Pay-per-click metrics can vary a great deal between seasons.

With the economy now slumping, it’s even more important to keep your supply, ad budget, and marketing sides synched with seasonal demand.

Need a surefire way to do that? Put reminders on your marketing calendar to check your cost per sale and profitability, then adjust your seasonal PPC strategies accordingly.

We’re well into the Easter and spring home-and-garden season, but for the rest of the year, you’ll want to map out your paid search strategy ahead of these major seasons:

Mother’s Day; Summer Fun & Vacations―5/1-8/1
Back to School and College―8/1-9/15
Halloween―10/1-10/31
Winter Holidays―11/1-12/25
“Get What You Really Wanted” Week―12/26-12/31

Here’s how to capitalize:

• Update sales and offers on your Landing Pages to match the current season. Ensure your headline, copy and calls-to-action on the page are completely relevant to the offer. You don't want to create "site flow disruption."
• Diversify your offers so that you always have a product that’s in season. Stretch. Innovate. Repurpose. For example, flowers and candy for Mother’s Day again? Yawn. What Mom really wants is . . . what you have to offer, of course!
• Study last year’s campaign results. Note the biggest ROI and most profitable keywords. Track these and apply adequate budget.
• Put a reminder on your marketing calendar to check your cost per sale and profitability. Successful paid search means locating the right customers, convincing them to convert, and eliminating costly traffic from tire-kickers.

Here’s a one-question quiz:

You already know the winter holidays are THE major engine for annual income, but how do the other major seasons and holidays stack up in terms of retail sales spikes? According to the National Retail Federation:

#2 Back-to-school
#3 Valentine’s Day
#4 Mother’s Day
#5 Easter
#6 Father’s Day
#7 Super Bowl (not really a season or holiday, but it generated over $9 billion this year)
#8 Halloween
#9 St. Patrick’s Day

Even if you missed #3 and #9 (today), now’s the time to start gearing up for #4-6. Think of it as March Madness for marketers. And if you want a cheat sheet for the rest of the year, download our 2008 MEC Annual Merchandising Calendar (PDF).

MarketingExperiments has always maintained that the display URL is a very important part of creating an effective ad. Our research over the years indicated that simply adding a www to the beginning of the display URL or capitalizing the words within the domain could increase click-through significantly. This brings up the question of “What is the optimal configuration for a display URL?”—especially when the domain name itself has no direct relevance to the search term.

Over the last month, we have been conducting an experiment to determine the answer to that question. We launched a test utilizing a couple of our research partners that contained three URL variations:

www.DomainName.com
Keyword.DomainName.com
www.DomainName.com/Keyword

Our results thus far have been very interesting. One of our researchers contended that “www.domainname.com” is what people expect to see. Any variation from that is unexpected and raises a small question in people’s minds,” and with one of our research partners, he appears to be spot on.

With that particular partner, utilizing a sub-domain resulted in an 18% decrease in click-through rate. Using an extension appeared to have marginal effect, resulting in a very similar—though slightly lower—CTR as the original display URL of “www.DomainName.com.”

Question answered, right? Wrong. Checking the results of our other test subjects produced the opposite results! The regular domain performed slightly worse than the extension while the sub-domain outperformed it by 15%!

We are now in the process of expanding the test and trying to determine why these results varied. Was it the subject matter? Why did the tests create or reduce friction and is it something inherent in the format or did we make an unfortunate choice in keywords? Hopefully we’ll have enough data to give you the answers in the next couple of months.

As an aside, displays URLs are just one part of PPC. It’s important that you gain a full understanding of the various elements of PPC ad copy writing. If you are planning on attending Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this year will have several sessions showing you how best to tackle the puzzle of effective ad copy head on. MEC subscribers can save an additional 10% when with our exclusive priority code, 10MEC.
To learn more, visit www.SESSanJose.com.

* SES conferences usually focus on all search-related promotions, revealing all the innovative marketing approaches and tactics used to reach your customers. Listen to “success stories” and the best practices from SEM/SEO industry leaders, experts, and the search engines themselves.

This is a big question with serious implications for online retailers in the months before the holiday buying season.
A recent article at Clickz throws some light on this topic.

Here is an excerpt:

The [WebSideStory ]study looks at traffic and conversion data from 20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006. Paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.

There are arguments to support both sides, Rand Schulman, WebSideStory's CMO, told ClickZ.

"On the one hand, because you control the message of paid search, you'd expect higher conversions. On the other side, because people value the 'editorial integrity' of organic, you'd expect higher conversions," he said. "Ultimately you need to do both. I think the eye-opener here is that neither side has a significant edge."

It would have been interesting to get some more details on the variables within the study.

For instance, were they comparing organic vs. paid, regardless of the position of either link on the page? In other words, did they compare an organic listing in position two with a paid listing also in position two? Or was the comparison between the two listings, on the same page, but regardless of position?

And did they compare paid and organic links which pointed to the exact same page? Paid links almost always point to an optimized offer page. But that often isn’t the case with organic links.

And were those 20 companies in the study of similar sizes? And did they represent a fair spread of industry categories?

However, putting aside those questions, and assuming the basic validity of the test, there is a big lesson to be learned here.

Keep your PPC campaigns going...but also pay attention to your organic search positions.

Remember, organic search traffic costs you nothing per click. So if you get the same conversion rate from organic listings, your net revenue could make a nice jump upwards. (Assuming you don’t spend an arm and a leg on search engine optimization.)

For those of you who are unaware, our next certification course covers the topic search engine marketing (SEM). In response to that, I have received several emails as to how the curriculum will pertain to Yahoo, in the midst of the Panama Update.

First, Yahoo’s Panama Update:

Later this year or early next Yahoo is scheduled to lunch a major change to its Search Marketing platform. This change is labeled “Panama Update” and will replace the old Overture platform with a platform similar to Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter.

The Panama Update will eliminate the transparent bid platform which allows users to bid on the position they want based on the CPC they are willing to pay for that position. They will be replacing it with a platform which uses a ranking formula.

Rather than the straight forward formula which is Position = CPC (Cost Per Click), Yahoo will use an algorithm which is similar to Google’s which is Position = CPC x CTR (Click-Through-Rate) x Quality Score.

What is “quality score”? Quality score is something Google recently added to adwords to help determine a sites ranking. It is the terminology applied to Google’s attempt at artificially ranking sites based on content. Strong related content receives a high quality score, little or non-related content receives a low score.

So how will the Panama Update impact advertisers? Essentially, it will place more responsibility on advertisers to build strong adcopy and send traffic to high content pages. It will also eliminate bid slamming (jumping up to one penny under your competitors bid) and Yahoo is no longer expected to have a waiting period for ad approval.

The Panama Update will help to promote those merchants who spend time to test and build strong ads.

Now, as to how it might affect the SEM Certification Course:

Since, Yahoo has not announced when the Panama Update will take place, we are proceeding with the curriculum based on the current platform. However, if the Panama Update goes live prior to the class on Yahoo Search Marketing we will cover the new platform.

We are committed to making this course as practical as possible and want to make sure the training covers the most current optimization techniques.