Bigger Buy Button University

Our Approach to Teaching Search Marketing

2010-04-24T20:33:19Z

Two and a half years ago, I taught the pilot course for Google's AdWords in the Curriculum program. The idea behind the course was that Google would pair university courses on AdWords with non-profit recipients of Google Grants. The Google Grants program provides qualifying non-profits with up to $10,000 in monthly AdWords advertising shown on Google's search engine results pages. The non-profit was to provide a training ground for students, and students were to provide lacking manpower to the non-profit, transferring the knowledge they had gained back at the end of the course.

From the university's perspective, we saw the chance to provide our students a unique hands-on experience to understand the web business ecosystem from visitor acquisition through to conversion. Once we had a program established, our students would walk out not just having heard concepts but having a real working knowledge of how those concepts could be put into action because they had actually done it in class working with real organizations.

Fast forward to present day. Each semester, under the heading of the AdWords in the Curriculum rubric, we're teaching two sections of a course on search engine advertising and one section of a course on landing page optimization. All sections are full. This summer, we're inaugurating a search marketing practicum. It's worthwhile to lay out the outline of the main concepts conveyed in each course.

Search Advertising (with Google AdWords)

All material is delivered in the context of working with clients who have $10,000 monthly search advertising budgets.
Discovering search-based segments for your business.
Developing effective appeals for those segments.
Harnessing visitors' revealed intent in developing effective landing pages.
Developing candidate landing pages using web-standard html and css.

Landing Page Optimization (with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer)

All material is delivered in the context of search marketing campaigns that deliver between 4,000 and 12,000 visitors per month to the clients' websites. These campaigns have been previously developed by other students.
Articulating visitors' revealed intent relative to organizational goals and objectives.
Analyzing the extent to which visitors are achieving their objectives on the current landing pages and conversion funnel.
Development and testing of hypotheses in the form of landing pages for improving visitor experience and increasing conversion.
Articulation of final recommendations and implementation.

Search Marketing Practicum

Hand-picked, strong performing students work with search marketing clients who have been with the program through at least one course.
Students manage the clients one-on-one to gain transaction credit that can be used toward professional certification.
Review and recalibration of search marketing campaigns based on performance to date and changed client expectations.
Introduction of Google Analytics and integration into search marketing planning where possible.
Development of online profiles and online and offline networking strategies for reputation development.

Bringing 11,000 New Monthly Visitors to the Non-Profit Energy Action Coalition

2009-12-20T17:16:16Z

The Energy Action Coalition is a web-savvy non-profit that makes effective use of social media in its viral Internet marketing campaigns. In these campaigns, motivated individuals actively reach out to engage others to advocate for clean and green energy policy.

Search marketing presents a somewhat different challenge. Marketers must determine how members of their target segment express themselves through search terms and use that information to write four line text ads that will make these searchers click.

As outlined in the attached presentation, our students, who worked with Energy Action Coalition to build out a Google Grants AdWords marketing program, found the following:

There was a large segment of people searching for "facts" and information on specific topics covered by the Energy Action Coalition.
Campaigns targeted at these information needs, especially for global warming, wind energy, and fossil fuels could be highly effective.
Having settled the ad campaigns, a good next step would be to test campaign web page designs that incorporated the keywords and appeals that had been demonstrated to work.

Overall, by focusing on what would appeal to specific search segments, students were able to add 11,000 new monthly visitors to the Energy Action Coalition website.

The student team for this project in Fall 2009 included:

Bringing 14,000 New Visitors per Month to the Non-Profit Making It to the Finish Line

2009-12-20T16:09:51Z

When we first started working with Making It to the Finish Line (MITTFL), I wondered how they would work out with a Google AdWords grant. MITTFL is a non-profit focused on empowering young women in Metro Detroit. In my experience teaching AdWords, it works best when you can describe concrete benefits that fill concrete needs. Empowerment just did not sound very concrete in either direction.

I underestimated both MITTFL and the student team. MITTFL had numerous concrete programs and product offerings. As outlined in the presentation linked at the start of this post, three of the most prominent were:

Special Moments, a Free Prom Dress Program: Contestants write an essay on a topic like career goals to become eligible to win a prom dress. In 2009, there were over 100 winners.
The Cotillion Button: This trinket, worn at cotillions, costs under $10 making a perfect inexpensive gift opportunity that has the added benefit of supporting a worthy cause.
Resume Writing Workshops

Students targeted AdWords campaigns for the first two at a national audience and the last at Metro Detroit. Their key learnings include:

Highly targeted, specific campaigns work best (somewhat of a mantra for the class, but it's nice to see it reaffirmed in practice).
Using keywords in the title and domain name significantly increased the likelihood that searchers would click.
Spelling and grammatical mistakes in an ad are lethal.
Landing pages for the AdWords ads will likely also work best when they adhere to these principles and present all their information in one clear screenful of information.

The good thing in these observations is not that their novel but that students put them to such good use in creating effective campaigns. The student team for Fall 2009 included:

Eric Wortman
Darius Smith
Zach Howell
Rendell Bailey

Increasing Engagement with the Organization for Bat Conservation by over 400%

2009-12-13T17:04:17Z

This project is our third with the Organization for Bat Conservation (OBC). OBC has been a great organization for our students to work with:

OBC derives only 15% of its revenue from grants. The remaining 85% comes from program fees (40-45%) and the sale over the Web of unique bat conservation equipment OBC has developed (40-45%).
In Fall 2008, students built out a $10,000 per month advertising spend largely focused on bat conservation equipment sales (specifically bat houses) and general information about bats.
In Winter 2009, students worked with OBC to dramatically increase conversions of pay per click visitors seeking to purchase a bat house.
The past year our students have worked with OBC has been its best revenue year to date.

This term, as described in the presentation linked at the top of this post, students worked with OBC to optimize the experience of visitors seeking general information about bats. As with Dance Marathon at University of Michigan, this work consisted of:

Analyzing visitors' intent based on search terms they used and ads they responded to.
Determining with OBC what the organization's end goals for this visitor segment were. OBC determined that they wanted visitors to engage with the "Bat Zone", an area that contains much information about bats as well as opportunities to participate in OBC's programs.
Developing alternative landing pages designed to maximize the likelihood that visitors would visit the Bat Zone.
The best student-developed alternative landing page increased the likelihood that a pay per click visitor would proceed to the Bat Zone from just under 10% to over 50%, an increase of over 400%.

Our students will continue to work with OBC in Winter 2010 to further investigate ways the organization can increase pay per click visitor engagement with its offerings.

The student team for Fall 2009 consisted of:

A New Landing Page for 7000 Monthly Visitors to the Non-Profit Dance Marathon

2009-12-12T20:42:43Z

The Dance Marathon at University of Michigan is a student run non-profit that raised $388,000 for pediatric rehabilitation programs in the 2009 academic year. Prior to coming to work with our student teams at EMU's College of Business, Dance Marathon's marketing efforts were focused principally on attracting dancers for their 30 hour marathon event, doing donation drives at sporting events, and other fund raising outreach.

However, the organization's mission is broader than just fund raising. One of the principal groups benefiting from Dance Marathon's efforts is autistic children. The student team in our initial AdWords course last Winter identified an opportunity to reach out to parents of autistic children and executed a very successful advertising campaign on that premise that was attracting 7000 monthly visitors as of Fall 2009.

The question for students this term then was how to design landing pages for this campaign that parents of autistic children would find useful. As detailed in the presentation at the top of this post, this term's students:

Analyzed intent for visitors drawn to the AdWords autism campaign based on search terms and ad text.
Worked with Dance Marathon to understand their goals. It should be noted that these goals evolved as the student project progressed such that Dance Marathon developed an autism blog specifically targeted at parents of autistic children half way through the project.
Developed and tested alternative landing page designs to address the concerns of parents of autistic children and allow them to engage with relevant resources provided by Dance Marathon.

With the best student landing page design, the Dance Marathon is now able to draw 10% of the AdWords autism campaign visitors to further engage with the Dance Marathon autism blog, compared with 0% at the start of the project. This is a great initial step for increasing Dance Marathon's engagement with the beneficiaries of their efforts. However, we believe it should be possible to increase this engagement significantly further still, and the Dance Marathon will be working with the student team again in the Winter 2010 semester.

The student team for the Fall 2009 term consisted of:

Why I started a landing page optimization course focused on non-profits

2009-12-11T19:29:55Z

My students and I have been working with recipients of Google AdWords grants for two years. These grants provide non-profits with an advertising budget of up to $10,000/month for ads that appear on Google's search engine results pages when people type in the appropriate search terms (keywords). AdWords is challenging for the average non-profit. It requires mastery of three things:

Keyword selection
Ad text creation
Web design for the landing page reached by the person clicking on the ad

Our first course focused on all of these elements. In the course, university students learning AdWords team up with non-profits and build successful AdWords campaigns for them. In the final seminar, students present their campaigns to the non-profits and propose the landing pages they should use.

The problem was:

Non-profits were not adopting the landing pages because they did not have the resources to implement.
There was no real way to know whether the landing pages were effective.

So, we created a second course where students worked on these two problems in conjunction with the non-profits. That course has yielded a couple of success stories that I will cover in the next two posts.

Coming up to Milestone 2 in IS379: Landing Page Optimization

2009-11-10T17:54:36Z

Our landing page optimization course is structured as follows:

Milestone 1 (5 weeks in): Establish and measure conversion events for the landing pages of an organization's pay per click advertising campaigns. Two things are critical in this endeavor: 1) the visitor's goals in visiting the landing pages; 2) the organization's goals for the item it is advertising. To a large extent, the visitors' goals can be assessed from the keywords they are using and the advertisements they respond to. Organizational goals come from interviews with the organization, what they have on their web sites, and other materials they have produced. Students then determine where the two goal sets intersect and measure what is working and what not by Milestone 1.
Milestone 2 (a further 6 weeks in): Develop an experiment using alternative landing pages designed to improve the likelihood of the visitor taking the next step in the conversion process. The landing page redesigns are informed by three frameworks: Wider Funnel's LIFT Model, Steve Krug's Don't Me Think, and Loveday and Niehaus's Web Design for ROI. By the time of Milestone 2, student experiments should have been running for approximately one week, and students should have communicated their basic designs to their non-profit sponsors prior to the presentation.
Milestone 3 (a further 2 to 3 weeks in): Students present the recommended landing page redesign based on the results of their experiment.

Currently, students are coming up to Milestone 2 on November 18. I'm looking forward to see what they have. The course presents a conceptual and technical challenge. Not only do students have to understand visitor behavior but they have to understand the intricacies of writing web pages from scratch and instrumenting them.

Here's a link to the project description students see when they first start the course.

AdWords performance secret: Tightly focused ad groups

2009-10-28T20:40:02Z

In Google AdWords, the central unit is the ad group. It consists of keywords (search terms) the advertiser bids on and the ads to be shown to searchers who enter those keywords in Google. When you master an ad group, your ads are tuned to your customers' searches such that you achieve a click through rate (or CTR, the ratio of number of times an ad is clicked to number of times it is shown) greater than 1% and sometimes much higher. Mastering the ad group depends on understanding what your customers want and crafting your offerings to suit them.

How then to learn to craft effective ad groups? The approach I'm going to adopt in this post is show a highly effective ad group and then decompose what makes it effective. The Energy Action Coalition's Global Warming ad group pictured above (presented previously here) is one such ad group.

What are the key features that make this ad group effective? In brief,

the keywords are all tightly focused on one topic: information/facts/research on global warming;
the ad text is clearly relevant to the key words searchers are using;
the ads offer these searchers what they are looking for.

Let's break each of these down in turn. I'll show how you determine if they apply to your ad groups using Energy Action as an example.

On topic, tightly focused keywords

How do you determine if your keywords are tightly focused on one topic? One obvious approach is to read them and see if they are on the same topic. The following are key indicators to check as you read:

Are the keywords using the same words with only slight variations? For instance, every keyword in the example above uses the phrase "global warming". There are no keywords about conceptually related topics like "green energy" or "clean energy" or "global cooling". These keywords are about one topic, global warming, and one topic only.
If you use different words, do they have close to the same dictionary definition? For instance, "facts", "information", and "research" all point to the idea of information and are fairly neutral. A word like "causes" however brings in the notion of causality, which is different.

Relevant ad text

People engaged in search do not read in depth, they scan for things that are relevant. In its simplest form, scanning is based on recognition. The searcher asks herself, "Do I recognize what I typed in in the ad text?" Google facilitates this form of recognition by bolding the search terms that appear in the ad text. Thus, the following are key indicators to check in your ad text:

Does the ad text contain the keywords you are bidding on? More specifically, does the first line or title of your ad contain keywords you are bidding on? It is obviously easier for your ad text to contain your keywords if your keywords are tightly focused on one topic. In the case of the Energy Action Coalition, the ad displayed used "Global Warming" combined with the word "Facts" in its title, in other words terms pulled directly from the keywords.
Do any of your keywords have click through rates greater than 1%? This measure indicates that searchers are finding some subset of your ads relevant for that keyword. It often validates your attempts to include keywords in your ads.

Ads offer searchers what they are looking for

People search on the web to satisfy themselves. They click on things that they think will satisfy the urge that made them search in the first place. There are two indicators of whether an ad is providing searchers what they are seeking:

The click through rate: Any ad with a click through rate greater than 1% is offering at least a small group of searchers something they want. The greater the click through rate, the more the ad is offering searchers what they are looking for. Of course, care must be taken that you are only offering searchers things you can actually deliver.
The ad's rank: Is the ad in a high position on the first page of search results? Ad rank depends on both the maximum bid for the keyword and the keyword's quality score (largely determined by its CTR). Ultimately, in a competitive landscape, sustaining a given ad rank depends on achieving a competitive quality score. Ad rank is particularly useful when considering competitor ads where you do not have CTR information.

Next steps

This post provided a high level overview of what makes an effective Google AdWords ad group using The Energy Action Coalition's "Global Warming" ad group as an example. We reviewed three key features of effective ad groups and measures you can use to determine whether you are hitting the mark. There are a number of topics we have not covered that could be elaborated on in future posts, for instance:

Examples showing the steps to turn an ineffective ad group into an effective one.
Analyzing and using competitor position to create more effective ads.
Redesigning web pages to better capitalize on the web traffic generated by ads.

Let me know in the comments if any of these interest you, or if you prefer, feel free to contact me directly:

email: bud@biggerbuybutton.com
phone: +1-734-926-9560

When Non-Profit Pay Per Click Campaigns Go Stratospheric

2009-10-23T16:50:54Z

Pictured is a screen shot of what is shaping up to be a very successful AdWords campaign on behalf of the Energy Action Coalition by students at Eastern Michigan University's College of Business. As illustrated in the graph at the top of the figure, the runaway success of the campaign has only become apparent in the last week.

We're approximately 7 weeks into the semester or our Google AdWords course, the half way point. At this stage, 50 students spread across to course sections have been working on Non-profit AdWords account for four weeks with differing levels of success. In all cases, the formula for AdWords success is simple: find things you provide that people want and then promise it to them. However, finding the match is difficult often requiring several iterations. Hence, the fact that it's only in the past week that you start to see real success in the Energy Action Coalition's campaign despite the fact that students had already been working assiduously on it for three weeks.

Here are some things that make AdWords campaigns difficult:

How do people actually express their need for the things you provide? In particular, how would those needs be expressed as a query people would type into a search engine like Google?
How do you most effectively present your promised solution? What features of your products and services (yes, you can think of non-profit offerings this way) are the most attractive to searchers?
People do not conduct web searchers to help you or your cause. They search to help themselves.
People do not become significant donors or even necessarily volunteer on the basis of one Internet ad. Both tend to require significant levels of engagement. The ad can be used to initiate that engagement, but that is as far as it goes.

The challenges students faced with Energy Action coalition contained all of these elements plus features that were specific to the organization. I'll be talking about those in future posts.

So, we have a student blog for fall courses

2009-09-07T11:50:53Z

I'm running a student blog using the typepad service. The main point there is that typepad removes 99% of my administrative burden. No more comment management. No more server management.

Yet, I'm getting adequate customization, and typepad allows each author to integrate in with their own social media like Facebook and Twitter.

I strongly considered blogger for this task, but its author management facilities are lacking. You cannot even list all the posts by a particular author. Google has great technology and APIs, but for all but the simplest things, they often miss key management aspects.

In the end, I think blogger blogs are best left to algorithmically generated content.

The Tyranny of Funnels

2009-08-31T15:15:11Z

When considering conversion in web analytics, you almost immediately encounter the notion of a conversion funnel. The idea is simple. Getting people to accomplish some goal on your site requires them to progress through a series of web pages (assumed to be hosted on your site). The mouth of the funnel is the first page in the sequence. The goal conversion goal is considered to be reached when the visitor reaches the last page of the sequence.

So, for instance, a newsletter signup funnel might consist of your site's homepage where there is a link to sign up, several intermediate steps where the user fill out a form as they are signing up, and a final thank you page once the user has completed the sign up. The mouth of the funnel is the homepage, and the goal is the thank-you page. Every time time the user moves from one page to the other is called a funnel step.

Generally speaking, you lose visitors at each funnel step.

The problem with this approach for most small organizations is that it assumes they are hosting all of these steps on their own site. It further assumes that each step is accompanied by a new page load. In the past 4 or 5 years, advances in web architecture have significantly negated both assumptions.

Web analytics needs to catch up.

The beauty of focus, why tool-based training is bad

2009-08-29T13:43:42Z

People need to accomplish tasks. Tools are what help them accomplish those tasks. Often to increase a tool's appeal, tool developers make it multifunctional. The tool suddenly starts to appeal to people who need a knife blade and those who need a screw driver.

Ultimately, the tool gets complicated enough that you need training to use it. You might get the screw driver aspect intuitively, but the part where it acts as an internet access device is opaque to you. Books start to get sold that purport to give you a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the tool.

The problem with this approach is that the focus is on the tool, not the task that needs to get done.

A quick review of Google's Conversion University

2009-08-28T18:54:24Z

Google's Conversion University is actually focused on teaching people how to use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on their site, not conversions per se. Unlike some training offerings, Google tries to give some context to the measures and how to interpret them. That sort of thing can help analysts figure out how measures found in Google Analytics might relate to conversions.

But, measures alone don't tell the whole conversion story.

You need to relate these measures to goals, and getting to goals is the hardest part for most organizations where the web site has typically been done as a feature to be checked off a checklist. A key part of the initial work in our conversion course involves coming to terms with what the goals must be for each landing page.

That bluster aside, Google's Conversion University is the best resource I've seen for getting down the basics of Analytics, and we're using it to that end.

It's the conversions, stupid

2009-08-28T15:14:45Z

A lot of people consider ROI the golden metric of search advertising. Put simply, ROI is the net profit of all advertising sales attributable to a campaign divided by the dollars invested in that campaign minus one. Positive is good. Negative is bad. Etc.

That's often a good perspective to adopt, but there are many problems with it. The key one I'm going to mention here is one I brought up in my last post. There's a big difference between getting people in the door and converting them.

Advertising is effective if it gets people in the door. Period.

With that out of the way, the question focuses squarely on where it needs to be: Do you have what you need to convert them?

Conversion is the hard part

Conversion is hard because it depends on a few things, some of which are related to how the people became visitors to your site:

Did your advertising draw in a segment ready to undertake the conversion you want them to?
Is your conversion opportunity one that any segment values?
Is your advertising landing page one that effectively communicates your value proposition to the segment arriving there.

The first question is like a siren song to most advertisers. It's easy to tweak ads, hard to change offerings and landing pages. Further, advertisers pay for the ad clicks, not the conversions, which tends to keep them focused on the ads.

However, studies show that redesigning, raw, untargeted landing pages for conversion can lead to over an order of magnitude improvement in conversion. That's where the real power lies. It's just harder to do.

The AdWords Value Proposition

2009-08-27T15:19:54Z

I've been reviewing two excellent resources that came out of Google Grants for setting up and managing AdWords campaigns (the account creation and ongoing management guides). The resources are targeted at non-profits, but they're written at a level that could work for most small businesses I know.

But, there's a problem: both guides assume that the real value of using a pay-per-click system like AdWords is readily apparent to advertisers.

In my experience, it is not. Most organizations start to use AdWords with the idea that it will increase traffic to their sites (often true) with all sorts of business benefits then automatically ensuing (almost never true). To get at the real value of AdWords, you have to understand search marketing as a two stage process:

Acquisition
Conversion

AdWords is all about acquiring visitors. Conversion is about getting them to achieve some goal on your site. The key missing point for most advertisers is that how they acquire customers almost directly dictates what they have to do to convert them. Specifically, the page advertisers are driving visitors to with search advertising has to reflect a continuation of what the customer was promised in the advertisement that took them there.

When advertisers don't get this, and most don't, search advertising just becomes an expensive way to acquire visitors, only a small percentage of which become customers. From there, it's not long until the advertisers abandon search advertising.

That's all I have to say for now. I tend to think you have to tune the acquisition and conversion processes separately, keeping one or the other fixed. But that's fodder for another post.

n.b. To be fair to the professionals at Google Grants, I think they have a good idea of the issues I describe here. They just have not written the guide for how to solve them. Nobody has. It's a hard topic and often depends very much on the non-profit's specific business objectives.