Photo Credit: Photo date: 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey,” MGM 1968.
Keir Dullea Photo by MPTV - © MPTV - Image courtesy mptvimages.com

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.

I wrote an article for iMedia Connection that was published today titled 6 Ways to Simplify Social Media Updates.  The piece maps out a simple and powerful way to spending more time communicating with customers and less time having to update profiles.

I’d love to hear what tools your using.  Please add your recommendations in the comments I’ll publish out the list.

I gave a three-hour workshop on Audience Generation with David Robinson of Birch Studio for The Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce.

You can download the presentation here => Audience Generation - Social Media, Search and Email

REQUEST FOR RECOMMENDATIONS!  Get Your Recommendations Published in the Workshop Handouts

On Wednesday, April 15th David Robinson of Birch Studio and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop for the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce.  The workshop is titled: How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences to Your Website.  And, I need your help.

Would you be willing send me your recommendation on how to cost effectively drive audiences to websites? I’d love to plug in your recommendations into the workshop materials we handout to attendees and that will be presented during the workshop.  It is also a great way to demonstrate the collaborative power of social networking to attendees.

Each person providing a recommendation will get a dedicated slide in the deck.

When you send over your recommendation, please include a photo of yourself, your company name, URL and either a Twitter link or blog URL so that workshop attendees can learn more about you.  Please email me your recommendation to todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com.

The handbooks are going to be printed on Monday — that’s the plan as far as I know — so please send me your recommendation before Monday, April 13th.

And, of course, I’ll give you a copy of the deck.

Many thanks!

Audience Machine to provide unique social networking technologies and viral marketing services to Brands, Entertainment, Health & Wellness and Education Companies

Los Angeles, CA and Charlottesville, VA — February 17, 2009 — Los Angeles, CA and Charlottesville, Virginia - February 17, 2009 - Social networking and viral marketing expert, VBMA (Viral & Buzz Marketing Association) board member, and Perceptions, Practices & Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing author Todd Tweedy today introduced, Audience Machine Inc., a unique technology company helping online brands who want to identify, cultivate and mobilize communities of individuals with shared interest across social networking sites to build their businesses using Audience Machine’s online marketing tools.

Guided by Tweedy, and video technology pioneer and advertising veteran Dan Bates, Audience Machine helps brand and product managers, chief marketing officers as well as ecommerce executives to establish new networks of social networking connections and dialog in support of purchasing preferences and participation in word of mouth referrals.

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are relationship amplifiers for brands, products and services that can have a profound influence on preferences, referral behavior, information consumption and internet usage if advertisers are prepared to listen to, act on and match the right technology and community practices to support a desired purchase outcome or subscription,” noted Todd Tweedy, co-founder and CEO of Audience Machine. “There is a natural migration of dialogs from offline sources to online social sharing sites. Marketing executives want to embrace customer-facing ad strategies and incorporate social networking processes in their firm’s online marketing DNA that can boost product perceptions and potential sales but many enterprises lack the expertise and resources to realize those objectives. Audience Machine was founded to give online brands unique technology solutions, community development processes, marketing services, analytics, and expertise they need to engage and collaborate with audiences.”

Audience Machine also announced that is has signed a strategic business development consulting agreement that will be led by Provident Financial Management, a prominent established leader in entertainment and media business management.

“Audience Machine is at the heart of an evolving consumer-facing marketing phenomenon that is transforming connections on social networks into a powerful audience generation channel. Led by an experienced executive team and founded on concrete business fundamentals with a number of high-profile clients already on board, Audience Machine is a rising star among our media and communication clients,” stated Craig Sussman, Business Development Director at Provident. We’re excited to support Audience Machine as they grow their technology and services business practices with customers that want and need to expand and sustain business growth by creating networks of social commerce.”

Word of Mouth Communications Opportunity
The eighth annual Burson-Marsteller/PRWeek CEO Survey published in November 2008, which surveys CEO’s about the changing influence of different types of media as well as plans for digital communications including social networking, reported that 60% of CEO’s noted that word of mouth has the fastest growing influence on business in the past three years but that just one-fifth of firms have used social media to communicate with stakeholder groups.

The proliferation of social networking and community sites has transformed viral and word of mouth marketing practices into a practical and necessary communication solution due in part to research findings that note that nearly 80% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know over all forms of advertising and marketing. These authentic and trusted voices serve an important role by distributing compete information for others to act upon across search engines and into indexes of shared knowledge that people can access along with advertiser-generated experiences and evidence whenever 1,463,632,361 internet users from around the world - based on Internet Usage and Population in North American data provided by Internet World Stats - need to research a brand, product or service.

Audience Machine Team
Led by Tweedy, who’s career started in the political grassroots mobilization arena working on Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Inaugural and issue-based public relations campaigns, the Audience Machine team has 35 years of combined leadership experience in online marketing, real-time communications, ASP development, video ad technology, viral marketing, search engine optimization, and community development practices.

Dan Bates, co-founder, president and COO brings a vast wealth of knowledge in community technology development, online video, online advertising and a decade’s experience in filmed entertainment and music. Bates previous served as CEO of Avant Interactive, an object-based video ad serving technology provider.

About Audience Machine
With offices in Los Angeles, California and Charlottesville, Virginia, Audience Machine is a provider of unique community technology solutions and online marketing services. Audience Machine works with online brands to identify, cultivate and mobilize communities of shared interest to establish social commerce that CMO’s, brand and product managers, and ecommerce executives can enlist to grow their business. The company is privately held. For more information, please visit Audience Machine’s website - http://www.audiencemachine.com, email us at info@audiencemachine.com, or call 1.800.573.1536. Audience Machine is presently engaged with several beta customers and will release its first product in Q2 of this year.

About Provident Financial Management
Established over twenty-five years ago with offices in Los Angeles, Woodland Hills, San Francisco and New York, Provident has become a leader in various entertainment and media business management practices. Provident recently established a strategic and business planning department to assist mid sized and emerging entertainment and media companies with their growth and business development needs. Provident Financial Management is part of RSM McGladrey one of the largest and most prominent accounting firms in the world. For more information on RSM McGladrey, please visit http://www.rsmi.com.