John Wanamaker (1838-1922), considered by some at the father of modern advertising, is often quoted in marketing circles: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A hundred years later, we no longer have that problem. In the age of digital marketing, with exceptional tracking systems (that stretch the very definitions of privacy), it’s no longer a matter of not knowing, but of investing the effort to find out. Today, savvy online marketers are saying “no campaigns without metrics.” SEM is a perfect example of this principle in action—a principle that can also be applied to email and social marketing. When you drive traffic to a web or mobile site using SEM, the basics of managing pay-per-click include an analysis of the costs for each keyword, deciding what to bid on, and then monitoring click-through reports to check performance and to see if you get out-bid on your keywords (in which case you may need to increase your bid or lose that keyword). But the basic reports in Google and Bing are about how much traffic you receive for what you spent. They don’t tell you how individual keywords are performing in terms of your business and organizational goals. What you don’t want to do is simply point to high SEM traffic and say you were successful. What if your top performing keywords are just draining your budget and delivering no value? You need to monitor what your visitors are doing, based on which keyword they came in on. A good analytics program will tell you not just which keywords get the most clicks (and thus cost you the most), but you’ll also gain insights into whether visitors are coming through but then immediately leaving (SEM cost with no value), or which pages they visit, in which order, and do they return to your site later (SEM cost with high value). About 10 years ago I developed a system for tracking campaign and keyword performance from Google AdWords and Overture (Overture was bought in 2003 by Yahoo, and Yahoo SEM is now merged with Bing). The idea was simple: if...
Read MoreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
In my previous post I wrote about the importance of competitive analysis as part of a Search Engine Marketing campaign. This post will discuss tips for keyword management, including targeting, scheduling, negative keywords, and multivariate ads. (In part 3 we’ll discuss analytics and performance tuning, conversion monitoring, and weeding out expensive under-achievers.) Both Google AdWords and Bing enable you to run multiple campaigns, each targeted toward a different purpose, product, or demographic. Each campaign can have its own budget and targeting options, including options for time of day, language, geographic areas, and search publisher networks. The publisher network extends your reach beyond the main Google and Bing search sites, adding sites that also display pay-per-click results relevant to their content and audience. For Google, the search network includes Google sites like Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Finance; for Bing, it includes sites like Facebook and MSN. The extended networks include many thousands of independent publisher sites, including mobile. Each campaign contains individual ad groups, and ad groups can have multiple ads, in a few formats, with text ads being the most popular and familiar. The targeting options mentioned above can be set at the campaign or ad group level. I won’t give you a full tutorial on how to use AdWords and Bing (good ones are easily found), as I want to focus on the work of making your campaigns effective. I’ll be using examples from AdWords, a system I’ve used for 10 years, but Bing uses essentially the same terminology and paradigms. Once you create your ad campaign and ad group and set your campaign budget, remember to also set targeting options. These can improve the response rate of your campaigns and will dramatically improve how your SEM budget is spent. For example, my company iMedia Revenue sells newsroom systems in the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK, so we only run ads in those countries. After all, why pay for clicks from places we don’t serve? If your target audience tends to search from work, then you can set the ads to run from 9am-5pm in your targeted geography. You can even target mobile. If you sell...
Read MoreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
For most organizations, search drives the bulk of traffic to their web and mobile sites. Even if you have a powerful brand and a loyal following, search traffic can represent 50% of your visitors (your site analytics system, such as Google Analytics, will give you a fairly precise accounting). Even in news sites with high traffic and loyalty, I have noted that up to 90% of the visitors are referral traffic, meaning they came via a link on another site, primarily a search channel, and not from a direct visit to the home page. (This is why I often say “Google is your real home page.”) I have written previously about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the way to improve your natural ranking in the search engine results, notably on Google and Bing. For many marketers, SEO is the most difficult and the most misunderstood. Countless search agencies make a living by peddling SEO voodoo tactics. But as I discussed in previous posts, the principles are actually fairly simple: the trick is to get the right people involved: content (editorial), marketing, and technology all need to work to make SEO a success. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) , also known as pay-per-click, is the paid search side. There is no voodoo here, right? What could be simpler than selecting your most important keywords and bidding on the traffic they bring? Well, here again, the principles are simple, but there is some real work involved to make effective use of your SEM campaign budget. There are two main players in paid search, and for most marketers, the first hurdle is in learning how to use their systems for managing the keyword buys. Google AdWords controls the proverbial 800 lb gorilla’s share of search marketing (I’ve been administering Google Adwords campaigns for 10 years, so many of my examples will be from Google). But Microsoft’s Bing is nevertheless important, in part because it is the paid search engine driving the new Facebook Graph Search. While the interfaces may seem daunting at first, there are plenty of tutorials and guides, so you should be up and running in an hour or two. Now, what...
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