Without Management, Search Fails
You have the metrics. You understand what they mean. And you’re spending lots of money on paid and natural search placements. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to do more than glance at the campaigns every few weeks, and make a few frenzied changes once in a long while.
This is a recipe for failure.
Management is the key to any online campaign’s success. We frequently recommend over a dozen different tactics for the launch of a campaign, then manage each to their maximum potential. Those that deliver better than the maximum cost per sale or lead, we keep. Those that don’t, we move away from. New tactics are cycled in and out as necessary, to maintain the campaign goals. Daily management, weekly review, and monthly reporting is necessary to accomplish this.
But management is needed even more in a search program. Search programs are dynamic:
• Your competition wants the same keywords, so bids fluctuate by the second
• Bidding wars eat your results
• Different creative gives different results
• Seasons change–so does creative
• Natural results depend on the search algorithms, which change regularly
• Natural results also depend on submission
• And everything changes when you add content or make a change in your site
To be successful in paid and natural search, management of bids, creative, and natural submission and placement are necessary. A smart agency will use a combination of software and human review to achieve your goals.
Software:
• Allows second-to-second management of bids to meet your target cost per sale or cost per lead
• Allows advanced techniques, such as dayparting, so your keywords appear only when your target audience is online
• Enables cost-effective management of large programs
• Provides the detailed reporting necessary for large campaign optimization
• Helps combat bid wars
Humans:
• Apply intelligence to optimize the creative for best results
• Review the software results to ensure there are no unforeseen problems
• Provide the feedback and optimization necessary of the global campaign
• Identify new opportunities for search and beyond
• Work with the search providers to ensure your keywords meet their criteria for performance–otherwise, your entire campaign could disappear
If your cost per click is over $1.00 for large campaigns, your management probably isn’t what it could be. Not getting reports on large-scale management issues? Start asking questions about your agency’s management methodology.
Doing search without both kinds of management? Don’t expect stellar results.
