Beyond search engine marketing--increasing post-click conversion rates with intelligent search.

Every marketer who stays current with marketing tactics knows that SEM (search engine marketing) has very quickly become a critical part of the marketing mix. According to a MarketingSherpa survey of over 3,000 marketers, SEM accounts for 15 percent of total budgeted marketing expenditures, a percentage that has increased from virtually nothing a few years ago. Market dynamics ensure that SEM will continue to expand in coming years. Nearly 60 percent of consumers believe advertising has little relevance to them (Yankelovich, 2004), and a new report from the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society reported that Internet users spend 50 percent more time online than they do watching television. SEM enables marketers to reach advertising-resistant online shoppers by targeting marketing messages to only those customers who have expressed interest in a keyword phrase of mutual significance. Marketers have embraced SEM because it represents one of the best mechanisms for reaching a targeted audience in a manner that is easily measurable, efficient and low in cost.

Problem: SEM Is Not A Silver Bullet

Appealing though it may be, SEM is not a panacea for demand generation problems. Accepted best practices to increase click-through rates and post-click conversion rates recommend that marketers create one-to-one-to-one relationships between keywords, ads and landing pages. In other words, if the marketer bids on the keyword "Roth IRA," the marketer should feature "Roth IRA" in both the ad and the landing page. In practice, few marketers have the time or resources to create individual ads and landing pages for every keyword a company tracks. Customer abandonment rates increase when the expected keyword is not included in the ad or landing page copy. Even when marketers follow best practice guidelines, two percent to three percent click-through rates and six percent to eight percent post-click conversion rates are considered exceptional. A campaign is performing well if you get one or two conversions (newsletter subscriptions, download registrations, completed sales, etc.) from every 1,000 ad impressions. Compared with traditional mass media advertising, SEM is arguably more effective and much lower in cost. However, considering the interactive potential of the Internet medium, and that most visitors initiated a search on a term relevant to the marketer's product or service, you could argue that the click-through and conversion numbers are disappointing. The reason: There is leakage in the SEM process. Potential customers, for unknown reasons, are not converting.