Despite total advertising spend shrinking in 2009, online marketing continued to experience growth with an estimated increase of almost 4% year on year for 2009 (WARC Advertising Forecast Q3). This increase is predicted to continue into 2010 with a forecasted growth of almost 7% (WARC Advertising Forecast Q3). This is being primarily fuelled by Search advertising which accounts for 62% of all online advertising spend. However, despite this massive growth, traditional metrics for search tracking still focus on click through rates and impressions and fail to provide any information on who is searching for your brand! Whilst we may know how many people clicked on a specific keyword we cannot tell whether they are young or old, male or female, rich or poor, or regionally biased.

Just think how much better search strategies would be if we knew whether different:

•Groups of keywords are appealing to different audiences

•Audiences are using Natural or Paid for Search to reach your website

•Keywords/ text are converting prospects better than others

To make this a reality ævolve have developed the Search Audience Monitoring (S.A.M) and web tracking tool.

What is Search Audience Monitoring (S.A.M)?

S.A.M uses a large (215K) pre-cookied online market research panel to track who searched for a specific brand, what keywords they used, what web pages they visited etc. This panel has already provided answers to questions regarding their age, gender, social grade, region, income and in-depth questions on specific categories (e.g. automotive, health, food and drink). Combining this survey information with the S.A.M cookied data enables clients to answer questions such as:

How do the profiles of customers differ from prospects ?

•Are there whole audiences which we are failing to convert? What strategy can be put in place to rectify this?

Are different groups of people using different terms to search for a brand and if so;

•Can the text be tailored for this audience?

•Can this inform which landing page specific groups of keywords click through to?

Which generic search terms are attracting the core audience and are therefore worth a great investment

Who is using natural search as opposed to paid search -

•Are these audiences different?

Are different types of audience coming direct rather than via search

•If so, who are they and how can make reaching our website easier for them?

 

Please click here for an example S.A.M Report

The output of S.A.M can be combined with other ævolve tools in order to get a bigger picture of how different groups of online customers are interacting with your brand and the journey that they take.

For further information about S.A.M please contact Jonny Protheroe:

jonny.protheroe@aemedia.com