If you're involved in your SEM program in any way, you should be consistently evaluating its performance. Whether it's from a high level perspective and you review general conversion, ROI, and/or CPA data or if you're heavily ingrained in the day to day and you analyze clicks, bids and keywords, your exposure to key performance indicators is going to be constant. Depending on your program you may see fluctuations in your program or a steady change or even completely stable data.
Staying educated on your program is crucial, but so is taking the time to improve it. This does not always have to be laborious process or require external consulting. Instead, we suggest simply taking a fresh perspective and dissecting your own data! You can learn a significant amount from taking the time to run a full comprehensive audit on your own past performance. You can identify weaknesses and areas of opportunity and even make accurate quantitative forecasts.
We run audits for our clients and prospects all the time. Below are some of the different areas we analyze as well as some tips to get the most out of each section:
Match Type (MT) data provides insight into the efficiency of a PPC effort. Exact MT provides complete control over which ad(s) will populate while phrase MT has slightly less control and broad MT even less. As a result, exact match leads to the highest level of user qualification and subsequently a higher conversion rate usually followed by phrase match and then finally broad.
What should you look for? Click and conversion distribution, as well as CPC by MT. Each term that is live in broad and/or phrase match should be live in exact match as well. Furthermore, exact match bids should always be higher than broad or phrase match bids for the same term. If this is not the case, impressions will go to the broad or phrase match term, diluting the data and lowering control over creative association.
An account should be structured by business categories. For example, if a business has five main types of products, there should be 7 campaigns: one for each product type, one for all branded terms and one for all generic terms. Specific products should have unique adgroups within the appropriate campaign. If this leads to extraordinarily large campaigns, break down the categories into sub-categories. Separate content into unique campaigns. Any competitor terms or terms that are not very relevant to the advertiser should be isolated as well.
What should you look for? Low Quality Scores. Terms with lower Quality Scores than the account means and mode should be isolated. These terms should then be either removed if not profitable or completely irrelevant or optimized through new creative.
- Quality Score: KWs & Creative
Quality Score is determined by the strength of three key relationships:
1. Advertiser and Keyword
2. Keyword and Creative
3. Creative and Landing Page
Maximize relevance by strengthening these relationships to yield the highest possible Quality Scores and ranks with the lowest CPCs.
Keep in mind: Great SEO makes great SEM more efficient. Optimize the landing pages with the key terms that are driving the majority of SEM traffic. This will maximize synergy between the two efforts.
Impression Share (IS) is a directional metric which provides a gauge on available traffic. That being said, Lost Impression Share and Exact Match Impression Share provide action items. Lost IS explains why a campaign does not have full IS while Exact Match IS shows exposure on exact match (the most efficient Match Type). Given that we like to maximize IS for the most efficient terms first, look to maximize exact match IS first, then push on alternative MTs where it is profitable at the keyword level.
Keep in mind: IS will never be equal to 100% unless a campaign is live solely in Exact Match. Lost IS will provide direction for how to go about getting more IS (increasing budget vs. improving rank). Look for campaigns that are performing well with incremental IS available and then dive down to the keyword level to find the real performers. Be sure to also look at campaigns that are underperforming to see if you can identify a diamond in the rough.
Be sure to evaluate the described elements above against a significant data set. Usually looking at numbers over the past 30-60 days should provide enough information to make a clear assessment of your program. Through the insights you gain from evaluating Match Type, account structure, Quality Score and Impression Share, you can be confident in the changes you implement to get your SEM program in shape! Please get in touch with us if you have any questions on best practices for performing an audit on your SEM program.
