With all the emphasis lately on how to market in a down economy, I’ve decided to go against the grain and dole out some advice for those organizations wanting to make less money (this is the “Just Behave” column, after all, and it sure seems like we could benefit from some decidedly contrarian thinking). Seriously, everyone is so focused on helping the weak “profit-seeking” companies weather this financial storm that the needs of all the strong companies needing to waste money have been overlooked. Well, not on my watch. So for those companies looking for ways to keep those pesky customers at bay, here are my top recommendations for how to utilize SEM to achieve your unique objectives.

(See the full article on Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-lose-money-alienate-your-customers-16536)

Just because you can swing a hammer doesn’t mean you should build your own house.

That’s right, we use builders for a reason. Building a house requires knowledge and skill, not to mention time and coordination. To top it off, the State is changing building codes every day to keep you guessing. Ok so maybe every day is bit of an exaggeration and maybe you’re damn good with a structural drawing – but you get my point.

Dear Reader: Note that this is a bit of a rant. As the Director of Business Development I’m always a bit amazed at how agonized some prospects are when deciding whether they should hire an agency or continue to manage SEM on their own.  And so while I get a little worked up about it, hopefully this message resonates enough to be taken to heart. With that said, I contend:

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

If you think about it though, isn’t managing your own Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Campaigns a little like trying to build your own house? Sure, Adwords management is a little cleaner than construction, and you’re not going to live in your Adwords account (or so you think), but you can just as easily end up with a horrible mess and a lot of money up in smoke.

To get right down to it, the problem is accessibility - the same element that’s contributed to Google’s smashing success. It’s so easy to get started with Adwords and see it working that anyone can do it. And before long they’ve convinced you that you’ve got wicked skills. You’re putting up a campaign and your ads are appearing! Upon inspection though, you realize you’ve got all your product keywords in one Ad Group, you’re using Broad Match where Exact should be and the Cost Per Sale is higher than any of your products are worth.

Managing a task that you would have normally thought absurd to take on yourself seems well within your grasp. Would you have thought of producing your own television advertising? But so many organizations have simply tacked SEM Advertising on as another component of an existing job. That was OK when you were spending $2000 per month on Search. But now that you’re spending $20,000 or $200,000 per month, it’s no longer acceptable to treat search campaign management like an afterthought.

So what should you do? The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.

(Read the full article…)

There you are, a solid 9 months into a relationship with your SEM agency. You’re paying them 15% of what you’re spending with the search engines. Yes, they’re paying for themselves through their gains, but lately, you’re starting to question what they’re doing. There was the initial bump, and then a few months ago, a junior account representative was assigned and the hockey stick ROAS chart you thought you’d be seeing is starting to look more like a hockey rink – flat and cold. In the back of your mind a few questions are racing around… Did I just get placed onto the autopilot list? Do these guys know what they’re talking about? Am I being taken for a ride? Did I just find the end of the Internet?

Well from our experience, you’re not alone. And unfortunately, as this field has grown in popularity, the number of bad practitioners has grown exponentially. And, since the word we’ve chosen is “bad”, let’s dive a little deeper, since there’s some ambiguity.

What does bad look like?

(Read the full article…)

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How Efficient and Effective is Your Marketing?

As I write this, the U.S. economy has been declared officially in a recession. And for all of us who aren’t big enough and/or incompetent enough to warrant a government bailout, it’s a challenging season, one full of re-evaluations.

A cultural sign of the times: I heard an NPR radio program delve into the origins of the phrase “tightening one’s belt,” complete with interviews of belt manufacturers. In happier times, I might’ve found this an amusing play on words, but now? I found myself cringing just a bit at the light tone, thinking of friends who’ve lost their jobs.

But back to the current economic challenges, and the opportunities they present.

Yes, I did say opportunities, and I don’t mean it in a Pollyanna, “the sun will come out tomorrow” sort of way. I mean that this is a time when businesses can discover more efficient, effective and high-return ways to market and sell than they’ve used in the past.

Marketing Efforts: Areas to Expand or Improve

If your company has not evaluated the following initiatives recently, it’s time to give them another long, hard look:

(Read the full article…)

Let’s be honest.  Setting up a new PPC campaign or editing an existing one is a somewhat tedious process.  Granted AdWords Editor has eased some of those burdens, but still there are a lot of processes that are just downright timesucks to say the least.

Over time, I have stumbled upon tools which have helped minimize my time spent on menial, yet essential PPC tasks.  However, these tools were spread out over a variety of websites and there were some tweaks that I could envision that would make them even more suited to what I personally needed.

So at Closed Loop Marketing we realized one day, why don’t we just create some of these tools ourselves so that we can do our jobs even more efficiently AND get more out of our clients’ campaigns?  And our next thought - why not share these tools with other SEM practitioners so that we can all be freed up more to focus on strategy, instead of spending too much of our valuable time on tedious, lower-level, manual tasks.

So, with that, let me introduce four Closed Loop Marketing SEM Tools that I hope will be as helpful to our readers as they are to us.

1. Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper

The Old Timesuck:  If you are doing any local targeting, you know what a headache it is to capture all geographic variations of keywords.  People search by city, state, city/state combination, state abbreviations, zip code, etc, etc.  How can you be sure you’re covered on all variations?  And if you’re targeting a metropolitan area, have you covered all suburb names?  And what even are all of the suburb names?  What are the associated zip codes?!?

The New Timesaver:  Enter your keywords and provide the zip code and radius you are interested in targeting.  Additionally, choose your match type.  The Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper tool will provide you all city, state and zip code keyword variations.

In Action:

2. Keyword Permutations and Wrapper Tool

The Old Timesuck:  People search a billion different ways it seems and if our keyword lists aren’t robust we miss the opportunity to capture relevant traffic.  Are you sure you’re covering all singular and plural variations?  Common misspellings?  Reversals?  Word variations with hyphens vs spaces vs no spaces?  Across hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of keywords building all of these variations out manually is near impossible.

The New Timesaver:  Cover more bases by entering your keyword ‘parts’ into 2 or 3 different lists.  The Keyword Permutation and Wrapper tool will provide all permutations of your keywords for inclusion in your campaigns.

Side benefit:  less reliance on Broad Match.

In Action:

(Read the full article…)