Understanding your audience and their need, whether immediate or exploratory, is crucial to your firm’s success. Are they looking for divorce advice, thinking about filing bankruptcy, or been charged with a DUI and have a court date in several weeks? What geographical regions do you service? What cases do you want to avoid because they are too costly in terms of research, time and travel? Who will handle the influx of emails and phone calls once the campaign begins? Will there be sufficient resources? What will the quality of the leads be? How much money should you invest in testing SEM for a new service offering?

The answers to these questions, coupled with audience and prospect messaging, post-lead follow-up, ability to retain clients, and the overall client value to the firm are important elements in helping to determine the viability of future success.

Limiting Risk While Testing and Learning

Many of the answers to the questions above are unknown, initially.  However, there are a few elements that should be in place before beginning SEM:

1)  Supporting content on your firm’s website with clear value propositions, credibility content and calls-to-action that encourages visitors to contact you

2)  Ensuring staff resources are available to handle, qualify and move prospects through the funnel

3)  Developing a feedback loop between marketing and legal staff to determine quality and value of leads and clients

4)  Understanding the competitive landscape and tailoring your core service message (i.e. price, level of service, etc.) to stand apart from other firms and advertisers in your space

5)  Establishing a test budget that is conducive to learning what works, what does not, and what to focus on in terms of growing the business

When getting ready to launch, it is important to think about where you have the potential to generate the most value. Staying away from general, non-specific lawyer or attorney terms will help to avoid unnecessary spend on untargeted queries from fragmented audiences looking for information.

In addition, you can help to increase the initial success of a campaign by:

1)  Targeting the highest value cases with the fastest ability to produce revenue

2)  Advertising to the regions to which you are willing to travel or the districts you serve

3)  Providing consistent messaging throughout all levels of interaction for a potential prospect from initial search to retained client

4)  Adjust messaging and bidding strategy and focus of campaign based on feedback from post-lead, client interaction

5)  Determine close rates and client value and revise the marketing and bidding strategy to focus on the most profitable elements on a continual and ongoing basis

6)  Measure the effectiveness of ad dollars at the keyword and ad concept level. Tie post-lead and client data back to the original marketing source to determine bidding strategy aimed at driving profit for the division, regardless of the time lag between lead and revenue

Finding Success and Pushing For More

Even if there is an initial struggle to get the numbers to be profitable, think about what is not working. Identify issues at the pre-click (ad copy), post-click (landing pages), or post-lead (internal processes) level and test new methods and strategies for improvement.

Once success is achieved, complacency should never set in. Ongoing optimization of bid prices, keywords, ads and pages can have significant impacts on lead and revenue growth. Identifying and expanding into new areas of opportunity, whether that be a position increase on a top-producing term, expansion into general, high volume case-based terms, expansion into a new network that is highly targeted to your audience or finding significant gains through page testing that allow you to drive more leads for the same spend, can lead to gains in retaining clients and growing revenue.

Overview: Our client’s success is built upon appealing to a wide audience with exclusive deals and a curated selection of listings suited to shoppers seeking everything from high-fashion prêt-a-porter to power tools. In an increasingly expensive and competitive market, their goal was to determine the value of their online marketing, grow conversion volume, and increase profit while overcoming restrictive CPA requirements, high click costs, and a shifting set of merchant listings.

Working Planet implemented a performance tracking and SEM strategy that targeted conversion volume growth, profitable account performance, and growth of their user base. Dayparting analysis revealed that nighttime site visitors converted at a rate 181% higher than daytime visitors.

To take advantage of nighttime value and volume opportunities, we changed bidding strategy to increase ad exposure during the highest-converting times of night. We found initial success with high-level bid adjustments and saw that a more diverse mix of search terms was producing traffic with bid adjustments in place. We quickly realized that performance differences were becoming so significant between day and night hours that new optimization rules needed to be established for daytime and nighttime account management. Creating full campaign clones to run exclusively during night hours allowed us to optimize day and night search term-level performance separately. Doing so also allowed us to take advantage of divergent campaign settings during daytime and nighttime hours.

Result: Independent optimization during nighttime hours yielded a 26% increase in conversion volume during the first 30 days of the tactic’s employment, and a 4% decrease in cost-per-click. Working Planet’s full suite of best practices, including implementation of time-based optimization tactics, resulted in an 87% increase in profit generated by our client’s pay-per-click campaigns over a six-month period.

Business Accounts were created to solve this issue by separating LinkedIn advertising accounts from personal profiles, allowing agencies and third parties to manage ad campaigns without using a client’s personal LinkedIn profile.  As an online advertising agency, we welcome the launch of this new feature.

In our upcoming blog series, we will show how to set up a LinkedIn Business Account, demonstrate how to create and structure ad campaigns, and share some of our best practices for LinkedIn ads.  Stay tuned!

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Search Engine Marketing firms are created differently, and perform different tasks in the execution of their services.  Here are some of the different approaches that agencies take, and  how they can affect the your online marketing results.

1. Traffic vs. ROI?

This basic question regarding core service separates firms that are focused on your business goals from strict media buying companies that take no responsibility for the quality of the traffic they purchase.  If a firm is focused only on traffic generation or holding specific positions in the ad networks, expect to pay very little for this service, as there is no optimization happening and you are on the hook for making the traffic that they supply profitable for you.  Everything else that follows focuses only on firms that are addressing ROI at some level.

2. How is ROI being assessed?

The goal of any company is to make a profit, so ROI from marketing should be tied as closely to profitability as possible.  Often, agencies will restrict themselves to measuring an online action that is not revenue producing (such as a lead form) and say that they are focused on ROI by controlling Cost-Per-Action.  In this example, Cost-Per-Lead is only loosely tied to profitability, since lead quality, close rate, and variability in deal value may all be additional contributing factors.   If the true profitability is not known, agencies run the risk of making tactical decisions that seem pro-ROI, but in fact are not.  For example, an agency looking to optimize on a strict Cost-Per-Lead target, without looking at lead value, is likely undervaluing the most important part of the market and leaving business on the table.

3. Percentage Gains vs. Dollars

Search Marketing, both organic and paid, touts percentage gains (e.g.,”We saw 201% gain over the prior month.”).  Sometimes percentages help dramatize the scale of a change in a way that the actual figures do not (for example, a change from .76 to .96 is a 26% gain). The danger arises in that percentages, when applied to ROI and profit, can be very misleading. This is why we always try to report performance as a profit number expressed in dollars.  In fact, it is dangerous to try to optimize for a higher percentage ROI, as your actual total profit can drop. (Example: would you rather have a 200% ROI on $50 or a 100% ROI on $500?)

4. Data Integration

Many agencies limit the data they analyze for a number of reasons.  Often this is because they are looking for efficiency, or they simply don’t have the tools or expertise to integrate data outside the norm.  Most ROI-focused agencies will combine the ad spend and performance data from the ad networks with some site performance and conversion data, often from tools such as Google Analytics.  These data form an incomplete picture as the true profitability of the user fails to be incorporated into the analysis and optimization.  True profit-driven optimization should fold in profitability, margin, fixed cost, and lifetime value information in the optimization strategy routines.

5. Automation and Data Integrity

Automation is critical to Online Marketing as it allows for the efficient use of time in managing accounts.  However, automation does not equal sophistication, and can severely restrict what an agency can do for you when bound by the limitations of its reach.  For example, many bid management tools (including those used by the biggest agencies)  limit the ad networks with which they can communicate (typically, Google and MSN for PPC, and limited ad exchanges for display).  They may also be limited in whether or not external data (such as customer or sales information) can be integrated into their optimization practices. Many commercial tools do not allow visibility into non-Pay-Per-Click data, so it is impossible for certain very important types of analyses or strategies to be executed (cross-channel attribution, for one).  Most importantly, many fully automated systems do not allow access to the raw data, and this makes data integrity difficult or impossible to be addressed.  Data Integrity, whether it is a simple de-duping, or more advanced rules-based data processing, is vital for any performance-based campaign.  Yet many agencies simply ignore it, or place it on the client’s shoulders to “clean” data from their site.  If an agency relies on automation to run on auto-pilot, very little if any actual data analysis, strategic direction, creative testing, or high-level optimization is getting done.

6. Data Analysis

As an agency, we spend more time doing data analysis than any other single task.  This often comes as a surprise to clients who think that the bulk of management time should be spent on keyword identification, ad writing, or tweaking bids.  But it is by digging deeply into the data that we discover the rich information that allows us to develop the client-specific strategies that net us big gains.  The sophistication of data analysis is probably the hardest thing to determine when evaluating an agency.  Sometimes you can get a sense of this by asking about how the agency is structured.  Who touches the account?  How many accounts are they involved in?  Is it an individual or a team?  If you find that the people (or worse, person) involved in the campaign are also involved in twenty, thirty, or fifty other accounts, it is impossible that you are getting the hours spent on your account that should be devoted to data analysis.

7.  Attribution

As Online Marketing matures as an industry and becomes even more performance-focused, the simple truth that user behavior is messy becomes more of an issue. Good Online Marketing firms are recognizing that they have to look beyond narrow marketing channel buckets in order to do the best possible job in creating profit for their clients. One of the main focuses in the industry right now is cross-channel attribution, which is the act of 1) identifying, and 2) attributing value to the multiple touch points customers might have across marketing channels prior to a sale.  While this is most critical for businesses using multiple marketing channels (SEO, SEM, display ads, content ads, email, etc.), even companies with only paid and organic search need to be aware of the cross-over effects and what that means in terms of strategy.  Good agencies look beyond their narrow management role to understand the big picture and to utilize attribution information to craft optimization strategies.  This is a major issue for many agencies on two fronts.  First, their tools (automation again) may have locked them into a last-click attribution model (which is to say, no attribution data), or they can only look at attribution in a single channel (for example, brand vs. non-brand terms in PPC).  The second challenge for these agencies is that they may have no visibility into the attribution data because the data sources (ad networks and analytics tools) don’t provide the data in the first place.

Online Marketing firms are strategic partners that help to drive profitability.  When evaluating an agency, remember that your profitability comes first. If an agency isn’t transparent, won’t let you own your accounts, or isn’t talking about how you make money, you should think twice.  And conversely, if your first question is “How much do you charge?” you are probably asking the question at the wrong time, as you haven’t learned anything about what they can do for you and how they do it.

We love it when prospective clients do their homework and ask questions about any of the above topics.  It doesn’t take much digging for the truth in those seemingly “apples-to-apples” SEM proposals to come to light.

Soren’s talk is focused on “Evaluating Content Effectiveness and Optimizing for Engagement”.  Topics include:

* Concrete ways to evaluate content effectiveness
* KPIs – having the right metrics for your business model
* How to effectively utilize audience segmentation and personality profiles

Attendance is limited and filling quickly!

Initially, the new feature may simply draw attention to the first result of any given SERP with the result being a dramatic increase in clicks on 1st position ads “featured” by the arrow.  As likely is an increase of reflex and accidental clicks on those ads. Impatient users may repeatedly hit ‘enter’ trying to “encourage” the page to load faster. While not an issue in the past, hitting ‘enter’ just a quarter of a second after the page is fully loaded now results in clicking on that first, most expensive paid ad, making it more important than ever to granularly manage your keywords’ bids and positions.

Initially, advertisers may see an increase in competition for the top 3 positions on the left side of the SERP, which are heavily favored by this new functionality as they are accessible with the arrow. To access the paid ads on the right of the SERP with the arrow, however, one must press the down arrow ~15 times. Whether users adopt the use of keyboard navigation functionality remains to be seen. The one thing we can be sure of is that Holiday season is right around the corner and it’s important to start getting all your Google blue arrows in a row!

There had been rumors that Google needed to squelch the increasing number of multi-word searches which were being delivered to lower-priced, long-tail keywords.  Will they ever accomplish that with this feature: 1) by design, 1- and 2-word predicted results are displayed first, and 2) the likelihood that users will be distracted by the rotisserie results before completing their intended query will be high.

The net result of all that will be more searches on common terms, higher bid prices, and happy stockholders. Google states that quality score will not be affected, however, the mix of traffic and volume of impressions is unknown.  We will be watching the trends in user behavior and performance closely.

It will be interesting to see whether users, in theory Google’s chief concern, will be equally happy with the new feature or will become  disenchanted.  I know some SEO shops that certainly hope it goes away…instantly.

1. Incomplete Tracking Systems:  The good news is most companies are now tracking something related to their marketing.  The bad news is that they are still very often tracking the wrong things or in the wrong way.  Tracking systems need to show aggregate site performance and individual user behavior.  Hint: most systems are not good at both.  You can use more than one.

2. Tracking Ends on the Web Site:  You need systems that let you feed sales/and revenue data back into the marketing program.  The good news is that most existing systems can be tied together.  You don’t necessarily need to invest in new systems, or expensive ones.

3. The “Bucket” Assumption:  Banish the assumption that every sale should be credited to a single marketing source.  People who believe that SEO, PPC, Display, Remarketing, Offline, PR, and nurturing programs work in isolation will make bad decisions.  Marketers working on multiple pieces of the marketing pie need a holistic view, and some forms of marketing (*cough Display!*) demand it for proper evaluation.

4. One-Way Data Flow:  Most installed systems that tie marketing to revenues have been purchased so that the C-Suite can generate marketing reports.  They are missing the value of these systems.  Data is *not* for reporting.  Data is for *action*.  You have to create feedback loops so that marketing campaigns can be optimized to improve results.  Take baseball.  Measuring a hitter’s swing let’s you evaluate good and bad hitters.  Capitalizing on that data in the training process makes for a whole team that can swing for the fences.

5. Online is Different:  Another challenge is to overcome internal assumptions about how marketing works.  In the old days you “dropped” marketing pieces, typically infrequently, that largely had a fixed cost.  You measured, if you could at all, on lift, and if not, on reach.  If you liked the numbers, wash, rinse, repeat.  Of course, the world has changed.  Online Marketing does not have fixed costs,  it is dynamic, and it requires constant optimization.  Campaigns can be driven by ROI, not evaluated by ROI.  Break the assumptions of old marketing and opportunities are everywhere.

Tying marketing to revenues does require work, but the payoff in reduced risk and increased profitability makes it well worth the effort.

Partially because consumer behavior changes so frequently and partially because competitors adjust their own advertising strategies on a regular basis, you can’t afford to let even a single day go by without assessing the performance of your PPC campaign and looking at what needs to change. It’s essential to pay close attention to what potential customers are searching for online, which keywords are delivering results and other forms of valuable customer interaction, and which ones are converting directly to sales or qualified leads. You need to how to assess and react to this information on a daily basis to run a profitable PPC campaign.

These are just a few of the reasons why hiring a professional PPC management service is a key to online advertising success. What worked yesterday may well not be effective today or tomorrow. Only true PPC management experts focused on ongoing optimization based on increasing your profitability can help you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making the most of the money you’re investing in marketing your company to qualified prospects online.

1. Profitability or Market Share?  In the face of unknown lifetime value metrics you have a choice in how aggressively you advertise.  Make this a conscious decision: How far beyond “known” value am I willing to go to obtain customers?  If you aren’t the business owner or CMO, and you haven’t had this discussion, have it.  Now.

2. Average Monthly Revenue?  If you have variable pricing (multiple packages or tiers, for example), optimizing on average value will hurt you.  When at all possible, tie specific sales value back to the most granular marketing source possible (think keyword).  This will help you not to overvalue, or (worse) undervalue, pieces of the marketing campaign.

3. Profitability and Payoff Time?  Know these numbers.  Optimize around a specific payoff time.  Control your cost of customer acquisition, don’t let it control you.

4. Continuous Re-calibration.  SaaS business models need to continually be re-calibrated in order to stay on top of shifting customer performance.  Don’t be the last to know that your customers are suddenly leaving before you hit break-even on your CPA.

5. Free Trials are Not Customers.  A Free Trial is not a paid conversion.  It might lead to one, but don’t optimize around Free Trials if you don’t have very consistent data showing these leads convert to customers.

Never (NEVER) evaluate monthly ad spend against monthly revenue for the current month.  In a SaaS model, your revenues this month largely did not stem from marketing that happened this month, so why evaluate them that way? Tie all customer revenue back to when the customer first landed on the site.  That is marketing effectiveness.