11 May 09 SEM Optimisation: 10 Simple Steps

Unintrusive and highly relevant, search marketing offers the most cost-effective and fiscally sound advertising options on the Internet. It works because your ad is only shown to people who are actively looking for what you sell.

While it is touted as being good for increasing brand awareness (through the content network) this should be treated as a fringe benefit.  Paid search is a direct marketing channel, and it’s performance should be measured accordingly.  How many customers did you get and how much did it cost you within a defined period of time (Usually 30 days)

You can measure everything on the internet so your web business should be driven by analytics driven-decision making.

The three primary pay-per-click (PPC) search networks are:
Google (including the Google Search Network and Google Content Network), Yahoo and MSN. This article will focus on the dominant network, Google, but the optimisation principles are transferable to the other two networks.

Campaign Creation
1. Understand the Business: What is for sale? Who is the target market and Who is the competition?
2. Determine marketing objectives. What are you trying to accomplish? Increase sales, attract new customes, reduce customer acquisition costs etc.
3. Define Campaign Goals. What are the KPIs you want to measure? Where possible, determine what these currently are and benchmark your progress from this point forward. Use tools like Adwords and Analytics reports to automate your reporting processes.
4. Manage Expectations: Ensure you know what the possibilities and limitations of the medium are and how pursuing one course of action may be counter-productive in another area.  For example, a brand that wants to increase their visibility in the market place, should invest in the content network and image ads.  However, this tends to be expensive and does not necessarily lead to sales.

5. Define your Campaign Structure

Campaign Level
Define who and where your target market is, your bidding strategy and at what time you want your ads to display.

Adgroup Level
Create a new adgroup for each keyword or keyword phrase.  This lets you maintain finer control over the ad text that is displayed.  The other alternative is to have tightly themed adgroups and then you can get the most benefit from Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

Keyword Level

• Pack thse into tightly themed adgroups.  For example, “iphone” and “iphone 3G” should be different keyword groups.
• Choose keywords around your product and also questions that lead to your products.
• It’s important to target ‘long tail’ keywords and common misspellings that your competition has neglected making them a very cheap source of lead generation for you.
• Define negative keywords as appropriate (If you sell iPhones and don’t repair them, then make sure you define “repair” as a negative keyword like this:  -repair
• One way to avoid dealing with negative keywords is to only use [exact matches].  This means exactly what you put inside of [] in that exact order will be trigger your ad to display. you will see a lot less impressions, but your CTR and Conversion ratio will both increase while your CPS will decrease.

6. Write your Ad-Copy

Headlines
People will quickly skim over the multitude of ads displayed.  The headline is where you need to grab their attention.  Include the keywords that they searched for.  Having tightly themed adgroups (even just one keywords per adgroup sometimes) and using dynamic keyword insertion are powerful tools to employ.

Body
You grabbed someone’s attention with your headline and now’s your chance to convince them to visit your website.  Repeat your keywords here.  A user’s search terms are always highlighted in an ad, so this gets you extra attention.  The body of the message is your only opportunity to convey your value proposition.  You have to convince your audience that they should buy the available product (which is most likely a commodity and available from x number of other websites also) from your website and you’ve only got about 70 characters to do it in.  No fluff allowed, just make your sales pitch.

Display URL
This is another opportunity to convey value to your audience.  Show the viewer that will convince them that they will get what they want from you and then make sure you deliver on your promise.

Ad Variations
It’s important to try multiple variations of headlines and ad-copy.  We all think we are creative geniuses when it comes to writing ads, but it’s always best to let your customers decide.

7. Landing pages (Destination URLs)

“At its best, selling is taking a doubt and turning it, jujitsu style, into a powerful push. Selling is making the customer feel better about spending money — or investing it — than he would have felt by keeping his wallet zipped.”

- Ben Stein

• Do not disappoint the user!  Your homepage is not necessarily your landing page. If your ad promotes a specific product, then the deliver that product and an easy purchase path when they click on the ad.
• The goal of your landing page is to convert the lead into a sale. You should provide all necessary information that the user will need to make a purchase decision without making them have to leave your site to gather more information.  If they do, chances are they won’t come back.
• The most critical information needed to make a purchase decision should be visible above the fold. Additional supplementary information should be geared towards turning doubts into incentives to buy. Make sure it is displayed in easy to navigate and easy to read, managable chunks.
• Your call-to-action button should dominate the page since this is what you want the user to do next.  Furthermore, it should take them directly to a checkout page where you can collect their delivery and billing information.  It’s important to guide the user through your desired navigation path by highlighting what you want them to do next, and also eliminate friction along the way.
• Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes (no pun intended if you happen to be selling shoes!) pre-empt any questions and present answers to them.  Most importantly, adhere to the principle ‘Don’t make me think.’  Online shoppers are very impatient.  They will buy from you only if they choose to and if the trust you.

Google Checkout

• Integrating Google Checkout into your ads is one way to bypass a landing page completely.  You get the user to ‘add to cart’ straight from your ad.  By reducing the number of steps to completing the purchase, chances are you are more likely to close the sale.  This is a great way to distinguish your ad on search result pages.

Campaign Optimisation

8. Measure everything
Don’t look past paid services like:  http://www.webtrends.com/Products/WebTrendsAdDirector.aspx
It’s easy enough to install the three lines of javascript tracking code provided by the search engine, after that,you need to define what reports you want based on the KPI’s you established earlier.
Measurement is too broad a topic to cover here and I will delve into it at a later date.

9. Reporting
Set up an automated email reporting system and use these to make analytics-driven-optimisation-decisions.  Everything can be measured on the internet, so there is no excuse for wasted resources and making decisions on a hunch.

10. Optimize Your Campaigns
Managing the Budget
Display your ads only on the Google Search Network.  Opt-out of the default content network placements.  Using the content network, your ad will display on any website that has relevant content.  These browsers may not be interested in what you are selling, but you get charged regardless on a CPM basis.
The content network now gives you the option to serve ads using Placements, so you can choose precisely which websites you want to display your ads on.  While this is an improvement, it is still tends to deliver a lower ROI than the search network, but it could serve you well to increase your brand visibility which can have positive flow on effects for your search network campaign.

Competitors:
If you really want to, you can see what keywords your competitors are bidding on using keywordsy.com.  This could help or hinder your progress depending on how you make use of it.  it’s great if you are just starting out in a crowded space and can save you a lot of time on initially setting up your Adwords campaign.

Stop fighting for the #1 ad position.
It isn’t always the most favourable position because it is usually the subject of competitor ad-bashing. Aim for #2 or #3 instead. Sometimes the top 2 or 3 sponsored results are placed above natural search results rather than to the the right, where a lot of people are accustomed to look for ads while shopping.  As such, many users suffer from a phenomenon know as ad-blindness. A benefits of the #1 spot is that Google search partners (AOL, Ask.com, Amazon, etc) typically only serve a single ad spot, which goes to the highest bidder.

Only bid on exact match keywords.
This means your ad displays less often, but it displays more often to relevant prospects.  You also don’t have to agonize over what negative keywords to choose.

Ad-Scheduling:
Depending on what type of business you run, it makes sense to serve ads at certain times only.  A blatant example is a hairdresser that is open 9am to 5pm and serves an ad encouraging you to call to make an appointment.  There is no point serving ads after 5pm since no one will be around to schedule the appointment.  Hot Tip:  Schedule your ads to display at times when your competitors have switched theirs off.  The lack of competition means that you can potentially secure a lot of low-cost traffic.  However, remember that your competitors have switched off their ads at certain times for a good reason, probably because sales volumes aren’t very high at those times and the directly measured sales results look poor in comparison to other times of day.  One man’s trash is another man’s gold.

Corroborating your Adwords reports with your sales reports will help you determine at what times and on what days you get the most conversions.  Obviously people shopping for your product are most inclined to buy at these times, to make sure you serve your ads at these peak times, and turn them off at off-peak times, where the ROI isn’t worth it.

Increase your clickthrough rate.
Your ad position on Google is determined by:  CTR X bid.  Therefore, to increase your CTR, ensure you have improved your quality score. Your quality score is determined by how well your keywords match your ad copy.  Improve this by being more relevant:

• Tightly themed ad groups
• Compelling ad-copy

Geographic targeting
Target your customers where they are.  You can now even narrow this down to the city and post code.  There’s simply no point showing your ad to people will never become customers.

Use Comparison Shopping Sites – Shopping.com powers Yahoo etc.
and get on google product search:  http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html

The Adwords API
This is a great tool to make your marketing department redundant.  Once setup, correct use of the API means that new ads can be automatically created and published for products added to your catalogue. While making your entire marketing department redundant may be pushing it, the API can definitely save your business some personnel costs.

In closing, understand that search marketing today is not just about Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Today you have to consider comparison shopping websites and social media opportunities.  I encourage you to check out my posts on Facebook Advertising and Twitter.

Watch out for a future post which will reveal all you need to know about Optimising your website for maximising conversions.  Find out how to minimize friction, close more sales and up-sell your customers. so your SEM efforts are not wasted.

Tags: Adwords, linkedin, SEM