So with simple, instant worldwide communication, it’s not really possible for markets to engage in “stand-alone” campaigns anymore. All campaigns live in a world of interconnected media, where TV personalities reference Twitter feeds and where consumers can easily build their personalized news sources. Accordingly, Paid Search doesn’t stand alone. The most popular method of Paid Search, Pay-Per-Click, is a valuable tactic that both feeds off of and drives intricate and interrelated marketing campaigns.

So in what ways can you utilize Pay-Per-Click to actually enhance your other marketing and public relations objectives and campaigns? Here are a few examples:

1. Public Relations

If you have a background in Public Relations, you know that one of the most popular defenses for Crisis Communication is a good offense. If you are a larger corporation and there is a crisis (think last year’s BP Oil leak), if you can get to the media and public first, you have the one-time opportunity to create perception. In marketing, perception is simple to create and very difficult to shift or change once it’s created. So if you have an Oil Leak and you know consumers are going to be searching in Google for news about “Gulf Oil Spill”, what do you do? Well you can let them find other websites with whatever media news is hot that minute, or you can setup a Pay-Per-Click campaign immediately and drive people to “Official BP News Page for The Gulf Oil Leak”. While it seems counterintuitive to bring consumers to a page where you are actually acknowledging the problem and discussing it, you get the opportunity to shift their perception and explain the situation, before other potentially far worse conclusions are drawn. So did BP spend? Yes, yes they did. In July 2010 (just after the height of the Oil Spill) an internal Google document was leaked. It showed that BP increased their PPC spend from nearly nonexistent to a whopping $3.59 Million dollars in June 2010 during the spill.
Perhaps you watched the superbowl and you saw Groupon create a bit of a stir with their socially incorrect commercials. Well, this would have been a great opportunity to run a comprehensive campaign showing consumers that they actually are a massive supporter of social charities, yet most people left February with a bad taste in their mouth about Groupon to the tune of roughly a 10% average increase in negative sentiment.

2. Impression Capture

When you spend millions of dollars to run a superbowl commercial, shouldn’t you make ever good-faith effort to maximize that investment? Of course. A simple, yet underused method is to make sure that anyone who sees your commercial but doesn’t remember your exact URL, is driven to your website. You could setup a large PPC campaign capturing every keyword related to your brand, product and services, for the 24-72 hours following the commercial airing, drive people to a unique place on your website reminding them about the benefits they remember from your commercial. Even better, extend the excitement the consumer feels by offering a continued experience, or build some mystery in your commercial and guide people via PPC search ads to a place where they can explore your brand and answer the mystery offered in the commercial.
The same techniques apply to radio campaigns, of course, since consumers are again trying to remember something, anything, about your brand that will help them find you later. Magazines are a bit more portable, so it’s easier to bring them with you and type in the URL exactly, but how many times are people reading on the go, and only remember something a few days or a week down the road, and then search to find the provider? I’ve done it, you’ve done it. Don’t let that impression go to waste by not following through.

3. Brand Association

Let’s imagine I’m the marketing director for a company that sells aftermarket car seats. And I’m not talking the kind your newborn sits in, I’m talking suede, hand stitched custom luxury seats with an under-seat air conditioning system built in. Do people search for these seats? Maybe a few, but not many. But do people search for Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Bugatti and Porsche? Of course they do – by the tens of thousands. How many of these people might be interested in after-market custom seats curing the horrible “thigh-stick-to-seat” condition found in hot climates like my home state of Arizona? Probably more than one, and likely, associating your brand with related luxury brands, offers you a way to cheaply build some brand cache of your own, while hopefully garnering a few new customers along the way.

These are just a few concepts, but there are dozens of other creative ways to utilize Pay-Per-Click marketing to assist, rather than degrade your more traditional marketing and public relations tactics.

Remember, in a world where you can text your sister from central park in NYC, to find out how she is liking that amazing (and scary) live Sushi experience she’s having while on vacation in Japan, and in mid-conversation she asks you why your friend Tony would check-in to Starbucks on Bryant street (in downtown San Francisco), when The Coffee Bar is right next door on Mariposa St. and it’s clearly “way better”…well, communication and media are fast. As a marketer, you’ll truly only get one good chance to control an entire stream of exploration, research and consumption by your target consumer. If you mess it up, yeah you can try again, but it’ll be harder, less effective and more expensive next time.

Feeling talkative? Great! Let us know what other creative uses you’ve employed over the years.

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Note: I originally wrote this article for our good friends over at Agencyside @agencyside.

1. Low Cost Product Sales
We’ve had more than one occasion when we’re approached by a company with a low dollar value product. Paid search campaigns are difficult with low dollar products, especially those that are one-time sales, where the end buyer isn’t signing up for a subscription where there will be a longer lifetime value. With a single-purchase, lower dollar value product, it’s very difficult to monetize profitably with paid search.
To evaluate if you can be profitable running a paid search camping for a low dollar value ($40 or less for the purposes of this discussion), take a look a look the average cost-per-click in the category. Let’s say for example you are selling a product, perhaps a Boil Buoy on your own website. The retail sales price is $9.99. Let’s assume you make a 50% profit margin, meaning it costs you about $5 to make the product. So to make a profit selling this product for $9.99, which means you can’t spend more than $4.99 to sell each unit. Realistically, it would be much lower, as you need to make profit, cover overhead and other business expenses that would likely be factored into your breakeven analysis, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll say there are no other costs being factored in. Now, if the cost-per-click in that category, is $1 per click, then you can break even selling this product (roughly) if you make 1 sale for every 5 clicks. That’s a 20% conversion rate of click to sale. Sounds pretty reasonable….right? Well considering the best e-commerce websites convert around 10-15% (see the article on our blog about e-commerce conversion rates), it might be a bit lofty to assume your client’s website will convert anywhere close to 20%. If it converts at 10%, then you will spend $10 on PPC for every sale, which will result in a $5 profit, meaning you will lose $5 on every sale. Not a good long term plan.
If your client is a website like www.quirky.com that sells a variety of products, you will have to run more sophisticated analysis to find out what the overall monetization rate for the site overall is, and most likely analyze cost per click by PPC category, to find out what categories of keywords, drive profitable visitors to your website. You would also want to consider the long term brand awareness of bringing new potential customers to your website, since some visitors might not buy anything right now, but might bookmark it for later.

2. No Tracking Capabilities
This one is simple. If your client wants to run a PPC campaign, for something that is metric driven such as lead generation, customer acquisition or product sales, and they don’t won’t work with you to put adequate conversion tracking in place – you’ve now got a recipe for disaster. To know if your campaign is tracking towards the goals you have set, you need to be able to establish the performance, which requires tracking. I’ve had clients tell me “Well, we just know PPC will work, so let’s not worry about the tracking”. 9 times out of 10, this will end with one party being unhappy – either you or the client.

3. Lack of Budget
You’ve got a client that is very excited about marketing their product and they’ve even allocated budget to market it with paid search. Great! When you ask what budget they have allocated (or ideally recommend the budget) and they let you know they have $100/month allocated. You know it’s not going to work. You won’t be able to get any usable conversion data. You won’t be able to efficiently manage the campaign and learn anything.

4. Wrong Goals
Your client comes to you with a goal that is outside the realm of smart uses of PPC. You’ll probably know this when it happens. For example, you client tells you they have a great idea – they want to drive people to call them directly by putting the phone number in the ad. And they don’t need to allocate much budget, because they just want to have people call from seeing the ad, without going to their website.

5. You are marketing a free app
If you have a free app and you are trying to get awareness for it, PPC might not be the best solution, especially if you don’t have a plan to monetize it at any point in the future. If you have a paid App, such as an iPhone app, then think hard about what you are trying to do. If you think the product has great buzz potential, then maybe PPC can get some users of your app who will help spread the word (you should probably have a good plan for this as well). If not, and your app is $1.99..it will be difficult to profitably monetize it.

There are most certainly plenty of other instances in which PPC may not make sense. These are just a few I’ve run into in the recent past. Comment below and let me know what you’ve seen!

Let’s take a look at the testing of a paid search, sponsored ad or display/banner ad campaign. If you set the clients expectation that you may have some good ideas upfront, but that much of the long term value will be discovered along the way – it’s highly likely you will end up with a more successful campaign and a happier client because they will be willing to look at results as the outcome of a strategic test or plan, rather than as a standalone factor upon which to pass judgment as to your overall value.

Once you’ve worked with the client to determine the overall strategy of your campaign, it’s a good idea to define the test(s) early. Make sure to remember the basics of testing and statistics. For reliable results in an A/B testing scenario (which is where you test one ad “A” versus another ad “B”), you will need to define a few things:

1. A variable to test in both ads
2. A static element to hold consistent between ads
3. A result to measure the results against
4. A sample size that is large enough to be statistically significant (or at least meaningful)

So let’s develop a sample test ad:

1. If we’re doing a pay-per-click or banner ad, ad then we might write a different headline for both ads, perhaps: “Subway Lunch Meals Now $5 Off” and  “Subway Lunch Meals Now 20% Off”
2. We’ll hold the rest of the ad constant so we can see the difference when we chance just this one element. Perhaps the rest of the ad reads “Find a local store and pickup something for the whole office!”
3. We now need to set a result to test. There are many options. If we’re running an ad with a specific end results, such as downloading a coupon, signing up for a newsletter or buying a gift card, then we would set any of those items as the goal. We would then track our results of the two ads against this goal. If, however, we’re doing a campaign that doesn’t have a specific conversion goal as the end result, then we might track something like “click-through-rate” to determine which ad was more compelling to the consumers who saw the ad. This could help build an understanding of what form of message is more compelling to consumers. But for this example, let’s assume we’re tracking coupon downloads.
4. We then need to determine a good sample size. Determining this size, should be based on what you will do with the data. If you are trying to find which ad is more compelling, you probably don’t need an endless sample size to have a pretty solid understanding. Keep in mind to know what a good sample size is, you really have to understand the market place and the meaning of the results. If, for example, you are doing an ad test and plan to use results to develop a product or brand (so this is more of an R&D function) then you would want a much larger sample size. You may want to read up on how to develop a statistically significant sample size based on the population and acceptable margin of error. Here is a good, quick and free, calculator to help you. But to keep this simple, let’s say we’ve decided that 200,000 impressions is enough for us to see the results of an ad versus another.

So we run our ad and here are the results:

After running this test, we’re able to deduct a few things. You can do a statistical analysis and see that your margin of error is a little over 2%. Is that good enough? Well, it depends on the importance of your test. But for our test, let’s assume this is good – just think, they forecast the winner of the presidential election based on polls with a margin of error larger than that.

So if 2% is acceptable then let’s look at the data. If the purpose of our test was to guage consumer interest, to test the value offer of “$5” versus “20%” off, then we definitely notice a difference. We see that the headline in Ad 1, has nearly twice the click-through rate of Ad 2. This would likely indicate something about consumers preferring to see dollar values rather than percentages, and indicate that Ad 1 is the better ad. The rest of the inference you can apply will be based on what else you know about the category and other things related to the campaign.

But…what if our test was being tied to another metric? Let’s assume we were actually testing consumer response to the headline and tracking it to actions. We want to know how many people actually downloaded a coupon after clicking on the ad. Let’s look at the rest of the data.

So now we see a different story. While Ad 1 drives more visitors to the website, people who click on Ad 2, are more likely to convert. Perhaps this is because 20% off provides more value when combined with the messaging “…the whole office”, because it will save quite a bit more than $5. Again, the strategic findings derived from a review of the results will depend on a variety of factors. But what we know is that if we’re trying to drive visitors, Ad 1 is going to perform better. But if we’re trying to minimize cost and maximize coupon downloads, then Ad 2 is going to perform better.

And here’s a free tip – “Like many things in marketing, testing isn’t glamorous, so at least make it look pretty”. In other words, many clients often find ad testing to be boring, laborious and extremely time consuming. If you want to get their attention and longer term support, I recommend presenting the results more visually to capture their attention. Here’s a sample. Your client will see this and want to know what Ad 2 is all about and how you brilliantly figured out […insert something great here]!

Thoughts, suggestions?

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Let me illustrate with a true story. We have a client whose competitor spent quite a bit on a radio promotion. These ads had a call-to-action that drove people to the web. When it comes to radio commercials, as it would happen, consumers do one of two things: 1) they remember the brand name of the company running the radio commercial, but don’t know the URL so they search for it in a search engine, or 2) they can’t remember the brand name, but remember something about the brand or product, so they search for whatever they remember.

So what if you set up a campaign and targeted the competing product name, as well as the competitors frequently searched related keywords? Well, we did. When a consumer did a search after hearing the radio commercial, they would see our client’s ad on top of the search results. We ended up getting traffic that came from another promotion, saw our client’s ads and got interested. We also earned thousands of impressions, each of which is an opportunity to build our client’s brand in the mind of a consumer who is actively engaged in the research phase, looking for a product our client sells. This is about as good as it gets when it comes to branding. Maybe they click on our ad and visit our client’s website and make a sale – great. Maybe they just see our client’s ad, near the top of the search results page when searching for a competing product – also great.

This is just one example of when it can pay to use PPC to build a brand. Hang in there for another few lines and I’ll explain a few more.

Reasons
• Competitor names and products – If you’ve ever been involved in a competitive speed sport such as running, cycling or car racing, you may have heard of the concept of “drafting”. This is concept of aerodynamics where one competitor takes a position directly behind another to allow the front competitor to break the air resistance. The spot directly behind the front competitor will be in the slipstream of the leader, which allows the follower to observe less wind resistance, allowing the “drafter” to conserve energy, build speed and more easily shoot past the competitor in the front. The concept of utilizing the leader’s energy for your gain also applies to marketing. As illustrated in the original example, there is a great opportunity to attain brand recognition and association within a specific marketplace. Often you can “draft” your competitor, thereby gaining advantage from their larger budget and offline promotions.

• Synergy with organic optimization – So your brand comes up on top for your name in the organic search results. Perfect. But what about all the competing messages on that page, and ads from your competitors? There are plenty of studies that have shown that you will often achieve a higher click-through-rate when your PPC ad is shown along with your organic listing, for both products and your brand name. But be careful, sometimes this can have a cannibalistic effect, and you should look for the net ROI change to make sure this isn’t happening in your instance. Here’s a great article about how to measure to make sure you are not cannibalizing your SEO results.

• Supporting offline campaigns – Using PPC to support an offline campaign is a great way to use PPC to build your brand. When you are running an offline promotion, whether PR, TV, Radio, Print or even a social campaign, it’s important to have PPC ads in place to support whatever your potential customers might be searching. This is your opportunity to associate your brand or product with their search. However, keep in mind that your competitors have the opportunity to “draft” by utilizing some of your offline campaigns to attain additional traffic and brand building. Bottom line, just be aware of this activity and don’t leave this gap open for your competitors to steal your mojo.

• Bidding for brand names, products, tag lines and associated keyword phrases – If you don’t have the top organic listing this is particularly important. It’s a good idea to associate your brand with the consumers’ search phrases, particularly when those phrases cover your industry or product. When the consumer is searching for a tag line that you are using, or hoping to use in the future, this is also your opportunity to further associate your brand with this tag line.

• Misspellings – It always amazes me when I do a search for a company and spell it wrong. Frequently the company website will not come up high in organic listings, and even worse, they won’t have a PPC ad waiting there for me. This is an opportunity to correct a brand mistake, build your correct brand name (spelling) and to direct a nearly lost customer to your web property. And best yet, more often than not, the cost for these PPC clicks is very low.

There are many more strategies to employ, but these should be a few good ones to consider when developing your paid search campaign strategy. Here are a few tips to remember when running a PPC campaign for Brand Building purposes.

• Make sure the keyword(s) you are bidding on are featured on the landing page(s) to which you are sending consumers. This will help keep PPC bid costs down by increasing quality scores, and will also help increase conversion when consumers get to your landing page.

• Make sure to show your brand or product name clearly in ad copy – too often I see ads that would be great branding ads, yet they lack a clear brand name and message. Don’t forget the most important thing in building a brand is… the brand.

• Make sure to put the brand name in the display URL – again, it’s critical to show to help reinforce the credibility of your brand name by showing it again in the URL.

• Make sure to bid aggressively enough to get a top spot – sometimes when you are running a campaign for the purpose of generating sales and ROI, the 3rd or 4th spot might generate the best return on your investment. When you are building your brand, this is a different story. If your ad falls in the 9th position on the bottom of a page of PPC ads, you will not be seen as a leader in the category that the consumer is researching…if your ad is seen at all.

• Don’t forget the content network – if the purpose of building your brand is to associate it with a specific need/category/product in the consumers mind, the content network does just this. It shows your ad next to an article discussing a particular topic that is relevant to the keyword you have bid on. It’s not perfect, true, but it will certainly get you a great number of brand-building impressions for a low cost.

While PPC is often one of the most cost efficient ways to drive direct sales, don’t forget the value of building a brand through paid search. In a world where you, and your client, could use every advantage possible, this is yet another powerful way to realize great gains with little expense.

Love the idea? Hate it? Feel free to shoot me an email, or discuss below.

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NOTE: This article was written for, and first appeared on the www.agencyside.net website. It has been edited slightly and modified a bit just to better suit the readership of this website.