Industrial Strength Search Marketing (SEM, SEO)

Interesting that this one is getting picked up by other blogs – not sure if it’s because of the content or because of the link to my column on Social Media. Or maybe just dumb luck …. Anyway this is my first attempt to put some structure around advanced optimization, a topic about which I am passionate and one in which I have been spending more and more time immersed. Here we go!

Used to be that you could optimize your site for search, buy some keywords, and reap the benefits of plentiful and profitable search traffic. Turns out those days are long gone. A couple months ago I wrote about how incredibly complex and nuanced SEM and SEO tactics had become, and how perhaps some of our time was better spent working on social media instead. You’ll be relieved to find out that I have since regained my senses and have decided to take a deeper look at some of the more advanced optimization tactics in search marketing, and how they apply to large, complex programs, like some of the ones we run here at Yahoo!.

For the purposes of this column, I’m going to assume that you’ve already covered the basics. That is, you’ve put some solid effort into your search marketing programs, to the point that your campaign performance has reached a plateau, and now you’re looking for ways to make the incremental improvements required to boost your returns. What you now need is next-level optimization.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

In order to take on an advanced optimization project, the first question to ask yourself is this: what business metric are you trying to optimize to? Is it CPA, revenue, ROI, or profit? You’ll need to have a clear vision of this before you get started. Hint: It’s going to be the metric that best supports your company’s goals. It’s also likely to change over time, but let’s start with what’s valuable today.

Stand in the Place Where You Are

Once you know what you’re going after, you’re going to need data, and lots of it. Make sure you have a good web analytics platform or other source of rich conversion and revenue data. Next, I believe you’ll want to start your optimization with your paid search program, because it offers both the most data and the most moving parts to be optimized. As well, I think that the same discipline and technique used in optimizing paid search campaigns will play well once we expand our scope to other types of media.

Hit Your Targets

One of the things that has drastically changed about paid search over time is the explosion of different targeting options available to advertisers. Targeting is a double-edged sword, however, because the more you use these options, the more data you suddenly have to analyze. Not a problem with small or medium-sized campaigns, but with large-scale programs this quickly creates data overload for the search marketer. Before we talk about that, let’s take a quick look at the major targeting options and some of their best practices in action:

Match Types: For high-volume keywords, add (and track) multiple match types. Don’t forget to use your keyword as an exact negative against your broad match version of the keyword to ensure proper traffic segmentation

Geo-Targets: Again, for high-volume words, use geo-targets to segment your traffic by locale – you’ll likely have local competitors in some markets, so you’ll need to address these markets differently than your nationwide campaigns

Network Targeting: Build out separate campaigns for search and content targeting. If you still have time, also segment syndicated and non-syndicated traffic. They perform differently and thus should be optimized separately

There are additional targeting tactics such as day- or week-parting and single-keyword ad groups and campaigns that can also help drive incremental goodness, but I’ll save these for another time

Now What?

Automation, that’s what. As I mentioned above, what you’ve likely done now is created a giant headache for yourself, the cause of which is the mountain of data you’ve just manufactured. What we face, and what most large advertisers face, is the need to build automation around paid search management. There are simply too many bits of data for humans to look at them all. But wait a minute – how do you automate optimization?

Look at Everything

If you’re really going after an automated optimized campaign, you’re going to have to go beyond the usual pieces of data search marketers look at – impressions clicks, conversions, etc.  The reason is that search marketers actually think about much more data than this. Accordingly, you’ll want to incorporate additional data like bidding history, quality score, and competitive landscape data.  If you’re going to rely on machines to make decisions, you need to inform them with types of data that human search marketers take into account when managing campaigns – when did I last bid (and how much), how is my quality score today (as apposed to last week), and what are my competitors doing right now? This means that you’ll need to build (or buy) the infrastructure necessary to capture all this data and aggregate it so it can be consumed, analyzed, and made actionable by bidding and/or management algorithms that are tuned to optimize to your target business metrics.

One Step at a Time

While there are some very good tools on the market for paid search management, most of them fall well short of end-to-end optimization. What this means is that you’re going to have to take a close look at the trade-offs in a build vs. buy world. If you choose to build (or perhaps even if you don’t), you’re going to need to prioritize your efforts very carefully. That’s OK, let the (pile of) data point you in the right direction! In other words, you’ll want to find automated solutions for either the most onerous or costly portions of your portfolio. You may want to develop solutions to automate control of your head keywords because this is the most cost-effective use of technology, for example. Conversely, you may want to start with the tail because you find it impossible to manage manually. Whatever your chosen course, take a measured approach so you can apply your learnings as you go. Believe me, I’ve managed many different kinds of paid search and no two programs are quite alike, so you’ll definitely get smarter the more work you do and the further you venture down the path.

Next time we’ll try to step out of our paid search silo and begin to look at how to think about optimizing search in the context of other media. Until then, Happy Searching!

My good friends at Search Engine Land posted (most of) this in the Industrial Strength column yesterday. As I had some mentions of specific conferences and companies, they edited out those parts. Here’s what the original looked like:

It’s amazing how, even as I walk the halls of Search Engine Strategies San Francisco, all the buzz is about social media.

“How much is it worth for a user to become a fan of ours on Facebook, or to follow us in Twitter? “

“How much revenue is social media really bringing in?”

“How should I think about hiring or putting resources against our social media marketing efforts?”

These are the questions marketers and managers alike are asking, both at SES and in companies like Yahoo!, Inc. In large companies in particular, where every incremental resource has to be justified by a business case, the lack of knowledge about the true value of social media can make it very challenging to get a program off the ground. (I’ve written in the past about how big brands should organize around social media) But before we throw in the proverbial towel on resourcing social media marketing (SMM) efforts, let’s take a step back and remember where we were less than a decade ago with search marketing.

The Way-Back Machine

When we started optimizing websites for search in the nineties, there was hardly anything in existence that resembled web analytics. For the most part we couldn’t quantify how we were benefitting from SEO, but intuitively we knew that traffic from search engines was good, so more of it must be better. Now, of course, the tracking of paid and organic search traffic, and the attribution of that traffic to conversion events, is not only well understood, but in fact it’s fueling a multibillion-dollar industry. So in order lay the foundation for a solid SMM campaign, let’s rip a page out of the book on search marketing and find something measurable to serve as a starting point.

Valuation, Valuation, Valuation

First of all, and you’re probably tired of hearing me go on and on about it, valuation will serve as the cornerstone to your SMM foundation in the same way that it helps search marketers secure and maintain their budgets and their jobs. But valuation in social media is fundamentally more challenging than in search, because the bulk of the value is generated outside the friendly confines of your website. I was talking to Brent Csutoras about this yesterday. Brent happens to know more about SMM than just about anyone. If you have a chance to sit down with him or any of the other BlueGlass guys (and gals) I highly recommend it. They’re a fun bunch of really sharp, forward-thinking folks.

In our conversation, Brent acknowledged that tracking SMM is tricky business. To cite a couple of obvious examples, only about a third of all tweets come from twitter.com, which makes the vast majority of tweets much more challenging to track. As well, while the bulk of facebook activity comes through the news feed, you can’t put traditional tracking code on your news feed page, so it’s a real chore to try and understand exactly what’s happening on facebook. The result of this conundrum is that, if your goal is to quantify the value of your SMM campaigns, you should start with something small that you can track and quantify, and that drives some sort of measurable value. Look for something bigger than a click, smaller than a conversion, to make your goals attainable yet significant. From there, your best bet will be to extrapolate the effect onto a larger scale.

Content Is King

Here’s an example. Think about promoting content on your site. Video, text, whatever you either have or can develop with some ease. Pick one item. Only one. Make sure that you have the content on a page where you can invite others to ‘like’ or share with all the popular social network badges right there around the content module. Heck, you might even try to make sure that the page where your content is hosted is search engine friendly (social helps SEO – I’m just sayin’). Then, either with an agency or on your own (if you know me you also know that I’m going to recommend you use an agency), promote the hell out of the content via SMM, and use tracking URLs wherever you can. On your facebook page, link to the content. Tweet about it. Promote it to bloggers. Here’s where an agency can really help, as they’ll know the best places to promote your content based on your goals. Use bit.ly URLs that re-direct to your analytics server to cookie the users if you can.

Wait For It

Then, you should be able to see the effects of SMM over time. If you’re promoting video, measure the number of times people play the video or the average time spent engaging with the video unit. If it’s a white paper, measure the number of downloads. If it’s normal web content, measure time spent or subsequent activity on your network. Anything that leads to quantifiable value is fair game here.

Now, you’re able to go back to your SVP and show him or her the value of SMM in some measurable fashion. The good news is that SMM is a little like SEO or SEM, in that once your executives get a taste of social, they’ll want more. And more, and more…

This post went up yesterday on Search Engine Land and is getting a pretty positive response. That is, everyone’s emailing me to voice their disagreement with my approach! Oh well, it makes for good discussion, and that’s what this topic really needs…..

In last month’s column I talked about buying brand keywords and some of the great (somewhat) new ad products available to advertisers. All that talk about buying brand keywords brought me back to a familiar topic about which, if you read my column with any frequency, you just might be getting a tiny bit tired of hearing me rant. In spite of that, I’m back for one more round of discussion about the relationship between paid and organic search traffic, this time with some real math to show for myself. Bear with me, this one’s worth it.

I mentioned in my previous post about paid and organic search traffic that the goal in any analysis is to determine if the paid ad is a source of lift, cannibalization, or both.  At the time I was looking at isolating the traffic from the organic listing and then quantifying the incremental effect of the paid search ad. Since then, thanks to Matthias Blume, I have seen the light, statistically speaking, and have thus found a much more elegant way to conduct this analysis. Let’s put on our statistical hats and go on a journey to the heart of the issue.

Let’s reset the situation: You rank #1 organically for your brand keyword search, and you’re trying to determine if and how much you are willing to pay for a paid ad on your brand keyword search. The goal then is to understand how the clickthrough rate (CTR) of the organic listing is affected by the presence of the paid ad. You’ll do this by looking at how the CTR of the organic listing changes with and without the presence of the paid ad. The CTR rates I am referring to need to be normalized for search volume. I’ll explain what that means below, but that was the tricky part that I didn’t get before, the elusive reality about which Matthias enlightened me.

In order to calculate this normalized CTR, you’ll first need to try to figure out what the search query volume is for the keyword you’re targeting. This isn’t always explicitly defined, but if you’re clever you can find some ways to approximate it with a good deal of accuracy. Some search engines provide approximate monthly search query volume for keywords, and I believe there are third party providers of approximate search query volume data as well. Ideally you will want to have search volume by day for whichever keyword you’re testing on a particular search engine. If you can’t get to this level of resolution that’s ok, go with weekly or monthly search volume. This will just mean that it will take longer to get your results.

I’m going to explain how we did our analysis, and you can make any variations you need based on your own constraints.  First, we chose a few brand keywords to track. At Yahoo!, we have many brand terms to choose from: yahoo, yahoo mail, yahoo finance, etc. At your company you may have a similar experience, or you may have only one brand keyword that really matters to your business.

Here’s how the analysis works: On Day 1 of our research period, we had the organic listing in #1 position, with no paid search ads (at all) on the page. We began to collect referral data from the organic listing. After a week we started buying paid search ads for our brand terms, and began tracking referrals from the paid ad as well. From then until Day 30 we bought paid search at different budget levels and turned it off for periods of time as well, just to get a variety of data points.

At the end of the research period we compiled our data and began to plot it out on a chart. The metrics that we calculated were fairly simple. On any given day, Organic CTR is [referrals from the organic listing divided by search query volume], and Paid Search CTR is [referrals from the paid search ad divided by search query volume]. We calculated these two metrics for each day 1-30, and plotted them on a scatter graph.  It looked like this:

Here is the way to read this graph: On the x (horizontal) axis is the Paid Search CTR. On the y (vertical) axis is the Organic CTR. Each of the data points represents a day where we gathered data, and each point is plotted where the two CTRs meet on the graph (I’ve stripped the values out of the chart to protect the innocent). The line on the graph is a linear regression, basically a trend line that represents a summary of the scattered data points. Here’s the key: If the slope of the line is positive (the line goes up and to the right) as it is here, there is positive synergy between the organic listing and the paid ad. This means that on days where we bought the paid ad, the CTR of the organic listing actually increased. If the line had a negative slope (went down and to the right), there would be negative synergy between the organic listing and the paid ad. I referred to this as cannibalism in my previous column on this topic, and it means that your paid ad is stealing traffic from your organic listing.

So in my case I ran around the building, loudly declaring victory. I mean, what could be better than buying paid search traffic knowing that you’re driving more clicks to your organic listings?  Believe me, I’m not saying that it will turn out this way in every case. Do your own analysis and come to your own conclusions, because naturally it’s going to work differently for everyone. I’m just here to share my story with you, and mine happens to have a very, very happy ending.

Hey, everyone: Check out the new Yahoo! World Cup Toolbar. It keeps you updated on scores and news, and for those of you who don’t work at Yahoo!, you can win a signed jersey. Also, there’s the Yahoo! Penalty Shootout Game on Yahoo! Sports. Over a million games played already. Enjoy!

Are you still arguing with your management about whether you should buy your brand keywords or not? Good news for you: I’m here to make sure you have two more good reasons to go ahead and buy that brand and feel good about it.

A few months ago I wrote about how advertisers should think about buying their brand keywords on search engines. Since then I have been happily buying a number of brand keywords and can safely say I’m delighted by the fact that there are now several viable enhanced ad products offered by the major search engines that can bring absolute joy to the open-minded search marketer who loves traffic from brand keywords.

Let me give you a brief summary of what’s out there before I further extol the virtues of these enhanced ad products for brand keywords.

Google Ad Sitelinks

Google offers a nice new ad product for brand keywords that is an extension of its Sitelinks product. As you may know, Sitelinks appear in the algorithmic listings and are set up by Google. Websites can opt out, but presumably have no control over the links themselves. There is now a new product available for advertisers, so-called Ad Sitelinks. This product gives advertisers more control over their Adwords ads that show when their brand terms are searched.  Advertisers can add up to four links at a time with tracking URLs. Ads have to be white-listed by Google weekly for inclusion. I would assume that over time Google may expand the Ad Sitelinks program to include a richer feature set, but for now the unit exists and operates very efficiently. This is Dell’s Ad Sitelinks unit as an example:



Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) from Yahoo

RAIS was designed specifically for brand owners as a way to showcase their products to brand searchers. The RAIS unit allows advertisers to put in multiple trackable links on the ad, directing users to specific calls to action. This is great because advertisers can choose how commercial they want the ads to be. Some advertisers go completely direct-response, while others provide links for existing customers, like login links or customer service links. In addition to the links, advertisers can also include video assets such as product demos or 30-second commercials. The big bonus here is that when a user clicks on a video asset to watch it, the video expands in the unit and renders right there on the SERP, temporarily pushing all the other ads down at or below the fold. Perfect if you want to showcase your company or product via video. Another nice feature RAIS offers is the ability for an advertiser to put a drop down menu or even a search box into the RIAS unit itself, giving users the ability to drill into your site in a self-guided way. This is what our RAIS unit looks like for our Toolbar product.

What does this mean to you, the search marketer? I can tell you empirically what we, as an advertiser, are seeing as a direct result of using these products. As you can imagine, your results will vary depending on how commercial or acquisition-focused your ads are. For us, as you can see from the screenshot above, the ad headline is primarily direct-response focused (“Download Yahoo! Toolbar”), but we also mixed in more educational messaging in the ad itself (“Learn about Toolbar Apps”).  The results of using these products have been nothing short of spectacular. Because the ad units are more complex, and the links more varied and numerous, we typically see conversion rates dip in a small but noticeable way. However, the dramatic increase in clickthrough rates on these ads and the resulting increase in conversions more than compensate for this by driving additional profit to the bottom line.

Before you get started, here are a few tips for managing these new ad products:

1. Start with your main brand term. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself – these ad units don’t behave like the keywords ads you’re used to.
2. Be open-minded but cautious. Be willing to increase your bids to get traffic, even if it means paying a higher CPC than you’re used to. With some of these systems you need to outbid your previous brand term ads in order to get volume. Don’t panic, your results should still be fantastic!
3. Be ready to test different elements in your ads. Once you have a handle on performance, try altering your links and assets based on what you’re seeing. Tinker with it until you think you have the right balance, then tinker some more!
4. Add ‘other’ brand terms, but create different ads for different terms. For example, we have a different ad unit for ‘yahoo toolbar’ than we do for ‘yahoo’
5. Differentiate from your organic listings. I’ve found that we get the best results when we have a different tone and call to action between the two listings

Still not convinced you should be buying your brand keywords? Take a run at RAIS and Ad Sitelinks before you turn your back on this lucrative traffic source. Also, tune in next month when I take a deeper, data-driven look into the eternal paid vs. organic debate. Until then, Happy Searching!

One of the things I mentioned in my previous series on Global SEM is that there is no such thing as going global. Going global means going local in 25 different ways. This holds true not only for brand campaigns, but even more so for broader marketing initiatives.

Since I wrote about supporting a global brand re-launch with paid search last Fall, I have had the pleasure of working with our international teams on a broader scope of marketing initiatives, and I thought it would make sense to jot down a few thoughts in the hopes of making others’ efforts more successful.

Let me first take a step back and state for the record that the longer I work in search marketing, the more firmly I believe that as search marketers, our ultimate charter is to support the business goals of the company or entity in which we operate.

As I begin to work more with marketing teams in India, UK, France, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other markets, I am constantly reminded that everything – business objectives, marketing goals, even measures of success (not to mention language and culture, of course) – vary widely between international markets, and each market requires essentially a custom built approach to SEM.

As a result, if you’re like me and work in a resource-conscious central marketing environment, it’s paramount to build a strategy that allows you to work efficiently and effectively to deliver search marketing services to a vide variety of markets, prioritizing efforts appropriately to support a diverse set of objectives across the globe.

To that end I’ve compiled a short list of questions you should be asking your international contacts before you get started.

The first two questions will help you qualify and prioritize your regions and determine what level of effort you can afford to invest in them:

What sort of budgets do you have set aside for paid search this quarter/year? As cold as it sounds, this needs to be the first order of prioritization for your efforts. You’re a very busy person, and budgets are a good indicator of commitment to the channel. As a secondary data point, you might ask what percentage of their total or online marketing budgets they’ve set aside for paid search. This approach helps normalize for market size and gives you an additional data point to consider.

Who’s in charge of paid search in your marketing team? Again, not so nice, but your ROI on teams with a dedicated search- or direct-marketing lead will generally be much higher than regions where there is a single point of contact for all things marketing. Don’t be a hero. At best, hitting a home run with a $25,000 SEM budget in Iceland isn’t going to get you a promotion, and at worst, if it keeps you from focusing on important initiatives in the UK, for example, it’s downright irresponsible.

Once you have established your priorities as they relate to regions or countries, the next three questions will help guide you toward building a winning SEM strategy in your target markets:

What are your most important marketing initiatives this/next quarter/year? This may sound like a no-brainer, but again, our job is to support the business objectives of the region. Don’t make the mistake of trying to jam corporate marketing objectives down the throats of the regional teams. It won’t work and it will only serve to annoy your international counterparts. Once you have built a trusting business relationship you can then begin to introduce other priorities into the mix.

Do you already have a relationship with an SEM agency, or a digital agency that runs paid search programs for you? You may have an agency or in-house team that can execute on a global scope. That’s great, but it won’t matter if the region has a comfortable relationship with a somewhat capable agency. Don’t attempt to displace the local agency unless you or your shop holds a significant advantage in terms of capabilities or cost structure. Your credibility is at stake here – don’t blow it. Believe me, you’d rather work with an established agency at first than force a relationship with an unwelcomed in-house team based in the US. Be patient.

What do you consider to be marketing success? Again, a simple question, but different markets have varying objectives and thus potentially different definitions of success. Here in the US, we’re fixated on cost, revenue, conversion rate, profit, and ROI. In emerging markets, for example, these metrics may not matter. Unique visitors, cost-effective referrals, market share, these are some of the KPIs I get when interviewing international teams, and these are what we should be focusing on in such markets.

Like most topics, the key here is to start with the basics, build strong relationships, and take it one step at a time. The gaps that exist between you and the regions as far as language, culture, budgets, business objectives and success metrics dictate a measured, prioritized and open-minded approach to international SEM. Good Luck!