Step Wise SEO

There are a number of key issues that must be taken into consideration when building a campaign around sales.

These relate to different aspects of campaign formulation and should be associated with a campaign it deemed necessary.

Affiliates
Changes in affiliate bidding, as of January 2005, on Google AdWordsTM (the most commonly used search engine for affiliate bidding) resulted in affiliates bidding frenetically to get the only listing available for a company under a particular keyword.

This is a departure from the current scenario, which allows more than one listing for a company to appear under one term.

The problem in a sales strategy, as with any, is that:

(1) If one listing is being shown, the term being placed might not be the `official site’ listing and

(2) If bidding is happening behind the scenes then should the ‘official site’ listing appear it may do so at a much higher cost than can be justified by the site’s conversion and ROI performance.

Contextual advertising
Content match has been a much-maligned mechanism for driving traffic to a website from some of the major (and minor) PFP engines.

As a vehicle for driving traffic it is exceptionally good; however, as soon as ROI metrics are placed against it, in many cases poor returns have been the result.

In a sales strategy, content match or content targeting is not recommended, but, with any type of vehicle, not completely disregarded. The following mechanism should be applied.

• Research - when researching keywords on some of the engines, content matching can be added to the analysis parameters to determine what additional success will be seen.

Some engines are more capable of providing these data so use judgment when selecting keywords.

• Measurement - for this measurement use traffic, CPC and conversion data. Both Overture and Google AdWordsTM have the capability of providing tracking parameters to measure search listings against content listings.

Ensure that these mechanisms are used to gauge the success of contextual advertising.

Using search engine marketing for ecommerce activity on a website is like a perfect marriage.

The combination of sales-related activity, i.e. recording the number of sales and value and plotting this against the overall cost of the click, provides the perfect grounds for measuring success and being able to optimize to the most granular level.

The following are the major highlights of a strategy designed to achieve sales or activity via an ecommerce site.

• Paid For Placement (PFP), PFI engines and organic search are the recommended types of search engine mechanisms to use for an ecommerce campaign.

• All types of search engines are recommended, as these will give the maximum coverage within the search engine network.

It is, however, recommended that the second-tier engines are tested to ensure that metrics are met.

• It is recommended that generic, specific and branded keywords are used for an ecommerce campaign; this is to ensure that each type of search query is covered throughout the research to buy cycle.

• Similarly generic, specific and branded creatives are also recommended to ensure all types of search and all types of keywords are complemented with appropriate creative.

• Control should be obtained by measuring success against the following (but not specific to any one): return on investment, return on advertising spend, cost per order and cost per acquisition.

• Management is deemed necessary in maintaining position in accordance with the control metrics of these phrases at the maximum possible within budget.

• Affiliate marketing must be controlled to ensure that any activity performed on branded terms (as well as generic terms) is done so at the lowest possible CPC.

• Contextual advertising is not an option.

• Buying brand names is recommended for this strategy, as this helps with the entire buying cycle and these terms can often have the best return on investment.

Keywords: affiliate, sales, sales strategy, Contextual advertising, eCommerce,