Brand Names and Search Engines
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Online Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
I just finished reading an article on a study of brand names and search engines done by Hitwise and discussed on Clickz. The article discusses how 15% of all brand searches are diverted from the company’s site:
After searchers type in a brand-name query on a search engine, only 85 percent end up at that brand’s Web site, while the rest are diverted to competitor’s sites, comparison shopping engines and affiliates. That’s according to a new study released by Hitwise, which undertook the research after determining that 75 of the most popular 100 searches in February involved trademarked brand names.
While the analysis considers a trip to an affiliate site as a diversion from the company’s site, I disagree with this analysis. The purpose of the affiliate site and the company’s site is to make the sale. Many affiliates presell the customer and then send them on the brand site. This is the whole purpose of the affiliate marketer, and the best affiliate marketers can do this better than the company site itself.
What should be of great concern to the brand managers is how many of those searching for their brand get picked up by competitors. These customers can be considered lost, because it is unlikely they will arrive back at the brand site. The article doesn’t discuss this aspect of the issue. How much revenue is lost to the competition? I would estimate at least 10 percent of the 15 percent quoted above go to competitors. It is true the company has to pay affiliates for the work they do, but only once the sale is made. The margin is slightly tighter. But when customers are lost to the competition, the sale is lost entirely. Which is better, a sale at a tighter margin or no sale at all?
To prevent lost sales such as these I advocate open search policies by affiliate managers. As I have said many times, when the search page is filled with affiliates, there is no room left for the competition. This policy can be harmonized with in-house search marketing efforts by requiring a bid cap, and reserving the number one spot for the company’s ad. The other nine ads on the page should be filled with affiliates. After all, the affiliate and the company all want the same thing, to make sales. There is no reason these two positions are mutually exclusive.
Bid on Brand Name Keywords? Case Study Results
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Online Advertising, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
I just read a fascinating case study on brand name bidding across the big three search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN. Jonathon Mendez concludes:
Running the PPC ads alongside the natural results for brand keyword queries provides a huge lift in orders and revenue for our client. The paid search ads clearly have a tremendous influence on user behavior. The ads did not drive more traffic but they drove more traffic that purchased.
This study showed that having PPC ads alongside natural results, does not have a significant impact on the amount of traffic the site receives, but it has a dramatic impact on the amount of revenue each visitor generates. He shows in a chart that the RPV (Revenue Per Visitor) increases by as much as 47% when the PPC ads are present. I think this is because the ad copy is preselling the visitors before they enter the site. It is easy to write good ad copy for PPC, but it is not so easy to get the search engine to display snippets that increase conversions.
It is important to note that this study was on 30 different branded keywords. So if your company has been struggling with justifying the spend on the PPC ads when you are already number one in the natural results, you have to read this case study. It shows that having PPC ads for your branded terms is not only a good strategy; it increases conversions across the board.
How is this relevant to affiliate marketing? As I have been discussing on this blog, brand name bidding has been in the midst of hot debate for about 2 years now. Very few companies have run these kinds of tests to determine the efficacy of allowing affiliates to bid on branded terms. Jonathon Mendez’s study clearly shows that someone should be bidding on branded terms, either through affiliate marketers or through an in-house program.
One study I would like to see is one that does a cost-benefit analysis of in-house brand name bidding compared to open affiliate brand name bidding. I would predict the open affiliate brand name bidding would drive more conversions, because with so many affiliates competing with each other, only the best ads would make it to the top. It would have to take into account those affiliates bidding on branded terms, sending the traffic to their own site, preselling that traffic, and then sending that traffic on to the merchant site. This is the kind of traffic that many affiliate managers want, but they can’t get it without outsourcing the brand name bidding on their display URL as well.
It is extremely difficult to manage the policy that permits brand name bidding but prohibits the use of the merchant’s display URL.
Jonathon Medez will be presenting this data in more detail in his presentation Ad Testing Research and Findings at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in New York on April 12th 2007. Check it out if you are interested.
Give Affiliates Landing Pages on an Alternative Domain
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
Affiliates and affiliate managers have been distraught by the problems caused by the display URL policy Google implemented, what seems like ages ago by now, in January of 2005. Google stated:
With this new affiliate policy, we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).
The rest is history as they say. Many PPC affiliates lost their bread and butter virtually overnight. Ever since, affiliate managers have had to closely guard the use of their domain as a display URL, because if they didn’t their affiliates would outcompete them for the one PPC spot available for each search.
Some affiliate programs have just prohibited the use of the keywords that the in-house search engine marketing team uses. Under this model, the affiliates are allowed to use the remaining keywords and variations. But that has caused trouble with broad matching, and it requires using the prohibited words as negative keywords. Unfortunately, many affiliates are unaware of how to do this. So, affiliates get a bad name for bidding on keywords they are not supposed to be bidding on. Affiliate managers get frustrated and the search engine marketing team is livid.
Now if we fast forward to the most recent “slap” Google has given to affiliate marketers, we have to talk about landing page quality score. Now Google is not only interested in the CTR, ad copy, trademark use and display URL; they are also interested in the content of the landing page. Many believe, and I have to agree with them, this goes beyond just the landing page. Google Adwords now evaluates your entire site and gives it a quality score based on the relevancy of the content to the keywords you are trying to buy. The end result was that affiliates who were enterprising enough to develop landing pages so their display URL would be different from the merchant they are promoting, again lost a majority of their PPC traffic overnight. Google called affiliate landing pages “doorway pages” and expressed the opinion that they brought down their overall user experience.
The simplest solution I see to this problem is for affiliate programs to start buying a single domain to host landing pages specifically for use by affiliates for PPC marketing. The landing page would not be considered a “doorway page” by Google if it was owned & operated by the merchant and it did not have any affiliate links on it.
Now affiliates would have to compete for that one display URL but it would not interfere with any in-house search engine marketing by the merchant. This method would also help eliminate competitors from the results by preserving top spots on the search results pages for in-house and affiliate efforts.
Let me know what you think.
Trademark Bidding Rules – Open Letter to Affiliate Program Managers
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing | 2 Comments
I have been dealing with this issue for too many years not to put in my two cents on the issue. Over the past 18 months or so it has become increasingly popular among affiliate program managers to ban trademark bidding. This trend was accelerated when Google Adwords adopted the limited display URL policy. Google will only allow one ad per search to contain any given display URL. This means that merchants that have their own in-house PPC effort are operating in direct competition with their affiliates. As an affiliate who manages close to 20 PPC accounts just for affiliate marketing, I will offer my position on the issue. This is an open letter to any affiliate program managers who care to listen to an affiliate marketers point of view:
Pay-per-click marketing is most effective when the marketer is able to send traffic directly to the merchant’s site. This eliminates any confusion in the mind of the consumer when they arrive at an affiliate site, when they were really looking for the merchant site. Linking directly also limits the need for the customer to make the transition from the affiliate site into the merchant site. Many are lost in this process, even on well optimized affiliate pages with the highest click-through rate possible.
In regards to direct TM bidding on the search engines, I believe this is the best way to dominate the search page for your own trademarked terms. I have seen far too many merchants enforce a no-bid policy for their trademarks, only to find that as soon as they clear out all their affiliates from the search results page, their competition appears. Of course, you have less control over what the competition does, than you have over your affiliates. It is currently Google’s policy to allow trademark bidding as long as the trademark is not in the ad copy. They have had this policy in effect ever since they won the landmark Geico vs. Google lawsuit. So any competitor can buy ads on the results page of your trademark.
Many affiliate managers feel you shouldn’t have to pay affiliates for traffic generated on your own brand name, because you have worked hard to establish the brand awareness. While I have the utmost respect for the work involved in creating brand awareness, I do not subscribe to this way of thinking. Many affiliate managers think those customers are already theirs, but until they convert, perhaps they are not. There is a significant percentage of traffic that is not being captured by the merchant website, even on a search for a branded term. The goal of the merchant should be to capture as much of that branded traffic as possible, because all branded traffic is by nature highly qualified.
Affiliates are a great way to increase the coverage across the search page for a branded term. This is why affiliate marketing is such a huge industry today. Isn’t it better to make a sale through an affiliate than to lose a sale to the competition?
6 Reasons I think all merchants should outsource their PPC efforts to the affiliate community.
- You would have less risk in the PPC arena.
- You (through your affiliates) would dominate the search results page for your own trademarked terms.
- You would be preventing your competition from bidding on your trademarks, because the affiliates would compete for the top positions.
- You would only have to pay commissions on actual sales, not potential sales.
- You would not have to risk spending your whole advertising budget in a few hours because of inexperience.
- If you have chosen to hire a SEM company, then you would not have to pay enormous fees to a company that is doing something the affiliate community would be happy to do based on their own proven performance. Most SEM companies are not paid based on a percentage of sales. They are paid whether they increase your sales or not.
What I am currently seeing from affiliate managers are complicated rules that allow bidding on one variation of a trademark term but not another. Or “you can bid on trademarks if you do not use our display URL”. Or “you can bid on our terms but you cannot link directly to our site”.
All of these policies are clearly rooted in merchant efforts to meet the needs of their programs, but I have to say they are all preventing affiliates from doing the job they are so good at doing, MARKETING. To be honest, I prefer not to work for programs that have complicated terms, because I have to spend far too much valuable time and resources making sure we are in compliance.
I have one suggestion for those affiliate managers who are trying to help their affiliates deal with these issues. This is especially important since Google hit affiliate landing pages with a penalty causing affiliate bid prices to rise dramatically in the Fall of 2006. Read more about Google’s efforts to eliminate affiliates from the search results pages.
Buy up domains with your brand in them and offer landing pages to affiliates that are mirrors of the site itself, but are on different domains. This would allow affiliate managers to keep the root domain for in-house PPC efforts, as well as allow affiliates to reap the rewards of linking directly to the merchant site without competing directly with the merchant. I have not seen any affiliate managers do this yet, but I think it is something all affiliate managers should consider. Especially if they are concerned with capturing as many customers as they can for a search on their brand name.