vonFelten.com

What mistakes to avoid when marketing online.
The exciting part of online marketing is that it allows marketers considerable leeway to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them; an unaffordable luxury in the world of offline marketing. In an excellent article titled “Ten Online Marketing Blunders to Avoid” in iMediaConnection,Tom Hespos hits the nail on the head and points out some of the common mistakes that marketers tend to make from time to time. These blunders cut across the type of marketing used, with some of them being related to display advertising or direct response marketing; so I’ve picked up three out of the ten most relevant mistakes that would apply to paid search engine advertising.

Over-targeting
Make no mistake- targeting is undeniably one of the most valuable features of search engine marketing and I’m all for it. In fact, I’ve work very closely with clients to explore and exploit all the targeting options that are available: for example, Google Adwords offers site targeting, position targeting, location targeting, hour-of-the-day targeting etc. In time, the targeting options will only get better (“narrower”) as the search engines get to know their users better and features such as personalized search gain ground.

The challenge with targeting though is that it is based on an assumption that we have defined our target audience perfectly and we know our target audience really well. The truth is that very often we don’t; and using too precise a targeting option can exclude potential customers. This is a judgment call that marketers will have to make- whether the incremental cost of broadening the target audience is worth the returns. I believe it may well be.

Manual management of campaigns
This is a tricky issue, simply because in many aspects of marketing—a cerebral science that thrives on human intelligence and understanding of human behavior—doing things manually is considered a positive differentiator. The virtues of manual activity probably don’t get highlighted anywhere more than in the area of search engine marketing.

Again, I appreciate why many things are better done manually and understand when it is not only inefficient to do things manually, but harmful to the business to do it thus. In the article referenced above, the writer talks about how a company is better off automating paid search advertising campaigns beyond a certain size, both in terms of the number of keywords and the spend (the author gives a cut off of $1000 per month, which is pretty low in my mind.) Imagine a campaign with thousands and thousands of keywords with varying bid amounts and costs, and it could take a non-experienced person weeks to put together all of the data available, crunch the numbers and come up with some actionable inferences — by which time, the campaign may have well changed course. 

In this case, using a bid management tool is perhaps the way to go. However, if you are experienced and working off CPA instead of CPC; I’m yet to find a bid managment package that is up to par… Even when you let the cerebral talent come through in defining the logic and the conditions that let the system “take care” of the optimization.

Failure to test
This is simply a cardinal sin in online marketing, simply because of the opportunities available to a marketer to test before and during a campaign. Testing before the campaign may include things like checking if the landing page is working, whether the links on the landing page (particularly the call to action) work fine, whether there are typos or incorrect phone numbers or contact details that could either make you look unprofessional or lose a prospect (or both), etc.

Testing during a campaign would mainly entail things like A/B split testing or keeping track of the results and acting on it and then continue the “monitor and modify” process till one is certain that a campaign is optimized (though if we look hard enough, we may still find areas for improvement, but it is prudent to be aware of the law of diminishing returns).

The failure to test all the elements of a campaign before it starts is probably the worse of the two, as it could straightaway drain a lot of precious time and money. Pre-launch testing is about preparation and prevention; while testing during the campaign is about maximizing the potential of the campaign. Smart marketers take care of both.