Mystere Solved

April 20, 2010

I was in Vegas a while back and had the foresight to set aside a few hours of my otherwise busy weekend for a Cirque du Soleil show. This time around I thought I’d go old school and head to Treasure Island to catch Mystere, the first Cirque show to take up residence in Sin City. It has withstood the test of time because it has all the elements that make Cirque a world-class spectacle – humor, music, mind-bending acrobatics, unbelievable athletes, and acts that absolutely attack your senses and sensibilities. If you’re going to a Cirque show for the first time I definitely recommend you start with this one.

The first element of the show to completely disarm me came as we entered the arena. Before us stood an usher of sorts, a charlatan in disguise. A somewhat insane-looking older gentleman in a mussed tuxedo with a pile of white hair on his head. The look on his face said ‘I’d like to help you find a seat, but I’m not quite sure what I’m doing’. For better or for worse, we were approached by another usher who politely showed us to our seats. In hindsight this was good fortune, for as soon as we sat down it became clear that the charlatan usher was leading various guests around the arena on a wild goose chase, much to the amusement of the previously seated guests in the arena.

Another amusing element to the show was the ‘baby’. She came out early in the show with some of the other bizarre creatures that inevitably inhabit the stage of a Cirque performance. As part of the act she chooses an audience member in the front row as her ‘mama’. As the baby begins to play with her new mama, you can sense a level of engagement with the audience that is unique to the Cirque experience. Sure enough, as the show goes on, the baby reappears at select moments, soliciting attention and companionship from the unsuspecting ‘mama’ in the audience. There’s a very funny twist at the end of the show that I won’t spoil here.

After the introductory elements and the music set the tone for the ensuing drama, there were then a string of acts so unusual and unbelievable that they left my senses completely drained for the remainder of the evening.

The first was the aerial cube, which apparently has been a staple of the show since 1995. Visually speaking, the act is remarkable. The cube, which has no body, only a frame, spins on the various body parts of the performer with an impossible display of color that leaves the viewer nearly hallucinating before it’s over. The difficulty of this act is almost completely forgotten due to the brilliance of the visual effects it produces.

‘Hand to Hand’ is an act I’ve seen adapted into at least one other Cirque show (Le Reve, I think). In this act, two men perform an intertwined act of balance and strength atop a revolving sphere. Watching this act it’s hard to believe it’s real. The two men move impossibly slowly and precisely, hoisting each other to balance on a hand or a foot of the other, then somehow reverse positions without losing their grace of movement. Truly impressive.

The other act that really captured my imagination was the Trampoline and Korean Plank. This act epitomizes what I understand to be the Cirque experience. Several dozen acrobats weave around the stage and take turns catapulting each other into space with the planks. What makes this a true Cirque experience is that not only are the acrobats amazingly skilled and precise, but clearly much work has gone into making the procession of acrobats visually compelling. It’s hard to put this into words, but the movement of the acrobats around the stage and through the air creates intricate visual patterns that make the experience much more rewarding than the individual feats of the acrobats themselves. You can’t watch this act without feeling both the compelling skills of the performers as well as the choreography behind it. That’s the Cirque spectacle in a nutshell.

So, all in all a great time! I think I’m finally getting the hang of this whole Cirque phenomenon. Now that I’ve been to a few shows, I have a much better feel for what it’s all about. The more shows I see, the more I’m able to stop trying to figure out what’s going on, and instead to focus on and truly enjoy the performance in front of me in its entirety.

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Actionable Attribution Analysis: A Three-Phased Approach

March 11, 2010

“Last-click attribution is dead!”

“Media-mix modeling is the key to marketing success!”

“Without an accurate attribution model you’re throwing away your marketing dollars!!”

With SMX West in town last week the halls were echoing with passionate cries about attribution analysis. It seemed as if all topics (other than the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal) had taken a back seat for a moment, and suddenly the most important thing to consider was attribution analysis, specifically whether or not you are giving too much credit to SEM and not enough to other media.

Believe me, I share people’s enthusiasm on the topic. It’s clearly one of the next big online marketing problems to solve. And despite the fact that moving away from last-click attribution toward a more elegant and accurate attribution model can really only serve to divert budget away from SEM and toward other channels, I do think it’s the right thing to do. But after talking to as many people as I could, gathering my own data and soliciting opinions, I’m convinced that we are a still a long way from being any good at this at all.

Currently there appear to be two basic types of approaches, both of which seem to me to be fatally flawed.

One approach I see in the market, offered by various otherwise credible services, has the advertiser entering percentages into boxes on a screen, assigning portions of the conversion value to different marketing channels – 25% for SEM, 35% for display, 15% for email, and so on. As a large advertiser myself, I can safely say that this approach gives someone like me entirely too much credit as a sophisticated marketer. I don’t know anyone who has a good enough grasp on their business and the implications of attribution analysis to make an intelligent decision in this type of situation. No knock on my fellow advertisers, but seriously, this is way out of our league. Even so, a Google representative stated during a panel I was moderating, that they intend only on providing attribution-related data, placing the burden of analysis on the advertiser.

The other approach I see emerging is a black-box math-based approach. This is more likely to be done in-house by large advertisers, using statistical and predictive modeling to simulate different attribution models, and mapping their outcomes to business metrics like profit, revenue or ROI. While I do think there is significant value in doing the hard math and understanding these problems from a statistical point of view, this methodology tends to be short-sighted. I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all approach to attribution analysis where you simply dump your marketing data in, and out magically pops an attribution model that maximizes profit, for example. It’s just not that generic of a problem.

It’s easy for me to sit back and criticize the status quo – so why not offer some solutions, you say? Well, here goes: I envision a three-phased approach that takes some elements of the existing practices, then combines and expands upon them to provide a more complete, appropriate solution for each advertiser.

The first phase involves smart people talking to each other. Revolutionary, no? We need an attribution specialist to lead off this effort by conducting a fairly exhaustive analysis of the advertisers’ business and online marketing programs. Starting with business goals and product adoption cycle, to conversion window analysis, on to a channel-by-channel audit of on- and off-line marketing. The purpose of this consulting and analysis is to provide the proper inputs into phase two.

Phase two is the super-math modeling I describe above. With the proper inputs as they relate to an advertiser’s business and its metrics, statistical modeling is needed to predict all possible outcomes and understand which model will best support the advertiser’s business goals.

Finally, phase three makes all of this actionable. We need a way to pluck the wisdom out of phase two and apply it directly to actual media channels the advertiser is running. Ideally we’ll find a way to automate this or at least automate the recommendations, which can then by easily implemented into the media buys themselves.

But before any of us sprint into the world of attribution analysis and media mix modeling, let’s step back and take a long look in the mirror: I don’t know of a way to realistically pull any of this off if an advertiser doesn’t have a common tracking/analytics system for all marketing channels. So before we start hiring expensive analysts, consultants and statisticians, let’s be sure to clean our own houses and get our own data in order. Standardize your analytics and measurement on a single platform so you can compare ‘apples to apples’. Then you can start to focus on the fun stuff.

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Bidding Strategies for a Complex SEM Landscape

March 11, 2010

If you’re managing multiple SEM programs across a broad landscape of web assets, as more and more of us are, it’s important to realize that when it comes to managing keywords and their bids, it’s not one-size-fits-all.  In this reality of diverse business goals and revenue models, marketers looking for a singular approach to SEM program management will be sorely disappointed.Bidding Strategies

In the past I’ve talked about the fact that at Yahoo!, we have many different properties (think Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.), and each of these properties has a business that’s unique in it’s own way. Some properties are supported primarily by display media (Sports, Finance, News, etc.). In others, users can subscribe to services (web hosting, merchant solutions). Yet other properties list products sold by other vendors e.g. Shopping and Travel. Since each of these businesses has a different way of making money, for each property we need a unique way of defining the value that a user can bring to the company. On this topic of customer valuation, I went into much deeper detail a while back.

But what about SEM campaign management? How do you manage different SEM programs for a diverse set of businesses? It turns out that each type of business requires a unique approach to SEM program management, particularly as it relates to keywords, targets, and bidding. Let’s look at the following 3 examples I pulled straight out of the trenches:

Keeping it Simple

For our branding campaign, as I wrote a few months ago, our goal was to deepen engagement with the Yahoo! Brand and Products. We were able to track and measure engagement through a proxy of web events to which we assigned points to define relative value. In executing against this goal, we (with the help of our Agency) managed to a cost per point or cost per value model on a keyword-by-keyword basis. We did this on a fairly manual basis, as the keyword set was finite and manageable, and performance was fairly stable. This is the simplest of examples I can provide from purely a bid management perspective.

The Tail Wagging the Head

In our orders-based businesses, where we’re driving users toward a common conversion point such as a subscription or sale, we (again, with Agency assistance) use a somewhat more complex management strategy that is now gaining traction in the industry, though we’ve been employing it for some time. We try to break up our keyword portfolio into the smallest possible discrete datapoints that we can, while maintaining a sufficient quantity performance data for bidding purposes. For example, a high-volume keyword such as ‘dating’ gets broken down into bits that look like ‘dating on exact match in Chicago during nighttime hours with a value-focused call-to-action ad’, and so on. Bids can then be managed on these micro-units so the campaign can be optimized to a level of efficiency not possible when managing solely at the keyword level.

Kicking It Up a Notch

For our listings properties, where users come in, research products and services then leave, the model is completely different. For one thing, our revenue is mostly earned in-session (as opposed to a 30-day conversion window, for example. To make matters more complex, we have keywords of every type that number in the millions. High volume, seasonal, long tail, you name it. In order to get the most out of these programs, we must deploy multiple management strategies within a single program. For head or high-volume keywords, we can employ automated bid management algorithms to optimize to a desired business metric – revenue, profit, ROI, etc. For other keywords we need to take a more rules-based approach. For example, we may want to take all the keywords that fit a certain profile – ranks on the 2nd page, has above 100% ROI, etc. and perform calculated bid management techniques – bid a percentage of revenue or profit, increase bids by 20%, bid to higher position, etc. As if that weren’t enough to worry about, for seasonal and other reasons, at any given time we have a large number of keywords that aren’t getting any impressions at all. In cases like this we periodically ‘re-activate’ keywords and try to bid them back to profitability once again (it’s assumed that we bid them down to inactivity at some point because they weren’t profitable). This takes a measured, rule-based approach to qualify and bid systematically to ensure the best chance at regaining profitability.

As you can see, as the landscape across which you’re managing SEM campaigns becomes increasingly varied, the more complex and custom your approach to search marketing will need to be. It’s only when you can match your businesses one-to-one with uniquely suitable approaches that you’ll be able to bring your ad spend to a truly optimized level.

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Paid and Organic Search: Lift, Cannibalism, or Both?

March 9, 2010

‘Why are we buying our brand keyword when we already rank #1 in the organic results?’ ‘Why are we paying for traffic if we’re already getting it for free??’ It turns out that the question isn’t whether or not you should be buying your brand keywords. The question is how much should you be willing to pay for that ad, and what should it say

For search marketers like me (and probably you), the question of the paid/organic dynamic has been around for years. So why is there such an amazing dearth of good information on this topic? Why isn’t there any kind of industry-accepted framework with which to address the age-old question?

I believe that the reason for this is that the conversation around the interaction between paid and organic search has historically been sorely lacking any good data. As a result, we get stuck talking about opinions and assumptions, and we typically don’t come to any meaningful conclusions. I am grateful that at this point in my career, I am surrounded by savvy marketers who understand how search results pages (SRPs) work. They understand that the SRP is a complex landscape, that each link has its own clickthrough rate (CTR), and that any link’s CTR is affected by the other links with which it shares the SRP. This is the path to meaningful dialogue on the subject, so I encourage everyone to get intimately familiar with the data around the paid/organic dynamic.

So how do we look at the data in a way that can help us understand this phenomenon? First let’s get a few ground rules straight:

  1. What keywords are we really talking about? Those that match exactly with your brand name or branded product name, where there is generally no competition. So if you are the Acme Widget Company we would be talking about keywords like ‘acme’ and potentially ‘acme widget’.
  2. What are we actually trying to compare? Ultimately we want to compare two different conditions: a) a SRP where the organic link for brand kw is ranked #1 with no PPC ad (and no competitors’ ads) present and b) a SRP where the organic link for a brand kw is ranked #1 with a #1 rank PPC ad (and no competitors’ ads)
  3. What phenomena are we trying to measure? In the above cases there are two things that normally happen. I call them cannibalization and lift. ‘Lift’ is the net amount of traffic that is added to the mix by virtue of the PPC ad. Cannibalization is the portion of PPC ad traffic that comes at the expense of the organic link. If you can quantify cannibalization and lift in any situation, you can then begin to think intelligently about what to do.

One thing we need to also acknowledge is the fact that the many variables affecting paid and organic search traffic – search volume, page layout, keyword bids and rankings – prevent us from doing any rigorous scientific testing around the paid/organic dynamic. It’s simply impossible to isolate all the variables necessary to completely understand what’s going on. However, there are some terrific ways that you can at least gather some meaningful data that can be interpreted and analyzed, and from which we can actually draw very useful and actionable conclusions.

Next, let’s agree on a few basic principles:

  1. Internet (and search) traffic patterns move in weekly cycles
  2. Search volume is affected by seasonality, media, and other factors
  3. You’ll want to ‘test’ in a period of minimum volatility (avoid holidays and seasonal peaks and dips if possible)

Now, consider the following approaches to gather the data required to quantify cannibalization and lift:

  1. On/off weekly: Pause your paid ads for one week and then resume. This is the simplest approach and takes the least amount of time. If you have more time, try alternating weeks as long as you need.
  2. On/off daily: For a two week period, alternate pausing and activating your paid ads on consecutive days. Why two weeks? This is the minimum duration required to get both ‘on’ and ‘off’ data for each day of the week.

These are just examples. Use your imagination to design something more elegant if you have more time or budget.

Now What?

Now, you need to gather your data and estimate your lift and cannibalization. The incredibly tricky (and potentially inaccurate) part of this is trying to establish a baseline for organic traffic. Naturally, you will want to use the organic traffic during ‘off’ periods as a baseline, but what about the ‘on’ periods? What would the organic traffic have been without the paid ads present? For this you will need a third data point. Either use averages of organic traffic during ‘off’ periods that bookend an ‘on’ period, or if you have access to data like search volume for a given keyword, you can use this trend to estimate what your organic baseline should be.

The key here is to come up with an approximation for cannibalization and lift. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because you’re going to use this data to determine, based on your business goals, what you should be willing to pay for a click on your PPC ad. Here’s an example:

Let’s use a day’s worth of data, and suppose we determine that our organic baseline traffic is 100 clicks. When we add a PPC ad, that ad provides us with 100 clicks, but when we do so, our total organic+paid total is only 180 clicks. That means that of the 100 PPC clicks we bought, 80 were ‘lift’, and the other 20 were ‘cannibalization’. Then, all other things being equal, you should discount your maximum allowable CPC on your brand keyword by 20% to account for the cannibalization, and adjust your bids accordingly. Make sense?

Now let’s look at the extremes. If your PPC traffic is 100% lift, then you can confidently say that buying your brand terms is absolutely justified, and you have the data to prove it. What, then, if all your PPC traffic is cannibalized organic traffic? If that’s the case, then you had better have an incredibly good reason for paying for the PPC ads. One reason might be that you want to put a differentiated message in front of people, a message that’s not reflected in your organic link. Possible reasons for this might be a brand re-launch or a strategic event like an important product launch or corporate milestone.

This may sound complicated, but I can assure you it’s both do-able and worthwhile. I just completed a study for one of our keywords and I can tell you that I am ecstatic about the results. I can’t wait to share them around the company! Good Luck!

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Supporting a Global Re-Brand with Paid Search – Part 3

January 12, 2010

This will be the last installment (finally) of my brand piece. It’s been hard to know where to stop this one as there is really so much to cover. As I say at the end, I am passionate about this stuff so if you ever want to chat about it, seriously, contact me. Here we go……

If you’ve been around me you’ve probably heard me say this, but it bears repeating:  As soon as you, the marketer, pay for a search click, someone will want to know what you got for it.

This means that you will need effective ways to both optimize and report out results on your campaign. This is yet another example of how search marketers can excel in otherwise uncharted territory (e.g. brand campaigns)

Optimization

I mentioned last month that in order to optimize to engagement we decided to place tracking pixels on a number of ‘expressions of interest’ that were relevant to the brand campaign. The challenge with this approach is in the design. Since the events in question do not drive direct revenue we had to use an approach that would value expressions of interest in an accurate way, relatively speaking.

As I mentioned we opted for a points system and grouped conversion events into strata so that we could create a more traditional ‘funnel’ for reporting and optimization purposes. By seeing how users were engaging with the brand we were not only able to optimize to deeper engagement at a keyword level, but we also learned how to refine our ‘funnel’ to better reflect the engagement process.

Furthermore, because as search marketers we are accustomed to optimizing on fresh data, we used daily conversion data to quickly optimize the campaigns and make landing page and user path recommendations. This put us way ahead of other channels, which do not lend themselves as readily to rapid optimization.

Once the design is in place and the data is flowing, sit back and pretend you’re running a direct response campaign. Optimize to conversion volume or cost per conversion, whichever will support the goals of the brand campaign. Identify strong performing ads and place new ads in rotation as often as possible. Believe me, this is the easy part. Now it’s time to show everyone what a brilliant marketer you are.

Reporting

Be ready to report out on your results in a concise and telling way. Remember, you have different components to your campaign and likely a number of countries or markets in which you’re advertising, so you’ll need a neat way to wrap up all that activity into a one-page report. This is where the direct marketer in you can truly shine.

If you have the luxury of reporting on revenue, congratulations. If not, then use a system like we’ve chosen where you can show value expressed in points or some equivalent measure, and then just use the same types of metrics you normally would for SEM reporting. Impressions, clicks, CPC, value (points), cost per point, etc. Organize your reporting in such a way that higher-ups can quickly get high-level data and then drill down into markets or campaigns to assess the drivers of success or failure. Here’s an example of what it might look like:

SEM data for brand campaign

In addition to metrics-heavy reporting like this, you’ll also want to include some graphs that speak to trends over time. This way you’ll be able to tell a story of how you launched and then optimized your campaigns. That report will look something like this:

SEM graph for brand campaign

Once your reporting is ironed out and being delivered on a regular basis to your internal stakeholders, now it’s time once to show how search marketing performance can run circles around other marketing channels. You may already know this as well as some of your counterparts in other marketing channels, but chances are your head of brand marketing needs a reminder. If your SEM results can be rolled up into larger buckets of ‘digital media’ or total media, the comparisons will be inevitable. Show your SEM results along side those same metrics for display ads and other channels.

Then, when it comes time to plan the next quarter or the next campaign, you can point to your outstanding results and ask for a healthy budget increase. I just did.

So that’s all for SEM and branding. There is, of course, abundant detail I haven’t the space to include here, so if you want more, feel free to contact me. I love talking about this stuff.

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Yahoo Reveals SEM of Re-Brand

November 20, 2009

The good folks at WebProNews made time for me last week at PubCon to talk about our brand re-launch. Good stuff, Mike…

more about “Yahoo Reveals SEM of Re-Brand“, posted with vodpod

 

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Supporting a Global Brand Campaign with Paid Search – part 2

November 16, 2009

For this column I thought a lot about how we set up our campaigns for tracking and optimization, as well as the launch and rollout process itself. I think there are a few parts of this that could be instructional for most marketers. I like it when others can learn from my mistakes J

Last month we took a look at how to plan, budget and organize around a Global Brand Campaign with paid search. Now I’d like to walk you through the launch process and talk a little bit about how you’ll need to set your campaigns up for tracking and optimization. Hopefully my experience will serve you in an instructional way so when the time comes, you will be equipped to execute flawlessly.

Tracking: Optimization vs. Analysis

Just a reminder, the goal of the brand campaign is to drive deeper engagement with Yahoo! products and services. In looking at how to execute on this, it became clear that the extent to which your site is (or isn’t) instrumented with web analytics support will dictate the amount of near-real-time campaign data you will be able to collect, and the degree to which you will be able to optimize your campaign. In our case we faced some really interesting challenges on this front, which forced us to split our world of data into two distinct halves – data we use to analyze overall results, and data we use to optimize the campaign.

In order to gather data that we can use to optimize our campaigns in near-real-time, we tagged a set of actions on our sites that we thought were good indicators of engagement – everything from page views on marketing microsites, to primary and secondary calls to action, on to to harder conversions like homepage sets (‘set my homepage to Yahoo!’) and downloads of the Yahoo! toolbar. Now comes the hard part (only since I’m a direct response marketer from way back). Because none of these events drive direct revenue, we had to look at all the conversions we tagged, and assign them values. We opted for a points system that would consider the relative engagement value of each of these conversions, so we could optimize our campaign to user engagement.

In order to evaluate the success of the campaign ongoing, we realized that we could leverage the awesome volume of data we collect on a regular basis. This process is much more post hoc (looking back) and not necessarily actionable, but for showing our success to upper management we decided this was the best route to take. More details on this in our next column.

Ready to Launch

Now that you know how you’re going to collect your conversion data, you have all your campaigns built out for each market (we covered this last month), it’s time to plan the launch. Naturally, you’ll want to launch SEM when the other media launches in each market. You’ll take your media flighting calendar, sit down with your agency, and work on a rollout plan that will synchronize your launches with in-market media across the globe. Not so fast. In our case we were doing our first launch, in the US, on a Monday morning at 12:01 a.m. EDT. Since I’m on the west coast, that meant 9:01 p.m. Sunday night. We set everything up for launch on Sunday night and naturally I got on my computer at the same time to look for our ads. Nothing. I started pinging our agency in a small panic – turns out we were having problems with the ads. Needless to say it was a late night and we spent quite a bit of time working through the issues with various parties.

We learned from this experience quickly and when it came time to launch in the UK and India markets the following week, we got a little smarter. Rather than launching on Sunday afternoon/evening, we set all our campaigns up and did what I called a ‘QA launch’ on Friday. We turned our budgets way down and flipped everything on. This way we could quickly identify and fix problems so that by Sunday, when the rest of the media went live, all we had to do was change our campaign budgets. No late nights, no lengthy calls with the engines. Beautiful. Looking back on this I really should have known better. Having executed countless launches in the past, I wouldn’t normally try to pull this off outside of normal business hours when search engine account managers are not standing by. Live and learn, I say.

That’s all for this month. Tune in next month when we look closely at what to do once your campaign is up and running, namely optimization and reporting.

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Supporting Global Brand Campaigns with SEM – part 1

October 21, 2009

Despite the fact that I’ve been doing search marketing for, well, longer than I care to admit, I rarely get the chance to sink my teeth into a good ole’ fashioned branding campaign. Well, good things come to those who wait. Now I’m in the thick of it, chasing launch after launch, supporting the biggest global band campaign Yahoo! has ever undertaken. So I thought I would take up a little space on the Internet to cover the essentials……

Planning for Success

On the heels of launching 3 countries in 8 days on an incredibly tight timeline, it makes sense to take a small step back and jot down a few thoughts about what went right, what went wrong, and how to improve next time.

Going Global

I think this term itself is misleading. It’s not like you can take an SEM (or any kind of) campaign and globalize it. Going global really means going local in a dozen (or more) different markets. Sure, there are some elements of the campaign that are universal, but the real work lies in duplicating the franchise across a large number of diverse markets without deviating from the core message.

In-house vs. Outsource

Outsource. Don’t be a hero. Don’t even think about running this in-house. Unless you are an SEM agency promoting your own brand, definitely look for outside help. Even then, you might want to contract with an agency that specializes in this kind of work, as the sheer volume of details can bog you down. Your existing SEM agency may have the skills and experience to pull this off, but I wouldn’t take it for granted. This is not your father’s SEM. If you are considering using your existing agency, make sure they have case studies ready to show you. If they don’t, then don’t force it. Move on. There are a number of agencies that have the shops to pull this off. Find them, interview them, and pick one that you like, because you’ll be spending lots of time with these people, and it gets pretty intense.

Budgeting

You need to look at your budgets two ways to make sense of them. First, take a top-down approach. Find out what your total media budgets are for the campaign and look at how they are distributed by market. You’ll probably have a big chunk of the media being spent on the US, and smaller percentages in EU and emerging markets. Take another metric that’s representative of SEM budgets in relation to other online (or offline) media. These days, you can use 40-50% as a placeholder for SEM as a proportion of total online media. Now you have some budgets by market. Next, you want to take a bottom-up approach. Once you’ve worked with your agency on basic keyword lists, find avails for the list in each of your target markets. Then run three scenarios based on share of voice (share of search) in each of those markets. Now compare your bottom-up estimates to your top-down approach and see how they line up. Hopefully they intersect somewhere. If not, no big deal, you will either bump up against the share of voice totals – if so, congratulations! – or will be limited by overall budgets and will have to trim your share of voice to fit the limited budget.

If you find yourself in the latter group, you’ll be managing trade-offs, so here is a tip. Break your reduced budgets down into components like brand, product, etc. so you can spell these trade-offs out clearly and explicitly to management.

Building it Out

So here’s how brand campaigns normally work for SEM. You’ve got a brand message. In our case the brand message is “It’s Y!ou”. So we have gobs of media out there – broadcast, radio, out of home, online display, you name it. Like all good campaigns, we have microsites and landing pages in all major markets that speak to this message, that invite users in to interact with our brand and guide them through the brand experience and the products that support the brand promise. So how does SEM play into this? Simple. First, write as many ads as your brand message (and associated web assets) will support. Take your brand keywords (and misspellings!), attach the new brand ads to them, and point them to your microsites, landing pages, or whatever web assets you have to support your brand message. Put your brand keywords in their own campaign, so you can manage the budgets carefully (this is especially important for big brands, as high search volume can eat through a ton of budget). Now, build another keyword list of all the terms associated with the message itself. There won’t be too much search volume there, but you’ll want coverage on these terms to ensure if anyone (inside your company or out) searched on these terms. Attach the same ads to these keywords. If your have product offerings that support the brand promise, you’ll need to tailor some ads to these products. Make one campaign for each product, again, so you can fine tune your budgets.

Permission vs. Forgiveness

At some point you are going to need to get approvals for your campaign builds. Depending on your organization, this could include brand and product folks in a number of countries. That’s a lot of back-and-forth. So a couple notes here. First, have your agency build approval templates that are easy to read. Second, review all the campaigns first and weed out the obvious problems. Now comes the tricky part. Depending on how highly-compressed your campaign is (think leadtime), you may or may not be able to get everyone to approve your builds before they go live. Don’t panic. This is where you can once again be thankful you are a search marketer. Go ahead and launch if you have to. Once you’re live, set up meetings with all the stakeholders and bring them up to speed. Get their feedback, and impress them with the speed with which you can make the necessary changes to your ads and keywords.

That’s all for now. Tune in next month when we talk about launching multiple campaigns in multiple markets, as well as measuring success.

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Big Brands and Social Media Part 3

September 21, 2009

I decided to add a third part to my (previously) two-part series on social media. Partly because social media as a topic is resonating with my audience, and partly because it occurred to me that I had left out the actual part about implementing the strategy. Details, details….

After my last column on how big brands should organize around social media marketing, I thought it might be useful to get tactical and look at some specific ways that big brands can begin to move the needle on social media. Again, I’m crediting Bill Hunt with inspiring some of these thoughts in a great presentation he gave here at Yahoo! last month, as well as Laura Lippay for leading the charge internally at Yahoo!.

Get The Basics Right

Like most things I experience here at Yahoo! that hold true for large companies, I find that we need to focus on doing some very basic things across a vast scope and scale. The same holds true for social media marketing. Focusing on a very few, important efforts and doing them well across the company represents success fur us and all big brands. So let’s isolate a couple topics and make sure we get them right.

Push All The Right Buttons

First, instrument your site for Social Media. Enable your users to join your network and promote your content. Your site needs links or buttons to follow the brand or product on twitter and facebook at the very least. Of course, if you have many products, like most big brands, you’ll need to point to different twitter streams or facebook pages that are appropriate to the respective product or service. As well, if you produce content on your site, at the end of your articles you’ll want buttons that promote your content to sites like digg, reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. Getting these buttons on your site will take some time and effort, not because the work is difficult, but because the folks who do the work will have many other priorities in their queue. At this point, you will need to rely on your previous work in creating a Center of Excellence (CoE), working with an executive sponsor to get the work prioritized.

A Cast of Thousands

Once your site is enabled for social media, you will want to rely on your company’s biggest asset: your employees. One of the nice things about big brands is that we employ large numbers of people who are brand evangelists. That means that at Yahoo! and other companies, there are thousands of potential marketers for our products and services. If we all spend just a few minutes a day talking up our products and services to our respective social communities, the effect will be significant. With social media, however, we need to be careful how we behave. Social media networks are fragile when it comes to commercial promotion. If your network thinks you are spamming them with commercial messages, they will likely ignore you and you will lose credibility within your network. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that it’s OK to talk about your products within your social network, but this should generally be done in the spirit of conversation. That is, when Yahoo! launches its new homepage, it’s acceptable to post a link to it on my facebook page and say ‘Hey everybody, what do you think about the new Yahoo! homepage?’ In contradistinction to this, it is generally frowned upon to promote your own products and services through some of the main social channels such as digg, reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. For example, if Yahoo! sports just broke a story about Shawne Merriman and Tila Tequila, I shouldn’t ‘digg’ it through my own digg account. However, it’s OK to share the story with my social network and invite others to ‘buzz it up’. You can imagine that if all my fellow Yahoos worked in this way we could really start to move the needle on our social media efforts.

Get Your Social Social On

Another great way to increase awareness and share best practices internally is to schedule small, informal meetings with the folks in your organization who are really interested in social media. We came up with some interesting ideas around this in our SEO and Social Media Conference in Santa Monica last month. Having lunch, brainstorming with other Yahoos, we developed a formula for putting this into practice. We’re calling it a ‘Social Social’ and we’re scheduling our first one next month, thanks to Laura Lippay. The idea is that we can have a small, targeted gathering where we can swap war stories and share strategies around social media. The goal is to make sure we’re executing in effective ways around the organization. The recipe is simple: Invite a small number of social media types. Pick a topic. Open with a Pecha Kucha. Add beer. Rinse and repeat.

Now that you’ve got the tactics down, you’re well on your way. Remember, with big brands: do a few things, but do them well and do them everywhere.

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Pubcon Interview from SES San Jose

September 17, 2009

Vanessa Zamora is one of the great people in the industry. She does most of the interviews for WebMasterWorld these days, and she is a delight to work with. We caught up at SES San Jose last month and talked about SEO tools and Social Media marketing. Thanks, Vanessa. PANTS!

http://www.pubcon.com/videoblog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1252950120

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