The Art Of SEO - The Science Of PPC

by 1 Comment

Measuring ROI

Dave Morgan had a great piece today on Online Spin about emerging trends among traditional brand advertisers, “These days, all marketers want measurable results related to sales objectives from their advertising and marketing expenditures, particularly online.”

Dave hits one nail on the head. ROI metrics and accountability are addictive. This kind of data seductively leaves the decision making to the return and takes the risk out of marketing investments. Unquestionably, advertisers will continue to strive for ROI measurability and online marketing is more appealing to ROI based decision makers.

Marketers who believe they can accurately quantify the impact of their online advertising, whether SEM or Brand, do so at their own risk. Every analytic system I have ever used is flawed; the assumptions and methodologies inherent in each approach creates measurement error.

One critical element to watch out for is that ROI for keyword search frequently appears as brand search.

  • Customers will find you searching for keywords and then return searching for your brand or some variation/misspelling of the brand.
  • Customers will find you on one computer and return via direct navigation or brand search from another computer to purchase.
  • Customers will enter the URL’s in the search box instead of the address bar (perhaps as high as 15% of users) so direct navigation shows as brand search.
  • Brand searches are frequently latent conversions from keyword searches.
  • Depending on the cookie setting of your analytics system, you may or may not capture this first touch.
  • Referrer data isn’t always preserved through caches and browsers. Firefox users on MSN, for example, will show up as direct searches instead of tagged with a natural search keyword.

I just finished a three month contract for a startup. Despite deploying sophisticated, redundant analytic systems (Google Analytics and ClickShift’s Statistical Bid Management, only half of the orders in the first three months were tracked and many were reported as direct navigation or searches for the brand.

You might expect this for a mature brand with a large repeat customer base, but it defies logic for a startup that was still only using CPC for marketing. Since we had a small data set, I was able to research the orders individually and attribute the source and term for each record in the customer table.

You wouldn’t want to try to repeat that method with 10,000 orders, but the result was a 200% increase in the reported ROI for the CPC campaign. Individually or combined, the analytics systems didn’t produce accurate enough data for decision making.

The only way to really understand ROI from each channel and search term is to find ways to get a customer to login as quickly as possible, while the referral data is as fresh and accurate as possible. Incorporate that referral/source data directly into the Customer_Id table and import all sales information into internal systems to produce the ROI measurement.

If you do not have an initial source associated with a customer record, make it a goal in every customer interaction (survery, customer service call, etc.) to obtain that information. This allows you to accurately attribute revenue to the marketing investment and track every additional touch point that generates a visit regardless of source, medium or computer. With that kind of data on hand, you have a baseline to begin to understand the value of each advertising channel. Then your ROI based decisions can be good ones.

by Leave a Comment

Integrity Preserves Brand

Always act with integrity to maintain your reputation and your brand. One reason to be fair and honorable in your dealings with customers and employees is the amount of damage an angry person can do to your brand. This damage can vary from complaints to the BBB and your credit card processor to posting negative reviews and feedback about your site. Negatives like this can really taint a site.

In the extreme example, the negative reviews can actually overwhelm the company’s own brand in search engines. Take the case of a now defunct SEO company called Traffic Power. They flourished briefly during the two years or so when a link farm could drive Google SERP. They acquired some enemies from their questionable practices as well as sued some people who made disparaging remarks about them.

Instead of silencing their critics, the lawsuit lit up the blogosphere, rallied the SEO community and generated thousands of back links to the story on SEOBook. The top ten SERP’s on Google for “Traffic Power” are currently dominated by websites dedicated to informing customers about the dangers of Traffic Power. The number one site is called Traffic Power Sucks. Traffic Power is in bankruptcy.

Most companies don’t have to worry about pissing off the top names in SEO or someone taking the time to create a site dedicated to telling people, for example “This Brand Can’t be Trusted” or P……….com is owned by a crooks. Only a mistreated former employee or a really angry customer would do that. Rarely is the anger sustained long enough to go to the effort of purchasing a domain like www.P………Sucks.com and optimizing it to control a brand.

What is far more likely is that an unhappy customer or former employee might spend a few minutes each day clicking on paid links for a particular company. For example, the search term of postcard printing brings up sponsored adds that cost between $5 and $15 dollars per click. If the spurned customer or jilted employee is angry enough to get their friends and family to do the same thing, pretty soon the ROI of the campaign can get be put in doubt.

So marketers and business owners, act with integrity in all of your dealings and your brand will prosper.

by 4 Comments

Search Engine Marketing

I swore to myself when I started the blog that I would focus on print marketing and leave the SEO stuff to the thousands of SEO blogs out there. I figured with company insiders like Matt Cutts from Google and the ever insightful Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiry and Aaron Wall from SEO Book, I wouldn’t have much to offer. Well, my resolution lasted all the way to my first post.

I have a friend who is trying to get a new company out of the sandbox and indexed by Google, MSN and Yahoo. One of the challenges faced by any new site is how to get links from “Trusted” domains. This company in question has the advantage of being included in the Adobe Certified Partners Section as a Master Printer. The problem is the listings are all hidden behind a “dynamic firewall” because they are only shown in response to a particular query.

The solution was so simple that it reminded me that marketing professionals frequently out think themselves. If you want a spider to find a page, you post a link to it. Find the direct link that takes you to the dynamic result and post it where the spiders will eventually find it. In this case, link directly to results of the Adobe Printing Partners page and voila, a link from a trustworthy site will shortly send the spider on to the site you want discovered.