ClearSaleing recently held a Web seminar titled, “6 Advanced Paid Search Strategies used by the Internet Retailer top 500.” The goal of the presentation was to educate the most sophisticated Web marketers on new techniques they can use to get even better results from their pay-per-click (PPC) marketing efforts. This post gives a high-level overview of the 6 advanced strategies.

1. Don’t be misled by PPC metrics: Most companies use cost per conversion or cost per acquisition (CPA) as the primary metric for evaluating an online ad’s value. Many companies focus on ways to lower the CPA. The thought is that if I can lower the cost to acquire a customer I will be more profitable. This is not always true. You may be acquiring customers cheaper, but you may be bringing in customers that spend less. The ONLY metric that does not mislead is PROFIT. In order to prevent yourself from being mislead by metrics, you need to be able to measure the true profit contribution from each online ad. This means being able to tie each order to the online ad that was responsible. When you can do this, you can apply the profit margin earned from each item in the order and then back out the cost of advertising. With this ability you can measure true profit and never run the risk of being mislead again.
2. It takes more than one ad to generate a sale: Every sophisticated internet marketer knows that it usually takes more than one ad to generate a sale, however most marketers do not have the tools that can track this. If you are not looking at all of the ads that earned the sale, a concept ClearSaleing coined as ‘Purchase Path’, you will end up eliminating ads that do a great job of helping other ads to close the deal. There are essentially 3 types of ads: Introducers, Influencers, and Closers. Closers are ads that get clicked on right before the sale occurs. If you eliminate your Introducers and Influencers because they do not generate a positive ROI, your Closers will suffer. The companies that look at the Purchase Path get a completely different, and importantly more accurate picture of how their advertising is working. This new picture also produces higher profits.
3. Connect your online advertising to your offline sales: What percent of your sales happen over the phone? Did some of those callers get to your site by clicking on one of your online ads? If so, wouldn’t you like to be able to tie the phone sales back to the online ad that made that phone sale? With this ability, you will never have to worry that you might turn off an ad that produces phone orders but rarely produces an online sale. Sophisticated marketers are developing or buying technologies to tie phone calls back to the online ad that caused the call to happen. They are then tying the sales that occurred over the phone back to the online ad. This gives a perfect picture of your advertising. In order to make perfect advertising decisions, you need perfect data.
4. Put all of your advertising and sales data in a data warehouse: When you look at the sales generated by your online advertising, do you also get to see which products were sold by each ad? If so, then you can do several valuable things. First off, you will be able to calculate the true profit earned by each ad, as we already discussed the importance in strategy #1. Secondl, if you store all of this sales infomation in a data warehouse, you can mine the data to analyze buying behavior. For example, you may learn that people that buy product X often times buy product Y. Knowing this will allow you to send targeted marketing messages to customers that only bought X and offer them Y or vice versa. Sophisticated marketers are spending time and money to find out better ways to market on a 1-to-1 basis vs. a 1-to-many. One of the easiest ways to do 1-to-1 marketing is to leverage the lead and sales data you already have today.
5. Identify new keywords and find negative keywords: You can certainly use the suggestion tools provided by the search engines to come up with new terms and to create negative keywords, but what is behind these suggestions? They are merely tools that generate words that may or may not provide any value. The real gold exists in your customer’s search queries. Sophisticated marketers not only look at the keyword that generated the sale, they also look at the search query the customer typed into the search engine. These search queries help to create new keywords and also identify negative keywords that should be added to protect your ad investment. An even better source of new keywords can be found by using the search queries that users enter into your onsite search box.
6. Follow a proven methodology to earn the maximum ROI on one’s ad budget: The best methodology we’ve seen is comprised of 5 steps. Step 1 is getting the ability to measure the true profit contribution from each online ad. Step 2 is the elimination of any ad that does not directly or indirectly contribute to profit generation. Step 3 is buying the maximum amount of clicks you can from the ads that are proven to generate profit. Step 4 is expanding your campaigns to other sources using the same keywords that have already proven to be profitable. Step 5 is to experiment with new sources and to focus on the site itself. Step 5 does not have to be done at the end of this list. It should be something that you are doing along with everything else.

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