SMX @ ad:tech: Paid Search Fundamentals
Session Description: Paid search lets you generate traffic from search engines by purchasing ads, usually on a cost-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This session covers the basics and current best practices of how to purchase placement from the major search engines, including the best ways to succeed with your ads, how to successfully measure performance and how to optimize your complete paid-search marketing strategies. Come join Danny Sullivan and several paid search experts in what promises to be an in-depth review of the paid search marketplace.
This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:
- Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com (Moderator)
- Mona Elesseily, Director of Marketing Strategy, Page Zero Media
- Chris Zaharias, VP, Search Sales, Omniture
- Nick Sheth, Director of Business Development, Gap Inc. Direct
Unfortunately the presenters talked really quickly, so I tried to get down as much as I could!
Bullet Point Review! Mona Elesseily:
- Get campaign architecture straight from the beginning.
- Think about keywords.
- Tap external sources.
- Proper tracking should be in place from the beginning.
- Is your company equipped to track?
- Define your PPC objectives.
- Tie the objectives to solid metrics.
- Tracking online conversion.
- Online order and pickup offline.
- Store location page.
- PPC local
- Focus on ad copy.
- Brainstorm.
- Product and Service descriptions.
- Calls to action.
- Offers.
- Features/Benefits.
- String things together after brainstorming.
- Brainstorm.
- Think “buying cycle”.
- Testing yields results!
- Get rid of extra information if it doesn’t impact conversions, doesn’t belong.
Nick Sheth:
- Know Your Trademarks.
- Register your marks with Google (including misspellings).
- Ensure you have clear, well communicated policy usage of marks by partners (affiliates, shopping engines, partners, etc.)
- Monitor your marks with a service
- Suggestions: AdGooroo, The Search Monitor, BrandVerity (I can personally vouch that this one is awesome), or Mark Monitor.
- Remember your domains (offensive and defensive).
- Suggestions: Alias Encore (which, again, I can personally vouch for), CitizenHawk.
- Hold domains that are even remotely related.
- Know Your Promotions & Offline Marketing Calendar.
- Calendar your promotions and share them with your agency and all digital marketing teams.
- Leverage offline marketing (buy terms, watch trends, use content ads).
- Finely tune search copy; don’t use blunt force – promotions should be relevant to your ad group.
- Work closely with marketing within your organization on all levels. Building trust is paramount to gaining the autonomy needed to execute quickly.
- Know Your Site.
- Landing page relevancy – right page for right copy and keyword.
- Product availability and assortment – consider using data feeds to automate.
- Dead pages – seems like common sense but there are a lot of ads out there that point to dead pages. Make sure you have internal tools and/or an agency to monitor pages.
- Know More About Your Site.
- Use on-site search to drive SEM & SEO.
- Use paid search to get ideas for SEO.
- Use SEO for paid search keyword ideas.
- Have a human review – don’t leave it all up to automation.
- Know What Works.
- Develop a culture of testing, including landing pages, copy, and promotions.
- Build a test budget into your annual P & L.
- Statistical significance is key.
- Maintain a testing plan that always has tasks and is consistent.
- Know Your Business.
- Understand your goals.
- Understand how you are moving the needle.
- Ensure you’re thinking about your portfolio optimization.
- Question branded search and answer: is it incremental?
- Look at everything holistically.
Chris Zaharias:
- Start -> key business requirements -> keyword research -> campaigns & ad groups -> syndicated strategy -> ad copy -> bid optimization -> analyze & conversions
- Business goals -> KPIs -> Optimization
- Use pre-defined metrics.
- Clicks, Impressions, Click-Through Rate
- Return on ad spend.
- Cost per Acquisition.
- Define and value customer metrics.
- Cart abandonment rate.
- Average Order Value.
- KPIs to measure branding.
- Multi-KPI Optimization.
- Search reacts to TV advertising.
- Measure across channels.
- There’s a myth that the long tail keeps growing – this isn’t true.
- The long tail is now in reverse.
- People are using search as navigation – i.e. they already know what they’re looking for but they go to a search engine to find it easily instead of typing in the URL directly.
- Assumptions:
- The long tail keeps growing.
- There’s 1001 things to do in search.
- PPC = Traffic Management.
- Listen to your search engine.
- Reality:
- Win the head, win the battle.
- Return on efficient, defined work flow.
- Pre & post-click are equally important.
- Search engine advise is often a contrary indicator.
I don’t have any notes from a question period, and I definitely don’t remember there being time for questions. Overall this was a completely useful session for me, given that I’m not an old hat at PPC marketing. It was presented very well and clearly thought out. I appreciated the slide presentations that all three presenters used and I only wish they’d shared them online somehow!
Read Moread:tech San Francisco: Performance Marketing – Getting the Most from Your Marketing Dollar in a Tough Economy
Session Description: How can marketers get the most from their budgets in a difficult economic climate? We’ll explore how to attain more from a smaller budget via performance marketing with practical, tactical solutions. We’ll look at the pros and cons of allocating dollars to performance marketing and we’ll discuss what technological innovations are coming to the performance marketing space that will maximize budgets and minimize challenges.
This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:
- Neil Strother, Analyst, Forrester Research (Moderator)
- Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust
- Steve Schaffer, Founder and CEO, Vertive
- Jarvis Mak, Senior VP, Global Research and Insights Director, Havas Digital
- Kelly Powers, Senior Manager, Customer Acquisition, Zazzle
This session was definitely geared towards those marketing and advertising professionals that are not already in the performance marketing game. It was very insightful to watch from that point of view in mind.
Bullet Point Review!
- Neil asks “What is performance marketing?”
- Paying only for results, whether those results are leads, referrals, a percentage of the sale. Advertisers get to determine how much they pay.
- You can leverage your affiliates to assist with your paid search efforts.
- You need to have good landing pages.
- What’s the real value of the actions being driven?
- What you’re paying for is marketing.
- Affiliates have more incentive to drive more qualified traffic and customers.
- Affiliates drive higher conversions, average orders.
- There’s three types of advertising, CPM, CPC, and CPA.
- Merchants only want to pay one touch point for the sale.
- There’s a mentality that affiliates are frowned upon; CEOs will be wary of the methods but CFOs will be excited about the value and efficiency of the channel.
- AM is very data driven – more money is shifted towards traceable marketing.
- Executives need to understand affiliate marketing; the whole industry is misunderstood.
- Industry is starting to get the data out and break through the black box and lack of transparency.
- Peter briefly explained what’s going on with the #advertisingtax to the crowd.
- A couple of states have been able to stop the #advertisingtax but it’s moving fast.
- Fraud has grown exponentially, especially in lead gen.
- Paying for leads welcomes fraud in som,e industries, ask yourself if you can pay for a different action.
- A major player will soon announce a ranking system (Peter couldn’t divulge who).
Points brought up during the Q&A
Is there a metric to show brand safety? No. It’d be nice to take the focus off the brand.- Yes you need brand awareness, but that’s not going to drive a sale. The best offer is.
- It’s not infinitely scalable; you can always throw more money at search, etc. but throwing more money at affiliate marketing doesn’t work because the core is the relationships.
- Amazing how much more some merchants pay on other marketing methods and channels over affiliate marketing.
- Advertisers need to do a better job at attribution to track the sales to the correct channels.
- Feel free to launch new products with affiliate marketing; it has worked in the past when done right.
- What are some practical takeaways?
- Continue to optimized
- Work on attribution
- Look at marketing channels as a holistic portfolio.
- Focus on better, fewer networks and don’t spread your program too think.
The Q&A portion wasn’t so much a traditional Q&A as it was a case study like discussion. The panel really wanted to help with real examples, and only one gentleman in consumer finance was willing to ask for assistance.
Read MoreMy ad:tech San Francisco Experience
So ad:tech has come and gone, and for my first experience at ad:tech is was pretty good. The first day I spent most of my time connecting with some industry friends in the very cool Affiliate Summit sponsored Beer Garden. I was surprised how much it looked like the conceptual drawing that Shawn Collins had posted on his blog when he first announced the beer garden.
For those faithful listeners of Affiliate Thing, you’ll be happy to know that there were no snuggies involved. Unfortunately that first day I didn’t make it to any sessions, but I did take a quick glance at the exhibit hall. I think this might be the first time I’ve seen two floors of exhibit hall. Can you tell I’m not an old hat at ad:tech?
That evening I joined some affiliate marketing folks at AT&T Park for a Giants vs. Padres game. Shawn was quite perturbed that he could not get a signal on his AT&T serviced cell phone at AT&T Park. I can’t say that I blame him. There were some great moments in the game, including the closest I’ve ever seen two runners together when rounding the bases. The Giants won and our seats were pretty good. Luckily it was a nice balmy night and I didn’t need a jacket, but I did get blisters on my feet walking from Moscone Center to the park in bad dress shoes. Nonetheless, I have to send a big thanks to Shawn for the game invite!
The second day I was able to attend some sessions, notes from which will appear here next week. They were hit and miss… I got a lot out of some of them and almost nothing from others, except for some entertainment value.
That evening I had a nice dinner with the folks from eBay, Linda Woods of PartnerCentric, Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit, Peter Bordes of Media Trust, and a couple folks from Red Anchor Media. We had a nice discussion on quality in Affiliate Marketing. I was honored to be invited and had a terrific time. Any fellow creme brulee fans will be pleased to hear about the lovely Butterscotch variation at Anchor & Hope on Minna in San Francisco!
I didn’t make it over for the 3rd day of ad:tech, but overall it was a good experience and I’m looking forward to attending more in the future and getting some more done once I’m more firmly established with my new clients and with Paulson Management Group.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Text Link
Text Link:
- A link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
More commonly in affiliate marketing, display advertising of using banners is going out the door and we see more text links along side of the more technical widgets, videos, and flash banners.
____
Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
BlogWorldExpo 08: Making Money Online with a Blog
This was also commonly referred to as the “Super Bloggers” panel. The members consisted, in total, of:
- Jim Kukral, JimKukral.com (Moderator)
- John Chow, JohnChow.com
- Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
- Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
- Brian Clark, CopyBlogger.com
- Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Jeremy was late due to some quality Vegas partying, but once he did arrive he had some quality things to say. They all did, really, but I especially enjoyed Darren & Brian’s takes as I had never heard them speak before and I’d heard John & Zac.
Bullet Point Review!
- Jim asked what their number #1 money maker on their blog was:
- John Chow: Switching from an ad network to direct advertising sales using the OIO Publisher Direct plugin.
- Zac Johnson: Direct ad sales
- Darren Rowse: Recommended affiliate products.
- Brian Clark: Launching a membership site & selling WordPress themes.
- Selling any old crap decreases content value; sell things you actually believe in.
- Bloggers just want to write, not sell, so plugins are useful.
- Write about something that’s interesting or else it’s not sustainable.
- Revenue: 1. Direct Ad Sales 2. Affiliate Programs 3. AdSense.
- BC: Selling things (information, membership, etc) instead of advertising makes more money.
- A couple of years ago readers would complain about ads, but now they’re accepted as par for the course.
- The amount of money to be made in “non-sexy” niches is ridiculous.
- Start with what your readers want to buy, not what you want to sell.
- Offer incentives to sign up for your newsletter – 3x the money to be made with subscriptions.
- Newsletters vs. RSS – it’s way more beneficial to get people onto your email list.
- Aweber – BlogBroadcast tools count is included in RSS subscribers & sends an automatic newsletter with your blog posts.
- Many people still have no idea what RSS is, so offer delivery by email too.
- Blogs don’t have to look monetized.
- Sell yourself using consulting.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Wait until 100 or 1000 readers to bother displaying RSS numbers on the blog.
- RSS subscriber count is powerful for branding and can be factored into ad prices.
- JC: Rule of thumb when setting an ad price – what is the ECPM for that same spot on an ad network? Double that. Offer the ad to run for a month at a time or a quarter, depending on price.
- Condense your header – big headers take up valuable space.
- How much traffic do they see through search? DR sees about 40% to ProBlogger and 60% to Digital Photography School.
- Chitika is a good ad network with powerful blog widgets for contextual, relevant ads.
- Write for your users, not Google. Search traffic is just a bonus.
- It’s a tricky line to keep your editorial integrity and still sell stuff, so don’t sell willy-nilly.
- Build a business – get repeat customers, loyal readers.
- What percentage of the time do they work? A LOT – you have to bust your ass, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme.
- Always look deeply at a product & only recommend valuable things.
- Announce it
- Talk about the product info, merchant or manufacturers information.
- Share testimonials of readers.
- Review your experience with it.
- Credibility is key with sharing information.
- Endorse, review products.
- Sell advertising in newsletters, lots of merchants love that.
- Establish yourself as an expert.
- Remember that Teaching Sells!
This was a very informative panel, and a great way to kick off the sessions. The room was packed, and I especially liked Jim’s approach to using Twitter to get questions for the audience. With a tech set crowd like bloggers, it was highly effective and a great panel for sure.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Earnings per Thousand Impressions (EPM)
Earnings per Thousand Impressions (EPM):
- Earnings or average payout per thousand impressions.
Pretty self explanatory, right? This is an important metric when buying ad space online, whether it’s affiliate ad space or traditional ad space on a website. Many web properties will use this metric to set the costs for the advertisers.
____
Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
