One of the biggest challenges with Online Marketing is operating a successful pay-per-click advertising campaign. Competition is fierce and the costs to advertise at Google are steadily climbing.
In this article we are going to review several of the factors that you should look at when deciding whether or not to outsource your search engine marketing campaign.
1. Search Marketing Expertise
(It should be stated that you are|Obviously you are an expert in your industry. Your goals are to grow your business based on your knowledge and skills and have achieved a certain level of success. That, however, does not make you an expert at SEM. While you may know your business inside and out, the marketing strategies required to successfully promote on Google are a totally different issue.
SEM Advertising/pay per click is a very specialized form of advertising. Strategies that worked justsix months ago are no longer effective. The search engines change as fast as the stock market and if you lack the expertise to create a effective search marketing campaign, you will overpay for clicks and amidst tremendous opportunities.
2. Keyword Selection
For years, our company has run campaigns with vast amounts of keywords. Back in 2001, we created campaigns with up to one million keywords. No one had heard of “long-tail keywords” and no one was developing large keyword lists. Today, the industry has changed. Many people have built tremendously extensive campaigns to the point that long-tail strategies had to change.
Due to search restrictions you can no longer bid on every keyword you can imagine. Today, you need a strategy that casts a net that is surgically targeted to specific services, products and audiences. Unless you know what to do to develop these keyword lists, you will very likely place yourself on the most expensive, high traffic, low converting keywords that are out there. To find the right keywords at the right cost is a critical skill in developing a successful campaign.
3. Tracking Capabilities
For decades, companies used newspaper, print, radio and TV ads that were hard to track. Online advertising changed all that, making most actions highly accountable. To be successful today in search you have to implement a system to track all actions; otherwise, how will you know what worked? Even if you are tracking, what will you do with that data?
4. Optimization Algorithms
Optimization systems / search optimization systems are the automated systems that analyze the data you capture, evaluate the actual success on the individual keywords, and make determinations as to which keywords should be bid higher, lower or eliminated completely. This needs to be a systems driven task to analyze the amount of search phrases required to maximize the results of your search campaign.
In the next section, we will discuss development costs, ROI analysis,how much time it takes to be successful and the learning curve involved in running a successful PPC program.