Traffic does Not Convert the Same: SEO vs PPC vs Press Releases vs Social Bookmarking

January 29, 2006

Each type of traffic has its own unique characteristics. Some distribution brings in more traffic, other types of traffic provides more backlinks, yet another traffic source will bring in more brand awareness. This test is an examination of the conversion rates by traffic source.

I have long suspected that not all traffic converts the same. While I had rough statistics to back it up (and very detailed statistics in some cases), I had never run a formal test to include ‘Social Bookmarking’ traffic to determine conversion rates and percentage of traffic.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve been running traffic statistics on myFree Keyword Research eBook offer to determine the difference in conversion rates by traffic source.

My original assumptions were:

Press Release traffic would be the lowest conversion among all sources. My reasoning was that many people who read press releases are journalists looking for stories (and bloggers count as journalists for this purpose). They would be looking at news, a few would download the eBook, but more would just link or reference the press release in their writings without ever having looked at the book.
Social Bookmarking traffic (i.e. delicious, technorati, digg, etc) will be the second lowest conversion rate among all traffic. My reasoning for this was that many of these visitors are just looking at the latest news and aren’t in the mindset to be converted. These individuals are often browsers, and clicking on social links are more akin to browsing than searching to find the answer to a progblem. They are also more sophisticated that the ‘average’ internet user - thus they will be immune to many offers.
SEO traffic (free search engine traffic) would convert somewhere in the middle. Often, a page ranks for something other than the most converting keywords. Thus, ranking for broad keywords would provide traffic that is looking for something other than what a page offers, and thus these visitors will not convert. However, SEO traffic must be broken down into two groups to really test the effectiveness of the traffic:
- Search engine traffic for direct keywords
- Search engine traffic for broad keywords.
PPC traffic would be the highest converting traffic. Being able to test keywords by conversion and make those adjustments would lead to the highest conversion rate among the entire group.

What is not taken into account is profits by total traffic. In other words, if Social Bookmarking provided 10x the traffic as SEO, but converted at 3x less, it would bring in more total conversions. I didn’t want to test the quantity of the traffic and conversions, just the quality.

I also wasn’t tracking RSS feeds differently than other traffic sources. It would be interesting to be able to add RSS feed conversions into this test - maybe next time.

The Methodology Was:

On the day the eBook was released:

Write a blog post about it which pings the major blog sites.
‘Seed’ the tagging engines with enough information to bring in some visitors (this worked better than anticipated).
Send a Press Release through all the major PR services, including a few donations to make sure the press release was picked up by Yahoo news and a few other large news aggregators.
Send PPC traffic to the page from Yahoo Search Marking, Google AdWords, and MSN adCenter (adCenter traffic was included at a later date as the ’self serve’ environment was not operational when I launched the test)..
Drop a few links from other sites to the page so that it would gain some rankings for very specific keywords (I also did a few 301s from pages which were ranking for specific keywords already).

Important Note: The keywords involved are things like ‘AdWords keyword research’, ‘PPC Keywords’, etc. They are mostly ‘jargon’ terms that would suggest a more sophisticated audience that is doing some internet marketing.

The first 2 months of results:

	Month 1: October
	Percentage of All Traffic	Conversion Percentage
Press Releases	22	0.89%
Social Bookmarking Sites	26	0.91%
SEO - Direct Keywords	11	2.93%
SEO - Broad Keywords	8	1.47%
PPC	29	6.42%
Unknown (or Direct)	4	2.41%
	Month 2: November
	Percentage of All Traffic	Conversion Percentage
Press Releases	9	1.12%
Social Bookmarking Sites	11	1.14%
SEO - Direct Keywords	13	2.29%
SEO - Broad Keywords	12	1.51%
PPC	47	6.53%
Unknown (or Direct)	8	2.32%

In December, I decided to do a bit of split testing on the PPC conversions, which also meant I upped my PPC budget (hence why PPC is such a large percentage of traffic). It had been a while since I’d written a ‘One Page Wonder’ site, and didn’t want to take the time to put one together. So, I wrote a simple informational message and removed the right hand navigation from the page. I then tested the original landing page against the new landing page.

The results are NOT a typo. I was pretty amazed by this conversion difference with such a small change. Usually a change like this can be quite significant. I had assumed that because the audience was a more internet sophisticated audience that it would be a bit more immune to these changes.

	Month 2: December
	Percentage of All Traffic	Conversion Percentage
Press Releases	4	1.85%
Social Bookmarking Sites	5	1.95%
SEO - Direct Keywords	13	1.92%
SEO - Broad Keywords	9	0.98%
PPC - Original Landing Page	33	6.35%
PPC - New Test Page	32	19.1%
Unknown (or Direct)	4	1.37%

What the results tell us (please remember, this is based on a single test, it is not across multiple platforms - so these inferences do lack the data integrity of running the same test across 20+ sites or 10+ offers should be noted).

Traffic Sources:

Press Release and Social Bookmarking traffic declined pretty steadily after the initial surge. However, their conversion percentage continues to climb - presumably, this is because those finding the information at such a later date are searching for something more specific. The amount of traffic that did continue to come through these sources amazed me. I was anticipating a larger drop. Yahoo News is by far the leading referral source among the Press Release traffic (I counted Yahoo News in the PR traffic as that’s the only reason I received that referral traffic at all).

I’m a huge fan of PPC traffic, both in quality and testing. I always find it useful when launching something more ‘official’ than just a free eBook to first test pages and offers with PPC traffic and then start to SEO, use press releases, etc (increased traffic) once you know what offer actually works.

I’m not sure why there was such a jump in ‘Unknown or Direct’ traffic in month 2. I could probably investigate it further, but its not worth the invested time for such a small test. What is interesting to note however, is that my highest page views per visit (for the broad sweeping categories above, not by individual referrer) came from direct traffic (as an FYI - my IP is blocked from my various stats program, so it’s not my own page views bringing this number higher) in all 3 months of testing.

Traffic Conversions:

Most of the initial assumptions proved to be fairly accurate. Social Bookmarking traffic did overtake Press Release traffic in terms of conversions in December.

I was surprised that the ‘SEO Direct Keyword’ traffic conversion percentage wasn’t more inline with the PPC traffic. Even for the exact same keywords, the PPC traffic had a higher conversion rate. I’m sure there’s some inferences that can be made about those who click on ads as opposed to natural listings for these results.

As a note, in the PPC traffic the highest conversion percentage came from MSN (which did have a small sample set due to their not being included in the initial test and the volume of traffic they can deliver), the second highest from Yahoo Search Marketing, and the lowest from Google AdWords. However; Google AdWords by far made up the most conversions among PPC traffic.

It is also good to note that why I didn’t break it out above, the conversion percentage from AdWords content match was higher than from AdWords Search (and actually higher than Yahoo Search Marketing). The cost per conversion on AdWords content match was three times lower than AdWords search. I definitely will not make any broad sweeping statements about AdWords content match here, as I’ve seen cases where it can be great and other times where it just doesn’t convert. This is just a note for this particular test.

Testing Analysis:

My mantra at every single conference I speak at is this: Anything is possible - test the results - the numbers will ultimately tell the story. Again, this proved true. The PPC test between the original landing page and the new landing page was significant. While I expected the new landing page to have a few points higher in terms of conversions, I did not expect it to be 300% higher.

PPC is an environment where you have more control than any other traffic environment on the web. Use that control to test ads, landing pages, keywords, etc - everything can be tested. Only by testing can you really know what happens.

Conclusion:

I love testing and putting together traffic numbers. Speculation is great - but in the end, there are only a few metrics that actually matter.

Social Bookmarking and Press Release traffic does not convert as well as other types of traffic. However, they do have an unspoken impact on SEO (gaining links, coverage, and overall exposure) which can be beneficial in the long run. While the traffic did not convert as well as other traffic, I wouldn’t say that it’s worthless traffic. It did convert somewhat, and bestowed branding exposure which is very worthwhile in the long term.

If you are running a purely direct response site, then the effort may not be worthwhile. If you are running a website that relies on repeat visitors, branding, organic traffic, etc - then the benefits of going through the effort of building social awareness is time well spent.

This is the story of just one website and one single test.

Always test your traffic. Test by keywords, traffic sources, country, time of day, etc.

Only testing, measuring, and interpreting results can tell the story of any website and its traffic.

Related Links:

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, PPC Info, PPC Tracking | 7 Comments

Microsoft to Power Blogs through Xbox

January 28, 2006

Microsoft’s Xbox, it’s flagship gaming product, is going to incorporate the Xbox with Spaces (Microsoft’s blogging platform) and then allow bloggers to monetize the blogs with Kanoodle (as reported by eWeek).

Microsoft’s impossible to find Xbox is internet enabled. Its users make up much of the ever elusive 18-25 male demographic. To date, the Xbox has allowed one to organize music and some other features, but hasn’t had any major internet capabilities outside of the gaming concept.

Kanoodle is a pay per click service that also serves contextual ads (ads based upon the text of a webpage).

This deal could allow Xbox users to post directly to a blog, keep track of high scores, cheats, tips, and anything else related to gaming (or just their life in general as many blogs are very similar to diaries), and make money off of the ads. Most likely it would be a revenue sharing deal with Microsoft. MS will handle the ad serving, the gamers write the content, they split the ad revenue.

A combination of gamers, blogging, and PPC ads could bring in the best of many worlds for Microsoft. It brings an elusive demographic into a centralized ad serving environment. It has the gamers creating the content, thus allows Microsoft to expand its content base with other people’s writings. To ‘pay’ these writers, it splits the profits with them.

How one will post to Spaces, opt in to the impossible-to-find-Xbox blogging platform, have ad control, and all the small details have yet to be released.

While this seems like small news, it’s a huge step in what I think is Microsoft’s real goal: To control the living room.

Roughly half of the US income is disposable; meaning it is spent on items besides the standard bills & rent. The leading portion of this disposable income is spent on entertainment: anything from iPods to game to DVDs to flat panel TVs, etc. We are an entertainment driven culture.

In the past, control of the living room has been in the hands of the major TV, stereo, and gaming console creators. Microsoft threw its hat into this lucrative market with the media PC and Xbox.

By combining the living room, the internet, and the associated entertainment into a single environment, it seems Microsoft has hopes of further controlling this disposable income. The last offering to really try to combine the living room with the internet was WebTV. WebTV didn’t have a lot of success, but did teach others some good lessons on combining these various aspects.

This interesting combination of the Xbox with the internet also has underpinnings of its own ’social network’ akin to Yahoo’s 360, Friendster, or MySpace. Social networking has been brought up time and time again over the past year by the major players as a way of recruiting and maintaining a stable user base. The goal is to have that user base vested in the site, friends, and content - thus the network owner can offer many free offerings to keep and grow the base, and the user base is thus monetized through ads or subscription fees. Its seen by many as a win-win combination. The user base has the chance to become part of a community and receive their own ’space’ on the web while the network makes money on the user base through a variety of means.

It has yet to be seen how Microsoft will combine all of these aspects in a central environment with the Xbox and Spaces. However, the concept is brilliant. The execution and adoption of users will be the ultimate decider of how well the play is executed.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Search Engines | 1 Comment

Using AdWords Dynamic Parameters in Links

January 22, 2006

Google allows four different dynamic URL parameters to be added to any AdWords destination URL string to pass along information about that particular click. These parameters are replaced with actual data about the click so that your log files, or tracking system, contains additional data about your AdWords clicks enabling one to analyze more data about any campaign and individual click.

The four parameters pass along:

If the click originated from search or the content network
The keyword in your account that triggered the ad that was clicked
The creative that was clicked
The originating website (for Site Targeted campaigns)

In the URL illustrations, I’m going to be using this URL as a starting point:
http://www.example.com?src=AdWords&medium=PPC&campaign=AdGroupName

In this URL, these are the current definitions (i.e. the minimum tracking I add to any URL for any paid traffic):

src=AdWords - The traffic source
medium=ppc - The medium for the traffic source (i.e. this could be banner, ppc, email, etc)
campaign=AdGroupName - The ‘theme’ of the traffic. (For Yahoo Search Marketing, this would be the category name.)

The AdWords Dynamic Parameters:

Is the traffic from the search or content network?

This is the parameter to determine if the traffic is from the content or the search network:
{ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}

AdWords allows one to replace the ‘Content’ or the ‘Search’ after the colon in the string to whatever you desire. If you only wanted to use a single letter to parse out the information, you would change the parameters to look like:
{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}.

This parameter is also known as ‘ValueTrack’. More information is available from the AdWords help section on ValueTrack.

The URL now looks like:
http://www.example.com?src=AdWords&medium=PPC&campaign=AdGroupName&Network={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}

What keyword triggered the ad?

With AdWords matching styles, it’s often possible for a variety of keywords within the same account to trigger an ad. The keyword parameter allows one to see which keyword triggered the ad. It’s a very simple parameter:
{keyword}

I generally add kw= in front of insertion to label what this parameter is showing. Thus, the URL now looks like:
http://www.example.com?src=AdWords&medium=PPC&campaign=AdGroupName&Network={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}&kw={keyword}

More Matching style definitions:

Which ad was clicked?

It is often useful in split testing or determining Profit by Click to know which ad was clicked for tracking sales or under preforming traffic back to the actual ad. This dynamic parameter adds the ‘ad id’ to the URL:
{creative}

The biggest issue with this is that it only shows the ad number (which usually looks like: 123653). It makes sense that Google isn’t going to pass the entire ad copy through the URL. To find which ad matches up with the ad id (which you’ll want to know when you line up the data to the ad) there are three ways to find the number:

In the AdGroup, view the source and line up the numbers (by far the most cumbersome)
Pull the information via the API (the easiest way when lining up numbers)
Run an ‘ad text’ report inside your AdWords account. When running this report, in the additional columns menu there is a check box for ‘ad id’. Click this box and it will display the ad id with the rest of your report.

I usually add ‘ad=’ before this parameter in the URL string for identification purposes. This now makes the URL look like:

http://www.example.com?src=AdWords&medium=PPC&campaign=AdGroupName&Network={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}&kw={keyword}&ad={creative}

Which website triggered the click?

This parameter is only for site targeted campaigns. If the parameter has no data, then Google does not display the parameter. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to add this to all URLs, however, just remember, many times it will be blank.

This will NOT show which website triggered the click in content targeting campaigns. For that level of tracking, you’ll have to choose an analytics package that reads past the ‘pagead2.googlesyndication.com’ in the referring URL.

The parameter insertion is pretty simple, just add:
{placement} to the URL.

This makes the URL now look like:
http://www.example.com?src=AdWords&medium=PPC&campaign=AdGroupName&Network={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}&kw={keyword}&ad={creative}&SiteTarget={placement}

If you are using Google Analytics:

Each tracking system has it’s own set of parameters that it reads. Therefore, you might need to change ‘kw=’ or ‘medium’ etc in the URL string to something your tracking system will parse into appropriate categories.

It is important to also note that some analytic packages require the parameters to be in a specific order, while others just look for the identifying information and don’t care which order is utilized (i.e. one could add site target first, then keyword, then creative, then search vs content, etc).

If you are using Google Analytics, this is how the tracking string would look like with the proper parameters attached:
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={creative}&utm_campaign=AdGroup&Network={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}&SiteTarget={placement}

The only parameters that need to be adjusted in the above URL is the website (i.e. replace example.com with your website) and AdGroup (replace with your Actual AdGroup name).

Wrap Up

Google has done an excellent job with AdWords of allowing variable parameters to be passed to your website. It has made it easy to track just about anything, especially if you’re pulling information via the API and automatically generating reports based on both your log files and AdWords information.

Understanding the URL string, it’s parameters (AdWords or not) is very important to learn and master. It’s not just about tracking AdWords, it’s about tracking in general. Once you’ve lined up your tracking system with AdWords information, you’ll be very happy when you start using MSN adCenter which has it’s own set of parameters insertions.

If you’ve structured your medium, keyword, creative, etc identifiers in a standardized URL, when you start using other traffic generating campaigns, you’ll already have a default to just plug in the new information and off you go. This makes it easy to compare banner traffic versus email traffic versus PPC traffic.

Know all the variables. Choose the variables you want to compare. Analyze the data. Make decisions based on facts.

The internet gives you the capacity to track just about anything - use the available tools effectively.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords, PPC Info | 13 Comments