Benny Blum

This question often comes up when facing relatively inexperienced advertisers deciding between PPC and SEO. While I cannot refute any argument based solely on this logic (organic clicks are free and paid clicks are not), I can make a case for PPC even when SEO is at its best – which certainly is not the case for the majority of sites out there.
There are three distinct advantages that paid listings have over organic listings, and as a result these are the three most compelling arguments for integration of SEM into any marketing scheme:

1. If you don’t use SEM, your competition will poach your traffic. The competition has always been able to bid on your terms, but since AdWords changed its trademark policy to allow competitors to actually use these terms in their ad copy, it has never been more important to claim the real estate that is rightfully yours.

Consider the following query for [iphone]. In the first instance, both AT&T and Apple are in premium positions:

Now imagine if AT&T owned the entire premium position, without Apple:

In both cases, Apple SEO is perfect in placing Apple.com at the top of the organic listing. However, in the second search, where there is no Apple ad, my eye is drawn to the AT&T ad instead of the Apple organic result. If I am specifically looking for the Apple website, I may click on the organic link. However, it’s inevitable that many users will click on the AT&T ad because they will see it first.

1. SEM allows for customized messaging, whereas the text for organic links is determined by the search engine. While several factors can help to control the text in the organic link (including but not limited to the page description, title and header tags) it’s a significant process and requires some technical knowledge. Ad copy can be changed almost instantly using paid ads, allowing marketers to create and rotate in unique messaging for sales, promotions, product launches, and so on. Furthermore, marketers can test which ads work best, optimizing for CTR and conversion rates by optimizing landing pages.

Consider the following query for a Sony Bravia TV:

While the organic link is relevant, Sony is running a promotional offering of a PS3 or Blu-Ray player with a TV purchase. This efficient and enticing offer might sway a consumer who was intending on purchasing the TV from Best Buy to click on the Sony ad and purchase directly.
Of course, ads can be tailored for more than just promotional purposes…

3. SEM can be optimized for the consumer buying cycle. In their highly regarded book, Search Engine Marketing Inc, Mike Moran and Bill Hunt conclude that all search terms can be classified as: informational, navigational, or transactional. Informational queries are for research [best flat screen tv], navigational queries are for getting to a specific website [sony.com], and transactional queries show user intent to purchase [buy bravia xbr8 hdtv]. How is this relevant to SEM? Because ads can be customized for different types of queries, SEMs can create ads that are tailored to users in different stages of the buying cycle.

A consumer typing in an informational query is researching a product, idea, service, etc. Calling out this notion in the ad copy and driving traffic to an informational page where the consumer can learn about the product(s) in question will build trust and allow them to make their own way down the sales funnel. Consider the query [plasma or LCD TV?]. This query indicates the consumer does not know which kind of television to purchase. Driving the consumer to a product page for a particular TB will not yield a sale, whereas driving the consumer to a page describing the benefits and drawbacks of plasma versus LCD may yield a sale. Whether or not the sale is made in that session, the consumer is likely to trust the source of unbiased information when moving forward and purchasing the TV.

Following the same logic, building ads that are relevant for navigational and transactional queries will have positive ramifications. Understanding and classifying various keywords as informational, navigational or transactional is a significant step to understanding consumer behavior. Studying post-click consumer behavior using an analytics package (such as Google Analytics) will give insight into how effectively consumers can work their way through the sales funnel within your website – channeling those informational clicks into transactions.

Benny Blum

The beauty of paid search marketing is that results are highly trackable. We can trace revenue back not only to the keyword and match type level, but also by the hour or even by the geography of the original search queries typed into any search engine.  This extensive tracking provides us the opportunity to understand not only revenue and cost implications, but a whole host of other criteria from visitor interaction with our website to offline conversions and gross margin. With this surplus of data and choice though, many marketers run into the dilemma of how exactly to define success. Shifting general business priorities outside of search, whether or not they relate to search specifically, can directly impact how we manage a search program.

One of the big tug-of-wars is between ROI and volume. Because search is so measurable and trackable, companies have come to expect hitting and surpassing ROI numbers. In turn, this ability to consistently hit ROI makes paid search revenue highly desirable, and executives will push for more and more revenue volume from paid search.  Another tug-of-war is between cost effectiveness and maximum exposure on a broad range of terms.  A lean SEM program will not run on unprofitable key terms while conversely these terms may be among those typed into Google when “surveying” the company’s search presence.

Ultimately, our mission as an agency is to achieve our clients’ goals; if these goals shift from month to month or even week to week, we will be reactive and shift along with the direction clients want us to move in. That being said, it is still crucial to note that paid search is most effective as a ROI-driver.  Branding and awareness, while having paid search merits, do not take full advantage of what the search engines have to offer. At the end of the day, we always prefer first to hit ROI numbers and then use excess budget to explore new profitable growth channels.

Shifting business priorities are a reality, and it’s always critical to be reactive with a paid search program, but when push comes to shove ROI rules.

For this reason, we offer two different algorithms for automated bid management:
- Long-tail (tail): analyzes a bucket of clicks from a given set of terms and makes bid changes based on statistical significance.
- Core (head): analyzes past performance by week, day, and hour, making bid decisions based on a variety of statistically significant externalities.

Our automated bid management analyzes traffic patterns observed at similar times throughout an account’s history and makes preemptive bid decisions to effectively anticipate consumer behavior and minimize CPCs which effectively maximizes ROI. Automated strategies base decisions upon the smallest possible set of terms. If a given KW has enough data, then the decision will be based strictly on that term’s data set. The data set is expanded until enough data is available to make a statistically significant decision. The first expansion is to the ad group level, and then to the sub-category level in terms of the KWs portfolio group.

Jacqueline Brown

Social media as a whole has gained instant popularity among marketers and advertisers – and why wouldn’t it?  The tools, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Technorati, FriendFeed, SlideShare, MySpace and many more, encourage instant brand updates and have the capability to reach gigantic audiences all at once.  Brand perceptions can be improved almost overnight with strategic messaging and blasting.  To top it all off, they’re completely free!

Social media tools have some serious benefits, but getting the most from these tools isn’t always a piece of cake.  Today, it is becoming more and more difficult to be the cutting-edge marketer the industry expects.  With the continuous growth of the online social network and introduction of new web tools, simply keeping up with the latest development in the social internet world is a feat.

In spearheading our internal social media marketing effort, I have come across a slew of sites for uploading photos, sending out messages, sharing bookmarks and more.   Though it’s exciting to find these different branding opportunities right at my fingertips, the question has become, how do I keep up with all this while still doing the rest of my job?

Registering my company’s name on the sites is continuously the top priority as “squatting” (brand stealing) is one of the negative byproducts of the free flow of information provided by these social tools.  However, once I register our name on any and all applicable sites, I still have to spend time writing for and updating each site as taking full advantage of my social outlets is an ongoing effort.  In this case, I struggled for a few weeks, trying to post regular updates across a few of the main sites and constantly debating how much time I should dedicate to this particular marketing instrument.   And then I learned about Ping.fm at a local marketing meeting in Ann Arbor.

Ping.fm is a free site that allows marketers to update all social sites at once.  I created an account and was presented with a list of over 40 different websites that I can add to my ping.fm network.  Not only were all of my sites listed, but I got ideas for new social websites as well.

Select sites to ad on Ping.fm

Ping.fm has saved me a ton of time already, and until the next tool comes along, I would recommend giving Ping.fm a try to achieve an efficient and consistent use of social media.

Rebecca Nathan

As we witnessed during the 2008 holiday season, consumers are shopping for a deal – even more so in times of recession. What’s changed since the last time around? Those big ticket items from last year are turning into the biggest marketing opportunities for 2009, namely smartphones (and other internet enabled portable devices such as iPod Touch). For SEM purposes, the biggest difference between a smartphone and a WAP enabled phone is a true (HTML based) web browser – as HTML mobile browsers can support standard ad copy. With the introduction of device targeting within Google AdWords, advertisers can isolate smartphones into a unique campaign and take full advantage of opportunities like geo-targeting and one-click purchasing. Imagine seeing an ad targeted to your zip code for the exact product you’re searching for at a store nearby, and instantly making a purchase with one click. 

As mobile phones close in on saturation and more and more phones are web enabled, Google has released case studies documenting and projecting the rise of mobile search with no signs of slowing down; mobile search is projected to equal computer search in 2012. If consumers are searching on-the-go, any advertiser that isn’t reaching out to them is missing an opportunity.

The immediate question is: how do we take advantage of this opportunity? AdWords automatically opts all advertisers into mobile search by default, so there’s nothing that needs to be done, right? Wrong. Just like any search medium, mobile search is its own beast and requires a savvy marketing team to capitalize on the opportunity with a unique strategy. Google only shows one ad (assuming Quality Score is high) above the search results on a mobile SERP, and one or two below the results (both below the results if Quality Score is not high enough to qualify for premium positioning):

This means that in order for mobile search to be effective, ads must have an average rank between 1-3 or impression share will be lost. Furthermore, an advertiser’s website needs to be relatively optimized for mobile browsers, making it possible for a consumer to easily purchase from a mobile device. As the purpose of this mobile strategy is to drive sales or at least drive customers to brick and mortar stores, rather than increase brand awareness, keyword and ad copy strategies will need to adapt to this.  Keywords should be lower funnel terms – or transaction related terms – to control CPA/CoS, while ad copy for these terms should be hyper-targeted (geographically and/or demographically) to further qualify clicks and limit cost.

After the latest iPhone release (with a reported 1,000,000 sales in the first weeks) and the constant stream of competitors growing every month, smartphones have become readily available to consumers and are no longer limited to corporate BlackBerrys. Given this rapid growth, it’s safe to say that the next step in search evolution is upon us and will be realized during holiday 2009. With that in mind, it’s critical to develop a mobile-specific plan leading into holiday to ensure that Quality Score and strategies are in place when it really counts.

Benny Blum

While Google continues to lead in search queries, the article does point out that the growth are not necessarily new users, just more searchers per user.