Shrinking budgets can undercut your search marketing efforts. But it doesn't have to be that way. Find out how to increase ROI during these lean times.
In today's challenging economic climate, many marketers face declining or stagnant revenues and cannot afford to increase their advertising budgets. While managing and even growing your revenue during these times can seem like a daunting task, there are things that you can do to make your current search budget work harder and smarter.
The tips outlined here will help you to manage costs and increase your return on ad spend, even in uncertain economic times.
Create a "culture of testing"
In times of change and volatility, it becomes even more important to test all aspects of your campaigns regularly. Creating a culture of testing -- where paid search performance is tracked and analyzed on an ongoing and systematic basis in order to fine tune campaigns -- can increase your return on ad spend and help you understand how market changes are impacting your campaigns.
Below are a few campaign aspects that you should test and review regularly.
- Creative / landing page testing: You've spent time building out your keyword list and managing your bids so that your ads appear when and where you want them to. But that's only half the work. Testing different ad creative and landing page combinations is crucial to make sure you maximize your paid search traffic and deliver an optimal user experience post-click. Test different ad creative for each of your keyword groups to see which language drives the most clicks. Then look at which landing page and ad creative combinations are more likely to deliver a conversion or your desired consumer response. This type of testing will not only increase the level of response you get post-click, but it will also translate into lower CPCs since the engines determine your ad's relevancy in large part based on the number of clicks you get.
Don't forget to observe the different results your tests produce across the engines. Yahoo searchers are different than Google searchers, and so ad copy and landing pages may perform differently on each engine. Testing these variables across the engines will help you better understand and leverage their different audiences.
- Match type combination testing: There can be significant differences in how match types are correlated on the engines. Therefore, match type combinations require continuous monitoring across engines in order to drive CPC efficiencies and obtain a higher ROI. For example, Advanced Match in Yahoo is often too broad, requiring a marketer to switch to Standard Match in order to obtain phrase or exact matching. To understand pricing differences under different match type regimes across and between the engines, marketers can create multiple ad groups with common terms but different match types.
Thorough and ongoing testing is time consuming, but when you are looking to get more out of your paid search campaign and cannot afford to increase your budget, it is the most surefire way to squeeze out even more bang for your buck. While we're specifically addressing paid search here, testing can be used to analyze and improve the performance of most of your online media, including display and email marketing.
Track assisting keywords
Few marketers know the full impact of the keywords leading up to a conversion because they tend to only measure the last click before consumer converts. Other related clicks that precede the conversion generally don't receive any credit. Understanding the relationships among keywords in your paid search campaign is essential to proper keyword bucketing and campaign optimization.
If you accurately measure the value of your keywords by analyzing the role they play in the entire customer search cycle -- from generating interest up to a conversion -- you can determine if you are putting too much money toward brand terms (e.g., Sony DVD player) versus non brand terms (e.g., DVD player). As a result, assist analysis can lead to changes in your optimization techniques for different keyword types -- head terms, tail terms, brand terms, top / bottom of purchase funnel, etc. -- and you may realize that you are allocating too much of your budget to certain terms and not enough to others.
Protect your brand
You should watch, manage and protect your brand terms closely, as they often the drive the most conversions in your campaigns. Work with your engine reps to insure that affiliates and competitors are properly adhering to trademark guidelines. If you see competitors bidding on your brand terms, filling an official complaint with the engines may be appropriate. In some cases, filing out some simple paperwork can prevent others from abusing your brand name. And, as outlined above, be sure to analyze your assisting keywords so you know what other factors might be driving conversions on your brand terms.
Use technology to increase ROI
New technologies are providing marketers with more sophisticated tools for allocating, optimizing and analyzing their media spend and performance. These digital media management and optimization tools, give marketers the freedom to do more "value add" activities such as landing page testing and keyword analysis, without having to focus on day to day management of a campaign. A search management tool also simplifies the process for running detailed data tracking and analysis by aggregating data from multiple sources and providing pre-formulated reports. Some of these technologies even go beyond search, allowing marketers to see how all of their online media work together and drive consumer response. At the very least, your technology platform should allow you to report and analyze the data elements mentioned in this article.
It's important to understand what technologies are out there and what they can do to help you achieve your marketing goals and improve the return from your online marketing spend. Not only will following these tactics improve your performance today, but they could also help you get a leg up on the competition since you'll be more equipped to ride out the economic storm and thrive once the clouds pass.
Roger Barnette is president and founder of SearchIgnite, a provider of search management and optimization technology.