Google is rolling out a new product for Search Arb called RSOC. In 2024 we predict that more and more people will get access to it and it could be a game changing event with significantly higher ROIs to anyone who has prepared for the changes. Watch the full episode to find out what it is and how to prepare.
Google is rolling out a new product for Search Arb called RSOC. In 2024 we predict that more and more people will get access to it and it could be a game changing event with significantly higher ROIs to anyone who has prepared for the changes. Watch the full episode to find out what it is and how to prepare.
All right Henry, nice to have you on again. It's been a while. I've had some other guests, so you've been out traveling. Where have
Henry:doing a couple of speed runs around the world, but all in good fun. I was in Asia first, then the U. S., then Europe, and then back to Asia.
Martin:Racking up those
Henry:was racking up miles and spending miles.
Martin:What did you do? Is that a secret or can you share some?
Henry:Yeah, the big thing was we went to meet our good friends at TikTok. And that was one of the reasons for the Asia trip. And then we visited our team in Manila we have, as a lot of campaign managers, a lot of support staff, and, That are based out of there about 40 now. So paying them a visit and and sprinkling in some fun in between.
Martin:Yeah. Your background gives a little preview of that fun, huh?
Henry:Always love to sprinkle in wine when possible.
Martin:Yeah. How nice. Nice. Today, we're going to talk about something that, that could, it could revolutionize the business, right? I don't want to be too dramatic or, what do you say?
Henry:I think it could, and it is already revolutionizing the search base.
Martin:Yeah. So we're gonna talk about RSOC, huh? What does it stand for?
Henry:related search for content, I believe,
Martin:Yeah. Or on content, perhaps.
Henry:on content. And yeah, it's a new format. We say new Google's been testing it for a little over a year now. But yeah, like you said, it has. Has the opportunity to really upend the traditional formats that we're used to. With AFD.
Martin:So after all these years, the beautiful park page design, I say it with a little bit jokingly, might be leaving us, because RSOC is different. The monetization page that you're used to, is, that's, it's dropping off in this model. So instead we'll have Yeah, how best to describe it? We'll have the first part of the parked page integrated in a content page, basically.
Henry:I'd say it's not so much dropping off, but rather there's been some innovation and the format is more or less the same with the keyword blocks, except now Google is wrapping it around content. This is something that I think a lot of publishers in the past have asked. Or advertisers, rather, can we include content wrapped around the keyword block, something relevant to the verticals? And this is, I think, Google fulfilling that request. To create overall a better user experience, in my opinion.
Martin:And the reason why we're pretty excited about this is that if you imagine a flow with a content page, say going from, now that we talked about TikTok, going from TikTok To a content page in the old times you would have to have some form of links on the content page, right? And then you would come to the park page and then two more clicks would be necessary. So all in all, yeah, there's a click on TikTok. There's a click on the content page. There's a click on the park page to see the ads. And then there's a fourth click in order to have the revenue event happen.
Henry:Yeah.
Martin:RSOC eliminates one of those clicks, so we shorten the path. As, I think everybody watching this channel or everybody that's tried Sertab, even if you get the CTR of say 50 percent is really good CTR. But that means that you lose half the people, of course. So if you eliminate one of those. steps, it's, it has the potential to be something huge.
Henry:It's always with content in the old format and the new format, losing users. I would look at it as more that we're qualifying users even more. And in our testing, as whenever we've done content the RPCs are always much higher, and I think that's because the users. these additional steps and they're reading content before they click. There's just more information all around for them to gather it before they click and move on to the next step. so Consistently. The reason we've always tried to do more content is because, yeah, RPCs are much, much higher. Even if you're losing a lot of the users in between you're getting generally a better user pool overall, a higher, more qualified user
Martin:For our viewers, is there a way for them to try it out today? Yeah,
Henry:it's not immediately of course, there are a lot of companies that are offering it, but it's still something that's being tested. And. We ourselves are also still in the infancy of our testing. We're testing different traffic sources, different formats, different content. It's really an additional layer that everyone's trying to understand. Different companies, different feeds are going about it differently. I haven't heard of any of the traditional feeds offering it in a. In a usable format for like third parties yet at least scale. But it's coming. It seems to be something that Google is pushing as we've seen with RPCs, it is generally a better user experience. Qualifies the user. I could see why Google would want to move traffic more in that direction to this form. Yeah, so not quite ready yet, I think for the, for everyone, but it's coming pretty soon, it seems.
Martin:And all the monetizers are currently working on products to make it available to a broader audience. It feels like there's a race between the companies to, to offer it. Spoke with Tonic yesterday, for instance, and they are racing to have something to offer in Q1. But they didn't sound super confident on it. So they said, yeah, maybe Q1, but it could also be Q2 or Q3. So yeah. Then nothing to hold your breath over just yet, but it's good to know what's coming up. It could very well be that the competing monetizers offer something a little bit quicker than what tonic
Henry:Yeah. It seems. It does seem everyone's going about it, or they're all at different stages of development and they all have slightly different ideas on how they might offer it to people. For instance with CEDAW, I believe, they want everyone to use their domain, the traffic would all go through their website content would be submitted. To their team, be approved and then loaded onto the site. Tonics looked at, they've looked at this in a similar format, but somewhat of a hybrid where potentially a little bit more control for. For people running the traffic. But if we look at it over the scale of like how long it took for AFD to get to where it is today, that took over a decade to to, to. Build it into the product that it is. Whereas with our stock this is something that everyone's trying to rush to, to get out to market. And this is a product that's only been around for a year or two. So it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of testing. Before I think the feeds determine what the best setup is for everyone.
Martin:feels like Google is also intentionally slow playing this whole thing. It feels like they want to test it out as well, because the RevShare so far has been, has only been workable for desktop traffic, whereas mobile traffic wasn't really there. It was supposed to change at the end of this year. We're there now. Have you heard anything about has the rev share been updated for mobile?
Henry:Negotiating mobile rev shares. I haven't heard anything yet, but with desktop, that's been where everyone has ran traffic for the last year and a half. And so it does seem like they're slow. Slow playing it taking in the traffic, seeing how it looks and then providing feedback. Desktop seems like a logical place to start. It's not as cheap with with that kind of traffic. And so you really have to focus on the quality there. And it's probably a field in which they would certainly want to see more traffic with desktop. So it would make sense that they start with it. Then also you don't get all the noise that you would normally see with mobile, like all the. The noisy like sources like push and extension traffic and all that stuff that tends to bleed in when you start mobile campaigns desktop always is much cleaner when you start,
Martin:Yeah. I also heard that Google is currently putting a limitation on the amount of conversions that Each monetizer can push over. So that's another signal that's, that they want to be very careful with this rollout. But if we look at the product and the first signs that, that we've gotten from it, it feels quite likely that they will loosen up as they go, when they feel more comfortable with this whole thing.
Henry:I think so. As, cause my understanding also is that it's slightly a different team that's looking at all this. So a lot of the learnings are being like what you would expect that they would have learned from AFD might not necessarily have transferred over. So a lot of these sources need that, that they're letting on to our SOC, their vetting, making sure that they're compliant, that the quality is there, but also the the ads are compliant as well. So it's a bit of a learning process for both sides. And as long as the quality is there and it's compliant, I think this is something that logically is going to be like rolled out in a much bigger scale because yeah. If you just look at it, it's a much cleaner user experience than just when a user lands on a parked page, sometimes it's, a lot of times it's confusing without content.
Martin:And I bet that Google also regularly, they must be getting complaints from advertisers that see them. Why is my ad on this crappy page? So it would probably take care of some of those complaints. Ah, one important thing I wanted to mention as well is that you don't necessarily have to go to a monetizer in order to get RSOC. As long as you have an AdSense account. tHere's a possibility that you can just get it straight from there. However, the indications that we've heard is that the rev share is a totally different one. So what it looks like now is even though of course the monetizer needs to take their own cut along the way, it seems likely that you'll be much better off. Going that route instead of doing it yourself. Unless of course you push a lot of volume.
Henry:Yeah. I Think the off the shelf. That's more something that is a product for like organic traffic. It's not something that's built for for referral traffic where you have to consider the cost of acquisition. It's more for sites. Or you could use it as a as like a placement instead of native, you could put in a keyword block in there in one of your articles or something. So yeah, what we've heard and what you've heard as well, I think is the other ref share is much, much lower, so it'd be more difficult to make it work. But that's not to say that people have not made it work, With the lower ref share.
Martin:Yeah. Do you have an example that we can show? That we can put a screenshot into, edit into the video? I'm sure people are. Curious how something like that looks,
Henry:yeah, let's see.
Martin:we don't have to do it live, but if if there is something then we can I'll edit it in later. Yeah.
Henry:yeah we'll edit in a still just to show what the whole experience looks like,
Martin:Yeah. Yeah.
Henry:I think overall, because once you look at the example, there's a lot more areas that you can optimize compared to the traditional keyword block. All you can do is optimize the keywords with RSOC, you have much more flexibility with. The headline the paragraphs, the first paragraph versus. The rest of the article and all of that kind of opens up a window into like more possibilities to, to get into verticals that, that previously were more difficult for just a part of page and you can make it match seamlessly with your ad as well. Like your ad title compared to your article title, it transitions nicely for the user.
Martin:Yeah. if You want to warm up before, I would recommend if you're only buying direct from whatever source you're buying, then feel free to experiment with adding in a interstitial in between. It might sound counterintuitive. Why would I add another step? But as you said before, by having a better qualified traffic, your RPM is going to look totally different. Once you monetize and we've seen plenty of examples where you actually make more money by introducing an interstitial than if you go direct.
Henry:Yeah.
Martin:yeah, if you're not warmed For that, then for sure experiment with adding interstitials.
Henry:absolutely. I've, it doesn't sound like it would work, adding that extra stuff, sometimes it, it makes all the difference.
Martin:It took us so long to introduce an interstitial. I really didn't want to do it. It was only when, before a time you really had to do it in order to get the Facebook traffic, then reluctantly I started doing it. And I was surprised that, hey, it actually can work.
Henry:And in, in a lot of cases, I think we saw that not just the RPC was higher, but the net commercial rate was also higher, even with that page in the middle.
Martin:But of course it requires skill. There's more that can go wrong. If you don't know how to build a page, then of course a lot of things can go wrong. If someone is looking at this and wants to try, I find a very easy way is to use a service called Unbounce. Unless you want to build your own page. But even if you build your own page, I would recommend Try the loading time of your page versus Unbounce's page. That's what we found with the solution that we had back then, that Unbounce was loading very fast. So that's definitely a metric to, to focus on. If you have too long load time, it's going to hurt your campaign a lot. So make sure to The loading
Henry:yeah. With Unbounce it's a really nice, like you mentioned it's good for loading times, but it's also really. Nice tool to manage. Like we have probably 50, 60 different articles running at any given time. And it's such a nice user interface for managing content, managing multiple pages, adding more pages, duplicating pages, it's just all around. Easier than having to build something from scratch and
Martin:That's the recurring mantra on, on these videos. Try to keep it as simple as possible. So if there is a solution that allows you to test it quickly without, yeah, like hiring a developer to create a page for you, I would be all for that. Of course, you can later on. Come to the point that you want to build your own system. It is for sure it's possible to build something nicer than what Unbounce offer, but it's always good to test the waters and see can you make it work with an interstitial. If you can't even get over that hurdle, it would be a shame to spend money on a developer to do something for you. Yeah, but it might be, yeah that's still unclear. If there will be. Services that offer if the monetizers will let you even write your own content or not, but I still feel it's good if you for yourself as a media buyer, if you know what a great interstitial looks like so that you don't have to take the monetizer's word for it because you, I find it's almost always that the people that work at monetizers. will be, their focus is, of course, on customer management. They won't be going in the weeds of media buying themselves. So it's good. If you have a better knowledge then you rep about how you want an article to look like.
Henry:Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the feeds go about it because yeah, like you said, it's, it could be a situation where the feeds come up with the content and that would not be. An ideal setup because like just as often as you're updating your keywords, you really need to be testing a lot of different content variations to, to figure out what, what works the best for your ads and your campaigns. If everyone is running to the same five different articles for the same vertical that makes it much, much harder to convert and to take advantage really of. Of what our SOC is meaning to provide.
Martin:Yeah. What?
Henry:That there is some control, editorial control over. The content that you're running the traffic to, but it remains to be seen next year how they roll it out.
Martin:What's the most important thing when you create a content page, would you say? What should one focus on?
Henry:It's, I would say, in my opinion it's similar to an, how you would construct an ad. Like you have your headline, the title of that page, and that's what really captures the eyeball initially. And we do the same thing when it comes to videos, it's that first. First three seconds how do you keep the user on the page initially? And the title of the headline of the content pages is what you would consider a hook in the videos. And so I would say that's probably the first thing that should be focused on and optimized. And then comes the first paragraph. Ideally, it should be short, concise, like to the point, not too long. You don't want the user. reading too much. And then also it goes back to the keyword optimization, like the keyword block itself. What are the keywords that that make the most sense based on how the user entered the page in the first place? So playing around with the keywords In combination with the headline, that's like the rest of the article we've found in a lot of edits and stuff. It doesn't make as big of a difference if you're editing the full length article. Not a lot of people are reading the whole thing.
Martin:Yeah, at least you want to, you want people to click, of course, on the keyword block and not read the whole article. And It's common that, okay, you got the headline, you have the first paragraph, you have the keyword block. Then often you have a requirement that you should have a certain amount of content. You can have almost nothing on the page, then the monetizer will complain to you. But it's allowed to, you can put an image below the keyword block for instance. So you push the rest of the text below the fold. And maybe you write the first paragraph that you can get the idea like. Now this article is finished. Now it's time to click on the keyword block. Needless to say, right? You want to guide them Now it's time. Here's the beautiful keyword block. Make sure to click it.
Henry:That's also, that's the importance of that first paragraph. You want it to be Like leading the user into clicking to that next step, not leading them to. The rest of the article.
Martin:Oh, and then another technique. The paragraph after, say you have them. Yeah, headline, paragraph, keyword block, picture that pushes the rest on the fold, and then the first paragraph after that picture, I've seen the people that do it really well, then they make a very boring paragraph. That optimally it's so boring that people then get the idea, I don't want to continue reading let's go up to this beautiful keyword block. Click here. So we use dental implants often as a, as an example because it's a beautiful org vertical. And I recall specifically there. That paragraph that I mentioned below the fold, then the headline was like, What are dental implants? And then a very dry text about, but of course anyone that has clicked a dental implant ad will know what dental implants are and doesn't want to read a very dry definition of them. So
Henry:a good point. Actually just make it as boring as possible.
Martin:stay compliant, but you can be a bit boring after the fall. Oh, and then here's also an important thing in order to stay compliant, what you write in the keyword block, that is your ad title. That's gonna, that's gonna be scrutiny on that. So you have to pass of course you always have to pass the correct ad title but in, in some, like in TikTok for instance, then it's not exactly specified where is the ad title, what is the ad title here, it can be in several different spots, but here it's 100 percent clear, so then you have to make sure to follow those rules and then all of a sudden you're faced with, aha, then you need keywords that are Commercially, they have a commercial potential. IE they have good CPC, but they also need to be interesting, right? And there are those keywords. We have an overlap and I would encourage you to look for those keywords and very, like a super basic rule is they should at least be three. words long. It's difficult to have an interesting keyword if it's just one word. Like optimally it would sound almost like a headline to an article. Those are the great keywords out there.
Henry:Yeah. That's a good point. That that's one thing that. That's a little bit different from the traditional like interstitial format compared to the RSOC one where like the traditional one where you're sending the user from the content page to the parts page the keyword block, you can be. Very flexible with without having to worry about like the keyword, like RPCs and whatnot, because you're still sending them to a park page. So your keywords could be longer. They could be more, more Beatty, a little bit more headline based. Whereas with RSOC, you need to find that medium between that is the keyword that you're getting paid for, what the person is clicking. You have to find a balance between a headline y kind of keyword, three words ideally
Martin:At the minimum.
Henry:that, yeah, something that actually pays though,
Martin:Good. Would you say is this extra good for a certain traffic source?
Henry:I, I wouldn't say it's better for certain traffic sources, but. But I think for certain verticals, it's certainly better. Whereas that's why I think there, there's always going to be a balance between AFD and RSOC. Some verticals, they just work much better on, on a traditional park page. And we've tested a lot of campaigns between RSOC and park pages. You just find some work better on one and not the other. And there are verticals that didn't work on park pages, but if you run it on RSOC, With the information, with the content and the headline, like all of a sudden it starts to work and. And so I think that's where it's going to be interesting to test.
Martin:Is it like a red thread between the verticals that work extra good on RSOC?
Henry:It's still early days, so it's hard to tell.
Martin:yeah.
Henry:I think as RSOC continues to roll out, we should do a couple more of these sessions and we could share our findings then. Yeah.
Martin:I'm just doing guesswork at this point, but I think verticals where people think a little bit more. Before a purchase, right? We have different amount of effort that goes into a purchase. So if it's like a bigger purchase, dental implants, again, is a good example. I think dental implants can work well because it seems like, if I would get dental implants, I hope that day doesn't come really soon or ever. But I would then think once or twice about what kind of implants am I getting? It's not something that I buy on a whim out of reflex. And so they are the the info can be more important. And to continue this this example, if you have a content page, you can run different kinds of angles with your traffic. You could go more aggressive with the angles that you're presenting because. As long as you can deliver, you can make promises that you can deliver on in the text that you couldn't deliver on in a part page. And
Henry:that's actually, that's something that we didn't really talk about like the benefits of the buy side, but there are a lot of advantages to using a content page for sure. Like testing more aggressive, probably not the right one, but like a little edgier with what you're saying. Because you're cleansing them a little bit on, on the content page. Once they get to it that's where you really need to focus on the compliance. But yeah with that initial click, getting them in the door you could be a little bit more aggressive
Martin:I always like to provide an example. Unfortunately, I don't have a white hat example. I've seen. Many years ago now, when I was studying our competitors, also again dental implants, they had a article with a claim that now dental implants are only 200 bucks, and that's of course nowhere near what a dental implant costs. But they had found a source, some crazy dentist somewhere on the internet. Made that claim. And so they made it very proper is also another tip include sources. Then if you make a crazy claim, find a nice
Henry:yeah.
Martin:because it needs to be true. You're not allowed to lie, but if someone else is claiming something and you're reporting on it and you provide the source, you're in a different spot. All of a sudden I still wouldn't recommend claiming something that can be true, but it's just. Maybe you find someone that has a great price and then you can write about that in the angle. Yeah,
Henry:That's a good example. I would say because generally Specific prices on your ad. But with a content page, that's something that, that you can explore a little bit where you can quote a certain price and then qualify it on the next page. Disc disclaimers sources. And yeah, that, that kind of gives you a little bit more of an advantage on the buy side to get that initial click.
Martin:I think your idea is good that we'll do another update when we have more info, because I expect that a lot will happen in the upcoming year. When there's been significant advances, then let's revisit and make sure that everybody's updated
Henry:Yeah. We should do a couple more of these throughout each learning stage. But it's something that I expect will grow a lot over the next year. So a lot more to share.
Martin:Cool. So to be continued. Ciao.