The challenge retailers face is how to engineer a broader keyword portfolio that widens their reach in the query space and deliver relevant products to satisfy consumer demand.

In this post, we’ll discuss several keyword expansion resources already available internally to many retailers and the ways to best organize expansion techniques to ensure optimal performance.

Identify Product Intent Through Inventory Feed

Perhaps the most valuable resource for retailers seeking profitable keyword expansion is within their product catalog, or inventory feed. For retailers, inventory feeds consist of an entire database of products available for sale within a given inventory. These products frequently contain specific facets appealing to consumers.

For our purposes, facets are defined as aspects or features of each individual product (brands, sizes, colors, materials, styles etc). The combination of products and their corresponding facets is defined as product intent.

Each time consumers execute a search on a search engine, they are asking a question. Some questions, or queries, do not reveal much specificity about the product intent, in cases where product intent is in the query.

For example, consumer A queries the search engine for “dresses”; Consumer B, on the other hand, queries the search engine for “black dress size 4″. In the first example, the consumer did not include any specific features of the product they were searching for. Conversely, the second consumer is very specific about the color and size of product they desire.

There is an abundance of information found within the facets of your inventory feed that can help retailers build a more robust exact match keyword portfolio. By combining every possible searchable combination of facets that relate to products in your inventory, retailers can specifically market products at a much more granular level.

Consumer Intent

In addition to resourcing product feed for product intent, retailers need to evaluate the consumer behavior to identify what are the common features relevant to the products being searched for, or consumer intent.

While sometimes consumer intent can be found within inventory feeds (as in the previous example of size, color, material), often intent exists outside of what retailers define as product features.

Some examples here may include “sassy dress”, “sexy dress” or even “holiday dress”. These examples illustrate either emotion (sassy or sexy) or occasion (holiday). Site search logs contain very valuable information for advertisers — exactly what product consumers are searching for while visiting your website.

Advertisers can develop an arsenal of exact match templates based on analysis of their site search logs. Google AdWords and adCenter search query reports also provide a wealth of information surrounding consumer intent. Using search query reports from the search engines enables retailers to identify new consumer intents and weed out poor performing or irrelevant intents by adding negative keywords.

Promotional calendars can be also leveraged to expand upon additional exact match keywords.

For example, many mattress outlets offer sales during Memorial Day for consumers who want to throw out their old mattress and purchase a new one. For mattress retailers, knowing your promotional calendar ahead of time can help to create keywords surrounding the specific holiday and place these keywords into their own ad group with ad copy specifically targeting promotions.

Poor Structure Leads To Poor Performance

Poor account architecture can impede a retailers ability to create quality ad copy post keyword expansion efforts. Historically, incrementally adding keywords without structure can adversely impact an account’s quality score and performance.

As retailers obtain new product lines or discontinue old products, they need to ensure they are keeping their account architecture as clean and tight as possible.

Adding new keywords from the new product line into the same ad groups as existing keywords with a different product line will clutter up the ad groups and leave room for a poor and irrelevant structure. Adding keywords without structure leads to a high number of keywords in ad groups which can also impact the relevancy of the ad served to the consumer.

Also, retailers should avoid adding products from different categories to the same ad groups and/or campaigns. By having tightly themed ad groups within campaigns, retailers can target the specific facets of each product within their inventory feed.

Retailers that are able to expand their portfolios by aligning the consumer intent found in the query logs and the product intent found within their inventory feed, will end up with more keywords that are significantly better targeted than those retailers who do not maintain this alignment.

By tightening the reins on the ad group structure and producing ad groups with a small number of keywords, retailers can develop more targeted ad copy based specifically on the alignment of consumer and product intent.

With the fast-paced digital environment that we currently live in, it’s not only important for SEM agencies to understand how to analyze and optimize advertiser data, but also how to efficiently manage client interactions.

Even though I work at a technology company, I’m responsible for client interactions. Many of my best practices are transferable to the SEM agency/retailer relationship. As such, in this article, I’ll explore:

• Where agencies get client management wrong
• Why retailers require different level of service from agencies; and
• Applying traditional business practices to digital agency relationships

Agency Communication

Developing and maintaining trust among all client contacts can be very labor intensive, but it’s instrumental in maintaining a positive partnership. Simply setting up weekly calls and sending reports is not enough to engage your clients.

Each client will have different preferences on how to engage with them on an ongoing basis. Some clients prefer half an hour once per week, while others prefer an hour twice per month. Be flexible with your clients and let them dictate what kind of schedule works for them.

Here are some simple but often overlooked tips for agencies to improve their communication with retail clients:

Meetings

• Send out agendas and presentations to your clients ahead of time — not 15 minutes before a meeting, but at least 5 business hours ahead of your call. If you have a recurring call at 10:00 am on Tuesdays, get reports out to clients by 2:00 pm on Mondays. Providing presentations ahead of time enables your client to review the data you have prepared and prepare questions.
• Keep it short and to the point; meetings that run longer than 45 minutes tend to lose both momentum and attendee focus.
• Keep the number of attendees to the minimum required; for each additional attendee on the meeting, input is significantly reduced for those participating.
• Visit personally with important clients 1 – 2 times per quarter; getting face time builds a certain rapport that phone calls cannot satisfy.

Reporting

• Transparency is a must; when clients ask for data, agencies need to provide it, along with any insights that can impact the performance of a client’s campaign.
• Schedule weekly high-level reports to go out to your clients at the same time every week so they know when to expect it.
• Fully engage your client by providing deep-dive monthly reports. This is also a good place for a sanity check on how current performance is lining up with original goals.
• Tech-savvy clients may want to hop on Skype or do a Google+ Hangout in order to have the personal touch to the interaction.

Email Etiquette

• Respond quickly to email requests, even if it’s a response that says “I’ve read your email, I’m going to investigate and will report back within a certain time frame.”
• Be concise with your emails. Don’t send your clients a novel. If clients have to scroll, your email is too long. Make sure to cover meatier topics with presentations and a phone call so you can walk them through the information
• Document all calls with call notes, objective setting and milestones reached with emails. Keeping a record of what you’re going to be held accountable for is important to ensure you understand client goals correctly.  It also gives your clients the opportunity to review and confirm the accuracy of your notes.

Retailer Communication

Client/agency communication is a two-way street. To maximize their relationship with agency partners and desired results from those relationships, retailers should follow these best practices:

Communicating Objectives

• Communicate both short-term and long-term objectives up front.
• Be specific — clearly define what metrics are important to meeting the end goal.
• Establish timeframes to measure results and track progress.
• Be responsive in a timely manner; you cannot hold an agency responsible for work that you have failed to execute on.
• Communicate with clarity about the current year’s goals compared to last year’s goals.

Sharing Necessary Data With Your Agency

• Grant them access to your legacy AdWords, Microsoft adCenter and web analytics tools. If you’re going to hold them accountable for performance, they should have access to any and all reports they need to improve campaign performance.
• Share promotional marketing calendars. Sharing promotional calendars can help your agency plan ahead for ad copy changes. Furthermore, trends in performance can be more easily identified if your agency is aware of what is going on within your business.
• Leverage your product feed data; your inventory is constantly changing and your agency needs to be aware of the changes happening within your product catalog to adjust performance. Your agency can help manage your keyword portfolio by activating/deactivating certain keywords based on current inventory.

Questions To Ask Before Engaging With An Agency

• Technical– will your database impede the ability to implement agency SEM best practices?
• Human– do you have people to write content, make site changes, champion results, etc.?
• Financial– do you have the financial resources to dedicate to paid search or is paid search a smaller byproduct of your marketing department?

Educate Yourself, Don’t Take Your Agency’s Word For It

Demand that your agency send reports in advance of the call. Allow for proper time to investigate their analysis and recommendations and challenge their analysis if you disagree.

Strategic partnerships between retailers and agencies develop stronger bonds when both sides are educated on the data at hand, are able to approach analysis from different angles and agree on conclusions.

Agencies – clear and timely communication with your retail clients around the above framework will go a long way towards maximizing the impact you are able to deliver and establishing the deepest relationship possible.

Retailers – clear communication with your agency encourages them to act as a catalyst on your behalf. Challenging their analysis and providing your own insights breeds a partnership that is certain to grow better and better every month.

In upcoming posts, I will focus on search campaign optimization techniques and tools to help facilitate some of the issues retailers encounter.