PPC is such a great way to get your site or your client’s site instant visibility, sales or leads. This is the big advantage that paid search has over search engine optimization. I have always take the approach that paid search management is a personal thing meaning you really have to become closer to your campaigns in order to be successful. This is not something you can “set it and forget” or allow the search networks to do this for you. In this post, I want to share a few of the important levels of paid search management and what it takes to run a paid search account. In my opinion, it is critical to understand and excel at these levels in order to have a winning paid search strategy.
Keyword discovery is you best friend – Your entire paid search campaign is based on how good your keyword list is. You need to research, add, delete, and repeat constantly. Finding good terms is a never ending battle and tweaking campaigns and ad group structure is optimal for your needs.
Know your keyword landscape and keep your competitors closer – Paid search is an action based platform that rewards you on the action or the click through of your campaign. Because of this, tracking your competitors is absolutely vital. Look often at your average positions on your keywords to make sure you haven’t fallen or risen too quickly and what new terms or products have entered the space. Tools like SEMRush or SPYFU are great tools to have a subscription to as they give you vital information about you and your competitors such as terms they are bidding on, the ads they are using, and the average position they are in.
Become your visitor – This is where the personal aspect I talked about becomes the difference maker. Understanding the intent of the users who are exposed to your keywords will help you bid properly, implement the right settings, write the best ads, send them to the best landing page, etc. The great thing about this is that we all are Internet consumers and we can tap into our thoughts when we are searching for something we are interested in. For example, if someone searches for “Taylormade golf clubs” what insights about this user can you test? Well, they are more than the casual golfer as they do know a specific brand. What about the fact they search for clubs? Are they looking for a set or just a single club? You must be constantly looking for insights into the intent of the searcher who has triggered their keyword ads and finding trends to test.
Don’t drowned in the data – Campaign reports, keyword reports, query reports, creative reports, ad repots, quality score reports, positioning reports, etc. There is a ton of data generated by paid search accounts and in this data lies the path to perfect paid search optimization. I have spent days in Excel optimizing the budget wasters and bidding up the keywords that seem to drive the most sales but also remember there are many unknown variables influencing your campaign that you’ll never be able to account for, such as the effects of current news events and competitors lowering their prices. To win at paid search, you have to be great at analyzing data but also great at putting it into context.
Become one with the tools – Paid search has become a very high technology-heavy market. It is a must to master the software you are using every day and to develop a process plan in using it. Within this software there are hidden settings and tiny powerful functions that can be godsends—but also plenty of traps that you can fall into. Put the time in on the front end and you’ll be rewarded daily for your efforts. Above all else, get to know Excel better than anyone else you know.
ABC – Always Be Testing – No way you can be successful in paid search if you are not testing constantly! Seriously, if you cannot buy in to this just hire an agency or find a new profession. Ads, keywords, landing pages, and creative all need to be tested so we can fine-tune paid search accounts. Just make the best analysis as possible and test your hypothesis for long enough to know if it’s working but not so long to disrupt the entire project. Over time, you’ll have enough insights to keep your account humming.
Crawl, Walk, and Run on your CTR Percentages – There is no magic bullet that will guarantee positive results in paid search. What most experienced paid marketers know is that tiny adjustments to an account will lead to tiny optimizations which eventually provide lifts in performance. Moving your click-thru-rate just one tenth on a keyword that drives sales for you, could mean a savings of five hundred dollars for every ten thousand dollars you spend. Or, if you could drop the cost of your terms down from an average of $1.00 cost-per-click to $.95, then you’d be able to buy almost five thousand more clicks (visitors) for the same $100K in spend! So this is why these tiny improvements will pay back dividends and why you never stop optimizing.
Use Best Practices Most of The Time – You can go online and find tons of tips and tricks that are “best practices” and they really are. For example, sending users to the most relevant landing page based on their query has proven to be a very successful tactic over a home page but you really need to find out for your visitors. You will have to test them all and make new ones for yourself. Keep that in mind.
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