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For most industries, SEM or search engine marketing is undoubtedly an essential channel in this internet age that’s dominated by the fervent need to acquire information coupled with advancements in smartphone technology. The result? A complete overhaul of the consumer purchase journey.
From the early days of its inception involving manual bidding to the use of artificial intelligence, SEM has come a long way indeed.
Given the changing landscape of SEM, technologies and consumer behavioural shifts, what is considered up-to-date and effective when it comes to SEM tracking?
The SEM landscape in Singapore
Primarily, SEM refers to the paid advertising segment of a search engine. Although some sources reference SEM as both paid and organic segments of a search engine’s listings, today in Singapore and other parts of the world, most people don’t refer to SEM as organic traffic.
There are various channels to consider with Google being the dominant search engine locally. Some SEM channels in Singapore include:
While Bing and Yahoo offer paid listings on their search results, the number of users utilising these search engines is minimal. This means that search engines apart from Google tend to yield insignificant search volume, resulting in menial SEM traffic, in Singapore at least.
How do marketers and businesses track their marketing results traditionally?
A firm that aims to drive enquiries or appointments could use manual tracking to identify how many phone calls or emails they receive. This certainly paints a clearer picture of your marketing ROI, as compared to not having any form of tracking completely. However, checking those checkboxes manually could be tedious and it’s definitely not error-free.
Take for example a business that utilises multiple marketing channels such as SEM and SEO. The receptionist may ask a client who enquired on how they found the business, and the client may respond with “Oh, I found your website on Google”. While this tells us that we have some presence on the search engines, it doesn’t indicate whether the customer discovered the brand via paid (SEM) or organic (SEO) listings.
However, all is not lost. One method that most firms use would be to combine both manual and SEM tracking.
SEM Tracking
An important area to look out for before starting your SEM campaign, every seasoned marketer would probably have heard of the term ‘conversion tracking’.
What is conversion tracking in SEM?
Conversion tracking aims to identify the online and/ or offline actions that are deemed to have contributed to the success of your SEM or Google Ad campaigns. For instance, if someone bought a product from your eCommerce store, that purchase event triggered by the customer can be counted as a ‘conversion’. For service providers, if your goal is lead generation, a conversion event could be attributed to enquiries, e.g. a successful contact form submission via your website.
This means that with conversion tracking, we can better identify the campaigns, ad groups, keywords, search terms, audiences etc that drive results. For instance, if your SEM agency is able to identify inept keywords within your campaign, these keywords, that do not contribute to your marketing goals, can be paused to allow your budget to focus on performing keywords instead.
This means that inefficient areas of your campaign can slowly be eliminated and over time, you’ll be able to maximise the ROI from your SEM investment.
Utilising accurate conversion tracking
However, conversion tracking alone isn’t enough. To get a clear understanding of how your campaigns are performing, you need accurate tracking. Accurate tracking allows us to obtain a clear overview of our SEM performance, allowing us to leverage this data to make informed marketing decisions.
A marketer or business owner running an SEM campaign would certainly want answers to these burning questions:
- Which keywords are driving sales and enquiries?
- Are there any products that are constantly underperforming?
- Which ad group is driving better results?
- Have we identified search terms that drive the most conversions?
- Do we have any campaign driving a negative return on investment (ROI)?
Accurate SEM tracking would certainly solve these mysteries allowing your SEM agency or strategist to eliminate cost inefficiencies. Yet, if this data is erroneous, disaster could erupt from decisions made via inaccurate reporting.
Secondary conversions
While most campaigns track primary conversions (e.g. an online purchase or an enquiry) secondary conversions do play an important part in optimising your SEM campaigns as well. Essentially, secondary conversions are events that don’t directly contribute to tangible or monetary success.
For an eCommerce business, adding to cart would be the perfect example. While a customer may add a product to their online shopping basket, this event still doesn’t translate into business success. For a lead generation campaign, a WhatsApp button click may not always result in an enquiry.
A double-edged sword indeed. Used correctly, secondary conversions can assist in more accurate decision making. Yet, having these unconfirmed conversions could place your SEM campaigns in a precarious setting.
Inaccurate conversion tracking: Fueling the confundrum
Since conversion tracking aims to identify crucial events on your website or app that contribute to campaign success, inaccurate tracking only fuels the confusion.
Imagine attributing the wrong web event as a valuable and precious conversion. Or perhaps the fault lies with double-counting an online transaction. In some cases, conversions may not be sorted clearly or accurately. Hence, in such a scenario, how does inaccurate tracking impact your SEM and decisions on broader marketing?
A case in point, although an email button click on your website is the first step towards driving an enquiry, this action clearly has lower value as compared to an email from a genuine customer. If one is unaware of such a configuration, an overarching report could present inflated numbers for certain marketing channels.
Depending on how your digital agency or specialist strategizes, wrongly attributing unconfirmed or secondary conversions could be disastrous.
Of course, there could be exceptions. For instance, perhaps there is greater efficacy in attributing secondary events as primary conversions, or there could simply just be a lack of better options.
Calibrating for optimal conversion reporting
While we know that with SEM, one area to look at would be if we’ve set up our conversions to be as accurate as possible. There are other areas to look out for as well.
For instance, if your goal is to drive leads or enquiries, then how do you define a successful lead? Do you look at the number of enquiries? Or would you take that further, to look at the number of actual appointments since not every enquiry would lead to a consultation or meeting? Analysing multiple layers of data would help with better identifying the gaps in your consumer’s journey.
Perhaps customers are initiating checkouts on your eCommerce website but are not purchasing. Or perhaps you are generating appointments on a daily basis, yet without converting enquiries into actual customers, appointments won’t mean a thing.
This also means that it would be crucial to identify the full funnel of your customer’s purchase journey.
Going beyond standard conversion tracking: Combining SEM tracking with additional technology
While standard SEM conversion tracking allows us to track specific events on our app or website, we’re able to take this one step further by implementing additional technology.
Call tracking
Food for thought, what if a potential client clicks into your website via search ads on Google using a laptop and makes a phone call enquiry via their mobile device?
In Singapore, under regular circumstances, this call cannot be attributed to your SEM campaign since the call is made via a different device. However, with call tracking technology, you’ll be able to track phone calls on top of the regular conversion tracking events.
For businesses where phone calls make up a sizable percentage of enquiries, especially for clinics or the B2B industry, this is a game-changer. This is because the phone calls can be attributed to your SEM keywords allowing you to better assess which keywords are converting, allowing pre-eminent optimisation leading to a higher overall return on investment.
Callback
Relatively newer as opposed to call tracking, callback technology allows potential customers to schedule a phone call with your business. This means that the customer is able to reserve the phone enquiry for better timing.
This also means that instead of having potential customers leave your website thinking that they’ll return later, they can now book a phone appointment for the future. Providing call-back as an additional option allows you to increase your conversion rates, meaning that you can expect more results without increasing your marketing budget.
Live chat Integration
With the increased use of smartphones and messaging, people are now more accustomed to chatting online as a form of communicating. This means that, unlike the older generation, millennials having grown up with technology, are likely more inclined to enquire via live chat messaging. While this doesn’t apply to everybody, we’ve seen more online communication in specific industries.
By implementing and integrating a live chat app with your website, you’ll offer more options for your customers to reach your team. This works even if you’re an eCommerce business since interested customers would likely have more questions especially for those who are serious about buying.
Final thoughts
In brief, having well-calibrated and accurate SEM tracking allows you to maximise returns if applied correctly. While conversion tracking is excellent in helping brands identify their digital ROAS (return on ad spend), an inaccurate setup could result in a long-term marketing catastrophe.
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