SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns left to themselves can just bump along.
You should continually try to expand or optimize them. I’ve talked a lot about expanding keyword lists in my keyword research series, so let’s talk about optimization in this post.
For the sake of this post, let’s say we are selling women’s red leather shoes. Our initial list of keywords was ~ 500 words. The campaign has been running for a while and has done well, but needs some cleaning up.
Here are some keywords that drove a lot of clicks:
- red shoe
- red leather shoes
- leather shoes
- women’s shoes
- women’s red leather shoes
The title and description looks like this:
Six Ways to Optimize an SEM Campaign
#1 Calculate ROI for categories or keywords
ROI = return on investment.
Do you know how to calculate it?
If you don’t calculate your ROI, you are just throwing money away.
If you spent $3,000 on keyword clicks in the ”red shoes” ad group and tracked 300 orders from that ad group, your cost/sale for that category would be $10. Make sense? Your cost per individual keyword may look something like this below.
#2 Deal with Poor Performers
In the example above, “leather shoes” and “women’s shoes” are costing me $100 per sale. That’s just too much for me. One of my options is to pause those two keywords. In that case, I’m not showing up for searches on those keywords anymore.
A second option would be to drill down even deeper and find all the actual searches people are making. Google allows you to run a “search query report” that will give you the actual keywords people searched on. You may find that the term ”kids leather shoes” is generating a lot of clicks and you don’t sell any kids shoes! See #3 below for how to add negative keywords to fix that.
A third option is to take those poor performing words and put them in a separate category and use a different title, description, and landing page to try to get a better ROI.
#3 Add Negative Keywords
Another way to deal with poor performing keywords is to use “negative keywords”. If you don’t want to show up for searches of “kids”, you can add “-kids” to your list of keywords in Google.
#4 Create New Ad Groups
Is $10/sale the best you can do? Maybe, maybe not.
An ad group allows you to display different ads to unique sets of keywords. You could put “red shoe”, “red leather shoes”, and “women’s red leather shoes” in one category, “leather shoes” and similar words in a second ad group, and keywords like ”leather shoes” in a third category.
That way you can tailor the ad to the search term.
#5 Add Match Types
Google, Yahoo, and MSN all allow you to use match types with keywords. Match types allow you to match what type of searches you want your keywords to show up for. If this is news to you, learn more about Google’s matching options.
So one strategy might look like this:
- Start by using broad match for your keywords
- Run a test with a limited budget
- Run a “search query report” and see what searches you are getting clicks for
- Use negative, phrase, and exact matches to cut out undesirable keywords
Maybe when you run the search query report you see words like:
- red shoe restaurant
- red shoe repair
- red shoes for kids
You don’t want to show up for these searches, so you can either add negative keywords like “-restaurant” or create exact matches for your top keywords like [red shoes]. You’ve got lots of options.
#6 Test Title/Description Combinations
Google gives me 95 characters in the title and two description lines to explain the greatness of my red shoes. One thing new advertisers don’t always realize is that you can use more than one ad with an ad group.
Here is another strategy I might use with my red shoes campaign:
- Create two ads for “red shoes”
- Perhaps one focuses on the attributes of the shoe (i.e. scuff & waterproof) and one on the value (i.e. free shipping & great service)
- Use Google conversion tracking to see which keyword/ad combinations are most effective
- Once you’ve established a winner, pause the “loser” ad
- Create more ads over time to run again your “winner” ad
Conclusion
Don’t leave those paid search campaigns to themselves. Keep working on em!
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
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on Christmas day (pun intended).
You’ve heard of the story of the ”Tortoise and the Hare”, right? The tortoise is slow and steady and the hare is fast and maybe a bit prideful.
In Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise as agent for Cuba Gooding Jr says to him, “Help me, help you!“.
