Pump Up Your Paid Search!

In this session, tips and techniques designed to help pros get even more out of their paid search campaigns.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

Brad Geddes, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Local Launch

Ben Perry, Ph.D., Paid Search Director, iProspect

Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Brad Geddes:

Who should use dayparting? Business who want to maximize business hours. Track ROI based on time. Finance industry -huge difference between 4pm and noon. Monitoring conversion rates by hour. Should we place higher bids at different times? In his case study, Sunday night converted well. Examine buying cycle and see how it applies. Expensive items like electronics have a longer conversion cycle. People usually spend their second paycheck of the month on disposable income. Are you adjusting bids based on this info?

Google has “ad scheduling”. MS has “dayparting”. Yahoo does not have an integrated tools. In Google, advanced mode allows us to increase % of bid based on time. Chart out cycle and make decisions from there. Adcenter has a slightly different interface. When bidding, set a base CPC. Incremental bidding – how much more do you want to pay on a Monday? or 3-7pm?

Closing thoughts. Marketing is connecting with people. In a service based industry, Friday is slow. So maybe we want to increase business by bidding up on a Friday. Might want to create time sensative offers. Call between 12-2pm for 25% off. Order before noon for free delivery.

Ben Perry:

Shows graph from 3 different clients.

Tips-

• Mapy our account structure before touching engine interface. Makes life easier, improves quality score. All 3 major engines have same structure. Makes it easier to import. Mirroring might not be the best idea, but could be useful.
• Budgetting: Do not use engine budgets to guide your spending. If you come close to budget, you can miss out on lots of volume. You want to serve ads as if you have an unlimited budget. If not, paying too much for click. More competitive. Shows graph to demonstrate.
• Use as many engines as makes sense.Use Google Website optimizer to test new traffic sources. Create new landing pages. Use multivariate testing that taps each of your main customer types. Send all traffic from a new source to that page only. Let the results tell you whether the source has value and to which customers.
• Keyword selection:Buy “tangential” keywords carefully or not at all. SEM works because of direct relevance. Contextual ads are usually a cheaper way to accomplish goal.
• Use board match with negative keywords to reach max volume under a CPA target. Can’t predict all ways people search. MINE DATA for negatives.
• Position: Side effect of ROI equation, not as a lever for driving the campaign. There’s nothing magical about position. Using it as a lever for your campaign makes you lose money. Calculate bids based on ROI.
• Use Geo-targetting strategically. When targeting most of the country, use a natuional campaign as the base with a geo-targeted overlays. Why? Often using only geo targeting leaves so much volume on hte table that it’s worth paying for clicks you can’t use.

Matt Van Wagner:

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the topic today. Gets the impression that its not understood in the way it was intended. 4 major engines support DKI. Google started it as part of the secret sauce. MS has DKI on steroids – very neat. Yahoo didn’t have it till Panama.

Query “used fish” – see irrelevant ads by Amazon! Same with “used underwear”. Query “paid search advertisements” on Google. Funny result.

What is DKI? Must understant conceptually. It simply is a campaign with many words, can customize ads. That’s all it is. Time saver. Don’t want to write so many ads. Can increase relevants due to the bold effect. DKI will cause the bold effect. Can transform a dynamic ad to a customized ad. DKI picks up from the keyword list only. Shows the syntax. Can insert dynamic text into titles, description, and display url. If query is long, it will default to static ad. Can control casing of the DKI text. For example “PPC” should be all caps. Can put you in violation of editorial guidelines if you don’t use it properly. Also, on display URL – people may copy and paste the URL and get a 404.

DKI was not need until Panama. Copied the Google model. Also goes to default if query is too long. Yahoo has the ability to give alternative text which can help with mispelled queries and stemming issues. Alternative text field lets you control word casing and grammar.

Adcenter gives the most control. Great online video tutorial. Makes it easy to add parameters. Adcenter allows keyword in display URL. Also, if they cut and paste the URL – 404 error.

Aks just recently added DKI.