SEM Mistakes You Did Not Know You Were Making |
Posted: December 9, 2021 |
Growth hacking with unpaid social media was very famous in the past years, but as an SEM veteran can tell you now, those days are long gone. You need to pay to play if you wish to have return for your marketing money. If you need to know more about Search Engine Marketing or SEM, you can visit websites that focus on digital marketing courses in Singapore. As people are preparing to change with upcoming changes in SEM, they are looking at recent Google AdWords data. AdWords is no longer just the ads that we see on the Google homepage, so you need to include search, dynamic search, shopping, YouTube, the display network, Google Analytics and Gmail. Here’s what people found out from their study: - All devices had a significant rise in cost per click - Ad spend on Google Shopping rose 44 percent from the past year - 59% of paid search traffic happens on mobile - Mobile cost-per-click, in particular, increased 40% from the past year Putting it shortly, mobile is no longer “on the rise”. It is here to stay, and new platforms are taking its place as the next rising star. Preparing for the Future of SEM The future we have been looking forward to for years which is mobile saturation, is here. Google is now making a whole new separate index for mobile, and that will become its main algorithm for mobile ads in the coming years. Having mobile as the cornerstone, the next trend is going to be voice search. People are going to see all the funny videos of conversations with Siri, and in reality, 500 million people now use a voice-powered assistant, whether it is Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana. It will only be a matter of time before all of those eyeballs, or eardrums, are going to be viable ad recipients, as voice changes the game yet again. Voice searches tend to be question and location-specific, which means people will search using real language, not just stilted search terms they have been trained to use on text-based search engines. It also means skipping ads is going to be more difficult to accomplish, and there is likely to be only one or two ads served with any search, as opposed to the five to 10 or more there is today. If you think it is difficult to stand out now, wait until the listener only gets one ad, and you have to use that single chance to build trust and support. Avoiding Mistakes and Missteps in SEM The good news is that the search engines make money when advertisers use them for the long haul. Any changes they make to how paid search engines works is going to benefit the advertisers who are courageous enough to accept them. As we move towards the future, it is time to double down on some basics and let go of our site-specific methods. If you are making these mistakes now, it is time to shift in order to achieve victory in the future.
Keywords were once the gold standard for making ads. Now, with intense competition, huge amounts of data, and improved search algorithms, it is better to look beyond keywords to actual search terms. With paid search, you can clearly see into exactly what the user searched to trigger your ad. Concentrating on the search terms is going to let you reverse engineer success by making a keyword list from your search terms. Take for example an internal marketing manager for a luxury hat brand that had been running AdWords in house for several years. Prior to engaging with an agency, the client had top-performing historical keywords and wanted the agency to focus on those keywords. The internal marketing manager was right, the keywords in the report were really the brand’s outright historical best performers. But, with what is usually considered somewhat granular analysis to optimize at the keyword level, key insights are lost. Evaluating performance based on the keyword level is somewhat like judging a book by its second or third chapter. The client’s no. 1 top performing keyword was “baseball cap.” But the search term – what users actually searched to trigger the ad – was “cashmere baseball cap” which garnered 20 times better returns than the keyword “baseball cap.” As it turned out, no keyword was set up to specifically capture the search “cashmere baseball cap.” By doing keyword research at the search terms level, the agency was able to make an immediate and long-term impact on the client’s return on ad spending. Keywords are like doors that allow you to access the inside of the house but don’t show you what exists in there. Search terms provide full transparency on what is inside the house. Use your understanding of the brand as well as the ideal customers by placing yourself in their shoes to uncover keyword ideas. Then, based on those perceptions, plug your ideas into a keyword tool like Keyword.io which will churn out similar keywords and their respective search volume data.
By now, you already know the trick about paying for placement when a user searches for your competitors. It can be annoying when it happens to us though. Thankfully, Google’s quality score is made to protect your brand. It usually won’t matter whether your competitor is bidding $100 a click for your brand name because the website it is driving the user to is not your site. If you launch your own branded campaign bidding on your branded terms, your quality score must be significantly higher than your competitor’s, as you are in fact the brand the user is looking for. This is going to likely give you a stronger impression share ( the percentage of time your ad serves when a user searches for one of your keywords) than your competitor’s ad. While your quality score might not be the end-all, be-all of metrics, improving it can help. Based on recent research, a one-point increase in your rating is going to decrease your cost per conversion by 13 percent. Conversely, a decrease of one point increases your cost per conversion by the same amount. If you waste your budget bidding on the wrong keywords, tweaking your quality score is not likely to salvage the campaign.
Why does your brand exist? Why should the searcher care about your used car lot more than the used car lot at the other end of the street? Users spend maybe five percent of their time on the actual search engine. Make sure that you stand out in that brief window. Ad extensions offer a slew of ways to provide additional information in your search ads: price via price extensions, value propositions through callout extensions, your array of offerings through structured snippet extensions and a lot more. The more pertinent info you can provide users, the more prequalified they will be prior to clicking
Think of your audience as three concentric circles. In the very middle, you have your bull’s eye which is the keywords your ideal customer is going to be searching. In the middle circle are valid, somewhat qualified users. Lastly, the outside circle can be considered more of your top-of-funnel prospects. With the right nurturing and additional brand education, they could become valid prospects. Every penny of your paid search efforts has to focus on the inside circle. If you don’t know exactly what keywords, search terms or targeting the inside circle is comprised of, then 100 percent of your budget has to be allocated to research and uncover your bulls-eye. Utilize the beta/alpha campaign structure where your “beta” campaigns act as your “test” campaigns, or your “R&D” campaigns are designed to uncover which search terms work. Beta campaigns contain broader targeting. Once your search terms have statistically significant data, build out your “alpha” campaigns, which contain SKAGs or single keyword ad groups, and use only exact match keywords with tightly aligned ad copy. With alphas, you will only be spending money on those bulls-eye keywords. SEM is really a very exciting industry that is going to see a major overhaul in the next few years. Winners are going to keep evolving with the industry and attack every new change with creativity. There will always be winners.
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