Search Data Can Uncover Incremental Revenue Opportunities for Clients

As a leading global digital marketing agency, we work on reputable brands with sizeable search marketing campaigns and budgets. An area that is exciting for many of us data geeks is the confluence of analytics, usability and optimization. The vast amount of data that our search and digital media teams comb through is frightening if you don’t know how to organize, filter and engineer it to expose learnings.

For many clients, our search efforts have steered us to identify new consumer behavior patterns that were virtually unknown to our clients. Upon discovery and further testing, these new patterns turned into growth areas that drove incremental revenue – something all agencies take pride in and clients appreciate.

Where to investigate for potential business opportunities:

Search Query Data

Search data provides valuable input into how consumers speak to your products and services and can uncover a variety of opportunities to better your consumer experience. First your site architecture and content strategies should support search and digital media and vice versa. By using search query data to inform site content and taxonomy you ensure that consumers identify with the content and have an improved experience.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Razorfish used query data as input into site design and informed site content and taxonomy based on query data.

• Overall average conversion rate increased by 25%
• 46% decrease in CPL
• 63% of total leads are driven by new lead gen pages

Search-Focused Content

Check website search logs or referring search query traffic for consumer behaviors and interests and ensure those interests are supported with an optimized experience. If nothing else, this is a good opportunity to build out search-focused content and landing pages to support consumer interest, which will also offer new organic ranking opportunities.

Search queries can also expose consumer product interest that may not be supported or offered by your client. Sometimes the client can react and build out the product offering for a new product category and revenue opportunity.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Paid Search data revealed a new product line offering that wasn’t fully supported online. Pages and products were built out to support the interest and resulted in a new revenue line for the Client.

• Product expansions increased the average number of conversions on these product keywords by over 70%.

 Digital vs. Traditional Trends

Review traditional media’s historical trends and categories that are deemed good or poor performance and challenge the results with comparing to digital media’s trends. You may find a negative correlation between the two exposing gaps and opportunities for online success.

Razorfish Client Example:

Results: Paid Search data revealed that offline marketing deemed “low performance markets” were actually high performers through Paid Search. The client is now shifting focus and service in those areas whereby online revenue steadily increased in new markets by over 4% each month.

Search marketing offers rich, insightful data if you set aside time to digest it. Investigate your analytics data to expose improvement areas in your site architecture, improve content expansion to match consumer interest, and potentially create new products for your client’s business.

Be sure to continue the conversation with Lindsay Blankenship on Twitter @lcblankenship.

FACEBOOK INSIGHTS OVERVIEW

As of December 15, 2011 current Facebook Insights will no longer be updated or supported (the “old” data will even be deleted in early 2012). Facebook Brand Page metrics will now come from the new engagement-based analytics, released at F8 this year. This Facebook Insights POV will review the major changes to the way brands can track Facebook efforts and provide implications of each.

• Engagement becomes an even more important variable in the somewhat mysterious Facebook newsfeed algorithms.
• Facebook has adjusted the way it tracks and reports on your page and content to better focus on this shift.
• Smart marketers will use this new data to optimize content publishing for maximum engagement and resulting buzz

THE (NEW) MAIN DASHBOARD

Total Likes: The number of unique users that Like the page. (Fans)

Friends of Fans: The number of unique users that are friends with the users that currently like the page. (Total potential reach)

People Talking About This: The number of unique users that have created a story (spread the word) about the page through Likes (of the page or content), comments, shares, wall posts, photo tags, etc. Stories are created through the various types of Facebook engagement that will become more diverse when more “actions” (read, ate, ran, etc.) are allowed to be incorporated into more apps.

Weekly Total Reach: The number of unique users who have seen content within a seven day date range. This number includes Ads and Sponsored stories.

Effects on Social Marketing: Growing new page Likes via organic means via current fans has always a brand goal. Friends of Fans and People Talking About This help quantify that goal; however the emphasis on sharing and interaction with posts provide new opportunities for brands to connect with users. When brands focus campaigns on Word of Mouth, they are now provided a calculable metric.

INDIVIDUAL POST METRICS

Say goodbye to Impressions and Feedback. Their successors are Reach and Virality, respectively. Joined by the metrics Engaged Users and Talking About This, brands can further analyze individual pieces of content, optimizing their content calendars for reach and gather insights on what makes content spreadable on Facebook. Also notable: These new post performance metrics only graph the first 28 days after a post’s publication. However, you can can all historical data via a data export.

Reach: The number of unique users that have seen a specific post. More on this in a moment.

Engaged Users: The number of users who have clicked on a specific post.*

Talking About This: The number of unique users that created a story about the page through Likes (of the page or content), comments, shares, wall posts, photo tags, etc. *

Virality: The percentage of users (from the Reach) that created a story about the post.

*Engaged Users includes users who click on a specific post. This does not necessarily mean the user commented, liked or interacted with the post.

Effects on Social Marketing: The previously missing metric, Engaged Users, bridges Reach and Talking About This. Feedback Score was based solely on Likes and Comments on pieces of content. However it overlooked what Engaged Users now addresses: the users who took the time to read and engage with the comment but did not interact further. In addition, Virality provides a metric to assess which posts resonated most with users. After all, how many users read specific blog posts but do not leave comments on the thread?

REACH

Facebook breaks Reach down into 3 categories: Organic, Paid and Viral. Pages can now decipher where most of their engagement comes from. Overall this alters how brands must view their content. At first glance, it appears the new algorithm adversely affects Impressions. But in exchange, it provides useable insights that help identify which content is innately spreadable.

Organic: The unique users that saw page content from their News Feed, the Ticker or visited the page. These users are being served content directly from the brand or opting to view the content from the page.

Paid: The unique users that viewed page content from a Facebook ad or Sponsored Story.

Viral: The unique users that viewed content from a story published by a friend.

REACH AND FREQUENCY

Facebook also expands on reach via the paired, “old school” metrics of Reach and Frequency, sortable by All Page Content,Your Posts and Shares by Others.

EXPECTED CHANGE:

Major changes in the Facebook algorithm redefine the standard for content visibility. There appears to be a significant drop from the change in Impressions to Reach. In initial sample testing over several posts, it appears the average difference is approximately – 77%.

Conversely, there is an increase in the Feedback/Virality Score. In the old Insights, posts fought for a rating of 0.10% or higher. Now these numbers are significantly higher. Again based on initial sampling over several posts, from the initial data it is an approximate increase of 312%

Effects on Social Marketing: Brands will now have a better understanding of “engageable” content. As the brand collects data over time, posts that have high readability versus high comment and likes will make themselves apparent. Again, this helps the brand optimize and craft their future content calendars and strategy.

LIKE SOURCES

This reflects the number of times your page was liked, broken down by where the like happened; a useful tool to track the effectiveness of your (possible) multiple Like Button locations and mobile apps/sites.

Remember, Facebook Likes can come from on and off Facebook.

DEEP INFO (OR TMI?)

Although not visible via Facebook’s primary Insights dashboard, a very, very in-depth look at brand page statistics is available for download (one would hope a newer query-based interface would make for easy cross-tabulating of variables). A sample of the ways marketers can slice data:

Daily, weekly or monthly breakdowns of each metric – further broken down by location or another variable – examples include:

• Daily breakdown of users who liked your page from their mobile
• Monthly (28 days worth) number of people who saw your page posts via a story from a friend
• Weekly number of impressions of stories published by a friend about your page by story type
• The number of people your page reached broken down by how many times people saw any content about your page

Insights go as far as a noting the daily top referring external domains which send traffic to your page – broken down by site – in total, over 1,000 columns of data are available.

CONCLUSION

Overall, the new Insights help brands focus on one thing: Post Engagement. It is counter balance to the aggregated News Feed. Only relevant, engaging content will get prime placement at the top of a user’s feed. Insights provides the necessary tools to optimize in order to secure that location.

“Advertising on the web is less about hitting someone with a message… it’s about engagement.” -Mark Zuckerberg

What are your thoughts on the changes to Facebook Insights? Continue the conversation in the comments, on Facebook or on Twitter @searchshots.

Sick of pulling 500 max keyword reports page by page from Google Analytics?

To avoid the manual labor of exporting and then consolidating all your CSV reports into one, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the report that contains the data you want to export.
2. Append “&limit=5000” (or however many rows you need) to the URL displayed in your browser’s URL window, and hit enter to reload the report.

Voilà!  Your 5,000 keyword report is ready with the press of a button.

Practical Steps Toward Integrated Direct-Response Marketing is a series of whitepapers offering clear instructions on how to improve ROI this year. Developed by Razorfish Search in collaboration with vertical experts from Google and marketers from Razorfish’s Media, Analytics, CRM and Ad Exchange departments, the series aims to cut through the hyperbole surrounding new advertising technology by telling executives exactly what they need to know. Razorfish believes a rare opportunity is at hand, and that sound guidance on measuring cross-channel activity, unifying views of the customer, testing contact strategies and optimizing creative are required for early success. Practical Steps… brings the broad experience of digital natives to bear on the core challenges of large marketing organizations.

Part 1 of the series is “Google’s Development Roadmap: More Info in More Places,” currently available at Razorfish.com. Forthcoming chapters will focus on specific verticals, starting with retail. All whitepapers in the series take an evolution-not-revolution approach, delivering recommendations on how to enhance offline direct-response efforts with online data. Razorfish believes success at integrated marketing is less a matter of tearing down traditional DR than of achieving the ability to learn new tactics that provide reproducible results.

We want to hear from you! Post comments or email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com