Cut Your Google Bill (Without Losing Sales)
At the DMA Annual Conference & Exhibition last week in San Diego, Kevin led a session offering three ways marketers can apply proven direct marketing segmentation principles to optimize search campaigns. Here are those three techniques, as well as further analysis that was provided at the session.
1. Focus on target audiences. In economics, the Pareto Principle, which states that 20 percent of your customers drive 80 percent of your sales, can be improved upon. Marketing better to that 20 percent will help you achieve a lot more without spending more. Targeting searchers from geographies and at specific times of day yields these results:
- higher conversion rates;
- higher shopping cart sizes;
- more profitable shopping carts;
- more profitable frequent shopping behavior;
- more visits to the store locator; and
- better quality leads and/or sign-ups to newsletters.
Finding the right targets helps you decide which keywords to bid on, how to target your searchers and what ad copy to use to entice them to click. Learn which messaging works best with your core customers.
2. Establish a relationship, and leverage it. Don’t think of a search interaction as a single customer communication — or even a single opportunity for a conversion. Think of all the possible interactions beyond search.
When targeting your best customers, focus on which audiences provide the best lifetime value or lead quality. When measuring the success of a search campaign, don’t just look at immediate shopping cart metrics alone. Use email sign-ups and online and phone tracking to better understand how you can integrate touchpoints beyond your site.
Finally, consider search retargeting, which follows search-driven visitors across the web with targeted display ads. Retargeting is particularly powerful for retail marketers who:
- have more than 150,000 visitors a month between organic and paid search traffic;
- have purchase windows longer than a day or two; and
- have customers who generally buy frequently.
But be careful: Pick a vendor that does not measure in a vacuum, taking credit for view-through conversions in a silo. You’ll pay for a significant percentage of orders you'd have gotten anyway, particularly if you have an active customer base.
3. Prepare for the future. From keyword-targeted videos on YouTube to real-time auctions selling display media, the rest of the advertising world is starting to look like search. Right now, advertisers who want to be in business two years from now can get a very firm handle on search — and the new advertising that’s an outgrowth of search. Or they can play catch-up when cost of entry is prohibitively high. I’d suggest the first option.
Learn what you can now and you’ll always be able to do more with less.
Kevin Lee is co-founder and CEO and Abe Mezrich is marketing manager of Didit, a digital advertising agency specializing in paid search and targeted display media buys. Kevin can be reached at kevin.lee@didit.com; Abe can be reached at abe.mezrich@didit.com.
