The document discusses the three pillars of success in advanced PPC: people, technology, and resource allocation. It provides tips for Google and Bing campaigns, including using negative keywords, pausing match types, and setting bid percentages between match types. The document recommends strategies for objectives, budgets, tools, and analytics and provides contact information for the author.
11. ADVANCED TIPS:YaBING! Tips
1. Negative Keywords can now be added as all
match types instead of Phrase match.
2. Pausing a match type pauses the other two
match types.
3. If all match types are in same adgroup:
Exact Match: Bid (at least $0.40 to make sure
you meet min bid threshold)
Phrase Match: 75% of exact match bid
Broad Match: 85% of exact match bid
Quick Poll. Ask the question: How many have managed a PPC account? OK, how many have managed a PPC account in the last 30 days? Last 7 days? Last 24 hours?I promise no “Death by Powerpoint” if I leave you with one thing it is to focus on these 3 things.Quick overview of my background, I am DR and as such don’t believe in budgets, if you are hardcore you shouldn’t either.(explain-KPI’s, Metrics and bid strategy in place = ALL YOU CAN EAT)
Paul Revere Analogy-I am on the horse and screaming this through the streets (problem is I am riding my horse through empty towns so far), been saying it officially since 2007 but knew it far earlier, lightbulb moment was when I was at Google watching them dominate the content network model and demolish Yahoo.The Platforms: Google, YaBING! In that order then everyone else.Billionaire Book Ends-OmidKordestani and Dr Eric Schmidt on my cheesy never updated Blog that I started when everyone was talking about Web 2.0The $600 Billion dollar opportunity, ‘‘worldwide advertising spending is anywhere from $600 billion to $800 billion annually, and 95 percent of that is untargeted.’’ - CEO Eric Schmidt, March 5th 2008
Caveat: if you are a one person operation that’s great! But maybe you need more Maverick or Lewis? If you are building a team, it is CRITICAL you get GREAT (not good) peopleCultural fit is just as important as the skill set fit, I use the 51/49 rule when hiring culture/skills, you can’t teach works well with a team and positive attitude when things get tough
With a great people base you must build the infrastructure to scale & manage large campaigns and be sharper than everyone elseSetting up the house, building blocks are: analytics, at a minimum daily reporting/spreadsheets, tools (more on that later) and engineering/technical prowess (explain)Sounds simple but these things can take years to build the right way, you have to mash cost and revenue together in a granular and meaningful way and this takes discipline.API’s are great but again take discipline and can be expensive if you are not careful.
You must allocate your time, people and resources, this is critical to being successful, you CAN do a million things but you MUST do the things that make you money, scale and are the most productive for your resourcesSounds simple but it is really hard sometimes, use estimated ROI for tactical things and long term ROI for foundational projects.We joke a lot around our office about marketing but it is very much black turtleneck meets propellerhead today and you need to embrace both, there is a TON of creative ideology that needs technical tempering to forge a sharp blade here.
Question: How many people have heard of BHAG’s?A Big Hairy Audacious Goal is a strategic business statement which is created to focus an organisation on a single medium-long term organisation-wide goal which is audacious, likely to be externally questionable, but not internally regarded as impossible.The term 'Big Hairy Audacious Goal' (BHAG) was proposed by James Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1994 book entitled Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary CompaniesGoogle BHAG: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usefulAmazon BHAG: Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds. Also: Earth's most customer centric company.Lululemon employee BHAG, encourage everyone to have their own as well as forming a company and department BHAG(s) Don’t be afraid to set more than one but know that you need to then craft Strategy and dovetail Tactics to that strategy to get there.Put it out there. Post them, change them, tear them apart and rebuild them but make sure they are clear and visible.
There are inherent flaws in MPT-Modern Portfolio Theory as well as Bid Algos in general. My advice: don’t overthink things!Some tips to follow in this deck that will help you set up the house simply and efficientlyOnce you work with your accounts enough, you will know and see your elasticity for volume and return, trust me.Push the ceiling (Nigel Tufnel Spinal Tap Photo Above), find the floor and optimize to your happy place.Position generally equals Volume and generally also equates in spend, again, more in the tips section coming
Side Note, I wanted to share with you a high level graph of post search alliance trending, needless to say the Bing Algo needs some loosening, they are very proud of the reduction in CPA but the dirty little secret is volume is WAY down and they absolutely have not fixed this issue and it worries me.They certainly transitioned with QUALITY at the expense of VOLUME and frankly I would like my volume back at the cost of a higher CPA
You know what SEM is? A money printing machine. If you disagree with me then you most likely work for a “Brand” and have set yearly budgets, which is OK but not the sweet spot for hard core PPCDon’t get me wrong, there is a time and place in PPC for budgets, I call it “Discretionary Spend”, for the true DR metrics focused stuff though, your daily will be WAY higher than your actual.Once you get this dialed in, metrics are set, tracking is in place, you have your finger on the hair trigger of that optimization cannon you have built, set your daily budgets at least 3-4x actual spendYou can model all day long but you wont REALLY know until you just get in there and measure in the auction, as Mark Cuban once said, “No Balls, No Babies” and look at that guy, love him or hate him they spanked the Heat last year.Reference CUBAN: I have a saying, “No Balls, No Babies”. It was told to me by a blackjack dealer when I asked if I should double down on an 11. The message was simple. If you dont take the risks, you dont get the rewards.
Let’s dive into some tips that I hope you will find useful.Conversion Tracking Pixel – Figure out if the Conversion Many Per Click, or 1 Per Click more closely matches your internal metrics-This is a great second metrics set that can work nicely if you have internal tracking in place as well, if it’s close enough use it to optimize, if it’s not within 5-10% tear apart the methods and trackingMax Bid Tracking – ALL numbers have been changed to protect the innocent. Set up a daily keyword report and save in your own separate excel pivot table. This allows you to more easily track daily behavior after bid changes as Google’s Change History tool is inadequate (BUILD)Manage Your Head Terms Manually – do not auto bid on your core drivers, stay abreast of all movement in the auction. Mid-Tier Keyword Opportunities – Use Adwords Editor, Advanced Search functionality to source custom segments of mid-tier keywords and make large scale bid changes to premier performers. (BUILD)Ad Preview Tool – Use this to monitor movement after bid changes within 10 minutes. https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/ . Are your competitors playing cat & mouse? Use Geo selector to verify auction consistency in the larger DMAs.Keyword Match Type Balance/Strategy – Are you too heavy on Broad keywords? Add Exact and Phrase KWs of some of your terms to increase efficiency. Have exact bid at least $.01 higher than the next MT. Monitor performance and adjust appropriately. Ad Groups – Create tight thematic ad groupings. Ad Copy – Begin creating new ad copy for text and display ad sizes. You will want at least 3 ads running head to head until you can determine a champion, and then isolate and refine. Negative Keywords – Run a search query report and see if you can spot any obvious negative keywords at the ad group level. Also you may want to create a base profanity negative kw list to add at all campaign levels. (Not to mention that’s a sometimes fun but usually disturbing exercise) Display Network – Your Automatic Placements may inflate your CPA due to the huge inventory of AdSense opted in sites. Sure a certain amount of testing is necessary to find new placements to add to the Managed List, but you may want to consider getting more heavy handed with your exclusions at some point. Day Parting – If you are budget constrained, you may want to consider Day-parting as most of your spend and transactions come within a core set of hours (Last Chart). This will add efficiency and allow to maximize on your daily budget(BUILD)
Why do I call it YaBing! Because last time I checked YHOO was still much larger than Bing in market share thus I give them front billing.MSN AdCenter Tips: Negative Keywords can now be added as all match types instead of Phrase match. This is a very recent change as of a couple months. If you want to pause a match type, keep in mind it will pause the other two match types for the specific keyword. Instead, bid $0.05 so that match type will not appear in the auction without affecting the better performing match type keywords. If all match types for a KW are in the same ad group, bidding should be as follows: Exact Match: Bid (a rule of thumb is $0.40 to make sure you meet min bid threshold)Phrase Match: 75% of exact match bidBroad Match: 85% of exact match bid *These bidding ratios are specific to AdCenter’s algorithm – Since the search alliance started it now treats broad match differently than when it first did so bidding higher than phrase is key. AdCenter does not treat keywords the same as Adwords - AdCenter doesn’t map plurals, synonyms or misspellings as the same keyword thus you need to specifically add these types of keywords and bid on them. Use the Search Query Report to identify these additional keywords to expand your list.
Use and test the engines first, both the Adwords UI and Desktop and the AdCenter Desktop ToolTalk to the 3rd party Bid Management guys but know that consolidation and breadth of offeringis occurring and they are part of bigger pieces namely analytics.Soapbox: % of spend nonsense, I don’t stand for it unless there is an API quota need and then it may make sense but be very aware of the pricing schemas out there.
So many tools out there, your big GUNS are EXCEL and the engine’s tools, use all of them, try to break them and discard what doesn’t work for you.Adwords Editor and the Adcenter Desktop should be your best friends, MSFT has worked hard on their tool with Excel compatibility and some other pretty cool features, both are bad ass bid management systems that don’t cost you a % of spendBe leery of market share analysis vendors and those that claim they can see/mine/scrape the auctionsALWAYS use the Ad Preview tools-Never go live, Google’s is found here: https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/ If your CEO calls you and is bitching about not seeing some ad on some keyword chances are they aren’t using the ad preview tool, send them the link.Also make sure to log out of your gmail account and a little tip is that your trademarks can show up in the Bing Preview tool as it is “pre-filtered”Last Tip: BE CURIOUS, try a lot of things and talk to peersLastly, here’s a good link with more tools: http://tools.seobook.com/ppc-tools/
Google Analytics Premium is now available, I am a big fan, if you are worried about giving them your data, get over itBe meticulous in setting up your analytics, follow and digest Avinash and you will be in good shape, all his books are on his blog at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
If you want my OPML file email me and I can send it to you
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