To observe the use of paid search advertising in the final hours of the 2006 US midterm elections, we queried Google for the names of candidates running in swing Senate races and analyzed the resulting 569 ads. We observed:

• Political pay-per-click advertisers use Google. Few political advertisers use Yahoo Paid Search.
• There are few political advertisers: the average search results page for queries in this study returned only 3.7 ads.
• The most prevalent advertisers within this query set were Accoona (search engine), Gather.com (social networking), CafePress (retailer), and GOPSenators.com (National Republican Senatorial Committee).
• “Red” ads (pro-Republican or anti-Democrat) outnumbered “blue ads” (pro-Democrat or anti-Republican) two-to-one.
• Blue ads were three times more likely to be negative than red ads.
• No campaign ads referenced President Bush.
• Iraq and Al-Qaeda were only mentioned only twice (stopidioticforeignpolicy.com, against Jim Webb)
• Only two ads linked directly to videos (against George Allen: “macaca” and prescription drugs).
• Blue ads were longer than red ads. There was no difference in the length of words in blue and red ads.
• Blue ads were more likely to include an exclamation point. Red ads were more likely to contain a question mark.

We conclude that paid political advertising on the search engines is still in its infancy. Note the cost of search advertising is a fraction of the cost of television advertising, yet often has comparable reach.

We anticipate search engine marketing will become increasingly prevalent to the American political process in coming elections. In the 2008 elections, we predict political advertisers will completely fill the paid search spots on the first page of Google search results pages; political advertisers will advertise heavily on Yahoo; political advertisers will use more video; and Democrats will increase spending to match Republicans.

We queried Google and Yahoo for terms related to the 2006 US midterm elections from November 3, 2006 to November 6, 2006. We found virtually no political ads on Yahoo. Yahoo searches on candidate names returned poorly-targeted e-commerce ads. For example, a Yahoo search george allen returned paid results from AOL Movies, Gifts.com, Dealtime, PeopleFinders, FindPeopleToday, etc. This observation suggests political organizations have largely ignored Yahoo as an advertising channel.

Accordingly, we focus our analysis on paid search on Google AdWords.

Using FireFox with cookies disabled, we searched Google 11 times for 14 candidate names in swing US Senate elections, yielding 154 searches over the last few days of the campaign.

Candidate names used as search queries were bob casey, bob corker, conrad burns, george allen, harold ford, jim pederson, jim talent, jim webb, jon kyl, jon tester, lincoln chafee, mike dewine, rick santorum, sherrod brown (Table 1).

We also conducted general political searches (ie war on terror, war in iraq, iraq policy, national security, control of congress, house of representatives, close elections, economic policy, bush popularity, republican base, democratic base, election turnout, congressional elections). We found little campaign advertising on these general terms. Accordingly, we focus our analysis on candidate names.

Table 2 presents the 569 paid search ads displayed on these 154 Google queries.

Note that Google may serve different paid search ads for the same query based on the user’s geography, prior searches, and other factors. Different users conducting identical searches during this time frame may have received different Google ads than we did.

The most prevalent advertiser was Accoona.com, a search engine associated with the Chinese government, appearing on 56% of the 154 searches. In close second was Gather.com, a social networking site aimed at the 35-and-over demographic, appearing on 47% of searches. CafePress.com, an e-commerce site offering personalized products, came in third, appearing on 29% of the searches. The fourth most prevalent advertiser on this query set was the National Republican Senatorial Committee (gopsenators.com), appearing on 28% of the searches.

Table 3 presents counts of ads by advertiser.

Google search pages can contain 8 to 12 ads. Google sells these spots to advertisers using a dynamic real-time auction. On typical e-commerce searches on competitive terms (dvd, business computer, flowers), every slot on the first page of search results is filled.This was not the case for these searches. Even on the day prior to the election, the ad slots on Google search results pages were largely empty.

The average number of ads returned by a query in this search set was 3.7 (Table 4).

We characterized each ad as “red” (pro-Republican or anti-Democrat), “blue” (pro-Democrat or anti-Republican), “other” (political, but neither pro-Democrat nor pro-Republican), or “neither” (not supporting any political party). 58% of these ads did not support a political party. These were ads from CafePress (campaign products) and ads from news sites (election information).

Red advertising dominated blue: 26% of these ads in the sample were “red” (pro-Republican or anti-Democrat), versus only 16% “blue” (pro-Democrat or anti-Republican).

We observed three instances of ads (0.5%) run by the Libertarian party. These were trigged by the search phrase rick santorum and criticized both major parties (“Vote Libertarian in 2006 Don’t waste your vote on the two old parties. Vote Libertarian”)

We characterized an ad as “negative” ad if it used negative language to characterize a politician or party. Table 5 presents the ads characterized as negative.

63% of blue ads were negative, versus 23% of red. This difference was statistically significant (chi-sq(1)=37.6, p=0.000).

The most negative ad in the sample was by blogpac.org on the phrase george allen, accusing the campaign of assaulting a constituent (“George Allen Beat Me Up Watch video of Allen staffers attacking a constituent – BlogPAC www.blogpac.org”).

Google AdWords consist of a 25 character title followed by 70 characters of text; thus, an Adwords ad has a maximum length of 95 characters, including spaces. Blue ads were typically longer than red ads by 9 characters, and this difference was statistically significant (83.4 vs. 74.4, t=5.8, p=0.000). There was no significant difference between the average length of words in red versus blue ads.

No blue or red campaign ads mentioned President Bush. The word “Bush” only occurred in ads for littledemocrats.com (“Why Mommy is a Democrat The book George Bush doesn’t want your kids to read!”), running on the phrase sherrod brown.

23 three ads mentioned “Iraq”. These were anti-Jim Webb ads run by www.stopidioticforeignpolicy.com (“Webb and Bin Laden Both Agree We Should Leave Iraq Now – Be Smart – Vote Allen” and “Webb Wants the U.S. to leave Iraq now–so does Al-Qaeda–So who gets your vote?”) running on the phrases jim webb and george allen.

Blue ads were more likely than red to include an exclamation point (18% vs. 9%, chi-sq(1)=4.4, p=0.03).

Red ads were more likely than blue to contain a question mark (33% vs. 7%, chi-sq(1)=20.8, p=0.000).

The words “help” and “now” occurred frequently in these ads. Both red and blue ads used the word “help” frequently (27% of ads). 27% of red ads contained “now”, versus 0% for blue ads (chi-sq(1)=28.9, p=0.000).

Only two ads linked to video clips, both on YouTube. These were attack ads against Senator George Allen discussing his prescription drug policy and his “Macaca” comment.

While it is difficult to assess the sophistication of an advertiser simply by inspecting their paid search ads, we suspect most political pay-pay-click advertisers are less advanced than their e-commerce counterparts. Only 30% of destination URLs contained tracking codes to enable the advertiser to monitor the traffic from the ad. Most of these embedded tracking codes tracked only the referring engine (“sid=google”) rather than a specific ad.

We believe political pay-per-click advertising is in its infancy. We base this opinion on the low utilization, limited tracking, Google-only perspective, and name-only search emphasis. Because of the greater cost efficiency of pay-per-click advertising, we predict campaigns and political action committees will move aggressively into paid search advertising as a marketing channel in future elections.

See all of the 2006 Election Study Tables

Download the PDF of the Study:
Google AdWords Paid Search Advertising In Close 2006 US Senate Races

Is your search advertising program healthy? How do you know? If you outsource, is your agency doing the job well? It would be nice to assume that hiring an expensive specialist guaranteed a clean bill of heath, but malpractice suits are often well-justified.

Just because your search results in aggregate look good, doesn’t mean the program is healthy and running at maximum efficiency. Once a year, or more often, a detailed evaluation of your program is in order: it will pay big dividends in the long run.

Here’s how to do it:

First: Gather Data

• Keyword-level Costs and Sales.
Your in-house search manager or search agency should be able to easily provide you with clicks, costs, orders and sales dollars by keyword phrase and engine for the last month or two. Don’t be content with the “top 50” or “top 100” terms, you need to see everything. If it isn’t easy for them to pull this together quickly, then one of two things is probably true: 1) they aren’t watching the important details of your program; or 2) they’re hiding the details because they’re ugly. Wave the red flag — your program is broken.

• Google and Yahoo Term Lists.
Have your in-house manager or agency provide the current active terms with the creative (ad text), the destination urls, the current bids and the current position (average position over the last week or day is fine). Again, this should be quite easy to access.

Second: Analyze the data for each engine

• Brand vs. Non-Brand.
Sort the Keyword level Cost and Sales data alphabetically by keyword. What fraction of your sales is coming from your brand name and its permutations (store name, storename.com, www.storename)? When you look at the costs and sales of these brand terms, do the numbers make economic sense? Do the costs and sales of your non-brand terms meet your economic goals? Don’t let sales on your brand name subsidize poor performance on the non-brand phrases.

• Bid Management.
Sort the same spreadsheet by cost descending, so that the most expensive terms come to the top of the list. Search is a “spiky” business, and it’s important to look at a month or two worth of data, to eliminate some of the spikiness.

For the twenty – fifty most expensive terms, pull back the current bid and position from the appropriate Term List sheet. Do the bids and positions make sense for these critical terms given the economic results you’re seeing? Are there instances where you’re bidding a lot on poor performers? Are there instances where you’re bidding too little on great performers and you’re not high on the page?

Bidding on mid- to low- traffic terms is a complex statistical game; bidding on the high traffic terms isn’t. Your in-house manager or agency should be able to provide clear, jargon-free explanation about this bidding logic: if the bids don’t make sense on the most important terms they probably don’t make sense on the rest.

Now examine the rest of the bids. Delete the “brand phrases” from the performance data, as these phrases distort the real picture. Re-sort the list by click-counts descending. Look at the sum of costs and sales for terms with more than 1000 clicks. Repeat this process for terms with between 900 and 1000 clicks. Repeat all the way to the bottom, ending with terms with fewer than 100 clicks. Bid management for the lower traffic terms is tough, but if each “bin” of terms doesn’t have reasonable efficiency, that may indicate problems with the system. It’s easier to break a fine watch than it is to build one, but if you’re paying a lot for the watch, it ought to withstand this scrutiny fairly well.

• Term Lists.
How thoroughly do the term lists cover your offerings? A decent rule of thumb holds that you should have approximately 5 to 10 keywords for each product you sell. But numbers aren’t the ultimate measure, as it’s easy to inflate a poor list by simply appending or pre-pending “shop for”, “buy”, “online”, “on sale”, etc. to each term. Creating a truly comprehensive list with permutations that actually help capture more traffic is hard work, but well worth the effort. Remember: low traffic, detailed terms convert at a much higher rate than more general terms and are often less expensive.

• Ad Copy.
Is the ad copy compelling, accurate and specific enough to the product? It usually isn’t cost effective to hand write copy for every single ad, but the templates used should be at least category specific. And, it may well be worthwhile to put extra attention into your top 50 to 100 most viewed ads.

• Destination URLs.
Grab a random selection of phrases and copy and paste the destination urls into your browser. Is that the page you would pick to land your customer on? If not, find out why the landing page is what it is. Getting the landing pages wrong costs you sales, as many shoppers aren’t patient enough to navigate more than is necessary.

If you get to this point and everything looks good, congratulations, your search program is in good shape. If not, depending on the severity of the problems uncovered, ask some more hard questions or look for a new provider. If you can’t do the examination because you can’t get keyword level performance data, fire your agency or help your in-house manager get the tools they need to do the job well.

Search is complicated, and getting every detail perfect is impossible, but if you uncover grievous problems take action. There’s too much at stake to tolerate poor search health.

How can you get more email signups from your site visitors? This article shines a spotlight on the email signup process at 45 leading retailers. These suggestions can help you grow your email list. Email signup is simple–a few clicks followed by a handful of keystrokes–but the same process of close comparative scrutiny can also improve complex processes like cart and check-out.

For this study, I pulled 45 sites at random from the 2005 Catalog Age 100 and Internet Retailer 400 lists. I signed up for email at each using a fresh Gmail account. You can check out the full methodology and get detailed scores and notes for each site at www.rimmkaufman.com/email-signup-study. I conducted these tests in June 2006; some of the sites have evolved since.

Here are my 13 ingredients for the perfect email signup process. You should start the signup from the homepage, preferably above the fold. You should be told the benefits of signing up, and be reassured your email will be kept private. You should reach the email form in at most one click. You shouldn’t encounter confusion, bugs, or irrelevant choices. You should get clear confirmation of success, be thanked for signing up, and receive some immediate benefit. You shouldn’t be forced to provide extraneous data. You should be able to specify what content interests you. You should have the option of RSS subscription. And you should receive a fast email confirmation.

You might quibble with any of these 13 points. That’s fine. I suggest as a set they have predictive validity: when you score sites on this 13-point scale, you’ll find higher-scoring sites have noticeably smoother signup processes than lower-scoring sites. The best sites are worthy of study and emulation.

Start on the homepage, above the fold

37 (81%) sites place the signup box or link on the homepage above the fold. Most of the rest place email signup the bottom. On 6 sites–Lego, Headsets.com, Carrot Ink, Black Box, Amazon, and Best Buy–I couldn’t find anything related to email signup on the homepage after a reasonable search, and gave up.

Explain the benefit of signing up, before the signup

34 sites (77%) offer reasons visitors should share their email. Why doesn’t every site? Whether you use full sentences or just a few words, explain why someone benefits by signing up for your list. Seems obvious, but 1 in 3 sites don’t do this.

Provide in-line privacy reassurance

Only 11 sites (25%) provide privacy reassurance near the signup box. A few others offer a link to their privacy policy, but that forces the visitor to click off to a page of legalese and disrupts the signup flow. You don’t need many words to reassure. Danskin does it in ten: “Your information is safe with Danskin’s privacy protection. Privacy Policy” I’m sure your company handles emails appropriately, so remember to tell your visitors you do, right next to the signup box.

Reach the email signup box in at most one click

40 sites (91%) follow this practice, making this recommendation the most widely adopted followed. Many sites place an email box on the home page itself (0 clicks); others place a link from the home page to a signup page (1 click). There’s no need for additional intermediate pages such as encountered on Vermont Teddy Bear or PC Mall–two clicks is too long a path for such a simple process.

Eliminate bugs and confusion

Your signup process has to be clear and has to function. 33 sites (73%) meet these basic criteria. Only one site, Etronics, failed outright [screenshot]. But too many sites complicated this simple process. How? Calling it a “Mailing list” rather than “Email list” (Dresses.com, Danskin). Adding a redundant screen (Lillian Vernon). Placing “Sign up for email” links on the bottom of every screen, including the email signup screen itself (QVC). Each time a user has to think, that brief pause interrupts the flow, increasing the chance of abandonment.

Provide a dedicated signup process

On 37 sites (84%), the email signup process only handle email signup. This is good design because it reduces complexity for the visitor. A few sites–probably to save a few lines of code–recycle management screens (“manage your email” or “manage your account”) for email signup. This is bad design. When a visitor wants to sign up for email, provide her a dedicated screen to do exactly that, and just that. Recycling functionality leads to confusion. On the Swiss Colony site, for example, after following a link labeled “Sign up to receive emails about specially priced items; sign up now”, the visitor is left wondering why the next screen provides a “I do not wish to receive email” option.

Offer an immediate benefit

Only 6 sites (14%) offer an incentive for signing up, such as entering each new email in a sweepstakes (Gumps, Neiman Marcus, Crutchfield, REI). A few sites offer discount coupons (Zales, $5 off purchase over $25); (REI , 10% off next order). However, Zales mentions the coupon only after the signup, so doesn’t gain any lift in signup rates. REI mentions the 10% off offer before the signup, then provides the coupon via email, ensuring the consumer enters a valid address.

Say “thank you”

Your company benefits when a visitor signs up for your email. Saying “Thank you” is polite and appropriate, and 32 sites (82%) do. Skipping those two little words makes your company sound mechanical and rude.

Avoid collecting extraneous data

Visitors will happily provide you with data when doing so benefits them, not you. To receive email from you, visitors need to provide you their email address. They understand that. When you ask for additional data–or worse, when you require it–and visitors can’t see how providing that information benefits them, you’ll lose signups.

28 sites (64%) understand this, and request or require minimal data. The remaining sites ask for additional data, increasing user frustration. To get email from PC Mall, one must create an account, which entails filling out 16 fields, of which 11 are required. Neiman Marcus forces the visitor to provide a last name and a zipcode. Harry & David forces account creation to sign up for email, and uses unfriendly language if the address isn’t postal service hygienic. Tool King forces the visitor to provide both his name and zipcode (and if the visitor does not, the site generates both an error and a thank-you message–confusing). Crutchfield forces visitors to indicate if they’re more interested in electronics for the home or for the car–what about the people interested in both?

Offer choices of content, frequency, and channel

Only 11 sites (25%) allowed visitors the choice of email list and/or delivery frequency. Cooking.com offers four lists. Williams Sonoma
allows visitors to specify from which companies they’d like to receive email. PetSmart lets visitors join email lists customized for different types of pets (Dog, Cat, Fish, Bird, Reptile, Small Pet).

Among the sites in this study, Barnes & Noble is the clear leader in content choice. Bn.com offers 25 email list options, including “Bestsellers,” “Heart to Heart: Our Romance Newsletter”, “Ransom Notes: Our Mystery & Thrillers Newsletter,” and a “40% Off Bulletin.” The site also offers “Writer Alerts” on over 100 specific authors, as well as DVD and Music Alerts.

Not one of the 45 sites reviewed allowed visitors to specify their desired frequency of email messages.

Only 2 sites (5%) offered an RSS option: Home Depot and New Egg. As RSS grows in popularity, retailers should also offer their email content via RSS feeds. Best yet, as RSS is a pull medium, the channel sidesteps the deliverability and spam conundrums of traditional email.

Provide fast confirmation

A visitor should receive an email confirmation of their signup that same day–preferably within minutes. Only 14 sites (27%) met the same-day standard; the majority of sites confirmed the signup within a few days. A fast confirmation ensures the visitor didn’t make an entry mistake, and the fast feedback can reduce the chance subsequent pieces are flagged as spam. Use a “From:” address that clearly indicates your brand–too many retailers send emails from ambiguous addresses like “custserv” (Company Store) “support” (Cooking.com), “webteam” (B&H Photo), or “info” (Diamond.com). The most confusing confirmation came from info@ldproducts.com; the address and the email did not identify itself as an associated site with Inkjets.com, where the email signup occurred.

Conclusion

Five sites scored 10 or better on this 13 point scale: Barnes & Noble, B&H Photovideo, Cabela’s, Crutchfield, and Williams Sonoma. Visit these leaders. Sign up for their email and note how their processes compare with yours.

You may find small improvements to your signup process increase your signup rate, helping you grow your email house file more quickly.

The Incremental Value of Paid Search

What portion of sales driven by paid search advertising is incremental?

For catalogers, incremental PPC contributes 14% of total online sales, for retailers with bricks and mortar outlets 7%, for e-commerce pure plays 52%.

These are among the findings from the Rimm-Kaufman Group’s recently completed study on brand vs. non-brand search advertising.

Over 18 months, we studied a random sample of 50 marketers with significant search programs. We studied key performance indicators including closing ratio, order size, sales per click and paid search sales as a percentage of total site sales. For each of these dimensions, we sliced the data to divide the incremental and non-incremental effects of PPC advertising.

Defining “incremental”

Actually assessing incrementality for individual orders is nearly impossible. As a meaningful proxy, we divided each advertisers’ search ads into two buckets: those involving the advertiser’s brand and those that do not.

When a person starts their search with a brand name, they’ve already selected the retailer they wish to buy from. These searches largely reflect a retailers’ off-line marketing — catalog mailings, television, radio, print, word-of-mouth, and brand awareness. In most cases, brand searches are not incremental. (The situation differs for manufacturers who sell direct and compete with their distributors – for example, Lego Corporation advertising on “Lego”. We excluded such advertisers from our sample.)

Catalogers traditionally divide their orders into those from previous buyers and those from new buyers. But in the age of the web, the brand / non-brand categorization is equally important. A name’s presence on a catalog housefile is not an indicator of loyalty. When a prior buyer types in a non-brand search, she’s considering multiple merchants: that order is in play.

Study Results

Not surprisingly, the study reveals the strong influence of offline advertising. But while brand-driven search is a powerful lever for both catalogers and retailers, the opportunity for a growing a program on the more competitive terms is large. Non-brand search contributes 46% of all PPC sales for retailers, 62% for catalogers, and 97% for e-commerce pure plays.

The data also affirms that many catalog readers are “closed” in print before using search and the web as an order channel. Catalogers enjoy a 10.3% closing ratio on brand searches, but only a 1.2% closing ratio on non-brand searches. Catalogers should beware of paying commissions on brand searches. It’s the orders on competitive, non-brand searches that matter–and should command the bulk of expense and effort.

Marketers with a significant retail footprint should also expect channel spillover. For catalogers, sales $ per click is 7.5 times greater on brand($11.81) than searches than non-brand searches($1.58), for retailers the multiplier is only 2.3. For retailers, a large percentage of brand traffic is doing research online and then buying in their local retail store.

The study also provides findings on how competitive non-brand search contributes across 11 categories of goods sold, and assesses its value by business types and size. For a look at the study data and more key findings, see the Non-Brand Study Data Set.

Introduction

For many catalogers, pay-per-click (PPC) search represents the largest line in their web marketing budget. Just as you should visit your dentist twice yearly for a checkup, so should you conduct a routine search marketing audit every six months or so. Regular checkups ensure your PPC campaigns stay healthy, whether managed by an agency or by an in-house team.

A PPC audit has three components: a sales data audit, a cost data audit, and an economic performance audit. The two data audits make sure you’re working with accurate numbers, and the performance audit makes sure your campaigns are running efficiently.

My firm manages paid search campaigns for catalogers. Conducting several of these audits for prospective clients each month, we’ve observed a wide menagerie of problems. Some of the checks suggested in this article seem basic. They are. However, all of the checks correspond to real problems we’ve observed in real campaigns, so we recommend following the full process.

PPC Sales Audit

First, audit your raw PPC sales data. Here’s how.

Pick a recent calendar month. From your search agency or in-house team, get the total sales attributed to PPC search over that month. Also get a detailed list of every order attributed to PPC search over that month, with order time and date stamp, order total, the search ad which drove the order, and the click time and date stamp.

Make sure reported total sales match the sum of the order totals.

Next, from your order management system, obtain a detailed list of every order taken through your website over the month. For each order, pull order time and date, order total, and the marketing channel credited with the sale (unknown, search, affiliate, email, etc.)

Compare the two order detail lists in Excel, matching orders by date, time, and amount.

You should be able to find every search-attributed order within the full list of web orders–and those orders should be credited to paid search.

If you find orders on the PPC list which are assigned to a non-PPC marketing channel on the all-web list, that’s a red flag.

This is “double counting,” where one order gets attributed to multiple programs. Dig into these cases, and see why the different systems disagree on what drove the order. Causes can range from the innocent (different tracking cookies, different order allocation windows, errors in tracking or allocation software) to the nefarious (malware, unethical agency tactics).

PPC Cost Audit

Next, audit your raw PPC advertising cost data.

Pick a recent calendar month. Ask your accounting department for actual advertising costs paid for that month to each major search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc). Your accounting folks should pull these costs from the actual advertising invoices received from the engines (if you pay by invoice) or from the actual credit card statements (if you pay by credit card).

Pull cost data for the same period for each engine by day from the engines themselves. Log in to the engine’s web management interfaces, or ask your agency to generate those reports.

Finally, gather cost data from your weekly search performance reports provided by your agency, your search management tool, or your in-house team.

For each engine, in aggregate and by day, compare these three sets of cost data — costs as invoiced by the engines, costs as reported by the engines, and costs as reported by your search performance reports. These should tie to within a few percent.

PPC Performance Audit

The sales and cost audits should give you confidence your search reports are based on reasonably accurate numbers. With that due diligence completed, next check that your search campaigns are running well.

The first check is to compare overall costs to overall sales. Compute this ratio. In aggregate, are your PPC campaigns producing sales efficiently? Is this ratio in line with your other online and offline advertising efforts?

Even if your search programs appear efficient in aggregate, this high level check can hide significant inefficiencies deeper down. Ask your agency or in-house team for phrase-level performance data. You want impressions, clicks, ad cost, average position, current max bid, sales, and orders rolled up by phrase over the last 60 days. Don’t settle for a report on just the top twenty terms–you need data on every phrase that had any cost or sales. If the team managing your search cannot (or will not) provide such data easily, that’s a big red flag.

Load the phrase-level data into Excel and compute three additional columns: A/S (ratio of advertising to sales), CPC (ratio of ad cost to clicks), and CTR (ratio of clicks to impressions). You can now perform several important checks quickly by sorting this Excel sheet different ways.

Brand vs. Non-brand

Sort the keyword-level cost and sales data alphabetically by keyword. Scan the list for your brand name (“Brand Name”, “BrandName”, “BrandName.com”) and its common misspellings, and pull those rows to the top. What fraction of your sales comes from your brand name? What fraction of your costs? Most retailers will find ads on their brand to be highly profitable. Great–but realize these sales come from customers already seeking you by name, and thus reflect prior advertising (catalog, radio, TV, web, word-of-mouth, etc.)

More importantly, consider the sales and costs from all the ads which don’t involve your brand name. Do the economics of this part of the portfolio also make sense? Make sure you are buying sales efficiently, with both brand and non-brand terms meeting your metrics.

In the catalog world, marketers carefully distinguish orders from new customers versus previous customers, and place more value on a new-to-file buyer.

In the search world, the analogous distinction is between orders following non-brand searches versus following brand searches. Even if a customer previously bought from you, the fact that she was doing general web searches in your product category just prior to her purchase suggests she was considering several merchants. Even if a customer is new to file, the fact that he reached your site and ordered following a search on your brand name suggests he was influenced by non-search advertising efforts. The first scenario is likely incremental business, the second scenario, not.

Most Expensive Terms

Sort the spreadsheet by descending total ad cost, bringing your most expensive search ads to the top. Are these crucial ads generating appropriate sales for their cost? Are the bids and average positions appropriate? Do you see low-performance phrases being overbid, or high-performance phrases being underbid?

Bidding correctly on low traffic phrases requires complex statistical algorithms. Bidding on the expensive high traffic terms doesn’t. Your in-house team or agency should be able to provide clear, jargon-free explanations of your bids on your top terms. If the bids don’t make sense on your most important terms, that’s a large red flag, and could reflect broader problems across the rest of the keyword portfolio.

Bid Logic

Remove the brand phrases from the spreadsheet, and sort the list by descending clicks. Group terms with more than 1000 clicks, aggregating their costs and sales. Group terms with between 900 and 1000 clicks, aggregating costs and sales. Repeat for each 100 click window, down to the last bin holding terms with under 100 clicks. Efficient bid management is always more challenging on low traffic terms, given the statistical variability around rare events. Regardless, you should expect each bin to have roughly similar efficiencies, as measured by their aggregate advertising to aggregate sales ratios.

Evaluating Your Phrase List

Look at your phrase lists, ensuring the words you are using to advertise your site covers the breadth of your products and services. A comprehensive phrase list will capture more traffic than a narrow list, and detailed specific terms often convert at a higher rate and enjoy lower CPC rates than more general terms.

Copy & Landing Pages

Check the ad copy and landing pages on your top 20 ads. Is the copy specific to the search phrase? Is the landing page appropriate? While it isn’t cost-effective to write custom ad copy for every search phrase in a large search portfolio, you should have specific focused copy on the top phrases.

Conclusion

Paid search is a highly complex marketing channel. Getting every detail perfect on a large campaign is impossible. However, you should expect the folks managing your search campaigns, be they in-house or at an agency, to keep your search campaigns in good overall health. Regular checkups, like periodic dental visits, take little time, allows early fixes to any discovered problems, and provide peace of mind when all is well.

• Blogs provide a personal voice for your brand: As the marketplace becomes more crowded, a personal voice that cuts through the clutter is essential. Executed thoughtfully, blogs create meaningful conversations with both current and future customers.
• Blogs provide relevant extensions of your core message. Content on your core business site necessarily keeps a tight focus on conversion and your essential selling proposition. And while your blog should always link to your core e-commerce site, it allows you to cover a broader range of brand-relevant topics. It lets you participate in key conversations that occur higher in the conversion funnel. (Read on to see how online jewelry retailer Ice.com uses blogs in this way.)
• Blogs offer low barriers to entry and low costs for maintenance: With numerous blog software packages available, entering the blogosphere is relatively easy. While your corporate website depends on ongoing support from internal IT and design resources, blogs allow–and require–you to be far more nimble.
• Blogs are good for PR. Journalists often mine the blogosphere for new content and leads.
• Blogs can help natural search rankings. Blogs provide “good bait” for natural search spiders.

• Tip: Read Cluetrain, and reflect on how your firm communicates with your customers.
• Tip: Embrace two-way communication: allow your blog readers to comment on your posts.

Blogs as more than brand punditry
Blogs need not be dry, impersonal, corporate-speak. Interesting people with interesting opinions write interesting blogs, and readers find interesting blogs. The best blogs provide a real sense of their author, and by reflection, of their author’s organization. To see how a blog can shape a company’s public face, check out Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, Matt Cutts of Google, Robert Scoble of Microsoft, or Bob Parsons of GoDaddy. Whether or not I’ve met these authors face to face, when I read these blogs I feel like I get know these people personally, and that very much personalizes their companies for me. Even when bloggers are not the official voices for their firms, their writing plays a strong role in shaping how the firms are perceived in the marketplace.
• Tip: Let your voice come through your blog.
• Tip: Offer strong opinions and interesting perspectives.
Blogs as public banality
Letting your own voice come through on your business blog does not mean that offhand or stream of consciousness content is appropriate. Perhaps because of the origins of blogs, some find this trap difficult to avoid. “Blog” is an abbreviation for “web log”. Many of early blogs were public diaries, and this genre is still popular today. According to Technorati, the blog search engine, over 100,000 new Webb logs and over 1.5 million posts sprout up each day. Many of these are personal diaries. While of interest to their creator, outsiders often find these personal journals banal. To peruse this banality, visit Technorati and search on the phrase “homework AND pimple”: you’ll be rewarded with hundreds of pages of teen angst. Or visit http://www.fotolog.com/cypher, where you can view a photo of every meal eaten by one blogger since October, 2002. Thanks, but no thanks. If your company is going to blog, make sure your writing reflects your brand. Just because your CEO can share her musings about her breakfast cereal with the entire world, doesn’t mean she necessarily should.
• Tip: Realize blogs can be more than public diaries
• Tip: Determine which individuals publicly associated with your brand are blogging, and how their blogs reflect on your brand
• Tip: Realize that as blogosphere is insanely crowded, you need useful, well-written content to win relevant traffic
Blogs and Reputation Management
Happy customers blog. Angry customers blog louder. Some complaints are warranted. Some complaints aren’t. It is critical to keep on top of what is being said about your brand and your products online. Because journalists in the trades and mainstream press rely heavily on the blogosphere, problems can percolate from private grumblings to the front page with surprising speed. If you learn of legitimate problems when monitoring the blogosphere, admit your mistakes and move to remedy them. If you hear inaccurate complaints, explain your view of the situation. Responding quickly is essential. There are reputation monitoring services available, or you can track your brand name and key product names yourself via RSS searches (Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Google / Yahoo / MSN News, etc)
• Tip: Monitor your brand reputation online regularly each week.
• Tip: Develop a response plan–who in your firm will respond to inaccurate posts?
Blogs as search engine bait
Search engines love good blogs. Good blogs are chock full of rich fresh content, clean semantic markup, and rich interlinkages. As a result, for many searches blog results rank higher than product detail pages on search engine organic results pages. For competitive SEO terms, excellent blog content can be a powerful tool to increase organic traffic. “Blogging should be part of any online retailer’s SEO arsenal,” notes Stephan Spencer, founder of Netconcepts and blogging expert. Being a participant in the blogosphere opens doors to links that would otherwise be inaccessible: blogroll links, ‘hat tips’ from bloggers crediting you for breaking a news story or making an insightful comment, listings in blog directories and search engines, and greater willingness of bloggers to cover your PR initiatives. Spencer offers results from a NetConcepts client, science toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science, which attributes 13% of their online sales to their blog. Pinny Gniwisch, EVP of marketing at jewelry retailer Ice.com, agrees that blogs can be powerful SEO tools. “We originally started blogging for search engine benefits. Today we have four blogs. We post three times a week, paying outside writers for enticing content.” According to Gniwisch, the most popular Ice.com blog is Sparkle Like The Stars, which tracks jewelry worn by celebrities. The site links back to the Ice.com retail site and has large regular readership. “During the holiday, our blogs drove over $200K in sales,” reports Gniwisch.
• Tip: Link your blog back to your commerce site
• Tip: Make your blogs search engine friendly, using appropriate tags and markup.

(For blog SEO tips, see Spencer’s blog at http://www.stephanspencer.com/.)

Conclusion
Blogs are here, and here to stay. Because blogs are fundamentally a “pull” marketing channel, blogs will suffer fewer of the spam problems of “push” channels like email. While your blog likely won’t make it into the top 100 or even top 1000 list, a blog can help connect with the most important niche of individuals on the web: your current and your prospective customers.

Check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog.

Introduction

Was your company swamped with online orders during Holiday ‘05? Did excessive web sales place undue strain on your business? If so, here are 19 tactics to torpedo your online conversion rate and impede your web sales.

(It’s possible your firm is actually seeking more web sales. In that case, if you’re not heeding any of the following advice, congratulations!)

Tactic #1: Make them work for it

Make sure users have to learn how to use your site. This is the best way to get them to concentrate and forget about competitors who are just 1 click away. Ignore the accepted conventions of industry leaders. And change layouts throughout your site—this increases “shopping suspense” and keeps even the most seasoned web customer on their toes.

Tactic #2: Design by committee

Let a committee of senior executives design your homepage—or you can just let your CEO do it. What’s important is never to test it or solicit input from your customers or front line, call center personnel.

Tactic #3: Ditch the style book

To increase interest, use lots of bright contrasting colors, multiple palettes and at least 4 font families. Use animated gifs. If they seem out of place, set them off with frames.

Tactic #4: Slow down, cowboy

Make your site isn’t too fast: rapid response from the browser can confuse and bewilder your visitors. Ignore complaints from users on dial-up—they typically represent only 40% of potential sales.

Tactic #5: Think big

Use all the bytes you need to create the image you want. Anemic homepages coming in at under 50k will under whelm your users. Your brand deserves and demands more space—consider 1/4 or 1/2 meg homepages.

Tactic #6: Use org chart navigation

Let the HR department design your site’s information architecture: the best way to structure your site is following your divisional structure and politics. Make sure each department’s pet project receives equal prominence on the homepage.

Tactic #7: Embrace jargon

“Labeling” is an important concept in website usability. For key product descriptors on your site, simply repurpose the language found on your receiving department’s invoices. Manufacturer model numbers are precise and unambiguous: MA107LLA. Consumer slang like “black ipod nano” could mean just about anything.

Tactic #8: Don’t suggest, don’t guess

When your site search function fails to find matching results, make sure it offers a nice clean “dead-end” page. If you feel this page must contain copy, make sure it’s written by the programmers responsible for search: your customers appreciate straight talk from the people who can tell them why they failed. Don’t correct mistakes in spelling, punctuation, or pluralization—inferring what a customer might have wanted in such situations is overbearing and rude.

Tactic #9: Hide the Buy Button

On product detail pages, make sure “add to cart” is given equal weight with every other call to action on the page. In particular, make sure it doesn’t overshadow other buttons like “add to wish list,” “email this page” or “click for warranty info.”

Tactic #10: Offer “1-Click Empty Cart”

Provide a big button that says “Empty Cart.” Place it near “Continue to Checkout.” Also, if a user leaves your site, be sure to empty the Cart for her. This avoids cluttering up her next visit with historic reminders of things she considered but didn’t buy.

Tactic #11: Take the scenic route

Make sure your Checkout consists of at least seven pages. Ask for plenty of personal information without explanation (your marketing department may find it interesting someday). Extra tip for seeding repeat purchases: Automatically opt your user into every email list you offer. (This is much cheaper than creating a meaningful loyalty program).

Tactic #12: Force log-in

Eliminate Guest Checkout; require registration. This will separate “on the fence” prospects from the people who are really serious about placing an order

Tactic #13: Forget everything your user tells you

If a user makes a mistake during Checkout be sure to erase ALL the info he’s entered: it is likely error-ridden as well, and users appreciate the opportunity to start over with a clean slate. If you feel you must offer helpful error messages, again, these are best crafted by your IT department.

Tactic #14: Offer plenty of “Exits”

Keep every link available on every page, particularly during Cart and Checkout. Halfway through your Checkout process, users may want to consult your “corporate history” link, or read about a high ticket item they have no real intention of purchasing. You need to support that.

Tactic #15: Ignore code standards

Who the heck is the W3C, anyway? Standards compliance is a costly distraction, If your site renders in the latest version of Internet Explorer the HTML is fine. Favor IE-only tags and javascript calls particularly critical during Checkout. Firefox is a passing fad: by November, 2005 it had only 100 million downloads.

Tactic #16: Forget about your catalog

Nobody reads those things anymore. Supporting catalog quick-order numbers isn’t worth the effort. It’s not like some user is sitting in front of his computer with your latest mailing, eager to type an item number into your Cart to make a purchase.

Tactic #17: Forget about your call center

Nobody uses the phone, so don’t clutter every page on your site with your 800 number. If a user can’t find the info he needs on your website, he probably wasn’t serious about placing an order. Anyway, you’re focus is your site’s web conversion ratio—not more sales for your company!

Tactic #18: Ignore the data

Buy an expensive analytics package. But don’t invest in the expertise to understand what it says (Note: this alone won’t actually lower conversion, but at least it will ensure that you won’t raise it.

Tactic #19: Don’t shop your site

Never shop your site as your customer would. Instead rely on third party research and “checklist articles” in the trades.

Thanks for reading this tongue-in-cheek article. If you’re seeking recommended books and online resources which help you improve your site, we have included a list of favorites below. May you have great success making your site the best it can be!

• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition) A good, fast read. Absorb Krug’s concepts to reduce friction and eliminate user speed bumps on your site.
• The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better by Seth Godin An early classic from Godin. Learn why every webpage is an offer page and what you can do to ensure customers find your offer on every page.

• Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen The first 4 chapters should be required reading for any web creative team.
• Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website Nielsen’s frequently updated site is well-worth a bookmark.

• The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Making your website more accessible for the disabled can make it easier for others to use as well.

• Webpage Design for Catalogers Published in Catalog Success magazine, this article by Alan Rimm-Kaufman provides practical tips for the cataloger entering the world of online design.
• Website Effectiveness Consulting Let us help you make your website easier for customers to shop. Online analytics tell you what’s happening on your site, usability testing tells you why and then redesign makes changes.