Feeling confident in your abilities and looking to take things to the next level? In the final installment in his three-part series on Sem Account Management, columnist Ted Ives discusses how to get ahead in your career.
In part 1 of this series, we showed how SEM account managers can avoid getting fired; part 2 detailed how they can improve account performance and “deliver the goods” to their organization in the form of conversions or sales. In my final installment here, I’d like to discuss how to take things to the next level in order to advance your career.
A good SEM account manager should strive to be like Alexander the Great — while you’re conquering one land, there should be an adjacent one you have your eyes on. That “next land” may be display, paid social, or even SEO or email marketing. Either way, if you do a good job with the small responsibilities you’ve already been given, larger responsibilities are sure to follow.
These items in particular should make your management stand up and take notice; and worst-case, you’ll be garnering experience that could help you get a promotion by leaving and working for another organization at some point.
Three things can get you more responsibility: finding opportunities for more reach, making major improvements to CPA or ROAS and expanding efforts into other channels.
Finding opportunities for more reach
Additional reach can come from a myriad of sources. One tactic is to simply expand into other channels, or larger audiences (like turning on the “Search Partners” setting in an AdWords campaign, or advertising on the Google Display Network). Reach, i.e., impressions, can also be garnered by bidding up on AdWords (and thus showing higher, and usually more often) or placing ads on Bing Ads. Here are some other ideas for increasing reach:
Making major improvements in CPA or ROAS
This is typically done one of three ways: better targeting, out-of-the-box thinking or conversion path optimization.
Better targeting can simply mean meticulously going through search query or placement reports and adding negatives to the account. In my experience, you can lower the CPA of a typical Google Display Network campaign by a factor of two if you go through your placement reports and add individual websites, as well as entire categories of websites, that are unlikely to perform well for your business (say, wrestling sites or dating sites).
Out-of-the-box thinking examples include things like shifting your lead gen strategy from a contact form-based one to one where you’re doing audience building and giving leads something of value in return for their information. Or it could be something in the other direction, like “ungating” your early funnel campaigns to allow prospects to research and educate themselves so they are more likely to convert when they come in on a later-funnel campaign. I love out-of-the-box thinking, and if you have any interesting anecdotes to share, do tell!
Conversion path optimization is the topic of numerous other articles on Search Engine Land, but basically it involves holistic analysis of a website visitor’s journey between the initial entrance to the site and the ultimate conversion. Tools like Unbounce and Optimizely can help tremendously with this process; landing page tests can result in a big lift to conversions, and making steady improvement in conversion rate is a great way to show your boss that you have the “optimization” chops it takes to get the job done.
[Read the Full Article]
In part 1 of this series, we showed how SEM account managers can avoid getting fired; part 2 detailed how they can improve account performance and “deliver the goods” to their organization in the form of conversions or sales. In my final installment here, I’d like to discuss how to take things to the next level in order to advance your career.
A good SEM account manager should strive to be like Alexander the Great — while you’re conquering one land, there should be an adjacent one you have your eyes on. That “next land” may be display, paid social, or even SEO or email marketing. Either way, if you do a good job with the small responsibilities you’ve already been given, larger responsibilities are sure to follow.
These items in particular should make your management stand up and take notice; and worst-case, you’ll be garnering experience that could help you get a promotion by leaving and working for another organization at some point.
Three things can get you more responsibility: finding opportunities for more reach, making major improvements to CPA or ROAS and expanding efforts into other channels.
Finding opportunities for more reach
Additional reach can come from a myriad of sources. One tactic is to simply expand into other channels, or larger audiences (like turning on the “Search Partners” setting in an AdWords campaign, or advertising on the Google Display Network). Reach, i.e., impressions, can also be garnered by bidding up on AdWords (and thus showing higher, and usually more often) or placing ads on Bing Ads. Here are some other ideas for increasing reach:
- RLSA campaigns (for keyword discovery)
- Dynamic search campaigns
- Shopping campaigns (if applicable to your business)
- Facebook remarketing
- Bing Ads
- “Native” advertising partners
- YouTube campaigns
- Gmail campaigns
- LinkedIn campaigns (great for B2B)
- Comparison shopping engine campaigns
- Amazon campaigns
- Search campaigns targeting the venue of an event (Tip: ZIP-code target the venue and advertise on the GDN on the terms “weather” and “uber”)
- AdWords customer match campaigns (These seem to usually be very low volume)
Making major improvements in CPA or ROAS
This is typically done one of three ways: better targeting, out-of-the-box thinking or conversion path optimization.
Better targeting can simply mean meticulously going through search query or placement reports and adding negatives to the account. In my experience, you can lower the CPA of a typical Google Display Network campaign by a factor of two if you go through your placement reports and add individual websites, as well as entire categories of websites, that are unlikely to perform well for your business (say, wrestling sites or dating sites).
Out-of-the-box thinking examples include things like shifting your lead gen strategy from a contact form-based one to one where you’re doing audience building and giving leads something of value in return for their information. Or it could be something in the other direction, like “ungating” your early funnel campaigns to allow prospects to research and educate themselves so they are more likely to convert when they come in on a later-funnel campaign. I love out-of-the-box thinking, and if you have any interesting anecdotes to share, do tell!
Conversion path optimization is the topic of numerous other articles on Search Engine Land, but basically it involves holistic analysis of a website visitor’s journey between the initial entrance to the site and the ultimate conversion. Tools like Unbounce and Optimizely can help tremendously with this process; landing page tests can result in a big lift to conversions, and making steady improvement in conversion rate is a great way to show your boss that you have the “optimization” chops it takes to get the job done.
[Read the Full Article]
