March 25, 2005
Contextual advertising
"Betting on traffic" - in such a manner can be formulated the main idea of specialists of average and small companies being busy with clients' attraction. Really, each of them can thoroughly explain their leadership that users getting on the site by means of search engines are exactly such a purpose audience, which the company needed. Obviously, that a standard set of a "local optimizer" includes two propositions - site's optimization (usually to a separate search engine) and context advertising.
It must be said that leadership demands from the specialist to take decision, which is not only effective (rather not), but also budgetary. Of course, when the leadership receives the budget, made for normal and competent optimization performance offered for outsourcing, this, as a rule, causes a strong protest. In this occasion, skilful manager will propose another variant - context advertisements placing. Advantages of such variant of the traffic attraction are obvious - they are perfectly described by each of search engines performing such a service.
First, result is visible at once. Within a half an hour you can organize a campaign, transfer money to the open account, program refers correctly, and watch the process of the statistics curve changing, which is rising up to the desired point. Secondly, "You pay only for the real and purpose customers." This statement, it would seem, can't be not agreed with. If relevant search words were picked, so it becomes difficult to feel some doubts, that the audience would not be a purpose one.
Undoubtedly, as it was said above, the results of context advertising are seen at once. And they look pretty well. However, there are some words "but". The first is that you need to have a clear idea of that where the visitors come to site from. The majority of search engines place their context advertisements not only on their main site, but also on the affiliate sites. However, many of search engines, especially Russian ones, don't use the services of affiliates. Affiliates are either sites of small, or local search engines, or rather popular sites of definite theme, which receive definite interest on each visitor, who enters then the site of advertiser. It's obvious that having such a system; affiliates feel advantage of receiving higher traffic. Not all the affiliates achieve this by means of honest methods. Therefore, there natural question arises - how to check the "quality" - effectiveness - customers. The easiest method is the analysis of sessions of customers, who came from such advertising campaign. If customer is really related to purpose audience, so he (she) must visit at least a couple of pages, that is each visitor must have at least a couple of hits. For instance, if visitor searches for "car sale", and your site is the site of a car sale-room, this means that proceeding from essential laws of human psychology, the visitor's sight will be attracted by sought words - in such a manner the hit will be formed in statistics.
If traffic is "counterfeit", therefore the multitude of sessions will be "empty", i.e. the time of such session, as a rule, equals to 0 minutes 0 seconds. Of course, even normal and honest traffic have empty sessions, but this is rather an exception than a rule. The conclusion concerning abnormality of traffic must be made only if you have information, with which you can make a comparison.
The conclusion must be made only if you have certain information about average time of visitors' staying on site, their behavior (if there are some stereotype ways of browsing a site, average depth of site's viewing and so on).
If there is any doubt as to traffic's honesty related to context advertisements, so the following question you need to solve is related to that how effective are these visitors. Under effectiveness of new visitors you may understand different actions, i.e. this parameter is individually determined by each company. If current site is an Internet shop, so the effectiveness here is determined quite easily. The most obvious criterion is the percentage of visitors, who came by context advertisements and ordered a product.
If site is imagery one, so you can understand visiting of some separate pages of a site or time spent by visitor on a certain page as an effectiveness index. Separate question is the cost of visitors, who came by advertisements placed on search engines. It would seem that an answer to this question is absolutely obvious, since there is an amount (bid) set for each separate word. Thus, for instance, if bid is set at $0,05 and attracted 20 visitors to site, so we definitely know that an amount will equal to $1. Really, you should better put the question about cost of visitors, who came by context advertisement, in a different way. How much does each effective visitor cost? If advertising campaign is performed by several words, so, the cost of such words will rather be diverse (depending on their popularity). Therefore, total amount, spent for definite period of time, must be shared between all visitors we defined as "effective". In different cases real visitors' effectiveness may dither in quite large margins. But, applying the Paretto's law to psychology of the masses, we may say without any doubt that effectiveness, which is higher than 20%, is a great rarity.
Therefore, continuing considering our case, only 4 of 20 visitors will either buy something on site, or read definite text. This means that real cost of effective visitor doesn't total $0,05, but $0,25 - i.e. five times as higher.
At proper approach to optimization, the results can be quite different. Proceeding from the visitors' behavior explorations, up to 90% of visitors obligatory look through the link placed on the first position of search engine results. Therefore, if keyword, which a page was optimized on, is quite frequent, so traffic can be very impressive. And the cost of effective visitor after optimization will be significantly lower (approximately 3-4 times as), than cost of effective visitor, who came by context advertisement.
Comparing attractiveness of a context advertisement with a link in immediate results of search engine, so the latter will take leading places, and what's more, at a great advantage. By the psychologists' review, studying visitors' behavior in search engines, hardly 5% of all visitors look at context advertisements. Therefore, if site is not optimized, and you'll be using only possibilities of context advertising, so significant part of a purpose audience will be lost.
Context advertising, as far as it wouldn't seem to be a budget solution for traffic enlargement, can perform a role of a supplementary tool. Its use is worth while doing, if keyword is too low - frequent to make a full optimization for it.
Posted by Melody at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)