Lore

Search Exchange Day 1 Pay Per Click Advertising

I attended Search Exchange Internet Marketing Conference held in Charlotte this past Monday. I attended day one of a packed three day schedule full of great speakers covering topics such as paid marketing, analytics, seo, and all things social.

The Pay Per Click day was great. Industry leading companies were present and provided insights on Google’s Enhanced Campaigns, Attribution Modeling, Holistic Growth Modeling, and more. Below are notes/recaps from some of the presentations.

Justin Vanning
Moz.com Customer Acquisition Manager
@justinvanning

Justin moved to Moz with a strong background and focus on PPC, but soon learned that PPC was not enough. His talk was all about how he learned to “embrace holistic growth marketing”, which essentially means that he understood that PPC was connected to social, organic, and all other channels. PPC was only one part of a greater whole, which once you can understand how all these channels work together and interact, the better and smarter decisions you’ll be able to make. He provided a list of “15 Holistic Customer Acquisition Growth Tips”:

  1. Go beyond click and make sure your funnel is healthy.
  2. Evoke emotion with your web design.
  3. Thank your first customers and utilize customer loyalty campaigns to reward customers for different actions.
  4. Launch a referral program – bonus – make it a double loop referral program to really incentivize both parties.
  5. Reach out to influencers, offer them something of value – your product for free or just simply introduce them to your brand.
  6. Utilize win-back campaigns.
  7. Create unique, compelling content that is easily shareable.
  8. Finding partnership distributions that you can launch.
  9. Launch a perks store or find stores out there that you can get into.
  10. Give away some of your tools for free.
  11. Invest in your YouTube channel.
  12. Show off your employees and culture.
  13. Use your community to get direct feedback, talk to customers, and share this with your company.
  14. Showoff customer passions and success stories.
  15. Work with social media marketers to make sure you’re measuring engagements and using your community for testing.

justin-vanning

Payton Dobbs
Google Head of Industry, Financial Services Large Customer Sales
[email protected]

Payton was at the conference to discuss “The Future of AdWords: Enhanced Campaigns”, which he touched on but was also berated with questions regarding every other product that Google has or is developing. I felt a bit bad for him, but I guess it comes with the company.

Below are some of the points he enforced regarding Enhance Campaigns:

  • Better helps manage device, location & time.
  • Measurement and analysis needs to start valuing much more complex conversion paths.
  • Big push on mobile – 73% of mobile searches trigger additional actions and 77% are in a location likely to have a PC available.
  • The upgrade was very complex on the back end, but there is now a structure in place that will allow for more features… Cross-device tracking is coming!

Tips for success:

  • Review your mobile bid adjustments.
  • Identify unwanted keyword duplication in overlapping campaigns.
  • Review Display Network campaigns.
  • Start taking advantage of powerful new features.
  • Additional mobile learning materials at g.co/fullvalueofmobile

payton-dobbs

Seth Lytton
Lowes Account Manager at Resolution Media
@sethlytton

Seth was the last speaker of the day, but covered the topic that most interested me, attribution modeling. Attribution modeling is the practice of measuring and analyzing how channels interact together along the path to a conversion. He went on to discuss different types of attribution models as well as five must knows regarding the subject.

Attribution Models:

  • Linear Attribution Model – Increased credit to clicks as you move through the buying cycle.
  • U-Shaped – More credit to first click and last clicks, but less value to mid-path clicks.
    *Big for new brands, emphasis on discovery.
  • Evenly Distributed – Giving even credit to each click throughout the conversion path.
  • Single Click – Giving credit to any single click in the conversion path, most common being first or last.

If You Only Learned 5 Things:

  1. Attribution helps brands make better use of their limited dollars.
  2. Kenshoo, DoubleClick and Marine are services that help with this.
  3. You need clear goals before starting.
  4. Media Mix Modeling and Attribution is not the same thing.
  5. This is where the industry is going. Early adopters will be rewarded with more efficient buys and greater breadth of campaigns.

Dave Bilbrough
SAS
@davidbilbrough

Dave also discussed attribution modeling, but stayed more high level on the why we should be using it rather than the nitty gritty of the how. His presentation strong points were “the numbers have no way of speaking for themselves…” and “reading a report does not constitute analyzing a report”.

Why Attribution Modeling:

  • Tablet & smartphone adoption continue to rise therefore delivery channels cannot maintain the status quo.
  • Understanding customer preferences is key.
  • Marketing efforts can drive enhanced performance on other marketing channels. Analyzing channels in conjunction with one another can uncover these relationships.
  • Attribution studies bridging multiple channels are complicated but give insight into total media spend and cost of acquisition. This can allow for gains in efficiency by delivering actionable insights to marketers.
  • It helps define your preferred customer and come up with a plan to reach them. One good customer is worth more than several bad ones.
  • Use analytics to find balance and then develop, test and validate hypothesis that support and guide marketing plans. Create a test plan that has flexibility and will be able to measure effects on other channels.