Saxo Bank Headquarters, Copenhagen, Denmark

Paid Search and Conversion Rate Optimization

Olga SafonovaDigital Marketing Managerhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/olgasafonova

Partner Marketing Seminar Copenhagen, June 2013

Paid Search in Online Trading industry

Paid Search in an Online Trading industry is a specific discipline, having certain features that are not characteristic for other industries and markets.

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Highly competitive market

There are players big and small, who are bidding for the same set of keywords in the trading search space

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Peculiar keyword space

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Complex product

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Traders and Investors areSpecific audience

The most important is to make our paid search efforts as much relevant as possible – so that it makes sense for our budgets, for our business, for our brand reputation, and of course for our clients and clients to be.

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Optimizing the Optimizing the mediummedium

Relevance is still Relevance is still relevantrelevant..

The most important is to make your paid search efforts as relevant as possible – so that it makes sense for your budgets, business, brand reputation, and of course for your clients and clients to be.

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Tight ad groups

The foundation of optimizing for relevance is having tight ad groups, with keywords carefully grouped by topic.

This way you’d ensure your ads are is likely to receive high CTR. High CTR means more traffic. High CTR means better quality score. High quality Score means lower costs.

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Elaborate negative keyword lists

Use account-level negative keywords lists. This way you can easily opt campaigns in or out into these, should your strategy change.

Account-level negative keywords lists are also much easier to manage.

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Tailored landing pages

Your landing pages have to be aligned with the ad copy messaging. They have to be engaging. They have to clearly state what exactly you would like the visitors to do on your page.

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Google penalizes youfor ignoringrelevanceLanding pages quality is another - extremely important – factor that Google looks at when deciding on your quality score and your cost per click.

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Google rewards youfor doing it right

Your reward is higher quality scoreand lower CPCs.

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Optimizing the process

Work smarter, not harder.

We used to be a bigger team and also having some ”free hands” of agencies to help us with handling all of our 25 (at times more) regional PPC accounts.

Currently we are 1,5 person. But the amount of work did not decrease. Quite the opposite.

So how do we manage it?

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Smart bidding rules Make sure that your bidding strategy is based on data.

Schedule the bid changes based on the performance of your accounts.

Third-party (pricy) bid management tools would make much more sense if you were a big online shop with millions of keywords.

Using the tools for the right purpose in a smart way makes you efficient with the reduced resources.

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Flexible budget distribution

Another useful tactics when optimizing work process in PPC is working with shared budgets.

Depending on your strategy and resources, you can develop specific budgets within your accounts.

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Streamlined ad copy production

Develop a set of 3 to 5 Call-To-Action variants and use them across the account.

Develop 3 to 5 USP variants – again, you might use them across the whole account – or across the whole category/campaign.

This way you can get more data for the analysis at a faster way – and have a consistent messaging across the accounts.

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Consistent ad copy testingPause what does not work. Keep what does. Introduce new ad copies and test them against existing.

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Accounts based on logic,not a whim

Accounts have to be based on business logic. One market, one budget, one sales team = one account.

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AGENCYAGENCY oror IN-HOUSE ?IN-HOUSE ?

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Agencies are experts with tools.

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Do they know your business

to the bone?

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Limited time

Often agencies have only a limited time to dedicate to your account.

Because you’re just one of the client of theirs. And definitely not the only one.

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Lacking in-depth

Superficial approach

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Lack of understanding of traders

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Fluffy reporting

Unfortunately some agencies like to give you fluffy reporting and shiny slides on something that hardly makes sense for your business

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Conflict of interests

Agencies are often paid based on your media spend. But you want to spend less - not more!

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Market is Market is notnot infinite. infinite.Unfortunately.Unfortunately.

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Get as much as possible

out of the generated traffic

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Optimise conversion rate

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Testing (yes, again!)Testing (yes, again!)

Continuous testing process

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What to test

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Ideas to test (by goodui.org)

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One column One column vsvs many columns layout many columns layout

Ideas to test (by goodui.org)

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Social proof Social proof vsvs talking about yourself talking about yourself

Ideas to test (by goodui.org)

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Recommending Recommending vsvs showing equal choices showing equal choices

Tools we recommend

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Case-study

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