Search is always changing. Staying on top of and in front of the latest innovations becomes extremely important for marketers and agencies alike. However, while we love to push the bar for what is possible, we also understand and respect the need to continuously revisit the fundamentals.
This series of posts will focus on the main components of a Paid Search account.
We will start with keywords, the foundation of all Paid Search campaigns. This post will heavily overlap with your total account structure strategy because your keyword opportunity often dictates where and how to layout your structure.
Without the right keywords, nothing else really matters. This part of your campaign build deserves careful evaluation and creative thought. We recommend not limiting this process to one or two people to ensure you avoid personal bias. Invite your whole team and members from other teams to a brainstorming session and get the creative juices flowing!
Great keyword builds should follow these steps: Goal Evaluation, Research, and Generation.
1) Goal Evaluation
Purpose (branding, performance, other)
If you are building a branding campaign, it is crucial to guide yourself through how you will we reach a high volume of your target consumers at the right time, with the right message, more often than the competition, and do all of this the most cost-effective way possible while leaving a lasting connection with your target consumers.
If you are building a performance campaign, it probably revolves around return. How will you make more money year over year and how will you do this more profitably? What Search channels were used last year – can channel expansion help maximize revenue? What products did you promote in market – should you focus more dollars on products with higher AOV’s (average order values)? How do you stabilize the peaks and valleys that come along with the seasonality of retail?
Success Metrics (traffic, cost, engagement, return, revenue, etc.)
This is the NUMBER ONE discussion to have with your client. Never, ever launch a campaign without end goals in mind. Your launch strategy, optimization schedule, and innovation path completely align to this discussion.
Timing and Budget (evergreen, flighting schedule, etc.)
Money doesn’t grow on trees. It will always be a constraint on marketing. Understanding what your budget is upfront can lead to more informed decision making down the road. For example, if you’re dealing with a retail client with several different “product seasons,” it’s important to build a calendar to support the promotions. This way, you know what products and/or categories are in the pipeline at all times, and your team can prepare budgets accordingly.
2) Research
Brand/Product
This may seem obvious, but it can never be overlooked. What are you selling? What are your POD’s (points of differentiation), your RTB’s (reasons to believe), and FAB’s (features, attributes, benefits). Your product isn’t just a product to your consumer. It’s the means to improve something in their life. While you hit the obvious product keywords and variations, always remember the phrase, “People don’t want to buy drills, they want holes.”
Consumer
The Consumer is BOSS. You don’t exist unless your consumer allows you to. Always think through the lens of your consumer. What could your consumer search for that is relevant to your brand? What associations could consumers make to your brand through seemingly unrelated paths? Where does your consumer expect your brand to live?
Competitive
When you build your keywords, make sure you actually Google them! (Or Bing them, of course.) If you’re using the AdWords Keyword Tool, use the Competition column to gain directional insights. Or, if you have good relationships with your search engine teams, break down certain categories and ask them (politely) to send you competitor benchmarks.
Using these tools can really shed light on the most lucrative areas for your client: what has high volume, what has high growth potential, and what is the most relevant and least expensive.
Seasonality
Never discard seasonality! If you’re performing keyword research for sunscreen in January, volume is going to be low on AdWords. Seek out additional sources to inform search trends and volume. Never rely on just one. If you have only one month’s worth of volume data, try to understand how this compares to trends throughout the year. Using that number as the base (100%), determine how each month relates to that number and model your yearly spend projections accordingly.
Website
You can’t build a house without wood and concrete (or a similar material). You can’t build a Paid Search campaign without a website. Look through every nook and cranny of your website to determine additional opportunities to build keywords and understand how best to structure your campaign.
3) Generation
Core Keywords
Ok. You made it. You’ve completed your research. You know your goals. Now, build those keywords. Process efficiency is key here. How can you build out the most relevant keywords, with volume and scale, and do so as quickly as possible without error? Tip: think before you act. Many use an Excel “concatenation grid” to build thousands of keywords in very little time. Here, all of your time is spent upfront on building out the grid and foundation, and then you put Excel to work for you. Also, remember that this step of the campaign creation process should tie into your overall structure and ad copy strategies as well. Setting up your Excel workbook in such a way that creates synergies (and themes) across your build allows you to leverage several efficiencies along the way, as well as reduce the opportunities for mistakes.
Variations
Now you have your core keywords. But, let’s be honest, if consumers only searched using your core keywords, your job would be monumentally easier. Think about different phrase variations and synonyms that could also be relevant to your products, and create separate ad groups for these to ensure you keep a very tightly-knit keyword theme in each and every ad group. Don’t go too far, though. Remember you have ad group limits within the engines!
Match Types
Match types are often very, very underrated. Probably because the discussion around them because extremely technical and can confuse some. Never fear, just talk through it. Think about it this way: one keyword with three different match types isn’t one marketplace – it’s three. Advertisers bidding on that keyword for Broad, for Phrase, or for Exact could be using completely separate strategies. You may be able to match to queries across all match types, but the auction evaluation exists on the individual keyword level, which is why you typically see variation in CPC’s and CTR’s for different match types. So, strive to understand which match types hit the sweet intersection of high volume, high relevance, and low competition and CPC.
Negative Mapping
Don’t just stick with the list that Google gives you. You are the train conductor of your SEM account, so YOU tell the engines which campaigns and ad groups you want it to serve ads from when a consumer’s query matches one of your keywords. This is especially true when you have less-targeted match types and overlapping products within a category. You must tell the engines which ad group to serve from in order to maximize the relevancy of your ad copy and landing page to the consumer’s query.
That’s it for our first installment of Paid Search Fundamentals. If you read this and kept thinking “duh, duh, yup, of course”, then we are very happy – keep pushing the boundaries! If you have questions, drop us a line in the comments section and we’ll be happy to provide additional learnings.
