Following the PDCA process I’ve listed some guidelines as to how each step applies to a new or existing Paid Search initiative. The guideline is not exhaustive and it is not enough just follow the guideline and assume you are going to be profitable. It is critical for you to standardize each step of the process so it is easy to repeat.

PLAN

Planning is the most critical step in the Paid Search process – when done correctly everything else will fall into place. Planning includes:

1. Review of Client Website and Offerings
2. Assessment of PPC Accounts
3. Assessment of Analytics Implementation
4. Client Goals and Past performance
5. Competitive Analysis
6. Campaign Structure and Design
7. Keyword Research
8. Landing Page Development
9. Ad Creative Development
10. Budgeting

DO

Once the plan is communicated and agreed to it is time for implementation. Implementation can be broken down into two main areas – PPC Campaign Build and Analytics.

PPC Campaign Build includes:

1. Campaign Settings
2. Budgeting
3. Ad groups
4. Keywords
5. Ad creatives
6. Landing pages
7. Destination URL tagging
8. SiteLinks, ProductLinks, etc.

Analytics Implementation includes:

1. Java script development
2. Site tagging for analytics packages like VisiStat or Google Analytics
3. Audit site tagging
4. Verify conversions are tracking properly
5. Set up a method for reporting (if this includes using a PPC Platform like Acquisio, additional steps will be needed to import campaigns into third party tools.)

CHECK

Now that you have launched your Paid Search campaigns and allowed then some time to run, it is now time to check the progress.

Monitoring & reporting on progress includes:

1. Review keyword activity for conversions and Quality Score
2. Search query mining for new keywords and negative keywords
3. Review text or display ads for conversion performance
4. Identify patterns in data for new targeting options
5. Review audience and demographics performance
6. Weekly Dashboard review
7. Monthly Dashboard review & analysis

ACT

Evaluation of the first three steps should provide insight in to ongoing continuous process improvement.

Actionable insights on where and what to do next to improve performance include:

1. Campaign and ad group targeting
2. Keyword performance and bid management
3. Keyword and Search Query expansion
4. Ad creative performance and future testing
5. Landing page testing

Again, this is a general guideline to follow. Using the PDCA process alone is not enough to keep quality, customer satisfaction, time, costs and profitability in its most effective and efficient state but it will give you a solid foundation to build from. By following the PDCA process you need to standardize the steps in each part of the process in order to tie those steps back to the amount of time and cost it takes to complete each step. Standardizing the processes allows you to make certain that you are using the most efficient way to complete the various tasks in the fewest amount of steps. Time, they say, is money. And lastly, you need to make sure you are not only following the standardization of the processes, but that you are also choosing to do the right type of work that adds value and meets or exceeds customer satisfaction and expectations.

*Deming’s PDCA (The Deming Cycle) was initially developed by Walter A. Shewhart. In his later years Deming updated PDCA to PDSA replacing the ‘check’ phase with ‘study’ since he felt that ‘check’ emphasized inspection rather than analysis…

Related Articles

American Society for Quality (ASQ) – Plan Do Check Act

Training for Endurance in Lean (with PDCA)

When we follow the Quality Score methodology, it creates a visual outline of the individual tactics. And regardless of the “stuff” we put into the account, it’s how the tactics are used to push the “stuff” to the audiences. So in essence, as long as we know the Tactical Best Practices, it does not matter what language your campaigns are in.

Some Obvious Tactical Guidelines for any language

1. Keyword Matching for search terms (avoid too many Broad Matching terms)
2. Negative Keyword Matching (avoid broad match)
3. Search Query Mining: Find the “golden longtails”
4. Google Search Only vs. Network Partners (based on conversions)
5. Different Bidding Options (CPM, CPC, CPA)
6. Watch out for too many DKI instances in Text Ads

In conclusion:
Regardless of any language barriers at the Keyword, Text Ad and Landing Page levels, all you need to worry about is the Core Campaign Settings and Quality Score Best Practices. Furthermore, it’s not so much about the translation of the keyword and understanding what it means, rather it’s the all of the other settings and best practices surrounding the keywords. This is why PPC can be considered a universal language.

In a very interesting article in Adweek entitled “Google’s Ad Rank to Consider Phone Calls, Not Just Clicks
Bid-per-call coming to AdWords“, the author Ki Mae Heussner stresses th at Adwords will shortly factor in Phone Calls into Ad Rank calculations, which in the PPC world means Quality Score. Furthermore, according to article it also states “that the bids and call volume will factor into an advertiser’s Ad Rank and, therefore, influence the position of the online ads”

In fact, for those who frequently follow the Inside Adwords Blog, we could see this coming from a mile away. Other than Google +1 phenomena, there has been an unusually higher amount of posts focusing on the Display Network and we should continue to see a lot more to come.

See a screenshot below:

So, if your a shareholder of Google and want to get some insider information. I would suggest making friends with a Search Marketing Geek to get the latest rumors in the pipeline.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… This is the interrelated structure of reality.

When I read that quote my systems-thinking light bulb went off immediately. And, as I often do, once I began to think about this quote from a systems perspective, I then began to think about how this quote relates to search engine marketing.

Whatever Affects One Directly, Affects All Indirectly

In AdWords it is commonly known that Quality Score is a systemic algorithm. Internally keywords with low click-thru rate have an indirect affect on keywords that have a higher click-thru rate. Externally Ad Rank is generally the result of your bidding strategy compared to your competitors bidding strategy in relation to Quality Score Quality Score resulting in both direct and indirect affects on your paid search advertising’s potential for success.

Expanding this view to include marketing channels beyond AdWords, whichever type of marketing channel is used to pitch products and services to your target audience will most always have an indirect affect on other marketing channels in use. This type of system is more commonly described as ‘following the click chain or click path’ also known as attribution.

The interesting challenge here is that you must know how each channel directly affects your audience as well as how each channel indirectly affects each other. If a clear view into attribution is not understood before making decisions, a decision to directly pause a keyword or pause a display campaign may indirectly affect other channels without you knowing it.

This is the Interrelated Structure of Reality

More so than ever online and offline marketing channels need to be viewed in an interrelated way. When scientists at the Bayer Corporation, the company who developed the systemic pesticides, did their research on the pesticides affect on honeybees, they only looked at its affect in lethal doses. What they failed to look at was the long-term affects of honeybees being exposed to non-lethal doses. Over time, exposure to lower, non-lethal doses along with exposure to other pesticides is a leading hypothesis as to what caused the bees to suddenly vanish.

Scientists at the Bayer Corporation also did their research, which they submit to the EPA for approval, in a laboratory, not in the honeybee’s natural environment. This type of siloed research created a narrow view and did not consider what indirect causes could result in direct uses of pesticides. The most worrisome indirect affect of the pesticides affect on bees is that crops suffer from a lack of pollination which will either cause food prices to raise or, even worse, a shortage of food all together.

So how does this interrelated structure of reality and interconnectedness of all things work within search? Great question but not necessarily an easy one to answer since there are so many moving parts. There are however some things that you can think about and build into your daily practice that can make your various search programs sustainable.

1. Don’t cheat the system. Often times I see SEM or SEO implementations built around trying to out-smart Google. It may work in the short-term but sooner or later it will have a negative impact on your program as well as a negative impact on the perception of other industry professionals.

2. Follow best practices. That might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s true. Google AdWords and Webmaster Central really do give you pretty much everything you need to know to be successful. Be relevant, be descriptive, build a solid website infrastructure and campaign structure. When you do the right things right the first time it does have a direct and indirect, interrelated positive impact on the use of marketing dollars, customer satisfaction and perceived quality of online marketing in general.

3. Be mindful of the way you do business. Similar to the first two points, there is a right and wrong way to practice search engine marketing. When you as an individual or an agency do a poor job it has an interrelated affect on other professionals in the industry that are passionate and dedicated to doing great work. I’ve spoken with a few prospects recently who have had terrible experiences with agencies and hesitate not only working with any other agency, but also fail to see the value in paid search advertising.

4. Look internally but expand your learning externally. Intimately knowing how AdWords or SEO or Display advertising works independently has it’s merits but knowing how all your marketing channels work together is more valuable. If you have your fingers on the pulse of all channels take learning from one and see if you can apply it to another. Conversely, learn something new from another industry or take inspiration from a book or movie or sporting event and see if you can apply it to your search practice.

And the list could go on forever… Like it or not we are all in this together. Good and bad campaigns, SEO implementations and search professionals are interrelated and what affects one directly affects all indirectly. It might be difficult to think about your work in this way throughout the course of a fast-paced day, but try. Or at least be aware of your actions as they relate to others. If you agree (or do not agree) I encourage you to leave a comment as to how you view the interconnectedness of our industry.

Resources

Vanishing of the Bees

Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Sustainability Institute – Thinking in Systems

In a recent Foxnews.com Opinion Article entitled “Google’s Hypocritical Anti-Bully Pulpit” author Penny Young Nance goes on a rant against Google and their Mistreatment of Presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s SERP Results. According to the article, she states “But when someone types his name into the Google search box, the very first result that appears is a website detailing a sex act “by-product” named after the senator.  In fact, the Senator’s own website is the fourth result” See screenshot below:

SOLUTION: If I were Rick Santorum’s Campaign Manager, I would use Campaign Contributions to start a PPC Reputation Management Strategy against this website or perhaps Google.

In addition to this SERP incident, it has fueled more controversy against Google. According to Nance, “While companies are free to give money to political candidates and parties as they please, Google has given millions to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and MoveOn.org.  The money flows so freely that earlier this year Eric Schmidt was rumored to be the administration’s next Secretary of Commerce.“

In an effort, to try and “calm down” Republicans, Google has decided to increase their political contributions to the other side of the aisle. In an article from The Huffington Post entitled “Spreading Freedom: Google, Microsoft And The War For The Web” the article states “Google, whose top executives have long been a bottomless cup of campaign coffee for Democrats, is finally entering its bipartisan phase, theatrically hiring Republican operatives and broadcasting the news through insider Washington publications, pumping air into a K Street tech bubble. The shift in political strategy comes as Google faces a serious antitrust threat, punctuated by a high-profile hearing on the company held Wednesday afternoon in the Senate. But Google’s investment in the infrastructure of the conservative movement goes much deeper than what’s been reported this summer.”

In conclusion:
In my opinion, Google is caught in the middle of a Political Firestorm because of it’s influence on the world. They have supported Democrats in the past, now they are supporting Republicans. They are creating uncertainty across Washington and getting negative attention from people of influence. Not to mention, they are under fire for SERPs of Presidential Candidates and now Antitrust violations.  Bottom line: STAY under the Radar!

Today, pay-per-click platforms like Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter and Facebook Ads are becoming much more complex. Beyond the core components of a pay-per-click account mentioned above, adding to the complexity of a pay-per-click account are features and tools such as campaign settings and automation, ad extensions and retargeting. At times the complexity can be overwhelming but there is a way to think about all this that can help you dance through your day as a search engine marketing manager a bit easier and it begins by thinking in systems. This elevated view and thought process into pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing enables accountable parties the ability to increase their capacity to think, learn, communicate and act more systemically¹.

The Pay-Per-Click Dance

In 2001, the late Donella Meadows published an article Dancing with Systems about her journey towards understanding systems. Dancing with Systems is a 14-step approach to learning how to develop your own way of working within any type of system – pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing included. The key take-away for me by reading this article is that if you give up the need to control the system and predict outcomes you leave more time for delivering value-added work. The 14 steps include:

1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, I’ve often thought that there is a certain rhythm, or beat, to managing accounts on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. I’ve written before about the idea that, if you listen and pay attention to what is important, keywords and text ads will tell you their story once the data begins to unfold. If you watch, listen and learn you will know what to expect from certain parts of the system and can prioritize work based on that knowledge.

Each day, search engine managers should crave to learn something new about an account or their approach to managing accounts and share what you learn not only with your immediate co-workers, but also with your clients. Like it or not, you are not isolated – everyone who touches a keyword is a part of the greater, global pay-per-click system. It is irresponsible to withhold information and doing so will come back to haunt you in the long-term. Collaboration and sharing of ideas and results, good or bad, can only help grow pay-per-click advertising efforts.

Paid search advertising has become an increasingly powerful marketing tool, but it also has the ability to make 95% of the users look like used car salesmen. Understanding the implications of how your approach to pay-per-click advertising, whether positive or negative, influences the greater system of search engine marketing and eCommerce is critical to its sustainability allowing you to dance all night long…

Resources

Thinking in Systems – Donella Meadows

Systems Thinking – F. E. Emery

¹isee systems

Ott starts off Process Quality Control stating some general principles recognized by those troubleshooting variability in data. Those principles include:

Rule 1. Don’t expect many people to advance the idea that the problem is their own fault. Rather it is the fault of the raw materials and components, a worn-out machine, or something else beyond their own control. “It’s not my fault!”

Rule 2. Get some data on the problem; don’t spend too much time in the initial planning. (An exception is then data collection requires a long time or is very expensive; very careful planning is then important.)

Rule 3. Always graph your data in some simple way – always.

These principles, or rules, are pretty straightforward and apply as much today as they did back in 1975 – even in the world of paid search marketing.

If you think about it, each keyword, search query, ad creative, competitor and customer adds more and more variables to the mix. The factors are countless but that does not mean managing and working to identify patterns and trends in the data is hopeless. It should be clearly understood that successfully managing variability in paid search means looking at the entire account over longer periods of time. With variables like cookie duration settings and other outside factors, hour to hour and week over week analysis is less effective than a broader analysis of month over month or year over year data. Managing day by day or week by week can inadvertently cause reactions to data that is not true. This false sense of information can open up the door for more variability in performance than should be expected. This is why knowing the tolerances of variability of your paid search accounts on an intimate level should allow you to focus more on the process of expansion and growth an less on flash results.

Once patterns and trends of variability in clicks, cost and conversions are established and you have a sense of the accounts’ takt time, you should be able to report on your findings effortlessly. As Ott states, communicate the analysis in clear and simple graphs or tables. Paid search is complicated enough and flashy charts are not required, however adding context to your reports and dashboards is critical for precise communication. Two of the best resources for analytics and dashboards, Avinash Kaushik and Stephen Few would echo this same basic principle. It is also helpful to understand variability and trends by campaign, ad groups, keywords, categories, styles, etc. as long as the information is actionable. Anything more is considered waste (over production) and should be avoided at all costs.

With the high level of variables in paid search it is essential to have the right enabling processes established in order act quickly on analysis so that performance targets are met. Next time you experience a random spike in traffic, follow the rules above – understand the root cause, collect the data to support your findings and communicate those findings in a way that is simple, effective and actionable.

Which Advertiser would Benefit the Most?
Well, the advertisers who are selling a specific product or service where there is a monetary commitment “after the click” would benefit the most from this as there is TRUE ROAS%. However, those advertisers that rely on Lead Generation as their success metric will have a more difficult time understanding the success. The reason is because Lead Generation usually requires another round of qualification to determine the quality of the lead, hence increasing the difficulty to understand true ROAS.

According to Google, “The Display Campaign Optimizer is a tool that increases conversions by automatically managing targeting and bidding for campaigns appearing on the Google Display Network. You simply set your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and the Display Campaign Optimizer automatically determines the appropriate placements to show your ads at the right prices to help you boost conversions, based on your CPA goals.”

Where do we Find it?
The ‘Automatic campaign optimization’ link is in the Settings tab for your campaign. However, this tool is only available to a small group of advertisers right now, but will become more available in the following months.

The Bottom-line:
Always remember that Google is trying to find as many ways as possible to take your advertising dollars. It all sounds awesome, until you realize that you spent more than you brought in. One of the biggest problems PPC marketers face is understanding true “Lead Quality” after the initial click. If the advertiser is getting 200 leads/day, but only 1% of them turn into “real clients”, then most likely that both the PPC strategy (including keywords, text ads and landing page) is failing.

#1 How to develop a Successful Workflow/Process
In order to be successful in PPC Marketing, you must create a process in which you carry out your strategy, implementation, optimization, and more. Everyone has a different mentality on how they manage clients. Once the process is established and working efficiently, everything will fall into place.

#2 Deciding what Questions need to be answered during the Discovery Phase
Asking the right questions is key to a successful client relationship through PPC. The Strategy is the single most important element of any PPC project. These questions go far beyond the basic goals and objectives and should be “tweaked” for every client on an ongoing basis.

#3 Understand and utilize 3rd party PPC Tools and Software
Yeah, sounds like a no-brainer, but just because you have a Certification, doesn’t mean you have the expertise to navigate through PPC Software Tools and platforms. You need to learn that one your own and apply your knowledge of the “blocking and tackling” to the platform.

#4 Compliment Offline Advertising
This is an important one that can make a big impact on PPC Success. If a client is running TV, Radio or Print Ads, having support at the PPC level to “re-engage them” and continue the branding from both mediums, is crucial to the overall experience. Strategies that come to mind are personalizing text ads based on terms that were mentioned in the Ad, the source of where the Ad was created (Magazines, TV Stations, etc…)

#5 Improve Qualified Lead Generation
Many PPC Marketers tend lose focus on when they are driving leads to their clients through PPC. Quite often, the client does not see the value in the leads unless they are “real leads” that generate “real revenue”. It’s a double edged sword that requires some “outside the box” thinking and continued discussions with the client to understand where and how the leads are being generated. Strategies to overcome this are Survey’s, creating a “POINT SYSTEM” based on the questions and applying it to Conversion Tracking (Subtotal Sales).

#6 How to develop a well performing landing page
Everyone it seems is an expert on Landing Pages. Too much Content, not enough above the fold, bad choice of photos, etc…. It is this continuous “tweaking” and identifying with the client’s specific audience is what requires experience and understanding of the client’s audience.

#7 How to create Overall Campaign Strategies
Bidding on Brand Terms as well as Products/Services is not enough. Depending on the depth of the client, there needs to be a complete strategy encompassing every possible search term that would relate to the client’s audience. This would a wide range of keyword segmentation, Network selection, Geographic and Demographic targeting, different mobile devices, etc…

#8 How to set the Correct Expectations with a Client
Explaining to a client how this whole process works can be a very difficult thing to manage over time. Google does not teach you how to communicate and manage their expectations effectively. Much of this success is based purely on experience of being in the Industry.

#9 How to identify “indirect” search terms from Generation Gaps
We live in an age where they are many different generations searching online. When someone types in Home Phone, and another Residential Phone and another Land-line Phone, the PPC Marketer better be aware that all of these terms are related to the same particular product or service. If they don’t prepare for this, it’s money left on the table.

#10 How to handle Resellers and Affiliate Hi-Jacking of Branded Terms
One of the most annoying and troublesome tasks of a PPC Marketer is dealing with a client who has an aggressive Affiliate and Reseller program that is penetrating the PPC landscape. Furthermore, the client wants to keep it “status quo” because they are making money and their revenues are fine. All Google tells you is to file a complaint. What a PPC Marketer should do is communicate to the client that there are ways to change the affiliate/reseller agreements on bidding on brand terms on PPC. If they don’t follow, then they can be removed from the program.