1-Have an overall web marketing plan and a person “driving” who understands the components and sequence of how things work together. We wrote about this in our May 14 blog and won’t repeat it here.

2-For easier understanding, break the big pieces down into smaller parts or steps. We will take six topics as examples of how to reduce web marketing topics into smaller pieces. For simplicity and brevity, we’ll only divide each topic into only two parts, rather than all the possibilities for further divisions. In internet marketing, some topics have more than one name. One of the main topics, pay-per-click advertising, has more than ten ways to describe it.

What Do You Need From the the Internet, leads or sales?

• Leads: Online inquiries or phone calls for a transaction that will happen later. Examples are complex sales for business services or products, professional services delivered in an office, services for your home or business.
• Ecommerce: The sales transaction for a product or service that takes place online and is usually paid by a credit card, PayPal, etc.

Your Service Area or Scope

• National: You want business from all over the country, and searchers may not use city names (or other “geodescriptors”) while searching for your product or service.
• Local: Your customers are likely to be from nearby because they come to you or you go to them. Even so, some of your customers will not include the name of your city or geographical area in their search.

Types of Web Traffic Available

• Natural (Organic) Traffic: Traffic your website gets without paying the search engines incrementally for it. Examples: Being found by search engines, direct links, and Google Maps. You can pay, however, to have an expert take action to or for your website that causes you to be found through natural/organic processes.
• Paid Traffic: Online advertising such as that from Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN. Some other names for this are PPC, Pay per Click, Paid Search, etc.

Search Results Page

• Natural/Organic Results: The part of the page in the left /center.
• Ads or Sponsored Links: Found above, to the right of (in a column), and in some engines, below natural/organic search results.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

• On-Page: Action taken to or on your website to help it gets found through natural search. Examples: adding or changing the content such as meta-tags or page names, keyword rich text, or adding a site map.
• Off-Page: Action taken somewhere other than on your website to be more visible to or ranked higher by the search engines. Examples include: directory listings, articles written and submitted elsewhere that reference your website. Links from other websites to your website (called backlinks) also fall into the off-page category.

Pay Per Click/ PPC

• Search Mode: Your potential customer enters a search (query) into a box and clicks “Send”.
• Content/Contextual Mode: Your potential customer is reading something and sees an ad. He/she may be “looking” but they did not just enter a query and hit the “send” button like in search mode.

We hope you find our systematic examples useful to you. We will write more about each topic and its subdivisions in future posts. If you have feedback or suggestions for future topics, please share them or send us an email.

• Who sees the ad (by IP address and the search terms they use)
• What URL, ad message, or offer they initially respond to in the text ad (with the option to drive equal amounts of traffic for A/B testing)
• What landing page content or secondary offer they view and respond to by converting

For this article, perhaps the best way to describe the potential of these is through scenarios:

Gauging interest in a new product, line extension, or service

If your B2B or B2C company is considering a new product or service, but is unsure of the demand in a specific geographical territory, search engine ads can function as a real-time focus group. You can post an article, white paper, online questionnaire, survey, or any useful resource on your website that works as an interim/substitute conversion. The response is a useful indicator of how the proposed product or service will do. For example, if there is low search volume online, the new effort will likely require a lot of education to generate online demand. As stated earlier, the click through response can be tested on different offers and messages in text ads. Finally, the onsite offer or content can be tested, provided there is enough time and search data available. This data can be compared to deeper conversion data from a known category to help project how the new product or service would impact your business.

Service businesses – considering changing or expanding territories or locations

We have a corporate client whose regional locations provide services to homeowners. When gas prices rose rapidly, they wanted to consider the benefits and impact on their business of temporarily reducing the geographical territory in which they advertise for new customers. The goal was to reduce the miles driven, which would save fuel costs and increase the amount of time technicians were performing billable services. By testing with different custom geotargeting, and projecting the new search and click through data with their previous conversion rates, we were able to accurately estimate how many fewer searches (thus appointments, jobs, and revenue) they would receive if they reduced their service area being advertised. The same testing process would also work if an expansion in territory is being considered.

Testing messaging, offers or a new domain name

If a company is considering rebranding, creating a new tag line, or microsite, text ads can be used to test the initial response to the proposed change. Changing and testing one variable with equal amounts of traffic is a simple way to quantify which version potential customers like. Since impression and click data are initial indicators of interest, to project profitability and overall success, there should be additional tests to see which variables on the landing page get higher conversion rates also.

Retail business – inventory planning, pricing, and more

For businesses that are subject to fads or trends, such as the retail bicycle industry, search data can be used to predict future business activity and needs. For example, we can monitor search/impression data by category, such as generic searches for road bikes and compare it with similar searches for mountain bikes. If a sustained shift in the ratio of searches in the two categories occurs, that could predict the number of upcoming sales of units for first time buyers by category. This data could be used to help with ordering, managing inventory, pricing, merchandising, and more.

The scenarios above are simplified for the amount of space available in this post. In the same way the process works for a retailer, it could be equally beneficial to a car manufacturer as a leading indicator for planning their production.

Why search engine advertising data works as a research tool

Because the data being gathered is actual consumer or end user search behavior, it is free of many of the biases inherent in focus groups or questionnaires. Why? In situations where participants know they are being observed or questioned, many times their answers are skewed.

Because we control so many elements, Google AdWords allows testing that would be more difficult or impossible with natural, more random traffic to a website. Many settings, such as the use of negative keyword filters and conversion tracking tools help us dial in the traffic to make Google AdWords a very effective research tool.