June 2009 - The Official Clickable Blog

Heidi Dangelmaier was our feature guest at our most recent Interesting Café, Clickable's monthly culture night.

Who's Heidi Dangelmaier? After feeling like a social outcast as the only “chick” studying robotics at Princeton Computer Science Department, Heidi became passionately interested in gender and design. Heidi applied this passion to invent 3iying, the first all-girl innovation agency. 3iying is devoted to understanding the changing millennial female culture. Her firm tackles questions like: Who is the new girl? How is she changing? And how do these changes impact brands? From technology to products to marketing, what needs to change, how must it change, and where are the biggest opportunities? Heidi’s work has helped brands as vast as Sega, Merck, Axe and Varsity.

After her engaging talk and showcase of innovative work, Heidi shared some gems in this short video interview:

Please let us know what you think. Email me at mkalehoff at clickable dot com if you'd like to join Interesting Café.

Many important search-marketing options are set at the campaign level, including daily budget, target network, and language and location settings. However, there may be situations where you want to adjust these settings while keeping the structure of your campaign — ad groups, keywords, bids and ads — largely intact. For instance, you may offer a product in two different locations (such as New York and Chicago) but at a different price in each location. To promote the product effectively, you’ll need two campaigns: one targeted to Chicago, and the other to New York. You might want to use the same ad groups, keywords and bids, but you should adjust your ads slightly to reflect the price difference.

Rather than creating a new campaign from scratch only to adjust your geo-targeting settings and a handful of ads, you can now create a copy of your existing AdWords campaigns within Clickable, and make the changes to your new campaign in our Manage section.

To copy an AdWords campaign, go to the Manage Account section that contains that campaign, and click on the “Clone Campaign” tool. When it launches, you can copy any of your AdWords campaigns in a few simple steps:

• Choose the campaign you want to copy, and the account you want the new campaign to reside in.
• Name your new campaign. (By default, we'll append "(Cloned)" to your existing campaign's name.)
• Set a daily budget for your new campaign. (By default, we'll keep the daily budget of your existing campaign.)
• Set a "bid multiplier" for your new campaign: this is the percentage by which we'll adjust all of the bids in your campaign. (By default, we'll leave it at 100%.)

Once you've entered or adjusted these values and reviewed your new campaign's structure, it will be created instantly. Just go to the Manage Campaign section for your new campaign, and you can make all the adjustments you need.

Last Tuesday, our own Max Kalehoff co-moderated the SEMPO Digital Media Meetup with Sara Holoubek, SEMPO president.  Over one hundred members of the New York search-marketing community convened at Yahoo!’s offices to debate the intersection of online display and search advertising.

The premise: “As the fundamentals of search advertising push efficiency, automation, and performance, the worlds of display media and pay-per-click advertising are beginning to blur. Increasingly, display networks are focusing on performance as advertisers find value in evaluating search and display side-by-side.  This has resulted in media networks that have moved away from targeting content and are now targeting audiences via scientific optimization. But how are marketers to navigate the various solutions and tools performance-centric media networks offer? Is there opportunity search-marketers must act on now?”

The short answer is: it’s complicated.  But our all-star panel composed of Eric Weiller, CEO of 33Across, Scott Portugal from Traffiq, and Adam Heimlich from Razorfish, provided valuable insights. 

(From left to right: Adam Heimlich, Scott Portugal, Eric Weiller. Photo by Max Kalehoff.)

Panel Highlights

Scale
We opened our panel with a question on everyone’s mind: What is the critical mass of advertising volume needed in order to move the needle with display advertising? How much scale is required to drive performance? Search works in the niches, even with very small campaigns and businesses, but why is display different?

Eric Weiller agreed that display advertising requires hundreds of thousands of viewers to obtain the efficiencies required to see results. “Display advertising,” he said “works best on a large scale to a very segmented audience.” But Eric also noted that display media is frequently not given its due. Most advertising attribution models have a long way to go, and advertisers often do not assign value to display ads, leaving full credit to search and the last click before conversion.

Maximizing Display Investment
Even when marketers have the scale required to obtain results from display advertising, how are they to determine performance and then maximize investment?

Scott underscored third-party measurement data and tools for planning towards goals. “But after that,” Scott said “advertisers need to be ready to take the rigor of search advertising and apply it to display, and this includes having architecture in place to obtain real-time data. Advertisers should always be aware of their key performance indicators and baselines, and from there, they must test, locate jet streams of revenue, and re-invest.”

Display’s Convergence With Search
We concluded the panel by looking at the future of display, particularly its convergence with search on the marketer’s desktop.  Scott felt the shift was already happening, pointing to several online ad exchanges, tools like Clickable, and even Google AdWords. Adam gave a more conservative estimate of several years, underscoring many hurdles to overcome before display performance metrics could truly align with, and complement, search.

If you are interested in joining the New York SEMPO Meetup group, please visit the Meetup Web site.

Note: Some terms discussed at the Meetup event, as defined by Wikipedia.

Online Display Advertising – Appears on Web pages in many forms, including Web banners.  These banners can consist of static or animated images, as well as interactive media that may include audio and video elements.

Advertising Network – A company that connects Web sites looking to host ads with advertisers. There are several types of networks.  Representative networks provide full transparency to the advertiser about where their ads will run. Blind networks offer low pricing in exchange for marketers relinquishing control over where their ads will run. Targeted networks specialize in using consumer click stream data to enhance the value of the inventory they purchase.

Retargeting – Helps companies advertise to customers who visit a Web site but leave without converting. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the Internet via various ad networks that the company buys media from.
 
Advertising Exchanges – Are technology platforms for buying and selling online advertising impressions, and represent a field beyond ad networks. Exchanges can be useful to both buyers and sellers because of the efficiencies they provide.

For all marketers – novices and experts alike – successfully launching a search campaign can be challenging. There are so many factors that can influence your costs, position and conversion rate.  As a result, it is difficult to build the ideal search marketing campaign. But if you avoid these five beginner mistakes, you will be off to a great start.

Keyword Selection – Choose Your Weapons Wisely
First, if you are a beginner, you need to know about the different keyword match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact.  You must be sure to include Exact and Phrase match types in your campaigns.

We’ve written about match types, but to summarize: Exact match and Phrase match keywords usually result in higher clickthrough and conversion rates than Broad match keywords. So you want to make sure that you do not forget to add Phrase match keywords (modified terms with quotation marks) and Exact match keywords (modified terms with brackets) in order to improve your campaign’s performance. You may even want to start with just Exact and Phrase match keywords at first and introduce Broad match terms to your campaigns at a later date.

If you are new to search, you will be relieved to know that there are many tools out there (some of them free), that will help you build keywords for your search-marketing campaigns. Some great free tools can be accessed via Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and SEObook.com.

When building your keyword sets, take a conservative approach to keyword selection. For example, if your Web site’s focus and monetization revolves around credit card applications, stay away from the temptation to bid on high-volume, generic terms, such as “money” or “financial services.” Although related to your offering, terms like these are simply not relevant enough.  They will increase your costs and erode your marketing budget. Stay focused on specific, related terms, and be careful when evaluating high-volume, generic terms that are not tightly related to your offering. If you would like to test high-volume terms that you are unsure of, start by isolating those terms, include them in a separate campaign, and apply a conservative daily spend cap.

Grouping Keywords In Ad Groups – Divide And Conquer
Another common mistake that new search marketers make is adding too many keywords to one ad group. When you begin building your ad groups, you will want to identify emerging themes, and group your keywords into ad groups accordingly.

The goal is to achieve high clickthrough rates by creating tight ad groups with keywords that will show up in your ad copy. Since ad copy is assigned on the ad group level and not the keyword level, you will need to pay attention to where you place your keywords.

Get into the habit of building and planning your campaigns and ad groups in a spreadsheet. While it can be tempting to add keywords directly into your AdWords account by using the Google Suggest feature, resist the temptation to build your account on the fly!  Use the Google Suggest feature, but bring those keywords into Excel where you can fine-tune your keyword strategy.

Negative Keyword Expansion – The Negative Effect
Negative keywords are terms that you do not want your ads to receive impressions for. If you are a retailer of iPods, for example, you probably do not want to attract searchers who are looking for 'Free iPods' as it will result in non-converting traffic. Many advertisers are so focused on building targeted keywords that they forget about reserving enough time to build strong negative keyword sets. In fact, there is a good chance that you are using the same keyword-generation tools that your competitors are. 

Investing time in creating a better negative keyword list can give you better clickthrough rates and ad positions than your competition. So think about the keywords you are using, check them twice and re-run queries in your keyword-generation tools, but this time focus on the negative keywords that you do NOT wish to include in your campaigns.

Negative keywords can be applied at the campaign level or by adding the negative keyword to your ad group with a minus sign in front of it.
 
Content Relevancy – Apples-to-Apples
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about content, content and more content, as well as attracting links from other sites. However, content also is playing a larger role in the paid-search game. Similar to how search-engine spiders crawl sites to assess and rank pages for organic search listings, spiders also crawl your pages to determine your relevancy for paid-search listings.

Unlike with SEO, you need not be concerned with the quantity of content on your site (having a huge Web site or having a high word count on your landing pages) but rather, focus on the qualitative aspects of your site. Hopefully you created tight campaigns and ad groups and if so, you should map these specific themes of your ad group to dedicated landing pages. Those landing pages should have relevant content that includes synonyms and phrases similar to your campaign’s keywords. Make sure that your ad groups’ most common phrases and best keywords are present in your landing pages’ titles and heading tags as well.

Go Deep!
Some beginners still send all paid-search traffic to their Web site’s home page, perhaps because more attention has been paid to the design and usability of this page. This is perhaps the most common mistake made by novice search marketers.

If your Web site offers just one or two products or services, this approach may work. However, if you are using a broad range of keywords, your home page may not have much correlation to your keywords.  As a result, you may be running a high risk of developing a bad account history, which can lead to limited impressions, higher minimum CPCs, lower clickthrough rates and lower positions.

This can be a tricky hole to crawl out of, so whenever possible, find deeper pages in your Web site to use as landing pages.  Use pages that have both, targeted content and strong calls-to-action. If you do not have too many deep pages, or they do not include a very strong call-to-action, your site is probably overdue for a tune-up and there is no time like the present to get this done!

Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

After we first introduced the Ad Scheduling tool last summer, Tony wrote a post on our Blog detailing ways that you could use "day-parting" to turn your ads on and off with pinpoint precision: right down to 30-minute intervals. (As Vernon explained in an earlier Tool Tip, you can be even more precise, setting your bids to a higher or lower percentage of their defaults on certain days or time periods.)

Another option is to use "week-parting," which means turning your ads on or off (or adjusting your bids) on certain days of the week. If you're not sure whether this option is right for your accounts, Clickable's new "Day of the Week Report" will help you make that decision.

This new report shows you how a number of key metrics have performed over the past 90 days, including Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Conversions, Cost Per Click (CPC), Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate. It also displays the variance between your actual Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Cost per Conversion or Acquisition (CPA), and the goal value that you've set. Most importantly, it breaks all of this information down by the day of the week. If your costs are high on Saturdays, but your conversions are low or non-existent, you may want to use the Ad Scheduling tool to pause your most expensive campaigns on that day of the week. You may even find that your account's data doesn't break down so cleanly along Weekdays vs. Weekends; Thursdays could be your outlier! Whatever the answer, you'll find it in this report.

The "Day of the Week" report is located in the "Excel Reports" section of the Report tab. Just select "Day of the Week Report" from the list of "Standard Reports" at the left, choose the account that you want to run the report for (this one works for a single account at a time), and then you can save or send your report in Excel format or as a ZIP file. If you just need the report for your own analysis, you're ready to go. But if you need to produce this for someone else, you can always white label it with a custom logo.