Cost per click for paid search is on the rise forcing companies to spend more on their Search Engine Marketing. With Google’s monopoly on search growing, expect average rates to continue to rise.

Using superficial metrics, such as click through rates and cost per click to inform your Search Marketing decisions can reduce campaign effectiveness.  Often you can increase your performance by focusing on deeper revenue-impacting measurements, such as profit per order, cost per unique customer and activity measurements such as time spent on site or click path.

To make the most out of your Ad spend, consider these best practices:

1. Organize your Ad spend into campaigns, identify the main purpose of your campaign

•    eCommerce – to sell products or services online
•    Lead Gen – to generate leads
•    Drive Ad Revenue – in an effort to sell ad space
•    Online Service – to reduce call centre calls and support customers online

2. Select and track important metrics that matter

•    Click through rate and cost per click are important measures, but conversion is the most important metric to optimize search campaigns
•    Measure overall revenue, leads and CPA (cost per acquisition)
•    Measure cost per customer (or sale), return on ad spend, and profit per customer (or order)

3.  Reinforce your message consistently from the keywords or phrase to your landing page

•    Broad keywords should take visitors to general landing pages – perfect for casting a big net
•    Exact keywords should take visitors to a specific landing page – expect less traffic, but higher conversion

4.  Create multiple version of landing pages – validate your strategies with facts

•    Create different version of the landing page; make sure there’s a noticeable difference or you won’t know what to fix
•    The headline in your Text Ad should match the headline on your landing page and call to action
•    Clearly state your call to action — what do you want the potential customer to do?
•    Briefly explain the benefits and value proposition of your product or service

5. Have an effective keyword organization strategy

•    Don’t manage key words and phrases manually using using Excel – you’re limiting your ability to effectively scale search marketing campaigns

•    Resource properly – give yourself and your team enough time to manage, organize and execute – Search Engine Marketing takes time

Good luck and let me know how it goes!