Below is live coverage of the Advanced Paid Search Techniques from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Advanced Paid Search Techniques | (08/13/2009) |
| 10:40 | Keri Morgret: How can you best tap into long tail terms? Are there targeting techniques you're overlooking? This session examines these and other techniques to help you get more out of paid search.
Speakers:
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Bill Lan, Vice President of Account Development, Efficient Frontier
Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media
Sage Lewis, President, SageRock.com
Ari Levenfeld, Manager Client Services, Ask Sponsored Listings |
| 10:41 | Keri Morgret: A few technical problems here, apologies for the late start. We're in the middle of Thomas Bindl's presentation right now. |
| 10:41 | Keri Morgret: He's talked about how we can't just look at the last paid click for conversion information. |
| 10:41 | Keri Morgret: You need to measure all of your data (ad text performance, placement performance, etc.) |
| 10:42 | Keri Morgret: Look at revenue per impression. Download the data from your AdWords account, then add some of your own columns to get the data you need. |
| 10:42 | Keri Morgret: Use filter functionalities on a regular basis. This has been improved a lot in the latest redesign. |
| 10:43 | Keri Morgret: There's a lot of information to help you measure exactly. Missed the points on his slide. |
| 10:44 | Keri Morgret: Looking at how to cut the long tail shorter, and optimizing your account with better tracking. Use negative keywords, helps with better targeting and spending less. Example if you're trying to advertise for the Paris Hilton hotel, do exact match, exclude things like videos, include things like reservation. |
| 10:44 | Keri Morgret: Video paris hilton will NOT get you videos of what the room looks like. ;) |
| 10:45 | Keri Morgret: Bill Lan is up next. |
| 10:46 | Keri Morgret: Their company manages $750 million of paid search. |
| 10:46 | Keri Morgret: Techniques they use: utilizing search query reports, mining the long tail, and how to use seasonal data. |
| 10:47 | Keri Morgret: He shows the broad keyword of bid management. Broad match search terms are including construction bid management, vendor management, procurement target. Looking at this report helps you figure out exact keywords to use, and what to use for negative keywords. |
| 10:48 | Keri Morgret: Google search query report isn't as granular as most web analytics packages. |
| 10:48 | Keri Morgret: There is still good data, you can add negatives based on incorrect query intent, and add keywords and exact match based on your ROI. |
| 10:49 | Keri Morgret: Mining the long tail -- you're getting away from dependence on head terms. |
| 10:50 | Keri Morgret: Systematically expose under-explored keywords, uncovering each keyword's full ROI characteristicxs. |
| 10:50 | Keri Morgret: You need to look at are you getting more keywords with clicks, impressions, conversions. |
| 10:50 | Keri Morgret: How to bid long tail keywords with convidence. You need to cluster similar keywords to maximize exposure efforts. |
| 10:51 | Keri Morgret: Talks about putting some math behind keywords, see how closely they match. Shows diagram. |
| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: Look at seasonality for your keywords. "cape cod hotels" has a definite seasonal search volume. |
| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: Use your historical data to help with exposure and bidding decisions. Know when to start pushing some keywords, and when to stop pushing them. |
| 10:53 | Keri Morgret: Match your search query reports to conversions to help determine your next direction. |
| 10:54 | Keri Morgret: Tool used to generate the semantic relevance / math that he talked about. They use an in-house modeling, but that data is available through the search engine APIs. You can also go to Google and type in keywords into their keyword generator, they do show some of the similarities. |
| 10:54 | Keri Morgret: Andrew Goodman is now speaking. |
| 10:55 | Keri Morgret: His presentation is titled "Greedy Ad Testing? & 'Quality Score Hygiene'" |
| 10:56 | Keri Morgret: He's explaining academic papers talking about bidding strategies. |
| 10:57 | Keri Morgret: Both you and Google want to make money. Quality score is how Google wants to make money. CTR is a big factor in quality score. |
| 10:58 | Keri Morgret: Ad testing: think about your objectives. If you use their default settings, they favor the highest CTR, don't care about your CPA. But your goals are often CPA and stuff is opposite of what they want. |
| 11:00 | Keri Morgret: "double winner" is the rare ad with both a high CTR that doesn't hurt your investment (has high ROI). |
| 11:00 | Keri Morgret: Do landing page testing, do lots of variations to try to get this. Also do for ad copy. |
| 11:02 | Keri Morgret: He's showing example of a variety of ads - the best CPA had the lowest CTR. A bad CPA has a good CTR. |
| 11:03 | Keri Morgret: How to give yourself a chance for the "double winner".
Keep more ads "in play", don't turn off too soon.
Multivariate testing.
Don't make mistakes with latency or date ranges. External factors can affect your ads, may not be just the ads themselves.
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| 11:04 | Keri Morgret: Consider attributes of winning ad creative "account wide". Look in Google Analytics for some of this information. |
| 11:05 | Keri Morgret: Think harder about why some ads can do both high CTR and high ROI.
- Information scent and relevancy. You've got better copy in your ads.
- several other bullet points. |
| 11:06 | Keri Morgret: With new accounts, you really need to think about quality score and CTR. |
| 11:06 | Keri Morgret: Don't let keyword tools run your marketing.
Build a tight campaign to start with, broaden keyword list later. |
| 11:08 | Keri Morgret: Sage Lewis is now up. |
| 11:09 | Keri Morgret: He watches this industry like other people watch baseball scores. |
| 11:09 | Keri Morgret: Most recent news: Digg rolls out a new ad platform, it's currently in beta. The more the ad is voted up, the lower CPC. Ads probably won't show right now, as it's in a light beta. |
| 11:09 | Keri Morgret: Click fraud declines, according to click forensics. |
| 11:10 | Keri Morgret: BrightRoll launches performance pricing models for online video advertising. They have cost per engagement, cost per completed video, and cost per click. |
| 11:10 | Keri Morgret: Google adwords is now dynamically adding addresses to the ads. Shows up the example of local pizza places. |
| 11:11 | Keri Morgret: You can manually add the address. |
| 11:11 | Keri Morgret: Search marketing spends double and take 59% share of online marketing budget according to a forrester report. |
| 11:12 | Keri Morgret: Lawsuits with trademarks in PPC (Rosetta Stone) |
| 11:12 | Keri Morgret: Search ads less helpful than TV, Newspapers from Harris Interactive. |
| 11:13 | Keri Morgret: Still on headlines of news. |
| 11:13 | Keri Morgret: YouTube Launches Call-to-Action overlay. |
| 11:14 | Keri Morgret: Hulu commands as much as TV and 10% of online video ads. "You know you have eyes on your screen" |
| 11:15 | Keri Morgret: Microsoft, NBC Universal to sell addressable TV Ads. Admira aggregates viewer data from multiple satellite and cable TV systems, then overlays that with geo and demographic data to determine which ads to serve. |
| 11:15 | Keri Morgret: Five more newspapers join the Yahoo Newspaper consortium. Started in November 2006 with 176 newspapers, now at 814. |
| 11:15 | Keri Morgret: Search Plus Display still hottest online ad combo in Q1 2009. |
| 11:17 | Keri Morgret: Search Giants Encounter Challenges in Mobile Ad Markets. |
| 11:18 | Keri Morgret: Wow, lots of news that has happened, and didn't get it all down here.
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| 11:19 | Keri Morgret: Re Bing/Yahoo, Lewis feels we need more innovation, is "feeling the excitement" is Bing. Yahoo is asking questions about what people wants to see. He thinks it's going to be good. |
| 11:19 | Keri Morgret: Goodman: With two players, it's going to be "easier to buy more" advertising once you have your advertising optimized. |
| 11:20 | Keri Morgret: Ask reminds us that they are still a player out there, and Chris Boggs relates that he had a report about good conversions from Ask. |
| 11:21 | Keri Morgret: Ari Levenfeld from Ask is now up. Thanks Yahoo and Microsoft for helping them to now be number three (chuckles from audience). |
| 11:22 | Keri Morgret: Ari comes to search from a writing background. He has an MFA in poetry, which doesn't have a lot of job options. He found search marketing, and thought it'd be great because it was all about words and haiku. Found out that it was a lot more about data. He's now going to talk about data. |
| 11:22 | Keri Morgret: Data falls into either having too much data and not going what to do with it..or not having enough data. |
| 11:23 | Keri Morgret: In either case, use existing keyword data, maybe from old campaigns, and put it to new campaigns. Helps you to make educated guesses.
Remove underperforming refers. |
| 11:24 | Keri Morgret: He's going to use CPA as the metric for the follow sample company of Federal Auto Company.
Company bidding on:
- hybrid car
- cheap auto
- new car deal
Problem: not enough data to make informed optimization. |
| 11:25 | Keri Morgret: Take existing data from other (older) accounts. Looks at CPA on referrers. Need to know what target CPA is before making decision. |
| 11:26 | Keri Morgret: tips for success:
- increase budget/coverage of keywords with good CPAs
- maintain list of referrers that do not work in certain verticals
Ask Sponsored Listing's Results
- Ask sponsored listings tested this method last six month
- Results - 3x increase in LTV (I think it was LTV - slide moved on too quickly) |
| 11:28 | Keri Morgret: Q&A time. |
| 11:33 | Keri Morgret: I suddenly have a bad headache, and have missed the Q&A so far.
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| 11:36 | Keri Morgret: q: say one thing other than CTR that weighs in on quality score.
ad text is important (helps CTR)
some of Google's predictive measures factor in, but factor in to CTR.
landing pages |
| 11:37 | Keri Morgret: money! have enough of a budget, be willing to spend. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: ask rep: yes there is a "secret sauce" in quality score, but CTR is by far the biggest factor, and focus on this. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: Andrew Goodman says he wants to reinforce the CTR factor. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: Testing landing pages is for business reasons, not quality score reasons. |
| 11:46 | Keri Morgret: Last question before session ends, closing down coverage. |
| 11:48 | 
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