An SEM Christmas Carol: Q4 Past, Present & Yet To Come
At its inception and for years afterward paid search could exist in a vacuum. You could send clicks and drive profitable return, staying inside your AdWords and other UIs, analyzing your keywords and executing your optimizations.
Over time, to remain competitive, it became more important to collaborate with other teamsin order to ensure search engine marketing (SEM) success. Landing page optimization is now an integral part of paid searchthatrequires creative and development resources. Conversion pixels and remarketing pixels need placement and QA by dev teams, as well.
We need banners to be developed by a creative team. We align our sitelinks and messaging with the offers on the promotional calendar, which are handled by the broadcast advertising or branding team.
Ideally, the paid search team also has visibility into the lifetime value of the users and can adjust bids based not just on the single conversion point, but the actual revenue being driven (even if it takes 90 days or 2 years for that user to mature to his or herfull value).
There are still many paid search departments operating in a silo. The industry has reached a tipping point where this is very dangerous.
Desktop impressions that have last-click attribution possibilities hit their peak and are now declining.Thecompetition for impressions continues to increase. The engines have shifted their algorithms such that the undiscovered long-tail does not exist anymore.
Its January 2010 and you, the SEM head at a womens dress retailer, are high-fiving the CEO after winning Q4 2009. You spent $1,000,000 and drove $3,000,000 of attributable revenue. You are giving a presentation showing how you did it.
By savvy execution, you gained the competitive edge. You were an early adopter of sitelinks and did frequent ad text testing, driving your click-through rate (CTR) to 5%.
You segmented your campaigns by device earlier in the year, and by Q4, you eliminated mobile searches that showed negative ROI, focusing your spend on the high-ROI desktop searches.
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An SEM Christmas Carol: Q4 Past, Present & Yet To Come