SEM Benchmarks

Tips from Real Simple’s marketing director.

By FOLIO: Staff
07/01/2008

At the Circulation Management Conference and Expo, held in Chicago last month, Real Simple’s marketing director Kim Miller gave a series of tips on maximizing search engine marketing.

Miller optimizes and refreshes Real Simple’s paid search words on at least a daily basis. When the title came out with its Weddings offshoot, Miller and her team began bidding on related words and can now see an average of half a million pageviews each month as a result. Miller’s team on sister publication InStyle.com bought keywords related to Princess Diana during the summer of 2007—the 10 year anniversary of her death—and generated 250,000 page views in a very short amount of time by tapping into consumer demand.

But, perhaps more importantly, Miller talked about what doesn’t work. For one, paying too much for words. Miller says you should pay between 10 to 30 cents per click. If your site is primarily a content site, monetized by advertising dollars, “Your SEM campaign CPM shouldn’t be more than the ad CPM you charge for those site pages. If certain words are driving your campaign cpm up, kill those words to optimize your campaign.”