Everyone enjoys a good scare around Halloween. But that doesn’t mean your paid search campaign has to be nightmarishly frightful. Witness four of the most spine-tingling and horrifying search marketing mistakes ... if you dare!
This time of year, everyone enjoys a good scare. Ghosts are around every corner, goblins meet you at your door and you are likely to face more tricks than treats. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be frightful, especially when it comes to your search campaign.
In honor of Halloween, here are some search marketing mistakes that should make you scream.
Not all budget caps are bad. But using them as a means to manage your spend is like trying to perform surgery with Michael Myers’ butcher knife. It’s inexact, messy and likely to not end well.
Budget caps are a great safety device, but the most effective way to control your spend is through keyword-level bids. This ensures much greater control and helps you avoid missing demand and conversions.
Unfortunately, just like some kids have to stop trick or treating at a specified time and miss out on more candy, some companies insist on caps even when there are more sales to be had. It’s our job to make sure they know what they’re making us give up.
Sometimes we’re under the gun to “own” a category or idea. Too often, that leads to a misplaced notion that we have to bid to position 1 for those related keywords. When they’re your brand terms, it’s OK, but for non-brand, it’s often overkill and leads to a bloodletting of your money.
Very few tactics are more quantitative than search engine marketing, so if the data shows running in position 1 for a top of the funnel non-brand term is wasting money – and, even worse, preventing you from spending intelligently on high performers – don’t do it. For most businesses, nothing’s scarier than wasting money.
Silos make for great autumn landscapes and backdrops for horror movies. But managing search from inside a silo – without a deep understanding of how search interacts with your other channels – is like wearing one of these cheap plastic masks where the holes don’t actually line up with your eyes. You don’t know what’s out there, who’s got candy, and who’s about to spray you with shaving cream.
Optimizing paid search without looking at how exposures from display, social, organic search, email and any other trackable media are helping move the user through the conversion funnel is a frightening concept.
At a minimum, deduping credit across channels is absolutely necessary. Done right, integration can help you run all of your media far more efficiently.
The search engines give you plenty of opportunity to dominate the landing page. Product listings, ad extensions, and sitelinks are just some examples of easy and efficient ways to take up more space.
Missing out on these would be like trick or treating in a one-block radius. Don’t miss out on valuable real estate. But like every smart kid, know which houses will have the most candy and invest your time and budget where it will help the most.
There are a more ways to turn your SEM efforts into a bloody mess than there are bodies in Crystal Lake or nightmares on Elm Street.
Do you have a horror story to share? What search mistakes have made you release a blood-curdling scream? Gather around the campfire and use the comments section to tell your most harrowing tale.