Search Marketing Best Practices

Creative
- Clear benefit statement.
- Visible and clear call to action.
- Headline ideally matches keywords.
- Ad reflects the landing page and vice versa.
- Test 3-4 variations of ad creative.
- Design landing pages that are unique to your Search Marketing efforts.
- A/B testing of landing page layouts and offers; best done on the server side.
- Refresh creative messaging regularly (while maintaining consistent brand platform).
Media Planning
- Optimize spend to focus on terms that bring in the most leads & conversions.
- Use day-parting to maximize spend.
- Understand your target, buy the right words.
Metrics & Reporting
- Set up campaigns that can track keywords to lead / opportunity / close.
- Create reports and dashboards that show keyword-to-close.
- Analyze to determine most effective traffic and lead-generation keywords, creative and landing pages.
Planning & Education
- Map your search marketing plans to all phases of marketing, from awareness to evaluation to consideration to purchase.
- Stay current on Search Marketing – it’s a fluid field whose ground rules and strategies change rapidly.
Advanced Tips
- Ad Creative – use the Display URL as a 4th line of ad text.
- If budget is a constraint, focus on maximizing conversions within budget (i.e. target cost/conversion metrics to get maximum number of conversions within budget).
- If budget is not a constraint, consider optimizing to maximize conversions/impression rather than cost/conversion.
- Start campaigns with 'Content' turned off – revisit 'content' once you’ve achieved success with search marketing.
- If you are marketing to more than 1 or 2 countries then set up separate campaigns for each country or region.
- Google (and soon, Yahoo) monetizes SERPs on a cost-per-impression model, taking into account not only maximum bids but also ad click-through-rates (CTRs). Ads with higher CTRs enjoy higher SERP positions at a lower cost-per-click (CPC). Therefore, work to continually improve CTRs and (with AdWords) tighten your ad groups.
- For high-volume keywords, use phrase and exact matching to achieve further granularity for your campaigns.
Further Information

For more advanced tips customized to your company's needs, please contact CPC Search.

additional information

Contact us at:
CPC Search, Inc.
11 W. Victoria Street, Suite 207A
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Glossary

A/B Split Testing: Test two landing pages against each other in real-time, while changing single elements between the two versions.

AdWords: A search marketing program utilizing small textual advertisements on Google and it's partner sites on a CPC (cost per click) basis.

Conversion: When a website visitor takes a desired action, such making a purchase or downloading a file.

CPC: Cost-per-click. An advertising system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click delivered to his or her site from a link or listing keyed to a specific search term, area of a site or even a banner.

CTR: Click-through-rate. This is the ratio of the number of times an ad is clicked divided by the number of times an ad is viewed.

Display URL: In Google AdWords and other paid search engine listings, this is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users (as opposed to the "Destination URL").

Keyword: A word that is entered into the search form of a search engine to return pages or sites about or including the keyword and information related to it.

Metrics: A set of measurements that quantify traffic, performance or other results.

PPC: Pay-per-click. Advertising model in which advertisers pay for click-throughs to their website. Ads are served based on keywords or themes.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Strategic alterations to a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page of search results displayed in response to a query.

SWOT: Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats. Opportunities and threats originate from outside the organization. A SWOT analysis, performed early in the project development process, helps organizations evaluate the environmental factors and internal situation facing a project.