Paid Search Rank Impact on Traffic & Conversion
The iPod. Ladybugs. Danny DeVito. Sometimes little is good. The ad: tech session “Paid Search Rank Impact on Traffic and Conversion” was certainly a testament to that fact, with a pared-down panel, minimalist audience attendance, and an uber-brief Q&A (as in two questions). No matter, ‘cause this proved to be a smart session with some great insights on the correlation between rank and conversion, the impact of cookies, and buyer latency.
Read on:
Nico Brooks, Director of Search Technology for Atlas DMT was up first with a series of slides containing sample keyword data from Google and Yahoo, the results of a study which took a look at the relationship between rank and conversion. The story told was that impressions and click through rates generally increase in tandem with rank, but Brooks cautioned that such results aren’t always the case. In order to truly understand the relationship between conversion rate and ranking, you need to look at each advertiser’s data. Variances can be big.
Chris Henger, SVP Marketing & Product Development at Performics (also a dead ringer for Comedy Central’s Dave Attell) came on next. He shared the results of a study which revealed that buyers conduct a number of searches prior to purchase, mostly on generic terms. But don’t throw out your brand name with the bath water. Branded keyword activity peaks just prior to purchase. Also interesting was the finding that over half of buyers made their last search two or more weeks prior to purchase. Overall recommendation: look at each term in your keyword portfolio and test, monitor, say a prayer, etc.
Last but not least was James Lamberti, VP of Research at comScore. His study focused on consumer electronics with Yahoo! Search, starting with the search event itself. This is that infamous 92% study many of you have heard about, which states that 92% of conversions are happening offline. Because of this, and because of the long latency associated with online conversions (30 days or more), Lamberti advised the audience to toss their cookies (into cyberspace, of course) and then track them and include the results in ROI calcuations.
The panel closed with a Q&A which was almost too brief to blog, suffice to say there were a few questions about study methodology and where to locate the studies online. FYI, they’re all at the presenters’ company sites - some paid, some not.
