Marketing Teams

Content Monitoring: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

October 04, 2016 | Affiliate Managers, Marketing Teams

Content Monitoring is an increasingly common practice where advertisers learn how partners, competitors, and other websites use their marketing content online. Typically, content monitoring relies on automated web crawling technology to look for specific instances of other advertisers behaving badly. You may ask…do advertisers really behave badly? Short Answer: Yes. Long Answer: Yesssssssssssss. 🙂 We’ve been monitoring advertising for compliance since 2008, and […]

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EyeforTravel Feature: The importance of monitoring for hotel price parity

August 16, 2016 | Agencies, Marketing Teams, Travel

The Search Monitor was recently featured on the Eye for Travel website. Our CEO, Lori Weiman, was interviewed about the importance of  hotel advertisers monitoring for price parity. The topic was OTAs vs. Hotels, a story that continues to keep hotel marketers awake at night. What You’ll Learn From the Article: Learn what is keeping three US-based hoteliers awake at night […]

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Which retailers have the highest share of voice for Google Shopping Ads?

June 27, 2016 | Agencies, Marketing Teams, Retail

Today we wanted to analyze which retailers had the highest Share of Voice for Google Shopping ads. The Google Shopping Share of Voice Report shows the market share for all competitors. The SOV is calculated by dividing the number of listings for the seller by the total number of Google Shopping listings for a specific keyword or keyword […]

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Brand Protection In Online Advertising: 4 Simple Tactics for 2016

January 05, 2016 | Affiliate Managers, Agencies, Marketing Teams

If you build it, they will come, right? Sure. But, when you build a successful brand, you attract the bad with the good. In this case, the “bad” are advertisers who intentionally or unknowingly hurt your brand and advertising performance by abusing your brand in online ads. As a marketing manager, your job is to catch and […]

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How to tell if your affiliates are brand bidding

December 08, 2015 | Affiliate Compliance, Affiliate Managers, Agencies, Marketing Teams

  Yes, your affiliates are your partners in marketing. But that doesn’t mean they won’t bend (or break) your program rules to make an extra buck or two. It can be tricky to tell if an affiliate is brand bidding on purpose or by accident. This gray area occurs because an ad can appear on a search engine […]

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Seasonality and CTRs: What’s the connection?

September 30, 2015 | Agencies, Automotive, Finance & Insurance, Marketing Teams, Retail, Telecom, Travel

How does seasonality impact clickthrough rates (CTRs)? The chart below shows CTR benchmarks for five key PPC verticals—Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom—during the past four quarters, and for two important benchmark groups: The Search Monitor’s top-tier advertisers (the group of 10 advertisers who received the most clicks during the quarter) The Search Monitor’s middle-tier […]

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How do your CPCs compare to the industry benchmarks?

September 21, 2015 | Agencies, Automotive, Finance & Insurance, Marketing Teams, Retail, Telecom, Travel

Cost Per Click is another key performance indicator that every search marketer should monitor on a regular basis. The chart below shows CPC benchmarks for five key PPC verticals: Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom. Further, we included benchmarks for both top-tier and middle-tier advertisers. Why the need for two tiers of benchmarks? For starters, you […]

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The Search Monitor reveals how industry affects ad rank

September 17, 2015 | Agencies, Automotive, Finance & Insurance, Marketing Teams, Retail, Telecom, Travel

The chart below comes from Q2 2015 PPC Benchmark Guide for Search Marketers and provides ad rank data for five important PPC verticals. For each vertical, we show the ad rank for US Google and Bing searches (desktop and mobile) for both our top-tier and middle-tier advertisers. The Search Monitor’s clients use this benchmark data by tier […]

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5 best practices for the Google Display Network

June 16, 2015 | Agencies, Marketing Teams, Retail

The Google Display Network (GDN) has been poo-poohed by some digital marketers because it’s not as effective at direct response as its AdWords cousin, paid search, and it doesn’t feature the targeting or programmatic buying capabilities of brand-awareness platforms like Facebook or DSPs. So, should you ignore the GDN? Emphatically: no. If you haven’t had success with […]

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Automotive SEM Snapshot: Who’s Bidding on Ford’s SEM Trademarks?

September 10, 2014 | Automotive, Marketing Teams, Optimizing SEM

Each week, The Search Monitor chooses one industry from our list of 1,239 industries for a weekly snapshot of SEM activity. This week, we had two topics that we wanted to cover. So in addition to yesterday’s post on financial aid advertisers, we are focusing this post on automotive advertisers. While the automotive industry is a complex mosaic […]

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