This got us thinking about other ways crowdsourcing has crept into PPC. In another post, we likened PPC to a Stereo System, describing how each stereo component is equally important to delivering good sound, with the speakers at the end playing a crucial role similar to landing pages. We suspect crowdsourcing will soon find its way into landing page creation, but for now we’re happy to see companies like Unbounce tackling the ever-important issue of landing page design and hosting.

Then there’s the crowdsourced PPC platform, Trada, which seems to be a good entry into PPC for smaller advertisers without a lot of time and resources. They might not get the strategy they’d receive working with a dedicated agency or bringing it in-house, but they’ll have a portfolio of optimization experts working hard on their behalf.

As a PPC agency, we welcome innovation in a field where there are a lot of levers to be pulled. We hope to come across more opportunities to leverage experts who may not physically be in our office but are still definitely on our team.

Know any more examples of crowdsourcing in PPC? Let us know!

• Hitting your budget and losing out on available impressions
• Missing CPA targets
• Not realizing an account has been paused or is no longer getting traffic
• Failing to install a conversion tag on new landing page
• … and more

The first step in setting up alerts in Google AdWords is to dream up some worst-case scenarios. In our agency, for example, we need to know when a campaign spends 95% of its budget because if we hit up against budgets on a consistent basis, we are likely losing impression share and have some bidding work to do. That might throw up a big red flag to our client. So… red flags = alerts!

We might set up this alert like the following: 

Other worst-case scenarios might be:

• a website going down
• conversion rates dropping below a target
• cost per conversion going above a target
• someone forgetting to un-pause a campaign

Using alerts to signal problems early on can be a real savior for any advertiser. Make sure to do these at the MCC level (if possible) and alert more than one team member for redundancy.

Once you have some alerts set up, let them run for a few days and tweak as needed. But keep in mind, you cannot Edit an existing alert in Google Adwords! Instead, you’ll need to create it over from scratch. Another good practice is to advise your team on how to handle alerts that signal problems. Put together a contingency plan and assign responsibilities accordingly. Worst-case scenarios can and should be managed as long as someone with authority is paying attention!

Just a week after their public launch, Asana quickly became the hot new thing at our agency. We had been searching for a simple solution to manage client emails, and so far Asana has delivered that and more.

What Asana Does

A project management tool with emphasis on task tracking, Asana allows us to create multiple projects for free (unlike Basecamp) with unlimited team members in each project. This means our whole team can follow a project and its various tasks and be notified via email when something is updated in that project.

For our hypothetical client ACME, we created a new project called ACME, added each team member as a follower, then setup an outlook email contact for the project itself which looks something like “ACME – CPC Search” x+12345678@mail.asana.com. You see, the cool thing about Asana is the ability to create a new task via email. Just put that address in the To, CC, or BCC fields, hit Send, and a your whole team is notified (as long as they’re following the project).

We repeated this process for each of our clients and now have a nice list-serve-meets-project-manager with a few other bells and whistles tossed in. One suggestion for the Asana product team would be a one-click V-card export to Outlook. Otherwise, each member of your team needs to create a new contact for each project. (At least we realized we could have one person do this and email all the V-cards to everyone else.)

Put It In Practice

Getting this to work for us took some experimentation. Since we wanted to copy Asana on all client-related emails (reports or  account updates) we figured we would put the client in the To field and Asana in the CC field. This caused problems though. When our clients hit Reply All to our emails they received an error message back from Asana saying: “You are not a follower or user of this Asana account.” So, putting Asana in the To or CC would not work.

By putting Asana in the BCC field, we eliminated those error messages, but what if our client had an excellent reply? How could we add that to the thread? It’s not perfect, but in those cases we will just forward meaningful replies to the Asana contact.

What Asana Does Not Do

Great technical support does not yet flow from Asana. In two cases we asked for some hand-holding and were denied both times — once in the form of a rejected LinkedIn message — doh! Well, I guess that’s life in the fast-lane!

As a task/project management tool that aims to be well integrated with email, they could take it further and let us do other relevant things via email: adding tags and due dates, for starters.

Speaking of email, there is no way to adjust your notification settings. So if you don’t want to receive an email for this or for that, too bad — you are going to be notified on EVERYTHING, like it or not. In the era of (over)engineered notification settings (Facebook, Twitter) these guys have some catching up to do.

But all in all, we seem to have put this free tool to good use and regardless of the lack of this or that, it has simplified our approach to client management in a way that is virtually invisible to our clients (if not overly visible to us).

In the past, when we’d run Dimensions reports by Day, the date would appear but the actual “day” would not. We’d see something like: Oct 11, 2011… Oct 12, 2011… etc. Not very helpful if you want to analyze weeks of data to look for similaries across, say, Saturdays and Sundays.

Now what we see (screenshot below) is the day just before its date: Tue, Oct 11, 2011… Wed, Oct 12, 2011… etc. When we download this report, we find it much easier now that we don’t have to whip out the calendar to make additional notes on what day falls on which date. (Note: We did find ourselves doing some quick excel magic to extract the day from the string, allowing our pivot table to show the right stuff.]

We’d like to thank the AdWords team for not only listening, but also for helping us save time and improve our day-to-day workflow. Hey agencies, did you notice this, too?

[Google AdWords agency support person],

Thanks for doing the work and for sending this (PDF document of AdWords account analysis and recommendations), plus for following up with the raw data (which we requested in order to further look at the same data they were referencing – p.s., when the data came, there was no date range anywhere on the document, so it was still difficult to look at the same data in the advertiser’s AdWords account – who sends data without referencing the date range from which the data is derived?? I mean, who does that???)!

In reference to the PDF, page 4 points out that during off-peak times, (our advertiser client: “the advertiser”) approaches “market” impression share, and that there is a gap between the advertiser’s impression share and the market during peak times. If we bid to a CPA target, how might we use this trend data to improve the account? In other words, if account clicks decrease, it is because conversion rates are decreasing and we are trying to hit target CPA. If we assume that the Google data shows we are missing out on an opportunity, how do we bridge the gap, knowing that we’re only decreasing bids to hit target CPA? Any ideas or insights would be great! (hint: I can’t imagine what these ideas might be — messaging that speaks to off-peak time periods? I don’t think so…)

Page number 6 assumes that the keywords on which we’ve lowered bids would actually convert just fine, if only we would increase bids to get these ads on page 1, but I’m not sure that’s indicative of reality. My feeling is that we have bid these keywords down for a really good reason – they are either not super relevant to the advertiser’s value proposition, or they are branded terms, where users have demonstrated they are really intent on seeking out the brand rather than signing up for another brand. (We’ve tested these branded terms extensively, of course.)

Thanks for listing some specific kw’s. We show that for (insert phrase-matched kw here) we have a CPA of (dollar amount), which is (about 30%) higher than target (dollar amount) CPA – but also that the Google Conversion Optimizer is doing the bidding – your spreadsheet is looking at the 1st page min estimated bid versus our current maximum bid – but our current max bid has no bearing on anything, b/c this is a conversion optimizer-managed campaign. We’ll go through the other keywords in the spreadsheet – maybe we’ll find something!

Page number 7 seems fallacious. The inference is that in general for this account (actually, the Google folks say this applies to just about any account), keywords in high ad positions convert better, which is totally false. There is a correlation between keywords in high ad positions and strong conversion rates; but the causality is that we bid higher on higher-converting keywords. We cause this correlation to be so.

Would love any thoughts.

SEM has grown very fast in terms of click spend and sophistication for several years running. The Google AdWords interface (both web and AE) continues to get more jam-packed with various bells and whistles (ways of looking at & controlling your click spend). 3rd-party technology for reporting, optimization, keyword discovery, ad optimization, etc., is as prevalent as ever.

CMOs need to know what’s important – what should their focus be, in order to get the best return on their time and effort. The answer gets back to the core of what search is all about, and it brings to mind the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

1) Focus on what your company brings to the table – what is the true value proposition, or need that your company fills?

2) What sorts of keywords might searchers use to seek out your products & services? Remember – the beauty of search is that users can find what they are looking for (rather than stumble across things they didn’t know they wanted! — that’s more for display!). Sure – go crazy with the long tail if that’s what makes you feel good – but don’t stray too far from your relevance curve.

3) Strive for a consistent thread in terms of user experience, starting with: a) bid on relevant keywords where user intent likely has to do with your value proposition; b) match keyword categories with ad text that is both relevant to your keywords and which encourage the click, but that also stays true to your value proposition; give the user a consistent post-click experience, with a landing page that messages benefits, additional info, and that includes the same offer/call-to-action mentioned in the ad, if possible.

4) Ask whether you are tracking and measuring the right things. It’s easiest to move SEM programs forward with a lot of daily conversion data. But at the end of the day we also need to measure actual revenue or lifetime value, or a suitable proxy for those. The trick is to be able to use a metric that gives the SEM manager enough data to do their job, but still (via an internal tracking system) be able to match that daily conversion data up with ‘harder’ metrics.

5) How good is the data? CMOs need to understand the data that they are looking at in order to gauge the accuracy of the data and the degree to which it’s telling them what it’s telling them. Google AdWords and Google Analytics often provide great data for making correct directional changes; but they are no substitute for a company’s internal database, which should be used to check against data discrepancies on a regular basis.

If the CMO stays focused on these big-picture items (where, actually, the details are all-imortant!) she will have the wind to her back.

Check out the vid:

Click here to read: (PPC Ad) Statistical Significance: Not Just for Geeks Anymore on SearchEngineLand.

The client came to CPC Search hoping that we might grow revenues and profitability of their PPC program. Upon auditing the client’s Google AdWords account, we noticed that there were multiple opportunities to optimize and expand Search and Content campaigns for this client. After 6 months, CPC Search has achieved very significant results*

• Revenue up over 100%
• Profit (after agency fees) up 73%

Every client is different, but for this particular client we focused especially on separating out Content from Search campaigns, adding and managing content placements, expanding content ad groups in the spirit of Google’s ‘Cast Your Net (CYN)’ technique for contextual campaigns, and on restructuring the Search campaign by creating multiple ‘child’ ad groups from what had been a small number of original ad groups in the Search campaign. We also had the wind to our back inasmuch as the client proactively sent additional display creative which, when rotated into our Content campaigns, improved CTRs markedly. In keyword land, ad fatigue is typically not much of an issue – the nature of keywords is that users search for what they need at the time, and later they are searching on something else that they need. With display ads, on the other hand, users may be seeing an ad again and again because they continually visit the same blog, for example. So, refreshing Content creative (display or text, actually) can actually do good things for CTRs.

* Note - we have used ’100′ as the month-0 benchmark number – revenue and profit numbers therefore represent percentage growth from month-0, rather than actual revenue and profit for this client. Also, we net out our PPC agency fees since we took over from an internal team rather than from another SEM agency.