Choosing the right SEM management platform for your business

SEM management platforms have evolved quickly, and offer more options than ever before. This creates both greater opportunity and complexity for today’s search marketers. And for marketers and agencies, choosing a platform isn’t easy. To hear directly from search marketers about what they wanted in SEM management platforms, Google held numerous forums over the past year. Below are our findings to help you choose the right platform for your business.

1. Feature set. The role of an SEM platform is to effectively manage search campaigns end-toend, and as part of your broader digital marketing efforts. For this reason, feature set is critical to evaluate. In addition to existing features, the product roadmap can provide insight. We hear that four areas matter most: workflow, reporting, optimization and cross-channel integration. Workflow. Dramatically simplifying day-to-day campaign management and reporting is a big benefit of an SEM platform: • Usability. This is important for users, who spend much of their day in the tool, as well as for new employees ramping up. Is the system intuitive and easy to learn, and is the underlying infrastructure reliable for large sets of data? • Bulk operations. Can you make big changes painlessly, and at scale, in the UI, in bulk upload sheets, or directly on the engine? • Customized reporting. Can you get a custom view of your campaigns with features like labels or filters? • Automation and alerts. Often, changes need to happen daily, and in some cases, at a specific time, or when unique conditions are met—sometimes long after you’ve left the office. Are you able to set up rules to automate changes when specific criteria are met? • Engine support. Because an SEM platform must consolidate and streamline campaign management, it should support the engines you need. Does the platform support features, reporting, tracking and API data imports offered by the different engines? • Feeds and business data integrations. How easy is it to connect and integrate your business data into your end-to-end campaign management? Can you add offline/event-based conversions? For retailers, can you sync campaigns with your physical inventory automatically, including creating/editing campaigns based on inventory? Reporting. Measurement is a critical aspect of SEM, but also one of the most time consuming. Here are key areas to evaluate in this category: • Conversion tracking. Can you use existing conversion tracking tags that are already on your site, or do you need to implement a new tag to start using the tool?

Choosing the right SEM management platform for your business

• Data speed and freshness. How quickly conversions are reported on, and how quickly data flows from the engines can affect both data freshness and the quality of data that informs auto-optimization. • Flexibility. Assess the level of customizability in reporting to deliver the insights that matter most. Can you run summary reports across all accounts and the different engines? Also, evaluate the number of metrics available for reporting and how flexibly you can manipulate and import/export data. • Insights. Can you dive deeper and extract valuable insights, such as search queries, reporting on site links, reporting by label, and budget pacing? • Attribution. Does the platform enable you to do search-based attribution, as well as attribution across channels? Further, assess what kinds of models are supported. • Site analytics integration. Assess whether the platform offers its own analytics package, whether it’s integrated into the platform. If you’re using a different solution, can you easily import its data into the platform? • Data access. Evaluate how easily you can get your data in the format you want. Is an API available for reporting and for uploading offline conversions? Is web query functionality available? • View impact of changes. Can you view changes made by users, and by the bidding system? Can you compare date ranges to detect trends and view impact of changes on performance? Optimization technology can be the difference between good and great search campaigns, as it directly affects campaign performance. Here are key factors to consider: • Testing. Is landing page and creative testing available, and what type (A/B or multivariate)? • Ability to easily express and meet unique goals. Whether it’s a revenue, CPA, position, or a combination, ask about how easily and intuitively you can tell the system exactly what goal you want to achieve. • Optimization. Assess the richness of metrics you can optimize from, including different types of conversions, micro conversions, or site analytics data such as “time on site”. Also, ask about the results the bidding system has resulted in. • System intelligence can be assessed with questions about how they platform handles low-volume keywords, whether a portfolio bidding approach is used, and how often algorithms are updated. • Transparency and control. Often, algorithm-based systems like bid optimization are a “black box.” Find out about the level of transparency and control offered, such as a rationale for bids, ability to preview or override intended bids, get insight into primary constraints, or if so desired, exclude keywords from bid strategies altogether. • Integration beyond search. Many marketers manage search as part of their broader digital efforts. If this is important to you, you should look for a platform that offers support for the media you care about, consolidated reporting across that media, and cross-channel opportunities. Seamless integration means it “just works”, and doesn’t require extra steps like data transfers, and reconciling multiple reports to get cross-channel reporting that’s real-time, accurate, and de-duplicated. Is the integration a true one?

Choosing the right SEM management platform for your business

2. Service level While features are important, marketers want proactive, strategic, day-to-day partners to work with and enable their success. This is especially true if your organization lacks many resources. Ask whether you get a dedicated contact who will be there to support you, how long it will take to deploy the platform, and the level of support you can expect during the process. And finally, does the platform team work directly with you to test newly available features and assess the results and next steps? 3. Price Price can vary widely between tools. It’s important to understand what features and services are included in the base price. Are there set up costs? Further, what service level is offered for the base price of the platform? What can you expect if your spend levels drop? Choosing the right search management tool is not easy. As you evaluate your existing or future platform, consider your unique business needs. Don’t hesitate to ask lots of questions, request demos and detailed insight into the areas you care about most.

About DoubleClick Search

About DoubleClick

Built on Google infrastructure, DoubleClick™ Search makes it faster

Google’s DoubleClick™ products provide ad management and

and easier to manage large search campaigns across AdWords,

ad serving solutions to companies that buy, create or sell online

Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing. Powerful, easy-to-

advertising. The world’s top marketers, publishers, ad networks and

use workflow and reporting features save you time, while strategic

agencies use DoubleClick products as the foundation for their online

bid optimization features help you improve performance. Native

advertising businesses. With deep expertise in ad serving, media

integration with the DoubleClick platform allows you to manage and

planning, search management, rich media, video and mobile, our

track all your digital ad buys across one platform, enabling rich, cross-

DoubleClick products help customers execute their digital media

channel reporting and attribution.

strategy more effectively.

For more information visit: www.doubleclick.com © 2012 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google, the Google logo and DoubleClick are trademarks or registered trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Choosing the right SEM management platform for your ...

learn, and is the underlying infrastructure reliable for large sets of data? • Bulk operations. Can you make big changes painlessly, and at scale, in the UI,.

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