Today we are featuring a guest post from Brendan Buhmann of Metric Theory, a multi-channel digital advertising agency and Skai partner. As Director of Special Projects, Brendan manages technology relationships and finds ways to make the entire Account Services team at Metric Theory more effective. Brendan has extensive experience and knowledge of the search landscape, and in this post, shares his perspective on how to best maximize resources across engines to improve optimization efforts and drive real results – and how Skai helps the Metric Theory team get there.
As search marketers, our goal is to drive business results by increasing lead volume, improving lead quality, or generating more profit. We accomplish these goals by reaching our most likely customers through management and optimization of campaigns, keywords, and ads.
While continued account optimizations are the primary levers by which we reach customers, they are not a goal unto themselves. Spending less time making campaign optimizations, like adding new keywords and ads, gives us more time to research our customer base, develop new optimization strategies, and otherwise focus on driving improved business performance. The opportunity to save time while driving the same or better results is why we’re so excited about Skai’s new capabilities that automate updates across platforms and campaigns.
Don’t be a Repeat Offender
Do you like to do the same work twice? How about three times? I know I don’t.
For many marketers, creating and managing campaigns across three search engines requires the manual creation of three separate campaigns. Maintaining campaigns on Adwords, BingAds, and now a resurgent Yahoo! Gemini, can require a lot of time spent optimizing the same campaigns on different channels. Some advertisers might even forego the additional conversions on Bing and Yahoo! and focus solely on their Google ads, since Google commands about 2/3 of total search volume. Even when campaigns are active on the other two engines, managers may neglect them in ways that hamper their performance or result in missed leads or revenue.
Metric Theory uses Skai because it provides us with a wealth of tools to tackle this challenge. By bringing the data from multiple engines side-by-side in a single platform, we easily analyze overall performance and deploy budgets where they are most effective. Seeing one consolidated picture also streamlines our workflow and obviates the need for inconvenient switching back and forth between platforms.
Skai’s Advanced Search allows us to filter keywords and ads across engines to identify areas of opportunity, and advanced bidding methodologies automatically determine optimal budget distribution across engines. Lower-volume search engines are a much more valuable investment when we are able to reduce the time cost of optimizing these engines separately.
Optimize your Optimization
Recently, Skai has introduced powerful new tools to help manage large-scale campaigns across multiple engines. The primary reporting grid has seen a number of enhancements that are making it easier than ever to manage multiple channels, enhancing our ability to make changes both at large and small scales, and simplifying reporting workflows by allowing us to filter, aggregate, and compare data quickly and easily.
Campaign Mirroring is another powerful addition to our multi-engine management toolkit. Skai has long made it easy for us to replicate campaigns across engines and geographies, and Campaign Mirroring takes that capability to the next level.
Now, with a few button clicks, I can link several “child” campaigns to a single “parent” campaign. Changes I make to that parent campaign are automatically fed to each of the child campaigns. For a client targeting the US, UK, and Canada in separate, but effectively identical, campaigns across multiple engines, we can now reduce the time spent managing these campaigns by 80%.
Adding new ad copy or introducing new keywords is a breeze.
Focus on the Goals that Matter
Skai’s new tools have freed up time that was previously needed to replicate changes across multiple campaigns, allowing us to spend more time focused on strategic matters, such as identifying our most valuable customers, establishing a funnel to attract them, and building an experience that is valuable to them.
