There you are, a solid 9 months into a relationship with your SEM agency. You’re paying them 15% of what you’re spending with the search engines. Yes, they’re paying for themselves through their gains, but lately, you’re starting to question what they’re doing. There was the initial bump, and then a few months ago, a junior account representative was assigned and the hockey stick ROAS chart you thought you’d be seeing is starting to look more like a hockey rink – flat and cold. In the back of your mind a few questions are racing around… Did I just get placed onto the autopilot list? Do these guys know what they’re talking about? Am I being taken for a ride? Did I just find the end of the Internet?

Well from our experience, you’re not alone. And unfortunately, as this field has grown in popularity, the number of bad practitioners has grown exponentially. And, since the word we’ve chosen is “bad”, let’s dive a little deeper, since there’s some ambiguity.

What does bad look like?

(Read the full article…)

Earlier this month, my esteemed colleague Lance Loveday wrote a compelling piece for Search Engine Land’s Just Behave column, colloquially titled “A Plea to Stop Dissing Your Customers”.

In fact, I’d highly recommend clicking over to that post before continuing with this one.

Seriously, I’ll wait.

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Welcome back.

As you no doubt noticed in that article, Lance highlights key points from the 3rd Annual Online Customer Engagement Survey – research that addresses how organizations are (or aren’t) preparing for long-term success in the online marketplace.

What struck me most about Lance’s post is his point that while customer engagement (obviously the focus of the 2009 Survey) is not a new term or a new concept, it is enjoying what he identifies as a “renaissance of sorts” in the online marketing world.

Upon reading the Survey itself, you’ll see this renaissance translates into approximately 52% of Company respondents (and 43% of Agencies) indicating that customer engagement is considered “essential” to their organizations – figures that are up from last year’s results.

Which is where I need to stop and raise a point.

(Read the full article…)

View related topics: client-expectations, customer engagement

Cross-posting my article from Search Engine Land here…

Dear Search Marketers:

I’m worried about us.

The way we’ve started talking about our target audience has me concerned that our priorities may be out of whack. By target audience I don’t mean our clients or employers. I mean the people to whom we’re marketing—the human beings performing the searches and on whose backs we make our living.

I’ve been wanting to address this issue for some time, but haven’t done so for fear of offending people. But I’m over that. So here’s the potentially offensive stuff…

Read the full column at SearchEngineLand.

How Efficient and Effective is Your Marketing?

As I write this, the U.S. economy has been declared officially in a recession. And for all of us who aren’t big enough and/or incompetent enough to warrant a government bailout, it’s a challenging season, one full of re-evaluations.

A cultural sign of the times: I heard an NPR radio program delve into the origins of the phrase “tightening one’s belt,” complete with interviews of belt manufacturers. In happier times, I might’ve found this an amusing play on words, but now? I found myself cringing just a bit at the light tone, thinking of friends who’ve lost their jobs.

But back to the current economic challenges, and the opportunities they present.

Yes, I did say opportunities, and I don’t mean it in a Pollyanna, “the sun will come out tomorrow” sort of way. I mean that this is a time when businesses can discover more efficient, effective and high-return ways to market and sell than they’ve used in the past.

Marketing Efforts: Areas to Expand or Improve

If your company has not evaluated the following initiatives recently, it’s time to give them another long, hard look:

(Read the full article…)

Let’s be honest.  Setting up a new PPC campaign or editing an existing one is a somewhat tedious process.  Granted AdWords Editor has eased some of those burdens, but still there are a lot of processes that are just downright timesucks to say the least.

Over time, I have stumbled upon tools which have helped minimize my time spent on menial, yet essential PPC tasks.  However, these tools were spread out over a variety of websites and there were some tweaks that I could envision that would make them even more suited to what I personally needed.

So at Closed Loop Marketing we realized one day, why don’t we just create some of these tools ourselves so that we can do our jobs even more efficiently AND get more out of our clients’ campaigns?  And our next thought - why not share these tools with other SEM practitioners so that we can all be freed up more to focus on strategy, instead of spending too much of our valuable time on tedious, lower-level, manual tasks.

So, with that, let me introduce four Closed Loop Marketing SEM Tools that I hope will be as helpful to our readers as they are to us.

1. Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper

The Old Timesuck:  If you are doing any local targeting, you know what a headache it is to capture all geographic variations of keywords.  People search by city, state, city/state combination, state abbreviations, zip code, etc, etc.  How can you be sure you’re covered on all variations?  And if you’re targeting a metropolitan area, have you covered all suburb names?  And what even are all of the suburb names?  What are the associated zip codes?!?

The New Timesaver:  Enter your keywords and provide the zip code and radius you are interested in targeting.  Additionally, choose your match type.  The Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper tool will provide you all city, state and zip code keyword variations.

In Action:

2. Keyword Permutations and Wrapper Tool

The Old Timesuck:  People search a billion different ways it seems and if our keyword lists aren’t robust we miss the opportunity to capture relevant traffic.  Are you sure you’re covering all singular and plural variations?  Common misspellings?  Reversals?  Word variations with hyphens vs spaces vs no spaces?  Across hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of keywords building all of these variations out manually is near impossible.

The New Timesaver:  Cover more bases by entering your keyword ‘parts’ into 2 or 3 different lists.  The Keyword Permutation and Wrapper tool will provide all permutations of your keywords for inclusion in your campaigns.

Side benefit:  less reliance on Broad Match.

In Action:

(Read the full article…)