Search Engine Marketing - 30 pieces of advice from 10 years of experience.

Read and appreciated by more than 200k Digital Marketers

Jun 20, 2023

Globally, 3 out of every 10 Digital Marketing dollars spent goes to Search Engine Marketing ads today.

Google generated $162.5 Billion from Google Search Ads last year.

Today, for a digital marketer, knowing and running SEM effectively is the most valuable skill.

Hence, I am sharing 30 practical pieces of advice from my decade-long experience in SEM.

1. For a keyword, having Broad & Exact Match ad groups in the same campaign with Campaign level bid is useless

2. When you want to scale up the campaign, increase the budget first before increasing the bids.

3. If you want to scale down the campaign, decrease the bids before reducing the budget.
Both make your campaign efficient.

4. After starting a campaign, if there are no conversions for a few days, always check your event configuration first.

5. If you don't have time to check the search term report, don't run broad match campaigns.

6. When in automated bidding, making a 10% bid adjustment for a particular segment won't change anything.

7. Want to run the search campaign only for a particular device? Use a -100% bid adjustment for the other devices.

8. Adjusting bids will always give you an incremental jump in the conversions, but fixing the landing page will give you a step jump

9. If a campaign doesn't perform for 30 days after starting, it won't perform at all 97% of the time.

10. Excluding your office IP from the campaign can straight away improve your campaign's performance by 5–10%.

11. If you want better control of your campaign, don't allocate more than 20% of spending to DSA campaigns

12. When scaling up the brand campaign, always check how many clicks you are losing in the search console

13. Do the above, if you are starting the PMax campaign too

14. In non-brand campaigns, sometimes your CPC increases by 50% when you increase the impression share by 10%. Do it only if it is worth it.

15. If you are given a target to show up for all searches for a particular keyword, don't take the CPA target

16. In a CPA-optimized campaign, if your click share is higher than the impression share, don't increase the bids.

17. When moving from eCPC bidding to CPA bidding, the campaign will start bringing in more returning users. It happens when you move from CPA to ROAS bidding as well.

18. Hiding the recommendation tabs is tougher than you think. Do it carefully to avoid auto-applying it all.

19. Optimization score has nothing to do with your campaign's optimization or performance.

20. If you want the campaigns to respond quicker to your changes, 100 monthly conversions is the sweet spot. If you have fewer conversions, wait for a few days.

21. Click share is an underutilized metric in campaign analysis. It helps you understand the competitive landscape better when used alongside impression share data.

22. If you don't want to bid on your competitor's keywords, add account-level negation instead of campaign-level.

23. When analyzing the campaign's performance, always cut the problems into pieces and resolve them step by step.

24. Cost/conv increased? Check for CPC increase or Conv. rate drop.

25. CPC increased? Check whether it is because of the competition or your quality score.

26. Conv. rate dropped? Check the search team first, followed by the landing page

27. Conversions at the site-link level are misleading. They include conversions whenever that site link is shown, not necessarily clicked.

28. Always check the CPA by the device. In principle, mobile's lower CPC should compensate for its lower CR. If not, consider starting a separate campaign for mobile when there is enough keyword volume for it.

29. Single keyword Ad group (SKAG) still works for high CPC keywords.

30. By default, your campaigns do re-targeting as well. There is no need to create RLSA unless the audience size is large enough and your communication needs customization.