Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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October 16, 2006
The Sun Ahead of the Curve? Paid and Organic Search Profile (Post 3 of 3)
The Sun is one of the more aggressive News and Media sites in the UK in paid search marketing and so makes a good example for dissecting their search engine marketing strategy.
In the four weeks to 14th October 2006, The Sun received 20% of its search traffic from paid listings. Among ten of the most visited News and Media sites in the UK, it was the only one to receive more than 3% of its search traffic from paid listings. The Guardian Unlimited received 2% and Times Online 3%. Telegraph and FT.com each received 1% of their traffic from paid search. BBC, BBC News, CNN.com, Daily Mail and The Scotsman all received less than 1% of their traffic from paid search listings.
The following list shows the top 20 paid terms sending visits to The Sun in the past four weeks. (Paid Volume refers to the percentage of traffic that term drove to the site as a proportion of all paid search traffic. Paid Rate refers to the percentage of traffic for the term that is paid.)
Hitwise UK: Top 20 Paid Terms Sending Visits to www.thesun.co.uk. Four weeks to 14th October 2006.
It can take time to move up in the organic search results and paid listings can be an effective way for content owners (such as tabloids and broadsheets) to respond to current events and to appear among the top of the search engine results. In the past four weeksThe Sun was the #2 website receiving visits from searches for "richard hammond" (after Google News UK and ahead of the BBC), #3 for searches for "steve irwin" (after Crocodile Hunter and Google News UK), #1 for "connie fisher", #4 for "lindsay lohan" (and the top news website), and #1 for "trinny and susannah" (receiving 26.61% of visits from searches for the term).
Media companies are facing new competitors online. From aggregators such as Digg and Google News to blogs to social networks, media companies are competing for the attention of consumers and advertisers. This makes the The Sun's marketing strategy even more interesting.
The Sun is a content owner with an advertising supported website. The Sun is now paying for visits that will in turn boost the cost per impression (CPM) that they can charge their own advertisers. It also may broaden their brand awareness and long-term site visits. I welcome comments on this. Is this simply triage - with The Sun buying and selling eyeballs or is it building long-term value for its brand? Media companies are in a difficult position and I commend The Sun for trying something different.
Also, a note on rankings - The Sun ranked #5 last week in the Hitwise News and Media category behind various BBC websites and Yahoo! UK & Ireland News. The Sun's ranking last week was buoyed in part by the Sun Premiership Dream Team and will likely drop down to #9 again shortly.
Post 1: Profile of MoneySupermarket
Post 2: Ad Copy & Click Through Rate
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 01:01 PM
Posted to Video Sharing
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Comments
Why would more traffic necessarily boost their CPM? More traffic could boost their total revenues, but they still need advertisers to fill that extra traffic. More traffic and a finite number of advertisers generally leads to a lower CPM. Please explain further if I'm missing your point.
Posted by: Chris at October 17, 2006 06:21 AM
Chris - good point, thanks for calling me on that. You are right- additional traffic won't boost the CPM for The Sun, but could boost overall revenues.
Assuming constant CPM rates (which is not always the case) The Sun will earn additional revenues from the extra traffic. They may need to bring in more advertisers to spread the cost, depending on budgets of their advertisers.
The thing I find really interesting is the idea of traffic triage. Can The Sun make higher profits by increasing traffic through paid search? If they are paying £0.13 per click (max bid price on Yahoo! Search Marketing for the term "richard hammond" yesterday) is it profitable for them to then essentially resell that eyeball to an advertiser on a CPM basis?
Also, I'll watch whether we see their traffic grow over time. Could be that paid search will work as a long term acquisition strategy.
Time will tell.
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at October 17, 2006 10:56 PM
This is very interesting that driving traffic could boost CPM rates. Media buying unfortunately has shown to work in reverse economies of scale. So if you buy more coverage you pay more per unit of coverage. Hence with a large audience size it is quite likely that Sun could start charging more for their CPM. I have seen that happen before in content sites...
Posted by: Harish at October 30, 2006 05:15 PM
