Views from Search Engine Strategies, New York

Last week I attended Search Engine Strategies in New York. I was taking part in the ClickZ track on Multichannel Metrics with fellow columnist Jason Burby and web analytics author Eric Peterson. The session covered areas such as building an overall metrics framework, integrating multiple data sources and building out your KPIs. Themes which come up regularly in mine and Jason’s columns here on ClickZ.

Having done my bit, I was able to take in the rest of the conference for a couple of days. It was difficult to decide which session to attend given the breadth of choice. Since I’m more into analysis than the technicalities of SEO, I headed over to sessions on the Stats and Research Track to see what the state of play is in the search market and what the latest thinking is on the way that people actually use search engines.

After listening to presentations from companies such as Comscore, Nielsen NetRatings and Hitwise, the dominance of Google in the search market was evident. Various statistics were thrown about in the session but they all pointed to the clear position Google has as market leader. Not only do more people use Google but they also use it more often, something we used to call the “double whammy” effect in consumer packaged goods marketing.

However, the Hitwise data also showed that there are some demographic differences between users of the various search engines:

  • Yahoo! Users tend to be slightly younger
  • MSN users tend to be slightly older
  • Google users tend to be slightly more affluent

These differences also can lead to different types of sites being searched for on each of the main engines. MSN sends relatively more of its traffic to Business and Finance sites than the other two, whereas Google sends more of its traffic to Education sites than the others. So, there are differences between the users of these different engines and where there are differences, there are opportunities.

The presentations also highlighted the complexity of user behaviour, particularly looking beyond the initial visit. A lot of search campaign response evaluation is based upon a direct response model, ie a click-through resulting in a conversion. A case study from Comscore on the US travel market showed that 80% of all transactions occur after the first clickthrough visit. In other words, only 20% of people convert on the initial search visit and they are likely to come back later to complete the transaction, predominantly using a direct entry approach like typing in the URL or using a bookmark. So, the argument is that in some markets like travel and other high-consideration products, analysis based purely on a direct response model is underestimating the true effect of search campaigns.

A great session I attended was on landing page optimisation. This deal with subjects such as A/B and multivariate testing. This is a huge growth area in the US at the moment and given some of the case study results; it’s easy to see why. Speakers from vendors and their clients were pointing to increases in conversions of 60% based upon the optimisation of a single landing page, such as the home page. Obviously these sorts of gains are not sustainable over the longer term but it does show that there is a lot of low hanging fruit to be picked from engaging in a systematic program of landing page optimisation.

One of the interesting things to emerge from the presentations was that in some cases the best landing page might be different depending where the searcher came from. The best type of copy, graphics or call to action could be different depending on whether it was a referral from Google or from MSN. For me, this tied in with the point about different search engines having different user profiles and this is obviously impacts on their behaviour when they reach a site. So, it’s important to differentiate between where the searchers are coming from and possibly treat them differently.

So, what were my key aways from the sessions I attended at the conference?

  • Search is maturing and Google is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay attention to the other engines.
  • The different engines have different profiles and this will result in different user behaviour on your site.
  • So, it’s important to treat the visitors from the different engines as different segments. Understand their behaviour and develop your campaigns appropriately.
  • Different landing pages for traffic from different search engines may be the way to go.
  • Landing page optimisation and testing is definitely the way to go.
  • Campaign analysis based on direct response may be underestimating the true value of your search marketing activity. A longer term perspective might be needed. Easy to say but harder to do. One way is to think about where someone came from the first time they visited your site before they converted rather than the last which is often the case.

Till next time…

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