How To Optimize Your Search Advertising Budget
As someone who has worked in advertising two summers in a row, I have learned a thing or two about how advertisers allocate resources to their search engine advertising. For this blog, I turned to someone with more experience to explain the nuances of search engine advertising and how to maximize ROI. Every advertiser starts a campaign by asking themselves the same question “how do I get the most out of the money I have to spend?”. For those on a tighter budget, Brett Middleton who is a search engine advertiser and blogger, says advertisers should focus on their Search Impression Share, a metric that is often not looked at closely.
Search Impression Share is the amount of impressions an advertisement is receiving compared to how many they had the potential to receive. This is a good metric to measure which advertisements are performing they way they’re supposed to, rather than just performing at all. There are two main ways to think of ad spend on search. Do you want a “deep campaign” or a “wide campaign”. A deep campaign would spend a large some of money bidding on one or two words that are performing really well. This typically means you are focusing your ad on one or two aspects of your business. The wide campaign approach means you advertise for all products or services, even if they ROI is lower. This is a problem many advertisers with multiple products run in to.
Once an advertiser understands their Search Impression Share, they can tackle these two ideas. If one or two key words are getting a lot more clicks than other words, you can adjust your budget accordingly. If you are spending a lot of money on one word and it’s getting 1000 clicks but that’s only 15% of the potential clicks, you may not want to put more money there. Rather, you’d want to spend the money on a word that is getting 500 clicks but is 75% of the potential clicks. This way you are spending money on key words that are working and getting a high percentage of clicks, rather than words that may be getting clicks, but not a high percentage.