Holiday Retailers Misdirecting Consumer Web Traffic

CrownPeak Study Reveals Holiday Retail Online Marketing Strategies and Results 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2009 – Holiday retailers are not making the most strategic use of online search marketing dollars, a new study by CrownPeak, the market leader in Web content management for online marketing, today reveals. CrownPeak’s “Holiday PPC Ad Strategies” study, analyzing key holiday advertising phrases and hundreds of advertisers and online advertisements, finds that 66% of holiday-themed online search advertising drives traffic to the Website home page or landing pages that are not clearly tied to the online ad where traffic originates. Only 34 percent of the holiday-themed search engine ads analyzed as part of the study directed traffic to specific landing pages that repeated the advertising call to action or were reflective of the original ad. On a more positive note, the study found that traffic driven by product-specific advertising was found to be more strategically targeted than its “holiday-themed” counterpart.

“The goal of our study was to determine how smart holiday marketers are being with their online PPC spend, and the results were surprising,” said Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. “By driving traffic to irrelevant content or the company’s home page, marketers are virtually guaranteeing that they aren’t going to convert Web visitors to buyers through online ads. On the other hand, tying campaigns to landing pages with a specific and relevant call to action can improve lift by up to 40 percent and--given how precious marketing dollars are these days--it’s time that holiday marketers get more strategic with their  budgets.”

Methodology:

As part of the study, CrownPeak analyzed search marketing results across 10 different holiday-themed phrases, including general phrases—such as “Holiday deals” and “Holiday Gifts”—specific products—such as “Nintendo Wii”, “Elmo Live” —and product categories—including “Halloween Costumes” and “Christmas Decorations.”  Individual advertisements were analyzed from over 100 online marketers, all of which leveraged the Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising product to disseminate campaigns. Advertisers were assessed over a period of two weeks.

Results:

CrownPeak determined that the majority of online ad campaigns and Website content were not linked, a core strategy often required to drive successful online advertising efforts. Of the 66 percent of advertisers that did not tie specific landing pages relevant to the search ad, almost 13% of these went to the advertiser home page. The remainder of the misdirected ads sent traffic to general category pages, or canned “searches” that didn’t specifically play off of the advertising copy (but in some cases, were loosely linked to the original search—e.g a search for “holiday gifts” would be linked to a general search for “gifts”).

Product-specific advertising performed better than its holiday-themed counterpart, though many retailers still failed to direct the majority of ads to a clear consumer call to action. 50 percent of product-specific advertisements linked either to a canned “search” or “category” page, or the Web site home page. Surprisingly, some advertisers—primarily content aggregators—directed ads to specific landing pages, which then featured advertisements for other providers of the product.

Study Winners:

Ecommerce retailers were the winners in the race to tie marketing ads and landing page relevance.  When looking specifically at Ecommerce sites, 54 percent of advertisers had content-specific landing pages paying off a click from a search ad.

Amazon and Target were among the highest scoring advertisers overall, consistently driving consumers to landing pages for products they were seeking.

To contact or learn more about CrownPeak go to http://www.CrownPeak.com.

About CrownPeak
CrownPeak is the market leader in on-demand Web content management for online marketers. CrownPeak’s unique combination of software and services enable marketers to create, manage and optimize Web content to drive measurable results and maximize the effectiveness of their marketing budgets. Hundreds of diverse organizations such as Skype, Hyundai, UPromise, Home Depot, Progress Software and the State of Virginia have realized the value in CrownPeak software’s renowned ease-of-use, its 24x7 customer support and strategic marketing services. CrownPeak has been named to EContent’s 100 most influential companies list, has won eWeek’s prestigious Analysts Choice Award and InfoWorld’s Product of the Year Award and has been named a finalist for Best Customer Service from the American Business "Stevie" Awards for the last three years.