Google & Trademarks & UK: A Good Thing For Clients

What is all the complaining about? I am thrilled we will be able to bid on competitor's brand words in the UK and Ireland starting in May 2008. That has always been a successful tactic - for years and years. People seem concerned that the bid price will go up. Yes, the price will probably go up but it has been cheap for a long time and I am sure that smart marketers can find a way to control their Affiliates and Partners. We had to put those controls in in the US/Canada a long time ago. I am not saying it isn't still a battle and that it doesn't take constant policing, it does.

NetImperative- Google Sparks Controversy with New Trademark Policy
BigMouthMedia - Google to Introduce Open Keyword bidding on all terms in UK and Ireland
WebProNews -Google Gives UK Adwords Trademark Bidding
BlogStorm - Big Changes to Google's Adwords Trademark Policy and its follow up reactions

Note - I am constantly surprised by people who think Google shouldn't do this to 'line their pockets'. Of course they should. They are a public company who is accountable for their bottom line to stockholders. It isn't about good and evil - it is about growth and making Wall Street happy.

Search Marketing Agency Mistakes on Google Adwords - Shocking!
Once again my team and I were totally shocked by a bad, bad implementation of an advertiser's search marketing strategy by their search marketing agency. Search is about keywords and creatives, yes, but ultimately it is about landing page conversions and optimization of the spend based on the ROI goals. To bid a high ($10) CPC on a keyword that has no relevancy and, not surprisingly, no conversions - but lots and lots of traffic - is really unconscionable. I don't hold the agency 100% responsible. The client should be watching the bottom line, and the media vendor should be paying more attention to their big spending clients.

The following items should be reviewed/considered when taking on a new client with an existing Adwords campaign. Note: All of these subjects can be discussed without knowing much about the client strategy or target audience; they are just common sense in the search marketing business.

1. Tracking - are they tracking? What tools are they using? Can you 'see' all the way through to sales? If B2B, can you at least see through to completion of a lead form? If not tracking, how do they measure ROI? Asking these questions will help the client either realize the campaigns are half-baked because no one was looking at ROI or give you the chance to review the value of the campaigns based on ROI.

2. Keyword Buckets/Groups - are all keywords in each bucket closely related to each, or are they too general? Keywords should be grouped so that the creatives and landing pages are directly related and relevant. This leads to better testing, thus better knowledge about how to optimize the campaigns.

3. Creative Testing - how many creatives are they testing per bucket? If there is only one text-based creative per bucket, you know that there is a ton of room for optimization and it wasn't being done in the past.

4. Broad Match - are there words that are being broad match that have nothing to do with the product/service represented by the advertiser. Classic example: your company name is Flower and Associates so you bid on the word Flower. Ok, really stupid example but I have seen it happen.

5. Budgets - what is the distribution of media money? If it is a B2B company a significant amount of money should be being spent on Google Adwords. Have the other engines been tested (the should be)? Is 'owning' the category important (ie: IBM may want to own the keyword computers whether it converts or not), then they should be buying on at least the top three vendors and not just Google. Is the daily spend being hit before the end of the day? What keywords are eating up the budget?

6. [And my favorite] Negative Keywords - are they using negates in their campaigns for words/phrases that may result in inappropriate search results to be associated with the advertiser? If you have a keyword like video or conferencing, the advertiser should be smart/mature/whatever enough to negate out words like xxx (fill in your favorite x).

So many more. Feel free to comment and add your own thoughts.

WebMama's Basic Keyword Selection Strategy

VRC

Volume
Relevancy
Conversion

What sources/tools do we use to figure out what has volume, relevancy, and conversion? Executives (see related topic), sales reps, volume estimators, PPC data, CRM systems, other direct marketing programs, competitors, rankings, ROI, etc, etc. But the hard part is then figuring out how to balance the above criteria. This is one of the most valuable things we do for clients.

Small PPC Budget? What To Do?

There are a myriad of companies spending somewhere in the range of $3000-$10000 a month on paid search marketing. The smart ones are realizing that managing PPC in-house is hard and they are afraid (and rightly so in most cases) that they are not spending their company's money wisely. They decide it is time to get some outside help. They call WebMama.com. I can't help them!

Why? Because I can't justify the resources it takes to come up to speed on a company's mission, figure out their marketing strategy, figure out where search fits in their marketing strategy, learn their product line, relationships with the search engines, do the keyword analysis, fix or create creatives, work on destination pages and put tracking in place, all for $450-1500/per month. [That is our fee for our smaller clients - 15% of media buys.] That just isn't enough money to cover the hours it takes to 'do' search.

Other than saying NO as nicely as I can, I try to steer them towards some educational courses at SEMPO so that they are more knowledgeable (ie will learn to stop burning money on broad match, single words). But really, they don't have the time to do the day-to-day management of search marketing themselves. There are companies that will manage your search campaigns for that small of an amount of money, but I am suspect that they will be managing the campaigns in a black box with no regard to company strategy, the competitive search landscape, and the best ROI for the customer's bucks. And don't tell me tools are the solution to this problem (I will be covering this topic further at Searchnomics in June). It is a niche that I don't see being filled and I am not sure how it should be filled.

Comments?

Are We Over Optimizing PPC Campaigns?

I am not sure about the answer to that but I do see a trend in closely monitored and optimized PPC campaigns; that we may not be giving the client what they really want. In the BtoB world clients want leads. If you have a savvy client they will give you a target cost/lead. [If you have a really savvy client they will give you a dollar number as to how much they are willing to spend to get one customer.] Let's say with some close attention to the right keywords, the right bidding strategy and the right landing pages, you exceed the client's expectations and come in with a lower cost/lead than the goal. They should be celebrating right? Not necessarily. You may be really good at PPC management, but they may be willing to spend the extra money, for words (more general words) or tactics (contextual) that don't convert as well, in order to get back to their goal, thus generating more leads. It will dilute the ROI for sure - which drives my WebMama team nuts. There are worst problems to have.