Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Marketing’

Holiday spending has been weakest in 17 years but TNS Retail Foward forecasts a 1.5% growth for the holiday Q4 in key retail areas. Online sales is expected to grow 9% to $42.5 billion during the holiday seasons compared to 19% in 2007.

Apparel retailers are expected to decline in 1.3%. Homegoods channels and Furniture/ home furnishing stores are expected to decline by 1%. Consumer electronic stores on the other hand is expected to grow at 4% partially helped by consumer conversion to digital TV signals. Mass retailers are also expected to show a 5.6% growth as higher food prices are expected to shift consumers to focus on value.

Holiday Shopping
Mediamark (MRI) is expecting 35% of adults (62.3 million) will begain holiday shopping before Thanksgiving while another 35.8% is expected to shopt between Thanksgiving and Dec 15th. 25.6% (45.3 Million) is expected to shopt from December 16 to December 23rd.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

What is comparative advertising? Comparative advertising is where companies like to pit their product features next to other well known competitors in an effort to differentiate their product. You have probably seen this in a table format with product features listed along the right with check marks showing which product holds which features. This is usually occurs when either the company sees particular features they hold to be a competitive advantage, or simply because their name is not as strong as the other leading competitors.

So this brings up a few questions to consider.

1. Should I do comparative advertising? What are the pros and cons?
2. Are there any legal ramifications for using competitor names and what are the legal considerations for the claims you make about your competitor’s product?

Let’s briefly tackle them here.
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Setting up SEM Campaigns
One of the most overlooked aspect of running a SEM campaign is how important the structure of the account is for both management purposes and for performance. There are numerous factors to consider when deciding how to structure your account.

How can I make my structure tight?
What type of keywords am I targeting?
How should I best group my keywords?
Is targeting by product type more important? Geo-type?
How does creatives factor into all this?
Do I need to split out keywords with good history vs ones with bad history?
How does keyword combinations affect content campaigns?
Should I structure search campaigns differently from content campaigns?
How do I factor in budget constraints and budget management issues?
What landingpages do I have for use?
The list is endless…

Tip of the Week
Today we’ll throw out one tip to consider when organizing your accounts after you have collected some data. After you have collected a good sample size you probably are starting to get a better idea on what keywords are performing. If you have cast a good enough umbrella of keywords you would easily find some surprising performers as well as surprising duds. So how can you sort through all this data for management purposes?
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It is easy for everyone to think that Google owns the search market. If I want to be on search, I need to be on Google simple as that. Well it isn’t so simple when it comes to international markets. Though Google has a strong grip on the US market, this isn’t always the case in other countries especially when compared to the local search engines.

Who are the players?
Some of these engines are familiar. Yahoo Japan owns more than half the market of Japan. They also have a strong grip on many other international countries. However you will also find country specific engines such as Baidu in China which owns about 60% of its market. Naver in Korea also owns over 60% of it’s market. Yandex in Russia owns little less than half it’s market. Seznam controls nearly 65% of the Czech market.

How is it that these search engines are able to compete with the likes of Google?
They know their market. They have the competitive advantage of targeting a local market and studying on their behaviors, their use of language as well as their preferences. They have worked on their technology and algorithms specifically catering to their local audience. Google unfortunately due to their sheer size and international presence have a more difficult time focusing on their individual markets. For example did you know in Korea, the more busy and complex the page is, the more authority the site is given by it’s users? This goes completely opposite of what one should do in the US where simplicity and targeted pages are key to a good conversion.

Foreign Laws
Another aspect is foreign laws. Local engines like Baidu are well aware with the regulations and as a local pioneer has a lot of say and influence. Large engines like Google have a hard time dealing with all the various laws especially as many countries favor local companies as opposed to foreign competitors. Many of these search engines were started before Google and has firmly established themselves as the market leader.

Google however has put a lot of investment in trying to target these local markets and it is Google’s hope that continued investment and effort will eventually entrench them deeper into these markets.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google has finally launched Google Suggestion, a tool which was started back in 2004, but was never released. If you go to Google.com and start typing out a search query, you will now see “suggested keywords” appear in a drop down. This seems to only work on their homepage. Once you make a search query you will no longer see the suggestions. For people who need keyword suggestions for the SEM campaigns, this can be a pretty handy tool to use.

Don’t forget that this is a great way to discover negative (google) or excluded (yahoo) keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you specify in your SEM campaign as keywords you DO NOT want your ad to show on. For example if you are selling books, but don’t sell education books, you would have the keyword books, but negative out the keyword education.

Yahoo! has had a suggestion bar for a while now. How this affects the way searchers behave remains to be seen. One affect it could have is to lower the cases of misspellings. Another is to potentially increase the use of longer search queries by users who previously only used 1-2 word queries. If there are any dramatic changes in either of these areas, it could potentially shift the way you should setup and maintain your Google SEM campaigns.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM