As online marketing continues to evolve, a growing number of advertisers have shifted to result-driven advertising. In that sense, which optimization method can help us drive better results and get maximum returns?

In this article I will share some account optimization tactics and tips. Hope it'll help!


01 Establish the Foundations of Performance-based Advertising

Performance-based Advertising focuses on looking at the entire marketing strategy from a wholistic perspective, and the optimization process can be carried out from two levels, respectively, account optimization and performance optimization. Account optimization mainly revolves around the campaign level, from the account, promotion plan, promotion group, keywords, creative and landing page and other dimensions to analyze, while the performance optimization requires us to look at other side of the business such as landing pages, consulting and sales, etc.

After determining the direction of optimization based on the marketing funnel, the following optimization principles can be followed for adjustments.

○ Buyer Persona: : In the pre-promotion optimization, you can follow the bottom-up analysis of the marketing funnel, first analyze the website business and audience, find suitable keywords to cover potential user groups, and then write creative ideas that meet the emotional and rational needs of users to impress them: In the preparation stage, we can follow the bottom-up method to analyze the existing marketing funnel by first analyzing the business and audience, finding suitable keywords to cover potential customer, and then crafting creatives that meet the emotional and rational needs of users to impress them.

○ Building a Well-organized Paid Search Account Structure: First of all, we will need to classify all the keywords we have based on lexical nature and stage of customer journey. We will then move to setting the campaign's geographical regions and times to improve accuracy of targeting. Don't be afraid to build a complicated account, the more detailed the account structure and content, the better. Keep the structure clear and reasonable, so that you will not be overwhelmed during optimization.

○ Keyword: optimizing keywords is the most important step here. We will need to make sure that the chosen keywords are relevant to the user's intent, each group of people's unique search habits, and different stages of the conversion funnel.

Now let's take English Training as an example, I will share some different user-related search behavior divided into four stages.

To sum up, keywords to use for Awareness, Consideration, and Decision Stage will be different, and so will be our marketing strategy. Through continuous testing, we are able to come up with the optimal marketing solution.

○ Performance-based Optimization: we will need to pay attention to external factors like landing pages, consulting tools, consulting skills and sales skills, etc., in order to better serve the traffic acquired. Remember: the higher your conversion rate, the higher value of paid search advertising.

02 How to Analyze Your Paid Search Data

After initial optimization adjustments, we can then combine data to verify the optimization result. Through scientific data analysis we can further categorize keywords, evaluate ads copy and landing pages to identify the advantages and disadvantages, identify problems, and then make adjustments accordingly to break dilemma in marketing. Here are some common data analysis methods we recommend:

○ Trend analysis: By comparing data with the same indicators or ratios in a row, we will get a general idea of the overall trend by looking at the direction, amount, and magnitude of data changes. We can set the analysis dimension by daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and by trend, etc.

○ Proportional analysis: This is method generally used to analyze the proportional relationship between parts and the total by categorizing the same items into several categories and calculating the proportion of each component in the total. We can compare whether the proportion is consistent over time, or what changes have occurred.

○ Two-eight principle: Find 80% of the total conversion, and focus on analyzing and finding solutions for those problems specifically, so that complicated problems become clearer and easier to digest and start from there.

○ Quadrant Analysis: similar to Matrix Analysis, performance under two parameters are assessed for each entity. Two parameters could be consumption and conversion, or consumption and cost.

03 Tools for Closed-Loop Marketing

For performance-based marketing, accurate data analysis can help us identify the core problem and crack the marketing dilemma, and can also combine the advantages of media and use tools to adjust and optimize to achieve closed-loop marketing. Closed-loop marketing is a form of marketing that relies on data and insights. Simply put, “closing the loop” means that sales teams report to marketing about what happened to the leads they receive, which helps marketers understand their best and worst lead sources.

○ oCPC Smart Advertising: oCPC as an important tool that helps us transition to fully-automated Smart Advertising, this model has demonstrated greater and greater results after continuous improvement. We need to consider the nature of the business when optimizing CPC advertising, and to accumulate as much data as possible for us to analyze, in order to achieve greater results.

Summary

Under the performance-based marketing structure, we established a full-funnel marketing strategy that tailored our marketing messages to each particular stage of a customer journey with the help of comprehensive user data analysis and some other tools.

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