4.3.2.2 Planning a SEA campaign

The first step in planning an SEM campaign is to define the target group. This should be the same group or a sub-group for which the web page is created for. For a site that is optimised for the target audience the bounce rate is low. Next, the keywords for the campaign have to be selected. Every advert can have different keywords. Supporting the campaign with SEO (see chapter 3.3.2) will increase success. Long-term costs should be estimated to see whether it is better to use SEA or SEO methods.

To evaluate the success of the campaign, it should be supervised with controlling methods (see chapter 3.5) with a special focus on keywords and advert texts. According to the controlling regulations, those should be readjusted. Only if a campaign is regularly monitored and readjusted, it can have long-term success, as internet responds very quickly to trends and external influences.

All further steps are based on an exact definition of the target audience. There are two possibilities to define them: On the one hand the enumeration of the attributes that each member has and on the other hand the description and assigning of ideal types. If the target group consists of several sub-groups they have to be described and differentiated from each other. So for each sub-group their own campaign can be launched (Erlhofer, 2008, p.180-181).

Because of proximity to their own products entrepreneurs are often professionally blinkered, therefore it is difficult to find suitable keywords. It has to be considered what a customer is likely to search for. For example many companies think that their own brand name is a suitable keyword, but this is one of the worse mistakes one can make. It is more important to define the capacities of a product than the name. It has to draw up a list with the keywords. This list can be produced using various methods:

• Brainstorming
• Log file analysis
• Benchmarking
• Find synonyms

Now the keyword list has to be assessed with some quality factors. One of these factors is the document frequency. This is the amount of documents where the search engine has found the keyword. It is easier to get a good ranking with a keyword which is not so frequent. The other method is the keyword popularity. The search engine offers various free tools to measure popularity. With these tools it is possible to measure the density of competitors and the search amount of the keywords. Both tools used together give a good overview if it is worth starting an advert campaign, using SEO tools or adjusting the keywords again, because it could be impossible to get a ranking with these objectives (Erlhofer, 2008, p.186-190).

Finally an advertising text has to be created. The most common form is a text advert. Within a Google AdWords advert there is only space for 25 characters for the title and 70 characters for the text (Google, 2010b). This makes it difficult to find an attractive text which contains all keywords and is convincing. As above-mentioned it is not only important how much one pays for an advert, but also the level of the advert quality.

Max Adler Salzhemmendorf Webdesign

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