Search Advisory

Back in February, I wrote a post called “Why You Should Bid on Your Own Brand Name With PPC“.  Kristen Bender at iProspect has just written a similar article aimed at encouraging marketers not to succumb to the temptation of stopping bidding on brand and trademark terms during the recession.  Many of her points are the same ones I made, but she had some good additions, including:

• It’s a quick and easy way to conduct market research on marketing messages that’ll appeal to your target audience.
• Branded PPC ads complement display advertising — 27% of people who respond to online display ads search for the brand featured, so you want to be sure you’re visible in the search results.
• If you leave the auction now, you may have to pay more when you come back if your competitors and resellers take advantage of your absence and continue to bid on your terms, improving their quality scores.

Here’s Kristen’s article:  PPC Recession Strategy: 7 Reasons To Keep Bidding On Your Brand Terms.

We’re getting better and better at predicting the success of our search marketing efforts in advance.  I’m just geeky enough to find it fun to dust off my high school algebra skills and crunch numbers.  Here’s the scenario that a prospective client recently challenged us with.

They said, “We’ve got $2500 to spend on clicks with PPC.  Our goal is a $100 cost per sale or less, and we typically close 70% of our leads.”  That’s it — that’s all the information we had to go on, but it was enough.  Here’s how I was able to use that information to predict whether or not we could be successful:

• I put together a quick and dirty sample PPC campaign on Google.  First, I used Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to generate a list of about 180 relevant keywords.   (Note that a real campaign would contain thousands of keywords — this is just a starter list to give us rough data.)
• I downloaded the list of keywords into Excel and loaded them in Google’s Traffic Estimator, using the $2500/month budget.  This allowed me to play around with different bids (maximum costs per click, or CPCs) to see how results varied.  Raise the max CPC and the average position/ranking increases, which can generate more clicks.  But it can also generate fewer clicks because each click is more expensive, meaning the budget buys fewer clicks.  So, by lowering the max CPC, I was able to find a “sweet spot” of $1.50 max CPC that generated more clicks — 1290 – than did either lower or higher max CPCs.  (Note that the actual CPC paid is predicted to be $1.13, and that Google estimates are often off, but it’s a start.)
• How many sales would we have to generate to meet our goals?  At a $2500 spend and a $100 cost per sale, we’d need to generate a minimum of 25 sales.
• How many leads would we have to generate to meet our goals?  At a 70% close rate, we’d need to generate a minimum of 36 leads.
• What kind of conversion rate would we need to generate 36 leads from those 1290 clicks?  Answer: 2.8%.  We know, based on past experience, that this is very do-able.
• If you’re really paying attention and breaking out your calculator here, you may notice that a $2500 budget and $1.13 actual CPC should buy 2200 clicks, not 1290.  By adding more keywords to the campaign (beyond the preliminary list of 180), we should be able to do this.  To generate 36 leads from 2200 clicks, we’d only need a conversion rate of 1.6%.  This is even more do-able than 2.8%!

Bottom line, when a prospective client can give us just a few basic pieces of information, we can fairly quickly tell them whether or not our search marketing services can help them reach their goals.  They know what to expect, and we know what to shoot for.  It’s a win-win, and it doesn’t even require statistics or calculus!

Hot off the presses — the search marketing industry is all abuzz about the change Google Adwords made in their policy regarding including trademarked keywords in ad copy (where you don’t own the trademark).  Here’s what their policy was before (in my words, not theirs):

Advertisers may bid on keywords that are trademarked, even if they don’t own that trademark.  But they may not include trademarks/brands that they don’t own in their ad copy.

So if I’m Microsoft, I could bid on “apple” or “mac” as a keyword, but I’d have to write a generic ad that talks about my product and doesn’t mention Apple.

As of late last week, Google began allowing a limited number of advertisers to include trademarks they don’t own in their ad copy.  These advertisers must either be resellers or they must be providing information or reviews about the brand that’s mentioned.

So this means that competitors still shouldn’t be allowed to include each others’ names in their ad copy, but I’m sure there will be some gray areas that’ll need to be worked out.

It’s a good idea to search on your company and product names every now and then to ensure that none of your competitors are violating these rules.

Two good articles with more info:

Google Change Could Stir More Advertiser Angst by Tom Krazit

Google To Allow Trademarks To Be Used In AdWords Copy In US by Danny Sullivan

“Click fraud” is what the search engines euphemistically call “invalid clicks” — when someone or something not interested in buying from you clicks on your PPC ad, charging you money.  Some PPC advertisers are very worried about it and some aren’t at all.

In my experience, B2B marketers and those outside extremely competitive niches have less to worry about.  At Prominent Placement, we have certainly detected click fraud on our clients’ behalf (and received refunds from the search engines for them).  But it’s often verticals such as gambling, pharmaceuticals, travel, and other highly competitive industries that are affected the most.

Ron Jones has written a great overview article on click fraud: Click Fraud 101.  I agree with Ron’s assertion that the best way to combat click fraud is to keep a close eye on your web analytics for suspicious trends.

By the way, Ron will be here in Atlanta tomorrow teaching Search Engine Strategies’ SEM Training Workshop, along with Debra Mastaler and Li Evans (who are both superbly knowledgeable).  Rumor has it Ron’s staying through Thursday for our SEMPO Atlanta event as well.

Just came across the best explanation of Google AdWords’ “Quality Score” that I’ve read in quite awhile.  I briefly explained Quality Score in one of my first Search Advisory posts.  Yesterday’s article by Craig Danuloff goes into great detail about how Quality Score affects your ad position/ranking, and the cost per click you pay (they’re separate effects).  He also compares the importance of your click-through rate to your landing page relevance in terms of affecting Quality Score.  Definitely a worthwhile read.  Here’s “Is The Hype Over Google AdWords Quality Score Justified?“

Most of our clients are B2B, so they have lead generation websites.  Our goal is to drive qualified traffic to their sites from search engines, and encourage those visitors to “convert” — fill out a contact form, register for a webinar, request a white paper, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.  At that point, the lead goes to the sales team and our job is finished.

At least, that’s how it used to work.  We’ve always reported to our clients each month on the number of leads we’ve generated for them.  That used to be enough.  But now that we’re in a recession, companies that are spending money on search marketing want to know how many of those leads are closing, how much revenue they’re generating, and what the true ROI is.  Fair enough!

We’re currently working on some technology solutions to “bridge the gap” between a visitor’s data in web analytics (when they turn into a lead), and the same visitor’s data in Salesforce or other CRM databases (when they turn from a lead to a sale).  So this is an exciting development.

In the meantime, I came across a good article on this topic.  It recommends scoring leads and judging search marketing results by the quality of the leads more than the quantity of the leads.  Here’s “How to Optimize When You Have Long Sales Cycles.”