Speakers:
- John Squire, SVP, Product Strategy, General Manager, Search Services, Coremetrics
- Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Mediasmith
- Isabel Sopoglian, VP of Search Marketing, Cars.com
John
Think about your marketing in terms of how we get the right visitors and what the right pages are to land on. Also how do we get the right measurement to validate our decisions?
Think about where you should invest your marketing dollars. Over 50% of customers interact with more than 1 ad when making a conversion. A little less than 50% click on one thing and then take some sort of action. When you look at the data though nearly 25% are touching more than 30 channels over a 25 day time period before making a conversion. Its important to look at all the influencers all the way through the sales process instead of just looking at the final conversion and believing that that was what made the sale. Multi-touch increases a marketers decisions whether to eliminate an investment, invest in more 3rd parties linkages, or bid up a particular keyword.
- Use attribution reporting across all sessions to gain an accurate picture of the paid search terms
- Identify critical groups of low cost per click keywords that precipitate sales
Bob
Search works with all the other branding activity that you do. When Napster did a Super Bowl spot, search activity went up.
Whether it’s an email or banner ad, it’s important to watch the click trail leading up to the last click.
There are instances where you try to be so efficient like just running search that you’ve eliminated all of your volume.
Isabel
What counts as a conversion on your site. (sale, signup, traffic)
What is the value of that assigned conversion. Are you tracking on keyword level?
Internal Key Factors to Conversion
Keywords, Ad copy, Landing Page, Conversion Path, Negative Keywords, URL Blocking
External Key Factors to Conversion
Traffic quality, click fraud, behavior of searchers, algorithmic changes, SERP changes, search engine testing
Example: Impressions up almost 300 percent for particular ad on Yahoo. This decreased CTR’s. They called Yahoo and Yahoo said they had been running “tests” Sometimes results are out of your hands.
Important to track
- Ability to track on keyword level
- By search engine
- Match type
- Ad copy
- Landing page version
Simple Strategies to Convert
- Only select keywords that are relevant to product
- Extensive negative keywords
- Use appropriate keyword match types
- Don’t mislead searchers with your ad copy
- Optimize your landing page and lead path to convert
Advanced Strategy to Convert
- Detect international clicks and demand search engines to block source or refund money
- Block non-performing domains
- Score traffic quality by source and implement into your bidding
- Check traffic for click fraud and provide search engine w/proof
Judge carefully when just looking at pure conversion data! The higher the quantity of traffic, the more statistically relevant becomes the results for your conversion. Once they were able to get more traffic from the Yahoo network they expect the conversion percentages for Google and Yahoo to even out!
Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.
