SEM Success Guide

We want you to love Google search marketing

And we know you're not going to love SEM unless you make money doing it. So we took eveything we know (well, about SEM anyway) and put it into what we are calling our SEM Success Guide in the hope that some or all of it can be used to help your organization more successfully use SEM.

But, we also know that you're not going to love SEM unless you have some fun with it. That means having campaigns that you can understand, fix, run, improve, clone, delete, and use productively. Without requiring long meetings with experts and stacks of reports.

This is not a course in SEM or Google Ads, but rather simply our prescribed methods for helping you to keep your campaigns simple, easy to manage, and profitable This section is not so much about trying to present technical details of SEM, as it is to help you get the right perspective on how to make SEM work for you.

There are four sections in the SEM Success Guide

1. Brand New to SEM?: Links to guides and videos that you might find helpful to get you a solid understanding of the theory of SEM as well as how Google Ads actually works.
2. Understanding SEM: Don't let a vague understanding of how search marketing really works limit your success with it. SEM is a very precise set of tools and it helps a lot to really understand how they work. Far too many search marketers do not really understand how search terms interact with keywords. Or any other critical concepts of SEM.
3. Best Practices: These are recommendations targeted specifically to small and medium sized businesses (under one billion in anual revenue). A host of ways to help you focus on what really matters in your campaigns and accounts and keep you focused on creating profitable conversions. You are competing for customers in a marketplace called: Google. Creating successful campaigns means more than just focusing on your campaigns. It means understanding the Google marketplace you are competing in and having a great strategy for winning.
4. Creating Profit. When you're trying to achieve profitable converions, that job seems pretty challenging in itself. However, the job of scaling that profitability once you're achieved it can be even more daunting. Measuring, managing, and improving your profitability is surprisingly tough. While this is a "problem" that most search marketers hope to have, it is nonetheless a real challenge. We've got some ideas on how to focus on profit and improve it with some scientific method.

Is the Success Guide just a long sales pitch for using CampaignBuilder?

• Absolutely not. We would heartily recommend the information presented here to anyone trying to create profitable search marketing campaigns. Whether they were doing it with or without CampaignBuilder. But you would, probably, have a lot more fun and success if you did use CampaignBuilder to implement these ideas.
• Probably not.  You can quite successfully use CampaignBuilder without considering adhering to any of the information presented here. But you would, probably, have a lot more fun and success if you used these ideas with CampaignBuilder. If you are using CampaignBuilder, it would not be easy to create campaigns that didn't adhere to this guide. But you could do it if you were determined.
• Well, sort of . . .  All right. Guilty as charged. We probably should point out that every feature of CampaignBuilder was created to help you put all this information to good use. Making profitable search campaigns. Keeping them simple, easy to evaluate, easy to manage, easy to improve. Then quickly scale that profit once you have it working.