🥇 SEM agency in Singapore | Grow quicker with the best

Q: Do you do non-English SEM campaigns?

We do Chinese-language SEM campaigns on Baidu in addition to European and Asian language campaigns on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

What is SEM?

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing which, as we practice it (because some agencies treat SEM as a catch-all term including all sorts of online ads), means paid advertisements appearing in search engines. Thus, SEM includes both text ads and shopping ads which show up in search engine results but excludes ads published outside of search engine results such as banner ads and social media ads.

To a large extent, SEM requires the same know-how as SEO. Contrary to common knowledge, ad positioning is not a straight “pay-to-play” system where the top slots are auctioned off to the top bidders. Rather, Google bases ad placement not just on price but a more complex equation including quality. Google assigns a quality score to each ad based on factors such as the relevancy of ad copy and landing page in relation to the keyword plus the ad’s historical click-through rate. The higher the quality of the ad, the less Google charges the advertiser. That being the case, a top SEO agency like Cogney can significantly increase the efficacy and ROI of an SEM campaign.

Why do SEM?

It’s fast.

To make your website rank well in organic search results is not an overnight project. Rather, it’s the hard-earned result of a systematic SEO plan which usually takes months to implement. SEM allows you to jump the queue and place your message at (or near) the top of search results right away.

To put it another way, SEM can be used in lieu of SEO if you are not yet ready to commit to the long-term investment and effort of the latter, or launched at the same time as SEO if you want to capture relevant traffic immediately, while your SEO campaign matures.

You won’t lose out to the competition.

If your website already enjoys a high search rank organically, SEM is an important marketing complement because it prevents you from being scooped by competitors paying for placement at the top of the page. (SEM is responsible for 20% of all search traffic.) If you don’t appear in paid results (SEM), you lose the traffic coming from those results. To put it another way, even if you’re the #1 organic search result, there’s no guarantee that your URL will be clicked first so long as there are paid results on top of the page.

It gives you total control over your message.

Consumers give more credence to organic search results largely because rank is determined not by the company in question but third-party sources. That’s all well and good for the inquiring public but not so great for companies trying to maintain control over their image. What journalists, bloggers or review websites focus on may have nothing to do with your core marketing message or unique selling proposition. For that matter, top-ranking organic search results may even contain information adverse to your cause, for example, a tepid TripAdvisor review for your restaurant or a lawsuit about your company. That’s where paid search results can come in very handy. By designating the exact wording of your search ads, you can transmit whatever message you desire, for example, “Voted Best Bistro of 2020.”

SEM paves the way for SEO

The insights you can derive from even a small SEM campaign are considerable and shed light on your website’s strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis SEO. For each keyword within your SEM campaign, you will receive the statistics for volume, click-through and conversion. Such data is a direct indicator of the exact products or services consumers are looking for in your industry or category and will allow you to prioritize the most popular keywords for SEO. Conversion statistics from your SEM campaign will give you an idea of whether your website’s landing pages meet the expectations of the searcher. For example, high click-through but low conversion means that traffic is relevant but your landing page fails to persuade. It’s best to address such problems before commencing SEO. Similarly, you can test your ad copy fast with SEM then apply those learnings to your choice of title tags and meta descriptions for SEO. Finally, Google’s analytics reporting for SEM allows you to discover new, relevant long tail keywords you might not have picked up during your original research.

SEM versus SEO

For any given page of search results, paid and organic search results take up 20% and 80% of the space on that page, respectively, and drive corresponding amounts of traffic. Ideally, your company appears in both paid and unpaid results and receives traffic from both those sources. However, if you’re not immediately visible in organic results, you can at least use SEM to garner 20% of that traffic, still a hefty chunk of highly relevant traffic.

The typical split of clicks between paid and organic search results in Hong Kong

Granted, paid ads don’t enjoy as much credibility as organic search results but they still drive a high volume of very relevant traffic and can certainly deliver conversions if your landing page meets the needs and intention of the searcher. Thus, SEM is always a powerful marketing tool and, indeed, it explains why it is the first thing we recommend to clients.

Generally, we encourage clients to pursue a two-pronged approach combining SEO and SEM. SEO provides a sound long-term foundation for site rank while SEM is tactically expedient and prevents the “leakage” of traffic to competitors’ websites. But, again, if you’re not ready for SEO, we recommend starting with SEM, because it can benefit your brand visibility and bottom line immediately. In the long term, SEM can function as a partial substitute for SEO.

FAQs

How long does it take before I see results?

It typically takes us one week to one month for set up (because we research keywords and review your website, to ensure that your landing pages contain suitable content and that your website’s conversion funnel, i.e. the journey between your ad and check-out, is smooth and efficient). Then, it takes another month to optimize your campaign, eliminating non-performing keywords, adding new keywords and adding negative keywords to repel irrelevant traffic. During this optimization phase, because experimentation and testing are taking place, your website could actually experience a dip in traffic. However, after this round of adjustments, we expect your traffic to stabilize and begin increasing. Thus, it takes approximately two months before an SEM campaign begins stable and steady optimization and your website begins benefiting from a corresponding increase in traffic.

How do I know the campaign is working?

Over time, the cost per click of a successful campaign will decline and click-through will rise. (Generally, we consider a 30% reduction in cost per click and a 30% increase in click-through to be good indicators that a campaign has been well optimized.) In short, you will be able to see that your SEM campaign is working if you see traffic to your site increasing. More traffic generally leads to more business. However, converting traffic once it’s landed on your site largely depends on whether your landing pages meet user intention and whether the user journey all the way to check out is smooth and well-designed.

We always vet the content of each ad’s landing page and perform a full review of the conversion funnel in advance of commencing an SEM campaign. But we cannot determine whether or how fast you implement our recommendations. Indeed, some clients run SEM campaigns without making these important changes beforehand. The result can be an increase in traffic without a corresponding increase in conversion. Thus, keep in mind that the success of an SEM campaign also depends on you, the client.

Finally, assuming that you have implemented our recommendations, your ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) should be positive and increasing by the end of three months. However, since there are fundamental issues over which we have no control, for example, product-market fit or insufficient landing pages, we cannot make predictions about the exact increase in ROAS.

How much does it cost and how does Cogney get paid?

In order for us to derive any genuine insight into a campaign, a certain amount of advertising needs to take place. Our value comes from optimization which we can't do if the numbers aren't moving fast enough to see patterns or make decisions. Generally, we recommend that clients run at least SGD 2,000 of ads per month on one platform. Cogney charges the client a percentage of overall spend or a minimum monthly management fee, whichever is greater. Note that our agency fees are separate from the cost of ads. We do not enter into success- or performance-based arrangements whereby our sole compensation is a percentage of sales resulting from the campaigns we manage.

Do you write the ads?

Yes, with ad copy subject to your final approval before it is made live.

Do you own the campaigns?

Full transparency with our clients is one of the bedrock rules of how we do business. Therefore, you always have direct access to your campaigns, reports and analytics. You can read more about our business philosophy here.