Spectacular SEM Results

Workspace is a really cool shared space / co-working environment in Vancouver’s Gastown. 2 weeks ago, Workspace had their first year anniversary party. Unfortunately, thieves broke into Workspace before the party and stole the iMac front-desk computer and laptops. Bill MacEwen, the owner of Workspace, was able to retrieve a photo of one of the suspected thieves after one of them uploaded a picture of himself accidentally. After the incident, the Vancouver blogging community decided to help on the rescue effort to find the thief but more importantly Workspace’s computers.

This is the guy who purchased one of the stolen computers and uploaded his picture accidentally. We all thought he was the thief but apparently not. Poor guy, he has his face all over the Internet by now.

As a result of all this blogging activity, hundreds of accrued incoming links fuelled the blogosphere. According to Bill MacEwen and Technorati, prior to the incident, Workspace had between 100 and 200 incoming links. It’s now showing 446. Consequently, Workspace has seen a 300% increase in visitors and page views to the site during the month of September. That’s a sudden, impressive growth, which usually takes years to achieve organically. In the last few days, my friends Travis Smith from Hopstudios.com and Boris Mann from bmannconsulting.com then ask me THE question: what is the value of all this sudden blogging activity & accrued visitors to Workspace’s site?

That’s a tough question but I will make an attempt at finding a figure for you. Of course, it is not the just the sheer amount of links that matters here but the amount of traffic to the site and finally the requests for new business for Workspace as a result of all this. If we only take the amount of accrued visitors into account in this scenario along with an estimated value of each visitor at $0.30, which is a realistic CPC (cost per click) average, we come up with a total traffic value of $2,250.90. Just to clarify, if Workspace would have had to pay to get this accrued traffic to their site, especially within that time frame, through any available paid options, such as Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising, it would have cost them at least $2,250.90, net of PPC Management fee. PPC Management fee in this case could have easily been evaluated at $1,000, in time and effort. Therefore, it is with a reasonable level of confidence that we can evaluate Workspace’s viral communication campaign worth $3,251.

Here is below the traffic over time and the sudden increase in September 2007. We usually create these spikes through PPC Advertising. It is quite unusual to see spikes like these through organic traffic, especially within that time period.

Finally, since a lot more people in Vancouver know Workspace and its shared workspace service, this unfortunate event is now turning into a noticeable PR campaign. This in itself has a lot of intrinsic value and long term branding effect which is hard to quantify objectively. Time will tell if the generosity offered by local bloggers will overcome the loss that Workspace has suffered. I can easily speculate that we have not found the end of this story yet and there is more to come back to Workspace then hot computers.

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O.k. here comes the juice. I have been working for the last few months on a new project that I can not disclose here but I will share the results I have been getting. Let’s just say that this kept me excited for quite some time as I see the traffic going up dramatically from one campaign after another that I have been optimizing. This is a case study that I am hoping to present to the next CaseCamp Vancouver, the tech marketing non-conference that happens twice a year. 

In Search Marketing, especially paid search, you need to have a really deep understanding of your keywords, your ad copy, your bidding rules and it must be well supported with strong web analytics in order to provide a good, great or outstanding ROI (Return on Investment). If you are not sure about what I mean by targeting the tail of search queries, may I suggest you read my article: Targeting the tail: how to get the most out of every marketing dollar. This will give you an overview on how important this topic is. This morning, I also came across a great article on this, called: Marketing to the long tail, which also focuses on the same topic which is worth the read. As the average click cost is constantly increasing as more competitors are getting into it, most business owners have no choice but to be smarter on how they invest their budget online, and this is one aspect they can use to get more value for their dollar. 

So, I took over a project 4 months ago on a major online advertiser who spends about $1.2 Millions per year. They are in the travel business and they have winter, summer and specific campaigns. We are using all 3 main search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

By simply adding the ALL the keywords included in the long tail of search queries for each ad group (and a few other tricks in my arsenal), here is an overview of what happened:

That’s right. The Client gets on average 4 times more value for every dollar they invest online. Whereas the average page view per visitor used to be $0.25 before I jump on board, it is now more like $0.06. Please note that the user engagement actually increased while the average cost per click dropped dramatically. As a result, the combination of the search term contained within the tail with a corresponding ad copy defines more of the quality of the user that the keyword itself. 

What most people underestimate is the time it takes to actually provide this kind of added value. In this case, it took me 4 months solid, but with 1 Million more page views per month, it is well worth the effort. If you are not sure if your paid program is actually providing what you expect, feel free to get in touch with me, I will make your paid search campaign, not good, not even better, I will make it stellar. And the beauty is that I only charge a small fraction of the cost to manage it. 

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Last year, I wrote this article about targeting the tail of search queries to maximize return on investment in Paid search advertising. For the benefit of everyone, I share it with you in its entirety: 

A lot has been said about pay-per-click management since its introduction in the late 1990s by GoTo.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google jumped on the bandwagon as first-generation “paid search expert” Kevin Lee was fueling education and general enthusiasm for a brand new form of online marketing known as pay per click (PPC).

I remember the day it became clear to me that in order to get the most out of every online marketing dollar utilizing pay per click, we had to target the tail, or focus on search words that are used less often, but carry a far greater level of information. The term “targeting the tail” took some time to get into our everyday online marketing conversation, but intuitively our discovery confirmed itself over time as we dug into a gold mine. This article unleashes the gold nugget of Search Marketing. So listen up.

Even though PPC management techniques have been around for years and the underlying principles for targeting the tail are quite simple (really, a million of microscopic target markets that need to be looked after with precision in every step of the PPC creation process), few pay-per-click campaigns reflect this basic principle. Just plain not taking the time needed might be to blame for this lack of sound customer-service focus in elaborating a campaign, but for now, let’s take a look at some other arguments for targeting the tail.

The Challenge: Rising Click Cost
SEMPO recently published their latest report, “State of Search Engine Marketing 2005”, where it clearly points out that the biggest share (83%) of online marketing expenditures is spent on paid search advertising. That being said, as more and more companies are fighting hard for the top five paid positions, all that they see climbing nowadays is their average cost per click and their blood pressure.

The Tail And The Purchase Sales Cycle
If you build PPC campaigns in a competitive environment like travel, you know by now that this query is searched more than 2.7 million times a month (source: Yahoo! Search inventory tool). The first question that should come to mind is: Where do all these people want to go? A little more analysis allows us to discover that a one-word search query is often initiated by an online shopper who is not quite ready to buy, but as they progress in the sales cycle, they will eventually refine their search query to something substantially more specific that reflects their true intent. What was at first an intuitive online behavior was confirmed later on: focusing on tail search term queries is like selling to customers when they are far more advanced in the sales cycle, and therefore much closer to a completed sale. Responding to the uniqueness of their intentions and desires is in fact good customer service.

Campaign Optimization
Once you understand the need to target the tail and you have established the keyword inventory you are planning to use for your campaign (including misspelled words, synonyms etc.), it is time to work the ad copy. It is in fact quite painful to go through every keyword contained within the tail, regardless of your product/service category. As a Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing rep will tell you, in order to make sure your customers understand that you are talking to them, you need to repeat the search terms in the title of your ad as well as in the description. Of course, they also need to land on a page that reflects the content of the initial search term they used, but that is another topic all by itself. Doing so implies that you write the ad copy on a keyword-by-keyword basis, which is especially the case for Yahoo! Search Marketing, as they allow you to refine your campaign at the keyword level. Sometimes it takes days or weeks to go through your keyword list, but when you are done, you will be flabbergasted by the results and will thank your lucky stars that you took the time to work your keyword list to that level of detail. At the end of the day, not only will you be more impressed with the results of your campaigns, but also your customers will think your site is relevant to their true intent and will respond positively to it.

Closer To Completed Sale: ROI
As I pointed out earlier, one of the secrets of a successful pay-per-click campaign lies in the tracking and the measure of the ROI (Return On Investment), especially when it comes to the search terms located in the tail and their corresponding cost per click. I have found that there is in fact an inverse relationship between the quality of a search term in its ability to convert into sales and its cost. In short, terms that cost less convert better. Then again, it takes a bit longer to build campaigns that contain hundreds, if not thousands, of search terms. By doing so, it should not come as a surprise that the average cost per click of a newly optimized campaign can go from over a dollar per click to $0.50 or even lower. If you can get more qualified traffic per dollar you invest, while every other variable remains stable, you will generate more sales at less cost. You will then be able to measure your cost of sales over time and will be pleased to see it dropping as you drill deeper in the tail.

Conclusion
I have heard too many business owners say that they care about their customers and are always striving to find ways to serve them better. If that is truly the case and you believe you are building a customer-service-driven organization, then you should take the time to understand all the search terms that your target audiences uses in search engines to build pay-per-click campaigns around their desires, needs and wants. Their search behavior should be your guide in developing your online marketing plan, which implies using all the search terms within your category. Targeting the tail is not difficult per se, but it needs time, dedication, and effort. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help you get the job done, and, by doing so, not only will you be delighted with the results, but so will your customers.

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