How search marketing can make you a better lover

When you think about search marketing, are you hung up on the numbers? Things like cost per click, CTR, conversion rate, total number of impressions, share of searches, number of keywords, average position, cost per sale?

It’s easy to get caught up in the analytical side of search and become downright mesmerized with your total conversions, total sales or total ROI each month or week or DAY. But there is a pitfall when you let all those pretty, shiny statistics overhwelm you - you can easily miss out on the things that make search marketing work.

Love search!

No, that’s not half a sentence. I didn’t intend to write “ten reasons to love search” or “Why you should love search marketing.” I’ve written plenty of articles like that, and I’m sure I’ll write more. However, this article is intended to make you a better lover…of search. I’m deliberately leaving the term “marketing” out for now. My point is that you should love search because of what it represents to you, your business and your customers.

Search is about language.

Let’s put aside the buzzwords for a minute - things like keywords and match types and cost per click. All of these words belong to the language of search marketing. But the language of search is the language you speak on your Web site, in your marketing materials and on your blog.

It’s how you describe yourself beyond marketing and advertising. It’s present in your mission statement, your conversations with colleagues, and in less obvious ways you employ to help your company grow (the type of people you recruit, the way you treat your employees and clients, your company’s connection - or lack thereof - to the community).

Search is also very much the language your customers speak - it’s what they type into Google when they need something, and what they look to for reinforcement when they reach your web site. Know this language. Speak it fluently and embrace it as part of your search marketing strategy.

Search marketing doesn’t have to be about guesswork. You have all the tools you need to create a holistic search strategy that incorporates the language of the people you want to reach, right at your finger tips. These tools are your customers. Ask them how they found you or what they’re looking for when doing research or how you can make your product/site/customer experience better. Listen to them. Then write down what they say.

Love results.

Search is about results. We perform a search online for something we want. Maybe we go to Google to look for a bit of information on hydroponic gardening, or maybe we go to Ebay to look for an out of print book, or perhaps we go to Weather.com to see what the forecast is going to be in Chicago on the day we’re planning to fly there. The point is that when people search, they are actively looking for results that will satisfy that search.

Searchers are on a journey and it’s important to understand that they will not be satisfied until they fulfill their quest. That’s why relevancy factors so strongly into a well-structured search marketing campaign. If you provide the answers that people seek, then you will likely achieve your goals. Do think about what keywords you’re targeting. Do think about what people will see if they click on your ad and, above all, do tell people what they want to hear. If you’re not exactly sure what they want to hear, then test, test, test until you figure it out.

Fall in love with the fact that people are actually looking for you. They want YOU to help THEM. Cherish that fact. Don’t try to trick them or redirect them. At best they won’t respond, at worst you’ll lose their respect.

Love the journey.

The best advice I can give you when including search into the marketing mix is to enjoy it. Search is unlike any other form of marketing you’ve likely tried (or are going to try). It forces you to speak the language of your customers, and confront (perhaps for the first time in a long time) the language of your business. You may find yourself rethinking how you define your business, your products, even your mission.

Many business owners discover that they are very connected to their search campaign, more than any other marketing initiative. They want people to find them in the search engines - not just for the traffic, but as validation that their business is relevant. It’s a great feeling to realize that Google - the omnicient titan of search - deems you worthy enough to appear at the top of their results for “pink sparkly socks” or whatever it is you want to rank for.

Take this with a grain of salt - Google is not the beginning and ending of all things search. Understand how your customers embark on their journey for information/products/services online and put yourself in their path. If you learn to love the journey then you’ll do well. And that’s how search marketing can make you a better lover.

Add comment July 24th, 2007

PPC Triage - Figuring Out What Ails Your Paid Search Campaign

One of the compelling things about paid search marketing is that it’s extremely easy to start and manage a campaign. Search campaigns can be launched in mere minutes on all the top engines. So not only is it easy to do, it’s quick to have your ads up and running. These two factors can be a mixed blessing, however, particularly if you’re new to search marketing.

One of the hard lessons that advertisers learn when they take the plunge and launch a search campaign is that it’s not always easy to get consistent results over the long term. Even if you came out of the gate with a 2 to 1 ROI or greater, it is not uncommon to see your marketing return dwindle for a number of reasons including increased competition, poorly performing ads, quality score penalties or just a poor understanding of what metrics matter.

Here are a few things to look at when triaging a failing search campaign. Most of these things are easy fixes that can help breathe new life into a campaign and get your perfomance metrics back on track.

Evaluate multiple metrics. It’s easy to look at one metric at a time and jump to conclusions about your campaign’s performance. For example, a rising cost per click (CPC) may indicate that your ads are more relevant to searchers while decreased ad positioning could mean more competition. However, you can get even better insights about problem issues with your campaign if you look at how both metrics are behaving side by side.

Here’s an example of a chart that shows the CPC versus the average position. Note the trendlines in blue and yellow (trendlines are a great way to see how a specific metric trends over time, particularly if there are wide fluctations in performance). This graph tells me that even though my CPC has been going up, my overall positioning has trended down - indicative of a poor quality score. Some actionable items I can infer from this are to:

1. Take a look at keywords and how they relate to my ad copy - rewrite as necessary
2. Delete poor-performing keywords or increase their relevance to the ads themselves
3. Delete poor performing ads. Don’t think about it, just do it.
4. Evaluate landing pages against the keywords I’m bidding on and my ad copy - is landing page text relevant to the keywords? Am I sending people to a generic home page when I could be linking them directly to a specific page on the site?

Now let’s see what the trending looks like when I compare the CTR versus the average position.

This chart demonstrates that the campaign’s CTR has been going up since April 2006, but the average  position continues to decline. This would indicate that there’s more than quality score at play here - and competition is playing a part in the increased cost of my campaign. The action items I get from this are:

1. Begin monitoring competitors for all major keywords/categories I’m bidding on
2. Review past competitive data if it’s available to glean key changes
3. Focus on keyword expansion and refinement - discontinue terms that are too competitive or expensive to maintain OR make the decision to invest more money per click in order to achieve higher positioning (I would only do the latter if there was a large margin for my client’s product and/or there was wiggle room to increase the current cost per aquisition of the campaign).

Other key features to consider when doing a PPC Triage include:

Landing page analysis and testing. I know this seems like it would be a no brainer, but horrible, conversion-fearing landing pages can sabatage a campaign more than any other single factor. Bad  landing pages are often the fallout of PPC convenience - that is, being able to get a campaign live in one-to-three weeks. My best advice to resolve this is to test, test, TEST your landing pages, Also, read case studies, statistics and anything that you can get your hands on that discusses what makes a good converting landing page and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to redesign and test your new pages. Did I mention you need to TEST your landing pages? Good. Go do it.

Engine-level analysis and testing. Not all campaigns work out well on all engines. We tend to group our campaigns into one keyword-centric bulk without really considering performance at the engine level. When reviewing how you can improve your campaign, take a look at all the search engines where your ads are running. Don’t just look at top-level data (volume, CTR, cost per click) look at your CPA then figure out how you can expand your campaign on engines that have low volume, but good ROI and vice versa. Don’t discount second tier engines such as Ask.com and LookSmart.

Campaign structure and set up. One of the first things I evaluate when looking at someone else’s paid search campaign is how they’ve set it up on the back end. If I log into Adwords and see that all the ad groups are contained within one campaign called “Campaign #1″ well, I shudder. You have much more control over your budget and targeting criteria if you break up your account into multiple campaigns which contain multiple ad groups. The more ad groups there are in a campaign, the better. Ad groups allow you to customize ad copy for distinct keyword groups and this just makes for a better, more relevant campaign.

 

Add comment July 5th, 2007

New changes from Adwords including CPA

Did you blink? Then you may have missed several new, fun, important exciting and oh-so-critical new features that Google rolled out for Adwords.

Google launches Pay-Per-Action (PPA) Globally - As this post on the Adwords blog states, Google launched their PPA program in the U.S. in March. They began offering the feature globally on 6/22/07. The feature will only be available to advertisers whose campaigns receive more than 500 conversions in a 30-day-period (qualifying advertisers will see an alert within their Adwords account to try the program)

New Adwords reports & Features - The SEOMoz blog has a good post about some recent Adwords Changes that Google recently rolled out. 

Two new reports - The Content Network Placement and Search Query Reports provide advertisers with more thorough insights about when and where their ads appear on both the search and content networks. I’ve personally only tried the search query report - what it shows is some of the “like” or “similar” terms that bring forth your ad on Google when you are bidding on broad and phrase match terms. It’s very interesting, but as SEOMoz pointed out, lots of data is ommitted in this report so it’s not a perfect tool for seeing exactly what keywords your ads appear for. The Content Network Placement Report shows you what websites in Google’s AdSense network are showing your ads. I can’t wait to run this for one of my campaigns.

SEOMoz.org’s post also lists two other new features - IP Address Exclusion, which lets advertisers suppress up to 20 IP addresses from showing their ads and automatic ad suuppression based on user search behavior. For example, if you search for your own keywords and never click on your own ads, then eventually your ads will start moving down in position and/or not show up at all. SEOmoz explains how to bypass this feature.

Add comment July 2nd, 2007