Mathematicians better suited to search than creatives

A few weeks ago I read an interesting opinion piece in the New Media Age (a UK industry news magazine for web agency types).

In the article, David White, Head of European Operations at Efficient Frontier, made some well made comments about how search marketing is executed:

“In an attempt to optimise bid positions, many agencies have huge teams of people, both on and offshore, using spreadsheets and pivot tables to manually analyse keyword positions”

Yes.

“This is a very tedious job, it’s time-consuming, boring, complicated and very easy to get wrong. So it’s little surprise that these organisations are enduring record levels of staff churn”

He concludes (after further thoughts which are worth a read, available in the original article)

“Search marketing is now so complex it’s akin to the financial markets and, as a result, its experts are market analysts, not marketers. It’s the mathematical experts who will create the highly complex pay-per-click campaigns that are required to deliver incremental value”

I absolutely agree 100%.

I remember about 6 years ago (end of 2002) working for a client (a hotel distribution dot com no longer trading - they sold out to another hotel distribution company a while back - hence I am able to recount this story!).

My brief was to create reporting systems and put in place a pay per click campaign in 7 different European languages…. across what was then Overture, eSpotting and some other “odds and ends” of PPC opportunities. The budget for the campaign was “multi million Euros”. (The assumption was we would get the money back…. rather than it being pure spend - hence a budget is fairly meaningless)

Being a technical person rather than a marketing guy, my initial reaction was that we needed to build a bid management system…. because I realised that we had too much data to handle “humanely”. (yeah I meant that!). We were managing several hundred thousand search terms per engine - and were advertising, across all languages and marketplaces, across 7 or so engines. Yikes.

I built a system that basically merged data available from the PPC engines with subsequent conversion data coming from our booking system. For example I would know that London would convert differently to Manchester…. but that a Manchester hotel booking wouldn’t be worth as much as London…. so the system would devise what we should bid in order to attain a certain revenue projection. Mind you, we still had to edit bid prices by hand in the PPC engines…. which was pretty much what I spent all day doing.

We were also looking at merchant model vs reservation model percentages….. as if you could find some cities that would have a higher proportion of hotels that we sold “upfront” to consumers… that money would be in the bank before we had to pay for the search engine advertising bill… hence would generate positive cash flow. Our analysis model also took into account aspects such as different commission collection percentages for different cities… some cities we struggled, on reservation model bookings, to collect what was owed to us!

Actually, what I have written above is what should have happened.

What really happened is that the director of marketing person (the client) wanted me to quit development on the bid system…. and go a “marketing lead” route…. they kept on saying “just get the search terms up….. we will sort it all out later”.

In the end that is exactly what we did…. the terms went up…. money started flying out…. bookings started flying in…. and the only analysis we had was a weekly excel document with the headline numbers. On some weeks we “won” other weeks we lost badly… but we had no idea what was working and what wasn’t.

My work ceased with them. Now I won’t do any PPC unless someone does it mathematically….. (actually I don’t really do PPC work now!)

If I were working in a travel company, if you have a web savvy financial controller - I would prefer to give the PPC marketing to them rather than to a marketing person…. I expect you would get more success with it.

p.s. I have worked for at least 4 hotel booking distribution companies or big hotel agencies…. unless you know me personally - you probably will not be able to guess which one I am talking about…. so don’t jump to conclusions!

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