Search Engine Marketing

Over the years, I’ve made plenty of catalog purchases, but rarely simply because I was a catalog business editor. I only turned to catalogs when I needed something unusual or came across a killer sale. Otherwise, I bought my mainstream goods off the rack. Today, that’s changed. And the two vehicles that have impacted me the most have been the coming of age of e-mail and the remarkable ease of search engines. I find e-mail’s impact on me surprising, because less than five years ago, I’d delete any personal e-mail from just about any address I didn’t recognize. But now, I find myself looking

If attendance at affiliate marketing sessions at industry conferences is any indication, many catalogers and online merchants struggle with how to effectively manage and grow their affiliate programs. In a Q&A with Catalog Success associate editor Matthew Griffin, Kelli Beougher, vice president of distribution services at Linkshare, a New York-based affiliate network, offers some tactics that can enhance your affiliate program, setting it apart from the the competition. Catalog Success: Say a cataloger has an affiliate marketing program; the merchant manages its affiliates well and communicates on a regular basis. What are some next-level steps to improve on an existing affiliate program? Kelli Beougher: Beyond the

On the Web, data rules. The trick is to not allow it to rule you. To do that particularly when you’re trying to figure out just what customers, prospects and surfers do when they’re clicking around your site, the key is to measure the post-click value. So said John Marshall, chief executive officer of ClickTracks, a Web analytics software provider, during a session at last week’s DM Days New York conference. He offered several tips on Web analytics and tracking: * Determine the minimum amount of data you need for statistical relevance. He suggested that with fewer than 500 visitors, “you can’t get the type of

In a session during the DM Days New York Conference held last week, Amanda Watlington, chief executive officer of consulting firm Searching For Profit, offered up five tips on ways marketers can best position themselves in search engines: 1. “County fair principle: You must be present to win.” If your site isn’t visible to search engines, they can’t and won’t list it, she pointed out. “My client had a nice large site,” she said, “but navigation was invisible to search engines.” She advised the client to monitor how much time its site was active and live by checking logs and asking hosts when the site

Like any successful marketing initiative, a pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign requires careful planning and regular maintenance. But should you perform campaign maintenance in house or outsource it? Oneupweb, a natural and paid search marketing firm, outlines the following triggers to help catalogers know when it may be time to seek outside help for their PPC campaigns in its recent whitepaper,”Fresh Google and Yahoo! Paid Search Strategies for C-Level Execs.” 1. Your current search budget runs out before the month ends. There are a few areas to look at if you’re having this problem. You could be the victim of click fraud, or your

Traffic from Google to your Web site for a given keyword will triple the first month your site appears on the first search results page, according to a recent study by search marketing firm Oneupweb. To help get your site on Google’s first search results page, here are some tips shared by search industry experts at Search Engine Marketing Day held last month at eTail 2006 in Palm Desert, Calif. * Build a sitemap. Even if it’s not accessible by visitors to your online store, a sitemap always should be included on your Web site, said Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Madison, Wis.-based Web

Online searchers clicked on more keywords in fourth quarter 2005 than in the comparable period in 2004. Additionally, keyword campaigns in general got larger, and the average cost per keyword increased 114 percent during the last three months of 2005, according to the recently released DoubleClick Q4 2005 Search Trend Report. ¥ 58 percent: the average increase in the number of actively managed keywords among marketers in Q4 2005 vs. Q4 2004. To be classified as active, keywords must be clicked on, so this statistic demonstrates that online searchers are indeed clicking more than they did in Q4 2004, notes DoubleClick. ¥ 107 percent:

Paid inclusion, the least-recognized type of search engine marketing, is a powerful channel that may drive additional online sales for catalogers. But to efficiently drive the most sales, you’ll need to utilize all the tools in the paid-inclusion toolbox. Extensible markup language (XML) feeds can allow you to submit robust product information more easily and effectively. For those new to paid inclusion, this tactic differs from paid placement, or sponsored listings. Marketers can submit all of the URLs in their sites to a search engine on a cost-per-click or per-URL basis with guaranteed inclusion in natural search results, without the listing being marked as

Search engines drove 18.3 percent of all shopping and classifieds site visits in December 2005, according to a recent report by Internet research firm Hitwise. Google drove 11.1 percent of all shopping and classifieds site visits, an increase of 28 percent from the previous year. Yahoo Search and MSN Search drove 4.1 percent and 0.8 percent of retail traffic respectively. The leading retail sites receiving visits from Google: eBay Amazon Froogle, Google’s comparison shopping service BizRate, a Shopzilla-owned comparison shopping service These four sites accounted for 18.1 percent of Google’s downstream retail traffic. For more, visit http://www.hitwise.com.

As a cataloger actively engaged in search engine marketing (SEM), what can you do to ensure your program doesn’t get stagnant? Consider keyword expansion, suggests James Colborn, author of “Search Marketing Strategies: A Marketer’s Guide to Objective-Driven Success from Search Engines,” (Butterworth-Heinemann). Keyword expansion is the development and addition of new keywords to a portfolio for the general improvement of the campaign. Colborn notes the best technique for expansion is to tie new keywords to other variables that might influence SEM performance. He gives the following examples: 1. Examine existing keyword performance. An existing keyword base is a great place to start expanding, writes