Search For Customers Online
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Every day millions of Australians use a search engine to find information on a product or service and every day marketers role out advertising campaigns that ignore the power of online searching.

What’s missing in most marketing plans today is an online search component. Despite the fact that search engine research is now a daily, routine part of consumers’ shopping behaviour, a surprising number of marketers have yet to adjust their advertising strategies to address this new reality.

 In Australia more than 65% of consumers use Google to search and more than 86% of all search traffic coming into the SmartHouse web site is from Google. After a consumer’s curiosity is piqued by watching a TV ad or seeing a product or service advertisement in a magazine, many of the buyers with money to spend or a desire to buy head straight to the Internet to uncover more information. As a result major vendors are now investing in new web sites. Just as you could in the offline world, you can gather data on just about any permutation of online activity. But the online space provides even more options for slicing and dicing. How sophisticated you get with your online marketing depends on what you need to know to make an impact on your investment and the resources you have to track, analyse and act on this information.

 What would you do if you knew for a fact that 50 percent of all prospects who spend 6 minutes or more learning about your product line and view at least one of your competitors products go on to buy one of the products they are researching? (SmartHouse Research 2006). You would focus your marketing efforts to drive this kind of behaviour, or at least make it easier for prospects to find this information, right? Well not only does Web analytics make this kind of insight possible, but it also helps you determine if such sales are profitable in the short term and the long term.

By analysing search engine data that show what happened before people got to your site along with Web site data that tell you what these people then did on your site, you can better manage your keyword bidding, site optimization efforts, affiliate programs … basically your overall SEM investment. What’s even better is that analytics is not an all-or-nothing game. Lisa Wehr, founder and CEO of search engine marketing firm Oneupweb, says it’s “shocking how many marketers still don’t even track their SEM and online activity,” she notes that even the most basic analysis can produce real results.

 

 

 When we recently re designed the 4Square Media web sites we designed sections to specifically accommodate Google search engines. We built sections such as Large Screen Display and in these sections we built sub section landing pages such as plasma, LCD TV, projectors etc. This allows the search engine to quickly find specific information and land a consumer right on that page. While a Fairfax or News Ltd gets a great deal of traffic information on a plasma or LCD TV is buried layers down behind information on politics, crime, sport or social events etc, as a result of this stories on specific products or services are missed. If a consumer is searching for LCD TV the chances are that they will prioritise a site similar to Smarthouse or Digital Home because the content is specific to the subject being searched. All 4Square Media sites are hooked up to Omniture a US Company that is the leading provider of on-demand, Web analytics and online business optimisation in the world. The company provides us with the ability to collect, integrate, analyse and automate the reporting and distribution of information we collect from our sites. We know when an attachment is linked to our email service whether the receiver has opened the attachment, printed the information out or forwarded that information on to another person.

Having a web site is one thing, getting results from it and driving traffic to it is becoming a marketing science. According to Josh Stylman, managing partner of SEM services firm Reprise Media, marketers should focus on those metrics tied to their program goals, such as sales, leads and ad impressions, and the costs associated with driving these actions.

 

 

 

 To do this he claims, you will need to look at the “building blocks” to the metric. In most cases, this involves determining what percentage of people might be exposed to your search engine link on say Google; what percentage of this audience is likely to click on your link; what percentage of this group then is likely to progress past your homepage; etc. This exercise gives you a starting point against which to measure your campaign performance and test options to improve your return. The point of measuring online activity from the search engine to your site is to determine where you could tweak your marketing efforts to drive more profitable online interactions. The aspects of a search program that see the most refinement and testing are keyword terms and landing pages. The goal is to connect the search user with the landing page that best fulfils there information needs. If 20 percent of search traffic is bypassing your homepage and going to a particular product landing page, then it would suggest that this group used a much targeted keyword query. To facilitate faster access to specific pages 4Square Media has developed a brand new product called Key Verts.

 But, perhaps, not much of this 20 percent is converting to a sale, says Wehr. The analytics will help you determine on which pages visitors dropped off, so you can create hypotheses as to why and then set up tests to address these holes. “You should be testing offer, product, design, and position of the buttons … all those things that can impact whether or not the conversion rate goes up. As you learn from that testing and figure out which landing pages perform better, you can further refine your [keyword] ad groups and start slicing and dicing those into smaller groups. Then you can design a more targeted landing page around those groups. So, eventually you’re going to have more landing pages and more keyword categories, but they’re going to be a lot more targeted,” Wehr explains.

 Keep in mind that as you refine your keyword groups, you will have more specific words — e.g., “Plasma, iPod, LCD TV” versus head terms such as “MP3 Devices or Large Screen TV” — says Stylman. Specific terms produce less data for analysis, and so your sample size will be insignificant. Refinement of a search program requires the creation of taxonomy for search terms that can be rolled up into slightly broader groups for more conclusive analysis.

Missed Opportunities
Besides not capturing online activity related to search, online marketers are missing a few other opportunities to leverage their web investments. One of the biggest search problems is that less mature online marketers continue to use legacy online systems that are not optimised for search engine spiders. So, they’re missing out on a great deal of low-hanging fruit when it comes to driving search traffic.

 

 

 

 Stylman would like to see marketers do a better job of determining lifetime value (LTV) for their online campaigns. There are so many ingredients in the search recipe, he notes, that it’s hard to get all relevant factors in the LTV model for online marketing. Wehr agrees: “Most [marketers] focus on CPA or cost per sale. They want to spend 20 cents to make $2, but they’re not accounting for the relationship they’ve now built with the customer and how it impacts future orders. That number is important, because it allows them to stay competitive and increase their spending if it makes sense. Otherwise, they start sliding down the slippery slope … they lose market share to a competitor or they become frustrated because it looks like their competitor is bidding more aggressively, so they may invest money in different channels because they didn’t understand search and LTV in the first place.”

 Given that cross-channel shopping activity continues to rise, getting a handle on LTV will only get more complicated. A study conducted earlier this year by Jupiter Research for SEM firm iProspect found that 62 percent of shoppers who went online to research purchases this past holiday season used search engines to find what they wanted; 47 percent of this group of consumers then bought these online-researched products offline.

In Australia Marketers are basically used to a spray-and-pray kind of world … and hope it reaches the right audience — and they are taking the same type of approach online,” says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at search agency Reprise Media. “We have clients that have as many different agencies, and none of them talks to each other.” Search, experts like Mr. Hershberg say, should be the hub of an integrated advertising campaign. The reason is simple-the Internet is where consumers now go to research and decide about what products they should buy. Laptops share the couch as consumers watch TV, according to a SIMM study that showed 66.2% of consumers regularly use TV and the Internet simultaneously.

Google has 65% of the search advertising market; Yahoo has 17%; MSN, 15%. Once online, 80% of Internet traffic begins at a search engine, according to a Harris Interactive poll. And 41% of Web users find brands through search rather than just by typing a URL into their browser, a DoubleClick study reported. “People are using search engines as browsers,” says Bryan Wiener, president at agency 360i, New York.

 

 

 

Connect the dots
“Search is the place where the consumer connects the dots and, if you are not there, they will not seek you out online and not engage with you offline,” says Cam Balzer, director of search strategy, Performics, a division of DoubleClick.

Search revenue growth figures are getting noticed in boardrooms. Top engine Google is expected to rake in nearly one-quarter (23.8%) of online ad revenue this year, while No. 2 player Yahoo Search is predicted to grab 11.2%, according to online market researcher eMarketer. In a recent inadvertent filing to analysts, Google mistakenly revealed its internal ad revenue projections of reaching $6 billion in ad revenue this year, shooting up to $9.5 billion in 2007.

But search agencies complain that just a minority of marketing plans include search media. No one has yet estimated how many dollars are lost by not integrating search, but anecdotally the potential hit to marketers is huge. “The risk to marketers is they do a great job creating interest and awareness…then someone sees a search and doesn’t see your brand, so they go nowhere,” Mr. Balzer said.

Lack of coordination
Another problem is the marketer that runs search ads — but forgets to tell the search agency of a traditional media effort. Buyers have long known that search can be used to track response in other channels because there is typically an uptick in search when a catalogue drops or a TV campaign runs. “We’ve been a bit frustrated to see that search campaigns will run better over a certain period of time and we don’t know why — it’s only later that we find out that the client ran a radio or TV campaign at that time,” Mr. Hershberg says.

How many keywords to buy?

How many keywords must a marketer buy? While some brands bid on thousands, including branded terms, words related to the offline promotions, generic phrases and local terms, “the key is having a lot of different words, testing them and making sure what words work the best for you,” says Ellen Siminoff, CEO of search agency Efficient Frontier. It’s not always necessary to buy the top position in search results, she adds. “No. 2, 3, 4 or 5 may be more appropriate,” she says, because those positions perform well for the cost. Another tactical tip is to buy keywords that take into account the length of the buying cycle. A Performics study, “Search before Purchase,” which looked at 30 retail sites in four verticals, demonstrated that consumers search for up to 12 weeks before making a purchase, even for items such as apparel. Consumers do a lot of general searches, using generic terms early on. “They start by searching broadly, not keyed to brand,” Mr. Balzer says. Then, they narrow the search down to particular brands of products and location. “They will use that last search on a brand name to navigate to a specific online store,” he says.

The key is to have a presence in the search realm. “You want to be there,” says Ms. Siminoff. “Even if someone doesn’t click on your ad today, they still want to know all the advertisers that sell what they” want.