In our work with Benefit, we found that existing pages were ranking office 365 database organically for new search trends without any paid activity. We learned two things from this: these relatively new queries should be less competitive, and Benefit’s organically ranking pages for a particular search term had twice the Quality Score of non-ranking pages. That meant we could prioritize expanding paid coverage to the newer terms to take advantage of the opportunity.
►The results demonstrate the power of closing gaps in your data: With a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 5.2, bidding on this set of keywords produced a result 20% higher than the account average.
This brings us to a critical point: a holistic view of data is as important for effective reporting as it is for finding actionable insights. Since a company’s organic and paid listings can share the same results page, a change in the appearance of a single listing has consequences for how users interact with both organic and paid listings.
►With data separated, time and resources are wasted trying to understand why, say, organic traffic has declined, rather than replicating the lessons from increased overall visibility and market share.
Acting on insights based on combined data is an early step on the path to a total search approach.
For the most advanced brands, the potential for competitive advantage is even greater.
Developing a bidding strategy that reacts to an integrated organic search data feed can further improve ROI. For example, for keywords with high organic coverage and low competition, setting higher efficiency targets allows reduced spend to be reinvested in other areas of opportunity.
►Using auction-time bidding strategies ensures that the algorithm takes advantage of the real-time intent signals being collected, while data-driven attribution ensures that the value of a conversion is based on the value of the steps in the user journey – essential to any approach where organic and paid work together.
Finding areas of opportunity to reinvest in becomes easier with the additional data provided by closing the gaps, which in turn has the benefit of making Google Ads Smart Bidding even more powerful.
