Jon Njos, Media Director/Stanton & Everybody
Ok, so you’ve decided to head into the digital advertising world. Great! Now what? Do you just do banner advertising? Do you also employ a search campaign? Do you do search first? SEO or SEM? When you launch an SEM campaign, what keywords do you use?
That’s just a few of the questions that come to mind as you explore the process, which ultimately makes your head spin and you end up doing nothing. Well let me tell you this………BRAND IS STILL IMPORTANT! While we have been discussing SEM strategies with our clients, an interesting phenomenon has occurred. Traffic, through search, has increased to our clients’ sites and the list of the top 10-15 keywords have something in common…..they all include the clients’ names in them. Not generic category search terms.
I have used an example over the years about the use of the yellow pages. Do you want people to go to the yellow pages and discover you there, or do you want people to already know who you are so when they go to the yellow pages, they just look up your phone number? If you’re Zebra Plumbing, people have miles of plumbers to look through before they hit the Z’s. If they ever get there.
Generic search terms are great, especially if you don’t have a brand presence. Pull up your web site analytics sometime and look at the keyword report. If you have an established brand presence, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many generic keyword terms in the top 10 keyword sources.
Now I’m not saying that an SEM campaign isn’t viable, and it can certainly do the reverse and help build your brand. But if you have been doing any advertising up to this point, then your brand identity will help with search.
I’ve had clients tell me that during a traditional and digital campaign, their traffic from search is doing better than those campaigns?? Actually, your search traffic is increasing, BECAUSE, of the traditional and digital campaigns. Think about how people (yourself included), go to web sites. How many times do you actually type in the URL vs. the times you just Google a site? Your web site analytics reports will provide a Traffic Sources report, usually identifying Direct, Referral and Search traffic percentages. Sometimes traffic from Search can be 25% or better of total traffic. But then look at your keyword sources. If over 50% of those keywords include your company name in some form or another, those are just as good as being in the Direct category.
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This is very insightful! And yep! We have a handful of new clients who have spent enormous amounts of money on SEM for the last couple years, are bitter about the results (not traffic results but conversion to revenue), and now are overly cautious about spending similar amounts on traditional campaigns.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting factor for me is that they didn't start out with a budget that they felt uncomfortable with or out of balance with brand or traditional efforts, however, as they began their SEM they were constantly encouraged and egged on by whatever new fashionable metric was tossed their way. Come end of year, they had outspent their budget chasing windmills by in some cases 300+%.
Now, if only we had that money to work with from day one...