For a digital campaign, there is rarely a time when search shouldn’t be considered as part of the marketing mix. The choice is of course, how much focus it has. Search is fantastic at capturing demand for a product or area of interest but it has much less value in terms of stimulating that initial engagement. Some may say that appearing against a generic search result is beneficial but when launching a new product or service, you need to build the customer awareness first.
The focus of a search budget will change for a number of reasons but one of the key initial factors is going to be the maturity of the natural search campaign and more importantly, the ranking of key search terms. For a new site, it is going to take time to be picked up by the engines and to start gaining the quality inbound links needed to help elevate a sites authority. In this situation the need for paid search is going to be at its greatest in order to help drive the exposure of the site in the search results.
For an established site, the choice of channel becomes more of an optimisation decision than being forced down one particular road. Assuming that an advertiser has a mixture of natural search positions, this will help direct where the budget should be spent. If they are already appearing on page #1 then perhaps it is worth the investment to optimise the site further to push them up the rankings. However, if they are much lower in position then paid search is vital to ensure that the opportunity to gain traffic is maximised. Clearly there needs to be a longer term approach to natural search to ultimately change the balance.
With the current economic climate, ROI is likely to be the primary metric for measuring campaign success and so this needs to be central when deciding whether paid, natural or in fact both search channels should be used.
Natural search is generally focused on higher search volume generic keywords. That’s not to say that long-tail keyword optimisation isn’t important but the balance of budget between channels becomes more vital for generic terms as these will normally have the higher CPC costs. Whilst ROI is going to be central, almost all businesses will have sales targets and so the volume of conversions also needs to be considered. By running paid search campaigns alongside natural search, an advertiser has the opportunity to gain additional traffic whilst also benefiting from greater control over the messaging and destination of this traffic.
Digital marketers have for many years said “why have capped budgets when you have a positive ROI”, however the reality of budgets and finance directors is that this is rarely possible. So assuming that the marketing investment is capped, if both search channels are achieving a positive ROI (assuming that’s your metric of choice) then why would you turn off a potential source of conversions?
Decisions need to be made and if natural search is achieving a higher ROI than paid (a fair assumption for a well ranked keyword) then it makes sense to look at whether the paid budget can be reallocated to other terms. This is where the question of search volume comes in. If there are other keywords that are performing at a high ROI and are not currently being served 100% of the time through paid search, then moving budget to them is a sensible step.
One important factor when deciding how a budget should be split is to understand how your customers are engaging with you. If the right tracking is not in place then the real story can be lost. Are your customers initially searching on a generic paid term and then converting on a natural brand term? Avoid making decisions in the dark by having the right analytics in place.
Only by truly understanding the interaction between search channels are you able to allocate budget between campaigns. And we haven’t even started to talk about interaction of search with media or affiliate campaigns yet….
Tips for achieving the optimum search strategy:
1.Set KPIs. Set targets and Key Performance Indicators, whether this is internal or a client initiative... CPA or ROI based... achievable campaign targets should be set and adhered to, automatically providing optimisation goals.
2.Target your users. Campaign structure, keywords, AdCopy, day parting, geographical. Each step of your campaign should be optimised towards targeting high converting users.
3.Always optimise towards conversion data, not CTR, otherwise you may find you are pushing more traffic through a worse performing keyword creative for example. A highly converting term may well have a terrible CTR!
4.Don’t forget about Yahoo and MSN. It’s all too easy to focus all your efforts on Google which provides the easiest PPC interface and the majority of your traffic. But MSN and Yahoo can often provide higher conversion for your campaign. International Search Engines (such as Baidu) should also be investigated when managing global accounts. In fact… it can also be worth branching out away from the Google, Yahoo and MSNs of our world, and using vertical search engines to test the performance they deliver.
5.Don’t only stick to standard PPC; test other elements of search marketing such as content or placement targeting. A well structured content campaign can often achieve higher results than a poorly structured PPC campaign.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment