How Search is used

Back in August 2004, Marketing Sherpa put an out a guide on search marketing metrics. The information identified three key lessons, which we are going to cover in this article.

The first lesson they described was that search engines were not alike. That's actually intuitive. What they did a great job doing was describing some usership patterns. Google users tend to do searches daily and generally consist of highly educated men with an interest in technology. The typical users of Ask Jeeves were children although the study cited that older teens were making MyWay.com a hot property. Primary users of MSN were moms and MSN users tended to use it a couple of times per week to look up specific things. We think this could be in part how the MSN portal is laid out to begin with. Also, for search being such a hot topic, only 43% of an estimated 270 million visitors use search.

The second lesson they addressed dealt with search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search ads. We've addressed SEO in previous issues but for those who are new to paid search ads, this is where advertisers pay to have their messages come up in searches. The guide felt that search engine marketing was "completely out of whack" with $3.3 billion (yes, you read that number right) spent this year on paid search and $238.5 million on SEO to get better rankings in organic search (which means coming up higher in a search). The interesting thing to note is that organic search seems to perform slightly better than paid search. The guide finished up this lesson with the advice using optimization as your first line of attack - a sentiment we agree with.

The final lesson dealt with a trend we have been seeing at CALIS - multiple keywords are an overlooked marketing opportunity. Almost 50% of search users are using three or more keywords in a search yet we continue to see many people concentrating on single keywords. But consider this, conversions for single keywords are between .5-1.0% whereas four-plus keywords can convert from 6-15%. That can result in as much as 30 times the conversion using high-targeted four-word terms.

Once again, the research done to produce the Marketing Sherpa guide underscores how much search marketing continues to evolve. That's why we spend a lot of ink covering this subject. If you want to find out more, contact us at info@calis.com.