Torpedo7 is now the top New Zealand Sport & Fitness site. Their market share has increased from <2% in August 2004 to over 16% in September 2006 of all NZ Sport and Fitness sites.

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The recent sale of Trade Me to Fairfax Holdings for NZ$700 million has triggered lots of interest in ecommerce and auction websites. What is even more interesting is that Trade Me has achieved this position by marketing itself through non-traditional methods - largely through word-of-mouth and search engines.

This case study examines the impact that First Rate’s Search Engine Optimisation campaign had on the traffic to Trade Me’s site back in 2002. It’s clear that search engines played a significant part in building the traffic and brand awareness to the site.

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There are many types of online measurement system available each with its own methodology and purpose. Confusion between these different types of systems is common and many system also overlap in there capabilities. The main groups of online measure systems are:

Site-centric
Traditional site stats package reporting centred on page views. Useful for reporting general stats like sessions, page views and referrers, also useful for accessing site usability and section/page popularity.
Examples include: Webtrends and LiveStats

Channel-centric
Marketing software often come with its own measurement system that is tailored to one specific media. For example an email marketing solution will report unsubscribe, bounce, open and forward rates in addition to clicks. While banner serving software will concentrate on impressions, hovers, clicks and creative performance.
Examples include: TouchPoint and Double Click

Media-centric
These tools concentrate on measuring the effectiveness of all media used in a multi-channel marketing campaign and will combine traffic from banners, emails, links, affiliates and search to provide a common metrics frame work to evaluate the effectiveness of each media, campaign and creative against each other.
Example: Media Tracker

Market-centric
These tools report on the relative performance of one site to another and are excellent for competitor analysis or identifying market leaders in a particular category.
Examples Include: Red Sheriff and Hitwise

Panel-centric
These systems use panel of surfers who are tracked to record their online activity. Similar to TV ratings these systems provide in-depth demographic analysis and supporting survey data.
Examples Include: Netratings

“Do you know which of your products or services are most popular online or how people buy them?”Access the search data of millions of searchers and understand what products and services are in high demand, which popular search phrases and topics have low levels of competition and how people use the Internet as part of their buying process.

What Is Search Phrase Research?

First Rate analyses over 350 million recent searches to identify all the relevant phrases used by your target audience. This research is used to understand how customers are using the web to search for your products and services. It will also identify the amount of online competition for any given phrase or topic.

Use Search Phrase Research To:

• Identify popular search phases
• Identify opportunity phrases
• Identify products to prioritise
• Identify content in demand
• Perform competitor analysis
• Find new business opportunities

How Search Phrase Research Works

1. Millions of users around the world use search engines. First Rate buys search data from a number of sources.

Features Of Search Phrase Research

The following are identified and analysed during the search phrase research process:

• Search phrase demand
• Search phrase competition
• Search phrase opportunities
• User behaviour
• Competitors search phrases
• Industry search phrases
• Searchers success rate
• Search phrase rankings
• Optimisation recommendations
• Advertising recommendations
• Content recommendations
• 350+ million searches analysed
• Local data sources
• International data sources
• Search phrase traffic reporting
• Search phrase conversion

The Search Phrase Research Process

Typical Outcomes

• Focus efforts on most popular products or services
• Refine site content to match users behaviour
• Target traffic with little competition
• Identify best tactics to reach target audience

There are a number of fundamental technologies that are used by measurement systems to collect visitor data. Here are a few of the most common:

Log files analysis
The original method for site stats reporting is by processing system log files that record all the requests made by visitors accessing the site via a browser. These log files can become large and need to be compressed and ultimately deleted to save server space. Also report generation is processor intensive and has to re rerun if any changes to the reports are required. This along with accuracy issues resulting from ISP and browser caching means that this approach is now less popular than it once was.

Page tagging
A much more popular technology now used by most modern site measurement systems is to place Javascript code on every page of the site this allows more accurate visitor data to be captured and the data is commonly processed in a relational database allowing for more sophisticate and timely reporting.

ISP analysis
Systems like Hitwise use data captured by ISPs to product market centric reports. These reports are based on a large sample size and can report on all sites as logs or page tagging is not required. The only short coming is that exact visitor numbers can only be roughly estimated and so market share (%) is often used to rank sites against each other.

IP - Unique visitors can be measured using a number of methodologies. Traditional Log analysis used IP addresses to identify unique users however this approach over reports people using dialup connections and under reports people using corporate gateways to access the internet.Cookie - The most common method of evaluating the number of unique visitors to a site is by giving users browsers a cookie that can be used to identify that person as unique. This system is more accurate than IP but there is still the issue of people whole block or delete cookies and also people who use more than one PC to access the internet (business and home) and people who share a login (family PC). However this is the industry standard for reporting unique visitors and Red Sheriffs particular approach to unique cookie tracking is recognized by OPG (Online Publishers Group)

Identified - The only true measure of unique people is to require a login to access the site or place and order. This can be supported by cookies to store login names between sections. This approach will always underreport but does provide the number of unique people who actively interact with you site.

CPM - Cost Per Thousand view. Even if banners are booked by the week you will need to understand the total number of impressions that are likely and the distribution of these impressions over the days of the week and over the hours of the day. Without this it is difficult to accurately predict the effectiveness of the campaign in real time.CTR - Click Through Rate. What % of people actually clicks on an ad. This is used to access the popularity of a particular creative  or placement.

CPC - Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you.

CR - Conversion Rate. What percentage of clicks/visitors took the desired action of the campaign (business outcome)

CPA - Cost Per Action. How much did each action (business outcome cost)

CPO - Cost Per Order. In e-commerce situations the cost per order is a vial measurement.

ROI - Return on Investment. For every dollar you spent how much profit you made. Often this is less than 1 in the case of new customer acquisition.

LTV - Life Time Value. For every dollar spent on customer acquisition and servicing how much profit did you make each period (week/month/year). At the break even point this is equal to 1 and should increase above this as repeat business is generated.

When we see an advertisement on TV that strikes our fancy, it’s often the next step is to look up the product online. The easiest way to find out more online is of course, with search.

70%* of this year’s Super Bowl advertisers purchased paid search keywords for their brand names which will help the advertiser’s site be found by someone searching for more information.

What’s sad however is that 93%* of the ads didn’t buy keywords related to their ad content (spokesperson, slogans etc) and only 28%* of the advertisers bought keywords around the Super Bowl. Surely another $1 per click on top of a US$2.7 million 30 second TVC wouldn’t deter these advertisers. Depending on your goals, it’s not usually the best keyword strategy to target words like these. But adding on a search campaign onto the TVC is going to help get the most out of their massive spend. It’d increase the number of conversions produced by the ads to provide more of a result than “branding”.

A couple of years ago Ford had a Super Bowl spot featuring Kermit the Frog to promote the Ford Escape Hybrid. Quite cunningly, GM purchased the “Kermit” keywords to promote their own hybrid line. This got them a lot of traffic who were actually searching because of the Ford ad.

I think/hope next year there’s more of an integrated approach to these ads. Maybe sometime in New Zealand we’ll see strategies like this taking place?

*Figures are provided by Reprise Media, to see full results of their study visit their Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard

Australia has recently elected a new Government and with it a new Prime Minister. Russell Brown from Public Address raises the impact online advertising had on Australian election campaigns in a recent post:

…There will be debate about exactly what lessons can be taken into New Zealand’s election campaign next year, but there is no doubt about one thing: the internet will be important. Kevin Rudd, famously, has 20,000 friends on Facebook, and his Kevin07 website was a masterpiece of online momentum-building. The campaign ads that ran on Australian news websites were numerous and increasingly biting.

As the Electoral Finance Bill caps third-party campaign spending in particular, internet advertising will look both smarter and more cost-effective. The full-page newspaper ad your lobby group buys is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapper — but the same money could buy you a pervasive campaign online. Just watch.

We nod furiously in agreement with Russell’s thoughts. Highly-targeted interactive advertising that chooses its audience, the time of day and where on the page it appears is a no-brainer when it comes to dollar-for-dollar value. Especially if you’re having to watch your advertising budget.

New Zealand’s fledging search industry will be put under the spotlight at the country’s first Search Engine Room conference at the Hyatt Regency Auckland, November 13.

It features a diverse and dynamic program mixing issues with search marketing and optimisation sessions while addressing new sectors like blogging and social search.

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