Impression Share and Google AdWords

OK, last time I discussed content. I am a bigger fan of content than ever, and feel that writing for successful content inclusion (and clicks) is one of the greatest challenges we as PPC marketers can undertake.

But let's turn our attention back to keyword search for just a moment. Many of you are no doubt more familiar than me with the power of impression share, but for those of you who are new to this tool, please take a few minutes. It'll be worth your while.

This year Google has created a new tool--impression share. It's useful, because now you have a way to check and see how well your keyword campaigns are doing against the competition.

Note--impression share reports don't apply for your content campaigns (yet another reason to keep the keyword and content campaigns separate).

Impression share reports can give you insight into how your ads are doing in the marketplace--as well as an indication of the overall size of the marketplace. There are three columns that are key to look at:

1. Impression share (%). This tells you what percent of the time your ad was displayed compared to when it could have been displayed. If your impression share is, say 20%, then of 100 times your ad was eligible to be displayed, it was displayed 20 times.

2. Lost IS (rank). This lets you know what percentage you are losing because you did not rank high enough to be displayed.

3. Lost IS (budget). This lets you know what percentage you are losing because of insufficient budget.

Improving impression share that you've lost due to rank is a function of boosting your ad quality and/or your bid. Remember, a very easy way to improve your ad quality is to tighten up your best keywords into smaller, more focused ad groups that repeat the keyword in the ad text.

Boosting impression share that you've lost due to budget means increasing your daily spend for the particular campaign. Sometimes it makes sense to do this, but it depends on the ROI you are getting for the campaign.

Another interesting way to use impression share is to set up campaigns with small daily spends. You can learn valuable info on the size and competitive complexion of the overall market for that keyword group. More on this, later.

Separate Google Content Campaigns for Greater AdWords Success

Go beyond the obvious with your Google AdWords Content campaigns.

OK, many of you who read this are way better at running AdWords campaigns than I am, but my hope is a few newer marketers will read this and learn something valuable.

First, the usual best place to start maximizing an AdWords campaign is with your Keyword search. There are tons of tricks to gain a higher click-through rate, but one of the best is to match your keywords with your ads. Tightening down your keyword-driven campaigns (or ad groups) into small groups that contain your best keywords in your ads is a great place to start.

But beyond the keyword search is an often-neglected group:Content. A well-refined content campaign can add 10 or 20% or maybe even more. So, looking at 80/20 rule, I typically focus on keywords first, but I also work at refining my content once my keyword campaigns are running strong.

Hey, if you could get another 10 or 20% customers for just a tad extra effort you would, right?

I also recommend that, fairly early on, you separate your keyword campaigns from your content campaigns. Why? Because typically your content campaigns will have a much lower CTR than your keyword campaigns. Eventually, you'll want to be able to compare keyword campaigns/ad groups in an apples-to apples comparison against other keyword campaigns/ad groups. But, if you have content mixed in with your keyword campaigns, then you are introducing both the CTR for content and the CTR for keyword into the same campaign.

Yes, Google will report each separately within that campaign/ad group. But for me, it's just been easier to manage the process when comparing campaigns/ad groups to simply set up different campaigns for my keywords and my content.

Do I ever set up campaigns that have both content and keywords in them? Yes, I do. Many times early on in a new campaign for a new product or maybe a new website I'll run a broad campaign that has loads of keywords in it as well as several ads. Here I try and test as broadly as I can, quickly. By doing this I can rapidly get a good feel for what keywords are working and what aren't working. I may run the broad campaign for a few days or a few weeks, depending on the budget constraints, how popular the keyword terms are, and how big the potential search audience is.

We'll cover several other reasons to separate your keyword and content campaigns in some future posts.

Happy Marketing.

Maslow and a Consumer Value Chain Analysis

OK, you are a business, marketing to a consumer. You know Value Chain analysis is critical. But, rather than matching up your Value Chain of your business exactly to the “Value Chain” of your consumer, you are ranking the buyer criteria as outlined in Michael Porter’s book Competitive Advantage.

Now’s the time to add Maslow’s Hiearchy of Needs into the mix.

Overly complex? Too much data? Too much analysis? Can’t we just write a couple of great ads and be done with it?

Sure—but we’ll miss out on so much.

So, go ahead and rank buyer criteria, both signaling and use. Porter’s figure 4-4 in Competitive Advantage is a great tool here. Then, once they're ranked, it's time to look at Maslow’s Hiearchy of Needs.

It's useful to build yourself a little fill-in-the-blank table. List Maslow's five needs down the left-side, then next to each one check if you can use the ranked signalling or buyer criteria for that particular need. Lastly, a simple "how" column can be used for your initial thoughts on how you might convey this through your advertising.

There will be more "no" checks than "yes" checks next to the five needs. Of course you'll often find you can build ad campaigns around safety/security needs. But, you'll be surprised at how often you'll be able to build in Esteem or possibly even a hint of Self-Actualization into your campaigns.

The beauty of marrying Porter's ideas on ranked usage/signalling criteria with Maslow's hierarchy is that you actually begin to see potential ad campaigns that you might easily miss out on if you hadn't taken the time to consider both. Without Porter, it's easy to miss how the consumer uses the product; without Maslow, it's tempting to think too narrowly and just go for the most obvious needs.

Customize a Value Chain for Your Consumer

If Value Chain analysis is so important, then why is it so few companies truly try to employ it in their day-to-day work?

Of course, there are a variety of reasons, but one reason may be the very general nature of the Value Chain charts that Porter uses. To be valuable across a wide variety of industries, Porter constructed a diagram of his Value Chain that is very flexible. There are five “primary activities” and four “support activities”. This broad view of the elements of a Value Chain allows many different industries to use the Value Chain tool to determine where they do, indeed, add value for their customer.

If you are a B-B marketer, the Value Chain diagram you use for your company can match up nicely with the Value Chain diagram of your customer. Since both are businesses, each will have very similar structures and each will incorporate elements of the primary and support activities. Likewise, if you are marketing to a distributor who in turn markets to end users, as Competitive Advantage illustrates, then the classic Porter value chain can be matched up, company to company.

However it becomes a tad more of a challenge when a B-C marketer attempts to use Value Chain analysis to map out where her Company Value Chain intersects with the Consumer Value Chain. Where exactly does the consumer HR department start? What about the consumer technology department? Does it start with Dad figuring out a better way to cut the grass, or with Mom determining a more efficient method to manage the family budget? (Wait, that may be part of procurement…)

It actually becomes very difficult to map out one-to-one relationships between a company and a consumer using all nine of the various activities in the consumer household. The nine activities in the business diagram of the value chain don’t match up well at all to how we think of the consumer household.

Part of the problem: humans are much more complex than organizations.

Fortunately Porter gives us a clue of how to proceed when he instructs us to rank the actual use of our product in the customer’s life. In Competitive Advantage figures 4-4, 4-5 and 4-6 he offers useful diagrams of how we can rank both signaling and use criteria, measure the value of each and then, once we’ve done that, match up the activities within our firm that impact the way the buyer uses our product and how the buyer feels about it.

But isn’t there a Value Chain diagram we can create for the customer? Beyond ranking criteria and attempting to measure it, why can’t we invent a separate graph or drawing to help us easily visualize where our company fits in with the end-user?

Possibly so, but it won’t be one-size fits all for all companies. There may be a way to create industry-specific or product-specific consumer diagrams of value chains. And, if you are a marketer looking to construct a custom-built consumer value chain for your industry, a great first place to start is with feedback from your top salesperson.

But there is another place to start in building a consumer value chain: Maslow and the hierarchy of needs.

Learning from Step 13 via a Package Solution after a Value Chain Analysis

OK, through your Value Chain analysis you’ve discovered that a key component in your assembly instructions was discontinued. The yellow piece of paper that explained Step 13 in tricycle assembly was deleted; the attendant result was a huge up-spike in Helpline calls from frustrated customers asking about Step 13.

Your solution—bring back the yellow. You mention this to management, and it’s approved. It takes a while—after all; you’ve still got the entire current inventory in the stores. But there’s also a quicker way to distribute that flyer. You can email it directly to the customers that call in to the 1-800 Helpline. Plus, you can post a link to it on your website. Although the frequency of Helpline calls won’t diminish immediately, you can aid in reducing the duration of the calls.

At first glance, you might think the above answer to Step 13 illustrates an example of a classic “packaging” solution. Remember, Package is “your face to the customer”. The appropriate package reinforces your Brand in the customer’s mind. But, there is more to it than that.

See you wouldn’t have known the problem existed at all if you hadn’t sought input from Helpline and Shipping staff in your search for a better understanding of how your company value chain intersects your customer value chain.

In his classic Competitive Advantage Michael Porter mentions two types of buyer criteria:

use criteria = what your product does for your customer

signaling criteria = how your customer thinks or feels about what the product does for them

Unaided, Step 13 in your assembly process isn’t easy. But, once the customer reads the quick instructions on the yellow sheet and knows how to properly insert the stove bolt, then it’s a breeze.

Many marketers think of signaling criteria and use criteria as living in different silos. At least they must, because that’s the way their marketing appears. It’s as if they never talk to their customers about how they really use their products.

In reality, signaling criteria can reinforce use criteria and help to position you in an extremely powerful position, especially against a competitor that has a superior product.

Imagine that your #1 competitor in the Trike business has no Step 13 in their assembly. They used to, but they received so many complaints they engineered it out of the process. To a person not trained in marketing, it might appear that this is an advantage the competitor will use to crush you. But you can turn it into a non-event with proper use of the yellow-sheet explanation sheet.

Effectively, you “out-signal” your competitor’s engineering advantage and negate it.

Can you always do this? Of course not. But, inside the mind of the customer, we often operate at a closer parity with our competitors than we think.

It’s our job as marketers to make sure we do everything we can to signal to the customer that our product is, in fact, performing for them up to their expectations, not ours.

And a Value Chain analysis is a great tool to insure that happens

Avoiding Step 13 by Leveraging a Value Chain Analysis via Smarter Packaging

When you’re ready to invest your time in developing a solid Value Chain analysis, you want to leverage that time in the most efficient and effective manner. That means looking in the most high-value places in both your company and in your customer’s interaction with your product (service).

A good place to start is by discovering complaints from your customer service dept.

Imagine you are in the tricycle building business. You sell your trikes partially assembled to retailers who sell them to end users. You pack assembly instructions in the carton that the trike comes in. Plus, you supply a 1-800 customer Helpline staffed during daylight ours.

OK, as a smart marketer you decide that the Helpline folks who handle those1-800 assembly questions are a great place to start in your Value Chain analysis. You discover that 40% of the customer calls relate to an assembly question for a one inch stove bolt that is part of the rear axle assembly. Customers invariably can’t figure out how to properly tighten this bolt.

It’s Step 13 in the assembly process

So, you dig a bit. You ask the requisite who/what/when questions concerning the product, model changes, has this particular question been asked in the past, was there a change in supplier, just when did this question became the dominant Helpline question, etc.

After you’ve pulled more than a few hairs out, you realize that the Helpline staff has discussed this problem with the folks in product development. Creating an engineering solution would involve an expensive retooling and it just isn’t worth it. But, it isn’t like the Helpline staff never tried to solve the problem. That’s a relief. So you thank your lucky stars your staff wants
But, you find out that Helpline staff never discussed the stove bolt problem with Shipping, and never spoke of it with Marketing. You speak with both, and uncover a key fact: In a previous model, there was actually an additional, separate flyer on brightly-colored yellow paper that was a supplement to the assembly brochure. This yellow flyer instructed the customer exactly how to tighten the bolt. The bright yellow paper really leapt out when the customer opened the tricycle’s packing carton. There was no way to miss it.

But the separate flyer cost a bit more money, and it was one extra piece to insert into the package, and sometimes they’d get left laying about on the floor and get swept up and trashed; so in a round of cost-cutting Marketing was ordered that the yellow flyer be incorporated into the body of the assembly instructions.

There wasn’t any battle. There wasn’t any consulting of the 1-800 Helpline staff, there was just acquiescence on Marketing’s part—they had to write a new ad campaign anyway and fighting for some assembly copy’s right to stand alone on its own flyer just wasn’t worth it. Truthfully, nobody in Marketing thought much about it. So they just pulled out their old copy of the Assembly instructions, and underneath the stove bolt step, where it used to say: “See attached flyer” they simply double-checked to see that they had the right copy in place, determined there wasn’t enough room for the illustration of the stove bolt that was on the current flyer without over-sizing the assembly instructions, and so they dropped the illustration and just left the copy.

That’s how Step 13 in the assembly of the trike became notorious among the Helpline staff.

Of course, you’ll come up with a solution. And that solution will look like a Package solution—which it is—but it’s a solution as a result of a Value Chain analysis.

We’ll review your solution next time.

The Importance of Value Chain Analysis for the Marketer

OK, so why do marketers need to understand Value Chain analysis? Why can’t we just write a super ad?

Because the more you know about how your product (or service) interacts with the customer the more you can match up company strength with customer need. If you can successfully do that, you will win at marketing.

In Competitive Advantage Michael Porter outlines the importance of the Value Chain for a company. Ideally, your company would view Value Chain analysis as an integral part of their strategy. Senior management would direct managers in Operations and Sales and Customer Service to map out the various contact points between Company Value Chain and Customer Value Chain; to ferret out what really matters to the customer. Then your company would engineer products and services to profitably provide a product that fits with customer want and company strength.

Hey, let’s get real. In most companies this just doesn’t happen. You’re the marketer; you’re tasked with driving up sales. Senior management might help you out a little; maybe they’ll pave the way by letting other departments know the importance of marketing. But in most situations you’ll need to do the heavy lifting of a value-chain analysis yourself.

By all means, ask your customers. Create customer survey tools and email feedback options. Find out as much as you can about how your customer uses your product, and what they like about it.

But voluntary customer feedback alone is insufficient to construct a good Value Chain analysis. Sure, it’s vital to know how the customer uses and interacts with your product, but you need to understand how the customer value chain connects to your company’s value chain.

For that, you’re going to need to ask some other people in your company. Find one or two key people in the following areas: Shipping, Customer Service, and Sales. Information you glean from each of them will supply raw material for total marketing connections to your customer that leverage your company strength with the customer needs. And you can use that leverage to overpower your competition.