Over the past few months we have been doing a number of pilots with our Keyword Management Suite and the biggest challenge has been to gather data. We have actually spent the better part of the last four builds to enhance the data import, cleaning and filtering functions to deal with the chaos of search data.

We expected these problems early on since only a few large companies have actually integrated their paid and organic teams into a central team. These are the people that are realizing the value of the collaboration of paid and organic. The following will illustrate how bad the situation is and why a tool like ours can help. The following is an example of the process to get the data from a single company that both the company and their agencies have won awards for their search marketing programs.

April 2nd kicked off a pilot with a large company that spends double-digit millions on paid search. They realized they were not getting the collaborative benefits from their search program and wanted to understand how fractured it really is.

April 2nd received the list of the companies ?most important keywords? from Global Search Marketing Manager – 1,120 keywords

April 4th received list of ?most important keywords? from SEO team – 98 keywords

April 6th received export from their Enterprise SEO Management tool that is tracking performance and auditing the tool ? 298 keywords

April 18th received paid search data from PPC Management tool – 187,664 keywords (note 2 weeks to get paid data)

April 22nd received Omniture organic performance export – 397,832 keywords drove visits to the site from organic search for the week we are testing. Note 3 weeks to get data from Omniture which prides itself on how easy it is to pull data.

Interesting facts:

A 1,012 word difference between the list the Search Manager says is important and what is being tracked in SEO tools

Only .029% of the words used in Paid Search are important (all words equally budgeted)

Only 1 of the Top 20 keywords with highest Cost Per Click was on important list, active in SEO or ranked on page 1

4,887 of the keywords in the PPC program are currently ranking in the top 3 positions of Google which makes them prime candidates to test co-optimization to identify collaboration or cannibalization.

The collective team was surprised at some of these number and have since been working together to get them reconciled and start benefiting from the collaborative value of paid and organic search.

How big of a mess is your data? Ask for a trial of our tool to find out.