SEM Best Practices in 2024
An Important Year for Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) has seen significant changes over the years, and 2023 proved to be another critical year.
Google — the largest search engine in the world and the most significant player in the SEM space — rolled out GA4 and sunsetted its prior version of Universal Analytics. This paradigm shift revolutionized the way marketers gather and interpret data.
In addition, Google finally phased out expanded text ads. This now leaves the sole option to create a responsive search ad,’ an ad type that automatically displays headlines and descriptions that will have the best performance based on Google-collected user data.
Though we have yet to see the full impact of these changes, one thing is for sure — SEM is still a highly effective tactic that allows marketers to target users at the intent and conversion stages of the funnel—resulting in some major ROI.
So that your brand can be on its A-game for SEM for 2024, our digital marketing team has compiled an action-oriented round-up of best practices.
Do Your Research
Bad news — you still need to do your homework. A successful SEM campaign continues to be rooted in comprehensive research that builds an understanding of your organization, its goals, the target audience, and good keyword lists to perform well.
The good news is that keyword research will be easier than ever in 2023, thanks to various great platforms, including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Spyfu. If you’re not in a place to spring for a paid service, there are several free SEO tools, including Google’s native Keyword Planner or Google Trends, which serve as a strong starting point.
Know Your Products and Services
Google and other SEM platforms like Microsoft offer a variety of campaign types to align with your products or services — and the goals you have for them. As an SEM expert, maximizing the success of your SEM campaign is rooted in selecting a campaign type that works best for the product or service you’re selling to maximize results. In practice, As an easy example, if you’re selling products on your site, you’d be remiss not to consider Shopping ads. If you want to elevate your brand name, you’d like to look at a combination of search ads and a display remarketing campaign.
Utilize Innovative Bid Strategies
Google has historically prioritized its smart campaign types (Performance Max) as well as automated bidding strategies such as Maximize Conversions and Target CPA.
The conventional wisdom is to start with a manual bidding strategy such as Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks to collect click and conversion data baselines, which will help make smart bidding strategies more effective in the future. This is still a valid strategy and can be especially useful if you’re launching a new campaign with a unique conversion for the first time.
However, Google’s smart bidding has become better and better over time. You may feel comfortable launching a campaign with a smart bidding strategy immediately if you have historical conversion data to rely on.
When in doubt, Google’s experiment feature allows you to split a campaign’s budget across two identical campaigns to AB test isolated differences, such as bid strategy, to evaluate performance with accurate results. This can be a great option if you’re an SEM expert and need to prove results to a client or marketing team before committing to a bid strategy.
Be Specific
Delivering the right ad at the right time is still the name of the game. Ensuring your ad groups are as specific as possible will allow you to provide unique creative to a highly targeted audience.
You might accomplish this by developing hyper-focused keyword groupings. For example, instead of lumping all closely related keywords into an ad group for “college open house” you might develop 3 or 4 ad groupings for:
- University open house
- College open house
- Undergraduate open house
- Fall open house
Another way to get specific is dynamic keyword insertion, which can be especially useful for targeting a geographic area with many neighborhoods. With dynamic keyword insertion, Google inserts a keyword from your keyword list if it’s an exact match to the user’s query. You need to be strategic about this so that the line of copy makes sense. See if you can identify this trick next time you perform a Google search – large retailers commonly use it to make you think that what you’ve searched is precisely what they have.
Improve Your Landing Page Experience
An aspect of beating out competitors on Google is landing page experience, a critical component that Google considers when deciding whether to serve your ad — along with budget, ad relevance, and expected CTR.
There’s an art to developing a dedicated landing page, but it’s not something that should be overthought. You want to avoid sending your traffic to your home page or any old page on the site out of convenience, and instead think about what the specific goal of your campaign is and if the user will get the information/product/offer they’re looking for when they land there. If there’s a perceived dissonance between the ad and the landing page, it will quickly generate bounces and guarantee a poor-performing campaign.
Instead, strategize your landing page and develop your SEM campaign. Ensure that the keywords you’re bidding on are also included in the copy of the landing page and you’re using similar words and phrases in both the ad and the site. These signals tell Google that the landing page experience is strong. By keeping users on the page longer (and converting), Google will learn that your campaign is effective and continue serving your ad over others.
Get Verified on Google
Google is cracking down on advertiser identity verification for all its accounts and will soon require it across the board. If you have been advertising for a while, you’ve likely already been asked to verify your identity.
Verifying your identity for Google will put you ahead and ensure that your ads don’t stop running at inopportune times before you can prove you’re you. It also opens up some excellent features, including brand logo extensions, and ultimately allows Google to display your business information to the public, which only benefits transparency and trust.
Integrate With GA4
As mentioned, GA4 is the newest version of Google Analytics and the world’s most widely used analytics and reporting tool. If you’re running Google Ad campaigns, you should have a Google Analytics account to understand how your campaign affects your site metrics. Linking your GA4 property is simple and can be done in a few steps. Check it off your list, and you’ll thank yourself in the future.
Continuously Improve
Once your campaign is launched, your work is not finished! Ensure your campaign is successful over time by closely monitoring its performance and your account health. Some things you might do every week include raising or lowering bids to keep up with competitors, pausing underperforming variants, analyzing keyword performance, and setting bid adjustments for specific keywords, audience segments, or times of the day.
Analyzing data is essential to making decisions about creativity, budget, or bids. It also gives you a benchmark for improvement over time. Compiling your data into a report is helpful to share with marketing teams or SEM professional who can advise on where to go next.
Be Prepared
Search engine marketing is easier than ever for someone with marketing prowess to hop into, but it will require time and resources to ensure a successful campaign. You may decide it’s more profitable to hire out this work to a digital marketing agency, which can run campaigns with more knowledge and efficiency than your team.
No matter how you decide to get your campaign off the ground, keeping these best practices in mind will ensure success for you, your team, and your clients.