Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

Pay for Click search engines for Corporations?   Looking at the internal search engines of large corporations such as Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and companies such as Avon, there are often situations where an internal search engine provides inadaquate results and an "ad" appears in the search results (to patch -up or enhance the search engine)

A search for "printers" on Dell, HP and IBM brought up the following "PPC Ads" although I doubt any of those corporations would term these "Smart Spots" in that way.

Avon Internal "Ad" for "lipstick" on Avon's Internal Search Engine

The "internal corporate search ads" do not have the  kind of bidding system that external PPC engines employ (nor could they, as pay with have "internal dollars" instead of real greenbucks - and various sub-brands may compete for the same keywords).   The Search Ads solve accuracy problems that Internal Corporate Search Engines often have - they simply can't produce an acceptable result for every search.

A. Corporate Sites often don't have enough of the "right" optimized content that will appear in the search results on their internal search engines for all the keywords they care about (CMS and Web Templates don't always mech well inth the internal search algos).

B. Copywriters for brands and lines of businesses are not writing their copy for search engines and often don't know how to do that. Education and Search Evanglists are needed from within the corporation but they are usually in short supply.

C. Corporations shoot themselves in the foot by altering the  ordering of search results  to favor certain terms over others - thereby throwing overall search effectiveness off - because the search engine can't be trusted to provide good results on it's own). In solving one problem, they can create yet another.  In time, visitors use the internal search engines less and less, favoring Google and Yahoo to find the content they are seeking for them - which they are often better at.

The solution lies in moving the internal search engines to real, full blown PPC models similar to they type of services provided by Google AdWords and Yahoo / Overture. 

Big Corporations don't run PPC engines on thier own sites - Why not?   Developing the software is expensive and third party services are usually not an option for security purposes.  Perhaps it's a solution just waiting for someone who thinks out of the box.

Let me put it another way:  Does anyone have a commerical PPC search engine that you can buy for your own site?  The answer is Yes.  There are companies that have used a product called Hyperseek Jackhammer 

The information of Hyperseek's PPC Search Engine came from PayPerClickAnalyst.com

The iWeb Jackhammer is web server software that powers over half of the Pay Per Click Search Engines. Sites like findit-quick.com, valleyalley.com, searchgalore.com, globesearch.com and abcsearch.com rely on The Jackhammer to keep their PPC Search engine organized, fast and secure. Additionally, they are able to provide their customers with the features and perks that they demand. These "second tier" PPCs are competing, profitably, with the likes of Overture (GoTo.com) and the other big guns as busy, popular Pay Per Click Destinations.

Corporations are in a different situation and the software would need to be modified but the application solves many of the problems that exist in corporation search today that I have seen first hand.

1. Corporations usually can not provide "metrics" on the internal advertising they run (they can't easily produce "impressions" and "click throughs" tied to internal search) - therefore they can't fully access how search effective the advertising is.   "Conversions" can't be accurately measured by corporations using thier current analytics for internal search - using a full blown PPC internal search engine goes a long way towards solving that problem - to solve it entirely, however, the commerce pages need to be accessable and tagged properly for the internal search PPC engine - that's seldom the case.

2. Staffing is lean, often being left to one person to oversee, a next to impossible task.  An internal PPC search engine solves the problem by putting the Stakeholders in direct control of thier own advertising and responsible for it's cost.  All artwork, copy, would be handled directly by the Stakeholder/brand elminating the need for staff to oversee this function.

3. Keyword Ownership - a delicate issue in any large corporation (ie: who owns the keyword "servers" in a company?  The Server Group? The Small and Medium Size Business Group that also sells the same servers?  The Large Enterprise Group - that also sells the same server?)

Today all three groups would face off and someone internally would have to decide.   However, in a PPC auction model, each Business Unit would simply bid what they were willing to pay in internal dollars for thier ad to be first - more or less eliminating the issue of who's page should be seen first for a keyword.

(since there's only a couple of bidders, all of them would appear on in the same search results  - on the same page - that may require some modification in how ads are ranked - perhaps Google's click through model that ranks Ads on the number of times they are clicked on relative to each other and the bid for each would work here).

In fact, if we put on our thinking caps, there's a whole world of Enterprise Search that is just waiting for this solution (and there's nothing to stop Google from coming to HP, or Dell or IBM and saying something like this):

"We, Google, can adapt our PPC AdWords engine to run against  your internal Search Engine" and only allow certain business units in your company access to the interface.  By doing so we save your corporation the price of developing your own PPC engine and we make a certain percentage of the internal dollars that are spent by the various business units).   There's money to be made here - alot of it.

Internal Search Metrics is waiting for solutions like the one I proposed above.