Optimize This

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Optimize This

• Shane L Wagg
• Director of Marketing
• Rugman.com
• August 9, 2006

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One Simple Take Away Today OPTIMIZE EVERYTHING

• Optimize Your Content
• Optimize Your Keywords
• Optimize Your Paid Content
• Optimize Your Budget
• Optimize Your Day Parts
• Optimize Your Promotions
• Optimize Your Seasonality
• Optimize For Things You Know
• Know When To Quit Optimizing

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Personal Bias/Full Disclosure

• Organic Guy
• Sustained results (over years)
• Amortized costs ( millions)
• More control

• Inhouse Focused
• More control
• Managed expectations
• Holistic focus

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Optimize Your Content large wool area rugs
In addition to Froogle and ebay listings, the 5
Star user rating comes from Shopzilla. 3
different data sources pulled into one channel
with optimize carried across all.
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Optimize Your Keywords
Not all keywords are created equally some cost
more than others (singular vs plural) some
convert better than others (exact versus broad)
and some are searched with more more frequency
than other close matches. While labor intensive,
invest the time in micromanaging your keywords.
The result increase clickthrough ( 65)
increased budget longevity and ultimately
increased sales.
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Optimize Your Paid Content
PPC is about more than clickthrough and
conversion. True story. In an attempt to shore
up month end, our company launched a clearance
sale while I was on vacation, a strategy that has
worked in years passed, but this year, not so
much.
The difference? Our positioning has moved away
from price and into a luxury sell. Our PPC
reflected a luxury statement while the web site
was heavy on a severely discounted sell which
cost us credibility and ultimately even the most
basic sales.
By changing the site message, without changing
the discount, we increased sales by over 600
overnight. And we got a new selling strategy.
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Optimize Your Budget
Your budget can serve as a key performance
indicator (KPI). A daily report (previous and
mid-day) can be a harbinger of variations in
traffic from PPC. (Particularly during summer
months when search traffic fluctuates. By
optimizing our budget, weve increased
conversions and sales overall. Weve also used
our budget allocation to define two PPC
strategies for us. In one instance, by
optimizing our budget on a keyword by keyword
basis, we identified valuable converting keywords
that were exhausting too early in the day. On
the other side of the equation, were better able
to accommodate for traffic fluctuations. That,
by the way, is not quite as easy as it may seem.
For us, we need to increase traffic exponentially
while reducing costs of that traffic by half.
But having optimized our budget for
better performance, we have a better indication
of what terms to plug in, when, and at what cost.
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Optimize Your Day Parts
As with costs, not all clicks are the same. A
recent Money Magazine/ICR poll revealed that 23
percent of men with a spouse or partner said they
have - or would consider - spending 1,000 or
more without telling their significant other,
compared to 13 percent of women. That may seem
trivial, but then again maybe not. With an
average order value north of 800, weve found
that clicks by night convert higher than clicks
by day. One possible reason, with a purchase
point that high, it needs household discussion.
So while an afternoon click may be research, a
night click has a higher propensity to be money
in the bank. How much more? A 63 revenue
increase warranting a budget that could be
metered out across the whole day. By the way,
according to Shop.org and Cyber Dialogue, nearly
half of Web users (46 of women and 47 of men)
say they've become late-night shoppers, using
the Internet as "the mall that never closes."
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Optimize Your Promotions
As marketers, we schedule promotions by creating
our campaigns, posting them and moving on to the
next one. Were exploring treating our
promotions as content and building out sections
for them. Mothers Day, Fathers Day,
Valentines. Christmas may only come once a year,
but people in search of Christmas show up all
year long. Building out lasting, static content
for promotions seasons is a long tail
strategy that can benefit you long before or
after the season has passed. Instead of building
out a list of value priced gift ideas build out
a content section that gives that product listing
better context.
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Optimize Your Seasonality
By optimizing your keywords and your budget,
youre better prepared to optimize for
seasonality. As I mentioned earlier, a daily
report informs me of site traffic patterns. That
extends into traffic seasonality. Particularly
for holiday seasons and vacation seasons. We can
accurately forecast which keywords segments to
implement against which cost to shore up against
seasonal traffic fluctuations. This has proved
invaluable particularly during the summer
months. Weve also used this information to
optimize against our datafeeds, particularly
those that have a cost per product listing fee
which we can adjust up or down, listing more or
fewer against seasonal traffic patterns.
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Optimize For Things You Know
Things change fast in this industry and because
were at the mercy of things we cant see, its
hard to know when and how to react and
respond. Staying on top of everything, every day
can be exhausting. The fundamentals, however, do
not change. Business models are predicated on on
very basic tenets that necessarily cannot change
to dramatically. Take the time to understand how
each search channel can benefit you and use
that information to the best of your
capability. One of the topics I keep hearing
this week is how this engine indexes easier than
that engine. Thats good news. If that engine
as 8, 10, 12 or 25 of searches, 8, 10, 12 or 25
of your efforts should see a Return that much
faster. And test constantly. If you have the
time, the patience and the curiosity, set up a
test site so you can test without
compromising all of your work.
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Know When To Quit Optimizing
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In Summary
Optimize everything. The tools now exist to
optimize keywords, contents, budgets, day parts
and site traffic. Understand them and exploit
them to best advantage. Dont forsake organic
for paid and vice versa. Both are valuable parts
of your SEM strategy and in an environment of
quick change we cant fully know how one
affects the other. Dont play favorites with
search engines and channels, each serves a
different audience segment and the one that
brings the most traffic may not be the one that
converts the best. Know when to stop. If youve
done all you can possibly do, its not time to
admit defeat, its time to explore a new strategy.
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Thanx.
shanew_at_rugman.com