Don’t be a Passive Marketer: The Benefits of Actively Managed Search

The 2010 holiday shopping season delighted a wide range of marketers. What metrics were the best arbiter of the seasonal ROI? It depends where you looked.

ComScore’s early assessment of non-travel retail spending growth saw spending rise 12% over 2009 levels, to more than $17 billion, and spending rose on both Thanksgiving Day (28%) and Cyber Monday (16%).

Search marketing technology provider Kenshoo also uncovered results that far surpassed the comScore averages when it analyzed the Kenshoo U.S. Retail Index, which includes more than 1 billion total advertising impressions, 30 million clicks and more than a million online sales transactions for the Kenshoo 2010 Online Holiday Shopping Report. The report stated, among other impressive growth metrics, that total online sales revenue grew 60% over the 26-day period from Nov. 4-29, compared to the same period in 2009.

Looking holistically at the entire shopping season provides the same general assessment. In January, comScore reported that non-travel retail spending reached a record level for November and December, climbing 12% versus a year ago to $32.6 billion.

Still, marketers ought to wonder what set some marketers in some channels apart from the pack, since many continued to exceed industry averages with impressive gains throughout the holiday season. Kenshoo’s season-ending numbers, for example, documented “nearly 70% growth in search ad revenue,” and Performics’ search campaigns continued to exceed industry averages into the late stages of the holiday season.

The important caveat for these superior sales figures? The analysis focused on actively managed campaigns.

Dissecting Active Management

Since this concept of active management can help underperforming marketers boost results, it deserves another look and some basic analysis. Even marketers that have achieved some level of holiday success to date ought to take a critical look at how their search, social, display and other campaigns are managed to determine if opportunity exists to generate even greater success with a more active approach to management.

Although active campaign management extends much further than this, certain elements exist in any actively managed ad campaign. As a starting point, let’s consider four basic components of an actively managed paid search campaign:

1. Keyword mining and build out: Paid search campaign managers need to scour the searchverse to find that next profitable keyword and capture more demand, but doing so requires diligence and discovery tools. The equivalent practice in a social or display advertising campaign consists of researching potential advertising properties to ensure ads are placed in the most ideal and profitable locations.

2. Persistent copy and landing page testing: Test, test and test again. This can’t be stressed enough. Regardless of what keywords or web properties a campaign manager chooses, they must create a bridge of relevance from the keyword to the ad copy and landing page. At any point where performance lags, optimizing copy and landing pages can often help. Testing ensures that effective copy and landing pages exist to support the ad campaigns and drive potential customers through to conversion.

3. Multi-tiered bid strategy: A segmented and prioritized bid strategy can significantly boost results. Chief marketers should determine how their teams approach bid strategy and encourage a segmented approach whenever possible. Typically, three segments or buckets will suffice. High performing keywords receive priority investment and optimization. Profitable keywords come next, and “to be proven” keywords follow. Social and display campaigns can easily be segmented in a similar fashion by separating high- and low-priority actions.

4. Cross-channel optimization: Integrating costly and high profile offline and online ad buys with cost effective online ad buys is critical. Whatever messages and offers a marketer pushes on TV or on large scale portal buys, for example, ought to be supported by search campaigns to capture the resulting demand. When potential customers get interested in a TV ad, they often turn to search engines for more information, and advertisers can successfully capture this created demand by optimizing search campaigns to support these other channels.

Michael Kahn ([email protected]) is senior vice president, client services at Performics.