This ruling is a long time coming. As search marketing continues to thrive, it is no wonder that everyone is up in arms. However, pharmaceutical marketers should be able properly respond to letter’s implications if they are properly tracking their site traffic and have put the necessary resources and money behind SEO. While I don’t expect to see an overnight elimination of Canadian drug companies ownership of paid brand searches, with proper tracking one can better understand the overall traffic loss created by the FDA’s decision.
Despite the FDA’s savviness, they ignored one bizarre exception: an advertiser is allowed to run an unbranded ad, with a phantom url, that drives consumers/patients to a brand site. As long as there is no claim or distinct language in the copy, the FDA does not deem this as a violation. For example:

This is a classic bait and switch tactic that is illegal in all other forms of advertising. However, somehow the FDA ignored addressing this tactic after having been so cautious with claims. Taking off my marketing hat and thinking as a consumer, I would immediately be turned off by this strategy and hit the dreaded “back button.” Just because the FDA currently allows this tactic, it’s a bad strategy for pharmaceutical marketers and I will be watching this space to see which brands elect to go down this route.  What do you think?

By using AJAX to build their interface, Google has created a platform that now uses common sense technology. If you see something you wish to change you click on it and change it. For example, in the old system if you wanted to update bids on a term you would check the term and click “edit keyword settings” and then make your changes and click “save changes”. While the page refreshes were relatively quick, to make changes you had to follow only this process. With the new platform, keyword bids changes can be made on any screen where that keyword appears, including reports. Additionally, the idea of bread crumbs have been eliminated and you can navigate between adgroups, even across campaigns, with one click and no loading, allowing more time for reporting and optimizing.

This is a huge leap from the technology found in Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search or Microsoft’s AdCenter. Yahoo! for example, actually takes Google’s setup and converts it to another document that then needs to be uploaded into their platform. This makes no sense. If you create the technology to convert it, why not just upload it straight in. As for making bid changes, tedious is not a strong enough word. While the process is just as many steps as Google, the average page load takes upwards of 10 seconds. This is fascinating since it takes Yahoo! 0.13 seconds to return 216M search results on the term “allergy”.

At least Yahoo! can allow you to upload something into their system, MSN has tried and failed miserably at creating a system for uploading new campaigns. Therefore you have to rely on people to do it for you, which can take days. And for the little amount of volume it typically brings, who has the patience for that?

I am not surprised that Yahoo! lags so far behind, it did take 3 years for them to implement a performance bid model, but MSN has no excuse. Microsoft, arguably the technology leader, should have the resources and the intelligence to create an interface that makes it easy and manageable to run a search campaign. Solving the dashboard issue won’t create searches, but if the plan MSN has to become a real force in the search world succeeds, the worst thing they can do is create a speed bump with their advertising interface.

My recommendation: For Microsoft and Yahoo! to please sign-up for Google’s new AdWords platform and try to learn a few things and accept the fact that Google knows what they are doing.