Taco Bell. You complete some people. Others, you tear apart. Mentally, physically, and metaphysically.

However, mere jeering and joking becomes a serious threat when your consumers take up a class action lawsuit against your company. You have to respond. Silence can be the determinant of guilt.

How do you prevent your company from continuing the downward spiral?

How do you educate consumers on the truth?

How do you manage your reputation?

Search.

Paid Search can protect your brand and direct consumers to accurate information. This reputation management campaign can be live in a matter of hours.

So, when your brand meets the press and consumers begin searching for answers…

When millions of search queries are pointed at your brand…

Respond with Search.

Respond with the right message.

And, right the ship with reputation management. Well done, Taco Bell. Well done.

As for the lucky questionable bunch at Razorfish Search in NYC… we are still alive and kicking after all this.

For now…

Search, paid search especially, benefits as an advertising medium where there is always room for improvement. This means PPC marketers often find themselves with massive to-do lists, outlining an overwhelming amount of tactical measures to perform for an account, or portfolio of accounts. As with any to-do list, the list can get so large that your mind spends extra time sorting out and organizing the list instead of actually getting things done. This becomes even more complicated when you factor in multi-goal campaigns (think retail: growing revenue, increasing ROAS, stabilizing run rates, lifting traffic, reducing seasonality). This makes for multiple lists of tasks under each goal and a limited time span to complete them. So, with this phenomenon in mind, below is a simple PPC Strategy Matrix to help focus your thoughts and improve your client’s accounts.

First, the setup:

Create an Excel worksheet with ‘Goals’ across the top and ‘PPC Tasks’ along the side.  Assign each goal to a column under the ‘Goals’ heading (as many as you have). Prioritizing these goals from left to right may also help later.

Next, filling it out:

Obviously, this part largely depends on your specific client, so the examples above are generalized and purely illustrative J.

Begin listing out (as many as you and your team members can think of) the PPC Tasks that will allow you to achieve each specific goal. Don’t over think here. It’s just a list of suggestions and possibilities, nothing is set in stone. Nothing is wrong here and you should encourage your team (and yourself) to throw away any preconceived barriers and focus on ideal environments. For example, if your client is most interested in increasing revenue, you could add new keywords to your campaigns (or new campaigns to your account) to extend your reach. Also, if you’re operating below 100% impression share on any campaign, especially ones generating high revenue, you could increase those budget caps to capture incremental revenue.

Breaking this out also helps explain to clients what your team is doing on the account and why.

Lastly, taking action:

Highlight overlaps across each goal column using a unique color for each PPC Task. Now, make a list and check it twice:

-          Bid management = 3

-          Add new keywords = 3

-          Increase budget caps = 3

-          Lift CTR = 2

The PPC Tasks with more Goal overlaps become priority; therefore, we can file the task of “lifting CTR” to the bottom of our to-do. Naturally, there’s a tie, but if your goals are prioritized left to right, you would focus on “Bid management” first because it appears the most often to the left.

For the next tiebreaker, think about what you know about each task. “Adding new keywords” is going to take more time than “increasing budget caps”. Since you want to show improvements quickly, this knowledge makes “increasing budget caps” the next priority.

You now have a focused approach to improving your accounts: bid manage, increase budget caps, add new keywords, and lift CTR. This ensures your team and your client get the most bang for their buck by taking advantage of the “two birds, one stone” adage.

PPC accounts can be downright intimidating when you’re new to SEM world. Hundreds of thousands of keywords, hundreds or thousands of creatives, and real-time budget adjustments for million-dollar accounts will make even the most seasoned search marketers’ heads spin. However, by breaking down your holistic task list and forming manageable buckets arranged by priority, you can quickly decipher how to move the needle on your accounts and starting getting things done!

We’ve been noticing a big trend with paid search marketing innovations, particularly those aimed at shifting consumer click behavior from organic to paid.  It is important to understand the cost and benefits associated with these innovations and leverage this understanding to improve your search marketing strategy.

These innovations seem logical for search engines who are looking for ways to better monetize search traffic, but how can it impact advertisers and consumers? The recent influx of ad accessories – think product extensions, location extensions, etc - has directly influenced consumers’ interactions with paid search ads. One particular ad accessory now has data to support how it shifts the click allocation away from organic results:

Sitelinks.

The proof comes to us from SEOmoz, where they studied the effects of running AdWords’ Sitelinks on Branded keywords. This experiment compares click volume and click ratio for the same branded keywords earning top organic placement with “non-accessorized” paid ads activated against the same allotted time frame with Sitelinks activated.

The results deserve careful consideration. During their controlled experiment, the ratio of organic to paid clicks drastically shifted to approximately 58/42. Total traffic to the site increased a mere <1% when AdWords Sitelinks ran in front of its organic achievements. Even though paid search traffic increased while running Sitelinks upwards of 91%, organic traffic dipped 25%.

The annual impact of this shift in click behavior? $50,000. Imagine the implications of this shift in click behavior for branded campaigns generating $30,000+ monthly spend.

There are arguments to be made both ways, especially if post-click behavior was affected.  Regardless, if this trend continues, it could impose new considerations for paid search strategies when an advertiser ranks high organically and when they do not; we list a few below:

1. Generate awareness of new product launches, promotions, and cross-sell by leveraging this shift in click behavior among a loyal (branded) audience. Sitelinks allow a great amount of control and multi-benefit communication that organic simply cannot compete with today.

2. Increase Sitelinks’ show-rate on competitive, must-own unbranded searches that you rank poorly on within organic results. If this behavior continues across unbranded queries, this presents a great opportunity to lift engagement for your brand, while decreasing your competitors’.

Our esteemed Discipline Lead offers advice to SearchShots readers. If you’re a search marketer in need of guidance, send us an email at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com with the subject line “Prof Ranker” and he’ll get to you when he can. (Note: the Professor’s opinions are not those of Razorfish. The agency is not responsible for bad career moves or other incidents caused by our guru’s sage advice.)

Dear Professor Ranker,

I’m hoping you can help with with this age-old paid search quest: How does one achieve higher click volume, while simultaneously decreasing CPCs?

-Scaling Inefficiently in SF

Dear SISF,

Two ways: Improve your quality score, and bid competitively. Accomplish the former by:

-Prioritizing exact-match traffic (double-buy top keywords on broad and exact, bid higher on the exact version)

-Running A/B copy tests on high-volume exact-match keywords (test new concepts, not just new variables)

-Improving keyword categorization to align more keywords to copy and make it easier for the quality algorithm to predict CTR

Bidding competitively means treating the auctions like a multi-player (rather than a one-player) game. You get a lower CPC for the same position whenever the advertiser below you in the auction bids down. You get a higher position for the same CPC if the advertiser above you vacates the auction. Many many many of the people who manage search campaigns make bid decisions based entirely on their own performance. This lends an advantage to the minority who understand “performance” as a function of other bidders’ decisions. Learn their habits, change their performance and you’ll probably be able to get competitors to bid down or vacate (especially if your competitors over-rely on automated bid tools, all of which play search as a one-player game).

Behind every search advertisement is a decision-maker trying to hit a goal. Some are aggressive and take risks to occupy high positions; some are cautious and seek bargains. Some compute smart estimations of how much they need to change a bid in order to change one position at a time; others take ignorant guesses. (Automated bidders are always cautious and ignorant.)

The interesting part is learning how aggressive bidders behave when they pay more than they expected to (so jam them), and how cautious bidders behave when they get a price break (so try and walk the auction down). Foreseeing their moves is how to achieve better prices routinely.

The Razorfish search team often gains access to beta opportunities ahead of other advertisers, offering the chance to test new opportunities and learn what is effective to improve and scale campaign performance.

Last year Google released a new beta ad format called Sitelinks, which can be a great way to learn more about the intent of your brand searchers and improve their search experience.

Example of a Google Sitelinks Ad:

If your ads meet a certain quality threshold, you may be eligible to run site links. With Sitelinks, advertisers can submit up to 10 links and Google will select the four most relevant links to serve for any given query.

Clearly the new ad format is designed to improve CTR and relevancy. We polled our national team to find out who has tested it and how it’s working. 78% said they have tested Sitelinks and it had a positive impact on performance.

Have you tested Google Sitelinks? Tell us what you think!