WhyCommunicate?

The iconic Duracell bunny advertisements were originally launched in 1973, a long time before a rival bunny, by Energizer came on the scene. In the UK and Australia, nobody remembers the Energizer bunny now, but in the US it’s the other way around. When Duracell’s trademark ran out, Energizer jumped in and 115 advertisements later, Duracell’s bunny is buried in US advertising history.

A lesson in commercial complacency perhaps, but certainly proof that if you’re not watching your marketing closely, a competitor may jump your bandwagon or you may miss an opportunity to jump on theirs.

This is particularly true for retailers when it comes to bidding on keywords and phrases in the run up to Christmas. Competitor considerations aside, the most popular during the Christmas period are not going to be the same as those for the rest of the year so it pays, literally, to review your keyword strategy.

We saw uplift of over 100% in visitor traffic across all of our online retailing clients, with all the keyword conventions of the rest of the year thrown out of the tinsel framed window. With such a surge in traffic it’s easy to lose focus on conversion rates, which is essentially what the keyword strategy is ratcheting up.

Consider what a 1% increase in conversion rate equates to in revenue and there you have a specific motivation and ROI figure to work with. In the New Year, the game changes again, in fact a keyword strategy should really just roll on continuously, like the Duracell bunny, or the Energiser one if you’re in the US.

There are many things in life best outsourced to experts, take dry cleaning or building a car for example, while theoretically you could give them a go, realistically they’re areas best left to specialists for reasons of expertise, time, safety and cost.

The same applies in the world of pay-per-click. PPC is increasingly an area retailers want more control over and indeed John Lewis, Moneysupermarket and lastminute.com have all taken PPC in house recently in an effort to get closer to important online revenues. However there are compelling reasons why you should think twice before going down this route.

To start with there’s the issue of competency. When you outsource PPC you have the insurance of knowing that not only are there more resources at your disposal but you’re tapping into the combined intellectual capital of many people with experience across a wide range of PPC scenarios, adding up to a far greater sum than you could muster in one small marketing department.

Some companies get round this by hiring the agency person running their account but then only a small portion of that expertise come with them and from the minute they arrive, their access to a range of best practice experience is cut off.  As online retail never sleeps you need cover for holiday and sick days and a plan for when that person moves on in two years time, taking a large chunk of your intellectual property with them.

Chief Google economist Hal Varian stirred up debate on Google and econsultancy forums with his comments about conversion rates not being affected by ad position. While Google’s statistical model shows that generally there’s a less than 5% variation in conversion rates across the first 11 ads, reactions from industry watchers suggest that these figures really don’t tell us anything new or meaningful.

Our own customer analysis tells us that the impact varies depending on a large number of variables of which ad position is only one. We have seen that the sector (b2b,b2c), the industry sector (retail, finance, etc.,) the key phrase, the competition against key phrase, the ad copy, the quality score, not to mention the price and product all have a significant part to play in conversion rate.

Inevitably early stage searchers will click higher up the page but if the site itself is not very good or irrelevant to their search, they’ll move further down. PPC agencies have an ethical responsibility to look beyond the ad and advise clients on the site itself as one compliments the other. Too often the builders of the site are separate to the process and don’t see beyond the static finished site they’ve created.

The best websites should be fluid and reactive to small changes in the adverts which can make a huge different to conversion.

Some basic tips are:

1) Always run more than one advert to test one against the other so that improvements can continue.

2) Dynamic insertion is an easy way to improve click through, assuming your ad matches the product being typed.

3) Geo targeting doesn’t work very well as it’s based on where your customer’s IP is located.