Campaign preparation

by Efficient Frontier

Having completed your research, you will now be armed with invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. As mentioned, research is a continual process. Effective research is like having a global focus group and you must take note of what your (potential) customers are telling you and take action to meet these demands accordingly.

Your team

Before you embark upon a search marketing campaign, first make sure your internal house is in order. If you are a large company, make sure there is collaboration between the relevant departments such as Marketing, SalesIT and Finance (for inventory management). You will get better results from your search marketing if there is frequent communication between your brand marketers, direct marketers as well as all disciplines of online including; display, affiliates, SEO and PPC. If you have affiliates, you need to decide upon guidelines for brand bidding and a strategy for enforcing it..

For smaller companies, one member of staff could be trained up to manage your search campaigns and partners in house. The skills required for SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay per click) are fairly unique and very different from each other so a company will need to recruit accordingly or work with an agency. Typically an SEO expert will have more relevant HTML and website developing skills but a PPC specialist will have great analytical and mathematical skills.

Ultimately, whether it is an individual, a small in-house team or an agency, search engine marketing should be considered part of the overall marketing mix and not treated as a stand-alone department of a business. In many organisations PPC data is considered central to understanding customers and is central to facilitating marketing and business decisions

Your Budget

PPC budgets can be dealt with in two ways. They can be treated as media spend and budgets can be set in the marketing plan or they can be treated as a cost of sale. Treating PPC budgets as a cost of sale is ideal for companies who want to react quickly to new sources of profitable sales.

If you can track effectively the relationship between spend and revenue and your budgets can be flexible and adapt to fluctuating sales and costs, it might be optimal to treat PPC as a cost of sale. This allows quick reaction to increases in sales volume.

As sales go up, so should your budget until you reach your optimal return. This can be automatic if you treat your PPC budget as a cost of sale since there is a clear cause and effect relationship.
Keeping your PPC budget as a marketing cost may be better for your business if there is no strong link from click to revenue and/or you prefer to deal with it holistically as a part of the greater brand positioning.

Timings

It is important to appreciate that although search marketing can provide quick results, not all objectives can be achieved overnight. For example, achieving a top position in the natural search listings can take up to 6 months. Paid search shows more instantaneous results so to make sure you are visible on the search engines, start paid search while you are waiting for natural listings to build up over time. Assign realistic timings to your objectives by doing some initial testing or working with an agency to work out your strategy. A specialist agency can also advise on how to integrate your search campaigns with offline activity and on consumer trends in search that may influence your success.

Your website

Perhaps the most important consideration is the structure of your website. Does anything need to be altered or added to fit in with your search campaign to ensure a seamless customer journey?

‘Information architecture (IA)’ is a term used to describe the organisation of information, the content, functionality, navigation and usability of a web site. Successful IA will ensure that users can easily find the information that they are looking for and help the search engines ‘understand’ your site.

Consider the range of information being sought and plan your website so that content can be grouped into logical ‘themed’ sections. Ensure that your internal linking allows users to easily navigate between the different areas on your site without getting lost. This also helps make the site ‘search engine friendly’ (see Chapter 5)

When using PPC, ensure that you create suitable landing pages. If they are looking to buy pink socks or to find out your share price, linking them to the homepage rather than directing them straight to the relevant page will just frustrate your potential consumer. By successfully marrying search terms, ad copy and an appropriate landing page, you can create a seamless ‘journey’ for the user which will help drive conversion. This will also positively affect your search engine quality score which in time will make your clicks cheaper. If you are aiming to drive sales, it is no good driving traffic through search if they do not go on to convert, so make sure these landing pages have prominent calls to action. It is essential to test the design of your landing pages to find the best possible combination of content that brings you the most conversions. Google has a free tool called the website optimizer that can help with this.

Online media offers you an unparalleled ability to analyse how users are interacting with your site. There are many solutions available to monitor site usage, but at the very least ensure that you know where your users are coming from, what search terms they used and what they do on your site. It is important that once you have set your KPIs you put in place a tracking system to help monitor them, whether it is your basic site statistics, or third party web analytics. Google Analytics is an example of a free web analytics tool for this purpose. (More details in the next chapter)

Structuring of Campaigns

One of the most important part of PPC is the way you structure your campaigns in the search engines.

Firstly it is important because it is the way the search engine looks at your campaigns and this effects your quality score which in turn affects your PPC costs.

Secondly good structure allows for a good user experience because it ensures that users view the most targeted ad for their search query. The smaller the adgroup the more targeted the advert can be.

Copywriting

Achieving a listing in the search engine results, in either paid or natural, is one thing, but getting the user to click-through to your site is another. The headline and accompanying copy to your listing is an important call to action and there are a number of things to bear in mind when preparing the copy:

• Think about what they are looking for and use keywords in the title
• description field and the URL(this is more important than your company name)
• Use the description to provide a concise summary of what the page will offer the user and give the user a reason to click through (e.g. highlight any promos or special benefits)
• Be honest and factual and back up any claims on your site
• Be specific about the products on offer to avoid false clicks (e.g. b2b companies need to make it clear that their offers are open to businesses only)
• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to insert the search term into the adcopy but be careful not to pay for irrelevant clicks
• Capitalise some words in your text to make them stand out. This will help to increase conversions
• Consider a short and memorable URL with no www
• Create a relevant sub domain to increase chances of click through
• Integrate offline messaging into your content
• Constantly test your creatives and analyse those which are underperforming. The search engines will suggest which creative is working best but be careful this is not based on clicks or impressions. You should base successful adverts on conversions