7 Blunders of Search Marketing

Gandhi's warnings were much more wise, but this is how they seem to apply to my job:

1. Wealth without Work
    -Automation without Manual Management of the Head Terms

2. Pleasure without Conscience
    -Conversion Volume without ROI Efficiency for Profit Maximization

3. Knowledge without Character
    -Broad without Negatives or Exacts

4. Commerce without Morality
    -Misaligned Keywords & Ads without Relevant Landing Pages

5. Science without Humanity
    -Analytics without Segmentation

6. Worship without Sacrifice
    -One-Time Optimization without Continual Testing

7. Politics without Principle
    -Campaigns without Targeting

Balancing Automation & Optimization

 

Automation saves time and manual optimization might save money, but a balance of both will lead to the best combination of efficiency and return. This is what is meant by utilizing both brains in bid management.

SearchCenter makes copying and applying bid rules very easy. New bid rule templates provide a solid skeleton for the logic pattern so that you can simply adjust the targets and apply the modified versions to each keyword segment.

Take advantage of SearchCenter’s improved control around execution frequency and bid triggers. This does not need to be a complicated decision if you follow these best practices.

Start out by considering how much time you would give your manual adjustments to prove their impact before you pulled another report to start optimizing again. Consider the common latency between the first visit and the final conversion.

Experiment with the activity triggers so that SearchCenter can dynamically respond as soon as a keyword had collected enough traffic or conversion activity that you feel is statistically significant.

Customize the logic by updating the bid percentage changes towards a velocity that will make a difference in position without losing control. (Again, the key here is to simply teach the system to respond in the way you would if you had infinite time.)

By default, the new templates look at conversion efficiency (like Profit, ROAS, or CPA) for converting keywords, cost for non-converting keywords, and impressions for low-traffic keywords. 

Which metrics could you include between those steps to evaluate cost per micro-conversions?Smooth out the logic by following similar patterns for metrics higher in the conversion funnel and and micro-conversions earlier in the click stream. 

Finally, remember to keep your hands on the wheel. Even though cruise control is a nice feature, it is up to you to decide whether locking it in at 80mph up a curvy canyon is a good idea. The concept of "set it and forget it" was a lie from old infomercials. You are smarter than that.

Let bid rules be an extension of your skills, not a replacement for them. Then you will be free to manually focus on the few keywords responsible for most of your performance.

In short:
Carefully choose targets and rule types for the major keyword segments

Adjust default thresholds according to real values from manual analysis  

 

Select triggers and evaluation periods that match manual frequency

Customizetemplate logic to include micro-conversions and ideal percentage changes

Manually adjust the 80/20 for the top and bottom outliers of each segment

Paid Search Evolution

• A Brief History of Paid Search Advertising
• The Google Decade Search in Review 
• Search Engine History - PPC  

The Profit Audition

 

http://xkcd.com/125/

What if our jobs were determined by an audition or scrimmage? Imagine if we tossed aside the resumes and interviews and simply had an hour to make some money.

Analysts, if you were the applicant, which bid management tactics should you try to save more time for ad testing and landing page optimization? Would you rather show your boss that you are a real marketer that tests compelling creatives or that you play with bids and pennies all day? Although the first few posts on this blog will focus on bid management, the underlying purpose is to help you quickly move past this essential first step towards other rewarding optimizations.

This is accomplished by remembering that two brains are better than one(more to come)...

Managers, if you were the interviewer, what would you watch for to ensure your strategies are effectively executed by the teams you lead? Instead of only asking about top converting keywords and campaign averages, which questions would focus your team on the most profitable optimizations?

My good clients know how to ask questions that hold me accountable for constant awareness of the 80/20 principle. Most of us already understand that this means the vast majority of performance is controlled by a small minority of keywords.

However, my most successful clients know how to ask me about the 80/20 for the converting, non-converting, and even the click-less keyword segments so that I am always on my toes. If your team does not already have a healthy fear of your questions, I intend to arm you with that with future posts. Once you are even more confident in your team's ability to execute your strategies, we can then discuss ways to improve the focus those of strategies on the bottom line.

This industry is too smart and progressing too fast to have secrets. Whatever we do not share eventually gets discovered by our colleagues that know how to ask these tough questions. Therefore we are eager and to help you avoid the most common mistake we observe in smart clients: Stagnation in tactics and key performance indicators.

I am fortunate to work with some of the best paid search experts in the industry. Sadly, endless search management chores too frequently turn innovators into mindless slaves. It is too easy to gradually believe in excuses about insufficient time and fall back on low priority or outdated best practices when a million keywords are on our plate. It is too easy to gradually develop tunnel vision on an incomplete version of CPA or ROAS when that has been the highlighted number on our dashboards for the past couple years.

The purpose of this blog is to prepare you for the 60 minute audition for your dream job. You might already have it, but in this economy we need to earn it every day. Give future posts a few minutes of your attention and learn ways to save hours in the coming weeks.

The next post will put the best practices of 2010 into perspective by considering the significant advancement of our industry over the past decade...

Profit Maximization Algorithms

 
Are your paid search marketing strategies stuck in the past? 5 years ago your computer would probably have half the CPU speed, a quarter of the RAM, and a tenth of the hard drive space than common computers today. Growing competition is causing SEM bid management strategies to change just as quickly.

Small campaigns that used to provide high volumes at low cost have now been replaced by large lists of long tail keywords. How can you avoid missed opportunities by investing your scarce time and budget with the highest efficiency and profitability?

How can you identify which situations must be handled by a real analyst and which parts of your account can be automated? Once the highest priority bid adjustments have been reviewed by human eyes, how can bid rules be taught to use the same decision framework on the rest of the account?

How can bid algorithms be organized to maintain clear logic while optimizing to the most appropriate metric for each keyword segment? How can bid rule templates be adapted to fit the metrics and thresholds of your unique situation? How can new functionality enable you to more effectively leverage the rich data sets you are already collecting?

Many search marketers used to focus primarily on return on ad spend or cost per conversion. How can you ensure your efforts are truly improving the bottom line by including offline conversions, cost of goods sold, and other factors in the calculation of real profit?

Even the most experienced SEM professional is limited in the number of intelligent bid decisions that can be manually applied in a day, but certain parts of any PPC portfolio are too critical to turn over completely to a machine. We must embrace both methods of bid management – manual adjustments and automated review.

Successful marketers will learn how to embrace both methods of bid management so that more time can be spent on the holistic strategies of 2010.

Once manual and automated bid management has been adopted and balanced according to key performance indicators that are lowest in the funnel and closest to real profit, paid search marketers are more available to dive into other campaign management tactics that really pay off. Use both brains to optimize bids towards profit then review raw queries, refine match types, improve targeting, align relevant messaging, and test landing pages.