Online Shops Put Search To Work

MARCH 11, 2008
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006038&src=article5_newsltr

Pay-per-click is the tactic of choice.
Search marketing continues to work for US online retailers, and they plan to keep spending on it, according to an Internet Retailer-sponsored study conducted in February 2008 by Vovici.

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More than one-half of the online merchants surveyed said they spent at least 40% of their budgets on search engine marketing (SEM)—including 25% who said that more than three-quarters of their budgets were going to SEM.

Pay-per-click search marketing worked especially well for responding online retailers during the past year.

Nearly one-half of responding merchants said they had increased their pay-per-click conversion rates.

SEM analysts and digital advertising agencies with retailer accounts interviewed by Internet Retailer said that a successful pay-per-click campaign should generate conversion rates of 1.5% to 3%. Yet 64.1% of respondents said their conversion rate on a typical paid search campaign was higher than 5%.

Jeffrey Pruitt, executive vice president at iCrossing and a board member of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization said that conversion rates were rising because more retailers were relying less on expensive generic keywords.

Instead, Mr. Pruitt said that merchants were bidding more intently on SKU- and product-specific words and phrases.

More than four out of 10 respondents said they were using PPC more often as a search tactic in February than they had previously.

eMarketer predicts that US spending on search marketing tactics other than paid search ads will increase through 2011, but that more than one-half will continue to go to such ads.

The eMarketer US Online Advertising report will be published this month.

The Best Kind of Traffic for Web Sites

NYT Drilling Down Subscription required

By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: March 10, 2008
If you sell things on the Internet, should you tinker with your Web site so that it ranks high in search results? Or would you be wiser to spend money on the paid listings that appear beside those results?

A recent study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company, analyzed 18.7 million visits over two years to Web sites run by 27 of the company’s roughly 500 clients. The study found that paid listings had a slight edge over “organic,” or unpaid, search results: visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something, and they spent about 18 percent more on each order.
But neither of these is the most valuable kind of Web site visitor. That honor goes to the people who arrive at a site by typing its Web address directly into their browsers or clicking on a bookmark. Such visitors, who tend to be repeat customers, linger the longest, spend the most money, and are the most likely to “convert” to buyers, doing so on 3.3 percent of their visits. On average, their visits are worth $5.69 apiece.

The Best Kind of Traffic for Web Sites

NYT Drilling Down Subscription required

By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: March 10, 2008
If you sell things on the Internet, should you tinker with your Web site so that it ranks high in search results? Or would you be wiser to spend money on the paid listings that appear beside those results?

A recent study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company, analyzed 18.7 million visits over two years to Web sites run by 27 of the company’s roughly 500 clients. The study found that paid listings had a slight edge over “organic,” or unpaid, search results: visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something, and they spent about 18 percent more on each order.
But neither of these is the most valuable kind of Web site visitor. That honor goes to the people who arrive at a site by typing its Web address directly into their browsers or clicking on a bookmark. Such visitors, who tend to be repeat customers, linger the longest, spend the most money, and are the most likely to “convert” to buyers, doing so on 3.3 percent of their visits. On average, their visits are worth $5.69 apiece.