Session: Paid Search Super Tools

Preview/Summary: The competition is fierce in paid search! From small in-house
accounts to ones with millions of keywords, it’s the new advances in SEM
technology that might just make the difference between success and
failure. Are there tools you could be using right now to help double
your conversions, lower your costs, or save your team hours of time
every week? At this panel, top paid search tool vendors will showcase… more

• Moderator:
  Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising
  Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising
  
  Click
  to close

  Speaker Profile

• Speakers:
  Thomas Bindl, SES Advisory Board
  & Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
  Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation
  Officer, ClearSaleing
  Richard Sim, VP of Product
  Management and Marketing, Anchor Intelligence
  Craig Danuloff, Founder and
  President, ClickEquations Inc.

LIVE SUMMARY:

In this “JAM PACKED” session, Mel Carson talks about how much everyone relies on PPC tools and why they are so important. Up first is Thomas Bindl of Refined Labs who goes though the some slides on analytics dashboards. He also says that technology helps reaches the goals setup by the adverisers.

• lowers resources
• more efficient
• enables team work
• centralized system
• better performance
• fixed costs to variable costs

Paid Search Tool History

• Rule Based
• Portfolio Based
• Algorthmic mgmt and campaign mgmt.

Parts of Today’s Tools

• Correct data
• single reporting interface
• aggregation and correlation of cost and income data
• support for all different match types
• integration of external data sources

What should you expect

• KPI definitions
• support for cancellations/returns
• manual adjustment of bids
• strategic groups
• 2-way synchronization

What you cannot expect

• completely eliminate for PPC mgmt work
• understanding your industry
• perfect system out of the box
• in-housing of ppc mgmt without adding resources
• support for all google/yahoo/msn functionality
• comparability of tools without testing them

What is the Future?

• Parity with platform functionality
• more tools for automating campaign mgmt
• better long tail support
• more specialized versions
• more control over actions
• even better performance improvement
• integration or more marketing channels

Next Up to the podium is Adam Goldberg and he talks about concepts, screen shots of his software. He starts off by talking about some bullet point from ClearSaleing

• Cross Media Profit Tracking
• Purchase Path Valuation

Advertising with a Purpose

• Introduce
• Influence (differentials)
• Close (convert, upsell, LTV optimization)

Attribution as an Evolution

• Display
• Social Media
• Re Targeting
• Branded PPC

Purchase Path Options

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 as CEO at Click Forensics? For example, what does a typical day consist of?

Answer: Well, there are no typical days when you’re the CEO of an internet start-up, but that’s what makes it so fun. This is even more true within the fast paced online media industry. We really are in the midst of seminal marketplace changes, which is creating significant opportunities and challenges.


That said, for me it’s about trying to always find balance – between thinking/acting strategically and accomplishing all the day-to-day tactics and to-do’s that need to get done; between driving/focusing the team and working with existing and prospective customers to understand their key problems that we can help solve. No two days are the same; it’s very fast-paced, which is how I like it.

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Question #2: As the Authority in Click Fraud Detection and overall Traffic Quality, can you provide us with any insights, trends, or concerns that you have seen over the past year with regard to overall web traffic? Is there anything we should be aware of for the near future?

Answer: I think the most interesting thing we’ve seen in the CPC space over the past year is that while more companies are focused on the issues around traffic quality, the fraud rate has been pretty constant. We’re actually seeing more sophisticated sources of click fraud emerge. Botnets, malware, and very sophisticated fraud schemes are becoming more common, while the old sources of fraud like competitor fraud and publisher fraud are being successfully prohibited/discovered. So while the click fraud rate looks like it’s been pretty constant over the past years, the complexion of the fraud has changed considerably.

In the near future, we really believe that the traffic quality problems will migrate to the display ad space as well. The advent of DSPs, ad exchanges and yield management platforms, along with the continued proliferation of ad networks means that advertisers and agencies are losing some level of transparency and control over their campaigns. Was my ad shown? Was it seen by the right audience? Did anyone actually see it? Those will become the measures of quality in the display ad world.

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Question #3: What would you say are the biggest challenge(s) facing PPC Advertisers in this highly competitive marketplace?

Answer: The PPC advertising space is no longer the wild west. It’s very data-driven and sophisticated. You can’t just bid up your core keywords and sit back and wait for traffic. Advertisers and agencies are hyper-competitive, so whether you’re talking about long-tail keywords or bid optimization, it requires a lot more work to make sure campaign dollars are well spent. The high ROI of PPC can mask a lot of inefficiencies, but those days are numbered.

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Question #4: Even with Google and Yahoo trying to improve the quality of traffic in their respected Content Networks, there are still problems with Click Fraud and overall traffic quality. In your opinion, how can Click Forensics help the typical advertiser overcome these issues?

Answer: First, let me say that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all do a great job at trying to prevent fraud in their advertiser campaigns. And when it does happen, they tend to be very reasonable about providing credits or refunds to advertisers. Our issue has always been that it’s incumbent upon the advertisers to ensure they’re getting what they pay for. Some advertisers simply choose to trust the search engines, and that’s fine. We’d say trust, but verify. Our products help advertisers to verify that they aren’t paying for invalid and fraudulent clicks.

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Question #5: With the emergence of more and more PPC Management Software Companies entering into the industry offering everything from Bid Management to measuring Attribution, how has Click Forensics, positioned itself to be different that the competition?

Answer: Given all the PPC data we see and our relationships with large advertisers, we’ve actually considered whether it would make sense for us to enter the search optimization space (bid management, attribution, etc.). But instead we’ve chosen to focus on our core competency, which is improving traffic quality. That means we often end up providing our service to a different audience than just PPC advertisers. Many of our largest customers are ad networks, publishers, and content aggregators.

They don’t want to deliver poor quality traffic to their advertisers. We help them by filtering out invalid traffic and routing the quality traffic appropriately. We help ad networks to manage their publisher base by focusing on quality providers. So, we’re not a PPC Management company, but we are helping to improve the quality of traffic for PPC advertisers – even for the ones who aren’t our direct customers.

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Question #6: From your unique perspective as CEO with Click Forensics, can you describe for our audience what specific products or services of CF would be most valuable to the typical customer?

Answer: Well, our “typical” customer might be a PPC advertiser, an ad network, or a publisher. There’s no one product that they all buy from us. But all our products are focused on the same issue: improving traffic quality. Click Forensics for Ad Networks helps performance-based ad networks to better serve their advertisers, better monetize their traffic, and eliminate waste in campaigns. We score every click and every source of traffic so that network operators can maximize their profitability.

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Question #7: For existing Click Forensics customers as well as others who might be interested in trying out Click Forensics, do you have any new and exciting enhancements that you would like to announce?

Answer: The most exciting thing we’ve announced recently is that we’re expanding our offerings to the display advertising market. We plan to bring to the display advertising industry what we’ve been providing in the CPC space for years: transparency, verification, and audience quality improvement. Click Forensics has now opened the beta testing program for a new platform that will enable online display advertisers to make impression filtering and ad serving decisions in real-time.

For more info visit: http://www.clickforensics.com/display

About Paul Pellman:

Paul Pellman is an expert on online audience verification for the search and display advertising industries. He has spoken on the topic at top industry events, including SES, ad:tech and Pubcon. As the CEO of Click Forensics, he oversees the development and delivery of the company’s ad verification offerings, which are used by leading advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks.

Before joining Click Forensics, Paul served as executive vice president of Marketing and interim President for Hoover’s, and vice president of Consumer Direct for Terra Lycos. He was also CEO of two early stage start-ups. Paul holds a B.S. in accounting and finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Harvard University.

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.
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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!

Session Speakers/Panelists:
Stoney deGeyter, Jennifer Evans Laycock, Ron Jones, Billie Jo Waara

Live Summary:
Jennifer Evans Laycock starts off the session with a great presentation about Social Media Conversations (Not Marketing). She goes into saying that Social Media is not a channel to push products and for companies to stop running towards the bleeding edge. There are good tools and properties that survive and other that do not and that is why you should not always run to the next shiny object. Social Media is also essential in our recession.

Consumers are hunting for information –> Social Media Conversation <– Companies hunt Feedback

• Flickr: All visual. Deeper than just pictures, it's a community. We are visual people. There's a different emotional connection with the consumer who views a photo. It's an engaged community that has a continuous conversation. Drives good traffic. Flickr has a No-follow rule, but does a great job to drive direct traffic. (Share your work, entice viewers, engage audience, invite or reward…..)
• Twitter: Some companies struggling to how best to use it. Create your listening board. Twitter is best used to listen to conversation and get to know a blogger. starting point to connect with people. Benefits of "re-tweeting". Great place to get feedback.
  • Broadcast: news and info, advisories, sales, events
  • Listening: consumer intent, target insight
  • Initial contact, networking, personal insight
• Value Triangle (context vs. competition for attention)
  • Blogs and article
  • social reviews
  • discussion forums
  • search results
  • social news
  • micro blogging

In the next presentation, Billie Jo Waara talks about measurement and show value in social media and give ideas on free tools to help identify what is working.

1. Step #1: Define your goal (brand awareness) + (sentiment) + (engagement) + (conversions) + (relationships)
2. Step #2: Set the Bar (social popularity) + (branded keyword search volume) + (viral reach) + (digital reputation) + (increase website traffic) +(two-way communication)
3. Step #3: Execute the plan
4. Step #4: Evaluation

Here are some Free sites to take a look at:

• Social Mention.com
• Twitrratr
• Compete.com
• TweetStats
• TwitterCounter

Live Analysis:

This was a great session on the basics of social media. I was impressed by the presentation by Lennifer Evans Laycock as it connected to the audience. She provided some great resources such as reviews and books for the audience to read. The presentation from Billie Joe was also constructive and provided some great free tools to help measure your social media initiatives. The last presentation by Ron Jones was helpful because it provided some "everyday" examples of using social media especially with iPhones and smartphones

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Session #2:  Landing Page Testing and Tuning

Session Speakers/Panelists:
Sage Lewis, Tim Ash

Live Summary:
Sage Lewis gives a terrific introduction to Tim Ash to the "tired" audience. Tim starts off talking about how your landing page is like "Your Baby is Ugly". The economic of conversions. Fix the landing page to lower costs. CPA = CPC/CR. Who should design your website? (ad agency, marketing, I.T., webmaster, your boss). The website visitor should design your landing page. The real conversion experts are your visitors. He then goes into a few case studies where A/B testing was done and +40% increase as achieved by making very small differences to the LP.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

1. Unclear Call-To-Action
2. Too many choices
3. Asking to much information
4. Too much text
5. Not keeping your promises
6. Visual Distractions
7. Lack of Trust

Live Analysis:

This was an entertaining and well constructed session where Tim engaged the audience and made them a part of the presentation. He provided a personable touch which makes him a very knowledgeable and a good communicator. He talked about his 7 deadly sins of landing page design. Highly recommended session for anyone interested in taking your PPC campaign to the next level.

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Session #3:  Social Media: Managing Conversations and Reputations When the User Is In Control

Session Speakers/Panelists:
Anna Maria Virzi, Dave Evans, Liana Evans, Brian Kalma, Mike Volpe

Live Summary:
Anna Maria starts off the session by introducing all of the speakers.

Dave Evans is the first presentation in which he discusses "the new marketing cycle" (word of mouth, awareness, purchase, social media) He also goes on to say there is more trust in people, than in advertising.

1. Method #1: Write a check (Coke.i9blogging, HP- Youtube, Cisco-Wikipedia)
2. Method #2: Trick the Audience
3. Method #3: Listen and learn

Liana Evans discusses "How'd we get here?" The emergence and rise for Mass Social Media andnot the message that is important, but what the consumer (end user) cares about your products or services. Social Media provides new signals to the search engines. It's not just generation Y, but actually the older generations who are making up the social media demographic. 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology. There many forms of social media outlets (message boards, video galleries, etc….) Monitoring and Measuring all of your social media efforts. (radian6, melt-water, etc…) Social media is different. It's not the purchase, but the influence to make a purchase. Interaction can be a double edge sword. Re-evaluate and tweak your goals and DO NOT fall in love.

Mike Volpe discusses social media and lead generation. He talks about the different brands from P&G, McDonalds and Pfizer in 1950 – 2000 and now we have Google, Amazon and Facebook. Inbound marketing. Yesterday search was KING, now it's Social Media that matters. Traffic for most companies are equally the same amongst search and social media. Social media is now a staple. He also says to make sharing easy. Content and social drive SEO, identify leads by channel.

Brian Kalma discusses his role with Zappos and talks about how to not wait for your customers to call you. Let your customers see the "real you"

• Zappos get 6,000 phone calls per day
• 400 live chats per day

Live Analysis:

This session provides a higher level understanding on my Social Media matters. The speakers mention some great online services that help track measurement and traffic attribution. Also, there was alot of emphasis that Social Media is catching up to SEO and PPC as the main drivers of website traffic. The advantage of social media is to not rely on it to make a sale, but to persuade and allow the consumer to make a better decision.

About David Roth
David guides SEM and SEO strategy across all Yahoo properties, overseeing programs, managing infrastructure teams, and establishing internal best practices and campaign management standards. He has 10 years of SEM experience, recently working with Carat Fusion, a full-service advertising agency, as the director of SEM in the San Francisco office. Previously, Roth worked with Avenue A|Razorfish, eonMedia, and Inceptor. He holds an MBA from UC San Diego and a B.A. in sociology from UC Berkeley.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

Question #1: As an employee at Yahoo, how do you objectively manage multiple search programs across business units?  Do you have an obligation to spend more of your Ad budget with Yahoo that any other search engine?

Answer: Because Yahoo! runs many different businesses with widely divergent business models, this can pose a real challenge. How do you think about prioritizing search marketing for Yahoo! Personals, where users pay for a monthly subscription, against Yahoo! Shopping, for example, where users click in, compare products and click out? The answer lies in a rigorous system of valuation. Once you understand what a SEM or SEO user (or any user) is worth to your business, it becomes very clear how much you should be willing to pay to attract such a user. From there, the math is relatively simple, or at least understood. Furthermore, we can tweak our valuation models to adjust to macroeconomic conditions. Many advertisers are doing this currently, moving, for example, from a growth strategy to a profitability strategy. Whatever valuation we’re using, we try to be consistent across businesses, and from there, the amount of money we can spend promoting any single property becomes apparent.

Speaking of ad budgets, we operate like most search marketers with regard to how we allocate our advertising spend. We invest as much money in any search engine buy or SEO program as it makes sense to, given the return that a program will provide to the business. We have very strict profitability requirements for all our programs, so this process sorts itself out fairly quickly. The only other thing I can tell you about this is that because we are Yahoo!, as you might imagine we have a certain amount of brand value that resonates on the Yahoo! network better than it does most advertisers, so our ad budgets skew more heavily toward Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) than it might for other advertisers.
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Question #2: Do you get any special treatment as a result of your close relationship with Yahoo! Search? YSM?

Answer: The short answer is ‘No’. As far as Yahoo! Search and YSM are concerned, we are either a large website or large advertiser, depending on the audience. That said, we do get to talk to product managers from time to time, who can tell us about upcoming features and enhancements. But no, we don’t get to talk to algorithm or marketplace engineers in a context that would allow us any advantage in the marketplace. Yahoo! is very aware of the perception that ‘special treatment’ would create, so we steer clear of this.
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Question #3: What’s the biggest challenge(s) in deploying SEO, as well as PPC, across a large “search engine” focused company within multiple divisions?

Answer: My biggest challenge, and my primary focus in my time here, has been to develop a consistent and standard approach to search marketing across business units. When you’re in a big, complex organization like this, the most daunting task is to bring the same approach to every opportunity. In the process of tackling this, we’ve worked on developing internal tools that allow us to standardize our approach across the company. For example, we developed an SEM campaign brief to help businesses get up and running on paid search.

We built product development checklists for SEO that allow us to evaluate SEO-friendliness within the development cycle, as well as an underlying process that allows us to highlight necessary changes when they need to happen. We lined out standard processes for forecasting and budget movement that explicitly spell out all the stakeholders and their respective roles in the decision-making process. And finally we developed a standard set of scorecards for reporting SEM and SEO results internally to upper management. All of these tools have helped make my job much more manageable.
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Question #4: With Yahoo, there are basically only (2) two keyword matches (Standard and Advanced Match) Can elaborate further about the key similarities and differences between Yahoo’s keyword matching and Google’s Keyword Matching. Can you tell us, in an “unbiased” manner, which provides better results.

Answer: I can’t say without bias which is better, because it really depends what your goals and resources are. I think the main differences between the two systems are 1) YSM uses a canonical keyword system that maps plurals and misspellings to the canonical keyword, and 2) Google’s extended broad match is a much broader target than YSM has. Both of these differences offer both advantages and drawbacks, but the bottom line is that it’s search marketing and it performs better than any other marketing channel, so you want to maximize the results of both systems given your resource constraints and business goals.
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Question #5: There are many software companies emerging into the Search Industry offering many solutions to help both streamline and automate the typical tactics of everyday PPC management. Do you or your team at Yahoo use any of these software applications? And if so, which one(s) are you willing to disclose.

Answer: Part of my job is to evaluate tools in the marketplace, so
I take a lot of demos and I look at a lot of tools. What I can tell you is that right now we’re not using any off-the-shelf tools, but that some of them are getting quite good and I’m always looking for a good fit.

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Question #6: When Yahoo acquired Index tools back in April 2008, were you obligated to use Indextools as your primary Analytics software? Do you use more than one analytics package?

Answer: We have made Yahoo! Web Analytics, the technology formerly known as Indextools, available to our Yahoo! stores customers, and we are currently looking at ways we can leverage this technology internally for our Yahoo! properties.

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Question #7:  In your position at Yahoo, do you currently or in the past, provide the Yahoo R&D Department with new ideas and/or updates based on your experience working with Google Adwords platform? In other words, do you tell them what they should consider in future releases of the Yahoo Search Platform?

Answer: As I mentioned before, YSM views us as a large advertiser. So, to the extent that YSM looks for product feedback and feature requirements from their other large advertisers, we do provide similar feedback and feature requirements.

In the past, these sessions touted the “Bidding Wars” as their main angle for getting the most out of PPC. However this year, a lot of focus and attention was put on the organizational structure at the campaign, adgroup, keyword and Ad/creative levels. In addition, there was an interesting emphasis on the Agency/Internal company best practices on handling the complexities of redundancy and duplication keyword coverage within multi-divisional product and service lines.

Kinda makes you think that Paid Search, like Organic Search, is getting more complicated and it’s comforting to know that the brightest minds in this industry are finding ways to tackle the high costs, increasing saturation and the expectations of success.