Posts Tagged ‘paid search’

Back from SMX East …. and a Few Other Things

September 29, 2011

I was at SMX East very briefly. I sandwiched in a 36-hour stint in The Big Apple in between a family mini-vacation in La Jolla (sweet!) and a trip to Chile to work with our development team down there – very nice place, Chile – never been there before. SMX was great as usual, as I got to catch up with some old friends as well as make some new ones. Shout out to Frank Grasso (new friend) and Mark Knowles (old friend) – we had a great time one evening at Ramblas tapas bar in the West Village.

I had the privilege of speaking on two panels with some really great folks, and I think the audience was pretty into it. They asked a lot of thoughtful and sophisticated questions. When I got back, I wrote a piece on Search Engine Land that recaps the two panels. As always I welcome any critique or criticism on these two topics – I always tell folks that I’m passionate about this stuff and I could go on and on for hours talking about it. Look me up, people!

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Next-level Optimization: Measuring Success

November 17, 2010

Measuring the success of our optimization efforts turned out to be harder than any of us initially thought. It occurred to me that since my situation is anything but unique, it might make sense to write about it. Hopefully others have had similar experiences and we can raise awareness on this rather new topic…

You’ve made the case for advanced optimization, implemented loads of slick technology, and deployed across some or all of your paid search programs. Did you do the right thing? Did you make more money? If so, how much more?

To answer the question ‘did I make more money’ implies a baseline. Trouble is, you don’t really have one. What you’re really asking is ‘did I make more money than I would have otherwise’, and it’s hard to tell with paid search, because the market is inherently dynamic, as are the programs we manage in these markets. This makes benchmarking really tough, and scientific testing nearly impossible.

What you need here is a way to (somewhat) objectively measure success, a methodology not only that people can agree upon, but also one where execution is manageable. Let’s look at a few ideas that might work for you, starting from the simplest and moving toward the more complex:

Trending Success Metrics Over Time.

Look at trends in revenue, profit, ROI, whatever matters to you most from week to week, month to month, etc. Look at overall program performance before you started optimizing, and over time as optimization took over. You just might find out that ROI has increased steadily quarter over quarter, for instance. This approach is relatively easy, and works fine in a steady-state environment, but if you’re subject to seasonality or a shifting market it may not work for you. For example, your optimization efforts may look like a home run in a booming economy or a high season, and conversely you might be inclined to run back to your cube and update your resume if you’re trending results in a low season or a rough economy. What if this method doesn’t give you any conclusive results?

Comparing Paid Search to Your Overall Business

If seasonality or macroeconomic trends are clouding your view of campaign performance, try comparing your results to those of your business as a whole. This may give you the baseline you need, particularly if your paid search campaign is in a somewhat mature state. For example, if your company saw ten percent earnings growth and your SEM profit increased by twenty percent over the same period, you may be able to claim ten percent growth attributed to paid search. That’s not bad for a day’s work, assuming the lift in profit is more than you paid for optimization. But what if your paid search program is on a totally different trajectory than your overall business?

Cohort Analysis

If the first two methods don’t work for whatever reason, here’s another way to look at it. You probably have parts of your portfolio that are managed by automated algorithms, and portions that aren’t. Try looking at these parts separately to understand what happened. Select a cohort of keywords that was managed by each method, and analyze what happened over time. You’ll need to account for seasonality, so ideally look at year-over-year comparisons, or if you don’t have that long a timeline, try to normalize for the seasonality with historical data (try to figure out how much your paid search business as a whole changes with the season). Then, look at the performance of each cohort and compare. For example, if you’re managing through an economic downturn and you see a downward trend in cohort A, but cohort B shows a flat trend line, even though you’re not seeing growth in cohort B you may conclude that it’s doing better by comparison, and you can now quantify the ‘growth’ or ‘lift’.

As I hint at above, once you understand your lift or growth from advanced optimization, you will want to calculate your ROI on the optimization effort as a whole. Particularly if you’re in a big company, you should always be able to hold your projects up against any other effort your company could otherwise use the money to pursue. If you can show that you increased profit by a million dollars at, say, a fifty percent ROI, odds are good that your management will be asking you if you can do more optimization projects, thereby eliminating the need for you to rush back to your cube and update that resume.

Again, I think the key here is to find a method that you and your management can agree upon and a process that is manageable. And once you do, you’ll be well served to have the data and analyses in your hip pocket well before anyone comes asking for them.

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Forget Search!

July 27, 2010

Tough to find my voice after the blitz that was the ‘Alliance Piece’, but I managed to muster up some creativity (with the help of a tall Highland Park). I think it turned out OK, thanks to an inspiring BlueGlassLA conference last week. Here’s how it goes…

If you have an extra hour in your very busy workday day, don’t spend it fine tuning your site for algo search, or optimizing your SEM campaigns for efficiency, ROI, or profitability. Spend it building out and executing on your social media strategy. I know, shocking advice coming from an old search jockey like me, but I mean it. Seriously, how much cash are you really going to squeeze out of your already-optimized site or SEM program compared to the huge opportunities in front of you in social media?

Let me take a half-step back. First of all, I just finished a monster piece on the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance detailing the upcoming transitions for advertisers and publishers, and I’m admittedly a teensy bit weary from the experience. Not complaining, mind you, it was a great opportunity and hopefully a decent column, it’s just left me with a bit of a search hangover, if you will. Secondly, while I was making the final edits to the Alliance piece, I was attending BlueGlass LA in Marina Del Rey. Chris, Dave, Brent and the rest of the gang did a bang-up job and we ended up in an intimate setting with an all-star cast of talent and an incredibly savvy and engaged audience. What struck me at the conference was not only that search marketing had clearly established itself in the mainstream of digital marketing, but also that the tactics around SEM and SEO had somehow suddenly become mind-numbingly complex and sophisticated. Don’t get me wrong, I could sit and talk all afternoon with Kris Roadruck about how to legitimately bootstrap link authority through strategic content in a competitive SEO space (and nearly did). And, I was proud as the proverbial peacock when at the conference I presented my favorite graph that shows positive statistical synergy between paid and organic search. However, it occurred to me as I nibbled on a chocolate-covered macaroon at lunch on Tuesday, that at some point in the last several years, likely when I was busy building infrastructure to support automated keyword bidding algorithms, we not only reached the point of diminishing returns, we shot past it a warp speed and kept right on going into outer space.

Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that anyone ignore paid search or SEO. I’m still search marketing’s number one fan, and I’ll be the first to chastise any marketer for leaving search out of the mix (if Melanie Mitchell doesn’t beat me to it). But what became so abundantly clear to me as I polished off that last bite of macaroon was that there is so much ‘white space’ in social media compared to search marketing, that the real challenge in a resource constrained world is to understand when you’ve optimized your search efforts to the point that the next hour of your work life would be better spent on something else.

Social media is today what search marketing was ten years ago when I started. It’s completely wide open. BlueGlass is a prime example of how search marketers and social media-types are teaming up to exploit the enormous opportunities that arise when the lines between search and social begin to blur. I’m not going to go into great detail about social media tactics, and I’m not (yet) going to pretend I’m an expert at it. There are plenty of folks who are dropping massive amounts of free social media knowledge on us. What I’m suggesting is you spend just a little (more) time researching, communicating, and trying a few new things in social. Dip your toes in the social media pool and see how the water feels. If you don’t, pretty soon you’ll be lagging behind the curve, just like all the search marketing nay-sayers of the last decade.

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Optimizing Your Search and Affiliate Marketing Mix

May 3, 2010

The other day I was thinking about all the silly things I’ve heard search marketers say about affiliate marketing:

“We’re losing control of our brand because of our affiliate marketing channel”

“Affiliates are cannibalizing our direct SEM/SEO efforts”

“We’re bidding against our affiliates on keywords and it’s driving up our CPCs”

Nonsense. If this is happening to you, it’s your own fault, not the fault of your affiliate channel. Marketers who think that affiliate marketing and search marketing can’t peacefully co-exist are kidding themselves and need to be stopped. Believe me. As I’m telling you this, I’m a search marketer, not an affiliate marketing manager. At Yahoo!, I have a counterpart in our group that runs the affiliate marketing channel. We maintain very close communication and we are able to cooperate to maximize value to the company by finding the right balance between affiliate and SEM programs.

Protect Your Brand

Search marketers will often say that you shouldn’t run affiliate programs because your brand will be damaged by affiliates. That’s a cop-out. Yes, you should be very concerned about protecting your brand. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. But to suggest that you will lose control of your brand by having other marketers drive sales for you is insulting to those of us who understand the business. To be sure, don’t let these guys run willy nilly with their SEM campaigns. Be smart about it and keep them in check. You control the creative, you control the messaging, you control the offers, and for paid search you control the keyword portfolio and the linking strategy.

Synergy, Not Cannibalization

In our ‘orders’ businesses for example, where we’re bringing people in to subscribe to various paid Yahoo! services, affiliate marketing helps us increase our order volume in a profitable way. In these businesses, we do need to monitor affiliates’ SEM behavior quite closely. We maintain and update our policies on a regular basis.  In some programs we allow affiliates to bid on our brand terms, and in others we prohibit it. Our decisions are driven by whichever route we think will drive the most profit to the company without sacrificing our brand value.

Increase CTR, not CPC

As stated above, direct linking is another tactic that should be managed carefully. As we know, for a given advertiser domain, most search engines will only allow one advertiser to show on a given SRP. So why not maintain a policy that prohibits affiliates from direct linking at all? Because doing so can significantly reduce affiliates’ conversion rates, in turn cutting the order volume they can drive to your business. Exceptions to this rule are the ‘comparison sites’ many affiliates maintain that promote various competitive services. In cases like this, no direct linking is required. Instead, you’ll want to negotiate terms with your affiliate that will favor placement of your offer over those of your competitors. The beauty of this scenario is that when the ‘comparison site’ affiliate is not direct linking to your site, you can essentially get multiple listings on the same SRP, thereby increasing your effective CTR across multiple sites. But what about when affiliates are direct linking? Aren’t you then bidding for the same real estate? In effect, yes. But remember that affiliate marketers are crazy about efficiency, so if they’re out bidding you for a keyword, chances are it’s worth more to them and should perform better for your company.

Policy, Policy, Policy

So what are the best practices for affiliate/SEM policies? As usual, it depends on your business. Try starting with some simple easy-to-manage policies and go from there. Don’t overthink it. Disallow brand terms and direct linking, for example, but be as aggressive as you can on your rate card to attract quality affiliates. Then, if you’re not getting the traction you need with the larger affiliates, selectively tweak your affiliates’ SEM policies as needed.  Keywords and direct links can act as currency in negotiations with affiliates. A word of caution: don’t publicly change your policies or rate card too frequently. Affiliates are human beings (as opposed to keywords), and if you jerk them around by changing policies and rate cards too often they’ll simply go away. You don’t want that.

Outside of policies and rate cards, there are also some situations where affiliate marketing can naturally complement SEM in a synergistic way. In one of our programs, for example, we have an affiliate partner that specializes in buying and optimizing traffic content networks. By contrast, our in-house SEM campaigns are mostly focused on keyword-driven search, so in this case there is no discussion of overlap, cannibalism, or other scary-sounding marketing buzzwords.

A Note On SEO

Many affiliates engage heavily in SEO to drive traffic to the offers they represent. In most cases this is fine. Where you need to be careful is where an affiliate might set up a microsite specifically to drive traffic exclusively to your offer. This can still work, because in many cases it’s going to be better to have an extra algo result on the SRP (see above), but if you’re going to allow this keep in mind a couple of guiding principles. First, you should be doing a better job of SEO than your affiliates, at least on your brand terms. If not, there is some reputation risk here – it doesn’t look good for affiliates to be outranking you in algo results. As well, you should enforce the same brand guidelines you would for paid search. It’s your brand, and it’s your job to protect it. A logical policy in this regard is to insist that all copy (and meta tags) related to your offers are subject to your approval.

So the next time you hear a marketer yammering on about how affiliates are ruining their campaigns, go ahead and set them straight. Tell them Dave from Yahoo! says you should be able to get along just fine with your affiliate brethren, and if you can’t, then you’re not doing a very good job.

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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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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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