The Tale SEM Queries Tell

Since 2003 I’ve been blog­ging on SEM, and for most of that time I’ve tracked queries that lead peo­ple to my blog. In addi­tion to learn­ing that off­hand ref­er­ences to Michael Jack­son songs can lead to tons of unwanted traf­fic, I’ve learned a great deal about what SEM buy­ers are look­ing for. In this blog post I’ll list some of the types of SEM-related queries I’ve seen, and com­ment on what the queries say about search marketing.

SEM Ven­dor Queries
’ppc man­age­ment [ven­dor name]‘
’Google rec­om­mended bid man­age­ment tools’
’[ven­dor name] com­peti­tors’
’[Ven­dor 1] [Ven­dor 2] [Ven­dor 3] [Ven­dor 4]‘
’top SEM firms’

It’s per­haps no sur­prise that when peo­ple respon­si­ble for SEM at an adver­tiser or agency are look­ing for SEM tools, they go to search, but what is sur­pris­ing is how lit­tle objec­tive con­tent they find. Do a search for any of the above queries, and what you’ll find is that aside from industry-specific blogs such as mine, there are no inde­pen­dent third party reviews on SEM tools to speak of. Not so for more mature tech­nolo­gies such as CRM, data­bases, indus­trial sup­plies and web host­ing. Per­haps some­one should take this bull by the horns? Any­one? In the mean­time, SEM tech­nol­ogy buy­ers should post on forums such as Web­mas­ter­world, SearchEngineWatch and Dig­i­tal­Point­Fo­rums ask­ing oth­ers what expe­ri­ences they might’ve had with Ven­dor X, Y or Z. Also, if you’re going to set­tle on the right solu­tion, see who is & isn’t adver­tis­ing on the SEM-related queries you’d expect them to, and keep in mind that irra­tional SEM bid­ding by SEM ven­dors is a sign they prob­a­bly won’t take good care of your own campaigns.

SEM Sales Rep Queries
’Chris Zaharias Omni­ture’
’Anil Kamath Effi­cient Fron­tier’
’Kevin Ryan Motivity’

No doubt the SEM buyer is try­ing to learn about the SEM sales­per­son they have met or will meet, but more impor­tantly, I think SEM buy­ers want to know that the peo­ple they’re speak­ing to out SEM tools actu­ally know what they’re talk­ing about, par­tic­i­pate in indus­try con­fer­ences and dis­cus­sions, and have enough knowl­edge of the space for their view­points to be worth con­sid­er­ing. Over the years I’ve had many, many busi­ness rela­tion­ships start with peo­ple com­ing to me and say­ing, in effect, ‘I wanted to get your opin­ion on your and other solu­tions because I keep see­ing your name as I research the space.’ Horn toot­ing aside, this really means that most of the peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing SEM firms in pre-sales dis­cus­sions don’t know enough about the space to be trusted as capa­ble of giv­ing accu­rate assess­ments of their and other ven­dors’ solu­tions. And fur­ther, these SEM cred­i­bil­ity searches make clear the unfor­tu­nate predica­ment SEM buy­ers face: there is no objec­tive source of SEM ven­dor reviews.

SEM Cam­paign Man­age­ment Queries
’his­tory of bid man­age­ment’ — sur­pris­ingly, there are quite a few stu­dents of the space, but very lit­tle in the way of Wikipedia entries or his­tor­i­cal SEM arti­cles. This will change, but only if SEM buffs do their part.
’Google match types’ — prob­a­bly the most fre­quent query I see, reflects con­sis­tent indus­try con­cern that the match types Google defaults to are not the ones that best serve advertisers.

‘Expanded Broad Match’ — like­wise, you never see peo­ple search­ing for Exact or Phrase match ; those match types work the way you’d expect them to, whereas EBM is much more chal­leng­ing for adver­tis­ers to understand.

‘Auto­matic Match beta’
’search query length’ — I’m see­ing more of this query lately, per­haps because peo­ple are see­ing shrink­age of the long tail in their own campaigns.

‘SEM opti­miza­tion algo­rithms’ — not as rare a query as you’d think, shows that buy­ers know SEM sys­tems’ math is an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion.
’ppc dis­tri­b­u­tion fraud’

‘AdWords account hijacked’ — lit­tle has ever been writ­ten about what is actu­ally a very reg­u­larly occur­ring PPC-related crime, but hardly a month goes by with­out some­one on an SEM dis­cus­sion forum claim­ing that their account was hijacked and new cam­paigns added that drive traf­fic to a fly-by-night affil­i­ate program.

Per­haps just as inter­est­ing are the SEM queries you don’t see. Why aren’t peo­ple search­ing for
’best SEM user inter­face’
’SEM buyer’s guide’
’what to look for in SEM solu­tions’
’SEM ven­dor reviews’

Because the major­ity of SEM solu­tion buy­ers are first-time buy­ers, most don’t know what they don’t know and just assume that if they research the ven­dors that con­tact them, they’ll do fine. That couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth, though, as SEM firms are noto­ri­ously good at — lo & behold — using search to iden­tify prospects and will take advan­tage of novice buy­ers like you wouldn’t believe. So as an SEM solu­tion buyer, rec­og­nize the lack of objec­tive infor­ma­tion, talk to as many other buy­ers as pos­si­ble, and know the ven­dors from mul­ti­ple view­points online and off.