For most retailers, the art of search engine marketing consists of the ability to grow sales from non-brand campaigns. Depending on how a retailer attributes their sales, for some this growth is getting harder. In fact, the inability to see meaningful growth from non-brand paid search is the number one area of angst right now for marketers of paid search campaigns. As an agency, we have so many discussions on this with prospective clients, current clients, industry analysts and others that I thought I’d sort out some of the issues and hot topics in a two-part post. This one illustrates the state of the state and Part 2 will cover attribution as it pertains to growth of sales from non-brand.
Paid search has an 80/20 rule in which 80% of an advertiser’s paid search spend goes toward non-brand keywords while generating only 20% of the revenue. For some advertisers it’s a little more, and others a little less, but 80/20 is on average.
Advertisers have long abhorred paying the search engines for their trademark terms but since anyone can bid on any company’s trademark, a competitor or affiliate can siphon off sales meant for the advertiser if the advertiser is not present on the trademark keyword. This is especially so given that the paid search trademark ad is shaded and quite enticing at the top of the page, in that it contains four deep links to desirable promotions and parts of the site that the organic listing doesn’t. Because of these factors, most agree that letting the natural search result be the gateway to sales from all searches from trademark terms is too risky.
Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides diagnostic reports and tools for improving a site’s visibility on Google and other search engines. While it focuses on technical aspects of search engine crawling and is aimed at webmasters and SEO practitioners, it also contains several features and reports of particular interest to online marketers. Listed below are three features of