PPC and SEO have always been complementary marketing channels — but have you been using this combination to its full potential? With keyword data now largely gone and Hummingbird making quality content vital to your SEO strategy, it has never been more important to invest in SEO — but you may not have the time […]
It’s been a few weeks since Google rocked our worlds and stripped keyword-level data from the referrer, so it’s time to examine the fallout and see what’s changed in the world of search marketing. Surprisingly, not much. Keywords were beacons of insight – fantastic beacons – but keywords were a double-edged sword leading us to create content […]
One of the most classic and beneficial analyses conducted for paid traffic acquisition channels is day parting. Not all visits are equal, and the time of day/day of week of the visit usually has a strong correlation with user qualification and likelihood to convert. That said, day parting is one of the most commonly misconstrued […]
In my previous post, From 3rd Party To 1st Party: The Evolution Of The Google Advertising Toolset, I wrote about the evolution of AdWords data and how recent changes have constricted the incremental value presented by third-party paid search tools. I wrote in loose terms about using internal analytics to calculate average profit per conversion […]
A year ago, I was firmly anti-Google. Not in the sense that I disliked Google — I just felt that Google did not provide the best tools in the business to analyze and make decisions on their own advertising placements. When asked if an advertiser should consider a 3rd party technology to help manage ad […]
You’re probably sick of hearing about it, but it’s true: enhanced campaigns are going to impact your ability to structure, segment, and optimize campaigns. Whether it’s in a positive or negative way is up for debate. Regardless, I hope you have done your research and understand the transition — how it affects you, your business […]
More so than any other product in the AdWords suite, managing, reporting on, and making sense out of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) extends beyond the toolsets provided in AdWords. The levers that we can push and pull exist within two unique systems — AdWords and Merchant Center — and, as a result, we need to […]
It’s relatively easy to report what happened in an ad campaign, but much more difficult to understand why things happen. Visits or conversions might go up or down, but why? It could be some form of seasonality or maybe your latest review hit the front page of Reddit. The mysteries of consumer behavior like to […]
Back in September, I wrote about the Product Listing Ads transition from free to paid clicks in Google Shopping. The PLA transition is now complete, and with holiday shopping in full effect, it’s worth taking a look at the evolution of the PLA transition, and more importantly, the impact of PLAs on the bottom line […]
Standard channel performance analysis makes the assumption that a click from all channels behaves the same way. Picture your weekly performance report – in a given week you observe x clicks and y conversions coming from a given channel (eg PPC, Organic search, Display, Remarketing Facebook, etc). If one channel looks better than the others […]
One of the most difficult and valuable exercises in quarterly planning is forecasting. Many companies require budgets to be set well in advance, and as a result, analysts often prepare conservative projections in order to remain cautious and not setup their marketing colleagues to under-deliver. The byproduct of conservative projections is more difficult forecasting mid […]
Messy, incomprehensible analytics make my stomach churn. Just knowing that I’m going to spend the next several hours cleaning up sloppy data puts the kibosh on my day. The problem with Google Analytics, or any analytics package for that matter, is that even if my site is properly tagged and I’ve developed a systematic inbound […]
Free clicks from Google Shopping were a gift. We all knew it, loved it, and were holding our collective breath because we knew one day it would go away. As you are probably well aware, that day is sometime in October of this year and the transition has already begun to take place. Beyond the […]
You’re a product person. You’ve bootstrapped together your website, dropped relevant metadata, setup an e-commerce platform, installed analytics, and are generating solid original content on your site and/or blog. You’re doing everything by the book. But the question remains: when it is the right time to dig in and try to understand what people are […]
Taking consumer lifetime value into account allows performance marketers to manage more volume at a higher cost per acquisition (CPA) or lower return on investment (ROI). If $1 of revenue at the time of conversion leads to an additional $1 of revenue ($2 total) down the road then breakeven for marketing is 0.5 ROI or […]
Virtually every piece of software I get pitched puts near to or real time analytics at my fingertips 24/7/365. It sounds fantastic and in some cases, is true – but the reality of ‘real time’ data is that very few products actually deliver data in real time due to the need to process raw data […]
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been challenged by advertisers on the topic of trademark search. The question is simple: why “waste” money buying traffic on trademark keywords when it is clear that the user intends to get to their site? Researching the topic, there have been a number of studies all concluding […]
More and more, I have been interacting with executives using campaign management tools as their internal reporting systems. In most cases, these companies have an analytics package but prefer to use ad server data rather than analytics for internal tracking. Campaign management tools and analytics provide fundamentally different information, and while directionally similar in many […]
The emergence of the tablet PC as a legitimate device for online activities beyond media consumption has turned the eyes of marketers and analysts towards understanding how tablet user behavior differs from that of traditional desktop and mobile. There are certain things which simply cannot be done on a mobile device – but the gap […]
Google made a significant event out of Leap Day 2012 by releasing a new version of Google Analytics featuring Data Sampling. The idea behind data sampling is commonplace in any statistical analysis: in order to get results faster, you analyze a sub-set of data to identify trends and extrapolate aggregate results based on the percentage […]
As performance marketers, it’s our job to find the valuable clicks and filter out the crap. By tracking specific events through cookies and pixels, we attribute revenue to clicks and keywords. Newer tools like conversion funnels allow us to further identify which clicks lead to subsequent clicks which in turn lead to conversions. Generally speaking, […]
All forms of paid advertising use the max bid – it’s the most basic concept yet calculating the theoretical maximum value to pay for a click is surprisingly difficult. It’s not that the math is tough; it just takes stepping back from the granularity of channel specific optimization to get a more holistic look at […]
Cross-channel revenue attribution – arguably the most widely agreed upon concept in the analytics space – is ironically the source of the search marketer’s dilemma. The dilemma is simple conceptually but digging into it brings up some fundamental flaws in conversion modeling and highlights the underlying catch-22 that marketers face. It all starts with a […]
Proprietary campaign management systems (eg AdWords, AdCenter, Facebook, etc) allow advertisers to track conversions and manage towards efficiency metrics such as Cost per Acquisition or Order (CPA / CPO). Some, such as AdWords and AdCenter, take performance management a bit further and allow advertisers to return a revenue value per conversion to report Return On […]
It’s probably my fault but I receive what seems like 20 emails a days from an endless stream of Groupon emulators, flash sites and discount etailers that have taken my inbox by storm. These sites are saturating the online marketplace with tantalizing deals designed to make even the most staunch consumers (like my wife) … […]
Since no analytics provider seems to have invented the perfect system to meet every need, we’re seeing an increasing number of advertisers using multiple systems together in order capture a wider set of data for reporting and optimization purposes. This is generally some combination of a search/display/Facebook technology provider and one or more analytics systems […]
First click. Last click. Linear. Reverse decay. Linear reverse decay…everyone accepts that attribution is a necessary consideration in analytics, but no one seems to be able to crack the code. There are countless ways to attribute revenue, yet the major analytics systems stick with the traditional last entry. The reality is that we, they, you, […]
Every web analytics provider requires nearly the same setup process: pixels. A couple lines of JavaScript pasted onto the pages of a website provide data critical to any optimization process, attribution model, or consumer behavior analysis. As part of my role includes integration engineering for an analytics vendor, I spend a substantial amount of time […]
Performance measure on a CPA basis is usually is a limitation of tracking – the advertiser cannot associate true revenue with the conversion. Managing to an ROI, and moreover, managing to maximize profit margin for each keyword will open up new doors for PPC efficiency.
The beauty of online marketing is transparency - there is no other medium in advertising within which a direct ROI or CPA can be associated without questioning a slew of externalities.
There are two key factors crucial to assuring the success of any large SEM optimization process: First, tuning the campaign so that it is efficient and second, scaling the account while maintaining the efficiency you've gained. Your key goal should be to identify incremental opportunity without losing profitability.
Search advertising success is defined by relevance. The concept of relevance is broad, but logical: it’s the relationships between advertiser, keyword, ad copy and the landing page/ post click experience. So, how do we know if our relationships are strong, and our account is relevant? Simple: Quality Score for Google, or Quality Index for Yahoo. […]
Account organization is the first and most important step in the optimization process – it’s the foundation for success.
Behavior is unique for these high volume/value keywords and as a result, steps need to be taken to make these terms more visible for daily account management and analysis. The first step is to identify and isolate these top terms in order to help prioritize where to focus.
The big take-away from this is an understanding of how match types can work together. Match type optimization is the first step in the process to minimize costs without reducing click volume - and is the simplest step to execute.