Jul 23, 2014 By Mark Vozzo

How to optimise your Google Adwords (SEM) Funnel [Slides]

in Featured, Marketing, Small Business

I have been doing search marketing for over a decade now (wow that makes me sound old) and if you do the maths, you'll see that I was optimising websites prior to Google's IPO in 2004. That's right, I was optimising sites to rank well on Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo, back in the day.

I enjoyed the roller coaster ride of Google algorithm updates such an Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. I wouldn't be doing search if I wasn't into the thrill of it.

I'm grateful to every company I've worked for as I've learnt a different search marketing skills along the way:

Citect: My first job taught me online marketing fundamentals: HTML coding, web design principles, managing web servers, logfiles analysis and how to improve search rankings.

Fairfax Media: This role shifted my search in the fast lane. SMH.com.au is one of many high traffic sites I worked on as the "in-house search guy". If a big news story was not optimised for SEO and we didn't buy SEM keywords, we would lose tonnes of traffic.

Microsoft: took my search skill onto the global stage. Working on a global domain was very different to a .com.au. I also got to spend huge dollars on SEM to launch products like Windows 7, Office 2010 etc.

I enjoyed every job, every challenge and I was able to deliver increasing amount of search traffic, but there was always this BIG question...

What impact does my search campaigns have on the bottom line?

It wasn't until I joined Salesforce.com, my life as a search marketer has changed forever. I was now able to measure each and every keyword I was buying down to leads and pipeline delivered to the business (see below).

I am going to share with you the slides that I presented at Web Analytics Wednesday in Sydney on the 23rd July, 2014.

This presentation will takes you through Step-by-Step each part of my SEM funnel and how I optimise my Paid Search campaigns using data gathered in the CRM system to maximise ROI. I will showcase tips on:

How to optimise Click Through Rate (CTR) from Impressions to Clicks
How to optimise Form Completion Rate (FCR) from Clicks to getting people to fill out forms.
How to optimise Lead Conversion Rate (LCR) from Form Completes to Leads (leveraging CRM)
How to optimise Flip Rate from lead to pipeline revenue, and
How to optimise Pipeline for maximum Return On Investment (ROI) as we all have limited budgets

This post focusses on SEM (Paid Search) and doesn't talk about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But if you want to learn more about SEO here is another blog post where I share with you some SEO Tips to improve your rankings.

Or, download this free eBook to read all the excellent comments and advise from SEO experts: