By Lee Odden

Moderated by Simon Heseltine, Senior Marketing Manager for AOL with panelists including: Eli Goodman from comScore, Justin Merickel of Efficient Frontier and Doug McMillen from Microsoft Advertising.

First up is Justin Merickel from Efficient Frontier, which runs about $180m in PPC through their platform. Justin talked about two main trends:

The changing SERP. Data comes front and center to the results page

Justin shows a SERP page for “bottled water” where the top PPC ads display images of bottled water. Not sure of it’s impact. However, if you’re not leveraging Google features (like images in PPC or local listings) you’re missing out on significant visibility.

Advertisers need to think about how to get their products and services into the new multimedia search results page.

Information is coming in the search results page in different formats. For example, “mortgage” displays comparison information between lenders right into the search results page. It’s therefore, critical for companies to gain coverage in Google on these new types if data inclusion.

How? What kinds of structured data do companies have to use for inclusion? What kinds of assets do they have? (Can I hear a DAO?)

Location, product extension, comparison

Benefits: Long tail automation, specific creative, prices and offers, automates a significant manual effort, compliments SEO
The end result is greater coverage in search results.

Great example: “Asics running shoes” for Zappos. #2 in Paid search results, top 3 image PPC ads top right and 2 of the 5 image search results.

Efficient Frontier has a platform that allows you to provide product feeds.

Creative management means developing feeds, mapping feeds to a creative template, generating ad variations from templates, push data to search engines via API and updating creative based on a feed update such as price changes & out of stock.

The second point Merickel covered: The auction moves beyond search

Is display now search like? There are two big trends driving display towards search-like performace, each with optimization implications: Rapid expansion of auction-based access to inventory. Also access to targeting data decoupled from media.

When exposed to both paid search and display ads, consumers were found to be nearly twice as likely to make an online purchase on a retailer’s web site.

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