01

Moneyball of MarketingIf over 60% of your search traffic is branded, you’re leaving revenue stranded on base.

02

Scouting Report

16% of searches are net new. 70% of searches are long tail.40% of natural search traffic should be from non-branded queries.*

*SEO expert and RKG President Adam Audette

03

Your brand is a household name.

Millions “Like” it on Facebook.

Competitors are jealous that customers use your brand name as a verb.

Your brand is global, like Brad Pitt.

Taking your brand to this level was no small feat. It took years of great products, advertising, some very happy customers, and a little luck.

The vast majority of visitors to your web site seek you out by your well-known brand.

04

Many strong brands approach search engine marketing by leveraging their hard-earned brand recognition. Investments in branded search terms – whether through SEM or SEO – have relatively high payoffs since the likelihood of conversion from a branded search visit is quite high. After all, these are your customers who knowingly sought you out; it makes sense that there was some intent that drove their search. And when your marketing team or search agency sorts their data for visits, conversions, or spend on keywords, the top spots are likely occupied by branded terms. So it is intuitive to focus energy and spend on those branded keywords. The problem is that the only way to increase demand for your brand is with awareness campaigns (social, TV, print, display, etc.) whose cost should be factored into the return on advertising for brand terms.

05

Non-branded Paid

Non-branded Organic

Branded Versus Non-BrandedBranded (also called navigational) and non-branded (also called non-navigational) traffic are two very different things – sort of like a curveball versus a changeup.

Before we continue, it is important we give an overview of the factors that drive branded versus non-branded traffic:

Non-branded TrafficNon-branded traffic does not contain your brand.

Paid means that the traffic came through a paid search link – using bids for specific keywords.

Organic are links from the natural search results.

Another way that marketers buckets the types of traffic is head terms (branded), torso terms (non-branded paid) and tail terms (non-branded organic).

Branded TrafficBranded traffic contains your site’s name. If you’re Amazon, that includes

“Amazon,” “amazon.com” and “amazon cameras.”

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You are already getting those customers. It’s reasonable to pay a small amount to give your branded visitors the convenience to find you in a click, but not at the cost of investing in non-branded search. The marginal return on your ad spend for branded

customers is much lower than the return on non-branded customers who not only may buy, but also are much more likely to be net new customers for your brand with high lifetime value. A business’ growth is going to be limited if they don’t capture new customers. And your new customers are not going to come from branded search – they will come from non-branded search.

There are key differences in the behavior of visitors from branded and non-branded traffic driven by:

1. Intent. The intent of a branded versus non-branded user is very different. Branded users want to find you. They’ve already heard about you and believe you have what they want. If they were not using a search engine, a very high proportion of these users would devise another way to find you – such as typing your URL. The search engine just happens to be the easiest way to do so. The non-branded user does not know who has the information, products or services they are looking for. So if you don’t appear on a search result page for this user’s intent then a low proportion of these users are going to find you.

Brand. Because the branded user already knows your site, your previous marketing efforts, including both online (non-branded paid search, non-branded organic search, display, social, affiliate, etc.) and offline (tv, print, radio, etc.) likely had more to do with driving the user to your site than what actually shows up on the search result page for a navigational query. Branded traffic thus is actually very similar to direct site traffic. It’s just that the branded users are using the search engine instead of typing the address directly into the browser.

2. 3. Rank. Non-branded traffic, on the other hand, is driven mostly by how well you are doing in your organic and/or your paid search marketing. If you get a visit, for “compact digital cameras”, then it’s because you were likely ranking for this term either on the organic or paid listings.

Knowing these differences, it would make sense why lots of data out there shows that branded traffic tends to convert at a higher rate than non-branded traffic which means that you should invest a lot more of your marketing efforts in capturing branded traffic at the expense of non-branded traffic,

Wrong. right?

07

Non-branded Traffic Throws a Curveball

If you aren’t attracting a significant number of visitors who are not seeking you out using your brand, you are not harnessing your full potential. For strong brands, you should be attracting up to 40% non-branded visitors to your website, according to SEO expert and RKG President Adam Audette. And while that percentage may vary by industry, if you don’t have a substantive volume of non-branded traffic, you are missing a potential grand slam.

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Jupiter Research found that 36% of users search for information about a product during the consideration phase of the purchase funnel, before performing a branded search and converting on a website.* In contrast, searches that include the site’s name indicate that the visitor already has a specific seller in mind and is close to conversion. So this means that with less than 40% non-branded organic traffic, you’re giving up many potential new customers – with potentially high customer lifetime value. Increasing your search traffic from non-branded terms from 10% to 40% of your total search traffic is not a zero sum game that harms your branded terms. Non-branded traffic grows the size of the pie rather than changing how you slice it. In that case, going from 10% to 40% is actually a 50% increase in total search traffic.

10%

40%

90%

60%

10%

40%

90%

60%

*JupiterResearch, Search and Attribution, November 2008

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Heads Or Tails?Think of how you search for something you need. Your research typically starts with a series of searches, often traveling further and further into the long-tail of search engine results, particularly if you are looking for something obscure like cheetah print twin sheet set or red ruffle chiffon shirt. You cast a wide net and then narrow in on the best results refining your search with brand names, color, style, size, etc., until ultimately you find the webpage containing that perfect product, which you proceed to buy.

Shouldn’t the search marketing strategy that you employ use this same logic? After all, branded searches show a strong intent to buy your product, but, as we’ve said, growing the size of your market requires attracting new customers. And those new customers’ searches are likely non-branded. This is precisely why we are seeing marketers from strong brands pursue the 60/40 branded/non-branded ratio. They recognize the value of these long tail visitors, whose net-new traffic spikes traffic by 50% or more.

Given that opportunity, how long can your big brand ignore the long-tail? As sophisticated and savvy as an in-house or agency search marketing team may be, there are still only so many hours in a day. The work of a search marketing team should focus on what they do best: producing great creative, optimizing “head” and “torso” search terms, and identifying gaps & tools that can fill those terms. The team also has the data, focus, and capability to optimize for those “head” and “torso” search terms. If they’ve been driving traffic and conversion, while continuously improving, why stop now?

It is clear that non-branded search can increase sales and bring new customers into the funnel. However, optimizing for the long-tail is a resource intensive thing to do at the scale and speed required to yield meaningful ROI. Non-branded searches are often semantic in nature and while their collective volume is massive, the individual terms may only come in ones and twos. No wonder it’s not cost-effective for SEO experts to continuously iterate to capture the long tail.

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BloomReach works with a major retailer of home furnishings and furniture whose name has tremendous cache. Foodies, decorators and gourmets covet their beautiful, high quality merchandise. Yet, they knew there was opportunity to do even better with non-branded search traffic, especially when it came to finding new customers…or more accurately…helping new customers find them.

Although their branded/non-branded search ratio started at a very respectable 75%/25%, four months after implementing the BloomSearch platform as part of their long-tail strategy they had increased non-branded traffic by 36%. Of those visitors, many became net-new customers. Not a bad way to fill cupboards with the retailer’s cookery!

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To paraphrase David Ogilvy,

A well-run marketing team is

like a winning baseball team.

It makes the most of every

crew member’s talent and takes

advantage of every split-second

opportunity to speed up

service.

“

”

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Playing Offense Change is a constant in the algorithms that drive natural search traffic. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for great content.

Images, video and text that describe a product and resonate with customers is, and likely always will be, the key to search marketing. There are no tricks. There are no shortcuts. Without great content, all else is lost. A data driven search marketing/ecommerce team knows what content works. Unleash them to spend the time and talent they need to create great content for every aspect of the site.

However, creating an easily traversable path requires interpreting the content on every page and identifying what content on the site is most relevant to it – as a referrer or as a subsequent destination. Search marketers call this a link graph.

One must think through what content is most likely to lead me to want this page and what content would a consumer most likely want next. And every time pages are added or

deleted, the process must be repeated. At the scale of most brands’ sites, this is a massive big data problem and why many shy away from long-tail search. Even

with unlimited human resources devoted to search, the long-tail would still be a challenge. Web-wide data is simply too large for people to analyze and

act on at scale and in real-time, which consumer behavior necessitates.

Finally, the hierarchies for navigation that fit your brand and your merchandising do not always accommodate all the ways a consumer wants to experience your products and services. In a brick and mortar store, a consumer would ask for help. Online, chat and site search help the consumer – but only after the consumer has found your site. These features don’t help discovery. For discovery, one would need to predict all the likely combinations of products without creating duplication on the site – and create those pages. For a brand of any significant number of products, that’s daunting.

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Guess? is a well known brand that according EVP & CIO Michael Relich, “didn’t have the time or resources to optimize our marketing to reach consumers with more focused needs who might convert a lot better on our site.” They recognized that addressing the long-tail would be too time consuming to approach with the same model they use for the rest of their SEM strategy.

Enter machine learning, BloomReach’s Web Relevancy Engine and Big Data from their site and the broader web. Optimizing in this way enabled them to grow their natural search traffic by nearly 25% (year over year) in just 2 months. They saw a 24% lift in queries driving traffic. Those new visitors converted at a 50% higher rate than the site’s non-navigational natural search conversion rate. Most importantly, after 7 months, 25% of non-branded natural search revenue comes from this approach.

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The Pinch-hitter: Long-TailLong tail discovery is dependent on speaking the customer’s language while still speaking in your brand voice. Often the richest descriptions of your products and services come from the reviews that consumers trust. Visually rich, highly effective category and product pages must be continuously enhanced with the relevant content found on other pages of the site to add context and synonyms logically to the pages. As the category evolves and consumer demand shifts, the content selections should shift as well.

At the time a major retailer was focusing on their overall search marketing approach, they decided to pursue additional non-branded traffic. They had started with a branded/non-branded ratio of 71%/29%. During a time when overall search traffic increased by 42%, their non-branded traffic actually shot up by more than 100%. This increased their ratio to 58%/42% and more importantly, increase incremental revenue!

015

Non-branded organic traffic is dependent on 3 factors:

By definition, the long-tail search is comprised of low volume, sometimes even entirely unique queries. One off, they would rarely be worth enough to a company to yield a positive ROI if created manually. But taken as a whole, if they can be brought into the marketing funnel or even convert on their intent to purchase, the revenue potential is huge. The challenge is optimizing for the long-tail in a profitable way. It is a problem many thought was simply impossible, until the advent of Big Data Apps (BDA) like BloomReach.

theLong Tail

<25%

70%

2.5x

of webpagesare visited by anyone

of search queries are long tail

long tail keywords convert 2.5x more frequently

1. 2.3.

Providing consumers and crawlers with an easily traversable path through your website that seamlessly connects the most relevant pages to each other in a continuous mesh.

Making the most likely first page rich with content that is descriptive and reflects what is relevant to consumers and changes as consumer interests evolve.

Creating collections of products that match the consumers’ expressed intent.

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Rounding Home BaseTo optimize for the long-tail, BDAs use enormous amounts of data on web-wide consumer behavior, synoyms and alternative logical ways consumers can describe products, and search optimization best practices. The scale and frequency of the non-branded search problem makes it ideal for algorithm driven solutions and impossible for human ones. Rather, it takes Big Data tools like Hadoop and algorithmic intelligence through machine learning to adapt to changing consumer intent and changing ecommerce content to maximize the relevant demand attracted to a site.

The nice thing about this BDA approach is that the proof is in the pudding. For the consumer, they will find what they are looking for faster. They will spend less time guessing how to “speak search” to find the results they want. They will spend less time clicking the Back button on their browser and more time on the page that matches their intent. All this will happen without the marketer having to think about Hadoop jobs, BDAs or machine learning.

On the business side, the results are clear. If the BDA works, clients will have more traffic, better conversions and most importantly, more sales (which can be tracked and attributed to these long-tail efforts). Considering that these long-tail customers are often net-new, the acquisition cost should be relatively low compared to branding campaigns. And if you have provided great products and an excellent user experience, the lifetime value of those net-new customers is something to consider.

BloomReach created the world’s first Web Relevance Engine dedicated to exposing the best content on the internet to the right consumers seeking it on search engines and social platforms.

BloomReach, Inc. 82 Pioneer Way, Mountain View, CA 94041 Contact Us

017

In The BloomReach Lineup: Guess, Williams-Sonoma, Neiman MarcusMany strong brands such as Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Guess and more are leveraging BDAs for marketing, such as BloomReach’s BloomSearch to automate long tail discovery. With extensive ongoing data collection, machine language learning model (semantic interpretation) and relevance prediction technologies, BloomSearch brings scale to the long tail – using the content already found throughout the brand’s site.

BloomReach created the world’s first Web Relevance Engine dedicated to exposing the best content on the internet to the right consumers seeking it on search engines and social platforms.

BloomReach, Inc. 82 Pioneer Way, Mountain View, CA 94041 Contact Us

018

In The BloomReach Lineup: Guess, Williams-Sonoma, Neiman MarcusMany strong brands such as Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Guess and more are leveraging BDAs for marketing, such as BloomReach’s BloomSearch to automate long tail discovery. With extensive ongoing data collection, machine language learning model (semantic interpretation) and relevance prediction technologies, BloomSearch brings scale to the long tail – using the content already found throughout the brand’s site.