(Chief Marketer) Four questions regularly arise when marketers try to understand their search potential. All can be answered with good competitive benchmarking analysis.

1. What keywords are my specific competitors using, and what am I missing? If you know your top competitors, AdGooroo, comScore and Hitwise all provide tools that can help you peer into their search playbook to see what’s working well and not so well. Want to know the top traffic generating keywords for a specific category? Hitwise can help. Is a competitor’s traffic on a keyword coming from natural or paid search? AdGooroo tools provide answers to this and other questions; Compete, comScore’s qSearch and WebPosition Gold also provide related insights. Chances are, if there’s something you’d like to know about your competitors’ keyword selection strategy, one or more of these vendors can help.

2. What advertisers bid on my most important keywords? How much visibility do they get compared to my program? In many mature search marketing programs, even those with thousands of keywords, a few highly searched keywords typically drive a large portion of the sales or leads. These keywords drive direct online sales, but the visibility they deliver can also boost awareness and brand equity and drive offline store visits/sales.

Hitwise helps marketers understand their share of clicks from these types of keywords. AdGooroo data is extremely useful here; it helps search teams understand their share of visibility leading to these clicks. Understanding how often you show up on a particular keyword versus competitors provides a critical benchmark for spotting untapped potential.

Marketers wrestle with such tough questions as “what level of visibility is ideal?” and “what combination of natural and paid search will deliver the optimal mix of traffic and sales?” Correlate relative rank and coverage data from AdGooroo with share of clicks data from Hitwise to understand where the point of diminishing returns lies for your top keywords. Feed these insights into the rank goals and budget caps for these keywords to find the right balance between level of visibility and effectiveness.

3. How much are my competitors spending? How much of their traffic/sales come from search? What’s their search ROI? These are the bottom line questions for many marketers. Are we doing as much as we can and getting the best possible results? As I discussed last month, you can’t necessarily take this question off the table for an ROI based program.

Because all the major search engines have abandoned a pure bid ranking model, it’s impossible to know what other advertisers are spending on any given keyword… even ones on which you have your own data. This has made answering the spend question increasingly difficult.

Ironically, it’s easier to find out how well their online campaigns perform. Panel-based analytics firms like Compete and comScore analyze site visitation data to determine conversions and revenue being generated by specific campaign types. This is invaluable data if you can undertake the research, but it still doesn’t get you all the way to ROI. The best approach is to create your own model, making assumptions about CPC based on your data. Tracking this model and the ROI metric over time provides one more benchmark to gauge search marketing effectiveness.

4. What tools should my search team be using? Here are some key tools that can help them answer each of the above questions:

AdGooroo tracks search engine visibility: how often do specific advertisers appear for certain keywords, delivering share of voice and other branding or impression related metrics. AdGooroo tools identify a marketer’s top competitors on each keyword or the entire keyword portfolio in natural and paid search, providing insight into competitive bidding strategies, the most effective copy and much more.

Hitwise tracks user clickstreams as they move between sites. Search engine data is just one of various traffic sources on which they report. With reports based on verticals, sites, and keywords, Hitwise provides several angles to view the effectiveness of campaigns and competitors.

comScore provides a media planning toolset as well as a search-specific tool called qSearch. Marketers can partner with comScore on custom research to gain insights into the behavior and source of their site visitors, or comparative Web site performance. Compete offers similar research in specific verticals.

Trellian is another valuable tool set for competitive keyword data, and Compete has announced a new toolset to increase search visibility over past tools. Contact me with questions or your own competitive intelligence recommendations.

Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick Performics and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at [email protected].

My last column, Search Engine Benchmarketing, covered the importance of competitive intelligence to ensure effectiveness in paid and natural search engine marketing. Although no single source exists, extensive competitive insights await the motivated search engine marketing team, including performance metrics relative to competitors, identifying unknown competitors, uncovering marketing secrets and insights used by competitors, and gauging whether or not appropriate ROI thresholds are in place.

When chief marketers try to understand their search programs’ potential, four types of questions regularly arise that can be answered with good competitive benchmarking analysis:

What keywords are my specific competitors using, and what am I missing?
If you know your top competitors, AdGooroo, comScore and Hitwise all provide tools that can help you peer into their search playbook to see what’s working well and not so well. Want to know the top traffic generating keywords for a specific category? Hitwise can help. Is a competitor’s traffic on a keyword coming from natural or paid search? AdGooroo tools provide answers to this and other questions; Compete, comScore’s qSearch and WebPosition Gold also provide related insights. Chances are, if there’s something you’d like to know about your competitors’ keyword selection strategy, one or more of these vendors can help.

What advertisers bid on my most important keywords? How much visibility do they get compared to my program?
In many mature search marketing programs, even those with thousands of keywords, a few highly searched keywords typically drive a large portion of the sales or leads. These keywords drive direct online sales, but the visibility they deliver can also boost awareness and brand equity and drive offline store visits/sales.

Hitwise helps marketers understand their share of clicks from these types of keywords. AdGooroo data is extremely useful here; it helps search teams understand their share of visibility leading to these clicks. Understanding how often you show up on a particular keyword versus competitors provides a critical benchmark for spotting untapped potential.

Marketers wrestle with such tough questions as “what level of visibility is ideal?” and “what combination of natural and paid search will deliver the optimal mix of traffic and sales?” Correlate relative rank and coverage data from AdGooroo with share of clicks data from Hitwise to understand where the point of diminishing returns lies for your top keywords. Feed these insights into the rank goals and budget caps for these keywords to find the right balance between level of visibility and effectiveness.

How much are my competitors spending? How much of their traffic/sales come from search? What’s their search ROI?
These are the bottom line questions for many marketers? Are we doing as much as we can and getting the best possible results? As I discussed last month, you can’t necessarily take this question off the table for an ROI based program.

Because all the major search engines have abandoned a pure bid ranking model, it’s impossible to know what other advertisers are spending on any given keyword… even ones on which you have your own data. This has made answering the spend question increasingly difficult.

Ironically, it’s easier to find out how well their online campaigns perform. Panel-based analytics firms like Compete and comScore analyze site visitation data to determine conversions and revenue being generated by specific campaign types. This is invaluable data if you can undertake the research, but it still doesn’t get you all the way to ROI. The best approach is to create your own model, making assumptions about CPC based on your data. Tracking this model and the ROI metric over time provides one more benchmark to gauge search marketing effectiveness.

What tools should my search team be using?
Here are some key tools that can help them answer each of the above questions:

AdGooroo tracks search engine visibility: how often do specific advertisers appear for certain keywords, delivering share of voice and other branding or impression related metrics. AdGooroo tools identify a marketer’s top competitors on each keyword or the entire keyword portfolio in natural and paid search, providing insight into competitive bidding strategies, the most effective copy and much more.

Hitwise tracks user clickstreams as they move between sites. Search engine data is just one of various traffic sources on which they report. With reports based on verticals, sites, and keywords, Hitwise provides several angles to view the effectiveness of campaigns and competitors.

comScore provides a media planning toolset as well as a search-specific tool called qSearch. Marketers can partner with comScore on custom research to gain insights into the behavior and source of their site visitors, or comparative Web site performance. Compete offers similar research in specific verticals.

Trellian is another valuable tool set for competitive keyword data, and Compete has announced a new toolset to increase search visibility over past tools.

Contact me with questions or your own competitive intelligence recommendations.

Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick Performics (www.performics.com) and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at [email protected].