Primer on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for the Small Business
March 21st, 2008 by Kelly Hair
Overview
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of advertising and marketing your products & services on the Net through search engines. Search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, receive a referral fee from you for the increase in traffic to your content. SEM is also referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC).
Why do it?
SEM is an effective way to draw traffic, and with it, customers to your site. The better your target your audience with your message, relevant keywords and great offers, the more likely you are to increase your revenue stream. Your goals for this increase in traffic may include:
- Buy a product or service from you online.
- Fill out a contact form for an offline sale.
- Fill out a contact form so you can continue the conversation with the lead through targeted marketing (email/other direct methods).
- become more educated on the products and services you provide.
How do you setup SEM campaigns?
You can hire a professional to do this for you or you can follow these steps:
- Prepare your Target Content
- Research Your Keywords
- Setup and Launch your Campaign
- Measure the Campaign’s effectiveness
- Tweak the Campaign/Content
- Repeat steps 4 & 5
As you can see from the steps above, this is not like a Ronco device - you don’t set it and forget it. You have to measure it and make changes. Ideally, you will have two (A/B) or more (Multivariate) ad tests . I’ll get into this a bit more later in the posting.
Prepare Your Target Content
Before you start your SEM/PPC campaign, you need to setup your targets. If someone were to click on your ad, what would you want them to do next? In other words, you’ve paid Google some money and you have a captive audience on your site.
Some suggestions on content:
- If you are looking at lead generation, make it easy for the audience to provide information to you. In other words, do not direct them to a page that does not have a contact form readily present. The more clicks required - the more chance you have in losing the customer.
- If you are looking at educating the lead, you will want to direct them to detailed product information. For example, on one of my campaigns, if someone comes through looking for web development then I will direct them to a custom web development page. This is much better than an overview of what services you provide.
If you are interested in learning more about content setup then I would suggest taking a look at a book by Tim Ash titled “Landing Page Optimization” (Amazon link). Ash does a great job helping you create landing pages and how to build a flexible landing page system to experiment on what works best.
Once you have your targeted content set, you need to research your keywords
Research Your Keywords
Now that you have set up your targets, you need to perform keyword research for your campaign. I found a post that may save some keystrokes here. The best tool in that posting is this page on SEO Book.
Setup and Launch Your Campaign
There are multiple offerings in this space including:
What’s the big difference between the three? Google’s traffic is much great than the other two put together. The most recent numbers I could find peg Google’s search traffic at 60% vs. Yahoo’s 22% (as of December 2007). While being bigger isn’t necessarily better for the long run, the size helps you test out a message very quickly in front of a large audience.
From personal experience, another benefit is Google provides better geolocation ads. In other words, if you want to advertise to a specific area, Google has the knobs and levers to do this. Yahoo! is decent in this area but prefers you to use metropolitan areas and this may be too large for some small business to focus on. Case in point: the NYC metro area includes New Jersey, Connecticut and of course NYC/New York area. Unfortunately, if you happened to be in central New Jersey and had clients in your local area, in NYC and in Connecticut then you could be very annoyed with amount of transit time required.
MSN AdCenter promises the best geolocation services but I have not seen the results from experience. When I ran a personal campaign for my business on AdCenter to test it out, I found connections from Iran, India, Pakistan and 30 of the 50 states in the union. This may have been caused by a content network (and not the search itself.) Either way, I’d rather stick to Google, and secondarily, Yahoo! for my dollars.
I digress…. I’d suggest you sign up for Google AdWords first. If you want to try another program then feel free to do this once you’ve measured your base results then please experiment.
Sign Up for Google AdWords
When you sign up for Google AdWords, you are given a choice between the “Starter Edition” and “Standard Edition.” I would advise you to signup for the standard package out of the gate. While there’s a bit more complexity, you have more control over how your ads are displayed including ad scheduling hours and better geolocation options.
Creation of A Campaign
Once you have logged in to AdWords, you have multiple options for campaign creation. Google has expanded their offerings to include newspaper and radio advertising. That’s a bit out of scope so I’ll stick to the topic of SEM/PPC campaigns. For these campaigns, you can setup either a “keyword-targeted” or a “placement-targeted” campaign. For our purposes, we want to create a “keyword-targeted” campaign.
Base Settings for a Campaign:
Assuming you do not have any current campaigns you will need to setup a name for the campaign, the ad group, which language you will use and where the customers you want to target are located.
Creation of your first Ad:
Once you have these basic settings, you will be asked to create your first ad. The format is as follows:
- First line - Headline - limit of 25 characters.
- Second line - Part of call to action/additional information - 35 characters
- Third line - Continuation of your call to action/information - 35 characters
- Fourth line - Your display URL w/o the http:// - 35 characters
- Fifth line - Your Destination URL (hidden from customer - can contain whatever tracking URL you want to include.) - 1024 characters max
In my opinion, creating the ads is the most challenging aspect of SEM. You have to be concise but offer enough information or have a good enough offer to generate interest. It seems fairly easy until you start writing them - you’ll see!
Keyword Submission:
After you have submitted your ad, you are given the opportunity to add your keywords you grabbed during your previous research. You can be very specific in the match criteria (use [keyword] to match exact keyword only or “keyword phrase” to have the show up in the search string) of you can be very broad and not use brackets or quotes. The more precise you are, you may receive less traffic but it may be better traffic. It may be the type of traffic you’re willing to pay for.
You will also be asked how much you are willing to bid for the keyword. Google, and the other guys, will display your ad based on how much you are willing to click and how many time people click on your ad versus someone’s elses ad. This later is generally referred to as the “quality” of the ad in the SEM speak…
How Your Ad Will Show:
You may be willing to pay $10 for a keyword but someone will only rarely click on your ad because it does not appeal to customers as much as an ad where a competitor is willing to only pay $2 for an ad but they rank above your ad. In rough number it makes sense. If your ad only receives a Click Thru Rate (CTR) of 1% and the competitor receives a 10% CTR then it makes more sense for Google to run their ad and not yours.
This is the other reason why writing the ads is the hardest part - you need to write great copy.
One last setting.. Setup Ad Serving to Rotate So You Can Measure Your Ads:
I would recommend you create another ad for the ad group/campaign in Google AdWords and then verify your Ad Serving is set to Rotate and NOT Optimize. If you have the campaign set to optimize then you will not have a good testbed to experiment one ad against another. You can verify this under the Campaign setings- “Edit Campaign Setting Settings.”
Measure
For simple campaigns, it’s a good idea to throw out a couple of ads with different message to see which one sticks. All the providers provide measurement tools to help you figure this out. Under Google AdWords, for example, you can find this information under the “Campaign Summary” - <Specific Campaign You are Running> - <Specific Ad Group> - “Ad Variations”. You will generally want to give the Ads a couple of days to compare their effectiveness. If you change things too quickly then you may miss out on the copy that could have turned you into a billionaire.
As an added benefit of your PPC campaigns, you may notice additional traffic in your analytics package. (Side note: Google provides a free analytics package that is bundled with AdWords or can be used independently - click here for more details). This is not an uncommon experience. Some folks prefer to go to the display URL themselves by manually copying/pasting and others my be directed by others who have already visited. Within your web analytics program should allow you to drill down to find the source of the traffic. This is outside the scope of this article but I wanted to mention the other benefits of PPC campaigns from a marketing standpoint. Basically, the Internet billboard you posted using SEM provides multiple benefits..
Tweak
Ideally, you will want to rotate the ad not performing and replace this ad. I would suggest you not delete the Ad, rather pause it so you can always go back and review your experiments and their varying levels of success.
Repeat… until expiration (if any)
For folks newer to SEM/Internet Marketing, this may seem a bit odd. In the past, you may have sent out a direct mail that took a couple of weeks to author, proof and deliver to the printer. After the printer ran their batch run, someone went to the post office with a big bag of bulk delivery items. Then, in a few more days, your message was in the hands of your customer. If this is the world you are used to and want to know what it will take to change to the new world then I’d recommend you pick up Do It Wrong Quickly by Mike Moran. I reviewed it earlier in this blog here. Another advertising & marketing channel of interest to you may be e-Mail marketing. I’ll cover this in another post.
As always, your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome. Feel free to drop us a line by filling out our contact form.
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