Even though, by the accounts of those perennially online that the time of SEM and, to a lesser extent, SEO is long over, the fact is that when performed correctly, it’s not just possible to see incredible results, but you will do so with the sport of ROI that makes most other marketing tactics blush. But while the reality provides that SEM is an increasingly critical component of any marketing strategy, many smaller operations are still stuck in the old ways of thinking that either don’t yield the kinds of results they’re after, or at worst, cause significant damage to their websites. This is why, to demystify things a bit, we’ve created this post offering up seven proven tactics that you can use yourself, or that your SEM agency will use, to send your results skyrocketing without seeing your bank account drain from a poor campaign.
Master The Fundamentals First
With any sort of relatively esoteric job (of which marketing is very much firmly rooted in), it’s imperative to master the fundamentals first. Most professional agencies will offer you a Free Action Plan that allows you to follow a framework to get started, but even with this, you will have to understand what’s involved and set things up correctly before moving forward at full force. So what are these fundamentals that you need to get sorted before you can really turn the money spigot on?
- Set clear goals and KPIs: Without clear goals or an understanding of what constitutes success, you will never be able to advance beyond the “shooting from the hip” stage. In other words, having something to aim for will give you a better understanding of what genuine results mean.
- Perform the right sort of keyword research: Intent has long been the name of the game, but you also need to ensure that you aggressively avoid negative keywords that will only serve to eat up your ad spend without yielding any real results.
- Research who your audience is: When you know who the people are who are most likely to take action on your ads and other tactics, you can more cost-effectively target them.
- Create a strong and constant message and value proposition: Your message needs to align with your brand and offer a value proposition that is hard to ignore.
- Make sure your landing pages are on point: We will get to this a bit later, but having a landing page that converts will turn your ad spend into revenue.
- Set up tracking correctly: If you don’t know how your campaigns are going, you will be unable to fix any issues that might be causing leakage.
Optimize For Search Intent
If you’re in the business of catering to large-scale corporate events, spending money on ads that target the sale of single items will only serve to cost you money for nothing.
| Search intent type | User mindset | Best ad approach |
| Informational | Looking for answers or learning. | Use educational messaging and offer up useful guides and resources. |
| Commercial investigation | Comparing options before buying. | Highlight features, comparisons, and offer up social proof. |
| Transactional | Ready to buy or take an action. | Use strong CTAs combined with on-point tracking to see how they interact. |
| Navigational | Want to reach a specific brand or site. | Reinforce brand trust and direct them quickly to the thing they want to buy (they already know they want to buy from you, so any additional work could push them away). |
| Local intent | Looking for nearby solutions. | Highlight location, availability, reviews, and push focus onto maps. |
Use Audience Targeting & Observations
By layering demographics on top of your keywords, you will have a potent combination whereby those who are most likely to take action will be the ones seeing your ads. This can dramatically lower your ad spend and keep your ROI high. You can also apply any bid adjustments on the fly based on real-time observations.
Build High-Converting Landing Pages
We touched on this briefly in the first point, but it deserves its own place in this list because of how vital it is. Your landing page will be the thing that can make or break your campaign, and if you haven’t set it up correctly, your losses will be enormous. The good news is that with the right tracking tools like heatmaps, etc, it’s possible to make adjustments as users enter the page. These adjustments should enable you to maximize each user and nudge them more successfully to the actions you want them to take.
Use Dayparting & Geo-Targeting
This option is quite interesting as it allows you to maximize your SEM budget as much as possible. In essence, it means you will only present ads based on the time of day, based on the locations that each of your users is more likely to be online. This is most effective when targeting multiple time zones, and you might not need it if you are a small local business, but for those who sell internationally or across time zones, it can be a real boon. You will need to spend a bit of time tweaking and setting things up appropriately. But the payoff for that work is absolutely worth it.
Use Profit-Focused Bidding
Far too many businesses (and low-quality agencies) will become enamored with vanity metrics. These metrics look great on paper, but if they aren’t resulting in sales, they are worthless. In fact, they are worse than worthless, as you are spending money without seeing any results from the effort. By placing more of an impetus on profit-focused bidding, you will ensure that your campaign budget is being spent wisely and not being thrown down the drain.
Track Micro-Conversions, Not Just Sales
Obviously, sales are the desired endpoint of anything you set up, but it’s easy to get bogged down in the end and not pay attention to the process that leads to it. Micro conversions can help you to see the larger picture of how users interact and give you suggestions on what to improve.
SEM is arguably the best and only way to achieve significant sales online. But, without knowing how to get started or what metrics you need to make real-time adjustments, you won’t be able to maximize performance. The suggestions in this post are only a few, but they should get you started with your first campaign.