My slides from the final session of Day 2 at SES London 2014. Your PPC Masterplan: Putting It All Together. It covers off looking for some of the gaps in existing activity and finding ways to make your PPC work smarter, particularly if you're on a small budget. Finally, it gives you ideas on ways to find activity that is likely to be incremental and takes you on the journey that we've been on, in trying to do our own analysis to determine whether or not our PPC activity was incremental.

1. Your PPC Masterplan
Putting It All Together
Arianne Donoghue
Mamas & Papas
SEM & Social Marketing Manager
London • 10–13 February 2014 • #SESLON @SESConf

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@ariannedonoghue
Our Challenge

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Conversion Overlap

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A single user journey
• How do you find the incrementality of PPC?
• How do you work out if it was profitable?

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Show of hands
• Do you have a “small” budget?
• Have you been asked to prove incrementality?

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Let’s talk about…
1. Finding opportunities in existing channels
2. How do you report on this?

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Finding Opportunities

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Product Listings Ads

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Product Listings Ads

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Product Listings Ads
• If you’re selling products rather than a service,
these are a must
• Use your product feed and the available
options in Adwords to help you stand out
• Google: Getting Started
• My 2013 SES Presentation

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Site Search

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Site Search
• High-converting terms may represent an
opportunity (particularly if they’re high
volume too!)
• Work these back to potential search queries
(e.g “tights” – should this be maternity or
baby?)
• Check your organic ranking and build list of
target keywords

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Adwords + WMT

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Adwords + WMT
• Understand the relationship between paid &
organic
• Look for new paid keyword opportunities
• Understand if PPC & SEO combined = more
traffic
• Helps with [not provided]
• How to use this report

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GA Demographics & Interests Reports
• Draw insights based on gender, age, interests
or a combination of the above

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GA Demographics & Interests Reports

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GA Demographics & Interests Reports

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GA Demographics & Interests Reports
• Target customers you know are more likely to
convert
• Feed this into GDN campaigns and other
Display-based activity
• Use that budget smarter!
• For more information on set-up etc, visit here

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Display Network
• Ties in nicely with your Interest/Demographic
insights
• Utilise Remarketing to help your ROAS
• Helps influence customers earlier in their
purchase journey
• Ensure you have a robust way to track this

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Bing
• Lower competition levels
• Yahoo Bing Network searchers spend 68%
more than Google searchers worldwide*
*comScore qSearch (custom), March 2013.

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Reporting

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Background
•
•
•
•
Tested PPC several times before
Results looked good in isolation
Not been able to prove incrementality
Only eroded SEO & Direct sales
• Wanted to understand the worst-case
scenario of what PPC delivers

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Process
June: Started with
PLAs
Added key
categories, e.g.
“Rocking Animals” or
“Nursery Furniture”
October: Turned on
Brand

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Process
• Wanted to understand the incremental effect
of not just PPC, but Brand
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Considerations
•
•
•
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No attribution
Same session only sales
Sales from all channels
Made adjustments to our Direct figures
– Worked out an 80/20 split for PPC/other
sources
– Rounded this down to 50/50

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Grouping The Data
Split out PLAs
The entire period when PPC was live
Branded PPC
Event Branded
Event No Branded

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Benchmarking
• To baseline and give an idea of trends, we
used:
– Fiscal 2012 Average
– Fiscal 2013 to date
– Quarter 1 2013
– Looked at total retail sales, incl stores
– Also analysed web only sales from
Coremetrics

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Onto the results!
Comparison periods:
•
•
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•
•
Fiscal 2013 v Fiscal 2012
PPC Live v Q1 2013
Branded PPC v Q1 2013
Branded PPC v PPC Live
Company Event v PPC Live
Company Event Branded v Non-Branded
(PPC Gain – Loss in SEO) + Increase in Direct = RESULTS

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Fiscal 2013 v Fiscal 2012
• Loss from Organic search not recouped by PPC
• Including additional revenue from Direct
helped
• Ended up with a small loss

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PPC Live v Q1 2013
• Loss in Organic is balanced by the gain from
PPC
• Including the 50% share of Direct growth=

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Branded PPC v Q1 2013
• The loss from Organic is lower than the gain
delivered by PPC
• Factor in Direct growth
• Our strongest result!

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Branded PPC v PPC Live
• This helped us understand if Brand
cannibalisation was worth it
• PPC recouped the Organic loss (and then
some!) straight away, + Direct

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Company Event v PPC Live
• How does general PPC compare to a period
when the site is up anyway?
• PPC delivered only 40% of the loss on Organic
• But the growth in Direct still made it work

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Company Event Branded v No Branded
• Does running Brand during company events
drive additional revenue?
• Gains in PPC 2.5x higher than loss in Organic
• Factor in Direct growth:

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Was it profitable?
• In short, yes!
• Depending on the comparison

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Summary
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•
•
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PPC is worth doing
Particularly Brand
Especially during busy periods
Want to do more testing!
– Understand by category
– Do more testing outside of sale

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Key Takeaways
1. Look for the gaps and exploit them!
2. Get a clear understanding of how your PPC is
fitting together with your SEO
3. Formulate your own testing/reporting plan to
prove the benefit of PPC