Copyright © 2012 Insurance Marketing HQ. All Rights Reserved. Snowblind by Themes by bavotasan.com. Powered by WordPress.
Internet marketing is here to stay. Whether it is search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or social media outreach, your business is likely participating in some form or fashion within this growing industry. The state of Search Marketing is good, and growing.
In fact, as the new Director of SEM for Astonish Results, I’m particularly biased towards the news that paid search spending is projected to grow another 16% in 2011. Coming on the heels of a 14% increase in PPC spending in 2010, online marketing continues to be an effective and efficient marketing tool for companies in any business vertical.
Being new to this blog, I’ll offer some of suggestions that can help you take advantage of this booming business. You’ll hear from me from time to time, offering tips and tricks when it comes to optimizing your PPC campaigns and updates on this ever-changing advertising medium.
In the meantime, let’s talk about a few things that make a good SEM campaign great. The following tips won’t guarantee a successful campaign, but they’ll get you closer to reaching its potential.
- Take a holistic approach to search marketing. The best performing campaigns that I’ve run have always used PPC in tandem with their SEO strategy. We all know that these two forms of digital marketing are vastly different from one another, but too often we choose one over the other. I’m here to tell you: don’t choose! Supplement your SEO efforts by utilizing PPC to run paid advertisements on keywords that you are having trouble ranking for organically. At the same time, support your SEO by analyzing PPC keyword data: identify new keyword opportunities by investigating all of the keyword searches than resulted in a PPC visit to your site. Is your PPC data showing that users are searching on a different type of vernacular to get to your ads? Incorporate that into your site’s content. The strategy is to use the available data from each form of digital marketing to inform the other, so that they work hand in hand.
- Test, refine … rinse, repeat. Search engine marketing is one of the most measurable forms of advertising in today’s business world. But what do we do with all of this available data? Use it to our advantage, of course, by testing different campaign tactics and strategies against one another. Not sure which ad copy is the best? Run two pieces of ad copy against each other, and pick the one with the best click-through-rate after 100 clicks for each ad. Don’t know what match type to use for your keywords? Set up two mirror campaigns for your keywords, setting one campaign to “phrase match” and one to “exact match”. Create another campaign with targeted keywords (long-tail terms) and set it to “broad match”. After a while, you’ll be able to tell which match type is most cost effective for you!
- Establish a conversion point, and assign a value to that conversion. Online retailers have it easy: a PPC visitor clicks on an ad, and either buys your product or doesn’t. Comparing the ROI for these types of campaigns is relatively easy, but what if you’re not an online retailer? What if you don’t “sell” something on your web site? It doesn’t matter, set up a conversion point anyway. Do you offer personal insurance products but don’t sell them online? Collect a lead from PPC by advertising for a free auto insurance quote. Are you a hospital chain with an online presence? Create an online appointment request form and drive your PPC traffic to that form. These may not be direct sales, but these “conversions” are a more effective performance metric than simply counting visits to your site. Your challenge is to assign a value to these conversions. Once you’ve set that value for your PPC conversion point, compare the “revenue” generated by these leads to the cost it took to acquire them. You’ll have a better understanding of how effective your PPC campaigns are.
- Have a dedicated PPC landing page. So, you’ve driven paid search traffic to your site … now what? Well, the best performing PPC campaigns have a unique dedicated landing page served up to only those visits that come through SEM. If you are sending PPC traffic to your home page, you’re likely losing valuable conversion opportunities for two reasons: first, the information you’re providing is too broad for your PPC audience (who have a specific search term in mind); second, there are far too many opportunities for a visitor to navigate to other content on your site (and thus away from your desired conversion point). This is the difference between a well-optimized home page and a dedicated PPC landing page: your site’s home page is designed as a broad gateway through which users can find a wide array of content, while your PPC page is designed to entice your visitor to perform one specific action (“Request a free auto insurance quote!”, “Download this white paper!”)
Come back to this space frequently to check out my thoughts on Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click advertising. After all, if American’s performed almost 19 billion searches in the month of March alone, shouldn’t you be paying attention to your Search Engine Marketing strategy?
June 15, 2011 at 8:52 am
[...] already spent time in this space talking about how paid search marketing is set to take off for the rest of 2011, but now come some new details about where that search growth is coming from. Paid search marketing [...]