Goldilocks Syndrome or How to Find the Porridge that is Just Right

Most companies we talk to spend their time coming up with keyword lists and writing ads.  But when it comes time to setting bids, they either don’t have the time or knowledge to come up with the best bids.

A typical account we look at has set the same bid for almost all of their keywords (with maybe a handful of higher bids for super important keywords).  They randomly pick how much they think a click should cost and then wait for Google to perform.  Usually anger ensues if performance does not occur immediately.

Let’s analyze what happens to accounts that don’t have an optimal bid established for their keywords.

What is the cost of a bid that is too low?

Interestingly enough, a bid that is below its optimum is much more detrimental to your account than a bid that is too high.  Bidding too low can actually end up sabotaging your entire account if you let it.

Here are the negative repercussions of a bid that’s too low:

Lost impressions due to rank. If your bid can’t get you into a reasonable rank on the first page, your ad won’t appear every time a searcher is looking for what you have to offer.  You can add this column to your Campaigns view in Google AdWords to see if you are losing impressions due to rank.

Quality Score Death Spiral. Your ongoing CTR is one of the biggest drivers of your quality score.  While Google technically says it tempers its expectations by ad position, we find that it can have pretty outrageous expectations for lower positions.  Almost every time we see a campaign with keyword running in the lower ad positions for a length of period of time, we usually see quality scores of 2-4 throughout the account.  Which is a truly horrible hole to dig yourself out of.  Quality scores this low, make it almost impossible for an advertiser to get into the higher ad positions without forking over a lot more money.

Not the best position for conversions. When thinking about your bid, think about the ad position that gets you the best results.  This is where you want your ad to appear.  For most advertisers we work with, this is above the fold on the first page of the results.

Losing leads to competition. When your bid is too low, odds are your competition is out there with higher bids.  So, not only are you not getting found, but you are losing business to your competition.

What is the cost of a big that’s too high?

While a bid that is too low is quite damaging, we are not by any means suggesting that you overspend!

Paying for unnecessary clicks. Lots of searchers are known to just click on the top result if it looks anywhere near relevant.  If your ad position is too high, especially for broad head terms, you are likely to pay for a bunch of clicks that will just turn into bounces.

Not the best position for conversions. Same story as with a bid that’s too low, you need to determine the ad positions where you perform best as related to your bottom line.  That might not be ad position #1.

Double high presence. We usually find that having a double presence (a paid and natural search listing) on a page has a strong benefit.  However, if you have a very high natural search presence, you might not need to be bidding for the very top paid search position as well.

Paying too much per click. Do you get as good of performance (CTR and conversions) in ad position 3 as you do in ad position 1?  Then no need to overpay!

Lost impressions due to budget. If you have all of your bids set too high, many times your budget won’t be able to support all the possible clicks your campaign might receive.  In this case, your ad won’t be able to appear all the time for your keywords since it will be limited by the budget.  You don’t want to miss out on impressions for top performing keywords, so it’s not good to lose impressions due to your budget.

In summary, it’s a little like what poor Goldilocks struggled with: how to find that bowl of porridge that is just right.  In terms of your PPC bids, too low is very bad and too high is no good either.  You literally need a bid that is just right.  Having bids that are just right can be a key determining factor in whether or not your PPC campaigns deliver ROI.  How to manage that?  You can start to review your analytics and adjust bids yourself, you can try out some of the bid optimization capabilities built directly into the search engines, or you can sign-up for a third-party bid management software like Yield Software, which does all the work for you.

But don’t stop there.  It’s very easy these days to set up advanced bidding, especially with the much better AdWords reporting now available inside of Google Analytics.  You can very quickly get a feel for days of the week and day part performance without having to create custom reports.

In AdWords, pause or lower your bids for lesser performing segments and increase your bids for the days and times that bring you the most benefit.  Give it a try – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up!

If you have some positions that you know work to bring you the best results, you can also use the campaign position preference settings to fine-tune where your ads will appear.

Happy Just Right Bidding!

13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

… On a First Date?

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around before they are ready to take that conversion step.  There are four generally-accepted steps in the sales cycle you should keep in mind:

Ignorance — This is the phase when a person is unaware of their need of a particular product or service that might make their lives or their own business somehow better or more efficient or less expensive.

Awareness — When a customer has become aware of a need and the means of addressing it, but is still learning, investigating and preparing.

Engagement — A customer-prospect has selected your company as one that might address their need.

Investment — Success! A prospective customer becomes a paying customer.

Most people these days go through these four stages of the sales cycle.  So rather than throwing all of your eggs in one basket, hoping to convince your visitor to “go all the way” on that very first visit, we encourage you to offer different avenues to make a connection on that first visit.  This will enable you to foster the relationship and be the one the searcher comes back to when they are ready to convert.

For prospects in the “ignorance” phase, it’s important to speak to a particular pain point.  Call out that pain and the clear cure for it.  For instance, say you sell solar panels.  You may want to run PPC ads like this one:

Energy Bills High?

Solar is more affordable

than ever – learn how.

solarxyz.com/lowermybills

(Hopefully, this is a fake company… we intended it to be!)  In this instance, the ad is addressing a common customer pain point: high household energy bills.  They point out why an alternative could be viable for the searcher.  And they entice the searcher with an answer to their pain (”lower my bills”).

Next, during the “awareness” phase, think about why your searcher is likely to be hunting around gathering more information:

Are they looking for the best price?

Do they need reviews / ratings / referrals before selecting?

Are they researching a gift for someone else?

Are they sure about the exact product accessory they need?

Did they simply get interrupted in the middle of their search?

Are they not currently using the right device or computer that they intend on converting from?

Do they need to run it by someone else?

We could go on and on — there are so many different reasons why people aren’t ready to commit on the first click.  After you figure out the likely scenarios for your particular offering, you can start to think about the types of valuable information for a connection that will enable you to stick in the mind of the visitor and leave a lasting presence they will return to.

The content that you offer to make the connection will need to be unique, valuable, helpful and just plain irresistible.  Following are some additional “connection” ideas that you can try out:

Newsletter sign-up.  You’ll need to say more than just “sign up” though – for instance, does the newsletter contain offers?  What type of content is in it that will entice them or be useful to them?

Facebook / Twitter following.  Again –why would they want to do this?  Is there some enticing content from your community that you can use as a teaser?  Are there special offers you have for your social following?

Webinar sign-up.  Do you have any relevant upcoming webinars that might be of interest that you can encourage them to sign up for?

Conference sign-up.  Any upcoming conferences that you will be attending?  Perhaps you are going to have some form of a giveaway that they can sign up for.

Notification sign-up.  Can you entice them to sign-up for an email notification if there is a price changes in the future?  Or would they like to be notified of future reviews that are posted, or stock level notifications?

Third-party data.  Do you have valuable industry or market data that you can share with them – any analyst or third party reports, or review aggregations that would help guide them?

Personalized information.  Can you provide them with any information that is personalized to them?  The ROI on a purchase, help finding the right solution through a series of questions, previewing how something will look for them, analysis of something that is theirs, any form of a calculator, etc.  Make sure to capture the results so you can also email them to them.

Personal response to questions, or personal review of something.  If an expert can help guide them in a personalized, non-salesy way, this is often attractive.

Contests.  Everyone loves to win things!

Polls.  Ask them for their input on something about what you offer.  This will usually require a strong incentive – but even showing the results of an ongoing poll that you have, that they can participate in can often times be enough.

A product brochure, white paper, recent use-case video, etc.  Any content that can help them learn more about you after they go away from your website.

After you are able to make the connection, you’ll want to spend some time nurturing it.  This gets you to the “engagement” level.  Continue to reach out to the visitor on a regular basis with more unique, valuable content along the lines of the connection they made with you.  Whether it’s an updated analysis, a new notification, some interesting community content from Twitter, or some new poll results, keep the conversation going and stay fresh in their mind.

Once you’ve gotten your additional connection points in place on your landing pages and throughout your website, you’ll want to make sure you are tracking their success.  Track all the meaningful events for your online campaigns, realizing that any connection made carries value – so if you have keywords that are bringing in lots of new connections, but no immediate revenue you’ll want to keep them alive to see if your nurture-rate to revenue is high.  For each of these connection points, you’ll want to monitor how often they bring about return visits and eventually generate revenue.  This will help you know where to focus your efforts as you go forward.

All of which gets you to that “all-the-way goal”: investment.

Thanks to customer feedback and suggestions, you will now see two improvements.  First, we have updated our cross-search engine budget allocation algorithm to consider additional statistics including click-through-rate (CTR) and stay rate. As a result, you will see a more optimal allocation of spend across search engines. All existing and new campaigns will automatically leverage this enhancement as they will be set to Automatic Budget Allocation in the Advanced Campaign Settings page.

Second, for those of you wishing to have more control, we have introduced Manual Budget Allocation, which gives you the ability to explicitly set your spend for each search engine in any campaign with this beautiful piece of GUI goodness:

Campaign Settings showing Manual Budget Allocation

This combination of settings of new features provides you maximum flexibility in achieving your targeted spend across search engines.  Keep the feedback coming — we really appreciate it — and enjoy the new features.

Crush Your Competition!

Fantasy sports continue to attract more interest each year. The concept of assembling a dream team of elite players, watching them outperform and raking in the profits is very appealing and addictive to many.

Since there are never enough sport analogies in the business world, let’s apply these fantasy team concepts to SEM. If you were to assemble your own SEM fantasy team, what would it look like?

The Fantasy SEM Team Roster. You can’t play any sport without a full team. What does a full team for SEM include? You need team members to both attract visitors to your website and then convert them once they get to your site.

Here’s what your starting lineup should include:

The Offense: Get them to your site.

Paid Search Keywords. Star keywords are short tail enough to get great volume and make a competitive stand, but yet specific enough to get you real results. You’ll need to think in terms of the search refinement path and the buying cycle so that you have all the necessary assist impressions and clicks as well as those that actually convert. The dream team keywords often come with a steeper price tag, but frequently contribute far superior rewards.

Paid Search Ad Copy Unique Offer Descriptors. These are the snippets in your ad that make your ad stand out from the competition. These grab searchers and say “hey- look at me and this amazing thing I have.” You’ll need a couple of different ones so you aren’t always showing the same line to searchers as they head down the search path.

Paid Search Ad Copy Calls to Action. These ad copy snippets motivate searchers to click and act. Create a sense of urgency and be specific about what they can expect and what you want them to do.

SEO Keywords. These are the keyword searches that would enable you to crush your competition on the natural search side. It’s important for these keywords to have great chemistry with the paid search keywords. When you’ve got a presence in both the paid and natural results on a page, your click-through rate will skyrocket.

SEO Link Bait. Your link bait can come in many different forms – original and valuable content is key here. It’s especially important for your link bait to play well with your SEO keywords, to give your rank the boost it needs.

The Defense: Stop visitors from leaving your site before converting.

Website Smack Talkers. No fantasy team would be complete without some smack. Highlight your benefits over the competition on your web pages. Make it as easy as possible for searchers to understand how you line up and what you have to offer that’s unique and better.

Website Credibility Givers. Showing awards and including reviews are good ways to make yourself shine and provide credibility.
Website Calls to Action. Without a score, even if you play great, it just doesn’t pay off. This is one of the spots where you can even use a player to play both offense and defense. If you have a call to action that’s working in your paid search ads or website, don’t be afraid to use the same one in both locations.

Remarekting ads. Rebounding is always important. If someone gets away from your site without converting, get back out there and try to lure them back in. Don’t give up because you didn’t make a score on your first try.

Fantasy SEM Tips for Success:

Here are a few tips for assembling and managing a winning Fantasy SEM Team:

Create Team Chemistry. Not only do they have to be great stars themselves, but it’s important that the members of your team have good chemistry between them and be on the same page. Consistent keywords, while providing broad coverage and consistent messaging without being repetitive to death are important. Your team members should create a cohesive tightly woven message.

Foster Team Competition. Even star performers can get a bit lazy if there isn’t some competition continually pushing them to do their best. Always have a set of backup players practicing every day and giving your stars a run for their money.

Reward Consistent Performance. Nothing is more frustrating than a great click here and there, but otherwise dismal performance. This is your dream team, not the minor leagues, if a piece of your team can’t perform consistently it should take the bench.

Keep Scouting. Don’t miss out on a hot new keyword, rising pain point or new critical feature. You need to continually keep tabs on the market place to make sure you spot and incorporate sleepers into your team to stay on top.

Monitor Competition. Keep an eye on all of your competitor’s moves. Do they have new messaging? Are they showing up for new keywords? Have they retired anything that wasn’t working? Are they copying any of your techniques? Always stay a step ahead and stay unique. Never be caught off guard.

Be Prepared for Challenges. As with any stars, your fantasy SEM team will likely have high drama associated with them. They will be in high demand, people will try to steal them from you, copy their techniques, etc. They also don’t come with ease, don’t come for free and don’t stay unless they are continually nurtured.

Become Addicted to Stats. As with any fantasy league, watching your star performers work in action is half the fun. Luckily reporting is easily available for much of SEM, so you can kick back on the couch, crack open a cold one and watch you fantasy SEM team work wonders – getting clicks, having visitors spend quality time on your site and bringing in “the Quan.”

Don’t Let Gut & Emotions Rule. There are going to be some offers and some keywords that in your gut you really want to be star performers, but when you look at the data, they just won’t be. Don’t let your emotions take over and put your non-performers on the bench.

Keep Your Eye on the Prize. It’s not free to play and the stakes are high, so you better stay focused on winning. Keep focused on how you are performing against your goals and in comparison to your competition. You might decide that second or third prize has enough cash for you, but you’ll need to monitor where you are in line, not that one of your competitors goes out and adds in some new messaging or keywords that crushes you.

Keep a Consistent Strategy. There is a lot of hype around SEM and people with new strategies and schemes every day. It’s important to tune out the noise and stick with your strategy until you are sure (based on the facts) that it needs tweaking.

Staying focused on an elite fantasy SEM team, can be a great strategy for achieving these 3 main SEM goals:

1. Make a name for yourself
2. Crush your competition
3. Make money

And there’s nothing wrong with those outcomes, right?  So assemble your team and take your league by storm today!

The Key Point: Are You Listening?

Search marketing is the fastest, most affordable way to stay on top of market trends.  In order to make the most out of every search marketing dollar that you spend, we’ve outlined some important data you should review regularly to inform other, parallel marketing efforts and to insure optimal performance across all your marketing channels.

Data From PPC / Search Network Results…

To SEO:

Keywords that are Popular and Bring in the Most Relevant Traffic. This will help you know not only what keywords to target, but, can also save you money if you optimize your SEO for the highest traffic PPC keywords.

To PPC:

Negative Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. When clicks occur on search queries that are irrelevant you are throwing money out the window- so monitor the search queries that are bringing in the clicks and be sure to add any irrelevant terms to your negatives keywords list.

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. There are so many different ways of saying the same things, so it’s important to monitor the terms your audience is actually using to search for your products.  This list of actual search queries can especially be a gold mine of new keyword opportunities if you are using broad match – it can be one of the easiest ways to move into longer-tail terms with lower CPCs and better conversions.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies, and also geographies to not focus on.  Monitor your PPC activity and results by geography.  This will give you indications of where to focus your marketing dollars and where to avoid additional spend.

Hot Offers.  Monitor your PPC ad CTRs to see which offers generate the most interest and which offers searchers don’t seem very interested in.  This will help you know what offers to emphasize in your other more expense marketing channels.

Product Popularity.  PCC traffic trends are a great way to see which product areas are hot and deserve more marketing dollars and which product areas have little interest and might even be candidates for sun setting.

To Website:

Hot Taglines & Calls to Action.  If you want to know the best content especially around calls to action to include on your website – your PPC ads can be the best indicators.  See what calls to action get the highest CTRs and which ones are ignored and you’ll have a great head start on the content to use in your website itself to garner action.

To Social Media:

Hot Product Areas.  Where should you be emphasizing your social voice – through blogs and social sites?  PPC keyword and search query trends can be a great indicator of hot areas of interest vs. areas which won’t garner much interest in social activity.

Market Feelings.   Searchers frequently include their feelings in their search queries.  Mining these feeling keywords can be a gold mine for relating to your potential audience and the current issues they are facing.  These feeling keywords can be a great way to grab a searchers attention through a blog title or other social post.

Data From PPC / Content Network Results…

To Marketing Strategy:

If you are running an automatic placement or re-targeting campaign these are a great way to identify popular websites that potential and past customers frequent.  You can use these to determine associations that might be valuable to join or thought leaders that you might want to incorporate into future events.

To SEO:

With the automatic and re-targeting campaigns, you can also generate a great list of popular websites which are complementary and relevant to your site and fantastic link building opportunities.  Showing a website the stats of visitors who take interest in both of your sites is a very compelling way to conduct manual link building.

Data From Natural Search Results…

To PPC:

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries. Monitor your logs to see how people are searching for your products.  Be sure to include all these different flavors in your ppc campaigns.  It has been shown that having a ppc and seo listing on the same page greatly improves the overall CTR for those keyword terms.

To SocialMedia:

Blog Keywords and Topics. Your natural search query list is also a goldmine for finding out hot topics to write blog and other social media entries for.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies.  Natural search traffic data by geography is another great source for identifying geographies to place more emphasis on and those to ignore.  The natural search geographies can frequently carry surprises about areas you didn’t expect to get great traffic from, since they are not restricted like they are in PPC.

Data from Google Alerts / Social Monitoring…

To PPC:

Negative Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you don’t want your ad to appear.

New Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you do want your PPC ads to appear.

To SEO:

Websites for Link Opportunities. Monitoring current blogs postings, news articles and other social posts can provide great indicators of potential complementary websites for link building opportunities.

Link-bait Content. Monitoring trends can give you great ideas for what type of content is most likely to be successful link bait.

To Social:

Be the News Source for Your Clients. Being on top of breaking news and the latest trends will enable you to be the first one to push out new news information to your social followers and enable you to have the blog postings on the hottest topics.

To Marketing Strategy:

Thought Leaders. Monitoring the news, social and blog worlds is a great way to identify thought leaders for you to develop relations hips with and to leverage in marketing events.

Newsletters, Blogs to Regularly Monitor. To make sure that your staff is always up to date, monitoring thought leaders is a great way to identify what blogs and news feeds your staff should be regularly reading updates from to ensure everyone is always up to date on the current market pulse.

Many larger, more matrixed marketing organizations manage many of these functions in separate silos, and understanding the impacts of one tactic on other, related tactics can be difficult due to organizational structure or dysfunction.  It would be in the best interests of these kinds of organizations, however, to improve interdisciplinary communication and cross-pollination in order to achieve a more effective marketing strategy.  Try sharing your portion of the data first with teams across different organizations in order to start opening up the communication lines and collaboration.

Marketing data from every aspect of your overall effort can positively impact a whole range of related and unrelated marketing and sales tactics.  It’s important to listen to that data, and to appropriately apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing program.

How to Become Unbounded by Budget (Without Raising It)

In a world where keyword recommendations are readily available, many advertisers have had the experience of logging into Google’s AdWords and seeing a message next to their campaign budget that says: “Limited by budget.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be limited by anything… especially by my budget!  Here are some answers to frequently asked questions:

What does it mean to be limited by budget?

Google will not display all your ads all the time for your keywords in order to avoid exceeding your daily budget.  If you’ve ever done a search for one of your keywords in the middle of the day and your ad hasn’t appeared, this may be why.

For those of you who live in a world of unlimited funds, Google will tell you the exact dollar amount to raise your budget to so your ads show 100% of the time.  All you have to do is click on the call-out preceding the “Limited by budget” message, raise your budget to the recommended amount and — viola — you are done!

What’s that you say? Money doesn’t grow on the tree in your office?

So is it okay to leave your campaign running in this limited state?

No!  Assuming that you are advertising because you are getting results, you have some keywords that bring in valuable traffic.  Being limited by your budget means that when a searcher types in these top keywords, your ad will not always appear – definitely not okay!

Think of it this way:  Let’s say you are at the horse races.  While you might identify lots of different horses to place bets on, you don’t have enough cash to be able to make all the bets you desire.    So, you determine the horses that you can afford and are most likely to win and then place bets on those.  AdWords works the same way — you should only bet only on keywords that fit into your budget.

How far has your desire exceeded your budget?

Click on the call-out preceding the “Limited by budget” message to find out the percentage of available impressions you are missing out on and Google’s recommended budget.  If you are missing more than 35 percent of available ad impressions and the recommended budget is more than double your current budget, you’ll need to reset your expectations and do some serious pruning.

While I am normally not a fan of machete-style campaign management (scalpels are much better tools), you’ll likely need a pretty heavy blade in order to trim your campaign and bring in line with your budget. 

Criteria for eliminating keywords unworthy of your budget:

Keywords with impressions, but no clicks. If you have a campaign that’s performing, these keywords should be easy to remove.  They are getting impressions, but searchers have not been compelled to click on your ad for them.  Especially focus on deleting keywords with the highest volume of impressions, but no clicks.

Keywords that have never gotten an impression. If your campaign is performing, these are another easy target for decreasing your keyword volume.  You can use Quality Score as another good second indicator – so if there are no impressions for a keyword and the quality score is less than seven, it’s a great candidate for removal.

High traffic keywords with poor results. You’ll want to tread lightly here, but take a look at keywords that do get a lot of clicks and, therefore, use up a lot of your budget.  Look at the stats for the individual keywords.  If you can identify one or more that have a bounce rate that’s over 60 percent, or a time on site less than 1 minute, and that have never brought you a conversion, such keywords are good candidates to pause.  Be very careful here, though, so as not to turn off keywords that assist in bringing back return visitors to your site–and let stats be your guide.

Keywords with a low CTR. Sort your keywords by their click-through rate (CTR).  If you have some keywords with a very low CTR – for example lower than 0.25 percent – and these keywords also have a high bounce rate, low time on site and / or no conversions, these are also good candidates to pause or remove.

Keywords with a bad quality score.  If you have keywords with a quality score of 4 or less and they have no clicks; or the traffic they bring in has a high bounce rate, low time on site and no conversions; these are good candidates to eliminate from your campaign.

Competing keywords. Campaigns frequently contain keywords that essentially compete with each other.  If you don’t know how to identify these, you can hover over the call-out next to a keyword and Google will let you know if that search term is already associated with another ad from your campaign.  It’s best to only have one keyword entering the auction so you aren’t competing against yourself, so pause the ones that are already covered elsewhere if they have not brought in any valuable traffic or conversions.

Please keep focused on your goal as you go through this exercise.  No one likes to cut back.  For every keyword you will hear a little “but” in your head and be very hesitant to take action.  Just remember: you want your ads to appear for your top keywords all the time, and the foregoing are the necessary steps to get there.

Cut out the lowest-performing keywords then give the campaign a couple days to adjust and see how your budget and performance are doing.  It may take several tries before you can get your campaign in line with your budget without sacrificing results.  We recommend that you go slow, but do not delay starting the process!

For those of you managing your PPC campaigns through our Yield Web Marketing Suite, our underlying optimization algorithms undertake these activities for you, recommending keywords to pause and which ones to double-down on, in order to get the best results from your budgets.  And, as always, feel free to contact our Customer Success Reps if you have questions or require guidance — we’re here to help.

First and Foremost: Have a Written Plan!

Now that you’ve solicited ideas from your co-workers and you’ve evaluated your 2009 marketing efforts, it’s time to roll this data into a Web marketing plan for 2010.  Follow this basic plan for setting up a credible plan before moving into the new year.

Establish Objectives

To be effective, your Web marketing plan should tie into measurable, realistic and time-based business objectives. For instance, let’s say you want to increase the number of readers to your blog because you’ve noticed that once people find your blog, they stick around and perform other actions on your website.

Instead of using the vague phrase “Increase number of visitors to the blog,” state your objective this way: “Increase the number of visitors to the blog who download our e-book by 10% for Q1.” You can then base your marketing tactics on this objective. These tactics could include:

• Posting comments on other blogs (to drive traffic to your blog)
• Developing a PPC campaign to promote your e-book
• Posting links to your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
• Publicizing your blog posts in your e-newsletter

Develop a Web Marketing Plan Format

You can format your Web marketing plan in whichever way makes most sense to you and your team. At a minimum, fire up Excel or a spreadsheet in Google Docs and start by listing your objectives, tactics, and timelines, and any associated costs for each tactic.  You can use a table format with columns for:

(a) objectives

(b) tactics

(c) budgeted costs

(d) actual costs

(e) results, and

(f) status.

Or, you can list each month in a linear format and then bullet your marketing tactics as a list of “to-dos” for each month.  If you’re using Google Docs, make sure each stakeholder has been invited to the spreadsheet so it becomes a living, accessible roadmap — and transparent accountability measure — for how it is you and your team achieve stated objectives throughout 2010.

Divide Web marketing tactics or “to-dos” into categories like:

• Social Media (including Twitter campaigns, and video or podcast publishing)
• Website (including your blog and landing pages)
• Search Marketing (including SEO, local search initiatives and PPC campaigns)
• Display Advertising (for Web publications, ad networks, social networks, and the like)
• Email Marketing (including your newsletter and promotional emails)

Set Up Accountability Measures

Whether you’re accountable to no one, a single boss or a whole team, it’s critical you set up regular mechanisms for evaluating your progress against stated goals throughout the year.  I also advise that you include deadlines for all of your marketing initiatives – big and small. As we all know, marketing projects tend to get shifted to the back burner due to the every day challenges of running a growing business.  The biggest issue for all those running Web marketing campaigns, however, is the tendency to “set it and forget it”.  The Web is a constantly shifting, ever-changing beast, and marketing on the Web requires your regular attention.

For instance, if you want to revamp your PPC campaign, set a deadline for that.  If you want your PPC campaign to deliver increases in traffic, traffic quality or conversions, set your goals and the dates by which you’d like to see incremental progress toward those goals. (Be sure to use the tools available to you in the Yield Web Marketing Suite if this happens to be one of your objectives.)  Depending on the types and number of goals you set for yourself or team, you may want to check in daily, or weekly, or monthly, or quarterly.  In no case, however, should you put off evaluating your progress any longer than quarterly; it’s hard to remain accountable for an objective when you check in on your status once or twice a year!

Plan for Big Events

If you’re developing a new product or service, you’ll want to incorporate deadlines for developing the corresponding marketing collateral, PR, advertising, tradeshow materials, and online content for blogs, landing pages, website pages (which will help with SEO), and PPC campaigns.  If you participate in events like tradeshows, make sure those are called out in your plan so you have all the elements in place to take full advantage of your participation.

Set your deadline for tradeshows or when you anticipate the new product or service being available, then work backward. If your event or product is set to go on July 1, you really need to begin developing the marketing and PR materials around it in January. (Trust me: too many companies make the mistake of thinking about marketing an event or product until the last minute – when it’s often too late.)  Make sure you have some goals associated with an event or the launch of a new product or service.  Are there product brand awareness objectives?  Or lead generation goals?  How about sales objectives?  Set reasonable, achievable, but nevertheless “stretch” objectives for your events andnew initiative and then regularly measure your progress against those objectives.

In Summary

Develop a plan for making gains in 2010.

Remember: don’t file your plan away and forget about it.  Be invested in it.

Once you have your written plan in place, refer to it often to ensure you’re on track. It also helps to meet with your team shortly after each quarter ends to see where you stand with projects; if objectives are being met; and, any challenges you’re facing. You can then make course corrections and/or revise deadlines — but only after you understand why such corrections are necessary.

Keeping your team in the loop helps keep them accountable and allows them to provide customer feedback or insights you might not have had when you first developed your plan.

We hope you’ll make improving your Web marketing campaigns part of your business objectives for 2010. Our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you automate the entire process of your search marketing effort (freeing you up to focus on other marketing initiatives), save you money, and give you the insight you need to make business decisions that positively impact your bottom line.  So be sure to make use of all the tools available to you!

Happy Marketing – and Happy Holidays from the entire team at Yield Software!