Empower Your SEM Team (part 1 of 2)
Data is just like pickles – I always want more.
Any good search engine marketing professional will want to have access to more of your data. This will help them ensure you’re getting the most qualified conversions possible. Whether it’s to increase life time value, average order value, lead quality, or sales, a good SEM marketer will want to know specifics on backend data that can help grow your business's profits long term.
As a client, you should share your data whenever possible. By sharing more data, you give your SEM team the ability analyze how all of your channels are working together. This also helps to optimize for traffic fluctuations and to capture any potential traffic outside of your normal search campaigns.
Data you should be sharing spans from what your other marketing initiatives are (radio, TV, email, etc.). The specific data you should look to share is time of launch (airing), who/where you are targeting, different landing pages, vanity urls and the creatives being used. This allows us to ensure we can capture the traffic you’re generating from other channels. You’ll never need to divulge any specifics of cost if you want to keep that internal, but that could also help your SEM team show where your best cost per acquisition is.
As a best practice you’ll want to have your Google Analytics account linked to your AdWords account, but you should also make sure you’re giving that access to your SEM team. This will help them see your traffic sources, without having to do a lot of heavy lifting on your end.
This practice will help you align marketing initiatives to ensure proper tracking, quality, and attribution across all channels. But most importantly, this will establish a strong partnership with your SEM team.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orlando Valencia
Orlando Valencia is a search engine marketing veteran with over 10 years of experience. Orlando currently helps clients expand their online marketing efforts via Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM), and Web Analytics.
