eMA: SEM = Direct Mail With a Psychic Mailman (& PPC Segmentation Strategies)
I’ve seen Kevin Lee from Did-It speak a number of times over the years – he never disappoints with his presentations on advanced pay-per-click topics. I loved this analogy.
Search engine marketing is like direct marketing by a psychic mailman:
- Keywords are like mailing lists (scarce and valuable)
- Search listings or ads are like the envelope
- Your website is the material inside the envelope
- Messages hit the searcher at the perfect time – it’s like you said “I need to find a house to rent for our beach vacation,” opened the door and found the mailman there, ready to hand you a direct mail piece about beach vacations.
Pay-Per-Click Segmentation
PPC allows so many options for segmentation that can vastly improve your campaign’s results. For example, say your average conversion rate nationwide is 1.5%, but in New York City, for some reason, the conversion rate is 2.1%. This means you can afford to bid 25% more for clicks from New York. Geotarget your campaign so you can do so.
Or take it to an even higher level – a power segment is the perfect storm. Let’s say that customers in San Francisco not only have a higher conversion rate (by 15%), but they also have a higher lifetime value (by another 15%) as well as a higher shopping cart value/spend (by another 15%). These increases are multiplicative – you can bid 45% higher in San Francisco.
You should also optimize campaigns based on bounce rate/stickiness. Look at pageviews per visit by geography. In an example Kevin showed, people from New York viewed three pages per visit, but in Los Angeles, they only viewed two pages per visit. So treat these visitors differently.
Another example looked at bounces by source, where the bounce rate for Google was 75%, but it was only 43% for Yahoo. Apparently Yahoo visitors are more valuable in this case, so the campaign strategy should be different there.
Other notable Kevinisms:
- With pay-per-click, don’t get upset about your competitor’s ad outranking yours. You don’t know if they are brilliant or an idiot.
- DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) was more effective in past when people searched using shorter queries. As query length has grown over time, the default creative is shown more often, which defeats the purpose. DKI is not a band-aid for poor account structure.
- Get radical when doing A/B testing on landing pages: long form vs. short, navigation stripped out, change call to action. Big changes allow you to really tell what works and doesn’t.
