DMNews • search engine marketing guide 2009 paiD search 23
Three recession-proof strategies you can use for search success
The paid search puzzle: Putting the pieces together
By Wister Walcott y now, most marketers know the drill for 2009: Trim budgets and focus on effectiveness. For search marketers, there are several ways to meet this challenge. In fact, you can often wring more ROI out of your paid search campaigns without sacrificing much traffic. Here are three clear steps you can take: set clear goals Search is the most measurable and immediate form of marketing, but measurability doesn’t mean much if you’re unsure of what metrics to analyze. The first step is to decide exactly what your goals are with SEM. Do you want to sell more product? Is your goal to collect e-mail addresses to generate subscriptions or leads? Do you want to drive conversions on your Web site, on somebody else’s Web site, over the phone or in a store? Make a clear list of your goals and then build your own measurement metrics for those goals. If you can justify a newsletter sign-up or catalog request with additional marketing dollars, it can allow you to bid for the terms driving that traffic. Measure with precision When every penny counts, maximize spend on the keywords and ads with the highest ROI. But first you need to identify them. If you are not using free publisher conversion tracking, each keyword will need to have a unique ID and include a creative ID as well (on Google, this is the {creative} substitution parameter). Some firms actually need to measure conversions that happen on other sites, or offline via a call center, which is trickier, but still possible. Wister Walcott Optimize, optimize, optimize marin software If location is the rule for real estate, then optimization is the rule for SEM. Make sure your ad shows to as many of the right people as possible. Do this by expanding your keyword set and experimenting with broad match and content distribution. Then, improve your click-through rate by breaking your keywords into many small ad groups and writing specific ads for each group. Reference a category in the ad text and include the keyword in the ad using the keyword parameter. Test your new creatives at “even” traffic split — what’s best for Google may not be best for you. When adjusting creatives for different prices or seasons, don’t delete the old ones, just pause them. That way you preserve their history if you want to turn them back on. Finally, make sure your ad is not showing to the wrong people. Check the Search Term Query Report in AdWords to see what people are typing when they see your broad match search terms.
By roger Barnette n these challenging financial times, ensuring that your paid search marketing campaign is fully optimized is crucial. We all want to squeeze full value out of our existing media budgets, but how do you do that? The best way is to see your paid search campaigns “holistically.” Each piece of your campaign is an integral part of the paid search puzzle that needs to be carefully managed, tracked and optimized to ensure the best performance. Using a search management technology with robust analytics can provide you with an immense amount of data about your search campaigns in aggregate, across all of the engines. Make sure you track normal ROI performance metrics, as well as queried keywords, assisting keywords and landing page and ad creative performance. Data about queried and assisting keywords — for example, keywords that help a searcher convert but are not credited for the transaction — can help you build your existing keyword list. Tracking your ad creative and landing pages helps you to understand what works best and in what circumstances — and provides you with the data you need to fully optimize and improve your campaign. Once you’ve built your keyword list and have access to a wealth of information about your campaign’s performance, how do you optimize it to achieve the best results? Again, it starts with keywords, but doesn’t end there. Bid optimization technologies can ensure that your keyword bids are appropriately aligned with your campaign goals and automate much of the manual labor involved in search marketing. The best technologies predict what your return on ad spend will be at varying budget levels, helping you determine how, and how much, to allocate roger Barnette towards your paid search efforts. searchignite With the technologies available to sophisticated marketers, optimization goes way beyond automating keyword bids. Sophisticated technologies can determine which landing pages align with which ad creative and keyword, and then serve up the combination most likely to encourage a click and result in a transaction. By building your keywords, gathering detailed performance data and optimizing all aspects of your search campaign – from bids to landing pages and ad creative – marketers can integrate individual strategies to perfect their paid search puzzle and weather the economic storm.
Wister Walcott is co-founder and VP of products for Marin Software. Reach him at wwalcott@marinsoftware.com.
Roger Barnette is president and founder of SearchIgnite. Reach him at rbarnette@searchignite.com.
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search engine marketing guide