SEO Strategies
What Do You Need to Succeed in Paid Search?
A look at what it takes to reap benefits of search by Dave Pasternack
Oct 26, 2004
How do you run a successful paid search campaign?
Do you need the latest technology, the best know-how, the biggest agency, the coolest tools and tracking, a dedicated staff, colorful reporting, automated bid management? Is it all of the above? Is there some perfect ratio to ensure success?
In today’s competitive online marketplace, search engine advertising has become an important new media for online agencies and their clients. Search campaigns that are currently generating a positive ROI are under constant pressure to continually improve their efficiency and effectiveness to offset the inevitable increases in click costs (set to double by 2007, according to a Jupiter Media study). In order to remain successful in the search space, clients need the very best search engine campaign management possible and their agency, consultant or internal staff must deliver.
As the search space becomes more expensive and as competition grows, what do you need to stay ahead of the pack?
It takes brains, brawn and finesse to run a search campaign. The best results come from a combination of an agency's, consultant's or individual's search knowledge and their utilization of the right management tools. What type of knowledge and experience does it take in order to design and maintain a successful SE campaign? They must know the marketplace. They have to be aware of all of the available search media and their nuances. You can buy search on Overture alone in four different ways; each will have its advantages and disadvantages. Not everyone has the experience to make these types of media placement decisions in an ongoing, ever-changing marketplace. In addition, an effective SEM team will also help determine and set an appropriate CPO/CPA or other success metric for their product or service as well as provide assistance in keyword expansion and listing and landing page creative. These are the types of decisions that only a professional can make and the quality of these decisions will be based on that professional's knowledge and experience.
But knowledge alone is not enough. An effective online campaign must be managed using the right tools to implement and maintain the most efficient campaign. What are the functions that a tool should deliver? The most important function is that of control. When you consider a search campaign that contains thousands of search terms, running across many engines, it's almost impossible to control without some sort of consolidated reporting system. An individual, department or agency can't be burdened by having to look at separate reports from Overture, Google, MSN, Findwhat, Looksmart, and other engines to determine how their campaign is going. The tool's reporting features should be both detailed and flexible - with an emphasis on the unique needs of a search marketing campaign. Some agencies prefer a tool with features like agency reporting, which combines reports for multiple clients into one, easy-to-read report which gives the agency the ability to quickly and easily assess how all their clients are doing in the space. That function alone can help identify opportunities with a very broad view that may be easily missed in an individual client reporting system.
While control of the overall campaign is maintained through the tool's reporting system, an agency cannot be burdened with the day-to-day, minute-by-minute keyword bid changes necessary to keep the campaign optimized. Nor will an individual want to manually deactivate Looksmart listings or XML feeds. Therefore, an effective tool must include automated bid and listing optimization. While there are many tools that allow a marketer to set specific keyword positions and max bid rates, this type of strategy will inevitably result in overbidding and underbidding, dramatically reducing a campaign's effectiveness. A professional should only use a tool that is capable of optimization based on post-click behavior, ROI, profit and traffic quality assessment, like Did-it.com’s Maestro.
What is this post-click optimization? It's a methodology that tracks CPO (cost per order), CPA (cost per action) or other conversion data and uses that data to make the real-time ongoing keyword adjustments necessary for maximizing orders, registrations, profit or whatever metric was chosen as a goal. The system then compares this cost data to a target cost set by the marketing team, and based on this comparison makes the logical bidding decisions. In essence, each keyword is constantly and automatically adjusted based on up-to-the-minute data to find and maintain it's most efficient position. Not only does this type of tool make sure the campaign is operating as efficiently as possible, but it also allows the marketer to maintain much larger keyword lists, increasing response while lowering their average order/conversion cost. This level of effectiveness is well beyond the typical campaign strategy based on position or click costs alone.
Of course, an effective tool shouldn't limit the agency, professional or marketing team. The marketer needs the flexibility to be able to place their client in the entire SE space, whether it's the pay-for-placement engines like Overture and Google or the paid inclusion search engines like Yahoo! (XML) and Looksmart (directory listings). The tool has to be able to administer the campaign, optimize the listings and report the results in a consolidated manor. A truly effective system will even help the agency allocate the client's media budget across the engines insuring that the client's campaign is yielding the lowest possible CPO. Flexibility in tracking is also important. Most marketers are already using a third-party tracking or web analytics service to monitor results for their clients’ campaigns. There are campaign optimization tools available that have the ability to "hook into" and utilize many of the most popular third-party tracking systems and optimize around a broad array of metrics. This makes set-up a lot easier rather than having to introduce a new and additional tracking scheme.
A successful search engine campaign is the result of a close working relationship between the marketing team, the search engines and the optimization tool they choose. There is no substitute for the knowledge and experience the professionals on the marketing team (internal or external) can draw upon -- and if they can use the right tool to make sure that their strategy is properly implemented, then they are sure to succeed. Choose the wrong tool and no matter how brilliant the strategy, it falls apart in the implementation. That's where the finesse comes in. A professional knows where to find what they don't know, or who to ask for help.
If one team is 10 percent smarter than another team, and the tool they use is 10 percent better, that team has a killer advantage over their competition. Which side do you want to be on?