Tag Archives: SEM

PM Digital Spring Apparel Study Released

Posted on June 7, 2010 by PM Digital Research

Our lastest Rewind report on paid search performance underscores dramatic improvements for apparel retailers in Spring 2010. 

PM Digital’s latest Rewind report has been released with a look at paid search performance for apparel retailers during the 2010 Spring fashion season.  And the news was very good.  Consumers shopping online for apparel increased their total paid search demand by an impressive 33 percent over the same months in 2009.  Even better, apparel marketers achieved this swell in demand from February through April with a modest increase of 2 percent in year-over-year spend, revealing that search ad dollars went further this year than they did at the same time last year, with CPCs falling by -1 percent.   

Click here for a full copy of the PM Digital 2010 Spring Apparel Rewind Study.

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iPad Web Traffic Shows Rapid Growth, Browsing Behavior Similar to Desktop

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Anthony Avolio

Apple recently announced that over 1 million iPads have been sold in the first 4 weeks of U.S. availability.  With media fervor subsiding and novelty wearing off, we were interested in better understanding how iPad users are browsing the web.  Listed below are three observations related to iPad traffic stats gleaned from some of our retail clients.  It’s important to note that individual marketers show variations in the amount of visits from iPad browsers, so your mileage may vary.

iPad is rapidly gaining share in terms of site visits.  With just a few weeks of availability, the iPad has shown rapid growth and in some cases, has overtaken more established mobile devices in terms of visits.  While iPad visits make up a small proportion of total site visits (typically less than 0.5%), this fast growth shows promise.  Whether this rapid growth rate can be sustained in the longer term remains to be seen.

iPad Traffic Growth

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Keyword Selection for Paid Search

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

It often seems like a race to keep up with the escalating complexity of paid search. From an agency perspective, changes to process, technology and training are frequently necessary in order to accommodate the evolution. Many of these changes enable us to move the needle here and there on leveraging performance, but the core of a solid paid search campaign hasn’t really changed that much.

Paid search is fundamentally about presenting a relevant ad to someone who enters a keyword in a search engine. Every month, 60% of the searches on Google are brand new. With the keyword list being the pillar of the paid search campaign, keyword selection is essential. Technology now exists to scrape a page and cull a list, but the fundamental strategies for effective keyword selection remain the same now as they have been for years. Here are some of the basic keyword selection tactics that apply to the retail vertical.

Top Sellers: Site analytics can determine the top selling products through direct load and natural search. These words should be part of the paid search campaign.

Top Searched Products on the Site: Site analytics can inform what people are searching for on the site, and these words should be included in the paid search campaign. Products being searched for but not sold by the merchant should be given to the merchandising team to potentially expand the product line.

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Retail Trends: The Unstoppable Search for Free Shipping

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Glenn Lalich

From years of tracking promotions, we know that free shipping incentives have risen steadily across all consumer retail sectors.  On the offline side, our MarketTrends studies show that 24% of apparel catalog campaigns included a free shipping incentive in 2009, up from 21% in 2008.  Similar growth was seen in non-apparel catalogs.  

For online, the story has been much the same, but the data is more telling. In addition to retail competitive activity, search data also helps us gauge consumer interest and intent with regard to free shipping.  And today’s shoppers are very interested in free delivery, and more so every year.  

General Searches for Free Shipping     

Below is the five-year trend for searches on the term “free shipping”. While the year-end holidays are the peak season, it’s clear that such searches have grown steadily year-over-year, accelerating significantly in recession-plagued 2008 and 2009.    

Google searches for “free shipping”    

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Smarter Searches:  Actionable Information    

Searches strictly on the term “free shipping” are by far the most common, but two popular variations are “free shipping coupon” and “free shipping code.” While the search volume for the simpler “free shipping” is much higher, the “coupon” and “code” variations have seen their own dramatic rise. What’s most significant about these terms is that they show how more searchers are seeking actionable information regarding free shipping, specifically the code needed for checkout.  This type of growing search sophistication is even more pronounced in the next section.  

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Google Betas: Paid Search Enhancements Are Welcome and Long Overdue

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

In 2009, Google released a slew of paid search betas mostly to support retail advertisers.  These betas are, where applicable, being rolled out to other verticals too.  Examples include GAN Product Ads, Product Plus Box (renamed Product Extensions) and Ad Sitelinks which we wrote about late last year.

Google is heavily diversifying these days, rolling out a smorgasbord of new initiatives.   Tangentially, most enhancements are related to where search is now and/or where search is going in the future.  These are welcome innovations in that they focus on how paid ads are displayed to searchers.  Up until last year, paid search display had been remarkably stagnant:  one to four shaded sponsored listings at the top of Page 1 and the rest running stacked along the right.   

Google Paid Search Display

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Measuring Organic Sitelink Activity

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Anthony Avolio

Sitelinks are the extra internal links that appear with some natural search results.  In addition to drawing more attention to a search result, these links are helpful to visitors that want to jump directly to a particular section of your site.  Organic SitelinksDespite the recognized value of having sitelinks, few organizations measure their popularity or effectiveness.  This post walks through how to use your web analytics solution to measure organic sitelink performance.

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Instant Ads: Targeting Perfection in Real-Time

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Chris Paradysz

A few years back, I was experimenting with songwriting and free-form poetry.  Creatively, traditional boundaries were killing the sound my head wanted to hear.  I wrote, “Eyelids blink, but what truth reveals?  That squinch of time between a blink and a-h-aa.  Revelation.” 

Today, with a digital marketing industry that’s grabbing new and existing ad dollars, these words carry a truth that could solve the dominant online advertising challenge, that is how to bring the economics of targeting precision to display media.  With the SEM and SEO industries maturing and their ability to grow sales naturally constrained by the limitation of consumer demand, this could be the old-guard display advertising’s missing ingredient.  

Led by Google, Yahoo and Bing on their respective exchange platforms, advertisers can pinpoint consumer interest as it’s happening.  Instantly, literally, ads are served based on what was just learned about what someone was looking for and doing.  And you can know how many ads they’ve already seen and when. 

Imagine you’re the Martin Guitar Company trying to reach people looking to buy a guitar that’s perfect for Eric Clapton’s style of acoustic blues.  If you could be in front of a prospect at the precise moment they left a Guitar Player Magazine article about Eric Clapton’s 1992 “Unplugged” album and his use of 3 Martin guitars1 and who, 10 minutes earlier had already clicked on The Guitar Center and looked at acoustic guitars, you’d pay a premium for that.  It’s like being part of a Facebook exchange as people are buzzing about exactly what you’re selling and you can show and tell it, right at that moment. 

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It’s All Search

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.

Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.

It’s all SEARCH.

Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.

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New Google Policy for Online Pharmacies Causes Some Google Campaigns to Go Dark

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Google has implemented a new policy affecting Internet pharmacies, HMO pharmacies, chain drugstores, and mass retailer pharmacies.  Such companies must now be certified by The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) through its Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS) program in order for Google paid search keyword campaigns to be approved.  This policy extends to keywords associated with any merchandise on a website that sells pharmaceuticals – not just pharmaceutical products.

For those still awaiting VIPPS certification, Google shut down all keywords across all campaigns beginning last weekend.  Many companies were affected by the policy and few were prepared.  The implications of what Google would do and when they would do it were not clear enough.  A week later, many of these companies remain dark on Google paid search.  A great deal of revenue has been and continues to be lost while these pharmaceutical companies scramble to rectify the situation.

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PM Digital’s Holiday 2009 Rewind Study Released

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Glenn Lalich

This year’s report on paid search performance underscores dramatic improvements for retailers in Holiday 2009 compared to 2008.

PM Digital’s 4Q & Holiday 2009 Rewind report has been released with a look at paid search performance for retailers during the 2009 holiday season.  And as the study quickly points out, what a difference a year makes.  With 12 months’ distance from the bleakness of late 2008—a season in which e-commerce holiday sales actually dropped—online shoppers in 2009 seemed ready to buy with a renewed commitment to enjoy the holidays.

While research firm comScore cited 5% growth for online retailers, PM Digital’s clients saw paid search demand grow 19% on average.  Clicks, conversion and average order value were all up.

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