There seems to be an endless supply of blog posts and articles tipping us off on the “Six secrets to success in search” or the “Top 5 tips for tripling your PPC ROI”.
Now, you’ll never hear me doing down the importance of building PPC campaigns in line with search engine best practice or ensuring that your ad copy is compelling, your landing page highly relevant, and your keyword lists well managed. If you don’t do this you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle with PPC investment – and the engines will be more than happy to take your money while you make the mistakes.
What bothers me is that across the industry, search practitioners seem to focus so much on this stuff. Surely excellence in delivery should be taken as a given? Yes, there’s a lot of intricate knowledge that an experienced search practitioner can apply to save a client a lot of money. Sure, you have to do all the granular campaign structure with highly relevant ad copy stuff, but that’s not what creates success. That just stops you from being inefficient.
I think there’s only one key to success in search; understanding your market.
To do this, PPC has to be used as what it is: a true blue, two way marketing tool. Not just a way of reaching customers, but a way of listening to them. Without going too evangelical, nowhere else are we presented with such pure data. Nowhere else do our customers (or people who, sadly, don’t want to be our customers) type out exactly what they are looking for, and allow us to observe their response to our offerings through click through and conversion rates, or observe what the latest popular search terms are.
But search practitioners sit somewhere between clients and their customers, so understanding our market also means understanding our clients’ businesses. There’s little point to all of our knowledge about the ins and outs of what effects Quality Score or knowing the Ad Rank formula, or even observing the latest market trends if we can’t make this usable for our clients’ business and relate it to their business strategy. Too long have we existed in a silo, reporting on the same old metrics. You see it in agencies, consultancies and in-house departments; all the specialist knowledge that we have access to just doesn’t get utilised because it doesn’t get properly connected with business strategy.
Forget about achieving a great CPA for a few seconds, surely a business is going to care more about the latest rising search that could open up a new product line, or the product sector that they thought just wouldn’t drive any sales that’s outperforming their best channel in terms of search query volume. Search is capable of driving consumer led change in the way a business behaves. The potential effect this could have on a business is much greater than achieving a low CPA in September.
So here’s the one secret to success in paid search: know the market. Listen to what your customers are saying, let your PPC strategy mirror your or your client’s business values and strategy but be willing to use search data to challenge and improve that strategy. Sure, you need to do the rest right too, but don’t get bogged down in it. The real opportunity is elsewhere.