2015 Hero Conf Notes by Unbounce

#HEROCONF 2015 NOTES

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

#HeroConf 2015 Notes by Unbounce

Hi there!

Thanks for downloading the HeroConf 2015 notes by Unbounce. We sent a gang of notetakers to Portland, OR to document the entire conference so that attendees could sit back, relax and just enjoy the sessions. What you’ll find below is the fruit of our labor. That’s 2 days, 70 speakers, 44 sessions and 4 keynotes – all packaged into this pretty PDF for you.

Enjoy the read, and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I’m always here to help.

Sincerely,

Chelsea Scholz Jr. Campaign Strategist Unbounce

Table of Contents

Hi there! Table of Contents Official Unbounce Notetakers HeroConf Sessions 10 Silent Risks in Your PPC Account Add To It: The Value of Ad Extensions Advanced Conversion Optimization for High Traffic Websites and Mobile Devices Advanced Excel Trickery: AccountSide Efficiencies & PostTransactional Analysis B2B PPC: Partners In Business The Best and Worst Bid Rules Ever Written Build It Right: Account Setup And Structure Building And Managing A WorldClass PPC Team Buy Now: Google Shopping And Bing Product Ads The Buyer Journey: Using Paid Media To Drive Demand The Chemistry of Landing Pages with Live Critiques Create An Ad Testing Framework To Perfect Your Ads Embracing The Inevitable: Account Restructures And Transitions Fill the Form: Driving Quality Leads and Delivering Results Forming Client Partnerships For LongTerm Success From Target CPA to Maximizing Clicks: Using Google Bid Management Tools How Smart Marketers Bridge Content and PPC Marketing How to Win with The Unexpected Keynote with Brian Sise Keynote with Surojit Chatterjee Keynote with Tim Ash Lead Gen & eCommerce PPC: You Got The Conversion, Now What? Leveraging Analytics To Boost Your PPC Performance Making The Case For Match Type Segmentation Open Your Eyes To Advanced AdWords Scripts PPC + LPO: Insider Strategies For HighConverting Campaigns PPC For Social: Leveraging Paid And Organic Campaigns For Facebook And LinkedIn PPC Heroes' Favorite Excel Hacks PPC Heroes' Favorite PPC Mistakes: Lessons Learned PPC in Your Hand: Search Advertising for Mobile Devices PPC Strategy for Startups The Psychology of PPC: How Consumer Behavior Affects You Quality Score: As Relevant As It's Ever Been ReEvaluating Success: The Value of PPC Audits

RLSA: Capturing The Wandering Visitor Selling Better: PPC Strategies for Ecommerce and Call Extensions Transforming Tweets into Closed Deals Where are They? Leverage Geography or PPC Success Worldwide Reach: The Impact Of International PPC Your Brand in Visuals: Retargeting with Display Advertising Don’t Let Your Takeaways Escape You A Call to Action

Official Unbounce Notetakers

Dan Levy Amanda Durepos Gary Allen Duane Brown

HeroConf Sessions

10 Silent Risks in Your PPC Account

Andrew Goodman, @andrew_goodman President Page Zero Media

PPC Auctions Feels Riskier Than Ever ● Google has no incentive to worry if we leave their business or if we over spend ● Google only makes money when they convince us to make bad choices and use bad inventory ● Feels like we don’t have a friend ● What Risk Is Not ○ Making mistakes ○ Poor execution

○ Risk we should worry about: ■ We get whipped out ■ Bad events are the start of a trend ● A portfolio of uncertained outcomes is different from one large risk

The Amazon Effect ● Got a call about a package about different billing address ● They have everything with great prices and a brand focus loyalty ● No emotional connection, no domain expertise ● People don’t like giving all their money to one company even if they are not a huge monopoly. They are getting beaten by vertical commerce brands ● Taxonomy: They have a one size fits all. can feel wrong to some people ● Amazon shows up in 7th ad position but doesn’t do Google shopping results

Bias For Action ● People forgot about bad choices over the long-term ● Replaces busywork with a playbook ● Prioritize and put different actions in context ● Make changes on statistically significant data ● Kill or don’t do many small volume changes in accounts ● Respected established structures in accounts and test creative

Having A One Track Mind ● Killing off non-performing keywords ● Only changing the creative and not looking at other areas of the account ● Making sure ads don’t show at night ● What the competition is doing

The Google Effect

● Them going into a new vertical ● Launching a new update that kills your effort ● Framing tricks in AdWords makes us think something is bad

The Data Isn’t Really The Data ● Triple counting data and revenue you’re unaware of ● Dayparting to the wrong time zone ● Leads that don’t convert on the back end in Google Analytics ● CPA vs ROAS: knowing which you are measuring against ● Understanding when the numbers are credible ● Understand numbers across the business

Getting Blended ● Having too many options: match type, Ad rotation, and bid optimization ● Buying junk display inventory ● Using exclusion of keyword and placements are great ● Praise and support up and coming platforms ● Ignore training wheel features. ● Develop apps using an APP whenever you can

Too Many Bidders ● Many competitors upping the costs of CPCs ● Not having a reliable channel for new customers acquisitions ● Going kamikaze on your account ● Try to diversify channels and cross channel opportunities ● Flat PPC isn’t bad if you’re still profitable and getting new customers

Making An Account Humme ● Look at automation for daily tasks

● Have a weekly team meeting ● Setup alerts, budget caps and rules across the account ● Use email alerts for the client and team ○ Setup for campaigns that have 90% of your spend

------

Add To It: The Value of Ad Extensions

Carrie Albright, Hanapin Joseph Kerschbaum, 3Q Digital

CARRIE ALBRIGHT

Ad extensions: Your ecomm account’s newest sidekick

You ad is the gateway to your customer – it’s your hero, baby Ad extensions are your trusty sidekick

Why do ad extensions really matter?

To improve the health of your PPC accounts – positions, conversions and Quality Score Both Google and Bing want us to take advantage of all their tools

The List

● Manual vs. automated extensions ● Sitelinks – dynamic sitelinks are provided by Google now if you don’t provide your own ● Callout extensions – can include product dimensions, special offers and benefits (without distracting from headline of ad) ○ Saw increase in CTR and AOV ● Location and call extensions – especially important on mobile ● Review extensions – social proof, baby ● Seller/Merchant ratings – for ecomm – aggregation of reviews through Google or Bing-approved third-party – out of your control

○ Using these increased Carrie’s conversion rate by 3.7% but reduced AOV slightly ● Consumer ratings – dynamically populated – can reach out to search engine reps to see how to optimzie ● Product ratings – from 3rd-party review sites, aggregated from whole industry Merchant promotions – have to be specific to products on your site – need to fill out Merchant Promotions Interest Form

Get the right data

● Make sure to segment by extension so you know which ones are actually working (add extension details report in Bing)

Main takeaway: Take advantage of ad extensions because other PPC marketers are. It’s ultimately about giving your users the best experience possible.

JOSEPH KERSCHBAUM

How to write & optimize PPC ads holistically

● Make sure ad extensions play nicely together ● PPC landscape has become much more complex and competitive ● “What you guys do is really hard” ● Too many people update accounts on a piecemeal basis – leaves your campaigns disjointed

Focus on entire ad units

● Remember ad groups are not keyword groups – write your ad first, everything flows from that ● Think in terms of ad units – how sitelinks, call extensions, phone extensions, etc. affect the whole ad

Every element of your ad plays a different role

● Headline – push people down the ad ● Body copy – supports headline, communicates USP ● Display URL – confirms destination, shows search query relevance, pushes user to website/landing page ● Call out extensions – show SQ relevance, build trust, highlight exceptions ● Sitelinks – support headline and copy, show SQ relevance, get topical and specific, drive deeper into site

Conversion action synchronization vs. diversification

● Sometimes you want to use each site link to address different segments and needs, other times you want them to all support one conversion action

In summary

● Focus on entire ad unit – all pieces of ad need to work together – if I change ad headline, how does this affect my sitelinks? ● Strategize each ad element ● Optimize your account structure ● Synchronize actions (or don’t– just make sure it’s intentional) ● Adjust for you audiences

Q: How do sitelinks jibe with dedicated PPC landing pages?

Carrie:

● Opt out of dynamically populated site links ● Use call-out extensions like you would sitelinks to send them to dedicated landing pages ● In other words, segment with your ad and convert with dedicated LPs

------

Advanced Conversion Optimization for High Traffic Websites and Mobile Devices

Chris Goward Founder & CEO, WiderFunnel

● Chris was a cute child

● His sister had mad rosy cheeks #TotesAdorbz

Agency goals are often at odds with their clients

Marketing + Scientific Process = Conversion Optimization ^Everybody wins

Tips ignore context, but they can be a great place to start ● With a new client it can be great to start with an easy test ● In this example Chris started with a button test ● The button copy was “Submit” ● They tried instead a social signal, and a sense of urgency ● The control won (whaat?!) ● So they kept testing!

Turn best practices into ‘tested practices’ Test errything

· Website redesigns are the wooorrrsssttt · But visitor expectations are increasing so you’re constantly fighting to keep up · With a redesign you’ve changed #ALLTHETHINGS, and now you don’t know what specific things are increasing or decreasing its effectiveness

Evolutionary Site Design · Constantly testing and upgrading your website

Example: BuildDirect · Site needed a redesign · WiderFunnel looks at the major factors part of the BuildDirect experience

· They tested those elements individually · Ended up with a completely redesigned website and huge conversion rate improvements · New test changed what main page linked to (information architecture test that led to specific merchandising page or a product listing page) · Merch page killed it · Completely redesigned website with zero risk - achieved with continuous improvement based on testing

The human brain is the best optimization tool. · There are lots of tools, most relatively simple, but it’s all about creating your hypotheses

What should I test? · How you answer the question will determine your success with testing

Lift Model

Value Proposition · What are you doing for me

Relevance · Capture the scent trail from the ad, email, or link

Clarity · Make your offer clear

Distraction · Don’t over-design

Anxiety · Remove barriers

Urgency · Why should they act now?

· Test based on all these elements to find out what’s important to your audience · Challenge your assumptions about your value propositions by testing

· Don’t stop at 1 test · Use small wins as a new control and test further · Drill into 1 insight to find new ones

· Social Proof is one of many different persuasion techniques · Find out which elements and value propositions work by testing

Which value proposition approaches should you test? · Landing pages are a great place to test this

Points of Parity · Where your features & you competitors’ features match your prospects desires

Points of difference < Most important · Where your features match your prospects desires, but your competitors’ don’t (BOOM)

Points of Irrelevance · Your features your prospects don’t care about (you don’t want these)

Don’t look at conversion optimization as a project. It’s an ongoing profit center.

MOBILE OPTIMIZATION MUST BE INTEGRATED · The year of mobile has passed - we’re living in a mobile world

· Mobile is not the difference between your laptop and your phone o There’s a myriad screen sizes, devices, etc.

· Mobile is a state of being #OprahMoment · Mobile is all about context, so optimize for it · Attention span is shrinking · You have less than 8 seconds to engage

· Desktop tests can lead to mobile wins, but with different contexts come different expectations

· A great framework allows you to build insights on insights on insights · Don’t undersell conversion optimization, the results can be phenomenal

Questions

At any point do you go back and re-test controls? Short answer: Yes · Depending on client · WiderFunnel has gone back and re-tested with some clients every 6 months

------

Advanced Excel Trickery: Account-Side Efficiencies & Post-Transactional Analysis

● Link to Excel examples ● Presentations

All the following need an equal sign (=) before the formula ● Len (A1) - to count characters in row ● Trim (A1) - to remove spaces in row ● Lower (A1) - to make caps lower case ● IF (This is true; then this; otherwise this) ● SUMIFS (what to sum; sum if this; contains this) ● VLOOKUP (look for this; in this table; get data from column #;broad match?)

Tools, Tips & Tricks ● ASAP Utilities - helps update data & charts in excel with a few clicks ● Power Bid ● Pivot Tables: use to show large sets of data and results over time

Dashboards ● Keep your data clean or you can’t use it for your needs ● First columns should be your data; last columns should be your results to keep things clean and easy to read. ● Use simple and easy campaign names ● SUMIFs can be use to generate reports for dashboard that can be updated automatically. ● (Target - realization to date) / (52 - current week) - what we have to do every week to hit our year end target

------

B2B PPC: Partners In Business

Margot Da Cunha, WordStream Diane Pease, Cisco

MARGOT DA CUNHA >> Watch out, she’s got a black belt in Taekwondo!

● Marketing moving away from paid marketing toward inbound ● The B2B buying process has changed – now about “B2Me,” the individual behind the purchase – they’re doing more research on their own #prosumer

1. Understanding B2B and B2C paid search

● PPC used more in B2C ● In B2B it’s all about the customer buying journey – Need to understand what guided them to making the purchase decision ● It’s about being where your customers are and speaking to them in THEIR language – Ask what keeps them up at night

Steps in B2B buying process

1. Explore ○ Create campaigns based on need ○ User offers that lead to the next step ○ Address their pain points

○ Ensure keywords align with the business ○ Long tail = more clicks ○ Know your audience – put personas in place 2. Evaluate ○ Retargeting – reach the people who have engaged but not purchased, or upsell those who did 3. Purchase ○ Negotiate and build commitment ○ Close the deal

Mobile

DIANE PEASE

3 Tips to Stop Wasting Money on Awful Leads

Tip #1: Find leads via Facebook targeting

● Can target custom audiences – your best leads ● Use lookalike audiences to find people just like them ● Target by job title – you can actually target the President of the United States

● Can isolate B2B – by company size, industry and purchasing behavior (ex. people who have bought marketing software in the past) ● INCEPTION: Layer the above options on top of each other and get super duper specific – ex. By college degrees, incomes, even “soccer moms”

Tip #2: Give your paid search strategy a facelift

3 Categories to Focus On

● Brand terms ● Competitor terms ● Money keywords $$$ (like “buy marketing software)

Spend less time on …

● Educational keywords ● Low search volume keywords ● Keywords with awful CTRs and low QS

...And take the weekends off!

Tip #3: Convert leads with remarketing

● For B2B software, 55% of PPC conversions take more than one day

● 33% take more than one week ● Users are 76% more likely to click on a remarketing ad ● The more times folks see your ad, the more likely they are to convert:

With that in mind …

● Be sure to make your ads remarkable through relevancy – Target by User Behavior to show ads specific to your leads’ interests ● Set your Membership Duration to 3x your average sales cycle ● Set your impression cap to unlimited (ads are almost never served to their full impression cap)

------

The Best and Worst Bid Rules Ever Written

Chris Haleua, @chrishaleua Senior Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

Free resources: tiny.cc/rule tiny.cc/templaterule tiny.cc/3x3template

Framework: 3 keyword segments (filters) Converting Wasted spend Clickless impressions

3 sub-segments (sorts) ● Volume leaders ● Efficient threads ● Position opportunities

Bid automation evolution:

It’s nice to have options other than manual bids.

● Manual management ● Single action-set rules ● Position rules

● Template rules ● Custom rules ● Portfolio optimization

3 Worst Rules

● If average position < 10 then increase 10% ○ Maintain a floor and a ceiling of data-driven thresholds based on realistic potential instead of assumptions.

● If average position < 15 and average position > 2.5 then increase 10$ ○ Apply gradual change velocity of making large changes when you are far and small changes when you are close

● If ROAS > 300% and ROAS < 200% then increase 10% daily based on the past 30 days ○ Avoid forcing keywords to fall in the same piece of logic or the change velocity will be increased exponentially

3 Best Rules

● If conversions = 0 & Cost > 300 then decrease 25% ○ Develop holistic coverage by falling back to the next best metric when your KPI equals zero

● If conversions = 0 & Cost Per Cart < 30 then increase 5%

○ Insert attribution perspectives, assists, and micro-conversions between main conversions & loss-leaders

● If Conversions > 30% then send email alert ○ Expand to multiple date ranges to adjust for customer lifetime value and long-term conversions with high ADV

Use Google’s preview function!

------

Build It Right: Account Setup And Structure

Jacob Brown, @jakebrownppc, Hanapin Marketing Timothy Davis, SoftLayer (IBM)

TIMOTHY DAVIS

Bottom Up Approach

● Keyword ● Ad ● Ad group ● Campaign

Tips

● No need to use phrase match ● Avoid cannibalization/double serving ● Use custom landing pages to see what people are actually searching for ● Remember: The entire existence of an ad group is to show specific ads to a targeted audience ● Snowball effect: If your CTR goes up, your QS will go up – so focus on creating relevant ad copy with message matched landing pages

Optimizing your landing page

● Make sure landing page correlates to search term ● Saw 200% lifts by ensuring landing page copy match ad copy

Results (from 70 campaigns)

● Increased leads by 164% on average ● Decreased CPA by 94%

Key takeaway

● You should always know the true value of a keyword. Not the value of associated keywords or keyword segments.

JACOB BROWN

Why account structure is important

Example: Education company with multiple schools, campuses and programs per campus

● No budget restrictions ● Different landing page for every program by campus

Original structure layout:

Campaign level: School_Campus_Match_type Ad group level: Program_modifier

Restructure layout:

Account level: School_network Campaign level: Campus-program Ad group level: Modifier_match_type

>>Increased conversion rate by 8%

Benefits of new structure

● Ease of Excel implementation process ● Ease of Excel reporting

------

Building And Managing A World-Class PPC Team

A Customer Centric Approach to Company Structure

Jeff Allen, @JeffAllenUT President, Hanapin Marketing

Many agencies struggle with expectations – the idea that any company has goals that are fixed and never change.

To prevent that, focus on being customer centric through dynamic processes.

THE HANDOFF (approximately two weeks)

● Before the sale: Get someone from the service team involved with the account as early as possible (even before the sale). Share notes from blueprint, from the call – this gives them insight into the evolution of the account as well as other things like seasonality, trends, frustrations. ● Kickoff call: small team. Goal: to reaffirm all the goals that were established and make sure everyone is on the same page. ● Second call: geotargeting, other analysis > put into a strategy roadmap. Break that down into a status doc with dates, resources needed etc.

Role clarity Ask the client:

Who’s your boss? What does she care about? What hairy problems is she trying to solve? What does she ask for in her status updates? Who reports to you? How can we make you look like a rockstar? What are the metrics you’re trying to hit? How much time do you spend on PPC?

Team structure ● Associate Director of Paid Search: Holds team accountable – oversees the team and makes sure the client is happy. Maintain momentum. ● Dedicated Account Manager: Owns account, strategy and planning. ● Client Services Manager: Internal voice of the client. Gets on the phone with the client and makes sure their voice is heard. Monthly 1-on-1 call with client. ● Production Specialist: Handles urgent requests, routine tasks. ● CRO Specialist

Career path PA > PS > AA > SR. AA, Resp. > ADoPS or PA > PS > AM > SR. AM, Resp. > ADoPS

Conditions for promotions ● Rock star in current role ● Company has a need ● The need is big enough

MEASURING PERFORMANCE Behaviors matter as much maybe more, than results. ● Are there values aligned with the company? ● Standards ● 360 degree feedback

● Metrics that are considered: are they hitting goals, utilizing time wisely, growing their accounts?

TOOLS Basecamp Hipchat Tinyquotes Recap: ● Put customer over process ● Get services involved in sales process ● Use structure to prevent damage from turnover ● Measure behaviors against company values and standards

Managing an In-House PPC Team

Ryan Dobrin, @rjdobrin Director of Marketing, Sylvane

Organizational structure

Sylvane’s structure: ● Manager ● PPC guy ● AdWords specialist (80% AdWords + affiliate program) ● Bing account + Shopping Engines account manager

Onboarding and training Goal: Spend money, make more money

Hiring process is straightforward. Posted on Craigslist, LinkedIn.

Onboarding: get them up to speed on the accounts, the company’s structure, best practices. Basics, account structure. Show them what’s worked for us.

Metrics and KPIs Revenue growth goal we try to hit every quarter

Two KPIs: ● Paid search net profit ● Total traffic

Other smaller KPIs that feed into the above. Report on KPIs weekly, monthly and quarterly.

Weekly marketing meetings.

Efficiency tools ● Keyword planners ● Internal tool ● Optimizely for A/B testing ● Blogs, webinars

Communication ● Intradepartmental ● Interdepartmental

Recognition and promotions ● 6-months review, yearly promotions

● If position is paying more elsewhere, salary is bumped up ● New responsibilities are given as people become more efficient at their job ● If we hit the quarterly goals, we do fun outings

------

Buy Now: Google Shopping And Bing Product Ads

Frederick Vallaeys, @siliconvallaeys CEO Optmyzr Inc

John Lee, @john_a_lee Managing Partner Clix Marketing

Google Shopping by Frederick Vallaeys ● 47% growth in ad spend on PLAs YoY (Q4-14) ● 20% if ad clicks came from PLAs (Q4-14) Feed Compliance ● Don’t included restricted product ● Don’t overlay text on images ● Keep inventory active

Feed Relevance: SEO For Feeds ● Title: 70 characters with spacing... front load the important words ● Description: 10K characters with spacing ● Images: High quality

● Product ID & Categorization ○ Product ID: You pick this based on your POS/inventory ● Quality Score (QS) does happen in Google Shopping. Changing “Product ID” can help you rebuild the QA for a bad product ● Make Your Ads Stand Out ○ include special offers with a promotions feed ○ Pick an imagine that stands out ● AdWords Optimization; forget what you know about AdWords when building Google Shopping feeds. There are no keywords

Campaign Structure ● All Products → Category → Brand → Product ● Avoid duplicate product targeting ● Doesn’t matter how you structure as long as you keep everything consistent in Shopping Feed ● Tie breaking for competing ads is CPC ● Use custom labels to priorities best selling items ● Use low bids for products that aren’t as important ● Use SQR to understand what you’re displaying for and add negative keywords where it makes sense ● Rumor: Google only takes first 10K products of campaigns ● Ad Groups bids don’t do anything ● Product group bids get overwritten when you change higher level bids

Bing Merchant/Shopping Center by John Lee ● Bit.ly/PLA-Checklist ● 30% market share in some markets ● Already runs within your Bing account ○ Assuming it’s linked with your Merchant centre

Merchant Centre ● Create a Catalog..by FTP or code ● Feed format from Google can be used with a few modification ○ Just need to modify some of your column headings from Google’s Merchant Centre ● Where does your feed come from ○ Look into different providers ● Approval time takes about 3 days. Feeds expire after 30 days with no update ● Product Target Report is like Keyword Report

Other Considerations ● Mobile bids are better ● Bing has 2 networks: Bing + Yahoo or Bing Syndication Partners ○ Do your research on Bing Syndication Partners and where you show up ● Bing is making updates to Match Google Shopping better

------

The Buyer Journey: Using Paid Media To Drive Demand

Kayla Kirsch, @Kayla_Kirsch Digital Analyst, Kre8 Media

Leverage TV/Search Relationship

1. TV drives online response

Even if your TV commercial is driving people to a phone number, you’re also driving people to your website.

● A study showed that 50% of ad clicks originated from television. ● 24% of TV-driven response uses generic keywords. ● Up to 60% increase in generic terms campaigns.

2. Take advantage of TV’s potential

Predict increase in paid search queries.

● Set up automated rules to push bids on during TV spots and up to 20 minutes afterward (TV attribution window = about 10 minutes) ● You can accomplish this by requesting pre logs from your agency ● TV sparks not only cheap branded search but also more general queries

Mobile is a key player

● TV will not drive traffic equally ● Mobile traffic can increase by as much as 82% ● Analyzing traffic pre and post spot can give insights ● Use automation further to manipulate bad adjustments for device Use your creative verbiage to channel traffic

● Steer clear of common industry jargon and instead put a unique twist on the language used to describe your product or service ● Direct the interest generated to keywords of your choosing ● Pick a few profitable keywords to drop into your spot, but do not keyword stuff. Your spot is like any other piece of content. ● Residual benefits: improving SEO, improving quality score

What to do if you’re not on TV (and your competitor is)?

If you do not have access to pre logs or creative control there are still some strategies you can adopt to capture demand being generated by your competitors ● Bid on their brand terms ● Go after their TV URL. Often TV advertisers will develop landing pages for their TV spots and advertise that as the call to action instead of their brand

● Go after the keywords or themes they use in their spots. Many businesses are still in silos, which mean there is a good chance that, their digital team in unaware of these little gold mines.

The New Buyer Journey

Kimm Lincoln, @kimmlincoln VP, Digital Marketing, Nebo

Think about your last purchase. Did the purchase journey look something like this? (AIDA Funnel)

Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Purchase

Probably not – so where did this idea even come from? The Aida funnel is credited to E. St. Elmo Lewis. (1898)

People don’t necessarily behave like this – it isn’t so clean cut. But as long as people are buying, things are going to be okay.

The New Buyer Journey:

Exploration >> Discovery >> Engagement >> Post-purchase >> Validation >> Purchase (Not linear but circular)

Step 1: Fight the system

You can’t do just do PPC. You might work in PPC but as a marketer, you’re part of something greater. Fight for what you need in order to tell your story.

Even if you’re a B2B brand, there are a ton of ways to make your story compelling and sexy.

Example: Zendesk – They’re communicating their brand story in a compelling way.

Step 2: Research your audience

Now it’s time to figure out who you’re going to tell your story to.

Focus on feelings.

Ask questions to get to the root of your audiences’ ● motivations and dreams ● fears and concerns

Step 3: Create your content

Successful buyer journey campaigns are built on content. But content can mean many things: video, white papers, case studies, etc

Use your research to understand your audience:

Check out the competition and see how you stack up.

See what people are actively searching for on your site. See what questions people are asking in forums and in blog comments. If you don’t have an answer, that’s a ripe opportunity for creating something you know people are looking for.

Create content that adds value

Step 4: Put it into action

This is where PPC comes in!

● Do audience research and come up with a persona. ● Write messages that speak to that person. ● Inject a little FOMO. #FDRonTinder ● Think about your prospects’ intent ● Use urgency in your retargeting ads

Don’t forget about post-purchase campaigns when you’re thinking about the buyer journey. How can you use the retargeting audience to cross-promote other events/products?

If you think of the buyer journey as a near, linear funnel, it’s going to be very limiting.

Be there are much as you can to guide prospects – serve as an advocate.

Fight for what you need to tell your story. Put in the work.

Focus your efforts on adding value and solving problems and you’re sure to be successful.

------

The Chemistry of Landing Pages with Live Critiques

Brian Massey, @bmassey & Joel Harvey, @JoelJHarvey The Conversion Scientists (learnings from the live critiques added in italics)

Whaddup with the lab coats? ● Entering the world of data-driven marketing ● Also they’re stylin’

Some background - the building blocks of landing pages → A framework to evaluate your current and future landing pages

What is a landing page? ● Keep the promise you made in the ad, link or email (#messagematch) ● Inspire action ● Reduce friction as much as possible to your visitor takes advantage of your offer ● Remind your visitor immediately that they’re in the right place

We know something about these visitors, so build a landing page that’ll make them convert.

The Simple Landing Page Reaction: Offer + Form + Proof + Trust + Image

Start with your offer The landing page MUST match the ad ● Whatever you’re offering in your ad, follow it through to the landing page ● Keep the promise of your ad, match them as closely as possible

Ask a designer - (but keep them away from your page) ● Use their skills to get your message across

Let’s build a form ● What’re you asking for? ● We want to eliminate Abandon ● Don’t give your visitors options to leave your page and not convert (landing pages FTW)

What about if you’re driving phone calls? ● Replace “Form” with “Phone” in the form ● Usually you ask the fewest things possible to get someone to convert ● If you want to generate phone calls, creating excessive friction with your form can drive phone calls ● Having a difficult form can actually increase phone calls - it makes the phone call the path of least resistance

Ask a Copywriter

● Write copy that makes more people comfortable completing the form

Build Some Trust ● Images and words that increase the credibility of your page ● e.g. logo, credit card logos for payment, customers

Provide Proof ● Credibility statements (e.g. 13 million sold) ● Specificity is awesome -13,453,123 is better than 13,500,000

Social proof ● Someone else talking about how amazing you are is much more valuable that you talking about yourself #HumbleBrag ● Don’t hide your social proof - it’s important stuff ● Test it all over your page, see what works

Social icons are tricky, you don’t want to send your leads off to Mark Zuckerberg - use when valuable to your campaign

Show the product ● Avoid “business porn” ● If you can’t write a reasonable caption for your image, GET IT OFF YOUR PAGE ● Spend as much time on the images as you are on the copy ● This can be video (test different videos if you’re using video - demo vs. story, etc.) ● Don’t use YouTube (sorry!)

The button color that converts the best is the one that doesn’t match (think contrast!)

● It should visually be the most important thing on the page ● The CTA should follow through on the promise of the headline ● Directional cues (“hey there” arrows) can help

Building a Testing Framework ● The key is test, win (hopefully), re-evaluate and start over again ● Isolate your variables

Questions Answered

Q: How do you match headline to ad if you’re testing your ad copy? ● Keep your landing page static ● If you’re testing your offer, have a landing page for each offer

I think we can all agree the theme of this Q&A is #TestAllTheThings

Your thank you page is a great place for driving further actions, e.g. social media asks (follow us, tweet this, etc.)

------

Create An Ad Testing Framework To Perfect Your Ads

Brad Geddes, @bgtheory Certified Knowledge

● Ad testing is not just great for increasing conversions, but also for market research

Here’s a simple framework:

1. The brainstorm

● Ask the big questions first ○ Are consumer price sensitive? ○ Does location matter? ○ How much does quality matter?

● Determine how you want to segment ad tests – always segment data by ad type (text, images, call only, DSAs, etc.)

● If on mobile, segment ideas by device

2. Multi ad group testing

● List out your test ads – Geo vs. non-Geo headlines, Call Us vs. Learn More CTAs, Brand vs. Non-Brand, etc.

● Use pivot tables or software to analyze the data → You now have answers to big questions like:

● Don’t use brand names in non-branded ad groups

● Call Us works best on a mobile device; learn more works best on a desktop device

Next steps

● If you have more big questions to answer, do more round of multi ad group testing ● If not, then move on to A/B testing

3. Ad Testing Metrics

● You don’t have to use only one metric: ○ CTR ○ Conversion rate ○ CPA ○ CPI (conversions for impression – Brad likes this one) ○ etc.

Lead gen types (examples)

“I want the most leads regardless of incremental costs” = The top CPI ad always the winner

“I want the most leads under a specific average CPA” =

● Eliminate ads above target CPA ● Pick the highest CPA ad

4. Ad rotation and minimum data

● Always use rotate for testing

● Always decide how you’re going to pick winners ahead of time – What are your testing metrics? When are you going to look at data? (always wait at least a week)

Recap

● Start with a big brainstorm – remember that irrational behavior is very problem online ● Determine your ad testing segments – always segment by ad type and device (never test mobile and desktop together) ● Ask the big questions first through multi-ad group testing – list our beforehand how you’re going to pick winners

● Use that data to create rules around ad creation ● Move to A/B testing on your top ad groups ● Determine how you’re going to pick winning ads ● Repeat repeat repeat ● Use software or pivot tables in Excel

Q&A takeaways

● Prefers CPI as metric because it uses a combo of click-through rate and conversion rate :) ● Stick to A/B testing on landing pages to keep data simple ● Need to preserve Message Match on landing page when testing new ad variants

------

Embracing The Inevitable: Account Restructures And Transitions

Diane Anselmo, @diane_anselmo Senior Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing

Drew Karges PPC Lead, Kanetix Ltd

DIANE ANSELMO

Truth: “You can’t hide from change”

“You’re getting a new account” << Something we’ve all heard

Why? Well, maybe:

● The current account manager is leaving ● In-house shift in account management ● It’s a brand new account, somebody’s gotta do it ● The client requested a new account manager << awkward

3 Steps to a successful account transition

1. Arrange a meeting with previous account manager, if possible – sometimes that involves being a bit of a stalker, but that’s okay! 2. Speak to the client – as soon as you can. Client needs to be reassured, even if you’re not totally up to speed. 3. Perform your own account audit. Show them you got this.

1. Things to ask the previous account manager ● What’s the client’s personality? Are they a total control freak? They cool? ● How does the client prefer to receive communication? How often? Are they into project management software like Basecamp? Do they need a lot of hand holding? Introduce new forms of communication gradually … ● Have there been issues between you and the client that I should be aware of? ● What would you say is the one thing I need to do to be successful with this account?

2. Things to ask the client on that first call

● What metrics/KPIs are you primarily focused on? Don’t assume they were on the same page as previous account manager ● What strategies have you tested that have worked? What didn’t work? ● Who are your biggest competitors? Take the time to scope them out since they’re the folks who keep your client awake at night. ● For ecommerce clients, what’s the average order spend on your site? Top-performing products? That’ll give you a clue about where to start and what to focus on. ● What’s your target market? Don’t assume ● Is there any seasonality in your business? If so, put key dates in your calendar so you can prepare accordingly. ● Is there anything critical about your business that we need to understand? Gives broader view of what’s important to them

3. The account audit

1. Account structure ○ Campaigns ○ Tightly-themed ad groups? ○ Keywords and ads? 2. Quality Score ○ A high level look at active keywords, which have QS under 7 3. Ad Extensions ○ Are they using all the ad extensions they could be using? ○ Any quick wins available? 4. Campaign Settings ○ Everything look kosher? 5. Keywords

○ Sometimes there’s money left on the table, key keywords are missing (is key keywords redundant?) 6. Impression share 7. Networks ○ Are we running on both search and display? ○ Are we not on display because they failed miserably in the past? Might be a good time to try, try again … 8. Analytics ○ Who is their customer? Who comes to their site? Where are they coming from? ○ One time with an ecommerce client, was able to see how many more transactions came from returning customers → led to great retargeting campaign 9. Segmentation ○ Mobile vs. desktop – are they optimizing ad copy for mobile? Do they actually have a mobile landing page?

● Summary: Following these 3 steps will lead to happy client and successful account :)

DREW KARGES

● Another Canuck!

“Yesterday was pretty much a tropical day for me” “I love plaid, it’s kind of like wearing an excel sheet on your back” << Brilliant

AdWords Restructure

A case study on “inheriting a mess”

1. Start with an AdWords investigation – think like Sherlock

● Understand the data using Search Term Reports – data trends ● Understand the client – how do they like to communicate? What are their goals? Make sure you’re on the same page. ● Verify goals and tracking ● Understand the industry – What are competitors doing? Scope out their landing pages

2. Case study: Spartan College (learnings)

● Learned that 70% of budget was on broad match - $100+ CPL (x2) ● No enhanced SiteLinks - 1-15% CTR increase ● Duplicate search terms - 1-20 duplicated found ● Challenged preconceptions – tested new geographic areas

If you build it..

● Build efficiently ○ Use AdWords editor – copy/paste/replace is your friend ○ Build in themes ● Start with campaigns, then adgroups, then negative layering ● Double-check your build!

Negative keyword layering

● Prioritize key words from search terms ● Broad negative

● Essential negative keyword list

Example:

Launch Strategy

● Launch in phases (less likely to disrupt flow of account) ● Launch at once (if it’s a total mess) ● Launch at the right time (so you have the time to optimize)

Now it’s time to optimize …

Recap

● Understand the data ● Conceptualize a structure ● (Re)build the account ● Launch strategically ● Optimize like crazy ● Results! Now roll out to Bing...

------

Fill the Form: Driving Quality Leads and Delivering Results

Kristina McLane Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing

Alexa Feckanin, @AlexaFeck Paid Search Strategist, Fathom

Recipe for a successful lead gen campaign ● 1 part source (Google, Bing) ● 1 part landing page ● Time

Landing Page 101 ● Custom forms ● Alexa’s had clients that want super long forms, but they see shorter forms having more success ● Call To Action (should not be SUBMIT) ● Keep it simple - no excess navigation ● Testimonials ● Location-specific landing page for relevance if you have the option ● Awards and accreditations help build credibility even in your ad copy ● Phone number in the top right - NEVER VIA AN IMAGE ● Every campaign should have its own landing page (NSAMCWADLP)

Now that you have the perfect landing page, let’s get your paid search on ● The more you know about your customer, the more targeted and strategic you can be ● Who are they? ● What are their pain points? ● Where do they get their information? ● What do they want?

Quality Users with Keywords ● Include several variations (including plurals of everything) ● Target keywords to the solution, not just the problem ● A good negative will help deter low quality traffic ● Have a “vulgar” list for all accounts

Ad Copy Always look at what your competitors are doing ● Share with a client and ask what they’re doing that’s better

Extensions ● Prove credibility - review extensions help drive leads ● Clients may be nervous

Call Tracking ● Use 3rd party tools for monitoring phone calls ● Listen in and find out what the pain points are ● Also WHY they called ● Match the message to the why Use information for landing page copy, ad copy, etc.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads ● Great tool for nurturing ● Negating those that have converted ● Use general keywords now that searchers are more qualified ● Provide different messaging based on actions

Dynamic Search ● Great for expanding reach and identifying new keyword themes ● You can leverage remarketing list of all site visitors to help control cost ● Use general, but relevant ad copy since the URL and headline will be dynamically generated

Gmail Sponsored Ads ● Conversion-wise they work really well ● Take a long time started out ● You can put in competitor domains so that anyone opening an email from your competitor will see your ad there ● ⅔ of active Gmail users access their email on mobile

Negate Bad Leads ● Exclude Bing Ads syndicated partners ● Google Display Network is a poor lead source ● If you want to use it try “layered targeting” - Google Search Partners might work for some - Integrate a CRM system

CRM Benefits ● Decrease manual lead management ● Decrease CPL once implemented

● Pull reports on which keywords actually convert, optimize based on that ● In an example client decreased cost by 30%

Key Takeaways ● Landing page optimization << DO THIS ● Know your customers ● If you don’t have a CRM use a negate bad leads strategy ● CRM is your friend - SO MUCH DATA

The Conversion Journey (between the click and the money)

How do you deal with all the metrics?

Cupcake Logic (Huzzah!) ● You want a fancy cupcake not a couple of Hostess ones ie. Maybe you pay a little more for a lead, but if you get more revenue on the back end it’s worth it

Best way to just lead quality is a CRM ● Sometimes what looks great isn’t ● If your goal is only to decrease CPL, you might not be attracting the right type of person ● Optimize for ROAS, not CPL

What do I do? 1. Download the CRM data 2. Copy and paste into a campaign report 3. PIVOT

How can you cut the crappy leads? Match types ● 80% of the time you can trust your match type CPLs within the same campaigns ● Optimize for match type based on ROAS ● Campaigns will vary

Search vs. Display ● Display tends to take longer to close ● Display still contributes to the conversion journey

Budgeting and account structure ● The more specific the campaign is, the better ROAS ● Optimize for ROAS

GETTING BETTER NUMBERS ON THE BACK END IS WHAT MATTERS

Excel Solver by closing lead rate ● Helpful when you have strict monthly budgets - prioritizes what’s working ● There’s a how-to video on PPC Hero (don’t forget to substitute your own closing lead rate) ● Solves the best budget placement for you based on how much you can still spend - it’ll tell you where to place your budget to get the best return ● Assumes CPL is static

Questions Answered

How do you get CRM data? Client sends daily spreadsheet with specific fields (not all personal data)

How granular is too granular for optimizing your campaigns? Depends on the account, but the more quick the campaign, the more often, even daily for a high traffic campaign

Is there a difference in lead quality between content vs. free trial? Free trial is generally further through the funnel, than someone looking for content

Tip: Look at competitor ads to find points of difference you can highlight (Define your USP)

------

Forming Client Partnerships For Long-Term Success

Andrew Goodman, @andrew_goodman Page Zero Media

Jeff Baum, @jeffbaum71 Hanapin

ANDREW GOODMAN

● Taking on short-term projects will burn you out

1. Best clients relationships have come through referrals ○ 2nd best: very long sales cycle; 3rd best: successful cold pitches

2. Need to filter appropriate prospects – can’t cave on prices, have to communicate value of service (running PPC campaigns is hard) 3. Important to have a consistent onboarding process ○ Set expectations – can be painful but gets them on board from the beginning 4. These is more than one personal style – client respect introverts as much as extroverts 5. Agency culture – need to foster a culture of dedication and obsession ○ Hire people who are quirkily passionate about PPC ○ Invest in professional development 6. Credibility is key ○ Expert/peer recognition ○ Gravitas ○ Thought leadership ○ Develop tools and partnerships 7. Reporting and communication is key 8. Don’t make clients do stuff! ○ Almost 90% of time they’re happy for you to do it for them

JEFF BAUM

3 legs of the client relationship

1. Competency – do we have the chops? 2. Communication - need to get buy-in 3. Value – are they getting enough return on spend?

How to demonstrate competency

● Get professionally certified – builds trust ● Audit accounts – shows you have a plan of action ● Provide key insights and takeaways – shows you know how to unpack the data

How to communicate effectively

● Demonstrate a sense of urgency ● Listen actively ● Create a strategy roadmap

How to demonstrate value

● Performance – meet and exceed goals, hit “soft goals” like brand awareness when going gets rough ● Suggest new opportunities ● Conversion rate optimization – landing page testing (optimize copy and message match), apply PPC insights to other marketing channels (email, etc.)

------

From Target CPA to Maximizing Clicks: Using Google

Bid Management Tools

Google’s Bid Management Tools for Conversions

Elizabeth Laird Director of Paid Search Marketing, shopathome.com

● Search terms are important but there’s SO MUCH MORE o E.g. device, browser, locations ● Shopathome focuses on deals o Imagine a 45 yr old woman in Chicago on her desktop at 10am o She’s probably researching o Very different from a 25 yr old male in NYC at 8pm - he’s looking for immediate ● How you want to bid should be different for those, based on understanding who what person is

Intent + Right User Profile = Stronger ROI

CPA Bidding:

● Target CPA gets more volume that Max CPA ● Better results on GDN than search

Enhanced CPC Bidding

● Adjusting bid down up to 100% is a really powerful tool ● More responsive than conversion optimizer (better for time sensitive) ● You can remove demographics you don’t want to reach ● Grows from 50% up to almost 100% over time ● Decreased CPAs by about 20% for Elizabeth in testing

Return on Ad Spend Bidding can be kind of clunky

Overall ● Test again and again, things change over time. ECPC has improved dramatically to the benefit of marketers.

The Science of Maximizing Clicks (Conv) in Google AdWords

Bryan Minor, @BryanMinorPhD Chief Scientist, Acquisio

Tools of Optimization ● Google Conversion Optimizer ● Google AdWords Scripts ○ Growing ○ Used as glue between you and other things like databases ● Google AdWords API

○ Now it’s free, but takes time to learn

You pick an Optimization Tool to see what’s going on, but how?

● Transparency of formulations ● Skill set of team ● Customization required (you need something that’ll do what you need it to do) ● Data size and persistence requirements

Relationship between bid and CPC: ● Highly non-linear, varies throughout the day (examples shows 40% variation) ● Changing bids based on best current information, constantly updating ● Can’t currently see bid history in Google AdWords

Mobile optimization problem ● Average of 40% mobile in example ● Huge change from 1, 2, 3 years ago ● There are no pure mobile campaigns - you can only set bids at the device level

[Mobile Example] ● Typically bidding more and paying less for mobile

Fixed Budget Optimization ● It’s worth exploring the lower options ● Often you bid less and you get more

Summary: ● It’s important to define your problem to find the right tool to solve it ● Continuous testing is important

● Inefficiencies in the PPC market are exploited by good tools

Questions Answered:

Q: How do you test one bid option over another? ● Time length depends on conversions, but at least 30 days to let it work itself out

Q: When dealing with clients who have a product that’s geotargetting but in a competition where there’s 10-20 and the bids are $20-40 / click. How do you compete and stay relevant? ● Dynamic algorithms are really necessary

Q: Would you separate the mobile and desktop campaigns? ● Can’t anymore ● They’re really 2 campaigns in 1 ● Bryan monitors them both separately

Q: Are there any indicators that you need to work on QS before you go back to your bidding? ● Elizabeth says it’s hard to test anything if your account isn’t in order ● Target CPA in AdWords automatically optimizes for conversion ● Statistical significance is a common problem #PPCProblems

------

How Smart Marketers Bridge Content and PPC Marketing

Eva McKnight, @evachristine09 & Tyler Cook Formstack

● Content Marketers vs. PPC Marketers ● Bridging a personality divide ● Back and forth “here’s something, promote it” from Content Team ● Always need to know the goal of the content

How to initiate the conversation between content + PPC? ● Need to collaborate in advance ● What is the point of this content?

One simple question: “What works?” ● What audiences, keywords work so you can plan together on building the right content

Breakthrough moment for Formstack - a competitor (Adobe), retiring their form tool ● They were the first to know, thanks to monitoring via Google Alerts ● Formstack started building campaigns that night ● Built out list of keywords people might search when looking to move off of competitor ● Built a landing page to allow people to easily transition ● Super-targeted PPC campaign built on live information ● Also included a social campaign reaching out to people tweeting worries about the transition

● Everything on the campaign pushed to specific landing pages that showed how Formstack was a great tool for the transition

Pro Tip: Dig back into archives and revive old content ● PPC team found existing content previously used for organic search campaign and built paid campaign around it ● Awesome to have evergreen content that you can build different campaigns around ● The visitors don’t know it’s not brand new because if you catch them at the right time it’s super timely to them

Discover ways you can build off of “wins” ● Formstack had a rad webinar that outperformed their others ● They built another campaign around the same content

Establish baseline questions to ask each other ● What is the end goal of this piece of content? << SO IMPORTANT - is it lead gen? ● Who is this content aimed at? << know who you’re talking to ● What promotional collateral do you need? ● What is your tentative launch date? << helps give context to how much you can ● Can we create more content like this? << build off you wins!

Create new target audiences based on your discussions

Write winning ads to complement the content ● Write a lot of them, stretch it, get creative

Harness the power of images that resonate with your audience

● If you don’t have in-house, use free stock images (be careful to use relevant and professional, not “obvious” stock)

Once you get traffic on your page, MAKE SURE IT CONVERTS ● No matter how great you content, audience, or ads, if you don’t have a great landing page, your visitors won’t convert

Create a “social” form to increase conversions up to 189% ● Pre-populate forms with your visitors’ social data

Think beyond a basic contact form ● Get creative with different types of forms

Time paid promotion with peak activity/submission

Questions Answered

Tyler suggests allthefreestock.com for free images

Test how often you can reuse content - there’s no hard and fast rule on timelines

Formstack’s sales team reports on which leads, from which content are most likely to actually become customers — this gives them focus for what type of content to make

------

How to Win with The Unexpected

John Gagnon, @jmgagnon Bing Advertising Evangelist, Microsoft

This talk looks at voice search and remarketing:

● When you distract people, it made the away time loses. ● Text search are usually 1 - 3 keywords long ● Voice search are 4-10 keywords long. 30 of the top voice searches on mobile are brand related. ● Question words are huge in voice search. Bid on brand names. ● SEO gets 56% of click on brand name. Add in SEO + PPC and you get 88% of brand clicks. 50% of the latter were PPC with an 18% overlap when you use both SEO + PPC for brand bidding. ● Look at ways to add remarketing pixel to target people interested in your brand. ● Look at events and try to figure out when people will be in the real world that you’ll want to target and how you can market to them ● Don’t do one size fits all marketing. Look how things like school start dates or an even start date changes from city to city or year to year.

------

Keynote with Brian Sise

Every Tweet Sends Signals: How to Tap Into Intent on Twitter

Bryan Sise, @bryansise

Product Marketing Team Lead & Sr. Mgr., Twitter

You can detect emerging intent on Twitter because tweets send signals.

The Opportunity ● When moments happen in the real world they happen on Twitter ● 500 millions tweets a day ● Half a billion “moments” ● People often think of large televised events as those moments, like the Superbowl, which saw 28.4 million tweets ● World Cup 35.6 million tweets - 580k tweets per minute at peak

For us marketers there’s other moments that are much more relevant ● everyday moments ● e.g. Sophie is checking out Twitter in a cafe ● Sophie tweets about looking forward to her coffee When you look at data on Twitter, what you might think is unrelated, is actually predictable ● Back to our example, we’re a competing coffee shop trying to market to Sophie when it’s most relevant ● Lets use keywords to target Sophie ● Seconds after Sophie tweets about her love of coffee, our promoted tweet pops into Sophie’s timeline (automatically served based on her everyday moment)

Active Intent ● There are only so many people who are actively telling you they’re looking for ● Your audience may be larger than you think: ● active intent might be where you focussed: +emerging intent

+influenceable

Example: Home Buying ● Active intent - search “mortgage pre-approval ● Emerging intent - tweet “which neighbourhood have good schools in Portland?” ● Influenceable - tweet “it’s a boy”

Example: Running Shoes ● Active intent - search “Nike Lunarglide” ● Emerging intent - tweet “going for a run” ● Quite likely in the near future they’ll be in need of new running shoes Influenceable - tweet “Nike” ● Lots of people like the Nike brand

Twitter worked with Nike to identify trends of when people were going for a run to target people in the personal moment and engage with them in a meaningful way

Richer Moments ● 80% of users access Twitter on mobile ● Photos and videos are now easily accessible for users

Your Objective ● We all want to scale up our campaigns to drive conversions ● When creating a twitter campaign the first thing you do is set an objective ● When you you select conversion as your goal, Twitter will tailor (swift) the workflow and distill the analytics

To Drive Website Conversions

1. Creative

Promote Your Content You can target anyone on Twitter you want with promoted tweets, not just your followers

Website card Ad type to maximize site traffic e.g. Toms, Sainsbury’s Users see a preview of the product advertised and a strong call to action

Photo Card Image is front and centre

Gallery Card Represent a collection of images in a single tweet

2. Targeting

Keyword targeting allows you to reach users who recently used your keywords Interest targeting is based on who the user follows on Twitter e.g. you could target based on star snowboard Shaun White to target snowboarders

Keyword Targeting ● Many of the same best practices from search ● Precision tool that allows you to hone in to the right people at the right time ● Who AND when ● Every tweet contains signals of intent

Match Types ● Same match types from search

Overlays ● Geography, gender, device, language e.g. spanish speaking women on android phones who recently tweeted or engaged with the phase “leche”

Twitter’s Website Tag ● Conversion tracking ● Remarketing ● Track all conversion paths ● View conversion analytics

Best Practices ● Use what you learned from search ...but Twitter is a different bird (do you see what I did there?!) Test high-performing keywords from search Mine the long tail ● requires a time investment to find the less frequent, niche keywords, but those are likely to drive especially high engagement Use tightly-themed keyword groups Optimize with keyword analytics ● remove low performing keywords ● TEST TEST TEST Use always-on campaigns ● You don’t know when a user’s “everyday moment” will happen so this allows you to be ready and waiting

Twitter is a Different Animal ● People don’t tweet the same way they search ● When people search, they know they’re talking to a machine, but with tweets, they’re talking to people ● Come at it from a different angle e.g. search: “boy infant clothes” vs. tweet: “his first birthday” e.g. search: “attorney auto accident” vs. tweet: “hit my car” e.g. search: “continuing education florida” vs. tweet: “a job i love” Twitter user open to message from a higher education advertiser ● Brainstorm moments when a person might be open to your message ● Identify moments of emerging intent

Add Value to Everyday Moments ● A good example is Lowe’s - serving up solutions to every problems like a stripped screw ● Users love it when brands add value to their everyday lives

------

Keynote with Surojit Chatterjee

Evolving Customer Behaviors: The Full Value of Your Ads

Surojit Chatterjee, Director of Product Management, Mobile Search Advertising and AdSense, Google

1. Overview: Technology embedded into our lives, making it more challenging for marketers

● Mobile came to his rescue in the Costa Rican rainforest – started to rain and he was able to find a shop to buy rain gear ● This was a frictionless experience – a “moment” ● Google is about making these sorts of moments for consumers 2. Cross-device behavior ● 90% of people use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time ● 98% move between devices that same day ● US travel – a high-consideration vertical – 9% cross-device conversions (new conversions), 20% more conversions can be attributed to paid mobile search when cross-device behavior is taken into account ● Conversions increased in other verticals like entertainment, tech, retail and local when cross-device behavior taken into account

3. Calls as conversions ● 70% of mobile searches have called a business directly from search results ● Example – Miller’s Bakery – used dynamic keyword replacement and a click-to-call ● Mobile call conversion rate is 700% greater than mobile online – users love to call before making a conversion ● New: Call only campaigns – allows consumers to call directly from ad (no landing page) 4. In-store conversions ● Online is driving offline impact – no one has been able to quantify the impact of online ads on offline sales ● 34% of people who search on PC/tablet visit a store within a day of their search, 50% on smartphones ● Store sales – working with consumer data brokers to match AdWords clicks with actual store transactions – Can upload PoS data into AdWords

● Example: Express – For brand keywords, retailer found that search traffic was almost doubling in-store sales ● Store visits – Google can calculate how many people are looking at an ad and visiting a store – How? #science ● Use Street View data to map the geometry of buildings so they can distinguish whether consumer actually walked into a store – operations team measures signal strength of store router, location history, etc. – Continuing to improve data (machine learning) ● Customer success with store visits – PetSmart seeing a 10-18% store visit rate (percent of clicks on search ads that lead to store visit), Famous Footwear seeing 15-17%; Sprint – 25% ● Retailers seeing 4x more conversions when measuring store visits, 10x on mobile; Auto and travel - 2x more conversions overall when store visits taken into account ● Best practices for driving foot traffic ○ Landing page – need to be mobile-optimized ○ Location extensions ○ Proximity-based bidding ○ Ad creative ○ Mobile bids

5. How do we bring it all together?

● Focus on the right metrics – not every channel will give you the same type of performance – ex. Mobile most important during consideration and awareness stages, drives more follow-up actions like cross-device and in-store ● Value your best customers – think about long-term value for customers, identify high-value customers (not just about that last conversion)

● Attribute value across channels – divvy up the value of the conversions across all touch points (disclaimer: This is hard) ● Validate impact – need to understand the incremental impact of your marketing investment, each channel – comes down to setting up valid tests ● This is not just a challenge for Google, it’s a challenge for the whole industry – working closely together with partners ● No longer about Impression > Click > Conversion – Landscape more complex and diverse and marketers’ expectations are higher (want to measure conversions across channels and stage of awareness) ● Final note: ‘Let’s work on this together!’

Q&A

● Very confident about sample size – all sign-in users who have enabled location services ● (Some skepticism in crowd over case studies, data – ability to distinguish client’s store from competitor’s store) ● A lot of customers using store sales and store visits in conjunction ● Requires sophisticated data management, partnerships to calculate store visits – still not accessible to everyone

------

Keynote with Tim Ash

The Context and the Power of Framing: Biasing Your Offer with Irrational Neuromarketing

Tim Ash, @tim_ash CEO SiteTuners

Part I: Brain Basics When your brain isn’t being used for other processes, it defaults to social processes.

We share our limbic system with all mammals – we are all herd animals. If you have a strong feeling about something then you memorize it.

In general, you need to remember that your web visitors are lazy. They like simple choices. Much of their behavior is on autopilot.

95% of our actions are pre-conscious

Things that really matter: the four Fs ● Feeding ● Fight ● Flight ● Fornicate

How the brain actually works

It’s only when we’re faced with something new that our conscious brain kicks in. We only use it when we have to.

The old sales funnel Attention Interest Desire Action

The real sales Funnel Brain stem Limbic system

Cerebral cortex

Part II: Creating Compelling Offers: Taking Advantage of Brain Biases

Overview of strategies ● Limit choice: We like to be able to choose between things we like: books, wine, movies. But people don’t want to have to choose between packages on your ecommerce site.

“You’re paralyzing me with choice.”

○ Only 4 items can be kept in your short-term memory so don’t give more choice than that ○ Never overwhelm with choice (unless you are talking about quick visual scanning of physical items that are substantially different visually – then scrolling is more convenient) ○ When appropriate, help guide customers (wizards – not filtering) ○ When creating Information Architectures for catalog navigation, go deeper and narrower (Not shallow and wide)

● Make choices obvious: ○ Use visuals to make choices clear ○ Remove similar pictures ○ Focus/enlarge/distort important distinctions

● Visually bias: The visual biases we have are to make the world more efficient for us. ○ Screen position ○ Amonit of visual space

○ Background color ○ Anchoring images for extra emphasis ○ Contrast or uniqueness ○ Motion (the nuclear option: “In the presence of graphics/motion, text will not be seen”) ■ Always ask if your embellishment serves the call to action on the page.

● Manipulate context and order: Use known cognitive biases to bias toward the option you want people to take ○ Priming, framing and context matter ○ We anchor on the first thing we see ○ Add a new high-end option (which will not sell well) ○ Show in decreasing price order ○ Sales of reasonable compromise will increase ○ Irrational anchors can be put in the “lobby”

● Understand that prices are pain ● Price activates the loss-avoidance mechanism – experienced as physical pain ● Loss avoidance is about twice as powerful as upside gain for motivation ● To minimize perceived price pain: “only pennies per day” ● To maximize contrast with more expensive alternative: “Don’t overpay by $100 per year!” ● Removing currency symbols lessens pain (Not seen as a visual trigger that we are conditioned to) ● Strike-through higher prices help frame lower pain

------

Lead Gen & eCommerce PPC: You Got The Conversion, Now What?

Andrew Miller, @AndrewCMiller Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

The PPC Challenge: Buying clicks and generating conversions is no longer enough!

Your job isn’t done after you capture a lead or make the sale. We can look further down the funnel and find out what happens after a lead is submitted and after they buy.

What is happening after our PPC campaign runs its course?

Your PPC Campaigns Most clicks you get won’t convert. Most leads you get won’t convert.

Start by asking two questions:

1. Of all the clicks we’re getting/buying, which convert to a closed sale? 2. How can I get more visitors like them?

Answering question #1: Of all the clicks we’re getting/buying, which convert to a closed sale?

1. Capture campaign data in your CRM a. Campaign & KW data b. Ad creative c. Offer d. Landing page variant

Campaign/data Promotion/offer Whisper messages

Customized sales pitches Calculate customer lifetime value

2. Track offline sales in AdWords

● Import CRM data from offline sales to create AdWords conversions ● Identify the campaigns, keywords, and ads that generated an offline sale

3. Nurture those leads

Answering question #2: How can I get more visitors like them?

4. Remarket to advanced segments

The more segmented you can make your remarketing campaigns, the more successful they’re going to be.

Focus on the bottom of the funnel with your remarketing campaigns instead of trying to retargeting everyone all the time. ie Are people abandoning your shopping cart? That’s an easy win.

5. Find lookalike audiences

You have customers who are raving fans – you know who they are and which channels they come from.

There are millions of people who are like your customers but they haven’t found you yet, so you can’t remarket to them.

Depending on which platform you’re on, this feature will be called something different.

Overlay other targeting methods over lookalike audiences and watch the dollars closely.

6. Measure assisted conversions

Which upstream channels contribute to your conversions? What other traffic sources did people come through before they came to your site to convert?

Last-click conversions vs. all the different steps in customer’s history.

Assign value to traffic channels they came from before.

Don’t rely on last-click conversions. Look up the chain and assign value to other channels.

Don’t shut off banner ads just because they don’t lead to conversions. IT may not be a direct conversion, but they could still be contributing.

7. Compare attribution models

The math behind how you assign values to each interaction before conversion. Look at different ways to assign value to a video view on YouTube, or banner ad impression.

100

Find this in analytics (in the conversion tab) and use it.

8. Identify trends with cohort analysis

Looking at the delay between a site visit and a conversion.

101

Recency & frequency method: how long ago and how often did people come to our site? This helps you determine how frequently and at what interval you need to be reaching out to people.

Where are drop offs occurring?

Recap 1. Measure conversions and ROI 2. Analyze segments and cohorts 3. Figure out what’s working and expand on it (audience + channels) 4. Refine. Add more data to the mix. Never set it & forget it!

102

------

Leveraging Analytics To Boost Your PPC Performance

Ashleigh Bunn, @AnalyticsAsh Director, Digital Analytics, American Cancer Society

Jamie Smith, @JamieSmithnow VP of Growth, iSpionage.com

Attribution Model by Jamie Smith ● Build model around 3 Cs: Creativity, Continuity and Conversion. ● Over 20% of sales happens after the 5th visit to site ● 5 sources of analytics data ○ Web / Calls Analytics ○ Google AdWords ○ Customer: demo and psycho graph data ○ Product and service data ○ Competitor data ● Shows multi-touch point customer journey across all channels ● Display is heavily associated to assisted conversions ● Remarketing is more direct vs assisted conversions ● Call analytics vendor, like Bionic, report in real time to Google Analytics ● Uses Position Based: 40% to 1st & last click each. remaining clicks get the remain 20% points.

103

● Look for more profitable ad position within AdWords for CPA vs just what you’re paying for each click. ● IP Exclusion in Google Analytics. Block competitors from seeing your ads.

Digital Analytics by Ashleigh Bunn ● Where does your data live: AdWords, Google Analytics..other platform? ● Figure out what your goals are and how they align with the data in your analytics platform. This will help you understand micro and macro economics. ● Run regular search query reports in AdWords ● Look at Hour of Day report in Google Analytics for micro-conversions. ● Build segments around people who buy often or donate a lot to your site and build a remarketing list around those segmentations in Google Analytics

------

Making The Case For Match Type Segmentation

Amanda West-Bookwalter, @Amanda_Westbook Senior Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing

Why segment by match type?

104

What if a search term has multiple keywords it could match to?

There are three rules:

1. If you have a keyword that is identical to the search term, the system will prefer to use this keyword to trigger an ad. This is true even if there are other keywords in your ad group that are similar to the search term. 2. If you have multiple keywords that are the same, the system will prefer to use exact match. 3. When several broad match keywords in your ad group broadly match the search term, the system will prefer to use the keyword with the highest ad rank.

With two exceptions …

105

1. On rare occasion, the system will prefer to use a keyword that is cheaper. If its in the same ad group, this means it as a lower cost-per-click bid and has a higher Ad Rank. If there are multiple keywords in multiple ad groups, similar to the search term, it needs to have a lower bid, a higher ad rank and a better quality score. 2. When one keyword contains the entirety of another keyword, the system prefers to use the longer keyword.

Why is this a problem?

● Negative effect of metrics

106

● Waste of money ● Less relevant ads/LPs

How do you fix it once you’ve identified a problem?

See the impact of match type cross-contamination ● Pull a search term report (90 days recco) ● Add the “keyword” column ● Download & delete report dates & totals ● Select all & run a pivot table, dropping “search term” into row label, and “count of keywords” in values

Then see how many keywords each search term has matched to in the date range.

Go back to your report, search for most egregious.

107

How do we fix this?

Two options for segmentation

1. Ad Group Level ● Fewer campaigns ● Can make custom ads ● Embedded negatives at the ad group level

2. Campaign level ● More campaigns ● Can make custom ads ● Embedded negatives with campaign level lists in the shared library

108

● Control budgets by match type

Analyze performance by match type A difference in performance dictates a need for budget control

*Consider excluding or segmenting branded or similar campaigns

Negative impacts of embedded negatives?

● Loss of “top level” views, difficult to analyze data at top levels ○ Labels and campaign grouping ● Volume loss from embedded negatives ○ Exclude LSV from embedded negatives

Low Search Volume

● For initial embedded negative lists, run a report for all LSV keywords ● Do not include any LSV keywords in embedded negative lists ● Re-run this once a month

An account-wide restructure? ● Careful! You could wipe history and shock your account ● Implement slowly, start with most egregious performance

Starting with a fresh account? ● Start with segmentation! Save time down the road (easier to set up with a template than copy/paste later) ● Avoid lost history of restructures

109

Landing Page Optimization by Observable Data and Match Type

Mike Olson Director of Online Experience, Beachbody

Observable data: a physical property such as weight or temperature that can be observed or measured directly, as distinguished from a quantity, such as work or entropy, that must be derived from observed quantities.

So what?

The process of diving what you can about the person “across the table” based upon whatever characteristics they will show you.

Characteristics and their levels:

● Physical: combo – limitations, assets, etc ● Auditory: gender, location ● Membership: demographic deep-layer ● Cookie: demographic mid-layer ● Search: hmm …

We really don’t know a ton when someone clicks on a search ad.

What data does a user reveal in their search terminology?

If a user is searching for size 13 shoes, you can safely assume they are male. If a user is search for cat food, you can assume (hopefully) that they have a cat.

110

Observable search:

● Circumstances: “sale,” “fast,” “closeout” ● Preferences: color, scale, size, amount ● Level of interest: breadth of search can show intent. Exact/broad/phrase/negative

Simple examples

Insanity Max 30 workout landing page: ● Folks attracted to Insanity brand was a heavy-duty workout. They want a lot of results in a short period of time. Headline that works well: ○ The craziest 30 minutes of your day for the Best Results of your life Triggers:

● “sale” - language, design, offers ○ Tested putting item in shopping card 5 cents cheaper than advertized - resulted in double digit increase in conversions. ● Color - design, intro/extro-version ● Exact/broad/phrase/negative - Level of focus can often show level of commitment. Negative results testing should come last.

Recap:

● Observe: what does the user give you when he comes in the door ● Characteristics plan: what do observations tell you? ● Triggers for page design/copy: how do observations translate to page? Include those triggers in your page design and copy. TEST: no, really. TEST IT!

111

------

Open Your Eyes To Advanced AdWords Scripts

Steve Hammer, @armondhammer President RankHammer

Christi Olson, @ChristiJOlson Director of SEM Point It

Presentation

This talk is geared to non-coders.

112

● Scripts allow you to be more strategic and not tactical ● What you can change automatically will make you better & free up time ● Anything you can do in the UI you can do with scripts ● Scripts are like javascripts, coding in excels ● Write code in Notepad++ first ○ Outlines code ○ Makes it easier to see what is happening ● Scripts ARE case sensitive and MUST be written camelCase ● You will see a lot of /* or // in your code is normal ● Spaces only matter in quotes like “” ● Always preview your script before you run it ● Loggers: where data can be hidden and if your code gets executed

113

● Selector: You can And statements ● Variables: Discrete, Arrays and Objects...are how you order your code ● Payload: This is where the code happens ● When you take other people’s scripts...updated URL and email fields in the code

Getting Your Training on Scripts ● Good Training Places: ○ W3Schools.com ○ Codecademy ○ FreeAdWordsScripts.com. Acc audit script ○ www.brainlabsdigital.com/adwords-scripts ● AdWords Scripts To Get Started: Bit.ly/ScriptsToUse ● AdWords Editors = Debugger

------

PPC + LPO: Insider Strategies For High-Converting Campaigns

Oli Gardner, @oligardner Co-Founder, Unbounce

Lance Loveday, @loveday CEO, Closed Loop

114

LANCE LOVEDAY

5 Strategy Tips

Tip #1 - See the big picture

● It used to be all search all the time, and it’s just not the case anymore. Rapid change in a short period of time. ● Used to be 92% - now 37%! (over 3 years) ● Takeaways from this: ○ This fragmentation is likely to continue (and our jobs might be a little bit harder). ○ We have to be a little more bold and adventurous with CPC than we have been in the past. Take risks because these forms of targeting that are coming out might seem strange, but chances are they’re going to catch on. ● Optimizing PPC to target larger companies? Full funnel tracking has enabled us to tease out really good intelligence from the data. ● We’re increasing reliance on security data and this affect is that it increases our accurate leads

Tip #2 - Check yourself

● Audit! You really need to have more than one person auditing your scorecards.

Tip #3 - Buy the most valuable traffic first

● Spend and budget allocation is often an overlooked strategy for people (too focused on algorithms and bid management).

115

● Look at your impression share for opportunities - it’s a directional indicator for a chance to restructure the campaign or reallocate spending

Tip #4 - Listen to what your quality score is telling you

● Again, directional indicators will tell you obvious clues. ● What is the biggest component of quality score? ○ CLICK THROUGH RATE (CTR) ○ Don’t let any other information dissuade you from that.

Tip #5 - You’re not done until the cash register rings

● Dig into the data and not just look into the main number ○ IE, if there are 6000 people who are signed up for your product, but 3000 don’t install the software (even though they converted) then you have work to do

BONUS tip - Perform a landing page audit (see below):

● How many landing pages do you have? ● What’s your traffic and spend by LP? ● Which have the best conversion rate and CPA? ● What’s the load time on those pages? ● Do you have any broken link? ● Are you sending traffic to old/wrong pages? ○ Visualize your LP ecosystem ■ take photos of your landing pages and put them all in front of you ○ Never review ads and landing pages in isolation - HUGE mistake.

116

■ Why? Because you can quickly eyeball and say ‘does everything match up here.

OLI GARDNER

● How do you make a delightful marketing campaign? ○ 7 principles of conversion centered design ● How to plot yourself on the campaign curve ● Get goodies: get.unbounce.com/heroconf-goodies ● Attention ratio: is the number of things you can do on a page to the number of things you should be doing ○ this ration should be 1:1 ● NSAMCWADLP principle ○ never start a marketing campaign without a dedicated landing page

7 principles of conversion centered design:

Principle #1 - Focus attention to focus on your goal ● as attention ratio goes down, conversion rates go up ● Oli has 23 principles of attention driven design ● Direction ○ point at things if you want them to be important ● Contrast ● Encapsulation ● Proximity ○ elements that are closer together are perceived to be related ● Dominance ○ this is two things: size and proximity

117

*Note: Form first design - if you’re communicating well with your form, you’re doing a good job

What’s more important than anything else is the information hierarchy → copy informs design, not the other way around!

Principle #2 – context

Principle #3 – clarity

Principle #4 – congruence

Principle #5 – credibility

Principle #6 - closing ● Put something near the closing action help it convert better ○ IE, “sign up for this webinar anyway and we’ll send you a recording, even if you can’t make it!”

Principle #7 - Continuance

RECAP

NEVER START A MARKETING CAMPAIGN WITHOUT A DEDICATED LANDING PAGE (NSAMCWADLP)!

118

------

PPC For Social: Leveraging Paid And Organic Campaigns For Facebook And LinkedIn

Elizabeth Marsten, @ebkendo Director of PPC, CommerceHub

Heather Cooan, @HeatherCooan Manager, Paid Advertising, Infusionsoft

Before Launch ● Can we try them all at once? Yes, focus on quality and where your audience is. ● Define success goals before you launch e.g. likes, followers & conversions ● Define end date of campaign

Audience ● Where do they hang out online; social vs message boards? ● B2B social selling: 81% marketers uses communities and blogs, 74% use Linked In, 42% Twitter to find information about a product they want

Budget ● Figure out how long your campaign will run before you think about how much to spend. Try to see how much a 1,000 clicks will cost for a test run. ● Look at where you will influence the purchase funnel and pull budget from that

119

Reporting & Attribution ● Look at adding assisted conversions; across business and channels ● 1st & last clicks each get 30% attribution. Other clicks get the rest. ● Play with the model as you build reports over time.

The Future ● Mobile is here of course ● LinkedIn buys Bizo and now you can retarget people

------

PPC Heroes' Favorite Excel Hacks

Matt Umbro, Diane Anselmo, Kristina McLane, Jacob Brown Hanapin Marketing

Ad Copy / Landing Page Testing: ● Using excel to come up with significant levels ● Trying to improve impressions until conversion ● Can also do conversions per click or CTR ● Get your college on - use the Z-score ● In the first week, if it’s 95% or higher, move to next test ● Second week 90%, third week 85%

Quick Keyword Tool

120

● Take your categories and modifiers and have it generate keywords for you

Metric Correlations =CORREL(array 1,array 2) ● Highlighting a selection of data, and comparing to another highlighted section of data and seeing if there’s any correlation 1 is an exact correlation -1 is a negative correlation 0 is no correlation (Above 0.5 either way is significant)

E.g. is there any relationship between my display campaigns and branded conversions? ● Download campaign report segmented by network and month (for last 12 months) ● Set up the data laid out horizontally ● Use correlation equation ● If it’s above 0.5 there’s correlation

Uses: avg. position, impressions, clicks, assisted metrics, offline revenue, competitive metrics ● Some things will obviously correlate, so don’t bother testing that

Index + Match = Perfect Together ● Sometimes V-Lookup just isn’t enough ● Index match is great for larger data groups, none horizontal data, etc ● It’s a little more complicated, but holds a lot of power

Filters ● Easily segment data

121

● Make sense of large amounts of data ● Use findings to create new campaigns ● Find top (and poor) performing: ● Keywords ● Text ads ● Search queries e.g. You can find high performing SKUs and create a campaign around them, or the opposite, break out lower performing SKUs and bid lower on those keywords

Questions Answered

How often do you use macros? Once a month, a way of checking that you’re not missing anything

Any recommended add-ons or plugins? Bing Ads Intelligence

How do you learn new specific ways to set up your own Excel? ● Top tip: you can find lots of great YouTube videos if you search (especially searching from something specific) ● PPC Hero’s blog has a whole section dedicated to Excel

What do we do with correlation? A guide to direct strategy

What are your favorite ways to visualize data? Heat maps, geography, conversion rate Hour of day

122

------

PPC Heroes' Favorite PPC Mistakes: Lessons Learned

Mismanaging Restricted Budgets

Develop a strategic bid plan Increased bis = higher CPCs = less traffic Ad rank increase = CTR increase = QS increase = CPC decrease

The Biggest Blunders and what I learned

Google Display Network

Ordered by CEO to shut down profitable GDN campaigns and relaunch them in separate accounts. Campaigns lost 5k per day Sunk profit for entire department and was near fired

Location targeting: What targeting?

Important AdWords campaign o Bing Import went smooth (So I thought) Spent entire months budget in 16 hours

123

Geo-targeting flipped to “entire world” during import Had more clicks from Africa than in Erie PA

I’ve Made a Huge Mistake

Jeff Allen, @JeffAllenUT President, Hanapin Marketing

Know your business ● What’s your difference that matters? ● Who would care if your business no longer existed? ● What’s your typical customer journey? ● What are your most profitable products/services?

Making decisions in isolation ● Sit in on client/customer service calls ● Survey existing clients ● Ask frontline employees ● Track behavior on your website

Now That I’m All Growed Up: The Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Amanda West-Bookwalter, @Amanda_Westbook Senior Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing

Running a campaign:

Ad URL updates never happened And no tracking was added to any of the URLs And … … they ran and ran . …

124

Until someone on the team noticed. :|

What went wrong? The ads weren’t in the same platform, thus no automatic URL updates.

Why?

The rookie didn’t understand the project. The QA and follow up processes were incomplete.

What did I learn?

1. How tracking works (it’s important to understand how everything ties together) 2. QA isn’t just about looking for the obvious stuff. 3. Every account has its own nuances. Learn them. Teach them. 4. Keep the lines of communication open when problems arise. 5. If you find a problem, identify who can help you decide how to handle it 6. Set up systems to ensure it doesn’t happen again 1. Scare the PPC children with your horror.

------

PPC in Your Hand: Search Advertising for Mobile Devices

Scott Finholm, @Finholm

125

Sr Manager, Bing Ads, Mobile Microsoft

Aaron Levy, @bigalittlea SEM Account Executive, Elite SEM

Microsoft Is Going Mobile First (like Facebook) by Scott Finholm ○ Especially after Nokia purchase. Stores will be Microsoft stores soon. ● Bing search in UK and US has 20% market share ● Mobile is 26% traffic VS 21% last year ● Only 11% of PPC campaigns are mobile optimized ● Call out mobile, use ad extensions & locations & hour targeting ● Sitelink extensions can improve CRT by 20% on Bing ● 61% mobile calls are ready to convert ● 47% mobile searchers would explore other brands for needs

Mobile Behaviours By Aaron Levy ● Mobile thrives in boredom, downtime and weekend hours. ● Use estimated conversions by Google for mobile attribution ● Mobile users switch 15% more than desktop users. ● Shorten titles & description lines to fix mobile screens ○ Title: 15 characters with spacing ○ Line 1 & 2: 25 characters with spacing ● 40% of Facebook’s revenue is mobile only ● Think about the picture associated with mobile

------

126

PPC Strategy for Startups

Esther Hwang, @essty Dollar Shave Club

Sahil Jain, @sahilio AdStage

ESTHER HWANG

1. Setting Realistic Goals ● Need to hit goals in order to keep investors happy, acquire the next round of funding ● Early vs. Late Stage ○ Early – Building a customer base most important, KPI = cost per goals, cost per sale, cost per acquisition, cost per page view ○ Late – Building brand awareness, brand affinity

2. Tracking ● Lean and efficient SEM – focus on bottom of funnel, one or two campaigns at a time ● Mobile vs. desktop

3. Campaign Setup & Structure ● Exact or broad match ● Importance of good naming convention - easy to transfer account to team member

127

4. Bidding strategies ● Manual bidding always best – algorithms can take on a life of their own

5. Save time with Excel ● “There’s a reason the performance team are the only ones in marketing working on PCs instead of Macs” ● Excel shortcuts and badassery: Hot keys, pivot tables, VLookup, Concatenate, Text to Columns, Remove Duplicate

6. Turn on your competitive radar ● SERP – what are your competitors ranking for? ● Auction Insights – Who are the big fish in your industry? ● SpyFu, SEM Rush – recommended tools ● Landing Pages – What types of call to actions are they using?

SAHIL JAIN

1. The #1 Mistake PPC advertisers make = sending paid traffic to your homepage instead of your landing page :( ● Focus on your “post-click environment”

2. Why landing pages? ● Higher conversions – Make CTA super clear ● Better Quality Score – Match creative on ad and landing page – If LP is not relevant or specific, you’re going to take a hit on QS ● Improved customer experience – Page needs to communicate value proposition

3. Optimizing your landing pages ● Start with very distinct landing pages and find overall winner

128

● Then get iterative – small incremental changes

4. Budgeting

● Startups scared to spend money ● Allocating smaller budgets for performance ● Cheap campaign = search brand campaigns – main keyword is company name, only spent $30/week – Google recognizes that you’re brand owner ● Another affordable campaign type = Retargeting campaigns, based on website traffic (which won’t be too high when you’re an early stage startup)

5. Driving more value

● Only focus on campaigns that are really, really good ● Amplify budgets around your press releases – “Pufferfish strategy” – Make your brand look bigger than it is around key PR campaigns

6. PPC advertising channels and your marketing funnel ● Display – Awareness ● Social — Interest ● Search – Intent ● Retargeting – Repeat

7. “Content is the new ad type”

● Need to create content that’s relevant and helpful to your audience, not to promote yourself ● Have a strong content roadmap, use social to promote and search to amplify ● Other amplification platforms include LinkedIn, Facebook Outbrain, Taboola

129

● MailMunch – recommended tool to capture emails on content pages ● For a long time, Bing performed better for AdStage than Google – less competitive

Optimizing your landing page vs. optimizing your website ● Very difficult to make your homepage speak to all your products ● Website about brand awareness and SEO, landing pages for conversion, lead generation ● Use Unbounce for landing pages, Optimizely to test your website

------

The Psychology of PPC: How Consumer Behavior Affects You

AdWords Customizer Countdown: Assessing the impact of the countdown customizer on user behavior

Matt Umbro, @Matt_Umbro Senior Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing

The Crowded Search Real Estate

There are a lot of great features …

130

● Extended headline ● Callout extension ● Sitelinks extension ● Seller ratings extension ● Location extension ● Google+ followers

But it’s easy to get lost and make your ads look too busy. …

It’s important to make sure that your text ads stand out – and that’s when the countdown customizer comes in.

“6 Days Left to Take 30% Off” “Flash Sales Ends in 1 Hour”

An Overview of the Countdown Customizer

131

What’s so great about it? ● It encourages urgency ● Tells searcher to act now ● Better promotes your offer ● Elicits eyeballs

Countdown Customizer Case Study ● Ads ran from 11/1/14 - 3/24/15 (busy season) ● Peak season begins in mid January ● Countdown was in description line 1 of 98.43% of impressions

Two types of countdowns: 1. Promotions: Free shipping, sales

132

2. Event: Beginning of spring – wasn’t talking about a specific promotion but was highlighting that spring was coming shortly.

When comparing countdown clicks vs. static ads, 10% of clicks came from countdown ads and the countdown ads had 2% higher CTR.

In other words, they were eliciting more eyeballs and resulted in more clicks.

● Countdown ads had higher CTR than static ads ● Countdown ads accounted for 17% of conversions with 10.5% of the clicks ● Conversion rate of countdown ads was nearly double that of static ads

How did the performance differ by time left?

● For the promotion case study, the sweet spot was 1-2 days beforehand. ● For the event case study, conversion rate was higher when there were 20-30 days left. As it went down to 2-3 days, conversion rate went down. Conversions went back up again on the last day.

Next Steps ● Test time until an event – webinar, conference ● Only available for X time ● Highlight an ongoing offer ● Promote awareness for new services or products

Behavioral Economics & PPC: Using Searcher’s Irrationality in PPC

Davis Baker, @DavisBaker Lead, Digital Media (PPC), Forthea

133

Classical economics: people are rational; they make well thought-out decisions that aren’t influenced by external factors.

Behavioral economics flips that on its head. How does that factor into online purchasing decisions?

Social Proof The tendency of people to assume actions of others or want what others having.

Social proof in the wild: Groupon example, “1,000 other people have bought”

How to apply social proof ● Make user feel like they’re not the only person making the decision ● Show them directly how many people have chosen their product or service ● Create a feeling of envy ● Show them that experts are making that choice and recommending it PPC ad copy:

134

Scarcity Tapping into the condition in which our wants appear to be greater than the resources.

Scarcity in the wild: Amazon example: instilling sense of urgency with “Only 1 left in stock.”

Scarcity in PPC:

135

How to apply scarcity ● Communicate time sensitivity and product quantity. Covey the point that this deal won’t last long ● Make the use feel a sense of urgency using words like hurry only and ends soon ● Use ad customizers and countdown timers

Anchoring The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information. As consumers, we latch onto the first thing we see.

Anchoring in the wild:

136

How to apply anchoring: ● Set the value with an anchor. Give the users a number of piece of information they can latch on to. ● Create an environment where B always looks better than A. ● Promote the original price with the sales price. ● Offer a lower price than your competitors.

PPC ad copy:

137

Framing A condition that occurs when the same information is presented in different ways, which can evoke different emotions.

A real estate agent doesn’t say a house is small – they say it’s cozy. A car salesman doesn’t say a car is cheap – he says it’s affordable. It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.

Framing in the wild: Yogurt: 20% fat vs. 80% fat-free <<< everyone will choose the latter

Framing in PPC:

138

How to apply framing ● Think like a lawyer or car salesman – present facts in the best possible way ● Frame the product, service or proposition in the best way possible

“Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless - they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.” - Dan Ariely

------

139

Quality Score: As Relevant As It's Ever Been

Lisa Raehsler, @lisarockSEM Founder, SEM Strategy Consultant, Big Click Co.

Sean McGinnis, @seanmcginnis Director, Marketing, Sears PartsDirect

Evaluating Quality Score (QS)

● Make sure your ad the best possible match to your product, keyword and landing page ● High QS means lowers CPCs, first page position, and higher ad rank, which is QS + your bid combined. ● Google uses QS to figure out what ad to serve from which ad group and campaign ● QS is an average in your account, updated once a day ● Aim for 7+ out of 10 on your ads and keywords (overall) ● You can find QS in the “speech bubble” next to your keyword or add a column in “Customized Columns”

Optimized QS

● Improve relationship between keyword, ad and landing page ● Improve the above three to increase your ad rank ● Maybe break up ad groups into tighter themed groups ● Pause/Remove keywords with high impressions and low clicks & CTR ● See how mobile is doing. Make a mobile only ad

140

● Exclude geo-targeted areas that aren’t performing well ● Make sure you’ve ad extensions as they help your ad show more and get more clicks, which helps build up your QS

QS Discussion Points by Sean M

● QS is dynamic and changes all the time. ● Tells if someone would likely click on your ad ● Sears doesn’t talk about QS, they talk about revenue, conversion rate, ROAS and profit ● The higher QS, the more clicks you get and lower your CPCs ● Sears only pays attention to QS when they take over a new business within Sears Holding ● Live from Google: They don’t use a QS on landing pages.

------

Re-Evaluating Success: The Value of PPC Audits

Wijnand Meijer, @wijnandmeijer Quality & Learning Manager, iProspect

Megan Ginecki, @megster88 Senior Paid Search Account Manager, Empire Covers

141

WIJNAD MEIJER

Why should you audit in the first place?

● Because there are a ton of missed opportunities ● Because your account likely has a ton of waste

Goals of PPC audits

● Audits start with a thorough analysis of best practices and results. ● But don’t stop there, include specific and actionable recommendations ● Even better: prioritize these recommendations. Start with goal setting, tracking quick wins and cutting waste. ● Try to estimate the impact of your recommendations,

Google’s Audit: The Opportunities Tab

Audit starting point: goal setting

● Tracking ● Campaign settings & bid adjustments ● Ad extensions ● Impression share and auction insights ● Quality score ● Account strucure

Goal setting: Essentials

● Define a non-branded efficiency target (e.g. CPA or ROAS) based on:

142

○ M= Your margin (ecommerce = in %, lead gen = in $) ○ A = The part of this margin you’re willing to invest in acquisition ○ C = The lead to sale conversion rate

Goal setting: advanced

● Approximate (or calculate if possible) the value (in terms of eventual revenue) of all micro conversion on your website, such as ○ Newsletter sign up ○ Downloads ○ Using the store locator ○ Sharing on social media ● Include customer lifetime value.

Find posts with PPC audit checklists

But keep in mind that they have their drawbacks... ● Most checklists don’t differentiate between high priority and low priority ● Checks are often too simplified ● Checklists give no weight to answers, however, not everything is equally important

Solution: Framework of the audit scorecard

● Topics are scored in order of priority and best practices are categorized as: ○ Essentials ○ Advanced ○ Cutting edge (if applicable)

143

>>>> Grab the scorecard here: www.bitly.com/adwords-scorecard

MEGAN GINECKI

The word “audit” has a bad rap. But they don’t have to be a pain.

Are you covering everything? Cover all your bases: ● Keyword planners ● Opportunity tabs ● Competitive tools ● Soovle ● Google Analytics ● Dynamic Search Ads

Mobile

Mobile isn’t going away ● How does your website appear on mobile devices? ● How are we modifying for mobile? Remember there are really only 2 spots on mobile devices

Different networks = different strategies

Never stop optimizing

You can optimize every level of a paid search account. It’s not just keywords and ads, you can really audit everything.

144

Targeting

● Geographically ● Hourly ● Daily ● Search Partners (Bing) ● Language

Set milestones and ask how the changes you made are affecting performance.

Keywords

Your keywords should be tight.

● Segmented mixture of match types ● Isolated brand keywords ● Cautious approach towards broad match ● Became BFFs with negatives

Think outside of the box

Your competitors are using the search term in the headline because it’s a best practice. Consider cutting it out to stand out.

Even if you and your competitors have similar UVPs, you can show your unique side with creative ad copy.

● Address relevancy ● Get granular. Granularity allows you to better tailor your user’s experience.

145

Bidding and budgeting

● You want to be bidding frequently but strategically. ● Let bid rules save your time and sanity. ● Modify for mobile ● Aim for the first page always but not first position. ● Have a healthy CPC to budget ratio “It’s better to get 10 clicks in position 3 than 1 click in position 1”

Competitors

● Be a stalker! Sign up for their newsletter

Extensions

● Extend yourself, appropriately

Content

● Search and content are two completely different mindsets.

Remarketing 101

● Use universal remarketing pixel ● Separate image and text ● Triple check your audiences and custom combinations ● Try our newer remarketing features

146

PLAs are becoming more prominent

● Remember PLAs are not search ● Run maintenance reports frequently ● Optimize your product titles ● Use relevant images ● Have conversational based descriptions but blend with USPs

If you can, have someone audit your account and audit theirs in return. Don’t be afraid to get critiques from someone unfamiliar with your account.

------

RLSA: Capturing The Wandering Visitor

Larry Kim, @larrykim WordStream

Manny Rivas, @mannyrivas aimClear

LARRY KIM

RLSA = Retargeting Lists for Search Ads

147

Targeting search ads based on browsing history

RLS, eh? << Larry Kim is another proud Canadian :)

How it works

Users visit your site, get added to your remarketing list Show them customized ads when they search on Google

RLSA is an “instant unicorn formula” because:

2x higher CTR 50% lower CPC 2x higher conversion rate

Why RLSA works

Quality Score is mostly based on click-through rate Brand familiarity greatly increases CTR Quality Score affects your CPC Conversion rates also increase with brand awareness

148

3 Super Actionable RLSA Campaign Strategies

Go with your widest possible segment Start with a +30% RLSA bid adjustment and go from there Try excluding segments – ex. Exclude folks who didn’t check out = cart abandoners

RLSA pet peeves

Sometimes you’re not increasing conversions, just sucking conversions from other campaigns – Need to be careful when structuring campaigns Not that useful for smaller businesses – Need a decent retargeting list, not as powerful as GDN display advertising

149

Search marketing is about finding new customers too – can’t just cherry pick bottom of the funnel Terrible acronym (doesn’t spell anything cool)

The Future of RLSA and PPC marketing

PPC marketing is getting way harder – paid search CPCs at all-time high in established markets, inventory flat (Yikes) Apps are stealing from desktop search – ex. restaurant searches happening in Yelp app Winning at paid search in 2015 means being pickier than ever – fewer, higher quality, more expensive clicks Identity-based, demographic marketing already available on Facebook, coming to PPC Future RLSA will look more like email marketing, Facebook marketing

MANNY RIVAS

Consumer-centric retargeting

Makes more sense to pay for more competitive keywords when you know they’ve already interacted with your brand/blog Obnoxious retargeting alienates potential customers and devalues brand equity – need both profitable AND consumer-centric campaigns - i.e. don’t be a jerk It can be a fine line between creepy & helpful Our job as PPC marketers is to demystify, serve and remove barriers Make sure stakeholders understand value of a list – “we paid for them before, we’re paying for them again” Be mindful of all possible user touch points

Q&A takeaways

150

Larry – Be aggressive about throwing out keywords that don’t perform Larry – RLSA enables you to get slightly higher-hanging fruit (further up the funnel) than you otherwise would have

Larry’s Favorite Twitter accounts: Drunk PPC Girl PPC Cat

------

Selling Better: PPC Strategies for Ecommerce and Call Extensions

Selling Better: PPC Strategies for Ecommerce

Lauren Frankel, @frankly_lauren PPC Manager, Seer Interactive

· Lauren has an adorable dog

Shopping Campaigns ● Organizing is crucial for building great strategies ■ E.g. if you’re selling jackets, seasonality and jacket type is really important

151

● Understand your product selection

Strategies ● Segmenting by price point ● Customers looking at different price levels are different customers ● Segment them by price group and bid based on performance

Segmenting by product SKU ● Default for AdWords shopping is all of your products dumped into one bucket ● But you won’t know what’s performing if you don’t segment specifically by product

Frontloading your product titles with your brand name e.g. 28% increase CTR, 53% increase in conversion rate Gives your brand more space

Managing Promotion Calendars ● Tons of promotions every month can feel overwhelming #PromotionOverload ● CALM DOWN, grab a beer

Labels are a way to group similar elements in your account ● Simple to set up, allows you to switch between promos ● AdWords only, in the interface, not the editor

Automation lets you set rules to more easily manage your account ● Can use to help you schedule ● Use your labels to set rules ● You can set multiple requirements

152

● Frequency - be cautious that your rule can run at any time within the hour that you set ● Lauren’s experience is they tend to run at the end of the time period ● Don’t forget about time zones, too Name the rule something detailed ● You can get email notifications whenever the rule runs << DO THIS

Countdown ads ● Achievable with small snippet of code ● Creates a sense of urgency ● Lauren tested it and saw some serious improvements in her campaign ● Don’t forget about time zone

PPC Strategies for Call Extensions

Cody Kunning Director, Search Engine Marketing, Marchex

Some businesses don’t want to drive phone calls ● Expensive ● Not easy to track ● But lots of people WANT to make a phone call after a search, especially from mobile (according to a Google study)

Mobile ad spend continues to BLOW UP ● Desktop is shrinking ● Mobile is likely to overtake desktop ad spend this year ● Getting harder for business to ignore phone calls

153

Where do calls come from? ● 60% happen on call extension button << MAKE SURE YOU’RE DOING THIS o 40% happen from the landing page

Building the call extension ● Google has some rules ● You can put your call tracking number ● It can forward to another number ● It can be local or toll free

Google forwarding number swaps out the number you enter ● Can be used with call tracking

Ad types for call extensions ● You can pick website and phone number, or just phone number ● Just phone number can be useful on branded terms ● Both are good for more general keywords ● Set up a schedule for your call extensions ● Set it up for when you can receive the calls (don’t waste money when you can’t pick up the phone)

Google call conversion tracking ● Really only measures duration and call count ● Doesn’t measure intent ● Doesn’t measure true conversion dollars ● Super useful though

Google is a great tool to use before the call happens, call tracking tools great for after the call happens

154

If a mobile landing page is not optimized, use call only ads ● Separate call tracking by device type for deeper insights ○ Got to see where it’s coming from: desktop vs. mobile ● Setup call conversion tracking with AdWords ● Talk to the call centre, more data may be available ○ Use all the data you have access to

● Use a call tracking provider

Call tracking ● Attributes calls back to the keywords ● Measures consumer intent of phone calls ● Visibility to bid towards both forms and calls ● Provides insights of offline actions to improve online optimizations ● SO MUCH INSIGHT, can help you optimize ads based on what people are actually asking about

Basic Call Analytic Insights ● Hold times are usually lower at national call center’s vs. local agents

Call Analytics for Search ● 100% keyword attribution for all calls ● Relates the call data directly to you keywords #ALLTHEDATA ● E.g. cable company reduced CPA by 43% and increased revenue by 50% ○ Found the keywords that were driving new customers vs. existing and optimized for them (BOOM)

Questions Answered

155

What are the impression requirements for Google Forwarding Numbers? ● There is a minimum ● Use call tracking

Advice: ● Click to call only you build as a call extension right now ● On June 15 call only campaigns will replace that ad type

Workarounds for automating promotional ads in Bing? ● Nothing that Lauren is currently aware of ● Bing is more manual that Google

Are the Google tracking numbers recycled? Yes. They will re-use those numbers

------

Transforming Tweets into Closed Deals

Tactical Twitter Advertising

Merry Morud, @MerryMorud Social Advertising Director, aimClear

156

Fluffy is no longer an option for social! ● It’s not just about community and engagement ● It’s about owning your audiences that are psychographically focused with omnichannel retargeting/remarketing including search remarketing (YAS ● If you’re not doing this you’re leaving money on the table

Social signals impact SEO

Paid amplification in Twitter Promoted tweets: ● Targeting based on interests, handles, TV targeting, keywords, tailored audiences (including exclusion which is super helpful), behaviours - via 3rd party data (that you can also exclude) ● These are all “OR” targeting, hopefully Twitter will allow you to layer at some point ● Life-reset categories (e.g. retirement, divorce, college students) ● Pay attention to government, politics (e.g. Airbnb facing legislative changes) Follower targeting: ● Can be tough ● You’re reaching out to similar followers ● Can be helpful to use a few handles so you get the overlap

You can use handles as keywords ● Influencers who are engaged will often tweet their own handle ● Engaged, themed users tweet at authority handles, also

Twitter handle tools ● Use Google - all the lists ● There may be overlap but it’s worth it

157

Keyword targeting ● You can often find intent with keywords

First-party data (e.g. your CRM list, website visitors) ● Export your Linkedin connections ● Can also use as negative audiences

Third-party data ● Currently restricted but likely to open up more

Close the loop with conversion tracking ● Check it out under “Tools” in Twitter

Promoted Dark Tweets ● Limit the deliverability like a pro

Lead-Gen Card ● Automatically collects email from their Twitter account when they click your CTA