The main difference in optimising the performance of a paid search campaign versus your natural search is the frequency at which you need to monnitor and make adjustments.
While just about everything about your paid search campaign is immediate and can be changed in a matter of minutes, your SEO campaign needs more time to reveal certain trends and then sometimes even longer for your adjustments to take effect.
It goes without saying that it is absolutely crucial to have an effective tracking solution to measure the performance of any search campaign. If you don't measure the performance of your campaign you are effectively flying blind and hoping for the best.
Red Mud Media have worked with a selection of analytics tools ranging from DoubleClick to Omniture and Google Analytics.
When it comes to choosing the right tool for your business you really need to think about what you want to get out of it. This may seem like stating the bleeding obvious, but you'll find there is no perfect tool in the market - they all have their strengths and weaknesses.
When it comes to optimising the performance of a paid search campaign, some may argue that the search engine interface that manages your campaign provides sufficient information because it provides click through rate, cost per click and conversion metrics. However, you also need to see what users who come from search campaigns are doing on your site to get the full picture. Red Mud Media have experience in using a selection of bid management tools including DART Search, BidBuddy and Omniture to help manage search campaigns, but we use these alongside the aforementioned site analytics tools.
There's more to natural search success than being number 1 on the search engines. Ok, it'd be very nice to be number one for all your target keywords, but you also need to consider the wider range of metrics which add up to a successful SEO campaign.
Getting a fresh pair of eyes to look at your search campaign can reap huge dividends. Our search specialists will analyse your campaign and provide a full list of recommendations to improve its performance.