7 Ways to Build an Integrated Search Marketing Team – Part II

Posted on | March 2, 2010 | No Comments

Part I introduced the notion that SEM teams do not always speak the same language and in fact sometimes operate in silos more than they work as a team. In Part II we focus on 4 more ways in which a search marketing team can become more unified. There are no hard rules to achieve this – in the end it is people working with other people, which means that due consideration is required. The most basic principle is communication.

4. Ensure Minimum Performance Expectations are Clear – fact is, when you’ve been working for an organisation for some time it’s easy to forget that the steps required in performing a deliverable are not as obvious to new team members as they are to you! It is important the team members are aware of what is expected of them so that they are well positioned to deliver. Providing them with tidbits of information rather than clearly painting the full picture may result in unnecessary time wastage, possible confusion and clients receiving service below the expected bar.

5. Never Assume: Communicate – the saying goes, assumption is the mother of all #&*#$! It is safe to say that if your SEM team is not communicating, a number of opportunities are being missed, work is not being delegated properly and inefficiencies hinder team effectiveness. Don’t assume, confirm. If in doubt, confirm. Don’t ‘think‘ - know. If ever you are unsure of something, be it pertaining to a client deliverable, a relationship with team members or your own work, ask the relevant parties for the required insight or clarification.

6. Communicate With Others as You Wish to be Communicated With – with the dawn of digital technology it appears that two things have been lost – the art of the full sentence and picking up the telephone. One liner answers to emails have their place in certain situations, but providing some clarity and detail around client deliverables may certainly help all team members to get fully on board a given task. The same goes for giving task instructions – the quality of those instructions is often a measure of the number of follow up questions. Rather than getting annoyed at a fellow team member for asking too many questions, use it as a quality benchmark against your instructions. Are you asking someone to perform miracles by holding key facts to yourself – thus wasting their time while they scramble for solutions and answers?

7. Basic Accreditation – ensure that the search marketing team is proficient in the basic fundamentals by providing training in industry recognised certifications offered by the search engines. Even though this type of certification is not always as ‘leading edge’ as other external training programs, these certifications offer a solid core in the ‘basics’ – information that the entire team should know. Sometimes, it is valuable to return to the core for a quick refresher, even for those SEM team members who have years of experience because basics can be forgotten too. Not only will this assist in setting the basic benchmark for both minimum required skills and knowledge for the entire team, but it may help streamline processes. Experienced SEM practitioners develop their own style of management – ever been frustrated working on a project in which three different team members apply different settings, management decisions and bidding rules to a PPC campaign? Returning to the basics may assist in cleaning up these types of scenarios.

Category: SEM Agency
Tags: Search Engine Marketing

7 Ways to Build an Integrated Search Marketing Team – Part I

Posted on | February 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

The search marketing industry itself is still very young, with ‘veterans’ having 10 – 15 years of experience the timeline of the SEM world closely mimics that of search engine creation, growth and expansion. Up to a few years ago, two years of experience in the SEM industry was regarded as significant while in 2010, the rough industry standard for ‘experienced’ is 3-5 years.

Many SEM specialists learned the ropes in their first position, perhaps in a start up their repertoire grew as the business expanded or they have a programming background and taught themselves SEO. Whether they took some online courses or developed their knowledge through extensive reading, SEM is no derivatives trading, that is to say, until a couple of years ago there were no university courses that taught SEM skills nor how to think as an SEM specialist. What this means is that the skills, level of expertise and SEM background is very fragmented and varied. This translates directly to SEM teams working together, whether in independent organisations or within SEM agencies, do they operate cohesively or in silos?

Speaking the Same Language

How do you ensure that your SEM team is speaking the same language? The saying goes, ‘the only constant in this industry is change’ so as an employer how do you ensure that your SEM team moves ahead of the tide, has the skill set that puts them at the top of the bell-curve and ensure that any new team members are effectively integrated?

There is no steadfast methodology in place and the solution will vary from organisation to organisation, but below we’ll explore 7 ways to proactively ensure that SEM teams work together in an integrated manner:

1. Offer a Robust Internal Training Program – ensure that new recruits are versed in all the important components of SEM. In the training process the new team member should start to develop a sense of performance expectations – the minimum benchmark by which client deliverables are measured. By omitting to do so right from the start of the candidate’s tenure may create dissonance and result in a discovery process during which unnecessary time is wasted. Don’t make recruits guess what is expected of them.

2. Share Internal Knowledge & Skills – grow as a team, rather than just individually. Given the accumulation of skills & knowledge in the SEM industry is so fragmented, this will result in a team with rich pockets of expertise, from varying disciplines. To put this into perspective, it is not like a legal team who will have had similar training & education. For an SEM team, that is so diversified, this can either be a great strength or an almost insurmountable challenge if the team does not share knowledge and work together. Actively sharing knowledge will not only build intellectual property but also create a strong team, capable of handling bigger projects, more demanding clients and greater responsibilities.

3. External Training to Develop Expertise – you’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again – the SEM industry is in a state of permanent flux. Information is readily available, industry professionals share sound advice on blogs, webinars, books and whitepapers. This has allowed clients to become increasingly knowledgeable and for this reason it is critical that SEM specialists are always a few steps ahead of clients. If the client’s expertise grows and they no longer feel that the specialist / agency is offering real remarkable value, they may start to consider to take their online operation in house. It is important to continually push the boundaries of your knowledge and industry required skills.

Category: SEM Agency
Tags: Search Engine Marketing

Does Your Search Marketing Team Set the Gold Standard?

Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

As a search marketing agency develops its positioning in the market, whether it is to serve a particular business niche; work with small to medium sized businesses or as a market leader, developing enterprise level solutions for multinationals; it is important to set and maintain a service benchmark by which the agency can be measured.

Within the search marketing team, a gold standard should be set as the benchmark at the highest level towards which every member on the team continually strives. When delivering client solutions, it is key that this gold standard drives the quality of the work presented to the client. What is more important is that every single member of the team delivers this identified level of service quality. Certainly, there will always be a level of hierarchy in skill sets, in which some members will have greater depth & breadth of experience; stronger analytical skills or quite simply they’ve been in the game for a long time.
This should, however, not affect the gold standard, because each team member should be armed with the resources, assistance and training in order to deliver at the expected benchmark.

It’s a Two-Way Street

How does an agency ensure that the quality of work delivered to clients meets its benchmark of excellence? The most obvious answer lies in recruitment – the agency must be able to correctly identify the types of people that meet the agency philosophy and possess the right skill set in order to deliver the goods.

However, beyond the recruitment process, once a candidate has been hired – the new team member needs to be integrated into the team so as to deliver solutions that can proudly bear the agency stamp. This is not to say that the individual should be so deeply pulled into the ‘status quo’ so as to stifle critical thought or be unable to offer a fresh perspective on how things are done, but without some level of integration – it is the individual’s stamp being left on the work and on client impressions, rather than the agency stamp. This can become a problem if there are certain individuals within the agency who are performing at a higher level than their counterparts. It may reflect negatively on the agency – if an individual is held above the agency itself and clients may poorly evaluate the agency if they notice a marked difference in service quality between team members.

Pulling in the Same Direction

By nurturing the skills and required core competences of the entire team, this not only serves to create a stronger team but it also raises the benchmark, so that the gold standard is always being challenged and driven higher. If the team shares ideas, strategies, core strengths and together, challenges the way that things are done this will not only improve the quality of deliverables sent to the client but ensure that everyone is clear on what the expectations are.

No agency will raise its gold standard by operating in silos – without spreading the wealth of knowledge, intellectual property and collective training. Without clear and effective communication, one team member’s interpretation of a service may be completely different from that of another member’s. If both interpretations are equally excellent – this is a positive result, but imagine the wasted synergy if these ideas are never shared and combined to create an even more powerful final result. Conversely, the results can be devastating if poor quality work is sent to a client because of a weak interpretation of the requirements.

In a service driven environment such as search marketing, not only is it fundamental for an agency to invest in its people, but it is equally important to ensure that the teams who work together share the same vision and have an understanding of excellence that drives up the average, rather than averaging out to a mediocre service delivery standard.

Category: SEM Agency
Tags: SEO Standards

Paid Search Receiving its Due? – Part II

Posted on | February 9, 2010 | No Comments

In Part I, we looked at two ways in which paid search may not be receiving its full credit – when lifetime customer value is not measured properly and when online sales tracking is not properly implemented in order to capture all PPC driven clicks.

In Part II, the focus becomes more complex because we dive into the dynamic elements that the advertiser needs to understand in order to correctly attribute the PPC click to a sale.

3. Your Cookie Window is Too Long or Too Short: Now this depends on your business model, the type of product that you sell, whether it is B2B or B2C, what the cost is etc etc. The important element to consider in allocating the appropriate cookie window is the length of your sales cycle – if you cookie window is too short, as in, it is set at 30 days but people take on average 50 days to make the purchase decision then not enough sales will be attributed to paid search and it will appear that your campaign is underperforming. On the other hand, if your cookie window is too long, you may then be attributing too much revenue to the PPC click, particularly if your selling cycle is short.

4. How is Multi-Channel Attribution Handled? Imagine someone who has never visited your website, clicks on a PPC driven keyword and lands on it. Then that person fulfils the desired conversion on the website. Thus, the keyword that was clicked on can be directly attributed to the conversion. That’s the simple version.

Most frequently though, searchers visit your website multiple times, via multiple channels – both offline and online. If this is the case and somebody visited your website through three different channels on three separate occasions, making a purchase on the fourth visit, which of the channels and which of the clicks should receive the revenue attribution?

The Last Click – This way you are in a sense disregarding the first three clicks and their marketing channels, which means that they are not receiving some percentage of due credit. This has to date been the most common form of attribution within paid search, wherein, no matter what the interaction of the searcher was prior to the purchase / conversion, it is the keyword directly prior to action that is given 100% credit for the conversion.

The First Click – Vice versa to last click, this model turns things around and ultimately says that no matter what happened after the first click, it is that first interaction with the website that is ultimately the most important. So, 100% attribution is allocated to the first click within the conversion window.

Linear Allocation – This method credits each touchpoint that led to the final conversion. If four visits were required to drive the conversion, each one is given equal credit for the conversion. Even though this may not be fundamentally the case, such equal attribution, at least this method recognises each touchpoint rather than dismissing them like last and first click do.

Weighted Allocation – This is the most complex of the models because it is in itself dynamic and unique to each business. This model takes into account all your marketing touchpoints and weights each touchpoint according to a statistically developed model to attribute revenue for the sale.

Most businesses will either be doing no attribution modelling at all, or they will focus on the first three, given their relative mathematical simplicity. In a perfect world, we would all be using some variation of the weighted model.

Category: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: Pay-Per-Click

Paid Search Receiving its Due? – Part I

Posted on | February 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

Gone are the days when PPC was new, sexy and could do no wrong – in the wake of a crippling recession that continues to hold us in its grip in 2010, even online marketing programs are under greater scrutiny.

Clients are asking more tricky questions about their paid search programs in order to evaluate their performance. They are tinkering with sales data and trying to make the right attribution calls. The client is becoming more sophisticated and agencies need the intellectual property and arsenal to be able to provide the answer even before the question is posed.

But, are clients asking the right questions and drawing the right conclusions? Or, are they beating to death an excellent marketing medium by over-analysing data incorrectly and making bad business calls as a result, such as dropping PPC spend or pulling out altogether?

There are a number of factors, if not measured / addressed properly, which will significantly skew paid search results. We will explore four of these factors in this two-part post:

1. Measuring Full Customer Value – When you get a paid search driven purchase, are you fully measuring the value of that purchase or are you selling PPC short? Beyond the immediate short-term benefit of a sale, there are long- term benefits that should not be overlooked:

Customer Lifetime Value: If you make monthly recurring revenue from a client, this should be factored into the sale and attributed to paid search. Certainly, recurring revenue will be a factor of attrition rate but perhaps estimate your average attrition rate and calculate the real lifetime value of a sale rather than just the initial value of the purchase. This will provide you with a much more accurate picture of sales margin.

Furthermore, depending on the type of business in which you operate, you may accrue the value of repeat purchases. If you run a solid business and happy customers return, the long term value of the paid search driven sale may far exceed the marketing cost to capture that initial sale.

Customer Referral Value: WOM (word-of-mouth) and direct referrals are incredibly valuable given their credibility. This is ‘free’ marketing that should not be overlooked!

2. Is Sales Tracking Fully Functional? Ironic, that with paid search the costs are completely transparent – we see all the costs incurred, but we don’t always see all the sales generated by PPC. This is for a plethora of reasons, some of which are simpler to solve than others:

Tracking code is incorrectly set up or the javascript is located in the footer so if a content heavy, image laden page takes a long time to load, the searcher may already have jumped to the next page before the tracking parameters have kicked in to record the searcher on that page. Searchers disable cookies making cookie tracking redundant or they use one machine for the initial search, only to make the purchase from another machine, at work, with a completely different IP address and a new cookie to track. Or if the cookie window is not long enough, the searcher comes back, via an organic click so the sale is not correctly attributed to PPC. The reasons are many, they are diverse and sometimes complicated – but it is important to know about them and try to fix them in order to minimise that margin of error.

In the next post we’ll dive a little bit more deeply into understanding cookie windows and multi-channel attribution.

Category: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: Pay-Per-Click

Google 0 vs. China 1

Posted on | January 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Google 0 vs. China 1 Google has a “new approach to China” as David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer put it on January 12 on Google’s official blog. The post quite directly points a finger at China as the source of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. The primary goal of this attack is believed to have been to attain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Why did Google share this information? To cite the post: “this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech…”

‘Don’t be Evil’ Now?
Four years ago when Google entered the Chinese market, a post on the company’s official blog implored to us to understand that Google’s “continued engagement with China is the best (perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there.”

Then it was all about working alongside the mighty Chinese dragon for the greater good of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible.” Perhaps it is worth noting that when Google entered the Chinese market in January 2006, world economic growth forecasts were looking rosy on the back of world growth rate of 4 percent in 2005.

In 2010, after trudging through a miserable 2009, growth is expected to be sluggish at best while the world economy continues to dig itself out of what the IMF has called “the most severe recession since World War II.” Perhaps Google has found a convenient excuse to exit a market in which the costs have been rather significant and the return lower than expected.

Perhaps upon entering the heavily censored Chinese Internet market in 2006, Google had not quite anticipated the resolute strength of a Communist run power. History has taught us that Western charm alone cannot bring down the Iron Curtain.

Then there are market realities such as Baidu, the Beijing based, locally run search engine in China that dominates the Internet market. As at Q2 2009, Baidu held 61.6% of the market, followed by Google China with a share of 29.1%. The other engines were but a blip on the radar with Yahoo China holding 5.6%.

Certainly, one cannot discount the challenges of operating in such a controlled and censored environment particularly in the online market, which thrives upon speed, openness and freedom of expression. China doesn’t make it easy for foreign companies to operate on its turf, but it was never was going to make it easy. China did not create any misconceptions, perhaps it was gallant Google that spoke too soon when they said: “We’re in this for the long haul.”

Category: Google

What’s the Point of PPC?

Posted on | January 18, 2010 | No Comments

Perhaps shocking but true, is the fact that there are still brand / lead generation / marketing managers out there who have allocated a marketing budget to PPC spend, but they do not quite grasp its purpose. What seems to happen is that upper management has experience with the PPC medium and they understand the need to include it in the marketing mix. The message is thus communicated and the worker bees implement as instructed.

The Agency Experience

Imagine now that the marketing manager in question is tasked with working with a search marketing agency who is to manage the PPC strategy. If the marketing manager does not understand the purpose of PPC this creates a number of challenges in effectively working together:

- Goals & KPIs: It is difficult to tie a KPI to a marketing function that is not understood. Furthermore, unrealistic expectations may be created: if a realistic cost-per-conversion is $1,000 but the marketing manager arbitrarily sets $500 as the goal, they are setting up the agency to fail. Before business goals can be tied back to PPC, it is important to understand the role that PPC is expected to play relative to other marketing mediums. Reasonable expectations need to be created so that PPC is not treated as the online marketing panacea only to be dumped later when it fails to meet the unattainable success.

- Internal Infrastructure for Success: A significant challenge lies in working with a company / department that does not possess the internal infrastructure to measure the success of the PPC efforts. For example, if the agency is tasked with driving conversions from a landing page and number of conversions is a measured KPI at the end of the month, then it is essential that the marketing manager is able to provide feedback on the value of those conversions. Without this information, how is the agency to measure the value of their approach if they cannot ascertain whether conversions are driving sales?

- (They think) PPC is Not Working: Often, it appears that PPC is not given the credit that it is due because of a lack of understanding and poor tracking of revenue attribution. When the client sees that the PPC cost is rising but sales directly from the PPC click are low, they immediately assume that the expenditure is lost. Little thought is given to the fact that PPC may have been the searcher’s first click, but the sale came with the third click, pending further research and after an organic search for the brand name.

The branding effect of PPC is a value that appears to be frequently overlooked. There seems to be this unrealistic expectation that a PPC click (thus incurred cost) should result in some form of sale or conversion, and be directly attributable to that conversion. That would be ideal – in a perfect world. Perhaps the organic click was a result of the searcher seeing the PPC ad but choosing to click instead in the natural search results. Even though this human behaviour cannot be tracked, ultimately PPC deserves the credit.

Whenever starting to work with a client on a PPC project it is important to gauge their understanding of PPC in the marketing mix. By educating clients, right from the onset, this will create a much more productive and pleasant working relationship for both parties because the project is built on delivering realistic expectations. Do not assume that even though a PPC budget has been allocated, the person managing that budget is convinced of the necessity of that expenditure. You’d be surprised at how quickly that budget could dry up if expectations are not aligned.

Category: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: Pay-Per-Click

Narcissism Reigns in 2009

Posted on | January 11, 2010 | No Comments

Our lives are now deeply entrenched in the online world, with the proliferation of smart phones, laptops and Wi-Fi access at our fingertips it is nowadays rare not to be connected. These days, the irony is that if you want to escape from all this connectivity you actually have to make a concerted effort to ‘disconnect’. With cellphone roaming, skipping the country to go on holiday is no longer a guaranteed reprieve from the online obsession – unless of course, you are ‘lucky’ enough to be headed to a 3^rd world refuge, where Wi-Fi is not ubiquitous, you still have to pay for an Internet connection and your phone cannot pick up a signal. What is interesting to know, amidst this online activity, is what we’re actually doing in that vast space of the World Wide Web.

The answer, provided by Experian Hitwise, is not a surprise, why, we are engaging, connecting, sharing, uploading photos, expressing excitement, frustration, disdain and in the latest craze even updating our friends, and friends of friends of the colour or our underwear. That’s right, we’re ‘Facebooking’, jumping on ‘FB’ because the most searched term in 2009 was Facebook.

Hitwise Top Searched Terms 2009

Surprising, I think not. It is our portal to our friends, our uninterrupted monologue as we share what is happening in our own lives while absorbing the events of those around us. From engagements, births to wedding photos, it all happens on Facebook. We are more connected and more involved with people that we might never have spoken to again, but on Facebook we can now track whom old highschool friends are dating and quite actively track the dating successes & failures of those who are still playing the field.

Facebook will no doubt continue to be important in 2010. I only hope that as we dive further into the digital world, we do not completely forget that there is interaction beyond the digital screen.

Category: Social Media
Tags: Search Engine Marketing

SEMPO – From Greatness to Mediocrity?

Posted on | October 31, 2009 | No Comments

Valiant Arbiter Did you know that within the search marketing industry, there exists a professional non-profit organization built to provide a foundation for industry growth through fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing?

No? Well, there is: SEMPO – Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.

Maybe as a first phase, SEMPO should focus on ‘fostering awareness’ of its own existence and promoting itself in the search industry.

In 2003 perhaps, when the search marketing industry was fledgling, barely in existence and Google started to gain some traction, SEMPO came galloping in, the valiant arbiter in a lawless, unchartered online world.

Suddenly there was a professional institution that stood for the search marketer – creating credibility where mostly business was done in dark waters. In the world of black hat, cloaking and doorway pages, there was little to define the ‘white hat’ marketer.

The SEMPO logo was the sign of a professional elite that stood for ethical search marketing and upholding the integrity of the field. Brandishing the SEMPO logo was a sign of a safe haven for hundreds of businesses that tried in vain to navigate these murky online SEO waters.

What happened to SEMPO as a professional organization? For an organization that calls itself ‘international’, its 700 strong membership base is modest at most if not rather embarrassing.

What went wrong?

This is not something that an impartial observer can hope to answer, but it certainly seems that in the tempestuous evolution that has swept the search marketing industry in the last few years, SEMPO lost sight of what it wanted to be. In this struggle, without a clear goal or direction, the organization has continued to trudge along, but perhaps rather aimlessly.

Even the SEMPO website looks rather tired and outdated. One could say that SEMPO has completely missed the boat on Web2.0 and could do with a significant revamp of the site. Even the case studies section seems to have hit a standstill with the archive only going as far back at October 2005!

What about a blog? Twitter? Real-time updates? Interactivity?

It all just feels a little bit stale, which is sad, depressing in a way. How is it that the organization purporting to be the official representative of one of the most exciting, fast moving and evolving industries in the world, can be getting it so wrong?

The irony lies in the fact that it is some of the best of the best in search, who came together to start SEMPO. Has all this amalgamated greatness resulted in a formula that produces mediocrity?

Category: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: SEO Standards

PPC Branded Sales Down?

Posted on | October 25, 2009 | No Comments

PPC's not to blame PPC driven year-over-year branded sales are down – so the first natural recourse is to find someone to blame. Logical deduction would have it that it is the fault of whoever is managing the PPC campaign, because surely, if the PPC campaign was driving strong branded sales last year, well then, what has changed this year to lower those sales figures? Surely, it should just be identified and fixed.

This is, unfortunately, not quite that simple. It is difficult to exert a great measure of control over branded sales online – certainly, a branded PPC campaign can facilitate branded sales but it cannot be managed in the way that the competitive landscape is managed within non-branded terms.

Whether people are actually searching under a branded term is a function of the strength of the brand, word-of-mouth and offline brand building marketing efforts designed to drive branded online traffic. The branded PPC campaign may have been built, but certainly it does not mean they will come and it is not the role of the branded terms online to make them come.

Not PPC?! Who’s the Culprit?

There could be a number of contributing factors to lower PPC branded sales. You should explore as deeply as you can to determine the most logical answer to your particular business scenario.

- Cannibalism: If you have affiliates, this would be the first place to take a careful dive and investigate whether affiliate sales have gone up while branded sales are down. As much as affiliates are commissioned to in the long term increase your business profits, affiliates are known to employ a number of less favourable tactics to increase their own sales and resultant commissions.

Are affiliates advertising under your brand name, mimicking your ad copy and even the look & feel of your site? If they are sneaky and advertising directly against you or outside of the hours on which you advertise under the brand name – this could well increase affiliate sales at the expense of your own.

It could also be another factor – if organic site sales are up on branded terms, then that’s a good thing – you’re saving money on PPC costs and getting more sales organically.

- Offline Marketing is Down: If you’re not doing the same types of things that you were doing last year in other marketing channels this will have a very real affect on your branded PPC sales. Even if you cut those catalogue mail-outs by a few 1000 or cut a radio advertising segment, this could significantly impact your PPC sales. Fact is, the act of searching online is an intent driven activity. If people are not aware of your brand and not thinking about it – then, they’re not searching for it either.

- Worldwide Economic Recession: If Average Order Value (AOV) has dropped, year-over-year, it may just be a sign of the times that your customers are making fewer orders at lower values that previously. There’s not much you can do about that.

- Competitors Outdoing You: If a close competitor has ramped up their offline marketing efforts or is offering a significant promotion – this could very well be pulling away sales from your brand. You need to monitor competitor activity in order to be to retaliate accordingly.

Most of the factors that could contribute to lower PPC branded sales have very little to do with the actual PPC campaign itself. This is why you cannot manage a PPC campaign in a silo, you need to be aware of not only micro environmental factors but also the greater macro economy.

Category: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: Pay-Per-Click

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