AFS-Inc (Advanced Formula Search) for PPC/Paid search and SEO/Natural search agency

Research

AFS’s clients say that this is one of the areas we excel in.

This is the type of research we do which is careful and painstaking. No other agency comes close.

Your business. We try to understand your business thoroughly. What are you trying to do? What do you want? In a retail context, what products or services are you trying to sell? What are their characteristics of these products? What is the size of the market (all channels including non-internet)? What is your current market share or planned market share. Who are your competitors in the total business space (internet and non-internet)? Who might enter this sector or segment? What are the barriers to entry? What are the economic and financial factors and structure of this market segment or sector? And so on…
Then there is the net. Narrowing down to just the internet, we examine everything above once again…. The size of the market, your market share (and/or planned market share), the actual nature of current and planned competition. Growth and the trends in this sector of the internet market place.
Then we look at the specifics of what you have done, what you are doing, what your current or possible internet competitors are doing. Natural and paid search and all other web-based channels. We appraise strengths and weaknesses of your website.
Keyword research. We spend several days at the beginning and every week we revisit keywords. This has several aspects as discussed below.
Data mining: Data mining is the process of extracting patterns and search terms that is relevant for people who may be looking to come to your site – potential, existing and new conquest customers/leads. We use a variety of different tools (none are foolproof) and common sense. However, we also verify our findings as discussed below.

Data mining for search terms can be used to uncover patterns in search terms but it is an art (played interactively) to develop a full set of search terms that will actually trigger the display of a paid search advert. The mining process will be ineffective if the samples are not a good representation of the larger body of data. Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the larger body of data if those patterns are not present in the sample being "mined". Inability to find patterns may become a cause for some disputes between customers and service providers. Therefore, data mining is not foolproof but may be useful if sufficiently representative data samples are collected. AFS, so far, has never let a customer down. In fact, we tend to find more relevant keywords and search terms than anyone else – by far.
The related terms data dredging, data fishing and data snooping refer to the use of data mining techniques to sample sizes that are (or may be) too small for statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns discovered. Data dredging may, however, be used to develop new hypotheses, which must then be validated with sufficiently large sample sets. In certain circumstances, this can become relevant.
Volume, cost-per-click/impression/action versus position within Google and likelihood of conversion
AFS’s unique ‘wind-tunnel’ tests. Scale models and high search volume is exactly what this is about and provides important and valuable information. This is typified by a small number of keywords with high search volumes.
AFS has a unique process, which we call ‘toe-in-the-water’ tests. This is similar to the well-known jargon of ‘suck it and see’. This is the process of conducting ‘live’ small-scale experiments in search engines (e.g. Google) to verify volumes, at different quality cost-per-click levels, different positions and so on. Feedback as to keyword quality and Google’s internal quality measurements are important. This type of test is typified by a larger set of keywords and search terms and a smaller search volume (by restricting geographical area or time displayed).

Research into how many accounts, which search engines, how many campaigns, how many adgroups etc is important. Intuition, gut feel or what we have done before is not a good basis. Scientifically this must be tailor made to each client and each application. Once created it must also evolve. However, the initial structure must be careful research with both wind-tunnel tests and toe-in-the-water tests.