Mastering Search Engine Advertising
Buying your way to the top of search results may seem easy, but managing an effective search engine advertising campaign requires a thoughtful approach with more than a little elbow grease.
Buying your way to the top of search results may seem easy, but managing an effective search engine advertising campaign requires a thoughtful approach with more than a little elbow grease.
Search engine advertising has exploded in popularity over the past few years, offering marketers top positioning and providing searchers with appealing alternatives to annoying banners and popups. To newcomers, the process of bidding on keywords, then sitting back and watching site visitors and online sales start rolling in, seems easy and painless.
That is, until the hapless advertiser gets into a bidding war with a non-rational competitor. Or when the boss asks for specific ROI numbers to justify the expense of a search advertising campaign. These are just two of many issues that can bedevil a marketer setting out on a search advertising effort.
Search Engine Advertising, a new book by SearchDay guest writer Catherine Seda, offers a wealth of information about the entire process of creating and running an effective search advertising campaign. It’s an excellent book, written by a pro who not only understands the mechanics of search engine advertising, but also has the ability to describe sometimes difficult concepts with ease and skill.
Importantly, the book starts off with a critical but often overlooked activity: planning a successful strategy. The apparent simplicity of search engine advertising can be a trap for those who don’t lay a solid foundation for their efforts.
Long before you place your first bid, it’s crucial to go through the often challenging process of keyword research. It’s also important to spend time writing your ads, creating compelling copy that entices people to click through to your web site. Another key activity is creating effective landing pages, your one chance to convince your visitor to spend more time on your website and ultimately “convert” — buy a product, register for an account, subscribe to a newsletter. Seda covers these topics in depth, offering numerous tips and strategies from her own extensive experience.
The book also has excellent coverage of paid placement and paid inclusion programs, their strengths and weaknesses, and when and how to most effectively use them. It also covers specialized search engines — shopping search engines, and targeted search engines that focus on a particular niche, or cater to residents of different regions of the world.
Once you’ve created and implemented a search engine advertising campaign, you must monitor it constantly, measuring success (or failure) and continually tweaking your approach. Part four of the book provides detailed information about performance measurement, including a look at some popular bid management, analytics, and ROI tracking tools and solutions.
The book wraps up with a section on protecting your profits. Although it’s not widely discussed, click fraud can and does occur with paid placement programs. Other problems include improper use of your trademarks by competitors, or affiliates using tactics that may do you more harm than good. Seda shows you how to identify these types of problems, and also offers useful strategies and tips for dealing with them before they become major issues.
Full disclosure: I was a reviewer for this book prior to publication. I’m going to repeat what I wrote then:
The wealth of accurate, savvy information contained in this book makes it a must-read for anyone promoting products or services online. Using even a few of the tips and techniques offered in Search Engine Advertising will boost your results significantly, paying for the book many times over.
Resources
Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index
Analytics Data Analytics in Marketing
Digital Marketing The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook
Digital Marketing Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study
Search Engine Advertising
by Catherine Seda
New Riders, $29.99
ISBN 0-7357-1399-5
http://www.searchenginesales.com/
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