The Paid Search Wall

“Paid search has been working well, what if we doubled the budget here?”

This is a question I’ve heard from my own clients in the past, and seen other marketers ask recently. From the paid media side, it can be tempting to immediately reply that scaling budget is no problem and you can jump right on it. However, through experience, I’ve seen that this isn’t always so simple.

It’s common for businesses to rely pretty heavily on search in their early stages of growth. It’s a channel that can provide a marketing team with prospects actively looking for the solution they’re promoting. When dipping into paid search for the first time, and eventually seeing some positive results, it’s natural to ask how much more business the channel can deliver.

The catch is that search volume is finite, especially for more niche solutions. If a team has already maxed out on relevant keywords, spending more will most likely sky rocket CPL and hurt efficiency.

Some easy ways to see if you’re close to capturing all relevant search impressions:

• Pulled monthly search volume estimates from keyword planner and compare those to actual keyword impressions

• Look at search impression share and impression share lost to budget

  • Caution: match types and bid strategies can skew these metrics, so I wouldn’t always take them at face value

If you find that you’re capped out on potential impressions, I don’t recommend moving to broad match or increasing budgets. This can end up targeting wildly irrelevant queries, or simply overbidding for clicks you would have captured anyway.

Instead, when my clients end up in these situations this is often a good time to explore channel expansion. With that comes a different perspective for performance expectations and creative, but that’s a subject for another post.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.