What would happen to your online marketing efforts if Google AdWords got hacked and suddenly stopped serving your ads? If the answer to that scares you, then it’s probably time to start de-risking your online strategy by adopting a more diversified approach to your marketing efforts.

Like a solid financial portfolio, your online marketing effort needs to be able to respond and adapt to changes in market conditions, unexpected problems, and shifts that could easily sink the less adaptable.

In the current, Google dominated field of search for example it’s all too easy to put all your efforts into a single search engine, not worrying overly that your efforts in with other engines are poorly maintained and given scant resource. It’s not just search either, Dominant sites in other fields can also absorb all your energies in a similar way; Facebook anyone?

Is it Possible to De-Risk Search?

The exact numbers vary of course but Google currently hold in the region of 65 to 75% of the overall search space. Having such a dominant player in any market is of course a risk, but businesses tend to magnify the problem by skewing their reliance on this dominant partner.

If you look at your share of business from paid search, chances are you’re going to be receiving at least ten points higher from Google than their actual market share at the time. Many businesses have well over 90% of their paid search traffic coming from Google.

Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s emerging Bing Search product both command reasonable, double digit percentages of the search space, but often don’t command the same amount of attention from search marketers.

If you remain singular in your approach to paid search you run into the “all eggs in a single basket” risk, but you also create an additional problem. Working with several suppliers in any market gives you a better market insight and best practice learning picked up from one supplier can be adopted by the rest. Applying something interesting you learn from one of the smaller engines to your AdWords account could potentially reap huge rewards.

Risk and the Customer

In the corporate world risk is associated with powerful customers, those that contribute a large percentage of your overall sales. When you’re looking at online customers, buying mainly from the consumer markets there’s much less chance of single customers creating risk in the same way.

There are still though customer groups. These are the different types of customer that buy your product and they can be analysed in many ways, including things like where they live, their demographic profiles, and how they find you.

It’s in this analysis and your understanding of your customer types that you can address the level of risk you hold. To demonstrate this, let’s analyse customers by traffic sources. Let’s imagine you have four customer groups that you split by the products they buy.

In this example it’s easy to see where the risk is. For some reason the customers who buy the products from Group D only reach you through Yahoo. Finding out why this is and then trying to reach those customers in other ways will considerably de-risk the products in that group, probably increasing sales into the bargain.

There are many ways you can slice your data to identify and close customer risks and the benefit of doing so is very often extended much beyond simple risk reduction.

Keywords for All Occasions

When we talk about keywords we tend to talk in terms of competitiveness, volume, uniqueness, and conversion. It’s much less often that we consider risk and contingency as it appears incongruous to our optimisation mentality.

Optimisation leads to a prioritisation of terms within an area whereby you place your effort in those terms that yield the greatest rewards for the optimum effort. This is all quite correct of course and you should continue to do this. For the purposes of risk though, it’s what you do with the suboptimal terms that it’s worth considering.

The question is what happens when your keywords stop working? Keywords can stop working suddenly or gradually over time for almost limitless reasons, and dependencies far beyond your control.

Retaining and working with your optimisation data and analysis allows you to create plans and “what if…” scenarios should your most profitable keywords fail. This analysis is also very useful in the continual development of your existing optimisation plans, so you most likely use it already, it’s just worth looking at it from a fresh perspective.

Out in the Market

In general risk terms it’s better to have lots of small pots than one or two huge ones. When you consider the spread and diversity of your online sources, it’s worth paying attention to your areas of risk and asking yourself whether you should be worried.

I hope I’ve shown in these examples that risk is something more than a negative concern and door you need to close, but rather a business opportunity that serves a dual purpose. If you can reduce your risk by increasing your sales, I don’t think anyone will argue with that.