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)

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

Trellian Direct Search Quick Bits:

• The Trellian Direct Search Network opening bid price is on average 70% less than major search engines’ CPC (Cost Per Click).
• Research has shown that Direct Navigation converts 50% greater than traditional search engines.
• Trellian Direct Search Network has direct access to 200 million unique visitors per month, that can be redirected to your website.
• The network includes domains parked with the Above.com platform that are authorized to redirect to advertisers.
• Offers Traditional Bidding Auction
• Supports Negative Keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic.
• Their Billing system supports PayPal and Credit Cards.
• You can add keywords to your Trellian Direct Search account directly from a Keyword Discovery search result

Why Consider Using It?
According to Trellian, research shows that Direct Navigation converts 50% greater because users are presented with a website that is highly relevant to their search, without the need to click on any ads. Furthermore, independent studies done by Mozilla and UCLA confirmed that direct navigation is a major part of the web user experience. So with that said, the biggest difference that Direct Search provides is that the direct navigators behave differently to traditional search engine users. Direct navigators are intent driven searchers. Also, it’s important to note that Direct Search taps into a pocket of internet “searchers” not reached by the traditional search engines. Since Direct Search bypasses search engines completely it provides a new untapped source of a potential customer. Because traffic is re-directed the advertiser has NO organic or paid competition.

How does it work?
Direct Search Network has access to Internet searchers using the navigation bar (address bar) and redirects unique visitors directly to your website. Trellian Direct Search has direct access to 200 million unique visitors per month, that can be redirected to your specified website.

What’s the Bidding Auction Like?
There is no fancy bidding algorithm here. For example, if you’re max bid is $2.00 and a competitor is bidding for position #1 for $1.50, then you would be paying $1.51 per visitor. So in essence, you will only pay $0.01 (one cent) more than the highest bidder. This is a simply easy to use bid manager tool.

How do the Keywords Work?
Direct Search uses both a standard broad matching, and exact match for all keywords. And they do support Negative Keywords. For example if you place the word “Blog” as a Negative Keyword associated with the broad match term PPC, then the “PPC Blog” Broad Matched term will not show up (PPC -blog).

What does Google/Yahoo Bing Offer that Direct Search Does NOT?

• Currently does not Support domain extensions as a negative, say -.fr to exclude French domain names.
• Currently does not support GEO Targeting, however Trellian is telling us that they will have this enabled in a future release.
• Only supports Broad Match Keywords, however provides ability to add negatives keywords. …Since we also support exact is this necessary.
• There is no fancy algorithm, just a traditional bid auction.

In Conclusion:
Yes, Direct Search is quite different from Google and Yahoo/Bing. However, a viable compliment to your current PPC campaigns. Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it not worth trying. In fact, putting aside a few hundred bucks for testing on the platform is not a bad strategy considering the low CPCs and traffic “sample size”. From my experience with Direct Search, I have seeing tons of low cost traffic and the CPCs across multiple campaigns are anywhere from 0.02 to $0.20 Cost per visitor.

To learn more about Trellian’s Direct Search, here are some useful links:

• Direct Search Quick Start Guide
• Direct Search FAQs
• Sign Up for Trellian Direct Search

Trying to Understand the Strategy
Now, since this PPC Strategy does not have an “actual” conversion metric, I do so see some important metrics to test the performance. For example:

• Clicks/Pageviews
• Social Network participation
• Increased visibility for other areas of the AARP website
• Banner Ad Revenue

The Bottom-line:
This is a very smart move by AARP to use PPC to drive awareness to this story, especially with the timing of the new Wall Street Movie in theaters to capitalize on the additional buzz of the actor’s name. This just shows that PPC is not always being used as a vehicle to drive qualified traffic and measuring conversion results. In terms of the end result, the best outcome would be a Cancer Free Michael Douglas and another movie about Gordon Gekko.

Continue the Discovery Phase After The Kickoff Call:
Just because you already had the kickoff call, doesn’t mean you do not need to ask more questions. In fact, the most intuitive questions and strategy shifts that makes the most difference happen during the first couple months of the relationship. If you have a scheduled weekly or monthly call, always have a handful of questions to keep the client’s confidence in you that you are just not the same old PPC Agency.

The client would like to here new ideas or other search or social media related trends that you are seeing perhaps with another client. There is nothing more important that open communication on hat is happening (good or bad), what is being done about it and what is next on the optimization, expansion or testing pipeline.

Read and “Re-Read” the Client’s Website Content
This sounds like a no-brainer, but if you want to know more about the client’s products and services you better find a quiet room in the office and get a good understanding of the keywords, phrases and even paragraphs within the website. The best content for writing Text Ads will most likely come from the existing content and in keeping with Quality Score, Relevancy and continuation from “before the click” to “after the click”.

Writing Text Ads is more than just (25) characters for the Title and (35) characters for the descriptions and just filling whatever you can to fill in those areas. It’s about taking what is found on the website and applying marketing-centric messages that not only get the attention of the user, but also compliment what the advertiser is actually offering.

Indirect Keywords Are The Goldmines:
Whether in conversation or direct questioning, finding out other ways that people label their services or products are an easy way to drive increased conversions and lowered acquisition costs. What I mean is, PPC Marketers usually rely on Keyword Research Tools to find the terms that people search for to find their products or services. However, there are times where the Keyword Tool does not go deep enough and the best keyword tool is the client’s business interaction with their “offline” efforts. This can also be found within the websites “internal search results”. The main point here is simply ask the client if there are other ways to say the same thing.

In Conclusion:
The best thing a PPC Marketer can do is to honestly care about the client’s business and start learning everything you can about their business. It’s much more complex than driving specific keywords to their site. I also think that taking on a new client requires the PPC Marketer to “on occasion” impress the client with their knowledge of their business. PPC is becoming much more than keywords, it’s evolving into a multi-faceted strategy where finding the searches through keywords, visual Ads, mobile networks and social networking. So the more you know about the client, the better your chances are for leveraging the clients performance.

Preview/Summary from SES Website: Search and social media are changing the way brands interact with
their consumers, and will be even more influential throughout 2010 and
beyond. Consumers find and engage with brands in social media, print,
radio, tv, and outdoor ads, which in turn influences what they search
for. How should advertisers use integrated search and social media
strategies to influence search terms and results, improve overall SEO
and drive increases in return on ad spend?… more

• Speaker:

  Craig Macdonald, Senior Vice
  President and Chief Marketing Officer, Covario

  Click
  to close

  Speaker Profile
• Panelists:

  Maura Ginty, Senior Manager,
  Global Web Content, Autodesk

  Cheryl Max, Director, Corporate
  Functional Capabilities, IBM

LIVE Summary:

To start off the session, Craig MacDonald talks about Search Powered
Marketing and how Social Media has reached an hysteria level. He breaks
down both Broadcast Media and Interactive Media. in 2010, Companies will
spend $106 billion on overall media and highlights that PPC only
accounts for $12 billion.

Next, Cheryl Max talks about the Voice of the Customer (Search & Social Media)

• The Objective (what are the best keywords to go after for the business)
• The Metrics (wanted to see Lift in visibility, however it then became a conversion exercise)
• The Systems
• The Process

Cheryl goes into say that with IBM, Visibility is/was the #1 Priority and success metric, then measuring traffic, then engagement then conversions. It’s a numbers game for IBM. A few years ago it was awareness, now it’s all about visibility and optimizing conversions. They are relatively very careful with it comes to PPC spend but expect to expand based on conversions. Cheryl then talks about lessons learned and specific tactics in which IBM pursued PPC. Also, IBM is evaluating their Lead System (monetization). For example, “Is a Video worth more than a Whitepaper download?”

Engagement was a single interaction on the webpage. Depending on how deep the interaction took place within the site, determined the LEAD value.

Funnel Segmentation: IBM is moving to perpetual websites, rather than specific Landing Pages.

Next up is Maura Ginty who talks about Signal vs. Noise and Prioritizing Responses. Social Media offers a deluge of self-noration. Sift, Sort and find an influencer and audit all social media to make sure what is being said and who is saying what.

• Listen
• Engage
• Respond

Maura mentions for AutoDesk, Youtube is a primary vehicle for traffic and lead generation, but of course it depends on your business.

How to join the conversation? Listen, engage, analyze. Authenticity of the message is key for the company’s reputation management. Also, the social conversation is a double edged sword where companies have to be very careful not to leak out sensitive material that could affect the company’s reputation.

Moderator: Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO , Enquisite

Speakers:

• Mark Knowles, President & CEO, Pixelstick, Inc.
• Chris Boggs, Director of SEO, Rosetta
• Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

LIVE Summary:

This session started off with Mark Knowles where he talked about opportunities and fear. SERP pages were good in the past, but now with mixed media/blended search. Mark also talks about Google’s Patent and how the patent provides details into this blended search platform. So, with this blended search results, the search engines are striving to provide searchers with “real-time” results. He mentioned other colleagues have been effected by this change in the SERPS, and is forcing everyone to look at SERP more holistically,

He also mentions “The Second Click” and that all things Google is not good for us, in general.He provides some visual examples of companies who has “re-branded” themselves and talks about how Google follwed a similar path. He also talked about how Google talked to webmaster, then purchases Urchin and then launched their own Google Analytics. GOOGLE is NOT to be afraid of. Either you Grow or you Die.

Next up is Chris Boggs, who talks about how to best evaluate a potential client. He shows a pyramid of 3 major areas. technical, on-site optimization and Off-site promotion. This is a NOT a one size fits all. Also, optimization is not just for test, it’s rich media/videos.

Important Questions to ask

• do high performers leveage non-text
• would target segments benefit from digital assets including videos, podcasts, images, etc…
• Do I have the fund to create and optimize content that may not be as easy to track to ROI as PPC and Organic Search.

Chris also provides examples of how product feeds bring down the results and depending on your industry, you should start adding videos, product feeds, etc… that will help a company within an “un-optimized” SERP.

High volume and lucrative search terms is the perfect example to re-evaluate your SEM/SEO strategy to best leverage the results.

Next up is Josh Cobb from Yahoo who talks about Yahoo (not be feared from us) they have an enormous publisher partnership.

Josh mentions the following

• Identify any and all digital assets (taking inventory).
• Sort the inventory into Commercial, editorial, entertainment or added value
• Align them to User Experience, Advertiser/Publisher
• Build and Test all market assumptions (actual user behavioral and technical limits)

Deciding what to Deploy

• Long term, deeply engaged loyal user base
• Highly transactional (point of sale)
• Pass through traffic. Buy ‘em and Goodbye ‘em

When should we deploy?

• A clear user value has been determined
• There is a source of funding for the content
• Total control over website
• You know your digital assets are generating money

Next up is Lee Odden who talks about Universal Search 2007 where we had all of these digital assets and new channels of promotion and matching the two together to provide the best user experience. Now in 2010, we have Social, Personalized, Real-Time and now Mobile it is now an holistic SEO marketing. If it can be search, it can be optimized.

DOA Content Strategy

Keywords –> Personas, SERPs –> Assets, Editorial, Mapping –> Operationalize, Off Page DAO, Promote, Measure.

Holistic SEO in action

• Goal
• Keywords
• Buyer Persona
• SERP
• Assets
• Off Page

Content Plan –> Blog Post –> Assets –> Social Media Optimization

- End of Session

————————————————————————————————-

Session #2: Sponsored Session: Achieving Success with Improved Ads quality

LIVE Summary:Understanding Search Ads Quality (technical difficulties)
Dan Friedman

Dan talks about Quality Score and is not the most important metric in your account.
Profit –> Revenue vs. Cost –>Conversions, clicks, impressions

Dan emphasizes that overall profitability is most important and that Quality Score is a balancing the interests of all parties in the online advertising ecosystem

What does QS influence?

• Elibility
• Position
• Price
• Top Spot

1-10 is just an approx. from historical data and expected estimate. Actual score are unique for each query.
what contributes to a Quality Score.

• CTR%
• Relevancy
• Landing Page

CTR% is comprised of the following elements:

• Query
• Keyword
• Creative

Relevancy
We use relevancy signals unique to the specific query to help inform our quality predictions
example: java+coffee+cup

LANDING PAGE Quality

• LP Quality is used to police offenders of our landing page guidelines. no pop-up, no pop-unders, have visible privacy policy,
• Not about the design or layout. usability and user experience is most important.

How to improve quality score

• Organize your account for max effectiveness
• Choose relevant keywords
• Create straightforward targeted ads
• Point users to a landing page with relevant, original content with quick load times.

Coming to terms with your quality score

• Even if you have done everything right, you might now have the perfect quality score.

More information on the Myths & Truths with Google Adwords
www.google.com/adwords/adsquality

————————————————————————————————-

Session #3: Sponsored Session: Getting the Most out of Adwords Features & Tools

LIVE Summary:

To start off, the speaker has discussed the following important elements for adwords.

• Time, Traffic and Results
• Spend less time
• Drive additional, cost-effective traffic
• A new Adwords Report

OPPORTUNITIES TAB

He also goes deeper into the different ways ad advertiser can get useful Advanced Data/Reporting without having to RUN REPORTS where it takes a longer time. Next up is Alex Kenin who talks about the opportunities tab.

The Search Land Scape is changing

• Big Picture View
• Toolbox
• Data Driven
• Automation

In a Nutshell: Google tracks visitors/users through the Adsense cookie only when a visitor may have seen a Display Ad on that web page. Again, this is not tracking clicks, just our eyeballs. So, it’s an invisible conversion. Also, this only works for Display Ads (sorry Text Ads) and it only tracks up to 30 days. So if the visitor happens to make a purchase by any other method (direct, organic, etc…) Google is attributing this conversion back to the Content Network so you can keep spending more and more money.

What does Google say? According to Google, “View-through conversion tracking provides you with additional information related to the value of your display campaigns on the Google Content Network. This feature provides a measure of the number of online conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw, but did not click, a display ad on one of the sites on the Google Content Network. You can use View-through conversion tracking to better measure return on investment (ROI) for your display campaigns and optimize your campaigns based on how users are responding to your display ads.”

Here’s the biggest problem. Client Adoption as a viable conversion metric.

I find it very difficult to convince a client or a CMO to take these “View Through” Conversions seriously, because it is/was not originally included in most PPC based CPA metrics (ie ROAS% thresholds in which the agency/client agreement were based on). In fact, Google makes it clear that all View-Through Conversions are NOT TRACKED in Google Analytics and NOT COMPATIBLE with Goals in Google Analytics neither. Hmmn, so were trusting our ad dollars to a 30 day cookie where even their own Analytics cannot track it.

So, this now opens up a can of worms for the PPC Guru because it creates an Attribution problem where even though overall sales might be better, PPC is not getting the credit it deserves. I know it sounds like Google is trying to help identify attribution, but it’s not realistic enough YET.

In Conclusion:

Unless there is more available data to measure, I would not take Google’s View-Through Conversion metric seriously. In hindsight, it’s pretty cool, snazzy and a good way to get more advertisers to spend more money on the Content Network. However, if the PPC guru’s bottom-line is based on actual and measurable conversions, I would stay away from it.

SemGeek.com is proud to present an Exclusive Online Interview with Allen Hammock,

This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies’ Pre-SES New York 2010 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

Interview Questions

Question #1: Can you tell our audience a little more about your role at LookSmart?

Answer: I’ve served LookSmart in various sales, marketing and technical roles since 2004, working to help define our leadership position in PPC search advertising. In my current position as Director of Technical Sales, I act as an educator and evangelist for the company, teaching customers and partners about LookSmart’s unique approach to search advertising.  Internally, I am partially responsible for training programs for our account management and sales teams.
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Question #2: What are the biggest challenge(s) that LookSmart faces in this “Google” dominated industry? In which areas does LookSmart have an advantage over Google?

Answer: At the end of the day, you have to understand that your customers’ choices aren’t about “Google” or “the other guy.” Instead, the biggest challenge is putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and understanding how to make your product worth their time and consideration.  So, how do we do that?  From our point of view our advantage is clear: it’s our service.  LookSmart offers top notch customer service to all of our advertisers, regardless of the size of their budget. We have dedicated account management teams committed to ensuring that our clients are meeting their goals.  If our customers have a question, they can give us a call and we’ll actually pick up the phone.

Google offers a great product to be sure, but they set a very high bar to succeed in that environment.   LookSmart doesn’t require it’s customers to be authorities in how to get value out of networks—we provide that expertise and the service to support it.
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Question #3: What would you say is the single most important reason for an advertiser to try LookSmart whether it would be their first time ever or again in many years?

Answer: LookSmart has a commitment to deliver predictable, sustainable, and profitable results to our clients.  Our goal is to be the network you can trust.  That means, we work tirelessly to achieve results for our clients and we’re honest when we’ve reached those limits.  It’s about being able to contact your LookSmart rep and ask questions, get ideas, and try new things while feeling confident that we’ve got your best interests in mind.
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Question #4: Can you explain in more detail about how the quality of traffic within the LookSmart platform and why a potential advertisers should consider trying out LookSmart.

Answer: First and foremost, delivering quality is making a commitment to provide traffic you yourself would want to buy if it were being sold to you.  That means taking measurements, developing models around those observations, and diligently testing and re-testing your assumptions.  We have a proprietary process in place with several check points to promote a clean network including: advanced pricing and targeting controls, click scoring technologies, and independent measurement through companies like Anchor Intelligence and Click Forensics.  We segment our traffic and price it appropriately according to performance .  We proactively solicit feedback from our advertisers and act on it.

And, to speak to the matter of trust—we advise clients about opportunities and give them a fair and honest assessment about the probability of success with their campaigns.  We adapt our programs to suit the needs of the advertiser.  For example, some advertisers are willing to take more risk on their CPA margins in order to grow their overall net contribution more aggressively.  Others need to hit precise goals even if overall growth is more conservative.

Traffic quality is more than just a score on a chart and it’s definitely not black and white.  Buying from LookSmart is more like working with a financial advisor.  We have a sophisticated view of the available inventory, really granular controls that allow us to customize our clients’ exposure to the network, and a set of ethics that guide how we handle our customers’ investments.  We’re the network you can trust.
———————————————————————————————————-

Question #5: Can you help us understand LookSmart’s Keyword Matching/Targeting options? For example, what are the key differences between your Broad Match Smart Matches as compared to the match types from Google and Yahoo.

Answer: LookSmart offers smart matching and broad matching technologies not too different from the leading search providers.  In some cases, like category matching, our platform is more capable than others.  Advertisers using our platform will find that the campaigns they run on Google and Yahoo! fit nicely into the same boxes we’ve reserved for Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Match Types on LookSmart.

But, we’re not really trying to differentiate ourselves from competition in that way.  The reality is, as a marketer it can be a scary choice to leave the safe confines of the web sites you know really well like Google and Yahoo!.  There’s a big difference between trying to figure out how to maximize productivity on two web sites where there is little variability from one pageview to the next.

In the world of networks, we don’t have the luxury of dictating the position, font size, and layout of every ad on every page.  You’re working with hundreds of thousands of unique web sites all with their own ideas about how pages should be designed.  Instead, LookSmart is sifting through over a billion queries a day looking for the opportunities that suit the right advertisers at the right price within an acceptable tolerance of risk versus reward.  So, our technologies are designed to help us measure that risk and deliver that reward.  We tend to emphasize the sophistication of our analytical and pricing capabilities over the nuances of targeting.

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Question #6: With more and more PPC Software tools becoming available for PPC Marketers to manage multiple accounts across all SE Platforms through API technology, can you tell us how LookSmart has adapted to this shift in PPC management?

Answer: LookSmart offers an API that is similar in function and form to the API’s you see from other leading search providers.  If you’re trying to manage Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ad Variations, Keyword
s, Budgets, Geo-Targeting, and get reports, you’ll find our SOAP-based web service easy to work with and comparable to other API’s you’re already working with.

But, we see the value of our API a little bit differently than the other providers do.  In a bid management scenario, for example, your automated bidding strategy depends a lot on the assumption that every page view is just like every other page view—the only difference being the advertisers you compete with and the price you pay.  That’s fine on a search site that hasn’t changed the layout of its results in over a decade, but when you get on a network with hundreds of thousands of page designs, your automated bidding strategy goes out the door along with those assumptions.

Our API makes it easy for clients to manage the performance of their campaigns with LookSmart alongside performance with our peers.  We have to live up to the same standards of return on investment that the leading search providers do.  Our API enables our clients to hold us to those standards.  But we deliver that performance through our own unique blend of service and technology that no automated bidding strategy is going to enhance.

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Question #7: Other thoughts we want to share???

Answer: At LookSmart, we have a dedicated group of people who are working day-in and day-out to deliver value to our customers.  Because we don’t have the virtually unlimited resources of some of our competitors, we have to work smarter and focus our energies where we can make the most impact.  Ultimately, we believe that is through superior service.  You don’t get to play in the game if you don’t have the technology to keep you running with the pack, so we’ve made substantial developments in that area.  But you can’t engineer a trusted relationship with a client, you have to earn it the old fashioned way.
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Question #8: Are there any Special Offers you would like to extend to our readers?

Answer: LookSmart would like to extend semgeek.com readers with the opportunity to try our network with $50 in matched clicks. To redeem your $50 advertising credit, you will need to open a LookSmart advertiser account using a valid credit card. Enter the coupon code “ls-mb-50″ at checkout and we’ll match every dollar you spend on our network, up to $50, with an additional dollar in advertising. Get started today!

For example, here are just a few questions that could be asked:

• When was the company formed?
• How many years have you been using PPC?
• Do you have an Affiliate Program? How are you managing them?
• Do you have your name Trademarked? How about with Google?
• Do you have a reseller agreement? What are the terms?
• Have you always contracted out to a 3rd party?
• Is there anyone “in-house” monitoring analytics?
• What is the current pipeline looking like?
• How many “offline” advertisements do you handle?
• Do you have an internal graphics department?
• How are your margins on this particular type of product?
• What is your relationship with Vendors like?

It is these types of questions that can make or break a successful client relationship. In today’s PPC World, everyone is competing with one another, even those who are on the same team want a piece of the pie. As a PPC marketer, you need to know the Politics, understand the limitations and know what types of strategy questions to ask in order to get ahead and avoid any “Imperial Entanglements” (Huge Star Wars Fan)

With that said, this is why the DISCOVERY Phase is most important. You need to know everything about the client’s needs and prepare yourself for a very “in-depth”, almost intimate conversion about the WHAT, WHY, WHEN and HOW. If the PPC Guru or Project Management Team just focuses or cares about numbers, in my opinion, the client will not be happy.

What can be revealed in an “in-depth” Discovery Call?

Well, for starters you can see where the company has been, where it is currently and where it wants to go. If the client is a retailer, you can ask about the evolution of how they may have handled their affiliates over the years or possibly issues they may be having with their manufacturers/vendors.

Be Proactive with the Questions:

Many agencies provide a list of questions to the client before the actual call and that is a very good tactic for the discovery phase. However, I have learned over the years, that the best information comes in the form of the “LIVE” Natural conversation surrounding questions like “what have been your biggest obstacles and how can I help you achieve success” or “What types of legalities should I be on the look-out for?”. Understanding their B2B relationships, trademark legalities and current competitors (other than PPC) can greatly influence your PPC strategy efforts for the next 6 month to a year.

In conclusion:

Ask the important questions. Write everything down. Give the client your utmost attention. Remember, depending on the client’s PPC past will determine how effective you could be for them. Even with an amazing and super-optimized PPC strategy it can fail miserably if the goals/objectives as well as past failures are not addressed in the beginning Discovery call.

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

- Galileo