Mindsets

Historically, the mindset of the two separate approaches of PPC & SEO have not always been quite the same. For example, when targeting high volume (often generic) search phrases pay per click marketeers would approach with caution immediately thinking of return.

What are the average CPCs of the keywords, profit margins or KPIs of the client? Does the site have a strong or wide enough range of products or services to achieve a high enough conversion rate to achieve an acceptable level of return on the spend? How has it performed in the past? What are the average conversion rates? Etc.

From an SEO perspective there would be some caution, but some of the more immediate thoughts were always – Is achieving 1st page rankings achievable? Where are they ranking now? What’s their current link profile like? How many days work each month will it require for link building to achieve this?

So perhaps already far less focus on real KPIs. The cost is somewhat detached, so perhaps accountability aswell. But times have changed.

Accountability & Return

I still believe some in SEO have a distinct lack of understanding or at least, sense of accountability of this most basic principle of search engine marketing. Return.

What I love about PPC is it’s transparency and subsequent accountability it holds. With a high degree of accuracy you can see exactly what you are spending, where it’s been spent and the subsequent impact on conversion and ultimately return. Clients expect to see a positive return. They can see exactly what is working, what is wasting them money and how much they are getting in return.

What struck me immediately when I started in SEO years ago was the difference in expectations and accountability. Agencies didn’t provide much more than ranking reports as a measure of performance. Clients didn’t necessarily expect much more either.

This is quite an amazing thing from a PPC perspective. Imagine running a campaign without tracking or delivering a keyword report with just cost and rank. While not completely the same, is it that different? Regardless of the search marketing discipline (PPC/SEO), clients are paying money to achieve agreed business objectives, which should be based on tangible business KPIs.

Increasing visibility (rank) is the core method to achieve these objectives, but is not the end objective. So it should not be the ultimate judge of performance either.

It has taken sometime for SEO to become more accountable in the same way as PPC. Expectations, analytics and SEO have developed hugely over the last few years. The search engines have also evolved with greater personalisation of results meaning that everyone’s SERPs are not always the same. But this should not be the reason why they are no longer a good measure of SEO success, they never were alone, it’s now just another factor to consider. I have never been a fan of made up visibility scores (Web Position, Advanced Web Ranking etc) much either. The only results that matter are conversion and alongside it, analytics data.

The Now

Ranking reports are not dead, just using them as the only measure of SEO performance should finally now be.

The average rankings on the base set of results are still extremely useful (alongside the other key metrics of analytics and conversion data) to guide the campaign. In a similar way to a keyword reports in PPC.

In the past I have seen high rankings and subsequent high visitor volume but very low conversion achieved by SEO judged as a success and that the low conversion was a failure of the site/business rather than the campaign. Something that would just never wash in the world of pay per click. Obviously sites are partly accountable and search marketeers cannot all be conversion rate experts, but the original strategy and implementation for targeting is entirely down to the provider. There is less control in SEO, but the responsibility for targeting and attaining ROI should be the same.

While the disciplines are separate in their approach, the ultimate objectives are the same. The cost might be more detached from the keyword in SEO, but it still costs, either in hiring an agency or time creating content or link building. Some good SEOs have understood this for a long-time, while some are still struggling to evolve from times past and should take heed from some of the grounding PPC can provide.

I think some negative matching might be required for Bingo PPC advertisers. :-)

It can be a very frustrating process tracking down who is running the offending advert and getting it amended to display accurate information.

The reason is anyone can run any advert as anyone else. I can run an advert with the display url set as any company in the world. So can anyone else.

Sounds strange that someone might be willing to pay to do this if they are an competitor. But by doing this a person or company can set about a negative ad campaign against their competitor. It could be a fairly minor thing to something much, much naughtier.

Take for example if I were a competitor of both DialAFlight and Flight Centre.

DialAFlight have just released a statement saying it is instituting legal proceedings against Flight Centre for infringement of their trademark.

Flight Centre say they have removed the ‘DialAFlight’ keyword phrase from their campaign. This is not the first time DialAFlight have warned Flight Centre apparently.

So imagine what a competitor can do to really wind this situation up by just displaying a little advert against DialAFlight as Flight Centre. I’d imagine that would not go down well.

Another example might be where all competition within a niche are playing nice, not bidding against each others brands out of respect. There is an almost unspoken mutual agreement in place of ‘don’t bid against me, I won’t bid against you’.

So you could shake it up a little and start running competitors adverts against your other competitors.

You might just find that the competitors you are running adverts against spot this and react by now advertising against the company you were acting as.

Time to remove your own advert and watch the company you have been advertising as now run their own advert against the competitor because they spot their advert.

Oh the fun.

I am certainly not recommending anyone to do this. In fact, I am recommending people not to do this as there are more intelligent ways to spend your advertising budget. But I have seen some cases of this over the past few months and it’s something to keep an eye as we might see more cases.

More on black hat PPC techniques here.

When bidding on brand one thing you should always do is track brand performance separately from your non brand campaigns.

There are some agencies who will encourage you to bid against your brand and then proceed to lump it all into one to make the overall figures of your campaign appear far more successful than they actually are; effectively hiding the poorer performance of non brand campaigns.

Things to consider when bidding against your own brand -

1) Other Advertisers
2) Organic Placement
3) Brand Volume
4) Affiliates

1. Other Advertisers – Are there any other adverts displaying against your brand? If there are other advertisers appearing against your brand then I would advise to bid against your brand no matter where you are placed organically. This increases your exposure or shelf space so to speak. If you have a trademark, submit an application to Google to stop other advertisers appearing against your brand in the UK. For US advertisers this works a little differently, you can’t trademark protect keywords, only the use of your trademark within adtext. So those targetting the US will have to maintain a degree of vigilance in monitoring the SERPS if at the time of checking their were no other advertisers.

2. Organic Placement – Where are you placed organically? You should be in the very top position for your brand unless you have an extremely generic or competitive brand name (or a new site!). If you are not top then you should bid against your brand to avoid losing any visitors. If you are top organically and there are no advertisers bidding against your brand then it makes sense to save your money and not bid against your brand. You should however take into consideration point number 4.

3. Brand Volume – How much volume do you get to your brand?. If your brand volume is quite low then cost will be equally small. However, if you are a large brand, bare in mind that you could get a serious amount of your volume going through the PPC advert obviously at a cost. In theory the larger brands should be able to afford this, but it still might be better spent elsewhere.

4. Affiliates – You should have terms and conditions in place to limit affiliates from bidding against brand anyway, whether that’s paid or organically. Obviously if you don’t have affiliates this will not be a problem, but those that do need to consider affiliates because bidding against your own brand can act as protection, especially in the US where you cannot trademark the use of keywords.

Conclusion

In general if you have no other advertisers displaying adverts against your brand name and you are placed at the top organically, then you should not bid against brand. There is no need to pay extra when the difference in clicks from a top organic placement against aggregate clicks via an organic top placement with a PPC advert are generally fairly small. I have seen the research which shows increases, but I have also seen many instances where you are simply paying a cost with no extra benefit.

Although average CPC’s on branded keywords in these circumstances are also very small, if you are a large brand then actually this can equate to a significant amount of volume. Some brands can incurr costs into the thousands each month as an example.

Would this spend not be better funelled back into the paid or organic search campaign?. That said, you will need to monitor your brand within the SERPS, in terms of other advertisers and affiliates especially if you do not have a trademark or are based in the US.

A Happy Medium

There are mediums to be had when bidding on brand. If you are concerned that you are losing out on some misspellings of brand or long tail brand related queries then you can use embedded match to show for the queries you want to.

This allows you to bid broad on your core brand keyword(s) and negatively match out exact (or phrase) match keywords where you are sure you rank organically in top positions. So you can run search query reports (and use log data) to negatively match out further queries you identify where you rank in the top position and believe you would be incurring cost for no reason. Alternatively you could just bid using exact match where you believe you need to show your ad. The Adwords example from the help centre explains embedded match -

“Example: An advertiser selling Toy Story merchandise might use the embedded match option of a negative and exact match on -[Toy Story]. This way, the advertiser’s ads appear for Toy Story dolls and Toy Story products, but not for the exact match Toy Story.”

Still Not Sure?

Like I said at the start, one rule does not fit all. The best thing to do is test and see what works best for you.

I don’t get it. Why bother?

Surely if site load time is long and delayed meaning the user experience for a visitor is that awful then they will simply go elsewhere, meaning the advertiser will lose out on conversion. Ultimately if it was that much of a problem it would be detrimental to the advertisers business and they would naturally drop out of the bidding or just fix their problem.

So what’s the point? Isn’t this basically just organic and self fixing anyway?

Do we really need a load time algo to dictate how fast a site should be…it raises more questions and worries about what happens if the site has a small or temporary issue etc. Apparently Google will be clarifying the new factor but still…

If user experience was really the key then develop a system where campaigns automatically pause when there is a certain server or site response over a given time instead of just making advertisers pay extra. Or something.

Budget caps are there to prevent you from overspending as a safety precaution and are not a primary method that should be used to control spend. They are great as a fail safe measure but they are not a performance effective method of controlling spend and are often a sign of a lazy marketeer or someone who does not know what they are doing.

Budget caps are great for those new to PPC but experts should know better and be able to control spend by cost per click (CPC) using caps merely as a back up precaution.

Simply put, if your campaigns are hitting their budgets daily you are not getting the most out of your paid search campaign.

Why?

Not only will your ads go offline meaning you will miss out on conversion when you reach your caps but by not reducing average CPC you are missing out on receiving more clicks for your spend, heightening the chance of additional conversion. If conversion rate (and avg basket value) remain equal you will get more clicks, more sales, a reduction in CPA and an increase in ROI. Nice.

There is a valid argument in some industries that very high rank is key to conversion and that lowering average CPC and hence ad rank, conversion rate will fall aswell. This is more in those industries or products that are heavy on the trust factor, like finance, loans, insurance and sometimes travel. So test conversion against your rank & evaluate whats best for you. If you are convinced you cannot reduce rank on key terms (or increase your caps), reduce costs elsewhere and increase ad delivery by optimising account structure, keyword lists and ads.

More often that not you will find that you will get less window shoppers and higher conversion in lower positions than the top 3 and a lower average CPC to boot all equating to a better return on ad spend.

So go check your caps…

2) You will pay 1p a click if there are no other advertisers – Minimum bids & actual CPC are quality based & some engines have set minimum CPC’s.

3) The content network is all bad – Actually no. There are a lot of scare stories out there but in fact the content network can perform very well in some markets and for certain businesses. Set up the content network seperate to search, test and evaluate. Consider placement targetting on Google and remember site exlusion. Yes, even domain parking ads can work.

4) Broad /Advanced match is all bad – Used in the correct manner broad match & Yahoos advanced match can be very effective. The expanded match element of Google broad match can be very unpredictable, but run search query reports to understand the real search queries behind those clicks and use negative match.

5) Bidding high increases your quality score – CTR and hence quality score are normalized to it’s position. So coming in with a high bid will get you more clicks (& in turn history) QUICKER but not necessarily improve your QS or Avg CPC.

6) There is only one search engine – Despite the myth, there are other search engines out there other than Google that should be tested. Google may have the highest volume, but it will not necessarily deliver the best ROI to your campaign. Test Yahoo and MSN/adCenter and consider the many other search engines out there such as Miva, Webfinder, Mirago and Yell. There are plenty more in the U.S.

7) PPC has a bearing on natural rankings – No, no, no. It doesn’t. The javacript does not act as anchor text!!!!.

8) Advertising spend has a bearing on quality score and hence ad rank – Even small advertisers can have great quality scores and 1p minimum bids. Take the tin foil hats off.

9) PPC is only short-term until organic rankings arrive – Pay per click can integrate with your SEO campaign. Test and measure individual and aggregate campaign data – If the PPC campaign delivers the right ROI then why stop?

10) PPC Optimisation is a one time event – Like SEO, it’s not a set up and forget campaign. Optimisation & performance improvement is a continuous process. Like your business, pay per click campaigns continue to develop, change and evolve.

11) Optimisation is campaign only, not the site – Don’t expect miracles from a campaign if you will not consider landing page and site improvements. That simple.

12) Deleting will delete history – History is kept at account level on Adwords. Delete a keyword and replace it elsewhere, its quality score will remain the same. Only individual adverts history are lost on edit, but this previous performance is still factored into relating quality scores and overall account quality score.

13) Adwords / Yahoo! / adCenter hates me – Maybe, but before complaning and going completely mad, make sure you read the help centre. I mean r-e-a-l-l-y read it.

Moving back to my original intention of discussing bid management tools, I wanted to look at there value today in an ever increasing opaque bid landscape. While bid management systems offer a single source for PPC multi channel control and management, there has been a fair amount of grumbles within the industry over their real worth and ability to do what they say on the tin. Bid manage and at least partly auto optimise campaigns.

Now looking at a lot of the rules that were once applicable to the older simple bid to position ad systems we realise that few still work (gap based / bid jammer / don’t jam rules), are now intergrated within the ad platforms themselves (time & postion based rules) or are falling under increasing scrunity for their actual ability in improving performance (ROI / CPA rules).

SearchQuant recently picked up on a particulary amusing piece of fineprint in Atlas’s own campaign optimizer (their automated ROI based management tool) brochure where by they footnote the tool with -

“** Automated campaign optimization does not apply to engines with opaque bid landscapes.”

So that rules out Google, adCenter and soon Yahoo then (in the UK, in the US they are all ruled out). Amusing really. It pretty much sums up where we are with third party bid management. However, things have taken an interesting turn. What’s next for these tools considering they have now both been acquired by the search engines themselves?

Will they be adapated and intergrated into exisiting ad platforms? Will they be offered to agencies and advertisers alike (for free?) as a cross channel management tool similar to Google analytics? That’s a lot of conversion data, competitor conversion data too…

Watch this space.

1) Because It Was All SEO -
When I first stumbled into the industry, a lot of news I read was SEO focused. I am equally enthusiastic about organic search now, but at the time there was little in the way of a PPC dedicated news source in the UK. I decided to give it a try.

2) To Learn -
I wanted to continue to develop my learnings on the web and not just with PPC. This blog has been a learning process in itself, but its also helped me clarify thoughts, keep up to date with the industry, bookmark information and discuss. The blog has developed as I have. It has ranked 1st page for both ‘PPC’ and ‘pay per click’ in the UK and nearly as quickly, dropped back to the 3rd page. Its invaluable learning and testing in understanding the reasons with something that does not matter to much. It has also allowed me to test many things including referral rates and various ad formats to use elsewhere.

3) To Rant -
Due to my anonmity being somewhat diminished to some, I can’t rant quite so freely. Still, the blog provides another way to get accross my view on certain subjects in the industry.

4) To Share -
I wanted to share my experiences with others and vice versa. I guess this kind of fits in with learning again.

I wanted to talk not just about PPC, but my ventures in affiliate marketing and a little SEO thrown in. There is a LOT of stuff I have yet to really blog about due to other priorities and time. I plan to talk more freely at somepoint – about how i’ve lost £250 in one morning (that hurt) and made £400 the next day. All through confidence and enthusiasm manifested through the blog aswell as hard work, experimentation, testing, learning by mistakes and more testing. For good or bad, the blog has played a BIG hand in this.

5) Because I Am A Geek? -
I have a slightly obesessive personality and it has come out somehow right?.

OK, who hasn’t been tagged? Lets try a real mix -

The Online Media Princess
PPC Hero or Heros?!
Search Anyway Blog
Jennifer Slegg (Come on Jen…)
Andrew Goodman

Aplogises if you have already been tagged guys.

A bigger picture can be viewed here.

In fact there were more results on the other pages, it’s only there similar ad rank that forced these 4 adverts to appear on the same page. How about a search for plumbers?

Is this is a case of one rule for some and another for others?

I find it hard to believe these keywords are all running in different accounts for a start, so possibly Thompson have added account privileges. They are also not being counted as the same domain, as they should be automatically as per all adverts in this way. It’s only TLD variations that can act as a seperate domain allowing effective double serving like this.

They run a similar thing on their own search engine, but Googles double serving policy remains -

To provide the best possible experience for our users and advertisers, Google does not permit multiple ads from the same or affiliated company or person to appear on the same results page.

Exceptions to that rule are only -

* The destination site for each ad offers different products or services (for example, a large manufacturer with two product sites, one solely for stereos and one solely for computers, both running on keyword ‘electronics’).

* Each destination site has a different layout and design, and each URL and domain is different.

Thomson might well be promoting different businesses per advert, but the fact remains they still direct visitors to their own domain which they ultimately get paid for. It’s like there very own version of business hosted pages.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were accurately geo-targetted. But I am looking at plumbers over 60 miles away!