Search Marketing Best Practices for Big Brands

PANELIST:

Nick Sheth, Director of Business Development,

Gap Inc Direct

Know Your Trademarks™

• Register your marks with Google (including misspellings)

• Ensure you have a clear, well communicated policy around usage of marks by partners (affiliates, shopping engines, partners)

• Monitor your marks with a service (AdGooroo, The Search Monitor, BrandVerity or MarkMonitor)

• Remember your Domains (offensive and defensive)

Know Your Promotional and Offline Marketing Calendars

• Calendar your promotions and share with your agency and all digital marketing teams

• Leverage offsite marketing (buy terms, watch trends, use content ads)

• Finely tune search copy, don’t use blunt force – promotions should be relevant to your adgroup

• Work closely with marketers within your org at all levels. Building trust is paramount to gaining the autonomy needed to execute quickly.

Know Your Site

May seem simple, but with large programs there are a lot of moving pieces! Audit,

Audit, Audit.

•Landing page relevancy – right page for the right copy and keyword.

•Product availability and assortment – consider using data feeds to automate.

•Dead pages – make sure you have internal tools and/or agency tools to constantly monitor.

Know More About Your Site

• Use onsite search data to drive SEM keyword selection and SEO optimization

• Use paid search data to find best phrases for SEO optimization.

• Use SEO and paid inclusion data to find new keywords for SEM.

• There are often pockets of high converting opportunity, find them and exploit. Automated bid platforms do not solve all problems.

Know What Works

• Develop a culture of testing, including landing pages, copy, and promotions. Build a test budget into your annual P&L.

• Statistical significance is key, use a free tool that can be found via Google to do this. Agencies often flub this.

• Maintain a testing plan that always has tasks and consistently report on what works and doesn’t.

• Document, institutional memory is fleeting.

Know Your Business

• Understand the goals of your business (topline, profit, awareness, etc). Build these goals into your bidding algorithms.

• Understand how you are moving the needle, think about incrementality even if it hurts.

• Ensure you are thinking about portfolio optimization for your entire marketing budget.

• Question branded search and answer the question. Is it incremental? Are you already highly ranked for a given term?

• If you don’t, someone else will.