Rich Ads In Search
Now that the Yahoo! and Bing Search Alliance transition has been completed in the UK, FR and IE markets, we are going to see the re-introduction of a Search product, originally brought to the market by Yahoo! in November 2010, call Rich Ads In Search. This product is targeted towards brand advertising in Paid Search and offers a richer, more dynamic experience for users when searching on advertisers brand terms.
So what are Rich Ads In Search? They are brand ads incorporating either a logo, video, site-links or form boxes to allow the searcher to engage with the ad, whilst not leaving the search results page. Videos expand to play within the search ad, logos and links are clickable and direct the user to the relevant landing pages of the site applicable to the messaging in the link. Brand owners dominate the North Ad positions in the listings, pushing any rival bidders to the East positions.
Having a logo or a video in the ad has proved to be successful in the US market when the product was released post Search Alliance transition, with ads experiencing increased in CTR of between 25% and 40% according to Microsoft data. Previously, only available on Yahoo! campaigns in the UK, Rich Ads in Search will soon be available through the adCenter platform, serving the more engaging brand ads simultaneously across Yahoo!’s results page and Bing results page.
The biggest enhancement for this product though, is the pricing. Previously the product was priced on a fixed tenancy basis for a fixed fee depending on the volume of searches forecasted. This proved challenging for advertisers to take advantage of the product as many advertisers were not in a position to offset fixed budget for a branding campaign without guaranteed delivery of impressions. This has now changed for the better and these Ad formats will now be available on a CPC basis, meaning this product is a ‘must have’ within any Brand campaign for Paid Search. It can be measured against traditional Search ROI metrics and optimised as a regular Search campaign would be.
This product is also ideally positioned between the Search and Display aspects of Digital Media buying. Advertisers can utilise Display or Offline creative assets in these Search campaigns, literally bringing TV ads or Display Videos to the Search page without having to go through a Video sharing website.
The product is currently being tested in the UK and is likely to be available to all advertisers in July 2012 managed through Microsoft’s adCenter technology platform.
