Jeffrey K. Rohrs welcomes that panel which includes representatives from Adobe, Fox and Intuit. Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media begins by giving an overview of Fox's network of sites that includes MySpace, photobucket and American Idol. Fox has recently taken the move to consolidate SEM into one in-house team of 15 to work across all of the Fox websites. An important part of Bill's work is with PPC arbitrage (the good kind), using a large network of high quality content sites. Ad sales is Fox's largest revenue source, although they also look at other monetisation efforts such as sales, subscriptions and e-commerce. He stresses that it's important to tie all your systems together to get real time data, including your financial backend, ad server, web analytics and PPC bid management system. You're then able to calculate real time revenue and makes running large scale PPC campaigns easier and more cost effective. Targeting high quality content and high revenue sites offers better returns and bid management software is important in order to keep the money flowing into the most profitable keywords. Keep increasing the money you feed into campaigns until cost equals revenue and then optimise so that the best profit levels can be made.
Olivier who works in-house at Intuit begins by explaining the issues that they faced when he joined the company, with each department running their own PPC campaigns and little internal communication. He formed an organised design of personnel structure and moved into creating a single department to focus on all brands and keeping Inuit's objectives aligned. Agency resource was also consolidated so that a single company was used for their campaign optimisation and keyword expansion. The result was significant cost savings and a resulting increased (and continually increasing) profitability. To keep these efforts aligned, there's a continued effort to ensure that keyword duplication across campaigns doesn't occur (bidding against yourself). Testing campaigns is also essential, should multiple products be targeting the same set of keywords.
Dena Yahya from Onetime.com is introduced as someone who has experience in managing over one million keywords within the travel sector. Each member of her team is given their own vertical and is empowered to make key decisions on their campaigns - helping to stimulate their initiative and job satisfaction. Keywords are divided into different buckets and are optimised from the tail to the centre. Regular analysis is extremely important to ensure that budgets don't get out of control, although you shouldn't micro-manage. A/B test the products and pages that you market and optimise your landing page based on how it effects conversions.
Jay Middleton for Adobe outsources all of Search Marketing (he's a team of one) and takes an overall view and management of strategy. In the perfect world there would be no keyword, product or audience overlap and and no internal conflicts and goals – although that's never the case. Adobe manages over 175,000 keywords worldwide with multiple agencies and products. With such a large company, it's often the case that inter-division competition occurs, especially when new products and companies are acquired. Software suites and bundles cause chaos with campaigns and interlinked keyword groups.
