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Catherine Schenquerman is an avid traveler and a savvy digital marketer. As the interactive marketing manager for Carnival Cruise Lines, she has been able to merge her love of travel with her interest in experimenting with innovative digital marketing strategies. Since 2006, Carnival Cruise Lines has worked with its digital agency, Razorfish , to implement successful Google search campaigns that both generate new leads and build brand awareness. But Catherine and her team wanted to explore ways to drive bookings as well. They wanted to be more precise about how they connected with customers at the critical moment in the purchasing cycle, when customers were planning vacations and were about to book a cruise. Catherine sat down with Razorfish to review innovative approaches they could try, and they decided to explore contextual targeting using the Google Content Network. Experiment, Measure and Iterate The Razorfish search marketing team quickly got to work. First, they set out to optimize the core components of the campaign within ad groups, and then apply those to their content campaign on the Google Content Network. These optimizations resulted in nearly 400 new ad groups with tightly-themed keyword groupings, each with roughly 8–12 keywords per ad group. The new groupings allowed Carnival to better tailor its messages and precisely focus each message on specific sites and content. Carnival and Razorfish used two Google Content Network tools to measure and fine-tune its efforts. They began by using DoubleClick Ad Planner , a free media planning tool to help identify websites that its target customers are likely to visit, and then used the Placement Performance Report , which shows performance statistics for ads on specific domains and URLs in the Google Content Network. Smooth sailing Within the first few weeks of the Google contextually-targeted campaign, the Carnival team began to see a significant increase in cruise bookings sourced from the campaign. After five weeks, online cruise bookings from the Google Content Network increased 284 percent and delivered a 72 percent reduction in cost per conversion. They also saw a 36 percent increase in leads. “The Content Network proved to be a great new way for us to extend our reach, by giving us both the push and pull,” Schenquerman explained. “The push to associate our ads with relevant content and help stir demand, and the pull to capture someone who says ‘I want to learn more’– and then to pay for that on a cost-per-click basis, makes a lot of sense.” Building on the success of their text ad campaign, Carnival recently decided to start running display ads on the Google Content Network. They applied what they learned from their search campaigns to run high performing display ads. Razorfish and Carnival Cruise Lines have been very successful in bring the science of search to the art of display. Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network

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

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

Over the past year, we've focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “ above the fold ” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads. We also developed innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns . Today, in response to feedback from many of you who run branding campaigns, we're announcing a new filter that allows you to show your ads only on AdSense sites among the 1000 largest on the web as defined by DoubleClick Ad Planner . This new feature will ensure that your ads reach a large number of users, but only on well-known sites best suited for branding goals. To activiate the new filter, select ‘non Ad Planner 1000’ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account. Keep in mind that not all sites in the Ad Planner 1000 are in the Google Content Network and that your ads will only show on those sites that are. It's important to note that the Ad Planner 1000 does not take performance statistics into account, and that by enabling this filter, you may be excluding many sites that are relevant to your advertised products. Additionally, with this or any of our other brand filters enabled, your campaign will run on fewer sites, so you may need to raise your bids if you’d like to maintain your impression levels. We recommend experimenting to determine which feature or combination of features best meets your goals. We hope this new feature gives you greater control and assurance over where your ads appear and makes the Google Content Network an even more powerful environment for effective branding campaigns. Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

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New Tool for Brand Advertisers on the Google Content Network

Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, has one of the most recognizable logos in the sporting goods industry. A silhouette of Michael Jordan mid-jump graces the footwear, apparel, and equipment that make Jordan one of the most coveted basketball brands in the US. Building energy Although his likeness still appears on merchandise, Michael Jordan retired from his legendary role in the game in 1999, posing a challenge for Jordan Brand-- keeping Michael Jordan top of mind for younger consumers. Looking for new ways to excite and engage youth within basketball culture, Jordan Brand turned to its agency partner, Wieden+Kennedy , New York (W+K, NY). Together, they hatched an idea for a campaign that veered from the TV campaigns they traditionally ran. As expected, they built an inventive, unique campaign around a basketball player. But the player was neither Michael Jordan nor another NBA star. It was Leroy Smith. The man, the campaign “Sophomore year of high school, Leroy Smith took Michael’s spot on the junior varsity team,” explains Jason Clement, Director of Findability and Search for W+K NY, of the true story that inspired the campaign. “Michael points to that as the moment when he realized he needed to work and train harder to become really good.” With the campaign’s central character chosen (and the real Leroy Smith on board), the Jordan and Wieden+Kennedy teams crafted a narrative that would pull in their audience. Played by actor Charlie Murphy, the campaign’s Leroy sells motivational DVDs, promising to teach viewers the same skills he used to dominate Michael Jordan. The DVDs, along with posters, an iPhone app, and music videos can be found on his site, www.getyourbasketballon.com . And of course the campaign’s Leroy also has a YouTube Channel, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter feed to communicate with his fans. But to create buzz and hype, Wieden and Kennedy and Jordan chose not to brand the campaign. Leroy Smith Banner ad that ran on the Google Content Network The ultimate forum And it was the discovery of this content that was key to the campaign’s success. The campaign’s six-week run opened with “Leroy” himself pitching his motivational DVDs in infomercial-style television ads during the NBA playoffs. Google AdWords search ads sent interested users to Leroy’s site. To reach additional basketball fans where they were actively spending their time, the Jordan and W+K NY teams used the Google Content Network to place a wide array of display and text ads on blogs and fan sites. By using keyword targeting to automatically place their ads on relevant sites on the Google Content Network, the team was able to find the right locations for their creative more efficiently. The strategy proved effective. They found a lot of niche basketball blogs where he could reach their target with very, very little waste and get them excited about the campaign. Once their ads were running, the reporting and optimization controls within the Content Network enabled the W+K NY team to see which sites were working best and adjust their targeting appropriately. As excitement over the Leroy Smith campaign grew, it was clear that it was striking a chord with its audience. A number of blogs had double-digit click through rates. People were taking screenshots of the ad on their blogs and then writing posts about how much they liked having the ad on their site. When all that enthusiasm was translated into numbers, the Leroy Smith campaign had generated 188 million impressions and 296,000 clicks over the six weeks it ran. And users were highly engaged with the content, showing very low abandonment rates once on site. Video proved compelling as well, with 27,000 YouTube channel views and 229,000 views for Leroy Smith’s “Get Your Basketball On” infomercial video . Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Jordan's Get Your Basketball On campaign on the Google Content Network

Display advertising is changing rapidly with the emergence of audience data, engaging new ad formats, dynamic creatives, and new technologies. We'd like to invite you to a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategy. Specifically, we’ll discuss: Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to optimizing your campaigns How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST Register here Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Upcoming webinar: Uncovering opportunities with display advertising