Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about search without keywords. Recently, the topic came up again at SES San Jose in a keynote presentation from Nick Fox, Google’s business product management director for AdWords. In the presentation, Nick outlined where paid search could be in the next 5 to 10 years and covered two general topics—paid search without keyword terms and phrases and pay per conversion. In this post, I’ll cover the paid search part of his presentation. In my next post, I’ll look at the future of pay per conversion.

Why is search with no keyword terms important?

There are several important reasons why search without keyword terms has recently become important. Some of the reasons for this include:

Longer query length. According to a Hitwise news release, the number of 5+ search queries increased by 10% from January 2008 to January 2009. In the same time period, 2 word search queries decreased by 5%.

Unique search terms. According to Google, 20-25% of search queries in the last 6 months were new queries.

Increased searcher sophistication. In his keynote, Nick provided an example related to cashmere sweaters that demonstrated this point well. He stated in 2007, people searched for cashmere sweaters 47 different ways. In 2008, people searched for the same keyword phrase 73 different ways. It’s becoming a headache for advertisers to anticipate and react to so many different queries. Should advertiser prowess be measured based on mind-boggling attention to long query keyword detail?

Resistance to do-it-yourself advertising systems. Google recognizes that PPC advertising considerations (like keywords, ad copy, cost per click, etc.) can be cumbersome for some advertisers. New methods of connecting advertisers with searchers seem inevitable—especially for those advertisers who don’t like fiddling with self-serve systems.

What would no-keyword search look like?

In the keynote, Nick mentioned that keywords were used as a proxy for relevance. Conceptually, there is no reason an advertiser couldn’t achieve the same results without having to directly manage a keyword list. Down the road, Google wants to state outcomes and have machine-based learning and algorithms come up with the best method of achieving specific outcomes. In the case of no keyword search, an advertiser (like a retailer) would provide information on products, product descriptions, pricing, etc. and Google would use the information to find the most effective way to place ads in front of potential customers.

In his keynote, Nick provided an example related to plumbers: a plumber would provide a list his services and Google would figure out a way to appropriately advertise the plumber’s services. Here’s a possible example of a list of plumber services Google could draw from:

• Faucets
• Bath sinks
• Kitchen sinks
• Bathtubs and showers
• Toilets
• Water heaters
• Water softeners
• Drain pipes
• Sewer lines
• Garbage disposals
• Laundry centers
• Gas vents
• Gas meters
• Backflow prevention

The advantages of no-keyword search

All in all, there are several advantages of no keyword term search. They are:

• Efficiency for advertisers—there would be no keyword research component to a PPC advertising campaign.
• There could be better connections between searchers and advertisers on natural language queries.
• It would allow advertisers to better connect with consumers and capitalize on all relevant advertising opportunities.

These are obviously initial ideas and now Google needs to figure how to make no-keyword search work. According to Nick Fox, it will be some time before Google shares specific product details. Sharing the concepts with the advertising community at this stage doubles as a feedback mechanism and a trial balloon: if too many people hate it, Google can modify its approach. We sure look forward to hearing more on this.

If you’re interested in reading more or chiming in on this topic, check out the Google groups keynote forum.

There’s no shortage of criteria for choosing a good agency. Reports, ratings, opinions, and referrals are traded freely and openly as you might expect in any technical business where appropriate vendor selection is paramount. A lot of the information is published, so anyone can refer to it.

By contrast, when talk turns to what makes for a good client – and a good agency-client relationship – a lot of the talk stays in whispers, behind the scenes. I’m hoping this article will bring some of this out into the daylight. For a project to succeed, both the agency and the client need to be “good.”

By the way, it’s important to state that I have many good clients in my mind as models as I write this. It’s not a bash session;  it’s meant to be helpful. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say the behind-the-scenes talks are more often about the horror stories. In the agency world, you tend to keep your good clients to yourself.

In my experience, several criteria make for a good client. In this article, I’ll share five points that we believe lead to an effective client-agency relationship.

1. Budget considerations

The client’s budget has to be appropriate for their industry category. You may run into significant problems if competitors spend approximately $40,000 per month in PPC advertising, and your potential client only has a budget of $10,000 per month.

Client budgets also have to be appropriate for our agency and margins have to make sense. We definitely factor highly competitive industries and/or complex accounts into the budget equation.

2. Can we make a difference?

Some industries are more competitive than others. Given factors like the competitive landscape, account complexity, account granularity, etc. – we ask if we can honestly make a difference for the client in their specific industry.

3. Good client rapport
   • Are key contacts easy to get along with?
   • Are they willing to listen to ideas?
   • Will they have internal resources to implement suggestions?
   • Are there significant internal barriers like poor reporting?
   • Are clients forthcoming with internal communications and information?

From the outset, we want to ascertain if the client will be easy to work with. It’s one thing for clients to be demanding; it’s quite another for clients to be the quintessential “difficult person.” It’s obviously better to figure this out before your prospects become your clients. Below are some questions that run through my mind when I think about good client relationships. It’s not always easy to pinpoint all of them. But with a few conversations before a contract is signed, you can get a general feel for the company, and the type of people you’ll be working with.

In general, projects are projects and a proactive approach to setting expectations and clarifying management styles at the outset will (a) help both parties to decide if they can work together at all; (b) help both parties figure out how to work most productively together.

4. Have they got time for you?

If a client cannot respond to urgent questions, or chooses to respond very slowly for a whole variety of reasons, it’s probably because they have multiple responsibilities. Great people with great intentions sometimes think they have time to get involved, but really don’t. When they’re able to delegate project oversight to a more appropriately paid staff member who is able to focus and deal in routine matters without feeling overqualified, the work routine can usually proceed comfortably.

Unfortunately, this can also lead to serious trouble if the right people are not in place. Many of those who find themselves picking up such delegated roles are ill-prepared for them. Smaller or more traditional companies may use a general administrative person to handle the agency’s work. Unfortunately, relationships with totally untrained individuals can be nearly unworkable. (To give one example, we were grilled on our SEO acumen by a technician in an unrelated line of work, asking us if we knew how to get them on a “search engine called GoDaddy.”) In any case, whether the person has time for the project and a reasonable aptitude for it are determining factors in project success.

4b) Have they got too much time for you?

It seems that a balance tends to work best. We’ve never had luck with clients who are always too busy to respond. But those who have nothing better to do than to call you constantly to review results can impede the actual momentum on the project. There is no nice way of saying it: it’s just a fact of life in any relationship. Too much time together can be as dysfunctional as not enough time.

5. Are they a know-it-all?

In some cases, we’ve had clients go beyond merely debating strategy and tactics, to second-guessing and showing off their knowledge. Clearly, a knowledgeable client is a good client. A client who structures the whole engagement to race their own personal skills against yours is using the project as some kind of outlet for their own needs and insecurities. Ideally, we’d like to be working to “win” against the client’s competitors, and our competing agencies, not the client directly. It almost goes without saying that working together is the goal. You surely don’t pay someone to “lose” to you, unless you’re the CEO of a major corporation and the game is golf.

In conclusion, it is extra work to ensure a productive work environment before starting client work, but it’s a must! Feel free to chime in with your own getting good client suggestions.

In some cases, clients are not receptive to new PPC account ideas. It’s even possible for PPC ideas to be kiboshed before they’ve had a chance to make it into campaigns. In this article, I’ll discuss some client obstacles and some important factors involved in getting good ideas incorporated into PPC accounts. For the purposes of this article, here are some examples that may elicit objections from clients:

• Content optimization – When we attempt to drive traffic from the content network.
• Bid changes – Objections may occur when we try to increase bids to test higher ad positions.
• Landing page testing - Here, we like to try revamped or new landing pages. In this particular example, I’ve had clients swear up and down there’s nothing wrong with blatantly bad landing pages. Sometimes, people take suggestions personally especially if pages have been revamped or tested internally.
• Campaign budget increases – Clients may fuss when we dramatically increase budgets to ensure we’re getting the most PPC coverage possible.

From the get-go, it’s worth mentioning a couple of things:

1. Sometimes good ideas don’t always happen because of the workflow with the client and that determines whether blueprints turn into implemented action items. Clients sometimes have a certain thoughts related to product lines or services that they consider important and their number one objective. In these cases, it can be harder to convince them of new ideas especially if it moves them away from what they perceive is important to their company. Also, clients can be overly concerned about revenue goals and not want to muck around with accounts. They’re scared to jeopardize the company’s bottom line even though often testing yields improved results in PPC accounts.
2. The biggest mistake is to assume you don’t have to sell when working with clients. As SEMers, we are constantly convincing clients to think a different way or try a different tactic or approach in accounts. You may not be selling a specific product or service per se, but sales skills of some sort almost always come into play. People have to do it within organizations, as well as within the agency-client relationship.

In the rest of this article, I’ll suggest ways to get clients to open up to new PPC ideas. The tips include: 1) client relationship / demonstrated expertise and 2) solid project management skills.

Client relationship and demonstrated expertise

Sometimes, it’s the client relationship which doesn’t allow you to move forward with ideas. Clients may not be convinced you are equipped to make significant improvements in accounts. Just because you have secured a contract, it does not mean you’re done in terms of selling yourself or your company. At the beginning of a project, it’s important to demonstrate that a company has made the right decision to invest in your company. In the initial stages, I try to secure some quick-wins. For example, I’ll tweak ad copy to show some relatively quick account improvements and demonstrate we’re headed in the right direction.

From there, obviously additional and consistent improvement over the course of a contract is key for the client relationship to continue to flourish. Client trust increases through expertise, communications, bottom-line results and tangible account effort. Don’t be surprised if clients love you more, and listen to your ideas, if they can see evidence of significant activity. This includes not only account work, but insightful reporting, interim commentary and asking relevant questions on a regular basis.

Solid project management skills

Use project management skills as method of further solidifying trust and gaining buy-in. When we implement campaigns, we sometimes roll PPC initiatives out in stages. Also, along the way, we are obviously tweaking and often add new ad groups and campaigns (as we determine what is performing in accounts). The various implementation times and dates can be confusing so good project management skills are essential. I dedicate quite a bit of time to ensuring projects are running smoothly. There are obviously a variety of project management tools available on the market, but the ones I use are quite simple. They are:

1) Basecamp – for project management, communications, budget tracking & reporting

2) Excel – for budgeting

Harry Beckwith’s great book Selling the Invisible reminds us that we need to make our service relationships more tangible, or we won’t get proper credit for everything we’ve done. Good luck with your PPC advertising!

As goes search, so goes paid search, at least in the sense that nobody would click on paid links near search results unless compelled by search engine results in the first place. So, changes in how people interact with search engines can affect where and how they search next year and in the future. As a paid search advertiser, you don’t want to get caught flat-footed so I thought it would be to examine emerging search user behaviors and emerging search technologies.

Today is not much different from ten years ago in the sense that many users still experience serious holes in the search experience. As always, search engines are addressing these holes as quickly as their resources and foresight allow.

Hole #1: Real time search

In general, Google and other search engines are great for getting information and do a fairly good job updating rapidly but in some cases don’t update rapidly enough. What if you want information on something that has happened in the recent past? Like the last 30 minutes? Although search result pages pull information from Google News for added timeliness, the results on a search results page can be from very different time frames. Google has a few tools in its arsenal but until recently, they had serious limitations, enough so to make it justifiable to say that Google can’t really help users with many fast-moving topical searches. It’s no secret that this accusation gained ground after Twitter got good at it.

Let’s give Google some credit. Marketing professionals, in particular, have long followed Google’s search trend information offerings such as Google Insights for Search (formerly called Google Trends). Google Hot Trends (formerly called Google Zeitgeist, and matched by many of their search engine competitors over the years) has often been the closest Google has come to offering real time information about hot searches.

Google Insights for Search has become increasingly robust, but is still a long way from the robust, query-able product many power users would like to see.

Meanwhile, Google Hot Trends seems poorly connected to the actual fast-breaking searches initiated by users. For example, the other week a hot trend was “sweeping.” But this would be hooked up to conventional SERP’s containing topics related to housekeeping, baseball and a “dust plume sweeping off Libyan shores.” That’s totally out of context. Advantage, Twitter.

More recently, the company has also sought to publicize new real world applications of its vast search technology and user query stream, almost as if to say “we not only have a handle on fast-moving information, we’re able to take it up a notch to help save lives, etc.” An example would be Google’s flu (and other health issue) outbreak tracking capability based on the rise of queries in specific geographic locations.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve noticed that Twitter has been able to fill the real time search hole, forcing Google to play catch-up. Conversations on Twitter can provide insight and allow people to easily infer subject matter meaning. For marketers, it’s certainly helpful to understand what consumers are thinking about and alert features can help marketers monitor their brands and stay current on relevant topics.

Hole #2: Little leverage of circles of influence

To make important decisions, people tend to turn to people they trust. The conventional search engines do a poor job of providing recommendations from trusted sources. Google and the other engines are good at helping consumers find a chiropractor in their neighborhood, but what about finding a chiropractor your friends use and like?

Google and Yahoo are increasingly integrating rich results (such as Yelp reviews) into search results, but some review sites are generic and you may not belong to them or trust the people giving the reviews as they aren’t your peers.

Enter a new service called Aardvark (also called Vark). Via instant messenger service, Aardvark allows you to ask it any question and it will try to find you an answer within your network (network is defined as your friends, the people your friends are connected to and your selected groups). While in San Francisco, we used the service to find an inexpensive Chinese restaurant in Chinatown for 12 people. We got an answer in about 7 minutes. Take a look at Danny Sullivan’s in depth write up on Aardvark for more specific information on the service.

The implications of this are pretty huge. Here are a few.

If marketers know what people are thinking and looking for, their ads will be more targeted and annoy fewer non-prospects. This could lead to better results and stronger ROI from marketing efforts. Along with that, there could be potential downsides familiar to any seasoned SEM. Fake personas? Paid endorsements?   Potential advertising opportunities on Aardvark and Twitter. To me, it sounds like there are big opportunities to target more specifically and such opportunities are obviously tremendous for marketers. What would this look like? CPC model? CPA model?

Google is at a delicate moment in its life cycle and must innovate to keep ahead. They’ll need to think about changes to the search scene carefully. Will there be an acquisition? Will Google see a piece of their pie eaten by other players in the new search game? If search changes a lot, there is no guarantee Google can grow revenue By staying on the comfortable path they’ve been on. Will they try to defend the old status quo with a slight modification of Ten Blue Links? Or change, and stop growing revenue?

The likelihood that people trust their own networks is only rising as technology is developed to take old, largely offline word-of-mouth processes and accelerate them with increasingly well-tuned social network intelligence engines. Facebook may have benefited from the hype surrounding that potential, but first movers don’t always get things right. Second and third movers in this space have enormous potential to create more clutter-free bonds among like-minded members. Research shows, in any case, that consumers are looking to tap into real, trusted, peer recommendations on products and services across the board, from a stick of gum to an expensive piece of business software. Indeed, it’s these kinds of sources that drive buying decisions.

Brand awareness campaigns and disruptive advertising campaigns are locked in a struggle with increasingly message-resistant prospects “hiding out” in these digital treehouses. The big mistake many companies are already making is trying to “infiltrate” or “advertise all over” new media that will be based on unbiased information exchanges and tight bonds of trust. There are many opportunities for companies to enter these spaces with permission, and to place commercial messages where warranted. Unfortunately, those who don’t get it will ruin their reputations by overstepping their bounds.

All in all, there’s a real shift going on with real-time search, what people are chatting about on Twitter, etc. We obviously don’t know what this looks like yet and there are certainly interesting times ahead. At the very least, we should ask these three questions, without necessarily having clear answers yet:

1. What will compel people to choose search engines like Google as a central resource in the future? If Google tries to cling to its traditional layouts as a means of maintaining the status quo revenue-wise, will people begin drifting away to other search tools?

2. Wherever they search, how receptive will users be to paid ads? If they aren’t receptive, will ad rates fall?

3. What will paid search advertisers need to change about their strategic mindset in 3-5 years?

A couple of our paid search columnists have offered some great tips on generating ad copy. I’m going to build on this and talk about gearing ad copy to the consumer buy cycle. By targeting specific stages, advertisers can increase relevancy by delivering appropriate messages at the right time in the buy cycle. In this article, I’ll outline the various buy cycle stages and provide some ad examples (fictional) related to “on demand publishing.”

Stage 1 – Awareness

While the right ad copy helps address buyers at the appropriate stage, it’s definitely the case especially at the awareness stage that “just showing up” can actually influence the consumer’s progress through all of the cycles. If a prospect is researching at an early stage and a certain brand fails to show up in the first few search results (paid or unpaid), that’s a lost opportunity to gain a foothold in an early-stage customer’s mind. In other words, don’t discount the benefit of simply showing up for your “core” terms.

In general, at the awareness stage, a prospect begins to think about a need and to identify the existence of solutions. They may also begin to formulate search queries in their mind. For example, an author wants to immediately connect with the marketplace, and is aware that there are various print-on-demand services that facilitate transactions. The author suspects there are some vendors that offer both printed and ebook versions of books.

A number of search queries begin forming in her mind. Some are driven by brands like Lulu.com and Cafepress that she’s already come across before. Others are more general as she intends to research the field overall before settling on any one vendor.

The author’s “early” awareness stage likely started years ago: in a previous job, as a customer purchasing a t-shirt through Cafepress, reading press mentions of Lulu.com, or other “lateral” forms of awareness. Also, traditional advertising like television ads or direct mail pieces could have planted the awareness seed. This also points to the need for integrated strategies related to PR, SEO, PPC, traditional advertising, etc.

Stage 2 – Information search

This stage is a fascinating and largely untapped area for paid search marketers. Many focus too heavily only on late-stage keywords. Yet there are likely to be ads showing up on early-stage words, too. You can take a couple of approaches here: you could send consumers to comparison or informational pages on your site, or you could make yourself more aware of the publications and resources that are supplying information to consumers, and try to gain editorial traction in these, become a sponsor, or show up on them using placement targeting. Here are some examples of ad copy related to “on demand publishing” appropriate for this stage:

On Demand Publishing
Comparison info & more.
Get buying tips & average costs.
www.PrintOnDemand.com/information

Print on Demand Reviews
Compare top companies.
Get user reviews and more!
www.PrintOnDemand/reviews

Stage 3 – Alternative evaluation

In this stage, consumers have completed informational searches and are now considering several specific options. Here, consumers consider specific information related to specifications, cost, brands, and how the products or services make them feel in general. Here is some sample copy for this stage:

CafePress Print on Demand
Cheap printing costs. 2 day turn
around time. Worldwide shipping.
www.PrintOnDemand.com/cafepress

Lulu.com Print on Demand
Quick & easy account set up.
Get paid every 2 weeks.
www.PrintOnDemand.com/lulu

In general, it can be tricky to figure out what information to include in ads (for example if your company has many features and/or benefits to choose from). If you don’t know what resonates with your buyers, try testing one against the other (in an A/B or multivariate test) to determine which ones work best for your product or service.

Stage 4 – Purchase decision

This is where people decide they want to do business with you (good job!). In this stage, people have decided to move forward with making a specific purchase. In this stage, try special offers or discounts to seal the deal. Here’s a sample of ad copy for this stage:

Lulu.com Print on Demand
15% off print on demand services.
Limited time offer. Order today!
www.PrintOnDemand.com/buy_lulu

Stage 5 – Post purchase behavior

The final stage where the consumer decides how they’ll react to the product or service in the future. This is key because depending on a customer’s experience, they may decide to transact with you again in the future. To encourage this, ensure your back end is in order by having a streamlined and efficient check out process. Also, don’t engage in tactics that could agitate customers like automatically opting buyers into email lists. We all know it’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.

Many of us in the industry agree, it’s important to think about creative strategies to broaden out spend and reach and start showing up on earlier-stage searches. Sometimes, clients want to shut off early-stage words because they don’t appear to be performing. This points to a larger problem: convincing clients to invest more in early stage words.

Search marketers are pretty good at claiming credit for online sales, and they’re getting better at measuring phone sales as well. However, there’s a huge amount of activity in brick-and-mortar stores, in terms of walk-in sales in the offline world, which is not properly attributed to online search. How can we get some of the well-deserved credit when our online campaigns contribute directly to offline sales?

Keeping tabs on conversions in a strictly online environment is pretty straightforward. The waters get muddy when companies want to understand how online search affects offline conversions. This article won’t attempt to solve all attribution problems, but will highlight some metrics and provide a few tips for you to get a better gauge on people who search online (through either paid or organic channels) and make purchases offline.

Is proper attribution important?

The simple answer is yes! Offline retail sales continue to dwarf online retail sales. U.S online retail sales currently make up about 5% of all retail transactions. Other markets have fallen behind projections made earlier this century: in the UK, online sales continue to lag at 3.5% of total retail sales.

At the same time, search is rapidly becoming the most important driver of online sales. According to Forrester Research’s annual Shop.org report, retailers estimated that 35% of their sales were motivated by internet search. Online activity is a huge driver of offline conversions. Without improved measurement, though, too many retailers are just guessing at the exact impact of search in the offline world. Of course, conversion figures vary by industry category so it’s a good idea to get to know your industry.

Relevant metrics & tactics

In this section, I’ll list some relevant metrics with tips on how to use them to gauge offline conversions. In many cases, it’s difficult to close the loop and link search activity to actual sales (for more information see my last article, Paid Search – Tips on Closing the Loop). The following data can provide insight and help paint a better overall picture offline conversions than if you didn’t refer to the data.

Order online & pick-up offline. To get a good idea of offline activity, a good place to look at is at your order-online-and-pick-up-in-store-data. This requires the retailer to have a specific program of this nature. This is a good place to start as the data is precise (other metrics will be unable to provide exact numbers) and will specifically tell you how many people searched online and then purchased in a brick-and-mortar store.

Store locator page. This one usually applies to larger brands with multiple offline locations. People who want to visit a particular store tend to seek information on store locator pages. As you know, for pages to be effective, they should provide relevant store information like “find a store near you,” store hours, directions, phone numbers, etc. and should be easily found on your site.

Time spent on site. In general, the longer someone spends on your site, the more likely they’re interested in your product or service. We’re currently working with a large company that sells consumer electronics. In this category, we know a large majority of online searches result in offline transactions. The website is well-suited to the “research online, buy offline” crowd, with deep information about the product lines. We know if someone searches for camera information for more than 15 minutes that they’re interested in cameras. Let’s not sugar-coat things, though. As online marketers, we would prefer to close the loop definitively; we would prefer that the prospect bought online. Websites that are “too good” at driving people to physical stores don’t do the online marketing department any favors. Conversion improvement efforts are warranted so the customer is spending more than just time online.

Contests, loyalty programs, and membership in clubs can be a decent alternative to an actual transaction. In that case, at least you’ve gained a permission-based asset. But again, that pales in comparison with a sale, which generates cash to defray the marketing costs and creates a permission asset.

Queries with geographic qualifiers. Some queries containing geographic qualifiers indicate offline purchase intent. For example, if someone is searching for the query “dentist in West Vancouver” they’re more than likely looking for a dentist appointment in a particular geographic location. The type of insight you get will depend on your industry category and may not be as relevant in other categories so be careful when examining terms.

Local search. On a similar note, many times local paid search campaigns (targeted to a specific area) are designed to drive offline purchases. For example, if the term “dentist in West Vancouver” was targeted to West Vancouver and was designed to drive traffic, it is probably driving a high proportion of your phone appointments or walk in traffic. Some Yellow Pages advertisers use dedicated phone numbers for their campaigns. Are you doing the same on the search side? If not, you’re not keeping track of the campaign’s impact. But in terms of walk-in traffic, only post-purchase surveys and other imperfect means will help you get a sense of the campaign’s impact (see below).

Promo codes. To track offline conversion, create a coupon or other search specific promotion that’s only redeemable in the store (if appropriate). Customers can write down or print special codes that they can redeem in-store.

Focus groups and post purchase surveys. Run a focus group to get a better idea of how your buyers shop. Also, after people make purchases online, ask for their feedback regarding a post purchase survey to get more information on buying behavior and offline impact.

Many of these measurement methods are rough guides rather than precise and predictable. To borrow a phrase from Avinash Kaushik, marketing shouldn’t be a faith-based initiative. But to track offline activity generated by online search, you will need a tiny bit of faith to continue your campaigns once you have some decent proof of their effectiveness as compared with other marketing methods.

If you stitch the above suggestions and tactics together, you can get a good idea of how your search marketing efforts contributed to offline conversions. Good luck!

Although paid search is far more trackable than many media – even online display advertising – many paid search campaign managers have difficulty tying detailed paid search data to actual sales. This is particularly true with long-sales-cycle campaigns, high touch lead generation campaigns, and campaigns that are designed to drive phone sales. Often, such campaigns track the cost of a lead or another metric that doesn’t necessarily tie them back to actual sales figures to get a sense of true conversions. This poses a problem in that uneven lead quality can lead to poor decisions in bidding, keyword selection, and so on.

In this article, I will discuss several ways companies can effectively attribute sales (or close the loop) in lead generation and phone sales campaigns.

Before getting started on this, you’ll need to:

1. Make sure you are equipped to track. This may sound silly but many companies are still not tracking their online initiatives. With easy-to-use tools like Google Analytics, there’s really no excuse for not tracking paid search campaigns (or other online marketing efforts). Some website developers might also create havoc with redirects or content management systems that don’t fully pass identifying information from an analytics program (for example, the long gclid string from Google Analytics that contains, in encoded form, a wealth of data about the click that will be used to drive data collection about that user’s session and, hopefully, subsequent sessions). In such cases, there’s no substitute for nagging and repeating yourself
2. Track appropriate metrics. To do this, identify solid goals and link them to appropriate metrics. You’ll usually identify a primary goal that’s tied to revenue in some fashion. If your company is attempting to get people to fill out an application form, a suitable metric would be to track completed application forms. Other metrics would not provide as clear a picture than if the metric is tightly associated to campaign goals. Secondary campaign goals are OK (don’t have too many of these), but make sure you understand the significance of such goals. In the example above, a secondary goal could be to track people who reach the second stage of an application process, while not necessarily completing it. In some companies, it might be a useful indicator of lukewarm interest from a prospect. In other situations, the connection between such interest and actual revenues would be low so the secondary goal should be given less credence in the campaign adjustment process.

Lead generation campaigns: lead quality is paramount!

All too often, these campaigns track cost per lead (CPL) and don’t tie information back to sales. In such a campaign, the information below is some data you may see:

Ad group 1

• Cost per month: 10K
• Leads per month: 35
• Cost per lead: $285.71

Ad group 2

• Cost per month: 10K
• Leads per month: 350
• Cost per lead: $28.57

Which one is performing better? Based on the above information, based on CPL, one may assume ad group 2 is performing better than ad group 1. One may even axe ad group 1 in favor or ad group 2. But the picture is actually incomplete. If we had taken a look at actual sales data, we would have learned the following:

Ad group 1

• Conversions (purchases) = 25
• Revenue from conversions = $100,000

Ad group 2

• Conversions (purchases) = 3
• Revenue from conversions = $1,000

So which is performing better now? Ad group 1 had a higher CPL but also a higher number of conversions and revenue attributed to conversions. If you had selected ad group 2, your ad group would have made $1000 as opposed to $100,000 for the same amount of money spent (10K).

Sound like an extreme example? Well, depending on the searcher’s intent, as represented by different keywords, and the business model, it’s not uncommon. Take a business model with a very narrow buying population, people who must be interested in the “pro” version of a particular kind of expensive software. The leads from one set of keywords are converting beautifully to sales, whereas the leads from another set of keywords are converting at nearly 0% because the campaign doesn’t make it clear enough that the software is not inexpensive or free, and because the keywords in this second group are too generic, targeted to a very broad audience. It may be possible to proceed with the second group, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, by using some negative keywords and changing ad copy. But the second group is inherently worse than the first for this particular target audience.

Integration to incorporate revenue data into reports We couldn’t have had the above conversation without those revenue figures, then. Without them, we would have been flying blind. Here are several options to tie lead information to actual sales data by pulling paid search information into CRM systems. Using various CRM systems, Omniture, HitBox (HBX), Clicktracks, Webtrends and Google all offer options to link lead and sales information. In the case of Google, they allow integration with Salesforce to provide information on opportunities generated from Google AdWords like the number of prospects and closed/won business.

Phone sales

The same can be said for phone sales. If campaign data is not tied to revenue, you’re only guessing at what’s effective and what’s not effective. Typically, advertisers underspend on quality clicks when they’re doing a poor job of tracking paid search’s impact on phone sales. Enter the call tracking system. Several companies use JavaScript code to dynamically change the phone number (so there are different phone numbers for different keywords and/or ad groups) when someone enters your website via a pay-per-click ad. Some much more inexpensive tracking solutions close the loop with ID codes that customers see on their page. Again these are generated with Javascript code that is associated with a particular user and their user session (including the relevant data from inside a paid search campaign, such as keyword.

Here’s a procedure I recommend to tie phone sales to actual sales figures (inexpensive solution):

• After selecting a solution vendor, do some brief customization work and install code on your web site
• Customer calls to make a phone purchase
• Phone rep requests page ID from customer and enters info into system with ID
• Periodically, information is sent over to the manager of the paid search campaign (such as members of our team here at Page Zero). In long sales cycle campaigns, without any major reason to make daily adjustments, every 1-2 weeks is fine for frequency
• The campaign manager goes into the back end and inputs the phone sales data into a conversion tracking system
• Presto! The loop is closed

Good luck closing your paid search marketing loops!

We’re all pretty familiar with the well reported search landscape of the US/UK. But, in other parts of the world, the search engine landscape is very different. In this article, I’ll focus on China, Japan and Russia. The goal of this article is to present PPC opportunities in counties that are not Google-centric and provide numbers associated with larger players. At the end of the article, I’ll highlight several general international PPC considerations. For this article, where information is not cited, I’ve pulled information from the Global Search Report 2007.

China

In China, e-commerce and online payment platforms are well developed and have a large number of users. The numbers will soon surpass US figures and, this year alone, Chinese marketers will continue to grow spend at approximately 8+% GDP. According to Analysys International, the Chinese search engine market is expected to see a compound annual growth of 30+% from 2006 to 2010. Within 10 years, China is expected to be the most important online ad and commerce market in the world.

The numbers:

In China, Baidu is considered the leading search engine. According to China IntelliConsulting Corporation (CIC), the market penetration figures for 2008 are:

• Baidu – 60.9%
• Google – 27%
• Sogou – 3.1%

Interesting facts:

• Baidu’s early success is attributed to its MP3 search engine.
• With Baidu, there are various well known controversies regarding corruption. One of the big ones is strong players must have strong governmental relations which may translate to foreign companies (like Google) never having equal footing in the Chinese market.
• On Baidu, issues related to poor search quality have also been documented.

Japan

Japan has one of the highest Internet penetrations worldwide at 67.7% (the US is sitting at approximately 70%). Japan has approximately $5.7 billion in the online advertising market out of a global market estimated at $45 billion. By 2011, Internet advertising is projected to grow to 755.8 billion Yen (approximately 7.5 billion USD) including approximately 128.4 billion Yen (approximately 1.28 billion USD) for mobile ads & 226.5 billion Yen (approximately 2.26 billion USD) for PPC ads.

The numbers:

In Japan, Yahoo! is predominant. The Japanese market share breakdown is as follows:

• Yahoo! – 76%
• Google – 5.4%

In July 2008, ComScore showed Yahoo! Japan had ten times as many monthly page views (21.9 billion) than Google (2.2 billion) and almost twice as many monthly unique Japanese visitors (Japan – 46 million & Google – 26 million). In terms of search volume, one can only speculate as Japanese search engines don’t disclose search volume figures.

Interesting facts:

• In Japan, more than half of the Internet users access the web via mobile devices.
• Japan is at ranked No. 3 in terms of total web population at 94 million. This is the same as the web populations of Germany and the UK combined.

Russia

Internet penetration in Russia is about 25%. According to ComScore: “The Russian Internet market has been experiencing rapid development, with its audience growing 25 percent during the past year”. In Russia, search related ads revenue expected to rise from $200 million in 2007 to approximately $1 billion by 2010.

The numbers:

In Russia, the largest search engine is called the Yandex (contained within a web portal). According to ComScore, the two predominant players in the Russian market are:

• Yandex – 47.4%
• Google – 34%

Interesting facts:

• In 2006, Google had a 5% market share and have since managed to capture one-third of the Russian paid search market.

Marketing considerations for international PPC

Here are some points to consider if you’re thinking of advertising internationally:

If you’d like to target international markets, it’s smart to use a company located in the specific geographic area. A company with “boots in the ground” will have knowledge in language, culture and marketing jargon and will be able to “localize” content and not just translate it from one language to another.

Currently, there a good deals to be had in other countries. For example, clicks costs are cheaper on the Yandex and Baidu than on Google in the US/UK. It may make sense to look abroad for other opportunities (if it makes sense for your business).

In markets like China & Russia, the government is an important consideration. They have been known to interfere in business. Having said this, China’s government seems to be encouraging and supporting Internet and technology related industries.

Good luck with your international PPC initiatives!

Mona Elesseily is director of marketing strategy at Page Zero Media, focusing on paid search campaigns and conversion improvement. She’s also the author of Page Zero’s Mastering Panama: A special report on Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform (August 2007). The Paid Search column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

I’ve been thinking a lot about landing pages lately. Last time, I talked about getting multivariate landing page testing straight. Today, I’ll look at a specialized offer technique that employs what I’ll call a Pain Reliever Page (PRP). A PRP is problem-based (or pain-specific). It addresses a specific consumer issue and attempts to alleviate a consumer pain point. The page, if well executed, taps into the psyche of a buyer and convinces them to make a purchase. In this article, I’ll outline key steps in designing a PRP and provide short examples from Apollo Health. (Fortunately for the marketer, in medical fields, the pain felt by prospects is often all too real and physical.)

Research consumer issue(s) for your product/service

The first step in this process is to uncover problems or pain points that are reaching the point of frustration for your prospect. Below, I’ve provided a few suggestions on how to gain insight. Some companies hire market research companies to do this work but, with a little elbow grease, you can do it on your own. I prefer primary sources of data as the information is specific to your customers and your product and/or services.

Feature and benefit speak The next step is to phrase USPs in feature/benefit speak. Here is an example of feature/benefit speak for Apollo Health. On the landing page, we highlighted features and tied them back to specific consumer benefits. Take a look at the following examples:

BLUEWAVE® (Apollo Health’s blue light technology) produces 100% of the recommended blue light for maximum benefit, so you’ll feel better faster.

BLUEWAVE® does not produce damaging ultraviolet light, so it’s very safe to use.

Apollo Health PPC strategy

As a part of our PPC strategy, we designed landing pages that spoke to elements such as depression, SAD, jet lag, sleep disorders, etc. In our PPC account, we added issue-related terms (like “depression”, “seasonal affective disorder”, etc. to our campaign. After running tests, we found the depression and the SAD ad groups converted best. Take a look at the following examples:

• Depression converted at 1:24 spend/sales
• SAD converted at 1:10 spend/sales

Here are some additional points to consider:

• In general, PPC is an excellent test medium. If you’re unsure, test different ideas and simply discontinue advertising if ad groups do not convert. We’ve uncovered some killer PPC strategies using this type of testing.
• We were able to determine the success of the ad groups after one month of testing. The length of tests will depend on account/ad group volume. You may have to run tests for a longer period of time to for statistical significance.

When it comes to developing landing pages that address consumer pain points, you shouldn’t guess at what pain points are. In addition, it’s clear that your competitors will be going after the most obvious, generic benefits: if you have a weight loss product or system, sorry, but it won’t cut it if you simply tout the benefit of “losing weight.” If possible, drill down and get more specific and granular. It helps greatly to use research methodologies – even informal ones – to provide additional information about how prospects lead their lives, and specifics about features and benefits make them feel like their problems could be demonstrably solved.

Mona Elesseily is director of marketing strategy at Page Zero Media, focusing on paid search campaigns and conversion improvement. She’s also the author of Page Zero’s Mastering Panama: A special report on Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform (August 2007). The Paid Search column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

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These days, you can’t go anywhere without hearing about multivariate testing so I thought I’d walk through a landing page test. Along the way, I’ll provide testing pointers and leave you with several testing considerations. I’ll highlight the importance of multivariate testing and show it can yield significant improvements in pay per click (PPC) accounts.

This case study centers on NXPowerLite, which sells compression software for PPT, Excel, and Word documents. While too many details are involved in multivariate testing to cover them all, the following information should provide a good basis for your own testing.

Multivariate Testing – Pre-Testing Considerations

Consider the following before starting a multivariate test:

Overall page quality
Initiate tests with quality content pages to yield more significant results. Consider all aspects of a landing page, including images, page layout, and copy for quality. In terms of NXPowerLite, the old landing page didn’t do a good job of spelling out specific product features and benefits, nor did it a have a suitable call to action. As a result, visitors were “undirected” and didn’t know what action to take on the landing page. On the new pages, product features and benefits were clearly displayed and had clear calls to action.

Solid call to action
In our analysis, we determined that 45 percent of the 30-day free-trial product customers became paying customers. As a result, we decided to include two buy options on the page – one to purchase the product directly and the other for a 30-day free-trial product. This was not to give people choice, but to make the free trial version of the product look more favorable. The “buy now” helped the trial version become the “no-brainer” option as it subtly encouraged visitors to sign up for the trial version of the product.

Solid campaign goals and appropriate metrics
In this particular campaign, we decided to track the following conversion events:

• Direct sales
• Sales from the 30-day-free-trial product

What you track in a campaign doesn’t need to be ultra sexy. The important thing is to ensure you identify solid goals and determine appropriate metrics for PPC campaigns (and any other campaigns, for that matter).

The Multivariate Test: NXPowerLite.com

With testing, NXPowerLite’s “compression software” campaign saw significant improvements in campaign conversions. In our tests we tested a number of page elements, but the ones where we saw the biggest impact were:

• Page copy
• Button size
• Button placement on page
• Other images (placement)

In our test, the page below converted at approximately 27.5% percent. This page had five features & benefits and fewer graphical images. Note: the top parts of the pages below (navigation bar) have been excluded from the screenshot.

When we ran the test slightly longer, we found that a shorter page converted at approximately 36.6 percent. The page had few features and benefits and a more prominent image in the lower right-hand corner (see below). Note: the page converted 100% better than the one in the old campaign. There is an important lesson here – to get sound data, be sure to run tests for a long period of time. In the above example, had we not run our test for a long time we would not have seen that the second screenshot outperformed the first one by approximately 33 percent. In this case, we had statistically sound data in one month, but you may have to run tests for a longer period of time (statistical significance is based on volume).

Multivariate testing considerations

Here are a few more testing considerations:

Before creating landing pages, think specifically about who your customers are and try to gain some insight into how they shop. Look through your web statistics for trends. Also, look to sales data or previous tests that have been run for additional insight. The more you understand about your buyers from the get-go, the more likely you’ll understand what your buyers “need” to make a purchase. In our example, we knew 45 percent of trial users became customers and were able to build on this success.

Don’t forget to keep testing. And don’t stop once you think you’ve found a winning formula, as there could be a better formula out there! Even in accounts that have been running for more than four years, we continue to increase conversion rates because of continual testing.

Recently, multivariate landing has become a lot easier and affordable. An obvious example of this is Google’s Website Optimizer tool, which enables you to allocate how much of your traffic you want to go to your test (for example, 20%) and will show which elements are negatively affecting your campaigns. You owe it to your campaigns to give testing a try. You may be surprised at how much it can improve conversions.

Mona Elesseily is director of marketing strategy at Page Zero Media, focusing on paid search campaigns and conversion improvement. She’s also the author of Page Zero’s Mastering Panama: A special report on Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform (August 2007). The Paid Search column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

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