Paid Search For Big Sites

On Thursday, January 10th, Chris Sherman, Executive Editor from Search Engine Land spoke at a very valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled ‘Paid Search For Big Sites’. This event was sponsored by iProspect and provided pertinent information regarding paid search programs for big brands and big sites.

At the onset, Chris indicated that the goal of the presentation is to help those attending to better manage their paid search efforts.

Mr. Sherman started by stating that all big brands do have big sites – but that not all big sites are big brands. The presentation was broken into two segments – what you need to do to set up your PPC program for success and the marketing end of things related to search.

Know Your Goals. First off, Mr. Sherman counseled the audience that the first thing anyone working on a paid search program needs to define is the goals. With any search marketing campaign, it is crucial to look at goals and understand what you are trying to accomplish. Without knowing goals – you cannot measure success. Ask yourself these questions:

Why are you doing PPC vs. SEO or even other types of marketing?
Are you measuring the right things?
Is PPC the most effective use of marketing resources?

Beyond The Basics. You need to get the right keywords, budgets and bids – however, when you are working with big sites and big brands, other things are equally important.

Running a paid search campaign for a big site means far more than managing keywords, bids and budgets.
Basic blocking and tackling is important, but there are several other key factors for running a successful campaign.
You need a strategy that focuses on your own success metrics, yet fully accounts for the competitive landscape.
You need an array of tools to automate manual tasks, offer feedback to fine tune strategy, and ideally, automatically adjust to constantly changing conditions.

Chris stressed that we need to understand what is we are trying to accomplish with PPC. Need to look at the competitive landscape and ascertain what our competitors are doings. For the big brands – whatever the competitors are doing will influence what you will do. You have to adapt and be flexible.

He also noted that you need to automate things wherever possible. Spend your time thinking at the higher level and leave the day-to-day work to automated tools (if you can). These tools are very sophisticated now and they can adapt in real time to changing conditions. Based on the business rules you supply, the tools will change the campaign and respond to what is happening with competition.

Leadership is Important. One of the important things that Chris Sherman feels is overlooked is the critical importance of leadership. In order to be successful, you need to work with all different groups to make sure all the stakeholders are getting their needs satisfied and that you are in alignment with other areas in the campaign. You need to influence not just the team – but top management as well. Top management is critical as they need to buy into your efforts for budgets etc. You need to show them that the campaign is working.

Managing Expectations is Key. Mr. Sherman posed the question …what happens when you find you are in a battle for position – against another group in your own organization? How would you deal with those types of challenges?

He feels that it is important to manage expectations amongst everyone.

You need to identify the owners vs. influencers. The owners own content and have the final say over specific campaigns. Equally important is mapping out the role of the influencers. Just make sure everyone has clearly spelled out roles, responsibilities, and evaluation metrics. If you can get these roles clearly mapped out it can really help drive the design and implementation of the campaign.

Global vs. Local Control. Another important area to define is whether the campaign is controlled globally (head office) or down to the local level (field office). One idea is to segment keywords and creative. For example – corporate could have the responsibility for general brand terms (a searcher just beginning an info quest) and local could have control over more specific, less branded terms (where the searcher knows what they are looking for).

Bidding Strategy. Chris suggested thinking of your keywords as you would your financial portfolio. Just as with your investment portfolio, some keywords will be winners while others will be losers. You will need to continually rebalance your portfolio after you understand how they are performing (trim the losers, invest more in winners) to maintain proper exposure to achieve business goals.

Automate Bid Management. As mentioned previously, Chris stressed how automation allows you to increase volume. With these powerful tools, you can perform rapid testing of ad strategies, position, time of day, day of week and other variables. Automation works well with both concentrated and localized strategies. With good bid management solutions, you can learn from testing and adjust your campaign in real time – 24/7.

Watch – Learn – Then React. You need to use your own goals and metrics as a baseline and then based on the feedback from the metrics you know when to raise bids, keep an eye on the status quo or dump the underperformers.

What to Do If Your Organization Has Separate Terms for SEO and PPC. If you organization has separate terms for SEO and PPC – communication is key. It is so important for the separate departments to share data and to beware of inconsistent or conflicting messages. The organic and paid search side must share data and be consistent and not competing.

PPC vs. SEO. One is not better than the other – instead big brands should use each for maximum effort. PPC is best for fluid, changing content, promotions and the beginning stages or search. However, it is less effective for getting people to evergreen or static content. PPC on the other hand is great to test creative for SEO campaigns.

Testing is So Important. Don’t assume PPC reinforces SEO – sometimes one strategy can undermine another. It is important to note that 70% of all clicks are still coming from organic results. Use organic search to help resolve conflicts between teams and dominate SERP (search engine result pages). If searchers see you in the natural listings and sees you in the paid search – it does reinforce legitimacy for the searcher.

Marketing Issues. After focusing on the tactical issues that need to be resolved with paid search, Chris switched gears and focused on marketing issues that are unique to big brands. He started by stating the branding is not direct marketing. With direct marketing, your focus is on conversion and outcome. However, with branding – it is more complex and takes place in stages. Branding can lead to conversion, but it isn’t the primary goal.

It is important that the paid search messaging should be tailored to match each of these stages.

Chris also stressed the importance of the role of perception. That is, the perception of what is in the searchers mind will ultimately influence what the searcher does. It doesn’t matter what keywords we have – but what the searcher has experienced leading up to sitting down at the computer.

Four Stages of Branding. Mr. Sherman then presented his perception as to what the whole branding process is about. It is a useful model to think about as you are creating your marketing messages.

Building brand awareness (early stage – overcoming low recognition and emotion. Your marketing messages need to raise awareness.
Reinforcing brand awareness (middle stage – emphasis on solidifying brand attributes and positive associations).
Enhancing preference and favorability (late stage – emphasis on persuasion). Really want to reach out to consumers at this stage.
Reinforcing brand loyalty (post sale). Here your messages are reinforcing their purchase decision to help them stay brand loyal in the future.

He also mentioned that search ads are only one part of the branding message – direct mail, radio, TV and online graphic ads are important too. Remember that your other types of brand messages can have a huge effect on the way people respond to search results. Search ads should complement your other efforts – they are important, but they are just one part of what you are trying to do. A good rule of thumb is – if you are doing an effective job on the other fronts, you should have a positive response to your paid search efforts.

It is a mistake to silo your ads. If you have a big brand, search ads are just one other component of all the other methods and techniques you have. Search ads should complement all your other efforts. They are important – but they are just one part of what you are trying to do.

Other types of brand messages have an impact. If you are doing an effective job on other fronts – they are likely to respond to your PPC.

Leveraging Online Strategy. Consider a mix of search and display ads. Chris sited the Microsoft Lending Tree study (11-07) where people who were exposed to both search and display advertising were:

556% more likely to visit LendingTree.com
650% more likely to fill out an online qualification form (so that the company could continue the sales process).

Use Your Search Data. Use your data! The data from your search campaign (demographics, time/day of search etc.) can help refine other brand campaign elements, and vice versa.

Get information from your search campaign – mine your data to find out important information that can help you relate to the prospects in ways that they have expressed through their search engine behavior. Remember to filter this information back to all your marketing efforts. It is a great testing ground because you get immediate feedback from people using it.

SERPs vs. Content Networks. SERPs are where all the direct marketers want to be. Content networks are when the search engine distributes ads to partners (ex. Google to the NY Times). Branding works both on SERPs and on content partner pages.

Since your conversion goal is less important – it is useful to be on both. There haven’t been any studies to determine effectiveness, but Sherman believes that they work in the case of branding. Again, he counsels that the only way to really tell is to go out and test with your own campaigns.

Conclusions

Paid search for big sites requires leadership, not just skilled search marketing techniques.
Search can be an effective part of a comprehensive branding effort.
As with all types of search marketing – success will be determined by the quality of execution on your goals.

At the end of the presentation, there were a few minutes for questions.

What tasks can be automated?
- Tons of tasks can be automated. For example, the bid management process, what time of day should an ad be running, what parts of the world do you want the ad to be running in. More and more of the processes are lending themselves to automation.

How do you manage crossover keywords – how do you do that when you share amongst multiple departments?
- It’s is important to define the owners and influencers. Those issues are quickly diminished if the owners and influencers are identified. The ruthless approach is necessary to determine who owns the keywords.

How do you rebalance your portfolio of keywords?
- It involves taking a hard look at all your keywords and how are they performing relative to the goals you have set for them. It involves going through the entire portfolio and matching each keyword against your goals. It is driven by bottom line but also by how those numbers relate to the business goals established for each individual keyword.

Thanks to Chris Sherman, Search Marketing Now and iProspect for an informative web seminar.

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Posted by Shannon Bowden at 1:49 pm
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