Its All About Paid Search
Paid Search Advertising is an amazing marketing channel. In the last 10 years, billions of pounds have been invested in search marketing by clients and Google has emerged as both media owner and technology giant. Millions of UK consumers have clicked on ads and made a purchase via the tens of thousands of UK-based search advertisements. It’s an un-paralleled success story, from both a user and client point of view.
Despite massive growth and the UK’s aggressive search market, there are still too many marketers and clients who are not grasping its full potential. Search advertising offers the marketer significant benefits beyond pure direct response; adding to their understanding and knowledge of their customer and providing insight that can contribute to future strategy:
• Competitor understanding – by gaining knowledge of what your competitors are doing and understanding their target markets and keywords, you will be able to gain great insights. If you keep tracking your competitors’ listings, you can predict and achieve early insight into who is doing what and when.
• Understanding your own business and your margins – search is such a transparent piece of technology and it’s very simple to see what your business and market is strong in. Using tools such as Google Analytics can show you at a glance what is proving successful – and conversely – what isn’t.
• Modelling search spend and return– knowledge of search seasonality, the likely cost per click, a likely click through rate and the conversion rate means you can model media spend and likely return on investment. By layering in search volumes you can start deploying ‘what if?’ scenarios and top down scenarios.
• Optimising media spend for mass market new technologies e.g. mobile and tablet. There are new devices that are coming to market almost every day which allow for customised search campaigns. These strategies should always be different depending on which device you target – and can lead to startlingly good sales volumes.
• Understanding search in the wider marketing mix. Attribution modelling technologies are all the rage which can only have a positive influence on Search investment. For example, Ignition One, Marin and Kenshoo all give fantastic insight into the wider media marketing mix and can also optimise media spend.
As the market continues to evolve, grow and mature I’m sure that there will be new technologies, tools, knowledge sets and case studies that allow marketers to go beyond the virtual door drop methodology that seems so popular right now.
