If you're a professional engaged in Search Engine Marketing (let's call ourselves Smarketers), chances are you're always looking for insight and tools to help you manage your program more productively. Let's face it: Smarketers have a difficult job to do. We get a lot of questions. We juggle many priorities.
We have to measure success in many diverse ways. So we've designed this guide to help you understand some of the proven principles and robust tools that are available, and the best ways to use them to continually improve your campaigns.
Smarketers responsibilities can generally be summed up with three statements:
- Generate more response volume (sales, customers, orders, leads, traffic)
- Do it more cost effectively
- Make the company look good (in other words build the brand)
Of course, you typically have a wide range of data sources to help you do your job, from search engine campaign data and internal reports to third-party providers or analytical tools. The tricky part is knowing how to implement that data into actions.
This guide is designed to help you do just that. It will provide you with an overview of best practices and proven steps for success. It's broken down into seven logical steps. Follow these steps, and you just may see some impressive results to call your own.
The seven steps are:
1. Refine Keyword Bids
2. Target Ideal Positions
3. Optimize Ad Copy
4. Select the Right Keywords
5. Use Specialized Matching Options
6. Leverage Contextual Campaigns
7. Monitor Against Click Fraud
Step 1. Refine Keyword Bids
The most obvious variable in paid search campaigns keyword bids is often the most neglected, or at least not leveraged to its full potential. Maximum bids are often set at a general, estimated level, and then largely forgotten. To be fair, many Smarketers do return to their campaigns regularly to adjust bids, but they often lack the precise knowledge to know exactly how their volume and efficiency will be effected at different bid levels. The most successful Smarketers are continually testing multiple bids and monitoring their effects. Armed with this information you can get a read on the ideal bids, search engines, campaigns, groups, or keyword levels.
Volume is the easiest metric to monitor, particularly since - each of the engines have readily-accessible reports on clicks. Makes sense, that's how they make their money! Most Smarketers also have internal reports that can be compared to search engine-reported clicks. The granularity of visibility (paid vs. natural, google vs. yahoo, campaign A vs. B, keyword search vs. contextual, unique visitors vs. total clicks, etc.) determines the level at which business decisions can be made.
To determine efficiency, metrics must be established to track desired behavior or actions. This can be addressed with internal or third-party analytics. Because conversions are further down the acquisition funnel than clicks, the numbers are smaller, and more time is needed to generate the level of data necessary for statistical significance. The critical exercise is to combine the cost data from the search engine with the conversion data from analytics tool to monitor the efficiency at the different bid levels.
This exercise can take place at any level of keyword hierarchy, but you should keep in mind that as the keyword volume decreases, the time it takes to see the impact increases. Bid automation tools can expedite this process, but handing the reigns over to a robot requires good data integrity and an especially detailed definition of criteria and resulting actions.
Net Takeaway:
If your most important goal is to maximize volume, you'll want to maintain a cost per acquisition (or other efficiency metric) at a certain level. If your current maximum bid is $2.00, you could test bids of $2.10, $2.50, $3.00, and $5.00. Watch your traffic at each of the given levels, and determine where there is the most change. If there is a significant traffic boost at $3 and virtually no incremental lift at $5, your next round of bid should start with $3 and work downward. But if you still see lift at $5, your next test should start at $5 and work upward. Once you have a feel for the traffic breaks, set your bids there long enough to get a read on efficiency.
