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Improving Search Engine Marketing

Revitalize Your SEM Campaign With 4 Easy Steps

When running a Search Engine Marketing campaign for a long time, statistics can begin to flat line. This can include clicks, impressions, bounce rate or click through rate (CTR) and can indicate that it’s time to make some changes. Keeping a SEM campaign fresh will help you maintain an advantage over your competition and stand out among the crowd. We typically like to manage our SEM campaigns on a daily basis with quarterly refreshes and monthly reviews.

Ad Copy

Your AdWords campaign has been running for 6 months now and you’re doing great. When your ad copy has a high click through rate and a high conversion rate, the last thing that you would think of is to make any changes to it. Even when ad copy is performing well, testing different messages can be an effective marketing technique. SEM provides a great opportunity to test new marketing copy to determine its success before spending marketing budget in other channels. Additionally, if users become accustomed to seeing the same ad copy month after month, they often begin to ignore it and click on a competitor’s ads.

Site Links

Similar to Ad Copy, Site Link Extensions can become normalized and won’t grab the attention of users. Historically, Site Link Extensions have produced some of the highest CTR’s within a SEM campaign. When launching and promoting new products, it’s a good idea to change out Site Links and watch for increases in important Key Performance Indicators, like CTR.

Think Local

When running a campaign that is targeting the entire US, but 80% of your traffic is coming from two states, it’s time to start thinking locally. Reallocate a large percentage of your budget to state targeted campaigns and test localized ad copy. Depending on how targeted you want to get, there are also options to utilize zip code targeting or radius targeting to continue testing hyper-local campaigns. Lastly, make sure to update Location Extensions to provide relevance for those local users.

Day Parting

If you’re running your AdWords with a limited budget and have 4 to 6 months of data, now is the time to start thinking about day parting. A quick analysis of the data will show trends indicating what day of the week and time of the day most of your conversions are taking place. Once you have isolated the specific days and times, start testing each campaign with day parting for a few weeks to a month. If your conversions remain stable, or increase, you should now have more budget to test the possibility of increasing your CPC’s.

Sometimes we are so deep in the weeds that it becomes difficult to step back and look at our AdWords campaign objectively. The above 4 easy steps will help revitalize a SEM campaign and there are many additional options available. Setup a brainstorming session within the marketing department or contact us today for a SEM strategy session.