Ponderings of a PPC Professional by Kirk Williams
What You Think You Know About Your Customers' Persona is Wrong.
Keyword targeting does something an audience can never, ever, ever do… it reveals (1) individual, (2) personal, and (3) temporal intent.
Keywords come from the mind of one individual, and because of that they have frightening, personal potential.
Remember, audience targeting is based off of assumptions. That is, you're taking a group of people who "probably" think the same way in a certain area. But does that mean they cannot have unique tastes, say, one person preferring to buy sneakers with another preferring to buy heels?
We aren't finding random people we think might be interested based upon where they live. We are responding to a person telling us they are interested.
With the keyword (i.e., Search Advertising), you are not blasting your ads into your users lives, interrupting them as they go about their business or family time, and hoping to jumpstart their interest by distracting them from their activities. You are responding to their query at the very time they are interested in learning more. Timing. Is. Everything.
Here are the two core, unchanging principles I see in the marketing funnel:
(1) There are stages of customer intent that change over time moving from less to more intentional in purchase behavior.
(2) These stages of customer purchase intent correlate with the number of people in those stages (i.e., more people in awareness, fewer closer to purchase action).
It informs our bidding decisions (we’re going to bid more aggressively for people closer to purchase), and it informs our campaign structure (we try to keep audiences or keywords grouped according to where they are in the funnel for bidding and targeting and budgeting purposes).
I am especially interested in Smart Shopping automation because I believe it is the next wave of “the new Google Ads”. That is, Google wants to utilize more automated systems such as audiences or product feeds to allow them to control more of the placement and bidding of ads than the old school method of keyword targeting. In this regard, I think there are crucial aspects to automation that the PPC industry (and in many ways, the broader digital marketing industry) needs to sit up and take notice… before we are too far down the path of obscure data.
We humans can make changes unnecessarily, or without enough data, and mess up the algorithm. Platform reps are rightfully concerned about giving an element of control over to humans who don’t fully understand the process. It’s a difficult friction in which we can both agree that humans are necessary, and yet also agree that humans can mess it all up. Even intelligent, professional, well-intentioned PPCer humans.
I’ll say it a different way: marketers send qualified audiences, but it’s up to the website (client) to convince that traffic to convert to the macro-conversion (the main action you are trying to get your target audience to take). What I mean is, if we filter our target audience by preventing certain kinds of people from actually completing the form submission (or even seeing our ads), then we can likely increase the Lead to Purchase ratio… but we also run the risk of not ultimately filling the funnel with potential customers who should have been willing to convert.
An account will ultimately see exponential growth, not by limiting the customer base by continually trying to filter out people actually interested in the product, but by more successfully identifying how to convert more of those “other” people already showing interest, but not yet bought in.
If you think the way to solve your lead problems is by limiting a good audience, then you’ll never blow up (in a good way).
Marketing is supposed to fill the funnel with great traffic. The website’s job is to convince that traffic why you’re the right choice.
Are you sending people who are searching for the right queries, and taking the right micro-actions on your site, but who do not yet want to purchase? Then fix the non-marketing problem. Fix your offer,
Step up your email strategy, optimize your landing page speed, change your pricing, or even rethink your business model. I love marketing and think it’s amazingly powerful, but the best marketing won’t fix a bad product, website, or offer.
PPC Can’t (Really, Technically, Kind of) Create Demand
For the sake of over-simplification let’s assume there are two core sides to advertising: Demand creation Demand capture PPC marketing is stellar at demand capture.
You can get your ad in front of one specific person (amazing!) just by identifying what they are asking Google. You get it right in front of them when they are asking and marketing shines its brightest.
PPC Isn’t Marketing, PPC Is a Channel Within Advertising, Within Marketing
As I have tried to communicate in this entire book, paid search is a fantastic advertising channel in which to invest. It does a great job of answering questions people are already asking and offering the solution of your product or service. However, if this is your entire marketing strategy, then eventually it will come to bite you simply because you need some way to create demand in the first place.
Truth #1: You only have two objectives when making a bidding decision.
Objective 1: Decrease bids on low performing entities (keywords/product groups/etc.).
Objective 2: Increase bids on high performing entities.
Truth #2. You need to focus on the right data to make a bidding decision.
When I am considering whether to raise or lower my bids (i.e., create a bidding rule, or simply make a decision on a certain audience or metric in my account), I ask myself variations of the following four questions.
Is There Enough Traffic?
Is It Affordable?
Is It Profitable?
What Is Happening in the Market?
A good marketer uses data. A great marketer uses data to take action on what she believes to be true that has not yet been proven (and sometimes, can never be proven), regardless of the attribution model’s simplistic assignment of value. A specific attribution model can only take us so far in determining true success of a channel, and therein lies the inherent weakness of attribution.
The glaring weakness of attribution is none other than our inability to accurately track human emotions.
A Linear model doles out equal percentages of credit to the channels in the entire user journey, and a Last Click model doles out 100% of the credit to the last channel to send traffic, and so on. However, these are giving out credit as percentages based solely on timing of sessions, and not on how we as humans actually make decisions… with emotion, with logic, with reason, with desire.
Here is what I mean, digital advertising is just advertising. It’s not the greatest thing to ever happen to marketing, and it’s not a bubble. It’s just advertising.
Regardless, as long as we keep chasing solely after tracked individual channel success and building digital marketing strategies (selecting keywords, ad text choices, locations, devices, audiences, demographics, etc.) without thinking beyond individual channel success, then we will continue to struggle to build brands and see incremental growth.
Only when we as paid search marketers strategize with the other channels to build a marketing strategy targeting the right message to people at the right place in the funnel (selecting unique keywords, and channels and campaign types for those, of course) will we begin to get beyond tracked ROAS as our primary KPI and focus more on overall brand growth across all marketing channels.
ROAS and Revenue Growth are initially conflicting PPC goals in rapid growth.
Practically speaking, when we push harder for rapid growth that typically means:
bidding higher, finding new keywords and audiences to target, shifting strategies to enter upper funnel auctions (which will tend to have lower tracked ROAS).
All of those have the practical result of surging spend and traffic from previously untapped auctions. Remember, Google and Microsoft Paid Search are auction based systems where you bid for position on every auction. When you bid higher, you are often entering new auctions. When you target new keywords or audiences (whether upper or lower funnel), you are entering new auctions.
You won’t make the same profit on a person entering your sales funnel as you do on a person at the end of the funnel, but that’s because the person at the end of the funnel also spent more of your money elsewhere making their way through your danged funnel in the first place.
Your Business Should Grow in Top-Line Revenue Over Time.
I believe an aggressive run to a crisis in advertising doesn’t actually help your long-term brand (and can potentially harm it). As much as you are able, avoid the temptation of marketing to the crisis, and instead lean into the benefits, intelligently highlighting their fit into the current crisis (by not mentioning the crisis).
Don’t focus on the crisis (this one or the next). Focus on how your product or service meets the needs of your potential customers (while they’re in the midst of this crisis, by the way), and they will naturally feel connected to your offering without feeling like they are being hard-sold.
8 Questions to Ask Yourself When Considering PPC Independence
“Am I Thinking Realistically About This?”
“Why Do I Want To Do This?”
“Is Now The Best Time To Take This Leap?”
“What Do I Want To Accomplish With This?”
“Do I Have Other Business Skills Besides PPC?”
“Can I Afford To Do This Right Now?”
“How Will This Impact Others In My Life?”
“Who Can I Lean On For Referrals And Advice?”
