Cream of Life

Sales and marketing are often linked and regarded as one single aspect that almost every business has. I was asked about this question one day: how do you view the relationship between online marketing and online sales?At the first sight, online marketing is pretty straight forward to understand, but the question is how I should understand the idea of “online sales”.

While online and offline marketing have the same goal of improving communication with target customers, they may differ in terms of marketing channels, tools, and metrics. Same for sales. Both online and offline sales aim at increasing the revenue for the business, but the means to achieve the goals are very different.

In the retail world or B2C business, offline sales efforts may involve cold calling, pitching and product consultation. Sales team simply reach out to your potential customers and show and discuss with them how your products or services resolves their problems. Online sales may appear to be more reactive, but instead focuses more on user experience of online store where transactions take place. The success of online sales relies on building a best-in-class online shop through website and conversion optimizations.

Optimizing the website may simply start with being relevant to users. It means showing every user coming in your site the right information on the right page at the position and at the right time. It involves your understanding of who your users are, where they are from, and what they expect to see on your site. One way to do so is to work with the SEM folks to ensure a relevance between the keywords they use and the landing pages they send users to. As part of site optimization, the bounce rate of different site sections is a good metric that should be reviewed regularly to check the relevance of the pages your users perceive.

The other idea to build a good e-commerce site to through optimizing conversion. The goals of conversion optimization are to address customers’ anxiety as they shop and improve their trust level with you as a retailer. One metric to measure success of conversion optimization is cart abandonment rate, and the fallout report of your SiteCatelyst or Google Analytics definitely can tell you a lot about it.

I remember the days I needed to rely on the so-called official AdWords keyword tool to help brain storm keyword ideas. I did not like it from day 1. The most important reason is the interface. You simply can’t believe that it’s so “primitive” — it’s like my HTML coursework when I studied multimedia design many years ago.

But the simplicity in interface design should not be a problem if it does not sacrifice functionality. I used to urge my clients and agency friends to try out the keyword tool, but most of them were not very impressed with it. After understanding with them, I found some of them did not realize they could enter an URL of their website to ask the tool to suggest keywords. Some did not see a link on the tool where they could choose country and language to narrow the keyword suggestions to suit their target users. Their “misunderstanding” or “lack of understanding” of the tool is because its interface is not very user friendly.

And finally this year, the long-awaited enhanced keyword tool arrived — Search-based Keyword Tool . To me, it’s an ultimate keyword tool that caters the 3 aspects that Google cares the most — user, advertiser and budget.

Similar to the old keyword tool, Search-based Keyword Tool lets you choose country and language to find keywords. But finally it’s now in a more prominent position so you won’t miss it. It’s also for existing advertisers to review the competition of the keywords in their campaigns and decide if they want to add more keywords. Well, campaign budget is always a concern for advertisers. The tool provides a “suggested bid” column to give you a sense about the CPC level of the suggested keywords.

So, maybe it’s time for us to move on to the new keyword tool and say goodbye to the old tool.

One of the key improvements I enjoy the most on the new AdWords interface is the way that Google brings 2 useful reports for optimization more accessible. The first report is the Search Query Report, and it’s for generating more relevant keywords. The other report is the Placement Performance Report (PPR), and it’s for optimizing performance in the Content Network (if you opt into that).

With the Search Query Report, you will see the search terms people use to trigger your ads on Google Search Network. Because of different keyword match types, like Exact and Board, the keywords that trigger your ads are not necessarily those you added to your campaigns, and you may want to add those keywords that you don’t have in your campaigns. To dig out these keywords, on the new AdWords interface, go to “Campaigns” Tab > “All online campaigns”  > “Keywords” Tab, and hit “See Search Terms” > All. Focus on the “Match Type” column and look for keywords with “Board Match.”

If you opt into the Content Network, you may want to know where exactly my ads are displayed. While you can choose “Managed Placement” (formerly known as “Placement Targeting”) to control the website to show your ads, the “Automatic Placement” (a.k.a. Content Match) has been a mystery that scared off advertisers. Although Google provided the PPR to address the concern allowing advertisers to view performance of individual website, the PPR was too shy, and too logically and properly placed under the “Report” Tab. The net result was no one cared to discover it and appreciate its beauty.

The PPR is now in a much prominent position on the new interface. Check it out on the “Networks” Tab > Content > Automatic placements > show details.  If you find some sites that you like, e.g. the CTR is high or the CPC is low, you can add them to your Managed Placements and set a separate bid for them (see the picture below).

I find the 2 handy reports/ tools easy to use for myself and easy to communicate my optimization suggestions with my clients. If you have time, please check them out and let me know what you think. Enjoy.

Many people know Google has an official certification program for individual or ad agencies to obtain the Google Advertising Professional qualification to manage AdWords campaign for advertisers. I was recently asked by a Hong Kong advertiser if there’s something similar for Google Analytics (GA). Yes, there is. But it’s not yet well developed as GAP. And there are different resources for advertisers and ad agencies.

If you are an advertiser who needs a vendor to install and maintain GA on your website, you may check out Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program. You will see a list of GA Authorized Consultants located in US, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacifica and so on.

Say if you work in the ad agencies, you may want to equip yourself knowledge of GA. Afterall GA is free and you are likely to be asked some common questions when you talk to your clients. Go to Analytics Troubleshooter if you have some specific technical questions on installing tracking code or setting up filters. Visit Analytics Help if you want to get an overview on what GA is.

Some of my favorite articles about how GA can help improve Conversions are found on the Conversion University. Check them out to make sure you understand GA not just on theories, but in practice as well.

In the world of AdWords, I always bear in mind either money or relevance can help optimize campaign performance. In practice, before we do anything in our AdWords campaigns, we should first check if we should focus on the money components, e.g. max CPC, daily budget etc., or the relevance factors like Quality Score (QS), landing page and so on.

But how can we tell if we should narrow our focus to money or relevance? All you need is to run a campaign report with Impression Share (IS) data. Google has a definition for IS, but I often explain this term to clients by saying that it’s a precentage that tells you how many times your ads are shown on Google.com to all the users who searched with your keywords. If the IS of your search campaign is 60%, that means only 6 out of the 10 users who searched with the keywords you used in your campaign can see your ads.

Then why the other 4 users cannot see my ads?

The 4 users, i.e. the 40%, cannot see your ads because of either low ad rank or insufficient budget of your campaign. You will find in the report with IS data there are 2 coloumn called “Lost IS (Rank)” and “Lost IS (Budget)”. The concept is simply like this.

Impression Share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%

The Lost IS (Budget) or (Rank) give us a good insights on picking the right approach to start our optimization.

If IS is 60%, Lost IS (Budget) is 0% but Lost IS (Rank) is 40%, that means a poor Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score) is reducing your impression share. Adding more daily budget cannot help bring back your IS. You should then focus on how to improve Ad Rank by either raising CPC or editing your keywords or ad texts to improve QS.

If IS is 60%, Lost IS (Budget) is 40% but Lost IS (Rank) is 0%, that means your campaign is losing impression share due to an insufficient daily budget. Google wants to show your ads because your ad rank is quite OK, but, sorry, your campaign don’t have enough budget to get you more clicks.

Of course, every time before I run a campaign report with IS date, I do long to see 100% IS with 0% Lost IS. But it seldom happens; otherwise, I will lost my job.

When you start optimizing an AdWords campaign, usually you would have an objective in mind, e.g. lowering CPA, increasing CTR and so on, before you run any reports to collect data for your optimization. Among so many types of AdWords report you can run, I’d say the Search Query Report is very likely to be able to help regardless of your optimization objectives. Usually, I run a Search Query Report to dig out keywords that users searched on and clicked on my ads. I need to know these keywords so that I can do the following 2 things.
1. Develop some negative keywords to exclude irrelevant searches
2. Add keywords with high CTR but are not yet included in my existing keyword list

In practice, you need to filter the following info before you can get a smaller list of search queries to find the potential keywords to include or exclude more efficiently.

1. “other unique queries” in the column “Search Query”
2. “Exact” in the column “Search Query Match Type”

You may also want to descend the “clicks” column so that you can look at the high click keywords (very likely high cost as well) first to develop your lists.

Lastly, open your eyes big. Read all the filtered search queries one by one and pick those you want to kill or add. Afterall, there’s no solution called “one click does it all.”

Like it or not, keyword-targeted campaigns in Google’s Content Network usually gives you a cheaper click than your search-only campaign. Some advertisers dislike the Content Network and opt their campaigns out of it because they feel insecure about where exactly their ads are displayed. The feeling of lack of control of what you pay for really hurts. But there are ways for us to minimize the feeling of insecurity and maximize the ROI of your keyword-targeted campaigns on the Content Network.

1. Set content bid
2. Separate a campaign for content network from search network
3. Run Performance Placement Report to suggest site exclusion or placement targeting
4. Use 5-15 keywords in each ad group

Google’s Zeitgeist is one of my favorite websites that keep me up-to-date on the popular search keywords in different countries. As 2007 ended, they released 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist indicating the fastest rising and falling search queries in U.S. and across the globe. It’s no surprise that gadgets like iphone tops the chart of fastest rising keywords while communities like facebook, youtube and hi5 also get their places on the list.

I also looked up the top search keywords in Hong Kong and China in December 2007. As you can imagine, Chinese people in these 2 places tend to search with entertainment buzzwords. Names of online game, TV program, novel and song once again got a place on the Hong Kong and China’s top queries lists. Cell phone models and electronic gadgets are also popular queries in Hong Kong. Three out of the fifteen top keywords in Hong Kong in December 2007 belong to this type of B2C Consumer Electronics.