Search Marketing

1
Search Marketing Best Practices for Big Brands
PANELISTNick Sheth, Director of Business
Development, Gap Inc Direct
2
Know Your Trademarks

• Register your marks with Google (including
  misspellings)
• Ensure you have a clear, well communicated policy
  around usage of marks by partners (affiliates,
  shopping engines, partners)
• Monitor your marks with a service (AdGooroo, The
  Search Monitor, BrandVerity or MarkMonitor)
• Remember your Domains (offensive and defensive)

3
Know Your Promotional and Offline Marketing
Calendars

• Calendar your promotions and share with your
  agency and all digital marketing teams
• Leverage offsite marketing (buy terms, watch
  trends, use content ads)
• Finely tune search copy, dont use blunt force
  promotions should be relevant to your adgroup
• Work closely with marketers within your org at
  all levels. Building trust is paramount to
  gaining the autonomy needed to execute quickly.

4
Know Your Site

• May seem simple, but with large programs there
  are a lot of moving pieces! Audit, Audit, Audit.
• Landing page relevancy right page for the right
  copy and keyword.
• Product availability and assortment consider
  using data feeds to automate.
• Dead pages make sure you have internal tools
  and/or agency tools to constantly monitor.

5
Know More About Your Site

• Use onsite search data to drive SEM keyword
  selection and SEO optimization
• Use paid search data to find best phrases for SEO
  optimization.
• Use SEO and paid inclusion data to find new
  keywords for SEM.
• There are often pockets of high converting
  opportunity, find them and exploit. Automated
  bid platforms do not solve all problems.

6
Know What Works

• Develop a culture of testing, including landing
  pages, copy, and promotions. Build a test budget
  into your annual PL.
• Statistical significance is key, use a free tool
  that can be found via Google to do this.
  Agencies often flub this.
• Maintain a testing plan that always has tasks and
  consistently report on what works and doesnt.
• Document, institutional memory is fleeting.

7
Know Your Business

• Understand the goals of your business (topline,
  profit, awareness, etc). Build these goals into
  your bidding algorithms.
• Understand how you are moving the needle, think
  about incrementality even if it hurts.
• Ensure you are thinking about portfolio
  optimization for your entire marketing budget.
• Question branded search and answer the question.
  Is it incremental? Are you already highly ranked
  for a given term?
• If you dont, someone else will.