Total Search - Why You Can't Do It

The concept of ‘Total Search’ – a unified approach that seamlessly combines all search channels into one comprehensive solution – has long been discussed, presented, and packaged up by agencies, brands, and marketing evangelists. And yet, few can claim to actually be achieving a unified search strategy.

From the ambiguity of the term’s meaning to siloed team structures, we explore the fundamental challenges hindering brands from realising Total Search, and steps you can take to start implementing it.

It sounds simple doesn’t it, but what actually is Total Search? It means different things to different organisations and even different people within the same organisation. Is it looking at paid search and organic together? The whole search result, including content formats and search features? Google and Bing? Or every possible search engine?

Your answer may well be different from that of your CMO or your counterpart across paid or organic, and nailing this is the first step towards establishing a shared language, expectation and set of goals.

We recommend having an ambitious vision with iterative steps to achieving it. Multi-channel, multi-format strategies are complex, so start with paid and organic integration on Google first. This will typically represent a large audience to draw meaningful insights from, as well as sharing the same audience across two channels with comparatively easy-to-mesh data points.

Your paid search and SEO team don’t talk to each other. We’ve seen it countless times where paid search is run out of the Performance team and SEO is in the Technology team and by the time they report to the same person, it’s too distant to drive cross-team collaboration.

This creates inefficiency. Successful ad copy is not shared with the SEO team to improve metadata, negatively impacting both SEO performance and ad campaign effectiveness due to potential cannibalisation. All the while, paid search teams chase cheap Cost Per Acquisitions (CPAs) on brand to keep the blended metric down, which eats into SEO brand revenue.

Whilst this was totally normal (the skills required to succeed in Paid Search and SEO are very different), the team structure now needs to be built around the people we’re trying to target, instead of bucketing skill sets.

With separate teams, there are inevitably separate targets, and a team or individual will do whatever they can within their remit to hit their own target. They can be unaware of the impact that is having on other channels. Web platform teams make Paid landing pages unavailable and Paid teams run campaigns on SEO’s best-performing keywords.

Either the targets are against different metrics or they’re the same metric but without any consideration of the impact from other teams.

Let’s be honest, it’s not easy to combine the metrics. Do you use your analytics package as a single source of truth and ignore the in-platform metrics or do you try to dashboard a combined set of metrics from platforms?

We’ve experimented a lot here and trialed using Google Analytics (GA) data and attribution exclusively as well as reporting on Sessions from GA vs. clicks in Google Ads or clicks in Google Search Console (GSC) vs. clicks in Google Ads. Each one has pros and cons and it’s own way of attributing value, which tends to favour paid channels.

There’s no right or wrong answer, and in some ways, this makes it harder to settle because there needs to be a mutual agreement on the limitation or bias of the final metric.

You need to be equally and sufficiently mature in both channels to benefit from Total Search. If your technical infrastructure is poor and organic visibility is unstable or underdeveloped, then you won’t get the most out of Total Search. It’s also likely the SEO and development teams won’t have the bandwidth to take on or share new data sources.

Conversely, if your use of Paid Search is inefficient and your targeting, messaging, placements and formats aren’t honed, then the better Return on Investment (ROI) is to optimise those before considering what SEO is doing.

This isn’t to say that both channels can’t mature by learning from each other, just that an imbalance or lack of maturity in one channel is going to make it harder for both teams to pull towards the same goal effectively.

On the face of it, this sounds ludicrous—but it’s true and we learnt this the hard way. You have a budget and if you don’t spend it all, you’ll have a smaller budget next year, so it’s not in your interest to save money. You want to reinvest it.

Instead of focusing on cost reductions as a result of a Total Search strategy, surface opportunities to repurpose those savings into reaching new audiences instead. Yes, you can save hundreds of thousands of pounds, but by repurposing this budget for keyword expansion or testing new channels, for example, you can drive an incremental two million pounds. This approach requires more analysis upfront to identify areas for expansion—and a rigorous testing process, which will establish the level of incrementality for the test channel, but by looking at new opportunities for growth, the project becomes far more compelling to those responsible for budget allocation.

That’s six very understandable reasons for not executing a Total Search strategy, but we’re here to help you overcome them. Here are some actions to take.

You need a group of people across both channels who share the same focus. This could be a re-organisation of your Marketing and Technology teams or, more easily, a working group across disciplines with regular check-ins and clear lines of communication. This team will start by setting out what they want to achieve, how they’re going to measure that, what tactics they might need to use, what resources are required, and any potential blockers or risks.

Identify who this activity is going to affect. If you intend to repurpose brand PPC spend into demand-generating media outside of search, your blended CPA within search will jump considerably. Is there anyone senior looking at CPA as a success metric? That person needs to be taken on an education journey to understand the ambitions of the activity. They need to have access to and be able to benchmark your new success metric and all reporting should be around the combined performance of channels rather than looking at each in isolation. For digitally mature clients with large budgets, Dynamic Media Mix Modelling (DMM) is the gold-standard solution here.

Show the incremental gains that can be achieved if overlapping spend is re-purposed. Show the expected impact of applying the best call-to-action, from paid ads to organic meta descriptions. Quantify the amount of time that’s currently wasted by attempting to share data between paid search and SEO teams when it isn’t centralised or democratised.

There are a lot of potential advantages, but they’re not clear-cut, especially with teams caring about different metrics. If you can make it easy to see the benefits and they speak directly to your stakeholders’ interests, you are far more likely to get buy-in.

It’s natural to hear “Total Search” and immediately jump to the conclusion that you’re going to turn off brand spend and hope organic picks it up. But both teams need to build bridges first, and they can do this by sharing data and learnings to improve both channels simultaneously. There are two great reasons for doing so. Firstly, performance should increase across both channels, which gives both teams the confidence to use more adventurous tactics later on. Secondly, if you jump straight into turning paid search off for certain keywords, you stop collecting fresh data for them and reduce your overall pool of insights. This limits the combined growth of both channels over time.

We’ve built a Total Search solution that tackles these problems head-on and brings teams together to share a unified approach that works for everyone. The use of incrementality testing proves growth opportunities in new channels before hold-out tests confirm whether all paid search is incremental and at what return.

To do this requires deep channel-level expertise to elevate the maturity of both channels by quickly and effectively sharing data. This is a key component of any Total Search strategy, growing maturity to a stage that enables testing and budget reallocation.

This article was originally published on RocketMill's website.