Fishermen Reeling in Huge Nets

Let’s talk fishing for a second.   You know those large Japanese or Russian fishing trawlers that the fishermen on the smaller boats just hate, because they’re so effective at fishing that they decimate the fish population wherever they go with their 2 mile long nets that catch hundreds of thousands of fish at a time?   Yep.  Hold that thought. . .

I was talking with an online marketing manager of a large adventure travel company the other day. She mentioned that her online “consultant” had built a “really big” campaign of over 2,000 keywords, and that it was working nicely with a positive ROI.  Still, she was frustrated, because her paid search campagn just wasn’t a big growth driver of her overall business.  She was hesitant to invest more money in PPC because she just didn’t believe there were that many more “high traffic” keywords out there that would be relevant to her brand.  I nearly fainted.

This is the holy grail in paid search– a positive ROI and a category, like travel, where a global adventure travel company can easily build out a set of campaigns targeting over half a million keywords (I’ve actually done it when I was on the client side).

Most people don’t realize that one of the real secrets to building successful paid search campaigns is the concept of scaling. By scaling up, and casting a wider net, so to speak, a PPC marketer can take the same ad strategy that works for 2,000 keywords and apply that to literally millions, increasing clicks and conversions proportionally.

How does a company scale up? Well, it’s possible to do a homegrown internal company effort to generate and sort hundreds of thousands of keywords into ad groups and campaigns, but realistically few companies can easily build the capability to do it.

This is where a good paid search consultant like SmartClick AdWorks can come in, using sophisticated tools and methodologies to build out campaigns with an enormous number of keywords.  It’s a lot easier for an agency that does this all the time, than for a client to try to do it themselves.

In any case, cat’s out of the bag now.  Big, scalable campaigns that let brands “cast a wide net” like a fishing trawler are the future on paid search marketing.