Your PPC Client Resisting Change?

Posted on | March 18, 2010 | No Comments

It appears that there are still a number of people out there who implement a paid search campaign in AdWords and then once it is operating at an acceptable level proceed to switch their minds off and forget about it.

Once they have ascertained that the existing CTR is acceptable, CPC is not bad and conversion rates going well, depending on their relative definition of ‘well’, they become opposed to the idea of changing anything, to avoid disrupting this status quo. What this means is that ad copy goes through little revision, if ever, and landing pages, well, let’s just say landing pages are as new as the 90s.

In the game of paid search where incremental changing, testing and analysing are required elements to increase performance, this can be a major setback. How do you deal with a client who simply does not wish to send a ripple through calm waters?

1. Persevere & Educate – It is imperative that you show your client the value of testing in PPC. Present them with white papers, industry citations, case studies that discuss the importance and successes of A/B Testing, of both landing pages and ad copy.

2. PPC Success is Relative – Help your client understand that ‘good’ in paid search is relative. How do you know that your current ‘good’ conversion rate is the best it can possibly be? You don’t. For this simple reason you should at every opportunity push forward the performance of the account.

3. ‘Help me, Help you’ – Every client will have paid search goals that tie into bigger business goals. If the goal for the quarter is to grow or reduce customer acquisition cost, help them see how revised landing pages that obey best practices may be exactly the change required in order to reach those goals & KPIs.

4. Testing is Safe – With technology such as Google Web Optimizer, you do not have to forgo the current ‘good’ landing page. It is as simple as setting up a Google Optimizer test – the winner takes it all. If you see the new design blow the old landing page out of the water, the business case for changing the landing pages becomes a lot more compelling.

5. Make it Easy – Some clients are so busy that the notion of organising new landing pages is a task with which they simply do not wish to deal. If this is what is preventing the recommended changes from moving forward, try to present alternatives. Ask the client whether they would be open to outsourcing landing page designs rather than doing them internally. If this is compelling to them, put together a quote and take this task out of the client’s hands. You can then have more control over the design process and you remove the burden for your client.

Category: PPC
Tags: Client Strategies

Rushing into Paid Search

Posted on | March 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

Rushing into PPC Sometimes clients launch into paid search advertising, leaving the decision making to the agency without fully understanding the strategy being implemented. They nod, agree and seem to ‘get it’ so you proceed with the project, implementing structures that have been agreed upon, setting up the appropriate reporting to report on business goals and KPIs, which the client has identified as important. The project starts to move forward and then 2 months later, the client drops the bomb and says:

The current paid search account structure does not fit our internal reporting model
We would like to modify the current goals, our CPA goals have become more aggressive – CPA target is now 50% lower
We wish to change our paid search online strategy, radically

Fools Rush In

The result of any of the above points can easily spell hundreds of hours of wasted work, particularly if it is a large PPC account that uses intricate campaign segmentation and geographic targeting.

This happened because at the start of the project the client just did not ‘get’ paid search. Nor did the client appreciate that PPC advertising goals tie in directly to structure, set up, design of campaigns & ad groups. The client will certainly not be able to grasp the number of wasted hours on a set up that they have practically declared null.

Get on the Same Page

A typical problem of launching projects is that once the client has paid some money upfront or a percentage of the costs, there is an expectation that things will get rolling right away. There is a pressure from the internal sales team to get the project going in order to develop a good business relationship with the client in those first 2 months of operation. This generally means everyone comes out guns blazing, both the agency and the client.

Strategies are discussed. Things are rushed. Tactics are implemented. The client tries to ‘get it’. But doesn’t. Two months later, after putting two and two together, the client demands radical change.

It is critical that at the start of the paid search project, the client is taken through a process of education. Just because a company has been running a PPC campaign for 2 years does not mean that the people now responsible for that campaign know the first thing about PPC.

A safe assumption is that the client knows very little about paid search and even if they think they know about PPC, remember that you are the professional being paid to implement the services. Ascertain, at the start of the project what the level of understanding is and proceed accordingly with the education required. Do not rush into a project because the Chief Marketing Officer is pressuring both you and his internal team to do so. At the end of the day, that internal team reports results to the CMO – those results will be much stronger in two months if you push back a bit, put your foot on the breaks and ease into the project, making critical strategic and tactical decisions only when it is clear that the client fully understands the implications of those decisions.

Category: PPC
Tags: Client Strategies

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: SEM Team

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: SEM Team

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: SEM Team

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: PPC
Tags: Attribution

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: PPC
Tags: Attribution

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: General
Tags: 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: PPC
Tags: Client Strategies

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: Facebook

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