Half of digital marketers don’t know which words gain optimum returns -study

Half of digital marketers don’t know which words gain optimum returns -study

What do you mean half of them don’t know what they’re doing?...A Hydra survey finds advantages for collaboration in digital campaigns and some of the realities of running online search.

July 13, 2011 2:41 by Precious de Leon

A survey on the current state of Natural Search (Search Engine Optimisation, SEO), Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click, PPC) and Social Media integration conducted by Hydra, a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing technology, reveals:

There are benefits to sharing keywords and phrases across digital channels

Technology is a necessity for managing, reporting and implementing digital campaigns

There is a need to simplify benchmarking against and understanding of competitor data

Advantages of collaboration

Measuring performance for terms at a granular level and discovering new high value keywords is challenging for most marketers. Nevertheless, Hydra’s ‘Natural Search, Paid Search & Social Media Integration 2011’ survey shows that teams sharing terms between disciplines display greater confidence in dealing with them when compared to their peers working in isolation.

Those that do are more confident:

The keywords and phrases in their campaigns reach their target audience (73 percent vs. 64 percent of the general sample and 54 percent of those that do not share keywords);

Their team is ‘on trend’ when handling new keyword trends (47 percent vs. 42 percent of the general sample and 28 percent of those that do not share terms).

Although most respondents (55 percent) answered ‘no’ when asked about knowing which new words or expressions are worth spending money on, there was a palpable difference between these subgroups: of those that share terms, over half replied ‘yes’ (54 percent); whereas a great majority of those that do not share terms answered ‘no’ (80 percent).

Consolidated technology

The use of technology in online marketing has become ubiquitous. However, marketers are in need of a more consolidated technology landscape where single-task tools can be replaced by more comprehensive multi-functional systems.

29 percent of respondents to Hydra’s survey indicated under 50 percent of their needs are met by their current toolset. Unsurprisingly, however, those with a greater number of tools (10 or more) had the highest percentage (39 percent) of replies within the ’75+ percent of needs met’ band.

In contrast, a resounding majority (90 percent) saw an advantage in having digital teams use a common reporting and campaign implementation platform.

Desire for competitive intelligence

Benchmarking performance against competitors is crucial for most online marketers. Yet there is a palpable need for facilitating access to competitor information.

The majority of respondents (77 percent) regularly benchmark their site against competitors. This was relatively consistent regardless of the number of keywords they managed.

However, 56 percent admitted accessing competitor data was either ‘moderately difficult’ or ‘difficult’; the most prevalent answer across the whole sample was ‘moderately difficult’ at 45 percent.

Those with tens of thousands of keywords displayed the highest percentage of respondents finding access to competitor data ‘moderately difficult’.

“Hydra’s survey shows teams that share terms and work collaboratively have greater confidence in their success than those who don’t because they can consider the whole picture”, says Ruth Zohrer, Solutions Consultant at Hydra. “Across the board, however, there is an obvious desire to gain greater insight into competitor data easily and efficiently. These two challenges justify their request for better, more comprehensive technology that meets most of their needs: an all-encompassing solution that can replace a set of multiple tools.”

Of course, one of the reasons Hydra has release the study is because it has launched the One Platform, which “enables enterprise marketers to strategically and proactively monitor, report and participate in the conversation existing and potential customers are having about their brand online.” At least that’s what the press release said.