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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns are some of our greatest success stories, yielding consistent, predictable and dependable website traffic and/or sales. Yet unforeseen by those new to SEM is the patience required to generate such results. The beginning may feel very “hurry up and wait.“ But without the wait, your campaign is destined to underperform. Here’s how patience is its own reward when it comes to SEM.

The Whole Kit ‘n Kaboodle

First, development of a strong strategy and appropriate planning may require as long as two weeks (depending on the complexity of your buy). This includes landing pages, keyword list, keyword groups and keyword ads. During this time, our media specialists and you are walking hand-in-hand, deciding on keywords, their hierarchy, the incentive(s) for the landing page, the exact messaging and creative. The weeks of preparation lead to increased anticipation. They’re worth it.

So finally your SEM campaign goes live. So how ‘bout that glorious click thru rate that’s going to pave the way to your conversion success? After day one, it may less than you expect. What now? Optimization. But not immediately, and here’s why.

Google’s Quality Score

About 80% of your SEM dollars will go to Google. Google bases your paid ad position and the cost-per-click you pay on the quality score of your keyword. The better your quality score, the better your campaign performs. This is most often a function of the relevance of your keywords (search terms). The most relevant keywords on Google have the most success. Relevant search terms get more clicks. That’s better for you, better for the consumer performing the search (and, of course, better for Google).

So you need a good quality score. How?

Here’s where the “wait” part kicks in.

One of the metrics in defining a high quality score is a historically high click thru rate. And you won’t have a historically high click thru rate until you’ve been running for a while.

So your competitors may have a leg up on you if they have been running campaigns longer than you, even if their current click thru rate isn’t as high as yours. If it’s historically higher, you’ve got some catching up to do before you’ll start outranking your competitor.

Never fear. Your quality score is also measured by the quality of your landing page, the account history of your buyer (that’s us), the relevance of your keyword ad to the keyword group, and the relevance of the keyword ad and the search query. That’s where we come in, with strategies for your landing page and keyword groups that are a step up from your competition. Anyone can buy numbers. We’ll do the skull sweat to get you the best ROI.

And there’s more. We’ll help you set your baseline and compare changes one by one against it. This is true optimization. Since the results of each change - whether to keywords, groups, bids, creative, landing pages - need to be compared against the previous state of each, patience is required. It’s not just a matter of tweaking bids and running reports on keywords. We’ll go in depth with you to really see what’s really affecting what. That attention to detail is what sets us apart. We take great pride in it.

What Have We Learned?

It’s paramount to have realistic and measurable goals for your campaign. Is your goal:

• A certain amount of conversions?
• A specific quantity of website traffic?
• A specific number of email signups?

Patience and diligence will take you there. If you have the patience, we have the diligence.

Happy converting!

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