MarketingSherpa Blog

Last week, my kid sister Rachel, who is a self-employed massage therapist in Newburyport, MA, sent me an urgent email from her Mac. “Help! I just spent a week and a half building a Web site so my clients can purchase gift certificates, and now I can’t figure out how to get it onto Google. How do I do that?”

Well, I clicked over to her “site,” and it was just awful. I love my sister dearly and she is an incredibly talented massage therapist, but she should be banned from Web design.

Mistakes included using “Welcome” as her headline and body copy in brown type on top of a yellow background. Plus, the entire site was only two pages with thin content so Google’s spiders would not be impressed by it.

Naturally, I did what any loving sister would do. I whipped up a blog for her using the same colors on the edges of the template and gave her a list of common massage-client-wannabe questions to answer so I could flesh out the content.

Do you know any entrepreneurs? Maybe this year instead of buying something, give them a gift far more valuable — a few hours of marketing hand-holding.

Anyway, here’s a link to the blog I whipped up for Rachel. There’s some interesting info about massage there, including why organic oils are important, and pregnancy and massage:
http://rachelhollandmt.blogspot.com

Welcome to the very height of coupon season. Roughly 20% more coupons are redeemed this time of year than any other. But, according to a fascinating data report from CMS (see hotlink below), your redemption rate can range from a low 0.22% to 20% or higher depending mainly on the big three factors:

a. distribution method — in-store instant redemption pulls the best
b. coupon value — higher usually does better
c. expiration date — longer is preferred for print coupons

Coupons are not just for CPGs (consumer packaged goods) anymore. Two new ideas are:

o Search marketing and coupons

According to MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, more than 60% of US online consumers use search engines to research purchases at all price points (not just high-ticket) … which 68% of them fully intend to make offline. If you want to affect offline purchases, you have to be very visible in search results.

Offline conversions are a massive headache for search marketers. If you can’t measure your conversion rate from search ad to in-store purchase, it’s awfully hard to fight for the budget you really need. Adding downloadable coupons to your high-traffic search landing pages can really help.

According to CMS data as of June 2006, Internet coupon redemption rates have been rising from 0.54% in 2005 to 1.31% in 2006. That’s overall; I bet your redemptions could be better for your best search campaigns. Plus, the lessons you learn about which search terms convert better than others will be invaluable.

o At-work coupon campaigns

Again, according to CMS data, typical supermarket shelf pad coupons received a 6.05% average 2006 redemption rates; however, shelf pads at military base markets got 20.23% 2006 redemption rates. That’s almost double.

The difference is the joy of targeting.

Inspired by this, I wondered if there’s a way to target civilians at work as easily as you can place an FSI in the Sunday paper?

Turns out, now it’s possible. In fact, Trident launched a new chewing gum earlier this year by inserting samples plus a coupon to several million office workers’ hands via inner-office mail distribution. The response rate was reportedly five to 10 times what a typical newspaper FSI would have been, for roughly the same CPM.

You can select inner-office mail distribution by ZIP code, distance from retail location, and/or for some SIC codes. That kind of targeting capability makes my head swim with ideas … now, if I could only target coupon campaigns by department!

Oh, well, a girl can dream.

If you’ve conducted coupon campaigns linked to search or via at-work distribution, please let me know how they went for you.

If you, like me, like to review the data on campaign tactics, here are four of the most useful links I could find for you:

A. CouponInfoNow – educational Web site for marketers sponsored by CMS (registration required)
http://www.couponinfonow.com

B. RetailWire — Extremely active, independent, online discussion forum for retailers and CPGs on topics including couponing (registration required)
http://www.retailwire.com

C. Past MarketingSherpa special report on eCouponing, including redemption rates and best practices tips:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?contentID=2610
(Open access until Dec. 7)

D. Workplace Media – vendor offering coupon distribution at work
http://www.workplaceprint.com

While in San Francisco at our B-to-B Summit last week, I drove up to the Presidio neighborhood for dinner with a real-life Sherpa, Chhring Sherpa, owner of Taste of the Himalayas Restaurant.

Sherpas are a native tribe of Nepal, some of whom earn their living by guiding climbers up Mount Everest. Very few live in the US. Our company name is meant as a tribute to their abilities.

Chhring, who came to the US a decade ago after meeting his wife (a nice girl from New Jersey), has just taken over ownership and management of Taste of the Himalayas restaurant on 2420 Lombard Street. They don’t have a Web site (yet) but you can reach them at (415) 674-9898.

The food was great — very similar to Indian food only with crisper vegetables. We also tasted the famed Sherpa beer, which is milky-white and slightly sweet with a heck of an after-kick.

You know a foreign restaurant is really a good one when actual natives eat there. Taste of the Himalayas is no exception. I spotted at least two other Sherpas. Chhring told me Monday nights are the big Sherpa night — almost all of the Sherpas in the Bay area gather in the restaurant that night.

So, if you want to meet real live Sherpas en masse, now you know where to go!

Last week while I was in San Francisco for our B-to-B Summit, I also grabbed the chance to talk with Matt Ackley, eBay’s VP of Net Marketing. I met Matt at a NorCal BMA luncheon. He’s funny, honest and smart — especially about search marketing.

Here are highlights of what I learned from him:

o Why eBay buys the keyword ‘eBay’

“We actually buy the word ‘eBay,’ which is very, very unintuitive. We’ve done numerous, numerous tests on this, because every time I go and say, ‘We buy the keyword, eBay’, people come back and say, ‘You’re an idiot. Why are you buying the keyword eBay? Everybody knows eBay. You don’t need to buy the keyword eBay.’

“We have proven this through analytics … over and over again that it is actually incremental to buy the keyword eBay.

“The reason we believe it is such that there are different types of users … [who] use search in different ways. … There’s probably users who essentially, we say, ‘Put their faith in Google. In Google we trust, and I’m just going to click on the organic search results because I trust the Google algorithm.’ Then, there’s the group of users who say, ‘You know what? If somebody’s willing to pay for something, they’ve probably got something of quality to sell.”

“So, we’ve seen that by buying keyword eBay, we actually get incremental traffic. Now, of course, we cannibalize the natural search or the organic search results. We’re paying for traffic that supposedly we would have gotten for free, and that’s always the question internally, ‘Why are you doing this?’ But, we’ve run the data over and over again.”

o Google’s One-Box presents new challenges

Matt agreed that, as Sherpa’s Search Benchmark Guide 2007 revealed, the fairly new Google One-Box (bulleted links often presented in the first organic search display) is presenting a considerable SEM challenge.

“Our site name is the same as our [stock] ticker symbol — so when you do a search on eBay, actually, the ticker symbol and quote comes up at the top of the natural search listings, which effectively drops our first organic result down to what would be like the third position. … I went to the CEO at one point and said, ‘You know we could probably save a ton of money if you changed the ticker symbol.’ That didn’t go over too well.”

o Why eBay buys weird terms (a.k.a. ‘eBads’)

Ackley noted there are several independent Web sites and blogs dedicated to tracking so-called ‘eBads’ — Google ads bought by eBay under terms no one would reasonably think could sell a darn thing. Terms such as ‘hole in the head’ and ‘dung’ for example.

He explained his team has a database of 250 million possible keyterms to runs ads under — and generally they’re running campaigns for five to 15 million of these. To make this possible, everything is automated and analyzed like crazy.

“We evaluate whether we think that keyword is going to make us any money or not, and then we go out and we buy it on Google at the minimum CPC, which is often a penny.”

Also, Google themselves sometimes complains about some of the terms — so eBay has to prove they’re relevant. In the case of “dung,” it turns out there’s quite a bit of dinosaur dung being bid on at the moment.

o Improving search conversions

You can’t convert high-end products on seller reputation alone. eBay finds the more expertise (factoids, content, reviews, detailed product guides, etc.) a listing has, the better the conversion rate.

o Biggest conversion ever

eBay sells more than $5 billion in B-to-B each year. Biggest item sold was a corporate jet for about $4.9 million. The buyers used PayPal because, as many B-to-B online buyers prefer, it allowed credit terms.

o SEO improvement Ackley would like to see for 2007

He wishes the internal PR department would get SEO religion and more rigorously optimize releases for more search traffic. Plus, more releases for the purposes of SEO would be great too.

Note: You can download an MP3 of my entire interview with Matt and our fellow panel members Dean DeBiase of Fathom Online and Jack Jia of Baynote over at NorCal BMA’s site at:
http://www.norcalbma.org/programs/November-2006-meeting-Moreinfo_html

A week and a half ago, I sent you a note about the fact that we are being acquired by another research firm, also in the ‘what works in marketing’ arena.

So far, it has been a heck of a crazy ride. Here are two main results you might find useful if you ever have to announce an M&A to your own company newsletter audience:

-> Congrats letters pouring in

It’s terribly exciting when the reader response floodgates open in response to an announcement like this. Then the typing starts. And goes on, and goes on, and goes on.

I feel very strongly that if you write me a letter, you should get a swift personal response. My husband feels very strongly that since I married him earlier this year, I should come home in time for dinner. You can see where this is heading …

Three other items on dealing with congrats:

o Folks who reach out and touch at a time like this often are your biggest evangelists, closest contacts and longstanding fans. Another reason not to relegate them to a form letter or make them wait for a thank-you reply.

o The word “congrats” spelled out goes directly into many Outlook junk mail filters. This means you’ll have to dredge through your filtered mail more diligently than usual for a week or two.

o Some people send gifts. Honest to gosh. Thanks to Paramore Redd for the yummy cookies and Elie Ashery for the huge fruit basket.

-> Less reaction than you (dumbly) expected in the blogsphere

Oh, even with 20+ years of WIIFM (what’s in it for me) marketing training on how to appeal to an audience, I still made the junior-league mistake of expecting the blogsphere to be hopping with posts about our acquisition.

What would they say? I clicked over and over and over again to blog-tracking services such as Technorati.com to track the world’s response to our ground-shaking news. Yes, there was some. But not much.

In fact, blog reaction was limited mainly to people who pick up press releases in part or in whole and repost without comment (or sometimes caring). So, we were splog fodder and release reprint “news notes” but not anything more, except for a tiny handful of bloggers.

Strikingly, way more folks blogged, discussed and linked to Case Studies and other stories our editorial team had published that week than to our corporate news about ourselves.

Old lesson re-learned. No one cares really deeply about you being acquired except for you, your staff, your family, the people buying you and their PR firm.

Oh, and the local paper. It was way fun to pose among fulfillment stacks of our Search Marketing Reports for the photographer Providence Business News sent over.

Anyway, news about you may not be remotely relevant or useful to your marketplace. So, they won’t blog about it.

That’s a fact that folks who publish corporate newsletters overloaded with words such as “Us” and “Our” should consider before the next issue goes out.

Sponsored by: New! Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3,944 marketers reveal their PPC and SEO tactics, clicks and
conversions. Contains 185-charts of practical data, plus 18
Eyetracking “heatmaps” in full color.

Download your copy instantly:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?1149
Or call 877-895-1717
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Well, as I told you in my note last Thursday afternoon, my post-acquisition role here at Sherpa isn’t changing with regards to content. In fact, I’m spending the next five days closeted with Tad Clarke, our Editorial Director, picking who our Email Summit speakers will be.

So, if you, a colleague or a client would make a fabulous Case Study presenter or an advanced tactics panel member, please click over to the nomination form before it’s too late:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=29750

For those of you who are planning your 2007 activities and might consider attending Sherpa’s Email Summit, here’s the brief scoop:

MarketingSherpa’s Email Bootcamp, Summit & Expo:
March 4-6th, 2007
Miami, FL
650 expected attendees

Agenda:
o 1/2 day intensive bootcamp on email basics
o Four interactive labs (including an on-site eyetracking lab)
o Case Studies & advanced panels
o Gala party at Gloria Estefan’s Club Bongo

I’m pretty psyched, and not just because Rhode Island is a bleak and depressing place to be in early March. I’m most looking forward to taking part in the eyetracking lab — seeing how my own eyes view email creative involuntarily.

(We’ve run plenty of labs, but I’ve never been involved as a participant — now every marketer who is interested can be.)

If you’d like to reserve tickets, there’s a special early-bird offer over at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html

But my main consideration now is picking absolutely fascinating speakers who have tons of real-life experience in testing what works and what doesn’t for email campaigns and strategies. If you are that person or you know someone, have them contact us right away via the official nomination form.

Thanks!

By the way, Sherpa’s B-to-B Demand Generation Summit is being held in San Francisco next week. Only a few tickets are left. For last-minute reservations, your best bet is to call (877) 895-1717.

See you there next Monday!

According to MarketingSherpa research data, click fraud is the new email filtering.

This August, we conducted the largest study of search marketers ever — with 3,944 search marketers submitting their data. This was our third annual study. Last year I was surprised to see how few marketers were highly concerned about click fraud.

At the time, the hype in the press was nearly deafening, and click-fraud panels at all the big interactive marketing shows were making solemn pronouncements to packed audiences. Why then weren’t more marketers really worrying?

In the past year, both Google and Yahoo! settled lawsuits admitting publicly that, yes, there was fraud. Highly publicized Outsell analyst estimates have set fraud at about 13% overall. Plus, anecdotally, most marketers interviewed by MarketingSherpa for our weekly Case Studies told us they had noticed, and sometimes been reimbursed for, fraud activity.

So, when we rolled out our big annual SEM survey via email, Web and phone this August, I was expecting the answers to come back giving click fraud concerns high marks. I was wrong. Which is, again, why I should never make predictions but stick to analyzing the data at hand.

We asked marketers if they were monitoring their fraud levels or not and if they were terribly concerned about it. Only 9% were worried that “click fraud will only get worse.” On the other hand, only 20% said click fraud was a non-issue or on its way to becoming a non-issue.

At 55%, the vast majority of responders said, “Like email spam, click fraud will continue to cost time and money.” In other words, it’s here, it’s not getting much worse, it’s not getting much better … get used to it. Which, as I noted above, is pretty much the way a lot of marketers feel about email filters. You know a portion of your email will be filtered, you do your best to get permission mail through, but you’re also resigned to the fact that this will perhaps always be a problem.

Fraud = fact of life for everyone.

However, some marketers should be especially concerned. If you’re in one of these three categories, chances are that fraud will directly affect your marketing tactics in the next year:

#1. Extremely Competitive Niche SMB Industries

Often these are B-to-B marketers who are duking it out in an industry that’s so commoditized that a slight change in costs can hugely affect your bottom line — example teleconferencing services.

Or it’s a small everyone-knows-each-other industry where clicks are expensive and search marketing is run in-house, perhaps even by the company president. I’ve heard several anecdotal stories of sites that had high fraud levels except for the week each year when everyone (including the competition) was at the big annual trade show. Presumably they were too busy networking and partying to click on each other’s ads.

#2. Sites Paying Affiliates & Partners by the Click

The problem here is you’re counting on your affiliates and partners to monitor their click fraud potential carefully. If you’re blithely paying for traffic without carefully tracking the value of each click (and potential of fraud), then your partners have no incentive to worry about fraud.

This seems to be increasingly a problem of large, mainly offline brands who arrived at the Internet party a bit late. They started sites and affiliate programs because they knew they should as part of their Integrated Initiative, but management still thinks of the Internet as that little department down the hall. It’s only a small slice of total company revenues, so why put heavy measurement into place for it? But, without measurement, you’re laying yourself open … a bit like walking down a city sidewalk with $10 bills pinned to the back of your jacket.

#3. Second-Tier Search Advertisers

We consider any search engine that is used by less than 10% of the search audience to be in the Second Tier (a.k.a. ‘Tier B’). This means everyone except for Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and Ask.com.

These companies make a great deal less from selling search clicks than the big four … so as you can imagine, they have far smaller budgets to fight fraud. Fraud fighting requires heavy-duty software plus a lot of people time. A fraud department at a major search engine might be staffed by dozens of people. A Second-Tier engine may only have one person handling that work.

The resulting fraud (along with far lower traffic) is one of the reasons that the majority of search advertisers avoid Second Tier. However, let me stress that not all Second-Tier engines are bad. I’ve met marketers who specialize in testing these engines who are delighted at some of their results.

For B-to-B marketers, some of the vertical B-to-B engines can provide highly qualified leads. For ecommerce marketers, some of the shopping comparison search engines can provide clicks that convert better than any other engine.

Other, more general Second-Tier engines are known for very low click pricing. You may not get all that many clicks, but they are a big bargain. Except for fraud that is. …

Which brings me to my top three action items if you are one of the above marketers beset by fraud concerns:

A. Track conversions by source

Get the budget for analytics software if you don’t already have a good package … and beyond that get the budget for a staffer to run and analyze the resulting reports.

The latter may be tougher than the former to get budgeting for. Management seems to be loath to let marketing departments grow these days. Plus, currently there’s a dearth of trained analytics staffers available on the jobs marketplace. You can advertise all you want — but without big bucks, you may not find anyone.

Some marketers hire the best math whiz they can from the recent grad crop of a local university. Others these days are outsourcing to places like India and Eastern Europe. In both cases, you’ll have to do a lot of training, but you’ll be able to afford the wages. And, there are lots of training manuals out there on database marketing and Web analytics. It’s just getting the dedicated, brainy staffer to read and act on them that’s the problem.

B. Review your search marketing contracts

Admit it, how often do you read every single word of a contract carefully before signing? Especially if that contract is on a computer screen where you can just click the “accept” button and move on with setting up your search marketing account?

Several marketers have spoken to me — shocked and dismayed — when the contract they signed with a search engine turned out not to have a click-fraud provision. You might (and they did) assume that if you buy something and it’s fraudulent the seller has to return your money. Guess again.

At least one of the top four search engines (and many more of the Second Tier) does not have a click-fraud payback provision in its standard advertiser contract. If you don’t know which one I’m talking about and you’re a heavy search advertiser, then you haven’t read your contacts carefully enough.

C. Invest in fraud tracking software/services

Only a third of the marketers we studied currently invest in tracking click fraud in any way, including internal tracking reports or external services. If fraud is a concern to you obviously that should change. Several vendors have sprung up in the past two years to help track this, pick the one that you think is most likely to survive the inevitable fallout as they mature.

And good luck!

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s SearcnMarketing Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

Last Monday & Tuesday I was in Boston at our annual East Coast B-to-B Summit. You can see the official wrap-up report below. In the meantime, here are my personal notes …

Lesson #1. Marketers = Magpies

IBM’s Jacques Pavlenyi said it beautifully: “A new marketing tactic is the shiny new object in front of our face. We go ‘That’s cool!’ and reach for it. But, often there’s no data or if data does exist, it’s quite sketchy.”

That’s why his team focuses mostly on what’s tried and proven.

I often see marketers pulled off course by this magpie instinct. We’re so bored by standard campaigns, so been-there-done-that-got-the-T-shirt, that we forget that prospects are not.

Marketers in new industries or technologies are the most prone to this. “We are revolutionary so our marketing should reflect this!” is the rationale I hear from many of them when they throw the entire quarter’s budget behind a new viral campaign instead of better white papers.

Well, guess what? If Jacques, who has spent nearly his whole IBM career in emerging markets, advocates focusing on classic tactics first and foremost *before* launching that podcast glittering in your dreams, then I’m pretty sure he’s right.

Lesson #2. Inbound links from content elsewhere

I think everyone in the audience, including myself, gasped when our search marketing Case Study speaker, Dave Martin of Allegiance, said by far the most important SEO tactic of this year is to:

Plant great content about your company or products *on* highly relevant sites that link back to you. That means articles, columns, reviews, webinar transcripts, customer blogs, etc. … These should all have hotlinks in the *body* of the content (not just at the very end in the author bio).

I’ve known for years that reciprocal links were not making the grade. But I didn’t quite realize how important links within authoritative textual content placed elsewhere were. Now I know.

I wonder how many marketers are running the numbers right now — compare your annual cost of hiring another writer versus PPC clicks.

I’m also wondering if I should do a speaking tour of journalism schools next year — encouraging students to consider marketing writing (not copywriting but compelling, trustworthy, SEO-worthy and targeted newsletters, white papers, columns and blogs) as a career?

Lesson #3. Users (vs Decision Makers)

DoubleClick’s Lynn Tornabene, who presented a great Case Study about a campaign her team did to turn current bored-now clients into active brand cheerleaders, reminded everyone, “The decision maker who signed the contract often has little product interaction on a regular basis, but gets lots of competitor sales pitches.”

Other speakers and marketers I networked with agreed. You have to grow your marketing database to include all those users. If it’s B-to-C, it’s the entire household. If it’s B-to-B, it might be dozens, hundreds or thousands of worker bees.

The worker bees know all about the glories of your product, but they probably rarely think to tell that to management. The only time management hears about you may be when there’s a problem.

I think we marketers focus so much on gaining new customers that we rarely budget or consider what our department can do to keep current accounts on board. Getting in touch with the whole user base is the first step.

Convincing management to give you budget for marketing to current clients is the next. Start inventing measurements to connect marketing touches with saving (or renewing) accounts …

Lesson #4. Networking is worth it

I’m shy enough that it takes a lot to pry me out from my desk. I’m a full-throttle whiner about leaving the office. It’s so comfortable and quiet. Travel is a pain. Plus, I have too much to do to take time off right now. Surely I can connect to the people I need to meet via phone and email?

And then I attend a Summit networking party (absolutely dreading every step walking down the hallway from the conference room to the party room.) There’s that hideous moment of awkwardness when I first walk in the room. Whom to talk to? Will I look like a geek just standing there?

Then I stand in line to get a drink (per company policy, water or soda.) And within about 10 seconds I’m chatting with everyone else in the line with me, and we’re all swapping ideas, war stories and laughter … and then a minute after that I can’t imagine why I dreaded this networking thing!

“This is wonderfully useful. This is educational. This is
inspirational. Man, I’ve *got* to do more of this.”

Lesson #5. Go home at 6 p.m. (every night)

After Jeanne Hopkins of Symmetricom made our heads spin with all the campaigns her team got out to turn an entire division’s marketing around in just six months, she added one piece of advice:

“Leave at 6 p.m. You have to.”

Wow. In many ways, I think that’s one of the bravest marketing tactics I’ve ever heard. It goes against all those long-hours-to-please-the-boss ideas that were ingrained in most of us on our way up the corporate ladder.

Here we are in a world where marketing is constantly challenged — new tactics, new measurements and, let’s face it, more often than not corporate management not completely trusting us. And instead of work harder, harder, harder, Jeanne says, “Knock off at 6 p.m. every night.”

Then I remembered one thing. One of Sherpa’s own most valuable marketers can only work 30 hours per week. She gets more done in those 30 hours than you can imagine. I suspect the rejuvenation she gets from spending more time with her family is at least partly responsible for that high productivity.

If you know you can work all hours, then, magically, your work will extend to all hours. If you know your time — just like your budget — is very limited, it’s magical how inventive you can become to make it work somehow.

So, I guess one more measurement is due: Number of nights you leave the office at 6 p.m. I’m gunning for 70% this quarter and then I’ll move the bar upward. I hope you’ll consider doing the same.

In the meantime, here are two useful links for you:

#1. If you attended, what was your biggest lesson learned? Post it to this blog below.

#2. By the way — this exact same Summit, plus an additional Case Study speaker from Durolast Roofing — will be held in San Francisco Nov 13-14th. For a complete brochure PDF:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/summits/DemandGenSummit06.pdf

Over the past year, Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves) has run two heavy TV campaigns. The first was September 2005 and the second March 2006 (and they’re in the midst of another fall campaign now.)

Ask.com, which is the fourth most-used search engine in the US, was hoping to lure users from the big three: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. (The days when AOL Search was one of the big three are long gone.)

Could well-done TV creative broadcast at high-enough saturation move the needle? Is it possible to break Google’s stride toward desktop domination? It’s a question Microsoft especially would love to know the answer to.

So, MarketingSherpa’s research team partnered with Compete Inc. to find out. You can see the results on the chart I’ve taken from our Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007 below.

The thin line above shows Ask.com’s ad spend. It’s pretty
dramatic; yet, at first glance, the results don’t appear to be. After a fairly major media spend, Ask.com’s online market share went from just over 3% to a bit over 4.5% and then subsided a bit.

The answer to the question then is, yes, you can grow online market share, but perhaps only a little if your competitors are heavily entrenched and you won’t keep your peak forever.

However a look behind the numbers tells another story. From
August 2005 to August 2006, Compete and MarketingSherpa research also discovered that Ask.com was the *only* major search engine to grow market share besides Google. Yahoo! and MSN Search both lost measured market share.

In that light, Ask.com’s achievement is a major triumph.

Lesson learned? Google is a juggernaut. Expect MSN and Yahoo! to do heavy TV. And, if you do invest in major TV, be darned sure you’ve got a must-return-to site or service beforehand. Because one or two TV-driven visits per consumer do not ensure long-term loyalty.

Note: As with all MarketingSherpa content, the above chart is copyright protected. Please do not copy it; however, you can link to it on this permanent link.

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s SearcnMarketing Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

I’m excited to say the results are just back from our second annual eyetracking study of major search engines.

As you may know, eyetracking labs study what real-life people’s eyes — and mice — do when they look at something on a computer screen. The final report, a four-color heatmap, reveals what was seen and what was not, how far people scrolled down or not, and where they clicked (even for clicks that weren’t on anything clickable, which is more than you may think).

Naturally one goal of this year’s study was to determine if anything major had changed since last year. Turns out, one of the biggest changes is something every marketer should pay close attention to:

The Google “One Box.”

The ‘One Box” is the name for that quick list of hotlinks that Google now often places at the very top of the standard organic (natural) results listings. Although what Google uses the One Box for is a moving target, as of press time the search engine often posted a list of these types of links:

– Local search results (especially critical for brick-and-mortar retailers)
– Google News headlines
– Stock symbols
– Scholarly articles
– Product lists drawn from product catalogs online
– Major site sections — sections of your site that get significant direct traffic and inbound hotlinks as nearly standalone topical sites on their own

As noted, there’s a lot of flux in what specifically Google is placing in the One Box. For example, product hotlinks also contained in Froogle used to be there far more than they are at present. You should periodically review how Google uses this One Box, for two key reasons:

#1. All One Box clickthroughs are free. These are organic results — not PPC — so you don’t pay for them. On the other hand, you can’t control them either. Only extremely thorough search engine optimization can help you out.

#2. According to MarketingSherpa’s new eyetracking study, search users pay more attention to the One Box listings than almost anything else on the search results page. Paid listings, especially the right-hand column AdWords ads, are getting periphery attention … if any at all.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the eyetracking heatmap results for yourself in this PDF report (open access, no registration requested):
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/SMBGExcerpt_07.pdf

The biggest marketer question our research team fields in response to these search results heatmaps is inevitably, “If no one ever looks at the right-hand column of ads, why do I get so many clicks on my ads there?!”

The truth is, obviously some people do look at that column. But, it’s a very small percentage of total traffic. You may think you get a lot of clicks … but compared to total visitors who landed on the page with your ad, you got very little. Top organic listings for the same exact search result inevitably got far, far more clicks than your ad did. That’s been a known — and studied — fact for half a decade now. Eyetracking studies merely show you why this is the case.

What can help your ad generate more attention? Before you ask that, first do whatever you can to improve your organic rankings — especially for One Box potential.

Then, start copywriting tweak tests. Aside from raising your bidding, copy is the only tactic you have to get that attention.

Every time we’ve researched copywriting tests for search ads, the marketers could demonstrate outstanding changes with often small-seeming tweaks. Two keys to explore:

1. Review your direct competitors’ copy on the same results page. (You can do this manually if you’re in a fairly small market or use software for more competitive niches.) Look at the words they use and the words you use. Which one would the most qualified prospects be more likely to find clickworthy?

(Note: That’s not always big savings or the word “free.” Sometimes quality assurances or phrases such as “24/7 customer service” can do much better for you.)

2. Go on a domain name shopping spree (especially if you’re not a trusted, well-known brand already.) Buy domains that match your top-performing keywords in some way. Example: if you market CRM software, buy “CRM101.com” and test it. (Yes, you can have it resolve over to your regular landing page. But you must own the domain to be allowed to use it even for vanity marketing purposes.)

Numerous tests have shown your visible domain name in a Google ad does double duty as marketing copy. So why not treat it as such?

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s SearcnMarketing Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html