October 4th, 2007 by admin
Free, Discount, Cheap and other Value Determinants
A couple of weeks ago Sandra, Hitwise analyst in Asia Pacific, wrote a post on what she terms “search value determinants” to consider the language people use when they enter search queries. To follow on her post, this is some similar US data to look at what Americans search for in conjunction with popular modifiers.
Here are the top 10 variations on some typical modifiers for the four weeks to 18th August 2007. Note that the number of variations for each go into the tens of thousands.
The term “discount” is associated with consumer goods, “cheap” is associated with travel and free is associated with low price point items such as music and MySpace layouts.
The term ‘prices’ appears to be associated with economic indicators such as gas, gold, oil, and stock. The term “deals” is associated with travel queries (similar to “cheap”) and “used” is associated with books and cars.
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2007/08/post_1.html
August 20th, 2007 by admin
August 20th, 2007 by admin
New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers who are en route to their sites anyway. Listings tied to such “branded” keywords, typically a company’s name or products, eat up about half of search budgets, Atlas estimates.
“The reality is those people are already intending to go to your Web site,” said Young-Bean Song, vp of analytics for Atlas, formerly part of aQuantive and now a unit of Microsoft. “What you’re really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing.”
Atlas studied 30 search ad campaigns reaching 120,000 users on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. It found that nearly half of clicks on ads came from people who had already visited the advertiser’s Web site. Moreover, about 60 percent of visits came from “branded” words, like the company’s name, while just 29 percent were from people who searched for generic terms and had never been to the advertiser’s Web site—the type of new customers search is meant to attract.
“Should you be spending half your search budgets on those [branded] terms?” Song said. “Probably not.”
In an earlier research report, Atlas found two-thirds of customers who took actions on advertiser Web sites were reached multiple times by ad impressions on several sites. The data led Atlas to conclude advertisers gave too much credit to search clicks over other forms of advertising that built awareness and consideration before the final click.
According to the Atlas report, navigational search ate up nearly 54 percent of search ad budgets. Since advertisers tend to credit the final click, which is often a navigational search, Song said they end up overrating the impact of these placements and undervaluing other search clicks and media placements.
http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003627915
August 14th, 2007 by admin
Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.
Researchers in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines — Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines performance in returning relevant results.
The queries included “camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music.”
Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.
The researchers then looked at each engine’s “score” to determine whether it fell above or below the average. Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.
AI2RS, the search engine created in-house with no brand-name recognition, fared the worst. The researchers calculated its average precision rating as 10 percent below the average although AI2RS had the highest score when the query was “laser removal.”
The study ties branding not just to product identification but also to product performance, Jansen said. Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen said he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top. Its total scores were 15 percent above the average for the four queries while Google’s total scores were just 0.7 percent above the average.
http://live.psu.edu/story/24878
jansen_branding_of_search_engines.pdf
August 3rd, 2007 by admin
comScore conducted research across dozens of retail and non-retail categories and found consistently that 65% to 90% of conversion occurs offline.
These figures alone have a profound impact on the strategy and economics of search. For example, pure-plays like eBay and Amazon rely extensively on search to drive ecommerce. How do the economics change when multi-channel nationals like Wal-Mart and Target achieve 5x or 10x the ROI as pure-plays?
http://www.comscore.com/blog/2007/06/larger_role_of_search.html
August 3rd, 2007 by admin
Search as a branding tool… here’s some data that demonstrate search’s effectiveness to brand marketers from the lovely people over at comScore.
The most classic and rigorous approach to measuring ROI is to test the effectiveness of a search campaign in driving classic branding measures like awareness, purchase intent, and likelihood to recommend.
In the past year:
- 75% of search brand tests conducted by comScore showed a significant lift in at least one of the branding metrics listed above
- Message association was most often impacted (75%)
- Awareness and purchase intent were improved 50% of the time
There are a few common threads running through the successful campaigns: integration with other forms of media both online and offline, the “creativity” behind the keyword selection, including integration with the brand communication or creative elements in the offline media, and the size and reach of the campaign.
Search as a reach vehicle:
My answer to that is “who are you trying to reach?” If you want to reach the total U.S. Internet population or some major demographic within it, then yes – search will not achieve reach in the same way as TV, Print, Radio or Digital Image campaigns. In fact you will be lucky to reach 1% or 2% of those broad targets using search. But if you are trying to reach, for example, the 15 million consumers who buy a PC in a quarter., search offers one of the most effective, if not the most effective, means of reaching your target audience.
Here’s a rough example for all you numbers people:
~ 15 Million PCs Bought in a Quarter
~ 7 Million People Searched on “Computers” or “Laptops”
= 47% Reach of Search Among Likely “In-Market” Computer Buyers
Can you think of a TV campaign that has that type of reach within a target segment of prospective buyers?
http://www.comscore.com/blog/2007/06/demonstrate_the_roi_of_search.html
August 3rd, 2007 by admin
Campaigns which use both display ads and search marketing convert more online shoppers into buyers than those which use only one of these tactics.
That is the main finding of a Yahoo!/comScore study called “From Clicks to Bricks: The Impact of Online Pre-Shopping on Consumer Shopping Behavior.”
Among consumers in the study group who had been exposed to both search and display ads, 43% made in-store purchases, compared with 26% of those who had viewed only search ads, and 6% of those who had only seen display ads.
The search/display combination also increased in-store spending. Those consumers who had seen both ad types spent an average of 83% more than those who had not seen either type of ad.
In comparison, consumers who had seen only search ads spent 26% more, on average, than those who had not seen any ads. Exposure to display ads lifted in-store sales an average of 11% over spending by buyers who had not seen any ads.
Many studies on the effectiveness of search and display compare the two, rather than looking at them in tandem. This search vs. display approach often measures click-through rates (CTRs) rather than conversions. CTR is a fundamental metric of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
By this measurement, the search click rate tends to surpass that for display ads. Morgan Stanley estimates a steady rise in the search marketing CTR from 10.4% in 2003 to 12.6% in 2010.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005214&src=article2_newsltr
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=64847
July 18th, 2007 by admin
Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web’s query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are:
- AOL Hot Searches: Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
- Ask IQ: See top searches at Ask.
- Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
- Google Hot Trends: What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
- Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
- Yahoo Buzz Index: Shows you what’s hot and what’s not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.
July 6th, 2007 by admin
comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines for April 2007. See below for details on % market share of all online searches by engine.
Other points of interest:
- Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in April, virtually unchanged versus March and up 11 percent versus April 2006.
- Google Sites led the pack with 3.6 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (757 million), Ask Network (376 million), and Time Warner Network (364 million).
Now we can compare April/March ‘07 against March ‘05 and March ‘06.
Other key points of interest for Mar-05 & Mar-06:
- Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months.
- Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849,000), Time-Warner Network (486,000), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376,000).
- The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.
Kind of interesting huh? Looks to me like Google is taking over the world.
July 2nd, 2007 by admin
In mid-2005, DoubleClick Performics introduced the Performics 50, an index designed
to track the evolution of search campaigns within a dynamic market environment and
provide a stable basis for comparative benchmarking and analysis. The key indicators
of average cost per keyword (CPK), average cost per click (CPC) and return on investment (ROI) are reported each quarter, along with additional insights.
Growth of Expensive Keywords Continues to Drive CPK and CPC Trends:
- There were nearly six times as many keywords with a cost per click (CPC) of more than $1 in January of 2007 than there were in January of 2006.
- This helps explain why cost per keyword (CPK) for the three months of the first quarter increased, on average, 33% per month over the first quarter of last year, while CPC rose an average of 55% per month.
Expansion of Programs Driving Both Sales Growth, Lower ROI:
- Total transactions in the first quarter rose 38% over Q1 of last year for direct revenue-based campaigns, while sales dollars lagged slightly behind at 28% growth for the same periods.
- While this sales growth is within 5% points of the year-over-year growth in cost per keyword, the average number of active keywords per month in a campaign has increased by 54% over last year.
http://www.performics.com/our_company_files/DoubleclickPerformics50_Q1_2007.pdf
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