Many companies spend a lot of time carefully crafting their pay per click (PPC) ad campaigns. Many also turn to paid search ads to make their company’s website pop up at the top of a search engine search. Search engines are at the beginning of more than 93% of all internet experiences.
Evaluating your campaign often is critically important to its success. The algorithm that is used by Google, for instance, changes between 500 and 600 times. That means if you have a campaign going for a long time without checking on how it is doing may mean you miss out on some valuable information and also waste a lot of money on a strategy that can no longer work due to changes with the search engine algorithm.
Review and modify or replace your campaign at least every six months. Your campaign has a structure. This is really just a data structure that you use to collect business intelligence that will help you make your decisions about your paid search choices. It can also get you good market level data that will help your entire business. This structure should be set up to lend support to your business goals. This will help you make sure what your paid search focuses on the most profitable parts of your business. Your goals will change and when they do, you need to reevaluate your structure and make the changes that you need to make. Remember you paid search campaign is not just about driving traffic to any part of your site. You want people to do to a, the part that is the most relevant to what they need but b, to where your top performing products are.
Modify your search engine parity situation at least every three months. If you have a paid search campaign, you need to be represented on both Google AdWords and Bing Ads. You should not favor one over the other in terms of how much you spend on either. The two platforms have slightly different audiences. You should monitor how your ads do on both search engines. Certain keywords may be more helpful on Google than Bing or vice versa.
Do an analysis of your search query performance at every one to three months. This will give you a great and unique perspective into what your customers and other consumers are looking for. It also will help you reduce the amount your spend per click. You can make your analysis easier by doing it alphabetically then by theme and then organize the data by cost, impressions, etc. Doing this kind of analysis will give you a great insight into how your customers’ behavior changes over time. This can help with other aspects of your business such as new product development or product feature changes.
Perform an analysis of your low and high volume keywords every three months. The most efficient way to bid for your paid search campaigns is by keywords. You therefore want to know which are your low and high volume keywords.
Are you staying within your budget? When you started your paid search campaign, you probably set a limit on what you were going to spend. Clearly, these are not set in stone and if you find your return on investment is so high with your paid search, you may want to extend it after you have hit your budget ceiling but you should monitor how much you are spending to make sure you do not exceed that ceiling, too.
It is amazing how important search engines have become in many companies marketing strategies. Every month, there are more than one billion searches done with search engines. Most people never look past that first page of a search though. Nearly 75% will not get even to the second page of a search. This is one of the reasons PPC consultants stress the importance of paid ads in a business’s overall marketing strategy.
Every now and again, some “internet expert” will announce the death of search engine optimization and that sort of thing. They will say keywords are no longer important, etc., etc. For now, nothing looks like it could be farther from the truth than that.
