Search Engine Marketing: How Minor Tweaks Reap Major Rewards
By Anna Johnson on February 3rd, 2010Internet marketers experienced running search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns know how important it is to test. In fact, testing a search campaign is practically synonymous with running an SEM campaign.
Because of the wide range of variables involved in a typical SEM campaign there are a LOT of things to test. The benefits, however, can be substantial. Also, by testing lots of things you can end up discovering that relatively minor tweaks to a PPC ad campaign can reap major rewards.
The first goal of testing is to identify the relationship between the variables in your SEM campaign and how changing one affects the others… and ultimately affects your cost per click (CPC) and, more importantly, your cost per lead and/or cost per sale, or whatever other metric(s) you use to measure the success ohttp://www.kikabink.com/news/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2511&message=9f your campaign.
When you understand the relationship between each element of your SEM campaign you can also identify which elements to focus on in order to make the most beneficial changes. Also, keep in mind that just as making small, but positive, changes can reduce your costs and boost clicks / leads / sales… NOT making changes or making NEGATIVE changes, can have disproportionately detrimental results as well.
What are the variables to experiment with? Just some of the elements in a typical SEM or PPC advertising campaign to consider are your:
- Target market (e.g. geography)
- Offer
- Landing page design
- Landing page headline
- Landing page copy
- Landing page functionality
- Choice of keywords (broad, exact match, negative keywords, etc)
- Ad headline
- Ad copy
- Ad URL (i.e. the URL displayed in your ad)
- Day-parting (i.e. time and days when your ad is running)
Changing just one of these elements is likely to impact on one or more of the other elements. For example, changing your target market (geography) is likely to influence the effect (and effectiveness) of your day-parting, and changing your ad copy is likely to affect the power of your landing page.
Consequently, you’ll not only want to understand how each of these elements impacts the others – and therefore how changing one or more affects your key metrics – but you may also see the need to change certain elements in tandem.
It almost goes without saying, let alone testing, that you’ll want to change such items as keywords, ad copy and landing pages together. BUT it’s still important to test, so you’re relying on hard data, rather than guesswork!
