The word, optimization, is used liberally in search marketing. It is a vague term that covers a broad range of processes, from changing ad copy, adjusting bids, looking at competitor’s ads for ideas, even adding a keyword. Search marketers talk about optimization all the time, and depend on the moniker as a crutch of sorts. As long as they’re doing something, it falls under optimization, and if a campaign happens to do well, it’s the result of… well, optimization.
Optimization, by definition, means making a process better — producing more desirable results and helping to achieve objectives.
Search marketing 101 teaches us some basic optimization techniques. Make sure your keyword appears in ad copy. Include a call to action, or rather, come up with 2 compelling offers and run them side by side to see which one gets you more clicks. Voila, your first AB test.
Optimization sounds simple, right? Just come up with creative ideas and test them, pick a winner, and run with it. In many cases, this can work to an extent. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with AB testing ad copy or injecting creative ideas into the ad mix. The problem exists with a prevalence of search marketers executing all of these optimization techniques within what I like to refer to as the “Search Silo.”
In the search silo, marketers acquire a tunnel vision of sorts. Their attention becomes solely focused on a standard set of metrics, of which dynamics are influenced by a playbook of search tactics. These aren’t fancy metrics — even search greenhorns have heard of them. Clicks. Impressions. CTR. Conversion Rate. Maybe even Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Lead.
To an extent, this tunnel vision approach limits paid search to a turnkey operation — a travesty to those who understand the sophistication and potential capacity of this medium.
Optimization requires one to discard the blinders and approach business objectives rather than click through rates. Optimization makes marketing effective and efficient.
If I were to sum up marketing in one word, it would have to be relevance.
There is a reason beer commercials crowd NFL airtime. There is a reason Rolex advertises in the Robb Report, alongside Yacht reviews and vacation villas in the French Riviera.
Marketing requires a market, and the only way a business will succeed is to connect with that market with a relevant message. A relevant message puts the right product in front of an eligible buyer. A relevant message compels with topics that are of interest to the audience.
Relevance, relevance, relevance.
Google evangelizes relevance. It is the core of their search business. When John searches for Florida beach hotels, he trusts that the links Google provides are relevant to his query. If John continues to go down the list of links, only to find websites on beached whales, hotels in France, and timeshares in Tallahassee… well, John won’t be likely to rely on Google anymore. Google rewards advertisers for providing a relevant search experience — quite handsomely in fact, with sizable discounts on media pricing. They even go as far as punishing advertisers that degrade the user experience by charging more for advertising.
True optimization goes far beyond CTR and Impressions. It addresses the client’s business objective by addressing the entire user experience to make sure that every step is relevant.
The majority of our business revolves around the search engine. Establishing relevance requires a wide bridge of relevance between the agency’s keyword portfolio and the market’s cornucopia of queries.
The perfect search marketer would have over a Google keywords in Google — advertising just one product to boot, red leather boots for women – pardon the pun. A recent study by Hitwise showed that Internet users are using much longer queries in their research for a product or service. Hitwise states the average query length is seven words – that’s a long way from people searching for “news” or “cars”. The ubiquitous search box is no longer a portal for keywords, per se. It is a virtual drop box for questions by savvy netizens who trust Google to provide better answers to more specific questions. It’s not just red leather boots for women anymore — people are searching to find out what shade of red looks best in leather, and whether alligator skin comes in crimson, not to mention a minimum heel height of 2″ to complement their new jeans. No marketer can predict every query, but we can get close. We can… optimize.
Marketing by the Numbers Can be Baaaaaad
Optimization, then, involves much more than tweaking words or bids. Optimization requires marketers to understand the marketplace and the audience therein. If search marketing existed in 1965, a business bidding on angora wool sweaters would have seen a dramatic fall in all the usual SEM metrics. Impressions down. Clicks down. Conversions down. Bid all you want and change all the ad copy you want, but it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Why? The market changed – American households were buying home washers and dryers at an incredible rate, and lo and behold — Angora wool was not washer-safe. Demand shifted.
Isolation in the search silo would leave one deaf to the changing demands, tunnel vision blocking the cover of Reader’s Digest exalting the new home washer as the invention of the century.
Technology Helps Pinpoint Relevance
To optimize properly, the process must begin with an innate understanding of what creates the bridge of relevance between the product/service and the audience.
Technology can serve this purpose well.
Web analytics software allows transparency into metrics beyond click through rates. To use a traditional analogy, what good is a customer walking into your store, only to leave after taking 3 steps past the entrance? Great billboard! Great sale sign! Not such a great marketing effort… in fact, that visitor might even cause detriment by telling friends and colleagues that your store isn’t worth visiting, “Yeah it looked interesting, but the store sucked. Don’t bother.” Negative word of mouth, negative branding. No good.
My agency’s approach to creative strategy, therefore, involves much more than ad copy. It begins by establishing alignment with the client’s business objective to gain an understanding of who comprises the ideal audience, and by ideal this usually means addressing KPIs such as customer lifetime value and other sophisticated internal metrics not found within AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter.
The agency is responsible, therefore, for establishing relevancy both ways — to the consumer and to the business. The ideal agency is not limited to media buying, or copywriting, or keyword research. The ideal agency creates strategies that are relevant to the business objectives of their client (identifying geographic and demographic indicators of high profitability and lifetime value), then discovering the most relevant and compelling message targeted at that specific audience. Once this bridge is created, we can start calling this optimization. It is truly optimal — a win win for everyone involved. Client gets sales, audience gets what they want.
The beauty of this type of sophisticated optimization lies within the technology that enables smart marketers to continue evolving the process. Paid search platforms, competitive intelligence packages, and web analytics software, to name a few, track everything from what browser was used, to what time a click was made, to which keyword performed best in a specific city versus another in terms of driving sales. Everything.
Once again, the search marketer runs into the ‘everything’ problem. Vis-a-vis the impossibility to include every query in the world in one’s keyword list, it is also impossible to make sense of every data point available from our various tools.
The ideal agency is able to draw useful, actionable insights, turning raw data into true business intelligence. The transformation of numbers into knowledge allows the agency to further optimize their marketing campaigns.
Ad #1 had a CTR of 20%.
Ad #2 had a CTR of 10%.
The wise marketer would retort, “So what?”. Flashbacks of my 9th grade English teacher occur, as Mr. Campbell always rebutted my essay’s factual statements with “so what” or “what does that mean to you?”. Those questions are deservingly pertinent however — who cares that ad #1 gets more clicks than ad #2?
Clicks do not make the business.
Clicks bring people who make the business.
My agency team has been relentless in its commitment to analyzing the entire post-click experience. Integrating search metrics with post-click analysis provides actionable insight that lays the foundation for informed business decisions.
Insights, then, provide sound reason for testing. Once statistically confirmed as a valid assumption, the insight is transformed into action — a business decision that our tests have predicted with confidence to succeed.
Because these insights are drawn from sophisticated analysis of user behavior and interaction, every test is a gateway to an optimization step, specifically implemented to drive business KPIs – whether it be increased sales, generation of qualified leads, or extension of brand awareness.
I’ve always been particularly keen on gleaning insights that can be leveraged directly in search marketing tactics. Audience segmentation is a primary area of such importance. Analytics can reveal demand by keyword and queries (providing semantic interest segmentation for SEO and keyword/bid optimization), geography (for geographic targeting), and content quality cross tabulation (which page shows highest engagement and/or conversion attribution). Analysis never ends with a comparison of two numbers, of which the greater is deemed better. One of our agency’s core tenets is client alignment and partnership — we understand the client’s business first, then apply our search expertise.
A Tale of Two Metrics
The tale of two numbers, therefore, is often much more than that of a winner and loser. It may have been the best of times, or the worst of times… but in either case, we never rest until we know why.
Ah yes, then we optimize.
Steve Jobs may have lived by his mantra, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” — but he never mentioned anything about staying thirsty. Stay Quenched… and stay extraordinary.
The latest design iteration by Diet Coke is genius. I’m one of DC’s biggest brand ambassadors and vocal fans (nobody at my agency asks for my drink order at meetings any longer…it’s assumed)….
It speaks to my audience segment with relevance and strikes an emotional chord with me that resonates “affinity match affinity match” with subtle under and overtones.
Steve Jobs loved beautiful things. Diet Coke is beautiful.
