New Google Checkout Badge

Google Checkout is one of those projects that you don't hear much about very often. Today, while searching around I discovered that there are now dollar amounts added to the badge that's displayed near a participating ad.

With so much traffic going to shopping sites, this is a great way to make sure people stay on page in order to get extra information about a store selling a product.

Data Driven Decisions

Over the course of my time in Search Engine Marketing, a question is often asked that almost never needs to be; "what do you think?"



For better or worse, thinking is one of the things that isn't inherently needed when it comes to making decisions to help improve the performance of your Search campaigns. This is by no means an endorsement to act without thought, but if data either isn't present or substituted with whimsy or opinion, the results can only be attributed to luck. The problem with this arises when you want to replicate the results or to build further upon them. Unfortunately, luck isn't scalable.



Data dependency is one of the key elements that helps separate SEM from being classified as a hobby. It's one of the main reasons why so many business love the idea of it and attribute so much credit for conversions to it. If you were to remove the ability to attribute success on a keyword level, companies wouldn't be able be flocking to search the way they are.



The growth in keyword and local search all boils down to data. Analysis is a lever of search that has to be carefully understood.



For keywords, data is keenly used when being applied to match types, time of day, bid amount, and position. It strikes me as odd when the conversation switches to spending more money to help improve performance over optimizing existing opportunities. Usually, you can use data to turn off non-performing keywords while increasing the bid for better keywords and testing their velocity in a higher position. In a perfect world, the top producing keywords would be split out from the rest of keywords in at least 3 different ways in Google alone.

• Splitting keywords between Google.com and it's syndication partners.
• Having keywords present as Exact, Phrase, and Broad match.
• Isolated in their own campaign with a separate budget.

This way when you make a change to a keyword, you're able to make a decision that won't have as many sweeping changes to the performance of your keywords. This is the kind of additonal flexibility that allows you to gain more insight which will only help you make better data decisions.

For copy, you want to make sure that you're constantly testing creative so that account is always evolving. Being complacent is the beginning of the end. You want to set things up so you can track performance from both the front and back end. Finding copy that drives a phenomenal clickthrough rate is great! Until you find out that there isn't a direct proportion between CTR and revenue. Then you're left asking yourself if you care more about CTR or revenue. It's a rhetorical question because no one gets paid from CTR. Having the mechanisms in place to track data all the way through the cart will provide tremendous leverage to radically improve performance.

Before a single keyword is launched, it should become a best practice to gather as much data as you can beforehand. If there's anecdotal data that can be used to help determine what keywords previously drove spend and conversions, you have the benefit of using this when you're setting your account up. The TCO (total cost of ownership) of an SEM account can be high depending on the size and complexity. You can minimize this by working "by the numbers."

Your "Perfect" Match [Type]

I didn't want to be cute with the title, but it was a little hard to help myself. Since the beginning of search marketing people have been trying to match intent. With match types being offered by all of the major search engines a lot of misconceptions have been created. One of the most pervasive is that you should just set up all of your keywords on broad match and instanteously you'll be able to get as much traffic as possible.

While that may have been true in Search 1.0, Search 2.0 is all about the dollars. You heard me, I didn't say it was about the user, or behavioral targeting or dayparting or any of that. It boils down to money. Engineers, statisticians, and physicists are on campuses all around the world looking for the best way to target an ad to a user. Unfortunately Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask don't have that long. They found another way of making the Black Box another shade darker. It's call 'quality.' Now they aren't going door to door asking users if they were pleased with the results they found, or if they found what they wanted when the clicked the ad.

Instead they are looking at other elements like the clickthrough rate (CTR), the bid, the landing page, and the load time of the landing page. I haven't seen any code that proves this, nor would I try to suggest that these factors aren't at play but I'll explain why it doesn't matter. Advertisers get into search marketing to reach users. While many welcome customers that are already customers, they want to get conversions, registrations and referalls from customers that are new. It would be even better if they were getting them from a competitor. Unfortuntately, to do this, you will have to do more than just on branded keywords.

You got it, you have to bid on keywords much higher up the consideration cycle. If you sold something hospitality related, you may find yourself bidding on a keyword like 'travel.' It will be almost impossible to have a great anything on a keyword like that. You can exact match, geo-target, daypart, show only to men in Fargo, North Dakota that are 24 - 35 until you're blue in the face but one of two things are going to happen. You'll be upset because you're only getting .1% of the share of voice (SOV) or you'll be happy that you're only spending $10 dollars a day instead of $100. Either way, you end up with a keyword that won't be very valueable to you when it come to driving whatever your metric is (unless it's impressions). [Ed. note - I realize that a lot of conversation is taking place around the value of impressions for branding, and I'm not arguing against that]. If all of this wasn't hard enough, you'll find a minimum bid of $1, 5 or 10 waiting on you.

Almost makes you wonder if the effort was worth it. It is, but there are few rules of thumb you want to keep in mind.

* - Let the big boys bid on the super general, unbranded, barely on topic, one word keywords: You're not going to want to back away since you're able to bid on just about anything you want. This isn't the place you want to be, it's going to be in the 2-4 term search phrases, and their most popular misspellings. There will be less competition, which will help keep your bids low. Also, you'll be able to custom tailor copy much better when you have a 2-4 term search phrase than a one word search term.

* - Once you know where your high spend keyword are, treat them different: I know, I know, this seems like a no-brainer but hear me out. With as much as 90% of your keyword spend going to these keywords, it's in your best interest to give these special attention. Try having them in their own campaign, in every match type. This give you the ability to optimize against 2 or 3 different variations of the keyword so if one match type isn't working, you can bid it down and keep the others.

* - Know the tools, and use them carefully: Google didn't just talk up Quality Score and leave it there. They provided reporting which gives some visibility into what keywords are being matched to. This allows you to have an ongoing repository of keywords to add as negatives and use for new keywords. By adding more keywords, you will see your CPC's go down on broad matched keywords since the keyword itself is in your account.

Testing is a basic and fundamental part of any successful search marketing endeavour. Testing and understand match types is just one way to do so.

I'd like to thank SERoundtable.com. After reading their article about Google only using Exact Match for the quality score, I was motivated to write this post.

Welcome

Something inside of me encouraged me to start up another blog. Sadly, I have several others (http://dontdiebroke.blogspot.com/, http://suitlandcondoforsale.blogspot.com/, http://tvlampsnbulbs.com) but don't spend much time updating them or adding any fresh content.

This will be different!

After seeing everything that went on with Google > Yahoo > Microsolft > AOL > MySpace > Facebook, lots of people are taking notice to all of the opportunities that exist within Search.

I really want to focus on the smaller, much smaller pieces of the puzzle and hopefully to carefully inspect some of the changes going on in the products being offers and the tactics used to operate them.