Making sense of Google: a quick guide for marketers

It’s by no means the only search engine – but it’s the biggest and, many would argue, the most innovative. Between searches options readily visible on its home page and what investigating deeper in the site can discover, Google has more tentacles than an octopus. For online marketers, managing the various paid and unpaid ways to be found on Google is an increasingly complex task, so search engine-marketing companies such as iProspect.com Inc. have developed strategies for marketers looking to make sense out of working with Google.

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The first thing e-retailers should do when figuring out what advertising to buy on Google? “Don’t start out by buying a Google product. Optimize your site for natural search first because in Google, that’s where 70% of the clicks are happening,” says iProspect CEO Fredrick Marckini. Then, marketers should consider buying Google’s paid AdWord programs. “They are important because 30% of the people who are on Google are clicking there – and they may be a different 30% who are clicking on natural search results,” Marckini says.

It’s then important for retailers to get into Google's shopping engine, Froogle. While not the most important shopping engine, says Marckini, it does have enough traffic to have an impact on revenue. Finally, depending on the retailer’s market, and at the right price, they should look at Google’s contextual ad program, AdSense. These ads are distributed to media and other non-commerce sites.

“Contextual advertising is a controversial area. There are reports that it doesn’t convert as well as paid search, but our experience is that it introduces you earlier in the buying cycle to the consumer who’s doing research,” Marckini says. That means that while the conversion rate at that point in the cycle may be lower, latent conversion is higher. “The customer may not buy then, but they may go back and buy it on your search ad later,” he says. “The key is paying hyper-close attention to the conversion rate on these programs, because you can spend an awful lot on keywords that don’t convert.”