By Matt Guerrieri, Medical Guardian Digital Marketing Manager
You may have heard a lot about Content Marketing lately—namely that content is king—but I am a firm believer in the fact that attention to detail is actually reigning supreme. When I first broke into designing search campaigns, I thought, as many others did, that performance was driven from bid amounts and mass backend content. The more money that is given to a keyword, the better performance you’ll see. The same can be said for content on the page, the more content you have, the better your Quality Score. But I slowly begin to realize that there was much more that goes into a successful search campaign then those two factors. When I first took over search opportunities for Medical Guardian, my team and I threw as many words as possible onto a landing page, filling the space up with content and valuing quantity over quality. I was confident that the more words we added to each page, the better our Quality Score would become. Using this method, performance was increasing slowly and we were paying less for each click, but we still weren’t seeing the kind of performance metrics we desired. That’s when we decided to shift gears based on research we had found on increasing performance. This helped us to see that while content is very important to Quality Score there are several other factors that need to be considered in order to boost performance.
Testing First and foremost, we realized every campaign idea must be tested on a small sample of the population before rolling out to the masses. Without implementing testing on our campaigns, it became harder to designate performance to a particular change or tweak. The first change we decided to make was to implement keyword insertion into our ads. This was important as the keyword becomes bolded in the search results, so the more keyword specific the ad is, the more it stands out from competing ads.
Make It Personal We also noticed that none of our competitors personalized their Sitelinks. If a user is more concerned with product reviews, then the links below the ad should have calls to action specific to products & reviews. Personalizing our Sitelinks helped to lead us towards dynamic keyword insertion, a granular approach that allows search campaigns to include specific keywords searched directly in the content of the landing page. This in turn brings a personalized experience to each user that clicks on an ad. If a user is looking for an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate, you wouldn’t give them a regular vanilla cone would you? Of course not. This simple principal was used to increase the Quality Score on our pages, and double our conversion rates.
Stay Close to Home Location is a large factor in our product, so we decided to change the user experience per geographic location. A user in Georgia would receive a different user experience then one from Ohio and so forth, therefore making our product relevant across multiple states. By personalizing each user’s experience, we began to see performance increase week over week. We eventually started to see a steady uptick in page conversions, conversion rates, click through rates and average position. What was even more beneficial to our campaign was that our cost per conversions were decreasing, allowing us to get more volume for the same monthly spend. By paying more attention to the details of search campaigns rather than blasting users with massive amounts of content, we can give customers exactly what they’re looking for, except for an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate—we don’t sell those here.
Matt Guerrieri is the Digital Marketing Manager for Medical Guardian. Matt began his career as an intern at Enguage Media, doing marketing and competitive research. In 2009 he became an Associate Media Planner for Digitas Health and within a few short years was promoted to Media Planner, where he became well-versed in video, email, mobile, rich media, flash, lead generation and content distribution. In his spare time, Matt enjoys all Cleveland sports teams.
