Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Chinwag’s PPC earthquake event on tuesday night was entertaining. Hosted by Mike Butcher, as per his usual style, discussions cut to the chase immediately. This was a welcome break from the normal sanitized chat on PPC that occurs at these types of events. Panellists included three agencies, Blue Barracuda, Latitude and Neutralize and Nigel Leggat from Microsoft Adcenter. (names updated)Firstly, i liked to say that most PPC events tend to be pretty dull for anyone who knows about the industry becuase typically what happens is the agencies tow the line and refuse to get drawn into opinionated discussions whilst the search engines play a game of diplomacy. Which all leads to a rather luke warm discussion on what is now a more mature industry. Nonetheless, there were lots of things to nod at or mumble under your breath about.Highlights were:Microsoft’s complete frankness regarding the launch of AdcenterThey scored themselves a schoolmark of “B/B : room for improvement” on the success of their launch of their new pay-per-click marketing product, Adcenter. I would have given them an “A” for openness in their evaluation on how much the launch met advertisers expectations. Basically to sum up:Launch went ok - in that they got a fair amount of avertisers on board.Service & support USP was a winner. Telephone support for all advertisers regardless of size of customer was working well and not met any crisis. In my opinion, lowering the barrier to entry is A Great Thing for such a big player like MSN to offer. Certainly in my experience, telephone support helped me to get on board quickly. As an agency this would spell good news too as it’s a great story to tell your smaller advertisers and make them feel loved. PPC was the most fun 5 years ago when you could use Adwords to propel a tiny cottage industry into the stratosphere - so for a second i got the tingle of a rennaisance of old fashioned values. None of this “what is your budget” snobbery that is rife among google and other agencies now.Quality traffic is present on the MSN network. This was backed up by Latitude who had discovered great conversion for some of their advertisers. They tend to work on a CPA busines model so they probably know what they’re talking about.Distribution & Traffic volume has still got a long way to go but is clearly outshined by Google. Ho hum.Demographic targeting - their most touted USP - does work but unfortuanately not a lot of advertisers are not really using it. This makes perfect sense to me and not something to worry about; until the volume and competition reaches a critical mass, there is no real need to target demographically, as current traffic volume are no where near most medium and large advertisers spending power. At this stage most of us are quite happy with cheaper traffic than Google!User Interface is tricky to use. Wow - amazed and glad they admitted that! Apologies to the guys at Adcenter, but in my opinion it truly is a dog. However if they acknowledge it then i’ll suffer in silence in the hope that it will get overhauled.The house tended to agree that Yahoo panama hardly had earthquake potential but was a step in the right directionNeutralize felt that the close resemblance of the new Yahoo Panama interface to Google AdWords was going to make account management easier and that they would probably attract a few more current advertisers on Google as it is now so easy to import the latter into the former. The quality score was more of the same, but was ultimately a fairer system and teh fact that you can separate Content and Search ads was a definite improvement. Blue Barracuda felt that clients were aware of the impending shift to Panama and that it would improve their image of Yahoo Search, especially if the new quality score helped them to improve clickthrough rates.Frankly there is not much to say about Yahoo Panama except that it is very very welcome. Personally i would have added that Panama should bring back a lot of small business and niche advertisers who have been burnt by overtures particularly unwieldy and inflexible bidding engine. Everyone acts like these advertisers are not worth bothering with, they’re just small fry, but clearly they have not been reading enough Chris Anderson“A big hit is required”No one felt that any of these developments from MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Panama was going to bite into Google’s market share. Although this was obvious - i was slightly disappointed at the overall lack of fighting talk from MSN or details of any strategy remotely resembling disruptive innovation. Mobile Search, Local Search and Pay-per-call were all word dropped which made me groan. Not just becuase all three make up the PPC grail trinity that everyone has been wishing on for years. Or the fact that it is universally acknowledged by the panel that mobile search is too low volume at this stage - but becuase clearly Google is already winning the mobile search battle with mobile sitemaps and auto-optimising websites for mobile browsers/screens. Furthermore MIVA are abandoning Pay-per-call this month not for lack of advertisers but for lack of response from consumers and local search is just not that interesting without a social element. Personally i think it’s the companies experimenting with microformats, like Upcoming and Technorati, that have anything interesting to offer this area. Obviously if anyone wants to debate this with me or just tell me i’m wrong - please do so!So seemingly no big hitters were really on the horizon, although we did get one interesting insight into MSN’s skunkworks. They plan to roll out their search engine onto Xbox Live - which clearly presents a huge demographic targeting opportunity for advertisers.Yet it’s hardly what i’d call disruptive innovation. What i really wanted to hear was that MSN would come to the rallying cry of publishers all over the country, replace their useless on site search facilities, and deliver a revenue strategy to supply PPC ads from highly targeted and desired demographics like the b2b sector. But maybe the market is more complicated than i think - Google has got most of the publishers tied up becuase they are willing to spend money on them. For the richest company in the world - microsoft have missed a great land grab and a chance to bite into the market share of search queries.Sod talking about the big 3 anymore - Yahoo and MSN are fighting a losing battle by refusing to innovate or respond to the crisis traditional publishers are facing. The only search orientated companies that seem to value the publisher in the UK, the niche content producers, in my opinion are MIVA and AdPrecision, the latter whom spoke up at the event. Those smaller players are the ones recognising the demand from advertisers for genuinely better demographic targeting through branded partnerships and see the desperate struggle that traditional publishers face to avoid being completely dominated by the disruptive power of Google.So that’s my roundup of the PPC earthquake - any food for thought? I don’t claim to be a journalist or anything, just an online ranter. An alternative view and interesting discussion is taking place here.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
To bid or not to bid, that is not the question
A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite Keyword Research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.Looking for answers in the wrong placesWhat i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.The PreambleThe idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at bestBelieve it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.Finding answers in the right placesTypically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.So how do you solve this problem?Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insightsSo where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself - but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson - ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!
A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite Keyword Research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.Looking for answers in the wrong placesWhat i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.The PreambleThe idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at bestBelieve it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.Finding answers in the right placesTypically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.So how do you solve this problem?Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insightsSo where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself - but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson - ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!
Friday, March 02, 2007
Backlinks backfire
I’ve been hit by it. You may have been too. February 2007 saw a massive index change as far as a lot of SEOs are concerned. Personally I lost 4 really competitive positions (top 3 on high traffic terms) on one website. These positions were literally buried in the results. Another was totally unaffected. Others are complaining too in the discussion forumsReally takes the wind out of your sails… You work and work and then it feels like Google just takes the rug right from under your feet.Personally I’d been working a year on my site, and almost feel like i’m back to square one.If you know about the importance of backlinks already, then hark back to the time when miserable failure made George Bush’s CV on the white house page pop up as the number one result. Because it ain’t they’re anymore sonny.Did Google lose their sense of humour? To be fair it was an old joke.The basic trick of googlebombing was to exploit the ‘authority’ algorithm thatattampts to find sites that point the user to a useful resource. You get as many sites to link to a target site with the same anchor text and in theory the target site should appear top of the results. In the case of miserable failure, thousands of webmasters and bloggers all linked to George Bush’s CV on the whitehouse.gov website with the words ‘miserable failure’ causing that page to be seen by Google as the most authoritative page on miserable failures.Google’s latest (February 2007) algorithm change (known as the Google Dance) seems to have heavily penalised sites benefitting from that type of link strategy. It seems like a lot of backlinks (those links from external sites that point to you), from directories for example, have been devalued massively. I suspect this because the site that i lost major ground on one was the one that had recieved the most link love from a recent directory submission. Furthermore a major event happened earlier this year that was bound to shakeup the Google index. A hitherto major source of high quality authoritative back links was Wikipedia. In a response to search engine spammers and general critics, wikipedia introduced a robots “no follow” tag, and so blocking the search engines from indexing their external links. This meant that the page rank benefit of wikipedia would not carry over to sites it linked to. Perhaps this can also explain the ‘burying’ of sites that myself and others have experienced.If your top rankings have been affected by the latest algorithm change, do not despair - there are loads of others out there affected too and soon advice will be on hand as to how to claw back lost ground.
I’ve been hit by it. You may have been too. February 2007 saw a massive index change as far as a lot of SEOs are concerned. Personally I lost 4 really competitive positions (top 3 on high traffic terms) on one website. These positions were literally buried in the results. Another was totally unaffected. Others are complaining too in the discussion forumsReally takes the wind out of your sails… You work and work and then it feels like Google just takes the rug right from under your feet.Personally I’d been working a year on my site, and almost feel like i’m back to square one.If you know about the importance of backlinks already, then hark back to the time when miserable failure made George Bush’s CV on the white house page pop up as the number one result. Because it ain’t they’re anymore sonny.Did Google lose their sense of humour? To be fair it was an old joke.The basic trick of googlebombing was to exploit the ‘authority’ algorithm thatattampts to find sites that point the user to a useful resource. You get as many sites to link to a target site with the same anchor text and in theory the target site should appear top of the results. In the case of miserable failure, thousands of webmasters and bloggers all linked to George Bush’s CV on the whitehouse.gov website with the words ‘miserable failure’ causing that page to be seen by Google as the most authoritative page on miserable failures.Google’s latest (February 2007) algorithm change (known as the Google Dance) seems to have heavily penalised sites benefitting from that type of link strategy. It seems like a lot of backlinks (those links from external sites that point to you), from directories for example, have been devalued massively. I suspect this because the site that i lost major ground on one was the one that had recieved the most link love from a recent directory submission. Furthermore a major event happened earlier this year that was bound to shakeup the Google index. A hitherto major source of high quality authoritative back links was Wikipedia. In a response to search engine spammers and general critics, wikipedia introduced a robots “no follow” tag, and so blocking the search engines from indexing their external links. This meant that the page rank benefit of wikipedia would not carry over to sites it linked to. Perhaps this can also explain the ‘burying’ of sites that myself and others have experienced.If your top rankings have been affected by the latest algorithm change, do not despair - there are loads of others out there affected too and soon advice will be on hand as to how to claw back lost ground.
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