SEM managers have a lot of things to keep track of – different best practices, guidelines, publisher updates and multiple goals to pursue in their never ending quest for marketing campaign management. But what if your search engine marketing strategies came with a crystal ball that would show you a clear picture of how your next campaign would work – and where it would make the most revenue?
Search Engine Marketing, Meet Data Science
This is where data science, the practice of using automation to extract multiple dimensions of insight from data, comes into play. Rather than running campaign after campaign from scratch, we can compile bid landscape data, which is potentially one of our most important SEM tools. Bid landscape data, which we can pull from Google Adwords or Bing Ads, incorporates data from previous auctions and lets us create projections for future campaigns to help us plan and budget for improved paid search optimization. Get more details on how to do this in our eBook, “Data Science Meets Search Engine Marketing.”
Getting Predictive with Paid Search Optimization: An Example
Consider a sample auction with a bid at $8, which results in 80 clicks and revenue per click (RPC) of $15. Using landscape data, we might project that increasing our bid by 50% to $12 will increase our clicks to 110. Given that our current projected revenue at the $8 bid is $1,200 (80 clicks x $15 revenue per click = $1,200), our 50% increase in bidding might take us to $1650 in revenue (110 clicks x $15 revenue per click) – a total increase of 37.5% in revenue as a result of the increased spend.
Optimizing Your Search Engine Marketing Strategies
You can see how this kind of insight – the ability to predict how changing your spend will affect your clicks and revenue – could be useful in your day-to-day marketing campaign management, not to mention managing your budgets and maximizing profit. This is just one way that data science empowers SEM professionals to dig deeper into their campaigns and squeeze out more revenue by optimizing to the best spend levels their budgets allow.
Of course, gaining the benefit of this type of marketing campaign management on a larger scale – such as in an enterprise setting which involves thousands of keywords – is practically impossible when managing bids manually. A smarter, faster alternative is intelligent automation that directly incorporates data science under the hood. Find out more about what data science can do for your search engine marketing strategies in our new eBook, or watch our webinar on how data science can optimize your SEM campaigns.
