Search Engine Journal reports that Google prioritizes websites that engage in high-level search engine marketing (SEM)—with the world’s largest search engine’s two most important signals being link-building efforts and high-quality content.
You heard it from the horse’s mouth—Google is more likely to rank websites that engage in search engine marketing best practices. But, as a busy digital marketer juggling client KPIs and Google’s (seemingly never-ending) updates, it can be difficult to do it all on your own.
SEM automation offers a solution!
For many of you who have become more advanced in your search engine marketing practices, automation offers a powerful appeal, and it’s easy to understand why.
Automation, once implemented, can significantly free up hours in your day, allowing you to shift your focus to other priorities. Plus, automating your SEM campaigns tightens many aspects of your processes—delivering efficiencies across the board (and, likely, fewer errors!).
Remember, there are many ways to automate your marketing and relieve your team of the manual duties that diligent digital marketing demands. You can automate your marketing email campaigns, automate your social media distribution, and automate your online advertising.
The benefits are countless, even if you only automate your online advertising campaigns.
A few benefits of online advertising automation include the following:
- Boosting your revenue—75% of businesses that use online advertising automation see results in 12 months.
- You will have more time to focus on strategy.
- You will be able to leverage much more data.
- Enhance the functionality of your entire team.
- You can create a personalized ad experience for potential customers.
Here are just a few basic tactics to help you get started with SEM automation:
Automate your Google Ads rules in a cinch.
This is a solid kick-off if you’re a rookie in SEM automation and where Google Ads rules can be an administrative hassle.
Here are just a few ways this could play out:
- Schedule your ads: Create rules that dictate when your ads will start and stop. This is critical for holiday marketing. You’ll want to have your campaign set to roll out—but don’t want limited-time offers or holiday content to keep going past the holiday.
- Pause low performers: Pause ads based on conversion rates or performance metrics (such as low CTR). Rules such as these focus your efforts only on the solid performers and create some financial efficiencies, too. Pause your ads and optimize them for testing again at a later time.
- Take control of your budget: This rule is great for companies with a high focus on certain days of the week. Rather than racing to your dashboard to increase bid budgets manually, create a rule that, say, allows for a greater budget on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- Auto-adjust your bids: Set rules that adjust bids based on conversion rates to focus on the goal completion and more.
Get serious with platform APIs.
Now, there’s no skirting around it—if you’re going to use APIs, make sure you have a developer to lean on. APIs, or application programming interface, offers a set of protocols for giving and receiving information. They’re the powerhouse of automation.
While some development assistance is required, once an API is set up properly, many functions of your SEM can churn on autopilot. If you’re serious about automation, it’s worth evaluating.
APIs offer ample room for customization and working the way you and your developer wish. For example, APIs provide a path for requesting information—but how you actually do it depends on your developer’s implementations. Your developer can choose the coding language and decide on the optimal path for working with the API in a way that is scalable and secure.
Again, the Google Ads API offers a deeper layer of customization and automation—ideal for large firms and corporations. You can automate nearly anything, from keyword generation and ad text to landing pages and reports.
Contact the SEM automation experts at MatchCraft.
SEM automation is a time-saving tool all digital marketing experts can use. If you’re interested in saving lots of time, and benefiting from data-driven automations, MatchCraft’s solution is right for you.
For over 20 years, MatchCraft has been building powerful technology that creates trackable results for digital marketers (and their clients) across the globe. From our AdVantage platform to our PPC estimator tool, if you need comprehensive digital marketing tools, we have you covered.
Schedule your assessment to learn more about our SEM automation tools.