Paid search now represents over 50% of online advertising in Australia, and continues to grow. Despite it being a cost effective marketing tool, marketers need to drive paid search harder than ever before to combat rising costs associated with keyword inflation. This article exposes some of the major areas that are often under-utilised with paid search.

1. Analytics;
Too much time is spent in the AdWords interface / and bid management tools and a lack of time is spent in analytics. Refining a campaign on the basis of the your paid search interface is like making a pizza without the dough – it is sloppy and is missing the vital ingredient to make it a success.

2. Ad Text;
So often marketers forget to modify the ad text or ad groups are too large resulting in untargeted ad text. Clive Peeters for instance has a current sale on with 25% off selected fridges, however when I search for a fridge the Clive Peeters ad doesn’t tell me this! Marketers spend a lot of time to devise messages for glossy ads whilst significant paid search spend is being spent without enough focus on the key message to drive results.

3. Yahoo Search Marketing;
As Yahoo search marketing powers paid search on Bing, it represents approximately 1 in 10 searches in Australia. With significantly less advertisers on their network, it provides an opportunity to drive traffic at a lower cost and provide reach to consumers that you may not be currently attracting to your site.

4. Impression Share;
Whilst conversions and engagement should be your ultimate goals – brand marketers cannot ignore the importance of increasing share of voice within SERPs to reinforce a brand in the market. As many campaigns target broad keywords, it often means impression share can run at low levels, meaning consumers may only be exposed to your brand 10 – 20% of the time that people are searching for relevant queries. Using the Google reporting tool, set some impression share targets to reach – and look for ways to refine the campaign to achieve them ie expanding your negative keyword list, pausing keywords which drive very low click through rates both of which help improve a campaigns performance anyway.

5. Competitors Campaigns;
Is your competitor running a special offer that could be driving new search queries. Consumers often can recall the offer but not necessarily the brand name. Monitor competitor marketing activities and piggy back off some of their media exposure and campaigns by targeting relevant queries related to their latest campaign.

6. News-Worthy Content & Issues;
Topical issues are now driving much search activity on social sites and the internet and thus SEOs are focussing on this area heavily. However paid search is more agile and targeting keywords based on topical issues could be considered as a technique to drive traffic to content onsite which covers the latest relevant topics.

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 9:05 pm and is filed under PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.