Top 10 B2B Paid Search Mistakes: Why Your Google Campaign Isn't Working and What To Do About It

Top 10 B2B
Paid Search Mistakes
T(Why your Google campaign isn't working and what to do about it) A Connect Direct White Paper
Top 10 B2B Search Mistakes
Contents Introduction...................................................................................................................Page 3 Mistake #1: Not Tracking Desired Actions .............................................................Page 4 Mistake #2: Not Using Custom Microsites or Landing Pages..............................Page 5 Mistake #3: Poor Program Architecture...................................................................Page 7 Mistake #4: Over-Reliance on Google Broad Matching........................................Page 8 Mistake #5: Too Few Keywords................................................................................Page 9 Mistake #6: Thinking Like A Marketer & Not Like Your Audience.................Page 10 Mistake #7: Selling the Product, Not the Offer ....................................................Page 11 Mistake #8: Uninformed Use of Google's Content Network.............................Page 12 Mistake #9: Not Leveraging Campaign Level Settings ........................................Page 13 Mistake #10: Ego Bidding.........................................................................................Page 14 About Connect Direct................................................................................................Page 15
©2008 Connect Direct Inc. All rights reserved. 2 No reproduction or reuse without permission. Top 10 B2B Search Mistakes
Introduction In order to address what it means to fail at search advertising, we first need to define success. Many business-to-business (B2B) marketers fail at search without even knowing it. The very basic performance reports available through GoogleT and other search providers can lead an advertiser to believe that his or her campaign is generating plenty of qualified interest, when the actual truth could be precisely the opposite. Search success is not defined by impressions, clicks or even cost per click. Certainly, you could argue that a high number of impressions means that many people are seeing your ad, but even that can be misleading. "Impressions" is simply a count of the number of times your ad is served. Whether people are actually paying attention is a different matter. Clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) are the measuring sticks of most search campaigns, primarily because they're the statistics most easily gleaned from online reports. As this paper discusses (see page 4), judging a campaign's performance by these standards is not only misleading, it can cause an advertiser to waste significant investment. Why? Because a click is only one action - it doesn't measure what that prospect did when he or she clicked on your ad (i.e. did he or she become a lead or buy your product), or even how qualified he or she is. Our experience tells us that many advertisers are content to generate thousands of clicks at considerable cost, but on further analysis, discover that the vast majority of those clicks are completely worthless. The perfect search campaign is one that: . generates a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) - whether your "acquisition" is a lead, download, registration or sale - competitive with other advertising vehicles . generates predictable results (measured by CPA) at projected spend levels . is sufficiently expansive to cover every keyword or phase, and every variation of those words or phrases, that a qualified prospect would conceivably search on . is designed to deliver relevant ad copy for every keyword (to drive clicks) and mapped to relevant landing pages (to drive conversions) . is designed in such a way that specific terms, groups of terms and campaigns are all optimized separately, with separate budgets, ad copy, geo-targeting and day-parting . is tracked through use of a back-end database or CRM system that measures ROI on a keyword-by-keyword basis Don't have all these metrics in place? Don't worry - no-one does. The scenario above is the ideal program, and a hypothetical ideal at that. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use these standards as goals to strive for, and as benchmarks for your current program. ... [download for more]