eSearchVision Official UK Blog

The Search for Great Account Managers

rnathan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:06:33 +0000

In a dynamic industry full of young talent and raw ambition, we’re in constant search for great account managers. So what makes a great account manager and what skills and attributes does such a person possess? As someone who’s hired and trained account managers for a while, I have a few thoughts on this topic.

The responsibilities of an account manager will differ from company to company so I first need to define my expectations of an account manager in the search industry. At its highest level, the role of an account manager is to keep both the client and the agency happy with an account, focusing not only on their client relationships but also maintaining excellent internal relationships with all those who touch their account. For relationships to be successful they need to be built on solid business grounds and that means profit for both sides.
A great account manager is likable, smart, positive, passionate, dedicated, inquisitive and entrepreneurial. They must have skin thick enough to withstand the pressures of having multiple demanding clients. They also must have a finely tuned political antenna, have a strong understanding of their client’s company culture and be able to empathize with different types of people. They must be good at developing trust and be able to diffuse conflict and disagreement quickly. In terms of knowledge, a great account manager is well-rounded: they need to understand the PPC industry, their client’s industry and their client’s overall marketing mix. They must be good writers, have excellent presentation, facilitation, time management and analytical skills. They must be organized and efficient, possess a strong focus on quality and have a high level of attention to detail.

A great account manager ensures their client is happy by listening to their objectives and goals, making appropriate strategic recommendations and ensuring their account runs smoothly. They will know when to bring other resources (bosses, tech team, etc.) into the equation and when to tell the client that they are right or wrong. Of course, being buddies with the client doesn’t hurt either. A great account manager is not only a fantastic manager of clients but also a good manager of people, with the ability to effectively develop a team.

It’s tough to find one person that has all the qualities I’ve mentioned above. My advice is that if you find someone who does, hang on to them, just like we do at eSV!

Jacqueline Calderon

SEO vs PPC

eSearchVision — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:17:40 +0000

Why pay for clicks when you can get them for free?

This question often comes up when facing relatively inexperienced advertisers deciding between PPC and SEO. While I cannot refute any argument based solely on this logic (organic clicks are free and paid clicks are not), I can make a case for PPC even when SEO is at its best – which certainly is not the case for the majority of sites out there.
There are three distinct advantages that paid listings have over organic listings, and as a result these are the three most compelling arguments for integration of SEM into any marketing scheme:

1. If you don’t use SEM, your competition will poach your traffic. The competition has always been able to bid on your terms, but since AdWords changed its trademark policy to allow competitors to actually use these terms in their ad copy, it has never been more important to claim the real estate that is rightfully yours.

Consider the following query for [iphone]. In the first instance, both AT&T and Apple are in premium positions:

Now imagine if AT&T owned the entire premium position, without Apple:

In both cases, Apple SEO is perfect in placing Apple.com at the top of the organic listing. However, in the second search, where there is no Apple ad, my eye is drawn to the AT&T ad instead of the Apple organic result. If I am specifically looking for the Apple website, I may click on the organic link. However, it’s inevitable that many users will click on the AT&T ad because they will see it first.

1. SEM allows for customized messaging, whereas the text for organic links is determined by the search engine. While several factors can help to control the text in the organic link (including but not limited to the page description, title and header tags) it’s a significant process and requires some technical knowledge. Ad copy can be changed almost instantly using paid ads, allowing marketers to create and rotate in unique messaging for sales, promotions, product launches, and so on. Furthermore, marketers can test which ads work best, optimizing for CTR and conversion rates by optimizing landing pages.

Consider the following query for a Sony Bravia TV:

While the organic link is relevant, Sony is running a promotional offering of a PS3 or Blu-Ray player with a TV purchase. This efficient and enticing offer might sway a consumer who was intending on purchasing the TV from Best Buy to click on the Sony ad and purchase directly.
Of course, ads can be tailored for more than just promotional purposes…

3. SEM can be optimized for the consumer buying cycle. In their highly regarded book, Search Engine Marketing Inc, Mike Moran and Bill Hunt conclude that all search terms can be classified as: informational, navigational, or transactional. Informational queries are for research [best flat screen tv], navigational queries are for getting to a specific website [sony.com], and transactional queries show user intent to purchase [buy bravia xbr8 hdtv]. How is this relevant to SEM? Because ads can be customized for different types of queries, SEMs can create ads that are tailored to users in different stages of the buying cycle.

A consumer typing in an informational query is researching a product, idea, service, etc. Calling out this notion in the ad copy and driving traffic to an informational page where the consumer can learn about the product(s) in question will build trust and allow them to make their own way down the sales funnel. Consider the query [plasma or LCD TV?]. This query indicates the consumer does not know which kind of television to purchase. Driving the consumer to a product page for a particular TB will not yield a sale, whereas driving the consumer to a page describing the benefits and drawbacks of plasma versus LCD may yield a sale. Whether or not the sale is made in that session, the consumer is likely to trust the source of unbiased information when moving forward and purchasing the TV.

Following the same logic, building ads that are relevant for navigational and transactional queries will have positive ramifications. Understanding and classifying various keywords as informational, navigational or transactional is a significant step to understanding consumer behavior. Studying post-click consumer behavior using an analytics package (such as Google Analytics) will give insight into how effectively consumers can work their way through the sales funnel within your website – channeling those informational clicks into transactions.

Benny Blum

It’s your algorithm!

eSearchVision — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:45:27 +0000

Most SEM professionals will agree that a solid SEM program strategy is multi-faceted. The program should focus not just on bidding, but also on Quality Score, data gathering and reporting, and aggressive testing of all aspects of the program. That being said, the great promise of bid automation remains a viable, debatable, and important topic.

There is no doubt that autobid algorithms are important to a well-rounded SEM bidding strategy but they can also be detrimental. Success with autobid depends on a number of factors. Obviously, one crucial factor is how well constructed the algorithm is. Perhaps more important, though, is the level of customizability made available by the algorithm. Does it treat core and long-tail terms similarly, or is it specialized for success with a particular kind of keyword? Is it customizable in terms of defining quantity of data analyzed, statistical relevancy, convergence speed, and data tolerance leading to a bid change? Can you influence bid security, day parting, data aggregation?

Algorithms can be a powerful part of your bid management arsenal, particularly when tweaked and managed intelligently. As all businesses have different needs, if the algorithms you are working with are not customizable, you run the risk of algorithms being unable to respond to your unique business conditions. Be sure to ask what your customizability options are so that you can take advantage of algorithms that fit your requirements!

Josh Krafchin

Search Engine “Recommendations”

eSearchVision — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:58:11 +0000

If you’ve had a meeting in the last 3-6 months with a search engine account team, then you probably left the meeting frustrated. It appears that sometime in the last two quarters, the powers that be in the big 3 search engines have recognized advertiser’s dependency on them for strategy…so they’ve taken into their own hands to make the most of it. We’ve heard it all: “Holiday starts in October,” “Get ahead of the competition by ramping up spend,” “You’re missing 50% of available impressions…why not increase bids to get more market share [regardless of performance]?” Here’s my question: When did the search engines make the conscious decision to stop caring about customer satisfaction and begin to make recommendations with their own best interests at the forefront of the discussion? At least they used to pretend that advertiser performance was top of mind.

To be fair, this is not indicative of every team I have worked with. Some teams are more capable than others, and teams that handle more mature programs tend to deliver fewer of these pitches – instead focusing on new products beta tests. That said, if you manage a budget for a relatively new player in search, let this be a warning to take these meetings with a grain of salt. The account teams do a very good job of illustrating potential volume of incremental traffic however they fail to back up the data with a forecasted ROI. If you do happen to sit in on one of these meetings, I urge you to question the presentation. Force the team to do due diligence and provide logical insight for scaling the account efficiently and effectively.

While I generally try not to promote our company through this blog, this seems to be the perfect opportunity to plug the advantages of using an independent search agency and technology provider. Companies such as eSearchVision have employees who spend all of their time (including yours truly) analyzing this kind of data and developing best practices and strategies – providing a clear and logical pathway to extrapolate directional metrics into actionable insight with the clients best interest (ROI) in mind. Furthermore, we use proprietary forecasting tools to project ROI to back up or refute the expansion opportunities presented by the search engines. We are mediators – directing the search engine teams to focus on the right categories, filtering insight, and shaping strategies to efficiently scale.

Benny Blum

Heads vs Tails

eSearchVision — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:46:22 +0000

Traditionally, search marketers base their search results on a “last click wins” basis. This means that the last click a consumer makes always gets attributed the sales revenue or conversion, regardless of how many other searches were made prior. The result is that brand terms often appear hugely profitable and costly generic terms appear to offer an extremely low ROI, if any at all. This makes it difficult to correctly classify “head” vs “tail” terms.
To combat this discrepancy, whenever we estimate performance for a keyword, we also calculate a confidence interval related to that prediction. When the confidence interval is too large, it means the prediction is useless (typical for keywords with very low traffic). We then need to aggregate in a relevant way (which is usually different from the way keywords are structured in ad groups) to get a critical mass of stats.

For this reason, we offer two different algorithms for automated bid management:
- Long-tail (tail): analyzes a bucket of clicks from a given set of terms and makes bid changes based on statistical significance.
- Core (head): analyzes past performance by week, day, and hour, making bid decisions based on a variety of statistically significant externalities.

Our automated bid management analyzes traffic patterns observed at similar times throughout an account’s history and makes preemptive bid decisions to effectively anticipate consumer behavior and minimize CPCs which effectively maximizes ROI. Automated strategies base decisions upon the smallest possible set of terms. If a given KW has enough data, then the decision will be based strictly on that term’s data set. The data set is expanded until enough data is available to make a statistically significant decision. The first expansion is to the ad group level, and then to the sub-category level in terms of the KWs portfolio group.

Jacqueline Brown

Hello world!

eSearchVision — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:46:42 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Breaking through the clutter – choosing the right SEM agency

eSearchVision — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:50:30 +0000

“Best in class”, “We drive results”, “Industry leader”.
These are just a few of the things SEM agencies claim as their identity. Like everything else, advertisers are flooded with messaging demonstrating that each agency is better than the next but the question is, “why?” What makes Agency X the leader? What makes Agency Y the best? Agencies are great at calling themselves the All-star, but don’t always make it clear for advertisers just why they are deserving of these titles. As SEM is all about numbers, it is particularly important for advertisers to gain clear insight into the pros and cons of each agency and not just rely on a glamorous marketing pitch. Below are a few things to consider when researching SEM companies:
1. Technology. While agencies will usually provide information on their technological capabilities, it is a good idea to dig deeper than this. Find out if they developed their own technology or if they license it from another SEM company. If they license it out, what made them choose this specific technology? Do they plan to change anytime soon? Why or why not?
2. Internal intelligence. It is a good idea to investigate how the company is broken down. A company that is 80% sales, 10% account management and 10% engineers is going to perform differently than a company that is 20% sales, 40% account management, 20% analytical and 20% engineers.
3. Historical performance. Perhaps the best way to see the true colors of an SEM agency is to talk to past and present clients. Agencies should be able to provide references for more official conversations or advertisers can just ask around to get an idea of an agency’s past business successes and mishaps.
4. Personality. At the end of the day, numbers are what count. However, there is a lot to be said for account managers and sales teams that you feel comfortable with. As agencies will work as part of your team, likeability shouldn’t be ignored.
The bottom line is that SEM isn’t a fluffy form of advertising nor is it the most creative. While a flashy website or shiny presentation can be enticing, it is important for advertisers to focus on other factors when ultimately choosing an SEM agency. SEM is about results and results aren’t proven by an agency’s marketing, they are proven through true SEM capabilities and intelligence. By taking the points above into careful consideration, you will be set-up for both strong SEM results and a successful relationship with your agency.