The best example of this is the introduction of a new news-paper which we managed. In the pre-introduction period, where you could only do trial subscriptions, the cost per subscription was higher than the actual subscription fee. Once the (offline) media campaign started and the brand became more well-known, we saw cost per subscriptions dropped to less than 10% of the subscription fee.

From this example, and more I’ve came accross, I would definitely say that branding is really important in search. But in the end, it’s all about your objectives and testing what works best for your brand within your selected target group(s).

I’m very curious to read your examples of the synergy between Branding and Search.

Next to me my colleague Wiep Knol will also contribute on the “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques” session, a must see! I’ll be speaking about International SEO (day 1) and Local Search & Blended Results (day 2). If you have suggestions to include in these presentations, please let me know and will try to fit them in. And of course, If you like to join me exploring the London nightlife, be my guest!

This is a question I get asked quite often. And to be honest, the first times they asked me this, I couldn’t give a complete answer. And to be even more honest, it still gives me quite a hard time.

If your working with big brands, most of the time their management isn’t interested really in visitors, conversion rate or even the conversion itself. They are used to being this data available. Offcourse they are glad to hear the number of conversions has increased, the bounce rate cut in halve and visitors returning more often, but their main indicator is market share. If our conversation has doubled, who says the conversion rate of our main competitor hasn’t tripled?

Big brands management is used to having this data available in the offline market. With having a lot of more data online, we still don’t have the transparency we see offline. All though market researchers are doing quite some good job already (Comscore, Hitwise, even Google’s Ad Planner en Trends give us insight in marketing shares) market shares still aren’t as transparant as we would like to be.

To present your data in a broader perspective, I’ve summed up some tips to give a better answer to the question: “How well are we doing”.

Define the right competition:
I often see marketers who only want to benchmark their results to offline competitors and therefor miss quite some online competition and market share. To get a greater insight on your online competitors, take a look at SERP’s (search engine result pages) and see who’s also ranking on your top keyword, sign up to affiliate networking programs and see within a certain niche who’s advertising there and even what they are offering for a sale. You’ll be amazed how much companies you see there which you haven’t heard of before.

Use the data that’s available:
Allthough not all online data is accurate, do use it! Each data source may not have the right numbers, but combining several sources will give you trends and will also give you an overview where to place your brand.

Use your search engines:
Search engines give a great insight in how well your competitors are doing in the  one of the most traffic driven sources on the internet. Since search engines still have the highest traffic numbers, it’s key to have great positions on your top keywords. Simply pull of a ranking report on your most competitive keywords (lot’s of free and paid tools available for this, just search for ranking reports) and see which competitors have the best positions and which don’t. If you have great rankings and your competitor doesn’t, you’re sure his missing out quite some traffic and conversions.

I hope these tips give you some help to answer “How well are we doing?”. Please feel free to add your tips and comments below.