In preparing for a visit to Google last week, I developed a wish list of features, tools, and metrics for the world of Search. In reviewing my list, there’s one I think is interesting enough to share…

Effective Reach. In the past, I have used this interchangeably with click through rate (CTR). The reality is I wish it was a metric that would give me the percentage of “Users” that actually visited my site during a given time frame relative to the total # of visitors that searched for a particular keyword. CTR percentage is calculated by dividing the # of clicks by the # of impressions. How helpful is that metric? Have you ever challenged this? Have you ever thought there must be a better way of assessing the ability to acquire potential customers? Well, maybe there is a better way. What if we exclude the repetitive searches by the same user? Think about it. We’ve all done it. Look at your search history. I would be hard pressed to believe anyone searches once and only once for each query. So, how many times have you searched the most common term in your logs… 2? 3? How about 10 times? It’s not that unlikely. These repetitive searches give us a false sense of effective reach.

Here’s another one. Think about the number of times the same user clicks on your ad using the same search term. We all know search is becoming highly navigational so it is not unlikely that users are clicking on your ad multiple times for the same query. Once again, the data becomes skewed in determining what I call effective reach. What I really want to know and understand is how many potential customers I could have in a given month.

As an example, let’s look at a shoe retailer that sells Birkenstocks. He bids on the search term Birkenstocks and gets 1,000 impressions in a month and 150 clicks on his advertisement that averages position 1.2. With this data alone, one would surmise the advertiser garnered 15% of the available traffic and did not get his website in front of 85% of the market. Now, a 15% CTR for a non-branded term is pretty good. While every keyword per industry differs in how “good” is defined, it’s safe to assume this ad is pretty well-optimized. Is that the best we can do with PPC? Do we need SEO to get the additional 85%?

In many cases, the answer is partly yes. There are some users that prefer the paid and others that prefer the organic. Last year, we actually ran a small test on a client to challenge our hypothesis that having a double listing (one from PPC and one from SEO) was incremental traffic and not cannibalization. We had a high volume search term that was #1 in Yahoo using our SSP Feed (which allows us to add a tracking url) and the #1 paid listing using YSM. We tracked all sales received through each of the ads and found 95% of the sales to be unique, meaning the user that purchased through organic never clicked on our paid search ad and vice versa. This being true, it validated the need to employ both an SEO and PPC strategy. Simultaneously, it challenges the idea that…

“I will bid on paid search UNTIL I get the organic listing I desire. Then I can turn off the PPC and laugh all the way to the bank”. Ok, I am paraphrasing slightly but you get the point.

I digressed to a PPC/SEO debate but it is an important part of understanding the importance of this new metric Effective Reach. Back to the topic at hand, we learned the average frequency for the keyword mentioned in the example was 3. This means only 333 users actually existed for the 1,000 impressions. And, of the 150 clicks, 25 were repetitive. The Effective Reach % would be 125/333, which is over 37%. Much better!!

Next, we looked at our analytics and found 72 organic clicks during the same time frame with 61 being unique (this can be determined using any basic web analytics solution). Now our Integrated SEM Effective Reach % is (186/333), over 55%; giving us a much better indication of our market share and the opportunity that still exists.
This new metric would be more valuable than CTR on so many levels. Effective Reach would be a more accurate representation of our ability to drive potential customers to our website.