How to spend PPC management time wisely

This post is a summary of two long posts by George Michie of RKG about how to spend PPC management time wisely, whether running PPC in-house or through an agency. The original posts can be found here (31 Tips For Using Your Pay-Per-Click Management Effort Wisely) and here (PPC: Spending Your Time On What Matters).

For direct marketers, PPC costs need to be in line with PPC revenue. That same logic should be applied to how your team allocates its time.

A company can feed as many analysts as it wants to into the maw of Search Engine Marketing. There is an infinite amount of work to be done. However, the amount of work that is valuable enough to cover the cost of having someone do it is limited.

Paying someone to do work that produces little or no incremental value is bad business. Paying someone to do work that is worth less than other work s/he could be doing is also unprofitable.

Understanding the relative importance of different components of your PPC campaign may help retailers to allocate management resources more appropriately.

In catalog marketing we talk about: list, offer, package. “List” meaning the mailing lists; “offer” meaning the products and price points; and “package” meaning the catalog itself: cover art, layout, copy, paper, etc. As any good direct mailer knows the relative value of each of these pieces is something like: List 75%, Offer 20%, Package 5%.

The search analogy is:

1. The Term List: 50%
2. The Bidding Logic: 30%
3. Landing Pages/Selection/Offer: 15%
4. Ad Copy
   1. Getting Offer Copy out when appropriate: 3%
   2. Getting “Why Shop Message” right: 2%
   3. Tweaking the wording: 0%
   4. “Refreshing” the copy: 0%

Clearly, if any one of these is really awful it can render the others irrelevant. However, assuming the program is reasonably healthy here’s how I’d recommend allocating human resources:

Term List Maintenance: 10% – 30%

Whether your business is closer to 10% or 30% depends on how thorough the list is already, how complex your business is as measured by the number of product categories, manufacturer brands, and SKUs you carry, and how much turn-over you have in your product offerings.

• Look for new and different combinations of words from product names, SKUs, manufacturers.
• Study the actual user searches that led to the clicks, particularly those that convert.
• Use product feed updates periodically to catch the new additions with particular attention to new manufacturers/lines.
• Drop terms that reference products no longer carried.
• Spend time on the site studying how products are described and presented.
• Don’t burn time with machine generated lists.
• Don’t waste time studying Hitwise reports of terms that “are big” for your competitors.
• Keep an eye on the performance of these new terms.

Landing Page Tests/Design/Research: 5% – 15%

Again, you’ll want to spend time wisely here. Frontload your efforts, spending more time on this early in the program than later.

• Test search results pages against sub-category pages early and pick the winner.
• If you have the ability to test different mock-ups of the winning template do so.
• Test dedicated landing pages for extraordinarily high traffic terms that perform reasonably well.
• Study what products are sold from the top keywords and consider constructing landing pages for those keywords that highlight those products.
• A/B test homepage versions for brand terms if you have sufficient traffic.
• Don’t test whispers, test shouts. Finding statistically significant differences is hard on a good site. Focus on testing big concepts, not nuances.

Ad Copy Testing/Maintenance: 5% – 10%

People spend too much time on copy, but that doesn’t mean it’s unwise to spend any time on it. Copy maintenance can be extremely time consuming, so make sure you don’t over invest.

• Initially, test which unique selling proposition works best for you as a tag line.
• Write modular copy, so that the line 2 and line 3 copy can be swapped out without breaking a sentence.
• Test offer copy vs standard copy at the first opportunity of a site wide sales event.
• If the previous test supports it, roll out relevant offer copy whenever the offer is wide enough to justify the time.

Data/Bidding Analysis: 50% – 90%

There is far more gold to be found in the mountain of data than in any other area. The hours spent by a sharp, experienced analyst studying data, looking for trends, finding opportunities and refining the bidding logic will almost always produce more ROI than the other activities.

The list is endless, but here are some ideas:

• Study performance by product category, sub-category, manufacturer brand, etc.
• Study performance by landing page.
• Study the above in the context of seasons and changes in product mix.
• Assess the impact of time of day and day of week on performance. Fold findings into the bidding algorithm.
• Look for commonalities that don’t fit into the groupings above “terms with the word ‘foo’ in them do better/worse than their cousins”.
• Assess the keyword level data over longer and shorter time windows.
• How much spillover is there from the search program to the call center or the retail stores?
• What fraction of the buyers are new to file vs existing customers? Does that vary by product category?
• How does traffic coming in on broad match perform compared to the traffic coming in on exact match?
• How does traffic from the Google syndication network perform vs traffic from Google.com?
• Does our bidding correctly reflect margin differences between different types of products? Can we tie that tighter? Do people searching for “V Neck Sweaters” actually buy sweaters?
• How do orders come in over time since the last click through? Does that order curve suggest a longer or shorter cookie duration?
• What kind of interaction is there between search and other online ads?

These types of analyses produce much greater return on investment than most other projects. However, finding nuggets of gold takes hard work, and persistence. However, by putting more time into analysis and less time into low value projects, you’ll get more from your PPC program.

Original posts: 31 Tips For Using Your Pay-Per-Click Management Effort Wisely and PPC: Spending Your Time On What Matters