Questions to Ask Yourself and Your Search Team

 

Efficiency: 

  • Technology: does your team have the technology tools in place to efficiently manage multiple platforms centrally: thus avoiding redundancy of action in creation of ads and keywords across the three major PPC channels (Google, Yahoo, MSN), daily management of bid optimization, reporting, and tracking?
  • Keyword Generation:  do you have the resources to efficiently & dynamically create huge volumes of 'tail' keywords which tap into lower cost, high converting terms? Are considerations made into the consumer purchase cycle stage, to focus on purchase intent rather than purchase research?
  • Labor Costs:  As an employer, what is the monthly labor cost allocated toward managing your in house search?

Expertise:  

Winning the Quality Score Battle: 

    • What is quality score? 
    • What things can specifically be done in the account setup to significantly enhance this score?
    • Are you currently suffering from a Quality Score Problem? If so, what four actions can be taken remedy this?
    • How much is non-optimal quality score costing per month? Per year? What is the associated opportunity cost of not garnering a higher volume of visitors with your set budget?
    • What creative copy tactics are being implemented to yield significant increases in your CTR?

Targeting & Reach

    • Do you know how to efficiently segment and target your audience?
    • Are you using the latest techniques and tools to target demographically?  Psychographically?  Can you do both of these concurrently?
    • Are you running PPC campaigns via Social Media outlets?  Are you advertising in Facebook?  MySpace? Do you have experience doing this?
    • Are you primarily running broad match or exact match for the majority of keywords?  Why?

Network Channel Support & Training

    • How are your employees staying abreast of the latest search products, and how most affectively to use them to increase your results?
    • Are your employees being trained in the latest emerging best practices? How much is this costing in terms of time and training costs?
    • Do you have redundancy in your search management capabilities in case an employee leaves your firm?

Measurement & Conversion

  • How are you tracking conversions?
  • How is your conversion tracking affecting material decisions in your campaign management?
  • Are you tracking phone calls directly driven by search marketing? If so, how? Are these phone calls calculated into your cost per success metrics?
  • Are you conducting multivariate and A/B split testing for conversion? What page elements are you testing? Why? At what frequency? What tools are you using? Are your variables that are being tested correlated or not correlated?
  • Have you found elements that have enhanced your conversion by 25% or more over the baseline metric?

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Author: Tom Rusling

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