SEM Agencies: Creative Ways To Get Amazing Results

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Dec. 16

Whether you outsource all of your SEM efforts or have an in-house team, it’s likely you will work with an SEM agency. I personally view SEM agencies as an extension of my internal team. The agency is just like any other employee at your company except they have their own office. World class SEM agencies can add so much value that they quickly pay for themselves. Today I wanted to share a few tips and creative ways to get amazing results from your agency! I’m going to skip the obvious tips such as having regular meetings, fostering a 2-way communication channel, and requesting regular reports. Rather, I’m going to focus on the more creative opportunities that truly flex the power of the agency model.

SEM Agency

  • Leverage your agency for true 24/7 operations. SEM is like the stock market, except it’s open 24/7. As humans, we all need sleep and we all need to diversify our time. What’s the best way to get campaign coverage on nights, weekends, and even holidays? Hire and SEM agency and make this a focus for them. Agencies are experts at resource allocation and at leveraging their global/cross-time zone capabilities.
  • Rely on your agency to get into exclusive beta tests on Google AdWords and Bing Ads. Large agencies have amazing relationships with search engines. They bring a ton of business forth, so the search engines are very serious about agency account management. If you are a smaller/mid-sized advertiser, you may find an agency as your key to securing exclusive beta tests.
  • Make sure to divide and conquer. This tip is for those large organizations that have both an in-house team and an agency team. In the world of SEM, it’s super easy to cross wires. Make sure there are clear lines of differentiation. Perhaps the agency owns one search engine and the in-house team owns another. Perhaps the agency owns on facet of campaign management (such as ad copy testing) and the in-house team owns another (such as keyword expansion). Perhaps the agency owns particular campaigns and the in-house team owns another. However you decide to slice it, make sure there is clear coordination. Otherwise, wires could get crossed.
  • Leverage your agency to build advanced technologies. In the world of SEM, it’s all about scale. Scale often requires scripts and programs to be built. It’s not always easy to gather resources in-house, however a super agency will offer to build programs for you. Have this discussion and see if your agency can bring your team technology capacity.
  • See if your SEM agency can also act as your creative agency. This point ties into the last one. Not always is it easy to get quick turnaround on in-house creative projects (such as landing page comps and display creative). However, many SEM agencies have their own creative resources (either in-house or very close by). See if your SEM agency can produce your creative assets.
  • Partner on social media with your SEM agency. Most SEM teams these days are offered the fun opportunity to run paid campaigns on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. However, running such campaigns is different from Google AdWords and Bing Ads. It requires a different approach and the strategy is evolving rapidly. Make social media a collaborative project with your SEM agency and you are likely to achieve excellent results.
  • Leverage your SEM agency for advanced bidding and campaign management technology. Large agencies often have a performance marketing platform in place, such as Acquisio. When you hire an agency, you not only get marketing expertise but you also often acquire the technology to truly achieve success. See if your in-house team can gain access to the technology platform and collaborate closely around the platform.
  • Save money on competitive intelligence with your SEM agency. Large agencies often have access to tools like Hitwise and Compete. They need to have the necessary data points to drive business forward for their clients. See if your agency has access to such tools/reports and leverage those tools for your internal competitive benchmarking.
  • Leverage your agency for a big picture perspective. Agencies see a lot of stuff. They manage a multitude of clients, search engines, and channels. Leverage your agency to truly understand your industry (and related industries) from an online marketing perspective.
  • See if your agency can help out with SEO. At many companies, the online marketing team is responsible for both SEM and SEO. These two channels can be quite different, but they truly go hand-in-hand. See if your SEM agency has SEO experience. If yes, the relationship will truly pay extra dividends.
  • See if your agency can open door in terms of relationships. Agencies mean big business and have extensive relationships across the industry. Leverage your agency to make connections. One quick tip: See if your agency would be open to holding a client summit where their clients get together and share best practices. Another tip: See if your agency can help build deep connections within search engines such as Google.

As you can see, SEM agencies provide a multitude of benefits above and beyond standard campaign management. I hope these tips help you get the most from your agency. If you don’t have an agency, I hope these tips provide some extra points to help you secure the necessary budget to make the hire.

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Getting The Most Out of Your PPC Agency

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Nov. 11

Do you work with a PPC agency? How about multiple agencies? In my opinion, managing an SEM agency is just like managing an employee on your team. To get the most out of your agency, you need to be a great agency manager. Today, I’m thrilled to share some of my favorite tips for getting the most out of your agency.

Tip 1: Regular Calls (Weekly or Bi-Weekly) Are Key

Agency

When you’re managing a PPC agency, it’s all about frequent touch points. There’s nothing like regular calls. I try to have weekly calls and sometimes bi-weekly calls (when the queue is super busy). Make sure to follow an agenda during your calls. Stick to the topic at hand. Cover results/numbers, successes, challenges, and projects in the queue. Calls with your agency are just like 1-on-1s you hold with in-house employees.

If you work with a local agency, try to have in-person meetings too. Perhaps you could meet for lunch and then go back to the office after for a meeting. I’m a firm believer that SEM is a team sport. You cannot have a solid team without regular communication and touch points. Leverage calls and in-person meetings to manage your agency as part of your team. The results will be so much better as a result of your efforts!

Tip 2: Manage Your Agency’s Queue of Work Closely

I typically get the best results as a manager when I clearly understand the queue of work on each employee’s plate. I’m talking about the projects, the estimated upside, the ETAs, and the current status updates. Why? When I understand the queue of work, I can contribute projects/ideas, provide assistance, manage expectations upward, and make sure wires do not cross. I’m a huge fan of collaborative goal setting. The best goal lists are created as a team effort between manager, employee, and team. I highly recommend leveraging this philosophy when managing your agency. More work will get done, everyone will be more empowered, and the results will be awesome!

Tip 3: Leverage Your Agency’s Perspective For Optimal Results

I absolutely love working with SEM agencies because they have an amazing perspective. They work with many clients across many verticals. All they do is online marketing. SEM agencies can bring substantial value to the table in terms of cutting edge ideas. Make sure to leverage your agency for their expertise. Regularly ask them questions such as, “What are your other clients seeing?” Of course, you don’t need (nor want) specifics. You want high level guidance around the latest and greatest trends.

So there you have it: A few great tips for getting the most out of your PPC agency. Looking for a PPC agency? I highly recommend reaching out to my friends over at PPC Associates and Rocket Clicks.

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Online Marketing People Management Tips

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Jan. 27

When it comes to online marketing, there are two high level career options when you’re first starting out: Affiliate marketing (start your own business) and the corporate route. I’m a huge fan of both, but prefer the corporate route. Today, I’d really like to highlight one of the main advantages of the corporate route: The ability to manage people early in your career. If you’re on a rocket ship career trajectory like myself, you can expect to start managing a team just a few years out of college (although it does take a little longer these days than when I started in 2004). When it comes to growing quickly, it’s all about leverage. Your team gives you that leverage. However, managing a team is definitely not easy, it’s one of the greatest (and most rewarding) challenges out there!

Today, I’ll be answering some questions one of my readers sent in recently, someone who’s new to people management and is managing his first employee. I hope this post highlight one of the big advantages of the corporate SEM route while providing some tactical people management tips.

Pace of Learning?

Leadership Management

This question really depends on the level of employee you are hiring. However, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to assume the person being managed is an SEM Associate (where I started when I graduated Stanford). It’s actually difficult for me to answer this question because times have changed. When I started my search marketing career back in 2004, SEM was a very new discipline. Due to the lack of SEM tools, documentation, helpful blogs, and overall industry knowledge, the training curve was much longer. Back in those days, you could basically assume that it would take three months to train a new employee before they could start adding value.

However, with all the advances in our industry over the years, the training curve has diminished tremendously. These days, I expect new employees to start adding value within two weeks. It’s important for managers in our industry to remember how far things have advanced and that it’s possible to learn much faster in our current environment.

In terms of overall pace, I like to inundate new employees with a lot of projects immediately. There’s really no better way to learn than to be thrown into the fire, so to speak. That said, I always stress quality over quantity. It’s important to hire A Players and an A Player will quickly get bored without a backlog challenging projects.

Online Marketing People Management Resources?

This is an awesome question and is very core to my motivation behind PPC Ian. There are many great books out there about people management. Two of my favorites are Winning by Jack Welch and High Output Management by Andy Grove. However, you’ll quickly discover that SEM is very different than other disciplines and requires its own unique management principles. Why? It’s a rapid growth career unlike any other. You typically have young managers managing even younger teams managing millions of dollars in spend. It’s because of this dynamic that I created PPC Ian with the goal of educating and empowering pay per click professionals. Stay tuned and also check out my Management category for Internet marketing people management tips.

How To Keep Them Busy For The Day?

This really ties back to the first question. If you hire A Players they must have a backlog of high value projects or else they will get bored, really quickly! You need to challenge A Players. How do you do this? Well, first things first: You’ll want to spend a lot of time with new employees. Typically, your own productivity will go down in their first few weeks. You’ll be spending a large portion of your day training them! Don’t worry, the long term leverage you will get far outweighs the negative leverage in the short run.

Second, you’ll want to classify projects into two groups: Recurring tasks and strategic projects. An example of a recurring task is sending out daily or weekly reports to the team. An example of a strategic project is launching a new campaign on Google AdWords. You can quickly fill up the schedules of your new employees by assigning recurring tasks. This is stuff you need done but is well defined and recurring (meaning it takes up a lot of time on a consistent basis). Over time, as your employees become more seasoned and independent, you’ll want to assign them more strategic projects.

What Tasks To Gradually Load On Them?

This really ties into the last question, great timing… In a new employee’s fist few weeks, they’ll work mainly on recurring tasks. Over time, they’ll do those recurring tasks in a fraction of the time it used to take them. This will free up tons of time to continue taking on more recurring tasks and also strategic projects. Just remember, we’re dealing with millions of dollars. There’s a lot at stake. Upon completion of their first strategic projects, you’ll want to review their work thoroughly. It’s only after trust and a great track record is established that I would recommend allowing new employees to make changes to production SEM accounts. The timing on this can vary, but I typically don’t let new employees make changes to production SEM accounts (directly) until they’ve been at the company over a month (and sometimes more).

What Should I Expect?

It’s of paramount importance to expect the world. I only hire A Players and expect a lot. By expecting a lot and pushing your employees to the max, they will grow quickly, add amazing value, and drive results. In turn, this makes you a success as a manager. The whole organization grows and everyone gets promoted! Just remember, everyone needs a break at some point so use your judgment. Moreover, we’re all human and we’re all different. Why is management difficult? No two people are the same. You’ll need to change your management style for each and every person you manage. It gets easier over time (once you’ve managed 10-20 different employees), but it takes time. Just remember to trust your instincts and that the relationship you establish with your employees is everything. To your employees, you are the company to them!

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Pay Per Click Budgeting Tips

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Nov. 14

It’s Q4 and time to start thinking about 2011. If you’re at a large company, there’s no doubt that the financial budgeting process is in effect (or at least will be very soon). I really enjoy budgeting and forecasting: It’s the ideal time to start thinking about the big picture and all the amazing initiatives you and your team will accomplish during the next fiscal year. Also, it’s the perfect time to start securing the budget you need to accomplish your goals in 2011. I’ve been through the budgeting process many times and today would like to share some great ideas for 2011 strategic initiatives.

Initiative 1: Implement PPC Automation Software

Looking To The Future

Are you managing your campaigns manually? If so, that’s great! Why am I so excited? It’s easy: There’s a huge amount of upside on the table for you. Implement a paid search platform in 2011 and you’ll uncover major efficiencies, save time, make your team more productive, make more money via automated bidding, and much more!

I’m a huge fan of paid search software (but I bet you already knew that by now), and recommend checking out my FREE 12 page whitepaper about selecting the right paid search automation platform. Once you’re done with that, I highly recommend checking out the plethora of amazing platforms out there including Acquisio, WordStream, and Marin Software. I also discuss a few other amazing platforms in my post about SEM software. Finding the right SEM platform for your organization is a long and exciting journey. It’s also an endeavor which requires budget and buy-in during the budgeting process. Secure the budget for your SEM platform now, during budgeting season.

Initiative 2: Expand Your Team

Online marketing is growing rapidly. Many large companies are finally transferring budget from offline to online. What does this mean for you and the pay per click career path? Nothing but upside! However, it also means increased work. I’m here to say that no matter how much technology you have in place, it’s fundamental to have a team in place. It’s during the budgeting process that you can secure budget to hire additional resources in 2011. Get your request in there and start working with your recruiter as soon as it’s approved, it can take time to find the perfect match for your team!

Initiative 3: Think Big About Acquisitions

We’re in very interesting times. Cash is abundant for many successful companies, but cash definitely is not king with today’s ultra-low interest rates. Wouldn’t it be great if you could help your organization put all that cash to use? You can! Think big in terms of acquisitions. Any competitors in the PPC marketplace that stand out as particularly amazing? Why not buy them up, especially if they have an amazing SEO presence as well.

Initiative 4: Invest In The Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance

When it comes to pay per click search engine marketing, it’s all about leverage. Now that Yahoo! and Microsoft have joined forces, leverage is plentiful. It’s my firm belief that the Search Alliance will take online marketing to new heights. The innovation and opportunities will be unparalleled. My advice? Budget for at least one full time person managing your Unified Marketplace accounts!

Initiative 5: Invest In Landing Pages

Back in 2004, PPC was just like printing money! The marketplace lacked a lot of competition and it was easy to grow by simply adding keywords, refining ad copy, and exploring new channels such as contextual advertising. These days, however, things are quite different. Competition is abundant and the tricks of PPC are not enough on their own to put you in the lead, consistently. The difficult part of this all? It’s the pay per click campaign managers that own the numbers! This is why it’s so very important to secure resources NOW for landing pages. Landing pages are something that will most likely require resources from your design and engineering teams. If you can secure those resources for 2011, you’re definitely setting yourself and your company up for success!

Initiative 6: Don’t Forget About The Basics

To close out, I’d like to highlight that the basics of PPC are still absolutely fundamental. All this other stuff is great, but it won’t get you far if you don’t have a solid foundation in place. Start planning for some major keyword generation, ad copy testing, bidding refinement, campaign deployment, match type testing, negative keyword generation, beta testing, campaign monitoring, and more!

The best part of this PPC budgeting process: You have real world numbers that you can leverage for your projections. Do your best to accurately forecast the results of your PPC initiatives and you’ll be surprised just how accurate your budget turns out! And, don’t forget to set aside at least 20 or more hours for budgeting, it takes a lot of time.

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Search Engine Relationship Management Tips

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Mar. 30

I’m really excited about today’s post because it covers an important component of the pay per click career path that sometimes gets overlooked: Search engine relationship management. Specifically, I’ll be discussing a few tips to get the most out of your relationships with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. At the end of the day, it’s all about leverage. Manage your search engine relationships efficiently and your profits will skyrocket!

Tip 1: Your Search Engine Reps Are Part of Your Extended Team

Business Space

My first tip is really simple, yet extremely powerful. It’s easy: View your search engine reps as if they are part of your internal team sitting just a few cubes away! Thinking of your reps this way is very powerful. Let’s say your internal team is comprised of three people, one for each first tier search engine. Now, let’s say you have three search engine reps, again one for each search engine. Rather than having three team members, you actually have six! Now, just think how much work six hard working individuals can accomplish, it’s very powerful stuff.

In reality, this tip is not completely true because your reps are not exclusively dedicated to your account. Even if you’re one of the largest spenders out there, your reps will still have a handful of clients. At the same time, if you are a large spender, your reps will have extra support on their end making the relationship quite powerful.

Tip 2: Your Reps Are Resources – Keep Their Queue Full

So now that we’ve established that your reps are part of your search marketing team, we’ll discuss some great ways to manage these "new" team members. First and foremost, would you ever have your internal team sitting around without any projects to work on? Of course not! Pay per clickers are very expensive and valuable resources. As such, you want to manage your reps just like your internal team and keep them working on the highest leverage projects possible at all times.

From my experience, most reps will go the extra mile. Some projects you may want to consider assigning your reps: keyword generation (both positive and negative), keyword review, keyword categorization, content match suggestions, account growth opportunities, and advanced intelligence. From my experience, those teams that invest sweat equity really do win the PPC game. Sometimes, however, you really need to divide the manual work on the keyword generation, review, and categorization side of things. Involving your reps in the process (in addition to your internal team) is the perfect way to gain scale on those valuable sweat equity type projects, helping the divide the work!

Tip 3: Leverage Search Engine Reps For Advanced Intelligence

What can your reps do that you’re not able to internally? They can provide advanced intelligence around your overall market, search engine trends, and most importantly what your competitors are doing. Therefore, I always like to have at least one intelligence style project in the queue. Now, here’s a word of advice: If you’re always looking at the market and competition, you’re looking backwards. For that reason, I’m always focused on setting new trends. I want the competitors to be following me. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of the market, just don’t spend too much time or else you may lose your first place position.

Tip 4: Manage It All With Weekly (or Bi-Weekly) Calls

The cornerstone of my personal management style hinges around weekly 1-on-1s with my reports. The 1-on-1 provides the perfect opportunity to dive into projects and also career progression. Now, you’re not going to dive into career progression with your reps, but you’ll definitely want to stay on top of their queue. How will you do this? Weekly (or bi-weekly) calls are essential. You’ll want to take close notes, get ETAs, and really stay on top of your reps just like you would with our internal team. Execute on all of this properly and you’ll ensure great productivity!

Now, let me flip this the other way. Excitingly, many reps will bring up great new ideas that you never thought of! They will help drive your priorities. I also like to view these weekly 1-on-1s as a status check on your own work, the work that is being driven by your reps. It’s a great two way street and a reality check for your own progress as well.

Tip 5: In-Person Meetings Are Key

Something I’ve learned over the years: Personal connection is critical in building great business relationships. You really need to know your reps on a personal level and meet them in person for the optimal relationship. It’s easy if you’re in San Francisco like me and can hop on over to Google’s office in a matter of minutes. However, if you’re out of town, I strongly encourage you to make the trip. It will really impress your account management team and will take your search engine relationships to the next level!

As a closing thought: I’m a huge proponent of beta tests. Build strong relationships with your reps (and add as much value for them as they are for you) and you’ll get included in beta tests. This can be a tremendous way to advance your business while being the first mover on new and innovative products before they’re released to the general market.

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