Last month our agency completed a four month process to become one of the first forty Marin Certified Agency Partners worldwide. Big whoop, right? 9,000 campaign changes and one certification later, here’s a snapshot of some SEM campaign changes we’ve made to our clients’ paid search campaigns.
Image source: Marinsoftware.com
· We’re finding that more and more clients have a need to manage toward multiple conversion events. This is especially true for high consideration purchases like Medicare. One of our clients needs to optimize their search campaign toward Enrollments, Enrollment Kit Requests, and Contact Us forms. With Marin we can track and manage toward all three goals and customize the value for each. We simply tell Marin that Medicare Enrollment Kit Requests are worth 30% of an actual enrollment, and a Contact Us form completion is worth 10% of an Enrollment. It does the math and gives us a single, simple view of our SEM campaign’s ROAS (return on ad spend).
For large-scale online marketing programs, Marin’s intelligent bidding algorithm and campaign optimization capabilities are a lifesaver for marketers. (Image source: Marinsoftware.com)
· Weekends typically produce poorly for paid search campaigns. One client in particular was having challenges with CPC (cost per click) spiking on the weekend. It looks like the same ad dollars chasing fewer clicks and even fewer conversions. With the help of Marin we reduced our bids by 40% on Google during the weekends and shifted the media savings into the work week.
· I’ve never found keyword phrases that contained “cheap” and “inexpensive” to convert well for insurance products. Based on this experience we researched some historical data and Google Analytics and discovered that this axiom held true for one of our clients. In under 1 minute we were able to search more than 80 campaigns and reduce bids on phrases containing these words by 35%. This saved us some media funds that we could immediately shift to our top performers.
· Marin suggested more than 3,500 new keywords for one of our client’s health insurance campaigns. We were able to quickly sort and review its suggestions which enabled us to add more than 600 new keywords to their paid search campaign.
· We created folders to organize similar generic insurance keywords across campaigns so that we could leverage Marin’s bid automation feature. After monitoring the enrollments, clicks, and ad spend for four weeks, Marin’s preview mode estimated that it could gain a 3%–6% increase in clicks and a 7%–11% decrease in costs if we turned on bid automation for these keywords. So we did!
· One client has strong trends on a month-to-month basis. Enrollments start out slow at the beginning of the month and the last three always had the most clicks. In order to meet search demand we needed to shift funds from the beginning of the month to the end of the month. To do this we now reduce bids by 20% the first week of every month and increase daily budgets by 30% the last three days of each month. Marin lets us make these changes to more than 80 campaigns in about 30 seconds.
Wow, that’s only in four months! Bring on Open Enrollment …
