Attention Retailers: 4 Advanced Moves to Effective Paid Search Marketing Nirvana
As Black Friday holiday shopping approaches, I thought I’d share my 4 Advanced Moves to Effective Paid Search Marketing Nirvana. Is this eCommerce optimization framework you would use (read the list first)? What resonates? Is search marketing no longer on your radar? And, what if you’re not a retailer? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s worked for you and well, what went in the trash. Please post comments below.
Here we go….
Number 1.
Build out a localized Black Friday PPC Campaign that can be deployed around territories, stores or products that leverages insights from your consumer insights team.
a. Connect with your Customer Insights and Merchandizing teams to leverage recommendations by Merchants and Retailers to identify new opportunities of BF09.
b. Review archived PPC results for previous Black Friday trends and brand marketing goals. What worked?
c. Build out segmented ad groups with day parting that focus on attracting customers and linking them to product purchase behaviors based on customer insights. Here’s one model to stimulate some segmentation of your own:
i. Bought on Black Friday from a source (circular, brochure, catalog, direct mail piece)
ii. Bought on Black Friday but not from a particular source
iii. Didn’t buy on Black Friday but made a purchase during the holiday season.d. Get your IT team on board as soon as possible and share your plan with your ad agency partner. Your new keywords are likely to guide site architecture for new pages so get your requests in early to the IT team. In fact, think of IT team as your part of your Ad Operation team. If IT is not informed your not as likely to achieve or sustain your desired campaign goals. Get their feedback on retargeting and display ad opportunities to boost profit growth.
e. Forecast maximum allowable investments (MAI’s) down to the keyword and ad group level.
Number 2.
Ensure the campaign and ad groups support the generation of high quality scores. You’re going to have one shot so make it count. Refine you keyword pool and bids, have a copy testing methodology in place with position targets across all ad groups on Google Adwords combined with deactivation of poor performing keyword phrases and ad groups. Have you established a deactivation threshold? Get to work. Connect with analytics team. Look for trends in ad groups and across keywords to find your ideal deactivation threshold. And, be sure every member of team is aware of that number and that it has been plugged into your optimization tool.
a. Use Omniture’s SearchCenter or another ad optimization tool. If you’re using SearchCenter, Leverage Born on Dating so that you can easily track performance of new ad groups.
b. I like to start with ad element testing then land pages. Titles, descriptions and URL would be tested (A/B split approach) to build 4 to 6 ad units for testing per ad group. Then introducing test to uncover winning titles and descriptions.
c. Start with phase and exact matching options and then scale up using broad matching and contextual networks.
d. If going mobile, only select iPhone platform since those uses out search other mobile devices users by approximately 4 :1.
e. Utilize insights from four customer tiers to fine tune messaging.
f. Map Keyword Assists (non-converting keywords that lead to a desired action) to converting terms and flow KA’s back in the ad copy as new creative tests. Did it work? Test hypothesis on why the Control may be winning.
g. Landing page testing will also be incorporated to assess the use of single terms on specific product pages vs. a single term and a category page as a method for achieving higher conversion rates. If you’re launching a new brand, drive people to product pages with pricing if pricing is your competitive advantage or to the homepage if Operations or Services are at the core of your organizations excellence.
h. Using testing as a syndication of best knowledge for ongoing testing on other search engines to expand reach, sales and profit. Learn in small chunks then plant a lot of seeds to expand your growth. Remember engines have different types of users, interests and matching options. Don’t forget: Search marketing campaign results on one engine are not interchangeable with another.
Number 3.
Create higher value performance metrics that will be used to drive campaign decisions now and in the future.
a. Utilize the COGS Vista rule within SearchCenter. SiteCatalyst allows you to upload a list of product IDs and unit costs so that SiteCatalyst can apply the unit costs in a custom event automatically on each purchase. I know I’m making a bunch of assumptions that your using a paid vs. free product. I love free but you get what you pay.
b. The objective is to calculate gross profit using the COGS Vista rule.
c. Combine the COGS Vista rule with an EBITA (earning before the deduction of interest, tax and amortization expenses). This is how Vintage Bath & Tub are cleaning up!
d. So what happens when you optimize around revenue or profit? In many cases, the sales volume is going to go down initially. Therefore, be sure to share the strategic implications with Sales, Finance and other executives. I had this experience with a retail client. They wanted to improve their PPC performance. I took that to mean ROI and even forecasted a 3x increase in ROI performance (I came in a 2.6x – not bad). When the campaign was fully implemented the ROI levels increased to 4x at one point with 18% decline in order volume. Let me put it this way: the sales team was not happy.
Number 4.
Begin to Close the Loop on Untracked Revenue Gaps. If you have a physical location, the hypothesis to explore is whether individuals who live within 10 to 12 miles of one of your stores are likely to respond to sales promotions by exhibiting Urgent Printer Behavior (UPB). Urgent Printer Behavior is when a customer goes to your site for an immediate product or service need and adds a desired product/service to a shopping cart so that they can see the price. (Note: This happens all the time in the real estate industry. You see a house you like a printout pages of the listing.) The customer then prints the page to take to a local store to get the product and the price-matching price for that product. How do you close the gap for your organization? Monitor dialogs across message boards, tweets, and blog posts and comments to uncover unpredictable user behavior and insights. How does your marketing organization fulfill the “now” need and capture data and insights that can be shared across your entire organization? The idea is to look at your organization form the standpoint of Search Engine Marketing Readiness from how analysts are pulling in insights into dashboards to when the search team is brought in to do their optimization magic. In many cases, search optimization is a silo. Start planning for 2010, you may just realize “My God! It’s full of stars!”
Note: Quote from Keir Dullea who played Dave Bowman in 2010 A Space Odyssey.
