According to the Google Keyword Tool,there were 7.5 million broad match searches on the term ‘soap’ in September.  Granted that some of the searches are related to “soap operas” rather than cleansing soaps, there are still quite a few people searching for the term.  CPG companies are fueling this growth in search with increased investment in online advertising.  In fact, according to TNS, one of the leading soap brands Dove spent nearly $5MM on online display advertising during the first half of this year.  This investment is significantly greater than that of rival brands Softsoap and Olay.  Due in part to their investment in online advertising, Compete’s data shows that site traffic to Dove.com are multiples greater than its competitors.

Over one million consumers visited Dove’s website in August.  This volume is comparable to the number of consumers visiting sites like Bravo TV, The New Yorker and Morningstar.  So how does Dove maintain its online visitor volume using display advertising?  Many of you have probably seen a Dove ad online recently.  We went back a few months and examined two campaigns that Dove ran on both Yahoo! and AOL in late July.  We isolated exposed consumers who saw the Dove ad and compared their behavior to a group of control consumers who did not see the ad but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition.  Take a look at the search results below.

On Yahoo!, exposed consumers were nearly twice as likely to search for the Dove brand as control consumers who did not see the ad up to a week after the campaign ended.  The ad on AOL resulted in an even greater shift in consumer behavior prompting exposed consumers to search at nearly twice the rate than those on Yahoo.  The incremental search activity for Dove is not just a sign of online success, it is also a sign of brand strength and consumer recollection. So it is no wonder that according to the Google Keyword Tool, there were 2.2 MM searches for Dove in September compared to 823K searches for Olay and 60K searches for Softsoap.  The ads did drive direct traffic to Dove’s site, but Dove got even greater value from the incremental searches and the resulting “indirect” traffic.  Here is another great example that shows that online advertising indeed works!

When it comes to brick and mortar retailers, Walmart is clearly the market leader just by its sheer size. In fact, Walmart’s dominance transfers online where it received 33M visitors in August which was 10% more than the next closest brick and mortar rival, Target. Not only does Walmart attract more consumers but it is also growing at a faster rate than Target. For the past 6 months Walmart.com has seen double digit year-over-year growth in site visitors, outpacing the growth rate for Target.com.

One might wonder how a giant like Walmart continues to maintain such strong growth. One reason is their aggressive online advertising campaigns. In the past six months, Walmart has run several prominent display ad placements on the front pages of large portals like Yahoo! and AOL.

But just how effective are these six-figure investments?

We took a look at a one-day homepage campaign that Walmart ran on the AOL homepage on August 6th. We compared consumers who were exposed to this ad against a control group of consumers who were not exposed but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition. The comparison of the exposed behavior against a control group allows us to measure the true lift of the campaign on online behavior.

Our data below show that the Walmart campaign had an immediate impact on the exposed consumers, driving an 81% greater rate of visitation to the site just within the first week after exposure. More interestingly, the impact of this campaign carried through to four weeks post exposure. With each passing week after August 6th, exposed consumers visited Walmart.com at a higher rate than the control group. By the fourth week, 27% of exposed consumers had visited Walmart.com which is 52% greater than the control group.

This was only one of multiple homepage campaigns that Walmart has run so far this year. Imagine the compound impact of all these campaigns on site visitation to Walmart.com. Clearly, powerful online advertising is one factor driving this retailer’s online growth.

In addition to running prominent online display advertising, Walmart has also been testing various ad formats, from clickable video to more involved interactive ad units. So in part 2 of this blog series, we will investigate differences in the impact on online behavior for these various ad formats. Stay tuned!

Search Share

Since its launch at the beginning of June, Microsoft’s Bing has been gaining traction in the search realm, and is proving itself to be a viable competitor to Yahoo! and Google. Bing has seen increase in its search volume for the past three months straight. Out of the “big five engines” Bing and AOL are the only ones who can make that claim. In terms of core search growth, Bing stands out.

Bing’s search share continues to rise and now stands at 8.5% when including Club Bing. The majority of Bing’s increase came from growth in core search which continued growing at .3ppt this month. While AOL and Yahoo! can barely show growth from last year, Ask, Google and Bing all enjoy double digit search volume growth Y-O-Y. Out of those three Bing is currently leading the pack with 29.7% Y-O-Y growth in its core search volume. Google served up 200 million less queries in August compared to July, dropping its search share to 72.3% when taking into account Club Bing.

Bing makes gain in Paid Clicks

Last month we reported that Bing wasn’t able to convert its search share growth into more paid clicks, but we cannot say the same this month. Not only did we see Bing increase its paid search share by .2ppt in August, the share of Bing users who perform a paid click and the rate at which Bing users perform paid clicks, are all up for the past three months.

Google has hovered around 6.2% share of paid clicks for the past 3 months. In terms of paid clicks per user, Google still dominates the field with an average of 4+ paid clicks per user. Yahoo! is second in this category, with an average of 1.6 paid clicks per user in August. When Bing launched in June, Bing saw an immediate 30% spike in paid clicks per users. While growth has slowed since then, Bing is still increasing the number of paid clicks by 5% in each of the past two months. This is a sign that Bing is doing a good job at providing relevant paid links that capture the eyes and intentions of the user

It will be interesting to see if this summer’s decline in search volume will recover in September. Could a short hiatus from searching cause a user to explore a new engine (Bing?) when they get back?

What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• The upward trend in search as a means of navigation continues. Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter account for a large portion of this growth.
• Yahoo! mail, AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail all make it onto the top movers list
• Netflix, ask.com, Comcast.net, TMZ, and Capital One have all at least doubled their query volume over the last year
• Michael Jackson is still on everyone’s mind still receiving over 2 million queries last month
• The fastest growing term was windows live, having less than 80,000 searches last year, last month there were 4.5 million (5588% increase)

Findings:

• With no election this year, queries for presidential candidates Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin have taken a back seat.
• Circuit City’s bankruptcy/liquidation and the subsequent closing all of its stores to exclusively become an online store has resulted in a significant drop in its search power. Surprisingly it still received over 200,000 queries.
• Evidently, Tramadol is no longer the narcotic hot topic.

Social networks are still becoming more and more popular. Based on an announcement this past Tuesday, Facebook has become the worlds largest social networking site with over 300 million worldwide users and is now financially viable, generating enough cash flow to cover all expenses plus the capital to continue expanding. Is Twitter next?

Microsoft Live has experienced considerable growth over the last year and their recent launch of the Bing brand looks to propel them even further.

The next few months should shape up to give an interesting look at the shopping habits of consumers as we near the Christmas season. Will the recession force price conscious consumers to rely on search as a bargain hunting tool? What will be the hottest toys compared with last year? Check back over the next few months to see.

July search term biggest movers are here! What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and YouTube have seen explosive traffic growth in the past year and to follow suit their query volumes have grown substantially
• While portal properties Yahoo! (141MM Uvs) and AOL (55MM Uvs) haven’t significantly grown in traffic, they have seen 50%+ increase in brand queries since last year
• No sharp traffic trends in webmail properties Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, but brand terms for both of these properties have risen sharply

Overall, brand term use is on the rise. Why, might you ask? One answer is that consumers are becoming more dependent on search for navigation (typing a brand into the search bar instead of navigating directly to the brands website). It’s not that consumers don’t know the names of these brands – they’re using the exact brand name as their search query as you can see below.

Taking a quick look at the top 5 keyword referrals (data taken from site profiles on compete.com) to some of the domains mentioned above, we see that navigational search nearly always encompases the top 5 keyword referrals to the sites (and a large portion of search referral traffic).

Search (as a means of navigation) is on the rise, at least in terms of traffic to some of these big online brands. Did internet surfer laziness take over (‘www.’ and ‘.com’ became too hard to type)? Are consumers showing more engine loyalty/trust in their engine’s results? I’ll admit I’m one of them.

Check back next month to see how this trend continues to take shape.

So now that we are two months into the Bing launch, where has the $100 million ad budget and loads of PR coverage gotten Microsoft? Well on many fronts Bing seems to winning a few hearts and minds but regarding the bottomline connections it’s a little less straight forward. Bing continued to build Microsoft’s search share, but paid search clicks didn’t grow at the same rate.

Last month we told you that this .3ppt increase was impressive because the Search industry as a whole struggled. This month we unfortunately can’t make the same claim; in a month where the industry grew query volume as a whole, we would have expected Bing to have more than just a flat growth rate. Still growth in any form is a good thing compared to the trends we were looking at for Live Search a few months ago.

Google’s market share grew a solid 12.8% from this time last year, remaining at roughly 74%. Yahoo! was the biggest loser this month in terms of search share, declining 1% since June.

Ask led the field with 48% month-over-month growth in volume, but this growth was needed simply to make up for the previous two months of losses. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that as impressive as 48% M-O-M growth sounds, that only accounts for a little over 100 million queries; hardly a drop in the total queries bucket that saw over 12.5 billion queries served up in July.

Google had a slight gain in sponsored click rate with a .13 ppt increase. While this might not sound like much, Google generates over 6 billion referrals each month, so that increase accounts for millions of additional paid clicks, which is nothing to scoff at.

We did not see the same uptick for Bing, which despite increased search share saw a slight decline in paid clicks. After strong growth in the sponsored referral rate in June, Bing lost .1 ppt in July. We saw a surprising jump in Ask’s paid clicks last month as well, but unfortunately like Bing, Ask was unable to convert its query share gain into growth in paid clicks and this month slipped back to 2008 levels. It is important to note that paid click performance is effected by a number of other factors out of Bing’s and Ask’s control. Bad advertising is still bad advertising even if you slap it on a Ferrari.

It will be interesting to see how the announced Yahoo! search and Bing partnership will pan out. Success will depend on Bing’s ability to keep increasing its search share, while Yahoo! will need to bring high quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks.

Although Dr. Bernanke is confident that the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery, we expect online advertisers to continue keeping a close eye on their minimized budgets until there are promising signs of increased consumer spending. Will the engines use this opportunity to do more with less and increase the effectiveness of their paid clicks? You know we’ll be watching and reporting!