Search Engine Benchmarketing

Chief marketers tell me they consider tracking the competition one of their most important tasks. All marketing is fundamentally competitive, and consumers can only engage with so many concepts, brands or products. In search engine marketing, the consumer’s attention is largely focused on three or four items at the top of a search results page. Getting into those high impact slots requires knocking someone else out… and doing it in a completely fluid environment where minute by minute adjustments and multiple factors keep the head-to-head action going 24×7.

From a senior marketer perspective, search engine benchmarketing presents some unique challenges and opportunities. Unlike other channels, search has no easy answers to the bottom line metric, “How much are my competitors spending?” You used to be able to see exactly what marketers were willing to spend per search click on specific keywords. But with recent changes to Yahoo’s bidding model, that bottom-up data source is also gone.

However, the action in search plays out every day on a public stage, and there are some great tools available to track competitive activity: what keywords drive traffic to a specific site? How much traffic is each keyword driving? What is a competitor’s reach and share of visibility and traffic from specific keywords?

The question may have occurred to you, why do I need to benchmark in search marketing? Since my own campaigns are so trackable and performance can be optimized in real time against hard results, why spend scarce time and energy watching the other players?

Isn’t ROI its own benchmark?
A common misperception among senior marketers is that competitive intelligence for search engine marketing isn’t necessary in an ROI-based campaign where their own bottom-line performance is the ideal benchmark.

First, it’s a simple matter of making sure you’re not missing an opportunity another marketer has discovered. It’s possible to identify virtually every major keyword your competitors are using to connect with consumers. And those competitors can — and probably are — looking at the same information about your campaigns. This type of data helps marketers achieve more within their existing ROI goals by driving tactical adjustments to paid search campaigns, or focusing effort on the right keywords for natural search optimization projects.

Second, while you might be experiencing great success based on your ROI goals, are you sure your ROI goal is the right one? Competitive intelligence can open your eyes to how competitors apply different ROI measurements to their campaigns. Many search campaigns are measured on a very strict definition of ROI, considering only the last click leading to conversion, and counting only online conversions occurring within a limited timeframe.

If a competitor applies more sophisticated ROI methodology to account for store visits, phone leads and other fruits of the search marketing effort, though, this competitor could be much more aggressive in bidding, budget levels and the types of keywords used to engage consumers.

And what about my brand campaign?
Without competitive intelligence data, marketers that use search for branding cannot evaluate missed opportunities or determine how successful they’ve been. If you want to be known as the place to buy luxury vacations, for example, how can you gauge your success in search if you don’t know how often you’re showing up on your core keywords?

Competitive intelligence helps marketers determine share of visibility or share of voice in these programs, helping them understand just how effectively they are reaching potential customers searching on a core keyword. Think of searchers as in-market consumers that explicitly express interest in a particular topic or product, and the goals of search branding campaigns become clear.

These campaigns focus on maximizing exposure/impressions and engagement points across a full spectrum of keywords any time those consumers are actively engaging.

Competitive data enables marketers to measure visibility levels against competitors in both natural and paid search. It clarifies how well your program performs according to rank and frequency and also provides comparison points to individual competitors or your industry’s entire competitive set. You can also measure results by determining your share of clicks or share of traffic for a particular keyword or set of keywords versus a single competitor, multiple competitors or the entire competitive set.

I’m sold. Where can I find this data?
While there is not a comparable single data source to TNS Media Intelligence in search, there are many sources out there where you can get this valuable data. Next time, we’ll cover some of the competitive intelligence tools DoubleClick Performics uses to benchmarket for our clients’ ROI and branding campaigns.

Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick Performics (www.performics.com) and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at [email protected].