What you need to know about brand search, long-tail lists and social media

Search has revolutionized advertising. For many direct retailers, search has become the leading advertising channel for customer acquisition, and its importance still is growing. Here are three big ideas to help you get more from your paid search marketing (SEM) and your natural search marketing (SEO) going into the fourth quarter of 2007.

SEO & SEM: Your Good Name

Many retailers enjoy significant sales from visitors arriving from searches on their brand name. Monitoring and managing the distinction between brand and nonbrand searches is critical to smart online marketing.

Why does brand vs. nonbrand matter? Consider two different Google searches, one for “J. Crew jean jacket” and another for “women’s jean jacket.” In both cases, the searcher is looking for a jean jacket, but in the first case, the searcher has a particular retailer already in mind. In this case, the query is navigational, and Google’s role is analogous to a telephone White Pages. In the second case, the searcher wants a product but hasn’t yet decided from which online retailer to purchase it. In this case, the query is competitive, and Google’s role is analogous to a telephone Yellow Pages. Even if this searcher has bought from J. Crew previously, she’s shopping the Web to see where to buy the jean jacket. In the second case, the order is “in play,” and the retailer (in this case, J. Crew) must strive to win the click and turn it into an order.

You could argue that we should consider “clickstreams”, not individual searches, when assessing whether a brand search is incremental. For example, if a searcher made these three searches in succession—“fall jackets,” “women’s jean jacket,” then “J. Crew jean jacket”—then you might argue that since the brand search was the last link in a chain of competitive searches, this sequence of three searches is incremental. This argument sounds good, but it isn’t supported by data. In a 2006 study of a sample of 1 million paid clickstreams from a sample of 100 clients, my firm’s research team found that a branded search is preceded by a nonbrand search less than 8 percent of the time.

The chart shown on page 131 presents data from an Internet 100 multichannel retailer. This chart categorizes the retailer’s term list, clicks, cost, sales and profit into brand vs. nonbrand bins. This retailer runs about 20,000 active search phrases on each engine. Only about 1 percent of these terms involve the retailer’s brand name or its trademarked product names, yet this tiny portfolio of terms comprises 9 percent of its clicks. These terms have low cost and high sales, so this tiny portfolio comprises more than 40 percent of the retailer’s pay-per-click profits.

The wrong way to interpret this figure is to say, “If we can get 40 percent of the benefit with 1 percent of the effort, why don’t we just run brand terms?” These sales are largely nonincremental, reflecting the brand equity this firm has built up over years of catalog and print advertising. These are “White Page” sales that would have occurred anyway.

The right way for a search manager to interpret this figure is to focus on the green portfolio. Charge your paid search agency, or your in-house team, to grow your nonbrand search sales aggressively and efficiently. Continue to advertise on your brand, but evaluate your success by focusing on nonbrand results.

What about natural search? Even though you’re not paying for organic clicks, the brand vs. nonbrand distinction still is highly relevant. Your goal is to optimize your site to rank highly on long-tail, nonbrand terms. A 2006 study conducted by online marketing firm NetConcepts indicates that a typical retailer receives 95 percent of its organic traffic from searches on its brand name.

SEM: Comprehensive Term Lists

To grow your paid search program beyond your brand, there’s great value in the “long tail” of search terms. Comprehensive term lists are your ticket to capturing that value. As a rule of thumb, test four to six times the number of terms as your site has pages, expecting half to two times the number of terms to have sufficient traffic and performance to merit ongoing funding in your campaigns. For example, an online retailer with 4,500 SKUs and a 5,000 page Web site should test up to 20,000 to 30,000 terms, expecting about 5,000 of these terms to work long-term. Since keyword counts can be inflated artificially with no benefit (for example, by pre-pending “buy” or post-pending “online”), your objective is to choose unique phrases with traffic and marketing opportunity.

To illustrate, consider the paid search program at CDW. (Disclosure: my firm manages its paid search program.) CDW is large reseller of IT products and services. Ranked 342 on the Fortune 500, CDW sold $6.8 billion in total 2006 revenue, with $2 billion of that occurring online. CDW.com is a huge site, with more than 100,000 SKUs. While your site is probably smaller, CDW’s success using large term lists to increase sales is instructive for any marketer.

In May 2006, CDW.com had about 175,000 selling pages on the site (product pages, category pages, etc.). We tested 466,044 distinct nontrivial phrases on Google. After culling terms for lack of traffic or lack of conversion, we obtained 85,664 terms with both traffic and favorable conversion. On average, we tested 2.6 terms for each URL, and 18 percent of total terms tested yielded effective terms. Term list creation isn’t static—we refresh and retest this list monthly to respond to product introductions and discontinuations. This focused and obsessively complete term list creation played an important role in CDW’s significant increase in sales and profits from paid search.

SEO: Social Media Drives Links, Links Drive Rankings

If you aren’t yet, familiarize yourself with Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and reddit. These sites are the “big four” social media communities. Each can drive huge volumes of traffic to your site. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are rocket fuel powering your organic rankings. Not all of your content will be “digg-worthy,” but a few times a year you should try to release content so compelling it warrants attention from the social media tribes.

If these sites are new to you, spend some time visiting them and read the comments. Establish accounts and try submitting or voting on content. (Tip: Don’t submit your own pages.) Get a sense of what each community likes. For example, the Digg community is composed primarily of young males. To generalize, they like: girls, cars, explosions, challenging the system and Linux; they don’t like suits, Microsoft or corporate PR.

Even if your target customer does not fit the Digg demographic, there’s still a place for these social sites in your PR mix. Suppose you work for a mutual fund company marketing retirement plans. While the standard discussion of 401(k)s might not interest high-school guys, you can write articles to intrigue this audience. For example, consider these story angles: “The 6.2 Percent of Your Paycheck You Never See Again” or “Here’s a Quick Way to Retire a Millionaire.” (Tip: Titles and descriptions are as important or more important than the article itself.) Community-relevant articles with compelling titles and interesting descriptions, posed by power users and backed by good content, have a shot at broad exposure. This exposure generates blog links, powering improved Google rankings for your entire site.

For a fun experiment, my kids and I inflated latex surgical tubing to make “the world’s longest water balloon” (if you’re interested, see www.rimmkaufman.com/projects). We shot video and created a Web page documenting this stunt. With help from Digg power users, our link made the Digg homepage. In less than a day, our page received 33,000 visitors, multiple inbound links and generated a slight boost in our overall Google rankings. Note: My business goals do not involve water balloons; even though the stunt was off-topic, the Digg-generated inbound links help our Web site rank higher on searches on terms relevant to my business.

Spark New SEM Ideas

While I focused on the top three search trends that I’ve seen driving results, the point I’m trying to make is that you cannot afford to let your SEM program get stale or lazy. Use the data and tools at your disposal, and determine what could move the search needle for your business.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency offering paid search services and Web-effectiveness consulting. You can reach him via his blog at www.rkgblog.com or at (434) 970-1010.

Online Resources Related to This Article

1.) RKG Search Funnel Study: http://tinyurl.com/yw7kb7

2.) Avinash Kaushik on the long tail of natural search: http://tinyurl.com/2a28mc

3.) NetConcepts Long Tail study: www.netconcepts.com/long-tail-whitepaper/

4.) CDW example: www.rimmkaufman.com/content/accmrimmkaufmanvargob2bsearch.pdf

5.) The “Big Four” Social-networking Sites:

• www.digg.com

• www.stumbleupon.com

• www.reddit.com

• www.netscape.com