Today’s infographic roundup looks at pet peeves around the office (are you annoying the hell out of your co-workers?), the impact of local reviews on businesses, how people interact with AdWords, how confident CEOs are, social media’s impact on loyalty, …
All too often, there are still companies who set their daily budget on their Adwords campaigns that is not sufficient in comparison to the available search volume. This will cause lost impression share. If your campaigns are performing according to the KPIs you have set, the budget should not be a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
This week was a lively one for Boston as we celebrated the future of marketing through the FutureM conference. Compete had the honor of hosting a TastyBytes event with the ARF about turning social media conversations into business advantage.
We wished we could have been at every event, but that’s why we had Bostinnovation around to fill us in! Check out a recap from Thursday’s event: #FutureM: The Future of Location Based Technology, GeoM2 Recap
Companies like Google and Facebook have been dipping their toes in the daily deals industry without a drastic amount of success so far. It’s Amazon’s turn now and in order to increase their chances, they are addressing the fact that the landscape may indeed by saturated by taking advantage of their very own customers. Lifehacker tells us how Amazon is integrating their daily deals into their very own product, the Kindle, to close out the competition: AmazonLocal Deals Coming Soon to Your Kindle with Special Offers Screensaver
I was talking with a colleague about how hacking in the begging of the Internet was experimental and less serious. Gizmodo must have been eavesdropping because they compiled this list of 10 Hackers Who Made History
SEO may seem like a term for a traditional online marketer, but as it turns out, social media marketing can have a part in it as well. Not sure how to optimize your search results via social media outlets? Read Search Engine Watch’s 5 Ways SEO Can Work with Social Media Managers
We’ll leave you with a little gem from Search Engine Watch: 5 Filters Everybody Should Use In Their Adwords Account
For more competitive intelligence and online marketing news, subscribe to the Pulse, Compete’s monthly newsletter. The Pulse includes the latest industry news, web analytics, market research, Compete PRO education and tips, and much more.
After traveling through Europe on vacation the past couple of weeks, nothing said I was home more than grabbing a slice of New York pizza!
Deciding to do a blog post on the topic, I wanted to find out who the “big cheeses” were in the pizza world and see if I could find some insight into their web strategies.
Using the Keyword Destination tool on Compete.com to get a list of sites referred to by a broad match for the generic keyword “pizza”, I quickly found that Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com were the hands-down winners. Approximately 16% of all “pizza” related search referrals went to Pizzahut.com and 5.8% went to Dominos.com.
Both Pizzahut and Dominos showed strong consumer brand recognition, as seen by looking at branded vs. non-branded search referral data collected by Compete:
With similar patterns in historical UV traffic, these two brands were ripe for comparison:
You would think that two strongly similar brands would show similar ad spend profiles, but I was surprised to see that visitors referred to Pizzahut.com via a search engine were 1.8X more likely to have reached the site through a paid search link as visitors to Dominos.com.
What’s the difference?
Using Compete.com again to analyze keyword search referrals to the two brands provided a bit more insight:
For the sake of brevity I am just including a few keywords, but the general trend was the same. Pizzahut seems to struggle to rank for organic traffic for long-tail phrases, even those containing their brand name. Paid search helps augment low SERP placement by artificially ranking Pizzahut ahead of the couponing sites vying for this sort of referral.
The Bottom Line:
While there are certainly more “slices to the pie” that this brief analysis can’t cover, the bottom line is that there is a constant struggle going on behind the scenes between large brands and third party sites looking to ride on their coattails through coupon offerings, referral links, and product reviews. If you find your manager questioning the value of SEO, consider that the average CPC for a “pizza” broad-match term was $0.63 (source: google adwords keyword estimator), and in Q2-2011 approximately 5 million search referrals were sent to both Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com. Strong SEO efforts can translate into significant savings through reduced ad spend on paid search!
This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.
Google makes a heck of a lot of money from online advertising. In fact, 97 percent of Google’s revenue, which totaled $33.3 billion in the past twelve months, comes from advertising.
WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.
And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research (embedded below).
WordStream compiled data from its own, vast keyword database and the Google Keyword Tool to determine the top 10,000 most expensive English-language keywords over a 90-day period.
Subsequently, the list was organized into categories by theme. The largest keyword categories were then determined by weighting the number of keywords within each category, as well as the estimated monthly search volume and average cost per click for each keyword.
For the record, Google AdWords is an auction-based marketplace where advertisers bid on keywords to compete for top ad placement, with a minimum bid of 5 cents per keyword (update: actually, there’s no longer a minimum bid for CPC campaigns).
The top twenty keyword categories that demanded the highest costs per click are:
1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood
Unsurprisingly, the list of most expensive keyword categories is clearly a result from people who, en masse, turn to the Web in search for help, whether it’s for financial, educational, professional services or medical aid. WordStream concludes that the keyword categories with the highest volumes and costs represent industries with very high lifetime customer value: in other words, companies that can afford to pay a lot to acquire a new customer because of the nature of their business.
But I would have personally never imagined that ‘insurance’ would be netting Google up to almost $55 per click. Think about that for a minute.
Negative keywords are a necessity in any well constructed high volume paid search campaign. In a perfect world, large advertisers would run all keywords on exact match to ensure that the keyword bids truly reflect the quality of each keyword’s expected conversion rate. Unfortunately, limiting…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
