1. Know Your Analytics

This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will focus on using analytics to optimize for ROI and knowing the limitations of your own analytics program is extremely important. Additionally, ensure that your ROI metrics are tied back to search-related key performance indicators (KPIs).

ROI attribution can become more cumbersome in the business-to-business (B2B) market place as sales cycles can be extremely long as well as potential of the sale occurring offline. In cases such as this, ensuring lead sources can be captured into CRM systems can provide vital statistics to the health of your campaign. (Yes, pun intended) Several CRM programs, such as SalesForce and Oracle, offer integration with some of the leading Analytics software providers. Simple Access or Excel spreadsheets can also be used to tieback the sales, lead value, or other KPIs to your search activities.

2. Optimize Landing Page Performance

So you’ve paid for the click; what now? Your landing page and ad copy must work together to assist in the sale of your product and convince the user into taking your desired action and converting into a lead/sale. On average, you only have 8 seconds to reassure the prospect that you are what they are looking for and convince them to stick around.

Landing page testing is incredibly important to the success of a paid search campaign and to improving ROI. With a landing page the simple combination of titles, copy, images, and call-to-action can make sweeping differences in the performance of the page. The difficult question is which combination? Unfortunately; other than best practices there is a limited supply of instructions and guidelines to assist search marketers in developing the perfect landing page, but there are testing tools that can help us along the way. Testing tools can range in abilities and cost, but one of the better landing page testing tools on the market is Google Website Optimizer. It is fairly intuitive, easy to implement, and provides clear results analysis, best part is that it’s FREE.

Your landing pages are perhaps one of the most important factors influencing the ROAS for Paid Campaigns. Simple landing page testing can be an easy quick win for any paid search campaign.

3. Optimize Conversion Paths

Conversion path optimization is the next important aspect of ROI optimization. We all know that attrition occurs at each stage of the conversion path, the key to optimizing ROI is mitigating the loss at these key stages.

Many of the analytics tools on the market do offer conversion funnel analysis which will allow you to dive deeper into the ‘fall out’ that occurs at each stage in the process. The key objective in this analysis is to determine at which stage in the funnel you are getting the largest amount of abandonment. Once you know where the users are leaving the funnel, you can then focus in on the potential problems with that page; what barrier exists, hindering final conversion?

Enquiro’s has used funnel analysis to optimize conversion funnels for its clients and has improved the conversion rates by up to 150%.

4. Leverage your SEO & SEM Together

Enquiro’s research has proven a significant branding advantage can be achieved by having a top paid ranking and top organic ranking above the fold. However, budgets can be saved by lowering paid ad exposure for those key phrases also occupying top organic position; allowing for more focus in other key opportunities.

With your SEM campaign, you are able to quickly test the traffic volumes and conversion rates for many keywords as well as determine what the best messaging is for communicating with your market. This knowledge can then be applied to your SEO efforts to help mitigate the costs of PPC. Although organic rankings take time to take achieve, there is significant benefit the can be attained by gaining organic rankings for your top search phrases.

Additionally, through landing page testing and ad testing, it’s possible to determine what messaging resonates with your target audience and which calls-to-actions are most effective.

5. Trim the Fat

We all have heard of the 80/20 rule, but in paid search campaigns it’s more like the 95/5 rule. Ninety-Five percent of your revenue will come from 5% of your keywords. Using your analytics and appropriately tagging your conversions to indicate, on the keyword-level, the source information can assist you in finding those 5% of the keywords and truly optimizing those ad groups. On the flipside this source can also indicate which keywords are simply driving up costs without producing results.

This should not be confused with eliminating long-tail keywords because they simply have not collected significant click volumes, but more so, finding those head and torso keywords that are costing a lot of money without driving conversions. Don’t be afraid to lose the dead weight in your campaigns.

6. Use Testing Budgets

When looking at paid search campaigns, once you feel you have developed a winning formula, there is a hesitancy to not want to mess with it. I know this feeling all to well, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it; but the truth of the matter is, if you don’t break it once in a while innovation cannot occur. To work around the hesitancy of making changes for fear of losing ground or ROI, assign a certain percentage of your budget that can be used for testing. Depending on how risk adverse you are, will determine how much you will assign.

Using a testing budget (in a separate campaign or even account) will allow you to perform keyword analysis, landing page testing, A/B ad copy testing, as well as experiment with different bidding strategies without affecting the performance of the main account. Once a winning strategy has been proven it can be migrated over to the main account to improve its performance overall.

One important caveat about testing to remember: one experiment = one independent variable. That is to say only make one change at a time; otherwise you will have difficulty in attributing positive or negative results to the correct changes.

7. Leverage Quality Score

Although I normally encourage focus be placed on optimizing based on conversions, optimizing on the basis of quality score has its advantages, there is nothing detrimental from using quality score to enhance your ROI. So what do I mean with that seeming contradiction in terms? Simple, look at the quality score suggestions and your campaign goals. Make the changes to your quality score that will not adversely affect your campaign. For example, using your ads to pre-qualify visitors may decrease your CTR; in turn negatively affecting the quality score. However, pre-qualifying visitors prior to their click will achieve a stronger Conversion rate, thereby increasing your ROI. Using keywords in the ad copy and landing page can boost the quality score without losing the pre-qualifying messaging.

8. Use Micro Conversions as an ROI Indicator

Sometimes it’s not always easy to attribute ROI to your paid search campaigns, in fact in most cases its down right difficult. There is hope, however, in using micro conversions. Micro conversions are those actions that a user will take on the path to conversion. For example sites using a demo can calculate the conversion rates from demos to leads to sales. It simply takes a bit of reverse engineering to the sales cycle and determining values.

However, with appropriate analytics, you know the demo to lead ratio, the lead to sale ratio, and average sale amount; therefore using your average sale amount multiplied by your lead to sale ratio, gives you your value per lead, then simply multiply that once again by your demo to lead ratio and you’ve calculated your value per demo. The same can be applied for filling out a contact us form, engaging in an online chat with a sales person, adding to cart, product customization, etc. Micro Conversions can assist in determining the value of a paid visitor by the actions taken leading up to the offline sales process where tracking can be more difficult, impossible even.


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