In today’s digital landscape, Google is the first go-to platform for users seeking information, products, and services. As Google continues to be an ultra-competitive platform, crafting a winning search strategy has become a daunting task for search marketers. Furthermore, the unavailability of key data points in current Google reports has posed more challenges to achieving satisfactory ROI from search marketing investments.
Due to inadequate proactive insights, marketers currently rely on continuous trial, analysis, and optimization iterations to improve their campaign performance. The lack of comprehensive visibility into evolving search engine results page (SERP) and competitive landscape in Google by countries, regions, cities, and zip codes has created huge data siloes for the search marketer.
Additionally, Google’s separated paid ads and organic reports make it difficult to implement holistic search strategies, which have become inevitable for today’s SERP landscape. Marketers also lack insights into competitors’ products, pricing, promotions, and placements information.
In summary, Google reports have become inadequate to empower winning search strategies. However, data-literate search marketers are filling these missing data points in their Google reports to gain insights and deliver effective and efficient search campaigns.
Market Entry With Proactive Intelligence
In today’s competitive digital landscape, proactive decision-making is essential for business success. This entails leveraging data and insights to gain a competitive edge and predict market changes in advance. Marketing managers need access to proactive intelligence, comprehensive data and insights to conduct SWOT analysis, compare product features, prices, promotions, reviews and ratings with competitors, and make informed decisions. By utilizing proactive data, businesses can seamlessly expand into new markets, launch new products, and enter new channels or marketplaces. This allows them to discover growth opportunities and emerging trends early, enabling timely market entry and exit.
Gain an Edge With Comprehensive Competitors’ Data
Understanding the competition is a significant challenge for businesses striving for a high ranking on Google. With various SERP types and content categories emerging, different competitors emerge for each keyword. Wikipedia may dominate certain organic features, while new outlets or big-box retailers could contend for others. Categorizing and analyzing competitors based on SERP features is essential for tailored strategies, providing insights into successful content creators and winning listings. Furthermore, it provides valuable information about ad spend allocation and the balance between paid and organic efforts amongst competitors. Search marketers can gain insights to optimize their ad spend, identify market gaps, and outperform their closest competition.
Holistic Rank Tracking
It’s important to understand and monitor your holistic ad ranking. A holistic ranking is a true ad rank in Google SERP considering all SERP listings, including organic and paid results.
Instead of solely comparing your organic and paid ads ranking separately, true ad rank provides a holistic perspective by considering your ad’s position considering the entire SERP landscape. This allows businesses to evaluate their ad’s performance relative to both organic and paid listings. With a comprehensive understanding of ad performance, businesses can make informed decisions regarding ad spend allocation and enhance their overall search engine visibility.
Optimize CPC and Estimate Max Bid to Win a Better Ad Spot
Google’s data on bid estimation is limited and lacks the necessary details for ads specialists to optimize ad performance effectively. While Google provides a bid estimate indicating the maximum amount to pay per click, it does not guarantee to win against competitors with higher bids. Setting a higher maximum cost per click (CPC) does not guarantee you win the bid. For instance, if you set your max CPC at $5, you could end up paying that amount for a click, however, a competitor with a slightly higher bid of $6 can outperform you. This implies that simply having higher bids and spending more does not guarantee click success. However, Google’s calculation of the actual cost per click considers factors such as Quality Score and Ad Rank. This implies that achieving a favorable position does not always require a significant CPC investment to win the position. Ad specialists require access to data that enables them to analyze competitors, study the top-ranked ads, evaluate competitive pricing and ad placements, and identify opportunity keywords. By having a comprehensive view of these data points, you can improve your quality score, enhance your ranking, and gain valuable insights to shape your bidding strategy effectively.
Stay at the Top of SERP Volatility With Trend Reports
Achieving visibility on the first page of Google’s SERP is crucial for success. However, Google’s diverse range of SERP features poses challenges for SEO and SEM managers. Gaining insights into the performance and popularity of these features is vital for making informed strategic decisions and improving marketing performance. Trend reports play a crucial role in understanding the traction of various SERP features and their impact on impressions and clicks. By analyzing these trends, you can optimize your content and ad campaigns to leverage popular SERP features and allocate resources effectively and avoid investing in less popular ones.
Conclusion
By breaking down barriers and integrating essential data and insights, you have the power to transform your Google strategy and unleash its full potential. Google’s existing offerings lack proactive intelligence, competitors’ data, true ad rank, adequate information to optimize CPC and estimate max bid, and trend reports. By removing these silos and integrating these vital elements, you can enhance your search visibility, capture a larger market share, and optimize your marketing budget. Additionally, this allows you to stay ahead of the competition, anticipate market shifts, and elevate your overall performance on the SERP to achieve exceptional results.
Prasanna Dhungel is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of GrowByData, an enterprise retail data platform that offers retailers, manufacturers and advertising agencies competitive data for merchandising, advertising, pricing, channel management and corporate strategy.
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