MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News and Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing and PR
The biggest surprise in MarketingSherpa’s 2004 Search Marketing Survey results was that neither marketers nor their agencies voted any type of search campaign to be “very effective.”

A $3.78 billion ad tactic (our estimate SEO plus paid search costs) mushrooms out of nowhere in just a handful of years, and it’s not “very effective”?! Here’s the breakdown of what folks actively using each tactic thought of their results:

Very Good Somewhat Not Good BAD
Optimization 31% 50% 14% 5%
Paid Ads 34% 47% 12% 6%
Paid Inclusion 18% 51% 23% 8%

As you can see, “somewhat effective” won out every time. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been startled, because this search-is-moderately-effective trend has shown up on every survey we’ve conducted to marketers of all varieties (b-to-b, online ad specialists, Google experts, etc.) for the past two years.

Why? Well, our guess is a combination of factors, including:
– PPC click costs are rising
– SEM newbies are flooding the field with inept campaigns
– Search algorithm changes make consistent SEO results hard
– Increasing results page clutter
– Competition

Search marketing costs and budgeting data

Despite only getting somewhat effective results, the average marketer using search reported that they were spending 15% of their total budget (that’s online plus offline) on SEM for 2004.

Predictably the b-to-c brand marketers were spending the least at 6% of total budget, while the eretailers were spending the most at 24%. This latter figure alarmed us a bit, because when a quarter of your budget is targeted to just one media, any changes can really disrupt your sales. A handful of search and shopping engines have an extraordinary amount of power over thousands of ecommerce sites’ fates right now.

On the paid search cost per click front, the results were clear: anybody who refers to average CPCs of fewer than 50 cents is either living in a dream world, or not conducting campaigns as aggressively as the vast majority of their peers.

At an average of 30 cents per click, content site marketers were the only folks to go under the magic 50. This makes sense because publishers are notoriously tightfisted about marketing, and most rely on ad sales, so converting that search eyeball to significant revenues is harder than you think.

Business-to-business marketers were paying the most per click – averaging $1.69 for product marketing and $1.75 for service marketers. Makes sense, b-to-b prospect pools are much smaller than mass marketing, and the competition bids the price up quickly. Of any demographic, b-to-b marketers have the most to fear from click fraud.

SEO is more wonderful than we expected

Strange — although respondents using it didn’t overwhelmingly vote search engine optimization as a “very effective” tactic, they did say their site traffic from organic clicks increased an average of 73% in the six months after optimization.

A 73% increase and you guys don’t think SEO is very effective?

We thought, “Well maybe organic clicks convert at such a lousy rate the traffic isn’t worth it.” And indeed, we’ve heard anecdotal evidence to support that theory from marketers we’ve interviewed for past Case Studies.

Survey results revealed that much depends on what your target demographic is and what your conversion action is. So, b-to-b marketers seeking lead generation wound up with 7.6% conversions from paid search versus 6.7% conversions from organic clicks. On the other hand, b-to-c ecommerce sites with an average sale of $51-100 converted 4.8% of paid search clicks to buyers versus 6.5% of organic clicks.

Landing pages — depressing news on best practices

Somebody’s going to have to give our Publisher oxygen, because she is gasping with appalled disbelief.

In Case Study after Case Study for the past five years, we’ve brought you clear, irrefutable evidence that specialized landing pages *without* regular site navigation get the highest conversion rates. Marketers who send traffic to their regular home page get pitiful conversion rates. Folks who deeplink but leave standard navigation are usually somewhere in the middle.

So, we were thrilled when our May 2003 survey of 406 marketers actively using Google AdWords showed that 62.6% of respondents were using specialized landing pages. Plus, 75% of the folks using special pages got a significantly higher conversion rate than folks sending traffic to a regular site page.

However, our new July 2004 survey clearly shows the paid search trend is toward… stupider marketing. Here are the numbers for paid search campaigns:

Marketers using specialized landing pages – 42%
Marketers using deeplinking – 32%
Marketers sending to a home page – 26%

We guess the 2003 folks were early adopters, and now that masses have invaded paid search marketing the quality of campaign will go down. OK, that’s mean. But, these results were very depressing.

If you’re paying for a click, and then you send it to a page that doesn’t convert well, you’re leaving money on the table. No wonder folks are complaining that search is only “somewhat effective”!

We have started development on a new website for this Arizona Web Design Company, obu Web Technologies. We are integrating many new and exciting features to support our existing clients, and broaden our product and service offerings to new clients. Look for our new site to be launched mid Q3 2004.

My old College Rugby Club was in need of a new website that they could maintain themselves. Hence LandSharkRugby.com Fun little project I did over the weekend.

Texas based, Digital Video Greeting’s has signed with Arizona Web Design firm, obu Web Technologies for a new website. DVG supplies custom e-cards to corporate clients with video recordings of company staff and music recording artiists.

obu Web Tech is pleased to announce that Venture Capital Firm, TrueNorth Partners LLC and Local Service Provider, Canyon State Air Conditioning, have hired Arizona based obu Web Technologies for re-design of their respective websites.

obu Web Tech has finished the development of a site for our client NextTouch Enterprises. NextTouch is a Customer Relationship Management solution offering a closed loop system of Customer Intelligence Marketing. The site relies on a fast-paced flash animated navigation structure with XHTML compliant page code throughout.

Due to explosive growth and key partnerships, we have relocated our headquarters to the Scottsdale Airpark.
8255 E. Raintree Drive, Suite 200
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
602.614.2930

Wired News: Netherlands Nabs Nigeria Scammers

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Dutch police have arrested 52 people suspected of defrauding gullible Internet users in one of the largest busts of the infamous “Nigerian e-mail” scam.

Also known as an “advance fee” or “419″ scheme, the scammers sent spam e-mails asking for help in transferring a large sum of money out of a politically or economically troubled country, in exchange for a generous percentage.

Robert Meulenbroek, spokesman for the Amsterdam prosecutor’s office, said the ring broken this week had reaped millions of euros. Recent victims included people from the United States, Japan, England, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland.

A task force of 80 officers raided 23 apartments, seizing computers, fake passports and 50,000 euros ($62,000) in cash. One suspect was injured attempting to escape by leaping from a third-floor apartment, he said.

The detainees were not identified under Dutch privacy rules, but most were believed to be Nigerian, police said.

In a variation on one of the world’s oldest scams, the Nigerian e-mail con artists present themselves as well-connected people who need access to a Western bank account to transfer a large sum of money that cannot be spent in their own country.

They promise a cut of the money in exchange for a smaller upfront cost before the larger sum can be transferred — but it never is.

The scam has existed for years in various forms, but in the 1990s it moved online, where it is cheaper to organize and harder to trace.

Arrests have been made in several countries in recent years, including Australia, Canada and the United States.

The Amsterdam scammers referred their potential victims to websites of fictitious companies with names like Global Securities and Financial Company Limited, or Fortune Trust Finance & Securities.

Often, they listed a fake address, though most had a working mobile phone number.

The suspects worked from their homes and sent more than 1 million e-mails, at times clogging the servers of their Internet provider, Dutch-based cable company UPC. Police enlisted UPC’s help to trace them, Meulenbroek said.

Six people, three from Nigeria and three from Benin, were convicted in a similar case in Amsterdam in May, receiving sentences of up to 4.5 years. They had defrauded victims for several million dollars, including a Swiss professor who lost $482,000 after being promised 25 percent of a $36 million sum.

Nigeria has recently stepped up its efforts to eradicate the scam, which taints its image abroad. The Central Bank of Nigeria denies any connection to the scammers, and Nigerian agencies have been placing warning advertisements in international newspapers for years.

The scam is sometimes called a “419″ fraud due to the Nigerian criminal code outlawing it.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this month, Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, reissued a statement promising to crack down on the scammers.

PageRank is Dead (Jeremy Zawodny’s blog)

I’d like to talk a moment to mourn the passing of PageRank, the secret sauce that made Google the spicy search engine we once knew and loved.

Some might argue that blogs killed PageRank. But the fact is, the online world goes through pretty impressive changes every few years. And, believe it or not, PageRank is old. In Internet time, PageRank may have been well into middle age.

Its death hasn’t been announced yet, but the time is near. The signs have been around for quite a while.

You see, PageRank was a brilliant yet simple idea at the time: use the structure of the web itself to determine what is and is not popular. But that’s behind us. Google is no longer concerned solely with what’s popular. Like most companies, they also care a lot about what sells or what advertisers want. Many speculate that Google is responding to various pressures to keep blogs from tainting their results. Perhaps.

With all the recent discussion of Google removing (or not removing) blogs from their index, people have been barking up the wrong tree. Google doesn’t have to remove them. The simply need to identify them in a reliable way. Then they can be penalized (given a lower PageRank). And, believe it or not, that’s not terribly difficult to do if you have a good web map and a few blogs to use as starting points.

It has already happened. And the results are less than ideal. A Google search for “jeremy” now [sometimes] yields something far different than what it used to. Notice that Google now believes that my home page is more important than my blog. That is, for lack of a better term, retarded.

(It seems that Google has only partially deployed this. If you play around long enough, you can get the old answer from one of their search clusters. That’s how I got both of those screenshots. So far it seems to be a 50/50 chance, at least from the West Coast.)

The fact that I’m no longer the first result isn’t the issue. I never expected that to last.

Let’s be honest. My home page sucks. Nobody links to it anymore. Sure, there are a lot of old links, but let’s look at what Google can tell us. There are roughly 600 links to my home page while there are over 1,800 links to my blog. There are three times as many links to my blog, and I’d argue they’re more significant. They’re newer. They’re often more than mere pointers because there’s commentary about me or what I write.

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.

Google has a really hard problem to solve. It’s not unlike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to “understand” the web caused the web itself to change. Blogs are only a recent example of that. Oddly, unlike many of the previous problems with Google (see also: search engine optimization companies; link spammers; google bombing), blogs were not designed to outsmart Google. They just happen to use the web and hyperlinks the way we should have been using them all along. Now they’re being penalized for that, it seems.

It’ll be interesting to see how Inktomi and Microsoft handle this “problem” too.

Oh, I should note that this could all be a bug and I’m just using it as an excuse to ramble. But you all knew that, right? My readers are smart. All three of them. 🙂

obu Web Tech and AviMail Internet Solutions have signed a joint partnership agreement to develop advanced web solutions. obu Web Tech will oversee all Web Design and New Web Business Development in partnership with AviMail’s extensive online marketing business model.

About obu Web Technologies inc.: obu was formed by Joshua Strebel in 2003 as a progressive web design firm serving the greater Phoenix Metro Area. obu specializes in creating custom high-end websites for cliental wishing a robust and cutting-edge web presence. obu employs a small number of highly skilled professionals to execute the advanced design ideas of the company.

About AviMail: AviMail stands for Audio, Video, Interactive mail. This unique system produces, sends, tracks and manages email messages with custom creative, interactivity, sound, video and animation for increased exposure, greater campaign effectiveness and higher response rates. Founded in 2002, AviMail leverages the diverse talents of its professional staff to bring volumes of technical and marketing knowledge to the bear for thier clients.