I am going to check out what is promised to be the search engine event that is not to be missed. I hope that our American friends will address some of the pressing issues in search today. Here is what I am hoping to explore while I’m there.

Bid Management Vs. Campaign management

I think that not enough thought and attention is being placed on the creative aspects of search. Most service providers and advertisers are still hung up on bid management and not paying anywhere near enough attention on optimising conversion through campaign management. Yes it is important to manage your bids so I’m not saying you should stop. What we also need to consider is the role that keyword, creative and landing page management plays. I have been a fan of targeting longtail keywords since 1999. In those days all we did was SEO but in our pursuit of algorithms we built a landing page with customised meta tags for each keyword we targeted - and we got sensational results. Yes there was less competition in those days but the strong focus on relevance paid dividends in the form of conversions. Paid search came in a few years later and it seemed that everything that SEO taught us was immediately forgotten. I believe that paid search needs to go back to grass roots and optimise each keyword, ad and landing page just like we did in the days of SEO. Google clearly agree because relevance is a big aspect of quality score . The major advantage we have with paid search over SEO is that we can create many more landing pages without having to worry about spamming and that we can test and change ads and landing pages rapidly in comparison to SEO. I have staked my livelihood on this belief by spending much of my companies R&D effort in addressing this issue so I am hoping to find some comrades in San Jose that agree with me so that we can explore this important issue much further.

ROI

Guilty as charged! I used to speak at conferences and seminars saying that search engine marketing is an inbound form of direct marketing and that we should calculate ROI based on short term profit. In a way that was true back then there was very little competition and the bidding wars had only just begun. The reality nowadays is that almost any keyword has competition and there always seems to be someone willing to pay more than you would like to pay. Happy days for GoogleJ - Why didn’t I buy sharesL. You can’t boycott Google adwords that is not a real option. Any dot com that has pulled their ads for a period of time will tell you that it has an impact on sales; but for some keywords, competition is so ferocious that even a perfectly optimised ad can consume the profit made in a single purchase occasion by the ever rising CPC. It is clear to me that we need to start looking at longer term ROI models that incorporate life time customer value. You wouldn’t book a TV ad and expect to make your money back the next day so why is it expected that paid search ads should deliver immediate results? I will say that it is possible to achieve immediate profit by targeting the longtail and bidding for 6^th to 10^th position - the problem with that strategy is that you acquire less customers than your competitors and when your CEO is pounding the desk with her fist (or his) saying “what’s happened to my market share” - You can say “at least our cost per acquisition (CPA) targets were met” and hope you don’t get fired. I am as sorry as the rest of the early SEM experts should be for spreading the word that CPA was the perfect ROI model for search but its now time to add a little more marketing science to the equation. So either we start calling all of our competitors and politely ask them to stop advertising in Google or re-examine our ROI models. Once again I am hoping that my American friends have lots to say about this.

So for the next week I will hang my South Australian SEM hat and change my name to Hank and hope to blend in the crowd at the San Jose SES to see what insight I can bring back home from the States. Show me the way in San Jose!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Search Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.