Posted on Feb 19, 2013 in Digital Marketing, More Visitors: SEO & SEM | 1 comment

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...

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