Improving PPC Performance: 10 competitive monitoring tips every search marketer should know

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and a former IBM distinguished engineer. Today, you'll be hearing from Laurie Wyman, who will present Improving PPC Performance: 10 Competitive Monitoring Tips Every Search Marketer Should Know. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try Gaggleamp for free today. Meng, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey Chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job, we're about staying current to grow in our careers. The Search Monitor, the leading competitive ad intelligence tool for search and affiliate marketers. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for a few more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Lori. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Lori Wyman is one of our authors at Biznology and CEO of the Search Monitor. She founded the company back in 2007 upon realizing that search marketers needed more powerful and precise tools to learn from their competitors and industry leaders. Laurie is a frequent speaker at search marketing conferences and a regular blogger on sites such as Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. So if you've ever struggled with creating more effective PPC campaigns, this is the webinar for you. Laurie, take it away.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks everybody for joining today. We're going to go through some tips to help you with your PPC campaigns. First, let me give you a little information about the Search Monitor and how we gather data. We monitor search engine ads, PPC, NPLA ads, also organic parts of the page, shopping engines, and we also monitor display and mobile. On desktop and in-app mobile devices. Our clients use this data to increase their PPC campaigns, to monitor for brand compliance on paid search ads, to monitor affiliates to make sure they are in compliance with terms and conditions of service, to benchmark themselves against other competitors, and also just to look at their own campaigns and make sure that they are doing exactly what they need to be doing. We monitor worldwide in pretty much every country that is supported by various search engines. And for display, we monitor over 100,000 publishers and thousands of mobile apps. The data can be gotten in real time. And it also can be segmented by vertical, by competitor, by keyword. And there is also raw data available via web reports, Excel files, exports, API, and FTP. So with that said, I'm going to talk to you about top 10 tips. And we'll go through some specific data examples. And you can see what kind of information you can actually pull with careful monitoring. So we're going to go through the competitiveness of your industry, how to pay attention to the ads that your competitors are running, how to learn from special offers and promotions that you'll find running in ad copy, how to compare your click-through rate performance against your own industry to see how you're benchmarking against everybody else, to learn if you're spending too little or too much or the right amount. You can keep a close eye on how your market share changes on a daily or weekly basis. We're also going to look at geo-targeting and why that's important, new opportunities on search engines that folks sometimes forget exist, and how to take advantage of Google's high-performing PLA ad units, And lastly, why the technology of monitoring is important. So, let's hop in here to a few examples. So, if we're looking at the competitiveness of a certain industry, you always want to benchmark where you stand. So, one way to do that is a popular stat, which is share of voice, essentially looking at a universe of advertisers and comparing how each one does against another. So, in this case, we're looking at 5 advertisers in the healthcare vertical, and how they all stack up in Q1 2014 against one another as far as paid search share of voice. And so, we can see the top 5 advertisers, and then we just divide the universe between them. So, if you were looking at yourself in this mix, you want to see where you stand not just in Q1 2014, but you'd also want to compare Q4 2013, and the current quarter now, and see how you're trending over time. So if your goal is to improve, then obviously you need to tell us— somehow to tell if you are. And looking at yourself in a vacuum, comparing your own data against yourself, doesn't really tell you if you're also keeping pace with the swings of the market. So it's very important to not only see if you're hitting your own internal metrics, But are you also advancing past where others are in the market? So if that's a goal that you have, you would want to track that and trend competitors over time to see if you're beating them. You also want to pay attention to the ads that your competitors are running the most. This should be a telltale sign as to what's successful for each of your competitors and perhaps some learning for you. Here's an infographic that we put out last year. For Black Friday to see which ads in the shopping season were seen the most. And Walmart, this jewelry ad for Walmart was the number one most frequently served ad across the search universe back on Black Friday. And it's important to see that. You can see what they're pushing. And you can also, if you really look at the copy here, you can see they're totally different. I mean, Walmart, they were pushing a specific product for jewelry. Jewelry, whereas with Target it's more of a generic ad with an offer in it. And then with Sears they were specifically mentioning Black Friday because that's the date that was important here for when these ads ran. So 3 completely different strategies and completely different copy. You can also learn from what's in the copy themselves. The offers that are running are really important. We've kind of come to expect, I think, in the retail universe free shipping of some kind or some kind of a shipping deal. And that's prevalent across the board. It's almost like if you don't have that, what have you been doing lately? So you want to really try to distinguish yourself. Free shipping is important, but it doesn't do it. It's not a distinguisher because everybody is pretty much doing that. It's something that you have to do. So you want to look at what other types of offers are running. In your vertical and see if you can compete effectively against those offers. So just going across the list here in this chart that we pulled, this is for the Easter weekend. And we looked at 2 categories, occasions and gifts keywords, and then keywords that were just Easter focused. And you can see free shipping was about 43% of the ads had a free shipping offer that were for gifts and occasions. And only about 8% of the Easter-specific gift keywords had free shipping. So maybe those vendors weren't as versed in what they needed to do because they only really do heavy marketing once a year. Then you can see the next one over is some kind of a dollar off plus free shipping. So it's multiple offers in the same ad. And you can see there's less of those. 19% of the occasions and gift keywords had some kind of a dual offer, and only 2% of the Easter keywords. This is great information because you can set yourself apart by having a double offer since it's less prevalent than the free shipping type offer. A free product giveaway, also a smaller subset. And then some sort of a sale, this means that you either mention the word sale or you say percent off in the ad. So some kind of a deal in the ad itself. And the occasions and gifts category had less of those than the Easter keywords had, a ton. So if you were keeping up with what was going on, you could actually adjust your ad copy in real time and make a quick change and probably increase your clicks by a very high percentage just by making a tweak to the copy. So keeping a careful eye on what other folks are offering and trying to be a distinguishable party actually will make a big difference in growing your click-through rate on search. And now we're going to look at how you compare yourself against your industry's benchmarks. This is pretty important. So the click-through rate goal that you have for your paid search campaigns probably was set internally. It was probably set based on some historical goal that you had from the year prior, or something that came down from the top requesting certain ROI metrics from you. And that's great. And you should definitely try to achieve the goals that you set internally. But is that goal in line with the industry that you're in? Maybe it's too high. Maybe it's out of reach. Maybe it's too low and you could do better. And so in order to tell that, you really need to understand the rest of the market that you're playing in, and then compare yourself. And the other important thing is you want to compare yourself against like advertisers. And if you are in the— like this is an insurance infographic, and you can see there is health insurance, auto insurance, annuities, different things. You want to really hone in on the type of insurance that you would be providing, and then the size of the market where you are. If you are a big player, you want to compare yourself against the big players. If you are a middle-sized player, then comparing yourself against sort of the big whales of your industry probably won't be a good benchmark for you. You need to really look and slice down the middle. So this is a nice infographic that Kenshoo put together using data they got out of our Lighthouse tool, which is a search competitive intelligence tool for industries. It's organized against 1,200 verticals. And they honed in here on insurance. And they're showing basically how different insurance types, what you can expect from the click-through rate here. So you can see the different axis, average cost per click and the click-through rate. Great. Then you also, like I mentioned before, you want to know if you're spending too little, or too much, or the right amount. And this is where it becomes really important to make sure you're comparing yourself against like advertisers. So you can see in this infographic also put out by Kenshoo as part of the same marketing piece they did on the insurance space from our Lighthouse product. And they looked at the top, the middle, and the bottom of the market. And that's pretty important, because Let's say you're a small player. Obviously, you're not going to be spending the same amount as someone who's at the top of the market. And you're also not going to be getting the same types of clicks and the same type of ROI, just because you don't have as much presence and as much brand recognition. So you need to compare yourself against other bottom advertisers. So that's why this chart is broken up by a top, a middle, and the bottom, because it's really very relevant to be comparing yourself where you actually stand. It's also good to look at the tier ahead of you. So, if you're in the middle, you look at the middle tier to say— see how you're doing. Then you might want to set your sights on a far-reaching goal. You can see how the top is performing and see if you can try to achieve a little bit of growth there. You also want to keep a close eye on how your market share changes on a on a timely basis. This is a weekly trend line here. Actually, I'm sorry, this is a monthly trend line. You really should be looking at this sort of on a weekly basis. Daily is probably too often, because anything can happen on a day-to-day basis. So, you want to look at bigger picture information. But if you were— this is a car infographic that we put out for the rental car space a few months ago, using again our Lighthouse data, which is organized by vertical. And we could just see how each of the top auto rental car companies were performing over the holiday season all the way through mid-March of 2014. So the red line is Avis. The yellow is Hertz. And the green is Enterprise. And Enterprise, you can see, is pretty consistent. They never really seem to change too much. But if you look at Avis, there was a big drop between December and January. So there was some kind of a strategy change there. And Hertz would have increased, which was commensurate with the Avis drop. So when Avis dropped, Hertz was able to pick up some market share that they probably gained from this drop from Avis. This is the kind of thing you want to pay attention to. We also put out a really nice infographic about Walmart and Target from last school buying season. We saw similar strategies where one would drop and the other would increase. It's something to look at and think about, because maybe if you're Avis, this is fine, because your organic campaigns kicked in and they were doing well, and it was taking up the traffic loss that you got from your paid search, and you were saving some money. Maybe you ran out of budget because you pushed it all into Q4 and you need to be slow in Q1. So maybe this is the strategy that you wanted. But if it's not the strategy you intended, It gives you a quick visibility into what's happening in the market, and maybe you need to make some adjustments. You also need to pay attention to how your ads perform in different geographies if you are a company or in an industry that has a local sort of focus. So with our tool, you can configure the crawler, so it's very customizable to certain locations. This is actually a screenshot from our system. Pick locations with these little checkboxes and just hone in on data that's specific to where you're looking. We notice a lot of our clients that are very locally focused do a lot of brand compliance in market. And so that's one use for why you would want these tight looks at these different geographies. Don't forget opportunities on other search engines. So obviously, Google is the top dog here, but you should always branch out. There are lots of opportunities in other places. You also should be looking at what your competitors are doing in those other places as well to see if they maybe learned something or they figured something out that you need to focus on. We'll talk about for a moment Google's PLA ad units, because these are extremely prevalent. When we first started studying product listing ads on Google about maybe a year ago or so, we noticed in this category luxury retail about 65% of the ads had a PLA ad unit running on the page. Now you can see it's closer to almost 100% across the board here have some sort of PLA ad unit running. So jewelry and watches, 96% of the keywords in that category have a product listing ad unit on the page. Footwear, 94%. Accessories and handbags, 88%. And then clothing, Almost 80% of the keywords have a PLA unit. And they're very eye-catching. They're usually showing up on the right side, right rail of the page. When they do that placement, if you're in positions 4 and plus on Google, that PLA ad unit is actually above position 4, and it pushes down the layout of the page. So 4 becomes a lot less desirable than it used to be when 4 used to be at the top right rail. Now it's mid-rail or even lower depending on how many ads are in that product listing ad unit. Sometimes there's, you know, 4 or 5. Sometimes there can be 8 or more. It makes the unit bigger. We have an example here on the left where you can see the different PLAs running for Coach bags. And one of the things we do is in addition to the unit, we also capture the price points. So you can see here different, a variety of price points. This becomes really important if you're doing shopping. If that's your primary job, you really want to see not just what's happening with yourself, but you also want to know what price point products are being pushed. Because if you find yourself with a product that's sort of outpriced for the unit, you might want to think about retooling the campaign and making sure that product shows up elsewhere. Like here we see Coach bags on Google. And we're right around $200 for most of these products, and then we have one that's $500. That might not be performing as well as the Coach bag that's $220 or $263. So it's very important to keep your eye on the price ranges, especially as these keywords are kind of generic. So you're not really looking for a very specific bag, but something more generic. We find like, example we usually use is the word backpacks. It's a very generic keyword. It's probably commonly searched though when you're looking for a backpack. It's the first place you go. And then you'll find backpacks ranging from $30 all the way up to $500 in the PLA unit. And then you figure these vendors really need to think about, these advertisers really need to think about which product they want pushed when something generic is being searched, the expensive one or the low-end one. You can let the technology that we provide do a lot of the work for you. We provide trend charts. We graph. Lots of data points. This looks like it's a rank report here. You can create alerts, so you can set certain thresholds and let it run, and then have it alert you when things happen that you need to know about. Like in this case, we see a little bit of a spike here on March 11th. And then behind this callout, it obviously spikes up for this advertiser which looks like it's Macy's. So maybe you wanted to get an alert when their rank starts to change. You can actually set that up. And that's important to keep tabs on what's going on in your universe. The benefits of monitoring are pretty obvious I think, but we'll just go through them again. It leads to better planned and managed campaigns. Should you sit around and be content, or should you make changes to something that's going on? You would only know that from monitoring. Again, like if you are running a race, And you just timed yourself against your own self. You might beat your own time, but when you actually get to that marathon, you're probably not going to win if you don't know how the other competitors are faring. So just beating yourself is not enough. You actually really, to maximize and optimize your campaign and do the best you can in your market, you also need to know where the competitors stand and see if there's more that you can do to do better. Are you spending too much, or too little, or enough? Something you need to really pay attention to. For agencies and consultants, having data like this is a great way to prove to clients that you know what you're doing. If you're doing biz dev activities, it's nice to walk into a presentation already having knowledge of an industry and specifics about the customer who you're approaching, so you can make very, very specific recommendations while you're in that meeting. And it's also a great way to find new clients for yourself. A lot of our customers use our system for business development to data mine and find good opportunities in their niches, looking for advertisers that maybe are underperforming or performing less well than they are performing for their own clients. And they know they can do some improvements for those customers' campaigns. They can identify new prospects and actually come into a meeting with some intelligence. Thanks for attending today, and if you need any further information, please feel free to contact me. My contact information is here on the screen.

Thanks, Lori. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of the best practices for more effective PPC campaigns, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions from our audience teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for companies who want to apply what they learn directly to their own business and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Our instructors will give you step-by-step and help you persuade that executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all of our offerings. We're about to start firing questions at Lori, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GagaAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GagaAmp for free today. Meng, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey Chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job, we're about staying current to grow in our careers. The Search Monitor, the leading competitive ad intelligence tool for search and affiliate marketers. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Lori, our first question is when looking at competitiveness of my industry, how far back should I go? If my business is seasonal, does that change the results?

So if you're looking at the competitiveness of your industry, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you might only need to look back to the most recent quarter. You want to know what's going on now so that you can make planning for the upcoming future. If your business is seasonal, then you need to look at a 12-month review because you need to look at last year. So it just really depends on what type of business that you're in. If you're getting ready to prep for, you know, that busy shopping season starting, you know, October-November timeframe, then you would want to look at the full last year's quarter.

Terrific, terrific. I've got 2 very similar questions, so I'm going to ask them both together. The first one is, are these kinds of tools too expensive for a small startup company? And the second question is, can what you showed today only be done by a paid service, or are there free tools an in-house team can manage?

So to provide the type of crawl data and monitoring that a search monitor tool provides is a very big, heavy investment in infrastructure, personnel, and And then there's more to it than that, also developing proper reports that are usable. It's an intense operation, so there aren't any tools that would offer something like this for free. We have a tool we call Live SERP. You can find it at liveserp.com. That is a toolbar plugin. It'll let you run up to 10 searches at a time in a row. really fast. And so you can get live data by doing it by hand. But other than that, I don't think there's any tools that would provide something like this for free.

But Live SERP is a free tool?

Live SERP is a free tool. The data is not captured and stored, and you can't report on it in the future, and there's no trending. But it will give you a quick snapshot of what's going on in the search space right now. As far as a small business is concerned, we have smaller packages, but our primary customer base are companies that have been running paid search campaigns for some time. If you're just starting out, you're probably better off focusing on how to develop good keywords and less concerned about fine-tuning the campaign, and in which case there are lots of free tools or very inexpensive tools that help you do that.

Thanks, Laurie. You showed paid search market visibility for rental car companies, but what do the numbers mean? How do you go about measuring visibility?

So visibility is essentially a factor of how often the ads appear on paid search. So that would be a factor of budgeting. So if you had a huge keyword list, let's say 50,000 keywords, but your budget was tiny, your ads might not be showing very often versus another advertiser with a big budget would have their ads frequently showing over and over. So it's a function of how frequently the ads are being seen, the breadth of keywords, the number of keywords that you have running these ads across, and then the length of time that the campaigns are running.

Okay, a related question, maybe answered already, but I don't think so. Can I measure search visibility by country? And why don't we just ask them one at a time? I got a couple of questions here. Let me just ask them one at a time to make it simple for you. So can I measure search visibility by country?

Yes, the same way.

The same way. So just as you showed the The, you know, being able to do it by kind of metropolitan area within the US, you could do it country by country as well.

Right, you can do it country by country, you can do it by region within a country, you can get very granular and do it at a town level, metro level.

Okay, and does search visibility take into account rankings as part of visibility?

Yes, it does. It's, I was mentioning earlier the frequency, and it's basically rank Frequency, how often the ads are showing, and the size of the keyword list. So an advertiser in position 1 is going to get more visibility points from our scoring system than an advertiser showing up on page 2 or on position 10 of page 1.

Got it. Let's see, and does the visibility metric count search engine market share, or is it only showing visibility for a single search engine?

In the reporting that we were showing here, I'm assuming they're asking.

I think that's what they're asking, yes.

Yeah, I believe it's across multiple engines.

And so I guess what they're asking is, does it count the market share? So if I'm interpreting the question properly, so if you have the number 1 ranking in Google and a number 4 ranking in Bing, for example, would you get a lot more credit that the number 1 in Google has a 67% market share, or would it just kind of Yeah, it would be credited.

Google has a higher market share than Bing.

Got it. And going back to the country question, I'm guessing that in Russia you're doing that with Baidu— I'm sorry, in China you're doing that with Baidu, and Russia you're doing that with Yandex. So country by country, you look at the search engine market share?

Right. Yep, that's correct.

Terrific, terrific. Well, Lori, that's all the time we have for today. We really would like to thank you for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen at— that's E-I-L-E-E-N— at mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Lori for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, which I'll be conducting, which is Are You Ready for Big Data Marketing? It's scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on June 10th. We hope to see everybody back here then. Bye, everyone.