One of the building blocks of a digital marketing strategy are the PPC Search Campaigns. In this article, we are going to discuss the components and trade-offs that we consider as we build an account strategy document. Regardless of the sophistication of your marketing plan, documenting and then measuring to the plan is one of the fundamentals.  Included with this is a sample of the form we use to record and present our strategies to our clients.

I would like to warn the reader in advance that this is a long article because the topic is complex and the issues are nuanced. If you are looking for a simple answer to your marketing plan, this is not your article. Many people want marketing to be fast, free, and easy and it is none of these.

In a search strategy, many of the elements of the plan are connected to each other so moving one will either directly or indirectly move other values. A simple example of this is that moving the CPA $ Target will very directly change the CPA Unit Target because budget divided by CPA$ = Conversions. Other relationships are softer such as the balance between quality and quantity.

Documenting your Business Persona

Developing a plan requires that we understand the balance decisions the business has made because the plan has to fit the business and it is not one size fits all. We will discuss each attribute in detail but first you need to understand what a balance decision is. In making marketing decisions, we have to understand the priorities of the business and we represent this in the marketing attribute. These are designed to be items that are routinely connected to each other with decisions that exist not in a yes and no format but rather in a scale from one side to the other. For example, many times in marketing we face the compromise of quality and quantity.  As the quality of the keywords goes up, the quantity goes down. These relationships are elastic not mechanical so moving one side does not always move the other equally so there is always room for improvement or leverage in the relationship. Let’s explore each attribute and remember that there is no right or wrong answers here.

Quantity Keywords vs. Keywords Quality

Quality and Quantity are often in conflict and in the area of keywords it is very pronounced. What we find in most cases is that keywords exists in layers of match to the business and the farther away from the business the keyword gets, the weaker the performance but the higher the volume. A simple example of this is the word plumber for a plumbing business. Let’s look at what that data might look like:

This pattern is common with the broad keyword having a high volume of traffic compared to the more specific searches. The thing for the plumber is that some of these more specific words are better or worse depending on the business we are talking about. For example, a plumbing business would hate plumber salary and this would be a common negative but a school that teaches plumbing is going to love that search. The general rule here is that the more specific the keyword (higher quality) the lower the quantity will be. The higher the volume, the more in love or in hate the business is likely to be with that word.

Transaction Volume vs. Cost Savings

Another version of the quality and quantity issue this is related to money rather than keywords. Almost every business will want as much transaction volume as they can get but at some point the transactions start to become too expensive. This value is controlled within the system with the keyword model and cost per click but it is also influenced by other things such as Ad Copy. The advertisement can be written to call the person to action or to filter to the better traffic – what we call a filter ad. An example of this was a computer consultant that did large scale projects. His target word was “Computer Consultant” but that keyword included traffic that did not fit his business and he was getting calls for very small projects. By changing the ad to include a qualifier of “Projects starting as low $10k” this dropped the volume but increased the cost per click because the quality score was impacted by the lower click through rate.

Formal Image vs. Personal Service

This impacts the website or landing page design much more than the search campaign but it can help focus the messaging and keywords. As a business becomes more formal in their communications they lose the personal touch. Examples of this are often related to the size or image size of the business. Many small businesses want to be seen as big businesses and many large ones want to be seen as providing a personal touch. The personal messaging would be a site like ours where we list the individual people that will be serving your account while a company like IBM would never do that. IBM’s advantage is in the dependability that the formal image creates in the market place and there is an old saying in the computer industry that nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM. On the other side IBM is not where you go for raw innovation.

Conservative vs. Experimental

Conservative in this content means that the persona leans toward things they can depend on. These are tried and true approaches that create dependable responses. What they do not do is create surprise or large leverage because everyone knows about them. They have been studied and written on and to some degree this connects to the lifecycle of a product with mature products being conservative (proven products) but new products being experimental. To some degree, this is an evaluation of risk aversion.

Control vs. Growth

There are many ways to manage your marketing and again this is a growth versus dependability balance. Growth at all costs can bankrupt the business but you can also save yourself out of business as well.

Relationship vs. Transaction

This is one of the big ones and it goes to the model of the marketing plan and there is not a right or wrong on this. On one end of the spectrum is the relationship sale where the business invests in building and culturing the relationship. This results in a higher cost in most cases but the benefit for the business is in the repeated business. These businesses might lose money on the first order but they make it up in the lifetime value of the customer. On the transactional side, you have businesses that sell a customer one time and move on and in those cases the transactional cost is crucial to surviving as a business. When a business is more on the relationship side of the marketing plan, there will be more investment in brand building and less in late stage search.

Monitor Competitors vs. Self-Improvement

This persona attribute goes to the way businesses look at competition. On the monitor side, they spend resources monitoring and responding to their competitors and over the years we have had clients that were almost obsessive on this attribute. The monitor attribute watches and reacts to competitor movement. On the other side is self-improvement meaning that the business focuses on and competes with itself and works to be better today than it was yesterday with little attention to competitors. This does not mean that they are not watching but it indicates the degree of reaction.

Aggressive vs. Passive

Some businesses really rock the boat and have very aggressive planning in their marketing while others are more laid back with a calm persona that some customers like. The draw back with the aggressive mode is that it alienates some percentage of the audience.

Male vs. Female

While it might not be PC the fact is that gender matters in marketing. While never true for all members of any group, the genders do react differently to different things. This attribute setting is the best guess of the business as to how their customer base breaks down by gender. In the past, we worked with a company in the computer industry and the starting assumption was that the industry was dominated by men. However when we actually studied their customer base we found that the decision makers were largely women. This surprised the business and the assumption is that while the industry was 80% male the product was more accepted by women resulting in 65% of their customers being women. Like all things in marketing, you have to be very careful about things that you think you know.

Direct Response vs. Brand

Direct response is the investment in creating transactions while the other side is the longer term investment in brand building. Branding is more faith based than direct measurable response and different people value this in different ways. The idea of this attribute is to express that balance.

Center of Attention vs. Observer

The internet like any other social interaction have a range of players and in marketing you have to decide where on that spectrum you want your business. I will be the first to admit that most of us like being the center of attention but I would point out that trying too hard to be the center of attention can come off poorly.

Professional vs. Fun & Friendly

Marketing is about painting an image of your business and the decision of where on the spectrum you want to be is important. Here the decision has great impact on the creative elements of the plan and helps guide them on the type of image they are paint. For professional think large formal businesses like IBM and think GoDaddy or Carls where the creative is much more creative.

Revenue Growth vs. Cut Costs

It is said that there are two classic ways to manage revenue. You either push revenue growth or you cut costs and the reality is that you do both. The question here is not are these important but rather how you balance these areas. Pushing revenue growth at all costs is a model that you see in a business like Amazon. The cost cutting pressure often comes from the financial side of the business, think from the office of the CFO.

CPA (Cost per Acquisition) vs. Budget

This loosely translates into how much cash or credit do you have available and how fast you want to grow. At the CPA end of the spectrum, the budget can increase as much as needed as long as it meets the target CPA. The budget side indicates that cash is not unlimited and that growth is constrained by this.  Some businesses operate on a budget basis and that is the ruling attribute. It is normal for organizations like Non-Profits and Government agencies to be bound by an absolute budget bringing them all the way to this side. For-profit businesses with a CPA target that is stand-alone profitable generally have no consideration for a budget. The middle of the range comes in cases where the transaction is not profitable immediately and in this situation, the balance is driven by the available cash to fund growth.

Summary of Attributes

This part of the strategy is to get you thinking about the high level items that drive the low level decisions that we will go through next. There is no right or wrong answers because what you are trying to get your mind around of the attributes of how you want to play the game.

Search Campaign Form

Below is a form that we use internally to record the basic strategy that our AdWords Experts use to apply to each account. This forms the guidelines for the account which is then modified based on the AdWords Expert’s experience. While we someday hope to be able to automate this process, that is likely well in to the future because AdWords only looks simple. The reality is that language is complicated especially when it get to trying to express the intent of the searcher. Keywords do not exist in a black and white world but rather in a universe of grays. It is this interpretation of the meaning of language based on the audience profile that makes AdWords an art not a science. A simple way to think about this is the statement:

What I said is not what you heard and not what I meant.

When we fall into the trap of talking about data as if it were accurate, please realize that all marketing data are clues and not facts. As a clue, data events need additional clues to increase our confidence in what they say and experience to understand what they mean.

The detailed discussion of each element is in the comments column of the form. After completing the strategy, the comments are normally removed and replaces with any special consideration of that item.

Search Network – Google

CPA Calculation

This form provides a step by step process to get from the conversion value to the bidding range for the strategy. It is important to understand this flow and where the challenges in your assumptions exist. The discussion here is a simple example of the value created, which becomes a more interesting discussion if your business value is over the lifetime of the customer. This simple transaction model does not work for all businesses and in reality it works for very few but it is good place to start.

It Varies

We have worked with hundreds of clients and helped guide them through this process and one of the common statements to many of the items is that “It Varies.” Of course it varies but what we are looking for is the average not a specific transactional amount. If it varies too much and you can separate the traffic, then it is best to have a separate strategy for each class of transaction. Keeping with our Plumber example, a Water Heater is a large ticket item compared to a simple service call. Since the traffic can be separated by keyword, a separate campaign strategy may be in order.

Positional Strategy – Search Network Google

This form is used to record the positional strategy and its connection to the bid decisions. The data should be comfortable by now but a few things are not as they might appear on the surface. The date range at the bottom is not the date range of the keyword class of converters. Converters means that they have converted at a CPA less than the target CPA. Because conversions can be very low volume events this is not as easy as it first seems. For example a converter might have one conversion at $40 in spend but currently is up to $85 and it is still within the target. This is why you label these keywords rather than filtering them. The $85 CPA in this case could convert on the next click instantly changing the CPA to $42.50. For low volume conversion keywords, you have to let the CPA grow to 2-3 times the target CPA before you demote the keyword to the “Others” class.

High volume keywords are simpler to handle but again you have to accept some CPA’s above your target because the $50 CPA is an average so at the keyword level a $100 CPA is acceptable assuming you have some other converters that keep your average below the $50 target.

The column heading of GT (Greater Than) or LT (Less Than) are numbers used in the filter to isolate the keywords that need adjustment. The Action column indicates Inc (Increase the Bid) or Dec (Decrease the Bid) and the percentage. The net effect of applying this is that the bids will work their way into the position targets. Again this is a very simple example and the class definitions can certainly be more complex than the examples given here.

In closing, I would like to point out that this is a simple strategy and the complexity can increase quickly when you introduce more variables. Next month, we will write on how to audit your strategy to make sure it is structurally sound and reaching the goals you set for it.

After posting this article the formatting lost lots so if you need a more usable form for your strategy please email me and I will send it to you in Microsoft Word format. bob@gettorchlight.com