How to combine multiple campaigns and stop competing with yourself: 5 ways to avoid the trick

Note: Below is a free translation of the article “How to Coordinate Multiple Campaigns Without Competing Against Yourself: 5 Ways to Avoid Pitfalls,” in which the author considers typical ways to optimize expenses for contextual advertising and its coordination with natural promotion in search engines.

When conducting several campaigns for different brands or divisions at the same time, the difficulty in implementing promotion in search engines increases many times. No one wants to compete with himself on certain keywords or to take profits from one campaign in favor of another.

This article describes how a travel agency in Michigan was able, with the help of concerted efforts, to intelligently implement search engine optimization for thousands of its private sector partners, which increased traffic to the site by 142% and upgrades to partner sites by 1770%. 5 strategies for organizing SEO campaigns focused on the main portal and managing PPC advertising partners are described. George Zimmermann, vice president of Travel Michigan, an economic development corporation in Michigan, and his team are creating leads for 13,000 travel and hotel businesses in Michigan.

For several years, the main source of sales for Travel Michigan has been the site - Michigan.org . It increases the attractiveness of the state for potential visitors and provides links to suitable hotels, restaurants and other places of recreation.
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“For us, one of the main challenges is to make Michigan.org a prominent position,” says Zimmermann. “We are a big pipe: our private sector partners want to get as many visitors as possible from us.”

Search engine optimization is a natural choice for his team, but here there are two main questions: how to manage traffic that meets the needs of all partners from the private sector on the site? And how to coordinate different campaigns between individual firms so that they do not compete with each other for popular search phrases?

In the tourism sector is quite high competition. Therefore, they did not want their efforts to reduce traffic for one group of companies by campaigning for another.

A team of marketers has developed a strategy that can be used by any campaign manager aimed at increasing search traffic. They combined SEO with paid search campaigns that do not compete with the first approach, and collected everything in one place. Also in the process of analyzing the market, the most attractive search phrases were revealed that could be used without danger of damaging other campaigns.

Below are 5 of their leading strategies:

Strategy # 1. Analyze the market to find the most profitable opportunities.

The Michigan team analyzed the current status of search queries for the tourism industry and identified those application points that provided the best effect. The following factors were taken for analysis.

• The position of the largest competitors in the search results and the strategy of their paid ads. Travel Michigan’s competitors include travel agencies from fairly large states, including California and Nevada. They tracked those sites that were displayed in leading positions by industry phrases, and used text that focused on tourism and travel, and multiple links from their industry partners.
• The search phrases that provide the most traffic and conversion for Michigan.org . Conversion could be expressed in the transition to partner sites or subscribe to the email-mailing Michigan.org.
• Search phrases that have very high competition or cost. Travel Michigan has limited the budget, so it was extremely unlikely that their ads would be in first place on general inquiries, for example, “travel”, “fishing” or “skiing”. These phrases are usually claimed by major news agencies and travel sites such as Travelocity.com.
• Search phrases that are competitive enough for Travel Michigan. A team of marketers found suitable sites for competitive battles that could be won.
• Leading regional markets for potential buyers. The Zimmermann team had a great idea of ​​which regions were the largest suppliers of tourists, for example, large cities in the Midwest. They then used these sources of potential customers to test the result of geographically-targeted search phrases.

Non-tourism sites may not have such a good opportunity to geo-target their ads. But in this case, you can take advantage of demographic or psychological characteristics of users, or even appeal to their loyalty.

Strategy # 2. Building search campaigns around phrases that are too expensive paid search

The team designed its search engine optimization actions around high-frequency queries that had an unreasonably high price to compete with a paid search campaign. Below is described how they achieved improvements for positions in search engines.

• We look at 2-3 phrases that are most suitable for tourism in Michigan, for example:
  
  • Michigan travel
  • Michigan beaches
  • Michigan skiing
• We are testing potential SEO phrases in paid campaigns with a limited budget. Historically, search queries do not match current search results. The team had a list of several potential phrases that were tested for two to three months in a paid search to determine which ones attracted the most traffic.
• We analyze the current pages to select from them those whose content can be changed for SEO. There were a lot of informational texts on Michigan.org that the team periodically corresponded to include more key terms that were chosen as the most promising in search engines.
• Encourage partners to write their own texts . The team helped partner sites to plan writing new texts, offering topics and key terms for articles that fit the overall SEO strategy.

The same technique can be used in a company or organization, if you coordinate the actions of product managers or local marketing departments to create new or change current texts.

Strategy # 3. Creating affiliate paid campaigns

The marketing team has expanded the existing cooperative advertising strategy to the actions of industry partners. Individual businesses or groups of organizations, such as merging beach city travel agencies, launching paid search campaigns and receiving funding from Travel Michigan.

Harmonizing paid advertising campaigns between in-state travel agencies helped Travel Michigan avoid competition on rates between different managers. The following describes how they managed the campaigns:

1. The team met with each partner and analyzed his current search strategy and goals. They checked:
   
   • Key phrases used in marketing
   • Site architecture and content
   • Existing keyword list for paid campaigns
   For marketers who analyze search campaigns between different departments or departments, this can be reduced to coordinating several agencies that promote search engines for each department.
   
2. Existing word lists were amplified by additional terms that the Travel Michigan team checked for the existence of a potential amount of traffic, while partners checked them for relevance.
3. Competitors were analyzed, including non-Michigan sites and other state partners who could compete on the same search phrases.
4. When potential overlap of search terms used by Travel Michigan partners was discovered, strategies were developed to prevent intra-state competition.

Tactic # 1. Analyze terms that may be useful to a specific group of partners.

This can be accomplished using trial campaigns and tracking traffic and conversion, for example, visits to partner sites from Michigan.org. If one group of partners creates most of the clicks and conversions, then it can “have” this phrase. The team then worked on finding alternatives for other groups of partners with less traffic.

Tactic # 2. Alternate campaigns for the same keyword list.

If certain phrases worked, practically the same for the two groups, the team could create schedules for alternating paid campaigns between the two groups. For example, one group could use a certain phrase for a month, after that the current campaign was stopped, giving way to another group to use another phrase for another month.

This strategy also helped partners with limited advertising costs stretch their budget to paid ads.

Tactic # 3. Send paid campaigns to relevant promo pages ( landing page ) on Michigan.org

For a separate traffic partner, the Zimmermann team could usually direct traffic to the partner page on the travel site itself. For a group of partners, a special section was created (a small site) that provided suitable texts for a group of partners.

Strategy # 4. Explore additional opportunities to buy advertising time and current events to determine situational phrases

For consistent SEO optimization and paid campaigns, they tracked ongoing marketing activities, such as media advertising and individual events. To identify additional phrases, they searched for:

• Major travel events in which Travel Michigan participation was planned. Phrases related to such events were added to their search campaigns.
• The slogans that were used in offline marketing campaigns that potential visitors could use to search. For example, all marketing in Travel Michigan uses the title “Pure Michigan,” so the team tracked the possible search activity for this phrase.
• Using their knowledge of upcoming events, for example, events planned for next year, the team could develop SEO strategies around key phrases related to event marketing.
• For upcoming events or random trends in search activity that did not allow the use of standard SEO techniques, the team could launch paid campaigns to drive traffic.

Strategy # 5. Track results and use data for consistent changes

The team consistently monitored search results and user behavior to optimize campaigns.

• Each partner located on Michigan.org receives a quarterly report detailing its traffic that goes through the state site.
• A team of marketers looked at users' paths through the site to search for pages with a large bounce rate , usual ways to use navigation, or ways that most often lead to conversion. These results helped to customize the site changes that brought the most traffic from natural search.
• Paid campaign data was transmitted to partners to demonstrate ROI or resolve any potential disputes between partner groups about search traffic. Until now, according to Zimmermann, partners are respectful of marketing strategies aimed at preventing the overlapping of their paid campaigns. With the help of the collected data, the team can demonstrate to the COP why a particular decision was made in each case about the use of keywords or the alternation of campaigns.

Increasing overall search traffic on Michigan.org is beneficial to all of its partners. Below are some results:

• Increase total traffic on Michigan.org by 142%, which put this site in first place for statewide in-country tourism.
• An additional 114,000 visitors coming from paid ads to Michigan.org every month
• 1500% increase in traffic to partner pages on Michigan.org
• Increase by 1770% of referrals to partner sites

“The more traffic we bring to Michigan.org through search engine optimization, paid campaigns or other leveraged marketing, the better for everyone,” Zimmermann sums up. “We generously distribute this traffic and create visible links to our partners. We want them to also receive these visitors. ”

Useful links during the article:

Sample pages for SEO and paid campaigns
www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/travelmichigan/study.html

Fluency Media plans and manages SEO and paid campaigns:
www.fluencymedia.com

Travel Michigan
www.michigan.org