10e20 Blog

Today, Chris Sherman from SearchEngineLand spoke at another extremely valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled “Maximizing the Impact of Paid Search Listings.” The event was sponsored by iProspect and provided a myriad of wonderful tips for anyone looking to create an advertising campaign to direct searchers to their websites.

Introduction
When considering paid search, it’s really important to set some goals. As you can tell, I’m very big on goal orientation. Some of these goals can be:

• Better targeting (keywords and position)
• Better messaging (ad copy/description and landing page)
• Lower cost/reduce waste
• Increase conversions
• Improve ROI
• Measure success

I’d like to start off by dispelling some common myths.

• #1 ranking is crucial. So many people have told me this. “If we’re not on top, people won’t click us.” or “My boss says we need to be number one.” That’s not a very good reason to gain a ranking. What you want to do is get the optimal position to get the maximum number of conversions (buying a product or a service) for a click.
• The most expensive keywords are costly because they provide better returns. That is true in some circumstances. The reason why it’s costly is that it is in more competitive areas. The return to the marketers is quite a bit higher. You don’t need to be competing with the highest cost.
• Search engines put a premium on click through rates, so therefore click-through rate is the best measure of effectiveness. It’s a good metric, but it’s not the best measure.
• I don’t need paid listings if I have top ten listings in organic search results. This myth can kill you. The search engines occasionally change the underlying algorithm, and they can refresh their rankings. If you achieve these top ten rankings, great, but you can’t rely on them. Paid listing gives you assurances and insurances against changes in the algorithmic organic listings. If you have top rankings in organic and paid results, people will notice you and that will reinforce their confidence in you in what you’re trying to promote in a marketing message.
• Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are essentially the same. They are similar but each system has their own idiosyncrasies and nuances. You want to know how they work and how they differ so that you can take advantage of them to their fullest.

Are you targeting the right keywords?
Popular keywords are expensive, and you’ll have plenty of competition. Therefore, don’t choose the most obvious keywords. You might want to target for the long tail, lesser common keywords. At the long tail, the searchers are a little farther along in their searching process. These less popular words may get fewer clicks, but that may be better, since they may have a higher conversion rate. You should experiment and see if that is true for you.

Also, a great keyword research tool is wordtracker.com.

Consider searcher behavior
Who are the people who are going to respond to these messages? How do we fulfill what they are seeking? Searchers are becoming more sophisticated, and queries are becoming both longer and more specific. If you target those longer search phrases, you will probably get better targeting. In some cases, even an exact match on a particular phrase may benefit you. You are going to get people who are aware enough/far enough along to be able to articulate their need in a specific way.

Improving Keyword Effectiveness
TEST the effectiveness of keywords by running short-term PPC campaigns. You can gradually weed out words that are not as useful.
Match your keywords with what people are actually doing. In some cases, people may be looking for a vacation. They might want to look for a destination (Caribbean), or they’re looking for an activity (scuba diving). Get into these people’s minds.

Google did a study about how people search. They saw that people prefer product (28%) versus brand (9%) vs. company (5%). Many marketers don’t focus their keywords the same way.

For keyword research, study your logs! Look what people are searching for. Apply this to your campaign. If people are getting to your site with words that you aren’t using in your ad campaign, add them. Don’t hesitate to drop keywords that don’t convert below a specific target.

Choose the best matching option
There’s a lot of different ways to have keywords match.

• Broad match - default. It’s called ’standard’ match. If you bid on a piano, you’ll get “Baldwin” or “piano lessons” in the result, for example. That can be helpful but very expensive.
• Phrase match
• Exact match
• Negative match (exclude keywords)
• Geotargeting: do you need to target the campaign in a specific region? Particular countries, states?
• What about contextual advertising? Adsense type programs. In some cases, contextual ads may help you but sometimes they may not.

Broad match considerations
Pros:

• They are very good discovery tools, ironically enough, for fine-tuning your campaign (you can find exact phrases and negative matches through broad match considerations). You might find out that people are looking for things that you haven’t excluded accidentally or can revise your keywords on how they are behaving and expressing themselves.
• Reduces the number of active terms you have to manage. You don’t have to worry about a big portfolio of search terms.
• Easily target tail searches - permutations and combinations.
• Lots of impressions very quickly.

Cons:

• Lots of impressions very quickly. Not necessarily converting.
• Mismatched searchers, disappointment.

Broad search is a powerful tool but should be used carefully.

Fine tune your messaging
People think that their title/description of their ad is important. This is true, but the landing page text is important too. Consider the following:

• Repeat the keywords in both the title and description. According to research, people who see these keywords feel reinforced that clicking on the link will satisfy their need.
• Know your audience and write for them. At a recent conference, a bridal company was selling/renting bridal supplies. On the page, they were writing for the bride. But most of the people buying their services were not the bride-to-be; it was the bride’s mother. The mother has different needs than the bride. By changing the message to appeal to both groups (using different targeting options), the company was able to expand what they are doing in an effective way.
• Create different descriptions to cater to different needs: price points (”we have lower prices than competitor”), official site, time sensitivity (buy now, sale is now!), etc. Be creative in the message that you use so you can broaden the scope.
• Experiment with incentives. Limited supply, free shipping, flat-rate shipping, etc. You want to encourage people to click through and create that call to action.

Lower costs/reduce waste
One of the goals is to lower costs and reduce waste. How do you do that? The easy way is to analyze campaigns for mistakes. Be brutally honest in what’s working and what’s not: wrong words, wrong position (#1 result may not be the best place to be, so test it!), poor landing page. Landing pages are crucial. A really good copywriter needs to write this and each page should be highly targeted to each specific ad. You don’t want to send people from your ad to your homepage. Send them to your landing page that is targeted to them. Give them exactly what they are looking for so that it can convert.

Another way to lower costs is to consider lower-tier services (Miva, Kanoodle, Looksmart, Quigo). They are smaller but give traffic. They tend to be less expensive than the major players for many keywords. A search marketer I spoke with did an analysis discovered that there’s less competition for popular keywords at the end of the month. His theory is that people blew their budget by the end of the month. He lowered his bid at the end of his month knowing that the price would go up at the beginning of the month.

Testing your ads
There are really subtle differences in ads and landing pages that can have HUGE effects. Even changing a color on a particular page or altering a few words on how you express something can really have huge impacts.
What’s the important messaging, product offerings, and benefits, that people respond to? The customers may not look at it the same way that you do. You may think that your benefits are important, but your customers may not see it that way. Use real users and real customers to get feedback and then fine tune your campaign. Changing one or two little things can dramatically improve the bottom line. Listen to your target audience. Don’t make assumptions. You may say “I know my product, I know my service, they’re the customer.” You need humility.

Also, keep testing simple to start. You’re not going to introduce a lot of complexity that may or may not have any true impact on your campaign.

Tips for testing

• Ad rotation is automatic. Ads with higher click-through-rates are displayed more frequently. This is a benefit for everyone. But in testing, turn the rotation off when you test so you can take control of what’s being seen so you can measure the results effectively.
• Don’t assume that Yahoo users will respond in the same way as Google or Microsoft users. In a general sense, Google users like algorithmic results while Microsoft users like paid results better. Yahoo is in the middle.
• Test different combinations of ad copy and landing page copy to see which ones perform best.
• Don’t forget that you have control over the “display” URL. It doesn’t necessary have to be the URL you are directing them to. Use this to reinforce keywords.
• You want to create good ads and powerful landing pages. There are other aspects of the web experience that are equally important, like design. People might be reading the message but the layout may turn them off. Experiment with different navigation, text/image ratios, etc. Make it appealing so that they have an overall trust in what you are presenting. It is a subtle change that you’ll undertake and it could have powerful effects.

A word about click fraud
We’re finally starting to understand that click fraud isn’t the major problem that it hasn’t been hyped to be. There’s no question that people are trying to game the system. The more that the search engines reveal the difference between fraudulent clicks versus the person who basically accidentally hit the back button and then the forward button and then the back button, that’s not fraudulent, but people are doing that at times. Regardless, you want to pay attention to it.

Here are some telltale signs of click fraud: traffic spikes from single IP address, particularly if they are outside of the geotargeting area, traffic is up and you’re not seeing more sales but conversion rates are dropping sharply.

Measuring success is important.
To measure success, you have to measure. A lot of people neglect this measurement aspect. They are not getting in and getting a granular look of what is happening, like what can give more information. What do you measure?
Everyone has ultimate end goals. You should define what success means to you. Do you want people to register for an event, download a whitepaper? Only once you have defined the goal, you’ll look at what you want to measure, such as the click through rate, ROI, or the lifetime value of a customer. There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the data but you should know how you measure the success because then you can eliminate emphasizing the data that is not as important. Apply what you’ve learned and feed it back into your campaign and do it over and over to stay successful and prove the overall performance of your campaign.

Measurement tools
There are a lot of them out there. Some are free, others are fee-based, others are bundled with services. Explore this and try to see what works for you. We don’t have a standard consistent definition of the metrics you’ll apply and how the tools work, so I’m not going to give recommendations. You should do research based on your own goals and what works best for you.

Analytics Tools are the same way.

• Check the log file analysis and reports, including search engine referrers, keywords used, landing pages hit, etc. These tools will help you really understand what happened and how can we adapt and change to improve.
• Beyond pure analytics, you can get into behavior tracking. Did the user do what we wanted or did they do something else? You can use these tools to get in the mind of the searcher to tailor and fine-tune your overall campaign.
• Track both direct and deferred conversions (especially if you’re selling offline, like in a B&M store).
• ROI tracking
• Budget tracking and optimization

These are offered by tools in some degree, so look into the tools.
These tools can:

• Test the effectiveness of promotions, such as different pricing strategies, free shipping, and other incentives. Is it working?
• Determine whether “dayparting” (running ads at specific times of the day) is an appropriate strategy. Is daytime better than evening? The target market is different.
• Bottom line: these tools save time. Good tools can reduce hours spent daily to literally just minutes.

Conclusion

• There’s a lot you can do to perfect your listing campaign to maximize the benefit. Perfecting paid listings is possible — it just takes a lot of work, a lot of experimentation, and willingness to abandon poor performers. It takes creativity and effort.
• Measure!
• Think about the tools. They save time and money.
• Test, analyze, adjust, repeat. It’s like a washing machine cycle.

Questions
Q: I heard that search engines are lowering organic results if there are corresponding paid links. Is that true?
A: I think that there’s nothing to that. Basically, there’s a very rigorous church and state separation between organic and paid listings according to search engines. Realistically, if any search engine were to do that and get caught when they say they have no influence on one another, they would lose users and search marketers. The trust keeps these companies in business, so by doing this could reduce the fundamental livelihood of their success. Take them on faith for that. The alternative scenario is nightmarish and can destroy a business.

Q: How worthy is it to target the long tail? Let’s say most long tail keywords have a few common keywords and the broad match matches the keywords and it’s not cheaper, how do you deal with that?
A: The most popular keywords are bid on by the most people and it will be expensive. The less popular words won’t cost as much. That’s what the tail is about. The search tail is the same as the long tail. If you’re targeting popular keywords, you’re probably not targeting the tail (in most cases). Rather than targeting individual (broad match) keywords, you should target two, three, four, five word keyphrases or strings, or in fact phrase-matching, which is a longer target. What this will do is likely lower the actual number of clickthroughs because you’re being more precise. But the people who are clicking probably are farther along in the process of making up their mind in the process of search for what they want to do. Overall, you will get a higher profit.

Q: How do you get around the problem that the ISPs don’t reflect where the people are?
A: That’s specific to an AOL address at times but sometimes other ISPs. I think we can get around that by targeting to the specific people who are not in that ISP. Another thing is that it’s a US-specific concern. Geotargeting is more effective in other countries.

Q: Should you test, analyze, adjust, repeat, and how much data is needed? (How often and how much?)
A: It goes back to your goals, your budget, how happy you are with your campaign. In an ideal world with unlimited time and resources, you want this to be constant. It’s like an athlete who is always improving himself. In the real world, we don’t have unlimited time and resources, so identify your goals, what’s important to you, and once you do, test until you achieve the goals. Once you’ve done that, then you don’t have to come back to it as often. If you aren’t happy, do it as much as you possibly can.

Q: Should you initially match for broad and for long tail? Is it effective to create different categories for different types of matching?
A: You will want to match all of these and capture the attention because your competitors are doing the same thing. You have to match that competitive mindset and you can better-believe that your competitors are doing that. If you don’t have savvy competition (you can observe what they’re doing, the bid activity that’s occurring), you’re in luck. If you’re in a left-competitive area, simplify and go for the options that are good for the area.

In terms of creating groups, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. You want to have lots of different variations. You’re targeting one group with one mindset, one demographic, and one behavior. The key is to get into the mind of the searcher and understand that it’s not just one idealized searcher that is doing all this searching. It’s lots of individuals with their own needs and vocabulary. Create personas to represent these people and the ad groups to structure the campaigns can reflect these personas that you create.

Q: Can I get a better search keyword if I daypart?
A: It’s not going to be a better keyword if I daypart. In other words, if you’re selling a business service, you probably want your keyword during business hours. It won’t be as effective to target in the evening when a teenager is searching. That is the importance of dayparting.

Thanks again to everyone - Chris, Bill at iProspect, Claire at SearchMarketingNow, and everyone else - for the webcast!