Search spend vs clicks, a missed opportunity?

by tom on February 2, 2010

In Rand’s recent post about SEOmoz turning into a software as a service company, he shared the following graph to illustrate why SEO is a missed opportunity in the competitive landscape.

While I do think investment in SEO often has the highest ROI of any online marketing spend and many businesses of all sizes underspend and under-utilize search optimization, the graphs used in Rand’s post (and shown below) don’t tell the whole story.

spend vs clicks

First off, lets call the search channels what they actually are natural or paid search. Not every click on an unpaid listing in a SERP is a result of SEO efforts. (Also not every paid search click is necessarily pay-per-click. CPA is now making its way making its way into paid search results.)

A study in 2008 implied that around 10% of searches are navigational, 80% are informational and another 10% are transactional. You can find definitions of these keyword types from the leaked Google Quality Rater guidelines [PDF]. Lets look at these ‘keyword spaces’ across both the paid and natural search channels.

Navigational – 10% of search clicks
If a brand isn’t ranking for its own navigational searches, they are already beyond help. The vast majority of navigational searches for a brand/website will result to that brand/website without any optimizations. Navigational SEO will likely have low incremental yields unless the website is already royally screwed up to begin with. Brands should probably run paid search ads for these terms, but only because they are cheap clicks and basically forced to defensively buy these ads by the search engines. Optimization around these paid search ads will also not create success and mostly just cannibalize natural search.

Informational – 80% of search clicks
SEO is great for information searches. It’s really fucking great. Look at About.com, Mahalo.com, Demand Media and plenty of other content portals that have a business model driven solely from aggressive SEO on informational queries. Of course, Wikipedia is the dominant player, likely getting around 2% of ALL Google downstream traffic (2007 data). Informational searches are less competitive and have more words per search which create more variation in word use and order. There are a ton of these searches! There’s still plenty of space to play in informational search.

So what’s the problem with informational search? It’s great and easy to measure if you’re selling ad space, but if you are all about customer transactions, it’s more difficult to measure success. The problem with gauging the success is not in the search tools but with the internal client analytics and CRM. Can you attribute customer acquisition and lifetime value to a informational search that occurred days, weeks or months ago? Can informational searches claim they retained a customer that would have otherwise gone inactive?

Transactional – 10% of search clicks
The search engines themselves have provided simple and effective tools to judge success of transactional searches with paid search tracking pixels and Google Analytics. Because judging success is more straightforward with these keywords, paid search spend skyrockets to the limits of what is deemed effective ROI, and the majority of paid search spend is placed on these keywords. In less competitive areas, this is where SEO is a huge win. In competitve areas, this is the space where SEO is hard and brand strength(domain authority, ‘trustrank’) matters more than your clever linkbuilding campaign and perfect on-page optimizations.

Is SEO a missed opportunity? Yes, but so is all of the informational search space. Will this change? Honestly, I’m not too optimistic, but I don’t think it’s SEO tools, training or awareness that is missing. The fundamentals of SEO are increasingly just proper website usability/architecture, viral marketing, brand building and marketing analytics- not some secret skillset that only SEO experts have.

What is needed is stronger client analytics with a more rigorous definition of success beyond the immediate event or purchase. This will help justify any ‘informational search’ spend and also the trendy social media budget.

{ 0 comments }

Number of Site Search Results in Google Analytics

by tom on September 19, 2009

Wordpress site search sucks out of the box, but with a few improvements, it can end up rendering some fairly decent result sets.

The usual method most people use to track their Wordpress site search is the Wordpress Search Meter Plugin. This is an easy way to get some feedback on how your users are utilizing your site search, but don’t you know that Google Analytics can track site search for you?

As great as Search Meter is, Google Analytics is the ideal place to track your onsite search. Not only can you capture the search phrases used, but I will show you how to capture the number of results in the search result set. This will let you identify all the null search terms used on your site and also see the number of results for popular phrases, and which phrases may be returning too many results.

The first step to tracking site search in Google Analytics is to edit your website profile information and and select Do Track Site Search, and put in s as the Query Parameter.

configure site search

The Query Parameter input is the only thing necessary for Google Analytics to start tracking your Wordpress search results, but notice we also added a Category Parameter called numResults and set that parameter to be stripped out from the URL.

Next we are going to add a javascript variable near the top of the page in the global header template.

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageType =  "default";
</script>

Then we are going to edit the template code where the search results are displayed. Some themes have a search results template, some display search results from a main template, but this code block should work inserted into either.

<?php if (is_search()) {
$numResults = $wp_query->found_posts; ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
pageType = "search results";
var numResults = <?php echo $numResults ?>;
var searchString = '<?php the_search_query() ?>';
</script> <?php } ?>

The outputted javascript should be 3 variables, pageType, numResults and searchString (We don’t use searchString in this example, but I wanted to show you all how to make it visible in JS).

Finally, you need to edit your Google Analytics code usually placed in your footer template. Make sure you don’t paste this in verbatim, as you need to maintain your unique GA id.

We are going to add a switch statement, and send a different request if the page is a search results page.

<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-99999-1");
switch (pageType) {
case 'search results':
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.href.toLowerCase() + "&numResults=" + numResults);
break;
default:
pageTracker._trackPageview();
}
} catch(err) {}
</script>

This bit of javascript appends the numResults variable to the pageview in Google Analytics, which Google Analytics then interprets as a Search Category. It also forces the URL and search string to lowercase, which normalizes search phrases with different cases.

Once Google Analytics starts reporting on your search results, you can break down search terms by number of results or number of results by search terms.

site search categories

You can then click on the different number of results to see the search terms used. In a future post, I’ll show you how you can use this same GA switch statement for 404 page tracking.

{ 2 comments }

Tweaking the Sociable Wordpress Plugin

September 19, 2009

News is that Joost’s awesome wordpress plugin, Sociable, has been taken over by Blogplay.com.
I recently installed the plugin on one of my blogs with some of my own tweaks.
Replacing the images is easy enough, I decided to go with the Aquaticus icons. You can find a few lists of social bookmarking icons, here [...]

Read the full article →

Omniture Summit 2009

February 21, 2009

I felt lucky to have been able to attend the Omniture Summit this year, as travel and expenses are very tight with the current economic climate. Since I just took a job as a web analytics manager in November, and the company I work for just transitioned to SiteCatalyst, a case was made that attending [...]

Read the full article →

Local Search Listings

August 22, 2007

Google and Yahoo search pages now often include maps and local business information into their results. Search engines often act as yellow pages for people so verifying your local contact information should help customers find and contact you.
Many businesses are already in Google and Yahoo because they take information from Yellow Pages, other telecom [...]

Read the full article →

Sending a DMCA takedown notice

June 24, 2007

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is considered a very controversial piece of legislation. While I do not personally support some of the law, I have sent DMCA takedown notices when one of my other blogs had posts lifted verbatim and republished without my permission.
When someone steals content and publishes on it on a free [...]

Read the full article →

Direct links from social bookmarks

December 20, 2006

I know I don’t post enough, but I try to have unique posts. I was holding off on this to better take advantage of it myself, but since SEOmoz is posting about Pligg sites, I better post this now before my content is less than unique.
Everyone knows the use of the social bookmarking sites to [...]

Read the full article →

Deep Link Percentages

April 28, 2006

Deep links are links to internal pages on a site rather than the index page for a site. The index pages for websites generally acts as hubs and receive most of the inbound links from sites especially directories.
Smaller businesses often only have backlinks to their domain root, and have no deep links to internal pages. [...]

Read the full article →

Link Building with InFormEnter

April 11, 2006

When building links for various sites, I often find myself hand-typing and submitting the same contact information to many different directories and comment forms. When you are serious about getting links, this repetitive action gets tiresome.
Now you can get rid of your typing with the InFormEnter Firefox extension. The extension adds a [...]

Read the full article →

Do private domain registrations hurt search rankings?

January 6, 2006

Do private domains hurt your ability to rank in search engines? This is a question that I have not seen asked, but I think it deserves consideration. Search engines use many factors to determine whether to trust a website and the links to a website, and I believe whether or not a domain is registered [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries