The Smartest Bidder Will Win

At the search engine marketing session, Did-it.com’s Kevin Lee hit me with a pile of new information about paid search marketing and left me wanting more.

Smart marketing is key, he said. “This is an auction market place, and the strongest, smartest marketer is going to win in the end. The guy who figures out how to afford to pay the highest price is going to win.”

So the key is not just finding cost-effective clicks, but making sure they convert… and then making sure you know how profitable those customers are in the long run.

Cast your net wide when picking words to bid on. 35 percent of search queries are three words or longer.  Don’t just concentrate on obvious search terms.  These may be the most click-productive, but are also, probably, because your competition uses them too, the most expensive.

Brainstorm keywords: match keywords to products, plurals, permutations of phrases. Imagine what the prospect might type, spellings, the brand name of merchandise stocked, even the model number of products. Finally, look at your own own search engine logs during previous shopping seasons to find indications of future trends.

Clicks aren’t worth anything if you don’t convert them, so pay close attention to the creative continuity between the search prompt and the landing page.

Bring as much granularity as possible to your clicks and landing pages. Put multiple tracking tags in place to figure out which terms and which landing pages result in the best results.  And make sure you are looking at the long term results… not just the initial sale, but the lifetime value of that client.