3 Ways to Use Search Engine Data as Research for Incremental Revenue

Search Data Can Uncover Incremental Revenue Opportunities for Clients

As a leading global digital marketing agency, we work on reputable brands with sizeable search marketing campaigns and budgets. An area that is exciting for many of us data geeks is the confluence of analytics, usability and optimization. The vast amount of data that our search and digital media teams comb through is frightening if you don’t know how to organize, filter and engineer it to expose learnings.

For many clients, our search efforts have steered us to identify new consumer behavior patterns that were virtually unknown to our clients. Upon discovery and further testing, these new patterns turned into growth areas that drove incremental revenue – something all agencies take pride in and clients appreciate.

Where to investigate for potential business opportunities:

Search Query Data

Search data provides valuable input into how consumers speak to your products and services and can uncover a variety of opportunities to better your consumer experience. First your site architecture and content strategies should support search and digital media and vice versa. By using search query data to inform site content and taxonomy you ensure that consumers identify with the content and have an improved experience.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Razorfish used query data as input into site design and informed site content and taxonomy based on query data.

• Overall average conversion rate increased by 25%
• 46% decrease in CPL
• 63% of total leads are driven by new lead gen pages

Search-Focused Content

Check website search logs or referring search query traffic for consumer behaviors and interests and ensure those interests are supported with an optimized experience. If nothing else, this is a good opportunity to build out search-focused content and landing pages to support consumer interest, which will also offer new organic ranking opportunities.

Search queries can also expose consumer product interest that may not be supported or offered by your client. Sometimes the client can react and build out the product offering for a new product category and revenue opportunity.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Paid Search data revealed a new product line offering that wasn’t fully supported online. Pages and products were built out to support the interest and resulted in a new revenue line for the Client.

• Product expansions increased the average number of conversions on these product keywords by over 70%.

Digital vs. Traditional Trends

Review traditional media’s historical trends and categories that are deemed good or poor performance and challenge the results with comparing to digital media’s trends. You may find a negative correlation between the two exposing gaps and opportunities for online success.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Paid Search data revealed that offline marketing deemed “low performance markets” were actually high performers through Paid Search. The client is now shifting focus and service in those areas whereby online revenue steadily increased in new markets by over 4% each month.

Search marketing offers rich, insightful data if you set aside time to digest it. Investigate your analytics data to expose improvement areas in your site architecture, improve content expansion to match consumer interest, and potentially create new products for your client’s business.

Be sure to continue the conversation with Lindsay Blankenship on Twitter @lcblankenship.

Tag Management Systems (TMS) – Efficient, Simple, Powerful

I imagine over 90% of people reading this post has run into a tagging headache. The process to get tags created, approved, in the project pipeline, into production, and live on a client site can take weeks (sometimes months) to deploy. Oftentimes the tags incorrectly fire and need to be adjusted, which delays a campaign launch even further. It’s time to break down these walls and make tag management easier.

Whatever glitches people may have faced along the way, the consensus is that tag management has historically been a painful process for clients and agencies… until now. Technology is here to change the way we manage tags. Tag Management Systems (TMS) are becoming a hot commodity in the digital industry and soon everyone will be using them. They benefit all parties as they reduce the lengthy hours spent managing tags on the client’s side. Thus, agencies get their tags loaded faster, new campaigns launch faster, and access to richer data through tagging sophistication is expedited.

Basic Features a TMS should offer:

• Time savings (time is money)
• Reduction of page load time (or no change)
• More control over vendor tags
• Tag scheduling (launch or pause on desired date)
• Ability to fire vendor tags on flash events without modifying the flash source code
• Multi-platform capabilities (Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends)
• Permissions and roles for different user types
• Pre-deployment testing through QA process workflow

In general, with a TMS you should have a newfound freedom from the typical arduousness of the tagging process. Technology adds a layer of ease and control that should enhance the accuracy of your analytics and drive more sophisticated media placements, thereby improving performance.

Advanced functionality some TMS’s offer:

• Site visualization overlay tools – enables efficient crowdsourcing of tagging events and object; also has UX benefits
• Elimination of need to write Javascript (time savings)
• Page event tracking – provides deeper media tagging for richer analytics insights and targeting
• Leads to sophisticated and advanced media targeting and retargeting capabilities
• Conditional rules based tag firing
• Mobile phone call tracking and device retargeting

As digital marketers, we thrive on tags to track behaviors and inform our digital programs. Web Analytics is crucial to evolve and scale digital success. Flexibility and nimbleness in adding tracking codes to a site without disturbing the site’s functionality and speed allows our media programs the ability to move quickly and adapt to change.

Employing the right TMS solution can reclaim 95% of your hours back from tag management tasks to focus on more important tasks like analysis and growing your business. When Google Analytics Premium was announced in 2011, many companies were excited. Many of those companies, however, were paralyzed by the thought of re-tagging their websites, which deterred any forward-moving progress to test Google Analytics Premium, or transitioning to any new analytics platform, for that matter.

Tag Management Systems make that nightmare go away by doing the heavy lifting through a simplified tagging process. If you aren’t currently thinking about Tag Management in your office, you should be.

Where should you start?

• Satelllite

SEMPO 2012-2014 Board of Directors Announced

I am proud to announce I am 1 of the 13 professionals elected to sit on the SEMPO Global Board of Directors.  I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented group of individuals who make up the board, but also excited about the opportunity to continue evolving the organization into the future of digital marketing.

SEMPO Board of Directors Nominees

I am honored to be nominated and part of the 2012 SEMPO Board of Directors election period.  I am among a distinguished list of 38 well known industry professionals and leaders among fantastic companies.

Lindsay Blankenship – TAG Search Engine Marketer of the Year

I was honored last night among some fantastic finalists with the Technology Association of Georgia’s Search Engine Marketer of the Year award.  It’s an honor to know my peers in the industry think my accomplishments at Razorfish and outside of Razorfish are award-worthy.  Thank you!

Press Release