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Is Your SEM Strategy What You Want or What You Need?
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About the Author
Kevin Gold (78 Posts)
Kevin Gold is Director of Internet Marketing at iNET Interactive, a social media company operating prominent online communities for technology professionals and technology enthusiasts. Kevin is a frequent contributing author to multiple publications including Search Marketing Standard, Practical eCommerce, DIRECT, Entrepreneur.com, ConversionChronicles.com, About.com, and On Target (Yahoo! Search Marketing newsletter).
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I must say that this potential hire probably did not understand the end objective of SEM. But in my experience most companies have better metrics in place.
Rishi
Its so easy to spend money on CPC and “get” results. The next question I would have asked was “what has been done about the organic search results” – I find so many times that these have not been properly looked after. I hear that – Organics take to much time, its such an inexact science… far easier to just spend the money on clicks and see the impressions and clicks.
Yet in my experience, the long term returns from organics done alongside the quick fix of cpc is a far better mix.
Included of course the tracking as you highlight.
I agree Michael. This might be one reason why retailers find only 2-4% of visitors to their sites convert! organic search has much better return rates.
Rishi
I agree with the combination of organic and paid. Organic delivers far higher visitor volumes (I assume) due to its higher perceived level of searcher relevance. However, a WebSideStory study based on eight months of data from B2C e-commerce sites stated, “paid search terms on engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN had a median conversion rate of 3.40%, compared to 3.13% for keyword terms found by organic search” (source: Conversion rate off paid vs. organic search about equal, says WebSideStory; Internet Retailer, September 26, 2006.)
From my own experience with B2C e-commerce sites, a well-managed paid search campaign typically converts far higher than organic although organic delivers far higher visitor volumes. Obviously the higher volumes range across higher and lower levels of relevancy and therefore impact the average conversion rate for the channel.
Nevertheless, Michael makes an excellent point. Personally, I think businesses must effectively work and measure both sides: organic and paid search and hold each accountable for their results.
Thanks for the comments!
Hi,
I agree that Paid search should have a higher conversion rate, because the ad copy written is more tactical than an organic search result.
With regards to measuring performance, i experience frustration that the in-house development we are using is not giving me the data I need to analyse and mgt doesn’t wish to use Google tracking.
Anyone has experience to share regarding developing your own 3rd party tracking system?
Yes agreed also that paid search should have greater converstion
ratio than organic search if the ad copy is optimized enough…
But considering the free nature of organic search results, the lower
converstion saves lots of cost and in overall more revenue than
paid search.