If you are reading this you are probably a digital marketer, and that too one in the Search space. Have you made any resolutions for your PPC campaigns yet? Have you committed to doing something different from what you did last year?

At Position² we have compiled a list of 7 PPC resolutions to abide by this year. We strongly believe that you will benefit from this information, a compilation of our focus areas, driven by our experiences, learning, strategies and best practices.

Wishing you the best for a fantastic and a profitable 2012! Let’s get started with the PPC’s 7 key Areas of Focus in 2012.

Get Critiqued:

Kick start 2012 with a audit of your PPC campaigns. Identify if your campaigns are hitting target metrics, measure your ROI – is it what you or your clients expected, study the pitfalls and evaluate things you have not done in a while (may be testing or adding negatives). Identify opportunities right from keywords to ads to landing pages.

PPC accounts can be audited on a variety of parameters. At Position² we use a 40 point benchmark checklist that is built on industry and Position² best practices. Our in-house experts audit across Campaign Structures, Competition, Keywords, Bid Management and Ads to name a few. At the end of the audit your campaigns receives a Best Practices Benchmark Score that tells you how effective your campaigns are.

Cut that Fat:

Evaluate your keywords thoroughly. Identify “the budget hogs”, those that eat-up your budget but do not convert or convert at a high cost per acquisition. Weed them out. Analyze your search query reports and think wisely about keywords that do not make sense for your business- add them as negatives. Dump keywords you should not be bidding on to start with.

Search space will likely get expensive by the day, so focus on common misspellings and long tail keywords for efficiency. Put yourself in the searchers shoes. What would they think of when they need your product or a service? Do they search in short phrases or long or do they search in questions?

This is not limited to just search, target content as well. Look at placement reports, find sites that are working for you and those that are not. Add negative sites. Select sites manually if that is what if required.

Be Relentless:

Conduct tests regularly in 2012 and learn from both success and failure. The flexibility to conduct tests frequently is the beauty of PPC. Testing is one sure way to improve your campaign performance. Start testing keyword positions, ads and landing pages. Test keywords in different match types.

Tests can be as simple as bumping your keywords to top positions for a day or longer and observing the impact or trying new ad messaging (text and images). Eventually you want to get to more detailed tests such as launching large MVTs or SEO VS. PPC testing for example.

Make Friends:

With SEO and Analytics that is. Do not forget, valuable learnings can be drawn from anywhere. So keep evaluating SEO and Analytics performance and reports regularly – at least once a month in our opinion.

You can get significant learnings from SEO and Analytics. For example organic headlines, title tags etc. can be tested in PPC. PPC’s quick customizability and turnaround time could benefit SEO, i.e. if you identify a winner from text ads testing, you could test that message on the site. You can also test landing pages with different designs, layout and content by drawing learnings from PPC and SEO.

It goes without saying that everything you do in digital should be measured and fed right into a robust analytics platform. Study the user behavior, do they stay on your pages once there, if so for how long, where do they go from landing pages, what is the bounce rate, time spent, depth etc.. All this information will help you optimize your PPC campaigns down to a keyword level. There are many benefits of capturing keyword level data within analytics tools, so go ahead and do that.

Improve Your Communication:

Marketing is all about communication. Paid search is no different. In PPC you have a governing principle of Quality Score (QS) that plays a major role in your visibility or lack thereof, therefore the overall performance.

Regularly monitor your QS this year. Analyze why the QS is low or high. Develop appropriate communication strategies to counter low QS. Always look for relevancy across your keywords, ads and landing pages. Modify messaging in your ads and the content on the destination pages to increase relevancy. The higher the relevancy, the higher the QS and better the performance- which means happy customers and a happy you in 2012!

Try Something New:

Go beyond regular Adowrds or MSN. Try Youtube, Linkedin, Facebook, and social and PPC integration with features like Google+ Project. Use Click-to-Call Extension, Communication Extensions and Social Extensions. All these could help you reach targeted audience and some of these, depending on your business, could be more useful than expected. Test these new features and always watch out for latest industry developments and case studies to learn what worked. Be sure to track and measure!

Train your Teams:

All of the above that you plan to accomplish this year is possible only if you have disciplined, subject matter expert, motivated and dedicated PPC professionals. So, make sure you train your employees and team members effectively. Take time out for formal education, set-up casual sessions and most importantly ensure they get enough practical exposure to PPC. If you are a single man/woman team, motivate yourself to learn. Teach yourself and learn from others.

In the spirit of learning and teaching, here are a few great sources to follow: ClickZ, SearchEngineLand, Adwords Blog, Hubspot and Sempo.

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Digital is a channel that can and should be tracked end to end – data capture starts from an impression and goes all the way to the final sale. As a company specializing in Search and Social Media, we regularly educate our clients on the importance of granular tracking and help them improve their existing tracking methods across platforms. With integrated in-house PPC, SEO and Analytics teams, we constantly seek to maximize our client’s campaign ROI through regular research, granular data capture and analytics.

This article’s focus is to showcase the importance of capturing paid search (PPC) keyword data through analytics. Google Analytics (GA) has been considered for this discussion. While you might have a different analytics tool, we believe that the information here still applies to your PPC campaigns and you should try and get similar data from your current analytics system.

Capturing Keyword Data through Google Analytics

When it comes to PPC, it is important to capture all the metrics accurately within the main user interface (Google Adwords) and the analytics system (GA). The metrics captured can be categorized as ‘front-end’ and ‘post-click’.

Front-end metrics cover data on keywords, ads and the landing or destination pages, and include clicks, Click through Rates (CTR), Conversions/Leads, sale value, Cost per Lead (CPL) etc. Post-click metrics include bounce rates, average time spent on site, % of new visitors and much more.

Adwords provides keyword information up to the point where the user clicks onto the website or the landing page. Post-click performance on GA shows user behavior on the destination page or the website. This information helps understand if users landing on the page stayed on it, if so, for how long, how many pages they visited etc.

Keyword level data can be obtained from GA in multiple ways. Keywords can be analyzed individually or at an aggregate level by defining segments. Data for one of Position²’s client in the B2B space is shown below as an example. An advanced segment named ‘Brand’ keyword aggregates data for a pre-defined set of corporate and brand name keywords. Similarly, the ‘Non-brand’ keyword segment excludes traffic from these keywords.

Table 1.0: Aggregate Branded VS. Non-Branded Keywords


Table 1.1: Keyword Level Performance

Regardless of the business type (B2B, E-Commerce etc), capturing keywords through analytics is crucial. Some of the key advantages of having keyword information through GA are provided below. The benefits should typically apply to any analytics platform you may be using.

• Keywords within GA help determine the performance at an aggregate level. In Table 1.0, aggregated performance of brand Keywords shows that they are producing 100% bounce rate and no conversions; an unusual occurrence for brand terms. This information indicates that the users landing on the destination page(s) are not finding what they are looking for. By extracting this data from our client’s GA account, we understood that those conducting branded searches could be doing so to sign-in to their online accounts. If the campaign objective is lead generation or form fills, the campaign may be better off without these specific terms.
• GA can be used to determine if non-performing keywords should be weeded out of the campaign or if new messaging should be tested. In Table 1.1 Keyword 5 and Keyword 6 are poor performers. These terms have 100% bounce rate despite driving new users and a reasonable time spent. For these keywords, it would be important to evaluate the ad messaging and the landing page copy.
• Keyword data from paid search can be compared with numbers Organic traffic. For example, if there is a drop in traffic and leads for a keyword in paid search, Organic traffic for the same keyword can be compared to check if it’s a seasonal trend.
• Destination URL performance can be evaluated down to a keyword level. This helps identify the best combination of Keyword-Destination Page and crucial information for campaign optimization.
• Performance for each keyword and post-click activity can be obtained in every match type (Exact, Broad and Phrase). Precise user queries that triggered the ads and their post-click performance can also be gathered. Again, important data for campaign optimization.
• The best position for keywords can be determined. As seen below, the position and post click performance for keywords can be captured. Crucial data to make decisions on keyword positions.

  

Passing the Keyword Data within GA

You can pass paid search keyword data to GA by:

1. Adding UTM parameters to destination URLs or
2. Linking the GA and AdWords accounts and enabling Auto-tagging in Adwords

Let’s now examine how you can pass keyword data to other analytics platforms.

AdWords ValueTrack allows passing detailed data to any tracking system to optimize campaigns. By adding parameters to the destination URL, it is possible to pass information on keyword, ads etc.

Here’s an example -

Destination URL tagged with parameters for keyword and match type:

http://www.example.com/?keyword={keyword}&matchtype={matchtype}

Actual URL post visitor click

http://www.example.com/?keyword=used%20cars&matchtype=p

Your tracking system will need to parse these parameters and allow for slicing and dicing of data based on these.

We recommend doing exhaustive testing to ensure all required information is captured accurately on your platform.

Conclusion

Keyword data helps optimize paid search campaigns down to the most granular level possible. This will in turn help generate efficient (low Cost per Lead) and quality leads. It will also provide multiple testing opportunities with messaging, positions and landing pages.

Not having keyword tracking within analytics will still allow for campaign management, but at an aggregate (ad group) level only. While not the optimal way to manage paid search campaigns, this will still help in optimizing campaigns possibly to increase leads.

At Position² we encourage all our clients and work closely with them to take advantage of granular information through their analytics platform. We use end-to-end performance metrics to optimize campaigns and work with our clients to improve not only the PPC performance, but also Analytics set-up, SEO performance and their sales process.

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Do you Think Bid Management is Simple? Think Again…

On the surface PPC bid management seems to be about reducing bids for keywords that do not hit your targets and increasing bids for those that do. The reality though is far more complex.

It is quite possible that the fundamental objective of your PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns is to drive the most relevant traffic to your site. It is also quite likely that you want these searchers to take certain actions on your site that add value to your marketing and sales efforts. These actions or conversions can be a sale/purchase, a whitepaper download, a form fill etc…

Needless to say each of these actions has a different level of importance to your business; therefore investing the same amount of your budget to acquire all these different conversions does not make sense. Meaning, having the same cost per conversion/cost per acquisition for all keywords that drive these conversions does not make business sense. Accordingly, the bid management for such keywords cannot be governed by a blanket bidding strategy.

As you develop your bidding strategy it is important to keep in mind that search engines have a major role to play in the bid price you pay and in turn your keyword ranking. Let’s take Google for example. Today Google determines the actual cost of your keywords with a series of complex calculations including Quality Score, Cost per Click (CPC), relevancy of your landing pages etc. only further making the bid price assignment more complex.

Combine this complexity with the sheer volume of keywords you need to manage. How confident are you of the CPCs you picked for your keywords? How well positioned are you to manage your keywords in today’s complex and dynamic search space? Attempting to even calculate an accurate keyword bid price manually can be a daunting task. But a sophisticated automated way of managing bids can help maximize your time as well as your marketing ROI.

Position²’s AutoBid Engine™

At Position2 we have developed a sophisticated AutoBid Engine™ to dramatically improve performance across our clientele. The AutoBid Engine™ is designed to accurately manage bids for individual keywords to achieve your ROI objectives. This is virtually impossible on manual and rule based bid management systems.

Reasons why you should consider Position²’s AutoBid Engine™:

• This proprietary tool is designed on a prediction model, one that can, based on your historic performance, forecast and recommend optimal bid prices down to an individual keyword level.
• Our technology is especially useful when your campaigns have multiple conversions, each of whose importance is different for your business. Using this tool you can custom define the weight for each conversion and let the system optimize your campaigns.
• The advanced algorithms emulate the search engine bid environment on a real-time basis and assess if your campaigns are performing at the optimal potential. Appropriate decisions are made based on the findings and your goals.
• The automated platform also allows campaign managers to expand keywords exponentially. It helps discover keywords fast and efficiently.

Your gains from the AutoBid Engine™:

• A customized tool for your business/industry to maximize results on your marketing investments per your ROI requirements.
• Increase in market share and profitability by predictably estimating and scaling up paid search campaigns to adapt to your marketing goals.
• Save time in managing complex campaigns with hassle-free integration of bidding and reporting engines.

Conclusion

Complexity with the search engine algorithms is here to stay and so is the uncertainty with users’ actions on your site, i.e. uncertainty about most of your keywords performance. A marketer who has found the right way to work with these forces is more likely to be successful in his/her PPC efforts compared to those who make decisions based on short term and on inadequate or unclear keyword data.

Your employees can be expected to make best decisions with the experience and knowledge they have. But to best utilize their expertise you need the right tools. Having Position²’s AutoBid Engine™ on your side means just that. With its unique algorithm it is designed to cater to every unique need of your business and to help you maximize returns from your PPC campaigns.

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