Search Marketing for Business to Business

While it has just been rolled out in the UK and US to users logged into Google this week, and so empirical data is scarce, there are at least two early indications to how this will impact search marketing:

Paid search is getting increasingly important for brands that want to be found. With the latest update Google is further pushing the organic (non-paid for) results further down the page.

Impression counts will go up. Any predictive search result that is shown for more than three seconds will count as an impression. This will undoubtedly inflate impression volumes in particular for head terms that are frequently used in beginning of search queries. Exactly how this in turn will impact click-through-rates and cost-per-click is yet to be seen.

What do you think of Google instant — love it or hate it?

First out is SEM Konferansen in Oslo (14–16 September). Here we’ll run a couple of sessions with a main one-hour event dedicated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Following this we’ll continue our Nordic journey and venture across the border to Stockholm and the world-renowned SMX (28–29 September). With no-less than three speaking sessions penned in it’ll be a busy couple of days.  We’ll be digging into the Google quality score and how to integrate search and display advertising.

Back in London we’re running a retargeting session at the always-excellent A4UExpo (12–13 October). This is the premier UK event for affiliate and performance marketing, and a brilliant opportunity to understand more about this exciting marketing model.

If you’re planning to attend any of the above events, please write a line in the comments as we’re always happy to catch-up over coffee in-between sessions. Otherwise you’ll surely find us networking in the bar.

The policy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ireland and Canada.

Furthermore, as a consequence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuitton in the European Court of Justice and also French High Court that allowed competitive trademark keyword bidding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other markets such as the UK.

Both policy changes are planned to come into effect on 14 September.

Read the full press release.

The concept of deep-linking isn’t specific to search. It applies to all online marketing activity, such as display, email and social. The difference however, is that the search phrase is an additional data point that should be used to segment and effectively funnel the user towards desired action.

Consider the site structure below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find campaigns that were all pointing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely limited internal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that someone arriving from a specific search such as “product x specs” will not immediately see the product they are expecting, and possibly just hit the back button in frustration and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Secondly, even if they are determined enough, and decide to give the site a second chance, they still have to find their way through via internal navigation and search functionality. This leaves them vulnerable to getting lost, frustrated and ultimately giving up, and return to their search engine of choice for a better match to their original query.

Simplistically, there are two levels of segmentation when it comes to keywords and landing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Category, Product, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, compare, complain, trouble shoot

At the first level, advertisers will send category searches (e.g. “printers”) to a category page, and product specific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the product page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the second level, the advertiser will utilise the search modifiers to better understand what the consumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y specifications”) will send traffic to the corresponding sub page or section of the landing page.

While this might seem like common sense and straight forward to implement, there are a few things to consider. The second level of segmentation increases the complexity of the campaign by quickly multiplying the number of individual landing pages. These individual landing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, accessible and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, advertisers can expect happier site visitors and improved conversion rates.

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

While the event was rounded off by Cedric Chambaz, marketing manager at Microsoft and myself, by looking at the latest developments of search and what lies ahead, what generated the most debate was how to get the fundamentals right; what can you do today, to make a tangible difference to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web marketing manager at Autodesk shared his experience of managing international paid search campaigns, and highlighted recent corporate structural changes that had helped facilitate increased ownership and subsequent coordination of their search marketing efforts.

Avaya, represented by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a different innovative fashion. With the objective of generating sales through their channel partners, together we had created a paid search reseller program that was rolled-out with selected partners across Europe. The challenges faced where not so much about technology as it was about communication and education.

The event clearly highlighted that although search can many times be perceived as a highly technology focused marketing channel; the biggest factor to success is still the people driving it.

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.

The following chart outlines the main factors that determine the quality score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This quality score is then used in an algorithm that determines click-cost and position.

Due to this, it’s very possible that an advert appearing in top position is paying less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course maximising their revenues by the higher number of aggregate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more complex for advertisers, consider the following scenario: an advert with lower CTR is converting very strongly on the website, as it effectively pre-qualifies the traffic. In comparison a high CTR advert for the same campaign converts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to filter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the landing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to calculate the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depending on objective.

In practise, it’s difficult to make this type of direct comparison on a live campaign, due to the ever-changing nature of competition, quality score, positions and costs. However, from experience, typically for b2c the benefit of a higher quality score from optimising ad copies towards CTR (with resulting lowered CPC and higher position) outweighs the alternative, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.