How Your Search Data Can Make You Look Like a Star - It's Not Just About the Numbers
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Search marketing data can communicate a lot of things about your business that goes beyond the success metrics and statistics listed in the previous section. Data available from paid search, in particular, can provide a goldmine of information that can not only help you streamline your natural search optimization efforts, but your overall marketing initiatives and even your core business model.
Data available via Google, Overture and other PPC campaigns such as the highest traffic-generating keywords, highest conversion-oriented keywords, and best performing ad copy and landing pages can provide a lot of insight about your website visitors and your marketing initiatives.
For example, you may think that your top revenue-generating product is “blue widgets,” but after one month of running a PPC ad campaign which focuses on this keyword and derivatives thereof, you may find that traffic for this keyword is not converting well at all. However, this same data may disclose that you are getting a lot of conversions for the term “green widgets.” Your site may provide consumers with twenty different varieties of blue widgets and only one or two green widgets, with very little search engine friendly copy written about it.
This is certainly interesting information. Here’s what you might communicate to your manager based on this information.
- People who search for “blue widgets” are not spending as much money as we thought - why is this? Let’s do a competitive assessment of our products and see what, if anything we are missing.
- Our conversion rate for the term “green widgets” is very high, but we don’t offer this product extensively on our website and it’s not very easy to find from the home page. We also don’t rank very well for it in the search engines. Let’s add some more green widgets to our product line, highlight the product throughout the site, and add copy so that search engines pick it up.
- Is there possibly a way to convert the “blue widget” traffic to “green widget” buyers? How can we demonstrate the value of our green widgets to customers seeking blue widgets? I think we should roll out a pilot campaign with the end goal of converting more blue widget traffic by up selling/cross selling green widgets.
So here you are presenting actionable next steps that have the potential to impact your company’s revenue stream. Wow, you certainly look like a star to me.
Conclusion
The bottom line goal with presenting success metrics to your manager or VP, is to demonstrate not only the need for SEM, but that it’s working. If you are the person who has convinced upper management that they absolutely need to incorporate search into their marketing mix, then you’ll also benefit from understanding how to communicate your campaign data into language that sales personnel, marketing managers and senior staff can understand.
Online marketing is a highly accountable medium, and search is no exception. Visitor actions are traceable and metrics are available almost instantly, something unique to the online medium. You can make this accountability work for you! The data is there; your job is to spin it so that your manager understands how much SEM contributes to your website’s bottom line, and what that means for your business in the long run.
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