Currently, the largest slice of the online cake, it is an effective brand building tool, a rapid response reputation management tool, and a great way to test the performance of landing pages. When used synergistically with natural search, display or social media programmes, paid search is an optimal part of the engagement marketing mix.
In November last year, Google, introduced paid site links to their ever-growing list of ad formats.
This format produces some definite PPC benefits; you take up more SERP real estate increasing CTR, the links can allow expensive terms to be shown against cheap brand traffic, you can deep link which increases usability and conversion rates.
The Impact on Paid Search
Since implementing these site links for a large travel brand recently the CTR on brand terms rose by 14 points. Not only did this drive a huge amount of additional traffic, the resultant improvement in quality score decreased the CPC by 17%. Truly a paid search dream, more traffic at a lower CPC.
How is SEO Affected?
As the paid ads now took up more space and were receiving more clicks from the brand related queries, it is unsurprising that brand clicks on SEO decreased significantly. In fact it was approximately halved. On high value terms the negative impact of this would appear huge if considered in isolation to paid search.
Analysis in Synergy
The key questions around this type of activity are not simply around the impact on visits, but also on revenue. Overall between the 2 channels the clicks increased by 12%. The increase in revenue was even more pronounced at 20%.
Look at the Whole Picture
These results highlight the important of SEO and Paid search being run in synergy. Without access to the paid search data some SEOs would have been screaming for the site links to be taken down. Similarly without understanding the decline in natural traffic SEMs could have been losing cash overall yet been totally blinded by their own perceived gains. By looking at the whole picture we were able to deliver true value to the client.
It’s been a while since my last taste of snowy alpine goodness and even longer since my last post on Connect and so thought I would get myself back in the swing of things with a post combining two of my favourite endeavours; snowboarding and paid search.
Now, I appreciate that to some people the connection might not be immediately apparent, and others may even think it tenuous, but bear with me and all will become clear. And if, like me, you very much like paid search and snowboarding, then you’re in for a treat!
Now, without further ado…5 ways in which you can use snowboarding best practice to improve your PPC ROI:
Coming from a PPC background, it was quite interesting to see what was happening on the other side of the digital spectrum, at SES on Wednesday. While most of the SEO technical aspects were quite new to me, I did come away with an interesting thought, which I think applies equally to SEO and PPC (and perhaps all other forms of digital marketing); evolution, change and adaptability. And before anyone thinks that I stumbled into a Darwin Expo, here’s what Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer from Google had to say.
Google is evolving. Ever since Google has started unleashing new products (involving search) like One Box results, local business listings,universal search across all verticals; image results, real-time results, news results, video and many others, organic results are slipping to a lower position on the first page of search results. However, Maile was keen to mention that Google looks at SEO as a partnership.
Universal Search for a highly commercial keyword 'flowers'
A key part of SEO is to evolve with Google. This could include optimising local results on Google maps, including images and videos on the website or having a social media strategy, amongst others. Infact a very important blog post written way back in 2007 by Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch, highlights this integrated aspect of SEO.
All this might seem like a lot to do, but Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph, is of the opinion that it is easier to wait and see how the audience (users) react to the new landscape on SERPs before implementing new strategies. It is afterall the users who have to evolve and adapt to the huge amount of information being made available to them in such varied and rapidly changing forms.
Each search result is likely to be relevant to the user query, thus improving user experience and it is important for agencies to measure impacts of the new landscape on CTR of PPC ads and organic results. Afterall, paid search has also come a long way from static ads to ‘The Rise of Universal Paid Search’.
My main point is this; It’s important to accept that the search engines we’re all so reliant upon will change and evolve at a rapid rate (look at the amount of major changes in search alone over the last decade). Google in particular has released a whole host of new features recently, in a bid to safeguard its market share from competition. Some of these developments impact certain digital channels more than others. Ultimately, clients and their agencies need to have an integrated strategy so that the impact of search engine evolution is limited. Don’t place all your eggs (traffic) in one basket!
On Tuesday, I ventured to Angel for the SES London conference and caught an inspiring debate amongst the top SEOs and SEMs in the industry. These included Rand Fishkin, Dave Naylor and Ralph Tegtmeier fighting for SEO and Paul Mead and Andrew Goodman for PPC. It was great to hear their take on the industry and where it is heading as well as a debate over the strengths and weaknesses of both PPC and SEO.
The session was kicked off by looking at the top line statistics comparing PPC and SEO, PPC wins out right!:) PPC had a slightly higher conversion rate, average order value, value per visit and average time on site. Please note though these stats do not take into account if SEO was involved within the users click journey.
To recap; Google’s been offering the choice for advertisers to have 4 additional site links to their Paid Search ads. One of the major positive aspects of site links is to shorten the users navigation to conversion as well promoting seasonal services or products.
However, another great benefit of the site links is… gaining visibility on highly competitive keywords.
I’ve been running site links for one of our clients. One of the site links is based on the keyword ”Theatre tickets”. As you can imagine this terms is one of the most competitive and expensive keywords found in its particular sector.
Nothing exciting?
For the period between 23rd December 09 and 21st January 2010, the “theatre tickets” generic campaign had fairly decent results in terms of conversation rate. But the ‘theatre tickets’ site link performed even better, with a conversation rate 216% higher for 92.5% cheaper!
This really shows how beneficial site links can be to a paid search campaign, particularly when concerned with highly competitive generic terms.
It also seems that generic keywords placed in site links have a positive effect on brand CTRs too.
Advertisers on your Site links blocks. Ready? Get set? Go!
I am currently doing a bit of personal development by spending regular time with the PPC team to learn what they do, and to find areas where our two departments can help and learn from each other. “Synergy” if you speak business-talk.
We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.
What are CSE’s?
Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.
As part of our decade in search series I wanted to pick out a few highlights that have caught my eye in 2009. We know of late Google has been pumping out new products and services quicker than Santa delivers presents. However, before we even touch the wonderful world of Google let’s take a quick look at what was called a pretender to Google before we really understood its main purpose.
The Pretender
WolframAlpha is “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would”. With that in mind this young pretender turns in to a no hoper if you were planning to do conventional queries. But where it comes in to its own specific data related queries or referencing. One of the weird ones is the ISBN barcode
Yes that’s right. It’s pulled up the corresponding barcode for the ISBN number. I’m not sure this will leave any of the search engines quaking in their boots.
A Familiar Friend
Nevertheless moving on to another new but familiar friend we have Bing who also made a splash in 2009. Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft that was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search.
Just like with their names Microsoft keep trying to improve their search engine. However apart from the name changing Microsoft have made an effort to bring something new to its service. First of all the ever changing homepage image which has always impressed me each time I see it. Another is how Bing now organises search results into categories. For instance typing in Margret Thatcher will allow you to see the normal set of results on the right hand side but on the left there are options to delve in to more relevant and related results such as the ones listed below:
Not to be left out Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft that would mean Bing would power Yahoo! Search. This all being said Google has pretty much owned this year and not just because of the size of the power house search engine but the developments they have put live.
Here Comes Google
The Vince update that boosted big brand websites within Google SERP’s was the cause of much conversation here as iCrossing UK. Liz Ayers and David Peiris did some fantastic analysis trying to unravel how Google might be using it’s algorithm to display this SERP’s . I’d advise you to take some time out and have a good read of it.
Caffeine was another update that was more focused on upgrading the engine of Google rather than the enhancements of the algorithm. Matt Cutts explains on the Webmaster Central blog that “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results” and that this update is “the first step in a process that will let Google (us) push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
Google Social Search is a personal favourite of mine and is an experiment featured in Google Labs. Basically “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.” Right now in Brighton it’s snowing so a quick search shows this for the term ’snow’
The content areas that Google uses can be broken down in to three areas (Web Search Help):
Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.
To find this content Google uses your social circle. “The following people make up your social circle:
People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.
It’s all very logical, simple in it’s idea but very clever and useful. If you want to find out more try watching MattCutts (with his lovely shiny Minority Report looking head, sorry Matt I couldn’t resist.)
“..Immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before”
Of course the main difference between Social search and Real time search is that latter is focused on topic, trending and drawing content from sources that will predominately feature outside your social circle. Not stopping there Google’s personalisation that was only available to users who had Google accounts changed its policy and made it available signed-out users worldwide using a 180 day cookie. This means the traditional ranking factors that Google uses to rank still are valid. However in your day to day searching your frequently visited sites will be more prominent in your search results where relevant. This has caused a real stir in the SEO community but like always this is yet another opportunity for the digital community to come together and provide digital strategy as opposed to single channel marketing.
Well that’s what caught my eye in 2009. It’s been a very challenging year for us all and will be the year that saw social come in to its own. I wish you the very best of luck in 2010 and I leave you with this final link that made me smile.
2008, eh? Well, something must have happened during it, since iCrossing kept paying me. ::surreptitiously consults Google Timeline::
Insofar as a BIG THEME can be detected, (besides the ongoing Yahoo! soap opera), it would be wirelessness. Google began the year by bidding heavily in the US wireless spectrum auction, not to win but to bust the cash threshold that forced open-access rules on to the winner. By freakish coincidence, the Android mobile OS was being demoed by May and launched on the shiny G1 in September.
Google also released this awesome comic strip drawn by the Infinite Canvas guy. It was about a browser or something? I forget.
Meanwhile in the trenches:
As is traditional, around April we all hallucinated an algorithm update, triggering weeks of the usual Beaker-like shrilling in SEO fora around the world. As is also traditional, Matt Cutts denied all knowledge of it, despite inadvertently dubbing it Dewey. The industry also freaked out over a couple of waves of visible PageRank penalisation - apparently aimed in the direction of link sellers. But no, wait - PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore! Phew.
Also, in no particular order:
Googlebot began crawling through certain HTML forms to discover content not conventionally linked to.
Google brought in 10-box results for local blended search, replacing the previous 3-box - because I know *I* just can’t get enough locksmiths in my morning SERP.
Long-tail freaks celebrated as the average number of keywords per search went from 3 to 4.
Redirects and vanity URLs became invalid as AdWords display URLs from April, causing PPC teams to become grouchy and overly attached to certain coffee mugs.
Cuil demonstrated that a dorky misspelled name is necessary but insufficient for online success.
So the year was 2006 - I was at Aston Uni (or “up north” as my colleagues would describe L ) studying for my post-grad. Looking back now, that year was pretty significant for my future career choice as that was the first time I’d ever heard of SEO. My group was randomly assigned a report topic for an e-marketing module - you’ve guessed it - SEO. We thought we had drawn the short straw at the time as it sounded complicated and way too techy even for the average nerd (erm….)
Anyway, I wanted to share one of the examples we used in the report to describe “black hat” SEO - one I still refer to today - the case of BMW Germany.
The German BMW site was penalised for cloaking (showing one thing to a user and a completely different thing to a search engine)/ creating ‘doorway pages’. Danny Sullivan called it a “poor man’s cloaking” - When users click on the URL in search engine results, a JavaScript redirect would occur taking users to a slick looking page.
Staying Competitive in 2010 is the next in the series of iCrossing hosted events attracting many clients wanting to hear from our search specialists on how to stay ahead of the game in 2010. Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search and Tom Jones, Head of Media gave a snapshot of this year followed by a compelling look at 2010, highlighting these 3 key areas to ensure 2010 is successful for your brand:
Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates
Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.
Charlie Peverett on 
Philip Buxton on 
aukseo on 
Dominic Parker on 
jhawkins on 
Chris Eden on 
