Enterprise SEM Management: Keeping Your PPC Agency Accountable

Enterprise SEM Management: Keeping Your PPC Agency Accountable

Table of Contents Introduction... 3 The 5 Pillars to Enterprise SEM Success... 3 The 5 Challeges of Enterprise SEM Campaigns... 5 The 5 Strategies for Enterprise SEM Success... 6 Conclusion... 9 About the Authors... 9 2 2

Introduction Building a strong foundation and process when managing large-spend search-engine marketing (SEM) campaigns is critical to getting the best yield per dollar. In this white paper you will learn: The 5 Pillars to Enteprise SEM Success and how to make sure you re supported by them. The 5 Challeges of Enterprise SEM Campaigns and how to overcome them. The 5 Strategies for Enterprise SEM Success that your campaign must follow. 5 Pillars to Enterprise SEM Success 1. Communication & Focus: Large organizations and large SEM campaigns are complex both in structure and number of people. Keeping all the different people coordinated through one point-of-contact on the agency side is critical. This streamlined communication can then get an agency and client aligned on the most important strategic goals for the business. For example, if you re in the education industry, student enrollments are what s important not just leads. Knowing enrollments and cost-per-enrollment is important when integrating SEM and display strategies with particular CRM systems. Having this integration means you can know the cost per enrollment by campaign, ad goup, keyword, and display ad. In Fathom s case with one particular education client, hitting these cost targets across multiple levels resulted in a 40% decreased cost per enrollment, a 5% increased cost per lead, and 152% increased enrollments from 2010 to 2011. 2. Strategic Planning: It s very easy to get lost in the weeds while managing an SEM campaign with hundreds of thousands of keywords and seven-figure monthly budgets. Looking at the account performance from a broad perspective is critical. The solution is to build a strategic plan that forces all parties to collaborate in a significant way, yet also allows for some of the budget flexibility that enterprise SEM demands. Seasonality and year-over-year performance must be built into the plan. For example, e-commerce businesses tend to spend more during Q4. The education industry typically spends more in January and August. Whatever the industry, understanding the low- and high- revenue tides should be deeply ingrained with the SEM campaigns. In order to cover all angles of an SEM campaign, you ll want to audit it on a quarterly basis, ideally with the fresh perspectives of those previously unfamiliar with the details. You also want to attend industry conferences (SMX Advanced) and Google conferences (ThinkEDU & ThinkFinance); read credible resources (ClickZ, PPCHero, Google AdWords Blog) and hold weekly departmental training sessions. TIP: Google Insights is a great tool to help you hold your agency accountable for the seasonality in your campaigns. Google Insights can provide data on the macro-search trends within your industry. 3. Meaningful & Customizable Reporting: From company to company, reporting requirements are very different, and adhering to your own company s standards can make or break an account. Align an agency with your own corporate culture, potentially creating monthly, weekly and even daily reporting in various forms. Whatever the reporting challenge, building efficiencies is critical: The last thing anyone wants is to waste hours on formatting. One way for an agency to meet your reporting needs is to have it develop plug-and-play interactive dashboards that give you insight into the most meaningful SEM results. 3 3

4. PPC Management & Optimization: Agencies can spend all the time in the world talking to their clients, planning for the future, and reporting; however, enterprise SEM results aren t going to improve substantially unless campaigns are proactively managed. Digging into the details on a daily basis to analyze, test and see results is the lifeblood of any succesful campaign. Common tactics include: Running search-query, daypart and geographic reports; conducting segmentation analysis (e.g. Google search vs. search partners), device targeting and impression share analysis; campaign/ad group restructuring; placement performance reports; ad copy testing; and conversion analysis. 5. Paid Search Management & Bid Automation Tools: Skillful use of third-party systems can improve account management and bring companies more profit. Some software allows agencies to successfully run automated bidding rules across multiple platforms (Google, Bing, Facebook, and many others) to improve profitability. Access to labelling functions allows advertisers to track and optimize individual business units and product performance separately without having to restructure campaigns. If your agency doesn t provide access to tools like these, then find one that does. As the attribution market heats up, you will want to integrate bid management software with attribution technology such as C3Metrics and Adotomy, allowing automated bidding and granular SEM and display strategies based on keyword-level revenue attribution, along with permutations and data from each display ad. The use of proper attribution is revolutionary because traditionally in SEM, revenue credit has only been given to the last click prior to a conversion, such as that which makes a purchase or fills out a lead form. In today s world, marketers are able to attribute the appropriate amount of revenue to all touch points in an online marketing and advertising mix, even if one occured 13 clicks in the past. 4 4

5 Enterprise SEM Challenges Here are the key challenges enterprise clients face with PPC, along with methods to overcome them: 1. Communication / Knowledge Sharing: Interdepartmental communication is usually a challenge for large enterprise accounts. Solution: One point-of-contact. Having one person coordinating all parties will improve efficiency, reduce errors and delegate tasks appropriately. Utilizing project management software like Basecamp and Smartsheet to assign clear task responsiblities and deadlines can be very helpful. An ongoing rhythm of meetings is also useful: Weekly, bi-weekly and even daily calls between an agency and client may potentially be needed. 2. Branding vs. SEM: Large companies care greatly about branding and much of the time want full control of what each ad says. The pure branding approach generally doesn t work well with high-performance ad copywriting and could actually hurt quality scores. Case-in-point: An ad with generic branding copy (lacking a compelling call-to-action) will decrease the number of clicks and lower the click-thru rate, and by extension, the quality score. Add to this problem the fact that the corresponding generic landing page may not have information related to the visitor s intent and therefore cannot be customized with specific and relevant offers. Solution: Test! Conduct A/B tests of ad copy to determine what performs best for click-thru and conversion rates. The knowledge gained from these tests can be used to enhance messaging for the brand in all channels. 3. Budget Changes: Often with large accounts, budgets can shift on the turn of a dime. Hey, agency, I just found 1 million dollars. Go spend it. Solution: The first element to examine is low-hanging fruit. Are any campaigns converting well that are limited by budget? Can campaigns be copied over from Google to Microsoft AdCenter? Perhaps there s a product or service you re under-promoting or a new Google beta you can sign up for. How about advertising on alternative engines? You can also increase aggressiveness with display, retargeting and images. Keep an overflow campaign always on standby with alternative or test-worthy ads and keywords. Have overflow campaigns on standby Create a series of campaigns that can be turned on and off at a moment s notice. Have overflow staffing procedures Have a clear protocol in place with go-to people for quick campaign creation. Make sure the procedures are clear and the standby team is prepped on the account before they re needed. Have performance-based display campaigns Agencies like Fathom form partnerships to create a network that serves up billions of diplay ad impressions. Using predictive modeling, you can determine profiles of people that are very similar to those who have purchased from you recently and serve them display advertisements. If your agency does this on a cost-per-action basis (e.g. cost-per-lead or costper-purchase), then you have a very cost-effective way to invest in display. 4. Running Out of New Ideas: Typically, enterprise SEM advertisers have more of a desire to try new initiatives than medium- and small-sized ones. After several years, however, strategic account planning can get more difficult. Solution: Stay up-to-date with industry trends by consistenly engaging on blogs and attending industry shows like SMX Advanced, PubCon, Ad:Tech, SES and others. Conduct a weekly SEM clinic for the entire online advertising team to audit an account and brainstorm strategic ways to grow revenue. Working with the right agency can also create a direct line to representatives at Google & Yahoo! to push through things that would otherwise be limited by each publisher. 5 5

5. Massive Account Confusion: Numerous accounts, hundreds of campaigns, thousands of ad groups, and more than a million keywords can be nearly impossible to manage in the wrong hands. Solution: Prioritize which tasks on the to-do list will make the biggest impact. Then, delegate tasks to appropriate people. An enterprise PPC account requires multiple eyeballs on it. There s way too much for one person to do in a given day, and the account needs a system of checks-and-balances in order to ensure proper support. Solid naming structures allow everyone involved to have a clear understanding of what the account, campaign and ad groups represent. Having such a structure also makes integrating reports into executive briefs much easier and creates better understanding of data for non-essential PPC staff. Agendas and accountability are critical to ensure everyone is getting the job done. Provide summaries of your regular meetings with action items, due dates and clear responsibilities. 5 Strategies for Enterprise SEM Success Successfully managing enterprise PPC campaigns can be extremely difficult. First off, your competitors are often spending about as much or more than you are. They also want to get a good ROI from their programs. You must remain several steps ahead in order to be the SEM king in your space. Below are advanced strategies that help large PPC accounts grow and thrive: 1. Campaign Restructuring: Properly executed campaign restructuring breathes new life into SEM. Fighting your competition by trying to improve quality scores across the board is imperative. At a minimum, boost low quality scores by breaking down keywords into more relevant ad groups and ad copy. Avoid changing top-converting keywords/ads and moving keywords that provide a lot of value in their current location to a new location in your campaigns. Such changes can harm account credibility and performance. 2. Follow This Checklist for a Large SEM Spend Spanning Several Accounts: 1. Create specific accounts for various devices, including desktop computers, mobile and tablets. 2. Create a specific account for display-only campaigns (Google Display Network). 3. Create separate accounts for each domain that you manage. 4. Keep ad groups of no more than 10-20 keywords. 5. Have landing pages geared to each ad group and keyword, where possible. The more landing pages (and more relevant), the better. Microsites can also help target diverse audience needs. 6. Create separate campaigns for non-branded and branded keywords. 7. Create separate campaigns for individual products and/or services. 8. Create separate campaigns by geo-targets (especially for brick-and-mortar accounts). 9. Utilize Google sitelinks for highly diverse campaigns. a. Sitelinks can increase click-thru rates by up to 20%. b. Sitelinks only occur at the campaign level, so it s important to have very granular campaigns to allow for multiple sitelinks. 10. Create separate ad groups for different match types. a. When using match type-specific ad groups or even campaigns, it s important to use negative keywords to control which keyword and ad are shown. For example, if you have a phrase-match ad group and an exact-match ad group, make sure you add the keyword as a negative exact in the phrase-match ad group. 6 6

The previous are just a few high-level strategies enterprise SEM accounts can employ to help with management and provide as much transparency as possible. Below is a chart of the potential structure for an enterprise SEM account: *Important Update: As of February 6th, 2013, Google AdWords announced Enhanced Campaigns, which will change the approach to campaign set-up. 3. Experiment Outside the Big 3: Third-tier search engines and social media advertising are your friends. Yes, believe it or not, you can find success in a few third-tier search engines, such as AdMarketplace.com and 7Search.com. Don t get the wrong idea, third-tier search engines are not going to generate similar traffic to Google/Yahoo!/Bing. However, many enterprise SEM campaigns may generate a similar (or even better) cost-per-action on satellite engines when compared to the major search engines. Below is a snapshot of results for an automotive company across Google, AdCenter, 7Search, and AdMarketplace: This company actually sees its best cost-per-lead ($9.86) from 7Search. However, as expected, the volume is much lower. 7 4. ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments): ACE is nearly equivalent to landing-page testing for AdWords components (with some limitations and frustrations). ACE will will allow an SEM campaign to split-test or test a control vs. experiment in 10% increments to determine if a change is going to hurt or help campaign performance. 7

For example, let s say a company has a keyword at an average position of 3.5 and converting $20 short of the target cost per conversion. The company can run a campaign experiment to see how the keyword would perform if bids were to increase by 20%. ACE will segment the data to show how performance metrics would be affected, such as average position, average CPC, click-thru rate, and cost per conversion. Therefore, a company can essentially see how different changes will impact keywords and ads before implementing them across the board. An SEM campaign manager can start slow and conduct the experiment on 10% or 20% vs. the control 90% or 80%. 5. Automated Bidding: Automated bidding rules allow advertisers to spend much more efficiently, lower the cost per conversion, and improve overall return on advertising spend. Automated bidding rules work well for the most important metrics such as cost per acquisition, return on advertising spend, or margin goals for e-commerce. In addition, you can create bidding rules to take the top spot for branded or mobile campaigns or automatically increase bids if they are below first-page bid estimates. You can also take attribution components from keywords or display campaigns to bring visitors to your website that are not quite ready to make a purchase but might be in time. Automated bidding works well, but to get the maximum ROI lift, a human eye should regularly evaluate bid changes. For example, after automating the bidding rules for one particular large-spend lead-generation client, Fathom saw a 60% increase in clicks and 30% increase in impressions, which led to a 43.5% increase in leads while staying under the cost-per-lead (CPL) goal. 6. Google Display Network: All enterprise SEM advertisers need to re-evaulate their Google display network campaigns due to a major shift in Google that occurred in 2012: Keyword-level reporting. In the past, Google only provided information on contextually based display campaigns at the ad group level. From a management perspective, knowing which keywords were succeeding and failing was very difficult. Now, Google allows advertisers to see performance at a keyword level and actually allows access to historical data on how each keyword performed even prior to the time this data was initially provided. To help illustrate what kind of difference this change made, consider an example from an enterprise financialindustry account. Before the change, when optimizing was limited to the ad group level, CPL for the largest display campaign was at $173.55. After Google allowed optimization at the keyword level, the CPL dropped to $109.02 over the same time frame (2.5 months). That s more than a 37% decrease in cost per conversion! 8 8

Conclusion You have learned the pillars of enterprise SEM campaign management, the challenges in enterprise SEM, and the strategies for success. The application of this knowledge could turn a solid SEM campaign into a spectacular one, potentially resulting in a doubling of profit. Make sure you re getting the best return on your advertising budget: Hold your agency accountable and keep your boss happy. About the Authors Joe Castro Joe Castro is the director of online advertising at Fathom. He has worked at Fathom since January 2008 with a concentration in search engine marketing (SEM) and display advertising. Joe s worked with a variety of clients across various industries including education, healthcare, e-commerce, and hospitality. His background in business and marketing from the University of Dayton has allowed him to quickly help grow Fathom s online advertising department. Follow Joe on Twitter @PPCJoeC. Brad Miller Brad Miller is a director of business development at Fathom. He is a recognized digital marketing expert with over 10 years of experience in search, social, analytics and ecommerce. He has worked in multiple capacities including roles in consulting, management, production and sales. His vast experience along with proficiency in online marketing and business savvy, allow him to identify areas for improvement and effectively put together strategic solutions. Follow Brad on Twitter @ibradmiller Hours: 8:00 a.m. 5:00 p.m. ET, M-F Tel: 1.866.726.5968 Simple. Accountable. Results that matter. 9