• Slightly Shady SEO, Friday, July 11, 2008 3:15 PM

Taking a break from the grind of day-to-day campaign management gave the Slightly Shady SEO some much-needed perspective on the art of search marketing.

For example, CTR may not always be the best performance metric to track. "I previously didn't track things down to the level of ad copy (at least not for all my campaigns)," he says. "I began doing that and discovered that out of my 2 active ads on one campaign, one had a CTR that was about 0.2% lower than the best one, but had nearly double the conversions on many less clicks."

Also, analyzing the competition is key. "If you see an ad appearing everywhere, examine it," he says. "Pick it apart. Pick apart the motivations, the banner, the offer, and where it's showing. Think, 'why is it showing so much here?'"

Lastly, understand that sometimes, campaigns just wear out their usefulness. After two months, a highly successful ad may just stop converting so well--no matter how you try to tweak the ad copy, placement or other factors. Take the best-performing parts of it (be it the title, the keywords, or the content it was running against) and apply it to a new campaign.

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