improve your sem campaigns

Improve your SEM campaigns: Webcast Guide

This guide offers valuable tips that can help search engine marketing (SEM) managers improve their campaigns. SEM managers tend to find complexity interesting, and they especially love the complexity of online marketing. But it’s also important not to forget to look at marketing fundamentals. This guide introduces those fundamentals in a way that lets SEM managers use them to their best advantage. As marketers, you will learn several techniques or action items that you can implement immediately. Ideally, one or more of these actions will make a significant difference to your marketing ROI.

Use foundational metricsUsing foundational metrics is perhaps the most strategic element of any SEM strategy. Testing is particularly important because the wrong metrics will very likely produce skewed or inaccurate results. First, be sure that you are measuring the right things. For example, evaluating each lead-generation input based on the number of closed sales (or even the dollar value of closed sales) is better than simply measuring the number of leads generated. The most valuable inputs are those that lead to the greatest dollar value of closed sales, not necessarily those that generate the most leads.

Analyze the right metricsMany people manage their campaigns to a cost-per-lead metric and leave it at that.

SEM managers have access to lots of data and metrics, but they need to keep their overall goals clearly in mind when studying them. This can be difficult, because it’s easy to get so buried in the complexities of the business and the data that high-level goals get lost in the weeds.

Vintage Tub and Bath uses Omniture® SearchCenter® to simplify many of its search marketing challenges. The Vintage Tub website has over 90 action sets that look at various metrics, including return on ad spend, product views, and total lifetime value of keywords. Although detailed findings are fascinating, the most important thing is how much profit a campaign generates. Therefore, marketers need to stop focusing so intently on the intricacies of their metrics, especially top-line revenue and return on ad spend, because these two metrics can be misleading. In fact, there are times when top-line revenue and return rates are lower, but profit has actually gone up.

Eleven Tips You Can Use Today to Improve Your SEM Campaigns

Presented jointly by:

Ben Brutsch Adobe

Mike Deckman Vintage Tub and Bath

2Improve your SEM campaigns: Webcast Guide

Omniture SearchCenter offers an intuitive interface for search campaign management and a tool called the COGS VISTA rule, which helps calculate gross profit minus cost of goods sold (COGS). With the help of Omniture SearchCenter, Vintage Tub looks at several areas to determine whether a campaign has been effective. Top-line revenue shows how many orders were generated, but this number doesn’t tell the whole story. Taking out COGS can decrease top-line revenue considerably.

Additionally, Internet sales have other costs associated with them, such as credit card processing, shipping, and sales-related processes. Profit drops even further after these costs are taken out, and what’s left is the profit plus the cost of ad spend. Since, none of these costs are noted in top-line revenue, SEM managers should focus on the metrics that matter most to their business.

Each component of an SEM account can be reviewed independently to calculate net profit, starting with the campaign, then each ad group, and finally each keyword. How much net revenue does each component yield? Looking at marketing spend from that perspective changes the way you look at all future marketing campaigns.

Keep test data cleanEach part of an SEM campaign is connected to every other part, so a change in one area affects everything. For instance, click-through rates are impacted by average position, ad copy, competitor ad copy, use of keywords in search titles, and other factors. Some marketers have even found an inverse correlation between volume of impression and click-through rate.

Everything Within Your SEM Campaign is Connected

Establish your success metrics before you conduct tests.

Make sure you test one element at a time.

Knowing these nuances of the relationship of various aspects of a campaign is important because it lets marketers test the things that might be impacting the click-through rate or “dirtying” the data. Before doing a test, you should answer these important questions:

• What is the overall goal of the campaign? Why is this test taking place?

• What are the success metrics? What are the things that differentiate a successful campaign from a less successful one?

• Which external influences could potentially impact the desired effect? For instance, would the click-through rate see greater effect from a change in average position or impression surge?

• How might the test affect other areas of the campaign that shouldn’t be affected? Running a test can have a positive or negative impact on some other area.

Small changes can have a broad impact. Because SEM components are interrelated, success in one area can lead to even greater success in another. It is important that SEM managers are aware of the way elements can affect one another in their campaigns so that the influence of any change can be accurately measured. Also, make sure that only one element is tested at a time.

Ultimately, the most important metric is net profitability, and SEM managers can delve even deeper into these results.


Be Comprehensive in Your Keyword Analysis

“Clawfoot tub” “Vintage tub” “Clawfoot tub faucet”

Ignored in Last Source A ribution

For instance, Vintage Tub’s site gets visitors looking for a particular product, but there might be a lag between the initial visit and the actual order while they check out other sites and compare prices. Eventually, they come back to Vintage Tub and make their purchase.

In this scenario, last-click reports would show that customers were only buying based on that specific keyword. But in fact, other keywords had brought them to the site, so it’s important to consider the impact of those other keywords. It might be useful to allocate revenue attribution to each keyword to figure out how profitable each one actually is. This helps marketers know which keywords or products might increase sales of other products, and thus keeps them from lowering a position that should stay as high as possible.

Keep in mind, however, that SEM managers have trouble assigning view attribution because they have no way to track views, so this scenario applies to users who click the ads before buying. Without advanced tools like Omniture SearchCenter, marketers can be limited in the data used to evaluate their effectiveness. For example, information provided by IT might be limited to first touch or last touch, whereas Omniture enables analysis based on multiple data points and inputs to better understand the factors that contribute to success.

KeywordsMany keyword techniques have implications for keyword list building, but that is not their primary purpose.

Become your customer

Question: What does the term “bid management” mean?

Question: What does the term “window” mean?

Marketers sometimes fall into the trap of looking at each keyword individu-ally, but keywords work in conjunction with one another as people click on multiple ads.


Marketers must first get to know their customers and experience what they experience. For example, when SEM managers use the term “bid management software,” they are typically thinking of tools like Omniture SearchCenter that help them optimize bids on PPC SEM campaigns. But others might use that same term to look for something completely unrelated (for example, bid management as it relates to construction). When managers don’t take the time to know their customers, companies end up competing for clicks with unrelated businesses.

To mitigate this, never bid on a keyword until you have first queried that keyword in the search engine and have previewed the first page of listings. Even if you have hundreds of keywords to review, you need to know what kind of results come up. It can take a long time to do this, but it saves a lot of time in the end, and it decreases unintended competition. This is especially true when it comes to organic listings. By knowing which meta tags are coming from the listings, marketers can find keywords they might have never thought about, which in turn can help with list building.

Match typesMatch types can be classified in a number of ways, but one rule of thumb to follow is related to broad match. Generally, broad match keywords should either be used for the company’s brand, or they should be used on a temporary basis. Broad matches should not be the crux of the keyword list, because they can sometimes catch a lot of unnecessary matches.

Using Omniture, you can start with broad matches to see what was actually searched for, then exact-match the words that drove appropriate clicks, and negative match the others that didn’t. After several iterations, you can remove the broad match because you have all the exact queries you need. With this approach, instead of a net to catch fish, you are using a spear, catching the exact fish you want and paying less in the process.

Use “Match Types” to Refine Campaigns

Don’t rely on broad match.

Pay less for the exact sh you want.

When visitors clicked on your ad, what did they first type into the search engine? They might have been matched to the ad, but that ad might not fit what they were looking for. A tool like Omniture SearchCenter can run a paid query report that breaks down all queries resulting in click-throughs. Log files might have that information as well.

When the exact query list is in place, divide it into two groups: those in which the company should show up and those in which it shouldn’t. For the phrases where it should, do an exact match in the campaign. For those where it shouldn’t, do a negative match. After the traffic patterns improve, turn off the broad match word. With those more targeted queries, the company pays less for each keyword, and the amount of unmatched traffic decreases. This can also be a way to discover words and phrases that haven’t come up before.


Myth #1

Know how to use contextual ad campaigns appropriately Populate your campaigns with unique words and phrases that you find on the sites you would like your ads to appear on.

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See an irrelevant ad…? …or a well-placed contextual ad?

Our first myth is that search engine and contextual campaigns can be handled in the same way. Keyword list selection is a completely different process in contextual campaigns. Internet marketers tend to view website layouts more analytically than other users do, and someone familiar with contextual keyword selection might understand why an ad appears on a page where it doesn’t belong contextually. An ad for arthritis, for example, might appear where a trowel ad should be because someone complained about arthritis acting up while gardening.

This tells us that keyword discovery for contextual campaigns must be done without respect to the search engines. Visit the sites where potential customers are, find the words and phrases they might use in that context but not in others, and then bid on those words. Instead of focusing on what customers are looking for, this approach focuses on how customers talk in a particular context.

One of the biggest challenges for SEM managers is creating or optimizing a campaign in an unfamiliar vertical. In these instances, find someone who is an expert and talk to them about the terms they use, and then build a keyword list from what you learn.

Key message: Be wary of contextual ad networks. Typically, the technology isn’t refined enough to avoid ads that are inaccurately mapped to content. It’s best to target sites rather than keywords. This can help you eliminate—or at least minimize—mismatching and dramatically improve your click-through rate, Q Score, and ultimately your ROI.

Leveraging toolsOmniture SearchCenter has been a valuable tool for Vintage Tub in a number of ways, but particularly in keywords and classifications. Keywords need to be organized in detailed fashion. Search engines tend to raise quality scores with keywords that are similar in character. Therefore, ad groups should be as specific and granular as possible, because that makes it easier to allocate budgets.

Although this way of organizing does facilitate search queries, it doesn’t make reporting easier. There are keywords in every ad group performing at different levels. Some groups have high performers and high volumes, while others have lower level performers and volumes. This makes it difficult to manage some groups.


Keyword classifications

Tag keywords with classificationsKeywords can be groups across different campaigns and ad groups.

Careful: a campaign with keywords about different products doesn’t look attractive to most engines.

Paused Low Volume

High Engagement Born-on Date

Paused Low Volume

High Engagement Born-on Date High Engagement

Paused Low Volume

Born-on Date

Classification is one way to mitigate the difficulty in managing some keyword groups, and Omniture SearchCenter helps considerably with this process.

As an example, Vintage Tubs might classify keywords based on a number of factors:

• Born-on dates—the date the keyword was first tagged—help separate keywords tagged three days ago from those tagged three weeks or even three months ago.

• Low-volume words aren’t searched very often and seldom generate any revenue, but stay on the keyword list because SEM managers forget about them. These run up the cost of ad spend, so marketers should watch them over time to see whether they get used more frequently—or less.

• High-engagement words are hand-managed keywords. They’re not subject to bid management rules, so marketers adjust them one at a time. Also, marketers want to see their usage in ads from competitors to find out where they place.

• Paused keywords are ones that don’t perform very well, but they’re set aside so marketers don’t forget them. There are times when some merchandise sales may suffer after a certain keyword has been paused, so storing them separately makes the impact easier to analyze and restore them if needed.

Which of these keyword classifications do you use in your environment? Are there others that you think are useful as well?

Omniture SearchCenter enables you to align keywords with the most relevant campaigns, but still apply additional clas-sifications and informa-tion to those keywords to enable advanced analysis and reporting.


AutomationTo make time for the responsibilities that bring the most value, it is wise to delegate some things to the technology at hand.

SEM can be time consuming, laborious, and data-intensive.

A�empt to automate any boring, redundant, or brainless process

through whatever tools available.

Omniture SearchCenter enables you to align keywords with the most relevant campaigns, but still apply additional classifications and information to those keywords to enable advanced analysis and reporting. You can create macros to automate reports and set up dashboards that create weekly or monthly reports. You can transform a days-long process into one that takes just hours to complete.

Take control of SERPs

While automation can save time, some things simply cannot be automated. A company’s brand and image as represented by its website and ads must be controlled by people, and the easiest way to do that is to control the ad copy.

Your ad copy and landing pages must clearly communicate your competitive advantage—your unique selling proposition. It is essential that your competitive advantage is something that customers care about and value. To do this effectively, you must go beyond keywords. Create a list of target sites and then look for the unique phrases and words that are being used. Populate your campaign with these words to take control of your search engine results pages (SERPs). This will increase your return on ad spend and more.

Marketers should use their available tools to automate redundant tasks so that they can spend most of their time analyzing data, making decisions, implement-ing plans, and analyzing results.


Myth #2

Let Ad Copy Reinforce Your Competitive Edge

Rule of thumb is wrong. Write to what you're good at, even if it is the same as others.

Another longstanding myth is that ad copy and landing pages should talk about the same things as the competition but in a different way or with a different focus. In fact, a company that isn’t talking about its competitive edge is relying on “pockets of ignorance.” A company doesn’t have to beat its competition in every aspect, but it does have to be the best in at least one. Once your company finds its competitive advantage, make sure that every piece of ad copy reinforces it—make sure the claim is true! Customers always find out when it’s not.

By emphasizing your competitive edge, one of two things might happen. Some competitors might change their copy to make the same competitive claim. At first, it might seem like everyone’s ads are indistinguishable, but the company that makes the claim honestly will win the game. Other competitors might write copy that reflects their competitive advantage, but this is fine. As customers gravitate toward the company that gives them what they need, each company loses some of the customer base, but they’re losing the base that most likely wouldn’t buy from them. Those customers who want something that you can’t offer (or can’t offer competitively) will ultimately look elsewhere anyway.

Keyword relevanceAs noted before, keywords must be relevant across queries, ad copy, and landing pages. But what happens if keywords don’t match across all these areas? Like other Internet businesses, Vintage Tub spends a lot of time querying keywords to see which ones are most relevant to the company. At times, one comes up that isn’t being used. At other times, a very relevant keyword might end up benefiting another campaign.

When this happens, it might not be the fault of the marketers but of the search engines themselves. For example, a recent ad from Vintage Tub led to links to Omniture SiteCatalyst® because Google had broad-matched Vintage Tub and Omniture and also exact-matched Vintage Tub and Omniture Test&Target. When Google grouped the query, it ended up serving “Omniture” and not “Test&Target.” Search engines often end up serving the less relevant ad, particularly when a lot of campaigns are running at the same time and their keywords are not very distinct from one another.


Fence Out the Wrong Keywords

Adwords Mismatch

But there is a fix called keyword fencing. Vintage Tub added “Test&Target” to any brand campaign where Omniture was a keyword, so now Google has to skip over the Omniture ad because the more specific phrase has been negative-matched. By keyword fencing, you can isolate overarching keywords from areas that should belong to a less popular or less expensive keyword.

Myth #3 Omniture has done a lot of testing of this idea and can prove that paid ads can move up organic listings and vice versa. In either case, the click-through rates went up on both ads, in some cases more than doubling.

Use SEO and SEM On the Same Key Words

Situation: Two primary target audiences

Solution: Ensure each listing targets one.

When SEO and SEM complement each other, their ads should also. Even if specific pages on your site are well positioned within organic (non-paid) search results due to SEO, you could also have paid search advertising, but use a different message for each. A page on your site might have great rankings for SEM because it is informational. If that’s the case, consider targeting your pay per click (PPC) ads for the same page on other messages (like the quality of your service or your prices). Make sure that each addresses different targeted messages: If the organic ad speaks to one target audience, the paid ad should talk to the other.

Yet another myth that persists is that SEM is only useful when a company doesn’t already rank organically on a keyword; otherwise, it cannibalizes search engine optimiza-tion (SEO). In fact, SEO and SEM can work well together.


Closing Thoughts

Summary of key messagesThe scope of your SEM strategy can grow out of control very quickly and easily. Use these 11 tips to broaden your search marketing in a calculated, measured way.

1. Analyze the right metrics.

2. Keep your test data clean.

3. Be comprehensive in your keyword analysis.

4. Become your customer.

5. Use “Match Types” to refine campaigns.

6. Know how to use contextual ad campaigns appropriately.

7. Tag keywords with classifications.

8. Automate.

9. Ad copy should reinforce your competitive advantage.

10. Fence out the wrong keywords.

11. Do both SEO and SEM on same keywords.

Can you answer these questions?

1. How did you originally find your customers?

2. Which campaigns positively influenced your prospective customers?

3. What ultimately compelled your prospect to make the purchase?

Without advanced tools like Omniture SearchCenter, marketers can be limited in the data they use to evaluate their effectiveness. For example, information provided by IT can be limited to first touch or last touch, whereas Omniture tools enable analysis based on multiple data points and inputs. This gives marketers a better understanding of the factors that are contributing to, rather than detracting from, their success.

SEM campaigns can be intricate and complicated, but the right preparation can make them more effective and profitable. Understanding how customers come to a particular site or page gives marketers the insight to refine their test data, keyword lists, and ad copy. This helps decrease ad spend while also improving click-through rates and sales.

Key takeaways:

• Internet marketing can be complicated, but don’t forget that marketing fundamentals are at the core.

• Each part of a campaign affects others, so isolate testing to one element at a time.

• Proper keyword selection and classification can increase marketing relevance and decrease cost of ad spend.

• Leverage the tools at your disposal to make tasks and operations more efficient and effective.

• Let ad copy reinforce your competitive advantage.

Based on recommendations presented in this guide, which new tools and processes will you consider using to improve the ROI of your SEM campaigns?

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Adobe, the Adobe logo, Acrobat, Adobe AIR, Authorware, Flash, Flex, and LiveCycle are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

© 2010 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

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To view this Webinar, visithttp://www.omniture.com/offer/796

About the presenters:

Ben Brutsch

Senior SEM Manager, Adobe

With 6 years experience running B2B and B2C search engine marketing campaigns in a number of different industries, Ben Brutsch brings a number of effective tools and hints.

Mike Deckman

Internet Marketing Manager, Vintage Tub and Bath

Mike Deckman serves as Internet Marketing Manager for Vintage Tub & Bath, an Internet Retailer Top 500 company and America’s largest private retailer of clawfoot bathtubs. Since joining Vintage Tub & Bath in 2007, Mike led his team through advanced in-house SEO, SEM, Affiliate, and SCE tactics that resulted in consistent double-digit growth for the company.

For more informationTo learn more about segmentation through testing and analytics with solutions from the Omniture Online Marketing Suite, contact your Omniture account manager or call 866-923-7309. For businesses outside of United States and Canada, visit www.omniture.com for the office nearest you.

Obtain additional resources at: 1.877.722.7088 View recorded Webcast: www.omniture.com/webinars Learn more: [email protected]

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