Search advertising can only carry you so far
If you rely on search advertising to bring home the bacon, be careful you don’t fall into a common trap for search marketers: putting everything into search and not enough into the outer reaches of the web, where people spend most of their online time anyway.
Building out your search campaigns fully is absolutely necessary. But you may reach a point where you’ve over-engineered them yet you’re scratching your head wondering why all the hard work optimizing and building isn’t paying off like it used to.
If this happens to you, let me ask you: what are you doing besides search?
I believe in a holistic approach to online marketing. It’s unfortunate Google Analytics is a last-touch attribution model because search appears to be your big winner when you’re winning. It’s true, search does deliver you people who are already interested in your brand or products. But that’s just the thing: they’re already interested. How did they get interested in the first place? This is where you should be looking when you’re in stuck in a rut wondering why search just isn’t performing like it used to.
In a recent article on Clickz entitled “How to distinguish between good and average talent,” writer Joni Ngai sums it up well:
One of the biggest myths that I have heard is search advertising, email, or what-so-ever channel is the most effective marketing channel. If you are looking into the customer journey, there are many customer touch points, including both offline and online communications. Search is normally the last mile used to drive the customer to take the desired end action, such as to register for the special deal or purchase the product. Without understanding that there are other activities and customer touch points that would ‘attribute’ to the final outcome, wrong decisions are often made. I have seen brands that have stopped all other advertising and allocate their entire budget to search. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the desired results. Why?
Those who understand the attribution model would not make such a decision because they always think through and focus on the customer journey in a more holistic way and they use technology to help them when it is necessary. It is this ‘integrated’ strategy that takes the customers through the journey to the end goal.
