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Toolbox: SEM

Let me make something clear before I go any further: when it comes to SEM I have startling little knowledge. Because of this, I secured the aid of friends and colleagues and I hope that the following will not be any more ridiculous that what I am usually doing in this blog.

While the monitoring-module was a way for users to define queries themselves, to assess them at a later time and the backlinkanalysis was to broaden the fundamental data, the SEM-module has its strength in the competition- and market-monitoring. The basis for these evaluations and analysis is a rather extensive, mainly German keyword-set. The results of the searchqueries from this keyword-set are calculated and saved every week. These data can be used to unearth a lot of interesting information, as I will show in a second.

The screenshot on the right shows the overview page of the SEM-module in the example of “ebay.de”. The first box shows a few indicators like the keyword total from the keyword-set for which Ebay is clearly placing ads, the average position of the Ebay-Adwords, the number of different display-URLs as well as a (in this case abbreviated) list of the domain through which the tracking is processed. Since I do not only have the data for the current week, the second box has an overview of the timely progression of the number of keywords that are bid on. Being steady in this example, this can become interesting if you are looking into whether an advertiser is strengthening or slowing their campaign. The third box holds a list with a selection of outstanding keywords that are being bid on. Just as the arrow besides the keywords/positions suggests, more information can be accessed.

To the left you can see that you also have the possibility to click through the complete keyword list. The screenshot shows, how on page 17, it seems that I ended up at Anglerbedarf (fishing supplies) on the alphabetically sorted list. Thanks to the small green arrow to the right of the keywords you are able to display those who are also placing ads for the keyword for the current week as well as the one prior.

To get approximately structured results for extensive lists, like the one from Ebay in this case, you can break down the advertisements by display-URL, the URL-fragment that advertisers put under their ads, which is often-times nonexistent in reality. For example, here we have all keywords that are being advertised for with the display-URL “www.ebay.de/garten”.

Besides the display-URL, the target-URL can be interesting, too. Target-URLs are the URLs to which the users are forwarded to when they click on an ad. Often these will be Adservers who count the clicks and measure other values such as conversion. In the screenshot we can see quite well that there are a variety of different domains that are currently advertising with the display-domain “ebay.de”. Besides the obvious ones like Webmasterplan, Ebay.com and Ebay.de there are also those like “adcenter33.com” or “kauf-beratung.com”. If we take a look at the keywords that are being advertised through these target-URLs, we can see that they are obviously trying to profit from the strength of the brandname.

Additionally to this inspection on domain- and directory-level we can extract nice toplists as well as other informations from this data. I am sure that a up-to-date list with the largest advertisers or rather the largest tracking-servers has its worth for many who work in this sector. What's more, the information, which ads are run through a tracking-server and to which extend (to the left as a neutral example from Zanox.com), is attractive.