Joseph Kerschbaum

Joseph Kerschbaum is Client Services Director with Clix Marketing and has over 6 years of experience working in the search engine marketing industry. Lots of great things have been happening for Joe lately. A few of the accomplishments that he is most proud of are his book with Wiley/Sybex, PPC Marketing: An Hour A Day and “running a kick-ass results driven agency that makes everyday an adventure is another big (ongoing) accomplishment.” Kerschbaum’s favorite aspect of marketing that is unique to SEM is the ability to see results in real-time, a level of visibility that is not available in traditional forms of marketing. Optimizing campaigns to improve performance is also one of Kerschbaum’s favorite aspects of working in the SEM industry and he was kind enough to share his top 5 tips to optimize your remarketing campaigns.

1. Adjust Your Conversion Actions

Remarketing gives you a second chance to get in front of non-converters. Understanding why someone didn’t initially convert will increase the performance of your remarketing campaign. A strategy that has proven to be successful is diversifying your conversion actions. There are several factors, such as buying cycle and complexity, which affect a user’s decision to convert. If a lead generation landing page was not successful, maybe a simpler product page would prove to be more effective. Testing out different landing pages and conversion actions will the help you understand and predict the behavior of your audience, therefore increasing the success of your remarketing campaign.

2. Image Ads

A picture is worth a thousand words. If a user has visited your site, then they should be familiar with your logo and product. Display ads that are consistent with your brand and site can increase brand awareness and familiarity. Take into consideration this concept when designing your image ads:

• Company logo
• Headline
• Short list of two benefits
• Images of products
• Call-to-action
• Company logo

3. ‘Come Back…’ Ad Copy

Messaging that directly acknowledges that the user has visited your site can be extremely effective. Use ad copy that contains special offers unique to the users within your remarketing campaign, for example: “Come Back & Receive 15% Off Your Next Purchase!” This tactic can be viewed as a little creepy, but if it improves your CTR and conversion rate, keep doing it!

4. Target Segment Strategies

Precise targeting allows you to deliver specific ads to users who have visited certain pages on your website. Depending on how precise you want your targeting strategy to be, ads can be delivered to users who have visited your shopping cart, signed up for a newsletter, or your free trial confirmation page. By breaking down the behavior of these users, you can customize ads for each segment to bring them back to your site and help them convert.

5. Test! Test! Test!

Remarketing gives you a chance to make a second impression and finding the most effective strategy can be achieved through testing. Not every strategy will be successful, but the key to building a strong remarketing campaign lies within finding the right combination of structure, creativity, and messaging. Extensive testing will allow you to discover the ideal balance between all these variables and help yield the optimum performance of your remarketing campaign.

Kerschbaum’s favorite quote is: “The definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” Joe is always focused on looking at tasks and projects from a different perspective, which is extremely relevant when it comes to SEM, as demonstrated by the 5 tips listed above. Kerschbaum’s final words of wisdom: “There is no time to rest: you have to continually get better and smarter.”

Do you have any remarketing tips that have proved to be effective? Sound off in the comments below! Happy remarketing!

How’s you new year’s resolutions going? I use to set new year’s resolutions but stopped because my list started to look like this list. It always felt so cliche to me too. I like setting goals in life but usually just do it throughout the year.

I’ve scoured my Google Reader this month to filter out the stuff that will help you take your PPC campaigns to new levels this year. Read on and optimize…

Amplified Gold Posts

• Build Stronger PPC Relationships: Communication with clients is critical in an agency role. After working at an agency for almost a year I’ve learned how big of a disconnect there can be between clients and agencies. Take some tips from this great post.
• 6 Reasons to Bid on Branded Keywords: From our own Ben Lloyd. There are always blog posts about bidding on branded keywords. Ben does a really great job of summarizing multiple reasons to bid on branded keywords.
• 5 Resolutions for PPC Ad Testing: This is my own post from earlier this month. If you have not read it yet, check it out. Learn some tips on improving your ad testing.

Amplified Platinum Posts

• Tips For Managing Negative Keywords: Negative keywords in an account can get out of control. Learn some tips on ways to manage keywords more effectively.
• Top 5 Tips For Effective Landing Page Testing: Are you running landing page tests? Save yourself some time and pain by reading this post. I’ve learned a few of these tips the hard way.
• Why Overreacting To Data Is a Bad Thing: Overreacting to data is another lesson that I’ve learned the hard way. Never assume a generic expensive keyword is NOT providing value. Many times these keywords assist towards a conversion further down the sales funnel.

Amplified Diamond Posts

• 7 PPC Resolutions to Keep You Focused and Inspired: This article contains some great recommendations that will help re-energize your approach to PPC campaigns. Anybody managing PPC campaigns can take away some inspiration from this post.
• Key Points From Frederick Vallaeys Interview: Frederick Vallaey is the Adwords product evangelist. This interview has some great insider knowledge on the direction Adwords is going and tips to optimize your PPC campaigns.

What’s a post you read in January that you bookmarked or saved? Share in the comments.

Here are a couple tunes that I’ve really enjoyed lately. The first one is a single off The Black Keys most recent album. I did not see the video until recently and it’s a must watch.

We’ve answered this question over and over again. Every situation calls for it’s own solution and you should test to find the answer for you, but by and large we’ve found that buying branded keywords in PPC is a good idea. Here’s all my thoughts on it. Buckle your seatbelt.

1. If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It

A properly managed PPC campaign is being managed and optimized to a performance goal that supports a business goal. All keywords and ads are measured against that goal. It’s pretty simple – if a keyword is supporting the goal by helping the campaign meet or beat the performance goal, then leave it in there. If it’s not helping the campaign perform, then get rid of it.

Sometimes though, you don’t know whether something is broken or not until you test it. I absolutely encourage you to test whether or not having branded keywords in your campaign is effective, but that judgement should be made based on data.

2. The Power of PPC Ads and Organic Listings on the Same Page

Don’t like my argument above? Then let’s look at some data. NYU’s Stern School of Business did a study in late 2009 called: “Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?” [Links to a PDF] Don’t worry you don’t have to read it or interpret the numbers – I did it for you. Here’s a breakdown of a couple key findings:

Click Through: Combine SEO + PPC for Best Results

Click Through Rates increase for terms where you have both an organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) presence. Not only do you own more of the search results page real estate, giving you a better shot at capturing a click, but perhaps there’s a gain in brand perception and credibility as well.

Conversion: Combine SEO + PPC for Best Results

Conversion Rates increase for terms where you have both an organic and paid result. Perhaps having a presence in both improves your credibility and/or encourages a repeat visit?

True, this study isn’t directly addressing branded keywords, but it does address the search results landscape. Having a PPC ad and an organic result on the same page improves performance. My assertion is that this applies to branded keywords just like it would any other keyword in your campaign. In our view – you HAVE to include brand keywords in your PPC campaign as a baseline. You can always test the impact of not having brand keywords, but if my job is to make the PPC campaign perform – I’m going to hedge my bets and include branded keywords in my PPC campaign.

3. Branded PPC Supports the Conversion Funnel

If your campaign is firing on all cylinders then PPC will be reaching users all along the conversion path with the right message at the right time. This includes the final stage of  the funnel where conversion/purchase/vendor selection happens. Sometimes people just want directions or a phone number. Why not use a PPC ad and take the opportunity to make that next step a little easier? That makes your brand look a little more helpful.

4. Defend Your Turf

Look at all the competition trying to get a click for this "iPad" brand search.

Competitors bidding on your brand terms can push your organic listing way down, giving them the click instead of you.

5. Control the Message and the Link

6. Quality Score

Conclusion

So there you have it, our thoughts on the role that brand keywords play in your PPC campaign. What did I miss? What did I get wrong? What are your experiences with branded PPC? Leave a comment.

More Resources – Don’t Just Take Our Word For It

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DO NOT pause or remove ads without statistically significant data

Avoid conversations with this guy about PPC ads. At my first paid search job I would frequently get in arguments about what ads were “better” and what people liked. That is a subjective argument you will never win. Enter your best friend in PPC, data and testing. You no longer have to have these discussions with anybody once an ad shows a statistically significant higher click through or conversion rate compared to the other ad or ads in rotation. There are multiple tools available to plug your data into and determine which ad has a statistically significantly higher click through rate or conversion rate. I prefer this tool from Web Share. Adwords also is making progress in the area of testing within their platform. Seer Interactive offers a great tutorial on how to implement ad testing within Adwords. Let data and performance make these decisions for you.

DO NOT track more than one ad element at a time

This is a VERY difficult one to practice. I will be writing ads and have multiple new elements I want to test. Once you add multiple variables to test your results become difficult to analyze. Elements in paid search usually are one of these:

• headline
• description line
• display URL
• punctuation
• capitalization

There are multiple elements to test but PPC ads have a limited number of characters to work with. If you are testing only one element at a time it simplifies the process of telling what’s working and what’s not. These learnings can better inform writing ads in the future to improve results.

DO NOT have more ads in an ad group than allows you to get testing results in a reasonable amount of time

A good rule of thumb is your ad group should receive a minimum of 200 clicks a month for rotating two ads in the ad group. So, if your ad group gets 300 clicks it’s OK to rotate three ads. Most of our clients do not have the volume for more than two ads per ad group in rotation. It’s important to ensure ad groups have enough volume for you to reach statistical significance in your testing. If you have too many ads in an ad group based on the volume you are unable to make data informed decisions with your ads.

DO document learnings (winners, losers, and detailed notes)

Keep some type of testing document or spreadsheet. Keeping detailed documentation of your ads allows two things:

1. You know what is working and you can expand those ads to other campaigns and ad groups
2. You also know what is NOT working and you can learn to not repeat that ad copy in the future

After pausing or removing ads I try and do a summary and analysis of what I think was working and what was not. I prefer to have a spreadsheet with two tabs. One with new ads along with the published date. The other tab includes removed or paused ads. Each tab follows the standard columns in Adwords with-headline, description line 1, description line 2, display URL, and destination URL. Here’s a screen shot of one of the tabs:

After determining winning and losing ads I will update the new ads tab by highlighting the winning ads in green and the losing ads in red. I also will have a column for notes where I will add comments of what the conclusion of the test ad was. I’m sure there a many ways to do this process but what’s important is you document it and have a system to learn and optimize your PPC ads.

DO Set up a document or place for brainstorming and stage future ad tests

Writing ads is one of the more creative areas of paid search. Many times when I’m writing ads I will have many good ideas but then have to go back to my earlier resolution of only testing one element at a time. Take all these great ideas and place them in a document to use next time you have to write ads. I’d also suggest you provide detailed notes on the logic behind the element. I’ve documented ideas only to come back to them later and don’t understand my cryptic notes or vague references. Putting all of these ideas in one place also allows you to have an area to stage and prioritize future tests and elements. Because we collaborate in a team environment we typically use either a Google Doc or Basecamp for this document.

What tips do you have to share about an effective PPC ad testing process? Share in the comments.

Amplified Gold Posts

• Text ad testing: his post is a reminder to perform tests during each phase of your campaign. There were also several testing ideas given.
• 3 PPC ad tips: One of the most time consuming tasks in my day-to-day responsibilities is composing ad copy. I’m always looking for inspiration for ads. This post has some great ideas taken from infomercials.

Amplified Platinum Posts

• 5 things learned from Don Draper: I can’t say that I’m a fan of the show Mad Men but this post is full of good principles you can apply to your search marketing life.
• Scary Adwords data: This is a post from Wordstream. Wordstream recently released an audit tool and they share some of their learnings from doing audits on thousands of Adwords accounts.

Amplified Diamond Posts

• Seeing results from new PPC campaigns: It’s important to set and manage expectations with clients and mangers. This post shares strategies and a formula to ensure everyone is on the same page when you are launching a new ppc campaign.
• 5 tips for transitioning an established PPC account: This post has some great tips to make sure your take over is as smooth as possible. Managing PPC campaigns can be quite complex at times. To manage this complexity I personally LOVE check lists. There is a great checklist at the end of this post for you to use to audit a new account.

And now a couple songs from my playlist. In the spirit of Christmas here’s a couple of my favorite Christmas songs from my childhood.