Stop Burning Your AdWords Budget:Simple Optimization Tactics To Make Your Spend More Effective

Emperitas Webinar March 10th 2016

www.emperitas.com / 801.810.5869 / 4609 South 2300 East Suite 204, Holladay, UT 84117

Hi, I’m Luciano Wheatley Pesci…

Founder & Director, Utah Community Research Group (UtahCRG), Univ. of Utah

• Teach microeconomics, statistics, applied research & data analytics, and American economic development & history.

Co-Founder and CEO, Emperitas

• Team of analysts, data scientists, and economists who find actionable business intelligence through marketing analytics and agile research to help our clients beat their competition.

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Allow Me To Introduce My Cohosts…

Tyler Calder, Emperitas

• Director of Analytics, leads the Advanced Concepts Team in automating analytics, insights and reporting for clients.

Savannah Paterson, iFreedom Direct

• Business Intelligence Analyst, oversees and mines the company’s data ecosystem in support of marketing, sales, and operational strategy goals.

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My Basic Argument Today

• Power of Visualization: most people are visual learners, AdWords data can best be expressed through simple custom visualizations.

• Controlling for Time: the effectiveness of your AdWords spend changes by the second, understanding the role time plays is critical.

• Game Theory & Agile Research: you don’t bid in isolation, understanding yourself and your competition leads to effective spending.

• iFreedom Case Study: data-driven AdWords bidding and agile research is helping veterans live the American Dream.

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The Power of Visualization

People Are Visual Learners

• Two of every three people (66%) are visual learners, which means they can’t process

written information (like reports) as effectively as a visualization.

• There’s been an explosion of do-it-yourself visualization

tools like R Shiny, Tableau, Gephi and D3.

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Moving Beyond The Dashboard

• The AdWords dashboard is a great place to start with visualizations, but it

doesn’t allow for deeper mining, especially at higher dimensions.

• Aggregate values put you at risk of missing deeper

patterns like outliers, variability, and multi-modality.

• You need to get the raw data.

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Getting The Raw Data

• Through the AdWords dashboard you can create a

report and then export the corresponding raw data.

• You’re limited to the existing AdWords metrics.

• You need to be clear what you want, which means you

need to understand how you plan to use the insights.

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Example :: Keywords Per Campaign Visualized

• Here’s an example visualization using

Tableau that shows:

• Clicks (y axis)

• Conversions (x axis)

• Campaigns (colors)

• Cost (size of bubble)

• Each bubble is a keyword.

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Keywords A

Keywords B

Keywords C

Controlling for Time

Timing Can Be More Valuable Than Money

• Campaign performance depends on more than the keywords, your quality score,

and your max bid price.

• Everything Google uses to determine bidding happens at a

specific time, so if you have historical data (more than a year)

you can find seasonal trends at the day/week/month/year level.

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Example :: Conversions By Month Visualized

• Here’s another example visualization

using Tableau that shows:

• Conversions (y axis)

• Time (x axis)

• Campaigns (colors)

• The height of each bars show total

conversions over time for the

different campaigns by month.12

Campaign X

Campaign Y

Game Theory & Agile Research

AdWords is An Auction, Which Uses Game Theory

• Google hired one of the greatest living applied Economists, Hal Varian, to build the

Adwords auction.

• Since it’s an auction it uses game theoretical methods.

• The way you pay makes collusion with competition

impossible because given any quality score, those who are

willing to pay the most end up ranking higher (and pay a

lower cost).

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It’s Pretty Competitive Out There

• The outcomes of any bid depends on you AND on your competitors.

Game Theory gives you a foundation for strategizing before you spend.

• Things you’ll need:

• Ability to measure expected value of leads.

• Who you’re competing against, what their spend is, and (ideally) their revenue and

production structure.

• In competitive markets you can often assume symmetry to yourself

if this information isn’t available (but it usually is).15

Needing To Know Expected Values

• Integrating with a CRM gives you critically important financial information

on the value of a customer or segment.

• The Pareto Principle says 80% of your revenue is coming from

20% of your customers, so identifying that group is high priority.

• If you don’t have a CRM, or it isn’t integrated, you can use

the expected (average) value as a proxy.

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You Wouldn’t Drive By Looking In the Rearview Mirror

• Dashboards and A/B testing are reactive: they tell you what’s already happened and

usually fail to explain why something worked.

• Agile research helps your competitive bidding by providing the

necessary information that doesn’t reside in AdWords.

• This is not a one-shot endeavor, and requires constant

testing and validation if you are going to stay a step

ahead of your competitors.

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iFreedom Case Study

iFreedom Case Study :: History of Company

• iFreedom Direct Corporation is a mortgage lender that’s served the nation’s military

community by specializing in government-backed VA home loans since 1996.

• Helped 100,000+ borrowers obtain the American Dream of homeownership,

and is a nationally top ranked VA lender.

• Direct to consumer lender so the marketing team carries most

of the responsibility for generating loan opportunities.

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iFreedom Case Study :: Why AdWords?

• We’ve been running AdWords since 2006. When competition was low we were

able to create a robust and optimized campaign with a very high ROI.

• As competition dramatically increased we were forced to scale

back monthly AdWords investment to maintain efficiencies.

• We engaged with different third-party firms specializing in AdWords

account management, but were unsuccessful in finding a partner

that met our objectives.

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iFreedom Case Study :: Why A Data-Driven Approach?

• We have big plans to grow our sales force in the next few years.

• For the marketing team to sustain this growth, we have more pressure

than ever to produce quality opportunities at an efficient cost.

• We’re focused on growing our monthly AdWords spend.

Due to heavy competition when bidding on clicks we know

a data-driven approach is the only way for us to compete.

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iFreedom Case Study :: Working With Emperitas

• We’ve been impressed with how Emperitas learned our core business, the landscape

we compete in, and tailored a data-driven approach to our unique AdWords needs.

• Emperitas is exceptional at creating visuals that allow for easy comprehension of

insights to all members on our team and the bi-weekly reporting constantly supports our

efforts.

• We’re excited about the next phase of our collaboration, taking optimizations to the next

level by incorporating data from Google’s API and our CRM to analyze the rest of our

sales funnel beyond initial lead conversion.

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Let’s talk…

The Conversation Doesn’t Have To End Here…

luciano@emperitas.com / 801-810-5869/ EmperitasSG / 4609 South 2300 East Suite 204, Holladay, UT 84117