We hope you enjoy the 4th of July!

Take just a minute to remember what this day represents…

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Just Kidding!

We’re proud to announce a new forum that is 100% dedicated to pay per click management - assuming you already know about pay per click advertising but have questions or want to bounce ideas off other pros in the industry then you need to register and participate at….

PAY-PER-CLICKMANAGEMENT.COM!!!!!!

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The new look is what we are.

Fresh, vibrant, green and fun!

Shane is the genius behind the new design - and in fact, we have given him a new official title to add to his box of titles - lol - he is now our copywriter and creative director. That’s really where his best experience and expertise is…he has already rewritten some of our ads for clients and they are decreasing costs per conversion even more! I have asked him to start blogging about copy writing ads for ppc, landing pages, etc. Let’s hope he posts something awesome soon!

And if you’re reading this via feed, swing by the site at www.semvironment.com/blog to take a look at our sweet new design!

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Tobias D Pimentel – Marketing Team
Coming over to the company from a management position at Verizon Wireless, Tobias is thrilled to be joining the semvironment team in June 2008. With several years in customer acquisition and sales, Tobias will add another level of service to semvironment.

Currently, Tobias is a senior level student at BYU-Idaho, and will graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Marketing this year. BYU-Idaho’s business program currently makes use of Harvard’s MBA case study library, and Tobias has participated in over 25 Harvard cases in marketing management, giving him a skillset and experience that will add significant value to semvironment’s marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization has recently become a passion for Tobias, and he’s planning on furthering his knowledge of SEO on the side as he works with our paid search clients.

Tobias enjoys sports and fishing, and one of his new challenges is to teach his lovely wife, Cosy, to fish. While Cosy is not yet a fishing enthusiast, Tobias says, “It may take a few years for that to happen, but I wont give up.”

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Woohoo!

We just became a ‘dofollow’ blog - all author names and links included in comments are now dofollowed…however, there is a caveat to having this privelege.

Here are the rules:

1. After 3 useful comments with the same email address, all future comments coming from the same email address will be dofollowed…the author and links within those comments, as long as they’re relevant, will be dofollowed.

2. After you follow rule number 1, all of your trackbacks to our posts are also dofollowed! Lot’s of love goin’ on ’round here!

3. Akismet is pretty good at capturing all the spam…but we will also ban bad use of our dofollow system. There are rules to the system…for example, authors must be legitimate handles or names less than 25 characters in length - but you can use text rich links within your comment if it is useful. In fact, we encourage a better web by using good text links in your comments. Remember, only useful, relevant conversation will be dofollowed. Ultimately, the choice is ours…so play nice.

Thanks for subscribing and participating!

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Christine Churchill

Offline Conversions - The Missing Metric

63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches for various product categories occur offline. Sourc: Google - ComScore Study March 2006

Why Offline?
-Many companies push prospects to a phone call “If I can get them on the phone, I can close the deal.”
–Power of human voice to convert prospect
–Appropriate for complex sales
–Works for B2B and companies with long sales processes
–Common for local service companies

“Web-only metrics…don’t provide a full picture of search campaigns.”

For job preservation, make sure you are tracking offline conversions.

Methods

Simple
-Make assumption based on sales, anecdotal data, in-store surveys.

Intermediate
-SWAG it from limited pilot tests
–Use a unique phone number in ads from pilot campaign
–Determine an online-offline ratio
–Extrapolate for future sales

-Offer coupons or special offer codes
-Unique pricing

Advanced

-Customer tagging
-Use of Unique Phone Numbers
–Phone per campaign
–Javascript provides different number based on referrer
–Track via phone logs

-Pay Per Call

-Keyword driven traffic

Ryan Gibson

Assumptions
-Managing at least to keyword level but preferably ad level
-Ultimate program goal is to drive profit
-Difference between brand & non-brand terms

Measurement by Proxy
-Typical measurements
–A/S: Ad Spend to Sales
–ROAS: Return on ad spend
–ROI: Return on Investment
–CPO/CPA: Cost per Order/Acquisition

Proxies based on margin
-Companies with a larger margin will have a higher ad spend

Typical calculation
-A/S = (1 - COGS - Variable Costs)/2
-ROAS = 1/(A/S)
Roughly target 1/2 of MARGIN
Why not use margin directly? There might be a diminishing margin of returns when you start spending more than you’re actually bringing in. The real question

is how much in marginal sales can I create for the next $ thousands in ad spend?

Why?
-Products vs Accessories…Accessories are almost always more profitable in terms of margin dollar ratio than the Product itself.

How?
Order level info - tie it to the keyword
–Existing tracking via Analytics…data can be passed to bidding system
–Post sale data feed…nightly process to match up orders to the margins
–The Best…feeding the margin data on the fly coupled with a nightly process to knock out frauds and cancels

Driving More Margin
-Understand lifetime value and adjust margin targets accordingly
-What other actions are of value on the site? Email sign up? Request a catalog? Other downloads?

Rich Devine

Problem with Conversions
-Don’t tell the whole story
–Money left on the table, miss the big picture
–Engagement, Attribution, Keyword Stacking

Study your micro-conversions too…which micro conversions are occuring prior to the revenue generating conversion?

Custom built performance model that assigns $$$ values to key website behaviors to create a monetization model for the website.

Micro conversions can also be called key site behaviors or success events

Building a Monetization Model
-Confirm business goals
-Identify and align site goals to business goals
-Establish accurate, key site metrics
-Identify Key Site Behaviors or “Micro-conversions”
-Assign Value to Key Site Behaviors
-Then…have a beer or sprite

Discover all available data sources you can get
-web analytics
-financial data

Prioritize your optimization activities

Study opportunitcy costs as expressed by revenue model

Implications for paid search
-Are you assigning too much value to conversions?

Models aren’t meant to be perfect

Akin Arikan

blog - multichannelmetrics.com

Measure multichannel success by customer - one size does not fit all

Paid search is easy to turn on and off

Social media is not so easy and can be hard to measure. Use blog monitoring and text mining to get a better idea about social media Matchback is the art of response attribution…for example, somebody receives a paper catalog 2 weeks ago, then they show up on the website via search so the inference might be made that the catalog increased the liklihood that the person would search or arrive at that website

Q&A

What method do you use to find the value of your micro conversions?

First thing is to get what you can out of analytics. Identify core key site behaviors - 4 or 5 of them and focus on the core business objective - sale? lead?

and value that activity. Get a little more complex after that and compare that value to other key site behaviors Another thing to do is identify what your measures of success are - what parts of your website are considered a measure of success? White paper? Page views? Sign ups? Newsletters?

Are those micro conversions happening offline in other channels? Always consider your offline channels and the possible micro conversion that is happening there because that can add to the lifetime value of a customer.

How do you dynamically switch your phone numbers?

External well known call tracking tools include ClickPath.com.

How do you manage expectations?

Address all the situations you can before you execute. It can take months with bigger clients and before you execute, expectations should be signed off on how to perceive value and attribute performance. One of the first conversations you should have with a client is what their expectations or measurements of success are. Your clients are smart and they see things from a different vantage point so education is key - on both sides of the fence.

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This session was mostly a quick Q&A:

Q: Are we in a recession?
A: Dollar is weaker against several major currencies so that would affect the environment while search may be the least expensive form of mass marketing. Stagflation might be skirted but we could still see inflation…but it’s all relative to the industry you’re in. Search is in a mini-boom. Recession is 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth - which we haven’t had but it’s been said that we’re in the worst possible non-recession. Recession is definitely industry specific.

Q: What worries you?
A: People are tightening up their marketing and proving what works and what doesn’t. Clients want provability. The nice thing about search is that it can be proven. Analytics and reporting helps marketing people get better budgets and improve their ROI. The main worry is “how can I prove it to the CFO”? Look for opportunities with search and web marketing. Client businesses can be struggling - one trade that seems to be affected by the recession-like economy is real estate.

Q: In this environment, where do you put your 1st marketing dollar?
A: If you have certain fundamental metrics that show the best ROI, put the money there. We can’t be just search experts, we need to be business experts and talk about how to acquire more customers. First dollar should be spent on understanding the customer.

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I hope you don’t mind me dumping my notes to the blog - I’ll be back to fill these in by the end of the week so they should make more sense.

John Tawadros

There is a lot more to a query than the general broad match keyword that shows as a ‘conversion’

Logging leads over time - from several months out

Know what channel is driving which actions

Look through all the lead logs and study trends and patterns - will you have a significant amount

of data?

It’s whether or not you want to track it based upon the incremental insight you get in your

tracking - how much is enough for you?

Alissa Ruehl

What does your company really want to get out of your marketing efforts? Sales? Top line revenue?

Margin? ROI?

What metrics are you using to measure the success? Leads? Clicks? Etc

Use CRM to measure whether or not the leads are truly converting - sometimes a keyword will show

’shallow’ successes due to volume of leads but the CRM might show that the ROAS is extremely low

because of a low real close ratio

Step 1 - create custom fields in CRM system for information you want to capture
–Keyword
–Search Engine
–Etc.

Step 2 - Update tracking URLS
–Use same variables that you get in analytics if you use analytics

Step 3 - Set Cookies
–Put cookie on all pages, not just landing pages

Step 4 - Add Hidden Fields
–Add hidden fields for each variable to all of your forms

Step 5 - Test and Report
–Test all forms to make sure your processes are working

Step 6 - Compare data to paid search spend

Adam Goldberg

Pick the best player (ad)

Pay attention to the ‘assists’ - it’s a team effort…offline ads, other online mediums besides

search are all part of the team

Stages of the customer buying cycle - Problem Recognition, Information Search, Evaluation of

Alternatives, Purchase Decisions, Purchase

Problem Recognition - email, website landing pages that don’t convert but show the consumer that

they have the problem is vital to the process

Information Search - click on an ad

Evaluation - Look for alternatives

Purchase Decisions - Final searches

Purchase - Conversion ad gets a lot of the credit when there were several other ‘assist’ points

accrued along the path

Always recognize the ‘team’ that preceded the final purchase

Phone call tracking - Ad dollar spent, web site, phone call, order, phone rep requests customer

link id, phone rep enters order into system with customer link id, periodic extract of sales data

sent to clearsaleing (shameless plug for product…ugh ), ClearSaleing Loads data into Online

Tool and Closes the Loop

Advertising ecosystem

Lauren Vaccarello

Benefit of integration - find out which leads are really worth it, true conversion tracking

Research first

Set goals before you start

Strategies to increase ROI - go after the low hanging fruit, time to sale reports, don’t create

campaigns geared towards long sales cycle leads, highest ROI by campaign report

Stop wasting money - stop campaigns that are generating $0 in revenue

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Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsft

My favorite quote from the Keynote: “Innovate the User experience and the business model behind it.”

…lot’s of boring ‘business’ talk about paradigms and ‘elements of innovation’ ‘entrenched competitor’…Sorry readers, I don’t think I appreciate Microsoft as much as I should…they just don’t seem to be in tune with what people really want like Google is.

Microsoft identifies 3 major verticals or query intent: entertainment, commercial, referrence - horizontal would be navigational queries. MSFT’s big focus is on commercial intent - MSFT started with cash back to drive more commercially intensive queries.

One item on their agenda is that they are going to fix the brand - MSN vs Live vs…

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This is my tentative schedule for live blogging what I can at SMX Advanced…I’m really excited to be attending this year!

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

9:15 - 10am Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft

10:45 - 12pm - Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

1:30 - 2:45pm - Creating Value in Your SEM Businesses

3:15 - 4:30pm - Closing the Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?

5:00 - 5:30pm - You&A with Matt Cutts

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

9-10am - Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession

10:45 - 12pm - What You Should Be Measuring But Aren’t

1:45 - 3pm - Bid Management Today

I can’t blog about the last session for 30 days…so I won’t list it here.

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