So we’re officially in a recession now (according to official government figures via the BBC) with no sign of things getting better anytime soon. Marketing budgets are being slashed by many and redundancies are spreading like wildfire. So, if you want to either make the most of your marketing budget, or if you’re in marketing and you want to hold onto your job, where should you be putting your money in online?
It’s pretty simple to be honest, just keep spending but make sure it’s working for you!
Something I’ve been doing for many years is capping all my online marketing spend through the use of a CPA (cost per acquisition) limit. Work out what you can afford to spend per sale/referral/lead and still make a profit, optimise your use of the various marketing channels available to keep your cost per acquisition under the limit, and then keep spending!
Hard to justify in the current climate? Just build a business model to show your boss (or yourself) which demonstrates the returns available by keeping spend tied to a CPA.
This is one of my bugbears, especially with regards to PPC (paid search). If it’s working for you, your campaigns are optimised continuously, and you’re coming in under your CPA, then why not throw more money at the campaign? Yes, you have to be diligent to ensure that your CPA limits are adhered to, but once you have it embedded as a process in your organisation it’s not that difficult to grow your spend and as a result your return.
So where should the marketing spend go (in online)? Well, into channels which are measurable and where you can track the returns. Paid search, affiliate marketing, banners (yes, you can work to a CPA if you use the right tools), social media campaigns, viral and of course natural search (search engine optimisation). Of course SEO deserves a different CPA to other channels as it’s naturally cheaper to do as long as you stick to the principles and don’t get sold by an agency looking to charge you the earth for something that costs nothing but common sense.
Google makes SEM’s life even more difficult
November 21, 2008
Search engine marketers aren’t having an easy time with Google these days.
Google have made a change to the search results interface which aims to make it more Digg/Wiki like by allowing users to move results up and down the list, delete sites from a results set and even add sites into a set of results.
For the user this is actually a really nice piece of functionality as it allows you to tailor search results to make them more relevant to you, I’m assuming it’s all stored in your web history so future searches keep the customisation.
What this does do is make it really hard for a search engine marketer to know whether what they see as the top ten results on Google is what the users are seeing. In most cases the answer is probably no now.
I think it’s a great move though and could actually help to focus the search engine optimisation industry on making pages more relevant through improving content and engaging users as that is what will encourage them to keep a result high up their list!
Full details on the Google Blog.
When Google gets beaten to it…
November 6, 2008
Sometimes even a mega-company like Google casn get beaten to the mark with a new piece of functionality that they should really be providing themselves. The reasons for this? Perhaps they overstretch themselves with their range of products and can’t focus enough to add the bells and whistles we’d all like? Or maybe they get a product to the point where it gets traction and keeps acquiring users and then leave it open for the rest of us to add the bells and whistles functional pieces?
Whatever the reason, there are occasions when great additions are made to their services which they aren’t responsible. The latest of these that I’ve come across is something called Glync which has been created by a company called Virante.
It’s a Firefox plugin which grants them access to store your data from Google Webmaster Tools to enable them to show you a graph showing the history of incoming links to your site and how that changes over time. An extremely useful tool, but in my opinion one which should be a standard feature of Googles webmaster tool set.
How long will this plugin be useful? Until Google decides to offer it themselves I’d say. That said, it is a very nice piece of functionality and the free version is most useful.
Does economic uncertaintly push online ad spend into SEM?
March 19, 2008
According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) it does.
Apparently money is shifting into search and away from print and classified at an increasing rate. The reason for this I’d surmise is that search is being seen as a way to follow consumers rather than just trying to put an ad in front of them. It’s now widely accepted that most markets have a need to be active in search so it’s natural for spend to shift towards it.
Key findings from the SEMPO study are:
- The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
- North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
- Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs
- Paid placement captures 87.4 percent of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5 percent; paid inclusion, 0.07 percent, and technology investment, 1.4 percent.
- Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago
Here’s how the spend is shifting:
Shifting to search is great for all the SEO agencies out there but is also going to make their jobs a lot harder as they have to work for their money to get clients to the top of the listings. As competition grows, so it becomes more difficult to get dramatic improvements in position, some SEO agencies have had an easy ride in recent years and that’s going to get harder.
Other developments will also affect SEO such as the introduction of semantic search technology (as announced by Yahoo recently). Developments such as this could change the rankings entirely and again will mean the agencies have to stay ahead of the game and work hard (not a bad thing).
Search marketing slaying seasonality in travel
February 26, 2008
Interesting take on the role of search marketing in travel here from Elisabeth Osmeloski of Search Engine Watch.
Not completely sure I agree that seasonality will disappear, there will surely always be a place for targeting specific seasonal activities and travel times with certain keywords. Yes you may run the campaign full time but it’s usually a good idea to ramp it up in the appropriate seasons.
Search marketing ROI improving
January 31, 2008
A report (here via Marketing Charts) shows that ROI on search marketing has improved in the past year.
What is really interesting is the figures showing ROI improvements by search engine. Google has improved ROI by 7.5% (and it’s taken a whopping 76% of the total spend). Yahoo showed a 39% improvement in ROI returned to advertisers since the launch of Panama which is great news for them although coming at a difficult time. MSN interestingly shows the highest clickthrough rate and ROI, it’s ROI was 27% greater than the average across other engines.
Just shows why the money is still all in search at the moment. While returns like this are to be had it’s going to be tough for anyone to convince me that it’s worth moving money out of search into other areas.
Search continues to lead the way in online marketing
January 14, 2008
Paid search (according to Marketing Charts) contributed 57.1% of the total spend on online marketing in the UK. The spend was up 44% year on year for the first six months of 2007 compared with 2006.
This just shows how effective it is and where your marketing pounds should be aimed.
Classifieds has shown good growth as well but this is not as targeted so it’s obviously not going to get the same amount of interest as search for the moment.
Reasons for using search are cited to be lead generation, driving direct sales and traffic generation. Great to see sales being the equal top reason for using search. For too long it’s been seen as a way to drive traffic and acquire leads, when actually it is the most effective way to drive a direct sale available to online marketers.
Google sends even more traffic to the travel sector
December 11, 2007
Hitwise have released a new report on the market share of the major search engines today (based on U.S. data). Unsurprisingly, the report shows that Googles dominance continues to grow rapidly. Google is said to now account for 65.1% of the search traffic delivered online, up 5% from this time last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask are said to be at 21%, 7% and 4%, all down slightly year on year.
Interestingly for those of us in the travel market 33% of travel traffic is said to be from search engines, thats 15% up year on year. That’s a big jump, perhaps we’re all finally nailing our SEO and PPC strategies.
Google shows its dominance in the online travel sector by donating 21% of travels traffic all by itself which really shows where the focus needs to be for search engine marketers in the travel industry. That’s a 26% increase in the amount of travel traffic that Google contributes to since last year, again a huge leap.
All this bodes very well for the forthcoming January peak booking period!
Innovation in PPC
December 3, 2007
We all know how notoriously difficult paid search is to get right in a highly competitive marketplace. Take car rental, loads of players, very high bid prices and some really proficient PPC campaigns. Need a what to stand out from the crowd? Take the lead from Sixt of Germany then, they’ve done something very clever with ascii art to make their adverts stand out from the crowd.
This is genius, and they experienced a 40% plus increase in clicks on the campaign! Something that could be applied to many industries!
This campaign has just won an award, more details here.
Yahoo search getting smarter
October 2, 2007
I posted the other day surmising whether Yahoo is catching up in search based on some new metrics from Compete. The general feel from that post was that they weren’t really and the numbers were questionable in value.
So, what should I see this morning? New, useful features in Yahoo’s main search interface, the kind of features that make search a whole lot less painful for users and add a lot of value, helping users to target searches more effectively.
The first thing I noticed was that they have integrated images from Flickr and also playable videos, kind of like Google’s universal search idea and equally as useful to the user. So if you search for a music artist (eg. Unkle) you should get images and video in the results along with useful additions such as links to albums, lyrics, photos and more videos. Next I did a search for a hotel (eg. ‘hudson hotel new york‘) in New York (being the online travel buff that I am) and the top result in this case was a Yahoo Local listing for the hotel complete with map links, again extremely useful (although possibly doing themselves out of a small amount of ad revenue here). Another cool feature is the inclusion of custom results for searches such as health related (eg. ‘lyme disease‘), quick easy access to relevant info is the killer in search and here Yahoo have it spot on.
And then there’s the biggest and most useful addition, and it’s an addition that Google haven’t yet implemented… It’s an AJAX based search assistant panel that appears if it senses you hesitate while typing a search query. It works as an auto-complete assistant and also a guided search tool as it will both try to guess what you were typing and give you suggestions as well. This is extremely powerful and really makes search easier for the user. It also adds a lot of value to advertisers as it should mean more qualified clicks on paid search results as the searches are better informed.
I’m actually really surprised this has come out of Yahoo first, I’ve been waiting for Google to implement something like this for a while now but for once Yahoo have the upper hand. Now all they need to do is sort out the problems with their paid search results (relevancy, gaming etc), fix their algorithms for natural search and improve the interface and they could become my search engine of choice!
