Make Your Search Campaign Successful
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Clicks, click-through rate and cost-per-click are the measuring sticks of most search campaigns, because they're the statistics most easily gleaned from online reports. Judging a campaign's performance by these standards is not only misleading, it can cause an advertiser to waste significant investment.
Why? Because a click is only one action — it doesn't measure what that prospect did when he or she clicked on your ad (that is, did he or she become a lead or buy your product) or even how qualified he or she is. Our experience tells us there are many advertisers who are content to generate thousands of clicks at considerable cost, but discover on further analysis that the vast majority of those clicks are completely worthless.
The perfect search campaign is one that:
■ generates a cost per acquisition (CPA) — whether your acquisition is a lead, download, registration or sale — competitive with other advertising vehicles
■ generates predictable CPA results at projected spend levels
■ is sufficiently expansive to cover every keyword or phase, and every variation that a qualified prospect could search on
■ delivers relevant ad copy for every keyword (to drive clicks) and maps to relevant landing pages (to drive conversions)
■ is designed in such a way that specific terms, groups of terms and campaigns are all optimized separately, with separate budgets, ad copy, geo-targeting and day-parting
■ is tracked through use of a back-end database or CRM system that measures ROI on a keyword-by-keyword basis.
Don't have all these metrics in place? No one does. The scenario above is the ideal program, and a hypothetical ideal at that. But you should use these standards as goals and benchmarks.
Know what you want to achieve. Are you trying to generate downloads, registrations, page views, sales leads, qualified leads or sales? How are you defining that goal — is someone filling out a registration form, hitting a particular page or meeting certain qualification criteria?
Your search campaign should measure how many of those desired actions are taking place; how much each desired action is costing in the aggregate; and, which keywords generate those actions at the lowest cost.
Howard Sewell is president of Connect Direct.
Marketing Blog founder and top-selling author Michael Fleischner has been featured on The TODAY Show, ABC World News, and Bloomerg Radio. 
2 comments :
I have done a lot of research on this topic and have not yet been able to prove that any form of CPC advertising is worth doing. I understand that some small sites with a specific product that may not be easily found may do very well using CPC, but larger sites with a very big product line tend to lose money on CPC campaigns. I want to know if you have found a way for large companies with(Product lines of over 15,000 products)to market their products without the risk of CPC.
Actually, Google Adwords give all the details, but hardly anyone does anything more than paying more when campaign succeeds in term of sales.
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