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Article of the Week; SEM getting the most
for your budget, it is not getting any easier to improve ROI
SEM or Paid Search has become a lot like SEO (Natural Search),
where you need to optimise & closely monitor your campaigns.
To get MAX sales you just bid on position one and go hell for leather,
with all the keywords & phrases you can find right? This sort
of strategy is not going to work if you have a budget to work within
and you will probably lose money on lot of these keys. The goals
of the campaign need to be clearly defined, and budgets agreed upon.
So you have your budget how do you allocate it across the term?
The first mistake people make is they allow the engines to allocate
their spend across a period. You have to know your market, no point
advertising AFL footy jumpers everywhere in January, when everyone
is watching the cricket or on holidays somewhere. I allocate my
budget over the year, then the month then the days.
Day
parting is another strategy, be careful of spending your
budget at night while your target market is online during business
hours by which time you have spent your daily allocated budget!
What am I talking about here? Google for example runs in US time
so the ‘day’ begins at 5pm, I run campaigns where I
turn them off at 7pm so I don’t burn cash on people who are
fishing, then turn it on in the morning at 7am to run through the
day. I have a colleague who talks about people not buying holidays
when it is raining, but if it is a nice day they start buying, also
people look for new jobs and holidays early in the week. Its all
in the stats, when do you make your sales, what days & times
of day are best?
Attention to detail rules the roost here, looking
at historical data to understand highs and lows and some keys just
don’t convert! Do you keep these as branding exercise? maybe,
or do you want to make money??? Depends on the goals, one thing
for sure if you just look at the averages you are going to be wasting
money.
Control your campaign;
Employ the peel & stick method, where for example you move
a high volume broad match keyphrase into its own ad group in adwords
or standard match in Yahoo Sponsored Search. This enables you to
manage bids more precisely, target/rewrite the ads better and adjust
landing pages. Deliver each user as close as possible to what they
are looking for. I call this optimisation of a SEM campaign, this
is an ongoing vigil, with things changing constantly. Allocate appropriate
resource to the job at hand to maximise your ROI.
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