Campaigns for SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are a fantastic method to expose your website to potential clients. They can also help increase brand awareness and boost sales. But if you don’t measure the success of your SEM campaign properly. Then it could be doing more harm than good. In this article, we’ll cover how to measure the success of your SEM campaign. So that you can see whether or not it’s working for your company.
Track the Right KPIs.
As you’re measuring the success of your SEM campaign, keep in mind that there are a few key metrics that will help you determine the effectiveness of your investment.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): KPIs are measurable elements used to indicate whether or not a company or individual has achieved their goals. For example, if they want to see how many new subscribers they’ve gotten in a month. They’ll look at their number of email opens and clicks on ads as well as average order value per customer.
- Most Important KPIs: These are ones that matter most when looking at overall performance over time. And can be considered “core” KPIs because they reflect what matters most about your business model. For example: If someone wants more leads from Facebook ads. But doesn’t care about cost per lead or conversion rate percentage then those numbers may not be very useful for them at all.
Make a conversion rate calculation
The percentage of visitors to your site who make a purchase is known as the conversion rate. It’s also called a “conversion rate,” but we’ll just stick with “rate” from now on (for simplicity).
Multiply the total number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors to determine your conversion rate. So if you have 100 visitors and 1 sale, your conversion rate is 1%.
Review Your Organic and Paid Traffic Periodically
Once you’ve established the goals and metrics for your SEM campaign. It’s important to monitor how each element is performing.
- Reviewing organic traffic will assist you identify the terms that are generating the best qualified leads. This information will help guide future decisions on which keywords to focus on.
- Paid Traffic: Paid search campaigns are great ways to increase brand awareness, drive more sales and generate conversions. But they don’t happen without a solid foundation of organic search engine optimization (SEO). To ensure that paid search ads are effective at driving qualified customers through their funnel. Make sure they’re set up correctly using Google AdWords accounts & Analytics reports (or another tool). So that they’re tracking properly throughout the entire process from start-to-finish.
Get Keyword Analysis Data
Now that you’ve set up your campaign. It’s time to get some data. The best way to do this is by analyzing the keywords that are performing well and those that aren’t. Check out these key metrics:
- How long does it take for your ad to appear on the search results page? This will give an indication of how competitive your keyword is versus other companies’ ads in general. If someone searches for “coffee maker,” let’s say Google shows up with Nestle as its top result, but if they search “coffee maker” instead of “Nestle coffee maker”. Then we know our competitors have already taken control of this particular market segment (and therefore shouldn’t be competing against us).
- What kind of click-through rate do we see? This can help guide future optimizations such as optimizing landing pages or adjusting bid prices based on past performance data points like CTRs or CPCs.
See whether there are any broken links.
Verify any broken links.
Broken links are a common cause of frustration for visitors, search engines, your business and even your SEO. If you’re not careful, they can lead to lost traffic and revenue. The following actions should be followed when looking for broken links:
- Look at each page in your site’s index so you know what’s working well vs what isn’t working as well. For example, if the title tag is “SEO” but there aren’t any links within it (i.e., no internal or external links). Then this might indicate that something was done incorrectly on that page or perhaps even in prior pages! You’ll want to make sure everything has been checked thoroughly before moving onto another phase of testing/optimization efforts.
Pay Attention to Your Bounce Rates
The bounce rate is a key metric for measuring how effective your landing pages are. It’s the percentage of single-page visits to a website, and it can be used to gauge how well your landing pages are converting visitors.
A high bounce rate might indicate that you have too much content on your site and need to downsize or simplify it if possible. A low bounce rate may mean that people aren’t finding what they’re looking for – which could be due to poor choice of keywords, lack of SEO practices (like adding more relevant meta tags), or simply not having a good design/layout that encourages users to stay longer on each page.
See if Your Ad Is Popping Up in the Right Places
Your advertisements ought to be shown where they belong. It’s crucial that your adverts appear in the appropriate places if you’re operating an advertising campaign. For example, if you’re advertising a new product on Facebook and it’s relevant to people who have searched for “new shoes,” then these people will see your ad when they search for those terms.
What occurs, though, if a person looks up something utterly unrelated? This could mean they’re looking at shoes and then getting directed straight to your website instead of being taken through a series of filters until they find something that fits their needs (and not just what the person typed into Google). In this case, those irrelevant searches could actually get counted as conversions. Which means there would be no way for anyone at all except yourself or whoever programmed this program into place knows exactly how many customers came from each individual search term.
Make Sure Your Ad Is Relevant to the Searcher
Relevance is the biggest factor in determining whether or not your ad will be seen by a searcher. Relevance is also a function of many other factors:
- The searcher’s intent, which can be determined by their search query and how they are searching.
- The content in your ad, including text and images that relate back to the keyword phrase being searched for (and have been chosen carefully).
- Placement within an overarching campaign structure. You don’t want ads appearing close together on SERPs.
Monitor Your ROI
You can measure the ROI of your SEM campaign in several ways. Some of these methods include:
- Measuring the number of clicks on your ads. This metric will show you how many consumers have clicked on one or more of your ads, and it’s a good indication that you’re getting some traffic from search engine users who may not know about what you do yet. If people aren’t clicking on any ads, then there’s no way to tell whether they’re interested in what you offer or not. And therefore no way for them to become customers!
You must take into account a number of crucial factors to determine whether your campaign is genuinely successful.
You must take into account a number of crucial factors to determine the true effectiveness of your campaign.
- Keyword Research: You’ll want to conduct keyword research on the terms that are relevant to your product or service offering. This will help determine the best keywords for targeting in an SEM campaign. As well as which ones aren’t working as well (if any).
- Conversion Rate: It’s important to measure how many people actually convert after clicking through from one of these search results pages (SERPs). The higher this number is compared with other SEM campaigns with similar budgets and traffic generation strategies/plans. The more successful it may be.
- ROI: This metric represents how much money was spent on advertising vs actual sales derived from each click-through rate (CTR). If there were no conversions at all but still lots of clicks being recorded on Google Analytics without any purchases occurring afterward then obviously this would mean nothing positive has taken place here so far. However if everything goes according those numbers. Then we could say confidently say that yes indeed there were some good returns earned by using SEM ads online today.
Conclusion
SEM is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. Because it allows you to reach and engage with new audiences. This can be a great way to build brand awareness, drive traffic back to your site or sales page and increase conversions. You’ll need to have a plan that takes into account these key elements in order for your campaign to be successful.
