• Adotas , Tuesday, July 29, 2008 1 PM

Wister Walcott explains that companies aiming to scale back marketing costs should not diminish their search budgets. "Instead, smart marketers need to learn to spend more, while maintaining, or even boosting, overall ROI," he says.

He offers some tips for maximizing your search spend, starting with results-based bidding. Instead of bidding to attain a specific ad position, Walcott says that bids should be placed based on the desired result (i.e. cost per lead, conversion rate, etc.).

Walcott also suggests constant copy and ad group testing and optimization. "Google will 'optimize' your ads by showing those with the higher click-through rate more often," he says. "This is great for Google, but for the advertiser, you should be optimizing for ROI or revenue/conversion volume. Measure margin/ROI, or revenue/conversions, on an ad-by-ad basis, then pause those ads that are not doing as well."

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