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Google remains the top online video property in June 2010. Top U.S. Online Video Properties

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Top U.S. Online Video Properties June 2010

From comScore’s May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time. YouTube All Time Video Views High

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YouTube Streams All-Time High of 14.6 Billion Videos Viewed

To improve the AdWords experience, Google is testing a new tool that helps advertisers optimize their account. The AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE, does this by letting advertisers accurately test and measure changes to their keywords and bids, ad groups and placements. This video describes step 1 of running an experiment: setting campaign experiment parameters.

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Google Adwords Campaign Experiments

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

If you haven’t tried gmail’s video chat feature you ought to! I have a pretty large house and recently discovered its much easier to reach and speak with my children via chat either text or video because they are often online too. Video Chatting If you have a Mac,  its real easy to set up and start video chatting. Gmail automatically grabs your camera and feeds the video into your gmail account. Give Gmail Video Chatting a try. Postscript: This post was originally written on May 19, 2010 yet inadvertently went unpublished. I have posted every single day since September 1, 2009 on this blog and I’m somewhat miffed my preoccupation with other matters caused me not get this piece posted on time…

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VideoChatting Is The New Intercom In My House