Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager
Setting goals for a new search engine marketing (SEM) program and developing the strategy that will achieve them are your first steps toward high ROI. There are several important factors that arise when you go through this process, ranging from qualitative considerations such as the audience’s awareness of your brand to quantitative considerations including your initial budget.
Let’s take a look at a few of these factors more closely:
- Brand Awareness – Knowing how familiar your target audience is with your brand plays a large role in goal setting and strategy development. This will help you define what tactics to consider as part of your program and what metrics you define as important in achieving your goals. For example, contextual advertising is a great way to generate brand awareness by targeting prospects that are searching for content related to your product/service offerings. However, since this is often primarily a branding tactic, you should expect a much lower click-through rate (CTR) than you might from tactics such as email or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. read more »
Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator
Analytics tools provide tremendous insight into the activity that is taking place on your website. These tools, such as Google Analytics or Omniture, reveal how users reach your website by disclosing the keyword phrases that are driving traffic, generating the best performance and helping drive the highest conversions. Plus, Analytics tools will break down your top-performing keywords based on paid traffic and organic traffic. All of this can be a big help in your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
By narrowing in on the data that these tools make available you are able to expand your keyword list based on your most successful keywords with the help of other keyword tools. Once you’ve identified the best performing keywords generating the highest ROI, you can use Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find additional keyword phrases related to your top terms.
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Posted by: Nikki Johnson, Marketing Coordinator
There are now advanced segmenting options available in Google Analytics to help advertisers better understand the behavior of “micro-segments” within their visitor base. The new ways to segment an audience will give advertisers “actionable insight” into identifying different users, tailoring offerings toward these users, and driving conversions on the site through search engine marketing and other channels. According to Avinash Kaushik’s blog, you can segment users into three main segments: Visitor Source, Visitor Behavior, and Desired Outcome. These are recommended for a few key reasons:
- Branded Search Keywords: Distinguishing how many users visit your site using branded keywords versus non-branded keywords is helpful in determining your level of brand awareness. Also, it might be useful to compare the site behavior of visitors who already know your brand to visitors who do not. Do they visit more pages? Do they spend more time on a specific page? read more »
Posted by: Megan Amick, Marketing Coordinator
Google Analytics is an extremely effective tool for managing the performance of your online marketing (or search engine marketing) endeavors. There are numerous findings that can be generated within Analytics to look at each aspect of your website visibility and traffic. Below are some suggestions to consider while performing your Analytics analysis:
General/Basic Knowledge
- You can link your Google AdWords account to your Google Analytics account for better pay-per-click (PPC) campaign optimization and website performance.
- Tagging within your site helps to distinguish referrals (visits generated by other websites) vs. search engine visits.
- There are many goals that can be set up to see if users are completing a desired outcome, but you need to implement code on your website to monitor these goals in Analytics.
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Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager
Ever since search engines have become such a commonly utilized gateway to the Web, new engines have continually emerged in an attempt to steal searches and market share from bigger companies like Google and Yahoo!; however, besides a small threat made by Ask, no other engine has been able to break through. Cuil, a search engine developed by some former top Google engineers, did pose some threat with its launch in July 2008. It was touted in the blogosphere as a potential “Google Killer,” but according to Search Engine Watch, it had a disappointing start, and traffic numbers are dismal.
So, what will it take for a new search engine to emerge onto the scene and show staying power? read more »
Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Senior Marketing Coordinator
Aside from its attempt to buy Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Live Search spent most of 2008 playing catch up to arch rival Google. Recent attempts to keep pace have included Live Search News, a quality based ranking tool, updates to Live Search local listings center, an adCenter community site, an expedited ad approval process, the adExcellence training program and improved adCenter functionality.
According to Nielson Ratings data, Live’s search volume remained relatively static throughout the year - averaging roughly 1 billion searches per month, while Google’s search volume increased from 4.25 billion in January to 5.5 billion in December.
With its mainstay software business being hit by the recession, Microsoft is under pressure to deliver in online search. So, will 2009 be the year that Live Search steps out of Google’s shadow?
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Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator
Personalized search is not completely new. It has been introduced slowly over the last couple of years, but it is now in full force. It is important to pay attention to this change and optimize search engine marketing (SEM) programs accordingly, since a shift towards personalization alters the broader search landscape.
Many factors play a part in determining how search results are shown to any given user, such as past searches, Gmail activity, IP address and more. In addition, once search results are displayed, Google SearchWiki users are further able personalize their listings by removing what they find irrelevant, adding URLs, posting comments, and designating which listings are their favorites. So what does this mean for the future of search? It’s going through big changes, but if we keep just a few key points in mind while optimizing our websites, we should be able to keep up with the transition.
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Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator
Closing out 2008, Yahoo! continued to lose usage share points, as Google widened the lead as the predominate search engine of choice. Rumors persist about the sale and acquisition of the struggling engine. And yet Yahoo! remains steadfast in its attempts to restore the engine’s image by undergoing both performance changes and staffing changes.
Late in 2008 Yahoo! announced it would be making changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. Some industry analysts have reported seeing some of these changes beginning to take shape with the increased emphasis on URL naming conventions as well as Yahoo!’s attempt to clean up the relevancy of search results. Yahoo! has not publically released any specific algorithm updates so far in 2009.
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Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager
Despite the tough economy and the fact that many companies are cutting portions of their budgets, most are maintaining their presence online and adopting an even more competitive, aggressive approach. The following tips can be utilized to help differentiate your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising/contextual advertising strategy from your competitors’.
1. Evaluate the messaging your competition is using within their PPC and contextual ads, and determine how to make your creative stronger. It’s got to really stand out. For example, use questions, customer testimonials and of course your strongest offer within your ad text.
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Posted by: Kerry Houchin, Marketing Coordinator
What is it, and how does it work?
SearchWiki is a new tool that Google has unveiled allowing users who are logged into Google accounts to customize their search results.
Now, in addition to searching, you have the ability to:
- Move your favorite search results to the top of the listings
- Add a URL to appear along with Google’s results for certain searches
- Remove search results you don’t consider useful
- Make public comments about search results
One thing to note, however, is that the public comments are the only customizations that will appear to other users. If you move your website to the top of the results, you are the only one who will see that. read more »