Benchmark strategy for search engine marketing (SEM)

Author: Alden DeSoto

Http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py? Hl = cn & Answer = 77125

Blindly strive for or maintain the top ranking, and it is easy to pin it in the keyword auction. Resist this temptation! You can use a better method. First, you must determine the billing balance benchmark for each click.

The cost of each click is a practical basis

Suppose you want to sell golf clubs online. Retail of a set of golf clubs is RMB 4000. The cost for making or purchasing a baseball bat is $2400 per set. If you reserve $800 for each set as other operating expenses, you still have $800 for marketing activities, such as making an advertisement series for each click.

Assume that one of every 100 visitors to your website buys a set of baseball sticks (the conversion rate from visitors to customers is 1% ). You have $800 as the cost to attract these 100 visitors, that is, the benchmark fee for each click balance is $8. If the cost for each click is higher than $8, you will lose money. If the cost for each click is less than $8, you will be profitable.

It is necessary to understand this benchmark when purchasing an advertisement for each click. If you know the conversion rate of all keywords, you can make a reasonable offer: high price for keywords with high conversion rate, low price for keywords with low conversion rate.

Now let's take a look at the specific practices. For the specified keyword or the ad series of each click, the RPC metric of Google Analytics allows you to analyze the fees paid for each click. You should not assume that each click income itself can provide the company with appropriate data. The revenue for each click is assumed that you can spend all your revenue on the advertisement for each click. Because the production cost and enterprise operation cost need to be set aside in proportion, we should first consider the actual percentage of the revenue for each click expense advertisement, and then adjust the quotation accordingly.

For example, if you have a revenue of RMB 93.28 yuan, you can use the "women's clothes matching skills" for each click. If you can use 10% of the retail price to pay for the advertisement for each click, your actual price should be 93.28 of $ 10%, that is, $9.28 for each click. If you pay more than $9.28 for each click of this keyword, you will lose money. If you pay less than $9.28 for each click of this keyword, you will be profitable.

I don't understand why my competitors can afford higher bids than me

Maybe they can't afford it, but they haven't realized it yet. They may be unable to extricate themselves from the bidding competition. However, they may also reduce operating costs or increase profit margins, enabling them to pay higher click fees. Or they get a higher conversion rate than you on some keywords. If you look at their search ads and examine their websites, you may get some inspiration about how to increase the website conversion rate.

At the same time, please remember that your quotation should meet your company's requirements and conversion rate.

But I am not selling it online.

Even if you are not engaged in online sales, you can assign some monetary value to the target webpage of each website. Check the value of each sales opportunity you obtain through the website, and then determine the billing of each click.

If your website is B2B, you can convert sales opportunities to offline sales. If you know that your salesperson has reached a transaction with 5% of the customers in the website sales opportunity, and the average transaction profit is RMB 8000, you can calculate the Balance of Payments benchmark according to the following formula:

Balance of Payments benchmark = website conversion rate x 5% x RMB ￥8000

Assume that a keyword converts a visitor into a sales opportunity with a conversion rate of 2%. At the same time, assume that you can allocate RMB 8000 yuan for each transaction to charge for each click, the benchmark for balance of income and expenditure for this keyword is:

Each click is 2% x 5% x 8,000 = RMB 8

Management, not just Measurement

To get the maximum benefit from the cost of each click, you must continuously use Google Analytics (analysis) to monitor the effect so as to prevent the quotation from being too high. Use network analysis as an online marketing management tool to test, test, and improve each click expense policy at any time to maximize the ROI of your website.