts, and AAA Map Services (Triptik Travel Planner) - and created a link for each service. We then selected the most relevant landing page for each link and created tracking that allowed us to monitor the performance of each individual link.

(click to view image)

How did the Google solution perform?

The implementation of the Ad Sitelinks helped to improve both clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as consumers were able to click on the link that was most relevant to the service they were interested in and sent them to the most relevant landing page.

What improvements did the client see as a result of this campaign?

The program saw significant improvements in performance across the board.

• CTR increased by 40%.
• The average CPC decreased by 11%.
• Overall conversion rate increased by 11%.
• The cost-per-conversion was 14% more efficient after implementation.

Did any results surprise you?

While we were not surprised that overall performance improved, we were surprised by how much the performance improved. Initially, the Ad Sitelinks were launched within a campaign that only included the core branded AAA keywords. This particular campaign is a key membership volume driver and already had extremely high CTRs and conversion rates. To see CTRs increase by 6% and conversion rates increase by 11% was a much higher increase than we anticipated.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?

Had Ad Sitelinks not been made available, we wouldn’t have had the ability to improve the overall user experience. Ad Sitelinks have allowed us to give the users options of other services offered by AAA. The program would have likely remained steady and would have not seen the improvements in performance. Overall, we feel that this ad placement enhanced searchers' interaction with the AAA brand while simultaneously improving performance of the core metrics.

For more information on Ad Sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Coffee break with clients: Proving the value of display with View-through conversion tracking

Our "Coffee break" series has provided us the chance to have great conversations with clients across industries, who have successfully used Google solutions to meet their marketing goals.

This time we sat down with Patrick Wang, Manager Online Marketing & Technologies from the search engine marketing company LeadQual, which implemented View-through conversion tracking to successfully demonstrate the positive impact of display advertising to Chegg, an ROI-driven textbook rental company founded in 2007 to help college students reduce their book purchase costs.

Here's what Patrick shared:

What was the client's goal?
Chegg was looking to expand its customer base for both rental and buy-back orders. It had more than doubled its growth year / year and had already heavily invested in search, yet had not been satisfied with the success of past display campaigns. We therefore needed a solution that provided reach while also being measurable and cost-effective.

What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?
We ran display campaigns on the Google Content Network, and used view-through-conversion tracking to demonstrate the additive value of display to growing Chegg's user base.

Can you describe the implementation process?
Chegg provided the display creative, with variations by season. We then developed contextually-targeted campaigns around themes such as "textbook," "used textbook" as well as target student groups like "fraternity." From there, we used the placement performance report to see which sites performed well, and moved them into management placements campaigns.

To receive view-through conversion statistics, we made sure that conversion tracking was set up.The campaigns began running in fall 2009 and remain active.

How did the Google solution perform?
By using view-through conversion tracking, we were able to show the client that the sales driven from the display campaign were within its cost/order metrics. We found that a quarter of the conversions came from people who had viewed, but not clicked, on one of Chegg's banner ads. If we simply looked at conversions directly from clicks, the cost-per-conversion would have been well above Chegg's goals.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
Without view-through conversion data, we would have had a difficult time convincing the client to invest in display.

For more information on view-through conversion tracking, please visit the Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Coffee break with clients: the value of branded keywords with Vineyard Vines

Here on the Google Agency Team, we commonly get requests to share case studies, both as a way for you, our agency partners, to feel confident in the effectiveness of a product or strategy, but also for you to learn best practices and be inspired by best in class examples.

To provide you with more case studies more often, we're pleased to bring you a new blog series, "Coffee break with clients." Each post will highlight a brief chat we've had with a client on how he or she has used a Google solution to solve a marketing challenge or meet an advertising goal, focusing on specific steps that you can replicate for your own clients.

For our first post, Google Account Manager Kali Steinman had the opportunity to sit down with Quinn Veysey, Direct Sales Manager of Vineyard Vines, a clothing company known for its fun, comfortable attire. Vineyard Vines worked with Google to execute an experiment to determine the value of branded keywords to its paid search efforts. The company asked itself "are we bidding against ourselves and incurring costs that could be better spent growing the brand?" Here's what Quinn shared:

Q: What were the goals of your experiment?

A: Our goal was to get quantitative data showing whether there was value to bidding on our branded keywords. On one hand, we felt that by bidding on our brand terms, we were paying for keywords that may have been at the top of the organic search result. On the flip side, if we were missing out on conversions/sales, it may be valuable to pay for those terms. Basically, we wanted to take the visceral piece out of the conversation and replace it with facts.

Q: How did you set up and execute the experiment?

A: We worked closely with Google to conduct the experiment in a statistically meaningful manner, from concept, execution, and analysis.

We set up an A/B test in Google AdWords by creating two campaigns, each targeting half of our focus demographic marketing areas (DMAs), distributed so each campaign targeted a similar audience size. The first campaign included brand terms while the second campaign did not. The test ran for 30 days.

Q: How did the Google solution perform?

A: The results were impressive. We realized that by paying for our brand terms, there was only a 33% cannibalization rate - in other words, by not running on branded keywords in paid search, we only made up one third of the clicks with organic traffic, losing out on thousands of incremental visitors to our site. We also found that the conversion rate on branded keywords was 5.12%

Q: What actions, if any, did you take as a result of this campaign?

A: We immediately tripled our ad spend with Google and are still making impressive double digit ROAS.

Q: If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?

A: We would have continued spending precious time debating personal theories on the value of branded keywords to paid search that had no data behind them. We are now taking search much more seriously and are incorporating it as a significant factor in our growth strategy.

For more information on geographic targeting options, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team