Part 3. Optimise your SEM campaigns with regular reviews

Once you’ve got your Search Engine Marketing platforms sorted, your keywords in place and your landing pages ready to rock, you’re going to go into repetitive review and refine mode.

The best way to get bang for buck from your search engine marketing is to review your ad performance consistently and make incremental improvements. But this can put the word ‘mental’ into incremental.

You have to keep reviewing performance to make tweaks such as; adding new keywords discovered from the actual search queries, adding negative keywords, raising or lowering bids. This is where the time + money <> ROI equation rears its ugly head.

Use automated rules to save you time
This piece of advice is especially pertinent as we head into the silly season. SEM platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and Instagram all offer manual task automation. These can save you time and let you focus on creating better campaigns rather than getting lost in the minute. That is, sweating the small stuff and missing the big picture wins.

Examples of tasks that can be automated include:

• pausing ads when you reach a certain spending threshold,
• raising bids to the first page or outranking a domain,
• maximising ads for CTR (Click Through Rates) or lead conversions.

Start with Smart Campaigns
An example of new automation techniques are Google’s responsive search ads, which allow advertisers to add in multiple headlines and descriptions, and Google will show and test numerous variations based on your assets. Especially useful for advertisers who do not have the bandwidth and expertise to check differences in ad
copy manually.

We predict that in 2020, SEM will include more automation in their advertising accounts, allowing them to create more effective campaigns and focus on making smarter assets that return
better results.

While Google can handle the automation sides of things, a truly optimised account still requires strategic input. As always, if you need a hand with your digital assets, we’ll be here.

Read part 1 and part 2 of our SEM series.