Little About Content Marketing

Why Should I Do Content Marketing?

• It’s great for SEO (search engine optimization). Google constantly changes its algorithm to improve search results. Over the past several years, many of these changes reflect Google’s efforts to favor content that’s truly useful. Conversely, Google’s changes punish content farms and other sites that create content solely to rank high for specific keyword searches. Creating relevant content signals to Google that the purpose of your site is to help people by providing real information.
• Worthy content gets shared. People like sharing their discoveries with their colleagues, friends and family. It’s a way of earning credibility, plus we’re just hardwired to do it: When we share something we like with others, and they like it too, that validates our judgment.
• Great content helps people make buying decisions. I’ll give you a personal example here. In doing some competitive research for a client, I found a personal training website with lots of blog posts about strength training, health, cardio fitness and more. As I read the posts, it became clear to me that this trainer had deep background in kinesiology, plus years of experience helping people get fit. Now I train with him.
• Content gives you something real to promote in social media. If you don’t have relevant, interesting content on  your website to promote, what ARE you going to talk about in social media? And how will you entice people to visit your site? Without compelling content, you may as well just talk about your cute pets and snap photos of the lunch you’re about to eat.

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Google Changes Mobile Campaign Management - AdWords Enhanced Campaigns:

Google today announced a bold and sweeping set of changes to their AdWords PPC management platform in a bid to greatly simplify mobile ad campaign management – at stake is the future of Google’s advertising business itself. All of the new AdWords Enhanced Campaign features – which I believe will greatly increase both mobile advertising adoption and Google’s revenues from mobile search – will become available to customers by the end of the month. In this article, I’ll walk through AdWords Enhanced Campaigns in detail. If you’re interested in the growing mobile search space (and you all should be!), pay close attention. These changes will affect all advertisers before the end of the year.

The Need For AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

We live in a multi-screen, constantly connected mobile world today, and marketers need to be able to easily reach people across all devices with relevant ads. Over the last 5 years, growth in search query volume from mobile phones has greatly outpaced growth in query volume from desktop computers – the number of daily searches on Google from mobile devices is expected to surpass daily desktop search volume by next year. 

Yet there’s been a big challenge with mobile advertising adoption at Google – to take advantage of the sophisticated mobile advertising features and strategies that are required to be successful, like geo-targeting and device-specific targeting, advertisers must take on an exponential amount of additional campaign management complexity.

Meaning, in the current AdWords platform, advertisers are expected to create multiple different campaigns – one for every city and every possible device combination, which quickly becomes pretty difficult, if not impossible for the average advertiser to manage. Because this is so overwhelming, only the most sophisticated agencies and advertisers with large budgets and dedicated in-house PPC managers took advantage of Google’s various mobile advertising features. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea of just how challenging mobile advertising was on Google AdWords before today (click to enlarge)

We estimate that within the small and medium-sized business segment, less than 1 in 25 bothered doing the work ofmobile-enabling their PPC campaigns, because it was such a hassle.

Google realizes that they need to simplify mobile advertising, particularly given that mobile search accounts for roughly half of all searches. Accordingly they are now rolling out new “Enhanced Campaigns” with the goal of greatly simplifying PPC campaign management. Let’s take a look at how they work.

Introducing Enhanced Campaigns

What’s changing is the way ad campaigns are structured. Google is rethinking how we deal with the multi-device world we live in, and is upgrading the decade-old PPC campaign structure to have the ability to leverage all of the important mobile advertising features, without having to create separate campaigns for every location and device combination – which was the previous best practice.

Going forward, ad campaigns will be different in several ways:

1. New Bidding Options: Currently, AdWords campaigns support a time of day-based bid adjustments (e.g., you can bid more when your store is open and bid less when you are closed – which makes obvious sense). Google is expanding on this concept and including new bid adjustment options for location (e.g., bid more for searches conducted close to my store, and less for the neighboring towns and communities), and another bid adjustment option for device (bid more or less for mobile searches). Rather than having to create specific geo-targeted campaigns and mobile specific campaigns, you can now do that all in one campaign.
2. Much Smarter Ads: Ads are getting a lot smarter about user context. Within a single campaign, you can have ads for desktop and mobile – similar to how you can have different sized image ads within a single display ad campaign. Google will make note of what device is executing the search and will correctly pick the right ad to run with.  Rather than having to specify different campaigns for tablet and mobile, etc., ads and settings will be adjusted for you automatically, based on user context.

So overall, the idea of these new Enhanced Campaigns is to take the mobile advertising features that were previously available – but rarely used because they were too hard to implement – and now offer them in a much more scalable way for all Google advertisers.

New Bid Adjustments: Location, Time Of Day & Device Based Bidding

So how do all these new bid adjustments work, exactly? For starters, all of the keywords and bids in your account still exist – no changes there.

Essentially the key difference is that rather than exploding the size of your PPC account by breaking out your PPC campaigns into hundreds of possible campaign variants, you only need to specify a single bid adjustment factor for location and device.

Specifically, for geo-specific and time-of-day based bidding, you’ll be able to specify a bid adjustment multiplier from -100% to +300%.

For mobile devices, you can now specify a bid adjustment between -100% and +300%. If you absolutely want to opt out of mobile (for example, suppose your company sells only desktop software that doesn’t work on mobile), then you can bid it down by -100%, which effectively turns off mobile search.

As a result of having the new campaign bidding options for location, time of day, and device – all device targeting is going away.

RIP Tablet Targeting Options

Another thing that’s changed with Enhanced Campaigns is that Google is no longer differentiating between tablets and desktop/notebook searches.  Google says that with the device ecosystem rapidly evolving, the boundary between tablet and notebook is becoming a bit blurred.  Take for example, a Windows Surface device that can operate as both a notebook and a tablet. 

Google believes that the core use case of tablet computing replaces desktop and notebook computer usage in the home – and as a result, they view tablets as being pretty much aligned with desktop, in that they both have a pretty similar mix of search terms typically being executed, and similar ad performance of those searches.

New And Improved: Smarter Ads

The second big bucket of AdWords Enhanced Campaign features has to do with smarter ads where you’ll be able to customize your ads for mobile.

Essentially what is offered is a check-box that says: “I want this ad to run on mobile.” If you just have one ad in an ad group, and you check this box, then it’s going to run across all devices. But if you do have an ad group that has the new universal ads and mobile ads in the same ad group, Google will always display your mobile ad to run on the mobile devices. Essentially, mobile and desktop ads can now live together, in the same campaigns!

Since creating a great mobile ad experience involves more than just changing a keyword bid, Google is rolling out some new ad extension management features. These include check boxes for your various ad extensions, like call extensions or site link extensions, that specify that you only want your extension to run on mobile or desktop. This way, advertisers can continue to customize the ads, landing pages, ad text (etc.) that are optimized for mobile and desktop search, respectively. So basically all of the existing ad extensions (such as location extensions, communication extensions, social extensions, etc.) will have the ability to designate them as mobile or desktop specific extensions.

Additionally, ad extensions will all have new scheduling capabilities – like the ability to run certain ad extensions during happy hour, etc.

No More Mobile Call Reporting Fees!

Previously Google had offered mobile call reporting features to allow an advertiser to see what phone numbers called, when, and how long the call lasted. This was helpful but a bit bizarre in that Google actually charged advertisers a dollar extra per call to use it – which, sadly, acted as a disincentive to adopt mobile search features!

With Enhanced Campaigns, Google is dumping the extra mobile call reporting fee because they would like all advertisers to take advantage of advanced call metrics and reporting as much as possible.

New Mobile Advertising Conversion Type

The ROI of mobile search is systematically under-reported because current conversion tracking is based on a user finding a thank-you page after having placed an order online or filling out a contact-us form. In mobile search, the call to action is often to make a phone call, so traditional conversion tracking doesn’t work.

Therefore, AdWords Enhanced Campaigns is adding a mobile advertising conversion type. The conversion type is based on call duration and is specified by the advertiser. For example, an advertiser can specify a minimum duration of a call that you consider to be a conversion in your reporting.

This new conversion type should give advertisers greater insight into the true value of mobile advertising and will result in increased mobile ad adoption.

Enhanced Campaigns: The Automatic Upgrade Path

Like a lot of other Google AdWords changes, Google will give advertisers until mid-year to manually upgrade to the new Enhanced Campaigns, and then will automatically upgrade all accounts.

1. If you’re like the vast majority of advertisers and you never bothered with separating your campaigns into different experiences for desktop vs. mobile – then you’re in luck! Your upgrade path is pretty straightforward. You just need to set your mobile bid adjustment factor, which Google will set for you automatically – more on that shortly.
2. If you’ve previously created a desktop-only campaign, then by default it would be upgraded to run across desktop and mobile devices, and Google will automatically set a non-zero initial mobile bid adjustment factor on your behalf.
3. If you’ve previously created a mobile-only campaign (i.e. no desktop targeting), then by default it will be upgraded to go across mobile and desktop, and they’ll set an initial bid adjustment factor for you.
4. If you had previously made copies of the same campaign, one for desktop, and one for mobile, then you'll need to merge those back together into one.

I personally don’t agree with the default settings for the auto-upgrade paths (2) and (3) above, because advertisers who had previously separated mobile/desktop campaigns (again, this was considered the best practice) will now end up having two campaigns targeting similar keywords with different ad experiences that target both mobile and desktop, even though they were likely intended to target either desktop or mobile search. It would have made more sense to me if the bid adjustment factor for mobile search was set to -100% for desktop only campaigns. I suspect the decision was made for business reasons (to grow Google Revenues).

Setting Your Mobile Bid Adjustment Factor

One of the key things that you need to do when migrating to the new Enhanced Campaigns is to set your mobile bid adjustment factor to specify how much more or less you’d like to bid for mobile searches –the range is between -100% and 300%.

If you haven’t yet separated out your mobile and desktop campaigns in AdWords, you may have noticed that on average, the cost per click for mobile search is quite a bit lower than that of desktop search. What’s currently happening is that Google is doing some behind the scenes discounting to determine a mobile CPC bid for you, even though you haven’t explicitly specified a bid amount for mobile search.

Going forward, it’s the responsibility of the advertiser to set mobile bids. Google says that they’re going to try to initially set that as best they can (either up or down) for an advertiser based on auction metrics and looking at the keywords in your campaigns and what other advertisers are doing, but that their guess isn’t going to be as good as if someone makes a conscious decision for their business..

Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Roll-Out Schedule

All of these changes are pretty huge and it will take Google a few months to roll everything out. Here’s a rough idea of what the schedule looks like:

• Early February: What’s happening today is just a pre-announcement that a change is coming.
• End of February: All advertisers will be able to start upgrading their campaigns from within the Google AdWords application. There will be a little announcement in the application that says you’re eligible to upgrade a campaign. The changes will also be available in the AdWords API so that Google Partners can will have enough time to adopt these new features, with the caveat that device targeting and stuff will be going away.
• Late June (tentative): All campaigns are auto-upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns.

It will be an option until mid-year. Then enhanced campaigns will be the default for all campaigns.

What’s The Real Reason For AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?

In addition to increasing adoption rates for mobile advertising in AdWords by greatly simplifying campaign creation, management and reporting for mobile search, Google wants to, eliminate the gap between mobile and desktop CPC’s.

So Are Mobile CPC’s Going Up?

Yes. I believe that on average, they’ll be the same as desktop CPC’s after the auto-upgrade rolls out due to increased advertiser competition and all of the auto-set mobile bid adjustment factors. In fact, last month Google CEO Larry Page was asked on an earnings call if he thought that mobile CPC’s would be going up any time soon, to which he responded:

“I am very, very optimistic about it. I think that [mobile] CPCs will improve … Obviously; I mentioned that we are working to simplify our ad system for advertisers. In the light of all these changes and I am excited about our plans there:  We don’t have anything to announce today but I am very excited about our efforts there. I think that we will make rapid progress in that area.”

What's WordStream Doing With Enhanced Campaigns?

WordStream was one of just 3 companies to be pre-briefed on the changes over a month ago because we work with nearly a thousand SMB advertisers. We're excited to add these capabilities to our PPC management platform, and we already have teams working on it!  We'll be publishing additional tips and best practices to our blog soon!

Summary: Are AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Good For Advertisers?

I think the changes make a lot of sense. Right now there are a bunch of advertisers that opt out of mobile search because they think (incorrectly) that the ROI of mobile search isn’t there. They’re led to believe that’s the case because they don’t fully take advantage of all the powerful mobile features that Google has to offer. And they don’t bother with those features because it’s pretty complicated and requires extra work on the part of the advertiser.

In particular, small businesses that I work with every day aren’t too keen on doubling the number of ad campaigns in their account because that doubles the campaign management complexity - and they have other things to do, like running their business! It’s also a bit more challenging to track the ROI of mobile search, and the call reporting costs are incurred by the advertiser. As a result, some advertisers make the determination that it’s not worth the hassle. As you can see, it’s a bit of a vicious cycle here.

I believe that the ROI of mobile search is very compelling – you have a lot of valuable leverage, like precise location, immediacy, commercial intent, and 1-click-to-call going for it. It’s always been a matter of just getting the advertiser to adopt the somewhat complicated best practices in terms of campaign setup and reporting to realize these benefits. By simplifying this process, I’m confident that you’ll see an uptake in mobile advertising adoption and ROI. I think the new AdWords enhanced campaigns will be particularly helpful for the SMBs who are not yet taking advantage of mobile search.  

By Larry Kim

Source : 

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Want to Transfer AdWords Accounts to Bing? Take Care of 4 Common Mistakes

Are you the one who transferred an entire Google AdWords account into Bing Ads? But do you actually manage your new Bing account? It’s now easy to copy an account from Google to Bing, but that doesn’t mean that your account will be performing the same in the Bing sponsored results.

Bing Ads is a completely different system with its own set of rules, and it is doesn’t matter how thoroughly you work inside your Google AdWords account – that won’t necessarily help you in Bing.

As a Paid Search Specialist at WordStream, I work with many accounts and I hear all the time: “Do your work on AdWords and we’ll move it to Bing when you’re all done.” Yes, that is easy but it is not the right approach to utilize the different networks. When I actually log in to Bing accounts I can see multiple mistakes which need to be improved ASAP.

Mistake #1: Screwing Up The Settings

Firstly, when you transfer an entire account you need to pay close attention to all your settings. Some features likegeo targeting, custom shapes, and audiences would be not applicable to Bing’s advertising platform. Your settings could be missed if Bing doesn’t recognize some of the AdWords features. Your ads might be shown to the entire population on every possible device in the United States or globally.

Mistake #2: Ignoring Your Bing Search Query Report

Secondly, check your Bing query report to avoid displaying for unrelated terms in Bing search. Your Bing and Google search queries could be completely different, especially when you target broad, modified broad, or phrase match types. Google AdWords is more advanced when it comes to matching advertiser’s targeted keywords, ad text, and the landing page. In most cases Google can detect when the advertiser bids on a holiday trip to Washington DC and not a book about George Washington. Bing Ads is not so advanced yet when it comes to matching queries to the right ad or landing page and some search traffic from Bing could be completely irrelevant to your business.

For example, we began to manage a client who sells lights and glow sticks for night clubs and partygoers. The client transferred his well-optimized AdWords account to Bing and left it on “autopilot.” Later on, the client logged in to Google Analytics and found a high bounce rate from Bing, indicating that people who came from a Bing search were unexcited and left the website right away.

We evaluated the Bing account and discovered that 99.9% of the traffic, everything except the branded terms, was unrelated. For example: the keyword “micro lights” brought hundreds of queries from people who searched for the Micromax smartphone, and the term “led lights” brought all different queries from people who were looking to repair their car’s headlights. It uncovers the fact that Bing does not match to landing page content and is less restrictive when it comes to broad match.

To check your search queries in Bing, go to the Reports tab, choose the “Search Query” Report Type, specific your Date Range, then click “Run.”

Mistake #3: Copying Mobile/Display Campaigns To Bing

Thirdly, I don’t recommend transferring your AdWords mobile and display campaigns to Bing because it can cause multiple mistakes and interruptions. They don’t work the same way on both platforms.

Mistake #4: Too Little Time Spent Optimizing Bing Ads

Besides working on your settings and queries, I also recommend doing a full evaluation of your Bing account on a monthly or quarterly basis. Microsoft is working to improve the Bing Ads system and the inside changes could involuntarily affect your account performance. By working on multiple Bing accounts, I have noticed that it is impossible to expect consistent performance from Bing. 

In addition, I recommend using WordStream software which allows you to manage AdWords and Bing Ads accounts on the same screen inside the same software platform. Our software can simultaneously apply negative keywords and make other improvements across both accounts.

By Sergey Rusak

Source :  

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RESOURCE ADWORDS ENHANCED CAMPAIGNS

Advertisers are scrambling to understand Enhanced Campaigns and get their campaigns in order for the fundamental shift in how Adwords is managed. We’ve compiled a list of as many sites as we know of that are reporting on this change. We will be reading and re-reading anything we can get our hands on to understand the changes! Hopefully this will be helpful to you too:

Last updated – 2/8/13

From Google Themselves:

• The Official Announcement – Google
• Official Site on Enhanced Campaigns - Google
• Webinar Series on Enhanced Campaigns - Google
• Enhanced Campaigns Upgrade Guide (PDF) – Google

Articles That Will Best Help You Prepare

• Enhanced Campaigns Upgrade Guide (PDF) – Google
• Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns: The Good, Bad & Uncool - Search Engine Watch – Alistair Dent
• Google Announces Big Changes to Mobile Ad Campaign Management - WordStream – Larry Kim

Enhanced Campaigns – Pros

•  Google Announces Big Changes to Mobile Ad Campaign Management – WordStream – Larry Kim
• Adwords Enhanced Campaigns: How Can I Protest Something I Haven’t Yet Used? – Traffick.com – Andrew Goodman
• Here’s The Real Reason Google Changed Its Mobile Search Rules – Business Insider – Jim Edwards

Enhanced Campaigns – Cons

• Why Enhanced Campaigns Aren’t Really An Upgrade Or Improvement – Search Engine Land – Neil Sorenson
• Is Google Getting Ready to Change the Ad Rules Again – BlueGlass – Richard Zwicky
• Google Enhanced Campaigns | Don’t Believe the Hype – Zen Search Marketing – Jeff Loquist
• Petition to “Provide more advertiser options” with Enhanced Campaigns – Change.org – Neil Sorenson
• Fury at Google: Advertisers Say New Search Rules Are “Stealing” From Them – Business Insider – Jim Edwards
• Are Tablets Mobile Devices? How Will Google’s Changes in AdWords Impact Advertisers – Adobe – Bill Mungovan
• Enhanced Campaigns for Mobiles: Why the AdWords world as we know it is going to End – Passion Digital

Enhanced Campaigns – Neutral

• Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns: The Good, Bad & Uncool – Search Engine Watch – Alistair Dent
• Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Inspire Love, Hate and Hope for The Next Version – Search Engine Land – Pamela Parker
• First Reaction to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns – SEER Interactive – Aaron Levy
• Google Enhanced Campaigns: A Flawed Step in the Right Direction – RimmKaufman.com – Mark Ballard
• In Big Shift Google Aims to Boost Mobile Ad Campaigns and Revenues – Forbes – Robert Hof
• Google Revamps AdWords in Nod to Mobile Device Explosion – Gigaom – Barb Darrow
• Google Just Blasted Away the Wall Between Desktop and Mobile Ads – Business Insider – Owen Thomas
• The Big Adwords Update: Enhanced Campaigns Puts the Focus on Mobile – Search Engine Land – Ginny Marvin
• Google to Force You To Go Mobile – PPC Hero – Sam Owens
• The Scoop on Enhanced Campaigns (good and bad) – PPC Associates – Susan Waldes
• Google’s “Enhanced” Campaigns”? – Datapop – Alex Dao
• Google Revamps Adwords in Bid to Boost Mobile Ad Revenue – Ad Age – Cotton Delo
• Enhanced Campaigns Storified – Storify – Katie Saxon
• Google Upgrade is a Tidal Wave for Advertisers – Wired – Ryan Tate

We will be updating this as often as we can so come bookmark and come back later!

If you have any site’s we’ve missed add them in the comments and we’ll add ASAP.

By Luke Alley
Source: http://avalaunchmedia.com/blog/

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Most Misleading PPC Metrics

Search marketers depend on data to make decisions. Bids are raised, keywords are paused, and ad text is changed based on data. Unfortunately many decisions are being made based on metrics that portray results in a misleading fashion.

While all of the following metrics are important, when looked at individually, they can cause you to make misinformed decisions.

Impression Share

This metric is most likely one of your Google rep’s favorite. Impression share, while valuable in some cases, can provide a drastically inaccurate snapshot of your PPC campaign’s performance.

As SEM managers do their thing, keywords are paused, bids are decreased or increased,dayparting is set up all based of performance. If a set of keywords doesn’t convert well or isn’t relevant to your business, then don’t use them. When impression share is calculated it doesn’t take your optimizations efforts into an account and thus can be quite inaccurate.

Time on Site

Another metric, while valuable, that can provide an inaccurate look into your campaign performance. This metric was useful back in the ’90s when everyone was sending traffic to their homepage and expecting the user to find what they were looking for. Now this metric is becoming increasingly irrelevant with campaigns that use sitelinks to send people to the most relevant page on the site.

Analytics tools such as Google Analytics also come with some flaws related to this metric. Analytics tools often only track up into the last action taken by a site visitor and don’t accurately record how long the visitor stays on the last page of their visit. For more info on this discrepancy please check out this article.

Average CPC

Averages lie, as Melissa Mackey pointed out in an earlier SEW post. When it comes to CPCs, your “average” only tells part of the story.

For example, throughout the day your CPC is heavily affected by your competition. You may bottom out at $2.00 CPCs and spike at $100. But paying attention only to your average CPC can cause you to grossly under estimate or over estimate what you're paying per click.

Average Position

Just as an average CPC can throw you off track, your average position can do the same. A metric that is heavily dictated by your competition it is important to understand the landscape of your industry.

The numbers of competitors bidding on your keyword set, how many ads are showing in the “top” of SERPs, and other metrics need to be included when making decisions based off of average position.

Daily Budget

OK, this one isn’t a metric, but it belongs here. As many SEM managers know, Google and Bing take your daily budget caps less than seriously. In some cases, you can overspend your budget by up to 20 percent. This can be fine for someone spending $100 a day for a campaign but for someone capping out at $5,000, it can be a big difference.

Conversions Rate

Without a doubt, keeping an eye on your conversion is important. However, depending on your business model, you may be misled by this metric.

When looking at conversion rate from the 50,000 foot level, it can be a great number to show thehealth of your PPC account. But for day-to-day management, other factors such as the margin of products sold and how you value your different conversions should be the priority.

For example, let’s say you sell one product, but in three different sizes. Each size is sold at a different price and provides a different product margin. Here is the example:

In this case, the advertiser makes a larger profit margin on the large size. If looking at conversion rate all up across the three products, it could lead you to make a poor decision. Taking the next step and granularly breaking out the data will help boost performance.

CTR

Click-through rate can be easily manipulated by an SEM manager by boosting your bid and getting your ad into the top 3 positions, using sitelinks or other ad extensions or by utilizing ad text that contains discounts or promotions (Free Shipping, 50% Off, etc.)

Decisions on keyword shouldn’t be based on CTR alone. If a keyword has a historically low CTR but converts below your target CPA and provides profit for the company, then you shouldn’t worry about CTR. Yes, you should attempt to increase your CTR, but the most important factor is how it works out financially for your business and/or client.

First Page Bids

First page bids have been a topic of contention for AdWords and me. There have been numerous times when my average position is above 3 but my bid is below the first page bid estimate. First page bid can be used as a guideline, but some simple manual bidding can help you figure out where your bid needs to be to get on the first page.

Quality Score

There will always be a debate on how important quality score is and if you should be bidding on keywords that have a low quality score. The argument then stems to how these keywords are affecting the rest of your account.

The bottom line when it comes to quality score should beyour bottom line.

For example, as highlighted in my post about bidding on competitor terms, if the keywords convert and are profitable, then keep using them – no matter what your quality score is. Do continue to optimize and attempt to raise your quality score, but don’t make it the single factor.

Recap

All of the above mentioned metrics are important to managing you PPC efforts but they all need to be examined and weighted correctly. No single metric should be the single reason you to pause a keyword or shut down an entire ad group. Performance should be judged by multiple metrics and – ultimately – if it's profitable for your business and/or client.

By Justin Freid, February 6, 2013

Source : Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

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Future of PPC Professional !

ou’re fired, laid-off, downsized, terminated, made redundant, rightsized, pursuing other opportunities, discharged, dismissed, pink-slipped. Search Engine Marketing professionals are becoming redundant, replaced by technology, so they should prepare themselves to hear those words.

In the next 3 years, 80% of PPC professionals will be replaced by an algorithm.

Those that won’t, will be the few who already provide high value or find ways to increase their value to clients. There will simply be fewer positions and high value change. If you are a PPC pro don’t imagine yourself immune; please read on.

What happened in other industries, automation replacing human workers is not a new story. With the speed at which technology evolves, and the vast opportunity for optimization in most accounts, PPC management is ready for this evolution and it is well under way.

Over the last several years, we audited numerous large-scale PPC advertiser accounts ($500K+ ad spend a month) and found the same common characteristic; neglect. A sad example is the story of a Top 30 Internet Retailer. Their account was managed by a super-reputable top-tier agency and had an average cost-per-click of approximately $1.50. That wouldn’t be so bad except that it brought in less than $.60 revenue per visit. The saddest part is that it was spending millions of dollars a year.

Certainly it looks like the agency you hired or your in-house PPC staffer is very busy, they legitimately are.  However, never in the history of advertising has anyone had to manage anything as complex and large as some of these accounts. The question is, how much of the business is truly high value activity? You may be seeing traffic growth, lots of bid changes, account structure and keyword changes (if you are a larger enterprise) but most of these tasks can be automated today. Plus the truth is, these are the activities that can be performed more successfully, at scale, with greater efficiency by crowdsourcing, or by using machines/ robots.

David Greenbaum, CEO of a crowdsourced ad copywriting company BoostCTR, shared:

“Ad copy optimization is one of the most straightforward paths to increasing conversions and reducing cost-per-acquisition (CPA). However, this is often an afterthought for advertisers. Typically, we see that clients are optimizing only 1 percent of their active ad groups representing 5 percent of their spend. As an extreme example, I have seen an account that spends upwards of $2 million per month and who hasn’t written a single new piece of ad copy in 3 years.”

If you are a smaller advertiser, you are less likely to have your account maintained properly by your agency. According to WordStream data, most SMB accounts had :

• Very low number of keywords or negative keywords added in the last 90 days.
• Very low number of ad groups and ad text added/edited or deleted in the last 90 days.
• Very low number of campaigns added/edited or deleted in the last 90 days.

Most advertisers aren’t really taking advantage of even the most basic AdWords account optimization tools, like conversion tracking, geo-targeting, or ad extensions.

Furthermore:

• More than 50 percent of them don’t even check their accounts once per month.
• Almost 25 percent haven’t done anything to their account in the last 90 days.
• More than 20 percent of them have yet to use a negative keyword and less than 50 percent have used at least one negative keyword in the last 90 days.

The highest value PPC optimization activities occur when you are testing and modifying ad copy or creating and optimizing landing pages; all critical components of Google’s Quality Score (YouTube video). Quality Score weights your bid in the auction so if your quality score is low you must pay more than another advertiser – essentially low Quality Score is a penalty imposed by Google for not optimizing.The tasks associated with optimization are traditionally the hardest to scale up. Nevertheless, solutions are beginning to appear because of big data technologies.

DataPop, offers a big data solution for automating the ad writing and optimization of your PPC ads and it is impressive. They still recommend you have a human editor for reviewing messages.

Just like should have been done with this marketing automation screw up (from a crowdsourced PPC vendor):

Here are some more ways you can take advantage of automation:

• You can crowdsource ad writing to companies like BoostCTR. Their incentives are also more in line with advertisers’ goals than traditional agency models.
• Monetate, will help your team test, personalize and iterate their creative ideas (leveraging big data) with greater agility than your current platform will allow.
• For creating and optimizing landing pages, we are seeing solutions like BloomReach, that can use a natural language interpreter and big data technology to create landing pages that meet the long tail of demand and self optimize those pages as well.

Of course, these technologies don’t do everything you need in order to optimize all your landing pages.

What can’t these robots do? They may never have the creative spark or strategic capacity that humans provide. No machine today could have come up with the on the fly, Dunk in the Dark campaign that Oreo did during the SuperBowl. However, technologies like NarrativeScience and Arria are working hard to get there. Surely, Narrative Sciences will displace many of the “web analysts” who only function as data reporters without adding much business value.

We can already see that big data solutions like RocketFuel are transforming the media buying side of display advertising, removing many of the inefficiencies.

I apologize to my friends who own and work in agencies. The marketplace has changed and sometimes it is difficult to see while you have your head down. I know and appreciate how difficult and time consuming the high value work is. Also the  traditional agency compensation models for SMB might not allow the margin to spend enough time in these activities. However the PPC industry will be completely transformed over the next three years. The truth can be ugly sometimes. I hope you pay attention. We must move away from the tool junkie mentality to the customer-centric marketing mindset.

When asked my friend Tom Cunniff of Cunniff Consulting, he said the following:

“The rise of automation in marketing is both inexorable and necessary. Moment-to-moment optimization is too exhausting for humans and too expensive for marketers. Marketing automation will enable smart marketers to shift their focus from spreadsheets to the big questions. Are we optimizing for the right things? Are our digital efforts properly aligned with our overall marketing? Are customers getting what they want and need from our brands? This is marketing’s mission, and we need to get back to it.”

 By BRYAN EISENBERG 

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