B1BLOG

April 27th, 2010

Search is about Humans, not Technology

Even if search has matured incred­i­bly over the last few years, both from a tech­ni­cal point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coor­di­na­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all lev­els of the organisation.

Ear­lier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Hud­dle. This was an inti­mate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

( Photo cc by Emelie Ogez )
( Photo cc by Emelie Ogez )

April 12th, 2010

The double-edged sword of PPC click-through

With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.