Efficient Frontier Insights

Efficient Frontier sponsors and will be featured at SMX Advanced Seattle 2010

We are excited to announce our participation at SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 8^th and June 9^th. SMX Advanced is the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced internet marketers and we are looking forward to sharing our industry expertise and best practices. Join us at the following sessions:

De-mystifying Search – Data  Wednesday, June 9^th 1:30pm-2:45.
Tom Shin, VP Sales
Some marketers cower and hide when faced with number crunching but there is a great deal of valuable knowledge and information that can be extracted from search marketing data. Efficient Frontier has analyzed more client data than any other search firm. In this presentation Tom Shin will bring to life some intriguing data snapshots on topics such as bidding on your brand, the path to purchase, Google sitelinks for brand traffic and display as a performance channel.

Targeting the Search Funnel – Tuesday, June 8^th 11:00am- 12:15pm.
Dr. Sid Shah, Director Business Analytics (includes other panel members)
Most people don’t do a search and immediately buy from a web site. They often research a product over days, weeks or even months, using different search terms from search session-to-session. The panel looks at the search funnel, as Google’s new tool recently renamed the sales funnel. How do you best target people at different points of the funnel using paid search and move them toward your ultimate goal of conversion.

The Mad Scientists of Paid Search – Wednesday, June 9^th, 10:30-11:45am.
Dr. Sid Shah, Director Business Analytics (includes other panel members)
These scientists have run various paid search experiments aimed at boosting performance of their campaigns. Come see and learn from their creations!

We look forward to seeing you at SMX Advanced in Seattle!

Margarita Golod
Senior Product Marketing Manager

Trends in Search Query Length

In my recent SearchEngineLand “Analyze This” column http://searchengineland.com/caution-reported-trends-in-search-query-length-may-be-misleading-41641 , I discuss the trends in search query length and how marketers should (or should not) approach adjusting their campaigns based on this. The most important factor is really analyzing the search term trends for your individual business. The results may be contrary to what you expect.

Dr. Sid Shah

Working your tail off

Every SEM manager knows that the bulk of her revenue comes from a few keywords ("the head") and a smaller but significant part of revenue comes from low volume keywords ("the long tail"). Dealing with the tail is tricky as tail keywords have little data. When done right, tail keywords can be very profitable and drive overall lift but when done wrong, one can burn through a lot of cash very quickly.

Our new whitepaper The Tale Behind the Tail deals with these issues and explains how tail terms can be managed to get you to maximize your returns. The reader will learn about the concept of the long tail, the problems you will face when managing it manually and finally about automated model based algorithmic solutions for the long tail.

We would love your feedback.

Dr. Siddharth Shah
Director, Business Analytics

Where were the head honchos at SMX Advanced London?

This week was a busy one for online marketers.  Google’s annual Zeitgeist attracted diverse speakers such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Howard Schultz and Sir Tim Berners-Lee who spoke to a crowd of Europe’s leading CEOs and CMOs.  Over in Munich performance marketers gathered for the a4u Affiliate Marketing Conference.  And on the doorstep of Efficient Frontier’s London office, SEM practitioners flocked from far and wide to SMX Advanced.

SMX London attracted an enormous number of industry folk from continental Europe and also the US to take part in the event.   No doubt this underlines that search conferences are just as valuable for networking as they are for learning.

Jonathan Beeston, Efficient Frontier’s search guru, spoke on two panels. His first session “PPC Logistics”, covered structuring accounts in a scalable fashion through a multitude of dimensions. Importantly to Jonathan’s presentation was the illustration of Efficient Frontier’s advanced campaign management features including;

• Dynamically creating keywords from product feeds
• Using feed columns as dynamic parameters for use in account structure creation, mapping
• Automatically creating ad variations tailored to the ad group them
• Integrating with Google Live Ads to dynamically update ads with NO impact on QS

His session, Making Sense of All the Numbers began with the principle that “Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all” and drew some controversial but substantiated conclusions;

• Don’t worry about click assists. They form a small part of all conversions.
• Do not use last event attribution models for sales funnels that are long and multi-point.
• Use multimetric regression models and multi-point attribution models to estimate the value of long tail keywords.

If you would like a copy of the Efficient Frontier presentations by Jonathan Beeston, please get in touch via twitter @efrontier. We now look ahead to SMX Advanced in Seattle where our own Dr. Siddharth Shah will present Targeting The Search Funnel on Day One and on the Mad Scientists of Paid Search Panel on Day Two.

Merinda Peppard, Global Marketing Manager

Efficient Frontier Wins TiE50 Award

I attended the TiEcon 2010 conference in Santa Clara, CA this past weekend where Efficient Frontier was honored as a winner of the TiE50 Award. Our co-founder, Anand Ranganathan, accepted the award which was given to the most enterprising companies worldwide in five sectors that are driving today’s economy: Internet, Software, Wireless, Cleantech, and BioSciences. We are honored that Efficient Frontier was chosen as a winner in the Internet Sector.

TiEcon is the world’s biggest conference for entrepreneurs, and the 2010  conference was packed with illuminating sessions on entrepreneurship, and state of the technology industry across different verticals. I felt privileged to meet and learn from business leaders such as Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO and VP of Eastman Kodak Company, Dr. Anji Reddy, founder of Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of LinkedIn, and executives of companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.  There were exciting discussions about several different topics such as the future of the social web and mobile applications, innovation in services, how to raise funding and build an entrepreneurial venture, exit strategies for startups,  the new rules of marketing in the digital age, and even the inner workings of the human mind!

All in all, we were excited to participate in such a prestigious event and look forward to next year.

Sameera Inapakutika
Business Analyst

April CPCs: Travel showing signs of recovery

 

April CPCs indicate that the market is showing signs of stablility and even some growth in the major sectors. CPCs are up 12% Month over Month (MoM) in finance which is inline with what we saw last year. Travel is up 4%. Last year this MoM change was -4%, so this improvement bodes well for the industry. In the automotive sector, we are seeing a 5% decline while in the retail sector we are seeing a 4% increase in CPCs.

On a Year over Year (YoY) basis, the automotive and retail sectors are showing robust CPC gains too. Finance remains flat.  On a very positive note, CPCs in Travel have increased 24% YoY. This is a promising sign and indicates that the travel sector might finally be turning around. The coming months will tell us if this is indeed a turning point.

Dr. Siddharth Shah
Director, Business Analytics

Google’s new broad match modifier launches today in the UK and Canada.

Murmurings of a new Google match type have been circulating the industry for a while but today we can reveal that Google has launched a new match type: Broad Match Modifier (BMM).  This new match type will allow part of the keyword to be matched to part of a search term.
 
Let’s look at this in practice for the keyword “Sony Phone”. Say you want part of that keyword to be matched to other similar search terms, i.e. misspellings, e.g. “Sonny”, but not matched to “mobile phone” (broad match), now with BMM simply apply “+” in front of that part of the keyword (+sony phone). This can be applied to any or all parts of the keyword, e.g. “phone” instead of “sony” would be: sony +phone
 
This is pretty new, and is only available in the UK and Canada, but we will be testing it on our clients who are eligible. Using the example of “+sony phone”, I would imagine this would have much cross over for keywords already in a well structured account, and so should be aimed at new keywords rather than existing ones, unless there are plans for a restructure.

Effectively, it is mimicking Yahoo’s Standard Match (matching the keyword to plurals and common misspellings).  It sounds as though this would be useful for initially uncovering new keywords based on a more selective criteria than the normal broad match, as the search terms should be much more filtered. Although, as with normal broad match, it would skew the performance, and therefore models, of the keyword as it would be matching to a much larger breadth of search terms – some of which will not be entirely relevant. We have discussed in previous blog posts, the perils of Broad Match.

Therefore, when using the new match type, search query reports should be regularly run to enable the highly abundant search terms to be added as Exact Match keywords, reducing the fluctuation in performance of the BMM keywords. Having said this, as we see an ever growing trend in Broad Match taking the Exact Match’s share of search terms, I would expect to see similar trends for Broad Match Modifier.
 
Ginal Patel
UK Account Manager