Lessons Learned From SMN’s “Paid Seach for Big Sites, Big Brands” Webinar

Earlier this week, I sat in on Search Marketing Now’s webinar, “Paid Search for Big Sites, Big Brands”, by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Land. The gist of the webinar was giving out tips and tricks on how to manage paid search efforts for large-scale companies.

The webinar was thus geared towards in-house PPC efforts for these companies. That being said, there were still some good bits of advice that I would like to share with our PPC hero readers.

Planning and Setting Goals

Chris constantly reiterated the need to set clear, manageable goals for your paid search campaigns. This is of utmost importance, as it will form the basis for your efforts. Only after determining which KPIs you deem to be most important can you then monitor your ROI. Chris stated, and I agree, that your strategy must focus on specific metrics, and success can only be determined by the quality and execution of your goals.

PPC Fitting Into the Rest of Your Marketing

It is important to intertwine your PPC and SEO efforts, especially if they are done by different people or teams. It is important not to pit these two marketing strategies against each other in a nerdy battle royale. Generally, undermining your own efforts is not a strongly recommended strategy. Besides, we all know that PPC would whoop SEO in the behind. In these circumstances where there are a variety of marketing strategies being employed, Chris recommends establishing clear roles for both owners and influencers. Everyone involved in the process and needs to work together to make sure that these roles are carried out appropriately. Good leadership at the top is critical for this to work.

PPC is Good for Brand Building

Branding is obviously a huge part of marketing for big companies. If you are wanting to help build a brand, PPC can certainly play an important role in brand building. One easy way to do this is to target ‘head’ keywords, or generic keywords geared towards searchers in the very beginning of their search process. For example, Gary’s Guitar Galleria might want to target ‘guitar’, ‘electric guitar’, and ‘acoustic guitar’ if they want to build awareness amongst potential customers looking to get a new guitar. While these keywords are highly competitive and thus more expensive to bid on, it will definitely aid in branding.  It is also important to note here that clicks aren’t the only metric that helps branding. Even impressions, which as we all know are free, help. The user will likely see your ad even if they decide to click on Marty’s Music Mart ad instead. Targeting these ‘head’ keywords also works in the content network, if you want to get even more exposure.

PPC Hero is always on the lookout for different perspectives on the PPC world and how it relates to everything else in the business world. I would like to thank SMN and Chris for their take in this webinar.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Webinars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.