Sonicko Consulting

Clever Search Engine Marketing Effort by Woot

A few days ago I was looking up the share price of Google and noticed a great ad that Woot had placed, which I captured in a screenshot above. With all of the market turmoil, recession talk, and financial collapse they capitalized with a clever ad reminding people that Woot is available to spend your last remaining dollars. Now I’m not sure what the CPL/CPA is from this strategy, but in my opinion it is one of those intangible brand awareness campaigns that cannot always be accurately measured. Anyone know who handles SEM for Woot or if they are in house?

Tags: google, Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing, woot

Utilizing Adwords To Take Advantage of Metrolink Situation

On Friday a Metrolink train crashed in Los Angeles killing 25 people. This was the deadliest train crash in over 25 years. Almost immediately after this occurred lawyers started buying up keywords such as ‘metrolink crash’ advertising their services. While the practice is fairly common to take advantage of breaking news to buy traffic this seems a little shady. The lawyers who we saw engaging in this include:

• Larry H Parker
• Seeg Miller Johnson
• Get a Referral
• Eisenburg

I completely understand that everyone needs to make a living, but I can’t believe that this is great for your brand as a lawyer to be seen as an ambulence chaser, and possibly the companies or agencies running SEM for these lawyers are simply looking for leads. Has anyone else seen this kind of activity taking place?

Tags: Google Adwords, metrolink crash, Search Engine Marketing, sem, using adwords for metrolink crash

Importance of Search Engine Results Position

Whether you are relying upon SEO, SEM, or a combination of both to achieve targeted traffic from search engine results pages you probably know that achieving a position within the top three results is critical. All too often I hear, “I need to be #1 in Google for X term” without having any science associated with it, but as you can see in the image below from Enquiro Research which conducted eye tracking studies for visitors almost all visible eye movement is focused on the top five results.

You can clearly see that eye tracking is focused on the upper left hand corner of the search engine results page, with minimal eye movement down towards the bottom of the page. There is also very little eye movement in the lower right corner of the page, typically where position 5+ SEM ads are placed. Enquiro’s visual eye tracking study is solidified when you look at the CTR (click through rate) associated with results in major search engine results pages. Pete at Searchlight Digital provided the following SERP Click Through Rates recently:

Rank	Clicks	Click %	Delta #n-1	Delta #1
1	8220278	42.30%	n/a	n/a
2	2316738	11.92%	-71.82%	-71.82%
3	1640751	8.44%	-29.18%	-80.04%
4	1171642	6.03%	-28.59%	-85.75%
5	943667	4.86%	-19.46%	-88.52%
6	774718	3.99%	-17.90%	-90.58%
7	655914	3.37%	-15.34%	-92.02%
8	579206	2.98%	-11.69%	-92.95%
9	549196	2.83%	-5.18%	-93.32%
10	577325	2.97%	5.12%	-92.98%
11	127688	0.66%	-77.88%	-98.45%
12	108555	0.56%	-14.98%	-98.68%
13	101802	0.52%	-6.22%	-98.76%
14	94221	0.48%	-7.45%	-98.85%
15	91020	0.47%	-3.40%	-98.89%
16	75006	0.39%	-17.59%	-99.09%
17	70054	0.36%	-6.60%	-99.15%
18	65832	0.34%	-6.03%	-99.20%
19	62141	0.32%	-5.61%	-99.24%
20	58384	0.30%	-6.05%	-99.29%
21	55471	0.29%	-4.99%	-99.33%
31	23041	0.12%	-58.46%	-99.72%
41	14024	0.07%	-39.13%	-99.83

Pete followed up the data with the following analysis: “As you can see, the number one position receives just over 42% of all clicks. Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).”

What this clearly shows is that eye tracking and CTR clearly favors being within the top five results. What this doesn’t necessarily show is that being #1 is always better than being #2 or #3. Sure, you need traffic, but that doesn’t always show a correlation. For those of you who are using Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords you can see a Keyword Position report like the one shown below: 

The default as you can see in the picture is to show ‘Visits’. Now while visits is important we already know that being in the top five positions will result in more traffic than being in position 26. What we’re concerned about is how this relates to the conversion rate and associated monetary gain on our website. For that we can still use the Keyword Positions report, but change the breakdown to focus on conversion metrics like the image below demonstrates:

What this image demonstrates is how through the Keyword Position report you can see from which position your conversions came from. Keep in mind that just because one has a 15% conversion rate and another has 5% doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better off bidding for position A or B if you’re running SEM through Adwords. Ensure that your data is statistically significant by using a conversion confidence calcualatorand then you can feel confident that the correlations and sub relations that you’re making actually make sense. In theory the beauty of this is that you could potentially pay less to run in position three that converts at a higher rate than paying more to be in position one. Hopefully this helps with your position strategies. Does anyone have any related stories about correlations between position and conversion rate?

Tags: Google Analytics, keyword position, keyword position report, sem, seo, serp position

Consistency When Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion

One of the more popular options when running SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns in either Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, or Ask is using a form of dynamic keyword insertion. There are several great guides written out there about the subject including this one from RedFly Marketing if you’re new to the subject.

Where I like to take it further is in the use of dynamic keyword insertion from start to finish. What I mean by this is that a user types in “Super Red Widget” in Google for example. Up pops an ad that has in the title exactly what I typed in, which is “Super Red Widget”. I think to myself, wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Note to readers: Dynamic keyword insertion is not the end all be all when it comes to text ads. There are several ads that I manage where traditional ads far outperform those which use dynamic keyword insertion, but this post centers around ads where it is effective.

After I see “Super Red Widgets” I as a user click on the ad which takes me to a landing page. Now traditionally this is where most SEM agencies and other marketers stop. Due to lack of control over the landing page or just not understanding what is possible with a decent web developer the use of dynamic keyword insertion is done. What I would suggest doing is talking with your development/technology group and asking them to try an experiment for you. Tell them you want to pass the keyword query from the search engine and insert it onto the landing page where you are driving the visitor. This can be in the form of a H1, H2, or H3 tag or it can be inserted as a Flash var if you have a Flash based website or header.

Sitting down with your developer and implementing some basic requirements is also helpful. If your keywords are particularly long you may want to put a keyword character length, similiar to what search engines do with default text in showing a standard keyword if the keyword exceeds that character length. Other requirements of capitalizing the first letter of each word and indicating a space are items you may want to take into consideration.

Don’t worry about fully understanding the implementation, but it shouldn’t take a developer more than a couple hours to implement and test this. In future posts I’ll get more into A/B and MVT solutions, but if you do have knowledge about these you can easily setup an A/B test provided that you only run this on ad groups that fully utilize dynamic keyword insertion. Send the traffic to the page without dynamic keyword insertion on the landing page and one group that has dynamic keyword insertion.

The end result is to test out the theory that having a consistent usage of the user’s keyword from start to finish results in a higher conversion rate than simply stopping at the SERP (search engine results page). You start with the user typing the keyword into Google, then seeing the keyword in your ad copy, clicking on it, and seeing it again on the landing page. In my experience this has resulted in a lift in conversion rate most of the time. There have been a few exceptions when it didn’t so my advise is to try it out, and monitor your results carefully. If it results in a lift you can expand into other ad groups and campaigns.

One tip with this is to ensure that you have all of your negative keywords properly attached so that you don’t have words associated to the landing page that you wouldn’t otherwise bid on. Chances are if you’re bidding on competitor keywords or other iffy terms you may not want to implement this strategy for the particular ad group or campaign. If anyone has implemented this or something similiar to it I would love to hear your results. Please feel free to post comments or to contact me with your results.

Tags: dki, dynamic keyword insertion, keyword insertion, Search Engine Marketing, sem