PPC Tools of the Trade #seslondon
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PPC Tools of the Trade #seslondon

21st February 2012

I love tools….it’s kind of a hobby to play around with new tools at night and during the weekend. So I’m looking forward to this PPC tools session at SES London 2012. The session is moderated by Jon Myers of Yahoo. Speakers are Thomas Bindl, CEO & Founder of Refined Labs, Alistair Dent, Head of PPC Training at Periscopix and Andy Mihalop, Head of Search and Biddable Media at Moneysupermarket.
The first speaker is Thomas Bindl. What should a good PPC management tool offer:

1. Search Queries / Placements: Search query report is nice, but inefficient. Thomas recommends Marin for search queries / placement management.
2. Keyword / Adtext reporting
3. Search funnels / Query paths: look at them use them! Attribution is key for optimization
4. Strategic groups: account structure for performance, strategic groups for reporting
5. Optimize for your goals and reach them: no company has CPL or CPO as business goal, margin is the next best goal.
6. Integration instead of isolation: search is a part of the mix. Long term success requires integration.

Next speaker is Alistair Dent about conversion tracking. Which parts of the PPC campaign are driving your profit? Without conversion tracking you wouldn’t know. So what should you track?

Purchases, Emails / Signups / Contacts, Bounce Rate, Phone calls .

Platform’s own system:

AdvantagesDisadvantages
Direct visibility next to keyword/adCan only track page loads
FreeCannot work with other channels

3rd party system:

AdvantagesDisadvantages
Cross-channel attribution possibleCan be out of reach for small advertisers
Can track a wider variety of actionsPoorer line of feedback to platform interface

Call tracking is crucial, when you get leads over the phone. Alistair recommends Adinsight a call-tracking tool.
De-duplication: if you have traffic from a various sources, de-duplicate the sales, also preventing paying more affiliates for the same sale.

Multi-touch attribution

Actions to take:
Feed data back to the most granular level, e.g. keyword link, ad, creative
If de-duplicating, decide which clicks take priority
Set yourself accurate CPA targets. Make sure every click is profitable.
Check for any double tracking and remove duplicated conversion types.

Conclusion:
Track anything that’s going to make you money, but assign realistic values to each action
Choose your tool carefully, direct lines of feedback to the system you use to take actions is important
Sometimes people trump technology, sometimes technology trumps people. You’ll get nowhere without making correct use of both

Andy Mihalop from Moneysupermarket about enterprise PPC and automation.
The challenge of Moneysupermarket:
50 product channels
10 milion keywords
400 campaigns
5 million negatives
Technology is crucial

Ourworld is changing: from PPC to biddable media, from search query volume and searcher intent to behavioral and customer data, from final click to cross-channel measurement and attribution, from bid management platform to integrated performance media technology and from silo channel to enterprise solution.

An enterprise technology solution consists of PPC bid-management, Social Media Advertising Platform, Demand Side Platform and Enterprise SEO Platform. On the other hand, you may have Attribution management, Web Analytics, Conversion Optimisation, Website, Tag management Solution

How to apporach? Business requirements, data sources and format, platform integration, KPI definition, Central reporting and dashboard, End- state vision.

Selecting a PPC Bid management platform:
1. Multi-channel capability
2. Campaign management: efficiency in workflow
3. Bid optimization

But build a good structured account first, before you use tools and bid management.

Use XML feeds for advanced campaign management.
Consider data integration and reporting.
Use dynamic landing pages to enable scale.

And his last tip:
Hire an Excel whizz and build your own tools. Andy mentions two of his in-house tools that save his team a lot of time:
Themy: identifies themes in SQR for new keywords and negatives
Cruncher: takes an SQR and Adwords editor keyword download, identifies searches matching to incorrect keywords and outputs negatives for campaign upload.

This post in part made possible by a sponsoring from Majestic SEO who have the largest Link Intelligence database in Search.

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Written By
Evert Veldhuijzen is consulting various international brands about different aspects of online marketing. His company Netlead is in affiliate business and develops websites for his joint-ventures.
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