For those of you I know who are already involved in this area there may be some value in the intelligence I picked up last night over dinner with my daughter in Sydney.
She is the Online Marketing Manager for an Insurance Company who have an annual SEM spend in many millions…
The main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) all use a Quality Score to help determine your position in paid search and the cost of being in that position. If you can concentrate on legitimately improving your Quality Score, you can have more control over what you spend. For more information on what factors affect Quality Score, click here.
The question is often asked, "How do the search engines determine the position of your ads in paid search?"
A very rough rule of thumb is your quality score times your bid amount.
Typically, a business’s text ads, keywords and landing pages are evaluated and you are given a score from 1 to 10 (10 being the best), and the higher your score, the more relevant your business appears to be to a related search.
Effectively, if A wanted to bid $100 to be in paid ad position #1 and had a QS of 5, but then B came in and bid $80 and had a QS of 7, B would win (7 x $80 is more than 5 x $100). This would also mean that B can afford to pull back the spend (or reallocate it) because he can now afford to be in position 1 and only pay $72 per click.
Importantly, the Quality score is given to each keyword or phrase in the account. So for example, "Estate Disputes" may have a Quality score of 9 because it gets a good click through rate, the landing page is relevant to the ad, and the keywords are used in both, whereas "contesting a will" only gets a quality score of 5, for the same reasons (eg not a good click through rate, lack of keywords in the landing page, etc). So there are hundreds of Quality scores in each account given to the keywords, not the account as a whole.
To help optimise spend she uses software to automatically manage bid levels and budget over time…even within a day the bid levels and budgets change…see also below. A bid management tool is not particularly useful for small accounts (modest budget and limited key words/phrases).
As a very rough rule of thumb,Organic links receive approx. 60% of all clicks in a search engine results page, with SEM receiving 40%.
The ads that appear above your organic search results are the ones that get most of that 40% available action, and position #1 gets most of the clicks...
If your ad is appearing at the side of the organic search results, and well down the list, the percentage of available clicks you get is very low indeed...
To get the most out of your search strategy, both SEM and SEO should form part of the mix. Whilst not known what the % of lift in clicks is, appearing in the top 3 positions for both SEM and SEO will help ensure one of your ads is clicked on and a visit/lead delivered to your site.
The ads that appear above your organic search results are the ones that get most of that 40% available action, and position #1 gets most of the clicks...
If your ad is appearing at the side of the organic search results, and well down the list, the percentage of available clicks you get is very low indeed...
To get the most out of your search strategy, both SEM and SEO should form part of the mix. Whilst not known what the % of lift in clicks is, appearing in the top 3 positions for both SEM and SEO will help ensure one of your ads is clicked on and a visit/lead delivered to your site.
Our discussion was just a chat…not intended to cover all the bases, but I thought you might be interested in her observations given the level of spend and intense experience…
In my own experience the visitor to your site who has arrived via either organic search results or PPC ads is looking for information that meets their needs fast…so the quality of content on your landing pages is vitally important and must be relevant to them. Making strong, obvious calls to action on those pages is essential. To really continue to optimise, testing different creative, and calls to action, is essential.
Analysing how long the average visitor spends on your site and how many pages they look at is very useful…especially once you understand what they did when they "finished"…did they leave, or did they make an enquiry on-line, or call the dedicated phone number provided?
Am sure many of you will have known some of these key issues from your own research and experience…I trust this adds a little too...
PS Just for interest, my daughter says that the term ‘life insurance’ is the most hotly contested and expensive search term in the country. The CPC for life insurance, when sitting at the top of the list as above (where they must be) tends to range from $70 to $110 depending on day of week and time of day…at proven peak times for searches in her field competition is intense, and I'm sure the bid management software more than earns its keep!
No comments:
Post a Comment