For the past two years, Razorfish has supported charity: water’s digital marketing efforts by managing donated media, providing social strategy consulting and manning their paid search program, funded by Google Grants. charity: water is an NYC-based nonprofit “bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.” As one of the most digitally savvy nonprofits, garnering the loyal support of big name celebrities (Adrian Grenier, Justin Bieber, and Jenna Elfman, to name a few) and thousands of people like you and me, charity: water has helped more than 2 million people in just 5 years. Earlier this month, they kicked off their 5^th anniversary “September Campaign,” the goal of which is to raise $1.2 million for a drilling rig.

The nonprofit space has been an interesting foray for the Razorfish search team. Earlier this year, Google launched the Google For Nonprofits program, which provides a wider range of free or discounted services for grantees.

Last year’s challenge was cleaning up the account in order to increase traffic volume. The charity: water SEM account was managed internally until the partnership began. We worked countless hours on:

-          Reorganizing charity: water’s keyword portfolio into semantic ad groups

-          Refreshing ad copy

-          Updating landing pages

-          Expanding the portfolio to cover geographically-oriented searches

And this year, in addition to all of the wonderful work we do for current clients, the team is focusing on performance optimizations to increase valuable traffic volume. Limits of the Google Grants program force us to be innovative. According to Search Account Executive Hana Lee, “I think our  biggest challenge is the $1.00 bid limit. For some brand exact terms, we are not in first position and often don’t appear at all. That leaves us to heavily depend on CTR to increase our quality score.” Things we search marketers take for granted – for example, conversion tracking – are not available to fully help us gauge the success of our efforts.

In addition to overcoming the bid limit, we aim to:

-          Study where our audience resides so we can effectively utilize geo-targeting options

-          Expand our negative keyword coverage

-          Utilize a stronger call to action

-          Utilize insights from Google Analytics

What are your thoughts on nonprofits in the digital space, useful KPI’s and the role of private sector companies in ‘giving back’?

One of my favorite SNL skits is the NPR Delicious Dish episode with Alec Baldwin. I love food, eating, enjoying, staring, and smelling unique flavors to excite my palate. And, in fact, my post today will be centered on FOOD!

Currently at Razorfish, I work with a CPG client on the paid search side of the house. I get exposed to the “food industry” and all the latest trends or buzz surrounding food both offline and online.  Earlier this year, Google released the “Google Recipe Tool”, which foodies and non-foodies alike, jumped on-board. The feature lets users filter search results according to ingredients, cook time, calories and more. Users can search, for instance, for recipes containing certain ingredient, devised by a certain chef, and even narrow down to how long the item takes to prep and cook. Pictures, ingredients and one- to five-star user ratings are highlighted in the listed results, helping users quickly discover or bypass recipes.

However, with this sudden influx of searches on the Google Recipe Tool, the search engine decided to do something with this data. Google created the Consumer Food Index, a handy internal tool that was created to gauge recipe and food search queries, trends and seasonality. For me, that is called “winning” because the team and myself now have access to see what you, the consumer, is searching on, what kind of food you love, tips/tricks, and popular recipes. The beauty of this is that our team can make a stronger connection between a brand and consumer based on this data.  That is what I like to call, making online paid search magic.  For our team to create this “magic” and have access to this data, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• This data is not available to the public. Sorry Mom.
• The queries are a request made to your Google Reps.
• The Data Dump of the queries comes in a raw excel file. Thousands upon thousands of queries. *Google is hoping to find an easier way to extract the data, but in the meantime, your search team has the chance to get down and dirty with the data.

This tool is even more valuable to a paid search marketer, since Q4 is the largest volume of search on recipes, snack ideas and holiday meals.  The chart below highlights spikes in search around Q4.

Why is this even relevant to you…? As a search marketer, it is crucial to have more data available to identify valuable insights within the user’s behaviors throughout the search process.  Gaining as much insight as possible into the consumer behavior, activities happening offline and online, will ultimately lead to a more positive online experience for the user. In addition, it will also establish a stronger connection with the user to the brand.

Interested in the Google Consumer Food Index Tool? A POV will be available the week of July 11^th, 2011.

Authored by: Rebecca Keen, rebecca.keen@razorfish.com

In the US, online advertising spend has tripled over the past five years, due in part to increased targeting capabilities.  Agencies and client-side advertisers have access to a wide array of tools, which allow them to specifically target their chosen demographics in unprecedented ways.  But every advancement comes with its own hiccups and the question of ethics often surmounts.

What would you do if you knew a certain picture would increase your click-through rates twofold?

Or let’s say you are able to figure out the religion of your targets. Do you use it to your advantage?

Has user targeting become the new pop-up?

When advertisers target too specifically, use weird bearded men in financial ads, or introduce interesting interactivity (such as the “tickle the fat kid” ad) … well… it’s just plain creepy. With the media recently focusing its attention on the quality and legitimacy of search results, will we see more efforts to clean up the internet advertising world?  Or, will it just get more interesting?

And, when we say interesting, we mean…

Not sure if this has hit the media yet, but I just noticed that the map in Yelp is now powered by Bing. It appears it’s not 100% rolled out yet, as different cities give you different engines.

First, fighting words over Hotpot and Content Syndication, now, break ups and going separate ways… next, maybe Google will buy Yelp’s affection back and offer to buy Yelp again.

So, to be clear… companies that fell out of love with Google:

1)      Yelp

2)      Apple

3)      Most television networks

4)      JCPenny…

But hey, if no one hates you, you’re not doing it right, right? Right?

That, and I’m pretty sure Google’s little black book ain’t so little these days.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the second iteration of the fastest selling Apple product of all time has begun production. After selling 14.8 million iPads in 2010, the technology giant needs to fend off an increasing amount of competitors like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, and the HP Slate. IDC,  a Global Marketing Intelligence Firm, predicts 30 million iPads will be sold in 2011. According to WSJ, here is what “people familiar with the matter” had to say about a new version coming out:

“The new device will be thinner, lighter and will come with a faster processor, more memory and a more powerful graphics processor . . . It will have a front-facing camera for the first time for features like video-conferencing, but the resolution of the new iPad’s display will be similar to the first iPad.”

iOS 4.3 is expected to come out in this week with new features for both the iPhone and iPad. The developer pack eludes to wireless syncing, Photobooth, personal wi-fi hotspot and a front facing camera for the new iPad. Another exciting feature is photo streams that friends will be able to follow, much like Instagram and PicPlz. All of these features come together to offer high engagement with our mobile devices and opportunities for brands to connect with their customers. Advertisers will have no shortage of ways to engage customers but will need to pick the ones that will increase brand affinity and potentially lifetime value.