Channel Sales (partnerships with local resellers of AdWords) is one of Google’s fastest growing divisions. That’s according to Global Channel Sales Director Todd Rowe who was interviewed along with an executive entourage in a Google mega-panel at ILM ’14 today.

James Croom, Google My Business Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google
Max Frause, Global Business Lead, Google Shopping, Google
Christine Merritt, Head of Premier SMB Partnerships, Channel Sales North America, Google
Todd Rowe, Managing Director, Global Channel Sales, Google
Francisco Uribe, Adwords Express Product Manager, Google
Moderator: Matt Booth, CEO, Connectivity

According to Rowe, this was born in a meeting with Larry, Sergey, and then-CEO Eric Schmidt about tackling the SMB sector through partners. And that’s a departure from Google’s normal “invented here” way (my words). So the channel sales division was born out of this necessity.

“The good news is there’s 100 million SMBs,” said Rowe. “The bad news is there’s 100 million SMBs. How do you wrap your arms around that?”

The discussion, moderated by former BIA/Kelsey Chief Strategy Offer Matt Booth, reached into many functional areas relevant to local and SMBs. Those included product listings ads, AdWords Express, Google My Business (GMB), and of course mobile.

— Product listings ads are growing within search results, particularly in mobile where users are high-intent shoppers. The product data are primarily from retailers and partners, but the next step is to get better real time inventory data for SMBs (likely through partners).

— Listings integrity is another sticky area, given the quickly changing SMB landscape and the fact that they aren’t always self-policing location data in Google (including Maps). So finding the right sources for accurate listings is an ongoing strategy for GMB.

— The biggest question coming from AdWords reseller partners is how to offer YouTube to advertisers in more turnkey ways. “We are working to provide more scalable ways to create content,” said Christine Merritt. “If we can scale it well for SMBs, it will take off.”

— The way towards this video goal, according Rowe is to templatize — in both production and distribution. SMB video quality has lots of variance, given typical cost of high production quality. Local videographers, templates and standardized pricing are the path.

— In mobile, the strategy is to go beyond the cliche of “mobile-first” in cases where the market is “mobile-only” (emerging markets). “It’s a great force function to design something simple that lets them get online with google and grow their business,” said Frause.

The post At ILM 2014: Google Mega Panel Wants More Partners, Video and ‘Mobile-Only’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Channel Sales (partnerships with local resellers of AdWords) is one of Google’s fastest growing divisions. That’s according to Global Channel Sales Director Todd Rowe who was interviewed along with an executive entourage in a Google mega-panel at ILM ’14 today.

James Croom, Google My Business Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google
Max Frause, Global Business Lead, Google Shopping, Google
Christine Merritt, Head of Premier SMB Partnerships, Channel Sales North America, Google
Todd Rowe, Managing Director, Global Channel Sales, Google
Francisco Uribe, Adwords Express Product Manager, Google
Moderator: Matt Booth, CEO, Connectivity

According to Rowe, this was born in a meeting with Larry, Sergey, and then-CEO Eric Schmidt about tackling the SMB sector through partners. And that’s a departure from Google’s normal “invented here” way (my words). So the channel sales division was born out of this necessity.

“The good news is there’s 100 million SMBs,” said Rowe. “The bad news is there’s 100 million SMBs. How do you wrap your arms around that?”

The discussion, moderated by former BIA/Kelsey Chief Strategy Offer Matt Booth, reached into many functional areas relevant to local and SMBs. Those included product listings ads, AdWords Express, Google My Business (GMB), and of course mobile.

— Product listings ads are growing within search results, particularly in mobile where users are high-intent shoppers. The product data are primarily from retailers and partners, but the next step is to get better real time inventory data for SMBs (likely through partners).

— Listings integrity is another sticky area, given the quickly changing SMB landscape and the fact that they aren’t always self-policing location data in Google (including Maps). So finding the right sources for accurate listings is an ongoing strategy for GMB.

— The biggest question coming from AdWords reseller partners is how to offer YouTube to advertisers in more turnkey ways. “We are working to provide more scalable ways to create content,” said Christine Merritt. “If we can scale it well for SMBs, it will take off.”

— The way towards this video goal, according Rowe is to templatize — in both production and distribution. SMB video quality has lots of variance, given typical cost of high production quality. Local videographers, templates and standardized pricing are the path.

— In mobile, the strategy is to go beyond the cliche of “mobile-first” in cases where the market is “mobile-only” (emerging markets). “It’s a great force function to design something simple that lets them get online with google and grow their business,” said Frause.

The post At ILM 2014: Google Mega Panel Wants More Partners, Video and 'Mobile-Only' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

During a Webinar yesterday, BIA/Kelsey’s Senior Analyst Mike Boland, along with Marchex VP of Operations Travis Fairchild and Head of SEM Cody Kunning discussed how businesses and those managing online and mobile advertising campaigns can best maximize performance with Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, which are set to kick off on July 22nd.

Enhanced Campaigns is a topic that has been talked about quite a bit over the last few months. It was discussed at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading In Local conference in March (read Leading In Local 2013: Enhanced Campaigns: Google Speaks), and Mikel Boland has written about it extensively (see Google “Enhances” Cross-Platform SEM: What Does it Mean? and More on Google’s Paid Search “Enhancements”: The SMB Angle)

Marchex brought additional firepower to the discussion. Fairchild, Kunning and team have spent the last several months testing hundreds of customer campaigns on the new AdWords Enhanced platform. Here are some of the key takeaways that advertisers must be aware of:

1. Do not wait to begin testing.. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning stressed throughout the Webinar that testing is critical to understanding how these changes will impact the way your advertising budget gets allocated. Google’s Enhanced Campaigns rolls out on July 22, 2013. The changes being made to AdWords are significant. If you fail to get the support you need now, you run the risk of wasting valuable advertising dollars when Enhanced Campaigns is launched.

2. Why is Google doing this? For advertisers, the new features should have some benefits and make management less manual. But one of the main reasons is that mobile advertiser adoption is accelerated through Enhanced Campaigns, because advertisers are faced with forced inclusion in mobile for all AdWords campaigns. This should help correct what Google sees as an imbalance between time spent in mobile and actual mobile advertising (see chart below). Google should see additional revenue from these changes as well. Supply and demand has kept mobile ad rates depressed. Greater mobile adoption, and higher performing mobile ad campaigns should help increase rates.

3. You will lose some of the ability you had to manage advertising by device. However, there are ways around this. Google has announced a mobile bid modifier, for example, that allows you to still run detail mobile campaigns. There also are geographic bid modifiers. Marchex recommends that advertisers locate the trigger points for budget allocation in order to gain some control over targeting by device. You will not be able to set a separate budget, as in the past, so how you set up your account will be key. This is why BIA/Kelsey and Marchex recommend you get started now. The learning curve is unavoidable.

4. Enhanced Campaigns require time for setup, familiarity, and the advertiser must know where customers convert and what they convert on. Device type, ad copy, device type landing pages, device type extensions are some of the key items. In addition to becoming proficient with setup, using third-party tools for tracking will be very important.

5. Call analytics is even more important than ever before, especially if you want to reduce volatility in CPL.

6. Both BIA/Kelsey and Marchex anticipate that CPCs in competitive verticals will increase after Google Enhanced Campaigns launches for three reasons. Reason 1: Advertisers will arbitrarily inflate mobile ad mods w/out analyzing return on spend to try to gain position. Reason 2: Advertisers will not properly optimize for quality score per device. Reason 3: Advertisers will not properly bucket keywords into similar bid ad groups to use mobile modifiers effectively.

7. Lastly, because Google’s Enhanced Campaigns will likely bring about CPC increases and potential headaches for advertisers, there is some potential for Bing to gain some market share from Google. Some advertisers have started to deploy more with Bing and have achieved favorable ROI. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning all agreed that increased competition can only help improve services and results for customers. However, it remains to be seen if Bing can make significant headway against Google.

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Register for BIA/Kelsey’s Leading In Local: SMB Digital Marketing, which takes place Sept. 11 – 13 in Austin. The program digs deep into the highest ROI for SMBs (and profits for their solution providers), and provides a first-hand look at the latest innovations and influential players in SMB-driven search, video, social media, mobile, promotions, CRM and reputation management. Register rates increase as the conference date nears, so take advantage of early pricing and register today.

Below Is The CoverItLive Twitter Coverage From The Webinar

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