Short Term vs Long Term Revenue

A scenario I run into a lot in my position is that businesses want to drive the most revenue possible with their budget, especially in hard times when the business isn’t doing as well, without taking into account the long term effects of such a short sighted strategy.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes, a business gets too focused on driving last click revenue that they cut off the top of their marketing funnel, eventually traffic dries up, and we are forced to optimize to zero. Watching revenue and available search volume for brand terms slowly decline month after month is a painful thing to see. 

To prepare for anything (including a business rough patch) create a flexible account set up where you can pivot to short term revenue gathering while also having a plan to get back to a balanced approach with a healthy funding of nonbrand in the future when the business is back on track. 

Be careful how you present the results of your optimizations towards short term revenue to your finance and stakeholders. Make sure to educate them on why we don’t always spend money only on brand terms and that we will need to accept some performance declines when we’re ready to grow the business again. When you’re looking to grow the business focus on new customer acquisition numbers and iROAS (incremental return) rather than just topline revenue.