April 6th, 2010 by John Lynch
@johnslynch
My advice to anyone building a PPC campaign is simple: don’t be lazy. Never leave a campaign at a point where “this is good enough for now” is an acceptable response. It’s this type of attitude that frequently leaves campaigns in a perfect position to become dominated by competitors.
Furthermore, PPC testing provides a fascinating opportunity to test the exact words and phrases that create the strongest response from users. These critical takeaways can extend beyond the PPC campaign and improve efficiency in organic search, print, banner, television, and radio.
Instead of delving into another Google Site Optimizer article, I’d rather discuss a few unheralded techniques that can be used to help convert users into buyers:
1. Try Video: video can be an exceptionally effective tool for more complex or visually oriented products or services. Isn’t a video the best way to show a house online or explain essential concepts that are vital in communicating product need? Furthermore, video is a fantastic opportunity to create a positive emotional response. With the right music and imagery, your video can inspire emotional connectivity with your brand in a way that your competitors static site cannot
2. Experiment between long and short form: If your business pitch in person takes five minutes, how the heck will a 100 word landing page compel users to buy? In any campaign, it might be a good idea to have at least one long-form landing page that offers multiple conversions (both “soft” and “hard”) and aims to educate visitors. A client of mine works in the education field, and all of his competitors landing pages are glorified RFP forms. Doesn’t the one site that offers valuable information peacock compared to its conversion driven competitors?
3. Offer a variety of conversions: frequently, marketers fail to realize that—depending on the keyword—users are often in drastically different stages of the buy cycle. Depending on the expert, the stages of a buy cycle can vary significantly, but it boils down to these elements:
- Information Seeking
- Product Identification
- Needs refinement
- Purchase
A visitor in the information seeking phase has no real interest in making a purchase and will often use vague or ambiguous search queries. The best way to connect with this user is to offer a landing page that offers depth and information. Additionally for the call-to-action, try multiple conversions that appeal to your users needs (white papers, product comparisons, calculator or free tool). In this example, the focus shifts towards creating a relationship with the consumer and an understanding that the sales cycle is going to be a bit longer.
On the other end of the spectrum, try more aggressive CTA’s if the user is getting to your site through a branded search query. This might be the time to push your business’s equivalent of “order now.”
4. Aggressively test copy: This includes headline, images, and copy. Try multivariate testing in limited campaigns before applying key learnings to the rest. Common industry practice is to allow for 300 conversions before drawing conclusions; however, you should be able to tell in a couple days if you’re page is a complete dud. If this is the case, don’t hesitate to remove the Ad quickly.
Good luck and remember these key staples:
- Account for visitors’ short attention span by making the page something that can be scanned. [Almost] Never have two consecutive paragraphs of text. Break them up with images, bullets, and headers
- Use the keyword in the headline of the landing page. Let the user know they’ve come to the right place
- Use design elements to accentuate the conversions pieces on the page. Let them pop.
Follow John Lynch on Twitter @johnslynch
March 24th, 2010 by John Lynch
At this panel, top paid search tool vendors will showcase their latest features in bid management, campaign workflow efficiencies, and reveal what the future holds for the industry. As well, the audience will be asked to brainstorm what the “paid search super tool” should include and create a wish list recommendation to tool providers.
Moderator:
Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising Speakers:
Thomas Bindl, SES Advisory Board & Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing
Richard Sim, VP of Product Management and Marketing, Anchor Intelligence
Craig Danuloff, Founder and President, ClickEquations Inc.
Thomas Bindl takes stage:
Is my PPC money spend best? -Get the numbers -Aggregate the numbers -Visualize the numbers -Document the numbers “You can see a very small percent is spent on actually performing work in Adwords.” How do we make it more efficient?
What you should expect:
-Smart bid management algorithm
-Intuitive and efficient user-interace
-Search Funnel analysis
-Integrated real search-query optimization
-Support for all match types -Integration of external data sources (ad parameters/tracking)
-Definition of own KPI’s as goals
-support of cancellations/returns
-reporting on most detailed level
-manual adjustments of bids
-strategic groups
-2-way synchronization
Adam Goldberg Takes the Stage
1. cross media profit tracking
2. Purchase Path Valuation
3. Marketing Portfolio Optimization Done with attributed values, not last click.
“Much more accurate view, not just last click.”
Profit tied to these keywords is an attributed value. We have this at the SEO level, too. When did an optimized keyword play a role in the sales path?”
Advertising with a purpose- Introduce, Influence, Close Example: 1. Display Ad 2. Social Media 3. Retargetting 4. Branded PPC All of these endeavours influence profit. Brand keywords are seen as incredibly valuable, but are they? Do they really get credit for the sale? In last click, they get way to much credit. Algorithmic Attribution- once you apply data, you can apply mathematical algorithms. Shows and example of head keywords that serve as introducers. In last click models, they show high cost/conversion rates.
But with attribution tracking, it’s now possible to demonstrate the value of head.
Richard Sim of Anchor Intelligence takes the stage -
-Belly and tail keywords can drive a ton of value for your business
-However, managing them is tough is especially tough because there are often not enough events to make a logical decision regarding the effectiveness of a keyword.
Valuable info that can be used to predict the value of a keyword
-time stamp
-cookie
-ip address
-user agent
-referrer
-keyword
You can you historical ad click data as a proxy when conversion data is not available. Anchor Intelligence predicts the value of each keyword by evaluating its traffic history. Introduces product which can help track and predict quality clicks.
Craig Danuloff, ClickEquations
For any tool, important to have:
-data
-reporting
-editing
-bulk & mass (done in excel)
-bidding
-automation
“ROAS is a joke at best. Need to be able to calculate ROI” “90-95% of the time attribution doesn’t matter. When it does matter, however, it’s a huge difference. Most critical for identifying the introducer keywords”
“Really important to re-organize your campaigns. Adwords Editor is phenomenal for it”
March 24th, 2010 by John Lynch
Li Evans and John Lynch of Serengeti Communications are currently live blogging much of the action over at endlessplain.com.
Li provided detailed coverage of David Meerman Scott’s SES New York’s Keynote while John Lynch covered the State of Search panel with notable staff from Bing and Yahoo.
Li and John will be providing more updates throughout the day.
February 24th, 2010 by John Lynch
You get it.
You see the incredible opportunity that search engine optimization creates, but that doesn’t mean the key stakeholders share your vision. You know, the people allocating quarterly market budgets?
This article is designed to empower non-seo professionals with a data driven arguments to help get budget for search marketing.
Argument #1: We are missing incredible opportunity to gain marketing share by not being optimized.
In order to present an engaging argument for search engine optimization, it’s first important to understand the relevant audience you are missing every month by not appearing in the top 3 results for critical keywords.
The Google Keyword tool is wonderful in that it provides reasonably accurate information as to how many searches are conducted each month for a critical keyword.Learning about average monthly volumes is a terrific way to explain the total amount of relevant web traffic your company might be losing on a monthly basis.
Let’s take a quick look at the insurance industry. There are nearly 1.8 million searches conducted every month for the keyword insurance quotes. The question becomes, can a company afford not to compete in this space?
Argument #2- Being on the first page isn’t good enough.
In my experience, people are frequently taken aback when they realize how steep the drop off is from #1 to position #2 in a search engine results page.
Based on leaked data from AOL in 2006, sites ranking in the top 4 in a search engine can expecting the following percentages of traffic*:
Position #1: 47%
Position # 2: 13%
Position #3: 9%
Position#4: 7%
There is an amazing drop between being #1 and #2 in Google. Position #4 sees a tiny fraction of the traffic.
It gets even worse— sites at the bottom of page 1 (position 9-10) in a search engine can expect less than a 3% click-through rate. Next time your boss says, “We’re on page 1,” be sure to explain the significance.
Argument #3- SEO Traffic Often Provides Higher ROI Traffic Long-Term
If you turn off your PPC campaigns tomorrow, the traffic loss will be instant. By and large, the ad spend committed to PPC traffic will not produce little organic traffic. Unlike PPC, search engine optimization efforts can produce robust traffic for years after initial investment. Ranking highly creates more links and more links means higher ranking.
Why not reallocate some of the banner budget or old media ad spend and put it towards the users that are actively searching for you product? Undoubtedly, introducing a product through brand awareness reach is important, but the low hanging fruit often lies in targeting consumers that are a bit further along in the buy cycle.
*measure through click-through rate
January 27th, 2010 by John Rhea
Recently eMarketer (in December ‘09) predicted a -4.6% US online advertising spend growth for 2009.
Although the total online spend went down (not too surprising with the economy) the percentage of Online advertising spend vs other advertising spending grew. So marketers spent less, but trusted online channels more to get them the return they were looking for.
And as eMarketer predicts, advertisers will continue to push both dollars and trust toward online channels.
They also predict that online advertising spend will grow fairly steadily by 5 to 6% through 2011. But Obama’s domination of online and social media in 2008 will surely encourage both candidates to bring out a strong online front, that coupled with the Summer Olympics in London, should make a banner year for online advertising in 2012.
EMarketer believes that the US recession is probably over since the third quarter of 2009 showed 3.5% positive GDP growth. We haven’t had a positive GDP growth since the second quarter of ‘08. However unemployment hit 10.2% in October ‘09 (a 26 year high) and it stayed above 10% for November ‘09.
As the spending starts to increase again and competition thickens, it might make sense to pickup an in-house resource now.
With unemployment high in-house resources needn’t be expensive, even if they require training. If you hire and train them now you’ll be expertly positioned with people committed to your success when the 2012 competition/spending bulge hits; you’ll be ready to thrive while other firms throw money at the problem.
November 16th, 2009 by John Rhea
For any of you who are going to the SES Chicago conference and haven’t bought your ticket yet, use the discount code 20SERE to save yourself 20%. (More Details)
November 4th, 2009 by John Rhea
We’ll be presenting one of our in-house success stories at SES Chicago on December 9th at 12:45pm. Nate Linnell our Director of Analytics will discuss how we helped American Public University System (APUS) bring their PPC in-house. Hee So, APUS’s Senior Internet Marketing Coordinator, will also be on hand to discuss how the process went from an internal perspective.
Between now and December you can whet your appetite for our session by reading the session description from the SES Chicago agenda (also available below) or by reading our case study on the very same topic, bringing APUS’s PPC in-house.
Bringing PPC In-House
While a PPC campaign can be a more cost-effective operation if done in-house, the complexities of staffing and managing one can be a lot more challenging than it first appears. In this session, we’ll discuss how to get the right combination of people, tools and resources in place to empower the PPC function internally. Determining when it makes sense to in-source your PPC, developing an effective bid strategy, and selecting suitable ad tracking software are just some of the key factors to be discussed.
Moderator:
Paul Elliott, Partner – Search & Media / Analytics & Optimization, Rosetta
Speakers:
Nathan Linnell, Director of Analytics, Serengeti Communications
Hee So, Senior Internet Marketing Coordinator, American Public University System
September 8th, 2009 by John Rhea
Then join us on Wednesdays at 1pm Eastern when Nate Linnell (@nathan_linnell) and Li Evans (@storyspinner) host a twitter chat on Social Media Metrics (#SMMetrics) starting tomorrow, Wednesday September 9th. Our first week’s topic for #smmetrics chat will be “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Social Media.” So come join the 140 character at a time conversation.
August 28th, 2009 by Nate Linnell
Is your company talking about investing in social media or have you already taken the leap into the uncharted waters? If you’ve already taken the leap, then hopefully you already have a social media strategy in place. If you have not taken the leap, then you should make sure you’re ready for a social media program before you embark on your journey into social media.
One aspect you need to address when creating a social media program is to make sure you have some way to monitor social media activity around your brand. There are plenty of tools out there to “monitor” social media, but which one is right for you? The real answer may surprise you since the answer very well may be none of them.
All the current social media monitoring tools are flawed and have a long way to go before you can confidently say that you’re getting the full picture of social media activity and that the data is being processed and displayed to you in an accurate manner.
Because of this, it is not possible to truly rely on a single tool to fully engage with your audience in social media. You’ll be able to engage a portion of it, but because these tools often miss a lot, and in some cases the majority, of social media activity, you won’t be able to engage them all.
In addition, the reports that these tools give you are flawed as well. There is often a lot of spam still in the results even though the tools have “removed the spam.” There are also often times many irrelevant records that are returned that supposedly match your keyword strings. This means you have to manually go through your results to make sure the records you have in the tool are good relevant records. Going through this process is very arduous and can be a huge time suck if you have a large number of records.
The sentiment that some of the tools provide you is a whole other issue. Again, it’s not very accurate and requires you to manually go through them if you want accurate data in your reports.
I could continue listing the flaws that the tools have and could go into further detail on each, but instead of knocking down the available tools, I think it would be better to go into what you should do. What is the best tool or tools for you?
The best answer is likely the paid tool that best fits your needs and then also incorporating some of the free tools that are available. Even though the paid tools are flawed, they are much better than having nothing or just trying to use a combination of free options.
I’ll leave you with a few of the paid and free options that are available to you.
Some of the paid tool options are:
A few of the many free options that can be combined to supplement your paid tools are:
August 13th, 2009 by John Rhea
Serengeti has just published a new white paper entitled Measuring Social Media. You can pick it up for free over at our main site, serengeticom.com. You’ll learn about how to measure social media and why it’s important.
