Top 10 Mistakes that Many Search Marketers Make
"We tried using Google about a year ago but it simply didn’t work for our business. We ended up spending $10,000 and didn’t get a single sale. I guess the only good news is that Google sent us a pen at the end of the year. We refer to it as the '$10,000 pen'."
The quote above is from a conversation between 360Partners and a prospective client. Unfortunately, the story is not unique. The days of entering a credit card into Google or Yahoo along with a list of 20 keywords is over. Not only has the market become much more competitive, the pay-per-click search engines have become more complex. As the search engines have expanded their capabilities, the knowledge and expertise to effectively use the engines has also grown exponentially.
The result of all of this complexity is the increased likelihood of an expensive search marketing mistake. Below is a list of 360Partners’ “Top 10 Mistakes” made by search marketers when running their campaigns. Are you making any of these mistakes in your campaign?
1) Advertising in Canada, Alaska and Hawaii
Search marketers commonly forget to check geography settings for their search campaigns. Whenever an advertiser sets up a new campaign on Google or Yahoo, both engines automatically opt-in the campaign to run in all 50 states and Canada. However, many companies either cannot effectively serve or are not seeking prospective customers in these areas.
For example, one of 360Partners’ clients is a winter clothing company. When 360Partners took over the account, the team noticed that the company had been running ads in Canada (which they could not service due to other partnerships) and Hawaii (which has very little use for warm, winter clothing). The money that the company was spending in these areas was driving in unqualified traffic – wasted spending. The team quickly blocked these areas saving the company money.
If your company can effectively serve Canada, Alaska and Hawaii, great! You don’t have to worry about geography settings. For many companies, however, it pays to turn these areas off.
2) Forget to opt out of the content network when setting up a new search campaign
Content network search has come a long way in the past several years. When first launched, the content networks were riddled with low quality sites and click fraud. Kudos go out to the search engines (especially Google) in cleaning up the content networks and making them a viable medium. 360Partners has had a lot of success using the content network for some of its customers.
However, even with improvements, content network traffic is generally lower quality than search traffic. This makes sense as content traffic tends to be “information gathering” customers whereas search traffic tends to be “researching to buy” customers. As such, the value of a content click is usually a lot lower than a search click. By forgetting to opt out of the content network, search marketers are basically bidding the same amount for both.
To maximize performance of both search and content network campaigns, 360Partners recommends creating a separate content network campaign with separate (and lower) bids. This way the performance of each medium can be measured and managed independently.
3) Setting all campaigns and adgroups to broad match
Broad match can be a powerful tool for search marketers. It allow your ads to show up on some of the most obscure “long tail” search queries – ones that you would never have found on your own. However, broad match does have its disadvantages in that it can match your ads to unrelated queries driving up costs.
When setting up a new campaign, 360Partners recommends running a new campaign as exact match to start. This gives you time to figure out which keywords are performing, determine proper bid levels, refine creative messaging, etc. Once the baseline changes and account improvements are made, broad match can be used to experiment in expanding the account.
4) Directing all traffic to the home page
The goal of any marketing program is to get the right message to the right person at the right time. One way to accomplish this is by having several entry points into your website for your search traffic. For example, if your website sells insurance, ideally you should send someone who is searching for “renters insurance” to a different page than someone who enters “homeowners insurance”. Both customers have unique needs and will respond to different messaging.
Many sites send all users to a single landing page or their homepage. When potential customers can’t find the information they are looking for immediately they will quickly go somewhere else. 360Partners recommends that site owners think about the different types of potential customers who may come to the site and then create customized landing pages. In the insurance example, the website should create two different landing pages with different messages and potentially even different calls to action.
5) Advertising on the iPhone platform
Question: how many enterprise software buyers regularly use their iPhone to shop for products? Not many. Given this, why do so many enterprise software companies run their ads on Google for the iPhone? The answer is simple: Google defaults new search campaigns to run on the iPhone and other mobile devices with internet browsers.
360Partners believes that the iPhone can be an effective search tool for specific types of businesses: restaurants, some consumer products, auto services, etc. However, for businesses that sell complicated or high value / non-localized products, running ads on the iPhone rarely pays off. In these cases, 360Partners recommends turning off iPhone searches.
6) Not regularly using the search query report
The Search Query report inside of Google is one of the best tools to help improve the performance of a search account. The reports shows the actual query run by visitors to your site and whether it was exact, phrase or broad matched to your account. While this information may be available inside of a site’s web log, few companies have the tools or expertise to be able to pull out and analyze this information.
With the search query report, you can quickly identify both “negative” and “positive” keywords. Negative keywords are those that are driving unqualified traffic to your website. For example, a telecommunications client of 360Partners was bidding on the term “T1” (as in a high speed t1 data connection). The term was getting a lot of broad matched search impressions and clicks but very few orders. Through the use of the search query report, the 360Partners team discovered that the client’s ads were being shown on the search query “TI” (as in the rap musician). Once “TI” was added as a negative keyword, account performance dramatically improved.
A “positive” keyword is one that Google is matching to your ads, is not currently in your account, and performs well. These are good keywords. 360Partners strongly recommends adding these keywords directly into your account. This will result in an increase in traffic for these specific queries and better performance for your account overall.
7) Not accurately tracking results
Running a search marketing campaign without any tracking is like driving a car in the dark with your headlights off without a map. You don’t know where you are going until you’ve hit a tree and spent all of your budget. Before you start driving down the search marketing highway, make sure headlights (aka tracking) are installed and working.
Google and Yahoo both offer excellent, free tools, which help track the performance of your campaigns. The implementation of both is very simple and can usually be done in a matter of hours. With tracking installed you can easily see which keywords drive revenue and which ones only drive costs.
8) Not A/B testing the landing pages
A/B testing is the secret weapon of search marketing. Imagine if your site converted 25% better than your competitors. What are the implications? You could raise your bids by 25% and get a lot more customers, or your could keep your bids the same and spend 25% less on the same number of customers.
360Partners believes that in the long run, a high converting website is a competitive weapon and a barrier to entry for competitors. Competitors who enter your market without a high converting site will quickly exit when their economics do not work. A high converting site also allows you to maximize your bids giving you high placement inside of the search engines.
The best way to improve the conversion of your website is A/B testing. A/B testing consists of a few simple steps. First, create two different versions of your web page. The changes can be small like the color/wording of a button or large like a radical new design. Then you have traffic alternate back and forth between the two versions of the pages and measure the results. The version which performs best “wins” and becomes the default page.
Google provides a wonderful tool called the “Conversion Optimizer,” which helps automate most of the A/B testing process. Conversion Optimizer simplifies the process so that it is easy to implement, run and track the results of a test. The best part is that the tool is free.
360Partners strongly believes in the power of A/B testing. In fact, we offer a consulting service to clients to help design, implement and run conversion tests. If your company is interested in learning more, please give us a call and we will give you a free initial site evaluation. 360Partners is a “Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant.”
9) Attempting to pre-qualify traffic in the search ads
Some novice search marketing gurus focus exclusively on click-through-rate (CTR) as their sole metric for the performance of their campaign. A running joke is that a search market can have a guaranteed 10% CTR on all keywords by simply inserting the phrase “Click Here for a Free IPOD!” inside of their ad text. Of course, the fallacy of this is that the search marketer will end up with a lot of unqualified and unhappy traffic on their site.
On the other extreme, some search marketers try to keep their costs down to a bare minimum by “prescreening” traffic prior to the click. This could be something as simple as having language in your ad such as:
- “… for customers spending $1,000+/month”
- “must have a bachelors degree”
The logic seems to make sense. Instead of paying for untargeted clicks, simply add qualifications inside the ad and only qualified people will come to your site.
However, what this doesn’t take into account is the “quality score” of the ad. In its most simplistic form, the quality score is a function of an ad’s CTR. The higher the CTR the higher the quality score. A higher quality score results in higher positioning and a lower cost per click. In several experiments run by 360Partners, stripping out prequalifications resulted in significantly better campaign and account performance.
10) Only advertising in Google
Many marketers overlook the potential of the “other” search engines like Yahoo! and MSN. It is obvious why Google holds such an allure: the Google brand is synonymous with search and they currently have the majority of the traffic. Google currently has approximately a 60% market share versus 30% Yahoo and 10% MSN. Undoubtedly, advertisers with a small budget and little time can start with the search volume leader and consume their marketing budget easily inside of Google. The downside to this approach is that Google does not necessarily have the highest quality traffic in every industry and demographic target. Also, competition in Google is typically more saturated, meaning higher cost per visitor and potentially higher cost per conversion. MSN and Yahoo are generally more difficult and time consuming to set up, but the rewards can be worth the extra effort.
For example, one of 360Partners’ clients generates over 70% of their customers from MSN/Yahoo and 30% from Google. Additionally, in this specific market, the cost per acquisition is 30% lower on MSN/Yahoo than inside of Google. 360Partners recommends that advertisers at least test their campaigns on Yahoo and MSN. Who knows, you may find a hidden patch of customers.
Did you make any of these mistakes in your account? If you did or even if you just want peace of mind, 360Partners can help you with a free search marketing account evaluation. We do a deep dive into your account and compare it to our 72-point best practice checklist. Once completed, we will give you a custom report highlighting opportunities we see. Usually we can show you tangible ways that you can improve the performance of your account either by decreasing costs or generating more customers. This is a free service that we offer to give us a chance to demonstrate our expertise to you. Interested? Give us a call.
