Ecommerce Masterclass: How SEO and PPC can co-exist more efficiently

We really enjoy Masterclassing events as they give us an opportunity to share top tips and have some engaging discussions with industry peers.

Our Client Strategy Director, Scott Donnelly, had the pleasure of speaking at the eCommerce Masterclass event today, where he engaged with the audience about helping their SEO and PPC strategies co-exist more efficiently.

Search is often treated as two separate channels – paid and generic, even though they both exist in the same landscape and both subjected to continual changes of algorithm updates, key phrase targeting, cost etc.

The way search should be is one single channel with two core disciplines that work together rather than fight each other. Ultimately this will enable the reduction of cannibalization and drive incremental performance.

In order to reduce cannibalization we use our proprietary tool Halo to analyse your generic and paid data and remove the wasted media spend and automate channel optimization. For Air B&B we removed £4.5M wasted media spend through our Halo analysis.

Generic search has the greatest opportunity to drive incrementality. Every brand has its limitations and comes with a cap as to how many brand searches happen from customers and it’s very easy to cannibalize in this area. Generic search terms may be expensive but they are extremely valuable and by targeting users earlier in the funnel you can reduce the CPAs by 87.5%.

The model in which we track and measure performance is broken and most models look at last click behavior which is negative towards generic search. We use our patented machine-learning software Corvidae to look at all of your marketing data across your entire marketing mix to identify opportunities to drive more revenue and analyse where your wasted marketing spend is. In a recent client study we identified generic search terms were 3x more valuable than previously though (£17k per day) which led to 5% more budget being spent on generic search. For Tesco we identified £28.5M incremental revenue through generic search after a Corvidae analysis.

In summary our three core areas for a successful search strategy are:

• Moving away from PPC and organic silos.
• Reduce wastage from removing cannibalization to drive true incremental growth in a saturated marketplace.
• Moving further back into the funnel we can capture new customers and drive incremental revenue.