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Do you need a Keyword Arbitration Strategy?

July 16, 2012 by Bill Hunt

One interesting challenge we encounter once we load a company’s data into the Keyword Management Suite is the fights over keywords that begin as the different business units learn others are using their words or ranking for their terms. In many cases they have been competing for the same keywords for a long time but often never knew about it.

Cross Business Unit Keyword Conflicts

Cross Business Unit keyword conflicts affects both Paid and Natural Search. Here is a typical scenario. Marketing Manager for Business Unit A searches on a term to see where they rank in natural search. They get a surprise when they find in addition to their organic listing, Business Unit B is a paid search campaign for the same product and their listing is showing in the paid search result but they are targeting small and medium businesses rather than consumers.

A variation of this happens when both of the business units are running paid ads and depending on the time of the day and match types one or the other is the ad that is listed when the managers does their search. I

Usually, this scenario arises when keywords are allocated based on budget rather than business objectives and searcher intent, resulting in multiple versions of the keyword being used in multiple campaigns simultaneously. While it is frustrating to managers, it is very frustrating to searchers. It can also lead to confusion for searchers when they visit your site based on the ad copy but encounter another set of content.

For example, this case from Adobe. The query is “Adobe Software” and the PPC ad is for “Adobe Photoshop for Students” offering a massive 80% discount. First the searcher wanted “Adobe Software” and not specifically Photoshop. Second we don’t know which audience segment they are so in this case the if the Educational Business Unit would get a “No” for relevant ad copy and not be allowed to buy this phrase.

These “Searcher Intent” issues and be sorted out by simply managing your match types and keyword allocations to ensure that you don’t have misalignment.

Often most are unaware of organic ranking conflicts since those that still do rank reports often only care that there is a page ranking and not necessary the best page. Since the late 90’s I have been advocating the use of “Preferred Landing Pages” to ensure the best page is the ranking page. We had a case recently where a client found for one of their most important keywords a PDF was ranking and not the actual page. Their SEO vendor showed everything was ok when in fact it was not – yes they were ranking #1 but no one was clicking and buying. Once they redirected to the desired page they retained the #1 rank and saw a 40% click rate increase and 12% increase in conversions.

Worst of all there is the time suck of explaining duplicate keyword situation to various stakeholders after the fact rather than dealing with it before the campaign starts. As a Search Marketing Manager it is your job of managing the conflicts and managing expectations and the cross business unit political minefield.

Implement a Keyword Arbitration Scorecard

Back in the old days when search engines allowed multiple accounts from the same company we often bid against ourselves. As I wrote previously about Developing a Cost Justification for Integrating Paid and Organic Search that was a big problem in that organization. Just having meetings and making suggestions are fine but you won’t make everyone happy. What has worked well for me is to implement a Keyword Arbitration process. This process is implemented in any case where we have a keyword conflict between business units that cannot be resolved by a hybrid page.

The scorecard can be as complicated as you think you need but here are is an example of the simplest one that I use which require a simple Yes/No answer:

The formula is simple – each “Yes” answer gets 1 point. The BU with the highest score gets to use the keyword phrase.

If there is a conflict over the context or business objective of the Keyword, you can escalate it to a Senior Manager to make the final call.

It is very rare where there is a tie but if so, suggest that a neutral search landing page, similar to the Dell example below, to “share” the Keyword. If they are unwilling to do so then escalate to a senior manger.

Hybrid pages can be the perfect solution when you have multiple audiences. In this example below from Dell they send searchers to a top level page that allows them to select which audience segment they belong to. This allows the business units to share budgets to get a larger share of the total audience and then allow the audience to self-select which category they are in and continue from there.

The bare minimum that I have found necessary for a scorecard are the following elements. These all help demonstrate how serious a business unit is for this words and how organized they are to be successful.

Relevant Landing Page – Is there a specific and/or dedicated page for this phrase or offer? This is important to help improve the quality score so that we can reduce the overall costs for the word as well as maximizing the conversions.

Relevant Ad Copy – Same concept as the relevant landing page. Is this word lumped into a large ad group or caught up in a broad match cluster? Also the context and interest of the searcher. We often see ads that are very focused in their offer matched to specific queries.

Appropriate Budget – This is very subjective but in many cases a BU may not allocate enough budget to get a significant share of the demand for a keyword. Depending on the word we might look at 50 to 80% share of voice on a keyword.

Tracking Metrics in Place – Are they using paid tracking to the conversion element? Lots of times a BU will throw up a micro site or other landing page and not track the performance. We want to make sure the person who uses the word can track the performance.

Current Offline Campaign – It is often unlikely that multiple business units are doing offline or other digital campaigns. If they are they are generating awareness which will drive people to search so we want to make sure that we are connecting with them.

P&L Requirement – this is often the tie breaker – does each business unit has a mandate to generate revenue

Note: We have added this function into our tool. I am working on dummy data to show you what it looks like. If we are managing multiple business units in our application we can see all the data in a single screen to allow you to make decisions on how to manage it.

Filed Under: Keyword Management

Cost Savings Justification for Integrating Paid and Organic Search

July 11, 2012 by Bill Hunt

The following is a proposal that I just found on my old laptop that I presented on October 28th 2003 advocating the creation of an internal roll of “Paid Search Manager” and further integrating paid and organic search activities at a large multinational. Edited to remove the name of the company and business units.

What is interesting is that after nearly 9 years there are still few companies that have integrated these teams and efforts. While bid management has become more sophisticated and there is more collaboration today; I do find that if companies better integrated their paid and organic efforts they could yield significant improvements in their campaigns.

Move to an Integrated Search Engine Marketing Program

According to the experts presenting at the recent August Search Engine Strategies in San Jose (ironically, I was one of the presenters) named higher overall click-through rates, greater penetration of search engine results “real estate,” more comprehensive keyword research, and building credibility as clear reasons to create integrated campaign strategies with both organic and paid listings.

The optimal strategy is to use both in a carefully managed campaign to complement one-another. A recommended strategy is to maximize free listings through SEO first, then augment and round off with PPC placements. However, it is strongly recommended we continue to leverage PPC activities for must-have keywords while SEO is in progress. The primary value from an integrated strategy will reside in the overall efficiency and cost savings that will occur as a result of the same person overlooking both practices.

We as an organization currently have 50 Tier 1 keyword phrases currently in the #1 position in Google. For 48 of these phrases, we receive 5x to 10x the clicks on organic than on the corresponding paid listing and 42% higher leads.

The average CPC for these phrases ranges from $3.00 – $8.00 per click. My research shows that we have enough brand leverage in these top positions to minimize the need to pay for clicks. Especially for those words where the organic click rate is at least 5x the paid click and lead generation rate.

By effectively coordinating paid and natural we can save significant amount of media spend through this efficiency.

Searches Click Rate Avg CPC Excess CPC Fees
1,000,000.00 100,000.00 $ 5.00 $ 500,000.00

Intel Reimbursement Loss Revenue

Business Unit C developed a campaign-landing page to introduce visitors to our line of servers that contained Intel processors for which we could be reimbursed for the costs of those clicks under their co-op marketing program. Since the internal search team, who negotiated the deal with Intel Search team was not consulted until the ads were live and the landing page content was final (we detected the ads using our competitive monitoring process). Since the page content omitted certain words from the landing page, thereby disallowing us to use those phrases, it restricted our keyword list of those considered for reimbursement. These omissions from the landing pages cost us $25k worth of reimbursed advertising.

Linux Keywords Example:

During the Q3 PPC campaign we had a situation where Business Unit A and Business Unit B were buying the phrase “linux” and “linux server.” While it would be ok for both of them to “own” this word in a PPC program, the fact that they were set up in the system in a competitive bid scenario (both set to be #1) it resulted in our paying significantly more per click than we should have. Fortunately, we caught this problem quick and were able to update the system before there was a significant cost.

Business Unit A – had a max bid of $25.00 per click for “linux server” to be #1
Business Unit B — had a max bid of $6.86 per click for “linux server” to be #1

These two positions were competing for 1stnd place up to their max bid. Due to the higher max bid of the #1 advertiser (business unit A) Business Unit B would be placed #2 at their max bid. However, the competing #2 place advertiser was paying $5.50 per click resulting in a difference of $1.36 per click. Had these two not been in a competitive position to each other they could have competed with the #3 position and not the #1 position. This situation pushed the max bids of both phrases to their max levels resulting in a higher CPC of $1.36 and $1.37 respectively per click for “both” placements. Had this not been noticed immediately and left to run over the course of a year, the potential excess cost to IBM would have been at least $11,164.51.

Annual Searches Annual Clicks CPC Delta Excess CPC Fees
41,046 8,209 $ 1.36 $ 11,164.51

This is for 1 phrase and we will have potentially thousands of phrases all competing for the same positions. This needs to be managed effectively along with the current natural placements.

Efficient Management Opportunity

Generally speaking the average PPC campaign that is not managed in a centralized manner using an effective management and execution protocol is believed to waste at least 35 percent of the budget due to poor management, excessive per click fees, and internal competitive bidding. If we were to take the proposed Paid Placement budget tentatively approved for FY2004 of $6 million this “cost of waste” could be significant in the neighborhood of $2 million dollars.

Program Change Request

1. Create and fund a new position of Global Paid Search Manager to oversee all paid search activities and monitor the duplicate keyword process to ensure business units are not bidding for the search term in a on-collaborative process.
2. Integrate this role with a dotted line report to the Search Team Manager to ensure collaboration and integration of best practices.
3. Establish a “Co-Optimization” process to monitor the collaboration or cannibalization of paid and organic search to ensure that they are working together especially for our “Always On” keywords
4. Create a rigorous performance scorecard for the media agency to ensure that they are coordinating and monitoring the performance of paid search within the standards we have set to prevent both the Intel reimbursement loss as well as any anti-competitive performance placements.

While this proposal is 9 years old it could be used nearly identically today by any company. This experience and others from large multinationals resulted in my creating the “Cost of Not Ranking” worksheet and integrating the Cost of Not Ranking Analysis as a key function into our Keyword Management Suite.

Filed Under: Co-Optimization, Integrated Search

How do your Expensive PPC Keywords Perform in SEO?

July 10, 2012 by Bill Hunt

One of the biggest issues I keep encountering as I demo our Keyword Management Tool is the aversion by many PPC managers to Co-Optimization. Yesterday I posted this new post on “Realizing Paid and Organic Search Strategies” and suggested that there are specific cost reductions that can be had when you can transfer expensive PPC clicks into your organic pages rather than paying for them in via PPC.

And today I was looking at two new pilot projects for large tech companies and found they they are prime for Co-Optimization. Co-Optimization is simply activities that maximize the collaborative performance of paid and organic search. It is not paid vs. organic but how do we combine them for even greater results. For all of the naysayers to this concept most are shocked when they realize they don’t even know what is happening when they have top ranking organic with top paid search listings. That is your first step – understand what happens in this situation.

How do your Expensive PPC Keyword Perform in SEO?

One of my top recommendations from my Advanced Keyword Modeling session at SES New York was to go back and take your top 20 most expensive keywords by Cost Per Click and just see how you are ranking and performing for those words.

I have had a number a people tell me that they have done this and were shocked by what they found.

Of the 23 people who have done this analysis only 1 had more than half of their keywords ranking on page 1 for their most expensive keywords. This clearly shows the communications disconnect between paid and organic search.

I have always used simple math to try to get people to understand this. A typical search results page for a popular phrase has 10 organic listings and 10 paid listings. IF you only have paid listing then the minimum potential click rate is 5% (10 paid + 10 organic = 20 options for click – clicking 1 of 20 options is 5%. Meaning if you also have an organic you have a 2 in 20 chance of being clicked so 10%.

Here are some of the responses I have received for why people don’t do this analysis:

“It just seems to hard and I don’t have enough time as it is”

“Research shows that there is an 89% increase in clicks when you add paid search to your program but we don’t know if we get that level of clicks”

“Our Paid Listings are for Conversion and Organic are for awareness”

“We can’t do this type of analysis since our paid and organic agencies won’t work together”

“We can’t share the paid data with the organic agency since it is our IP and we don’t want them to reverse engineer our proprietary bid strategies”

“We don’t have a conversion option on our organic pages so we need paid to get people to convert”

“$35 and $50 CPC’s are acceptable to us since we can’t change our organic pages to add conversion options”

Now… that we have the excuses out of the way – lets look at reality. The following are two real examples from large companies that gave these types of excuses only to be shocked when they actually saw the data

In this fist case, out of their top 20 keywords by CPC cost, with costs ranging from $43.76 to $27.79 (yes that is per click) and only 1 of the words is in the top 5 positions 4 of 20 on the first page. What was interesting is that some of these words were not on the SEO teams priority list. A second thing to note, is that many of these words don’t have a lot of search demand and yet they are managed on broad match.

While I thought this first case was bad was even more surprised when we loaded the data from another company in a similar industry. They were even worse if that is possible:

Their keywords ranged from a high of $123.96 to $46.81 for a single CLICK. Wow…. I don’t even think the ambulance chasers spend that much to rope people into class action lawsuits. Only 2 of the 20 have a first page listing with 15 of the words not even being in the top 50 positions.

These both are examples of a key problem when paid and organic are not looked at holistically. Again, I am not saying paid is bad but lets go for the 1+1 = 3 multiplier and at least work to get some organic representation.

Co-Op Baby Steps

Start small with just the simple understanding of what is happening for keywords. Do you have paid and organic at the same time and where don’t we have them both. When you do are the collaborating or cannibalizing each other?

Filed Under: Co-Optimization

Realizing Paid and Organic Search Synergies

July 9, 2012 by Bill Hunt

For a number of years I have been evangelizing the benefits of integrating your paid and organic activities. It does not matter if it is via a single agency or multiple agencies as long as you do have a unified strategy. The following are 8 key reasons why you should have paid and organic in sync.

1. Search Results ShelfSpace

This one seems pretty obvious but rarely listed as reason for jointly managing the search programs. Forget any sort of paid vs. organic but lets get them both positioned well and take of two of the potential 20 spots on the SERPS shelfspace. This double listing gives additional branding, double the message and often sways searchers in clicking one or the other listing. Add in social media listings and you can have a significant part of the SERPs covered.

2. Insights from Unified Reporting

By integrating the results of both paid and natural search in a single report helps you understand the relationship between the two better. The joint view into the clicks can help understand the needs and interests of the searcher. Which listing they click can also allow you to determine if there is a synergistic or cannibalistic effect between the two listings.

3. Cost Reductions

So far 100% of the pilots and clients we have worked with have not had all of their most expensive keywords by cost per clicked represented in the natural search results. This results in all of the clicks being “rented” and incurring a cost with no chance of getting them for free. When these are your most expensive keywords even a 10% shift of clicks into the organic results for these words can save significant budget to target words with less budget allocation.

4. Program Management Efficiency

Quite simply, if the client has their entire search program under a single manager or agency they can ensure collaboration and uniform execution. This can be with a single agency or multiple agencies but under a single owner. This saves a lot of time and money in terms of communication, project management, results reporting, account management and much more since all this is done at one time. Many people have indicated they like our application since it allows for rolled up data without the problems of agency IP concerns and extra costs of aggregating it.

5. Landing Page Strategies

Unfortunately, too much effort is applied to paid search landing pages and little applied to organic landing pages. Too often the SEO team is overly focused on rank and not as focused on conversion of their organic pages. I actually had a company tell me recently that their organic pages are just for awareness and not for any conversion. This is a huge mistake. You can use the data from paid and organic conversions to impact the performance of the other. A key feature of Opportunity Models is to identify landing pages that are outperforming their counter parts for review and best practices reapplied to the other. By combining the best of the two approaches, you should end up with the perfect landing page – one that ranks highly, improves your quality score AND most importantly converts.

6. Algorithm Shift Risk Mitigation

With all of the changes lately in the algorithms paid search is a great way to hedge against a massive drop in performance. By monitoring a drop in organic performance in high-value keywords the PPC team can immediately fill the gap until the SEO is adjusted to regain the original performance.

7. Relevance Cannibalization

The effect of owning PPC terms where natural results already rank highly differs completely according to the brand, site, product, ranking position, competition and many other factors. When paid and natural are in the same place, these effects can be understood and accounted for. We are seeing some interesting results interaction with different offers based on searcher intent as to which listing the searcher clicks. Paid ads tend to be offer related and organic listings are awareness related. By reviewing which the searcher clicks and the objective of each listing/page we can better understand the interests of the searcher. A big challenge for large companies is the organic listing is pretty consistent yet the paid listings may be spread across multiple offers from different business units. This may cause confusion for the searcher.

8. Misspelled Keywords

Often, the organization is focused on ranking well for high-demand keywords and get the branded variations by default. Since it is rare that you will have misspellings on the site unless they are really close to the brand name you may not rank for them. For one recent client, there were nearly 12,000 brand name misspellings that were driving traffic to the site. Many of these were captured very inexpensively via paid search.

There are a few others best practices and reasons for integrating paid and natural search but for now lets focus on these 8. All of these are key attributes in our new Opportunity Miner feature. What do you think? How do you view the relationship between paid and natural search?

Filed Under: Co-Optimization

Trust But Verify Click Rate Reports for High-Ranking Paid and Organic Results

July 7, 2012 by Bill Hunt

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen the research reports. And it’s become almost a part of the lore of search marketing. When searchers see the same site at the top of both the paid and organic results, they click a lot more than you’d expect. More than they click on those two results on that same page when they are two different sites. We’ve repeated this over and over again, so it must be true. But is it?

It does have a certain logic. When you think about the way searchers scan result pages, they are looking for their keywords and related words in the search results and deciding in a split-second what to click on. If they see the same company in two places, they might believe that the company is more credible than the other individual search results. That slight edge in credibility might lead to a lot more clicks.

It’s been important for search engines to persuade us that this is true. Why? Because there is equally powerful logic in the other direction. If you already have the #1 result in organic, why would you want to pay for the top paid search spot? You might be paying for traffic you’d get for free. So, it’s good for business if the search engines can prove that showing up in both places really pays off.

So, search engines have regularly studied the issue, along with search consultants who also would like this to be true. Yahoo! reported that it saw a 60% lift back in 2003 when it studied this issue. Google was even more optimistic, saying that there is an 89% lift in clicks on paid search when sites have top results in both areas.

Are these studies false? Unlikely. They probably revealed just what they purport to show. But that isn’t the important question for you. You don’t really care whether searchers in general click more. You want to know if your searchers do! On top of that – do you even know if you have both in high-ranking positions? Ironically, it’s very easy to test which your searchers are clicking and converting on. You just need to pause your PPC campaign and take a look at whether the organic clicks go down.

But almost no one even tries this kind of experiment. A Back Azimuth study on keyword management best practices shows that fewer than one percent of all search marketers have even looked at paid and organic search together. Have you? And what would you find if you did?