Kenshoo Interview (Part 3 of 3)

Hey Everyone,
Welcome to part three of my exclusive interview with Chad Baldwin, VP of Sales at Kenshoo, one of the best SEM platforms around! If you haven’t checked out part one or part two yet, I highly recommend doing so! Personally, these are some of my all time favorite posts on PPC Ian! Without further ado, I’m thrilled to continue this amazing interview with part three!

Ian: Chad, At this point, I’d like to transition to a few high level questions about the industry. First, I’d be curious about your perspective on the SEM industry. Where do you see us heading in the next several years?

Search Is The Operating System For The Information Age

Chad: Search continues to be the operating system for the information age. Understanding what someone wants is the cornerstone of all marketing. This is why Search is the anchor. I think that our definition is too limited today – basically, we characterize SEM as ads that are displayed after consumers type in a search box on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

Search and intent-based marketing are becoming omnipresent though – re-targeting and cookie-exchanges mean that search intent data will follow the user around and be used to make ads more relevant. My hope is that this mechanism becomes more transparent to the user so that the value there can be more easily controlled.

Facebook and The Wisdom of Crowds

I think an interesting question is who defines what is relevant. Google has played a dominant role in this through advanced algorithms and the evolution of hypertext and semantic analysis. What Facebook is enabling with the like button actually paints quite a different story. Facebook is helping to re-organize the web based on a different principle – the wisdom of the crowds. A basic thumbs-up or thumbs-down. People are organizing the web for themselves. This is a very powerful idea. Put a social search engine on top of Facebook and you’ll start to see things get very interesting.

Ian: Chad, that’s really interesting stuff. Facebook is definitely a really hot topic right now. What is Kenshoo’s perspective on Facebook Ads?

Chad: I commented on this a little before, but our feeling is that the Social Web is here to stay. We’re very bullish on the opportunity here and already have a number of clients using Kenshoo Social to make money on Facebook ads. The targeting and creative capabilities will be unparalleled. There is lots to do here yet to make the ad platform sing, but Facebook is on a mission and we look forward helping drive their continued success.

Ian: Chad, at this point I must say I’m thoroughly impressed! I’d like to open it up and see if there’s anything else you’d like to share with PPC Ian readers?

A Question For Me: Direct Response Vs. Branding Campaigns

Chad: As a strategic thinker, Ian, with a good network of readers, I’d like to pose a question for the next round. With Kenshoo’s drive into multi-channel attribution, social (Facebook) and display, we’re seeing some very interesting evolution in terms of how marketers think about Direct Response campaigns vs. Brand Campaigns. I have been in a number of conversations predicting the full convergence of the two traditionally separate sets of objectives and tactics. What are your thoughts on this?

Ian: Chad, that is an awesome question and will definitely become the topic of an upcoming PPC Ian post! Chad, thanks so much for everything, this has been a true honor. I’m seriously impressed with Kenshoo and appreciate the interview! I know everyone reading PPC Ian will really enjoy it!

Chad: Thanks Ian. Appreciate the time to share some of what makes Kenshoo so special.

Evaluate Kenshoo For Your SEM Team Today

Ian: PPC Ian readers, regardless of your current situation (already own a platform vs. actively looking vs. more of a manual team), I highly encourage you to check out Kenshoo. As you probably know by now, I’m a huge fan. You’ll be amazed at what you see! If you’re interested in arranging a demo, you’ll want to reach out to the Kenshoo team via their website or by emailing info@kenshoo.com. Thanks so much for reading and if there’s any way in which I can help in your SEM automation decision making process, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly. Last but not least, please make sure to check out part one and part two of my interview with Kenshoo’s Chad Baldwin.

Kenshoo Interview (Part 2 of 3)

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 27 2

Hey Everyone,
Today, I’m thrilled to continue with part two of my exclusive Kenshoo interview with Chad Baldwin, VP of Sales. If you haven’t read Part One of the Kenshoo Interview With Chad Baldwin, I recommend checking that out first! Also, stay tuned, part three will be coming very soon! Update: Kenshoo Interview Part 3 of 3 is now live!

Ian: It’s really amazing how far the industry has come. Just a few years ago, SEM platforms did not exist. Now, I can confidently say that I’m more of a buy vs. build guy. In short, it’s a competitive market with a variety of great tools. What sets Kenshoo apart? Where does Kenshoo outshine the competition?

Chad: As in all healthy maturing markets, SEM is becoming verticalized and the first thing that any company needs to do is to understand their own needs and then look at solutions. There are the basics that everyone needs to do well. Reporting, campaign management, engine features – we have done the essentials really well. In Kenshoo, everything structured around natural workflows and intuitive design.

Kenshoo Accelerates From The Pack With Advanced Vertically-Targeted Features

Kenshoo really accelerates from the rest of the pack with more advanced features for targeted verticals. Sophisticated B2B, Finance and lead-focused companies love that our bid algorithm can work off direct CRM integration and decision based on lead-stage and downstream LTV. Multi-channel retailers appreciate our depth and breadth in inventory integration and strength in both national and local programs. Agency partners are driving us towards extensive cross-channel attribution capabilities and sophisticated modeling.

Having been in a number of leading companies in my career, I appreciate more and more that software is a marathon. A feature list is a snapshot in time, but it is the long race and the many legs throughout it that matter most. When I reflect on how we outshine the competition and what sets us apart, it’s easy to talk about some of the capabilities I’ve outlined above and say, "Wow, we rock in X, Y & Z…"

Kenshoo Hires The Best Minds and Most Passionate People In The Business

I think that the most important thing about Kenshoo is that we hire the best minds and most passionate people in the business. We have world class athletes that want to solve tomorrow’s problems. It is the character, passion and forward momentum of each employee in Kenshoo that sets us apart…for now and for the marathon. I am very proud to work within a company of such dedication and talent.

Ian: Chad, that’s great to hear! I’m an engineer and love companies with an engineering and analytical background. Could you talk a bit about Kenshoo’s team and your corporate culture.

Chad: Our strength is our people and our culture. The management team spends a lot of time thinking about this. Firstly, character flows from the top down. Meet Yoav, Alon, Nir. These guys are tremendous – each in his own right. They inspire a culture of respect, passion, collaboration, open and direct communication, stretching and questioning.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some wonderful companies like Zappos and Facebook and have learned much from the driving energy that is within culture. Below are a few observations and sayings I’ve heard repeated often within Kenshoo:

We love what we do and enjoy our customers. Kenshoo brings real meaning to the term "partner". We believe in our customers and dedicate ourselves to making them win. The level of our commitment around customer success is highly unique.
We want people to be themselves and share their talent. Kenshoo is not a place where you have to put on a different "face" when you get to work. There is much appreciation for the unique talent of an individual and we want that fostered. Be the best you and that is best for Kenshoo and our clients.
Face forward! Go tackle it. Whenever there is some challenge or issue in front of us, I always hear words that Yoav spoke to me the first week that I joined.
We support each other. We win or lose together. We hope to win … and we only lose if we’re not learning. There is a lot of respect inside of Kenshoo.
Creativity is simplicity.

You can probably tell that I am quite a fan of the family that is Kenshoo. We doubled in size last year and my deepest goal is to continue hiring the highest caliber of people around.

Ian: Sounds like a truly great place to work! By any chance are you hiring right now? If so, which positions are in the highest demand?

Kenshoo Is Hiring Aggressively – Submit Your Resume Today

Chad: We are certainly hiring – in all departments and in most every office. San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, London, Tel Aviv, Sydney, more. Postings are listed on our website and more to be posted soon. I think that every manager here feels that his/her open positions are the highest in demand.

Ian: That’s awesome! Readers, if you’d like to apply for a position at Kenshoo, please check out their website or simply send your cover letter and resume to jobs@ppcian.com and I’ll be happy to forward directly to Chad. I know Kenshoo is a true international company. Could you talk a bit about your global perspective. In which countries does Kenshoo have offices?

A Truly Global Search Engine Marketing Platform

Chad: We are a truly international company. We have primary offices in Tel-Aviv, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, London, Sydney and satellite offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong. We are excited to open new offices in Europe later this summer. We have taken this approach to both ensure that we are close to our regional customers and can as well provide unparalleled global support to our multi-national clients.

Our product is also truly global. We support all major languages. We integrated with the major search engines in every country including Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia. Our system supports double-byte characters and all foreign currencies.

Ian: Now, I’ve got a hard question for you! With any SEM platform comes a fee. How do you structure your fees at Kenshoo? How do you compare to the competition? Any advice for folks looking at your platform and trying to rationalize the cost?

Chad: Our license is typically based on a percentage of media spend. The higher the media spend, the lower the percentage tier. We are a well-established leader and our pricing structure is competitive in the marketplace.

Kenshoo Has To Pay For Itself

In terms of pricing and cost justification, we work with customers to make sure that Kenshoo makes sense. We have to pay for ourselves, drive incremental revenue and lower operational costs. In the end, it all comes down to numbers and we have a great track record of driving results.

Ian: All of that makes complete sense. In my experience, great SEM tools can pay for themselves in a matter of months (or even sooner)! The cost savings and growth opportunities are astounding. Couple that with the fact that you’re creating a more robust infrastructure and you have a win-win situation. Chad, I’m sure you have an amazing list of clients these days. Could you discuss some of the industries that Kenshoo represents? Are you pretty well balanced or do you cater to some verticals more than others?

Chad: I am excited to say that Kenshoo is big enough at this point that we actually mirror the shape of the entire industry. I spent years as a product manager in SEM studying this market. It’s a real achievement to have earned such a nice blend of clients. Mirroring the industry, our top three verticals are retail (6 of the top 10 US retailers use Kenshoo), travel and financial services. We see growth in manufacturing, B2B and Education. We as well mirror how the industry is broken out between in-house management and agencies. At this point, we map to the industry breakdown in the US, EMEA driving results.

Ian: Kenshoo offers an interesting business model. You empower search marketers with an amazing platform while providing stellar service. Could you talk a bit about your account management team? How do they interact with clients on a day-to-day basis?

Chad: I think back to my earlier statement that our primary goal is to make a customer successful. We hire really talented and driven people. Our average number of years of experience in SEM is over 3 years. The Kenshoo platform provides tremendous power, focus and flexibility to a program… BUT you still need to know how to fly the plane. Just to be clear for the readers. Kenshoo is not an ad agency, but a focused technology provider. Our account management team ensures that the system is being used to its maximum potential to drive program goals.

Ian: Chad, amazing stuff! What an awesome interview! PPC Ian readers, if you haven’t checked out part one of my interview with Chad Baldwin, I highly recommend it! Also, please stay tuned – part three will be posted shortly! Update: Kenshoo Interview Part 3 of 3 is now live!

PPC Ian Hanging Out With Chad (2nd From Left) and the Kenshoo Team at SMX Advanced Seattle 2010

Kenshoo Team

Kenshoo logo © Kenshoo
Image of PPC Ian and the Kenshoo team © PPCIan.com

Kenshoo Interview: Chad Baldwin VP of Sales

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 26 4

Hello PPC Ian readers,
Today is a tremendously exciting day! Following is one of the best posts on PPC Ian, in my opinion. I’m honored to interview Chad Baldwin, Vice President of Sales at Kenshoo. What is Kenshoo, you ask? It’s one of the leading search engine marketing platforms around. You may remember from my post about SEM automation and my video about pay per click technology build versus buy that I’m a huge fan of search marketing platforms. It makes perfect sense, I’m a Stanford CS grad after all. Moreover, it’s systems like these that have fueled the growth of my past companies, leading to amazing success! I’m going to tell you right out the gate that Kenshoo is one of my all time favorite technology platforms out there. If you’re in the market for an SEM platform (or even if you already own one), it’s imperative that you consider Kenshoo very seriously!

The team and story behind this company are amazing and the company has been growing at an unparalleled pace. Over the years, I have been very fortunate to build a personal bond with the team over at Kenshoo. Without further ado, let’s jump into this exciting interview! Today’s interview is part one of three, I’ll be posting parts two and three over the coming days! Update: Kenshoo Interview Part 2 of 3 and Kenshoo Interview Part 3 of 3 are now live!

Welcome, Chad Baldwin, VP of Sales at Kenshoo

Ian: Chad, thank you so much for doing the interview! It’s a true honor and I know this will become one of the most interesting posts on PPC Ian!

Chad: I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.

Ian: Let’s first start with your personal background. How did you get started in this industry? When did you join Kenshoo?

Kenshoo Team - San Francisco Office

Chad: I started at J. Walter Thompson after college as the third employee of JWT Digital. I was into the Internet early and was lit about it. There I was an account exec, a producer, a coder, a designer – whatever needed to be done to get a site and an ad campaigns out. I launched some big sites and at one point owned California’s division of tourism which made the top 10 sites in the country. Pretty fun and dynamic.

After JWT, I decided to go to a direct marketing firm (Miller/Kadanoff) for a few years and learn about driving leads and direct sales on the internet. There I worked with Cisco, Netscape and Oracle and learned the value of databases, segmentation, targeting and leads.

Later, I joined Buzzsaw.com, an online project management start-up to lead the development of their website. Buzzsaw was acquired by Autodesk and I was drafted into the role of Product Manager. I loved analyzing needs and developing solutions with Engineers. I spent 5 years in product management in that early SaaS business.

Google Is The Operating System For The Free World

I was always attracted back to my roots in advertising and was fascinated by Google and Search. I remember thinking… Google is the operating system for the free world. I’ve got to figure out how to tap into the potential. I came up with a business plan to create an optimization system… and then went to Coremetrics to see if they were thinking of building out this area. I spent over two years there with a tiger team building Coremetrics Search. It was a great experience and got me steeped in multi-channel attribution and a deep understanding of online retail.

Kenshoo’s First US Employee

I was a 120% fan of search and was beginning to see a bigger picture where advertising and merchandising would become one. I thought to start a company focused on media-mix modeling against multi-channel attribution data. I was getting things together when Kenshoo, an Israeli start-up funded by Sequoia Capital, reached out to me and I got to meet Yoav Izhar the CEO. Yoav is quite a charismatic individual. Someone I could follow up a hill. I joined as the first employee in the US to build out the business here. Evolved to become head of North American sales. We started with one client and have grown dramatically since.

Ian: That is a really amazing story. As a career-minded individual within the SEM space, your personal career is one that I have been following closely! In short, I’m inspired. Now, let’s talk about Kenshoo! For those new to your platform, could you please give a little background? How did Kenshoo get started?

Chad: Kenshoo was founded by two engineers in Israel – Alon Sheafer and Nir Cohen. Alon is visionary and an artist. He has an eye for elegant design and a strong desire to know about all pieces behind something and how to improve it. Nir is a brilliant engineer – quite someone to meet and know. He’s totally Zen about his craft with a keen ability to understand many points of view and synthesize a direction. Once a problem is studied, he is discerning; an execution machine.

Alon and Nir first started working together to create a new type of Comparison Shopping Engine called Bazman. They built this tremendous crawling technology to scrape website content. They became practiced in the art of SEM – driving traffic to their site and generating revenue as an affiliate.

Dynamic Ads, AdGroups, and Keywords

After trying many technologies for SEM, they decided to build their own. This new system dynamically created ads, adgroups and keywords based upon a single SKU pulled from a website and could automatically deep-link the ad back to the page the content came from.

While working on their start-up, they met Yoav Izhar, an experienced entrepreneur and tremendous leader. Yoav assessed the technology, partnered with Alon and Nir and started building the business.

As Kenshoo grew, the opportunity to become a unique SEM provider became clearer and clearer. After putting up a lot of their own money to boot-strap the technology, they went to Arts Alliance and Sequoia Capital to accelerate the growth of the company. The rest is still being written.

Ian: Chad, that’s a truly impressive history. What are some of the main features and selling points of Kenshoo? Where does the platform really shine?

Kenshoo Drives Incremental Revenue

Chad: Kenshoo is awesome software. It’s built by search marketing engineers and the most robust system on the market today. There are many features in the software, but before diving into the detail, I think that the first measure of a system’s value is how much incremental revenue it can help a company drive.

There are many "dials" to refine a search program and we have a stellar track record of driving incremental volume and hitting efficiency targets. A few focal areas that are driving tremendous results for our clients:

Realtime Campaigns – In retail, travel and other long-tail businesses, Kenshoo is helping to automatically build out the tail by tying into backend merchandising and inventory systems to dynamically create campaigns. This drives higher relevancy, stronger coordination, and higher conversion rates. We’ve also seen time savings of up to 80%. This is a foundational aspect of Kenshoo’s software and helping to facilitate complete integration of merchandising and advertising.

Massive Campaign Management – We have focused on how to easily manage larger and larger programs. Customers tell us that they really love Advanced Search – a way to find any aspect of a campaign based on any criteria and do anything to it.

Bid Algorithm – The sophistication of our math is constantly growing. We have a team of PhDs and, with every release, the algorithm becomes more sophisticated and nimble. We have filed a number of patents and believe that our newest seasonality work is unparalleled.

Data Scoring & Reprocessing – This past year we have delved heavily into processing downstream and offline data. Financial Services customers and lead-focused B2B companies have helped us uncover more sophisticated ways of measuring value along the conversion lifecycle. We integrated with a number of data firms to make this easier for clients.

Ian: What are some of the newest and most exciting Kenshoo features? What’s been added in the last year?

Chad: There’s a lot that has moved forward with Kenshoo in the last year. I would say that I’m excited about four main areas:

Local – Kenshoo has been blazing a new trail in how search can be optimized on the local level. I think that what this team is doing now is a guide to what will be standard practice in years to come. How can the word "Porsche" be worth the same about of money in rural Michigan as it is in San Francisco? I think we will know in the next few years that location-location-location is also critical in search. The future of well-run search programs is more and more granular campaigns with robust mass management and optimization. I’m excited to see the next generation of innovation coming out of the Local team at Kenshoo.

Facebook Is Becoming The Operating System For A Personalized Web

Facebook – I’m really excited about our Kenshoo Social product. We are pushing lots of investment into this area and are very bullish on opportunities with Facebook. Facebook is becoming the operating system for a personalized web and going to create an environment with the most targeted advertisements around.

Kenshoo Universal Channel – Kenshoo now can manage multi-channel attribution data. We developed and launched a really elegant system that allows us to capture the click and cost data together. We’ve developed an open XML format for attribution data and are excited to bring this idea of open standards to the marketing optimization market.

Kenshoo is Blazing Trails With Its Forthcoming Desktop Editor

Kenshoo Desktop Editor – We are taking the most robust technology in the market and we’re also making it the easiest. With our new Desktop Editor, any Search Marketer can start day one and know how to fly the plane. Our editor scales to over 20x what Adwords Editor can do in volume and works across Google, Yahoo! and MSN. It’s in Beta now. So watch out world… it’s coming soon.

Ian: You probably know where the next question is going… What’s in Kenshoo’s future? Where are you guys heading? Any new features on the roadmap that you can discuss?

Chad: I wish I could talk about our futures as we have lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline, but working on a team comprised of many former members of the Israeli Defense Force, I’ve learned that keeping our plans close to the chest is part of competitive advantage.

We have much in store for the market. Kenshoo has established its leadership position in search and we are now looking to expand our footprint and bring additional value to our channels. We are undergirding our entire platform to understand customer value within a multi-channel environment – and to be able to optimize. You will see more expansion with Local and Facebook. You’ll also see a few surprises from us in the near future. Innovation (and late nights) is in our genes.

Ian: Wow! Chad, I can’t thank you enough. This is truly amazing stuff! Everyone, this is part one of a three part interview. Stay tuned, parts two and three will be posted in the coming days! Update: Kenshoo Interview Part 2 of 3 and Kenshoo Interview Part 3 of 3 are now live! Make sure to check it out! Don’t forget to check out Kenshoo. Also, if you’re interested in a job at Kenshoo, they are hiring aggressively. Please don’t hesitate to email me your resume and cover letter and jobs@ppcian.com and I’ll forward over to Chad directly.

Images in this post © Kenshoo

WordStream’s Free Quality Score Toolkit

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 23 10

I’m very excited about today’s post! I’m going to discuss one of my all time favorite Internet marketing systems, WordStream Moreover, I’m going to discuss their amazing quality score toolkit which can be yours absolutely free! It seems like more and more companies are giving away free whitepapers and eBooks these days (and I can’t get enough of it). Well, WordStream takes it a step further and offers an entire quality score toolkit – comprised of a whitepaper, cheat sheet, video, and quality score worksheet – all for free!

What Is WordStream?

If you’ve been following PPC Ian for a while there’s no doubt you’re aware of my SEM automation obsession. I have discussed a multitude of SEM tools in past posts and even wrote a free whitepaper about evaluating SEM applications for your organization. What is WordStream? WordStream is an Internet marketing application that automates and adds immense process to keyword generation, keyword review, keyword grouping, ad copy writing, and much more.

The tool has taken the industry by storm! From my perspective (someone who has used the vast majority of the SEM tools out there), WordStream tackles a truly unique and exciting problem, one which few other tools properly handle. Said another way, I recommend coupling WordStream with your other SEM bidding/management solution if you have one. Below are just a few of my favorite aspects of WordStream (definitely not a comprehensive list, just a few highlights):

Adding structure and workflow to keyword review and grouping, WordStream ensures you always have the right keywords in the best possible ad groups. In turn, this translates to optimal click through rates and therefore lower CPCs.
WordStream is all about workflow. It conveniently organizes the manual activities of keyword review, keyword grouping, and ad copy writing into prioritized queues. You can work through the queues yourself or easily delegate/outsource. Once you’re done, WordStream works wih search engine APIs to upload your work.
WordStream ensures you continuously improve your search engine accouts. Are you adding new, relevant keywords to your account daily? Are they in the right adgroups with the right ad copy? How about custom ads?
It seamlessly integrates with your site, leveraging organic traffic to generate PPC keywords.

What’s In WordStream’s Free Quality Score Toolkit?

As you can tell, I’m a huge fan of WordStream! I’m also a huge fan of their free quality score toolkit. So, what exactly do you get in the toolkit?

First and foremost, you get an amazing 18 page whitepaper all about Google’s quality score. The whitepaper explains the importance of quality score, how you can improve your quality score, and how you can leverage WordStream to improve your quality score. I recommend reading this first as a great introduction to WordStream.
Second, you get a one page quality score cheat sheet. This is a super one pager that you can pass around your organization. Its a great way to educate your management team, should they have any questions about quality score.
Third, you get an amazing mastering quality score video.
Last, you get a sophisticated quality score worksheet that analyzes your Google AdWords account.

I highly recommend downloading WordStream’s free quality score toolkit and learning all about how WordStream can take your SEM team’s game to the next level.

Image in this post © WordStream

SEM Software – Four Amazing Tools

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 21 13

I’m a tremendous fan of pay per click automation. I just wrote a FREE 12 page whitepaper all about buying the right search marketing software platform. I highly recommend checking it out!

Last Friday, I also wrote all about portfolio theory versus margin maximization bidding models. Today, I’m super excited to continue the SEM automation trend and discuss four of the most popular SEM software tools. Specifically, I’m going to introduce Marin Software, Kenshoo, Efficient Frontier, and ClickEquations. While there are pros and cons with all tools, I’m really going to focus on some of the high level pros of each tool today. At the end of today’s post, I’m hoping you go away with four great tools that you can evaluate for your organization’s SEM program.

Marin Software – The Industry Leader

One Plus One

I’m starting with Marin Software because it’s one of my favorite SEM software tools of all time. In fact, I had the pleasure of recently interviewing Matt Lawson from Marin Software (one of my favorite posts on PPC Ian). Following are a few of my favorite things about Marin:

As the largest search marketing application, Marin has over 180 customers and $1 billion in annual paid search spend. This figure is absolutely amazing! More than anything, more spend equals more features (and better features). Marin clearly has the client base to support best of breed innovation.
- Just one recent example: Marin now supports Facebook Ads. (I’m a big believer in the future of Facebook and also recommend checking out my review of Jonathan Volk’s Facebook Ads book.)
Marin Software has the best account management team, period. I personally know several of the account managers at Marin and give them my highest recommendation. Marin hires the top dogs of the corporate pay per click industry, account managers that can truly add value to your program. It’s actually quite funny: The best campaign managers I know all end up joining Marin!
As you know from my last post, I’m a huge fan of the margin maximization bidding model. Marin offers a no-nonsense (anti-black box) bidding model that absolutely delivers. In my opinion, it’s the best bidding engine out there.
Marin’s user interface is amazing and polished. If you’re going to be in one application all day, you want one that’s easy to use, visually appealing, and powerful, right? You get all of these benefits with Marin. They truly put the user first.

Kenshoo – Intelligent Campaign Automation

Kenshoo is another one of my favorite search marketing applications. It’s actually really crazy: About a year ago, I visited an office warming party at Kenshoo’s new San Francisco office and had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Mike Moritz, one of the top venture capitalists in the world. Over the last year and a half, I’ve really gotten to know the Kenshoo team and give them my top recommendation. Following are just a of my favorite things about Kenshoo:

Kenshoo is new! Let’s face it: The search engine marketing industry has matured. I’ve been doing this stuff for over 6 years now and can hardly believe it. The beauty of Kenshoo is it’s a brand new application so its code base is fresh, innovative, and fast.
As you may know, I earned my BS in Computer Science from Stanford University back in 2004. Recently, I spoke all about online marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I love technology and innovation. Kenshoo is all about innovation. Their roots are in technology and they think and build innovation like true engineers.
If you’re in product shopping, Kenshoo offers amazing crawling technology that will spider your site and link your SEM campaigns into the various nodes of your site. This technology can do some really great stuff such as keeping prices in your ad copy up to date with current prices on your site, and so much more.

Efficient Frontier – Optimized Performance Marketing

Next I’m looking forward to discussing some of my favorite aspects of Efficient Frontier. Efficient Frontier is a little different than Marin Software and Kenshoo in that it’s more of an agency package. Marin Software and Kenshoo enable internal SEM teams to better manage their campaigns. Efficient Frontier, however, not only offers an amazing software solution but also combines it with the leverage of agency resources. If you’re looking to leverage one of the most amazing bidding models out there while outsourcing your campaign management, Efficient Frontier is an excellent option. Following are a few highlights:

Efficient Frontier offers the premier portfolio theory based bidding model around. As I discussed in my last post, there are two really great bidding models for the corporate setting: portfolio theory and also margin maximization. If you’re under a budget (especially a strict one), I’d definitely encourage you to investigate portfolio theory.
How many people work on your team? Do you plan to hire more? Let’s face it: There are many situations where you simply don’t have the ability to hire more team members, but you need more scale. Now, it’s my firm belief that any of the tools in this post will help you in that situation, they all offer scale. However, there’s nothing like the power of outsourcing and agency assistance for maximum leverage.
Efficient Frontier is the leader in algorithmic bidding. They employ some of the most amazing PhDs in the industry and can truly take your bidding to the next level.

ClickEquations – The First Intelligent Paid Search Solution

I’m going to close out today with ClickEquations. ClickEquations is a newer paid search application that has taken the industry by storm. I’m going to write a bit less about ClickEquations simply because I don’t know as much about it. However, that definitely doesn’t mean there is anything less valuable with this tool. Following are some of my favorite things about ClickEquations:

The management team at ClickEquations truly gets it. At SMX Advanced Seattle, I had the pleasure of hearing Craig Danuloff, President and Founder of ClickEquations, talk about Quality score. He presented a quality score whitepaper that is truly the best I’ve seen on the topic. I highly recommend checking it out! After reading this whitepaper, I’m convinced you will be a fan of ClickEquations too!
ClickEquations has a superb team. At multiple conferences, I’ve heard Alex Cohen (Digital Alex) speak on behalf of his employer, ClickEquations. This guy always hits the ball out of the park and makes a great name for his company. It’s people like this that truly inspire confidence.
I’m a big fan of the ClickEquations Blog. The blog makes a great name for the company and I can’t wait to learn more about this great SEM tool.

Image of One Plus One © iStockPhoto – topshotUK

Portfolio Theory Versus Margin Maximization

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 16 16

Have you checked out my SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide yet? I highly recommend it! You’ll get 12 FREE pages of information about buying the perfect SEM software for your company. I’ve been at the forefront of SEM technology for the last six years and share my proprietary methodology for choosing the perfect platform.

Two Very Popular SEM Bidding Models

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Today, I’d like to stay on the topic of SEM automation and specifically discuss two very popular bidding strategies: portfolio theory and margin maximization. I’m a tremendous fan of bidding automation. It’s really the only way to go when you manage hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords. Of course, you’ll always want to involve human judgment (and supervision), especially on high volume keywords, but a solid bidding model will become your organization’s SEM backbone. At the end of this post, you will walk away with two things:

An understanding of the differences between portfolio theory and margin maximization.
An understanding of which model makes the most sense for your particular business model.

What is Portfolio Theory?

Portfolio theory based bidding models involve a parameter (or parameters) you’re trying to maximize given certain constraints. Typically, you’ll find portfolio models set up to maximize volume of conversions within a budget constraint. You’ll often have a cost per acquisition constraint as well, whereby the algorithm stops short of the budget if your overall CPA is running too high.

Within your portfolio, different keywords will end up running at very different CPAs (cost per acquisition). You may have some running at extremely high margins with others even running at a negative margin. It’s all really a function of the CPA/volume tradeoff. In those cases where the algorithm can drive significantly more volume at slightly higher CPAs, it will go for it. In cases where higher CPAs drive relatively less incremental volume, the algorithm will decide to go for margin. At the end of the day, the algorithm does its best to make intelligent tradeoffs so the overall portfolio’s volume is maximized within the constraints.

In my opinion, portfolio based bidding models are absolutely awesome! They tend to break down a bit when you have an unlimited budget, although elements of the portfolio theory can still help you out in that scenario (more on this later). The most well known portfolio software out there: Efficient Frontier.

What is Margin Maximization?

So now we’ll move onto margin maximization. Over the course of my SEM career, I’ve worked mostly at companies that have had unlimited budgets. That’s right! As long as the CPA is at or below the target, I have been free to drive as many conversions as possible. It’s precisely in these types of situations that a margin maximization model thrives.

What is margin maximization? It’s simple: The model basically maximizes your margin (typically percentage margin) on a keyword level. If you have enough statistically significant data on a keyword level, it’s easy to just bid 1 – margin percentage target (while also adjusting upward to take into account slack, the delta between your bid and actual CPC). What if you don’t have enough statistically significant data on a keyword level? The best margin maximization models will forecast your keyword level revenue per visitor based on closely related keywords.

The primary benefit of margin maximization: You can rest at night knowing that you are never losing money on any keywords (as long as your forecasted keyword values are accurate). One of the downsides of margin maximization: You can sometimes leave volume on the table. If you simply take a lower percentage margin on certain keywords, you may be able to drive significantly more volume. There are a few tricks in getting around this downside, however. The first involves experimenting with different percentage margins in an effort to optimize your dollar margin. The second involves experimentation on a keyword level to allow a few loss leaders in your campaign. The margin maximization platform that I’m most familiar with (and highly recommend): Marin Software.

Which SEM Bidding Model Do I Prefer?

So what’s my preference: Portfolio theory or margin maximization? It’s really a function of my constraints. If I have a budget constraint, I’m a portfolio theory guy all the way. If I have unlimited budget, I’m all for margin maximization.

Let me tell you however, even in the second case (unlimited budget), I’m a fan of a hybrid approach. I’ll manage most keywords to a strict margin percentage. However, I will experiment placing my the best keywords (Google.com only, exact match only, category leaders) at higher bids. In cases where I can drive significantly more volume at a lower percentage margin, I’ll sometimes make the tradeoff, especially if my organization needs the volume. In terms of making up the percentage margin for the overall portfolio, I’ll often rely on my trademark terms because they run at such high margins.

So I’ve mentioned Efficient Frontier and Marin Software. What are some other great SEM applications? I recommend checking out Kenshoo and ClickEquations. In a future post, I’m looking forward to discussing some of these SEM applications and more!

Image of Math Equations © iStockPhoto – enot-poloskun

SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide Whitepaper

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 12 24

Hey Everyone,
Today is an exciting day! I’m officially launching PPC Ian’s Whitepaper Series. Today, you’ll have the opportunity to download my FREE 12 page whitepaper all about buying SEM automation software. I’m launching my SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide, the culmination of years of very hard work in the SEM technology arena. Want to download my free whitepaper? Read on! Instructions follow at the end of this post, it’s easy…

SEM Automation Software

SEM Automation Buyer's Guide

There’s no doubt about it! I’m the biggest fan of SEM automation software. Over the years, I’ve had the huge pleasure of building several in-house automation tools. I functioned in a product management role to build scalable campaign management technologies. The benefit in all of this: I learned exactly what it takes to succeed in the world of search marketing software!

Later in my career, I quickly noticed that the solutions available on the market evolved tremendously. Today, they’re far more cost effective, practical, and advanced compared to the in-house route. These day’s I’m a big proponent of buying instead of building, and was directly responsible for buying a major SEM platform at one of my recent companies. (You may wish to check out my recent video on the build vs. buy decision). The crazy part of all of this: I’m not the only one who has arrived at this conclusion! This year alone, I’ve coached at least 10 different corporate SEM teams in their SEM software audit. It seems like everyone is in the process of evaluating SEM software right now!

My Whitepaper Will Help You Buy The Right Search Marketing Software

So this all brings me to the topic of my whitepaper. When it comes to SEM software, I’ve really seen it all and done it all! I have added huge value to numerous SEM teams this year, coaching them through their buy decision. However, I’d like to scale even more and help even more search marketing teams. As such, I created an incredibly comprehensive resource for those of you evaluating SEM automation software. In 12 pages, I share my proprietary framework for completing an unbiased audit of the major SEM applications out there, arriving at the perfect decision for you and your company. Regardless of your current situation, I highly encourage you to download and read my FREE whitepaper. It will save hours of work while taking your career to the next level. If you really want to stand out as a leader in your organization and make the right software decision, my whitepaper is definitely worth your time!

PPC Ian Whitepaper Series – Sign Up Now!

The really exciting part of this all? My SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide is the first whitepaper of many. My eBook highlighting my Top 5 SEM Career Tips has been a huge success. It even landed one PPC Ian reader several job offers. As a result, I decided to launch my whitepaper series. Download my first whitepaper and you’ll automatically receive all future whitepapers directly to your email inbox. Moreover, you’ll periodically receive PPC Ian updates. It’s easy! Simply enter your first name and email and you’ll receive my whitepaper in just a few minutes. Already on my email newsletter list? My whitepaper list is actually new so you’ll want to sign up again!

Thanks so much for your support! I can’t wait to hear what you think about my new whitepaper!

Sincerely,
PPC Ian (Ian Lopuch)

Video: PPC Automation – Build vs. Buy

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 27 9

Hey Everyone,
Just a few days ago, I posted my first video entry: Who Is PPC Ian? I’m really thrilled that it took off and already received over 250 views on YouTube in just a few short days! As promised, today marks my second video and I expect to post quite a few more over the coming months! I’m excited today to discuss my deep experience with pay per click automation build versus buy decisions.

Pay Per Click Automation

If you read my Pay Per Click Automation post or Interview With Matt Lawson from Marin Software, you know I’m a huge fan of PPC automation. As someone who’s been through the decision many times and who has a Stanford Computer Science degree, automation is consistently top of mind for me. In my opinion, PPC automation is an absolute no-brainer for horizontal organizations with keyword sets spanning many different verticals (such as product shopping, financial services, education, home services, real estate, and more). However, I’m also a fan of automation for vertical organizations (those that are the 800 pound gorilla in their field) as well, those that have deep expertise within a very focused vertical.

Over the past few months, I’ve been on the phone with many folks in the pay per click industry right in the middle of the build versus buy decision. I know it’s a top priority for many large PPC organizations right now as teams are looking for the next big growth (and efficiency) driver. I truly hope my video helps in your personal decision. I know more than anyone that there’s no perfect decision that fits all organizations – Every time I’ve made this decision the outcome been a little different. Today’s video presents three thought points that will help you and your team work through your personal decision. As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions and feedback, it’s always a pleasure to hear from you guys.

Sincerely,
PPC Ian (Ian Lopuch)
P.S. Huge thank you to my beautiful wife Nicole for shooting, editing, and producing this video!

Video "Pay Per Click Automation Build vs. Buy" © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)
Image of Automation Factory © iStockPhoto – belknap

Interview: Matt Lawson from Marin Software

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 10 7

In general, I’m a big fan of interviews because they open the opportunity to work closely with other amazing professionals in the industry. Moreover, they provide very compelling content. To that end, I’m officially launching PPC Ian’s interview category! Today, I and extremely honored and lucky to launch my interview category by interviewing none other than Matt Lawson, Director of Marketing at Marin Software!

As someone with a Stanford Computer Science background, I truly appreciate the power of a great search marketing application. There are many applications out there. However, as someone who’s personally product managed two in-house systems, surveyed all of the major tools out there, and leveraged Marin Software first hand, I am very confident saying Marin is in a league of its own. However, enough about me! Let’s jump right into the interview and learn all about Marin Search Marketer.

Ian: Matt, I’m just about the biggest Marin Software fan out there. It’s a real pleasure and honor to interview you, thanks so much for sharing your time with everyone who reads PPC Ian!

Matt: Thanks Ian and congrats on the PPC Ian blog! We have more than a few readers here at Marin Software, and we are excited to be your first interview.

The Perfect Combination of Creativity and Science

Ian: I am very honored that the folks at Marin are reading my blog! Matt, you’re Director of Marketing at perhaps the coolest search technology company out there. How did you arrive at Marin? How long have you been there? Would be really curious to hear a bit about yourself and your career path!

Matt: I think everyone who ends up in paid search, finds themselves here because it provides the perfect combination of creativity and science. My digital marketing career began about 7 years ago at Coremetrics – which is now a leading web analytics provider. Back then the search engines didn’t even have API’s, so marketers would cross reference their search engine data with their analytics package manually to figure out which programs were working. At first paid search was a small piece of the marketing pie, but as it grew it became pretty clear to me that the market would demand applications for managing paid search. Wister Walcott, a friend of mine from a prior job recruited me to come work at Marin about 6 months ago, and I’ve been enjoying the ride ever since.

Over $800 Million In Annualized Paid Search Spend

Ian: For those who are a bit newer to the pay per click technology space, could you please start off with an introduction to Marin Search Marketer? What do you guys do? What’s your application all about?

Matt: Sure. We provide a software-as-a-service solution for managing paid search that’s designed for large advertisers and agencies. Running an enterprise-class paid search campaign has its unique challenges – reporting across millions of keywords, modeling large data sets for accurate bidding, and attempting to manage across hundreds of campaigns and thousands of ad groups. Marin Software helps search marketers save time and improve financial performance through a combination of automation, improved workflow, and optimization tools. In just three short years we’ve grown to a leadership position in the space, with over $800 million in annualized paid search spend being managed through our platform today.

Marin Search Marketer: Power and Ease of Use

Ian: These days, there exists a huge selection of search marketing tools. What’s different about Marin? How do you guys compare to some of the other tools out there?

Matt: There are a lot of reasons why we’re different; it’s hard to pick one! If I had to choose, I would say the real difference with Marin is that our tools provide a great combination of power and ease of use. A lot of paid search tools out there are simply too complex to use, forcing search marketers to rely on spreadsheets or vendor client service teams to accomplish their goals. That not only slows the process down, but it takes success out of the hands of the search marketer. Marin empowers users to manage campaigns, while at the same time delivering all of the automation and optimization capabilities that you would expect from an enterprise class tool.

Marin Takes a Novel Approach To Customer Service

Ian: One of the things that consistently impresses me about Marin is your ability to attract top-notch account managers, pay per clickers who have managed multi-million dollar campaigns at previous gigs (basically the industry’s top dogs). In my opinion, these are the perfect professionals to help your clients achieve major success. What’s your secret? Would love to hear more about your recruiting strategy.

Matt: How we service clients is truly unique to Marin. A lot of enterprise companies hire support teams with a rich history of…well, enterprise software support. In our case, we simply chose a different route. By focusing on hiring search marketers rather than software guru’s, our clients get more than just training. They get coaching in best practices and a helping hand when it comes to solving hard the hard problems in search. The secret isn’t in the recruiting, it’s simply that we decided to take a novel approach to servicing our customers and it’s paid off.

Marin’s Famous Bidding Algorithm and Key Features

Ian: Digging into the specifics about Marin Search Marketer, could you please walk everyone through a few of your highest leverage features? One that I know everyone would love to hear a little about is your bidding engine (arguably the best in the industry).

Matt: Of course. When I think about Marin, I think about several key features:

First, our Analytics to Action interface is a critical piece of our clients’ success. Because we allow marketers to take action on data from directly within reports, they experience a more natural workflow for paid search. Lack of adoption is the #1 reason that software implementations fail, so at Marin we’ve made it a priority to make our interface as easy to use as possible.
Our bidding provides all of the power of a portfolio based solution, with all of the control that a rules based solution provides. Marketers can easily set up business goals and run our automated bidding in a lights-out fashion, or they can manipulate bids for key terms. By putting search marketers in control and giving them the tools they need for success, they can adapt their bidding strategies to meet the unique needs of their business.
Finally our optimization tools allow you to aggressively improve ROI by applying a full suite of campaign management best practices. We provide keyword suggestion tools to help you quickly grow your campaigns, as well as tools for testing creative and landing pages. We also help you to manage match types and ad group structure to maximize campaign quality.

A Company of Search Marketers

Ian: There’s no doubt about it, your UI is incredibly polished with a tremendous amount of thought and testing behind it. Would love to hear a bit more about your overall UI strategy and your take on making pay per click professionals as efficient as possible.

Matt: We are a company of search marketers – in fact our entire client service team has a history of running actual paid search campaigns. As a result, we have been able to center our design philosophy around the day to day needs of search marketers. We call this our "day in the life" methodology. When we build new features we work with our client teams to evaluate the complete workflow, trying to minimize the time and effort required to complete a task. More importantly, when we push a new release our client services team is the first to test new features – before our customers even see it. By making sure that it works for people who have actually been in the trenches, it helps us deliver a product that goes beyond checking the box on feature requirements.

Yesterday, I was talking to a customer about our product and asked them what we could do better from a UI perspective. They literally told me that they couldn’t imagine a UI better than the one we have! We love that kind of feedback, even though we know we can’t rest on our laurels. Tomorrow our product team will be dreaming up a new way to shave half a second off of the time it takes to copy a campaign. With search marketing, time really does equal money.

Transparency Is Critical To Search Marketing Success

Ian: From a marketing perspective, Marin has branded itself as the "anti-black box SEM" company. Would be interested to learn more. What does black box mean to you and how do you guys create transparency?

Matt: We think transparency is critical to search marketing success. With most portfolio based bid engines, the search marketer has no visibility into how bids are calculated. That’s great, until something goes wrong and you need to troubleshoot it. We expose all of the data and calculations that go into generating a bid, so search marketers can see how our algorithm is affecting their most important daily decision – how much to spend on a keyword.

It’s interesting to note that this concept of transparency permeates everything that we do. For example, we post the pricing for our software on our website for the entire world to see. When we encounter a problem with a client, we surface it and address it head on rather than try to sweep it under the rug. At the end of the day, we believe being transparent with your customers is not only the right thing to do, it’s critical to long term success.

Employees Take Ownership In Marin Software’s Success

Ian: As you know, pay per click is a very small industry. From industry connections, I have heard overwhelming accolades in regards to Marin’s corporate culture and career satisfaction. What’s your secret behind this great corporate culture?

Matt: The reality is that the principles that we apply to our software – empowerment and transparency – are the same principles that we apply to running our business. The management team here focuses on setting aggressive goals and outlining a vision for the company, rather than micro-managing their employees. By simply making the expectations (and the results) clear, employees are able plot their own course to success and take an ownership stake in the company’s future. A big part of this is about open and honest feedback. With everything we do, we try to understand why something succeeded or failed. Nobody gets faulted for making a mistake, it’s only when you fail to learn from a mistake that it’s a problem.

Microsoft and Yahoo’s Partnership

Ian: The search marketing landscape is changing so rapidly. As just one example, Microsoft and Yahoo have a pending deal that could create a real competitive force for Google. What are your thoughts around these changes and how is Marin positioning itself?

Matt: We think it’s good for the industry to see Microsoft and Yahoo! coming together. At the end of the day, competition in paid search benefits advertisers, and since those are our clients we are happy to see it.

From our perspective, we don’t think that the merger of these two giants will affect Marin and its positioning. At the end of the day, managing a campaign with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of keywords is hard to execute on Google alone. We’ve built our tools to deliver time savings, efficiencies, and financial lift, even in a world where all paid search runs through a single engine.

Marin Software’s Impressive 2010 Plans

Ian: What are some of your core areas of focus over the coming year? What’s new for Marin Software in 2010?

Matt: There are going to be a lot of new things happening in 2010. As a company we are just over 3 years old and growing rapidly.

Last year we opened our first international office in London, this year we expect our international expansion to continue, building out our sales and support teams as well as translating the UI into more languages.

Today we deliver six product releases a year, based on feedback from some of the largest, most sophisticated search marketers in the world. As our company grows, so will the pace that we innovate at. While I can’t disclose where we are heading with our product, it’s fair to say that in 2010 Marin Software will make search marketing software smarter, with more solutions that intelligently recommend changes to optimize quality scores and bids.

Finally, we will be growing our employee base here in the states. Anytime you experience rapid growth, you are always challenged to maintain your corporate culture. We’re fortunate in that our sales, service, and engineering teams are all co-located here in San Francisco. That not only helps us to communicate and resolve customer issues faster, it allows us to easily assimilate new employees into the Marin way.

Marin Software Is Hiring!

Ian: Is Marin currently hiring? If so, which roles are most critical?

Matt: Marin is hiring! We are hiring across a variety of roles – in sales, marketing, client service and engineering – all critical roles. From our perspective, the roles that directly touch our customers and our product – client services and engineering – are the roles that are most important to our growth. Because our clients’ success fuels our growth it’s hard to ever have enough talent in those two areas.

Ian: That’s great! PPC Ian readers, if you’re interested in applying for a position at Marin Software, please send me your resume and a brief cover letter to jobs@ppcian.com. I will personally screen your resume and connect you with the right people at Marin, if the fit is right.

Advice For Choosing The Right SEM Technology Solution

Ian: I personally know that a huge array of search engine marketing professionals are currently benchmarking various technologies, looking for the right one for their organization. I’m consistently seeing Marin as a top contender. What’s your advice for companies actively looking at technologies right now? How can they get in contact with you guys and learn more?

Matt: We work with a lot of companies on software selections, and see some consistent themes across companies that are successful, not just through implementation but in terms of long term results.

The most critical thing to get right in a selection is to begin with your own requirements. A lot of companies will simply survey the vendors out there without first taking a look at what is important to them. Beginning with a detailed checklist of your business requirements ensures that there are no hidden surprises once you deploy.

Second, you need to find a vendor that works with companies like yours. Take a close look at client lists, do informal reference checks, and ask around at trade shows. We often see prospects assume that all tools are the same and that price is the only thing that matters. The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Finally, make sure you are working with a leader. Companies like Marin are operating at scale; with over $800 Million in annualized spend under management. That means more investment in product, client service, and the hardware and bandwidth required to provide you with an enterprise class solution. Make sure that the vendors you are looking at will meet your requirements not only today, but as your business and your search marketing program grows over time.

For those readers out there looking to learn more about Marin, you can always reach us at info@marinsoftware.com.

Matt, I Sincerely Appreciate The Great Interview!

Ian: Great stuff! PPC Ian readers, I highly encourage you to do your due diligence, a very important component of the PPC career path. There’s no doubt that SEM technologies can bring your business to the next level. Make sure to reach out to Marin Software to learn more! Matt, it was a true pleasure and honor. Thank you so much for the interview! I’m super excited about it and know everyone reading PPC Ian will really enjoy reading. Looking forward to staying in touch and thank you!

Matt: Thanks so much for your time Ian!

Marin Software’s Contact Info

Website: http://www.marinsoftware.com/
Email: info@marinsoftware.com
Phone: (415) 399-2580
Address: 123 Mission Street, 25th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

Pay Per Click Automation

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jan 22 29

As you may know from my about me page, I majored in computer science at Stanford University. I truly feel like my computer science background prepared me perfectly for the corporate pay per click career path. Why? When you’re dealing with extremely large campaigns (especially across a portfolio of verticals), it’s nearly impossible to scale without automation of some sort. As someone who’s product managed several internal automation tools and who has worked with third party solutions, I’m thrilled to start discussing PPC automation today. I’ll start off with an overview of my automation thoughts and will follow up with a series of in-depth PPC automation articles over the coming months.

Why Automate Corporate Pay Per Click Campaigns?

Automation Gears

What’s the key difference between affiliate marketing and corporate pay per click marketing? There are a few, but the big one is scope. In the affiliate world, you can make quite the decent living by focusing on a very specific niche. However, in the corporate world, it’s all about going big. You’re dealing with millions of keywords, unreal budgets, extremely complex accounts, often across multiple categories.

As a computer science guy at heart, I like to equate manual campaign management to The Mythical Man Month. After a certain point (usually after 5-10 campaign managers), throwing more marketing professionals at your corporation’s campaigns will simply not help. Actually, more people at a certain point can actually slow you down! Here’s where automation comes in: Automation will take your program to the next level. Automation will assist your human team in executing certain aspects of PPC faster and more accurately than possible through manual campaign management. Automation will get you over that plateau your team is facing.

Another critical point: Corporate PPC is an extremely competitive field. You need to assume your competitors are investing in automation. If you’re not, your PPC campaigns will fall behind. You simply cannot keep up without automation. For this reason alone, it’s extremely important to automate aspects of your PPC campaigns to maintain your edge against the competition.

What Aspects of PPC Should You Automate?

I want to be clear from the beginning: I’m not one of those guys that recommends automating all aspects of PPC. In my opinion, that’s a recipe for disaster. I’ve seen it play out before: You automate everything, the campaigns start trending down, and then a manual manager needs to jump in and fix everything. What I am arguing however is that automation should play an absolutely critical role supporting your human campaign management team. Below are just a few aspects of PPC that are totally worth automating.

Automate PPC Bidding: Biding is perhaps the primary aspect of PPC that should be automated. Bidding is very tedious, it’s totally based on data, and it’s very time consuming. In my experience, it’s very easy for humans to make major mistakes with manual bidding.

Automate PPC Reporting: There’s no doubt about it, reporting is extremely important. Corporate PPC is all about data analysis and data-driven action. If you automate your reporting, your team can spend more time analyzing and driving action versus pulling numbers together.

Automate Keyword Generation: I have mixed feelings on this one because some of the best gains in PPC have been a direct result of creative keyword generation. At the same time, you simply cannot scale your keyword set effectively without automation. In a product shopping vertical? Leverage your catalog to generate keywords as new products are released. Looking to deploy more exact match queries for increased bidding efficiency, targeting, and position? Deploy exact match versions of all raw user queries that drove conversions. Looking to leverage the competitive intelligence of your industry? Pull keyword lists from tools such as Trellian, Wordtracker, and KeyCompete.

Build Versus Buy and a Few Great SEM Platforms

As discussed in the introduction, I’ve both built and bought PPC automation tools during my career. While building was the only option when I first got started (there were simply no tools available on the market for purchase), buying is a lot easier these days (thank goodness).

As a general rule, I’m much more in favor of buying versus building for smaller organizations. Small organizations need to focus on their core business, they simply don’t have the resources to effectively build and maintain automation tools. There’s actually quite a bit of overhead in simply maintaining SEM tools due to search engine API upgrades that happen regularly. Moreover, the tools available on the market these days are absolutely astounding. Two tools that I highly recommend are Marin and Kenshoo.

Now, if you’re at a larger organization, the decision can become a bit more difficult. Because most SEM platforms out there operate on a percentage fee model, buying at a large organization can become very expensive (unless you’re able to negotiate a great deal). There may come a point where building becomes more cost effective than buying. One thing is for sure: SEM automation is very high leverage and should be an important decision that every corporate SEM team considers regularly.