Manhattan Marketing Maven

Pay-Per-Click Dayparting Didn't Work

In the evolving world of Pay-Per-Click many of us, especially those older than 35, try to adapt media tactics from traditional media to the business of adwords and clicks. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t.

In the case of dayparting, a tactic for optimizing budgets by attacking an audience when they are actively engaged in a medium, the results are mixed according to my favorite PPC jockey “Silent Jeff” Petrosillo of Solid Cactus.

Our client has a well known brand name. Management has little or no understanding of PPC and even less cash to spend. By looking at e-Commerce buying patterns we determined that they did the vast majority of their online business from 11a till 8p Monday through Friday. We reasoned that if buyers were active in this midday day part so were prospects. So we concentrated our spend and limited the campaign to branded keywords in this smaller time frame.

Previously we were running a 24 hour schedule of branded keywords and achieving an ROI of 23:1 where our average cost per click was twenty cents. But our dayparting strategy depressed our results in two ways; our ROI dropped to 14:1 and our conversion rate dropped from 5.06% to 3.77%.

It seems that a constant exposure yields more total impressions and perhaps repeat impressions against active shoppers which boosts average conversion rates, while the more limited time window reduces our shots on goal. I still want to test time-sensitive offers but in the short run we’re returning to a longer rotation and better results.

 

Finding the Optimal Search Marketing Partner

Finding the right search engine partner is tough. There is no barrier to entry in this market. Brand name  agencies have no significant competitive advantage over unknown geeks madly trying to psyche out their counterparts at Yahoo or Google. Number of employees, revenue, location, number of accounts, or volume of media spending -- the usual criteria used in finding media partners -- are not particularly useful indicators of expertise or success. 

Having just hired a great, under-publicized team from Solid Cactus located in Silicon Nowhere -- Wilkes Barre, PA -- allow me to suggest three criteria for evaluating prospective search engine marketing partners.

1. Tools are Table Stakes. Managing organic SEO and pay-per-click keyword purchasing requires sophisticated software to assess where you're at, the competitive landscape and to plan, buy and manage campaigns. No tools equals no sale.

There are only a few universally used 3rd party tools like Alexa and Google Analytics, so for the most part these are homemade tools with a wide range of capabilities and an equally wide range of value to clients. And unless you have software development skills its hard to assess the claims or the code underlying these proprietary tools. Look for firms that use a mix of 3rd party and proprietary tools. See how they combine free tools with tools they've invested their own time or cash to build. Ask what the tools do. Then ask yourself if these functions actually help you work faster or smarter.

But the real insight comes when you road test the tools. Demand sample uses of the tools to understand what they do and why they'll be useful and valuable for you. If you don't learn something you don't already know or if you aren't surprised or blown away by the information they reveal walk away. Zero in on the guys who can demonstrate the benefit of the tools for you and who can show you how the tools will impact your business.

2. It's the Thinking Not the Tools. Your success is not about the tools. Too many SEO jockeys are so wrapped up in their own world that they can't focus or understand yours. There is a heavy Walter Mitty-meets Dr. Geekazoid factor among SEMers. If they can't explain it in a simple English sentence its a negative warning sign.

The best players understand business; specifically your business. They actually think for you and can map their magic to your business objectives and your budgets. Look for the team that understands your business objectives and can help translate them into the wild and woolly world of SEM. If they can't show you what you'll win in terms of traffic, cash and ROI --- forget about it.

3. Assess the Tactical Game. To win at search engine marketing you must focus on the short game. If you don't, Google laughs all the way to the bank and you end up with meaningless clicks. The game is won by carefully watching each move, calibrating words and buys, continually assessing what words people punch into search engines and what words you use to describe your merchandise or services. Played well its a fast-moving game of arbitrage.

You can squander your money in a blink. Your partners have to be in this game on several levels. You need a smart field general who sees the big picture, preferably your big picture. Then you need the digital marketing equivalent of a chess master + stock trader + bookie to concentrate, think 3 moves ahead and make your moves day-by-day and dollar-by-dollar. If you don't have somebody hunched over a laptop or nosed into their flat screen monitor thinking about how many cents to bid, which days or hours work best for you and how to spell each word you're optimizing, you are losing the game.         

An Amazing Cyber Monday Deal

Here's an amazing customer-centric offer to my readers from Boris Mordkovich.

Get 67%OFF a one year subscription to SEARCH MARKETING STANDARD by using  the coupon code HOLIDAY67 before DECEMBER 10 and clicking on this link

https://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/subscribe.html

But wait -- there's a charity tie-in! For each reader who parts with $4.95 (the discounted price) Boris will give $1 to Toys for Tots. Is this a deal or what?

You get the publication, you get much smarter about search engine marketing. The kids get the toys and they stop whining. There's free shipping and free parking. And Hanukkah is still to come. 

So dear readers, help me prove that I'm not just pissing in the wind. Help Boris get rich and help those kids get those toys. CLICK EARLY and OFTEN.

The Latest SEO Intelligence

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is marketing alchemy. Everybody wants it, Nobody knows what it really is or how it really works. And the hype served up by agencies hawking it is impenetrable.

Enter MarketingSherpa, once again soliciting and organizing the collective insight of practitioners and selling it back to us as the 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. Here are the highlights of this year's survey of 2475 marketers and 711 agency pros as interpreted by yours truly:

Natural search, the cat-and-mouse process of changing keywords, tags, headers and burying clues for spiders behind the presentation layer that is becoming synonymous with the term SEO, is being done by one-third of marketers lead by the big guys, who are doing it 30% more than the rest of us.

45% of us are betting our pay-per-click (PPC) chips on Google, which for all but the top spenders is the whole act. 84% of the little guys and 75% of the big guys, those who spend more than $25K on search, see Google as having a well deserved dominance with the best ROI for the money. The big guys are buying Yahoo, MSN and vertical players mostly to average out their cost-per-clicks (CPC) and because they have the cash and the patience to experiment with the wannabes and also-rans.

Search is perceived to pay off better than PR and direct mail, way better than the all-but-dead banner ad and 4 times better than print ads. Though search isn't seen as strong as banging away at our house e-mail lists. Maybe that's why PPC claims just 40% of online marketing budgets, which are less than 1/4 of overall marketing budgets. Despite the relatively light investment levels, more than half of all respondents think natural and PPC search is a strong tactic with a good ROI -- just don't ask us to prove it.

Measurement is still a big issue. We are counting clicks something ill-defined called "actions" orders, page views, unique site visitors and time spent on site all by way of trying to understand what searchers do, what separates buyers from tire-kickers and what justifies handing over hard cold currency to Google?

We are slowly training a cadre of in-house people to do search marketing. Between 34-44% don't think finding in-house full-time employees is any more difficult than finding other skilled marketing players. That said a lot of us a eager to outsource this process which is labor and software intensive when done properly.

So far the survey says our best tactics to improve search effectiveness appear to be (in ascending order of potency)

1. Create clear buttons to click on and easy forms to fill out

2. Display trust symbols like Hacker Safe

3. Build in the phrases people actually use when searching into your natural search terms and buy the phrases as keywords. Mirror the way your customer thinks, talks and searches.

4. Don't let searchers leave the page. Remove the navigation. Force them to either buy or abandon.

5. Create dedicated landing pages for each search term. Take clickers exactly to the product they clicked on. Then romance the product, make them an offer and call the question.

Searching for Santa & Holiday eCommerce Success

While Christmas seems far off, savvy marketers are lining up their holiday merchandise, offers, promotions, landing pages, infrastructure and planning their campaigns right now. Enter ChannelAdvisor Search with a scarily illuminating white paper titled "Seven Steps to Holiday Search Success."

These North Carolina-based software and ecommerce services guys argue that you have to think long and  hard in advance to optimize holiday search since every Nimrod and his brother jumps in Q4 creating a phenomenon they call the "CPC Wave" -- which artificially spikes the costs and muddies the waters. Just when you thought you had retail ecommerce search figured out and bench-marked, you have to rethink and retool your program. But actually its the good news.

In figuring out a holiday search strategy you are trying to extract the best fish from the ocean at the right time without overspending. Its a daunting objective since traffic and shopping grows steadily from Halloween through New Year's Day. You don't want to double pay for over-pay for business you'd get anyway. But you do want to separate the active buyers from the tire-kickers, harvest more-than-your-fair share on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. get maximum impact for offers like free shipping and use "last ship day for Xmas" and other urgency messages to create optimal revenues. And you are doing this at exactly the same time everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.

Planning are parsing are critical. Use historical data to figure out when you need to pour it on and when you can afford to coast. Similarly you need to re-craft keywords to zero-in on how buyers actually search and buy rather than shoot your wad attracting people who are checking out the merchandise or researching alternatives.This can be tricky since you need to buy not only specific product and model names you also need to embed offers, obvious misspellings and broader category terms into your keyword phrases.Then you need to figure out how to ride the predictable waves, how to watch this whole program like a hawk between Thanksgiving and December 20 and know when to throttle back as shoppers automatically go into post-holiday sale mode.

And its not just about buying words. In addition to aligning with inventory availability and discount cycles, the program should involve multi-dimensional messaging, dedicated landing pages, optimization models and some quick and reliable way to measure what you are doing and spending so you can adjust on the fly and take advantage of timing, news, weather or unforeseen developments. Are you tired and anxious yet, even though its just the dog days of August?

If you're thinking "oh, brother nothing's easy" ...you're right. But if you're not thinking about using what you know and what you can predict to make your search effort dramatically more effective, you'll waste time and money when the holiday shopping season gets into gear. 

 

Searching & Almost Finding

Have you noticed that while search functionality is increasingly sophisticated, the ability to find what you're looking for isn't getting easier or faster?

You'd think that the investment of all that brainpower would incrementally or dramatically improve search but evidently the variables and the need to create artificial intelligence tools to sort out results is not progressing as quickly as our collective addiction to search engines. Similarly our patience for landing on a site and getting lost in a thicket of bad navigation or underinvestment in search tools leads to cart abandonment and undercuts efforts at building brand equity, brand advocacy and loyal, repeat customers.

The answer, at least in the short run, is that sites must do the math for customers by tagging, sorting, filtering and pre-searching their merchandise to make it easier and faster to find and buy. Look at the work done by my client Dev Tandon at Trunkt where by understanding the needs and impulses of his customers he has anticipated the search criteria for a broad range of customer segments.

Site visitors can search by color, product description and category , occasion and price. You can also look at other people's picks and at the most popular items. This is all fairly standard stuff. But Dev has also researched his fashion-forward buyers to understand that psycho-demographic factors and even political sensibilities shape how customers search and shop. He has pre-sorted merchandise to address customer interests in organic materials, hand-made goods, eco-friendly materials, items made without labor exploitation, fair trade goods, items using recycled materials and goods designed by artists in selected geographies.

Each of these search assists not only expedites customer action but creates a s a branded experience that encourages joining the community and returning more frequently. The result has been a 25 percent traffic spike driving a 10 percent increase in sales.

This is labor intensive but the investment of time, money and brainpower will pay off and pay out quickly both in terms of conversions, sales and affirmative word of mouth. There are Web 2.0 tools that enable the process and good internal search tools can be licensed at reasonable rates. These are prudent investments even for smaller sites since there is considerable evidence that 1/3 of those landing on your home page immediately use the search function.

Adjusting Assumptions About Adwords

I used to think of Google Adwords as an automatic traffic faucet. And while you trade cash for targeting precision, buying Adwords usually worked to my client's advantage. They paid and they got traffic.

Now I'm not so sure because with clients operating in niche markets where even Google's traffic is relatively light, finding significant numbers of needles in the Google haystack quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. This experience combined with findings from Marketing Experiments Journal that messages inserted in blogs and social networks drove more traffic at dramatically cheaper rates than Adwords has got me rethinking some fundamental assumptions.

Consider the evidence:

Trunkt, an artist's collective, makes a blog-only buy and triples their site traffic in two weeks generating several hundred visitors a day. At the same time they buy category words in a PPC campaign (e.g. accessories,  gifts) and are surprised that they can get decent position for modest prices yet are doubly surprised that the number of people searching these terms --and the subsequent impressions and clickthroughs -- are tiny. In the same two week period Google is delivering 20 or so clicks per day.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested messaging via social media and blogs over 12 months. They hired a dedicated person to make 225 blog posts and comments and embed links back to their test sites. This approach generated 93,207 site visits versus a month long Adwords campaign that produced 2057 site visitors. The ROI for blogging was 1427% greater than Google even though the time frame was 10X longer.

So here's what I'm thinking -- though these hypotheses are open to debate and your thoughts:

1. If you have a niche product or service with constituent audiences you can find them faster and cheaper by intercepting them on sites already generating traffic with relevant content.

2.  There are products and services where demand is a function of psycho-demographics or mindsets, lifestyles and sensibilities where finding the relevant community is easier, cheaper and more persuasive than trawling the ocean on Google.

3. For smaller clients with niche audiences Google Adwords isn't or shouldn't be an automatic play.

 

Search Marketing Standard

I'm fascinated by the search engine game and I read and clip about 100 trade publications and eZines a week. The relatively new Search Marketing Standard is loaded with useful content. I read stuff I didn't already know and I clipped about 40 percent iof the Summer 2007 issue. Check it out.

Published by two Brooklyn-based Russian brothers -- Boris & Eugene Mordkovich -- they've somehow managed to skip the usual trade magazine pablum and self-serving vendor provided by-lined articles in favor of meaty, practical stuff. I clipped a step-by-step blog marketing piece by Joe Whyte and a couple of data-rich Industry Stats pages that re-purpose Marketing Sherpa data in ways that I can wave persuasively in front of skeptical clients.

The design is so-so. The type almost bleeds off the pages. Kerning is airy but distracting and evidently nobody told them that serif typefaces read easier. But editor Andrey Milyan has the goods on SEO/SEM so I'm eager to see the next issue and to see if they can get the ad support from the usual suspects and beyond to keep publishing.   

Search is Driving eCommerce

Internet Retailer found that search engine marketing drives more than 50% of sales for 30% of the respondent retailers. The race for the best key words and an alternative to Google is on.

Search engine marketing is more important to virtual merchants, of whom 40% attribute more than half of sales volume to search, than store based merchants or consumer brands. But across the board merchants are shifting strategy and cash to optimize search results though only 26.4% are outsourcing the task and most see search engine skills as a necessary in-house competence.

Natural search is perceived as better in terms of conversion rates compared to pay-per-click (46.1% versus 37/3%). Almost two-thirds (64.4%) say pay-per-click yields a 6% conversion to sale or less while natural search is credited with 10% or more of purchases by 18 percent of responders.

57 percent of merchants in the survey score search as better or much better than other marketing tactics, a third of whom are spending more than 50 percent of their marketing budgets on search engine marketing which is somewhat or significantly higher than last year for more than half of participating merchants..

Three-quarters are buying from Google versus 13% for Yahoo; the closest competitor. Yet the same three-quarters say they are marketing on unnamed specialized search engines

Keyword inventory practices are evenly split. One-third uses 100 words or less, another third manages 101 to 1000 words and the final third manipulates as many as 1001 to 10,000 words Fifty-eight percent spend between 16 and 75 cents per keyword which suggests either that clever copy writing and phrase-making and/or modest traffic is keeping search affordable or that retailers are limiting or parsing their spending.

It will be interesting to see if these words correspond to the words used in traditional media that the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association claim drive people to search in the first place. According to research from RAMA and BIGresearch half of consumers take cues from TV and print when they search online.

Search clearly is the battleground for retail eyes and clicks. Retailers will be scouring the planet for ideas and talent as demand and prices steadily escalate. Stay tuned.

Keywords as Creative Cues

Effective key words and phrases can be creative cues for other forms of branded customer engaging messaging. But too few creatives mine the insights from SEO analytics.

Maybe its because SEO is considered to be an arcane art like alchemy or maybe because the data-centric nature of SEO puts off copywriters, but there is little connection between these two; which to my way of thinking, is missed cue and waste of resources. It seems to me that effective key words or phrases -- defined as those words and combinations of words that prompt significant clicks -- are proven indicators of rational or emotional brand or behavioral triggers.

Something about these words or phrases instantly communicates a brand value or a proposition that searchers understand, believe and are willing to click on. What better cue about how to craft messages that will resonate with target audiences. And while two-to-five words do not an ad or an e-mail or a sell sheet make, there is an explicit direction to be discerned.

Writing effective key words is like origami. You have to twist, turn, fold and re-fold your ideas, expectations and standard copy points in unusual and sometimes surprising or convoluted ways to create a short pithy and motivating message that strikes a chord with searchers. The task is daunting. The writer is trying to psyche out potentially millions of searchers coming at an information problem or a question from an infinite number of perspectives with an infinite number of expectations, points of view and search habits. So when you craft a phrase that attracts a significant amount of traffic, its a fair bet that something in the choice of words and/or the sequence of words creates a meaning, an understanding or an answer that speaks to potential customers. Is anybody willing to ignore this ind of intelligence?

I'm advising everyone I work with to mine keyword successes and draft contextual language and proof points around them to build compelling marketing communications assets for use on-line and offline. I'm also insisting that we export the test-and-learn sensibility and discipline from the SEO world into the creative and design process.