Link between SEA & CRM is Missing? – Scale Search Audience Performance by CRM!

It is a common feeling for SEM marketers that the link between CRM and SEA is missing. This is because the bridge between CRM and SEA has not been built in companies.

This data building needs lots of investments, involving strong collaboration among SEM, Business Intelligence, Controlling and CRM etc. External CRM tools or outsourced agencies are often utilized to match the customer data, spot new leads, and align the 1^st party customer data with customers’ behaviors on social media etc.

Many companies use Data Management Platform (DMP) to build this link, but not every company, and not for every market.

RLSA & CRM Data

In SEA, For audience-based management, we have a good option of RLSA strategy. By virtue of RLSA, we can easily split the strategy for acquisition traffic and remarketing list traffic; within remarketing list traffic, we can use bid modifier to bid down or up based on different behaviors of audiences.

This remarketing list can be created through Google analytics. SEA managers create the list, usually based on audience web behaviors: buyers, non-buyers, bouncers, page view >5 etc.. However, if CRM data can be exchanged with SEA managers, the power of remarketing list can be even stronger.

How stronger? We can (and should) segment the ad message with remarketing list.

Segmented Ad Message

As all the SEM marketers know, in search campaigns, it is very important to send out ad messages based on segmented audiences. For example, new customers should get messages that encourage them to come to the website: “Shop now, get 10% off on your first order!”, while customers with special category interest should get messages that encourage them to buy this category.

Google has a great function to achieve this sequencing and segmented ad messages:

This IF function can target audiences based on the list you create, write segmented ads and fallback ads, and make different ad messaging to different audiences. To achieve this amazing audience ad targeting, we need not only standard audience definition creation (new visitors, returning visitors etc..), but more granular definitions coming from CRM.

Once CRM data is on board for SEA, the search campaigns will achieve to a more dynamic and strategic level.

Let’s talk about CRM data onboarding in the next post!