Search Strategy
Five things to consider when evaluating pay-per-click management tools
By William Leake
For companies just starting out with online marketing, and for many who have been online for years, pay-per-click search is a tried-and-true method of driving traffic to your web site and increasing revenue. To meet the quick deadlines and ambitious revenue goals of the Internet retailer, some marketing executives may be tempted to jump in feet first with a recognizable name like Google AdWords. But search is far more complex these days than it used to be, and e-commerce is a vertical industry with highly specialized requirements. Online retailers really should do their homework before investing in pay-per-click advertising in order to maximize the revenue from this powerful channel.
Overwhelming data
As the search marketing industry has matured, the proliferation of data that must be monitored, managed and acted upon to keep an organization’s search campaigns running optimally can become overwhelming. And as the performance data piles up and your search strategy becomes more multifaceted, so does the need for tools that help manage it all.
There is an abundance of pay-per-click management tools available, but e-commerce retailers must weigh their options and assess their needs carefully in order to determine which tool is right for them. Certain things, however, are universal in their appeal.
These are the top five things to consider when evaluating search management tools.
1. Reporting
Many pay-per-click management systems have a large selection of pre-built reports, but no custom report-writing capabilities. This will invariably become a problem when managing complex search campaigns. Advertisers should have the ability to extract specific data that could have a significant impact on campaign performance. For example, a books retailer may want to query all textbook-related keywords with conversion rates over 5% and over 200 clicks during July to determine where they can get the best returns during the college pre-enrollment season. Without a custom reporting feature, this type of analysis would be difficult, to say the least.
2. Conversion tracking
Assuming that you are optimizing your campaigns to an ROI metric (either cost-per-acquisition or return on ad spend), conversion tracking capabilities become extremely important. There are three options for tracking conversion data with a pay-per-click search management system: search engine conversion tracking, pay-per-click system conversion tracking and third-party analytics conversion tracking. Each option carries pros and cons:
— Search engine conversion tracking is supported by almost all pay-per-click system vendors, making it easily accessible. However, this option is the most limited when it comes to reporting. Raw conversion data, including things like order ID, order amount, IP address, etc., are not available through search engine tracking and therefore cannot be used for other reporting purposes, such as analyzing the click path specific users took to get to a sale. Also, because it does not take into consideration duplicate conversion events due to browser plug-ins or user error, this tracking option can be less accurate. Some browser plug-ins read the HTML code on a web page in much the same way your browser does, causing a tracking pixel to be fired a second time. Visitors accidentally hitting the “submit” button more than once can also lead to false conversions. Moreover, tracking can be a hassle because each search engine requires a separate piece of code, or conversion tracking script, to be added to your web site.
— Pay-per-click system conversion tracking varies from vendor to vendor, which allows you to choose the provider that best meets your needs. It is easily integrated into existing operations and the system vendor can provide support from conversion tracking. Just as the pros vary from vendor to vendor, so do the cons—testing is important to find the right vendor. One common potential problem to look out for is the management, or mismanagement, of duplicate conversion events. Does the vendor allow you to define the amount of time until a cookie expires? Does the vendor only track through a user’s session? Does the vendor use first-party or third-party cookies? These are questions you must address before choosing a provider.
— Last but not least, third-party analytics conversion tracking provides the most detailed reporting on conversion metrics and beyond. Reports on the average time spent on a site, average page views per dollar spent, conversions resulting from multiple channels, etc., can be tracked to give you a more holistic view of consumer behaviors and trends. For example, a consumer may have clicked on a banner ad one day, then on a search ad the next day, then converted. In this situation, the conversion cannot be attributed exclusively to the search ad. This level of detail can provide you with strategic insight that can help you optimize multi-channel campaigns. On the negative side, this option requires additional development work to integrate analytics data with a pay-per-click management system and support from both vendors.
Whatever conversion tracking process your company has decided to adopt, you will want to make certain that the pay-per-click search management system will support it.
3. Managing the long tail
Most automated bid management tools can properly optimize a keyword to meet a specified return on ad spend or cost per acquisition metric. By looking at the conversion rate and average order price for a keyword, it is a simple calculation to determine the optimal cost per click necessary to achieve a target return on ad spend. But, considering that 80% of sales are driven from 20% of keywords, what about the remaining 80% of keywords, often referred to as the long-tail, which may only get three or four clicks per month? You certainly can’t expect that one sale out of four clicks will accurately predict a keyword’s conversion rate at 25%. To manage long-tail keywords effectively, you must group them into portfolios or categories that combined provide the necessary statistical significance.
Why are the long-tail keywords important? Because they can constitute 20% to 30% or possibly more of your total sales volume. Consider the fact that the long-tail often consists of 3- to 4-word phrases which are specific to what you are selling. These specific searches are more likely to convert into sales than the more generic keywords that may be more popular. If long-tail keywords are an important part of your search marketing mix, make sure the system you select can properly manage them.
4. Data integrity
Synchronizing a search engine marketing management system with a search engine is easy, right? The idea is that you write a script that pulls campaign data from Google using Google’s application programming interface and populate a database. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly that easy. Data integrity is one of the toughest issues that any search engine marketing systems developer has to deal with. If you are looking at incorrect performance numbers, you will make incorrect bid decisions and potentially lose money. It’s a difficult criterion to assess during the vendor selection process, however, because you have to use the system before determining if there are any data integrity problems.
Samir Patel, CEO of SearchForce, a provider of search engine marketing management software, combats this problem for clients with synchronization algorithms. This approach catalogs multiple versions of data to keep track of the latest information and considers daily network latencies and search engine programming interface specific requirements to ensure consistent data reliability and accuracy. “One of the common problems is retailers updating data on the search engines while working with a centralized search management platform,” Patel says. “Search engine marketing managers need the flexibility to work directly with the engines. Therefore, a search system must be able to determine for every data point whether the most recent change occurred on the search engine or on the search management platform.”
Additional data integrity problems can arise from search engine reported data. “The major search engines constantly restate their click, impression, media cost, and keyword position information,” says Dave Fall, vice president of product management search technology for DoubleClick Inc. “We’ve invested heavily in engineering resources to build an infrastructure that retrieves and replaces search engine data as it changes. Search engine marketers should expect their management system of choice to reliably report and optimize on the same numbers search engines report in their own interfaces.”
With the above insights, the best advice is to get a trial license before making a long-term commitment. If that is not possible, make the sales rep explain the steps the company goes through to assure data integrity for client campaigns before a purchase.
5. Ease of use
This one’s pretty obvious. If you need a team of techies to operate your search management tool, you’ve probably wasted your money. Google set the high-water mark here with AdWords. Since AdWords was created for the marketer rather than the I.T. department, its dashboard and reporting capabilities are extremely intuitive. Pulling custom reports and interpreting data is easy, and marketers can quickly and efficiently get the desired data. The same should hold true for any tool that you select.
So how do you find this magical search tool? First, really evaluate your search marketing strategy and what you need to successfully deploy your search campaign. And by all means, test. There are many providers of management tools, and any worth considering will allow you to take their tools and services for a test drive. There’s no better way to determine the right fit than seeing the tool in action.
Hitting the ROI
And for a little real-world perspective, Swimlocker.com is an online retailer that began using a pay-per-click search management system in July. The ROI from the system was almost immediate. Swimlocker has achieved an estimated reduction of more than 50% in the time to perform the same optimization tasks that were previously done without a search management system. Furthermore, its search campaign managers are able to more easily analyze data trends that may lead to improved campaign performance, which was time-consuming prior to implementing a search management system.
But as with all technology systems, search management systems can’t work wonders on their own. So don’t forget the people element. While you’re evaluating these tools, perhaps it is most important to consider these words of wisdom from veteran search consultant Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim LLC: “Search marketing is not an exact science and 80% of your success is driven by the expertise of the individuals you hire.”
William Leake, an Internet marketer since the early 1990s, is founder and CEO of online marketing services firm Apogee Search, which operates as a division of Leads Customer Growth. He can be reached at 512-583-4200.
