Webinar Transcript: The Opportunity Cost of PPC

JANUARY 19, 2010

Bill:  Bill Barnes – Host
Angela:  Angela Sanfilippo – Presenter
Angie:  Angie Dzwonkiewicz – Presenter

Bill:Hello, and welcome to Enquiro’s B2B Expert Series of webinars. My name is Bill Barnes, I am the host of the B2B Expert Series of webinars and I’m delighted to have you join us today. This is going to be a really good one. We have discovered that people really have a thirst for case studies and hearing from those people out in the trenches day to day working on their search campaigns and marketing campaigns in a B2B arena. And so we will not disappoint today. A couple of things for you, that this is I think our twentieth B2B Expert Series webinar. They are all available for you to download, the previous ones, if you want to go to enquiro.com/webinars and find the topic that interests you and listen to them. I encourage you to do that. As well on Enquiro’s website there’s lots of white papers and research that we’re happy to share with you, including the BuyerSphere book which of course was a big part of our B2B Expert Series last fall. In its entirety it is available for you for download, so we encourage you to do that.

So today’s topic or title is “The Opportunity-Cost of PPC.” And I have two experts joining us here today, that I’m delighted to have join us. First of all, Angela Sanfilippo, who is the Director of Product Marketing at YouSendIt. Also joining us is Angie Dzwonkiewicz, who is a Search Marketing Strategist right here at Enquiro, and works with Angela to help them with their online PPC campaign. So before I introduce too in a little bit more detail, I did want to tell you that throughout this broadcast, if you’d like to ask a question, we will have a Q&A section at the end of Angela’s presentation where we’ll answer any questions specifically about her PPC campaign or anything else that might come to mind.
There’s a couple ways that you can ask those questions. Of course there is a question box on the “Go to Webinar” section, just on the right-hand side, just click on that, fill out a question and we will respond to as many as we can. We usually get a lot of questions, but any that we don’t answer on the actual webinar, we will answer to you directly. Also you can join us on Twitter, where we’re hoping there will be a very lively discussion, we’ll be posting there as well as answering any questions you might have that is at B2B Expert, is our Twitter account there, and join in an offline conversation if you’d like.

So onto our two experts today. First of all I mentioned Angela, who is the Director of Product Marketing at YouSendIt. Angela has over 13 years in the marketing industry with a multifaceted background in brand strategy and awareness, as well as marketing communications, product marketing, and demand gen strategies. She is currently the Director of Marketing for YouSendIt, which is the number one secure digital file delivery company serving professionals, businesses, and government agencies on the web. And we like to have clients who have cool products, and this is certainly one of them. It’s a great product, I advise you to check it out. Also joining us is Angie, who is Search Marketing Strategist here at Enquiro. Before joining Enquiro, Angie’s background including a tremendous expertise and knowledge in email marketing and community relations, with skills in reporting and analysis, which as we know is vital to search. And Angie’s been with us for about a year and a half, and has proven to be one of our strongest search marketing strategists and has worked very closely with Angie on the PPC campaign.

So the way we’re going to work this one is Angela actually has prepared a presentation for us which I know you’re going to enjoy. Angie has gone through the presentation and has some comments she’ll be throwing in throughout the presentation, so you’ll hear both voices. First of all Angela, I just wanted to thank you very much for joining us here today.

Angela: Thanks for having me.

Bill: And Angie also, thank you for joining us.

Angie: Thanks Bill, it’s good to be here.

Bill: There, so now you’ve heard both their voices, so you know who is who. And they will offer to kind of walk through the whole process that YouSendIt has gone through. So without any further ado, bring your questions throughout this presentation, but right now let’s join Angela from YouSendIt. Angela?

Angela: Thanks Bill. So I realize that today is a little bit of an interesting topic, and I think it’s an interesting topic for a lot of us because a lot of us have been challenged with how we quantify and how we prove the value of SEM. So the thing that I want to run you through is just kind of the overall background of what happened at YouSendIt. What happened when I first came in, what was the strategy, how we leveraged segmentation and how we leveraged [lead nurturing 04:59] and then more importantly, how we measured each component of our SEM program to make sure that we could truly quantify what its impact was.

So before I get started I just want to give you guys a little bit of background on what YouSendIt is. We like to call ourselves the FedEx of the internet, and I know there’s some copyright infringements on that, but we provide file transfer. So if you’re a marketing person who needs to get artwork to your vendor to print, you might use it. If you’re someone in legal, you might use it to send some legal documents that need to be secure. And because of that, because of our diverse audience, we really have two different segments of people. We’ve got individual professionals who might need it for large file reasons or secure file reasons, or we might have some SMVs or enterprise who are looking at it more from a company-wide perspective for both large files or secure files. And then YouSendIt also has a free service which really allows us the opportunity to build our reach and get a lot of free users to expose them to what we can provide, and then you know, hopefully upgrade them to a premium subscription.

So with that, some of the issues that I had when I first came in, and keep in mind I’ve only been with YouSendIt for a little over a year, and this was one of the first things that my boss came to me and talked to me about. We were spending a lot of money on search engine marketing. A lot of people thought it just wasn’t working, there was nothing that we could truly measure in terms of N subscribers, and there seemed to be this perception that branded traffic was the only traffic we should buy. And I think ultimately that was because there was no real structure behind this campaign, and there was no formalized measurement.

So what we did was we turned off non-branded keywords, and we moved to branded traffic alone. And I took a look at that the minute that we did that, and in addition to the no-brainers – yes, I’m going to get less reduction, or less impressions, yes, I’m going to get less clicks – we actually saw a slight drop in conversion rate to leader-user from 15% to 10%, while we saw our conversion rate to a sale actually increase. But ultimately at the end of the day, we weren’t driving the same amount of bookings that we were driving before. And I think the nut of that is that with branded traffic, it’s a finite universe. There’s only so many people out there searching for your company. But one of the things that Angie and I found, and we proved it out twice – once through the moment that we actually turned off the non-branded keywords, and again when we reduced keywords in a specific bucket – we found that those keywords, and let me use an example, “[SQP 07:38]” was one of the buckets that we used, and it seemed like it was a non-performing category. But when we reduced the spend there, we saw the impact on branded traffic. And what we gleaned from that was that people were looking for a solution to [SQP], they were searching, they found us, they might not have converted right away, but came back and searched for YouSendIt. And it was driving more of the people who were ready to buy into branded traffic.

Angie: Yes, this is a discussion that I’ve had with a number of clients. There typically is a correlation between branded keywords and awareness or non-branded keywords, and it can be challenging to prove this dynamic, especially when there’s a lack of clarity around the tracking mechanisms. Certainly with YouSendIt we were seeing that one category influences the other dramatically, and this PPC strategy has been instrumental in capturing new customers and driving them further into the sales funnel.

Angela: So when people are approaching your SEM strategy, I think it’s important to really note the differences between the two. When it comes to a keyword strategy, what you are addressing is an audience of people who are looking for an answer to a problem. That is going to be the most expensive, it is going to give you the biggest amount of reach. But the reality is it’s going to cost more and it’s going to take a longer time to convert. But that’s important because it’s all about attracting that new customer. When you’re looking at branded traffic, it’s already about people who know you, of course it’s going to take less effort to convert them, but you’re really only converting existing customers. And I think at the end of the day, one of the things that YouSendIt quickly realized was that we wanted both.

You need to make sure that the program gives you the ROI that you need, but at the same time it needs to afford the business opportunity to grow, because this is about acquiring and customers. So one of the first slides – and these are literally slides I put up in front of our executive team – about aligning your strategy with your objectives. You really have to understand, and ask the question of those key people who are going to be influencers on how much you spend, “What is it that you want to do? Do you want to drive awareness, do you want to drive interest, or do you really want to catch people’s decision-making steps?” And if it’s awareness, you know that that’s really about keywords. This is not a group of people who necessarily know about you. If you’re about really trying to push them through the interest piece, then you want to make sure you’re there for both, because if they’re searching on a competitive solution or a topic like [SQP], you want to make sure that you’re front and centre. From a decision-making process, if they already know who they’re going to go with, that’s going to be really driven by branded keywords. That’s the opportunity to just remind them why it is they want to buy. But make sure you know which of these that you’re really focused on, and that you get alignment from people within your organization on which ones that they, that are important to them.

So to boil it down to what we really did at YouSendIt that I think was the most effective was that we focused our keywords around five segments. Branded was one of them, and then the other four segments are really centered around how people define the problem. Because you’ve got different audiences and different ways that people approach this problem. Some people consider it an [SQP] replacement, some see it as a large file solution, some see it as managed file transfer which is the [Gartner 11:00] category, and some see it as being able to send an email attachment. By segmenting those groups we could focus on how much we wanted to allocate and prioritize to each group as well as measuring each.