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For this paper, we will define search marketing as the process of purchasing advertisements in the form of text ads on search engines, with the goal of increasing exposure and attracting high quality visitors to a website.
Search marketing, as an online advertising platform, is entirely performance driven. Advertisers pay the search engines only when a user clicks through from the advertisement or search listing to their website. Being such an easily measurable, real-time response ad strategy, search marketing offers excellent possibilities for analysis and fine-tuning.
The search marketing industry has matured rapidly in the past few years and a three stage best practice has emerged for search marketing campaigns: Research & Strategy, Implementation and Reporting & Analysis.
Search engine optimisation is the practice of increasing referrals from organic or natural search engine results. Whilst search engine optimisation often works hand-in-hand with search marketing, its implementation follows an entirely different approach; one that is not covered in this white paper. Search engine optimisation tends to require a long-term strategy as opposed to the direct response nature of search marketing.
Implementation
Once the search engines, search terms, and price points have been determined, search marketers can proceed to design the campaign and purchase the search listings. This includes assigning landing pages to each search term or cluster of terms to increase the relevance for the search user. In setting up a campaign, advertisers need to identify which “landing page” they will deliver users to for each search term. The landing page is the webpage a user visits after clicking on a listing within a search engine and is the first point of contact between the buyer and the advertiser’s website. Designing the landing page to answer the user’s search query and provide relevant content can help increase conversion rates, with a conversion meaning an enquiry, download, or purchase.
Once the landing pages have been identified, the “creative” is developed for the search ads. This includes the title and description assigned to a search term or cluster of terms. The creative appears in the search results pages and includes the advertiser’s marketing messages. Offers or calls to action can be used to increase click-through rates.
Reporting & Analysis
Search marketing is a real-time advertising platform. You will see immediate results, be able to gather useful metrics and fine-tune your marketing campaign within a short time frame. Typically, an initial analysis can be done within the first few days or weeks of your campaign, with continual optimisation of the listings throughout the campaign period to ensure maximum results.
Having appropriate measurement tools in place to quantify the click-through from the search engines to online conversion is critical and will minimize ad budget waste by allowing advertisers to eliminate search terms that fail to draw qualified traffic. Advertisers should use the tools offered by the search engines, a site-centric tool and a bid management tool.
Completing this stage in the search marketing cycle will give search marketers a picture of their search marketing campaign and provide the intelligence to make informed decisions and ensure a strong return-on-ad investment.
The remainder of this paper focuses on researching search terms, the first stage of the search marketing cycle and provides a detailed explanation of how to maximise your efforts in search term selection.
The following six-step process focuses on Stage 1 of the search marketing cycle, Research & Strategy. It offers advertisers a step-by-step process for researching search marketing campaigns. This process demonstrates how Hitwise Search Intelligence™ tools provide marketers with a competitive edge, helping them evaluate the effectiveness of search terms and equipping them with analytical resources that can help shape their search marketing campaigns.
In particular, this paper focuses on search term identification, outlining the methodology for targeted search term research and selection. The diagram shows the steps involved in search term selection, discussing each step further in the following sections of this paper.
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