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Advanced Track: Web Marketing Strategy for Paid SearchWhen starting a web marketing strategy for paid search, there are a lot of questions to answer such as:
Phrase Research: When it comes to defining key phrases for your web marketing strategy, you’ll need to do research to determine how many people search on a phrase monthly. This page on Overture gives you an idea of how often a word is searched: http://inventory.overture.com/. When thinking about the keyword selection, don’t forget to consider the sales cycle that each of your site’s target audience’s goes through, so you can appeal to potential customers at every sales phase. For example, searchers will often use broad, generic terms when at the beginning of the sales cycle. They’re just looking for general information and typically want to see a variety of products and brands. These words tend to be the most expensive. When the searcher has more information, they might come back to the search engine and type a multi-word phrase. These phrases typically cost less because they are much more specific and don’t appeal to as wide of an audience. But it’s good web marketing strategy to keep branding in mind and bid on the occasional general phrase to make sure you have exposure at several levels of the sales cycle. Ad Writing Strategy: Considering different audiences and buying cycles is essential when writing the ads as well. A good rule of thumb is to include the phrase in both the title and description to reinforce that your site is relevant to the search. It is also good to tailor the ad to the anticipated audience and their anticipated intent. And finally, be sure and direct visitors not just to the index page, but to pages within the site that are most relevant to the phrase and ad. Bidding and Budgets: When bidding, ideally you would pay the minimum of $.10 a click for the lead and the customer would come to you looking for the exact product they searched for and then make a purchase. This direct connection to conversion rarely happens. You can bid in any position you are willing to pay for, but be careful not to engage in Ego bidding (bidding above competitors regardless of bid costs) as this leads to bad ROI and bidding wars. Deciding where to bid is a fluid and ongoing process. You’ll need to be sure and track conversions to make the best decisions about bidding and connect click costs to return on investment (ROI) costs. Choosing a budget will require the same flexibility. Ideally this decision should be based on ROI data, but it is often, understandably, based on yearly marketing budgets. Conversion Tracking and Bid Maintenance: Tracking conversions and ROI is not a simple process, but it is possible to do this work at any level desired online and the data is invaluable. As a basic option, Google and Overture offer conversion tracking tools within the accounts. These programs give you code to put on your conversion pages (such as a “thank you for buying” page) and then collect data to give you rates and costs of conversions. Other off-the-shelf software offers ROI and traffic analysis on a deeper level – showing per product ROI data and also tracking other details of user behavior over time. Once this data is analyzed and decisions about where to bid have been made, managing those bids can be done by hand or with software. In less competitive industries going manually into the account a few times daily can work out well. But with the growing popularity of Paid Search in most industries it is typically worth the investment to use software that automatically changes bids according to parameters you set on desired position and budget. Some tools can even adjust bids based on ROI parameters. Setup: You can sign up using an online marketing company to help you research phrases, write ads, and get conversion analysis in place. Or you can do this work yourself. If you decide to go it alone, remember that Overture and Google are happy to help you through e-mails, customer support forms, and the phone. Phone numbers can be hard to find, however. Overture’s customer service line is 866-999-6837. Google can be reached at 866-246-6453. Other Paid Search opportunities to consider include FindWhat, Enhance, LookSmart, Business.com, Shopping.com, Thomas Registry, and a host of shopping and other industry-specific websites. | ||||||
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