Effectively Prioritizing Your Paid Search Tasks

In my last Paid Search column I wrote about six common business fallacies that lead paid search managers to spend time unproductively. Unproductive work is costly in that someone internally or externally is paid to do work that adds no value, and that same person is prevented from doing work that is valuable.

Prioritizing tasks is difficult in the abstract: tasks that can generate the most impact for one account will be less important for another. Triage experience dictates that almost any weakness taken to an extreme can be devastating. Lousy, un-targeted, un-compelling ad copy can hurt quality score so much that bid management is irrelevant. Landing all the traffic on the homepage will hurt conversion so much that no amount of wizardry elsewhere will save the program. Account structures that prevent ad copy from being targeted can by itself sabotage performance. If there are just a couple of hundred keywords attempting to cover a product catalog with tens of thousands of items, you will not be able to make the program hum until that problem is addressed. No question about it, if the account foundation isn’t reasonably solid the priorities below won’t make sense.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume we’re talking about a program where some time and thought were put into keyword development and the connection between keywords, landing pages and ad copy is reasonable. The question then becomes:

How should the paid search manager prioritize her or his time?

Here’s is how we think the priorities should go in tiers:

Highest leverage activities

Measure value accurately. The wonky data mining and paid search tips and tricks below are irrelevant if the program doesn’t accurately measure the value of traffic generated. In lead generation all leads are not created equally. Establishing a backfeed of lead valuation info is the first order of business. For eCommerce sites measuring the margin rather than total sales is crucial if the spread varies across different parts of the inventory. For many there may be multiple success metrics that need to be tracked to understand the full value of traffic, including email sign-ups, catalog requests and a host of different advertising revenue metrics for arbitrage advertisers.

Measure spillover and breakage. For many advertisers, spillover to the call center is an essential part of the equation. Some products and services are more likely to have “clicks to bricks” influence than others. Even the online tracking isn’t clean. Javascript tracking drops between 10 and 30% of the traffic it’s trying to track.

Measure cross channel effects. Those crediting only the last touch are likely to be losing sales to cannibalistic channels. Some folks even mistakenly credit brand paid and natural search (navigational searches) that follow visits from truly competitive marketing initiatives, blinding themselves to the real value of each channel.

Think long and hard about cookie windows. The higher the ticket and longer the consideration cycle the more important cookie considerations become.

Carefully develop efficiency targets. What is the role of paid search in the overall marketing plan? Is it a “cash machine?” Is it a prospecting vehicle focused on acquiring new customers? Or, recognizing that oftentimes “my” customer is also one of my competitor’s customers, is it focused as much on wallet share as anything? Have lifetime value considerations been carefully studied and baked into the above assessment?

Without a clear understanding of, and execution around the fundamentals above, the tactical issues below are merely window dressing. The above determines the size of the opportunity; what’s below can help determine how much of that opportunity is realized.

Sidebar rant: There are folks who don’t know how much value paid search traffic brings to the table because they haven’t set up the tracking and understood its limitations; haven’t thought about channel interaction or even how much they should spend to generate a lead or a dollar in margin, and yet they still want to talk about account structure—it blows my mind!

High value ongoing work

Study performance by keyword and by clusters. The key to smart bid management is to marry the bids to the value of the traffic coming from each ad. A sophisticated bid management system will run the statistical analysis across all the different ways the data can be logically aggregated or disaggregated to determine the net effect of each variable. Absent such a platform, a smart analyst with a spreadsheet can look for important trends in the data that may help inform how they set bids (eg: “That’s interesting, when you look at the combined performance of all the terms that include words like “cheap, discount, bargain, wholesale” they perform as a group very differently than other words in the same product categories!”). Product categories, subcategories, geographies, manufacturer brand names, traffic volume level, keyword length… there all kinds of ways to cluster the data.

Get away from campaign budgets. If you’re hitting campaign budgets regularly you are wasting money, guaranteed. If there are legitimate reasons for budgeting use bidding to hit the target spend. Would you prefer to have 100 visitors at $1 each or 200 visitors of the same quality at $0.50 each? Pretty easy question to answer, yet so many folks rely on campaign budgets. As I argued before, campaign budgets are like guard rails: they’re a great safety feature, but they’re not a substitute for steering.

Build out the keyword list. Keyword list maintenance can be a daunting task at the highest levels, but for folks without tools, focus the build out around the top selling products and product categories. It may seem logical to focus efforts around keywords related to the stuff that isn’t selling, but remember that paid search is demand driven. Assuming the basic coverage is decent, build out the winning categories in depth first.

Study user search strings. This is tremendously valuable for both negative creation and new keyword development.

Hand-write copy for the top volume keywords. Writing keyword-specific ad copy for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords is impossible, and not worth the time involved. However, having super-targeted, tested copy on your most important or head search terms is absolutely worth the time.

Hand-pick landing pages for the top volume keywords. Landing traffic on the ideal page is tremendously important for conversion rates. Designing special pages may or may not be cost effective, but taking the bulk of the traffic to the best available page is well worth the effort.

Study seasonal impacts on traffic quality. How much does the value of traffic vary with the seasons? If the answer is “significantly” for some categories of keywords then there is a significant opportunity for anticipatory bidding to capture more traffic as the season ramps up and avoid over spending as the season winds down.

Study match-type and syndication partner performance. Add layered campaigns with exact match versions bid highest, modified broad match or phrase bid next highest, and broad bid lowest as the data dictates.

Valuable projects as time allows

Product-level keyword build out. This is hugely valuable for folks with makes and model numbers. Should be done once for every advertiser; must be done regularly for others. This can be less valuable for others, it just depends on the importance of the tail for that particular advertiser.

Build and track geo-targeted campaigns. Folks with brick and mortar footprints, and lead-gen advertisers may find this most beneficial.

Tie in Google product extensions if possible. The click-through-rate benefit is real and worth going after for folks with clean Google base feeds.

Test landing page templates. Do sub-category pages convert as well as search results pages? Does sorting, or limiting the view of search results pages help/hurt conversions? These tests often need to be done across a wide portfolio of keywords to generate actionable volumes of data.

Test “unique selling propositions,” static versus dynamic headlines and calls to action in the ad copy. It gets hard to raise the bar on copy after a while, but these tests are worth doing particularly in the early stages of a program.

Test offer copy in the ads. Well-written promotional copy improves clickthrough rate and Quality Score, but often brings in lower quality traffic as well. Find out early on whether touting promotions helps or hurts and apply the findings of those tests ongoing if the promo copy typically helps.

Study time of day and day of week effects on traffic quality. Day-parting can have material benefits for some companies and not much for others. It’s worth investigating and making adjustments as needed.

Build out content campaigns. Constructed properly and bid properly, content ads whether text or display can be cost effective. They’re not likely to be huge, and we recommend wading in slowly.

Study keyword-level data over longer and shorter time windows. Sometimes interesting and actionable trends appear when you look at different windows than “normal”. We’ve found, for example, that keywords tied to particularly high-ticket items often have very low conversion rates. That can make them bounce from being “goats” to “heroes” depending on the window of time studied; that fluctuation can result in irrational bidding and lost opportunity if not spotted. Keep statistical significance in mind.

Play with Google’s bid simulator data! You may find that there are opportunities to bid more aggressively and make up the lost efficiency in volume, and, you may find opportunities to drop bids and save significant amounts of money without losing much traffic.

When available, add product listing ads and non-brand site-links. We anticipate both will be material wins for well-managed programs.

This list is not intended to be complete, but a mixture of tried and true essentials and perhaps a few new ideas that folks haven’t tried yet. I’ve written about many of these topics on the Rimm-Kaufman blog; head over there for a list of links to additional posts and further elaboration.

I’m speaking at SMX East on the Industrial Strength Paid Search panel. Y’all come!