Paid Search Series Introduction:

Here in New England, the leaves are turning colors, the temperature is getting colder, the air is feels crisper and the amount of daylight is getting shorter. As every seasoned New Englander knows, these occurrences are early indicators to one thing (no, not time for a tropical vacation), the holiday season!

Each holiday season, brands are willing to spend millions of dollars on comprehensive multi-platform holiday advertising campaigns in order to deliver their message most effectively, persuading consumers to ultimately do one thing; buy their product!

Search has become a leading marketing channel and consumers are actively searching for product information, reviews, specifications, pricing and availability. According to Google 42% of consumers research online and then purchase online. Additionally, 51% of consumers research online and then purchase in store. This trend will continue throughout the 2011 holiday season.

Overview
Should advertisers run paid search ads on their own branded and trademarked search terms? The answer is yes. Even when a brand already has high organic rankings on those terms? The answer is still yes.

Catalyst online analyzed the impact of activating paid search campaigns on branded/trademarked search terms for brands that already had high organic rankings on those terms. The results were quite clear: the brands received a significant lift in clicks, and click share, when appearing in both organic and paid search results. The increase in clicks didn’t just result from the paid ads, clicks on organic ads also increased.

In a separate study, Google conducted similar tests which supported our findings. In fact, the results from the Google test were even more dramatic.

Quantitative results from Catalyst’s research and Google’s test are included in this POV.

Most people have a metric that they obsess over. Supermodels watch their weight and baseball pros watch their batting average. Saudi Arabia obsesses over the price of crude. For online marketers, it looks like one particular metric has overtaken all others. That metric is the bounce rate.

I have been in countless meetings, and on numerous calls, where the bounce rate was positioned as the be all and end all of success, the metric that supersedes all others.  In the religion of Web Analytics, everybody seems to worship at the altar of the Bounce Rate. Let’s play devil’s advocate, at least for the next five minutes.

Before diving in any deeper, let’s remind ourselves precisely how the bounce rate is calculated. I go on your site and arrive at a landing page, and instead of going to another page in your site, I leave.  There you go; I have just contributed to the bounce rate. According to most web marketers, your site has failed me. In a tiny way, my interaction will have contributed to a poorer performance. But did I have a horrible time on your site?