In my chapter, “SEM and SEO: Core Drivers of iDirect Success,” I address the importance of applying data-driven project management to every aspect of search marketing.  For even the most basic of SEM or SEO campaigns, marketers can access up-to the minute statistics at the most granular of levels.  For someone with a more traditional direct marketing background, having such an abundance of real-time data at their fingertips can be both a blessing and a curse.  It’s easy to begin tweaking every aspect of a campaign, and tempting to react to every fluctuation in demand.  By systematically integrating data into campaign analysis, however, advertisers can start managing their campaigns with a more disciplined approach.

Dividing the chapter into two sections, one on SEM and one on SEO, I put forth a set of core strategies which are designed to help you more precisely measure effectiveness and drive continued growth:

SEM

• Comprehensive, Integrated Data Create a single reporting framework for connecting data from search engines, your internal accounting system and your bid optimization platform. Comparing click traffic and conversion data can help allocate incremental spending to campaigns that yield the greatest ROI.
• Efficient Account Structure Keywords should be categorized according to theme, product, type of customer, or stage of the buying cycle. Constructing narrow groupings enables you to serve highly targeted ads and landing pages.
• Targeted Creative Creative should be clearly stated and should ideally include words from the search query, promote your value proposition and specify your competitive differentiators.
• ROI- based Bid Management Knowing the “right” bid for a keyword depends upon your goals. If you are looking to drive revenue, you may be willing to spend more on certain keywords. If your goal is to have a very narrow cost per acquisition, you may have to sacrifice a few auctions.
• Optimized Landing Pages Optimizing post-click experience can be a game changer in SEM. Landing pages should be relevant to the keyword query and should reiterate the promise made in your paid ad.
• Test, Measure, Test Measure, ad infinitum What makes SEM such a compelling, yet challenging medium, is that no campaign ever reaches a stage of perfection. Continuous testing should be the mantra of your SEM campaign.

SEO

• Campaign Planning Before beginning, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your site, customer behavior, objectives and competitive environment. From this analysis, you can develop an extensive keyword list, categorizing terms between high-performing keywords and long-tail terms.
• Opportunity Analysis Each keyword campaign is then connected to a new or existing webpage, prioritizing high performing campaigns ahead of low-volume search queries.
• Diagnosis A thorough SEO diagnosis should include an extensive analysis of site architecture, code-level components, linking and content.
• Reporting and Analytics Depending on your level of data integration, marketers should strive to measure campaign effectiveness based on organic conversions, revenue or net margin, rather than traffic to the site.

These tips are naturally a starting point, but they can be extremely helpful for optimizing both developing and tenured campaigns. Once SEM and SEO are well understood and optimized as individual channels, you should then begin to look at the two holistically and concentrate on optimizing them together to maximize margin and volume based on specifics of your corporate strategy. To read more about how we apply the principles of iDirect marketing to search, please review the entire chapter, which includes more detailed best practices along with some informative case studies.

So in the world of SEM, people initially like the idea of bidding on a popular keyword like “new car.” But because it does not convert as well as say “Acura RL dealership location” they have a hard time justifying the spend against a keyword that on its own direct merits may not return a positive ROI. Now, no one I know doubts that being present on the keyword “new car” has some value; but most of us struggle to answer the question, “how much?”

How can we determine the value of the keyword “new car” and what should we do with that information?

So many factors impact a purchase decision:  friends, marketing, reviews, personal taste, etc.  Most likely, we will never understand all of the factors but we certainly should be able to understand some factors better. For the case of a general query like “new car”, we should be able to figure out who clicked on our ad, what they did when they clicked, where else they see our marketing messaging and when they actually bought, if they bought at all. Again ignoring all of the other data we would love to know (and there is a lot of it – subject of a future blog entry) , this information can be used to begin to paint a picture about the relative value each marketing message contributed to the final purchase of that Acura RL (a completely underappreciated car in my opinion).

Let’s assume I saw a total of 32 online marketing messages that were Acura RL related over the past 30 days (yes, I am only talking about online right now… you have to start somewhere, right?) through a combination of search keywords, banners, social media, etc. Some I clicked and some I did not, but all 32 influenced my decision to buy in some way. The question is to what degree did each touchpoint influence my decision, and thus how valuable was each message? There are a number of factors to consider including recency (with the theory being that the more recent the marketing message to actual purchase the more likely it had a greater influence on my decision), actual clicks versus impressions, relative interaction on the site post-click, purchase lifecycle, the actual marketing collateral, marketing relevance, etc.

An example of the recency impact is shown below:

Of course, all the factors need to be built into the model, not just recency.  And as we continue to dig through all of the data and test models, we will provide updates via this blog about how our thinking evolves over time.

We are already testing making concrete bid changes in paid search for a few in-house test accounts and a few of our Partners and we are excited about the results.

Stay tuned, it will be a great voyage, particularly in an Acura RL…