Nine-Tenths of Search Success
Woody Allen once said, “Nine-tenths of success is just showing up.” Marketers should have such a firm grasp of the obvious. Nine-tenths of search success is simply showing up on the right terms. Translated for search, the adage might be, “Don’t overlook or undervalue the obvious keywords.”
Most marketers have recognized how often consumers turn to search engines during any consideration process. They know that some significant percentage of consumers whose interest is piqued by a TV, radio, or print ad will ignore the call to action, go directly to their favorite search engine, and explore their full range of options. Proactive marketers can accomplish many goals by showing up on the right keywords at the right times.
Don’t overlook obvious keywords or “CEO buzzwords.” Some CEOs don’t understand that buying the top spot for a company’s most obvious keywords is not always practical and can be quite expensive. “Boots,” for example, gets 150,000 searches a month on Yahoo! alone; “cell phone” gets more than 4.5 million. Direct marketers focused only on immediate transactions often try these words but don’t get the desired return on investment. What many CEOs do understand are the years and millions of dollars spent making their name synonymous with a product or category. Many consumers and CEOs expect to see the brand next to these keywords, and showing up satisfies those expectations, delivers a favorable impression, and sets the stage for a consistent brand experience that can further the branding goals of many marketers today.
A major electronics retailer that wants consumers to know it sells LCD televisions, for example, had better bid on “LCD TV” and related terms. These terms may not yield an immediate sale, but they often reach consumers earlier in the purchase process, positioning the retailer for later consideration. Offline advertising investments that tout brand attributes and product line associations fall short when the marketers are invisible to searchers on relevant category keywords.
You can show up in most of the right instances if you do your best to abide by two rules of thumb. First, you should accommodate consumers traveling many different paths before landing on your site. Television commercials may drive some directly to a site. Others will navigate directly with a branded search. Some will move up the purchase-process funnel and search instead to find out where they can buy a particular product or get more information about something. Marketers planning for multiple scenarios will show up more often and achieve more…but what will this cost?
Obviously an important question, it prompts the second rule of thumb: You should understand that the best answer to this question of cost contains a “%” rather than a “$.” Large brand marketers spending millions on TV commercials are likely driving a lot of traffic through search, whether they capture it themselves or allow competitors to capitalize on their absence. Niche product catalogers, on the other hand, might advertise only in trade publications, reaching a much smaller universe of potential customers. In either scenario, the “percentage of media spend” rule works well as a starting point in pay-per-click search, especially if you are also leveraging natural search optimization to capture significant unpaid traffic. Regardless, you need to avoid “handcuffing” results.
Marketers often handcuff results by allocating only a fixed budget or limiting the definition of ROI without accounting for the full value of search visibility, traffic, and transactions. Visibility, one of the most commonly overlooked returns, builds awareness and association of your brand with a category even without generating clicks. “I didn’t know [blank] sold LCD TVs!” How are marketers valuing that reaction? Unfortunately, many still fail to track these and other valuable returns.
Search clicks engage consumers, bring them to marketers’ sites, and initiate a relationship that often leads to offline store visits, purchases through other channels, etc. While search campaigns should be managed to budgets and return metrics, the metrics should account for a full spectrum of value delivered by search to an increasingly search-enabled world. For marketers, determining returns should be about using the right metrics and measuring all resulting value, including customer acquisition, online and offline transactions, and the pure brand value of reaffirming user associations with a brand.
Marketers tend to spend nine-tenths of their time—and more of their budget—hunting for the nonobvious: the inventive, unusual way to get the attention of advertising-bombarded consumers. Search, perhaps too obvious, often gets overlooked. But consumers start with the obvious when they enter an online consideration process, often with broad, topical keywords. Many marketers would do well to spend even 10% of their budgets to show up in the most obvious places, where both CEOs and customers are likely to start.
Cam Balzer is director of search strategy for Performics, the Chicago-based performance-based marketing division of DoubleClick, and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER.
