Enterprise SEM is written by search marketers running massive search advertising campaigns. Running large budget campaigns with millions of keywords can be an entirely different animal than running less complex ad campaigns. Additional details, such as more complex ROI metrics, optimizing efficiently, managing creatives and automation become the focus of such campaigns. Experts share real-life experience and perspective to running search campaigns of such scale.

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Creative Testing For the Advanced Search Marketer, Part 1

Jun 8, 2012 at 1:17pm ET by Matt Lawson

In a search landscape where millions of keywords define intent, generating the most compelling creative can prove to be a daunting task. Understanding your audience and formulating a message might be easy, but packaging up that message within the narrow limits of a 130 character creative can be a challenge. For paid search programs both big and small, creative optimization remains one of the single most impactful strategies for increasing traffic, lowering costs and acquiring more revenue. To optimize creative, search marketers rely on testing. Continuously generating, analyzing and iter [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

5 Ways To Capture Brand Equity With SEM & Affiliates

May 31, 2012 at 1:24pm ET by David Roth

Last week, I read David Rodnitzky’s Enterprise SEM column on brand term bidding, and I loved it! Even better, it got me thinking about search and affiliate marketing again. While I think David made some excellent points, as I consumed his endless wit and wisdom, I kept thinking: All that brand keyword goodness, it’s almost too much for one advertiser! See, I’m a bit unorthodox when it comes to brand terms and their keyword space. I read a lot around here about how search marketers should deal with brand keywords – don’t buy, don’t allow them to be bid on, don’t include brand t [...]

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How To ‘Protect’ Brand Keywords For Less

May 24, 2012 at 9:51am ET by David Rodnitzky

Imagine you own a restaurant and one day, a couple of big guys in nice suits come through your front door. One of the men introduces himself: "Good evening. My name is Gino, and this my colleague, Salvatore. We’re helping local businesses with their marketing and wanted to see if we could help you." "Nice to meet you," you reply. "Of course I’m always interested in getting new customers. Tell me more about what you do and how much it costs." "Gladly," says Gino. "It’s really quite simple. When someone approaches your restaurant, we open the door for them. For every person that comes i [...]

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Accelerating Revenue Growth With Keyword Parity

May 17, 2012 at 12:10pm ET by Matt Lawson

As campaigns mature, keywords evolve from experiments to proven revenue drivers. Remembering to add a keyword to Bing after a successful trial in Google or remembering to expand a new top performing keyword across its other match types is easier said than done. With so much focus these days on the next best thing — generating the most compelling creative or discovering the next diamond-in-the-rough keyword — search marketers often ignore the keyword gaps that slowly accumulate over time. Maintaining publisher and match type keyword parity is one of the most important campaign managem [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

4 PPC Tactics To Ensure You Meet & Exceed Your Plan

May 10, 2012 at 9:22am ET by David Roth

In this column, we routinely write about some fairly advanced topics: Next-level optimization, automated bidding algorithms, hyper-targeted search campaigns, paid vs. organic search, etc. Lost in all this is the underlying discussion around the need to hit your financial goals. The majority of large enterprises engage in annual planning, which means that as SEM managers, we are tied to pretty strict financial goals. While all the advanced topics sound good and do warrant execution, in a world of limited resources sometimes we just need to hunker down and focus on hitting Plan. At one poi [...]

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Basic Econometric Modeling: Measuring The Offline-Online Effect Of TV Advertising On Search Spend

May 3, 2012 at 2:13pm ET by Siddharth Shah

Multi-channel advertisers often ask me how to measure the effect of their TV ads on their online marketing channels. The question is important because it is the first step in the answer to the media mix question: What is the right distribution of budget across TV and online channels to maximize return on investment. This is a tricky question to answer for the following reasons: TV campaigns are typically branding campaigns while search is typically DR focused. There is typically a halo effect in TV campaigns, e.g. when you run a TV campaign you typically see its effect last on search [...]

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The Complete Guide To Bidding On Competitor Brand Names & Trademarked Terms

Apr 26, 2012 at 1:59pm ET by Ted Ives

It’s been long known in the industry that brand term keywords garner a much higher click-through-rate. As a result, marketers often start by bidding on their own brand terms.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | Legal: Trademarks

Benefits Of Cross-Channel Analytics For Search Marketers

Apr 19, 2012 at 12:03pm ET by Matt Lawson

John Wanamaker once stated, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half." One of the things we love to tout as search marketers is our ability to track our efforts. We pride ourselves on it. But, as much as our tracking capabilities would leave Wanamaker dumbfounded, there are still a lot of clicks which we can’t easily tie out to revenue. For marketers, the question of accurately tracking revenues often comes down to a conversation about attribution. For some, the "last-click wins" model, which remains an industry standard, is insufficie [...]

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Three Questions To Ask When Selecting An Enterprise SEM Tool Provider

Apr 12, 2012 at 12:51pm ET by David Roth

Having just experienced a round of demos from some of the major enterprise PPC tools, I can’t help but love my job. It’s always fun because I get to peek under the hood of some of the biggest, baddest, most robust search management tools on the market. Within these demos, we talk about thin data, dynamic clustering, Bayesian math and other light topics such as attribution management, profit curves and media mix modeling. The reason I do this, other than the fact that I like to hang out with both sales people and applied mathematics PhDs, is that for certain businesses at Yahoo!, is b [...]

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What Is The Real Value Of Branded Search Campaigns?

Apr 5, 2012 at 9:34am ET by George Michie

Enterprise SEM practices apply not just to direct response advertisers, but to brand advertisers as well. We'll dive into that logic after a brief stroll down memory lane. The earliest adopters of sophisticated paid search practices were those companies with deep roots in direct response marketing. [caption id="attachment_116840" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Roots in Direct Response Marketing"][/caption] In e-commerce, it was the traditional catalog companies that figured out search first. The cost of a book (catalogs are called "books" by insiders) in the mail looked a lo [...]

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Understanding The Limits Of Attribution

Mar 29, 2012 at 11:36am ET by Siddharth Shah

While there is much discussion about attribution and its benefits, marketers seldom discuss what it can’t do. Unfortunately, this creates a perception with many marketers that attribution will solve all their multimedia problems and that their media mix problems will go away. While I believe that the evolution of attribution and media mix modeling technology is one of the more significant online marketing developments in recent years, I also think that the technology in its current form has a ways to go before one can confidently say that the problem is solved. Multi-event attribution [...]

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SMX West: Where Search Marketers & Fire Alarms Meet

Mar 15, 2012 at 12:21pm ET by David Roth

The sirens suddenly sounded, shattering my concentration and halting the flow of my presentation. "Please evacuate the building immediately", the robotic recorded male voice advised. More blasting sirens. "This is the emergency response system. Please evacuate the…" Was this really happening? I’d been preparing all morning and patiently waiting my turn to speak as the last of four presenters on a panel, only to be interrupted three minutes into my presentation by a freaking fire alarm. I laughed aloud, gave a double thumbs-up to the modest crowd, advanced my presentation to the final � [...]

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4 Reasons Your Boss Might Hate Your SEM Campaign

Mar 8, 2012 at 11:16am ET by George Michie

An Enterprise Paid Search program can be, and should be, a sophisticated operation. Sophistication drives performance, but can often lead to challenges with perceived performance within the organization. It is not at all uncommon for senior management to become unhappy with a terrific and progressing paid search program because of the way we communicate results. Averages and aggregates lie, as I've argued many times, yet they are also an essential tool of managing a paid search program. Even the manager in the weeds cannot look at the most granular performance data and make any sense of [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

Preparing Your Search Program For Mobile In 2012

Mar 2, 2012 at 8:30am ET by Matt Lawson

Between the rise of tablets and the continued proliferation of smartphones, 2012 is looking more and more like the year of mobile for search marketers. Neilsen reports the number of smartphone subscribers accessing the Internet on their phones has grown 45 percent since 2010 with the majority of 18 to 34 year-olds owning a smartphone. Similarly, Google recently found 79 percent of smartphone owners use their devices to compare prices, research products or services, and locate retailers. Mobile devices, it seems, are a shopper’s best friend. There’s certainly no shortage of tips and a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

Why Patience Is A Virtue With The Long Tail

Feb 23, 2012 at 12:47pm ET by Siddharth Shah

A recent article by fellow Search Engine Land contributor Matt Van Wagner on long-tail keyword management - as well as some recent experiences with several large-scale advertisers, inspired me to write this article on quantitative long-tail management. Too often, I have seen cases where marketers apply incorrect reactive rules on the long tail and kill it in effect. This can have a disastrous effect for a large-scale marketer with an ad spend in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a month, where the tail can represent a significant portion of the business. The Dilemma Tak [...]

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An Inside Look At How Yahoo! Handles Olympic Games Marketing

Feb 16, 2012 at 12:01pm ET by David Roth

Last month, I wrote about managing search in a decentralized marketing organization. We covered budgets, goals, alignment, etc. All good in theory, but how does it work in real life? To answer that question, I thought I would take a close look at how we’re working on one of our major marketing initiatives of the year: The 2012 Olympic Games. The London Games is one of our big ‘tent pole’ events for the year. At Yahoo!, that means that it’s a major one-off event that gets maximum marketing support. For the Games in July, Yahoo! has the ambitious challenge of attaining (and main [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

The Paid Search Uncertainty Principle

Feb 9, 2012 at 2:14pm ET by George Michie

[caption id="attachment_110359" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Werner von Heisenberg courtesy of Wikipedia"][/caption] In 1927, Werner von Heisenberg documented what he referred to as an "Uncertainty Principle" governing quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle holds that an observation cannot precisely reveal both the position of a particle at a point in time and its momentum. The more the observation reveals about one, the less the observer can know about the other. A similar principle governs paid search. Physics sidebar: feel free to skip! If memory serves, the notion [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?

Feb 2, 2012 at 9:19am ET by Eric Enge

During the week of January 4th, I had the privilege of spending a week with the Bing and adCenter teams in Bellevue. First off, I would like to thank them both for their tremendous hospitality. Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts. Firstly, there was a clear recognition by the adCenter team regarding the challenges they face. They ha [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | Microsoft: Bing Ads

What The Holidays Tell Search Marketers

Jan 26, 2012 at 12:08pm ET by Matt Lawson

I realize most of us are already well-focused on 2012, so a look back at the 2011 holiday season may seem a bit dated. However, the holiday season provides search marketers a snapshot of behavior that should prove relevant for the upcoming year, though perhaps on a smaller scale. To gain a more accurate view of how online shoppers’ habits may be changing, we took a look at paid search, display and social advertising metrics across our retail clients. Here’s what we found: Savvy Buyers Sought Deals In 2011, online advertisers drove more revenue in November than in December. The opposit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

To Centralize Or Decentralize SEM – That’s The Question

Jan 19, 2012 at 9:18am ET by David Roth

Having been through a number of re-orgs over the past few years, I’ve been thinking lately about SEM and direct marketing within the larger organization, and it seemed like a good time to take a step back and look at the different ways companies organize around SEM, and which models make the most (or least) sense at any given time. 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. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM

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