Kikabink News

A guest post on the Hitwise blog by search engine optimizer / analyst Dustin Woodward, suggests that the long tail of search might be much longer than most of us expected.

Woodard evaluated a data set of search terms used in the last three months, and found that the top 1,000 search terms only accounted for about 10 percent of all search traffic.

Indeed, the Hitwise’s top 100 search terms account for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic, while the top 1,000 search terms only account for 10.6% of all search traffic. Even the top 10,000 search terms drive just 18.5 percent of all search traffic.

What does this mean for Internet marketers? Well, it does NOT mean you should try to optimize your site for all those long tail keywords. Together they may account for a lot of searches, but if anything, Woodard’s analysis confirms the fact that long tail terms are infrequently searched on i.e. they are likely to be ‘one-offs’.

There may still be opportunities to pick up traffic for such one-offs, but trying to target such keywords is unlikely to pay off – simply because such words are unlikely to be searched on next month.

So it still pays to optimize for the most popular, relevant keywords you can afford to target. And if you want to be creative, think into the future rather than the past. In other words, instead of targeting last month’s long tail keywords, think about what keywords you think will become popular, based on trends in your market or industry.

Source: Frederic Lardinois, “Hitwise: The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected”, ReadWriteWeb, November 7, 2008

‘The Vote Hour’ - a group started by Google - has released a video on YouTube featuring CEOs ranging from Google’s Eric Schmidt to Donald Trump - urging Americans to take an hour off from work on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 in order to vote at the United States’ presidential election.

The fact that the U.S. presidential election is scheduled during a week day is probably news to a lot of us Australians. Our elections are held on Saturdays, when most people (with the notable exception of the retail sector) don’t work.

Then again, next Tuesday is a public holiday where I live - Melbourne. Want to know why? Because it’s the Melbourne Cup - yep, we have a public holiday to celebrate gambling a horse race…

Here’s the video:

If you run banner ads, you may wonder what kind of click-through rate (CTR) you should be targeting. Well, according to MarketingSherpa… don’t worry too much about it!

The thinking is that since display or banner ads are primarily a branding tool, CTRs are a by-product rather than an objective.

Still, as MarketingSherpa point out, the higher your CTR, the more successful your ad is likely to be in terms of resonating with your target audience.

My take: accept a lower CTR (compared with paid search ads), but keep track of industry benchmarks. While the aim may not be to get clicks, the CTR is still an indication of the effectiveness of the ad.

So what are the industry standards? What is a reasonable CTR to aim for? A study by MarketingSherpa reveals different average CTRs for different banner sizes:

• 160 x 600: 0.14 percent
• 300 x 250: 0.37 percent
• 120 x 600: 0.18 percent
• 728 x 90: 0.27 percent
• 468 x 60: 0.10 percent
• Overall average: 0.21 percent

So now you have some benchmarks. But remember, a lot will also depend on your target market, where you run your ad, and the placement of your ad on a given website and webpage, among other things.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Banner Ad Size and Click Rate: Bigger a Bit Better, But It’s Clicks that Count”, MarketingSherpa, September 16, 2008

Great article in MarketingSherpa about how to identify and avoid click-fraud i.e. where you end up paying for someone to either erroneously or maliciously click on your pay-per-click ad.

Competitors, employees, customers and blatant fraudsters can all bring about click-fraud. It may be accidental or malicious, and it tends to be more common in highly competitive industries.

Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest offers some great advice in the MarketingSherpa article for how to identify and avoid click fraud. Among other things, Mr Myers offers these three tips for avoiding, or at least reducing the instance of, click-fraud:

1. Avoid ad networks, since click-fraud is more prevalent on ad networks rather than in the search engines.
2. Identify the IP addresses of your key competitors. This will allow you to see if you’re getting a lot of clicks from them. You can then ask them to ‘cease and desist’.
3. Identify your company’s IP address. Although it’s known as ‘fraud’ a lot of click-through fraud is really just ‘click-through ignorance’ - where employees click on your ads out of interest rather than spite. Deterring employees from clicking on your PPC ads may be a simple matter of explaining that you pay each time they click (and that you’ll dock their pay the next time they do it… only kidding!)

Check out the article (free account required) for more helpful advice about the causes of click-fraud and how to detect and avoid it.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Crack Down On Click Fraud: How To Identify, Monitor, Prevent It: Red Flags and Links”, MarketingSherpa

According to eMarketer, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) members – namely the main movie studios in the U.S. - spent $754 million on online advertising in 2007. By 2012 they are expected to spend a whopping $2.4 billion.

The online channel represented approximately 5 percent of all film advertising in 2007. eMarketer expects this percentage to rise to 13.2 percent by 2012.

A lot of online promotion for a given film involves creating profiles in the major social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, creating a YouTube channel, developing a dedicated website, and investing in a plethora of other promotional initiatives.

Source: eMarketer, “How Movies Are Moving Online”, eMarketer, September 10, 2008