Black Condor Rises on Paid Search

The Paid Search and Keyword Optimization session featured Scott Symonds of Agency.com, Chris Churchill of Fathom Online, Mike Moran of IBM, and Michael Rosenberg of Autobytel sharing their insights on paid search in a highly competitive environment.

One overriding theme of this session was the need to develop a complete understanding of the value generated by search marketing efforts. As competition becomes more sophisticated in their research, bidding, and management approaches the intense price competition demands that advertisers do the same.

Scott Symonds described the evolution of a typical search campaign this way:

• I. You have a campaign, it may be profitable, or was at one point.
• II. You’ve moved past just monitoring Cost-Per-Click, you’ve begun to build out your keyword list, but you haven’t seen a big increase in volume.
• III. You begin tracking multiple conversion points on your site, and you attribute value to your campaign from multiple sources.
• IV. You have a full understanding of the returns generated by a particular keyword and so have a clear understanding of what you can pay for a particular click-through.

Now, I think there is a lot of generalization in this list. And, if I had a criticism of this session it would be that some of the presentations seemed to be dumbing down the message in order to emphasize just a couple of big points. These points however are important:

1. Optimize the performance of your campaign at every action. Improve your keywords, copy, landing pages, and ROI/value.- Scott Symonds
2. In an auction-based environment good buying is linked to conversion rate.  - Chris Churchill
3. Take advantage of the lower prices and better conversions offered by “The Long Tail”—the more specific multi-word phrases. - Mike Moran

Mike Rosenberg shared his experience with the development of Autobytel’s sophisticated bid management and ROI analysis tool, code named Black Condor.

It seems Autobytel’s sponsored search campaign had grown from about 10,000 words and phrases on two engines to 150,000 phrases on four engines. They bid on keywords manually by dividing their keyword buckets, but knew they were missing on the opportunity to tie revenue feedback into their bid strategy. After an unsuccessful search for a bidding system that could account for their multiple revenue streams (CPM advertising and lead gen) they decided to go it alone.

Black Condor now integrates with the APIs of Google and Overture to help them identify new keywords, create new listings, build out new landing pages, bid on keywords, and maxmize their profit on a keyword level.

Mike’s key learnings:

1. Developing your own system is hard. Make sure you really need it, and that it doesn’t already exist.
2. You get a lot of insight from digging into the details of your business.
3. Automated bidding is important but is increasingly a cost-of-entry.
4. It is very important to name your internal project after a large bird that eats dead animals.

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