What You Need to Know for a Successful SEM Campaign

The bounce rate is influenced by the relevance of the traffic brought to the site: you can advertise on every combination of keywords known to mankind, but if thy are not relevant to your business, your are just driving up your costs and you are spamming people!

Moreover you have to be careful that your ad doesn’t promises something that your site can’t offer. For example, if I searched for a specific model of a product, I saw your ad that was talking me about that specific model at a discounted price, when I get to the site I expect to see that exact model whith the discount you promised me; otherwise I’m going to feel deceived by your ad and I’m going to leave your site (bounce back), possibly hating you with all my heart!

The ad plays a fundamental role both in the quality of the traffic I drive on the website, but also on the number of clicks I get. Even if you bid only on the most relevant keywords, you may still not attract the proper amount of traffic due to the fact that your ads are not appealing to the users. Catchy phrasing must be coupled with the promise of a valuable selling proposition that gives an edge to our product with respect to the competition (promise that must be kept at all costs and clearly visualized in the landing page). Limited discount? No shipping costs?  I want to know about it right away, but they are going to make me choose your product over a competitor’s one only if the offer is truly unique! If no one makes you pay for shipping costs then advertising it won’t give you an advantage, but it is still necessary requirement to compete in the market. [For the fanatics of economic theory here we find the concepts of Unique Selling Proposition and Ideal Point of Offer]

Even if this may seem counter-intuitive (and wrong), the reality is that I’ve got coght up so much with the mathematical formulation of this “theorem”, that I’ve applied a substitution. If you remember a few lines above I’ve assumend that the traffic relevance was a function of keyword relevance and the attractiveness of the ad.

Having said that here I imply that the click through rate is a function of keyword relevance, attractiveness of the ad (value proposition, messaging, etc.) and ad position. Needless to explain that higher ranked ads get haigher visibility therefore have higher chances to be clicked (see the F shaped heat map that that shows the attention given to the elements on a search results page on Google). This doesn’t imply though that a top position is the one that will allow you to have the greatest ROI or profitability (quantity x price – cost of good sold).

While we can directly influence the bid we are put forward for a specific keyword (adgroup or campaign), quality score is a mysterious and complicated metric to influence.

One of the main elements that influence quality score is the historical CTR. Obviously if you bid on a keyword like “chipset” when you are selling designer begs, your quality score will start low. But the system of a (good) search engine is always eager to learn from it’s user: if it sees that people keep on clicking on your ad very often (keeping a decent ctr), it will gradually improve the quality score to the point that will “learn” that a famous designer has created a new pochette called exactly “chipset”!

(If we want to get very picky about the silly example I just made, let me say in my defense that “chipset” will still be a very bad keyword to choose. I would go more on keyword like “chipset bag” “chipset pochette”, “chipset -name of the designer-”, and use wisely match types and tons of negatives!)

This is very straightforward. Both levers can be actioned immidiatly. The only thing to notice is that in the Keyoword # I imply also the “nature of the keywords chosen”, which includes both how generic they are, and the matching option chosen. Obviously we need to remember that greater the number of generic keywords chosen, greater is the chance that the relevance of such keywords will decrease, compromising traffic relevance and quality score. [Let’s have a postulate for this: keyword number grows in inverse proportion with respect to keyword relevance in an accelerating fashion]

FINAL REMARKS

When managing a SEM campaign there are many switches that we can play with right away in order to influence the success of our online advertising campaign.

Some of these metrics, such as budget, keywords number (considering also their broadness and match type), bids, keyword relevance, messaging, landing page quality, website usability and dropout-rate, can be influenced in the short term in order to see an impact in the success of our campaign.  

[Caveat: obviously this implies that our online marketing department has full control on the website (landing pages, forms, carts, etc.); often happens that the website is managed by the IT/engineering department, which doesn’t always implement the things for the benefit of your advertising campaign. If this is the case make sure your CEO realizes the missed opportunities (profits) deriving from a sub-optimal website, so that he can grant you a better spot in the priority list of whoever manages your website!]

At the same time we have to remember that in case of faliure of our SEM campaign (negative ROI, high CPA, etc.), we cannot blame it only on a handful of metrics, but we need to consider the above function holistically with respect to all the elements that constitute it.

Moreover is important to remember that the cost/benefit ratio of an improvement to one of its components, shouldn’t be confused with your ability to implement such a change, but should always be evaluated in light of a sound analysis. This means that if changing the layout of the landing page of your campaign is going to be painful just because who’s in charge of it has other priorities, doesn’t mean that it’s not what it needs to be done, but just that your campaign lives in a suboptimal business environment and is destined to bring a suboptimal result.

Obviously I understand that in no company there is an ideal business envirenment and everyone needs to compromize between costs, resources and results; but is always fundamental to remember what is the difference between what can be done and what should be done. I believe that doing everything that can be done to achieve what should be done will make you not only a better online marketer, but a better person overall.