I have been interviewing a bunch of potential hopefuls and I have started thinking how lucky these college students are to have the chance to enter the internet marketing world fresh out of college. If I would have had the same opportunity, it would have saved me a few years of few years of ‘aimlessness’, so to speak, figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

After my first gig in the Health Insurance Industry, I took a job with the marketing team of a startup online dating site. The dating site never took off, but the experience gave me my first taste of internet marketing. At the dating site, the clouds parted, and I found my path towards a career in internet marketing.

If your struggling to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, below are 5 traits that if you possess may mean that internet marketing is a good fit for you.

1. Possess a Competitive Spirit: In the summer of 1992, when I was 11 years old, I wanted to be an Olympic Gymnast. The one problem was that I had no formal gymnastic training, but that did not stop me from practicing by doing flips over my couch. For Amanda my colleague at SEER, who is 5 years younger than me, it was the summer of 1996, when she too dreamt of Olympic gold. Ok, so it is not necessary to have had the Olympic gold dream, like Amanda and me, but you do need to have a competitive spirit and an internal drive to be the best. Both Paid Search and SEO is about beating your competitors to maximize web real estate on the coveted first page of Google.

2. Love Puzzles & Games: I know when I was a kid, my mom could not buy puzzles fast enough for me. Now I love a good game of Scrabble. Aaron another fellow Paid Search member enjoys a good game of poker. Games also tie into a competitive spirit, as I still hate to lose, but have matured a bit from throwing the cards in my brother’s face and leaving the table crying. Both SEO and PPC are big puzzles. For SEO, you are spending your time figuring out how to understand the Google Algorithm. PPC is a puzzle in itself. Try fitting a keyword, benefit, distinguishing feature and a call to action into an ad of just 95 characters.

3. Enjoy(ed) and Excel(ed) in Analytical Classes, such as Economics, Math or Science classes. Wil actually wanted to be economics teacher before he found his way into Internet Marketing. For Paid Search you can’t be afraid of numbers and have to be comfortable analyzing data. Sure, you need creativity to write ads and help wireframe landing pages, but we are data junkies and spend a great portion of our day determining statistical significance, analyzing trends and calculating ROI. For SEO sure you need creativity to come up with link bait ideas, but you have to enjoy analyzing a sites architecture, monitoring your sites traffic and monitoring your site’s conversions. We know colors and design have their place, but as a team we care more about calls to actions, usability and content with relevant keywords.

4. Love using Excel to figure out better ways to do things: This is similar to number 2. If you actually enjoy learning about pivot tables and neat new Excel formulas, then you will probably also enjoy a life as an internet marketer.

5. Enjoy being a lifelong student: The web is constantly changing. You have to enjoy continual learning because what works well today may not work well tomorrow. Everyone at SEER loves learning about the web and staying on top of industry trends and news. We are constantly sharing blogs and ideas. We even started a SEER Internet Marketing book club, so that we are always growing and learning together.

I hope this helps provide a good gut check to help you figure out if a career in Internet Marketing would be a good fit for you. To other experienced Internet Marketers out there, please add additional traits that you think are common among you and your colleagues.

1. Running Content and Search in the same campaign

Not separating out content into its own campaign is a rookie mistake. I recently saw this rookie mistake being made by a big name agency, on an account spending $60k/month. While it was an incredibly disturbing that an agency would make this mistake, the reason this mistake is made so often is that Google’s default is to run ads on both content and search. The first thing you do when setting up a new campaign is to turn content off and only run search. Content can work great to supplement search but it MUST be managed separately. Why? The intent of content is totally different. Someone reading an article about your industry vs. someone doing a search for what you sell online is completely different and thus, needs to be optimized separately. Also, without even realizing it you may be spending the majority of your budget on the content network. More on this topic can be found here:
Google Adword’s Content Network

2. Only Using Broad Match:

The problem with this approach is that oftentimes one broad match term could be eating up almost your entire budget. By using different match types effectively you can control spend and bidding much more effectively. Below is a great post by PPC hero on how to use the different match types together.

Match Types in Google Adwords

3. Poor Use of Negatives:
Even more disturbing is that many of these accounts with only broad match also are not using negative keywords as effectively as possible. Using Search Query reports on a regular basis to find the unrelated terms you are being matched to, is imperative to eliminate inefficient spend. Details about running these reports can be found at the link below:

Google Search Query Report

Time and time again, I also see campaigns set with Negative terms that prohibit terms that are actually being bidded on from appearing. Take advantage of Google’s Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Option to avoid this common mistake.

4. Campaign Settings Set to All Devices:
Like number 1, new campaigns are automatically set to target all devices, which now include mobile devices. I always opt out of serving ads on mobile devices in the same campaign as computers. Serving ads on mobile devices can be a great way to reach certain audiences, especially when a call is the desired action, but you would want to set up a campaign to target this separately as bids, ad copy and landing pages need to be optimized separately for this medium.

5. Poor Budgeting by Campaigns:
Oftentimes, I see accounts set up that have their budgets set so their ads have very poor visibility throughout the day. While budgets are sometimes necessary for a business, there are so many ways to maximize how you spend your budget. Points 1-4 will actually help your budget spread further. Other tactics include but are not limited to:

a. Separating out your high CPC or top spending keywords in their own campaign so that they do not eat up your entire budget from more tail targeted keywords in the same campaign

b.Take advantage of Day Parting. Scour your Google Analytics for the day of week and time of day that do not convert cost effectively, and use Google’s advanced day parting capabilities to adjust your bids accordingly.

6. Targeting Multiple Countries in One Campaign:
You want to be able optimize each country independently as each market is different. This ties into point 5. What if it turns out that the UK is an extremely cost effective area to drive conversions, but based on the way you have your day parting or budgeting set up, you have no visibility in the UK during the UK business hours? You want to be able control for different time zones, local dialects and competitors independently for each country.

7. Landing Pages that are Not Optimized for PPC Traffic:
Please do not send all of your traffic across all ad groups to a flash home page with no call to action. Your keywords should tie to your ads, which tie to your landing page. More on this topic can be found in the post written by my colleague JoAnne, linked below:

5 Must Read Articles on Landing Page Best Practices

8. Ad Groups that are Not Broken out by Theme:
Break up your ad groups into tightly refined groups so that you can use keywords directly in your ad copy. Not only will your ads be more relevant to your audience, and increase your CTR, but also this will help your Quality Score, which in turn will lower your CPC’s for the same position.

Below is a great link to how Quality Score, Ad Position and CPC are all related and why point 8 is so important when managing a paid search account.

Quality Score Ad Position and CPC What and How They All Connected Together

9. No Ad Copy Testing:

Building on the importance of Quality Score, make sure you are always testing and tweaking ad copy to increase you CTR, which in turn helps your Quality Score. You should pay attention to each ad variations conversion rate as well. More on how SEER evaluates and tests ad copy is included in this post, written by colleague Crystal:

5 Simple Steps for PPC Ad Testing Strategy

10. For e-commerce Sites, Not Optimizing to Revenue:

When a completed purchase is your target conversion goal, it is imperative that revenue tracking is installed. Doing this requires a dynamic variable (the order subtotal value) in place of the static variable provided by Google. If you’re unfamiliar with revenue tracking, Google has a great Video Tutorial explaining the process step by step. Without having revenue tracking installed properly, you are unable to measure the true profitability of a PPC project. But it doesn’t end with revenue tracking; product margins are just as important when optimizing an ecommerce account. Google uses a metric called ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), which is a simplified version of ROI. The main problem with optimizing around ROAS is that product cost is not considered. Quite often, even a campaign with a seemingly healthy ROAS (let’s say 600%) may be generating a net loss for the client. For a more in depth explanation of the difference between optimizing around ROAS and ROI, check out Joanne’s on the SEER blog:

My Roas is Over 600% and I’m Losing Money

Have any additional mistakes you see over and over again you would like to add to this list? If so, post your comment below!

Unlike most fraudulent clicks that will often cause a spike in your CPA as they do not result in conversions, what made this spike unique is that conversions also spiked over this same period.

Below is the graph of Clicks vs. Conversions:

Not much had changed in the account and there was no noteworthy press to speak of to explain this spike. My gut told me that the over 200% spike in clicks and the nearly 400% spike in conversions was unfortunately too good to be true.

I turned to Google Analytics to investigate my suspicion and evaluated the following:

• Were they from the same IP address?
• Were they from the same network?
• Were they from the same location?

The answer to all these questions was no.

Still not satisfied that these leads were legitimate, I reached out to my client to see if the leads looked real in their database. On the surface they actually did. The email addresses were different and the forms were filled out. It is important to note that the conversion in this case is a completed form. For this client the lead to sale turnaround time is about 2 weeks, so I told my client to let me know what the final lead to sale conversion rate was and how it compared to the website’s rate on average.

Despite the leads looking legitimate on the surface, I still felt this spike was unrealistic and I did not want to wait two weeks before we found out that all these leads were not legitimate sales prospects. I turned to Yahoo new placement tool, which was released in September 2009, to see if it was a particular search partner that was responsible for the spike.

I found my culprit, the domain, http://www.trafficz.com/. This one placement month over month increased over 2000% (that final 0 is not a typo), not two hundred, but two thousand percent!

Moreover, all the conversions were attributed to one keyword on standard match. I immediately excluded this placement from my account, as this one word in that one placement caused the entire spike.

Two weeks have gone by and it turns out my suspicions about the leads driven by Traffickz were confirmed. Not one of the leads actually resulted in a final sale. The typical conversion rate for this site in a 2 week period is MUCH GREATER than 0%. (I am not providing the actual conversion rate here to protect the confidentiality of my client)

I believe the forms were filled out were by a computer program with fake people’s information. What makes this type of fraud so hard to detect is that program made the leads look like they were coming from different IP addresses and geographic locations. This was not your ever day click spammer. These guys were sophisticated and I can see why Yahoo’s click fraud protection system did not catch these spammers automatically.

I have reported this click fraud to Yahoo and am still waiting for an answer. I am going to push hard for a credit on this one, as we are talking thousands of dollars of SPAMMY traffic. I am confident that the people at Yahoo will see this traffic for what it is, aka fraud, and provide the account with a credit.

This experience will not force me to abandon Yahoo all together, and I am not suggesting you do either. Yahoo comprises about 17% of all traffic and is a very important supplement to Google Traffic. Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding. I would tell the people at Yahoo that they should choose their search partners more wisely for their long term success.

Though you should not completely write off Yahoo, I suggest the following to protect your accounts against this new form of click fraud keep the following in mind:

• Make sure you or your agency monitors weekly if not daily for any unusual spikes in traffic for each engine
• Click spammers are getting smarter making click fraud harder to detect using the usual measures such as IP address, location, bounce rate or conversion rate.
• Click Fraud does not only hurt your numbers at times by causing spikes in your CPA, but can also deceivingly help your numbers by increasing conversions.
• If something seems way too good to be true, it probably is.
• Fight for credits back to your account for fraudulent traffic.
• Make Yahoo’s Ad Delivery Report part of your optimization process and look for suspicious search partners to exclude

PPC Hero wrote a nice overview of the new interface back in April. Their post describes all the new changes of the interface.

One new feature I want to discuss in more detail is the “See Search Terms” button under the keyword tab, which is an incredibly powerful tool to enable search marketers to take Keyword optimization beyond just tweaking and editing bids.

Below is a step by step guide on how I use the new “See Search Term” button to hit my CPA goal without sacrificing volume (for the example below lets assume my CPA goal is $30)

Step 1: Click on the Keyword Tab and Sort Keywords by Spend

Step 2: Look for Keyword above your CPA target:

In the example above if we were targeting a $30 CPA, the top spender is far over metric at $72. Before the new interface, I would have lowered the bid on this term to cut the bleeding. I may have also pulled a Search Query report at the ad group level to add negatives, but I would have not been able to easily see what terms the phrase was being matched to without having special filters set up in Google Analytics.

The downside of just cutting the bid on this term is that, although above metric, it has had 18 conversions in the last 30 days. Immediately lowering the bid on this term, which is already only in 6th position, would undoubtedly sacrifice conversions.

In the new interface, I instead go straight to the “see search terms” as seen in the example below.

This will bring up all the queries being matched to this phrase matched term

Step 4: Sort the Search Query List by conversions or cost and look for terms you want to add to your campaign that are hitting your CPA goals

In the example, let’s assume the term, “buy shoes online”, received 5 conversions at a CPA of $20. If I would have just lower the bid on the phrase match of “buy shoes”, I would have hurt visibility on “buy shoes online”, which is a great term!

Instead of just blindly lowering the bid, I can add “buy shoes online” as a keyword so that I can maintain position on this term, even if I eventually lower the bid on the phrase match “buy shoes”

Step 5: Check off the terms you want to add as Keywords and click on the “Add as Keyword” button

You can edit this Keyword to be the phrase matched or the exact match version. Click Save and the term will be added to the same ad group that it was originally being matched to.

Step 6: Next check off the terms you want to add as negatives and click on the “Add as Negative Keyword” as seen below.

In this example the shoe store does not sell clown shoes, but Google is matching to the term “Buy Shoes Clown”.

Google will default to the exact match negative. You can edit this to add any phrase you want. In this example I would change this to the term “clown” in general so any phrase that includes clown would be excluded.

By eliminating these irrelevant queries you may be able to bring the CPA down for “buy shoes” without lowering the bid. This will help you maintain visibility and maximize your conversions, while hitting your CPA goals.

One thing to be VERY careful about when using this technique…
Make sure you are adding keywords when you want to add keywords and negatives when you want to add negatives. The last thing you would want to do, is to start bidding on the broad completely unrelated term “clown” This would be BAD!!!!

What I love about Google is that they never stop improving. They continue to create ways for more transparency and functionality to help advertisers to cost effectively find consumers ready to take an action.

My colleague Joanne, recently wrote a blog on helping e-commerce clients determine if they are profitable when they include SEER’s fees. She uses her calculator and the method she describes in her blog for the e-commerce clients she manages and in doing so she helps our client sleep better at night because they know even with SEER’s fees and their variable costs she is able to achieve increasing profitability.

The SEER team has recently enhanced this calculator to help both lead generation clients and e commerce clients determine profitability when all cost and fees are taken into consideration. The excel file is linked here, but will eventually be made into a widget on the SEER site.

The goal of this calculator is to help clients and potential clients determine with all fees included whether or not their paid search campaign is returning a profit.

To use this calculator you need the following information:

1. Monthly Budget
2. Set Up Fee (if applicable)
3. Commission or Flat Fee paid to the Agency
4. The average CPC for the account
5. The Lead to Conversion rate (leads/clicks)
6. Sales to Lead Ratio – for e commerce clients this will be 100%. For lead generation clients knowing this ratio is essential for evaluating the profitability of the account
7. Average Order Value
8. Variable Cost or Profit Margin

All other fields can be calculated with this given information.

1. Profit/Sale = Average Order Value – Average Variable Cost
2. Clicks = Total Budget/ CPC
3. Leads = Leads to Conversion Rate * Clicks
4. Sales = Sales to Lead Ratio * Leads
5. Revenue = Sales * Profit per Sale
6. Monthly Fees to Agency = Flat Fee or Commission + “Setup Fee/12”
7. Total Cost = Monthly Budget + Cost to Agency + Variable Cost
8. Profit = Revenue(E) – Total Cost(G)

Let’s look at how this calculator can be used, with the following assumptions held constant.

1. Sales to Lead ratio = 25%,
2. Average order value = $3,500
3. Profit margin = 25% or $2625

Scenario 1: No Agency

Monthly Budget = 5K,
Set Up Fee = 0
Agency Fee = 0
Avg. CPC = $5
Lead Conv. Rate = 3%

Plugging in these assumptions into the calculator, as seen below the client is doing ok and able to generate $1,562 in profit a month on his own without an agency.

Scenario 2 No Change in Performance with Agency

Monthly Budget = 5K,
Set Up Fee = $6,000
Agency Fee = $2,000 Flat fee
Avg. CPC = $5
Lead Conv. Rate = 3%

In the example below you can see that total profit for the month fell from $1,562 to $63 by adding agency fees with no improvement in performance. The conclusion from this example is that an agency better increase performance to justify their fees.

But as the following examples will demonstrate, if you were to choose a strong agency that can increase performance metrics, the results will improve your profitability.

Scenario 3: Agency with Improvement in Conversion Rate

Monthly Budget = 5K,
Avg. CPC = $5
Lead Conv. Rate from 3% to 5%
Agency Fees = 1k Flat fee
Set Up Fee = 6K

This example illustrates how improving the lead to conversion ratio from 3% to 5% can change the profitability.

How can an agency increase conversion rate? At the onset, they will help you re-organize the account and will do extensive keyword research to identify keywords that have the potential to convert. They will then make sure that they organize these keywords into tightly themed groups, with ad copy that speaks to the keywords that you are targeting. They will also work with you to find the best pages to land these clicks on or recommend that landing pages be developed to target these keywords directly and ensure their ad copy includes any offers or benefits emphasized on the landing page.

Also, a strong agency will watch your account like a hawk and identify any keywords that have very low conversion rates using Google tracking or high bounce rates using Google Analytics. They may lower bids on these terms, or suggest a new landing page, or even eliminate these terms so more of your budget is available for the higher converting terms. Additionally, they will use Search Query reports to eliminate irrelevant terms you are being matched to by adding negatives to your account. Combined, this continual tweaking should influence your conversion rate in a positive way. They may also suggest landing page improvements and test these changes using the website optimizer to help develop the page that has the highest overall conversion rate.

These steps will not only impact your conversion rate, but may also increase your Quality Score, which in turn will influence the CPC you will have to pay for any given position. In other words, with a better quality score you may be paying less than your competitor for a better position. The impacts of quality score are not factored into the calculator example below, but is just another reason why not using an agency may be costing you money.

Plugging in the increase in conversion rate into the PPC calculator, illustrates how increasing your conversion rate, which results in more leads, which results in more PROFITABLE sales, may take your monthly profitability from $1,563 in our original non agency scenario to $4,438 with fees included

Scenario 4: Agency w/ Improvement in Conversion Rate and Account Expansion

Monthly Budget from 5k to10K,
Avg. CPC = $5
Lead Conv. Rate = 5%
Agency Fees = 1k Flat Fee
Set Up Fee = 6K

Now, in our final scenario your agency not only helps you increase your conversion rate but they also help you expand your campaign which pushes your Monthly Budget to 10K. Again is this realistic? The answer again, is yes VERY. An agency can help you expand into engines you were not using like Yahoo and MSN. This is a no brainer for many clients because if every lead is profitable to you, than the more leads the more profit, so why not expand what you know works in Google into Yahoo and MSN. Additionally, a strong agency should have a plan and set goals on how they plan to profitably expand your account. They should look tirelessly for new keyword ideas, using Google Analytics for what types of terms are working organically. Additionally, they should look at Search Query Reports on a regular basis to find additional terms that you are being matched to with broad matches, which may spur on new keyword recommendations. An agency will help you expand profitably because they will be monitoring the account daily and providing reports on a weekly or bi weekly schedule, which will help them catch quickly what is not working.

Plugging the increase in budget into the PPC calculator, with all other factors remaining constant, illustrates how increasing your budget, which results in more clicks, which results in more leads, which results in more PROFITABLE sales could take your monthly profitability from $1,563 in our original non agency scenario to $10,375, fees included!

The next question you may ask, is now that I know all this, why should I use an agency? This question could be its own blog and there has been a lot written on this topic. Below are some posts that help answer this question.

1. Why You Need to Outsource
2. Search Engine Watch Forum – Outsource PPC
3. Why Outsource your PPC Advertising

Now, even if you choose the right agency these performance enhancements cannot be expected over night. Typically it takes about three months of tweaking and testing for an agency to achieve the efficiencies that were described in this post. Moreover, not every client is the same, so expanding the account without your CPA increasing dramatically may not be possible in your industry. However, the PPC calculator helps you see what type of improvements an agency needs to make to cover their fees. As seen in the scenarios explained, in many instances you cannot afford not to test working with an agency. Not only will you save time by not having to manage the account yourself, but you may also be missing out on huge profits that a seasoned professional can help you achieve.

The above example is only a small example of how keyword research could be used to develop a branding strategy, but this exercise really got the SEER team thinking about how search behavior can provide invaluable insight in developing a marketing strategy and could potentially save a company $1,000’s if not millions of dollars on a marketing campaign that would have otherwise ended up as failure.

SemGeek.com posted the blog post: 5 Ways to Persuade Your Clients to Spend More PPC Dollars, which highlighted this concept of how SEM can help in the research and development phase of a marketing strategy.

The paragraph that really stood out to me in the above post is below:

“III: More Affordable Testing:
In most cases, search marketers promote landing page A/B testing and Ad/Creative testing and that is a good thing. However, there are many other ways to use PPC as a testing vehicle not only for the website, but for the entire company and its offline ad initiatives. Let’s explain…
For example, making the case to use paid search to determine which Ad Messaging works more effectively before the Ad campaign hits the airwaves and cable stations is a very valuable tactic. Over the years, many millions of Ad dollars were spent on messaging that did not entirely make a good impression on the companies. With PPC, it’s a cost effective “pre-campaign” strategy to test the market before spending $100,000’s of dollars on TV, Radio and Print.”

This concept is truly insightful. Think of how much time, effort and money a company might spend thinking and developing the perfect messaging to resonate with their audience. Think of the time, effort and money spent developing the creative. I have never worked in the offline advertising world, but I can only imagine the hours of back and forth bantering it takes to develop a concept that you “think” will work. Being able to A/B test different messaging in a PPC Ad or on the landing page, instead of just guessing what may work and spending millions developing this messaging is an invaluable way to use paid search. I know best practices in online advertising often fail and that all the experience in the world can not ensure you an ad or a landing page will win over another. I am sure this is the same in the offline world as well.

This idea of testing Ad messaging before it is launched can be taken one step further to product development. Again, I have never worked as a product developer, but I can only imagine the time, effort and money it takes determining the best price point, the best packaging or the best way to sell the new idea. These elements can all be tested in a landing page to see what motivates individuals to sign up for product updates before a single dollar has been spent actually creating the product. This can help your team assess if there is actual demand for your new concept before you waste money creating a product that no one will want.

Now, this idea is a great theory, but how can it be accomplished in reality. This comes down to truly integrating your online/offline marketing strategy. Many times, you may have different agencies handling the different elements of your marketing mix, which is actually extremely smart, as you want to have “the best” in all aspects and finding one agency that is the “best” in everything may be impossible. While finding one agency may be impossible, integrating your strategy is not. All it takes is cooperation between the different agencies and making sure the online team is involved in the process before any ideas are finalized. Your online team can then create a paid search campaign designed to test the different ideas.

Being able to gather statistically significant data on which concepts work better than others enable paid search to be so much more valuable than just the web visit, the CPA or the conversion. Using paid search in the testing phase or the research and development phase, as SEMGeek’s post highlights, could potentially save millions.

However, while we all may strive for the above scenarios and give each other high fives around the office when they happen, sometimes in the real world it just does not work out that way. In instances where you’ve put your sweat and tears into optimizing your campaigns, but performance drops or remains stagnant, how do you explain it to yourself and to your clients?

Before questioning your strategy and the changes you made in the account, take a look into Google Insights. John at SEO Boy, wrote a great article on how he uses Google’s Insights to project SEO leads and traffic.

Below are 3 examples when Google Insights, provided me with great data and “insights,” which helped to explain atypical search behavior:

Atypical Performance Trend #1 – Increasing Rankings but traffic staying flat or decreasing

I was recently working on an SEO client where we were killing in Google in terms of Rankings. We were ranked number 2 for the client’s most competitive and traffic driving term. We had also achieved top ranking on numerous other high search volume terms. Yet, month over month we were reporting search traffic remaining relatively flat since January. To help shed light on this very frustrating situation, we turned to Google Insights. Below is the Search Trend of the Top Volume Keyword:

Upon showing this trend to the client, he understood why their search volume had not increased since January 2008. The search volume that existed had fallen since we started the campaign, so flat traffic was actually a win when overall interest in the product was declining.

In situations like these, it is important to emphasize to clients that as search marketers, we don’t create search volume; instead we help our clients capture a greater percentage of the search volume that already exists.

Atypical Performance Trend #2: PPC Client Conversions dropping over time At SEER, our PPC team creates optimization plans, where every 5 to 6 weeks we set goals on how we plan to improve our campaigns. One goal we may set is to increase our conversions over time. We then outline our plan to reach this goal. Recently, I set the goal to increase conversions for a client and, week over week, I optimized the account to reach this goal. I expanded our keyword list, optimized ad copy, ensured our positions were staying competitive and, to my dismay, week over week conversions fell. Again, I looked to Google Insights for my answer. Below is the search volume trend for the top converting keyword in this campaign:

Again, like in the above example, this graph brings clarity on falling conversions.

Again search marketers do not create interest; we just help to ensure that when the interest is there, our clients are getting a bigger slice of the pie than our competitors.

Atypical Performance Trend #3: Unexplained Sky Rocketing Performance: Now, Google Insights can be a double edged sword. It can definitely help you justify stagnant or declining performance, but search marketers often have to put their egos aside when a client’s performance suddenly skyrockets and ask is it solely the result of their hard work? I wrote a blog entry a while back that explains a situation I ran into when volume and performance spiked as a result of offline industry PR.

72 Hours of SEM Heaven and Hell-How to Use PPC to Capitalize on Unexpected-Offline PR

Below is the graph of the top searched term in this scenario.

From February 2008 to March 2008, conversions increased over 200%. I would love to say my optimization efforts were the reason for this dramatic spike, but just as my efforts did not result in the decline of performance in the above examples, my efforts were not entirely the reason for this spike.

Now, I don’t want to sell myself short here, as I put my client in the right position to take advantage of this spike, but giving me all the credit is definitely not the entire picture!

As Search Marketers we often have to break out of our bubble of rankings, bids, and keywords and take a look at the world around us to help explain our numbers, both good and bad.

Google Insights can help us understand market factors that are bigger than search and simply out of our control.

@BonnieSchwartz

The definition of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” pulled from Wikipedia is below:

“In this game, regardless of what the opponent chooses, each player always receives a higher payoff (lesser sentence) by betraying…However, if the other player acts similarly, then they both betray and both get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent…Hence a seeming dilemma.”

So here is my Prisoner’s Dilemma…
Several of my client’s competitor’s have decided to create multiple Adword’s accounts and are serving several ads for the same keywords. This practice is not new and is referred to as “double serving” in the PPC world. One competitor is mainly doing this practice to protect their brand. At one point, I noticed that about 5 of the ads on the first page for the competitor’s brand were being run by this same company.
The company was doing things like creating a landing page that sat on a different domain but clicked through to their main domain. Additionally, they were linking their ads to press releases that talked highly of them or they were linking to their listing with the Better Business Bureau.

What was the impact on my client’s performance?

On terms that contained my competitor’s name from August through November:

• CPC increased over 100%
• Avg. Position went from around 3.5 up to 7
• Conversions fell over 50%
• CPA went up over 100%

Of course other external factors may have also been in play here impacting these number, but the practice of double serving was helping to push my CPC’s up, while simultaneously pushing my position lower, which understandably led to lower conversions and a higher CPA.

I am also seeing another competitor carrying out a similar practice but on my client’s Brand name.

Through August to November:

On my brand terms:
• CPC increased over 100%
• Avg. Position remained flat
• Conversions fell 30%
• CPA went up over 47%

Again, there are definitely other external factors at play, including the environment for this industry getting increasingly more competitive, but individual competitor’s taking up 1 to 5 spots for the same keywords is not helping my performance.

When I first starting seeing the blatant double serving taking place, my initial instinct was that I had to play in this game.

Remember the prisoner’s dilemma, instead of all the “players” trying to cooperate, by playing “fair”, when one competitor defects, then we all need to defect to be better off.

My immediate thought was that I needed to protect my client’s brand by setting up duplicate accounts and “double serving” ads. After my anger cooled and I talked about the dilemma with my client and colleagues, I realized this may not be the optimal response.

Why you may ask?

Let’s go back to the prisoner dilemma again “by us all defecting then we are all worse off”

By us all defecting, we all will have to pay higher CPC’s to achieve the same position, which again increases our spend and increases our CPAs

Instead, of playing in this game, my client and I decided to play defense.
The practice of double serving is actually not allowed according to Google‘s rules (see link below), so we have been reporting instances of “double serving” to Google.

Ad-Words Support

So far, reporting the violations has been working and Google has been linking the violating accounts, which effectively stops the domains from showing up for the same keywords.

However, we are not out of the woods yet…

According to the comments I have read in blogs and forums, it is very easy for violators to violate again and not be caught by Google.

See below:
• google-could-care-less-about-double.html
• webmasterworld.com

In fact, my Google rep even recommended that I watch out for the violators to appear again. Also, new violators may enter the landscape.

Ultimately, as in the prisoner dilemma, the deflections still make us all worse off, because now I have to spend my time monitoring for double serving.

If we could all play fair, we all would be better off, except maybe Google who stands to make more money as we collectively drive up our CPC’s and spend to stay competitive in the market.

About a year ago, Google released the “search query report”, which caused waves across PPC marketing professionals. This report opened up a can of worms so to speak. Basically, the report allows individuals to see any term they are being broad matched to.

When the search query report was launched, I was doing PPC for a Big Wedding Brand. The first time I pulled the report for my client, we were being broad matched to the singular term “formal”. This caused my heart to palpitate, as I would have never wanted my ads to appear when a searcher just searched for the term formal. Since the Search Query report’s launch, search marketers have learned to pull these reports to help them build out negatives for overly broad terms they do not wish their ads to be served for.

Google’s Search Query Report showed SEM Marketers that Google’s definition of broad is pretty broad.

What about Yahoo’s Advanced Match? How “advanced” is “advanced”?

Yahoo does not provide the Yahoo Search Query through their interface. However, the Yahoo Search Query report does exist. I came about the report by accident.

I manage an account that spends over 30K a month in Yahoo, which means I get “special treatment.” I have a premium rep, who helps me manage the account. One day I was complaining to my rep that I would really like to see what search queries my ads were being matched to because of Yahoo’s “Advanced Match,”

Lo and behold I discovered the Yahoo Search Query Report. My rep said that they can pull a report that shows me what term each keyword on advanced matched is being matched to.

“Send it to me!” I exclaimed.

My Premium Rep now sends me monthly the “Yahoo Search Query Report” With the Yahoo Report, which is not the case for Google’s, you can see at the keyword level what search queries a keyword is being matched to (Google’s report you can only see the ad group triggering the impression). With Yahoo’s report you cannot see conversions even if you are tracking them in the interface but in the Google report you can.

Now, just as my heart stopped the first time I pulled a Google Search Query Report, my heart stopped again upon opening the Yahoo Search Query report.

I was bidding on a very long tail term – a four phrase term (Note: which included the term “online” in the query) and according to my Yahoo Search Query report I was being Advanced Matched to the term: “Online”

Yes, you read that correctly, my ads were actually showing for the term online – a long tail term nonetheless was triggering my ad to appear when someone searched for the term “online”. Just writing this brings back the heart palpitations.

To pour salt on this wound, the client the report was pulled for was in a very competitive PPC landscape where each click had the potential to spend up to $10.

I have since added 100’s of negatives to my account. The Yahoo negatives, act like the Google “Negative Exact Match.” Adding the term “online” as a negative prohibits my ad from showing up for that term and only that term. For example, if I were bidding on the term “online dating,” I would still show up for “online dating” just not the stand alone term “online.”

This was not the only instance of poor “Advanced Matching” in my account. There were tons of other terms that caused my heart to skip a beat, but “online” was definitely the most disturbing.

I whined about this for awhile in my office, telling my colleagues how unbelievable it was that my ads were showing for the singular term “online”. My colleague Crystal wanted to get a similar report sent to her for a different account. Here is the twist of this story – Crystal who has a different non premium rep, asked for the report and the response she got was…“I have never heard of that report.”

Her rep had no idea what she was talking about. So, Yahoo has this report, which is replete with useful information for advertisers and not only do they not publicize that it exists, but also their own employees do not even know that it exists. No wonder Google makes up about 70% of ad spend.

The fact that Yahoo hides the existence of this report from their own employees makes you wonder how confident Yahoo is with their advanced matching technology.

Maybe Yahoo does not publicize this report because they are afraid of too many advertisers opening up the Search Query Report can of worms.

What can other PPC advertisers take away from this tale?

• Ask Yahoo to send you the search query report. They have it; you just have to be pushy about it if they say they don’t at first. If your Rep does not know about it, ask to speak to his/her boss. I have seen the report – it exists!
• Watch out for Long Tail Terms in your account that have alarmingly high impression levels. For example, can there really be 3000 people a month searching for “online under water basket weaving class.” This should raise red flags that your long tail term on “advanced match” is most likely being matched to some overly broad term such as “basket”
• Make it part of your process to check this report monthly so that you can continually add more negatives to your account.
• Like Google, this report can also provide Keyword expansion ideas that you can add to your account. Amber at PPC Hero goes into more detail this for this in the post “2-major-reasons-why-you-should-run-a-search-query-report-today”
• Yahoo’s advanced match is quite advanced and from what I can tell, Yahoo’s matching algorithm is much less sophisticated than Google’s.
  Take the results that show up when you search for “Online” Google only matches one ad to the term “online” Yahoo has 8 advertisers matching to the term online. (Note: my ad is no longer there). Do you think all these advertisers are really bidding on this term?
  I bet “SingleParentMeet.com” would love to hear their ad is showing up number one when someone searches for the term Online. I’m guessing they would love to be in on the secret of the “Yahoo Search Query Report.” I know I am.

- Bonnie





]]> http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/a-new-ppc-can-of-worms-has-been-open-%e2%80%93-the-yahoo-search-query-report/2008/06/09/feed/ 7 http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/my-72-hours-of-sem-heaven-and-hell-how-to-use-ppc-to-capitalize-on-unexpected-offline-pr/2008/03/25/ http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/my-72-hours-of-sem-heaven-and-hell-how-to-use-ppc-to-capitalize-on-unexpected-offline-pr/2008/03/25/#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:29:50 +0000 Bonnie Schwartz http://www.thinkseer.com/blog/my-72-hours-of-sem-heaven-and-hell-how-to-use-ppc-to-capitalize-on-unexpected-offline-pr/2008/03/25/ As Search Engine Marketers, we have to remember that we do not live in a bubble. Sometimes we get so focused on what is happening with our individual keywords, our bids and CPA that we forget there is an entire offline world of marketing and PR taking place.

A recent client experience showed me how powerfully the offline world can impact what is happening online and how important communication between the client and a PPC firm is for integrating online and offline marketing successfully.

Our client’s industry was featured on Good Morning America recently. Upon being featured, our client called us first thing and asked how SEER could help capitalize on the interest.

Now our client was lucky as they had quality high ranks in the natural results when the news story broke. You or your client may not have this good fortune, which makes having a fast acting PPC firm even more essential to capitalize on unexpected PR buzz, which as the story below illustrates, can have incredible influence on people’s search behavior.

Immediately, we saw a surge in online conversions and spend due to the buzz Good Morning America created. This buzz was not even generated by promoting our client, but actually just the industry our client operates in. Seeing this, we added Good Morning America ad text into our rotation to speak to the people who had just seen the segment.

The new interest began to quickly push us up to our daily budget cap by mid-morning on a campaign that previously had been 100% visible all day. To fully capitalize on this new interest, we bumped up our budget. We thought 50% would keep us live all day, but as the day went on 50% became 100%, which quickly became 200% and ultimately ended up being 650% to ensure complete visibility. Only by knowing this new buzz had taken place were we able to realize our full potential by ensuring 100% visibility as consumer demand skyrocketed.

Watch out for Sneaky Competitors.

We were so proud of ourselves! Our ads were the only ones that were capitalizing on the GMA story. However, this was not the case for long. Since this was a story about our client’s industry, not just our client, by evening our competitor had copied our GMA ads.

Next time we may want to use a strategy promoted in this great post by NickyCakes.
Basically, the idea would be to “Fake Out” your competition by finding out their physical address and setting up a campaign with “not so good ads” and low bids only in their area. This way they will not be able to see your stellar ad that you would prefer they did not copy.

Brad Geddes, in his post about click fraud, explains another potential strategy. You may want to block out a competitor’s IP address. Geddes warns to make sure you are blocking the correct IPs, and explains that some hosts have thousands of users sharing the same IP.

Besides ad text changes, which can easily be copied, and budget increases, what else can online marketers do to capitalize on offline promotion?

We began to bid on words discussed in the promotion. This allowed us to find new words that were less costly, but relevant because the search demand for these words was new. These new words proved successful at a much lower CPA than what our current campaign was averaging. We also bumped our positions on our current keywords, with the idea that the new demand would increase our conversion rate and thus, keep our CPA in check, which proved correct.

Look at the content network for ripe places get an Ad syndicated.

My colleague at SEER, Laura, wrote about this concept of getting the most out of the content network, which became very applicable in light of the PR. We negotiated with the different content networks to get our ad listed on the online syndication of the PR.

We got an ad shown on the story on GMA’s site. If this is not possible, posting an ad to syndicate “Run of Site” may still be worth it.

You may have to look beyond Google, Yahoo or MSN to find the content network that has ad space on the relevant story. An easy way to tell is to look for the advertise link in the ad block and see which network is syndicating the ads. If you can accomplish this, you will be getting a very relevant ad in front of the audience who may have just seen a promotion on TV. Now, instead of potentially going to your competitor, your ad is in front of this reader for them to click on and convert on your site.

“Ah, we were done,” we thought. All the changes were made and our campaign kept sailing and converting for the next few days, but we were not quite done yet…

Interestingly, once GMA launched the story, we saw other networks shortly after follow suit with their own take on the story. NBC picked up the story, followed by the Today Show, and so the process of changing ads, adjusting budgets, increasing bids, finding relevant new keywords and finding content networks started all over again.

In summary, below are key insights we learned from this experience for successfully integrating offline and online marketing:

• Open communication with clients is essential
• Know what is happening off line in your industry
• Be prepared to increase your budget 10 fold if a major network provides PR for your actual client or even just their industry
• Watch out for sneaky competitors
• Look for new keyword opportunities that may have low competition
• Look for new content network opportunities
• Look out for other networks, which may follow suit
• Act fast to capitalize on this buzz!

This buzz is still happening as I write this, so only time will tell when the effects of a promotion on a show like GMA will die down, but so far it has been an exciting ride – a little taste of PPC Heaven and Hell.

For a good 72 hours we had a combination of quadrupling conversions (Heaven), and sleepless nights as dropping everything to ensure no stone was left uncovered to capitalize on this once in lifetime Buzz was essential (Hell).

If our client did not communicate with us and give us the flexibility to increase budgets, change ads, look for new keywords and content opportunities, and if we in turn did not act quickly, we would not have been able to fully capitalize on this incredible PR.

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