Archive for the ‘SEM Stuff’ Category
Search media of choice in difficult times
I’ve read several articles over the last few months from a number of authors and publications and it seems to me that online advertising will be the media of choice to get companies through the tough times we are in! Specifically, pay per click advertising, will emerge as the preferred choice for many marketers as the move from banner and other forms of advertising dissipate.
All the research points to search marketing continuing to grow even in the downturn because, I suspect, it is a proven method of successful advertising with a great ROI, is very affordable and highly measurable.
One can only imagine that when the search fence sitters and depleting number of sceptics get over their fear of taking a search ‘ticket to ride’, consumers will have greater choice. In the meantime those with search in their marketing mix will weather the current financial storm and take market share from their competitors.
Search Engine Marketing - Prove It!
Many people ask me to prove that our people, software and search methods really work. I tell them our clients and results are our best proof. Several of our existing clients are happy to talk to companies looking to use our services & talk about results like just a few listed below. Others prefer to keep e-Channels results a secret (sshhhh)……from their competitors! Below are a number of real examples but we can’t show you company names! Some will allow us to talk about these results with you over the phone and some will give you a personal reference so contact us.
Career company XYZ - e-Channel improved CPC of $0.66 in January 08 to $0.46 in November 08. We are now at $0.37 CPC (Dec 08). The industry average is around $0.63 to $0.73. CTR is 11% the best competitor in the employment category has a CTR of 7.6%
Classified client X - CPC is now at $0.24. The client told us that an opposition agency was averaging mid .30’s
Car Loan company Y - before contracting e-Channel use one of Australia’s larger Ad agencies & their CPA was over $153. Within 9 months e-Channel’s team improved the CPA to $75.
Classified client Z - e-Channel dropped their CPC from $0.37 to $0.19 and at the same time increase their traffic by almost 95% within a few months.
Client W- e-Channel has delivered in 12 months:
- 30% decrease in CPA
- 22% increase in conversion volume
- 40% decrease in CPC
- 15% decrease in advertising cost
Book seller client XY - their KPI is a $16 CPA, we are now $12 CPA
Florist Client - KPI is $0.71 (CPC) & $4.66 (cost/conversion). We are now at $0.51 (CPC) and $2.53 (cost/conversion)
Many of our clients are happy to provide verbal testimonial. Other examples can be found on our website.
When Average Position Is Not The Average Position
Most of us within the SEM industry use the various performance statistics provided in Google AdWords to make everyday decisions to optimise and improve our campaigns. Some recent tests provided some interesting (yet very logical) insight into the Average Position statistic which is shown for keywords, ad groups and campaigns.
For those are not aware, this statistic provides an indication of the position in the paid search result list an ad is being displayed for a given keyword, the position is determined by Google using several factors including the landing page Quality Score and your Max CPC. Each keyword is assigned an Average Position and until this point everything appears very straight forward… moving up to the ad group/campaign level it would appear the average position is not in fact (as I would have expected it to be) simply the average of the average position values for each keyword within the ad group!
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Example:The total average of the values shown here should be approximately 1.7, however, when factoring the number of impressions the adjusted average is actually 1.3. |
It seems that the Average Position for each keyword, when viewed from an ad group/campaign perspective, is actually adjusted to include the number of impressions each keyword has received. Therefore the Average Position for those keywords that have had the most searches are given the most weight and the least weight is given to keywords with the least searches. The resulting formula to calculate an ad group’s Average Position, where k=keyword and n=number of keywords within an ad group/campaign:
average_position(k1…n) = sum(average_position(k1…n) * number_of_impressions(k1…n)) / number_of_impressions(k1…n)
This logic allows the importance of each keyword to be reflected the in the Average Position shown for ad group and campaign statistics allow more accurate decisions to be made.