Elyse Thibault, Hearst Magazines In this session, Elyse’s opening comment was her best. She stated “Bidding Wars get all of the glamour, and that keyword research and campaign organization are most important”. This statement was a great lead way into her presentation. She then continued to identify the problems of competition within the internal divisions of larger companies and corporations. She mentions that the common issues such as generation gaps, sibling rivalries, new kid syndromes and the world cup where companies are competing regionally as well as internationally. She also mentions the difficulties of Affiliate marketing and resellers/partners who are also driving up the costs of paid search campaigns. Elyse identified the main challenge areas such as Messaging, Tracking/Reporting, Keyword management, bidding wars as well as how we need to differentiate between metrics such as downloads, form submissions, sales, etc… She also talked about how the lack of coordination leads to irrational bidding. There was much emphasis on creating benchmarks and having a more centralized structure are ways to overcome the challenges of multi-divisional SEM campaigns. Olivier Lemaignen, Intiut Global Search Marketing Next up to the podium was Olivier, and he discussed the “real-life” issues with having a multi-divisional SEM team at Intuit. He mentioned the complexities of handling paid search for all of Intuit’s products such as online editions, Mac vs. PC editions, QuickBooks, TurboTax, etc... He went into details such as redundancy and the overwriting of the display urls which confuses the engines, hence making it a nightmare to track performance as well as driving up the costs. Another area of focus, just like in Elyse’s presentation is the importance of SEM Team organization and how to best manage the teams as well as harness the best practices and processes. He went though how the company had a more “Holistic approach” where one (1) person had oversight over all teams, and that having an aligned keyword development and an SEM strategy process reinforces faster sharing of best practices, consistent communication and methodologies. In closing, his vision for the future of search is a more holistic SEO/SEM relationship. Matthew Greitzer, Dir. of Search AvenueA/Razorfish The last presenter Matthew Greitzer, pinpointed on the four (4) rules for managing internal competition which are building an organization & service structure to support collaboration, having accurate unified tracking, strong keyword allocation and brand protection. He acknowledged that most of all big companies or corporations have “intra-company problems” with regard to paid search. He also discussed the importance of a well organized “Centralized Vision”, as well as developing master keyword lists and trying to avoid competitive bidding conflicts. Matt then focused on Trademark protection especially with affiliates and reseller partners. He noted that even though all of the engines address Trademark policies, they are all different. His best suggestion to get a handle of this is to simply restrict affiliates and partners from bidding on that company’s trademark terms. A strategy that worked well for him was to convince the client to run a test without affiliate bidding and the results very very encouraging. The client saw lower CPC (quality score & less competition), higher conversion rates, better ROAS% and more qualified traffic volume.
Due to internet problems yesterday, this session is being posted a day late.
This article written by Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.
