Search Engine Optimization: Know When to Outsource Your Search Marketing Campaign

Like any successful marketing initiative, a pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign requires careful planning and regular maintenance. But should you perform campaign maintenance in house or outsource it?

Oneupweb, a natural and paid search marketing firm, outlines the following triggers to help catalogers know when it may be time to seek outside help for their PPC campaigns in its recent whitepaper,”Fresh Google and Yahoo! Paid Search Strategies for C-Level Execs.”

1. Your current search budget runs out before the month ends. There are a few areas to look at if you’re having this problem. You could be the victim of click fraud, or your campaigns may not be qualifying your search audience effectively. A professional search marketer can help you identify and correct click fraud with the search engines, or revise your bidding strategy to reduce budget strain and increase conversion, Oneupweb officials write.

2. You’re too busy to review daily your PPC accounts. The risk in not regularly monitoring your search marketing programs is accidently running through a significant sum of money due to click fraud, or missing opportunities to build the program successfully. To run a successful PPC campaign, you must establish and review search metrics often enough to determine trends or patterns, which you then can use to adapt the campaign to capitalize on those opportunities.

3. You’re too busy to regularly evaluate your creative and promotions. If you don’t test and improve on an ongoing basis creative elements in your search campaign, conversion could drop as new competitors increase bid prices and make it harder for you to achieve customer visibility, Oneupweb notes. The same goes for promotions. Are you still offering “free shipping by Dec. 25” in January? Creative and promotions need to be honed, tested and retested as your competition reacts to your improvements, the whitepaper’s authors point out. A search marketing firm can help you keep up with these tasks.

4. Your campaign can’t keep up with inventory changes. Your PPC campaign should adapt to new products coming in or current ones going out of stock to best serve prospects. Simply put, you don’t “want to [pay] for traffic that’s coming to your site from a keyword that promotes a discontinued item,” Oneupweb officials write. If you’re having a hard time keeping up with these product changes, outsourcing the campaign may be a good idea.

To obtain a copy of Oneupweb’s whitepaper,”Fresh Google and Yahoo! Paid Search Strategies for C-Level Execs,” visit http://www.oneupweb.com/search-marketing-library/3_06_exec_level_ppc.htm