Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization.

If You Don’t Know Where you’re Going, Any Road Will Take You There

Challenge: How do you build and maintain long term motivation from your team?

Start with the end in mind. That’s a really simple statement but it can be challenging to put into practice. How often do you leave the office and say ‘What did I do today?’ or ‘Did I really accomplish what was most important?’ In today’s multitasking work environment, we’re pulled in so many directions and by so many means: Phone calls, emails, meetings, travel – and all in an environment of change. Yesterday’s plans are put aside for new action plans.

Fortunately, a few simple steps can bring clarity, sanity and most importantly, increased motivation for your team members. This starts with a process of developing organizational objectives from the executive staff and then translating them for everyone in the organization. Organizations just need to translate CEO objectives into those that fall onto the VP Marketing and so on to all in marketing. Simple, right? What if your organization does not have this in place? Good news – you can still put this into action, all on your own.

In outbound marketing and lead generation, you are responsible for sales targets. You can take the quarterly sales objectives and drive these into executable programs. These might impact new opportunities, increase awareness, target verticals or geographies, support sales enablement and more.

So you can ask – do these new requests I just received via email or on a call support my target objectives? Are these tasks somehow more important than the ones already on your plate? Our time is a zero sum game. We only get one chance to complete the day ahead of us and spend our time most effectively. If we get new incoming requests, we need to compare these to the current tasks in plan. Put your plans into place and take these to your manager, Director or VP. This will start a conversation regarding which programs will best support the target objectives. You may even develop a set of quarterly objectives for the team (positive steps!). Once agreed, as plans change, you can raise these up to ensure that the new plans better support your objectives.

The result? Not only will you have better alignment and coordination in your team, but also better motivation by feeling more connected with the organization. You will feel more engaged knowing that your activities directly contribute to the advancement of the organization. Being a part of a successful organization and knowing the role you play is a great source of ongoing motivation.

Lesson: Aligning objectives throughout the organization drives increased motivation

It’s Not Such a Small World After All

Challenge: Small companies want to expand to global market but face limited resources to invest

OK, so you have small company that’s growing well in the US. The product value fits well with international markets, which are inviting local exploration. International expansion frequently starts with hiring a local, in-country team in English-speaking markets (UK, Ireland, Australia and/or New Zealand). The thought is that hiring local resources will help translate what’s worked well in the US and assist in guiding localization efforts. These resources also bring to the table channel relationships and past customer experiences which help propel the process forward. Sound familiar?

The plan is not unreasonable. The learning curve will be steep and frequently initial sales will prove to be positive. The typical issues don’t arise until the next phase, where business growth doesn’t take off as expected, due to expectations of increasing revenue without continued investment.

This is where further investment is required. Certainly the local team may need additional personnel to ramp up channel partners, produce local events, develop local case studies and/or provide collateral localization. However, there may be further investments required stateside in the form of additional development, product management or product marketing to support this fledgling international team.  The further investment doesn’t stop there. Driving internationalization as a priority with the executive staff is required as well. Every quarter an executive should make a location visit to  see progress and challenges firsthand and bring this experience back to HQ in order to make a plan and implement necessary changes. The executive team needs to make the commitment to drive international agenda, communicate feedback and plans, and drive initiatives to support the remote team.

The fundamental mistake most companies make in their internationalization programs is lack of secondary investment, which won’t likely be justified with short-term revenues. The meagre initial revenues’ true payoff is in the learning necessary for next steps on the investments required for success. Likely investments will have to be made in advance of revenues – often significantly in advance of increased revenues.

Lesson: Only make initial investment in international markets if you are willing to double down with further investments ahead of increasing revenue.

Matching Marketing Automation to Prospect Online Posture

Challenge: So you have implemented a basic email program and lead scoring — what’s next?

Lesson: Developing sophisticated lead development programs that respond to your prospects’ online postures takes effort but will most certainly take your marketing automation programs to the next level.

Challenge: So you have implemented a basic email program and lead scoring — what’s next?

Almost all marketing automation systems will have you start by building an initial email series for new prospects, a lead scoring system and other programs to optimize your organization’s sales processes. You’ve built the systems and spent time troubleshooting and optimizing these programs. Next, it’s time to take these programs to the next level.

Step One: Data Analysis

You are likely capturing and tracking very valuable information: Data on initial lead source, key campaigns, important offers, customer segmentation, lead scoring, lifetime customer value and more. Take sufficient time to extract and analyze the data to show which campaigns, offers and other programs are associated with the acquisition of new customers (the logic being that if you continue to acquire new customers, you can also later optimize lifetime customer value). Investigate the various flows prospects take as they enter your systems through to a sold deal. Which campaigns or offers are associated with capturing new leads? Which campaigns or offers are associated with moving these leads through to initial sale? What common threads drive leads that do not progress at all or move to a ‘closed-lost’ opportunity? In just a few hours, you are likely to find key trends in your sales process – some trends you want to replicate and others you want to avoid.

Step Two: Collaborate with Sales

Armed with this information, collaborate with the sales team to validate the data your system uncovers with their real world experience. Very often, they are driving many of these ongoing touch points and can provide key insights behind these reports. As a result, you may also develop additional questions that will drive further data analysis to discover true causal relationships. The goal is to reach consensus on how to best support sales efforts with your marketing automation systems. Ideally, you will be able to identify areas where the sales team spends significant time/effort and explore opportunities to accelerate deal flow or reduce overall friction in the sales cycle. From these meetings, you should have a set of tactics where marketing can assist in the sales process. These tactics may be to focus efforts on certain industry verticals (greater segmentation in marketing automation), improved sales process (better offers at various stages of marketing automation) or optimized profiling of target prospects (better data collection or enhancement to make better decisions) – to name a few.

Step Three: Match Prospect’s Online Posture

Armed with your new-found insights into levers that drive sales, you can evaluate how your marketing automation systems can best support the sales team. You should now have insights into optimal lead sources, leading indicators when a prospect is ready to move to the next stage and good predictors of imminent purchase decisions. Your marketing automation system should be capturing these details and triggering the next phone call, email or offer.

Now you can optimize your initial marketing automation programs – and specifically the flow of your programs that will more reliably deliver relevant content for your prospects to take them to the next sales stage. If you see that a prospect takes one action or visits certain content on your web site, you can alter your programs to deliver better offers at the right time. Read your prospect’s ‘online posture’ by evaluating the offers they have consumed and the actions they have taken – and then offer them up the next likely step in the sales process.

Most marketing automation programs in their first or second generation are really just a series of emails that don’t respond dynamically to the actions of the prospect. To be fair, these programs take significant time and effort to set up – even at this basic level. However, once in place and optimized, now is the time to re-engineer the program, adding more options based on your prospects’ actions. This will probably entail more complex programming that creates different paths for your prospects – ones that more closely match their needs and interests.

Your goal is to get the right offer in front of the right prospect at the right time. If this were a face-to-face interaction, a sales rep would be reading and interpreting body language, tone, word choice, etc.,  to make the most appropriate, and therefore optimal, recommendations. You will have to make these recommendations based on how the prospect interacts with your website and your content. Your goal is to read the prospect’s online activities and then to adapt your response.

Step Four: Optimization

Once implemented you will again need another round of optimization – likely your initial design can be improved by watching open rate, click-through rate (CTR) and the actual completion of the offers delivered. You may find that you thought an offer was great but the CTR is very low. This may require changes to the messaging, a different offer, or changed timing. In fact, you may find that your initial results were lower than your previous simpler program! Don’t worry. If your analysis of sales process was accurate and your new automation design solid, you will be able to change timing, offer, copy and other variables to dramatically improve your results. These tests will take time and patience – but the results will be well worth the effort.

Lesson: Developing sophisticated lead development programs that respond to your prospects’ online postures takes effort but will most certainly take your marketing automation programs to the next level.

Lead Qualification Call Architecture

Challenge: In B2B lead prospecting, how should you design your follow-up calls to quickly assess the prospect and maximize progress on the call?

Lesson: While the wording does not have to be exact, the call architecture above will quickly get to the key data points you need to put the prospect down the right lead qualification or sales path.

Challenge: In B2B lead prospecting, how should you design your follow-up calls to quickly assess the prospect and maximize progress on the call?

Every B2B sales process is unique. However, there are many common elements that provide a common approach to designing your lead follow-up strategy by your lead development representatives. You cannot assume that, left to their own methods, they will find the optimal structure. You need to get feedback from your reps, design a call flow, enforce usage, and then assess the feedback to optimize the structure. Following are a few common elements that will help script an initial follow-up call. Let’s assume that the rep is calling a new prospect that has entered your system from a marketing program – a tradeshow, a whitepaper download, a channel partner registration, a website visit, etc.

Step One: Opening

Make sure your prospect is shown all necessary respect by telling them who you are, and why you are calling and most importantly, keep it shortA pretty standard opening would be: “Hi, my name is Larry Stein with ABC Corp., and I’m following up on your recent download of the XYZ whitepaper from our website.” Don’t add words that diminish your value (e.g. ‘I am just calling you…’) – there’s never a need to apologize for your call. You are calling to help them. You may choose to add a few more words if your company/brand is not well known, in order to help them remember their interaction with your company: “Hi, my name is Larry Stein with ABC Corp. We make the ABC product called the Widget, and I’m following up on your recent download of the XYZ whitepaper from our website.” 

Step Two: Initial Question

You want to stop talking quickly and get them talking. So get to the first open-ended question. My favorite is: “Can you tell me more about your interest in ABC Product/Area?” We don’t care if they read the whitepaper or liked your tradeshow demo. We don’t care how they’re feeling today (let’s face it). This person acted on their own to interact with your company and we want to learn why. There is some business reason that drove them to show up as a lead in your system (remember, we’re not addressing cold calls here). It could be that their boss directed them to look at your product. It could be that they are researching options to solve a problem. You may also find that the person wants to learn more so they can make a job transition or other personal reasons. That’s fine – but let’s get around to understanding this quickly so we can disqualify this lead.

Step Three: Probing Questions to Identify Pain

You may get useful information from your first question – but they may side step the answer initially. That’s OK, in just 2-3 sentences and in less than 30 seconds you have now introduced yourself, your company and why you are calling. Game on! Now you can ask them some initial questions to help guide your qualification. Without identifying a pain point, you cannot sell them anything. Your questions need to get at this area quickly. These will vary – but common questions are:

  • What products or services are you using today to address PRODUCT AREA?
    • If they don’t know the answer, you are likely speaking to the wrong person.
  • What are the primary challenges you face in PRODUCT AREA?
    • If you can’t identify pain points, then the prospect likely needs more time/development.
  • Do you have an IMPENDING EVENT coming up in the near future?
    • Is there something coming up that’s a good target point for you to start a sales engagement? E.g., Office move, acquisition, planned upgrade, etc.

You get the idea. You need to have a few (3-4) well-crafted questions to really probe for pain points or impending events that will enable you to deliver a solution for the prospect.

At some point in this process you can insert your value proposition. When they describe their current solutions or issues they face, you can then respond with a quick, 3-sentence solution overview. This builds on the short introduction you gave to your company and starts to embed the nature of your solution and why you are calling. Keep it short – you have not yet earned the right for a monologue.

Step Four: Seeing is Believing

If the call is going well and worthy of deeper investment of time, now is the time you should get your product in front of your prospect. A picture is truly worth a thousand words. This could be a 5-minute web demonstration via phone, a canned video or some other tool that will make your solution come alive for the customer. Given that this will frequently extend the call by 3-10 minutes, this step should only be taken with qualified prospects. The objective of this demonstration is to solidify their interest. Ideally you want to get them to experience a ‘goose-bump moment.’ This is the moment when a prospect clearly understands how your product would make their life easier/better. Make it personal and visceral.

Step Five: Next Steps:

So now you’ve learned about their needs and gauged their interest in your solution. Next, set the hook for their next call to action. You need to get your prospect to commit to a next step in the sales process. They need to actively take steps to evaluate and learn about your solution. By taking an action, your prospect will become more positively disposed to your solution (see the blog post “Power of Persuasion”). This could be to attend a one-hour web demonstration, to have an onsite visit/demo, to gather data and send back to you, or other important steps. You must close the prospect for this step and schedule the timeframe. Set a date and time for this action and set a follow-up discussion date/time. You are now off to the races!

Lesson: While the wording does not have to be exact, the call architecture above will quickly get to the key data points you need to put the prospect down the right lead qualification or sales path.

CPC Part 6 – Alternate Search Engines – Can Anyone Compete with Google?

Challenge: Should I consider the time and effort involved to run a separate PPC campaign alongside of Google?
Lesson: Google is king – in terms of volume and quality. Marchex is one of the only other PPC programs we have been able to successful run alongside Google.

Challenge: Should I consider the time and effort involved to run a separate PPC campaign alongside of Google?

Running a PPC program takes time and effort to structure, optimize, manage, etc…  Is it worth the time to run with smaller search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Marchex, Business.com and others?  Of course, the answer is – it depends. Here is a quick list of many B2B search engines.

Google makes it relatively easy to export your program so you can import into another search engine.  In fact, other search engines may be motivated enough for your business to take this export and build your campaign for you.  In some cases I have seen some who are willing to even replicate the changes to the program over time.

However, even with this assistance, you need to test the search engine to see the comparative cost per lead and revenue generated.  You may find that despite a duplicated program, the source of traffic from other engines decreases the quality of leads acquired.  The only way to know for certain is to run a test.  Based on my experience with B2B enterprise IT products, I have not yet been successful with Yahoo or MSN/Bing.  While I tried several experiments and ongoing optimization, I could not ramp the quantity of the program as well as the quality of the programs I had run with Google to make this worth the effort.  On the other hand, I have been able to run successful programs with Marchex.  While not the same scale as my Google campaigns, the quality and volume justified their ongoing investment.

There are new search engines and innovations happening all the time.  So keep your eyes open.  I would also be open to hearing your experience!

Lesson:  Google is king – in terms of volume and quality.  Marchex is one of the only other PPC programs we have been able to successful run alongside Google.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

CPC Part 5 – PPC Closed Loop Reporting – The Holy Grail

Challenge: I think my PPC program is performing well – but how do I prove it?
Lesson: The true proof of any marketing campaign is comparing program costs to revenues (ideally gross margin). Closed loop PPC revenue reporting is possible with a bit of effort and analysis and will guide your future decisions.

Challenge: I think my PPC program is performing well – but how do I prove it?

In a previous blog, we talked about tracking metrics like CPC and CPL.  These are good measures as you get started, however the real payoff is in driving revenue.  Given the relatively simple integrations between search engines like Google and SFA systems like Salesforce.com, you can track leads driven by PPC into SFA and through to a closed sale. 

Basic closed loop reporting is pretty simple and can be done by combining cost data from AdWords with sales progression shown in your SFA program.  If you are tracking Ad Group and Keyword sources, you can then run reports on closed revenue by these fields.  Generally, I have found, that tracking down to an Ad Group level is sufficient level of detail given that your PPC campaign has relatively small ad groups.  Even starting at the Campaign level can provide satisfactory results when starting out.  This can immediately give you visibility into which areas are driving revenue and which are not.  You can then use this information to guide your future optimization and bids in your PPC engines.

That said, what is best is to compare you spend to the revenue generated on an ad group basis.  This requires the integration of spend data by ad group with the revenue data by ad group from your SFA program.  You need to work out time periods and have similar naming structures in both sets of data to effectively build this integration.  While not exactly simple, this can be done via Excel and matched on a weekly basis.  The resulting reports will directly show ad group spend compared to revenue.  The remaining challenge is to account for the average sales cycle – since your spend today may not pay off in sales for weeks or months.  To the degree that your sales cycle is longer than 2-3 months, you may also need to consider a means to time shift your PPC spend to more closely match your PPC revenue.

Sales cycle time adds further complications in that changes you make to optimize your ad groups today will not show the full impact until these new leads have a chance to run through your average sales cycle time.  It takes significant discipline to wait this long to evaluate the impact of these changes.  Being impatient, my preference is to identify early indicators of future revenue.  This can be the lead rating or status of these leads.  If you see a spike in the Junk or Unqualified lead rating after a change is made, you can be somewhat sure that revenue will likely drop in the future from that ad group since the conversion rate to qualified lead has immediately dropped.  While not perfect, this allows you to make faster assessments of your ad group optimization efforts.

You may be surprised at what you find.  In the past, we have found that some campaigns looked great on a cost per lead basis. However, later it was discovered that these leads were not closing in terms of revenue. At this level of analysis you may find that your sales team is not well trained on how to position a certain product or that the product itself does not compete well in the marketplace.  So you may be generating quality leads but there are other issues in the sales funnel that are preventing this ad group from being a real success in terms of revenue. 

Lesson:  The true proof of any marketing campaign is comparing program costs to revenues (ideally gross margin).  Closed loop PPC revenue reporting is possible with a bit of effort and analysis and will guide your future decisions.

CPC Part 4 – Are You Getting Your PPC Money’s Worth?

Challenge: How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your pay per click spending?
Lesson: If you don’t measure, any road will take you there. Decide on which metrics are important to your organization and measure them weekly. Over time you will optimize your metrics and reporting which will, in turn, optimize your PPC program.

Challenge: How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your pay per click spending?

So you have your PPC program running, optimized and well designed landing pages.  Are you doing as well as you could?  What metrics should you use to evaluate your program?  You should evaluate your program at several levels.  

First, there are a few metrics built into your PPC program that can be useful – these are cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL).  CPC gives you a good idea of your traffic costs in order to compare to other opportunities.  That only gets you so far, as lead generation campaigns have to produce leads to be effective.  Thus, CPL is an important metric in any B2B search marketing campaign.  You can measure CPL directly in AdWords by placing their conversion tracking codes on your post-registration form pages.  You want to compare your CPL to other marketing programs you are running.  How does this compare to your direct mail campaign or your lunch and learn program?  In the end, PPC is only one area out of many marketing programs where you need to balance your overall marketing spend.

The next level of analysis is looking at revenue generated from your program.  The great news is that most SFA programs like Salesforce.com and others provide great ways to track results using Campaigns and tracking fields. You can pass key variables to your SFA system like: search term, keyword, Ad Group, or campaign so you can then report on how well a given ad group, key word or campaign is performing in terms of lead qualification or revenue generated.  With relatively simple SFA structures and usage, you can track the progress of these lead throughout the sales process.  Here is a really useful guide to setting up AdWords conversion tracking.

Typically I have found that leads generated by PPC programs are frequently the first step in the sales process where other programs like webinars help to qualify and move these prospects along.  The good news is that the leads coming from PPC into your SFA systems will frequently be net new leads and therefore you can then trace lifetime of this lead throughout the sales process.

What is required is the ability to integrate all future activity into this lead record.  This may require a marketing automation system like Eloqua, Marketo, Aprimo or others.  See more on this in other blog….

Lesson:  If you don’t measure, any road will take you there.  Decide on which metrics are important to your organization and measure them weekly.  Over time you will optimize your metrics and reporting which will, in turn, optimize your PPC program.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Landing Pages that Land Customers – CPC Part 3

Challenge: Visitors to your website are nice, but how do you turn them into buyers?
Lesson: Put yourself in your prospects shoes when reviewing your landing page? Does it sell the product or materials in a clear and compelling way? Would you fill out the form or complete the sale?

Challenge: Visitors to your website are nice, but how do you turn them into buyers?

OK – so you now have your ad groups, key words and offers working well for you.  You should see your click thru rate (CTR) increasing nicely.  Are your prospects converting on your website?  Can you get them to fill out a form and opt-in to communicating with your company? Can you get them to convert to a sale on your website?  Here is where landing page optimization comes into play.

When your prospect clicks on an ad, where will you take them?  Best practice dictates a landing page that encourages a sale or conversion, not your home page.  In some cases this may involve a two step process to qualify and then convert, but most frequently you will want to ask them for the sale or the form registration on that first landing page.  How to structure this page? There are several key elements to consider.

The first step to is your headline – or the large words listed on the landing page.  These need to reinforce the value proposition from the keywords the prospect used and your ad text. Inclusion of the keyword in this headline is a best practice, but can only be implemented if your ad groups are tightly organized for relevancy (see the entry on account structure). 

Next you want to consider a large image of the offer for this page.  What will the prospect get if they register or buy from you on this page?  Show them a large image of what they will receive – either the product, the whitepaper, the video demonstration, etc.  This large image is effectively your advertisement to encourage them to register – with supporting text.

Certainly the landing page copy needs to be well written text giving a description of the asset or product and what the prospect will learn or receive from registering.  I prefer brief text that supports both the ad that the prospect just clicked on and also supports the image on the page.  This tight linkage should confirm that they have arrived at the right location to learn more or purchase the product.  My bias from past campaigns has been for driving new leads for the sales team.  It is important to note that you may have a sales process where you need more education before a registration or purchase.  In this case you may need a landing pages focused on education versus lead generation. 

Finally, you need to have a simple and clear form for the prospect to complete.  Typically the landing page text will be on the left with the form on the right. This layout is common because people read web pages from top to botton and from left to right.  Ideally we hope that they will first read the text on the left and then fill out the form on the right.  Combining this with a clear call to action and a button draws the eye toward your objective and will help move more visitors from prospects to leads.

Here is a good example:

Here are a few links that do a nice job of describing landing page optimization:

Lesson:  Put yourself in your prospects shoes when reviewing your landing page?  Does it sell the product or materials in a clear and compelling way?  Would you fill out the form or complete the sale?

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Ad Groups, Ad Text, Offers, OH MY! – CPC Part 2

Challenge: My cost per lead is too high to support my sales objectives.
Lesson: Optimizing ad groups, key words, ad text and offers is an ongoing exercise which may take months and years to truly perfect – and even then requires constant attention and management.

Challenge:  My cost per lead is too high to support my sales objectives.

Now you have an account structure you like and is designed around your prospective customers.  Let the optimization begin!  No matter how well thought out your account, it can ALWAYS be optimized.  While campaign optimization could fill many books, here are a few common starting points to review to ensure you have covered the basics.

First you need to put all the wood behind one arrow – more succinctly, you need a tight linkage between your ad group, adwords in that ad group and ad text.  The more closely you can align the search terms your potential customers are using with the ad text you provide, the better your chance for success.  The implication?  You may need to divide your ad groups far further than you planned to achieve better results.  Most commonly, as you optimize your program you will be subdividing your ad groups to make them even more focused over time.  While this will increase your ongoing management effort, it will improve your overall results.

Review your keywords and don’t forget the power of negative keywords in these ad groups.  As you review the actual search terms, you may find they have meaning to search for other products.  You may want customers for web conference software – but clearly the word ‘conference’ could be used to search for a face to face event or venue.  You need to both clearly use keywords based on exact match or phrase match instead of the default broad match as well as add negative keywords.  Examples of negative keywords vary by industry, though most B2B companies could benefit from adding the following negatives to their accounts: home, consumer, personal, free, shareware, freeware, job, salary, position, and consultant.   For more information on using negative keywords, see this post by Lindsey Walsh.

Next, review your offers – are they really relevant to the keywords searched?  Is this offer something the potential customer would be interested in seeing or reading?  Is the offer too much of a lead – such as asking for a face to face meeting when the prospect is only just learning about the product or solution?

Another area that many people miss is the traffic distribution settings which declare whether your ads are shown only on a search results page for a relevant search or if they are also shown on the Content Network for web pages which mention your keywords.  While the Content Network can be an excellent source of traffic and leads, it needs to be managed in separate campaigns to allow for different bidding strategies.  If you didn’t make this choice specifically, Google opted you into the Content Network when you first set up your campaign.  Simply change your network settings and create a new campaign for the Content Network if you still want to pursue that traffic – but beware that your results may be very different than the search results.  More information on the Google Content Network is posted on the AdWords blog.

Lesson: Optimizing ad groups, key words, ad text and offers is an ongoing exercise which may take months and years to truly perfect – and even then requires constant attention and management.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.

Even the House Google Built Needs a Good Foundation – CPC Part 1

Challenge: How do I get started with AdWords?
Lesson: Review the structure of your account to make sure you have aligned to the needs of your target audience.

Challenge:  How do I get started with AdWords?

If you are just getting started or looking at optimizing your ad words campaign, the first step is to review the structure of your account.  Pay per click advertising is built upon relevance.  The reason that Google achieved dominance as a search engine is because their results were more frequently relevant than the competition. This emphasis on relevance carries through to the structure of your ad words campaign.  Your ads need to show up on searches that are directly relevant for your search offering.  The first step in achieving relevance starts with the structure of your account.

Campaigns set the boundaries within your account.  Budgets, geography & language settings, and traffic distribution all are set on the campaign level.  Within a campaign, you can create one or more ad groups, which are used to segment out groups of keywords and ads.  Each ad group should be a focus area for relevancy so that ad text can be linked to the keywords within an ad group.  Bidding happens on the ad group and keyword level, allowing you to group keywords that might be more or less expensive for easier tracking.  Negative keywords and sites can be added at either the campaign or ad group level depending on the amount of fine tuning you’d like to provide.  Any tracking URLs can be placed within ads, thus targeting the ad group level, or on individual keywords. 

So what do you place at the campaign versus the ad group level.  Google has a great posting that explains these tradeoffs. While it is difficult to later make structural shifts between ad groups and campaigns, it is not impossible – so don’t stress out.  But do think about what tests you may want to run or budgets you may want to set to help guide your decision.  There is also a graphical depiction of this structure .  As a final thought, you may also want to consider using different campaigns to manage Google’s Content Network (discussed in another post) compared to traditional Google search results.

Lesson: Review the structure of your account to make sure you have aligned to the needs of your target audience.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.