(Part III of a Series on Web Analytics for Search Engine Marketing)
There are lots of ways the web analysis can supplement or improve your overall Search program. Many of these take advantage of the unique cross view that web analytics provides across PPC, SEO, external advertising and direct traffic. By providing a comparative view, web analytics is ideal for finding the right balance of competing programs. Today's installment is on Organic Cannibalization - a topic I've written about several times already - but which remains interesting, especially to larger companies with aggressive SEO and PPC programs.
Organic Cannibalization and Support
The degree to which a PPC program may be "borrowing" clicks from organic listings can have a dramatic impact on the perceived ROI of Paid Advertising. In our numerous studies of this issue, the most common result was significant organic cannibalization of "brand" terms and highly-positioned (top 3) organic terms.
However, the degree of cannibalization varied widely (and could even provide support). In addition, this cannibalization was always accompanied by true incremental lift from PPC.
This last point is made much of by the various Search Engines in their marketing - and I've recently heard that they address the issue of organic cannibalization with data nearly identical to our own showing this undeniable lift. Because their stories are so similar, I've dubbed this the "Yooglesoft" take on cannibalization. It misses the point, of course. Program managers need to know the real cost of incremental lift by search term or they can't effectively manage their programs. Incremental lift is only desirable within some price range - and you can't figure out the real price of the lift unless you understand the depth of cannibalization.
There is no one right answer about the extent or importance of organic cannibalization - there is only the right answer for your organization based on actual measurement. Most enterprise web analytics systems can do this type of analysis easily - and provide you with a significantly better understanding of your PPC programs real ROI than you'll get from looking at your basic PPC statistics.
This is a classic case of the inability of SEM oriented measurement systems to provide a broad enough view of customer behavior. By failing to measure any behavior from organic sources, they provide zero-ability to track cannibalization. Web analytics tracks sourcing by both paid and organic, it provides organic-cannibalization analysis with relative ease.
Comments