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PPC Campaign Domination: Campaign Organization

2009-11-12T00:07:05Z

This is part of my series of posts that I’m putting together about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

My planned PPC Campaign Domination topics:

Landing page optimization
Google Adwords, quality score & you
Why cost per conversion isn’t ALWAYS the best metric
Aligning your efforts with business goals

Today’s topic is:

PPC Campaign Organization

Everyone at Amplify Interactive knows that I tend to obsess about organization. I have a folder for everything, I maintain a well pruned task list, I harp on them about keeping our project management systems up to date, we have a process in place for nearly everything, etc. So it should come as no surprise that all of our PPC campaigns must be well organized and thought out so that our efforts at optimization are easy.

“Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.”

-A.A. Milne

Success Starts at the Very Bottom - Organizing Your Terms

One of the biggest PPC campaign pitfalls we see when we take over campaigns from someone else is that the previous owner was lazy and put too many terms into too few ad groups. Taking the time to organize your terms into granular, extremely focused ad groups makes things easier in the long run. Consider the following example:

Let’s say your company is called “SawCompany” and you make Circular Saws. After doing your keyword research, you realize there are three major categories of terms.

Branded: terms that contain your brand name “sawcompany”
Circular Saw: searches for circular saws ranging from general to extremely specific
Safety/Injury Prevention: searches for safety features

In AdWords – we’ll turn these distinct categories into “campaigns”. Within these campaigns – we’ll organize the terms into specific ad groups where the terms within each ad group are specifically related to one another, and generally related to the general category. After some work – we come up with the following structure:

Example of an organized PPC campaign

PPC Campaign Organization Will Set You Free

Organizing a campaign like this will give us the power to do two very specific things:

Understand performance and manage our spend by term, group and category. If a particular Ad Group and/or Campaign is performing particularly well – we’ll be able to tell right away and explore options like allocating more budget to the top performing group/campaign so that our ads show as often as possible. We’ll also be able to tell if there’s a specific group or campaign that doesn’t perform very well so we can prune it from our spend and maintain a good quality score.
Test ad copy at the ad group level and run the best possible ad copy for each individual group which will, you guessed it, help us to maintain a good quality score. If we didn’t have our search terms broken up into really specific ad groups, we might end up running the same ad copy for a term like “woodworking safety” that we do for “best contractor saw”. These terms are clearly entirely different and we should be serving different ads and landing pages for each.

There are other benefits to be sure, but I’m not going to give you all our secrets. Please feel free to share any PPC campaign management & organization tips with our readers by commenting below!

Second largest search engine adds real-time comment results

2009-10-22T00:08:11Z

The second-largest search engine has added a component to search results that is real-time.

What was that? Yahoo?

No. YouTube. YouTube is the web’s second-largest search engine. If you’re still in the camp of, “It’s just a video destination,” it’s high-time you started thinking something else.

The truth of the matter is: YouTube is a video / discussion destination. If you mosey on over to YouTube’s TestTube, you’ll see that they have recently added the Comment Search component. This allows you to search through comments made on any video on YouTube in real-time.

What this means for online reputation

This new component means there is yet another place to monitor any mentions of your brand. This new feature is wonderful, because you’ll discover comments about brands on videos that may not even have any relation to the brand at all. For instance, I did a quick search for any mentions of one of our current clients and found many mentions that have been in comments over the last five days. Often, these comments were made on videos that don’t have a direct relation to the client. Like message boards, a topic about the newest movies might start going in the direction of the benefits of owning a home, or if someone likes a car that they mentioned.

Seeing as how YouTube is the second largest search engine, there can be a ton of information to weed through to find what’s relevant to your brand. Please let us know if you need help in setting up and executing an online reputation strategy that has you covered.

How to Boost the Effectiveness of Your SEM Campaign

2009-09-15T17:55:42Z

The surprise answer – run display ads.

Just read an interesting article over at eMarketer “Display Campaigns Boost Search Effectiveness” about a study that shows that display ad campaigns increase visits from search engine users by nearly 14% from both organic (SEO) and PPC search combined. Another benefit? Cost per click for PPC decreased as well – demonstrating greater efficiency of the PPC campaign as a result of display.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. A lot goes into whether or not users are going to click on a search result… or even search for something in the first place. Depending on the type of search I’m doing, I know that I personally run through a little bit of a mental checklist before clicking on a result that goes something like “does the result seem to match what I’m looking for?” (title/description), “is the source credible?” (URL/recall), “have I heard of/been to the site before?” etc. Those last two questions are where display and other marketing efforts can have a bigger though less direct influence than you’d think on whether or not someone’s going to click on your result in a search engine.

There are some great stats in this article, but I think the number one takeaway for all marketers is that search engine marketing is a great option and it should absolutely be part of your marketing mix, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that your organization is doing to market itself. I think this is also cause for celebration amongst “traditional” marketers and agencies. Search has been a much easier sell over the last year, but here’s a reason to encourage their clients to spend money on display and better integrate with search marketers to improve marketing results overall.

While most PPC marketers (myself included) frown upon running programs like Google’s content targeting option within our PPC campaigns because the click through performance is poor, perhaps it’s time to change or adjust our perception. I know that I always encourage our clients not to put all their eggs in one basket and rely on search as their only marketing tool, but this study definitely makes the case that display campaigns should be a consideration for any SEM campaign.

Web Analytics Strategy – Part 3

2009-09-15T18:07:46Z

Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics Are Made for Each Other

This is a follow up piece to “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 1: Making the Most of your Web Analytics” and “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 2: Analyze Your Results”

Once you have met with your stakeholders and decided on goals (see part 1). And once you have created a review schedule to measure those goals (see part 2). A common first place many people start is to understand how well their website is performing in search. Keyword ranking is where most people start, but as they come to understand how organic search works and what the factors involved are, many of them start looking at a wider range of metrics. Reporting becomes more complex and critical for success.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) are two of the best examples of how to use Web analytics to improve your website’s and your business’s performance. Search engine marketing (SEM) and Web analytics are made for each other. Once you understand how search marketing metrics work, you will have insight into almost every key measurement aspect of any online marketing program.

Organic and Paid Search – A Brief Overview

Just in case anyone doesn’t know this already, here is the basics of search engine marketing. There are two types of visitors from search engines–organic and paid. Paid search listings (PPC) are ads, or “sponsored results” that you see in search results. Organic listings are the “regular” results that the particular search engine deems most relevant for the search query. For both, how closely you rank to the top of the first page of results for any given phrase will greatly impact how much traffic you get. While both types of listings show up very close to one another, they generate different types of visitors and require different metrics to understand their effectiveness. (For more about SEM basics, see our SEM resources section)

Why You Absolutely Need a Web Analytics Strategy for Search Engine Marketing

Basic Metrics

Any website owner needs to know how many visitors it is getting and where those visitors are coming from. The basic metrics here are almost universal. You need to know:

How many visitors you got from search and if that number is increasing
What the bounce rate is of those visitors
How long visitors are spending on your site
What the most popular keyword phrases are
What the most common entry pages are
What the most common exit pages are

These are some of the basic visitor metrics you need for any marketing program. Without this information, you can have almost no idea if your search engine marketing initiative is producing results.

Beyond the Basics: Segmentation

Both organic and paid search have a lot of opportunity for visitor segmentation. This is something that many people don’t take time to work through and is one area where having a professional marketing analyst review your metrics can really help.

In organic search, the primary segmentation is normally between branded and non-branded search. Branded search is loosely defined as any keyword phrase that includes your company name or a specific product name. These searches indicate that the visitor already knows who you are and is looking specifically for you. Branded search can provide a good benchmark for overall search performance since performance here is normally stronger. Non-branded search is also known as “topical search”, meaning the visitor found you by way of a topic they were looking up. Because this visitor may not be familiar with your company or products, “performance” here is normally lower but these visitors are also critical to your growth. Segmenting out the topics into distinct groups provides an additional layer of insight into your search analytics and performance by group can vary widely. This segment provides great insight into what your next marketing & content development initiatives should be. Again, a marketing analyst can provide great value here in helping to find the differences in performance and where opportunity exists.

In paid search, the segments can be predefined by how the program is structured. If you have integrated your paid search program and analytics (for instance with Google Analytics and Adwords), then you will be able to see the performance of each segment as the performance of various parts of your program. In reviewing this, the performance may vary widely. All this variation gives you rich insight into the needs and experiences of the visitors following those paths and what you can do to make the experience more successful.

Beyond the Basics: Goals and Conversions

“Goals and conversions” should be included in the basic metrics for every marketing campaign. Determining how many people become a lead or customer as a result of a marketing program is critical to knowing if your they are successful. However, I did not put “goals and conversions” in the basics group for two reasons:

It’s surprising how many organizations do not have clearly defined goals and conversion points identified in their websites, and if they do,
Many times the Web analytics platform is not configured correctly to capture this information.

Understanding your conversion paths and setting up your Web analytics platform to capture the important information about your visitors as they travel your conversion paths is a key benefit of using an analytics specialist. When goals and segments are defined and combined, you can find a wealth of information about how to make your website more valuable and profitable. It is absolutely worth your time and effort to properly implement goal & conversion tracking.

Additionally, for paid search, knowing the conversion rate of any given program is essential to determining ROI and cost per conversion (lead or sale). Other metrics unique to paid search, such as Cost Per Click (CPC), are useful mostly for campaign optimization, not bottom line business reporting of success.

Summary: Web Analytics & SEM

Web analytics for your search engine marketing programs can give you more insight into what the visitors to your website are looking for and how they think about you and your products. Having a well configured Web analytics package in place to capture the visitor data from search is critical to determining if your search engine marketing program is working. Whether you are looking at basic metrics such as traffic trends, or digging into several layers of segmentation, it is the analytics package you have supporting that program that will make all the difference. Working with a Web analytics specialist can also help to make sure your metrics are accurate and actionable.

In conjunction with our recently expanded Web analytics services, weâ€™re putting together this series of posts with our Web analytics expert to shed some light on Web analytics best practices and how your organization can leverage analytics to improve business. Amplify Interactive is now providing full service Web Analytics strategy, implementation, support and reporting services across multiple platforms. Contact us if you’d like to discuss taking a more comprehensive, pro-active, and substantive approach to Web Analytics.

Web Analytics Strategy – Part 2

2009-09-15T17:54:16Z

Got a Web Analytics Strategy? Get Ready for Some Numbers!

This is a follow up piece to “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 1: Making the Most of your Web Analytics”

I was recently discussing a campaign with a client. We were going through the campaign strategy and what was working and where improvements could be made and listing off all the next steps that we would take. The conversation itself was a hour long just to talk through results. After the meeting, he had to run off to another meeting for a different project. Then he had another meeting after that. In any given day, his day is 80% full of meetings! When does he ever have time to think?!

Most business decision makers are involved in a lot of decisions. The decision process takes time and understanding. Very few have as much time as they’d like to sit down and really dig through campaign response metrics. Practically none of the marketers I know have the time to do the deep work that is required to thoroughly analyze under-performing programs.

Web Analytics Best Practices – Properly Analyze Your Results

Once the goals have been decided and everyone is ready to get started, the next step in having a successful analytics strategy is to figure out who is going to review and analyze the numbers.

Put a schedule in place. Reporting schedules that align with how long it takes to implement a change work well. For instance, if it takes two weeks to get all stakeholders on board with a landing page change, then schedule your reporting time every 2 weeks. Reporting normally leads to action items. If those action items start stacking up on top of one another, it can make deciphering what was effective and what wasn’t more difficult.
Make time to think about the results. Scrambling to look up conversions five minutes before a review meeting is not ideal. Block out time on your schedule the day before. Give enough time to not only pull the numbers, but also to think about the numbers.
Review results with others. Having more than one set of eyes looking over the information is a good idea, especially if things are changing.

Analyzing marketing results takes time, more time than most people anticipate. Creating a regular schedule and setting aside time specifically for reviewing & analyzing results will help you manage that time better. If possible, get a marketing analyst to help you with this. You’ll have more time to think through the results and make more thoughtful plans.

Next: “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 3: Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics are Made For Each Other“

In conjunction with our recently expanded Web analytics services, we’re putting together this series of posts with our Web analytics expert to shed some light on Web analytics best practices and how your organization can leverage analytics to improve business. Amplify Interactive is now providing full service Web Analytics strategy, implementation, support and reporting services across multiple platforms. Contact us if you’d like to discuss taking a more comprehensive, pro-active, and substantive approach to Web Analytics.

Yahoo/Bing Market Share Continues to Inch Up

2009-08-06T22:08:55Z

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Microsoft’s Bing & Yahoo will be teaming up to take on Google, StatCounter reports that Bing gained another 1% of the search market last month and is slowly but surely growing their share. In a preview of what’s to come with a joint Bing/Yahoo effort, their combined market share comes in at a little over 20%. Granted – it isn’t Google’s near 80%, but the opportunity to reach 20% of the search market with a Bing/Yahoo combined effort is worth paying attention to.

We’ve already had several clients start inquiring about testing a PPC campaign with Bing and I’m sure we’ll see more as we move into Q4 and start looking at 2010 budgets. Let us know if you want to look into a PPC campaign with Bing or any of the rest. We’d also like to hear about any recent experiences you may have had with Bing.

Web Analytics Strategy – Part 1

2009-09-15T17:41:17Z

Making the Most of Your Web Analytics

Every organization that has a website, regardless of size, should know what that website is contributing to the business. Analytics reports are designed to help you see that. However, knowing what information you need your analytics report to tell you is most important. Building a Web analytics strategy to help uncover those key performance indicators and design reports that tell you what you need to know is the best first step in making the most of your analytics package.

Web Analytics as a Tool

Most people who have a website also have some sort of website measurement tool. Many times this is a free solution provided by the hosting service. For example, Urchin was a very popular reporting service for a long time. Normally, these reporting tools are tucked into the website management interface and come with the default set of canned reports. When you see these reports they show some really intersting stuff–how many people visited your website, how many pageviews you get each week, what the most common files requested are, how many people came from search engines. In fact, these tools can show you so much stuff that it is easy to get lost. Or even worse, many people start correllating all the different bits of information in all sorts of different ways. You can spend hours digging through web analytics data, but miss the information completely. In the worst cases, some people end up in semi-permanent state of analysis paralysis.

Building a Web Analytics Strategy

This situation can be avoided, and the first step is to step away from your website analytics tool. Instead, sit down with yourself and the other business decision makers and decide what information is key for you to make a good decision. The services of an analytics consultant can be very helpful in facilitating this conversation. Some people will need the same information, some people will need completely different information, and some people will need similar but not quite the same information.

For example, the marketing manager and the sales manager need similar but not the same information–usually dealing with leads and sales close rates. The sales manager will need more details around the sales close rate while the marketing manager will need more detail around lead generation process. Product Marketing Managers will want all that information as they are normally tasked with marketing but responsible for units sold against a goal (we’ll talk about tracking goals in a later article).

Once you know what the key pieces of information are that you need to make well informed decisions, your analytics consultant can take those generic analytics reports and turn them into very valuable, actionable chunks of information.

Real World Example – Web Analytics Best Practices

An enterprise size client had a robust sales force, a well trained marketing team, several very involved VPs, and some really smart product marketing managers. They also had very few ways of knowing if their marketing was working. So, they made some infrastructure investments by upgrading their CRM and data warehousing. They started some new initiatives around marketing support. They gave more authority to their PMMs to make decisions. All really good ideas. However, they still could not tell how well their marketing was performing. After several rounds of conversations and many example reporting dashboards, the core issue started to become clear–they could not agree on definitions. What is a lead? What is an opportunity? What is a conversion? Without knowing these central pieces, they were cross-talking in a fundamental way. This lead to some very serious mis-alignments. How can you agree that you need to generate more opportunities, if you don’t understand and agree on what an opportunity is? Once we got some working definitions down and started using them, the decision making criteria became clear and the reports stopped being data and became actionable information.

Next: “Web Analytics Strategy Part 2 – Got a Strategy? Get Some Numbers“

In conjunction with our recently expanded Web analytics services, we’re putting together a series of posts with our Web analytics expert to shed some light on Web analytics best practices and how your organization can leverage analytics to improve business. Amplify Interactive is now providing full service Web Analytics strategy, implementation, support and reporting services across multiple platforms. Contact us if you’d like to discuss taking a more comprehensive, pro-active, and substantive approach to Web Analytics.

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing Team Up to Take On Google

2009-07-30T00:39:19Z

Finally – maybe Google will get a run for it’s money. I love Google as much as the next guy, but it’s been tough to watch the rest of the “competition” get left so far behind in the dust.

As you can read in this article on Search Engine Watch “It’s Official: Microsoft and Yahoo! Finally Strike a Search Deal” – the deal basically says that:

1. Bing will power Yahoo’s organic search results

I think this is a great move. Bing has made some pretty terrific strides in creating a better search engine. Spending another 100 mil on advertising it is making a dent as well. Bing isn’t perfect, but Yahoo organic results haven’t been all that great either.

2. Yahoo will handle the paid search

Again – this is a great move. If you manage paid search campaigns – you know there’s two specific problems with Microsoft/Bing.

1. AdCenter sucks to use. It just does. That’s not to say that Yahoo’s platform is great, but it is better than AdCenter and now they can focus on making it more usable.

2. Low search volume: WIth the exception of some verticals, the search volume is rarely there for clients to justify the time, energy & budget required to build & manage an additional campaign with Bing

So ideally, as a part of this deal we’ll just be able to opt-in or out of displaying ads on Bing with a simple check box. Just like you check a box to add the Google search partner network today.

This move will still be tricky and they’re both a long way from pulling it off. But hopefully by allowing each to focus on what they do best – maybe they’ll be able to actually compete and we’ll also have to start thinking about results from more than one search engine!

Which should come first: the search term or the content?

2009-07-28T23:48:37Z

All too often, SEO & site development efforts are out of sync. It’s a common complaint among SEO’s that a client will come to them with a Web site in hand and say “optimize this”. Whereas SEO’s would prefer it if the client would ask first and say “what content do we need to develop in order to have a site optimized for our target terms?”. It doesn’t have to be a chicken vs egg scenario though.

“Content is king.” As SEOs, we say this fairly often. And it’s most certainly true: if you’re shooting for a first-page ranking for a particular search term, you better have some focused content about it.

But what if you have some content that sort of pertains to a search term you wish to rank for. And you start thinking ‘if I just insert that search term here… and one there… and another over there…’ and call that good? Well, then you’re turning your content into something that’s not focused and probably sounds pretty forced. This is where SEO’s get a bad rap. The last thing we want is content that’s in keyword-ese but sometimes that’s the only option you’ve got when the content comes first.

If the content comes first, you’ll find that specific content with the search terms shoehorned-in probably works as as effectively in helping your site’s conversion rate as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest (no offense to any one-legged men who can probably kick my butt to the moon). I mean hey, you’ll have content and you’ll have your search terms in that content… but think of the site users who will read it.

If the search term comes first, you’ll write content specifically around that search term. It’ll sound genuine, it’ll be interesting and will show that you command that topic. A piece (or several pieces) of content written with a search term in mind can help your site by creating more focused content around relevant search terms that are related to your business, helping not only search engine rankings but also providing information for site users. This instills trust in a user; it lets them know that you’re an authoritative figure in your industry (“By golly, this company certainly knows their stuff!”).

So what should come first? Content that you’ve written then deciding on what search terms you should focus your writing around? Or researching search terms that users are actively searching on and writing content around those? Luckily – there’s a compromise to the chicken vs egg scenario, and it all revolves around something everyone on the Web team will love – a content strategy and a flexible site architecture. With a plan in mind for how you’re going to be able to expand your site over time you’ll be giving your SEO something to work with. Your SEO will be able to optimize your existing content while being able to work with your Web team on developing additional search-term optimized and integrated content for your site.

How to Become a Social Media Marketer

2009-07-22T18:45:55Z

Turns out – you may not realize it, but you already are a social media marketer.

Just read a great entry over at our partner McClenehan Bruer’s blog & newsletter titled “You Are a Social Media Marketer (Almost)“. The main takeaway I got from the article was:

“Most social media tools that work today in deep tech have analogues in the marketing work youâ€™ve always done… The key difference is this: social media opens up an intimacy and ongoing dialogue not found in traditional marketing communications.”

The article goes on to discuss some key social media tools & tactics and talks about what’s the same and what’s new for marketers, and presents specific examples for:

Blogger relations
Corporate blogging
Social media networks
Microblogging

Excellent topic. Go check it out at the McBru Deep <Tech> Dive blog