Search results matching tag 'PPC'

Adding value to the PPC equation

2517221 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:17:00 GMT

Regardless of the techniques used to entice customers, a standard acquisition strategy generally has the potential to deliver prospects of both high and low value. On the positive side, prospects who are converted into active customers may prove themselves to be worthwhile targets because of the revenue they generate in the short and long term. On the flipside, other new customers may not allow such a fruitful relationship; they may take advantage of an introductory offer or only make a single purchase, costing more to acquire than the brand can ever hope to secure a return from. And of course, yet more customers will fall somewhere between these two extremes.

New customers delivered through investment in search marketing – both SEO and PPC – can deliver both types of customers. However, PPC, in its prime role at the entrance to the sales funnel, can be used in a much more tactical way, in order to encourage the acquisition of consistently higher-value customers.

Firstly let’s consider how PPC works. A good PPC agency will be constantly improving and enhancing the search terms associated with a brand campaign, to capitalise on those terms which are delivering the greatest responses. By adding another layer of insight to this process – namely identifying which search terms deliver higher-value customers - the campaign can then begin to evolve to appeal to a larger majority of these prospects.

It sounds simple, but there is the obvious requirement of developing a more detailed understanding of customer value, in order to clearly recognise and group new customers, and utilise this information within PPC activity. Value isn’t an exact science, and can be more about examining the potential a new customer can deliver to the brand, as well as considering other factors like risk and attrition. The brand may need to develop a communications strategy to successfully unlock value over the long term, based on customer insight and its own product and service portfolio. But if an accurate enough gauge can be created at the point of acquisition, the PPC campaign can develop to reflect the need to attract certain customer groups over others.

The brand will obviously benefit from the improvement in quality of new customers it acquires, and the PPC agency can use this in combination with other methods of campaign enhancement to improve its own performance; especially important if it’s working on a cost per acquisition model. If the average value of new customers increases, it can even lobby to increase the acquisition fee to reflect this.

Brands should investigate the opportunity to use PPC in a strategic and considered way. In doing so they can improve the quality of customers entering the sales cycle while simultaneously maximising their search marketing investment.

Google feeling the agency wrath once again

1713999 — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:34:00 GMT

These days Google can't step out of the front door without upsetting someone and it's become somewhat de rigueur for agencies to slag them off left, right and centre despite the fact that a lot of us, myself included, generate some profit from the existence of their services.

As such when the news broke last week that Google are further relaxing their trademark policy in the US you could already here agencies across the land downing spreadsheets and sharpening pitchforks in protest. In case you missed the screams of anguish the first time around (last year in the UK following a ‘test' in the US), the first stage of Google's evil plan was to allow advertisers to appear against users' searches for trademarked terms they don't own, although the advertising copy itself could only refer to the brand if it was run by the trademark owner or an authorised party.

The result of such a change is that competitors could suddenly appear against each other's results, reducing the cheap brand traffic that paid search advertisers love so whilst competition also forced up the cost of buying clicks due to the auction model Google uses. Whilst there was an impact the reality is simply that Google's algorithm for paid search, whilst dictates which position advertisers appear in and how much they pay, meant that legitimate advertisers almost always still get to the top spot for a fraction of the cost of a competitor due to increased ‘relevance' - itself a function of copy and proportion of users that click.

The next step in Google's master plan? To allow advertisers to use whatever trademarks they like in an ad. Advertiser frustration may seem understandable - advertisers using your trademark now appear more relevant to both Google and the consumer and therefore you end up getting less clicks for more money. Yet before you go and start collecting rocks to throw at our little search friend it's worth considering a couple of points.

Firstly you can only include a trademark if you have a legitimate justifiable reason, e.g. you offer information on or sell the trademarked product. Which, it's worth pointing out, pretty much puts Google where Yahoo! have been for years (so they DID get something right obviously, huh?!) and also... Kind of makes sense. Especially when supplier and affiliate terms will enable brands to police this space themselves anyway.

The second thing to consider is Google's justification. I'm paraphrasing (see their reasoning in full here), but ultimately their rationale is that you've been able to do it through other media for years. You run Joe Blogg's car showroom and want to run a press ad telling the world you are now giving away an iPod to your one billionth customer? Not a problem... Yet on search? Not on your nelly. Until now (in the US at least... the UK soon no doubt).

And this is what the complainants overlook - paid search is probably the only form of advertising where the media owner tries to police the advertisements. If you run an advert that breaks the law on TV then it is your responsibility and sure, if you passed yourself off as another brand you can bet your bottom dollar someone's going to get sued, but it won't be the TV channel. Google's latest change merely shows the medium is growing up.

Jack of all Trades

1713999 — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Going back a few weeks, I wrote about "who owns social media?" The answer to that particular piece being that social media cannot operate in isolation and to be successful, multiple different skills need to be blended together. To add some more fuel to the fire and to broaden this a little, we've been discussing internally the merits of a specialist digital media agency versus a full service one.

Paid Search became the domain of the specialist agency when a flourish of agencies were set up focusing all of their resources on that particular field, developing expertise as a genuine point of difference while increases in technology took away some of the man-hours to increase efficiency. Media Planning & Buying has existed in its own right in the traditional sense and that has followed in digital with large agencies dominating on the pretence that they can achieve greater buying economies of scale with an increase level of spend.

The disadvantage with specialist agencies comes from the nature of a ‘specialist' - someone who is devoted to a particular occupation. They can be very single-minded due to the expertise and experience that they have in that particular field, however this can lead to them having a narrow and restricted view on advertising and indeed marketing in general. To that end specialist agencies are beginning to broaden their services, such as The Search Works merging with TradeDoubler to offer a more holistic approach. It's also been said a million times before that people consume media differently now than they have in the past therefore surely their behavior requires an approach from the people who connect brands with consumers which mirrors this?

Naturally I'm inclined to believe that a full-service environment, with all disciplines together under the same roof with central co-ordination of these disciplines, is the way forward. This way, full-service agencies can provide independent, agnostic advice on aspects such as the budget allocation between the different disciplines, or advise on the impact that Display actually had on persuading one of their customers to convert online through a different channel.

Moving away from media in isolation, we're seeing digital creative agencies such as AKQA launching their own media divisions to combat the need for digital expertise in all areas under one roof, i.e. Media and Creative. As the IPA's newly inaugurated president, Rory Sutherland recently addressed the challenge of having media planners who do not have experience in dealing with creatives, highlighting the need for a more rounded approach:

"It terrifies me that almost nobody under the age of 35 in a media agency has any experience of working with creative people and vice versa; hence fewer and fewer people understand ... the whole equation of business"

Coming from LBi it would be easy to accuse me of blowing my own trumpet but that would be missing the point. Ultimately co-operation is what is important - we are all better if we are working together. If a business is able to get a group of specialist agencies working together towards a common goal then that is fantastic, but in practice this rarely happens and it is most achievable within a full service environment, with each party fighting for their share of the budget.

Understanding what works is the best investment in a downturn

2184893 — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:25:00 GMT

Amazon.com’s decision to end commission payments to affiliates who drive traffic directly through paid search is a good example of what brands should be doing during the recession. Analysing all channels in depth, even those which are traditionally accepted as the most efficient and strongest performing and understanding what’s really driving incremental sales is one of the most valuable exercises any advertiser can perform. It will go further than any other activity to ensure the business emerges leaner, fitter and stronger than the competition when those fabled green shoots of recovery inevitably appear.

In Amazon’s case it’s about understanding whether their affiliates are symbiotic and therefore driving incremental sales against the companies own direct PPC campaign or whether they’re parasitic and simply an unnecessary middle man in the process. This should be the yardstick for any affiliate program. Does it add incremental sales and is it a positive experience from a brand and a user’s point of view?

Understanding this question requires accurate tracking and de-duplication of sales across all digital channels, combined with the resource to analyse this data so it can be used to inform the strategy going forward. This all sounds pretty obvious doesn’t it? But it’s amazing how many advertisers with very large digital budgets don’t have such a process in place.

Forty percent of companies surveyed in a recent industry wide poll by a tracking company said between 11% and 20% of commissions paid to affiliates were duplicate payments. Almost 20% said that between 21% and 30% were duplicated. Bearing in mind companies tend to play down the extent of these issues we can assume it’s regularly higher than this. Of course it’s not just an affiliate issue. There is overlap between all digital channels but especially between all ‘search sourced’ media – PPC, SEO, affiliate and aggregators. Many online marketing managers I speak to are aware that this is an issue but rely on the ad serving based tracking solutions from their media agency to do a job they’re not designed to do. But there is a lack of technical understanding as to what exactly is missing and how easy it can be to resolve.

In the exciting and fast moving world of digital marketing it’s easy to overlook the fundamentals. There’s always something new to consider as part of the digital strategy, whether that’s mobile, video or social media. But in these challenging times, investing in understanding what really works, before doing anything else, is the strategy which will deliver the greatest return, especially as we move into a world where brands with the most effective data driven strategy will be the outright winners.

Heaven forbid you reduce your PPC budget !

1713999 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:19:00 GMT

For a any campaign, there is rarely a time when search shouldn’t be considered as part of the marketing mix. An exceptional mechanic at capitalising on demand and a worthy investment despite its weakness in terms of stimulating that initial engagement. Some may say that appearing against a generic search result is beneficial and while I give that argument credence it is rarely the motivating factor in investment choices.

So we are all agreed, spend money on search. Now the tricky bit – the relationship of investment and results between SEO and PPC. Why do clients confidently and happily spend many hundreds of thousands on PPC however balk at the prospect of paying five figures for an annual SEO retainer ? Naturally the focus of a search budget will vary for a number of reasons - vertical, seasonality, competitive set, business objectives your current position and learning, internal resource, I could keep going for some time however what’s really starting to wind me up is the energy and funds going into the source of 15% of the traffic while the remaining 85% is just “assumed”.

More specifically SEO still seems to be falling between the cracks. It still doesn’t have a comfortable home, its not marketing, its not IT. As a result of this I have recently had the following exchange

“We cant do SEO someone, forgot to put a line in a budget”

“don’t panic” was my retort “lets recut the PPC budget and reinvest in SEO”

eery silence with a look that suggested I’d just asked him to give me his first born.

So my question to you, all 15 of my readers is, what have I missed ? Why on earth wouldn’t you reduce reliance on PPC to invest in organic search ?

Should We Educate Searchers Or Just Get Better At SEO & PPC?

980070 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:23:00 GMT

My mate Dixon Jones just Tweeted a Guardian post which shows just how far we have yet to go in educating consumers on how online advertising works.

FastHosts recently commissioned a survey called Online Search Matters asking 1636 UK adults questions around their online usage and perceptions.

A whopping 24% are not aware of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, and have no idea that search results can be influenced by website owners who embark on a robust and comprehensive content and linking strategy.

22% seem to think organic listings are paid for and 33% deem PPC or Sponsored Links as less “useful” or “worthy” than the main algorithmic results.

Now I love a challenge and when I meet someone who says, “I never click on the sponsored listings because they’re paid for!” I get a cheap thrill explaining just how relevant and timely they can be.

Consider the huge discounts being offered online right now. It could take days for organic results to show up a change in prices to reflect a quick two-day “50% Off Sale!”

But with PPC, a sale ad could be up and being clicked on in minutes.........and that doubter could be a lot better off wallet-wise.

We’re the experts though. We live and breathe this stuff and I remember how hard it was when I was learning to get my head around it.

Maybe consumers just don’t care?

Ignorance can breed defensiveness if challenged so how do we educate? Is it necessary to explain to consumers the intricacies of how the web works?

2009 will be a big year for SEO and site architecture optimisation as businesses get their “sites in order” so they capitalise and profit when we emerge from the downturn.

Will increased relevance in both organic and paid change how people think about search?

Only time will tell....

Wanted teachers for international/local students

2433659 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:31:57 GMT

we are searching well experience teachers , tutors or professors for international /local students in all subjects . please register freely in our website http://find-guru.com/register.php or email your resume to info@find-guru.com

Re: PPC agencies

2369260 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:36:00 GMT

Hi Louise, Why PPC? A multi-channel approach using social media, social networks and contextual paid search should provide you with much better results and ROI. These PPC agencies will readily spend your money and charge you for quantity. I'd go for a very targeted approach delivering you quality...and tie an agency into a performance related set of metrics. It can be very easy to be caught out. Karl

International Partnership

2063264 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:52:45 GMT

SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) is one of the largest independent digital agencies in China and is seeking to find partners in other markets to either resell our technology/services in International markets or provide an outsourced digital team. Specifically, we wish to partner in the area of Search Marketing and/or Digital Buying/Planning.

You can find more information about SinoTech Group from the website.

Regards

Matt

Re: PPC agencies

2063264 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:10:36 GMT

Louise,

Our company, SinoTech Search would welcome the chance to work with you. We have a great deal of experience in this area. Please either look to our website (www.sinotechsearch.com.cn) or you can send me an email to arrange more follow up or for a phone call.

Regards

Matt