Using SEM as a strategic channel and step by step setup process

As a marketer you’ve set your strategic goals and are now you might be asking yourself if Paid Search will be a channel you’ll be choosing to promote your product or service.

The short answer to you is yes, you will test it. Paid search is probably the most versatile channel, in terms of reach across industries, (with only a very few exceptions where search engines have limited for ethical or legal reasons) and in terms of effectiveness.

To help you understand how to make the most out of it I will do an overview of how we can use paid search as a strategic planing channel and the process to follow if you decide to activate it:

Use as a strategic insights tool

One of the first things to highlight is the importance of paid search as a strategic channel. You can use it to gather insights that are available to anyone and for free.

We can use different reports and data, that will inform the business and help us understand the market and our customer and will influence our marketing planning. These are the type of insights you can gather:

• Customer insights: we can use Google’s keyword planner to asses the volume of searches or demand for products and services in a specific moment. We can use Google trends to identify longer periods of time, to understand seasonality or the influence of specific events in user behaviour. This information can help us understand how to plan campaigns over the year.
• Insights for product/content development: Google search is a tool used by consumers and businesses to look for information and products, we can use the search data provided in shape of keywords to understand in a qualitative way what users are looking for, we can use this data to inform the product development team about user interests.
• Customer life stage identification: We can also use this data to segment and understand what is the user behaviour and at what stage of the life cycle they are. An example for this could be the difference between the volume of searches for a travel related keyword such as ‘travel to Spain’ Vs a more specific term such as ‘trip to Barcelona’.
• Competitor insights: we can use the keyword planner reports to gather data about the competition for specific keywords based on the cpc’s (cost per click) required to pay to be on the first page of the results. Google has also additional reports that will provide insights about share of voice compared to competitors for specific search terms. These are good to understand the context, but shouldn’t be used to determine our strategy.

If you’re interested in knowing more about what we can do with this data, look at the example of how I used paid search data to develop a marketing strategy for Samsung TV.

Advantages and limitations of paid search

Before we start looking at how to activate this channel it will be helpful to understand what are the advantages and limitations of this channel.

Advantages:

• High control over targeting and cost.
• High intent, users are very engaged with the content.
• Ability to target users from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
• Integration of this channel with other such as YouTube and display.
• It can be used as an always on channel, meaning it won’t necessarily require campaign planning.
• Creative setup is very simple compared to display advertising.

Limitations:

• Limited reach, it can only reach the amount of people that are looking for something at that given time.
• As simple it is to set up, it is also limited in the way we can display our ads, with very restrictive character limits and no images (most of the times).
• High competition: owning top search results has become the way to keep sales for many online business, some business will struggle to find a profitable business model if they rely only on paid search as the primary source for customer acquisition.

Steps to set up a paid search strategy

Now that we have the information to understand the market, our customer and the viability of using SEM as a channel to reach our marketing objectives, let’s do a high level overview of what are the steps you should follow to have a campaign set up:

1. Identify a set of keywords that you can use to target your audience.

Use a landing page, product information and other sources of information to build keyword lists. It is very helpful to segment these and organise by themes. The most commonly used can be:

• Generics
• Product specifics
• Product categories
• Brand terms
• Competitors

If you are launching a campaign in different markets, make sure that you have someone local or with native language skills that can do a proper translation and even know technical words and jargon.

2. Identify volume of searches and potential outcome of a campaign based on cpc’s you can afford. Define a target CPL and ROAS goal.

You can do some math to calculate what is the CPC you can afford to pay based on your goals. This will be a balance between volume and cost. As search marketing works as an auction paying more will provide higher positions and more traffic, but you have to make sure you’re bids/cost is affordable.

To do this calculation you have to understand what is the LTV (Life time value) of your customers, based on this figure you can calculate the ROAS (Return on ad spend) you will achieve with a specific CPA of your campaign.

A detailed budget plan, can include what will be spent over the year each month through specific campaigns or as a whole. Have in mind that brand campaigns take most of the credit and ROAS will be attributed to them, you might want to have a flexible ROAS for non brand campaigns.

There are two key levers that you can influence as a marketer and will impact your Max CPL, these are the conversion rates and the value/life per customer, the higher these are higher will be the margin you can afford to pay. Dependant on conversion rates you are able to achieve.

To understand and calculate your target and max CPL, refer to the source of growth method I shared.

3. Set up your campaigns

There are key things to have in mind when setting up your campaigns some are quite technical but, SEM relies on que accuracy and detail of this set up to work efficiently and effectively, I’d like to point out the main.

• Define a good structure: This is key to manage your campaign but also to understand it’s performance. Campaigns, ad groups and keywords should be very well organised. This will give you control over the outcome and performance. It is also important due to Quality score, you want this to be high by providing relevant ads and landing pages associated to each keyword.
• Set up your creatives
• Make sure you have landing pages with relevant content
• Set up comprehensive negative lists
• Set up as many extensions as you can
• Set up tracking pixel
• Mirror ‘Exact match’ with ‘Broad match’ campaigns, this way you will always have control over what terms you’re bidding for and where your budget is spent.

4. Activate and optimise your campaigns

Once you’ve decided what is the daily budget you want to spend, and set up all of the above, you’re ready to go. Most of the heavy lifting work has now been done, but there are plenty of opportunities to optimise your campaigns. Use data from the reports to understand the performance of your campaigns and optimise towards your goals.

• Build up the campaigns based on the SQR (Search query reports), adding new keywords but also negatives.
• Test and learn: Creatives and audience targeting.
• Adjust your bids, you can do this in different ways, manually, setting up a bidding platform or strategy, some people will even integrate other more sophisticated ways based on CRM data.
• Set up retargeting lists that you can use to develop programmatic based on data such as user behaviour, funnel or any other relevant data point.
• Adopt innovation quickly, this can become a competitive advantage and help you beat big competitors that take more time to adopt change.

5. Review your campaign performance

There are many reports and data in Google advertising platform you can use to understand the performance of the channel as a whole but also in detail to the keyword level, there is a comprehensive set of metrics and dimensions you can use to segment these.

6. Leverage SEM for SEO

Use your learnings and complement synergies between SEM and SEO. Develop your owned channel content strategy based on where you identify success from your paid activity.

To conclude, SEM is a key channel that is playing an important role and will continue to be a key piece of any marketing strategy. Google has been the one of the first and most relevant players in this field, but as the internet matures other specialised platforms are now starting to rise, examples are Amazon search or Youtube.