Insight at SES Chicago!

SES Chicago was this week, and 7Search sent me downtown to the Hyatt Regency to attend. This event hosts all of the major internet marketing and e-commerce businesses in the US and from all around the world, who share the latest industry trends and news with working professionals. It’s a great opportunity to increase your knowledge and to learn from experts in the field. I attended a seminar devoted to advanced pay per click analytics methods. The speakers were Andrew Goodman, president of Page Zero Media, and Joseph Kerschbaum, VP of Clix Marketing.

The gentlemen spoke on the capabilities of different analytics systems, as well as how data can help your business. Andrew focused on Google AdWords, and its ability to affect the traffic quality score of your keywords. Joseph presented Microsoft Ad Center’s resources to allow you to compile data, help you to draw conclusions, and to be email alerted with up to date reports. Implementing these tools can help you to save time and make more informed decisions on your business. Using tools like AdWords Editor can help you to gather data and adjust campaigns more quickly using several filter options. Looking at your reports to determine the extremely high and low swings in spend can help you to find more opportunity for correction.

One note that stuck in my mind was the idea of looking at your business from the top down:

I found this to be helpful specifically to our advertisers. If you take a more broad view of your effort, you can gain a clearer picture of your activity. Trending analysis provides more of a contextual understanding of the activity of your campaign. For example, if you take a look at your activity for the last 3 months, and are seeing spikes in activity, what may be some contributing factors? Were you running a special offer, or starting a new one? Is your traffic trending more towards the weekends? Have you been testing different ads, and their effects? These are all elements that can help you explain the volume in your account, and create better decision making.

This breakdown is also useful in that it covers the main elements in your business individually. I find it easier to solve a problem by breaking it down into parts. I’ve often written that your success is not predicated on one factor, but several in a balanced effort. This diagram is a good reminder to look at the bigger picture, and then work your way through the parts.

Another element that came up in the presentation that may prove useful to our users was the use of bid automation. This is a tool that is available through several platforms, and allows the user’s bids to be raised or lowered based on competitor’s bids. Joseph recommended that these be used only for stabilized campaigns, meaning that you should tool around with the campaign until it has reached your expectations of spend and conversion. This is to ensure against extremes in spend and changes in your campaign. This should also be used strictly for high volume campaigns, as a campaign with a lower level of traffic would not benefit from automatic spending increases. This is also not considered, in Joseph’s opinion, a form of optimization, but a tool to maintain a level of success.

The point made in the seminar that may be most important to our advertisers was to test your ads all the time. By running several ads for your products, within our Rules and Guidelines, you have benchmarks that you can use for comparison. You can find which ad is most effective in terms of traffic, cost, conversion ratio, etc. The comparison of ads provides a lot of information on the effectiveness of the ad copy, but also the temperament of your audience. What are they clicking onto? What types of searches are your keywords receiving? How long are they staying on the site?

It was great to learn more about this subject in order to gain a frame of context. Often our advertisers have come from Google, Bing, and other platforms and have a different vernacular. I feel I gained a better understanding of the intricacies of other platforms and how I can better communicate with my clients. You can learn more about SES, which holds events all over the country, here: http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/