7 Tips for Better Search Engine Marketing

Whether its for buying a car or a flight ticket, consumers have been using the internet  as research a media for a while now. Increasingly, in the B2B world, customers are showing up on-line to do a lot of their primary research. As such, effective on-ine marketing is becoming a must-have tool for a B2B marketer.

In this post I will provide some broad strokes on tips for running effective paid search campaigns. In future posts, I will write about each of these tips in more details individually.


Note: I am using examples from Google Adwords here. However, the concepts should apply to Yahoo and MSN as well.

1. Use Appropriate Campaign Settings
Being thoughful about the campaign settings is the first step towards running effective campaigns. For example, do you want to target all the countries within a specific region? What about the time you want to run your ads during week days? How about the weekends? Do you want to run your ads both in the Search network as well as the Display Network? Remember that by choosing to run your ad in the Google Display Network you could end up having more impressions, however, you might not have many conversions.

2. Determine and Use the Right Keywords
This is the most obvious one. Keywords are the words/expressions a person uses in the search window of a search engine to look for products/services. The most important thing to remember is that keywords shouldn't be what you think people will search for, but based on what people actually search for. It's extremely important to get actual internet search traffic data from reputable sources (e.g., Comscore, Alexa) to determine what are the right keywords you should base your ads on. Also, make sure that you are not using ambiguous words.

3. Improve Relevance of Ad Text

To increase the probability of someone clicking on your ad, you need to make that the text of your ad very relevant to the search. By looking at the quality score of your ad, you will be able to measure whether your ads have the relevant text or not. For example, if your ad text does not have any of the keywords you have on your ad group, you are more likely to have lower quality score than if you use keyword(s) in your ad text.

    

4. Optimize the Organization of Ad Groups, Ads, and Keywords
If you have too few adgroups, each having a broad spectrum of keywords, with all likehood, your ads will have lower quality score and might not show up on the search results as expected. Try to "cluster" your keywords in ad groups in a way so that the ads and the keywords are very relevant within the ad group.

5. Use Negative Keywords Appropriately
Negative keywords are a way to ensure that you do not waste impressions for search terms that are not relevant to your product/service. For example, if you are not an open source software provider, you might want to filter out searches where people are looking for open source software only. By using "open source" as a negative keywords, you will be able to filter out those searches.

6. Tweak Your Bids As Needed
Your bid for a keyword is one of the most important determinants for whether and where your ad will show up in the search results. The "relevance score" of your ad determines how competitive your ad is. One way to look at the relevance score of your ad is - relevance score equals bid * quality score. Even after improving the quality score of your keywords, your ad still might not be very competitive compared to what others are doing if your bid is too low. Make sure you monitor how your bids are doing and tweak the bids to find the optimal value over time.

7. Monitor and Measure Regularly
It's extremely important to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and the individual components (e.g., adgroups, ads, keyowrds) on a regular basis and take corrective actions as necessary. Google Adwords (combined with Google Analytics) give you a weath of reporting options to analyze your campaigns. Typically it's a good idea to let the campaigns run for about couple of weeks before you start monitoring the campaigns on a regular basis. For example, by analyzing your campaigns you will be able to figure out:

• how much are you losing to competition because of budget?
• how much of "impressions" share are you loosing to competition?
• how much are you loosing to competition because of lack of ad relevance? 

I will write more about these in details in future posts.