You (Still) Do Paid Search (SEM) Wrong

Your paid search advertising performance may be outdated and not maximizing your results if:

1. You are not yet tracking relevant goals for your campaigns.
2. The bulk of your paid search advertising program still consists of branded keywords.
3. You still don’t know what percentage of your PPC revenue is actually incremental.
4. Responsibility for landing pages is NOT yet on the team running the campaigns.
5. Search impressions still dominate your PPC (pay per click) strategy decisions.
6. You’re still using last-click attribution, or worse, paid-channel-only attribution.

Recently, the owner of an international b2b e-commerce company shared . With me access to his campaign data and google analytics account to review performance nigeria telemarketing . They have had outstanding results, sustained business growth . And consider paid advertising on the search engine as the secret to their success.

Looking at the google ads account, the first thing . I noticed is that each campaign is maximizing four different objectives (conversions) . E-commerce purchases, product views, website scrolling, and pdf downloads. While these are relevant actions for e-commerce, optimizing for all four types . Of conversions creates distortions . In the data and in the type of optimization . That can be done in the account.

Each campaign must have a single objective . And focus on a single result, so that the data reflects . The real behavior of the campaigns, potential customers . And return on investment. In this e-commerce, since all conversion actions are mixed . It is not possible to know . Which ads or searches really generate sales, which products really have . A positive return on investment, or whether . The cost per sale is adequate for the business.

There are several reasons to invest in branding: increased results, opportunity to control the message (via links to the site), gaining position over a competitor who uses your brand to advertise, among others.

However, don’t forget that branded  balanced scorecard: improves the measurement of management indicators keywords are converting people who already know about your business. After all, they’re searching for your brand and have already decided that they want to do business with you. If your PPC (pay-per-click) strategy is based primarily on branded terms, you’re harvesting the work of your other marketing channels, and you’re not maximizing the return on your SEM investment.

A winning strategy is to capture those who have not yet decided who to buy from, or to convert those who are not considering your business as one of their potential suppliers. If your non-branded keywords strategy is not solving this problem, it is not generating a competitive advantage for you. And how do you know if you have competitive SEM execution? You do if you actually solve long-tail keywords.

Incremental results are difficult to prove.  email leads database However, they are the only way to access brand budget and have more resources. After all, any financial manager expects incremental returns from any investment.

There are many dimensions that can be used to test the incrementality of results, and the way to do this is through campaign experiments.

A few months ago, a consumer goods company launched a national campaign through digital channels. After the first phase of the campaign, it was unable to verify the incrementality of its results. From the second phase onwards, Resultero Digital Marketing Agency worked with the advertiser creating multiple experiments to verify the impact on consumption. These experiments included isolating geographic variables, digital channels, gender, among others, and using the data to establish whether the experiments generated additional results compared to the control group. We were able to verify that there were observable differences in sales and in the total impact of the campaign.

This, unfortunately, is still all too common.

It is a reflection of the siloed structures of companies . The paid search team (be it a digital marketing agency or an in-house team) is responsible for placing the ads on the search engine. The development/systems/technology team . In turn, is responsible for the landing pages on the website.

The consequence: there is no consistency between . The ads in the search engine and the website, traffic bounces, low-quality traffic generation is encouraged . And the website does not improve at the speed required by digital campaigns.

For all purposes of your paid digital marketing strategy . Give full responsibility for landing pages to your digital team or digital marketing agency. It’s the only way to ensure the connection between keywords, ads . And website, and create a unified experience . That truly drives sales increases.

You can be on the search results page (impression) and not get any value for the business (clicks). That’s because you’re not the only one there. Showing up in the results without generating website visitors is wasting the potential of the channel. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many advertisers obsessed with “showing up” and maximizing their share of shelf and not getting any value for it.

By its nature, a search engine is made for people to find something and get out of it. The quicker they get out of the search engine, the better it works, because it means it has given a better answer. This means that no one is stuck on Google or Bing reading descriptions and building awareness of the brands that are advertising and then identifying those brands and showing some sort of preference.

When you combine these two elements, you can see how bad it is to maximize impressions instead of clicks. Optimize for what is valuable to your business: clicks instead of impressions. And more precisely, profitable clicks over just clicks.