Hitwise's senior research analyst explains how to boost searches that lead to your brand's site.
As the search engine marketing industry has grown, so has the volume of information on how to optimize search campaigns. However, little information exists on the role of brand and search. According to Hitwise research, internet users are increasingly searching by brand-- 75 of the top 100 search terms across all categories in February 2006 contained brand names, an increase of 17 percent versus February 2005.
In February 2006, Hitwise conducted an analysis of 30 leading online brands in the Travel, Retail, and Business & Finance categories and found that an average of 85 percent of brand name searches resulted in a visit to one of the brand owner's websites. The remaining 15 percent of visits went to competitors, affiliates and price comparison websites.
At the same time that advertisers are moving more of their offline ad budgets online, ecommerce is taking a larger percentage of retail sales, and consumers are using search engines to navigate the web in increasing numbers. This major behavioral shift in the nature of commerce, compounded with the prevalence of brand search, drives a need for a new branch of brand management-- search engine brand management.
It should be acknowledged that not all brand owners are deeply concerned with the competitive traffic on brand searches. In particular, many manufacturers should be pleased to see strong competition for their brands and products in the sponsored listings on search engines; they do not expect their own sites to receive the majority of visits resulting from brand related searches. However, most brand owners will benefit from some form of search engine brand management.
This month, Hitwise released a white paper that outlines methods for understanding where traffic from brand related searches goes, and how competitors and affiliates are capitalizing on brand search terms. The white paper also covers how to protect your brand within the search networks, and makes the case for bidding on your brand name. Vigilant online brand management will allow brand owners to optimize their campaigns, keyword lists, marketing promotions and affiliate relationships to gain a larger share of traffic.
Following are some examples from the report:
Monitoring brand traffic: While Expedia receives 90 percent of the traffic from searches on "expedia," affiliate site Dealcrawler.com receives 2.5 percent of that traffic. But that single term "expedia" accounts for 30-40 percent of search traffic to DealCrawler. Could this be happening to your brand?
Bidding on your brand: While some marketers may not feel it is necessary to bid on their own brand name, it allows their ad to appear among competitors' ads for optimal placement. It also allows them to control the text of the ad, and possibly include a differentiating offer, as in the case of a search for "oreck" vacuum cleaners on Google.
Online brand tracking: Search engine queries can be considered a form of unaided brand recall, and monitoring trends in the seasonality and breadth of search terms containing the brand name allows marketers to better understand how consumers perceive the brand as well as determine which products they are most interested in. For example, the second most popular search term containing the car brand name "Nissan" is "nissan skyline," a model that was never sold in the United States, which indicates a significant level of interest in a high-end sports car model aside from the sports cars already made by Nissan.
If you would like to learn more about this topic, you can request a copy of the report here.
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories. By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation. Hitwise collects internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.
LeeAnn Prescott is senior research analyst, Hitwise. Read full bio.