Search engine marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.
That may sound like an overly simple question to most readers, but it’s still worth pondering it for a moment because other people in your organization may not give you the answer you’re expecting. Just like a football team needs to know where the goal line is so that they can all move in the same direction when trying to score a touchdown, the search marketing team and the rest of your organization need to know their goal so that they can work together effectively. (At Google, we used OKRs [Objectives and Key Results] to align a company of 40,000+, but that’s for another article.)
Your goal should be the one key performance indicator (KPI) that matters most to the business. It must be tracked, and the data has to be integrated with AdWords where it can be used for optimizations. The goal must also be reasonable. For example, hitting a target costper-acquisition below $25 while at the same time remaining in the top position are contradictory goals. If you’re lucky, you may be able to reach both; however, in most cases, you have to choose one or the other, so you need to know which one matters most. Finally, Ad Words Quality Score should never be your main goal. Having been on the Quality Score team at Google for many years and having given many presentations on the topic of Quality Score, you’d think that there are hundreds of companies who live and die by QS, but it’s ultimately just one of the metrics that should be used to guide decisions in pursuit of the real KPI – the one that an investor in the company might care about, like profit or revenue growth, for example.
Now that the goals are clearly defined, it’s time to get started managing your campaign for success. This is the part where all the hard work comes in, and it can sometimes be tedious and repetitive. But fear not, many of these steps can be automated with AdWords Automated Rules, AdWords Scripts or tools from PPC management platforms like the one we build at my PPC management company, Optmyzr. The checklist itself came from SalesX, where the team created an app to stay on top of all the tasks required to make an AdWords account successful. It’s called the Optimization Recurring Checklist for AdWords (ORCA) and it covers a variety of things ranging from managing keywords to managing budgets.
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