The future of media reporting. Part 3 – integrated search understanding

By: Garry Lee | September 25th, 2009

In the first part of discussing media reporting we talked about how ‘last click wins’ was coming to an end and more complex and intelligent models would be used in the future. In this post I’ll focus on the effect this will have on one particular channel that is renowned for both the success it has in acquisition and the mystery behind its true value – search.

Search is one channel that already recognises the importance of interaction between its various elements (natural, paid, brand etc…). However as one of the last ‘black arts’ of online marketing it has for too long relied on historical assumptions without the true numbers to back it up. We’ve all heard them, “These terms are expensive but they drive high conversion on your brand terms” or “I know they don’t convert as well, but their influence on brand sales cannot be underestimated”.

I’m certainly not saying ignore these claims/theories, far from it, my only comment as an analyst at heart is test the theory. We have the data and techniques now to truly know what works. And you can be assured what does work will be different by sector and brand.

Whilst I know from my research so far that some old school search assumptions are wrong and some right, one thing I can say with absolute confidence – none of the theories work as a blanket across all sectors and companies. This for me is where the real gold is with the data now available to us.

The work we recently published for Monarch Airlines shows (in their case) expensive destination terms were not converting or influencing other conversions, thus they re-directed budget into natural search which led to a 55% increase in SEO revenue. From experience this same approach would not have worked for some of our other clients. It really is a matter of judging each case on its own merits (or data!).

In my final rant about this subject I’ll discuss attribution models. The ultimate goal of a true model for the future is to attribute sales based upon recency, relevance and interaction. (Pay the channel accordingly.)

In the meantime, if you want to understand more about how you can implement and start exploiting this new data, please drop me an email at blog@redeye.com and please do follow my random musings on twitter.