Earlier this month, The Business Insider published a post titled: "How To Save Money On Search Advertising". A timely post given the new year and potentially, new budgets. There are many strategies that can be used to optimize search budgets, unfortunately, site side optimization tends to be one of the last strategies implemented and practiced on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, implementing automated optimization programs like product/content recommendations or behaviorally targeted promotions, automatically refine and improve conversion rates.
If you are pouring money into paid search, potential revenue is leaking out if you are not optimizing, refining and personalizing your website and landing pages. I fully agree with #3 on the Business Insiders' list. I would, however, recommend optimizing your website before any other ad optimization strategies (thus moving it to #1 on the list).
(via: http://www.businessinsider.com/save-money-on-search-advertising-2010-1)
Optimize Your Website First
If you have tracking installed on your website but haven't optimized your website's ability to convert visitors into buyers, you probably won't be able to compete for the best possible placement for your ads. As a result, your ads will appear infrequently, buried deep within the search results pages. And more importantly, you'll only be capturing a small percentage of the sales you would have captured by identifying and eliminating sales bottlenecks.
Conversely, if you can improve your sales by 50 percent through the practice of conversion optimization (a very modest goal for most websites), you can easily double the return on your ad spend! This gives you the option of either cutting your spend while maintaining the same revenue or, alternatively, increasing your spend to drive more traffic. The choice is yours.
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