Last month I took a look at how to plan, budget and organize 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

To recap, the goal of our 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.

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 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.

To evaluate the success of the ongoing campaign, 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 my next column.

Ready to launch

Now that you know how you’re going to collect your conversion data and you have all your campaigns built out for each market (I covered this last month), it’s time to plan the launch. Naturally, you’ll want to launch SEM in conjunction with 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.

Heh – 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 our team 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 I’ll take a close look at what to do once your campaign is up and running—namely optimization and reporting.

On the heels of launching Yahoo campaigns in three countries in eight 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 with SEM

I think this phrase 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.

To go 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 chops 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 in two different 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.

Asking 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 I’ll write about launching multiple campaigns in multiple markets, as well as measuring success.

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

Get the basics right

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

Push all the right buttons

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

A cast of thousands

Once your site is enabled for social media, you will want to rely on your company’s biggest asset: your employees. One of the nice things about big brands is that we employ large numbers of people who are brand evangelists. That means that at Yahoo! and other companies, there are thousands of potential marketers for our products and services. If we all spend just a few minutes a day talking up our products and services to our respective social communities, the effect will be significant.

With social media, however, we need to be careful how we behave. Social media networks are fragile when it comes to commercial promotion. If your network thinks you are spamming them with commercial messages, they will likely ignore you and you will lose credibility within your network. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that it’s OK to talk about your products within your social network, but this should generally be done in the spirit of conversation. That is, when Yahoo! launches its new homepage, it’s acceptable to post a link to it on my Facebook page and say “Hey everybody, what do you think about the new Yahoo! homepage?” In contradistinction to this, it is generally frowned upon to promote your own products and services through some of the main social channels such as Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. For example, if Yahoo! sports just broke a story about Shawne Merriman and Tila Tequila, I shouldn’t Digg it through my own account. However, it’s OK to share the story with my social network and invite others to “buzz it up.” You can imagine that if all my fellow Yahoos worked in this way we could really start to move the needle on our social media efforts.

Get your social social on

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

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

Last month, I took a look at Big Brands and how we’re approaching Social Media. After I wrote that column, which talked a lot about how the book on Social Media largely remains to be written for big brands, a number of things happened. First of all, we had our annual internal SEO and social media conference at Yahoo!, where we spent a great deal of time talking about how we, as a company, should organize around social media. Then, I spent a few days at SES San Jose talking to folks around the industry as well as catching up with some of the presenters from our internal conference. Finally, at Yahoo! we began to take the first steps toward really organizing and coordinating our social media efforts. All the ensuing conversation gave me a glimpse of at least one possible picture of how big brands will successfully latch onto social media and use it intelligently as marketing channel going forward.

You are here

The truth is that at Yahoo! and other big brands, there is already a decent amount of social media marketing going on right now. As well, it’s normally the case that these efforts, however many and however significant, are not being coordinated in any way. Sound familiar? It should, because this is the age-old challenge with Search Marketing, both paid and organic, in large organizations. Perhaps that’s why as search marketers, we find ourselves both drawn to social media and in the center of the conversation about social media in large, multi-divisional companies.

So, now that we’re engaged in the conversation, what do we do? This is the question I asked repeatedly to everyone who would listen in the past two weeks. One of the most well-thought out answers came from Bill Hunt, who happens to have just wrote a column on Centers of Excellence (CoE) for search and social media.

In his post, Bill does a great job of defining the CoE role as it relates to search marketing, and then teases us on the topic of social media. I was lucky enough to spend some time hanging out with Bill and we were able to dig a bit deeper on the topic. It turns out that many of the ways in which SEO plays out in large organizations have direct analogues in the world of social media.

Take it from the top

In order to succeed, you need to start with executive buy-in, and you need a focal point for the CoE who can act as the expert. This is normally someone from marketing, corporate communications, or public relations, but I think the key is that this person needs to be empowered in this position and backed by a C-class executive. This is the person who ultimately will set standards, key performance indicators (KPIs), serve as the primary social media evangelist, and define high-level strategy. Perhaps most importantly, this person needs to clearly outline the scope of social media at your company. In other words, how many points of presence (think Facebook pages or Twitter feeds) will the company have? What topics will get representation? Who owns each point of presence? These are the tough decisions your thought leader will have to make.

Supporting the leader of this group must be a resource (ideally a small team) of people who can roll out the strategy into practice. These folks will generate the documentation to support standards, conduct social media audits, build the Facebook pages, dictate conventions for Twitter hashtags, and will coordinate with SEO, engineering and other neighboring groups. They will also have to handle governance, which Bill points out is not enforcement, but ideally looks more like stewardship and guidance. Finally, this team will need to be responsible for measuring success against the KPIs that have previously been established.

If You can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist

This is one of our credos in our direct marketing group at Yahoo!, and it translates to social media. What are we trying to accomplish with social media, and how will we measure it? This will be tricky, because most of the metrics associated with social media are fairly soft. Do yourself a favor here and start simple. Track unique users from social media as a starting point. Do you have any type of valuation for new users on your site? If not, make some assumptions, just remember to go back later and validate them. One example of this was pointed out during a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a company that builds viral applications for Facebook. The example goes something like this: start out with a promotion to your existing client base. Measure the amount of customers who enter the promotion. Put it out on Facebook and measure the viral adoption. When the promotion is over, you will then know how many new users or customers you’ve adopted via this promotion as it runs through a social media application. The associated lift is your return on your marketing investment.

Build on your success

An early win will be critical to your social media success. Find something measurable that works, and use this as your blueprint for your next project. Celebrate your victory, give credit to all who participated and look for ways to replicate this model around your organization. The next piece in the puzzle is to drill down into the specific tasks to execute on this strategy, but we’ll save that for another column….

“What’s our Social Media Strategy?”

Has anyone in your company asked you this lately, or at all? Chances are if you haven’t heard this question from a VP yet, you will soon. It’s what everyone is trying to figure out – not if we should be using social media, but how we should be using it. In this column, I’m going to look at a few ways that Yahoo!, and others, are using social media and how it’s evolving from a big-brand perspective.

But first, a bit of perspective

Why is it that SEOs typically end up being the ones in their respective companies who are responsible for social media? On the surface, the two activities have little in common. SEO can be very technical in nature, both in strategy and in practice, while social media looks a lot more a like a public relations campaign.

But just to reset, when sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, even Digg started to become popular, SEOs could readily see the potential for promoting their own sites. Social media in the beginning was a double-whammy: not only could SEOs get bloggers and other authorities to link to their sites, providing link relevance, but they also got the incremental traffic coming from users following those links. The link-building aspect has since been downplayed with the advent of nofollow tags, but the traffic source is very real and very powerful if you can get links put in the right places.

So now that social media is becoming much more mainstream (as has SEO), how does a big brand use social media to its full potential? As well, who in the organization should own social media marketing? When I look around at how we and other big brands are using social media, it’s clear that social media’s role has yet to be fully defined. Let’s look at a few examples and we’ll see.

Survey the landscape

Try this if you haven’t already: go to Facebook and search for your favorite big brand, be it online or offline. Where is the company’s official facebook page? The fan page? Specific product pages? Hard to tell, isn’t it? This is one of the challenges with the social media landscape. As a brand loyalist, do I really want to sift through all those entries so I can find the group that speaks to me? Try the same thing on Twitter – these spaces are already so crowded it’s hard to find the signal through all the noise.

If these networks are going to be viable for commercial use, and one could argue that they will have to be in order to survive, social networks will need to find some way to stratify the landscape, to draw lines between the commercial and the non-commercial, without alienating the user base. But enough of that, let’s look at some of the ways that big brands are trying to use social media to their advantage.

Customer support

Some companies are starting to leverage social media as a form of enhanced customer support. The reason is that it enables brands to have a dialogue with their customers in a new way. I saw a presentation recently about how a company was using Twitter to communicate with its customers in conjunction with their Superbowl ad. Other companies are using similar platforms to field support questions, akin to an 800-number or web chat. This works to a degree, but when you look at the volume of inquiries coming through say, twitter, with incoming emails and phone calls it hardly looks like a relevant channel at this point.

Community marketing

Many companies now have their own Facebook group that customers can join. This method of community marketing shows a great deal of potential (assuming customers can find the right page – see above). The additional challenge here is that companies largely have not figured out how to use this to their advantage.

For example, I joined the Facebook group of one of my favorite wineries in Sonoma, but in fact, there’s very little that happens there. The winery isn’t posting much in the way of notices, promotional or otherwise, and the customers, although you would think they would be posting about their favorite wines and discussing such topics, rarely do anything of the sort. I think the lesson here is that it’s not enough to simply put up a page; as a marketer you need to first generate a critical mass.

Naturally, if you’re a winery in Sonoma, you will need to work much harder at this than if you’re a top Internet site.  Once critical mass is there, brands can offer their social communities first access to promotions, product previews, exclusive content, anything to allow this community to deepen engagement with your brand.

Protecting your brand

One of the things that social media does for big brands is to magnify consumer opinions, both positive and negative. This can be scary for brand owners who have grown accustomed to controlling their brand image and messaging. The notion that one dissatisfied customer can post a bad review on Yelp and dominate the image of the brand online has some marketers and business owners in a cold sweat late at night. Relax. Fight fire with fire. The best thing a brand owner can do is to leverage his own community and ask them to write their own reviews using the same channels. The above mentioned winery did a great job of this, posting a link on their Facebook page, inviting members to go to Yelp and write reviews.

Let’s be careful out there

One thing businesses should be aware of is that social media can be a double-edged sword. I was talking to a friend on the train today who revealed how he used Twitter as a competitive intelligence and sales tool. He was monitoring tweets from and about his competitors and could tell who his competitor was selling to.

From that point, a well-placed sales call is all it takes to get a meeting with the right party to close a deal. Big brands don’t need to fear this particular tactic so much, but the lesson remains: assume that whatever you post in social media will be read by everyone, and use this as a filter when crafting your social media messaging.

What’s ahead?

Despite the staggering numbers associated with the rise of social media, I don’t think we quite know what to do with it yet. Sure, we like it when celebrities tweet, but I think we will all agree that we don’t care if my cousin Vinny just ate a really good steak. We may be interested in Facebook updates from some of our friends, but the sheer volume of posts makes it almost impossible to find anything useful or interesting.

I think the people who are really going to capitalize on the medium will be the ones who find the niches where this medium really excels and build products that live in these niches. I have some friends, for example, who are looking at this space closely, and have figured out a really slick way to create deep and meaningful dialogue among groups of people. The beauty is that this happens in an anonymous mobile environment where people interact freely and in real-time, reducing the inevitable clutter and noise that come with existing social networks. I could go on and on about this – you’ll just have to follow my tweets if you want to know more.

I’m going just a bit off topic this month. It may seem a stretch, but bear with me, there is a modicum of relevance to this column. You see, most of my ideas for Industrial Strength columns, as well as the bulk of my SEL column writing, take place on either the Capitol 523 or the 542. These are the trains that I take to get to and from work. While I work in Sunnyvale, CA, I live in El Cerrito, just over 50 miles away. Why I live so far from work is yet another long story, so let’s stay on topic here.

All aboard for Silicon Valley

The Capitol Corridor is the name of the rail service I take, and despite the fact that it’s been in operation for 20 years and now enjoys its highest ridership in its history, it always surprises me how few people have actually heard of it. Its more famous Bay Area mass transit cousins are BART and CalTrain. BART is the light rail system that services most of the Bay Area, focusing mainly on customers who commute into San Francisco for work. On a given workday, 300,000 riders take BART. CalTrain, which runs on a normal gauge rail, runs up and down the Peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose and points beyond. It services commuters who live in San Francisco and work in Silicon Valley, as well as those who live on the Peninsula and work in The City. CalTrain serviced 12 million passengers last year.

The Capitol Corridor, which runs on the Union Pacific line from Sacramento to San Jose, carried a mere 1.5 million delighted passengers to work and back during the same period. It is operated by Amtrak, a bit of a throwback, if you will. It’s comfortable, there are table tops, electrical outlets, even a café car. And although it’s not the fastest way to get from A to B, it’s a whole lot better than sitting in traffic on Interstate 880, which is enough to make you want to jam an ice pick in your ear.

I get on the Capitol in the morning and ride down the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay to Santa Clara. My fellow Yahoos and I then pile into leased vans and drive the 3-4 miles to the main Yahoo! campus. In the evening, we meet at the same vans and head back to the train station. The 542 takes me back up the Bay and drops me a couple miles from my house, where I get into my car and make the short drive home.

Slow going

The major drawback of taking the train, of course, is the speed. It takes me two hours door to door, each way. So if I take the train 5 days a week, every week, that would amount to a whopping 1000 hours of commuting time per year. That’s a lot of time to think about SEL columns! But just like search marketing, train commuting is a process that takes time, and there’s just no getting around it. Regardless of the time and work invested in both, I try to make sure it’s time well spent. As it is on the train, if I mix in a little telecommuting and a minimum of driving (sans ice pick), it’s pretty tolerable. Did I mention they serve cocktails in the café Car?

Upside: train traveling is a social network

One of the best things about riding the train, other than the obvious fact that I don’t have to hit the road, is the people. My aunt, who grew up in Connecticut, regales me with tales of her father, who commuted to New York City by train for 30 years. From her accounts, the friendships her father formed with his fellow commuters were much stronger than those he had with his co-workers. He changed jobs over the years, but continued to keep in touch with his commuting buddies well after he had retired. I can relate to that.

This is essentially my social network of follow commuters. I ride with people from a wide spectrum of talents – marketers, engineers, business owners - who by and large work in the tech industry in the Silicon Valley, so it’s a great way to keep up not only with what’s going on in my industry, but also with the tech sector on the whole. Plus, there’s something about sharing your commute to and from work with others that builds deep relationships. I think it’s several factors. First of all, there’s just the amount of time spent together that give you a wide range of topics to ponder and discuss. Second, you never know what’s going to happen once you’re on the rail, and sharing those (sometimes harrowing) experiences deepens bonds between people.

No trespassing: rail blocks ahead

Sometimes people think it’s funny to leave bicycles and shopping carts on the tracks for the train to run over them. While I don’t share that sentiment, these incidents aren’t so bad because if there’s no damage to the train, the conductors can get us going again in 10-20 minutes. The real problem is trespassers. Trespassers are people who end up on the tracks in front of a speeding train.

Most of the time, trespassing is an intentional and final act of a desperate and often depressed individual, but not always. Apparently, it’s quite challenging to estimate the distance and closing speed of a moving train, because some people still try to cross the train tracks in front of us. Some are on their way to school, others play chicken. One unfortunate lady was dragged into the path of an oncoming train several weeks ago by her large dog, which she was walking at the time. Note to self: Don’t walk the dog near the tracks.

As you can imagine, when a trespasser incident occurs, aside from the obvious tragedy (not to mention the trauma caused to the train engineer), the ensuing 2-3 hour delay waiting for the police and coroner to finish their work gives me plenty of time to question the wisdom of rail travel (see Cocktails, above). It’s good to remember that in train commuting, just as in direct marketing, strange things can happen that bring with them unforeseen consequences, and you have to be ready to adjust your strategy on the fly. If it’s not a trespasser on the tracks, it could be a drop in conversion rate or a change in a ranking algorithm that send your results skewing sideways. You just have to roll with the punches and adapt quickly.

How much longer?

Some informal observation tells me that the average shelf life of a train commuter in the Bay Area is about two and a half years (although one guy on my train has been at it over 15 years!). At that point, commuters generally either get another job closer to home, or come to their senses and move closer to work. I’ve been taking the train for three years and change, and although I can’t see myself either changing my job or moving my home in the immediate future, I can’t help but wonder: how long will I last as a rail commuter?

I’ve managed to stick with search marketing as long as I have largely because I truly believe that the majority of online marketing will be managed in a similar fashion to search in the coming years, and that puts me, professionally, in a very good place. So I imagine I’ll be sticking with train commuting, and search marketing, for some time to come.

“How much revenue is SEO driving to our site/property?”

“What’s the ROI on the resources you’re using in SEO?”

“How should we be thinking about funding SEO on an ongoing basis?”

These are the questions I’m hearing these days within the purple walls of Yahoo.

I don’t know about you, but since the economy started heading downhill faster than a snowboarder at the X-Games, I’ve been seeing a lot more attention being given to SEO than in recent years. Back when budgets for SEM were essentially unlimited and the industry was growing like the hat size of a future Hall-of-Famer on steroids, SEO seemed to get the short shrift for a while. I mean, why work really hard on SEO when you can scale SEM so much faster by throwing cash at the problem, especially when SEM budgets are paying for themselves?

Now that the tide has turned, economically speaking, and with SEM budgets focused more on profitability than volume, it’s time to take another long look at SEO and how to use it to your company’s advantage. Of course, in my world, the work starts by making a business case for SEO, where we quantify opportunity with a data-driven approach. Using a conservative valuation of SEO traffic we can not only make the business case for SEO, but also prioritize some of the ensuing projects. I’ve also written about how to take those priorities and implement them throughout a development process, thereby gaining efficiency and lowering cost and time to market. It’s time to take a step back and think about how to manage this on an ongoing basis in a sustainable way.

What I’d like to talk about here is the ongoing tracking of traffic, value, and opportunity required to build out a long-lasting SEO program at a really big company. Because no matter what size company you’re in, here’s what you’re going to face: Once you’ve gotten the green light to proceed with SEO for your site, how do you quantify what you’re actually doing for the bottom line? The truth is that if you don’t know or can’t prove it, your SEO program is about to die a quick and quiet death. The good news is that if you take the time to put into place some decent web analytics that account for SEO, you will have all the data you need to tell everyone in your organization how much profit you’re driving to the company, and where to invest the next dollar.

SEO referrals

Make sure you have an analytics solution of some kind—almost any kind—on your web property. Ideally, you could have something built just for SEO, but at the very least you should have a package that can isolate SEO referrals from other traffic sources. For us, this meant building a proprietary system that parses SEO referrals from incoming traffic and reports out to users in a bunch of different ways. For most ‘normal’ websites, this usually means something powered by those javascript tags that IT managers hate. They’re easy enough to implement, but from my experience they’re also easy to install improperly and tricky to maintain, and you should know right off the bat that the accuracy of the data they provide is questionable.

But that’s OK. Just try to avoid making a data salad out of your results. What I mean by this is try to stick to one source of truth for all your marketing data. Don’t try, for example, to subtract your SEM clicks, as reported by the search engines, from your total search engine referrals number, as reported by your web analytics software, in the hopes of getting a number for organic search referrals. I can tell you this doesn’t work because I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work. Instead, choose analytics software that can attempt to decipher whether traffic is coming from paid or organic search and then use those numbers. Similarly, when trying to answer the question “how much of my site’s traffic is coming from SEO?,” you will want to use a total traffic number from that same data source, even if you know it is not perfect (see above).

Value your SEO traffic

The same analytics software that will segment your organic from your paid search traffic will probably also track your SEO leads to conversion. This of course depends heavily on your business model, but the general idea is that decent analytics can give you a notion of value for your SEO traffic. At Yahoo!, our internal systems track SEO referrals in-session to a variety of revenue events. In some cases the various pieces of this data chain are disjointed, so it’s by no means perfect, but it does allow all properties to track SEO referrals, and in many cases we can track those referrals to direct revenue dollars. I have also written about different valuation models which, when applied to SEO traffic, can help attach real value to organic search referrals.

Create meaningful reports

I’ve also written in some depth about quantifying SEO opportunity, in the context of making a business case for SEO. Here I will only add that the same principles apply ongoing to SEO. In fact, once you’ve been tracking SEO data for a year, comparing performance year-over-year will help you make your case for continued SEO work. Since things change so rapidly in SEO, one suggestion I always make in reporting on these ‘long-term’ results is to build out your performance graphs on a timeline and then plot out real events that have taken place—site re-launch, shifts in the market or competitive space, outbreaks of swine flu – it will help you explain otherwise mysterious shifts in your SEO metrics, as well as impress your management.

The advanced track

So once you have the basics covered, you’ll be able to report out on SEO referrals, value and opportunity. So what’s next? We’re spending some effort trying to understand how the evolving nature of search is affecting our data. For example, of the referrals we’re seeing from organic search, which are coming from web search, image search, video search and so on. We’re calling this vertical search reporting. Also, we’re building out opportunity reports on a fairly regular basis and pushing them out to management periodically as a regular reminder of what’s still on the table as far as SEO value. Finally, we’re trying to combine some of the metrics we have to make more subtle decisions.

Combining metrics

It’s easy to get mired in all the data, especially at a company like Yahoo!, where the sheer volume of data can be truly overwhelming, but by keeping it simple we can make some useful prioritization decisions.  For example: Search volume is an important component in prioritizing which keywords to go after. You won’t ever be able to get a perfect read on search volume for a given keyword, but there are tools on the market that can give you a general or relative idea of search volume. Rank, when paired with search volume, can help you prioritize keywords and their untapped potential. You’ll need to make some assumptions about clickthrough rates associated with each position. By combining these metrics we can prioritize keyword level optimization efforts. This helps us understand for a given keyword, how much effort we should spend optimizing our site, given the value of the opportunity for that word.

Keep it simple

First things first, remember the basics:

1. Get an analytics solution in place that can isolate SEO referrals
2. Attach value to SEO referrals through tracking technologies or valuation models, or both
3. Find useful ways to leverage the above data to build useful reports for your management
4. Rinse and Repeat

I love Yahoo! Buzz. Always have. I loved it in its first incarnation (think Google Zeitgeist) and I love it now, in its current form. And not just because I work inside the big Purple Palace, mind you, but rather because it tells me everything both delightful and horrifying about myself in one concise web page. I am a searcher. I love searching for everything on the Internet. I pride myself on my ability to find anything for sale or of interest in a minimum of time and keystrokes. Just ask my wife. She thinks I’m nuts, but that doesn’t stop her from consulting me any time she’s looking for anything on the internet. Also, I’m an American. Not in a particularly patriotic sense, but for the notable exception of reality TV, I follow more or less the same popular icons as most of my fellow citizens. So as an American Searcher, when I’m clicking through Buzz today, I’m both riveted and appalled by what I see.

Aporkalypse now

As I write, at the top of the top searches, as expected, is “swine flu symptoms.” A quick buzz search yields 102 stories on the pandemic. It’s fascinating. Has anyone ever seen a disease spread like this? Or maybe it’s just that we’ve never seen this in the Internet era. It is really spreading this fast or does the Internet just make it seem that way? By the time this column publishes we may well know, but for now it’s one of the world’s greatest mysteries. I mean by the time you read this we will either be shutting down entire countries (Mexico was the first to shutter at time of writing), yelling and screaming about the impending Aporkalypse, or we’ll be saying “whew, I thought that was going to be a lot worse.” Whatever the outcome, I challenge anyone to find a surgical mask or a bottle of hand sanitizer on any shelf in any store within a mile of where you are right now. That’s how big this story is, and that’s how plugged in we all are, as evidenced by search behavior.

This just in

On to other stories. Judging from the TV coverage during my morning workout today, I’m expecting the Chrysler story line to be buzzing pretty loudly, which it is. Chrysler announced today it’s officially going bankrupt. As I write this, Chrysler shows 133 stories on Buzz… But wait—what’s that between the swine flu and Chrysler? Kirstie Alley put back on the 75 pounds she lost, Jon & Kate Plus 8, American Idol, Christina Applegate smoking (!), Kentucky Derby, Jon Gosselin (of Jon & Kate fame), and Sarah Jessica Parker. I mean I’m happy for Sarah and Matthew and their unborn twin girls, but come on, all of those stories are getting more search volume than Chrysler going bankrupt? How can that be? What does that say about us? What does that say about me?

Search is what we want

This is at the same time the most revealing and disturbing thing about search. Search is demand. Search tells us what we’re really looking for, what we really want to see. Just as we, the American public, really do want to see dysfunctional couples duke it out on Jerry Springer, we really are in fact much more interested in Kirtstie’s saddlebags and unfaithful Octo-dads than the fact that our nation’s only remaining industrial foothold is eroding around us faster than the price of pork belly futures. We’re about to raise the white flag on the companies that practically built this country, but we’d rather read about how Simon trashed the latest batch of talentless contestants on Idol. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of American cars in general, or of Chrysler in particular. The last Chrysler car I owned was the ‘72 Dodge Dart handed down to me by my big brother, that I drove in high school. In fact, I can’t even bring myself to buy anything but Toyotas anymore, so I’m definitely part of the problem – but come on, American Searchers, a horse race is a bigger deal than the biggest bankruptcy story of the decade that just broke today? I hate myself.

I’m hooked

This is one of the many reasons I’ve stayed in the search industry all these years. Search fascinates me. It tells me more about myself and my fellow American Searchers than just about anything else I can find (and sometimes more than I want to know!), and like Yahoo! Buzz, it’s updated pretty much in real time, 24/7/365. At this point in my day, I can only find peace in the fact that Chrysler is getting more buzz than Dancing With The Stars. BTW, Can you believe Julianne Hough is calling it quits?!

Should we use an SEM agency or take it in-house?

The recent trend to pull search marketing in-house has generated more than a few articles on this topic, so I thought I’d put an industrial strength spin on it. Here, I’m not going to contemplate whether you should use an agency or not, but rather how to use your agency (and how not to) in order to extract the most value from them.

At Yahoo!, we try to use an SEM agency in businesses for which we think it makes sense. In these businesses, we are solving what I would call ‘generic’ search marketing problems. Bringing users into our properties to subscribe to our services is the goal here. Yahoo! markets web hosting services, online dating services, even search marketing services in this manner. These are easy to outsource because they follow a basic impression-click-conversion pattern. If you can track your conversions with a third-party pixel or javascript tag and translate those conversions into a quantifiable value, you should definitely consider using an SEM agency.

Play to their strengths

Use your agency for things that they are good at. Leverage them for campaign management and optimization. Have them do lots of creative testing if they have the resources. Last month I wrote a column on planning and reforecasting. This is a great use of agency resources. Have them bring competitive insights to you. They probably see more of the industry than you do, so they can likely help you see how you’re doing versus others in your space. Landing page testing is another task that is well-suited for outsourcing. Agency SEM managers are often adept at evaluating landing pages once you’ve created them.

A Note on keyword expansion

Some agencies are good at keyword expansion and others aren’t. One tip I have on this is that if keyword expansion isn’t your agency’s specialty (or even if it is), use your existing assets to grow your keyword portfolio. That is, if you have a search box on your site, see what users are searching on and use that. If you don’t have a search box, see what other keywords your users are searching on to find your site and test them out. What searches are driving organic leads to your site? Don’t be afraid to buy these, especially if they convert.

Pick your battles

While using an agency can save you resources, you can’t always use them for everything. I’ve made the mistake of trying to put agencies on specific businesses where they lacked expertise. That did not go very well, and in each case we ended up pulling the program back in-house after a good deal of frustration. In addition, sometimes your SEM programs are tied so closely to your business that they can’t easily be outsourced. Examples of this are businesses where the value of a conversion is highly variable, or where the conversion itself can only be tracked through internal systems. In one sense, this makes it much more challenging, logistically, to engage with an agency. In another sense, managing the business of SEM for such a property can require very specific skills that your agency may not have.

Weeklies, QBRs and feedback

Because we have multiple SEM advertisers at Yahoo!, it’s important to make sure that each one gets the right level of service from our SEM agency. Over the past year or two we’ve put several processes in place to make sure we’re on top of this. First, I have weekly in-person meetings with my agency account team where we review every business under their care. Second, every quarter the agency conducts a quarterly business review (QBR) where we look back at last quarter’s performance and look ahead to projects for the next quarter. This is the time to bring in competitive insights and deeper analysis of the metrics. We don’t conduct QBRs for every internal business, mostly just the larger ones. Finally, after each QBR we actively solicit feedback on the agency’s performance. We ask for a numerical rating as well as qualitative feedback. After the feedback is collected, I work with the agency to open action items that will address any negative issues that came up in the feedback, and we evaluate progress against those items the following quarter.

Making good choices

Having worked for SEM agencies in the past, I can tell you that the most important assets an SEM agency brings to the table are a) good technology and b) smart people who work hard. Outside of these basic requirements, its really up to you, the advertiser, to create a relationship that makes sense for you and your business. To review: Use SEM agencies to solve generic SEM problems. If you have SEM needs that are very specific to your business, pull them in-house. Where you do engage with an agency, meet in person weekly, review the business quarterly, and evaluate their performance and insist on results.

If you’re like me, you spent most of Q4 last year planning out SEM budgets for 2009. Perhaps you even changed your entire SEM strategy from last year to this year due to the economic downturn, and now you’re optimizing to different metrics. Planning meant accounting for seasonality, negotiating with different groups around the organization and finally, finally, sometime between last December and now, you unveiled The Plan. It’s your SEM plan of record for 2009, and it includes spend, clicks, CPC, conversion rate and ROI by search engine, for all products and services you’re going to market with SEM this year.

The only problem is, you’re wrong.

Don’t worry, it’s not really your fault. Your plan has to be wrong, because with all those variables you’ll never be able to forecast SEM with complete certainty, especially if you’re trying to forecast next December, last December. So how do you stand up in front of your managers in Q3 and Q4 and tell them that the budgets and performance targets you planned in Q4 last year don’t really make sense anymore?

After all, it’s your job to get it right—you’re the expert, remember?

The way to deal with this dilemma is what we call the Monthly Reforecast. If you have only one product to market, and you control the budgets, you might get away with just winging it. But at the other end of the spectrum, where we work, we needed something much more bullet-proof. We had 15 different properties engaged in SEM, and to move budgets around we needed the cooperation of roughly 8 different groups. We started doing monthly reforecasting because we had to. It was the only way to manage the special kind of headache we had. Here’s how it works:

Get a sponsor

First of all, nobody in your organization is going to want to re-forecast monthly—why would they? So you’re going to need a VP or higher authority to mandate this new process. SVP of Finance or Marketing is about the right level to shoot for. Tell them how you’ll be able to get a better handle on performance issues and flag wasted SEM spend before it starts. Then draft an email that your sponsor can edit and send to his peers around the company, informing them that you’ll be hitting up all your counterparts around the organization every month to re-forecast SEM.

Make a standard template

Create an Excel template. It will take a while to set up the first time, but you can reuse it every month. Break it down first by product or property (if you’re marketing more than one), by search engine, and include the basic metrics—cost, clicks, orders, revenue, profit, ROI. Don’t forget rows for agency fees if applicable. Total it up at the bottom for each property or product so you can see the totals easily. Use one tab for each effort, and make a summary tab so your manager can see the Big Picture. You may even want to show what this forecast looks like compared to last month’s forecast.

Set a schedule

You’ll want to manage everyone’s expectations around when this is going to happen. Every month you send it out on the 20^th, and finalize it by the 30^th, or something like that.

You will need time to look over all the revisions, negotiate any discrepancies, and pull the whole thing together, so 10 days is about the right amount of time. Once you get through the first few months, it will get easier, and the incremental changes that surface with every forecast will likely get smaller over time. A cautionary note: keep your forecasts limited in their timeframe. In other words, don’t try to reforecast Q4 when you’re in Q1. Stick to what you can see in front of you.

Lean on your agency

If you use an SEM agency, insist that they get involved in the exercise. They can forecast more easily than any of your internal customers, and since they work for you, they’ll be more responsive. Put the burden on them to generate the reforecasts, and have your internal customers approve them. If you have weekly or monthly meetings with your agency, the reforecast will fit nicely into your already-established meeting cycle. 

Ride the RAPIDs

At Yahoo! we use Bain’s RAPID as a decision-making framework. Some companies use RASCI or RACI, some don’t use any at all. If you are in a large or matrixed organization, you will need to define all the players involved when budget decisions have to be made. I spent 9 months of last year building RAPIDs and standardizing process across our company. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Now, when budgets need to be added or removed, or moved from one program to another, we have a playbook that states exactly who the decision makers are and who gets to weigh in on the decision making process. This is key to making your reforecast happen within your 10-day timeframe. Again, use your sponsor to pave the way for you and get buy-in at a higher level.

Once you’re set up and running you’ll be a search marketing superhero. The finance folks will be delighted that they know how much you’re spending (and earning), and the marketers will appreciate the way you effectively manage expectations around the organization. So while you may not need to do monthly forecasting just to keep everything straight, in times like these you may want to do it anyway, so your management knows at all times that you’re on top of every dollar being spent. Happy forecasting!