Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Author Photo

Gary Angel brings over twenty years of experience in decision support, CRM, and software development, to SEMphonic. Gary co-founded SEMphonic and is president and chief technology officer. He's responsible for leading SEMphonic's development of Web analytics and SEM decision making tools for web marketing professionals. In addition, he helps companies like WebMD, Intuit, American Express and Charles Schwab maximize their web channel marketing through intelligent use of Enterprise Web Analytics

More articles by Gary Angel





Features

SEM Marketers are Missing Out: Seven Ways to Mis-Measure Your SEM Program

Written on
June 12th 2006
Author
by Gary Angel  |
Feed
   XML Feed

PPC Self-Cannibalization: Many visitors source multiple times via Search Engines — and are particularly likely to re-enter a session as a “brand” term. When this happens, PPC engines will often credit only the last keyword used — effectively over-stating the performance of “brand” words while understating the performance of every other category. Even if they credit both, they typically provide no way to understand the overlap. Again, web analytics can do this - and provide significant corrections against mis-optimizations or misunderstandings based on multiple PPC entries about the value of certain types of words.

Measuring Engagement via Conversion Proxy: When a business is multi-channel and/or conversion is offline, then optimizing PPC buys can be nearly impossible. By building “Conversion Proxies” — measures of engagement based on specific behaviors or quantities of behavior - in a web analytic solution, you can provide comparative measures of qualification by Search Term (or Ad Group) that are nearly as good as (and in some cases better) than true conversion. For PPC programs where online conversion is non-existent or a poor indicator of overall performance, this technique is absolutely essential — and can vastly improve the real performance of a PPC buy. If you let an agency optimize your program to clicks, you are almost certainly wasting 30-50% of your program dollars.

Cost of SEO Optimizations: SEO experts are always clashing with site designers about the specifics of site implementation. Will or does a set of SEO optimizations really decrease usability? And if so, how should this be measured versus the increased lift in traffic? Web Analytics can provide detailed understanding of both the increased organic lift generated by SEO improvements and any change in the actual efficiency of the site in converting visitors. Using “functional web analysis” — the measurement of web pages using statistics specific to their function within the site as “routers”, “convincers”, etc. — the web analyst can provide finely grained analysis of the real impact of SEO changes. There really is no other way to evaluate this argument sensibly.

Identification of SEO Opportunities: One of the things many organizations don’t have a good handle on is the size of their SEO opportunity and also how to target it. Other than optimizing for Google, what can companies tell their SEO consultants about how to proceed? Web Analytics can help here by providing an analysis of SEO “holes.” Holes are pages or content areas within a site that are poorly indexed on one or more Search Engines relative to the average for the site with that Search Engine. Holes often pinpoint content that one or more engines are struggling with — and they are the highest return places for an SEO expert to target. For large sites, SEO experts often miss big holes — and focus on building the performance of the home page and other obvious site components.

Evaluating Lead Qualification: A big part of understanding where to focus resources is ranking the quality of leads sourced by each channel. In many situations, companies will find they simply get better prospects via PPC or SEO or banner campaigns. When that’s the case, it often makes sense to concentrate efforts on that channel. Web Analytics is the natural place to perform this evaluation — and has the advantage of offering long-lead cycle conversion analysis that can evaluate the cross-channel cannibalization of each of these channels — something that simply can’t be done within any single channel measurement solution.

Value of Controlling Where a Visitor Lands: One significant benefit to PPC leads is the fine-grained control PPC buys provide for where a visitor lands on your site. The value of this can be directly measured by web analytics solutions — which usually make it quite easy to compare the performance of segments by initial landing page.

The Need for Real-Time?
Web Analytics seems like the natural place for understanding and optimizing Search Engine Marketing — just as it is the natural place for understanding and optimizing visitors sourced by any other channel. So why isn’t it used more often?

Part of the explanation lies in the very real need for real-time optimization of bidding. As Pay-Per-Click programs increasingly rely on automated bid-management systems, it seems essential that these same systems have direct (real-time) feeds about behavior. For organizations that use a Bid System from a web analytics vendor, that’s a slam-dunk. But for anybody else, it probably means that a duplicate tagging/tracking system be put in place.

But while the need for real-time PPC bid management is completely valid — it is frequently exaggerated and mis-stated. With PPC Bid-Management, the one variable that can change with lightning rapidity is the bid environment. As bidders move in-and-out of a marketspace, the price that a company must pay for a search term can shift dramatically in hours. On the other hand, nearly every other variable used by a Bid Management system is much more static — and can be productively analyzed by non real-time systems.

It simply isn’t true (as should be obvious) that for most organizations in most situations that the value of click from a given keyword/creative combination fluctuates dramatically. This isn’t true for any other advertising medium — and it isn’t true for PPC either. When it does happen, it’s more likely an artifact of click-fraud than a genuine business issue.

But even if PPC Systems should be able to take conversion data on a batch basis — they frequently just don’t work that way. You may be stuck tagging your site to support both traditional analytics and your Bid Management System — but that doesn’t mean that the role for Web Analytics goes away. As the seven items above plainly illustrate, measurement done by traditional Bid Management systems doesn’t cover nearly the range that a good enterprise web analytics solution will.

Summary
Search Engine Marketing has become one of the key tools for almost every serious web site. To measure it properly, you may need to integrate conversion data with your Bid Management system — but you shouldn’t assume that this means you’ve got measurement covered. There are variety of web analytic techniques for helping measure Search activities better — and to help you understand how each fits into the larger business goals of your website. The good news is that your probably already have the appropriate tool (an enterprise web analytics package) for addressing each and every one of the measurement issues described above.



Pages: « previous page 1 2

Tags: , and
Article Sponsor

More Features

Reader Comments.

No comments yet

Leave a Comment

Add a comment


Spotlight

HipCricket: SMS Is Still the Wave of the FutureADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — HipCricket, a mobile marketing company, has been changing the way advertisers think about reaching their audiences since [...] more...

Adotas Partnership