IZEA Blogs :: Advertiser: Relevance = Clicks & Conversions

Get Started!

Relevance = Clicks & Conversions

Jul 30, 2007

[Hey folks...this is Dan, not chicken hat Dan, but venture capital Dan. I managed to hack into PPP's new blogging platform (hint: Ted's passwords are names from his Littlest Pet Shop collection) and access the Advertiser blog. I wear various PPP hats -- advertiser, postie, investor -- so I'm hoping to hack into all the blogs eventually. Until then, I'll share some thoughts, perspective and experiments for advertisers here. Shhh...I think I hear Mark reconfiguring some firewalls or something...]

As an advertiser and investor, I draw a lot of analogies between sponsored search and sponsored social media. GoTo/Overture was the PayPerPost of sponsored search and pioneered the multi-billion dollar pay-per-click (PPC) search revenue model that funds most of the "cool stuff with no revenue model" that Yahoo, Google, MSN and others provide today. Early adopters of the two platforms were also similar -- with measurement-minded direct marketers leading the way for broad-based online marketer adoption.

Although PPP offers a broader ROI than sponsored search (like the branding benefits, viral opportunity and ROI growth over time from persistent posts), it's worth monitoring best practices in the PPC field for PPP insights. One that hit my inbox recently, was a MarketingExperiments (MktgExp) report on the importance of relevance in paid search campaigns. The folks over at MktgExp reported the results of two case studies:
1) Click-thru-rate (CTR) Impact of Ad Title Relevance, and
2) Conversion impact of Keyword Relevance

I'll leave the detailed process/results to MktgExp, but takeaways from each case study were:
1) The ad title that including the purchased keywords generated 147% more clicks than those that did not, with CTR almost two and a half times that of the next-highest treatment. For example, "Encyclopedia Britannica" had much better CTR than "Brittanica Sets" and "2007 Brittanica Set" for visitors searching variations of "encyclopedia" and "brittanica".
2) Purchasing indirectly related keyword terms yielded a higher CTR than directly related keyword terms. However, the conversion rate decreased from an average of 0.8% for directly related terms to less than 0.01%. So, despite increased CTR, the indirect key terms performed much worse where it counts: conversions.

So, how could these results improve PPP ROI? It comes back to relevance: both in the opp description and the link text. Bloggers, readers and searchers are the same people, so the psychology of rewarding relevance remains. All else being equal, opp descriptions that are more relevant to your product or business may garner more interested bloggers (higher opp-take-rate, OTR). Sponsored posts driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more interested readers (higher click-thru-rate, CTR). And, last, click-thrus driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more conversions.

My experience has been that CTRs for sponsored posts are already significantly higher than banners and sponsored search. That makes sense given the reader's interaction with sponsored posts versus other online advertising. However, it never hurts to review PPC lessons to optimize PPP efforts. Relevance is relevant!

Guest blogged by Dan...an entrepreneur in venture capital clothing

Posted by danrua at 06:02 PM in Advertisers , Featured , Opportunities , ROI , Social Media | Comments (7) | TrackBack (3)

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e00991f57a883300e3981e95488833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Relevance = Clicks & Conversions:

» Codeine. from Somas do they have codeine in them.
Cheap codeine. Extract codeine. Liquid codeine how to make. [Read More]

» Codeine. from Codeine.
Codeine 3. Smoking codeine. App codeine 300 30. [Read More]

» Metabolism of codeine in urine. from Adverse effects codeine.
Buy 222 codeine. Promethazine with codeine. Codeine antitussive action. [Read More]

Comments (RSS)

lilian said...

Dan, I am not a number person so those numbers you quoted up there do make my mind a bit confused. Blame it on coffee-deprived. But I wish to point out how important keywords are. For example, PPP has an opp for selling leads. I took it and name it Sell your leads on my Make$ Money$ blog. There are 80 millions results and that post of mine is on #2 on page one for sell your leads. (still is as I am writing this).

I have seen many opps I took appearing way above the advertiser's own site after a couple of days and surfers found our site when they are searching for something. So, to emphasize what you have said - Advertisers, please give us good keywords and let us bring your site way above the pack. It's a proven result.

BTW, I am a postie and (small-time) advertiser as well. Thanks, Dan! If you can, can you hack into the system and give me a few votes and tacks too? :)

Jul 30, 2007 11:59:01 PM

Lisa Renee said...

My own personal experiences in having 7 blogs of varying page rank that entail sponsored posts and no sponsored posts is that page rank matters when it comes to search engines more than the whole "own domain" factor. I follow very carefully which search terms and key words lead people to my blogs both political and otherwise both paid posting oriented and non-paid posting oriented.

For me, I'm proud of the fact that all of my blogs have a higher than average page per visit and average time on blog numbers - ranging from 5 minutes to over ten minutes which means that people are coming for the search terms but staying for the content. That gives advertisers exposure when people searching for something totally different come across information you provide. This to me demonstrates that in the end when it comes to blogs that content is king...provide interesting content and no matter how someone finds you, if they stay to read more? That should be of value.

As an aside I realize you were trying to be cute with the whole "I hacked into" but personally I feel that wasn't necessary, your advice and thoughts given your long standing relationship with PPP would have been better served with honesty rather than humor for this scenario.

Jul 31, 2007 12:52:56 AM

Lisa Renee said...

As a ps....I'm not really impressed with this typepad formation of the blog. Immediately what I notice is a downer is the fact it does not list comment numbers so that every post appears to have no comments which makes it very hard to determine if anyone else has commented.

I also am not impressed with the captcha imaging used, it is very hard for me to read and I had to input codes four times to be able to post the above comment. That is really not user friendly for those like me who have difficulty with a gray on black imaging scenario. If the idea is to create discussion through comments? It is not very user friendly.

Jul 31, 2007 1:06:03 AM

Dan... said...

@lilian: Great example lilian. Quality and relevance make a powerful combination.

@Lisa Renee: Thanks for the feedback.

I'm seeing comment #s for each of the posts. For example, this post footer shows: "Posted by danrua at 06:02 PM in Advertisers , Opportunities , Science , Social Media | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)"

Are you seeing "COMMENTS (0)" for all posts?

Jul 31, 2007 8:13:48 AM

Jamie said...

Dan I think she came from the Blog Portal. It took me a while to figure out how to get the comments count from the RSS feed but it's in there now. No worries!

Jul 31, 2007 12:43:59 PM

Loretta said...