We’re very pleased to be presenting a case study webinar in just over a week’s time with one of our clients, YouSendIt, titled The Opportunity Cost of PPC.

I had a chance to sit down with YouSendIt’s Director of Product Marketing, Angela Sanfilippo, at their office in California just before our latest B2B Expert Series: Face-to-Face event. We talked through the advances her team has made over the past few months with their paid search campaigns. This success has led to increased investment in SEM moving forward.

This webinar will be of interest to other marketers that have struggled to get budget increases for paid Search. It also highlights the power of campaign segmentation, vital for a company like YouSendIt that works across various markets, and in B2B/B2C.

The Opportunity Cost of PPC

Date: January 19, 2010
Time: 11 am PST
Length: 30 minutes
Webinar registration >>

What would happen if you turned off all PPC advertising for a month?

This is exactly what the YouSendIt marketing team did last October, a risky manoeuver which ended up proving the value of their search marketing program.

In this 30-minute case study webinar, an Enquiro client shares her recent B2B/B2C marketing success that has been driven by paid search.

1. Improved SEM performance through proper segmentation of campaigns

We take a look at how YouSendIt increased the number of subscriptions to their service by 70% while also reducing overall ad budget. Strategic adjustments effectively reduced cost-per-click by 18%, and increased the amount of qualified traffic from paid search.

2. The importance of nurturing a lead

Once they’re in the door, it’s important to maintain the conversation. Search marketing’s effectiveness increases when coupled with email nurturing.

3. Demonstrating the value of search internally

YouSendIt’s Director of Product Marketing, Angela Sanfilippo, was faced with the challenge that many marketers face: prove to the board that the money you’re spending on paid search is actually driving revenue. In this webinar, Angela walks us through the numbers and her approach.

Case Study Background
YouSendIt offers an online solution for independent professionals and businesses for sending, receiving and tracking large files and digital content without email and ftp limitations. YouSendIt has over 10 million users across 220 countries. Prior to initiating an SEM partnership with Enquiro, YouSendIt was running a paid campaign that drove few leads and qualified visitors at a high cost per lead of $442. They needed help in developing a more robust sponsored search strategy that would increase the number of registrations and subscriptions while reducing overall costs.

Presented by:

Angela Sanfilippo
Director of Product Marketing, YouSendIt

Angela Sanfilippo has over 13 years in the marketing industry with a multi-faceted background in brand strategy and awareness, marketing communications, product marketing and demand generation strategies. Currently, Angela Sanfilippo is the Director of Marketing for YouSendIt Inc, the number-one secure digital file delivery company serving professionals, businesses and government agencies on the Web. As Director of Marketing, Angela is responsible for establishing YouSendIt’s market leadership in file transfer services and oversees the company’s demand generation and user acquisition strategies. Prior to joining YouSendIt, Angela held various management positions at Rainmaker Systems, an outsourced provider of sales and marketing services managing B2B technology clients such as HP, CA, Lenovo, Sybase and Symantec and the HotJobs.com division of Yahoo! Inc.

Angie Dzwonkiewicz
Search Marketing Strategist, Enquiro

Angie brings forth a background knowledge and expertise in email marketing and community relations with skills in reporting and analysis, building strong operating mechanisms and process management. She manages several of Enquiro’s B2B client accounts, and worked with YouSendIt to deliver impressive results for their PPC campaigns.

Hosted by Bill Barnes – Enquiro’s EVP of Business Development

Mr. Barnes is a marketing veteran who has been in the marketing, advertising and promotion industry for over 20 years, the last 10 of which have been focused on Search Marketing. He co-founded Enquiro along with Gord Hotchkiss in 1999. Mr. Barnes is a featured speaker at events presented by Search Engine Strategies, Ad-Tech, Jupiter Media, SIPA, Forrester Research and Frost and Sullivan. He has also conducted workshops designed for Marketing, Editorial and Public Relations departments.

At Enquiro Bill has overseen explosive sales growth. In fact, Enquiro was listed on Deloitte’s 2004 North American Technology Fast 500 and has appeared on Profit Magazine’s Top 100 for three consecutive years. Bill has extensive experience in setting up and implementing Search Marketing and Research campaigns for such companies as AIG, AT&T, IBM, HP, Lexis/Nexis, Siemens and Grainger and strives to always help companies succeed in Search.

About 6 years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer. It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo! and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the click through break-downs between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were non-existent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one has the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines. To me, this was an unforgivable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects use search? Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what”. The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the ground-breaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious co-hort in Kevin Lee, from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now famous “Golden Triangle”. I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color…The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider August 13th 2009

In marketing circles, the old adage: "Half my advertising money is wasted. The problem is that I don’t know which half!" is often regarded as marketing fact and has been more or less accepted as fact until now. In a down economy marketers are now heralding this statement no longer as a quote, but as a mission statement to finding where to invest money.  However, the very nature of this quote embodies the challenge that all marketers face: attribution. The famous marketing quote was reportedly said by William Lever, John Wanamaker, and F.W. Woolworth; begging the question: who gets the credit? Do we give credit to who said it first, said it last, or do we give credit to all equally?

While we are thinking about the question of whom do we accredit the quote to, now let’s think more close to home; how to we accredit revenue to individual marketing channels?

The double edged sword of PPC measurability is the ability to measure with a great deal of accuracy how paid search is performing and yet it is still easy measure impact wrong when looking at performance rather myopically. There are many different ways to attribute ROAS, such as first click, last click and a linear attribution model. Making decisions based on an individual attribution window could introduce significant error into your decision process and affect the total ROAS of your paid search campaign.

The problem with most analytics tools is that they attempt to apply linear modeling to explain a problem solved with bounded rationality. Business-to-business purchase behaviour is not a simple linear series of events, but more of an entanglement of communication touch points where a decision can be easily swayed by a chance encounter or incalculable externality. Most revenue attribution models ignore that paid search is only one marketing channel that is interrelated to all other marketing activities; which involve both online and offline company touch points.

With B2B marketing, many purchases involve multiple interactions with the vendor from multiple touch points prior to purchase. A study of a retailers, conducted by Coremetrics, indicates that all buyers had interacted with at least 3.9 campaigns prior to purchase; in a B2B environment it can easily be many more. This does not factor in many of the elements active within the B2B purchasing BuyerSphere. Enquiro’s Brand Lift of Search research also indicates that sponsored listings increase a prospective customer’s propensity to purchase by 8% and occupying the top sponsored position increased aided brand recall by 150%. These are all facts that a simple revenue attribution model can easily de-emphasize.

The majority of companies are still solely relying of the last click attribution model, which attributes the entirety of the revenue to the last point of interaction with the site before purchase. The inherent risk with this type of attribution model is the emphasis on the conversion-oriented campaigns and gives no attribution to the campaigns that originally started the marketing conversation. By making bid management and investment decisions based on only this information, the risk of divesting into the acquisition or branding channels increases substantially; effectively reducing the overall effectiveness of the marketing efforts. This risk increases if the company has a relatively unknown brand in the marketplace. The same can be said for focusing only on the first click attribution where we are looking only at the value of the keywords at the beginning of the purchase decision cycle and can ignore the importance of the conversion keywords at the end of the purchase process.

The only answer to this analytics dilemma is to strike a balanced measure using multiple attribution windows. Coremetrics has recently released a great whitepaper on Appropriate Attribution models which is a great read for any marketer on how to better attribute revenue to your online marketing efforts. For quite some time Enquiro’s Sponsored Search Team has been using a similar model of revenue attribution within the confines of the abilities of existing analytics programs, which vary depending on the provider you are using. However, we have also found great success in determining how paid search integrates into the macro-level marketing equation by using a micro-conversion and correlation analysis.

Often Paid Search campaigns are evaluated based on the number of qualified leads they have brought in or the strict revenue they have generated, but there is a missing element of how this impacts the overall marketing efforts. Post click behavior is an important element to any revenue attribution analysis such as the subscription to an email newsletter, requesting a catalog, downloading a whitepaper or other important marketing collateral, calling the phone number listed on the site. Each of these interactions with the website is part of the marketing conversation and can be assigned a value based on historical conversion rates and average order values. These numbers can then be applied to the paid search campaign as part of the revenue attribution model to assist in determining the value of paid search.

Another important metric is to measure the correlation of paid search traffic with direct and branded site traffic. Paid search may be the gateway to starting the marketing conversation with the prospect, but may only be the initial touch point. Measuring the impact of paid search on the direct and branded traffic can indicate how paid search is acting to acquire customers and brand the company in the marketplace. A simple correlation analysis is effective in revealing whether paid search is having a positive impact on the overall traffic to the site. The user may not necessary complete the desired conversion in the same session, but may use a direct or branded search to navigate back to the site at a later time to continue the relationship building process. 

Unfortunately, analysis of the marketing efforts often collides with internal politics which often complicates issues and can even impact the distribution of budgets. However, knowing how your paid search campaigns interact with other marketing channels, drive revenue, and build relationships can assist in determining the total value of the marketing channel.

The key takeaway from this is to look at the impact of your paid search campaigns as holistically as possible to determine your total ROAS. What is the direct revenue from the campaign? Does the ROAS change when using an appropriate attribution model? How does your paid search campaign initiate the marketing conversation and act as a relationship development tool?

Without much fanfare or publication, Yahoo has released its day parting and demographic targeting technologies. This is a great stride forward for Yahoo and, until now, has been a pain for many search marketers advertising on Yahoo. Yahoo now joins the ranks of the other major Search Engines (Google, Microsoft Live Search, and ASK) with offering a greater level of sophisticated targeting tools to help advertisers eliminate wasted advertising dollars. 

We have been working quite closely with our Yahoo Representatives who have been up until this point been assisting with manually day parting our clients’ campaigns. With Yahoo we have seen, through the implementation of manual day parting, an increase on Return on Investment of over 300% by only running ads within the hours when our target market has proven to be online. With a now automated system for advertisers to implement day parting on campaigns we can all now enjoy even greater control over campaigns and optimization best practices. This technology is of specific assistance to B2B marketers who are primarily targeting persons during work hours.

Here are some screenshots of the Day Parting Interface:

On the Campaign-Level view of the Yahoo UI, day parting can be easily seen through the incorporation of these icons beside your campaign names:

To access the day parting controls, enter into your campaign settings. On the right side of the page, you will see your settings for demographic targeting, geo-targeting, and day parting. Simply click edit and the pop-over appears as the following image depicts to edit the day parting.

Simply, click on the day and the controls for editing the day parting settings will appear.

Click save and you are done.

This is a great new functionality to Yahoo and we are excited to be able to expand day parting for all of our clients to further achieve our campaign goals.

Thanks Yahoo!

SEO or SEM (PPC), organic vs. sponsored? Where should your online marketing budgets go? Well the answer is both. SEO and PPC can work very nicely together depending on where you are with your online marketing efforts. We came up with ten instances where SEO and PPC should be used together as an effective online marketing campaign.
 

1. Preparing for a Site Redesign – when planning a redesign and making sure that all of the SEO best practice are being put in place as you prepare to launch, you’ll want to bolster your online campaign with sponsored efforts as you transition your site from the old site to the new. Once the SEO efforts kick in post launch, you can reduce your PPC spend and focus your sponsored efforts elsewhere.
    
2. Preparing to Launch a Microsite – Microsites allow you to try out a more targeted online strategy. For quick traffic generation to your new microsite, you’ll want to utilize an well planned sponsored startegy. At the same time your SEO efforts can be geared towards a focus on long-tail, and less competitive keywords to drive additonal traffic to the microsite.
    
3. Launching a new Sub-Domain – Similar to launching a microsite, sponsored efforts can be used to direct traffic to the new sub-domain while an SEO strategy can be developed to obtain long term rankings for the sub-domain.
    
4. Launching a new Website – Anytime you launch a new website, you should have both an SEO and SEM strategy working together to help obtain traffic to your new web property. Initially your sponosred startegy might be the only means of driving traffic to your new site, until you can improve your visibility in the natural search results of the search engines.
    
5. Marketing Your Website on a Shoestring Budget – If you have a tight budget, you can focus efforts on SEO and compliment that with a smaller PPC strategy where you bid on phrases that are less expensive. You may want to focus your PPC spend for local search while you concentrate your SEO efforts for more genreal search engines rankings. As you develop content through SEO and on-page optimization the only cost you incur is time.
    
6. Company Mergers & Merging Web Properties – In the dynamic economic environment that we have experienced in recent years, it’s not uncommon to see companies merge. Quite often startups are bought out and you are left with multiple web properties at your disposal. This is another great example of when you should be using SEO and PPC simultaneously to educate your target audience of your recent merger or acquisition. You may want to phase the old company out, as a resul you may want to move some content from that companies website to your own. Developing an SEO transition strategy that is backed up by a solid PPC strategy can be an effective way to educate your existing consumers as well as any new prospects who may be looking for your solution.
    
7. Releasing a New Product Line – PPC can be used in conjunction with SEO to promote your new product or solution line. Chances are that your new product name will be easy to rank for orgnically, backing that up with some non-branded traffic from sponsored efforts and you can quickly acheive some additional branded and non-branded traffic that will convert on your site with the proper type of messaging and promotion.
    
8. Online Reputation Management Campaigns – Experienced some negative press? Use SEO and sponosred solutions to protect your brand in the online space. From an SEO point of view, you’ll want to ensure that any negative organic listings are pushed to page two of the search results page, by optimizing your site for blended search, and leveraging social networks to dominant the SERP landscape. Furthermore you will want to protect your branded via PPC efforts so that negative or "questionable" listings do not appear within the sponsored results.
    
9. Entering New Markets – If your company is large enough to go global or is entering new regional markets, you might want to use SEO and PPC to target these geographic demographics. Depending on your expansion, you might want to try a GEO-targeted sponsored campaign, backed up with content development for organic rankings in the natural search results of the search engines.
    
10. Plateauing Search Engine Traffic – Seen your website traffic start to plateau? Maybe you need to modify or add a sponsored strategy to your SEO strategy or vice versa. Revisit both your SEO and PPC efforts and get creative with some new messaging to drive more traffic to your site.

While many companies are doing SEM or are developing SEO strategies, there are still a number that are not leveraging SEO and PPC efforts together. If your company is experiencing any of the ten issues above, you may want to establish a co-existing SEO and SEM strategy to ensure that you effectively intercept your target audience and that you continue to drive qualified traffic to your site. Search engine optimization and sponsored search marketing efforts can work together to provide you with optimal results. The more effective you become with your online marketing efforts, the less spend it will take to drive more business. While it takes time and is subject to the changing nature of the Internet, realizing when to use SEO and PPC together can return tremendous results.

Original Post Courtesy of SEO-Space:  SEO & PPC Working Together

Ah SEO and PPC living together in perfect harmony.  Yeah right.  How many of you out there put as much effort into your SEO efforts as you do with your sponsored efforts?  We hear of all of this money being poured into sponsored spend yet when asked how much you spend monthly on SEO many will respond by scratching their heads and look back at you with a shrug of the shoulders implying "I don’t know exactly…".  Or even worse, others will state that they do not track what they are spending on SEO.

As you track the return of  your sponosred campaigns,  remember this little stat.  Based on some of our original research inside the mind of the searcher, we found that Organic results received the majority of clicks on a SERP.  We found that the split between organic vs. paid clicks was as high as a 70%-30% split.  Over the past couple of years this ratio has changed slightly, but the fact of the matter is, more people click on organic results.  Now of course further research suggests that there are other factors that affect what people click on when they perform a query in a search engine.  Factors such as:

• Blended Search Results appearing
• The phase of the buying cycle that the searcher is involved in
• Brand Awareness or lackthereof
• Type of keyword/phrase queried

Ah yes the all mighty key phrase.  Depending on what the users types into a search engine may dictate whether they click on a sponsored listing or an organic result.  So as online marketers, where should you spend your time?  Organic or Sponsored?  The answer quite simply is both.  SEO and PPC work together quite nicely when establishing your keyword strategy for your online campaigns.  However, how many of you have a balanced SEO/PPC online marketing campaign?  When it comes to keyword strategy, something to think about when planning your keyword strategy is understanding where you are today.  That is how competitive is the online space that you are trying to occupy?  Are your "money" phrases hyper-competitive and expensive to bid on?  Ask yourself if you can really rank for <insert your desired key phrase here>.  Note: Prior to establishing your final keyword list it is assumed that you have performed research into your target audience and have identified the language that they will be using to search for your solution or product.

Keyword Strategy:  SEO or PPC?

Ok so you have an understanding of your target audience and of what they may be searching for online.  You’ve looked at some of your competitor’s web properties and you’re aware of what they are trying to position their sites for now what?

Step One:  Determine the Genetic DNA Make Up for your Keyword Strategy - When you think about it, there are three types of key phrases.  Head Phrases, torso phrase and long-tail keywords.  You will need to establish which combination  will work best for you in terms of being able to intercept your audience.  How does SEO and PPC fit in?  Well head phrases tend to be hyper-competitive but can drive a ton of traffic to your site.  In this case, a simple SEO strategy may not get you the rankings that you hope for, instead you’ll want to utilize a sponsored strategy where you bid on some of these hyper-compettive phrases to drive this traffic to your website.  Depending on your budget, the level of success depends on which phrases wil provide the best bang for your advertising buck.

SEO on the otherhand can be effective when optimizing your site for long-tail keyphrases that are more specific to your industry.  These tend to be phrases that the user will type in a search engine when they are closer to making a purchase decision.  A lot of times long-tail phrases tend to be less competitive, but they drive more qualified traffic.  More qualified traffic to your site means more qualified leads.

Step Two:  Monitor Your Exisiting Visibility – from an organic (SEO) point of view, monitoring your visibility in the search engines will determine where you draw the line between sponsored budgets and organic SEO for your site.  If by chance you are lucky enough to rank in the natural search results for a relevant head-type key phrase, you may not need to put sponsored spend towards this phrase.  Instead you can either A).  Save this spend (which affects your bottom line as less money going out) or B).  Put this spend into other keyword groups or baskets that may require a boost.  By monitoring your visibility, you will determine the right balance needed between SEO and PPC when positioning keyword visibility for your site.

Step Three:  Consider Timing – Considering the timing of when to use PPC to boost SEO is critical to the success of any online marketing campaign.  We all know that SEO can be very rewarding and that the results are longer lasting, but the fact is that SEO takes time.  Do not expect to improve your website’s visibility overnight with SEO.  So as part of an effective keyword strategy is understanding when to use PPC and SEO and when to use PPC with SEO.  For example if you are planning a website redesign, you will want to use PPC to mitigate any risks from organic ranking decreases as a result of transitioning your website durning the redesign.  For a period of a couple of months, you may need to use PPC to boost site traffic until the SEO and organic results are "revived".  Also if your business is somewhat seasonal, you may want to boost sponsored spend during this time while optimizing your site for organic visibility.  If all goes well, once you enter your "slow-season", you can reduce sponsored spend and time it so that your organic rankings drive traffic to your site.

Step Four:  Revisit Your Keyword Baskets – for both SEO and PPC, you’ll want to visit your keyword groups and baskets on a regular basis.  Your target audience will not remain status quo with their searching habits.  Identifying the latest buzzwords that your audience is using is critical for obtaining qualified traffic to your site. 

SEO and PPC work nicely together when establishing an effective keyword strategy.  The key is to know when to empasize one over the other, or when to use when to support the other.  SEO is effective when focusing on long term keyword strategy.  PPC is effective when you need immediate traffic, together the two of them work to ensure that your site remains visible in the competitive online space that is the World Wide Web.

Over the past several months, in part due to increased economic pressures, we have seen an increase of importance placed on improving return on investment (ROI) from search-based activity, particularly from PPC campaigns. ROI attribution and measurement becomes especially important when justifying the cost of the online sponsored advertising and improving the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Here are some tips on improving your search performance and getting the best ROI possible.

1.      Know Your Analytics

This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will focus on using analytics to optimize for ROI and knowing the limitations of your own analytics program is extremely important. Additionally, ensure that your ROI metrics are tied back to search-related key performance indicators (KPIs).

 ROI attribution can become more cumbersome in the business-to-business (B2B) market place as sales cycles can be extremely long as well as potential of the sale occurring offline. In cases such as this, ensuring lead sources can be captured into CRM systems can provide vital statistics to the health of your campaign. (Yes, pun intended) Several CRM programs, such as SalesForce and Oracle, offer integration with some of the leading Analytics software providers. Simple Access or Excel spreadsheets can also be used to tieback the sales, lead value, or other KPIs to your search activities.

 2.      Optimize Landing Page Performance

So you’ve paid for the click; what now? Your landing page and ad copy must work together to assist in the sale of your product and convince the user into taking your desired action and converting into a lead/sale. On average, you only have 8 seconds to reassure the prospect that you are what they are looking for and convince them to stick around.

 Landing page testing is incredibly important to the success of a paid search campaign and to improving ROI. With a landing page the simple combination of titles, copy, images, and call-to-action can make sweeping differences in the performance of the page. The difficult question is which combination? Unfortunately; other than best practices there is a limited supply of instructions and guidelines to assist search marketers in developing the perfect landing page, but there are testing tools that can help us along the way. Testing tools can range in abilities and cost, but one of the better landing page testing tools on the market is Google Website Optimizer. It is fairly intuitive, easy to implement, and provides clear results analysis, best part is that it’s FREE.

 Your landing pages are perhaps one of the most important factors influencing the ROAS for Paid Campaigns. Simple landing page testing can be an easy quick win for any paid search campaign.

 3.      Optimize Conversion Paths 

Conversion path optimization is the next important aspect of ROI optimization. We all know that attrition occurs at each stage of the conversion path, the key to optimizing ROI is mitigating the loss at these key stages.

 Many of the analytics tools on the market do offer conversion funnel analysis which will allow you to dive deeper into the ‘fall out’ that occurs at each stage in the process. The key objective in this analysis is to determine at which stage in the funnel you are getting the largest amount of abandonment. Once you know where the users are leaving the funnel, you can then focus in on the potential problems with that page; what barrier exists, hindering final conversion?

 Enquiro’s has used funnel analysis to optimize conversion funnels for its clients and has improved the conversion rates by up to 150%.

 4.      Leverage your SEO & SEM Together

Enquiro’s research has proven a significant branding advantage can be achieved by having a top paid ranking and top organic ranking above the fold. However, budgets can be saved by lowering paid ad exposure for those key phrases also occupying top organic position; allowing for more focus in other key opportunities.

 With your SEM campaign, you are able to quickly test the traffic volumes and conversion rates for many keywords as well as determine what the best messaging is for communicating with your market. This knowledge can then be applied to your SEO efforts to help mitigate the costs of PPC. Although organic rankings take time to take achieve, there is significant benefit the can be attained by gaining organic rankings for your top search phrases.

 Additionally, through landing page testing and ad testing, it’s possible to determine what messaging resonates with your target audience and which calls-to-actions are most effective.

 5.      Trim the Fat

We all have heard of the 80/20 rule, but in paid search campaigns it’s more like the 95/5 rule. Ninety-Five percent of your revenue will come from 5% of your keywords. Using your analytics and appropriately tagging your conversions to indicate, on the keyword-level, the source information can assist you in finding those 5% of the keywords and truly optimizing those ad groups. On the flipside this source can also indicate which keywords are simply driving up costs without producing results.

 This should not be confused with eliminating long-tail keywords because they simply have not collected significant click volumes, but more so, finding those head and torso keywords that are costing a lot of money without driving conversions. Don’t be afraid to lose the dead weight in your campaigns.

 6.      Use Testing Budgets

When looking at paid search campaigns, once you feel you have developed a winning formula, there is a hesitancy to not want to mess with it. I know this feeling all to well, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it; but the truth of the matter is, if you don’t break it once in a while innovation cannot occur. To work around the hesitancy of making changes for fear of losing ground or ROI, assign a certain percentage of your budget that can be used for testing. Depending on how risk adverse you are, will determine how much you will assign.

 Using a testing budget (in a separate campaign or even account) will allow you to perform keyword analysis, landing page testing, A/B ad copy testing, as well as experiment with different bidding strategies without affecting the performance of the main account. Once a winning strategy has been proven it can be migrated over to the main account to improve its performance overall.

 One important caveat about testing to remember: one experiment = one independent variable. That is to say only make one change at a time; otherwise you will have difficulty in attributing positive or negative results to the correct changes.

7.      Leverage Quality Score

Although I  normally encourage focus be placed on optimizing based on conversions, optimizing  on the basis of quality score has its advantages, there is nothing detrimental from using quality score to enhance your ROI. So what do I mean with that seeming contradiction in terms? Simple, look at the quality score suggestions and your campaign goals. Make the changes to your quality score that will not adversely affect your campaign. For example, using your ads to pre-qualify visitors may decrease your CTR; in turn negatively affecting the quality score. However, pre-qualifying visitors prior to their click will achieve a stronger Conversion rate, thereby increasing your ROI. Using keywords in the ad copy and landing page can boost the quality score without losing the pre-qualifying messaging.

 8.      Use Micro Conversions as an ROI Indicator

Sometimes it’s not always easy to attribute ROI to your paid search campaigns, in fact in most cases its down right difficult. There is hope, however, in using micro conversions. Micro conversions are those actions that a user will take on the path to conversion. For example sites using a demo can calculate the conversion rates from demos to leads to sales. It simply takes a bit of reverse engineering to the sales cycle and determining values.

 However, with appropriate analytics, you know the demo to lead ratio, the lead to sale ratio, and average sale amount; therefore using your average sale amount multiplied by your lead to sale ratio, gives you your value per lead, then simply multiply that once again by your demo to lead ratio and you’ve calculated your value per demo. The same can be applied for filling out a contact us form, engaging in an online chat with a sales person, adding to cart, product customization, etc. Micro Conversions can assist in determining the value of a paid visitor by the actions taken leading up to the offline sales process where tracking can be more difficult, impossible even.

This is the final installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

Speak Their Language

There has been constant debate as to what to use for keyword analysis with regards to long-tail versus head phrases and which yields the better results. Head phrases are the very generic and broad search queries where there is enormous search volume, but costs associated with the keywords are quite high. Torso keywords are the more-specific keywords; the 2- to 4-word search queries that still have lower search volume compared to the head phrases, but also tend to be cheaper. Long-tail keywords are the keyword phrases over 4 words where the costs tend to be minimal, but search volume is also sparse.

When doing keyword development, first look at the torso phrases and develop your keyword strategy using 2- to 4-word search queries to develop the keyword basket. Once you have the torso phrases, run the account and closely monitor the performance of the individual keywords down to your most granular KPI (ideally ROI or cost per conversion on the keyword level).

Once you know which keywords are driving highly-qualified traffic in the torso, it is then possible to look at the longer-tail keywords associated with the high converting torso phrases. Accounts with literally millions of keywords are not necessary when only a small percentage are actually working; spend where the ROI is made.

When developing your keyword basket, make sure you step into the mind of the searcher. Which keywords is your target market most likely to be using when searching for your product/service? Ensure you are not simply bidding on the marketing language you use internally, but also the language with which your market is most likely to initiate a search. (Hint: Talk to your sales department. They know the language your customers will be using.)

We recently took over a PPC campaign from a client doing it in-house and our first step was to look at the keywords. By refining the keywords based on user intention we decreased the Cost Per Click (CPC) by 23% and doubled the Click Through Rate (CTR). The conversion rate also increased substantially.

It is also possible to break out keywords by the Purchase Decision Process (PDP). By paying close attention to the keyword refinement process, it is possible to determine which keywords are being used at the beginning of the research phase, in the consideration and comparison phase and in the purchase intent phase of the PDP. By allocating these keywords into appropriate campaigns, you can then control the budgets associated with those keywords and effectively increase ROI, awareness, brand reach or whatever your PPC goals are.

Quality Score Is an Indicator, Not a Destination

There has been lots of debate around quality score and what it means to PPC advertisers. The long and short of a quality score is that it is designed to assist the customer. Google and Yahoo (with MSN just coming on board) have been using quality scoring to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. That being said, quality score should not be managed.

If you, as the advertiser, are looking to provide the consumer with the best experience possible (a good idea if you’re looking for conversions), then your quality score should naturally be good. A colleague of mine, Chris Davies, gave the perfect analogy for quality score: "It’s the ‘check engine’ light." If you have a poor quality score it serves as indication that it’s time to look under the hood and see what’s causing the issue. Look to your ad copy, landing pages and keywords, or reassign ad groups to adjust your quality score.

Ultimately, if you have a poor quality score and conversion rate is good and cost per conversion is good, then the few cents difference a better quality score can make is irrelevant.

Stop Measuring Cost Per Click; Start Measuring Cost Per Conversion

Ultimately, every change made to a PPC campaign should be to lower the cost per conversion. Therefore, don’t be afraid to bid aggressively on high-converting, high-quality, traffic-generating keywords and bid lower on the other 90% in your campaign if at the end of the day you are achieving the end goal.

This is the third installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2). So far we’ve introduced the basics in the planning and measurement involved with the setup of a PPC campaign in addition to conversion path analysis. This week we’ll get into testing, demographic targeting, and vertical engines.

Don’t Guess… Test

With a PPC campaign, testing is the campaign manager’s best friend. Testing is a constant, iterative process that must be followed to refine the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Multivariate testing can be as complex as developing a multitude of landing pages and testing multiple aspects (such as images, titles and page copy, to name a few) or as simple as using versions of a landing page or ads in A/B tests and constantly refining the best performing versions.

The key with a testing strategy is to balance the size of the test with the size of the account. The larger the test, the longer the testing process needed to gain statistically-relevant data. No matter what the size of the test, budgeting the necessary time is as important as budgeting the media spend.

Don’t Get Punished for Bad Behavior

Behavioral targeting has become one of the more popular buzzwords in the industry and rightly so; after all, the better we can target our market the more effective our campaigns. Several options are available to better target our online market, including geo-targeting, day-parting and demographic targeting.

For example, geo-targeting can be used to communicate more efficiently with users in a particular region and better allocate your product offering. After all, selling snow shovels in Florida wouldn’t be particularly advantageous, whereas selling air conditioners would be.

Finally, it is possible to target based on demographics. This targeting is most effective when using a content network and using site targeting based on the demographics of the audience for a particular site. However, although the information is available through such tools as MSN’s Ad Intelligence, I would stay away from disqualifying keywords because they are not in line with your target market’s demographics.

For example, according to the US Census data, most HR managers tend to be female, yet in targeting this audience I would not disqualify the keyword "Human Resources Management" because the demographics are skewed towards men. One of the marketing basics that’s literally been engrained into all marketers is to advertise where your market is and one very effective behavioral targeting mechanism is the use of vertical engines in your paid search strategy.

Get Vertical

Vertical search engines are an effective method of lowering CPC and improving the overall quality of traffic. The quality of the searches with a vertical search engine also tends to be better due to the increased propensity for buyers to use vertical search engines later in the purchase decision process. This presents an opportunity for those with more limited budgets (and those with the budget, too) to more effectively spend online and generate higher ROI.

Vertical engines also offer the ability to access a much more targeted audience which will allow you to develop custom ad copy for the particular demographic. Although the traffic on vertical engines is no where near what it is on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it is important not to discount these engines from any paid search strategy.  The ROAS that can be gained from advertising on vertical engines can far exceed what any mainstream engine can provide. The detriment to working on vertical engines are the differing revenue models ranging from CPC to fixed cost and the management nuances to be learned for each engine.

Of course there is a lot more to these best practices than the little snippets above, but those will be the subjects of future, more in-depth articles to come. For the continuation of this series, please visit PPC Best Practices Part 4.

Article wriiten by Jody Nimetz and Kyle Grant

• Organic search is cost efficient and rather inexpensive.  Organic campaigns are often cheaper than sponsored campaigns.  The only costs associated may be incurred as a result of outsourcing an SEO firm or training staff internally to perform search engine optimization.
• Organic listings tend to generate more click throughs as they offer unbiased product information. FACT: More people click on organic listings than sponsored listings. 
• Organic results tend to be longer lasting.  Unlike a sponsored campaign where a competitor can outbid you for top spot, a well-optimized site can remain in top position for weeks, months and even years.   I have clients who have ranked in the top position for their main key phrases for years.  In fact, I have a client who has ranked in the top spot in Google and Yahoo for a couple of very competitive key words for nearly four or five years.  It easy to see how these top organic rankings help contribute to their achieving average online sales of 150-200K per month.
• Organic search can offer a better ROI.  With the limited expense of using an organic campaign, the return can be great.

• The return from SEO/Organic search can be difficult to measure.  Without sound goals, key performance indicators, and analytics to measure your success, organic search efforts can be hard to associate a dollar value with.
• Organic results take time.  There is something to be said in the world of search engine marketing for being patient.  Unlike a paid campaign where results are immediate, organic rankings can take some time to generate.  In some cases, (due to various factors such as competitiveness of key words, online competitors with larger budgets etc) you may never achieve top organic ranking for a key phrase.
• With organic search taking longer and being harder to measure, organic search can often be a tough sell to management and decision makers in your organization.  Search in general is a new media and many executives still do not think search is credible.