Search Marketing Sage

There have been multiple studies about the incremental lift in search traffic that Pay Per Click Advertising provides in recent years.  I’ve been quoting to clients the Google Study that said that search ads provide 89% incremental traffic.  The studies essentially say that when ads are shut off that the natural search results will only pick up for 11% of the lost traffic.

The study results, are almost in every case met with doubt and skepticism by the clients because the clients don’t trust that the information is valid because Google did the study. The issue is particularly doubted with regard to advertising on the companies name or brand names that they already rank number one for in natural search.

Our Test

We recently started a test for a retailer that had not previously utilized PPC advertising on its brand names before and monitored both the impact on natural search when those ads were turned on and the impact on PPC with the addition of the clicks on those specific brand keywords.

The results pretty much backed the premise of the Google study.  The study said:

Multi-Channel Attribution is a pretty big topic in our industry, and most of us aren’t as knowledgeable as we would like to be on the subject. Attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. The problem with attribution models historically has been that they segment attributes at the single channel level: paid search, social media, direct traffic, organic search, etc., and often lack the ability to simultaneously compare various models across a multi-channel format.

We’ve been interviewing quite a few potential search marketers at Search Mojo over the past few weeks, and it got me thinking about the traits that make the most effective search engine marketers successful. In this industry, it’s rare to find entry-level candidates with more than an anecdotal understanding of search engine optimization (and even if they’ve had experience, it might not be the right type of search engine marketing for us—all agencies are different), so instead, we typically look for an amalgam of ‘soft skills’ that we can build upon.

Since I’m a Social Media Specialist at Search Mojo and don’t have the same day job as our Account Managers (although our roles naturally overlap), I leaned on my team members to help craft this list of must-have traits for the effective search engine marketer.

**Disclaimer, potential interviewees: do not see this as a comprehensive or be-all-end-all list; we LOVE talking to anyone who is excited about online marketing!

So with that, the top skills, as determined by the themes most oft echoed by our Accounts teams, are as follows:

Google Analytics Social Reporting continues to grow and provide insights into how social media is tying into your company’s goals. Last summer, I wrote about the recently introduced Social Visitors Flow, Social Sources and Activity Stream, and Social Plugins Reports. On Tuesday, Google Analytics announced that they redesigned some of the social reports to make it easier to see the activity happening around your content. The two new reports that were introduced are: Trackbacks and Data Hub Activity. Both of which were already previously available.

These reports already existed, so what’s the big deal? Google developed these two new stand-alone reports to provide greater ease in digesting this data. The data is clearer and now, you can drill down through this data separately.

With my wedding just around the corner, we’ve almost come to the culmination of our planning. All throughout the course of our engagement (about 18 months from the proposal until now), I’ve utilized many online resources to help with the planning process. For those in the wedding industry, the ultimate goal is providing chairs, linens, chefs and venues to those just ready and willing to fork over mindless amounts of money for the event. While more and more brides-to-be are using search and social media to find the best vendors to set the stage for their big day, vendors need to make an effort to get their name out there among the sea of competitors. It’s hard to think of another industry that has one person so engaged for such a long period of time, ready to sign on the dotted line. So, for those in the wedding industry, make sure brides find you instead of your competitors.