So, thanks to my gambling crazed roommate (we had a huge whiteboard full of lines and proposition bets for Super Bowl Sunday), I’ve began discovering a lot of similarities between gambling and SEM campaigns, among them:
The House Always Wins
It doesn’t matter the client you are working for or the affiliate program that you are in, the Search Engines are always going to cash in on your success / failure as long as you are running a campaign with them. Same thing with gambling, the house always takes a percentage of the payouts and/or stacks the odds against you no matter what the outcome.
Calculated Risks
Professional gamblers read through tons of statistics on the games they are betting on. Chances are, they bet the most amount of money on the games that they feel will most likely go in their favor. Even card counting systems in Blackjack, such as the Hi Opt 1 emphasises on betting more when the card stack is in your favor.
In SEM, you always have to spend money in order to (ultimately) make money. There are certain keywords that we feel like might be profitable and others that are more borderline. Now, after working in the industry for a while you kind of get a feel of what might work and what might not (and for the most part, I am usually more right than wrong), but I’ve been wrong before and I am sure I’ll be wrong in the future. In the end you usually come out ahead but that doesn’t mean you don’t go into the red a couple of times a year. Calculated risks are still risks… which brings up point #3:
Know When to Go For It and When to Quit
Good gamblers will stay away from stuff that they know will most likely end badly, for example a sports betting line that could go either way (meaning a 50/50 shot at best) or games that significantly favors the house (slot machines).
In SEM, there are campaigns that clients like to run that you know is most likely to fall short from their expectations from the get go, for example a parity product where the competitor has a much better offer and has a significant edge in brand awareness and/or SEM due to historical account performances. In this case it might be wise to have a discussion with the client telling them that in order for them to succeed they’ll need to do X, Y and Z in addition to running a SEM campaign and that it’s not possible to hit their lofty goals. If the client has other products that are more competitive, suggesting allocating a bigger portion of their advertising budget to that product instead.
Until next time!
Moses