Are you getting value from your search agency?

Managing budgets especially during  a recession is a key part to any marketing managers role. Ensuring you are getting value from external agencies from is absolutely key to running a successful online business or marketing department. Managing external agencies to tight KPI's is an absolute must if you are to ensure you are getting a suitable ROI.

Setting objectives for a search agency

When setting any objectives it is key to give them a perspective, the story & previous data. Agencies need to know the background performance & previous actions to enable them to help set actions to hit future targets. As with all marketing objectives it's key to relate them back to business objectives, crucially revenue.

KPI's

• Set monthly targets but have daily & weekly health checks
• Overlay other channels to understand performance vs search
• Relate them back to business objectives

Metrics to use:

• Traffic from search
• Leads from search
• Sales from search

Isolating brand and non-brand traffic in your search reporting

When setting targets or monitoring your search agencies performance ensure you seperate brand terms from other keywords that drive traffic to your website. Brand terms often account for more than 50% of search related visits, especially for well-known brands. In these cases, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.Brand key-terms can often skew search data as they will more than likely have a higher conversion rate, account for more repeat visits and be affected by other marketing activity. This means when setting metrics as per above you need three columns - Traffic from search, traffic from brand key-terms, traffic from non-brand key-terms. The final column is the area you would monitor your search agency on as this is the area they can monitor & track against.