The reincarnation of search marketing
As I write this, Google’s stock dropped down to $273 — over 62% off of its 52-week high. In the same period, the Dow has only lost 44% of its value. In other words, the market’s assessment of Google — in theory a bright star for the new new economy — has been far more punishing than for the overall state of the economy. Whether you agree with Google’s valuation at either extreme, there’s no denying that the current economic crisis is a major bump in the road for search marketing.
But that might be a good thing.
Google and search marketing have both risen together, starting in earnest right around the end of the dot-com bubble. (Although I miss the pets.com sock puppet, I’m happy that William Shatner has nostalgically kept dot-com campiness alive for Priceline.)
By the time Google went public in 2004, the core of their business — AdWords — was firmly established. Despite all the cool things they’ve released since, not much has changed about their core economic engine. Google makes the far majority of its money today the same way it did 5 years ago, and they’ve clearly been reluctant to mess with that golden-egg-laying goose. Search advertising is essentially the same as it was 5 years ago.
Search marketing has largely been unchanged for the past 5 years too. Many of the best practices that are promoted today are about the same as they were in 2004. There have been incremental improvements, to be sure, but not many big innovations in the industry. Especially when you compare it with all the feverish innovation that’s been happening elsewhere in the Internet, especially the social sphere, search marketing looks like it’s largely stood still.
To quote a U2 song, search marketing seemed to get “stuck in a moment” circa 2004.
The ~3% conversion rate from paid search ads that was common in 2004 got locked in people’s heads as the acceptable number. Landing pages and the overall relationship between pre-click and post-click marketing developed to a point — “you should have a landing page” — and then plateaued. Search marketing, as it was, was good enough. Tremendous untapped potential was left on the table.
Herein lies the silver lining to the current economic cloud: it’s a powerful motivator to restart the forces of innovation around search marketing.
For both Google and search marketers across the industry, it’s time to pick up from 2004 and pursue bold, new ideas in search marketing. Certainly there’s incredible opportunity in what happens after the click: landing pages 2.0 and the unexplored creative territory between landing pages and microsites. But the overall strategy and tactics of search marketing are equally ripe for new ideas. See Justin’s post about 120 ads with 532 landing pages, all produced in 10 days, or consider some of the underdeveloped dimensions of the search marketing maturity model in your organization.
As a fun example, take a look at this:
The promotion of the upcoming apocalyptic movie 2012 gets kudos for an innovative use of search marketing by distributing a shocking but mysterious trailer in theaters that ends simply with the directive for people to search for “2012” in Google. Check out the ad and their corresponding landing page.
The strategies and tactics of 2004 search marketing are no longer good enough. You have to be more competitive, more imaginative, more effective.
Paid Search Creative Canvas Visualization
If you’re an avid reader of this blog you’re no doubt in touch with our insistence on moving focus lower in the online marketing conversion funnel. There are simply more opportunities for connections down there.
This morning, I thought I’d draw (literally) an analogy to something many of us can understand: bandwidth. Remember the days of dial-up? Painfully, I do. Those pipes were small. And as content got richer and richer, the pipe felt smaller and smaller.
Today, most of us are dealing with much bigger pipes. Even on wireless we’re at 3G. At home we’re on DSL or cable. And at work we’re hanging off of gigabit networks and fiber. The pipes are big and the content that comes through them is the richest ever.
Equate your 120 character search keyword ad with 56k dial-up. There just isn’t much to work with. The canvas is small and what you can force through that pipe feels smaller as your messaging struggles to get richer.
As you move lower in the funnel those constraints almost immediately disappear. Landing pages 2.0 offer a broad canvas of creative possibilities — virtually unlimited experiential bandwidth to engage with message-specific, rich, sensory experiences.
The further down in the funnel you go, the more freedom you have to deepen engagement and ask for more time and effort from your respondents. Once they know you’re taking good advantage of the creative bandwidth at your disposal, respondents give you more latitude — because it becomes worth it for them.
Anyway, this was just my preamble. Here’s the visualization of the inverted creative funnel juxtaposed over the SEM conversion funnel:
Move your effort lower in the funnel to take full advantage of the broader creative bandwidth.
Post-Click Power Breakfast: How to Outsmart Your Competition Online
Breakfast and best practices — what could be better? Join ion interactive’s Scott Brinker and Anna Talerico on December 2nd at the Westin Copley Place in Boston for an essential online marketing seminar, Post-Click Power Breakfast: How to Outsmart Your Competition Online. This 90-minute seminar will give marketers best practices and case studies for improving online marketing ROI. Led by ion interactive’s Scott Brinker and Anna Talerico, content includes examples of how companies such as American Greetings, Howard Johnson, Citrix Systems, and Overland Storage have reduced their cost per conversion, increased their ROI, and gained a competitive edge over their competition. Independent research by Compete, inc. shows that the fastest way to boost ROI is through post-click marketing and this seminar will show you how.
Attendees will:
- Learn how to spend less online and convert more traffic
- Get strategic best practices for improving online campaign ROI
- See how to convert higher than competition and gain a competitive advantage with strategic post-click marketing
- Learn how companies like American Greetings, Howard Johnson, Citrix Systems, and Overland Storage reduced their cost per conversion, increased their ROI, and gained a competitive edge over their competition
Scott and Anna speak regularly at leading industry events, such as Search Engine Strategies, SMX, and ad:tech, and the Power Breakfast intimate seminar format will allow attendees to engage one-on-one with the speakers. Space is very limited, so register now!
Date: Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Time: 8 AM - 9:30 AM
Location:
10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116
Fee: $45 in advance, $55 at the door, includes breakfast & seminar materials
Speakers:
Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive
Anna Talerico, Executive Vice-President, ion interactive
Agenda:
8-8:15 - Registration & Introductions
8:15-9:15 - Session
9:15-9:30 - Discussion and Q&A
Who should attend:
- Online marketing directors & managers
- Senior-level marketing management
- Anyone who is spending on online marketing and wants to improve their results
Event hotline: 561-922-5241
Events New SEM: 7 campaigns. 40 messages. 120 ads. 532 landing pages. 10 days.
Over the past couple of weeks I took on the role of SEM madman. We hadn’t focused on our own paid search in far too long, so I took it upon myself to dive in. In the process, I applied many of our age-old best practices and made up a few new ones along the way.
Here’s a recap of my experience in narrowing the top of our search funnel and matching messages through the post-click experience:
Getting (Strategically) Organized
First and foremost, we had to define and codify what we were looking to accomplish with our paid search campaigns. We were armed with tons of data, but needed to parse that down to something usable and actionable. I tapped our own site analytics, Google Trends, Wordtracker, and our historical paid and organic keyword performance to form a picture of where we were and where we need to go.
Since we are, to some extent, defining the post-click market, our panorama of potential terms and messages is wider than most. We have to look under more rocks.
I ended up with seven high-level buckets of terms. Within those seven buckets were 40 unique messages. For each message, I wanted to test a minimum of two ads and two post-click experiences (landing pages).
At the highest level, our objective was to improve the quality of respondents from paid search. This included the understanding that fewer people would click, but that better people would convert.
Finding Sanity
;)
Click for larger image.In the face of seven campaigns, forty messages, eighty ads, and eighty landing pages, I needed a system. I’m a spreadsheet kind of guy, so most systems start there for me. This was no exception.
I created an Excel workbook with a sheet for each of the seven campaigns. Each sheet included four columns: keyword; ad; character count; and click-through URL. Each keyword had its own row and there were many keywords within a message. (A message is simply a group of keywords related enough that they can have the same ads and the same post-click experiences hooked to those ads.)
Whenever I wrote an ad, I split the ad-column row into four so I’d have each Google line in its own row: headline; description line one; description line two; and display URL. I then used a formula to automatically count my characters in each row and warn me whenever I exceeded Google’s maximums.
Each message was delineated from the others by blank black rows. With this workbook as my canvas I set out to write my ads. On average, I wrote three ads per message (about 120 altogether).
A page from the workbook can be seen above right.
Taming Chaos with Consistency
What happens in a lot of search marketing campaigns is that the pre-click message gets separated from the post-click message. This is often because the two camps are entirely separate departments or even organizations, but it can happen even within one department. One way to minimize the chance for that disconnect is to name the messages and carry those names through the campaigns. So that’s what I did.
Each message name was used as the name of the Google ad group and the name of the LiveBall traffic source. This way the ‘landing page software’ ad group hooked up with the ‘landing page software’ traffic source and the gods smiled. It’s now quite easy to see the flow from keyword to ad to landing page and visualize the participant’s context. It also makes it easier to process the analytics. Regardless of the number of ads within an ad group or the number of landing experiences tested on an ad group, the message is top of mind.
So, at this point I created a (message-named) LiveBall traffic source for each message and included its URL in my master spreadsheet. I had keywords, ads and URLs — everything I needed to load up Google. And that’s what we did next — creating a one-to-one relationship of campaigns-to-campaigns, and of messages-to-messages. Everything was paused until we got the post-click pieces in place.
Matching and Making Landing Pages
Like I said, I wanted to test at least two experiences per message, so I needed around 80 conversion paths. Of course the resources necessary to create 80 original landing experiences from scratch are enormous. I needed an unfair advantage. (Of course I already had LiveBall which is a huge advantage, but I needed another one.)
;)
Click for a larger imageEnter my favorite shortcut — the Flash object. Using a Flash file that is built around variables (placeholders) instead of real images and text let’s you take control of everything within the Flash without ever going back to Flash development. In a nutshell, you can make incredibly polished looking ‘graphics’ without ever touching Flash, Photoshop or anything else resource intensive. You just associate images and type text — the Flash object applies fonts and behaviors for you and like magic you have perfect graphics.
Note that Flash has only recently become Google quality score friendly for landing experiences. Google and Adobe recently got together to make Flash more ‘Google friendly’ and Flash developers can now make Flash in a way that lets its text be read by Google (just like ordinary HTML). Google now crawls these Flash files and can read their content — making a quality score determination possible.
An illustration of two landing pages based on one Flash object can be seen above right.
Segmentation Strategy
My prototype conversion paths used two different segmentation alternatives. My initial (A) paths tested product segmentation (for us that’s platform vs. services); while my (B) paths tested solutions interest vs. ROI interest (softer than the product-segments).
For the record, our top-line mission here was to narrow the funnel and get higher quality prospects to engage. This meant abandoning the ‘FREE’ messaging (white papers, webinars, etc.) in favor of more direct selling language to attract more immediate and more qualified buyers. That said, the gorilla wasn’t being offered superfluous bananas — if they clicked and engaged, we were pretty sure they were our people.
;)
Click for larger imageSo I had two basic conversion paths. Each experience was about seven total pages and featured 1-3 conversion points (lead capture forms for requesting an ROI calculator, requesting a platform demo or requesting contact). That’s about fourteen pages of web content for each message (A|B test). Multiply that times forty messages and you’ve got around 560 web pages. Hefty.
A screenshot showing one of the 76 landing experiences in flowchart view can be seen at right.
532 Landing Pages in 3-1/2 Days
Obviously I used LiveBall to roll out my 532 pages (using the aforementioned Flash objects) to minimize my pain. I localized each experience by matching its copy and imagery to the ad group. It took me about three and a half days to create and launch what ended up being 76 landing experiences. I did it all myself (because I am a control freak).
What’s next?
Our plan is to iterate challenger landing experiences as soon as winners emerge (with confidence) in each message/ad group. For some ad groups this will happen within a few days, others may take a few weeks. I’ll blog about performance and iteration as we extend the campaigns.
SEM Scaling search marketing, connecting the dots, and pizza
How do you scale search marketing?
For the keywords that are at the center of your market and brand, the best you can do to increase your flow of traffic is to tweak your ad creatives. But there’s only so much tweaking to be done in a 130 characters of plain text.
The other way to scale search marketing is through word associations.
For instance, if you’re a pizzeria, it’s pretty straightforward to bid for “pizza” and its variations. But that only works when people are explicitly searching for pizza. To expand your reach, you can bid on other keywords that might catch people in a seducible moment for pizza, even if that wasn’t at the top of their mind.
Our hypothetical pizzeria might bid on:
- birthday parties
- office parties
- affordable catering (really affordable)
- picnic places (yes, pizza delivered to the nearby park)
- sports bars (forget the bar, have beer and pizza at home!)
- gifts for new parents (pizza delivery gift cards — a life saver)
…and so on. I’m not saying that all of these are necessarily great ideas, but these are the types of above-the-funnel associations that businesses must consider as they expand their search marketing. This is part of what Long Tail marketing is all about.
However, it’s not always obvious — to the marketer or the audience.
The farther out you go in your associations, the greater chance you have of people scratching their heads and saying, “Pizza gift cards for new parents? Are you kidding?” They might click on the ad out of curiosity, but with a healthy dose of skepticism.
This is where post-click marketing must connect the dots.
Just sending them to the regular pizzeria’s home page won’t necessarily make the connection.
But if Hypothetical Pizzeria has a landing page that speaks directly to the topic of why delivered pizza is a new parent’s miracle dinner — a gift guaranteed to be savored when it’s most needed — maybe with a little humor, maybe not (that’s what A/B testing is for) — they might pull in a whole new set of customers. And, assuming the pizza is good, a happy new customer has a high probability of becoming a repeat customer.
The “pizza for new parents” landing page doesn’t have to be a big production. Spending 15-30 minutes or so on it — coincidentally, about the time it takes for a pizza to be delivered — would be more than sufficient. And then move on to the next Long Tail idea.
Long Tail marketing is about trying lots of ideas. Some will work, many won’t. You want to keep your investment in any one relatively low until it’s proven itself out. But by connecting the dots with your post-click marketing, you’ll find that a lot more work than you may have expected.