Getting Started with Search Engine Advertising
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“SEO and Pay Per Click operate within a ‘marketplace’, like Ebay, where everyone is bidding for attention – not with Google or the audience, but with competitors. If you dabble your toes in the water and it doesn’t work, you need to keep persevering until you make it work – because as a concept, as a marketing channel, Search Engine Advertising definitely works.”
Luke Farley, Founder, LCubed.
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The Search Engine Advertising (SEA) market can effectively be split as follows:
- The main player, Google with 68% – of search traffic
- Yahoo with around 25% market share
- The rest of the market is made up of a number of smaller players
Where should you advertise? The answer depends on your target audience. For example, Google is the search engine of choice for business-to-business marketing in Australia. But in consumer marketing, a company may choose to spread its advertising across Google, Yahoo, and if the budget permits, some of the smaller search engines.
Ideally, a company would spread its Search Engine Advertising ‘bets’ over Google and Yahoo to test and determine where it can achieve the most success. But this process is very expensive. Establishing, monitoring and comparing campaigns operating across multiple search engines is a significant exercise beyond the resources of most SMEs.
Preparation
Preparation is essential for any Search Engine Advertising campaign. The following diagram highlights important success factors that need to be established before commencing any campaigns.
Internal resources
To implement and manage a successful Search Engine Advertising campaign, you need people that understand a company’s products and services, its target audiences, and the technical aspects of Search Engine Advertising.
It is also necessary to know how to handle that traffic once it gets to the website. What will visitors be asked to do? What do they want to do? How do you get them to do what you want them to?
External resources
A search engine, such as Google or Yahoo, will be required for Search Engine Advertising. Also, due to the particular combination of marketing and technical skills required (as outlined above) many companies access external experts to advise them, or manage the entire Search Engine Advertising campaign. Alternatively, you can recruit external talent, seek external learning opportunities, or consider using external consultants.
Expectations
Companies with no previous experience of Search Engine Advertising can expect a difficult time. To just ‘set it up and have a go’ is almost guaranteed to fail – it may result in traffic to a site, but traffic alone will not translate into sales.
Despite the apparent ease of getting started – superficially, you just need a credit card and a web browser – to make Search Engine Advertising work properly there has to be an understanding of the wider marketing concepts involved. It is not a set-and-forget process.
Companies will often be unsuccessful when they immediately start. This doesn’t automatically mean that they will never succeed; initial failure often just demonstrates that the company is going through a learning phase. But Search Engine Advertising takes time to understand and master. If you lack prior experience of how it all works, you will not know how much money should be spent and how much time and effort will be involved.
Even with comprehensive marketing knowledge, there is still an element of trial-and-error process. Keyword effectiveness needs to be constantly monitored and refined. For example, certain keywords may work, but they may cost twice as much as other keywords. Therefore, to achieve the desired return on investment a company will need to refine its campaign to use the right keywords for its price point and desired success rate.
Other campaign refinements can include:
- Adgroups
- The landing pages that people go to
- Conversion mechanisms on your website
The dynamic marketplace
The highly competitive, fluid nature of web searches also demands constant campaign refinements. It is vital to appreciate competition factors. There is a ‘playing field’ and a company needs to play on that playing field. The field is made up of a marketplace of competitors where one needs to be active to be successful. People are often not aware that SEO and PPC is simply a marketplace, like Ebay, where everyone is bidding for attention. A company bids for that attention against their competitors. And the more expert your competitors are with SEO and PPC, the more demanding the whole task becomes and the greater the cost of staying on the field.
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