Michael Lamontagne

Search marketing is a tool that is still too often ignored by CPG food marketers. Their slow adoption of search can be attributed to a difficulty in defining success and traditional ROI metrics that are a challenge to determine. As a result, CPG food marketers have been slow to incorporate paid search into their overall marketing mix and strategy, unlike e-retail and other lead-generation industries where the benefits are measurable in real-time. In addition to paid search, CPG food brands often forget to think about organic search as part of any website development efforts. Some of the most neglected websites for basic SEO practices are CPG food websites; both brand and promotional sites.

In the past year, however, new information on search’s positive effects on CPG food brands has helped these marketers better understand why search should be included into their overall media mix. As a result, more CPG food marketers, including Kraft Foods, Betty Crocker and others, have launched search marketing campaigns. But there is still a long way to go before the industry fully and enthusiastically embraces the opportunity.

As more consumers use search to find information about CPG food brands and their products, there has been an increase in organic search traffic. Spikes in CPG food websites driven by paid and organic search activity typically can be seen in the Q4 holiday timeframe, when consumers are actively seeking entertainment ideas and recipe-related information. Over the past several years, there has been a steady rise in the search traffic for recipe information. This was further heightened by the recent recession that shifted consumer behavior to be more value-centric.

During this time, CPG food brand websites have focused a large part of their digital efforts on recipe dissemination to help drive interest in their brand products and to mirror consumer interest in recipes. To support their efforts, more CPG brands have leveraged paid search to help disseminate recipe content by bidding on recipe-related terms to drive consumers to the content. From December 2009 to May 2010, the top searched and clicked paid keywords across a panel of 16 CPG food brand websites found that 58% of the top 100 keywords were recipe specific, 20% were brand and 18% were food-specific (i.e. pasta salad). Interestingly, only 2% of the keywords related to coupons.

All CPG food marketers should have a strong search marketing component that fits within their overall digital marketing strategy. For CPG food marketers who are just starting to think about search marketing or who are just testing out the waters, consider the following recommendations:

1. Don’t forget about SEO Many marketers forget about the importance of organic search when developing their brand or promotional websites. If you aren’t sure about how your website is performing from an SEO perspective, ask your digital agency to provide you with a performance overview.

2. Understand consumer search behavior for your industry and products Better understanding how and what consumers are searching for in your industry can help you learn what drives their interest. This information can help form your search strategy.

3. Search efforts should mirror digital strategy Any search marketing campaigns should support a larger digital effort. If recipe dissemination or couponing is a core component of your digital strategy, your search strategy should also incorporate these elements.

4. Evergreen approach If budgets permit, search marketing should be on at all times throughout the year. The longer your campaign runs, the stronger its performance will be. As your campaign is optimized over time and consumers are able to see the ads multiple times, you will likely see improved metrics and better visibility compared to your competitors.

5. Corporate Communications/PR/Crisis Management Search marketing should play an important role for any corporate communications, PR or crisis management initiative. Search can help to drive consumers to the right information. There is no greater recent example than BP’s paid search campaign relating to the oil spill.

Google Analytics recently launched a new type of tracking code that can help with the problem of web analytic platforms not being able to capture visitor information if a visitor leaves the site too soon. The new tracking code would replace the old traditional tracking code and is placed in the page header versus at the bottom of the page. The code also allows for quicker load time.

This is a great solution to an increasingly difficult problem that is affecting the industry.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html

This could have some interesting implications on digital measurement.

Google Will Soon Allow You to Opt Out of Google Analytics Tracking.

I attend the Omniture Summit this year. My overall experience was must better, largely due to the fact that I was in a much better hotel. This year the conference was held at the Grand America hotel, which was a much better experience that the conference center.

Below is a summary of the key takeaways:

• Adobe now owns Omniture. Everywhere you looked in Salt Lake City and at the hotel, you saw the Adobe logo. It is very clear that Omniture was purchased to create an integrated solution of content and analytics, what they affectionately refer to as art and science merged together.
• Seth Godin is a great speaker. I was very impressed by him. His keynote speech was about finding the inner artist and genius within to help find new ways to solve problems. One point of interest was his discussion about lizard brains. Lizard brains are the part of the brain that is instinctual and may cause us to revert to what is comfortable for us. We must be aware of the lizard brain.
• Flash content is now available to be used in a Test & Target environment.
• The integration between comScore and Omniture is interesting. It will allow a more accurate representation of basic website traffic such as unique visitors, page views and time spent on site in comScore media metrix but based on Omniture data.
• Experian data is now available together via a Genesis integration. Omniture client will be able to select specific segments and import offline data into Omniture.
• Facebook ads are now available to be optimized in SearchCenter. As a result, Omniture will be able to import Facebook segment data and optimize against it.
• Display was a key focus at the conference. Omniture will now be able to target visitors on a site and serve ads across display ad networks.

This is really old news but I thought it might be good to bring up again. Omniture SiteCatalyst allows Twitter mentions to be integrated into the dashboard. I recently remembered that SiteCatalyst has this functionality when I was thinking about social media measurement for a client.

Here is a link with instructions on how to integrate SiteCatalyst and Twitter.

http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/02/23/integrating-twitter-into-web-analytics-inside-omniture-sitecatalyst/