• DM News, Monday, April 7, 2008 12:15 PM

A paid search campaign is only as good as the actionable metrics it can provide--and Olivier Silvestre, director of optimization consulting at Omniture's Visual Sciences, discusses the three areas that marketers should focus on for optimal campaign metrics.

For landing pages, Silvestre says it's about the "single access visit" ratio, or the percentage of visitors that land on the page and then leave the site without browsing any other pages. "If the ad copy is relevant to what a company offers, and the landing page is consistent with the ad copy message, then the SAV should stay low, as long as the landing page is not a final destination in itself, which is not recommended," he says.

When it comes to ad copy, the key metrics are CTR and return-on-ad-investment or spend (ROAI or ROAS)--not just sales. "Assessing your SEM campaigns based on sales alone could lead a company to make unsuccessful online campaign decisions as sales transaction is not the sole criterion," Silvestre says.

And with keywords, Silvestre says that you should start a new campaign by buying broad keywords or phrases on the cheap and using broad match--as the resulting analytics reports provide some of the best, actionable proof of which pricier terms your target audience is actually searching for.

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