Category: Search Engine Marketing

When an online search becomes an online sale, that conversion can usually be measured. That’s how you calculate the true ROI of sponsored search listings. But is there an additional, hidden value to that investment?

Consider these examples: 

• A j.jill online visitor — who got there through a Google search – decides she really needs to try on the jacket she found in a store. She goes there based on her online search and makes the purchase there. 
• A search on a favorite author causes someone to browse the virtual stacks of Barnes & Noble. Later in the week he buys the book at a bricks-and-mortar location.

Those examples don’t include business-to-business purchases. For instance, someone needs a widget, so they type the phrase into a search engine. This person finds a promising widget merchant, but closes the deal much later, via phone and email.

How do you capture the value of those original search listings — whether they are paid or organic?

ROI Research attempted to find out (in the b-to-c space, at least), and their findings turned up some provocative numbers, including the following:

• As many as one out of every three offline purchases was precipitated by an online search
• Search can influence an incremental 3 times the dollar value of e-commerce transactions by reaching consumers who shop in traditional channels
• Those who search up to 10 times annually spend an average of $1,789 online
• Those who searched 31+ times spent an average of $2,943 online
• As you might expect, off-line purchasing volumes went up as well with the number of online searches a consumer made in a year.

Take-away:

As measurable as search engine marketing is, its full value is much larger than what you see in ROI reporting. For the right keywords, the search engine results pages become ad hoc portals attracting people more likely to purchase, both online and offline.

What if you were presented with the challenge of grabbing a piece of the search engine pie? Two development teams approached the challenge with the same programming application and produced results that could not be any more different. First on the scene (by several years) is the people at KartOO Technologies. Their search program can be found at KartOO.com.

These folks specialize in organizing information visually. In the example to the right, I searched for “SAT testing.” The results are plotted out as though they were clusters of information islands. I then moved my mouse over a word in the middle of several islands (“offers”). The modifier showed up in the search box, and the items related to “offers” are highlighted and joined by curved lines. It’s a clever way to parse through popular ways that pages are related — all in a visually entertaining (well, as least intriguing) experience.

Entertainment is definitely the goal of this most recent competitor in the search engine category. I won’t add to the din of bloggers commenting on Ms. Dewey (msdewey.com). All I will say about this comely peer of the late Jeeves (of Ask.com) is she is the most video-centric — and talkative — search experience you are likely to find. And the developers? None other than Microsoft Live Search.

Two Macromedia Flash search engines deliver two extremely different experiences. Which is more successful?

User-generated content (UGC) is a major force in influencing buying behavior among the young and habitually online. That’s irrefutable. But this morning a friend who is neither made the argument that its power ends with that generation. He said that bloggers and such don’t reach people like him – and that’s a serious problem for marketers like me.

He said his generation (the very recently retired) possesses the most disposable income of any age group, and also has plenty of spare time to spend that money. It’s a huge and important audience, and one completely lost to anyone who puts too many eggs in the UGC basket. He almost had me convinced. Then, nearly in the next breath, he completely blew his theory.

This all happened over an early morning coffee. My friend explained that he was recently looking to buy a sailboat. I’ll call this friend “Pete” (although I don’t know why I’m disguising his real first name, since he says he doesn’t read blogs).

Pete loves to sail, and it’s clear he’ll never have a better opportunity to live out a lifelong dream than right now. So he started shopping last month for a 36-to-40-foot used sailboat. The length of a boat dictates a lot about what it has and how you can use it, so every foot or so is an important consideration.

He excitedly told me about his search for, and eventual purchase of, the ideal boat — one that’s reliable, fits his lifestyle and is at a price he can live with. In his explorations, he found a promising model, built by a good manufacturer. It was a 36-footer and seemed to have it all. Then he did what anyone with an internet connection and a favorite search engine would do. He checked the boat out online.

He didn’t go to user groups or blogs. But they came to him. When he typed in the name of the boat along with words like “problems,” he found four or five accounts of a defect that was big enough to be a deal-breaker. Worse, it was a problem that the manufacturer had not yet publicly acknowledged or tried to correct. In fact, when Pete went back to the broker with this knowledge, instead of the broker taking the problem seriously and trying to negotiate a solution that wouldn’t kill the deal, he got defensive and then angry. Naturally, Pete walked.

The story ends happily of course. Pete found his boat, a 39-footer, and it sounds wonderful. I hope to travel down to see him and his wife this fall or winter, and hopefully join them for a sail.

As you might guess, Pete’s new boat wasn’t built by the same manufacturer as that 36-footer, and it wasn’t purchased through that same pugnacious broker. The sale was, however, facilitated by mostly anonymous boat owners who cared enough to share their frustrations with the internet world.

We all know UGC is influential, but we may underestimate its reach, for the following reasons:

1. Thanks to search engines and the ubiquity of web connectivity, this type of persuasion finds people at pivotal moments in their purchasing activity, regardless of their age or their inclination to regularly read blogs or other UGC.
2. Conversely, a surprising number of people do regularly read UGC — at least 2 out of every 5 web users. I say at least 2 out of 5 because the latest research on blog readership gives that proportion, and blogs are a subset of total UGC*. And this new statistic is no idle guesswork. According to a recent phone survey by Pew Internet American Life Project, conducted with over 7,000 people, 39% of U.S. internet users read blogs. That’s a really big number.

Those statistics mean that roughly 57 million Americans would say they read blogs if they were surveyed today on the phone.

As for Pete? If he was one of those 7,000 surveyed, he’d have said he never reads that type of content, and never will. But the truth is slightly different. A search engine will likely point him to UGC again. It will happen the next time he’s considering an important purchase.
 
*I define UGC as the freewheeling “public” content on blogs, discussion groups, folksonomies and wikis (most notably Wikipedia, the site I just used to define folksonomies).