intro
today we learn website marketing,
For more infomation >> DASH Chef 1400Watt Premium Digital Blender with Recipes - Duration: 21:10. 
A big round of applause, talking about paid search, Donna Lagow.
Thank you guys for joining us this evening as we wrap up, especially as we're leading into the very important happy hour part.
What our session is about today is specifically focused on some of the large perils
and disastrous performance that we've seen in PPC account management.
So I'm going to be kind of pulling back the curtains on what we've seen as an agency
and hopefully you can learn from some of the lessons that we're going to be covering today
and how to not fall into those same pitfalls of money loss, really.
Before we get into that I'll tell you a little bit about me.
Again, my name is donna Lagow. I'm the Senior Account Manager at 360Partners in Austin, Texas.
We are a boutique agency. I manage clients across the PPC, SEO, and CRO vertical, and my clients actually
span across a myriad of industries, from web hosting clients to the financial services fortune 500 group,
as well as large E-com clients.
So lots of, again, pitfalls of performance to be able to pull from examples here.
Before we get started, I also want to tell you a little bit about Austin, Texas.
This is where we're from. If you guys have not been there yet, you should.
It is the queso capital of the nation.
I live there with my great Dane Cecelia. She is quite great, all 120 pounds of her.
And I really like spooky things, which aligns very well with the topic here today.
So without further ado, let's get into the good stuff, or the disastrous stuff, as I've been calling it.
We're going to be going through three of the primary storylines today.
First, how meeting our members overall was actually killing the company.
Next up, the rise of the scripts, or the rise of the machines, as I call it,
and how that strategy nearly slaughtered our ROI. And then last but not least,
three fatal errors that we see when going through paid search audits as an agency.
So: how meeting our numbers was actually killing the company.
How's it even possible? you ask.
That person wants to know.
Alignment: it's key. It's really important when you're
hearing that word it's one that we use in our in our day-to-day quite often
it's usually in reference to a goal are we aligned in terms of the reach goal
that we're aiming for are we aligned in terms of the new business shift and
product target that we're trying to meet it's pretty important to get that all
established upfront as part of our vernacular alignments really just how we
feel relative to a concept I guess so we had a client this is one of our larger
online clients as well and they are in the in the business of selling large
basically storage containers those mobile mini office things that you see
alongside railroads and when starting to have initial meetings with them and
onboarding them as a client their senior management team walks us through and
articulated their goals for us and they took us through overall what their
primary acquisition focus was again we're going to be focused on mobile
offices specifically a secondary and far less important goal for them was this
storage containers category and he said really I don't want to allocate any
spend at all whatsoever to the pods category but the money waster for us so
when looking at the account this is basically what we expected to see boot
crews of money allocated to mobile office well some spend towards storage
containers obviously as much as we can get a brand and then zeros been
allocated to the pods category just as senior management directed so what we
did was started our account analysis and really anyone can do this
we pulled long-term search query report data and basically went through and
steamed each of the queries based on the product category that it was associated
with then PivotTable and aggregated that data to get to spend number so again
this is what we would expect to find there in reality what we found was
something much different they were spending only about half of their budget
on their primary product offering that they wanted to grow much less on the
storage containers still doing about right on brand and a whopping 30 percent
on the pod category but they did not want to put any investment into it all
whatsoever a loss leader for them how could it happen
it goes back to alignment so the marketing team was given a series of
goals the goals were getting me 2500 leads I want to take them to sales I
want them to be about $40 a lead and our budget is going to be around 100k great
so when looking at the goals okay leads right on the money
bullseye our cost per lead fairly close as well I'm comfortable with that
and then our spend again right there on target so overall we're winning right
we're hitting goal I feel good about it but should I not really overall what
this strategy was doing was incentivizing performance to the actual
goal target not towards the product line and the product growth is the senior
management team wanted so what you have to do with your marketing teams is be
very very clear in your budget setting process and very clear in terms of how
they are segmented and how they're managed there should have likely been a
separate specific budget for the overall storage category itself and then you
need to align your spin with those goals as well and then make sure that you're
doing those checks again the very simple process of going through and reviewing
your query data to inform whether or not the actual business goals the company
goals that you want to hit or how you're allocating your dollars and like all
good horror stories this one has a sequel da da da
one of our marketing team again looks as if they're they're winning at
performance hitting goal just as we Illustrated but really they're killing
our new customer base how can that be happening one of the stories that comes
to mind for me is again in a new customer conversation we were talking to
the CMO about their overall performance and of course goals came up and how
they're pacing against those so immediately the conversation was we have
a 10 percent conversion rate this is a large EECOM luxury online retailer so 10
percent conversion rate and they cited an astronomical return on adspend and
our response was I am so sorry how could that be you should not have
that high of a conversion rate if you're actually a large Econ retailers it's
almost impossible so what that signal to us was in general that they were
targeting a way to small demographic and really not focused on growing the
business and scaling so what we then saw in their actual numbers was that they
were focusing heavily on their profitable brand terms and again I think
everyone here knows that that can lead you to a very quick march to demise so
overall we started to see this curve of their new customer demographic continue
to dwindle and dwindle and dwindle given that incentivized focus on that higher
ROAS target and again the lower the lower focus on new customer acquisition
in general the stat that you will hear often is for new customers it costs
about 4 to 10 times as much to actually acquire that customer it's a heavy
investment you're introducing yourself basically it's a hard sell you're going
to have to introduce yourself multiple times and it's really essential for
growth obviously the more new customers you get the more existing customers that
you retain it all makes sense right folding back to the other story in terms
of how you map back to the goal have to segment them out a lot of the
way that we manage our goals in our agency is very heavily acquisition
versus retention focused they have very specific targets in terms of the return
in terms of the conversion rates in terms of the investment across the board
in terms of the CPC's as well and you have to set up your spend allocation
accordingly overall when you're mapping back to the types of goals that we said
you're really not taking into account that greater difficulty in acquiring a
new customer and the balancing scales at that lower cost of acquisition does for
you on a current customer side so the thing that can be a threat overall to
performance is really incentivizing marketing teams without even realizing
it to preclude the new customer demographics if you have a blended Cpl
or CPA without clear and illustrated goals for each of those you're likely
going to be driving you're driving your overall performance and an efficiency
model versus a growth model how do you elude that overall again different
budgets different goals very easy and at overall investment in the new customer
drivers things like display things like - all keywords the more money that you
put there the more long-term customers are going to see on the retention side
as well and in general when you're setting up goals strategically across
the two types of customer demographics you always have to measure them and
segment in that way as well so new customer campaigns can't be evaluated on
the same standards and goals that the existing customer campaigns are I think
we've got that point down next up the rise of the scripts of the machines I
call them who doesn't love scripts we all do I'm
assuming they make our lives much easier they can scale quickly they take into
account a myriad of conversion touch points to inform the automated decisions
that they're making so you know what's wrong what's the part
it's really our brains and the fact that we're stopping using them overall when
people implement scripts oftentimes what we've seen is an over-reliance on the
technology and really the removal of those periodic checks that you do in the
manual format generally without the reliance on scripts it's so convenient
they're built right into the platform they give the illusion of management and
efficiency but again you have to be able to go through and check that how the
tools are actually performing or in line with the overall product goals that
you're setting who's really in charge that's the biggest question the thing
that you have to look to again is the manual the manual review of those
specific tools so your script and your tools are going to be as good as the
person behind them right you have to know your accounts you have to set up
your scripts in line with the overall budget goals and strategy of the company
and then you have to check them and check them often a thing that we've seen
quite often in reviewing script implementations is what I would call an
erroneous layering approach some of the scripts that I've seen and even bidding
functionality you can do things like I want to manage my bid to this target CPA
I want to also hit this average position I also want to hit this max CPC well
what happens when you continue to layer and layer what's really driving
performance how do you know it's a compounded impact really and what it
leads to over all is a heavy reliance and a removal as we call it of
performance one of our clients this is actually a recent story they had to take
their actual ad spin back in-house they were with an agency for probably four
years not being us pardon me and they decided they needed to get more
efficient with their spend so they brought it back in-house and with their
smaller team we're looking for ways to get more efficient overall as well
internally hence scripts so scripts were applied
for bid optimization scripts were applied for budget management what we
saw over time and evaluating their account because they they actually ended
up coming back to our agency and asking us to do an audit
when performance continued to decline was there were scripts that were set to
turn keywords and AD group on and off based on performance and the performance
metrics that they were allowing for in terms of those thresholds were pretty
liberal it wasn't that the rule was actually fairly sound it was that there
were no periodic checks to go back and review what had been turned off and
evaluate that for things like larger performance swings seasonality for
instance was that being taken into account things weren't being manually
turned back on so over time what we saw for them was a heavy degradation of
their actual keyword volume the keywords within their accounts that were active
as well as the keywords that were driving traffic overall and the account
continued to have less and less lead volume less traffic as you would expect
and results continuing to go down and down an ROI out the door so that was a
primary recommendation that we've put forth to them if you're going to
implement you've got to make sure that you have the people power to make sure
that the decisions that you're making are the actual right ones that again
points to the fact of doing the work I think that's really the primary message
here while scripts are great we love them we've use them judiciously it's the
quality and checks that you have to make sure you continue to interwove through
your your processes as well next I like this one I really like paid audits I'm a
geek with a spreadsheet we do paid audits generally any time we're
onboarding new business or just really trying to help out a referral in terms
of improving their performance so some of the big flaws that we see
paid search auditing are in general never doing them why in the world would
you not want to understand what's going on in your account at a very granular
level we've actually had clients say I haven't done an audit over the last year
or two peak so when you know when you're doing that you're allowing for a status
quo you're allowing performance to be the good enough phenomenon we actually
on the 360 partner side have what we call an account swap situation where we
probably every six months will rotate accounts between our account teams and
then evaluate how performance could be better again is it hitting long-term
growth goals are we efficient enough are the big things that are the money
drivers for us as effective as they can be so again it's it's an opportunity for
you to get better who doesn't want that in general the things that you're
looking for fast wins you kind of want to follow the money as well looking for
opportunities to reduce waste spend and in general an opportunity to buffer up
your strategy and your your long-term game for your account
next up the beast you really want to focus on the beast and the things that
matter really is what that's indicative of the big huge things in your account
that are the primary drivers of revenue the primary drivers have spend and the
primary drivers of orders when you're looking at those larger aggregates of
spend you're likely going to be able to get to in short the problems the areas
that are absorbing that spend and how it can be improved better focus on that not
on the little guy basically you can spend a lot of time focusing on
something that's accrued you ten dollars over the last two months in order to do
this you really need to also focus on weed leads and understanding that
they're really not all created equal what does that mean well it goes back to
being able to focus again on the things that matter we're possible you want to
be focusing on lead-to-revenue ratio your cost per sale how do those things
grow and be impacted by your overall account performance optimizations on Cpl
can lead to what we call the death spiral we've had a client who wanted to
bring their CPL down I would like to take it down 10% okay that's a fair goal
I'll take that challenge but what they weren't focusing on again was that end
to end measurement this was an online academic client and they weren't looking
actually the cost per enrollment so in general more of that lead to revenue
ratio was what they were removing from the equation so when you actually
flipped the numbers and focused on the end-to-end tracking and performance
versus only Cpl it was a different story completely and again was a heavy
impactor to their performance and how they continued to actually move up from
there next this one why is last-click still a thing
why why why I know that this is something that we talk about often but
it really can't be the last point in terms of your auditing process so what
does that mean you have to think multi-channel all the all the
attribution platforms and really even what we can find in Adwords now gives us
the ability to look beyond the last click we can evaluate things like
assisted conversions cross-device conversions anything that's contributing
overall to the myriad or numerous touch points that a customer may have before
they actually reach that culminating last click evaluating all that basically
helps you look to what's contributing at the higher funnel level and not putting
off the top of your funnel in short that's a classic error that we always
see I need to get more efficient I need to cut out 20% of spend so I'm going to
cut out everything that's over a certain level in my CPL well without looking
across the board at what else that was contributing in terms of traffic maybe
that was your second and third touch point to that conversion again you're
creating a gap in your conversion process overall and lastly you can't
preclude the website itself so we like to see what's going on
threaten performance on the PPC side we're obviously very interested in
landing page performance as well but what happens after that what happens
after they start the conversion process as they're moving through the funnel are
there opportunities to improve that is there friction that's being created that
can be taken down you can't just stop at the last click on the site either
in short you have to keep moving all the way through the full customer journey
and the experience to look for opportunities to improve the customer
path that was a big one I think that is all for the horrific stories that we've
seen on our end I'd be very curious to hear some of yours and definitely please
reach out I like hearing these types of interesting quirky stories from PPC
accounts so please get in touch with me at Donna logo at 360 partners comm would
love to hear from you
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