Don't work harder, get Smarter!

So you're boss has just told you that you need to cut your marketing spend for 2012 by 50% - ouch!

What do you do? All the data you need to gather/analyse/predictive modelling and so on... So much to do now!
The old adage that "one half of the marketing budget will be working for your business, but which half?" springs to mind!
Sure, you could look at your usual reports for the information, look at your PPC keywords, attribute revenue and performance to each search engine/keyword and try to work out what is and isn't working for your business - but just take a moment to consider just how many keywords you have? It won't be a few (or even a few hundred), more like thousands!

So, how can you possibly identify the performance of each Paid Keyword? Just because a keyword is or isn't taking most revenue for your business, does that make it a poor performer? What about the touchpoints by each individual on the build up to conversion, have you considered those?

What you need is an automatic bid-management platform; one which looks at the performance of onsite engagement/conversion and feeds what it knows from the web site back into bidding for a better price with the search engine promoting your keywords.

Such a platform (and one I have personal experience with) is Optimine. Who else can make such a bold claim during these difficult economic times as Optimine with quotes like this one: "Improve your paid search returns by 25 percent or more – guaranteed, with OptiMine bid management software".

But looking at the performance of keywords alone is really like looking at the weather forecast wishing you could change it and make it better (such as snow on Christmas day please!!). Ponder for a moment, what would make a bid management platform better?
I can tell you - a Customer Insight platform that looks at the individual level but empowers the business to weight individual activity based on 'Goals' that have been achieved - such as viewed landing page (1pt), viewed product detail page (5pts), added product to basket (7pts), checkout started (9pts) and so on. By feeding information such as this back into the PPC Bid Management platform, I can not only look at the performance of each keyword from a revenue recognition point of view but also ALL the keywords which played a part in the build-up to conversion.

So, when your boss asks you to cut your marketing budget by 50%, now you have a good idea with PPC which keywords you can safely 'bin' without affecting your online business but you can also find golden nuggets of information which help your business boom beyond 25% - how about 250%? A keyword is outperforming expectations today - pay more for the keyword to increase demographic or geographic exposure! You just can't do this sort of thing with traditional web metric platforms - and if you were to try, don't forget to tag everything up!!