The bottom line is that you can make any organizational model work if you have the right people in place – smart, flexible people who can see the big picture and draw the right amounts of dotted and hard lines to ensure accountability and align incentives.

Let’s go ahead and take a deep dive into a couple of these models and how they shake out in real organizations.

Centralizing Around SEM & Other Marketing Channels

Centralization makes the most sense if you have new marketing leadership (new CMO, SVP, etc.) and Marketing needs to establish its own identity within a company. This is what happened at Yahoo! when we hired a new CMO several years ago. We had been without one for some time, and the incoming CMO wanted to build a global, integrated marketing team.

We accomplished this over time and in doing so we rebuilt most of the marketing functions at Yahoo! with a global perspective. In our direct marketing group, we even had one person devoted solely to ‘international’, making sure that our direct marketing best practices were disseminated around the world to regions like APAC and EMEA.

So what does this mean for managing PPC in a centralized marketing organization? Mostly, it means that SEM likely follows a ‘shared services’ model. In this model, our SEM teams work more or less as an internal agency, engaging with the various business units (BUs) as internal ‘customers’.

Because we don’t report to the same people as our customers, it’s critical to maintain clear communication channels. If you’re in this world, make sure you have regular face to face meetings with your customers, and you have well-oiled approvals processes for keywords, creative and the like.

Over-communicate all budgeting issues, lest you take a BU marketer by surprise and ruin a perfectly good working relationship. Here’s a typical centralized marketing org chart for a large company:

This is what it looks like when SEM is part of a centralized marketing group

Speaking Of Budgets

Where do PPC budgets live in this centralized world? Funny enough, I’ve seen it work both ways. When we were centralized as a marketing org, at different times the budgets actually lived in Marketing and then in the BU. It works OK either way, but there are some things you’ll do differently as a result.

For example, when our marketing group was centralized but the budgets lived in the BU, I had to create a lot of process around moving budgets. I’ve written about it here, and the central theme is that SEM budgets need to be mobile in large organizations with multiple BUs. Reason being, money will need to be moved from under-performing businesses to over-performing businesses in order to maximize return to the company.

When Marketing is centralized and the PPC budgets all live in Marketing, it becomes much easier to manage of course, because SEM managers can move budgets at will. The risk in this case is alienating your internal customers, so just as noted above, communication is key.

De-centralizing The Marketing Organization

De-centralizing is helpful if there is a region or group of business units with which Marketing feels like it should align, perhaps because these businesses are of a higher priority within company, or if they’re earning the lion’s share of the company’s revenue.

In this model, the whole marketing organization lives in the region or BU, with marketers, salespeople and product teams all reporting into the head of the BU or region. The advantages here are efficiency and alignment. PPC budgets in this world need less mobility, and there’s less ambiguity about how the money should be spent. Marketing’s objectives are the same as BU goals.

Decisions can be made quickly because there are fewer cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. Keyword and creative approvals are still necessary, but if my boss is your boss, I know right where to go to escalate and resolve any delays or disagreements. All good, no?

The downside is that marketing best practices are more challenging to share across regions or businesses. What works for one business may not get translated to another. And international? Well, that becomes tricky as well. You’ll be hard pressed to find funding for that international marketing manager, as there aren’t really any incentives to ‘go global’.

Here’s what a de-centralized org chart might look like:

SEM and other marketing channels in a De-centralized Organization

Wither SEO?

On a side note, you might have noticed that in the org chart above I have SEO listed under ‘Product’. In many companies, there is an eternal ‘tug-of-war’ for SEO, usually between Marketing and IT.

At Yahoo!, we’ve pretty much decided that SEO belongs in our product group. I wrote a column on this a long time ago. In Marketing, we build tools for SEOs, but we leave the work for those folks in Product. The reason is that in a big place like Yahoo!, the product development process is where the real SEO work has to take place. If you try to drive it from anywhere else, you fail. Believe me, we tried…

That’s all I have on organizational models for now. See you next month!

There were only three presenters on the panel, myself included, but there was a conspicuous depth of paid search experience, as I was the least experienced guy at the podium. My fellow panelist, Wister Walcott has been building enterprise search management tools for years and even co-founded a company that makes large-scale SEM tools. For his presentation, he focused primarily on non-bidding SEM challenges and their potential solutions.

Wister likened managing large PPC campaigns to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. For those non-Bay Area residents, the analogy is that the Golden Gate Bridge is always being painted. As soon as painting crews are ‘done’, they simply start over because there are always parts of the bridge that need painting.

So it is with managing large PPC campaigns, Wister says – your work is never done, and if you haven’t ‘painted’ parts of your campaigns in some time – because you’ve been working on other aspects – it’s already time to go back and revisit those areas you haven’t looked at in a while.

Wister focused on large, mature campaigns, and how to find new opportunities within them. Some high-level areas he suggested looking are creatives, campaign structure, negative keywords, budgeting, and – of course – bidding optimization. If you’ve got all that under control already, the next logical place to look is Landing Page Optimization.

One of the things I really liked about Wister’s presentation is the fact that he acknowledges that with large campaigns, most of the activity is about what I call ‘managing by exception’.

The point is that the campaigns themselves are running pretty well, generating revenue and profit, and what you’re really looking for are outliers – campaign elements that are secretly bogging down the performance of your campaigns – secretly, because they’re operating in otherwise healthy campaigns that mask the negative effects of these elements. Since Wister sees lots of large campaigns in action, he has a unique and accurate view of where these profit bandits live.

First off, Wister says, look for ad groups that don’t have any active ads in them. This is more common than you think, as ads sometimes go inactive without us noticing.

Then, look for large ad groups with low clickthrough rates (CTRs). If you find them, break them up into smaller ad groups where you can target keywords more closely with keyword rich ads that have a better chance of clicking against the keywords in smaller, more tightly knit ad groups.

Smaller, Tightly-Themed AdGroups Perform Better

In addition to ad group optimization, match type segregation can also yield increased profit through efficiency – separate your keywords into ad groups by match types, and use negative keywords to ensure that you’re separating the traffic. There is good content already published on how to do this, just do a search for ‘match type and negative keywords’ and you should be on your way.

Headroom analysis, as Wister puts it, involves identifying areas where there is a delta between your max CPC and actual CPC. The notion here is that you’re willing to spend more on a keyword but for some reason you can’t.

In this case, Wister suggests using that unspent ‘budget’ and investing in keywords that have lower ranking so you can drive additional traffic to those keywords. Finally, Wister reminds us that once you’ve done all these things, it’s time to start over at the beginning. See Golden Gate Bridge above.

Fellow columnist Brad Geddes, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a panel before, has his own consulting company and has seen a great deal of action in paid (and organic) search over the years. He brought some of that experience to bear when he dropped some good PPC knowledge on the audience in his presentation.

With a nod to the unique nature of large campaigns, he suggests using tools that lend efficiency to paid search management, because he understands the resource constraints at hand and has had to solve these challenges himself many times.

The more keywords you’re buying, in general, the more tools you can and will need to keep your day-to-day management, well… manageable. The happy truth, Brad says, is that big accounts throw off lots of data, and in this sense, they can actually be easier to manage than small accounts.

The notable exception to this is creative, which doesn’t seem to be very scalable in terms of the effort required to get incrementally positive results. Conveniently, Brad’s company, Certified Knowledge (CK), has some creative tools, and as well Brad mentions some third party services that provide crowd-sourced creative development – some even have performance-based pricing.

In addition to creative, Brad talked about some other areas where tools can be applied to large campaigns to gain efficiency. Negative keywords can be generated with third party tools, and some analytics packages can lend a hand as well. Brad says to pay attention to your ad group names, so you can easily filter through them and target areas where negatives are needed.

Finally, we all know that quality score is an important metric, and to address this in large campaigns CK has developed a quality score analyzer to help marketers target the right keywords for optimization. Oh yeah, one more tidbit from Brad. He recommends time management tools, again because of the resource constraints we all inevitably face. Specifically, Brad likes calendars as opposed to task lists. I agree!

As for me, I did my usual song and dance about how we manage paid search here at Yahoo!, Inc. I talked about valuation (of course!) and about how we deploy PPC campaigns using an agency or an in-house team, depending on the needs of the business and our resourcing constraints.

In this particular session, I did spend more time talking about the bidding algorithms we build for some of our businesses. Here’s a slide on that very topic:

Segment Your Porrtfolio and Optimize Accordingly

The point here is that by segmenting our keyword portfolio, we can then address each segment separately according to its performance characteristics.

Head terms get one algorithm, body keywords another, and the tail is a different matter entirely. Ah, yes, the tail. Maybe I’ll devote a column just to that….Until then, Happy Searching!

Hiring Search Marketers

Josh Gampel kicked off the panel with a fine presentation on hiring for search. Josh and his teams were the first folks to build a company (Onward Search) around staffing for search engine marketers. They have since evolved and now cover so much more  – developers, writers, UX experts – but Josh and his folks clearly still have a soft spot for search marketers.

They even published a salary survey that pinpoints salary ranges for six different types of search marketing functions across 20 US cities – very impressive!

You can find it here.

The latest salary survey from Onward Search

Josh also had some terrific tips for managers who are hiring. For example, he said it’s imperative that the hiring manager writes the job description. Human resources, while both capable and critical, simply lacks the specific knowledge to build a job description that will pique a search marketer’s interest and get them excited about the job.

He also emphasized the importance of behaviorally-based interviewing, and pointed out that right now, the highest demand for search marketers is in the mid-range salary positions.

In House Teambuilding & Tools

Tony Adam focused on how he built in-house SEO teams and what he did to engage and motivate his team members. I loved his suggestions not only because of their innovative and clever nature, but also because the obviously have implications beyond SEO. In fact, his primary message to the audience was that building SEO teams is about people, not SEO.

Tony emphasized follow-up and salesmanship in the recruiting process, but really hit his stride when talking about how to handle teams once they’re in place. He talked about mentoring and training, as well as ways to keep teams energized. He likes team lunches, and in fact advocates the ‘inappropriate lunch’ in some cases – though you’ll have to ask Tony what that’s all about!

Tony thinks highly of ways to empower teams by giving them ownership of their business, and even favors other ‘teambuilding’ techniques like happy hours, nerf wars, remote controlled helicopters, and the like.

Peter Leshaw had some interesting things to say about team building, but really got me going when he started showing dashboards and talking about bringing in consultants and vendors to work with your in-house team. Now that’s right up my alley!

First, the dashboards. Peter believes, as do I, that dashboards are a great way track your business and hold folks accountable to the plan. They (hopefully) provide a simple way to look at performance over time.

Here’s an example of a dashboard Peter uses:

An SEO Dashboard from Blue Interactive Agency

I really liked when Peter talked about bringing third parties in to support in-house teams. This is a very tricky thing to do, so to have any success at it, you have to be really careful.

What’s the single most important thing to keep in mind if you’re bringing in an SEO expert to give an extra boost to your team? Peter says that it’s to make sure they have the same seo approach, strategically, as the in-house lead. This helps ensure that there is no ‘stepping on toes’.

It’s also critical that the consultant is comfortable with his/her role as such, and that he/she understands and accepts the chain of command and communication in the organization. Follow that recipe and you’re headed for SEO success.

Bridging The IT-Marketing Gap

Elmer Boutin is a very experienced webmaster, and he gave us a really fresh perspective on the relationship between marketing and IT, particularly as it relates to SEO. He boiled it all down for us, into what he calls the three C’s:

1. Contact. Marketing and IT are separate entities, both physically and functionally. Learn about their pain points. Try to find ways to connect, and understand how to make their lives better

2. Communicate. Someone on the marketing side needs to know how to ‘geek speak’. Put them in charge of communication with IT. Then, find the most marketing-savvy IT guy (or gal) and make him/her marketing’s main point of contact in IT. And when you do communicate with IT, be specific – be direct, be exact. Leave nothing to interpretation. If marketing is making requests of IT, ideally boil it down to providing code for them to copy/paste.

3. ‘Carpe Scientiam’.  Sieze the knowledge of your Web technologies. Elmer points out that the more marketers know about their Web technology, the more success they will have with IT. He reminded us that IT isn’t always the problem, sometimes it’s marketers not having sufficient knowledge that’s the problem.

One of the most useful things about Elmer’s presentation was that he pointed all of us to various resources on this topic. He like’s Ian Lurie’s Conversation Marketing blog. Also check out Scott Brinker’s work at www.chiefmartec.com , and Elmer’s own work at www.crossingmarketingandit.com. Enjoy!

Dozens of spreadsheets packed with endless assumptions, each one more fantastic than the last, combining to ultimately seal a marketer’s fate for the next 12 months. What could be better than that?

Well, how about three steps to make your SEM planning process more successful:

1. Align SEM goals with company strategy
2. Build different scenarios to illustrate tradeoffs
3. Engage with all stakeholders multiple times throughout the process

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about our Monthly Reforecast, an internal tool that we’ve found indispensable; we use it still to this day. In fact, I’ve had multiple requests for the reforecast template we use.

It helps us to communicate unanticipated changes to what we thought was going to happen when we built this year’s plan, last year. I wanted to take a moment to reiterate the importance of that particular tool, and to look at the basic process that gives rise to the need for the reforecast – The Plan.

The reforecast, of course, becomes necessary when your SEM Plan of Record inevitably turns out to be incorrect, and as I mentioned, your real work around this phenomenon comes less in SEM management and more in expectation setting and management.

To summarize, the reforecast template should be standardized, and buy-in on all levels is required before you can roll this out in an organization of any significant size or complexity.

But back to the planning process — because that’s where most of us are right now. The planning process, as it turns out, is equal parts financial analysis and cat-herding.

The most influential factor in the planning process is (and should be) the overarching business strategy of the company. Depending on whether you’re a start-up in hyper-growth mode, or a mature, industry-leading brand (or more likely something in between), you should align your SEM planning process with your company’s financial goals.

As an example, a few years ago we shifted SEM strategy from one that focused on average ROI to one that strives to maximize profit. The resulting metrics, like cost and revenue, diverge pretty widely in these two scenarios, and thus I can’t overemphasize the need to work on this topic before you build your plan.

Data Is Good

When building your initial plan, pull together as much historical data as you can. In our case, we have some programs that have been running for half a dozen years, and other seasonal campaigns we’ve only executed once.

Either way, you’ve got something to go on. You may want to assume growth rates in your plan if it’s not too mature or if you have some product innovations in the works.

If you don’t have historical data, and you want to plan for a new campaign next year, think of it two ways.

Top-down: How much budget can I set aside for a “test” campaign of a reasonable size, where there is no guarantee of positive results?

Bottom-up: Build a keyword list and get inventory from the engines, assume CTRs and CPCs, conversion rates, etc., and build a basic plan.

If you look at this from both a top-down and bottom-up approach, you’ll probably find that one approach makes more sense than the other, or that there’s a happy medium between the two.

Now back to business strategy. What happens if it’s not crystal clear? What if business units have different strategies? What if management isn’t giving specific orders to marketing as far as what profitability metrics reign supreme?

When we first went into planning this fall, there were cases where we didn’t have much explicit guidance around which metrics we should optimize our SEM programs to. So, once we built our base plan (based on our current strategy and historical data), we constructed a number of scenarios around it to help folks see how changing the ROI of our programs would result in corresponding shfts in cost, revenue and profit.

This is a mock-up of what it looked like:

This is a mock-up of SEM scenarios we call "ROI Bands"

ROI Bands

We call these “ROI bands” because they illustrated different levels (bands) of performance that can be achieved depending on the preferred strategy.

This is great because it allows management to see the trade-offs and pick the scenario that best suits the bias of the company going into the new year. Then, as budgets begin to settle, and PPC gets either more or less than the base plan asks for, you’ll already have managed expectations around new performance targets.

Before you get too gung-ho on this approach, you’ll want to stop for a moment and remind yourself (and others) that ROI bands have inherently low confidence. They are what-if scenarios and can’t be taken straight to the bank.

What makes this even trickier is that although you can put an asterisk on a number and flag it as low confidence, if it turns out next year that you can’t hit that number, nobody remembers the part about your initial estimate being “low-confidence.”

Here are two things you can do to protect yourself:

• When building ROI bands, be conservative
• See Reforecasting, above

Plan Early, And Plan Often

If you’re anything like us and you have multiple businesses (and internal customers) to support throughout the planning process, you’ll want to be very proactive with your planning communications.

Go ahead and set up face-to-face meetings with your constituents around the organization before the process even begins. Tell them that you’re starting to think about planning and want to know what their planning calendar looks like. Ask them if there are any big product initiatives in the coming year that you should be aware of. Ask what the business strategy is for next year, then ask again, and ask again during your next meeting.

Get the picture? Set up follow-up meetings where you can show them your plan drafts as you produce them. (Hint: People don’t like surprises in the planning process.)

And don’t forget the most important thing about The Plan. It will be wrong. You can’t avoid it, so just plan for it and you’ll be fine!

Enterprise PPC

It was interesting to get some very different takes on Industrial Strength SEM from the seasoned pros seated next to me on this panel, such as Frank Grasso, who deals with massive inventory-driven businesses like travel, retail, and events (tickets).

His sweet spot is optimizing from the ‘back-end’, integrating supply and demand to maximize the effectiveness of his customers’ campaigns. He has figured out how to manage and optimize, for example, when seats on a particular flight change value, or become unavailable, and to automatically change an SEM campaign accordingly. Great stuff.

By virtue of her role with Razorfish (Hey.. I used to work for them!), Rebecca Keen deals with huge consumer packaged goods (CPG) clients who have dozens of brands, working with them to achieve and maintain balance in their paid search programs.

She preached governance as the main driver of success for her clients, as the difficulties of keyword overlap and decision making loom large in her day-to-day work with CPG advertisers. I loved the part where she talked about RACI, a decision making framework I have used at Yahoo! and find very helpful in navigating complex corporate landscapes.

I did my soapbox presentation on valuation, because I can’t seem to get through a presentation without talking about it in nauseating detail (hint: it’s really important!). Make sure you get this right before you start buying clicks!

Other than that, my main message was that different SEM challenges require different approaches. Don’t get locked into a singular approach (inhouse vs. agency, build vs. buy) for every SEM problem. Use your finely-honed skills as a PPC ninja and make the best choice for your company depending on your particular needs, constraints, and priorities.

And, in the spirit of Rebecca’s RACI discussion, I had a riveting slide on forecasting workflow that I’m quite certain put at least one lucky attendee directly to sleep:

This workflow helps us manage PPC Planning and Re-forecasting

SEO & PPC – Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

The following day, I was on this panel, which turned out to be lots of fun. First of all, this is a topic I could discuss for hours (not that anyone would want that). Second, I was sitting alongside Tim Mayer and Brad Geddes, two guys who have been at this gig at least as long as I have. Finally, this was somewhat of a late entry in my schedule, so I didn’t have much time to pull a presentation together, adding a certain amount of excitement to the whole experience.

Tim talked about ways to leverage different data sources to help one channel (SEO) inform the other (PPC), and vice versa.

Among other significant endeavors, Tim used to run some of the largest properties in Yahoo! In fact, he was even my internal customer for a couple of years. Small world!

Tim also showed some results from a recent Google whitepaper that concluded that 89% of PPC clicks were incremental to the SEO referrals and adwords advertiser gets. He did a great job illustrating how this number might be just a bit overstated. Come to think of it, Tim did work for every major search engine on the planet, except for Google…

For me, I basically put one slide up and talked to it for about twenty minutes. If you’ve ever seen me speak, you’ve probably seen this picture before:

Paid and Organic CTRs Show Positive Correlation

I talked a lot about how we set up a test to answer the question: “Should we be buying our brand keyword if we already rank #1 organically?”

I emphasized that there are a number of ways to get at this answer, only one of which we tried. In our case, however, the results were fantastic, as you can see by the positive slope of the regression line in the graph. The positive slope means that when we bought the ad above our organic listing, we actually increased the click through rate of the organic listing. What could be better than that?

Brad tied up our panel nicely by looking at similar issues with non-branded keywords, and in fact, illustrated some of the other ways to get at this age-old problem.

The good news is, most advertisers now have the data to analyze this somewhat intelligently, they just need to commit to doing the work. You’ve come a long way, baby!

I do enjoy speaking on panels at conferences, and SMX is definitely one of my faves. We search marketers are an odd (but adorable) bunch, and it’s always a blast to get together with our brethren to talk search, tip a few drinks, and exchange ideas. Until next time, cheers!

In fact, we were back to square one with a last-ad model, the same one that’s been dominating our industry for what seems like forever. When I asked why we abandoned the obviously superior system, I was surprised by the answer I got.

Hard To Sell

The attribution model developed by our analytics team was quite elegant, apparently. It accounted for ad interactions from various marketing channels, it differentiated between views (impressions) and clicks, and even weighted ad interactions differently depending on where in the conversion stack they occurred.

The real problem was that while mathematically sound, the model was simply not sellable. That is, while the analytics group (and some others) believed that the model was valid, they simply couldn’t get the various groups in the organization to buy into it.

A Cautionary Tale

I’ve since corroborated this story with countless others in the industry and it’s unfortunately a common tale, particularly in large companies. In fact, it seems that the successful adoption of complex attribution models in big organizations is more the exception than the rule.

The ones who do have a successful track record seem to be the same companies that have statistical modeling in their DNA (think credit cards, insurance, finance, etc.) and thus may be comparatively comfortable with the idea of tinkering around with complicated attribution schemes within their marketing groups.

The lesson I learned is that while it seems a significant enough task to get the attribution model right from a mathematical and statistical perspective, in big firms, there’s a whole separate set of issues around getting buy-in so that any model can actually be successfully adopted and put into play.

Given the immense challenges of developing and selling a new attribution model internally, what’s a search marketer to do?

OK, here’s what you do:

1. Find a model you can sell internally
2. Test it in a (somewhat) controlled environment to validate it
3. Evolve your attribution model and repeat #1

Walk In A Straight Line

It may seem like a cop out, but try selling a mathematically inferior model internally as a first step. I hate to suggest this, and it certainly goes against my better judgment, but in a big corporation sometimes you just have to take one for the team.

Try a linear model that simply accounts for multiple ad events like impressions and clicks, and weighs them all equally. Think about it. Your current last-ad model completely ignores any ad interaction other than the last view or click before conversion.

Even if you’re wrong (which you are, by the way), you’ll be one step further away from your last-ad model, which means you’re one step closer to a model that actually makes sense.

Log Some Miles

If you’re feeling brave, here are some alternatives to the obviously flawed ‘linear’ model. First, try weighting views differently than clicks. How much? Try half! It’s wrong as well, but see above – it’s probably closer to reality than equal weighting.  Confident still?

Try a ‘geometric’ model. This model has ad interactions gaining weight as they get closer to conversion, with the differences in weight evenly distributed throughout the curve.  Simple enough to calculate, also flawed, but still fairly digestible.

Still hungry? How about a ‘logarithmic model’ that weights ad interactions exponentially more the closer to conversion they are. I’m not particularly bullish on this one, but depending on how statistically oriented your audience is, it might fly.

Some Examples of Attribution Curves

Test & Control

It may be necessary to validate the need for attribution before taking any model and trying to sell it internally. If this is the case (as it most often is), you should probably set up a test/control scenario where you can objectively evaluate the impact of additional ad exposure to users. There are many ways to do this depending on the type of business you have.

If you’re a publisher (like we are) it’s not too difficult to control a group of users and make sure they don’t see ads, then evaluate their behavior relative to users who do. If you’re an advertiser, you might segment users based on the number of ad exposures and validate that their behavior differs accordingly.

Now What?

The unfortunate truth is that, if you keep working on developing an appropriate attribution model for your business long enough, the complexity of the model will almost certainly exceed people’s ability to aptly comprehend it. That’s why it makes sense to start by getting people used to alternatives that they can understand.

If you move slowly away from a last-ad model, people will understand the inherent tension between a model that actually works, and one they can readily understand. At that point, they will likely come to accept the reality that a good model will probably only make sense to a statistician, and not a marketer. Once this acceptance takes place, the real work can begin.

After talking to some very qualified folks in the attribution management business, I’ve come to realize that there is no standard set of models that make sense for all, or even most businesses. Every business will require a different type of attribution model, and the best we can hope for now is a consistent framework that can be applied to each business problem, where the outcome is an attribution model that works for our particular business.

I’ve written about this in the past, and won’t re-hash here, other than to say that this might be a good time to bring in outside help if you haven’t already. I still maintain that marketers (like myself) aren’t qualified to cook up attribution systems. It’s like handing me the keys to a NASCAR rig and expecting me to compete in the Brickyard 400. Not gonna happen, people.

There is one thing, however, that my experience tells me. Just like search marketing, I believe we’re all going to be engaged in attribution management sooner or later, and just like search marketing, we’ll figure it out.

At many large companies, SEO is an uphill battle, so any victory should be fully celebrated. I asked what happened that enabled him to be so wildly successful in this case, and he told me there were three things that caused an SEO tipping point:

1. Executive Support
2. SEO involvement early in the project
3. SEO ownership of standards

Executive Support

As I’ve mentioned before, executive support is a prerequisite for SEO success in a big organization, so it’s great having leadership that is vocal about SEO.

As you may know, Yahoo! recently hired a new Chief Product Officer. He is a sharp, energetic leader who also happens to be a big fan of SEO – he mentions it at all-hands meetings, and even includes it as part of his monthly business reviews at CEO staff meetings. Since his arrival, many Yahoo! products are evolving with the imprint of his leadership.

One recent project involved a retooling of the building blocks of some of our media properties. The project, Yahoo! Publishing Platform, was meant to standardize publishing for our content-oriented properties such as news, sports, and finance, globally. News ended up being at the top of the list, and the product folks in News are huge fans of SEO.

Early & Often

While executive support is a necessary ingredient for SEO success, it’s not enough. I’ve written in the past about the approach to SEO that we try to take at Yahoo! Rather than auditing our Web properties once they’re built and trying to retool them for SEO purposes, we work to incorporate SEO into the products themselves throughout the design and implementation phases of development.

I’ve noted that we work this way out of necessity – once the sites are built and released, the teams that wrote the code generally disband and move on to other projects, reforming in different teams to build new products. So the audit-and-retool approach, while expensive and inefficient for most companies, doesn’t work at all for us.

As a result, products or sites we build are either released SEO-friendly or not, and they pretty much stay that way until they’re eventually replaced.

Building SEO Into The Product Development Cycle

The real challenge, then, is getting SEOs in the right place at the right time and giving them the proper audience and support so they can do their jobs. When we follow that recipe, sometimes the simple things can make a big difference.

By working together in the early (and late) stages of development, SEO and Product were able to incorporate SEO requirements into the product development cycle. One of the smart moves here was prioritizing a small number of key SEO requirements that we knew would make a difference.

Own Your Standards

There were several long-standing and well-known issues with our news sites that we sought to address in this release. First off, we knew that our URLs were a big problem for search engines. Long and non-intuitive, these beasts had long ago been identified as one of the main culprits on our SEO most-wanted list.

Also, our tags weren’t standardized or automated with SEO in mind. Finally, the architecture of our legacy publishing system allowed for duplicate content, a well-documented SEO problem. The key to solving these SEO problems was to bake SEO-friendly standards and conventions into the product so that published content can’t be SEO un-friendly.

In SEO terms, the content platform is very inflexible. URLs are automatically generated from article titles with fixed ranges for keyword count in the URL. Subdirectory structure is strictly limited by design. Title and description tags are generated automatically. Editorial and SEO approval of content and tags is completely centralized.

Yahoo! News' New URL Structure is Much More SEO-Friendly

From a product perspective, the initial features of the new sites are not major changes, but from an SEO point of view, they make an enormous difference. Now when articles are published, they generally appear with clean titles and URLs – globally. This was huge.

We’re talking triple-digit percentage increases in SEO traffic in some regions. Another great benefit of this standardization is that it eliminated a lot of the duplicate content out there. So we are now seeing large increases of SEO traffic on a significantly smaller number of pages. If you’re an SEO, that makes you smile.

What’s Next?

Editorial, that’s what. We’re in the process of hiring an editorial search lead for our media properties. In addition to working with editors on SEO-friendly titles for articles, this person can further the SEO cause by building and standardizing internal and external linking strategies.

Looking forward, such a resource could leverage search data to drive content development strategies, and also might assist in developing more robust standards for de-duplicating content on a more global basis.

In any case, how can you be sure you’re supporting the proper marketing initiatives with the appropriate marketing mix? How do you make budgeting decisions for each of the channels – search, display, email, affiliate marketing?

If you’ve been doing this a while like we have, you’ve probably got the basics down pat. You know how to support other marketing channels with search, how to engage with marketers from the respective businesses, and how to report out on results.

We’re very fortunate in that we’ve enjoyed a great deal of continuity in our DM group. I have the pleasure of working with some very talented counterparts in the other marketing channels and, as a group, we’ve been the beneficiary of some quite capable leadership. So the question arose some time ago, how can we raise the bar for our group?

One of the ideas that came up was to create a ‘Direct Marketing Board’, a type of Center of Excellence (CoE)– but not some figurehead kind of CoE where middle managers sit around and complain about upper- and lower-management, but one that actually makes a difference – one that makes real decisions that add value to the bottom line. One that can take decision making off of our leaders’ plates and move it closer to where the money is actually made and lost.

So, where to start?

The Direct Marketing Board or Center of Excellence (CoE)

First, your VP Marketing (or whoever sits on top of your marketing teams) needs to have buy in. This means that as a group, DM needs to have a track record. You wouldn’t want to throw a bunch of newcomers or people unfamiliar with each other into a CoE and expect them to formulate a cohesive strategy – these need to be seasoned marketing people who already trust one another. After all, at some point, you’ll be making decisions about who gets what budget, and for that you need folks who’ve been around the block together, preferably more than once.

Once you have executive support and a solid DM team, set up a meeting with the respective channel heads. Make it over lunch if you want, you’ll be there a while. During the first meeting everyone should cover their own channels and talk about how they work. Topics you’ll want to cover for each channel: Broad description (how it works, what you use it for – acquisition, retention, branding), what are the key metrics (KPIs) used to measure success, what are each channel’s particular strengths and weaknesses, and how you are currently budgeting/planning for it.

For the next (and subsequent) meetings, try pivoting from a world of marketing channels to a world of campaigns, events, and strategic initiatives. Pick an important upcoming event and talk about how each channel should support it. Dig into the details – talk about creative, budgets, flighting, which channels to (and not to) use.

What you’ll probably find out is that when you’re done, you’ve essentially built out a brief and a media plan for the event. Once it’s ironed out, use this as a blueprint for other events and campaigns. Pretty soon you will have built an entire process and practice around supporting company initiatives with DM.

Now that you have the blueprint, turn it into a Powerpoint presentation and deliver it to your VP as a group. There will be some minor tweaks as you gather feedback, but the intention here is to give something to your boss that he can take to his peers in the organization. The end-game is to give the DM group a more influential role in the planning stages of a campaign.

If you’re successful, when new events and initiatives come up, you’ll have a seat at the big kids’ table, and can thus drive some of the budget allocation and planning decisions of the supporting campaigns. By doing so you will create campaigns that are better informed than they would be without your expertise in media.

What Else Can The Direct Marketing CoE Do?

For one thing, since heads of marketing channels generally mange teams, the CoE can be used to decipher and handle teambuilding issues. This can range everywhere from troubleshooting staffing issues to creating formal cross-training programs. In either case, you’ll be better equipped to build and retain winning teams.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, you can build better reporting dashboards to show off your new cross-channel integrated goodness.

To summarize, we’ve covered three very good reasons to think about forming a Direct Marketing Board, or ‘DM CoE’:

1. Gain control over and drive planning and budgeting for campaigns and events
2. Tackle teambuilding and development issues with your peers
3. Build better and more integrated dashboards for cross-channel reporting

And, once you’ve solved all those problems and you’re still looking for something to do, then you can sit around and complain about upper- and lower-management.

I love these kinds of tales because they nod to the promise of search marketing – leveraging the comparatively precise nature of search data to inform other marketing channels in ways that only search can. And because I’m a search geek at heart, I get really excited when I think about ways to use search marketing for something other than just driving clicks and conversions.

Do The Easy Stuff First

When thinking about all the stories I could tell that pointed to integrated search campaigns, I decided to first take a tiny step back and think about my audience.

• What if some of these marketers hadn’t integrated search into their marketing efforts at all?
• What if search was sitting over in the corner all by itself, the wallflower of the media channels?
• What one thing could I tell everyone to do that they could take back to the office and actually implement?

Ah, yes…Search Retargeting! Search retargeting is something that marketers can buy from their search engine representatives fairly easily. You basically take your top keywords, hand them to your rep along with any display creative you’re either running or want to run, and off you go!

Users who have searched for your top keywords are then targeted out on the broader network with your display ads. Here’s the example I used. Suppose a user searched for “ncaa hockey championship” as in below:

If we were running a retargeting campaign using this keyword, then a user elsewhere on our site might see an ad such as this:

I’ve exploded the ad so you can see it better — it’s an ad for NCAA Hockey Championship gear at the Yahoo! Sports Shop. You can then track these users back to your site, using your analytics platform, where they normally perform much better than untargeted consumers of display media. This is the easiest way to ‘connect the dots’ with Search, especially if you’re already buying display media. Try it — you’ll like it!

Wagging The Dog

Once you’ve gotten a taste of integrated search marketing, you’ll be instantly hooked. So where will you get your next dose? Some time ago, we conducted offer testing using paid search, and it’s a story that I enjoy telling even now because most marketers still aren’t harnessing the power of search marketing in this way.

The story goes like this: I was working at an agency and we were trying to help a client determine the best offer to use for the holiday season that year. Should they use ‘free shipping’ or ‘we pay the sales tax’? We had tried to test the offers through our email channel but something had gone horribly wrong, either with the email list or the drop itself.

There was a sense of panic in the room as we looked at our inconclusive results and our seemingly limited options. I quietly smiled to myself and raised my hand. “Give me a week and I can tell you which offer will work better”, I said with confidence.

As the collective eyebrows raised, someone finally asked the question I was eagerly awaiting: “How are you going to do that?”. I explained that with paid search we could quickly build out these offers (and a control offer) and we could do some crude but fast testing to see which offer converted best to sale. We all agreed that conversion rate was the metric that mattered, and I ran off to put my plan into action.

A week later, we were sitting in the same conference room reviewing our test results. Sure enough, ‘Free Shipping’ was the hands-down winner as far as conversion rate went. But here’s the really cool part: We not only went with “Free Shipping” for our PPC campaigns that holiday season, we went with it for all media channels AND the site as a whole for the ENTIRE holiday season.

Paid & Organic, So Happy Together

I wrote a previous column about this a while ago, but I love this story so much I’m going to tell it again (and again), only this time much more concisely. This anecdote begins with the common question: “We already rank #1 organically for our brand keyword. Why would we ever buy it on PPC?”. While the answer can be different for everyone, we should be able to agree on how to find the solution.

Here’s how we did it.

Our goal was to track the clickthrough rates (CTRs) of both the organic listing and the paid link to see how the two links interact (looking at CTRs will tell you if you’re cannibalizing your organic traffic). We did this by estimating daily search volume for the keyword and tracking the click volume on both the organic and paid listings.

Once we were set up to measure this, we alternated periods of buying paid ads and then pausing them. Then we plotted these effective CTRs on a scatter graph by day and did a linear regression to see what the trend was.

Here’s what it looked like:

(Note: One of the key best practices that came out of this analysis was to make sure and differentiate your ad copy from your organic listing).

In our case, the paid ad actually drove more traffic to the organic listing! Who knew?! Depending on your business this may or may not be the case, but if you at least know how to find the answer, you can wrestle control of the conversation and guide it in a rational way.

There are many more examples of innovative ways to ‘connect the dots’ with search marketing by integrating it into your larger marketing initiatives, and we’ll continue to discover more exciting ways to leverage search data to make our marketing worlds better in the coming months and years. Until then, Happy Searching!

This type of tactic can turn the ‘head’ of your portfolio into more of a ‘tail’ and makes it work more efficiently for you. But if you’re like us, and you have super-sized SEM programs, how do you tackle this in a manageable way that will drive incremental profit to your group or company, and make you look like the PPC Superhero you’ve always dreamt of being?

Channel Your Inner Superhero

Today I’m going to focus on search network targeting as an example. This is one of the simpler targeting options to leverage, and if you can master this one, the others won’t pose too difficult a task.

First, let’s define the target. On both AdWords (for Google) and adCenter (for Bing & Yahoo!), you can, with some degree of accuracy, split out your search traffic from so-called “Owned and Operated’ (O&O) sources and syndicated sites (third-party sites whose search functionality is powered by the big engines).

For example on AdWords, for a given campaign, you can choose to have your keyword ads displayed on Google search only, or on Google search + search partners such as AOL, Ask, etc.

On Microsoft’s adCenter, the target is set at the ad group level, and there are three options: a)Yahoo & Bing b)syndicated sites only, or c)Yahoo & Bing and syndicated sites.

Either way, in order to take advantage of this, you’re going to want to duplicate parts of your portfolio. So where should you start, and where do you want to put the duplicates?

Digging In

As far as where to start, you’ll want to first hit the campaigns and ad groups that have your highest volume keywords in them. Reason being, once you start breaking up keywords, your data thins out pretty quickly. Also, duplication and the ensuing management takes a fair amount of work, so you’ll want to apply these efforts where they’ll bear the most fruit.

There’s the work involved in building out these duplicates, managing them, and added stress on APIs in bidding on duplicates. In our case, these desirable head keywords are spread throughout our portfolio, so in some instances we may duplicate entire accounts, rather than sifting through them to find the right combination of ad groups and campaigns.

Also, because these programs are very large, the duplicates will often live in new, separate accounts.

Going Once, Going Twice

Next, you’ll need some notion of how to bid these duplicates. On Google this is particularly important, because these two targeting options actually overlap (see above). But even on adCenter, you may want to make some assumptions about the relative value of each of the targets.

Hint: Sometimes core search performs better than syndicated search. Pick a percentage lift and apply it appropriately.

For our risk-averse friends who are feeling a bit queasy about changing bids too radically, start slowly (a few ad groups or campaigns) and get a feel for the relative difference in performance – then change your tactics accordingly.

Creating Synergy

Remember that the goal here is to separate out the traffic sources and optimize them individually. Once you’ve done so, and you’ve reached a stable state with each of the keyword instances, roll them back up and see what your metrics look like.

If you’re lucky, you’ve achieved some combination of efficiency and lift, and you’re better off than you were before. For example, if the profit/roi/revenue driven by the sum of both of the keyword instances is greater than the single instance was, congratulations!

Keep moving through your keyword portfolio from the head toward the tail, until the returns you see no longer justify the effort.

Once you’ve reached this point of diminished returns, you’ll want to turn your attention to one of the many other targeting options offered by the search engines. Match type, geo-target, day part, etc. Just take it from the top, rinse, and repeat!