Looking for help in optimizing your site's presence on the web? Underscore Marketing's search practice lead walks you through building a successful search campaign from the ground up.
This is the first in a series of articles on creating the conditions for a successful search campaign from the ground up. These practices are based on my years of experience managing campaigns ranging from million dollar plus budgets a month to less than a few thousand. Though these practices cannot guarantee success, it will help you avoid many common traps marketers fall into.
The overview
I break down all search campaigns into the following five phases: foundation, launch, optimization, testing and growth beyond engines. The foundation includes keywords and creative build-outs, tracking implementation, marketplace evaluation and quality assurance (QA). Launch is benchmarking, initial trend analysis and quality score evaluation. Optimization phase is about maximizing results, but once we hit a point of diminishing returns -- in which the work put in does not justify the incremental lift in volume and profits -- testing is needed to raise conversion rates and, finally, grow beyond the engines.
Many of these steps feed each other and blend together so, for example, although testing is its own phase, we would still employ creative testing during the optimization phase to try to get a good quality score to lower costs -- this and other strategies will be explained in more detail as we come upon it.
The foundation: marketplace evaluation and keyword build outs
I've had the opportunity and satisfaction of teaching more than a few people about search, and one of the first things I tell them about starting a campaign is that the foundation is the most important part of the process -- get it right and we prevent 70 percent of the problems before they happen, get it wrong and the campaign is likely doomed to fail before it even gets started.
Before any keyword or creative building starts, the first thing the search marketer must know is the client and their competition -- this I call marketplace evaluation. Talk to your client about their product/services, who their target market is, who would be an ideal customer and why. Ask your client who they think is their biggest competition and what differentiates them from the rest. Keep probing and ask as many questions as you can, then use that info as a starting ground.
If you haven't already, go to their website(s) to learn more about them, view all pages and the source code and pick out keyword phrases (such as product names and numbers), discover their uses and build to that; for example, if it's a product to relieve sinus congestion, build out those related words.
Next, type some of those keywords into the engines and view the paid and natural results; many times you will get more keyword ideas by simply looking at their titles and descriptions. Visit those sites and do the same thing, noting what separates your client from them -- the differential advantage.
Once that is done, use whatever keyword building tool you like. There are many out there, but the tool I like the most is from Google. The Google tool allows you to put in URLs to leverage their spidering ability to get even more words that you might have missed. Think about and build out words that contain adjectives, verbs, singulars and plurals. Utilize negatives -- words that you don't want your ad to show up with, such as "free" – this will qualify your audience better and make your ad dollars much more efficient.
Separate your list into categories -- "brand," "product," "competitor," "general," etc. This categorical separation is extremely important for creative build out, as well as for organizing the account for a better quality score.
The foundation: creatives
I'm from the John Caples school of advertising; he said the most important part of an ad is the headline. Most people just glance at a page -- be it a search page, a website or an email -- but the headline attracts the eyes first. It is here we make the impression that can get the right user to click on the ad, or to pass us by.
Start by building out three or four headlines for each category of words, see what your competition is using and try to make yours stand out from the rest. If most are using keyword insertion, don't use it for yours -- it will just blend in with the results.
Creative build outs in our industry is, unfortunately, an art that never was discovered, much less lost. Marketers never quite grasped the importance of creative build outs since it is text based, but it is the most important part of your campaign after the keywords, and it bears time to get it done right. A collaborate effort is ideal: the more eyes, the more perspective and ideas that will only make it better.
Once the headline is created, pack it with benefits about how the client's product or services will make it better/easier/faster for the consumer. Finally, use a call to action such as "act now," "buy today," etc.; studies have shown that call-to-action copy works better than ad copy without it.
At this point we want to decide what landing pages to send visitors to that reflect the category of keywords and what we say in the copy to align our messages and consumer expectations. I like pages that have a lot of content with a clear call to action to order or to submit information right away.
The foundation: tracking
Throughout this whole process, tracking tags and code should be generated and labeled. This is where a campaign can grind to a halt -- generating incorrect tags or waiting for the client to implement it on their sites. Hopefully, the industry will someday create a best practice guide that spells out the process -- how to generate tags, where the code must be implemented, etc. -- to everyone involved. Great search experts are not tracking experts and vice versa, and not all clients understand what the process entails.
The foundation: QA and launch
Once tracking is installed, keywords and creative are made and we've decided what landing pages to send consumers to, the final phase is to upload it to the engines, with each campaign representing your categories and each ad group representing similar themed keywords for quality score purposes. Put a few keywords live and test them in the engine to ensure tracking is set up properly and that the keywords and creative are organized in the best way possible.
If you are satisfied with it, launch the campaign. And look for our next article, where we take you through the next phase of getting better search results.
David Singh is manager and search practice lead at Underscore Marketing LLC. Read full bio.