Now that we've explained the importance of analytics, it's time to talk about using it to get the most out of your SEM campaigns.
In this article, we'll talk about how you can use analytics to determine the best keywords to bid on, how to design your ads to make them more impactful, and how to decide which bids to bid for topics that are more economical for you.
How to use analytics
Of course, you know that search engine marketing costs you money like any other type of marketing, but it has the ability to track what you spent and where? Through analytics, in addition to understanding the parties that benefited you from this spending.
Remember the guest house example we talked about? Well, let's dig into that example a bit more, and imagine that it offers three distinct rooms in different styles: Muhammad Ali's room, the modern romance room, and the football fan's room.
Let's say you decide to launch separate search campaigns to promote each room, aiming to get people to your website to watch a video of an entire room.
This means that your business is going well, but you want to grow it. With the analytics tool, you can review the keywords used by each of your campaigns, and immediately see which ones are most effective.
Reviewing recent romance campaign data, you may notice that when you use your keywords “romantic guest house” and “romantic vacation guest house”, fifty percent of your visitors view the video.
This is considered a referral rate of five percent for the goal of watching the video. But when people search using keywords like “romantic luxury guest house” or “romantic luxury guest house,” the referral rate drops to just one percent.
This means that you have just found a point that needs improvement. What will you do next? There are a lot of ways to improve that.
First you might look at the relevant pages on your website and see if anything could be changed. You can also review all your ads about luxury, and try out a few different messages that might highlight the video tour itself or aspects of luxury that the guest house has.
Whatever you decide, the important thing is that you still keep track of what's going on after you make your changes, which means you'll be able to see if your fixes raise your referral rate from one percent to a higher percentage!
How to design your ads
Well, this covers some of the different ways you can measure keyword performance to bid on them, but that's just one part, where analytics can also help you understand the impact of the ads you're showing.
Of course, you know that you have to write ads that are clear and attractive to the user, but you and your potential customers need to agree on the definition of clarity and attractiveness, and that's what analytics can help you with.
Still with our Modern Romance room example, let's say you have two different ads with different titles; The first is entitled "House of Happiness" and the other is entitled "Hosting a Romantic Weekend". This is where analytics tools can help you.
It will show you how they compare together, which one is likely to win the click and thus result in a visit to your site, and which one is likely to make the visitor watch the video tour; To find out which one is better.
You can also use the insights you learn here in other campaigns, and in other areas of your website as well.
See: Email Marketing Success Metrics
How do you decide which bids to monitor for the topics that are most economical for you?
Finally, analytics tools help you understand how much you have to display for each click on your ads; To ensure that you get a good return on your investment in search engine marketing.
For example, by using Google Analytics, deeply integrated with Google Ads, you can see which keywords and ads lead people to your website, what they do when they come to your website, and even more, like how much you have to pay for each of those clicks. For example, how much your bids raise your ads in search results.
This shows you what you're getting for your investment, as well as helping you decide to budget higher or lower CPC. Let's go back to your guesthouse, and suppose that he is not the only one in town, and that he is in competition with "Othman's Guesthouse".
You may see that when you bid enough to take Usman off and place your ad in the top position, this will result in a two percent conversion rate.
But, if you keep investigating, the analytics tool might also tell you that when you bid a lower price and are behind Osman in results, you get a little less traffic, but your referral rate jumps to four percent.
This means that your ideal position and the most suitable offer depends on a lot of things, and you may find that it is better to be ahead or behind, but the important thing is that by using analytics, you will know exactly where you are performing better, and this means benefiting from your investment more than your competitors.
Summary
Whether you're analyzing your keywords and ads or how to bid in your ad campaigns, analysis tools are essential to getting the most out of your search engine marketing investment.
So, before doing another update on your ad campaigns, make sure you make all those decisions based on data!
See: Avoid Common Mistakes When Using Social Networks