Pay Per Click Strategy
Mike Solomon, VP, CJ Search talked about the best ways to outsource a PPC campaign. He’s worked both at Overture, and then on the outside at CJ search. Companies start to think about outsourcing when they have a $20k - $25k spend. Naturally Mike described how outsourcing the PPC spend to an agency is the most efficient way to manage the spend.
Key points for internal vs. external PPC management
- people and experience
- tools required to measure and optimize
- core competency
- time allocation to manage
Advertisers have issues like paying for advertising on products that are out of stock. Whoever manages the spend has to stay on top of these kinds of details. An important aspect of setting budgets is to have a test budget. How much are you allocating for your monthly test spend? Mike made the point that some companies talked about budget caps, which is surprising on an ROI driven ad spend where there really should be no cap.
Mike also talked about how they use a 45 day cookie to track actions. Probably this takes care of 95% of repeat visitor tracking. He also said that search/affiliate campaigns need to be managed by the same people either all in house, or all external, in order to reduce conflict and most efficiently manage affiliates that are doing search campaigns.
Mike also mentioned he is not using clickfraud software. The moderator asked the audience to raise hands for people using click fraud software and nobody raised their hands. Her comment was that clickfraud detection software just doesn’t work. On the publisher side I am hearing that ValidClick from Think Partnership which does real time clickfraud filtering for publishers does work. Perhaps this is a problem best solved on the publisher side, not the advertiser side.
Both Mike and fellow panelist Daina Middleton, Global Interactive Director, Hewlett-Packard Company, talked about how to manage contextual targeting spends, and said that a key technique is to be able to exclude sites. Clearly some sites are sending low quality traffic into contextual spends, and blocking those sites can make contextual work.
