In mid-2009, Forrester Research released a report entitled The Best and Worst of Paid Search in 2009. All this month, the theme we’re trying to promote is how to get your business found. One of the common parts of this is through paid search. In this report, Shar VanBoskirk examines the results of Forrester’s search marketing review to 300 keyword ads.
Here’s a summary of the report produced by Forrester:
Forrester applied an adjusted version of its Search Marketing Review methodology to 300 paid search ads from the retail, travel, consumer packaged goods (CPG), media and entertainment, financial services, and business services industries. Despite some bright spots — primarily in retail and travel — the majority of ads failed. Retail, travel, and CPG companies must improve their calls to action; media and entertainment companies should screen out irrelevant clickers; financial services firms should mention keywords searched in their ads and landing pages; and business services marketers should learn paid search basics. All marketers can improve their paid search return by applying search for shortand long-term goals and across a customer’s entire purchase process.
- Retail and travel fared the best in a scoring comparison across 300 search ads. However, while they did receive a higher score by Forrester’s methodology – which could be attributed to direct marketers having long search tenure – their Achilles’ heel is the call to action. While you have strong keywords, ad copy and relevant landing pages, Forrester notes that the motivation to getting customers to the next steps may be lacking.
- Media and entertainment ads aren’t as targeted as they should be. The recommendation from Forrester is that these companies should screen out irrelevant clickers. Look at specific audiences that you want to reach and make your ad copy and keywords focused on that.
- Financial services should improve on their ad and landing page relevance. Out of the 300 ads that were reviewed, “one-third failed to include the keyword searched in the ad copy or title”. What’s more, the landing pages after clicked by the user did not even include content that tied the keyword in with the page and the service offered.
- Business services: Master the basics. These are probably the worst “offenders” of search ads since Forrester claims that those surveyed in this industry don’t adhere to best practices. For example, they did a search on “database marketing” and the result was that business service ads failed most criteria – the ad copy and landing page didn’t match up with the keyword searched or had confusing ad copy.
As illustrated above, Forrester did a comparison of a variety of industries and scored them on a scale from -2 to +2. Using their own criteria, Forrester assessed the ones that passed with a higher score and those that failed with a negative one. Out of six industries reviewed, 4 of 5 on average had their keywords featured in the ad copy somewhere. However, none of the industries had a compelling call to action. Moreover, half of them utilized landing page best practices to aid in improving the user experience.
So what does this boil down to? Here are Forrester’s recommendations:
- Plan for short-term and long-term business goals. Immediate returns should not be prioritized over reaching long-term customer relationships. Forrester believes that putting emphasis on the instant gratification of paid search ads shows that companies need to think long-term.
- Use search across user’s purchase processes. A point in the Forrester report is that search ads need to focus on more than driving sales. Your users are on search engines to do research and buy…take advantage of every available touchpoint.
You can read the entire report from Forrester along with their methodology and data by clicking here.
Source: Forrester Research
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