Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns

Google Insights, a free and relatively new research tool, provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization.

Like it or not, many online retailers depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) to drive shoppers to their digital stores. If the clicks slow down, so does business. And keeping good-quality traffic flowing has been a real challenge. Retailers, particularly those with annual sales of less than $100,000, have had to constantly massage their PPC and SEO programs, tweaking a keyword here to save 3 cents per click or adjusting a landing page there to make an incremental gain in organic listings. This constantly changing process has often been akin to alchemy—a retailer makes a change and then huddles around his analytics software watching for an effect that may or may not produce web traffic gold.

Google, which derived most of its $5.5 billion in recent quarterly revenue from PPC advertising, has an interest in helping advertisers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. So Google has long offered free tools to help advertisers and marketers. The newest apparatus for SEO and PPC effectiveness is Google Insights for Search, which can help online marketers make choices about their PPC and SEO campaigns. As helpful as Google Search is, it is not a panacea that cures all marketing and advertising ills. Marketers will still have to experiment, test, and try new ads, new landing pages, and new keywords.

Insights For Your Ad Message

There are many ways to market the products your online store sells, and Google Insights is a good tool for helping to hone an advertising message. Let’s imagine for a minute that I sell electronics via my online store. Recently, I got a great deal on a lot of 3M’s new MPro110 handheld projectors. This micro projector fits in the palm of my hand, but displays a 50-inch diagonal slide show on the wall of a darkened room. The MPro110 has three advantages over its larger competitors—(1) it is more compact and therefore easier to take on sales calls, (2) at $360 it costs less, and (3) it uses very little power and is, therefore, more environmentally friendly. But because I am a small store with a limited advertising budget, I can only afford to run an advertising campaign around one of the MPro110’s three advantages. What do I do? Well, I can check Google Insights and see which of these features will likely get me the best results.

To use Google Insights I can focus on three possible phrases: portable projector, cheap projector, and “green” (meaning environmentally friendly) projector. Also, since I am not licensed to sell the MPro110 outside of the United States, I want to limit my results to the U.S. I type my terms into Google Insights and learn that “portable projector” tends to be the most popular search term of the three. While there is still a lot of analysis to be done, I have a good starting point for my campaign. If I center the PPC ads and my landing pages around the MPro110’s portability, I should get more total traffic—or at least that is one way to read the results.

Insights to Find New Markets, Times

A second way that I can use Google Insights is to find new markets or to find out when my marketing will be the most effective. Let’s imagine that I operate an online sporting goods store that targets high school athletes. For years I have made my money selling football gear and baseball bats, but I want to expand into new sports. I head to Google Insights and look to see how wrestling shoes are trending. I know from my experience in football and baseball that sports have a seasonal ebb and flow, so I look for my search term across a series of date ranges. The results show me a clear trend line. Interest in wrestling shoes increases in October and peaks in November when most high school teams are starting their practices.

Understanding the Numbers

It is important to understand exactly what the numbers in Google Insights mean. In particular, Google is not releasing the actual number of searches for a particular keyword or phrase in the Insights tool. Rather it is offering normalized and scaled results that help to track trends relative to each other.

Here normalizing means that Google takes the raw rankings for given sets of data and divides those data sets by a particular variable, essentially balancing the results across regions. Google gave this example, “Canada and Fiji show the same percentages for the term ‘hotel.’ Does this mean that they have the same amount of search volume for that term? Just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn’t mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. Data from these two regions—with significant differences in search volumes—can be compared equally because the data has been normalized by the total traffic from each respective region. So, we can assume that users in both Fiji and Canada are equally likely to search for the term hotel.”

Next, Google scales the data sets so that you can see a relative comparison, displaying the results on a scale of 0 to 100 where 100 is the peak interest in the term or phrase and all other points are relative to that peak. For example, searches for the term “ecommerce” peaked in February 2004. That peak is ranked as 100 on the Insights scale. In October 2008, there were slightly more than half the number of searches for “ecommerce” as there had been in February 2004, so October 2008 rates a 55 on the relative scale.

Conclusion: Use Google Insights, But You’ll Still be Doing Some Trial and Error Marketing

Google Insights for Search is an “insightful” tool for marketers and advertisers. It will help make some choices about what and when to promote with your PPC and SEO campaigns, but it is not a cure all and a certain amount of promotional alchemy will still be required if you want to make marketing gold.