Performics Performance Marketing Blog: SEM, SEO, Social & Display

The Benefits of Paid Search Click Attribution

Posted by Jenna Sheeran, Account Director

Advertisers should be looking at paid search click data beyond the last click.  Here are a few ways that paid search click attribution (i.e. ClickStream) enables optimal paid search performance:

Understanding how the Content Network and Facebook Affect Paid Search

ClickStream gives marketers the ability to understand how other paid search channels like the Content Network and Facebook cost-per-click (CPC) ads directly affect a paid search program.  At Performics, we have seen that running Facebook or Content Network campaigns jointly with paid search increases the number of conversions/leads from the program’s paid search campaign.  These conversions/leads are originating in Facebook and Content.  By utilizing ClickStream data, we are able to manage the Content and Facebook campaigns in a more detailed manner by adjusting those programs based on the impact they are having on the regular paid search program.

A Quick Survey of Google Sitelinks Usage by Three High-Volume Multi-Channel Retailers

Posted by Sachin Gadhvi, Account Director

Google Sitelinks is starting to gain wide adoption among online retailers.  The ability to link deeper into the site straight from the ad as well as additional space for targeted copy opens up a range of possibilities.  Advertisers are using Sitelinks to emphasize their core brand message, focus on specific product areas, highlight promotions or focus on specific consumer segments.  Below is a quick look at three high-volume multi-channel retailers that are using Sitelinks.

(Searched on retailers’ brand term on Thursday, Dec 17)

Walmart
  
One link is promotional.  The other three are high-volume gift-giving product categories.

Top Terms Paid Search Campaigns

Posted by Dan Hanson, Account Manager

It’s not uncommon to find yourself the proud new owner of an outdated, inefficient paid search program.  Dated structures often include a variety of non-related terms organized into one or several campaigns.  As a result, campaigns tend to cap out early in the day, limiting coverage.  This is especially common among smaller accounts with budgetary constraints.

To combat this, Performics recommends isolating top performing keywords into separate campaigns, allowing for more efficient bid/budget management.  Taking this one step further, it can be beneficial to create two identical campaigns, one for exact match terms and one for broad match terms.

Launching a Multi-Million Dollar TV Campaign? Protect Your Brand Online with Keyword Coverage

Posted by Brian Aubert, Account Director

Anytime a brand is launching a new promotion, commercial, ad, or Web site, your paid search team should mine the content of the launch for new keywords.  Consumers are likely to search for keywords associated with a new promotion, and you need to have SERP coverage to capture the demand you have created.  Most importantly, don’t forget to protect taglines and catch phrases that are in your commercials by bidding on those phrases in paid search. 

To use the last Super Bowl as an example, Cars.com ran an ad featuring a normal person named David Abernathy who did extraordinary things.  Abernathy was a made up character, but the commercial sparked a ton of Google searches from people seeking to learn more about this mysterious David Abernathy.  In fact, the “David Abernathy” keyword ranked #1 in Google Trends hot searches in the hours after the commercial ran.  The problem was that Cars.com had zero keyword coverage for “David Abernathy.”  The only results that came up for a “David Abernathy” search were a few natural results for real people named David Abernathy who had nothing to do with the Cars.com campaign.  Cars.com was not running any paid search ads on the keyword.  Thus, Cars.com effectively missed their chance to capture the huge amount of buzz they created around this character.  They started running paid search ads on his name a few days later—and the commercial (posted on video sharing sites) rose in the natural search results—but Cars.com had already missed the massive demand around the promotion launch.

ICANN’s Non-Latin Characters – Making the Worldwide Web Worldwide

Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Search Strategist

New domain names will soon be able to contain non-latin characters.  What does this mean for your brand in the world market?

The Internet is at once very simple and very complex.  It’s simple for users; just start your Web browser and get going! On the other hand, it’s complex for the people in charge of how the Internet works and who work to improve your online experience.  One such behind-the-scenes organization doing complex things for the Internet is ICANN, an acronym that stands for "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers."  ICANN is about to do something very important that will hit the Web in 2010.

ICANN is the organization that decides what characters go into a domain name.  For example, suppose back in the misty past (in 1995) you wanted to set up a Web domain and call it "Yahoo."  ICANN was the organization who said that it was okay to use a string of five alphanumeric Latin characters in your Web address, beginning with the letter "y" and ending with the letter "o."  If you wanted to set up a Web address named "www.#@#@#I’mgreat!!.com," ICANN was the organization who would say “No, you can’t have that domain name; Web addresses can’t have pound signs, tildes, apostrophes, spaces, or exclamation points.”

SEM Budget Strategies for the Holidays

Posted by Aaron Hoiles, Account Director

2009 has witnessed the continued growth and evolution of online shopping.  Consumers are not only using online resources to shop more often, they’re also developing more sophisticated online strategies to fill their shopping carts with sale items and deals, online as well as in-store.  As such, marketers are evolving strategies to connect with customers through the awareness, consideration, research and buying phases of the consumer shopping journey. 

With regard to SEM, below are two strategies for pacing budgets that can help marketers realize higher return on their advertising investment:

• Heavy-up on media spend during the busy “research” days, especially on keywords related to products or research terms.  For the 2009 holiday season, many online sites realized high traffic but low sales conversion during the days leading  up to “Black Friday,” indicating that consumers were researching purchases and looking for great deals. 
• Coordinate SEM spend and messaging with traditional and other media buys, not just during promotional efforts, but for several days following awareness campaigns in effort to reach consumers who are migrating from “awareness” toward “purchase” intention.   Sales tracked from SEM ads can realize a lift for several days following large online display campaigns, such as homepage takeovers on publisher sites.

Consumers are getting smarter with regard to finding the greatest value for their dollars; developing a strategy for pacing SEM budgets during holidays can help marketers do the same.

Google Takes it Personal

Posted by Patrick Marshall, Analyst & Paul Williams, Analyst

Underreported by Google, but definitely of importance to anyone with a website was a recent announcement by Google on personalized search. Google has been using personalized results, that is using historical search information associated with a logged-in Google account, since at least 2007. The big change announced is that personalized search will be extended beyond signed-in users, so that anyone using the Google Search engine can view personalized results. To quote the Google blog:

"What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”

Speculation on why Google does anything can always be a little dicey, but based on the information Google appears to be collecting (search history and click-through rate), it’s easy to see why Google has chosen to extend personalization. By modifying results based on what people are searching for and navigating to, Google can ensure that they continue to serve their users relevant content. Google is finally coming around to accepting that search activity (e.g.  click-through rates) provides its own form of relevance.  Possible positive outcomes of Google extending personalized search include:

Paid Search Best Practices for Leveraging Your Product Resellers

Posted by Stacy Gross, Account Manager

Many large retailers struggle to efficiently and effectively collaborate with their resellers to sell their products via paid search.  This can lead to missed opportunities to engage consumers, and even resellers cannibalizing your traffic and sales.  The keys to working with the resellers of your products are communication and collaboration.  Once the communication lines are open, here are a few best practices to leverage your resellers to maximize paid search sales and ROI:

Reseller Support/Collaboration

Retailers should reach out to collaborate and support their preferred partners.  This is the online equivalent of an end-cap in a physical retail store.  It includes providing your preferred partners with co-op dollars that they can use to increase visibility for your brand in a way dictated by you.  Uniting your resellers in terms of strategy and messaging can help you dominate the search engine results page (SERP) for your product/brand.  You can also work together with your resellers to push promotions. 

Search Happenings: Weekly Search Headlines

Posted by Dan Malachowski, Product Marketing Manager

From the Engines:

• Google now allows paid content in Google News.
• AOL rolling out paid inclusion as Yahoo! SSP ends.
• YouTube captions–an SEO game-changer?
• Yahoo! search year in review.  Google year-end Zeitgeist.

Other Topics of Interest:

• FDA yet to create regulations on how drug makers can use social media.
• Twitter most popular word of 2009.

Some Fun Stuff:

• Dog saves guy from heart attack.

Google Caffeine – The Update’s Coming Soon

Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Search Strategist

A couple months back, we took a look at Google’s new search results on Caffeine.  The “Caffeine” engine represented Google’s experiment with a new way of looking at their own data, and was presented in a “sandbox” format separate from its standard results sets.  For example, if you visited

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

You could enter Google queries, and in some cases you’d come across different results than you would find on Google.com.  Performics checked out these listings and we found that Caffeine was faster and presented a broader set of query matches.  We also found that the results were slightly different on Caffeine for retail keyword searches and some long-tail searches (e.g. searches with three or more words). 

As of recently, the “sandbox” has closed, and the only message from Google that remains at the URL is that Caffeine will soon be ready for prime time.  What does this mean for your site?  It could mean a great deal, so read on.