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Online Advertising Effectiveness: Search Engine / Keyword ValueThe following is a compilation of pieces from the Drilling Down Newsletter on tracking visitor value using web log analysis. If you want to get neat stuff like this delivered to your e-mail inbox, sign up for the newsletter! You might need a little background on web logs first, so if you haven't already, first read this "kick-off" article to the discussion below: Monitoring Visitor Conversion Using WebTrends New! Series: Online Advertising Effectiveness
Online Advertising Effectiveness? Take my current little pet peeve - I'm getting ripped off on advertising, it would seem. Or am I? Oh, not on the response rate side, I get great response rates with Google AdWords and GoTo. I'm talking about the quality of the visitors generated. It seems that visitors coming from my ads might be of a lower quality than free visitors coming directly through the search engines. Check out this little chart, all based on visitor
sessions (times in minutes):
Online Advertising Effectiveness? Because I'm a Drilling Down kind of guy, I took these numbers down to the next level. I wanted to see if there was variation by the search phrase used, not just an average of all search phrases. So I took my top 3 search terms (relationship marketing, customer retention, customer loyalty) and did a similar break out. The following is a chart of visitor behavior for the 3 search terms above, broken out by whether they clicked on an ad displayed in response to the search term or clicked on the search engine listing itself. By the way, in many cases both are displayed at the same time (if I rank high enough for the search term in the engines involved): Top 3 Search Terms Comparison - Paid versus "Free"
(times in minutes): I know what you're thinking - he's going to Drill Down some more, take it down another level in next month's newsletter... And you would be right! Practice What You Preach: Online Advertising Last month, we looked at a chart comparing the value of these visitors for my top 3 search terms (relationship marketing, customer retention, customer loyalty) and did a break out of visitor value by source - paid ad or "free" search. By the way, in many cases both paid and free links are displayed at
the same time (if I rank high enough for the search term involved).
Visitors from paid ads are clearly of better quality - higher rates of
downloading, bookmarking, and newsletter subscription. Paid ad
visitors also stay twice as long on the web site. The implication of the above shift: there is variability in the quality of visitor generated according to the *search phrase*, and this may account for some or all the difference between the quality of a pay versus free visitor. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, because I only pay for relevant search terms, and "free visitors" may be arriving as a result of a non-relevant search. This is tremendously important to know, especially in light of the general industry commentary that paid search listings result in poorer search quality for users. Hmm... So, let's take a closer look at search term quality by busting up
the aggregate "paid" search results above by search term,
and see what we get. The following table compares each search
term individually with the total site statistics, where RM =
Relationship Marketing, CR = Customer Retention, CL = Customer
Loyalty, and TS = Total Site statistics (Avg. Visit Length times in
minutes): Practice What You Preach:Online Advertising Well, we're getting there. We've previously proved visitors clicking on a paid listing are of higher quality than "free search" visitors for the same search term, and now we see there is also significant variability in quality of visitor by the term itself, according to the chart above. Look at Customer Loyalty (CL). Much shorter visits, and lower download and newsletter subscribe percentages, but much higher bookmarking percentages. What could this mean, why the difference? The stats above are a combination of all visitors for the same
terms from both Google AdWords and GoTo, so it seems logical the next
"Drill Down" would be to look at each source individually,
and that is just what I have done. For clarity, instead of
creating two charts and having you bust your eyeballs trying to
compare them, I have created a ratio between the Google and
GoTo numbers. "For the paid search term Relationship Marketing, the Average Visit Length for visitors from Google is 65% that of GoTo, the percent one page visits is 110% that of GoTo, the percent Downloading is 48% that of GoTo", and so on. A number over 100% means Google is higher than GoTo, under 100% means Google is lower than GoTo. One thing is perfectly clear from this chart - Google dramatically under-performs GoTo for the paid search term Relationship Marketing, and outperforms GoTo on the paid search term Customer Loyalty, across the board, in every category (note a lower number on % 1 Page Visits is better). Things are less clear-cut for the term Customer Retention, although I'd have to give it to GoTo because Bookmarking and Subscribing to the newsletter are highly correlated to future purchase of a book. Where does this leave us? Overall, it appears you can not attribute "quality" as defined here to either a search term or a search engine; there is a combined contribution which creates dramatic visitor quality differences. This is a perfect example of the mistake people make when using "averages" or looking at the "average customer" - rarely does the average customer represent the true underlying behavior of the actual customers. Tactically, it means I should budget paid search expenses by term by engine, and in the case above, shift most if not all the budget for Relationship Marketing to GoTo, and most if not all the budget for Customer Loyalty to Google. Customer Retention might need a little more work to resolve, but instead of running the budget 50 / 50 as initially set up, it would make sense to maybe run 70% on GoTo, and 30% on Google, from what I see here. Hey, it doesn't always come out black and white, you know? As far as why this occurs, it's fun to speculate, but a marketing behaviorist cares more that it does happen - it's a fact, Jack - and takes action based on this fact. There's plenty of time to wonder about it later, after the spending has been reallocated and the highest ROI possible is being realized. A "gun to the head" guess? It's the content at the other end of the click making the difference. The content on the Customer Loyalty page appeals more to a Google user, and the content on the Relationship Marketing page appeals more to a GoTo user. Why? I haven't got a clue. Check them out for yourself: Customer Loyalty (favored by the Google user) Relationship Marketing (favored by the GoTo user) Let me know what you think. If the responses seem to be trending one way or the other, I'll present the arguments in the next newsletter. Meanwhile, the idea of content making the difference (a 3rd variable in addition to term and engine?) is kind of interesting - maybe there's a way to test the idea. I'll let you know... Practice What You Preach: Online Advertising Things are less clear-cut for the term Customer Retention, although I'd have to give it to GoTo because Bookmarking and Subscribing to the newsletter are highly correlated to future purchase of a book. This analysis brings up an interesting question, though. What is the effect of the content searchers land on when clicking on a search item? Could the variances above be at least partially explained by a good or poor match of the content with the expectations of the searcher? How large could this effect be, a double or a triple in response? That's what I tried to find out, by sending all these searchers to the same page - my home page, which covered all three subjects in a generic sense, and had prominent links to the same pages searchers were sent to previously - Custom Landing pages written to match the search term used. Note: The current Home Page is different than the one used when this test was run. The Home Page used in the test was similar to this page with links to the Custom landing pages displayed prominently at the top of the page. The chart below shows the conversion metrics of visitors for my three primary search terms - Relationship Marketing, Customer Retention, and Customer Loyalty - when they are all sent to the Home Page (far left column) and when they are sent to a Custom Page designed to reflect the search term they were using (far right column). Also provided for comparison are the same metrics generated by All Search visitors and All Google search visitors combined: Search-Driven Visitor Conversion Metrics
(times in minutes): But check out what happens when they land on a page designed for the topic they were searching. Shorter visit (bad), higher abandonment (bad), higher download, bookmark, and subscribe (very good, since these stats directly correlate to future purchase of my book). What does this mean? Can we reconcile the "bad" and the "good" in terms of the behavioral marketing approach? Well, sure. Two possibilities come to mind: 1. When I dump highly targeted visitors on the generic home page, they stay longer and view more pages *looking for what they came to find*, but a higher percentage then leave without engaging in the desired behavior. When I take the exact same traffic and dump it to Custom Landing Pages, they stay for a shorter length of time and view fewer pages, but they download, bookmark, and subscribe at a much higher rate, because they found exactly what they were looking for. 2. It's also likely the targeting of the Custom Landing pages itself is causing shorter visits / higher abandonment. In other words, a visitor types in "Customer Loyalty", a pretty generic concept, and lands on a page with a specific view on the search term. It's more likely this specific content differs from what was desired by the visitor *relative* to the Home Page, which by nature is meant to have a generic appeal. The generic approach gets the longer visit and deeper site penetration relative to the specific approach, but also ends up driving away the specific visitors I am looking for (those who might want to buy a book on measuring and tracking loyalty metrics) at a higher rate. This kind of effect is seen quite frequently in direct marketing efforts; the more targeted you get on the front end, the lower the "initial response" but the higher the "final conversion" to the desired outcome you are looking for. In this case, the listings (paid or free) are acting like the "outer envelope" of a direct mail letter, and the landing pages are the letter inside the envelope. Same kind of idea. The results may seem intuitive to you (give them what they want and they respond at a higher rate) but you don't know for sure until you measure the effect. To maximize the ultimate conversion of the whole site, you have to find the "perfect balance" between the initial response and final conversion to the desired behavior. Did you notice how the stats get better and better as you read from the left to the right of the chart? Scroll up and look at it again. Weird, huh? Almost mystical in consistency. I get better performance from natural search traffic than I get from driving highly targeted (and paid for) traffic to the generic Home Page. And "natural" Google traffic is even better than "All Search" engine traffic. What does this mean? That's right, you guessed it. I'm going to have to go down another layer and find out what the heck is going on. Next month we'll have the last Drill Down on this topic, I promise. Make sure to download and try the free visitor metrics calculator, it works with just about any traffic analyzer and contains 22 more metrics like the ones above. Not all of them will apply to your web site, but you will probably find many of them do apply to your site. If you really want to get serious about this area, check out the book on creating and using visitor metrics. Visitor metrics are all about getting customers. Once you've mastered visitor metrics, some of you might be interested in making more money from and keeping customers; that is what my other book, Drilling Down, is about - the metrics you need to create High ROI customer marketing. What would you like to do now? Check out the book on creating and using visitor metrics More Visitor Analysis: Monitoring Visitor Conversion Find Out What is in the Drilling Down Book Learn Customer Marketing Models and Metrics (site article list) |
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