Challenges of Paid Search Marketing in 2008
Almost a year ago, I explained the reasons paid search marketing was to become more competitive. In 2008, the challenges that PPC advertisers are to face will not be less. Below are going to be the challenges:
Educating your potential clients and making PPC campaigns ROI-sustainable
Many potential clients may still not realize how their overall business strategies will be benefited from incorporating a cost-effective paid search marketing campaign. It will take time for PPC agencies to educate their potential clients. One of the methods is to show them the success stories of other clients they have worked with. Good numbers always make good evidence.
Once your potential client reckons the importance of paid search, your PPC campaign will only exist when it is funded by your client. If your client has almost unlimited budgets, it is great for you. If your client is not willing to spend, there is not much you could do.
However, it will be a different story when both your client and you can work the campaign towards a return-on-investment (ROI) model. If the campaign can break-even on ROI or even make profits, your client will be more willing to fund the PPC campaign. When both the campaign spending and the profits are scalable, there is no reason why your client should not invest more.
On top of the above, ad agency companies that can run paid search campaigns cost effectively should consider offering their clients services on commission based models. I have previously explained the different PPC business models.
Recruiting new talents and keeping your key members
Paid search is still very much a new profession, especially outside of the US. This makes hiring experienced PPC managers a challenge. Keeping your top PPC staff members is also an ongoing challenge. Hiring anyone having over 3 years of PPC management and optimization experience is difficult, and almost all of them are very expensive. Depending on their levels, most of them are able to involve in variety of online marketing strategic decision making.
One of the solutions is to always keep one very experienced PPC guy in your business, and have him led your paid search team or your online marketing team (depending on his experience). The team should consist of less-experienced and the non-experienced members who will learn from him and grow in experience and knowledge in PPC and other online marketing channels. If this is to be incorporated into proper training programs, new PPC specialists will be produced regularly.
Balance between servicing your clients and optimizing their campaigns
As your business is becoming more client-centric, your team will be spending more time on servicing the needs of your clients. As PPC professionals, you may be asked to provide all sorts of information to your clients regarding to their campaigns. This can become overwhelming when you have to manage multiple PPC projects of multiple clients.
It is important to have a balance, so that you do not neglect the really important aspects in PPC campaign management. Depending on the objectives of the campaigns, it can include optimization on campaign structure, keyword selection, actual CPC reduction and campaign expansion.
Both your client and you want to have things done professionally, cost effectively and time efficiently. One of the best ways is to provide your clients weekly performance reports, and to communicate on a weekly basis. Quarterly or monthly meetings can also be set up to discuss long term objectives and how they can be achieved.
Improving ad copy writing, finding alternatives to raising keyword CPC, and monitoring click fraud
Great ad copy writing can considerably improve the click-through-rate and conversion rate of your paid search marketing campaigns. It is important to apply professional ad copy writing.
If you are seeing continuous inflation on keyword cost-per-click (CPC) of your search targeting campaigns, one of the alternatives is to consider shift more of your marketing budgets to content targeting. In general, average CPC of content targeting campaigns is less expensive than that of search targeting. However, it is important to improve the quality of your content targeting campaign so as its conversion rate.
As long as there is paid search, click fraud is not going to completely disappear. The point is that how you will save your marketing costs by effectively monitoring and spotting possible click fraud situations.
Posted in: PPC
[...] post by Gordon Choi and posted by Alfred [...]
Gordon,
I agree with your points about the challenges facing paid search. I would add that a major challenge for enterprise search (large, international companies often with many sub-brands) is the coordination among search campaigns and their other media. As you also point out, accurate ROI estimation is crucial, including the cross-channel ties between search and the media mix (TV, direct mail, etc.)
Regards,
Pat
Hi Gordon,
I think you’re dead-on with your assumptions, and offer some sound advice. It speaks to the massive complexity facing the marketplace, particularly for small-to-midsize advertisers, and those new to the game.
For example, we see that learning multiple ad-network interfaces, analytics and conversion tracking systems are making it very difficult for advertisers to mature and optimize results across networks. The complexity creates entropy which prevents advertisers from succeeding as much as they could, or investing dollars where greatest ROI will be achieved. Additionally, the practice of exporting raw data out of the ad-network systems into Excel, analyzing them, and then re-importing is unproductive, to say the least. There are many other aspects of the current system which are ripe for improvement.
Fortunately, I would suggest that two things are happening to counter this trend of complexity and opacity. For one, advertisers will get more sophisticated. Over time, they will demand more transparency and ease in the underlying search networks and systems — on their terms. Additionally, new tools will enter the marketplace to empower and simplify search advertising. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that hunger for simplicity will be the primary driver of innovation in online advertising and media over the next decade.
Proof of this larger trends is my own startup, Clickable. Our mission is to make search advertising simple and effective. We believe advertising should be easy, effective and accessible to all. And we know that can be achieved through simple, powerful tools that yield transformational results. In addition to polarizing the notion of search by introducing search concepts in plain-English terms, we’re introducing the notion of “analytics 2.0″ where our SEM management tool delivers prioritized recommendations — NOT overwhelming analystics, dials and features.
If you’d like to speak with us about what we’re doing, or try out the system, please let me know at mkalehoff at clickable dot com.
Best regards,
Max
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