By Martin Murray
CEO
With more and more advertisers adding search engine marketing to their marketing mix, how do you select a Search Marketing Agency who will deliver results for your company. The following are a few questions that we at Interactive Return feel you should be asking your prospective search marketing partner.
What services does your company provide? How much of your overall activity is search engine marketing?
There are many companies who say they do search marketing but for a great many of these, search is a small part of their portfolio with much of their expertise and experience in other areas such as banner advertising or web development. In these companies, search tends to be the "cinderella" that rarely gets the time or resources it deserves. Search has become a very complex area. It is only very dedicated search profesional who can keep up with the changes in the markertplace.
Have you experience of search marketing campaigns for the geographic and sectoral audiences my company is targetting?
Conducting a search marketing campaign for an online shoe retailer with an Irish target audience is quite different from the campaign you should conduct for a hotel aggregator targetting 10 markets in Europe with 8 different languages. Make sure that youor search marketing provider has experience relevant to your business objectives.
Can you provide references? Can I speak to these references?
Always look for references relevant to the work that will be carried out.
Where are your offices? Will I have contact with the person executing the campaign? Will I meet the person during the campaign.
Decide the level of contact that you require to have with the Agency. We would always recommend a face-to-face meeting at least once a month to review a campaign.
What kind of reporting will I receive? How frequently is it updated? How do I access it?
Some search marketing providers may offer that you will receive a report once a month, covering both organic and sponsored listings, possibly as a Word document attached to an email. There are a few reasons why this is simply not good enough. Firstly, Search Marketing is a dynamic environment, particularly in the case of sponsored listings. A month is far too long to leave a sponsored listings campaign running without confirmation that it is working as planned. Secondly, monthly reports presented in Word documents probably do not permit you to take an overview over the whole course of a campaign.
Professional Search Marketing Agencies now offer 24/7 access to daily-updated online reporting, relating to both organic and sponsored campaigns. Agencies that have a long and trusted relationship with the search engines are provided with programmatic access to the search engine's index and sponsored listing data so that it can acquire campaign data and format it as required for you. This means that data from campaigns conducted in Google, Yahoo, MIVA and other engines can be aggregated to present the total picture for a whole campaign. The right search marketing technology platform does not simply present data, it calculates metrics that allow you to measure the success of the campaign.
Do you use ethical search marketing techniques?
The recent banning of the bmw.de website from Google's index for unethical search marketing behaviour shows that this is not a moral question but a commercial one. You cannot afford to have your website associated with unethical behaviour.
What if I want to take the search marketing work in-house?
Your search engine marketing agency should be able to assist you to develop your company's search marketing competence and to take ownership of any work carried out by the agency. It should be possible to transfer sponsored listings campaigns set up in Google and Yahoo over to the client whenever they wish to do this.
Are you an outspoken member of the Search Marketing community?
The most reputable agencies will have a presence in the Search Marketing industry. They will be members of professional associations, regular speakers at industry events and will write notable articles.
