A majority of people are using a search engine for at least part of their shopping journey. In actuality, a search engine is usually one of the final stops before someone makes a decision. If you want your product or service to be considered, search engine placement needs to be an important factor for your business. It’s also true that people use a variety of keyword combinations to search for things, more combos than even a good SEO strategy can compete in. To make matters even more complicated, search engines like Google are placing a much greater emphasis on prioritizing ads over organic listings.
So what can a good paid search strategy do for you?
Understanding the significance of good SEM is important, but having a clear Paid Search strategy is key for driving sales to your business. On this page, we intend to outline what we consider to be the most important factors for a good SEM strategy. If you would like to learn more about what a good Paid Search strategy could do for your business, contact us for a free consultation.
Imagine that you were offered a billion dollars to guess the top 10 cars of a 500-lap race. If you had plenty of time to a bunch of research on the drivers and their cars then maybe you could form a fairly educated analysis on the most likely winners. But once the race started, there are many variables that could completely change your outlook. Perhaps your 10 cars all get in an accident (don’t worry, nobody gets seriously injured in this scenario). Perhaps the pit crew for one of your cars is just not having a great day. Your research is undoubtedly valuable, but real-time performance is extremely important.
Now imagine that you had the same objective of picking the top 10 cars, but this time, you could change your answer after every lap until the final lap. How would your strategy change? Instead of spending so much time and resources on research, you would instead focus on precisely measuring performance during the race. The cars that consistently paced ahead in laps would stay on your list, the ones lagging behind would fall off. There is always a chance for variation on that last lap, but you’d feel a lot more confident about winning that billion dollars in this second scenario, wouldn’t you?
In this race car metaphor, a completed lap is like a conversion and the cars are like your ad variables (e.g. keywords, ad copy, geo-location, etc). Tracking conversions within your ad campaign is the most effective way to measure performance. Without knowing what ads are leading to Key Performance Indicators, you aren’t doing much more than playing a guessing game with your money. The goal of the ad campaign is to optimize ad variables based on conversions. Keep and enhance the variables that are working, dump the ones that aren’t. Win the billion dollars.
Our team works with you to determine what your meaningful conversions are. These could be form submissions, online purchases, phone calls, or other actions. The point is that a conversion relates to a direct revenue opportunity.
Once we know what the conversions are, we’ll set up tracking pixels and connect those pixels to your ad campaigns. Doing so allows you to see exactly what ad variables are driving revenue generating actions for your business.
When we are making decision on what keywords to build campaigns around, it’s important to focus on the INTENT of the searcher. Instead of thinking of WHAT a person is searching for, consider WHY they are searching. Are they looking for information about air conditioners or are they looking for an air conditioning repair company? Are they looking for details on how much a lawyer typically costs or are they looking to call a law firm right now? Keying in on the intent of the searcher is essential for targeting people that are ready to make a decision right now.
Our team has years of experience analyzing customer intent and is capable of building campaigns with specific phrases to focus on that intent. We also use industry-leading tools to perform keyword research.
Setting up the campaigns is only the beginning, our campaign structure is designed to continuously farm the highest value phrases from your active campaigns and eliminate poor performers.
For a paid search account to truly be successful, there is a constant level of optimization to be done. Every new click gives insight into how keywords and ads are performing. There are dozens of ad variables to split test and thousands of data points to analyze. These optimizations become exponentially critical as budgets get higher and demand an even closer eye on performance. A key to success is having a proven process for optimizing accounts and the right tools for analyzing data.
We’ll review your advertising goals and budget and put together a management plan that will lead to success. Our team spends dedicated hours every week (even daily) on our client ad accounts. We don’t cut corners by applying automatic-optimization software and we will never set it and forget it. We comb through every single account and make adjustments by hand. Doing so gives us the ultimate awareness and control over the performance of an ad account.
