Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, October 2006
Below, are the top 10 search terms by search volume. Data are provided by HitWise. Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending October 28, 2006.
The Top 3 in each category were as follows:
IT and Internet:
paypal
paypal.com
people search
Automotive Manufacturers:
ebay
kelly blue book
used cars
Movies:
imdb
netflix
movies
Internet Advertising:
free samples
free stuff
free
Food and Beverage Brands and Manufacturers:
pizza hut
mcdonalds
starbucks
Pharmaceutical and Medical Products:
lexapro
cymbalta
zoloft
Blogs and Personal Web Sites:
xanga
myspace
yahoo 360
Broadcast Media:
cnn
cnn.com
msnbc
Shopping Rewards andDirectories:
consumer reports
halloween costumes
coupons
Travel Destinations and Accommodations:
hotels
hotels.com
holiday inn
To find out what the top 10 were in each category for the month of October, along with their search volume, click below:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623913
Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 Web sites across 160 industry categories. It collects Internet usage information through a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels. Data are collected in accordance with local and international privacy legislation and are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Keyword Testing and Expansion Done Right, Part 2
By Kevin Lee
Finally, you've completed your keyword discovery. The next critical decision is determining whether to use a new campaign structure to roll out your new keywords or to feed the keywords into an existing campaign structure (using existing Ad Groups and creative in Google, for example).
Many of the new keywords you'll add will be phrases if it's a mature campaign being expanded. Thus, there may be a compelling reason to use an Ad Group that contains similar phrases or root words. My general philosophy in Google is if you really want to know if a new phrase has potential, put it in its own Ad Group with custom-written titles and descriptions.
To determine if a phrase or word deserves that level of attention, I look at the following factors:
Search impression volume. The minimum will vary by industry or client and has more to do with the rest of the campaign and the customer's potential importance than any arbitrary number. I may not recommend a custom Ad Group for a dating site when a phrase gets only 50 searches per month, for example. But for a site that sells music equipment, I may recommend a custom listing for the phrase "marshall ms2 practice amp," which probably gets about 100 searches per month across the major engines. A searcher seeing a custom-written ad for the item he seeks is very likely to respond. If the merchant/advertiser can fulfill that need, everyone's happy.
Customer's importance. If a business-to-business client sells "double beam spectrophotometers," I don't care if that search term gets well under 100 searches per month or not. The searcher needs to understand the advertiser has what she seeks. A custom-written ad accomplishes this objective more effectively than a generic one.
Resources. If you have internal or SEM agency resources available to implement best practices, take advantage of them. Alternately, if you're resource-constrained and must concentrate on how to get your campaign's core keywords as efficiently as possible, temporary shortcuts on keyword expansion make sense.
One factor cited by those advocating the use of existing Ad Groups in Google for keyword expansion is the click-history/Quality Score issue. Though it's true an existing Ad Group in an existing campaign structure may have a good Quality Score, if your new keywords differ from your existing keywords in regard to relevancy of creative, then a new Ad Group will generally perform better and more efficiently over time.
Another key factor in campaign structure in Google is themed grouping. Making sure an Ad Group is themed improves targeting (and therefore efficiency) in Google's contextual AdSense network (should you opt in to it).
MSN uses an Ad Group-style method of clustering ad creative with keywords. In MSN, the "Order" is similar to the Ad Group, as many keywords share the same ad. Of course, in Yahoo! there's currently a one-to-one relationship between keywords and their ad creative. The next generation of Yahoo!'s system may have a different structure.
Selecting Landing Pages
Regardless of whether you plan a sophisticated landing page test, you clearly have to start somewhere. Often, the winning landing pages for new keywords are the ones that currently win for you. So compare the new keywords to those in your current campaign and imagine the searcher's intent. If you have already-live keywords that target a similar search intent, a good place to start in respect to landing pages is with the current winners.
Where to Start a Bid
Once your keywords are uploaded into an existing or new campaign structure, you must decide where to start bidding. Clearly, each keyword must have a bid range that meets your overall visibility, ROI, and long-term profit objectives. The trick is to learn as efficiently as possible where that bid range is. I mention a bid range because many marketers find themselves altering bids on a frequent basis or pausing campaigns to take advantage of dayparting conversion effects (large changes in conversion rate).
Your objective should be to bid as high as possible (given a specific ROI objective) to answer the question, "Will this keyword work for me?" Bidding too low has several negative side effects, including:
A low number of clicks per day means you must wait a long time for sufficient data to accrue.
It's easier to convince the engines that use hybrid algorithms that your ads are relevant if you get a high CTR early on (this shouldn't happen, but it seems to). Conversion rates may be lower at the lower positions.
Look at your current campaigns and the CPCs you pay for similar keywords. Boost that CPC as much as you think you can based on potential increases in conversion rate. Regardless of your bid strategy, testing new keywords is an investment. It may require significant monetary investment before you find the winners and weed out the losers.
Data Scarcity: Clustering by Keyword Stem and Landing Page
Keyword expansions often occur in the tail of the search distribution curve, meaning the keywords and phrases aren't often searched. Given a CTR of 2-15 percent and a conversion rate of 3-5 percent (both aggressive estimates), it would take years to know if a keyword resulted in profitable sales. Data modeling can help. Cluster keywords by stem (root word) or landing page. The data you get by looking at the cluster isn't perfect, but sometimes it's the best you've got.
When Keywords Fail
You tried a keyword. The data look bad and the target ROI isn't likely to be met, even at lower bids/positions. Do you toss it? Perhaps, but before you discard that keyword, look carefully at the ad and the landing page. A mismatch or any other factor that provides a poor user experience can sabotage a perfectly good keyword.
Go forth and expand your keyword list. But know ahead of time the monetary and HR costs associated with testing new keywords.
************************************************************
April, 7 2006
Copyright © 2006 Did-It.com
Lee is co-founder and executive chairman of Did-it.com, LLC.
Finally, you've completed your keyword discovery. The next critical decision is determining whether to use a new campaign structure to roll out your new keywords or to feed the keywords into an existing campaign structure (using existing Ad Groups and creative in Google, for example).
Many of the new keywords you'll add will be phrases if it's a mature campaign being expanded. Thus, there may be a compelling reason to use an Ad Group that contains similar phrases or root words. My general philosophy in Google is if you really want to know if a new phrase has potential, put it in its own Ad Group with custom-written titles and descriptions.
To determine if a phrase or word deserves that level of attention, I look at the following factors:
Search impression volume. The minimum will vary by industry or client and has more to do with the rest of the campaign and the customer's potential importance than any arbitrary number. I may not recommend a custom Ad Group for a dating site when a phrase gets only 50 searches per month, for example. But for a site that sells music equipment, I may recommend a custom listing for the phrase "marshall ms2 practice amp," which probably gets about 100 searches per month across the major engines. A searcher seeing a custom-written ad for the item he seeks is very likely to respond. If the merchant/advertiser can fulfill that need, everyone's happy.
Customer's importance. If a business-to-business client sells "double beam spectrophotometers," I don't care if that search term gets well under 100 searches per month or not. The searcher needs to understand the advertiser has what she seeks. A custom-written ad accomplishes this objective more effectively than a generic one.
Resources. If you have internal or SEM agency resources available to implement best practices, take advantage of them. Alternately, if you're resource-constrained and must concentrate on how to get your campaign's core keywords as efficiently as possible, temporary shortcuts on keyword expansion make sense.
One factor cited by those advocating the use of existing Ad Groups in Google for keyword expansion is the click-history/Quality Score issue. Though it's true an existing Ad Group in an existing campaign structure may have a good Quality Score, if your new keywords differ from your existing keywords in regard to relevancy of creative, then a new Ad Group will generally perform better and more efficiently over time.
Another key factor in campaign structure in Google is themed grouping. Making sure an Ad Group is themed improves targeting (and therefore efficiency) in Google's contextual AdSense network (should you opt in to it).
MSN uses an Ad Group-style method of clustering ad creative with keywords. In MSN, the "Order" is similar to the Ad Group, as many keywords share the same ad. Of course, in Yahoo! there's currently a one-to-one relationship between keywords and their ad creative. The next generation of Yahoo!'s system may have a different structure.
Selecting Landing Pages
Regardless of whether you plan a sophisticated landing page test, you clearly have to start somewhere. Often, the winning landing pages for new keywords are the ones that currently win for you. So compare the new keywords to those in your current campaign and imagine the searcher's intent. If you have already-live keywords that target a similar search intent, a good place to start in respect to landing pages is with the current winners.
Where to Start a Bid
Once your keywords are uploaded into an existing or new campaign structure, you must decide where to start bidding. Clearly, each keyword must have a bid range that meets your overall visibility, ROI, and long-term profit objectives. The trick is to learn as efficiently as possible where that bid range is. I mention a bid range because many marketers find themselves altering bids on a frequent basis or pausing campaigns to take advantage of dayparting conversion effects (large changes in conversion rate).
Your objective should be to bid as high as possible (given a specific ROI objective) to answer the question, "Will this keyword work for me?" Bidding too low has several negative side effects, including:
A low number of clicks per day means you must wait a long time for sufficient data to accrue.
It's easier to convince the engines that use hybrid algorithms that your ads are relevant if you get a high CTR early on (this shouldn't happen, but it seems to). Conversion rates may be lower at the lower positions.
Look at your current campaigns and the CPCs you pay for similar keywords. Boost that CPC as much as you think you can based on potential increases in conversion rate. Regardless of your bid strategy, testing new keywords is an investment. It may require significant monetary investment before you find the winners and weed out the losers.
Data Scarcity: Clustering by Keyword Stem and Landing Page
Keyword expansions often occur in the tail of the search distribution curve, meaning the keywords and phrases aren't often searched. Given a CTR of 2-15 percent and a conversion rate of 3-5 percent (both aggressive estimates), it would take years to know if a keyword resulted in profitable sales. Data modeling can help. Cluster keywords by stem (root word) or landing page. The data you get by looking at the cluster isn't perfect, but sometimes it's the best you've got.
When Keywords Fail
You tried a keyword. The data look bad and the target ROI isn't likely to be met, even at lower bids/positions. Do you toss it? Perhaps, but before you discard that keyword, look carefully at the ad and the landing page. A mismatch or any other factor that provides a poor user experience can sabotage a perfectly good keyword.
Go forth and expand your keyword list. But know ahead of time the monetary and HR costs associated with testing new keywords.
************************************************************
April, 7 2006
Copyright © 2006 Did-It.com
Lee is co-founder and executive chairman of Did-it.com, LLC.
Keyword Testing & Expansion Done Right, Part 1
By Kevin Lee
Keyword expansion. You hear it at shows, your engine reps remind you about it, entire sessions at Search Engine Strategies are devoted to it, and your SEM agency also chimes in, especially if you have a seasonal business or your product/service mix is changing.
Everyone says you must expand your keyword list. If you don't, you're missing opportunities the competition is profitably exploiting. Those advocating for keyword expansion may be right in recommending an expansion, or you may have already completed so many expansions over the years that very few keywords rally are missing from your campaign.
Keyword expansion gets a lot of attention. If you find a new keyword and it can deliver significant incremental high-quality traffic to your site, your business will benefit for as long as it remains a profitable part of your overall campaign. There are right and wrong ways to add keywords to a campaign, however, because every keyword, new or old, must be tested to determine if it can become an important profit driver for your business. If it can, further testing helps determine how best to maximize the positive impact each keyword has on your business.
In this two-part series, I'll cover the right and wrong ways to discover, test, and implement new keywords. My objective is to help you find the winners fastest while determining how to eliminate the losers.
Keyword Discovery
Keyword discovery has been covered before here and in other columns; however, there are some unconventional ways to generate keywords that can be added to your standard methods of using engine-supplied keyword research tools.
Spider-based keyword extraction tools have been around for a while, for example, and can be used to generate keywords from your site. The less conventional use of these tools is to send the spider through your competitors' sites, one by one. Clearly the more accurate, usable list is the one your site generates. But depending on how closely your business matches that of your competitors, their lists may be useful. The quality of spider-generated lists is particularly high if the sites (yours or theirs) have good SEO. Remember to take trademark ownership into consideration when considering keyword use, and be sure to follow keyword use editorial guidelines. Note: There may be ethical, or even legal, ramifications in crawling another person's site.
We have access to tools built with data licensed from comScore that provide insight into keywords actually used to find and visit competitive sites, as well as a client site. We find this data superior in many ways to spider-generated keyword lists. Although the keyword lists are smaller, they focus our efforts on keywords that are much more likely to matter (and be searched). This is particularly true in respect to phrases. Spider-based keyword-generation tools generally extract individual keywords, which don't take into account how people search.
Any list you generate should be reevaluated in respect to stemming (plurals and other forms of the word), although many engines automatically expand searches to include stemmed versions of the keyword (in both organic/algorithmic results and paid listings). The closest match is generally considered most relevant, and the search engine only puts the exact match in boldface. Bolded keywords in titles and descriptions increase visibility and CTR, increasingly important in all engines.
Keyword Implementation
Regardless of where new keyword suggestions originated, those keywords must be rolled into your campaign in a structured, intelligent way. Otherwise, you do a ton of work without maximizing the opportunities inherent in the new keywords. After deciding a keyword or keyword phrase is worth testing, you must decide on campaign structure, a very different decision in each of the major engines. In Google, for example, you must decide whether to add the keyword to an existing campaign or AdGroup, or to start fresh. There are pros and cons to each choice.
In part two, we'll continue discussing implementing and testing new search campaign keywords, including how to structure a campaign around the new words, how to select landing pages, and how high to set initial bid prices. I'll also cover how to deal with the data scarcity that occurs when a keyword has low click and impression volume (even if it has a high CTR).
*******************************************************
April 7, 2006
© 2006 Did-it.com
Lee is co-founder and executive chairman of Did-it.com, LLC.
Keyword expansion. You hear it at shows, your engine reps remind you about it, entire sessions at Search Engine Strategies are devoted to it, and your SEM agency also chimes in, especially if you have a seasonal business or your product/service mix is changing.
Everyone says you must expand your keyword list. If you don't, you're missing opportunities the competition is profitably exploiting. Those advocating for keyword expansion may be right in recommending an expansion, or you may have already completed so many expansions over the years that very few keywords rally are missing from your campaign.
Keyword expansion gets a lot of attention. If you find a new keyword and it can deliver significant incremental high-quality traffic to your site, your business will benefit for as long as it remains a profitable part of your overall campaign. There are right and wrong ways to add keywords to a campaign, however, because every keyword, new or old, must be tested to determine if it can become an important profit driver for your business. If it can, further testing helps determine how best to maximize the positive impact each keyword has on your business.
In this two-part series, I'll cover the right and wrong ways to discover, test, and implement new keywords. My objective is to help you find the winners fastest while determining how to eliminate the losers.
Keyword Discovery
Keyword discovery has been covered before here and in other columns; however, there are some unconventional ways to generate keywords that can be added to your standard methods of using engine-supplied keyword research tools.
Spider-based keyword extraction tools have been around for a while, for example, and can be used to generate keywords from your site. The less conventional use of these tools is to send the spider through your competitors' sites, one by one. Clearly the more accurate, usable list is the one your site generates. But depending on how closely your business matches that of your competitors, their lists may be useful. The quality of spider-generated lists is particularly high if the sites (yours or theirs) have good SEO. Remember to take trademark ownership into consideration when considering keyword use, and be sure to follow keyword use editorial guidelines. Note: There may be ethical, or even legal, ramifications in crawling another person's site.
We have access to tools built with data licensed from comScore that provide insight into keywords actually used to find and visit competitive sites, as well as a client site. We find this data superior in many ways to spider-generated keyword lists. Although the keyword lists are smaller, they focus our efforts on keywords that are much more likely to matter (and be searched). This is particularly true in respect to phrases. Spider-based keyword-generation tools generally extract individual keywords, which don't take into account how people search.
Any list you generate should be reevaluated in respect to stemming (plurals and other forms of the word), although many engines automatically expand searches to include stemmed versions of the keyword (in both organic/algorithmic results and paid listings). The closest match is generally considered most relevant, and the search engine only puts the exact match in boldface. Bolded keywords in titles and descriptions increase visibility and CTR, increasingly important in all engines.
Keyword Implementation
Regardless of where new keyword suggestions originated, those keywords must be rolled into your campaign in a structured, intelligent way. Otherwise, you do a ton of work without maximizing the opportunities inherent in the new keywords. After deciding a keyword or keyword phrase is worth testing, you must decide on campaign structure, a very different decision in each of the major engines. In Google, for example, you must decide whether to add the keyword to an existing campaign or AdGroup, or to start fresh. There are pros and cons to each choice.
In part two, we'll continue discussing implementing and testing new search campaign keywords, including how to structure a campaign around the new words, how to select landing pages, and how high to set initial bid prices. I'll also cover how to deal with the data scarcity that occurs when a keyword has low click and impression volume (even if it has a high CTR).
*******************************************************
April 7, 2006
© 2006 Did-it.com
Lee is co-founder and executive chairman of Did-it.com, LLC.
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