O, the agony of the summer game as we approach the dog days of the season.
And yet, we mustn’t turn away. Wisdom lies buried in the rhythms of the long 162-game season.
Jacques Barzun wrote in 1954: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules, and reality of the game.” I don’t really have a clue what he meant. But I put a lot of faith in parables. And I’ve learned a lot from the game of baseball, and people who write about it.
Moneyball is one of my favorite books. I didn’t see the movie.
Notably, one thing baseball and digital marketing have in common is that they massively lend themselves to statistical analysis. Related to that, both are increasingly concerned with unlocking the puzzle of attribution. “Wins Above Replacement” is a core stat in today’s sabermetrics, purporting to provide deep insight into a player’s value to the team. You can go back in time and compute a player’s career Wins Above Replacement. Yikes!
We don’t officially keep that stat for digital marketing professionals, but guess what? We’re thinking it. I don’t know about your shop, but here at Page Zero we’re not just looking for warm bodies. People won’t pay an awful lot for 100-level seats, parking, and hot dogs for just average performance.
In pro baseball, to the casual observer, wins and losses come seemingly at random.
Pitchers, especially, seem hard to fathom. But not so much to seasoned analysts. As the third warm body trots out from the depleted bullpen, fans already disgusted that their team has fallen behind by a run watch helplessly as the new pitcher nibbles at the corners, and misses, walking a batter, falling behind the next batter, who singles, and serving up a hanging breaking ball to the next. Turn around and blow a kiss to that long ball! You’re now down 7-3. If there’s a formula for losing, that’s it.
Make your pitch & get paid to win
In our industry, I’ve met a lot of job hopefuls and have audited a lot of seriously underperforming accounts. A failure to “throw fastballs for strikes” is often the reason behind the lack of employment advancement, and often the reason behind PPC account underperformance.
The problem is more widespread than just “how to prepare yourself for the job market if you’re young,” of course. In all walks of life, distraction is rampant.
In our industry, as far as most experienced folks are concerned, there are known and proven techniques to paying for clicks with a high probability to result in profit. There are also a lot of moving parts (levers, analysis, research) that can help you to achieve that goal.
What do so many account managers do with that obvious opportunity? They squander it.
Outside a core set of tactics that we can and should go to again and again, everything else is a facilitator at best, and distracting noise at worst. If you’re paid to run PPC accounts, are you being paid to amuse yourself, or are you – like the professional pitcher – being paid to win? To help your company or client companies grow and profit?
When I set out to write the world’s first book about ways of winning the Google AdWords (now Google Ads) auction with each and every impression and click (and in the aggregate, every day, month, and quarter, in order to grow your business using this highly measurable, unusually targeted advertising method), I wanted at least some of the advice to stand the test of time.
Based on reading in other fields, and given that Silicon Valley and global capitalism tend to figure out the market value of things at a breathtaking pace, I figured that our core tasks in “PPC” advertising were mainly of the “fastball for strikes, get ahead in the count” variety. If you’re going to buy a whole lot of little snippets of media exposure to prospective customers, the closer you could come to “making your pitch” each time (buying a click for the optimal price), the more profitable growth you could generate. You won’t do well if you’re bouncing pitches in the dirt or sailing them to the backstop. (OK, eventually these sports analogies do outlast their usefulness, but that spares you and me an extensive literature review.)
The absolute worst would be to completely forget what you’re there to do; say, go get a hot dog, talk about your crypto portfolio with the bat boy, or spend an inordinate time taking whiffs from the rosin bag.
Noise levels and forgetting to remember
After long observation, I’ve concluded that the digital marketing profession is heavy on rosin-sniffing. In accounts I’ve audited, I’ve witnessed stunningly poor prioritization more times than I care to mention.
Some practitioners bumble their way around and miss the logic of bidding or fail to understand how geo and other key settings work. Others self-destruct in spectacular fashion. Most buyers of ads may be intelligent or have some intelligent friends, but they aren’t buying their media intelligently.
Why?
Are they so busy throwing parties, or throwing shade on the socials, that they can’t manage to stand up there, toe the rubber, and throw fastballs and sharp sliders, mostly over the plate? Oh yes, that. And much more, potentially.
Normally, it’s ill-advised to answer open-ended, causal, or existential questions. But here goes.
The level of noise (media, ideas, career advice) in all of our lives has reached a fever pitch.
It’s always been hard to focus. I’m sure in days gone by, when my father was skiing, tying his own flies for fly fishing, enjoying concerts in Gatineau Park, picking out a good table wine, raising children, worrying about car repair and snow shoveling and making nice with the neighbours, it might have been a rich, full life that never went too far career-wise. Fortunately for him, there were some antidotes to that: membership in a profession, “going to the office,” a dedicated spouse, various means of compartmentalization, no social media, and very little TV.
For a couple of years, my Dad pursued his Master’s degree at night, after work. He got his exercise by skating from the office to the university (on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa – true story). What a cool Dad!
There is an antidote to perpetual distraction and lack of depth, and it’s been around for a long time. When you join a trade or profession, you belong to a society that prides itself on that very focus. In a future instalment, I’ll take a glance at the state of professional development in our industry. (Yes, part 50 is in front of you, but that’s not the end of the series. We’ve decided to up the ante. Another 50 parts to come 😊 ).
Today, the challenges to focus are exponentially greater than even Renaissance Man 1970’s Dad faced. Unless we recognize societal and career Attention Deficit Disorder for what it is, we may be unaware of the problem. The problem is massive, unless it’s addressed.
And in PPC, as one colleague just remarked, so many of our peers “forget to remember the bottom line.”
Yep, that’s career ADD in a nutshell. You’re so busy with “everything but,” that you “forget to remember.”
On pricing
In advertising, the market for clicks and impressions in a number of digital platforms is auction-based, so (a) pricing may fluctuate based on supply and demand; (b) pricing may edge up if the platform provider can build a premium into their pricing mechanism – easier to do if they are a large monopoly or part of a cartel.
A core element of what I’ve always wanted us to focus on in PPC is pricing. We need to understand the nature of the auction and how various ratios work. How much you’re paying for a click and why, how those clicks convert into leads and revenue, for example, and various related points about what your competitors are doing in the auction, how to improve your standing via solid keyword choices, good ad to keyword matching, solid campaign structure, Quality Score engineering vs. just bidding higher, and so on.
Today was a typical day at Page Zero in that regard.
A client wanted to know whether {Exotic Google Campaign Type Delta} is a good idea, because he’d read a favorable case study. As it turned out, it wasn’t working for most of our clients. But it was working well for one client in financial services. It was working as well as other campaign types and other channels. We were getting the right price for the outcome we wanted. In light of that, I have no blanket approval or condemnation to offer of that campaign type – just a thumbs-up that this strategy works in some cases.
That seems obvious, but I’ve seen accounts where that same campaign type was considered to be “just branding” or “was recommended by Google,” and therefore, ran indefinitely while overpaying for that mix of media by a factor of 5x.
On a side note, for the past week I’ve been optimizing accounts for a couple of colleagues who are on vacation. On one hand, any aspect of account management is on the table – I could edit or pause ads, add negative keywords, and so on and so forth. But a lot of what I work on comes down to bidding. That’s going to affect a high number of CPC’s in a wide range of auction situations. You can go ahead and give another speech about the future of media, about the folly of working on accounts in this manner, etc., if you like. If I see a way to impact the price we pay for the media we want, especially in a highly granular way, I’ll take it.
What not to do
By contrast, here are some examples of ways to distract yourself from focusing on the “fastballs in the zone” of core PPC account management:
- Creating an elaborate campaign structure that in your “signature style,” is sure to be nominated for the PPC Cannes Lion (if they ever award something like this);
- Thinking your primary role in life is to add negative keywords (how about figuring out the best keywords and match types first, and bidding them appropriately?);
- Testing small variations in ads in a trivial exercise in banality, as opposed to finding the big drivers of consumer response in ad tests;
- Having too much trouble with Google Ads? Focus on Microsoft Ads instead! It’s better! (No, it isn’t. It’s part of the mix, but focus on Google first.)
- Make long lists of other channels you could allocate funds to: TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapface, specific vertical websites, etc. (Note: niche strategies may be helpful in some niches. Facebook and Instagram, tied with Microsoft, constitute your #2 option in many cases. We see a lot of value in organic search, programmatic, email, etc. – but the point remains, core is core and past a certain point of return on time spent, other stuff is potentially more of a boondoggle.)
- Before joining our profession in a full time capacity, do a little bit of everything and never dive deep into any realm. (To be sure: I like interesting resumes and I think people can pivot to our profession from other fields. But at some point, the pivot must happen and evidence of some level of commitment to that pivot has to emerge.)
- When hiring and planning your small agency service roster, try to hire ten or twelve different types of people in equal numbers so you can provide ten or twelve different services.
- Change the daily budget setting often.
- Schedule meetings, and meetings about meetings.
- Learn how to hide your insecurities about job skills behind as many different third-party automation, bidding, workflow, collaboration, reporting, and other tools as possible. Create an elaborate dashboard; create an elaborate report; don’t optimize the account.
- Watch a podcast about chatbots.
- Try to sell your Aunt Mavis as an NFT.
- Discuss on forums, Twitter, reddit, etc. about how the “future” won’t have any “keywords.”
- Without consulting any Google Ads account data, make frequent, a priori statements about company positioning, “our” demographics, “our” seasonality, “our” geographic quirks, etc.
- If possible, schedule a series of meetings about “getting a feel for” the above. DO NOT SCREEN SHARE ANY DATA.
- At the agency, think about why your team isn’t doing what their team is doing. Redesign your website. Compete to get better speaking slots than your competitors do. Out-tweet, out-LinkedIn, and out-dress whoever you think “looks like a more successful agency.” Spend so much time faking it that you fail to grasp what making it even means.
- Embrace buzzwords and be easily embarrassed by conversations that go through processes in layman’s terms.
- Accept the use case for paid media in each and every situation as similar enough to every other situation that everything should be fine. If it isn’t fine, blame the ads and the landing pages and rewrite them until all the Quality Scores are 10. If they don’t get to 10, have some meetings with Google Reps to find out how to get to 10, if not 11.
- Never ask if the feed is optimized, just keep yo-yoing bids and daily budget around.
- Plunge so deep into the quirks and statistics relevant to a single vertical that you forget your specialty is online advertising and analytics efficiency in any context that requires it. Become obsessed with zoo real estate, self-driving street sweepers, or drainless bathtub technology that you lose all touch with reality.
- Say “there’s no way the client will let us measure that.” Instead, create a presentation about which of the Canadian chartered banks’ logo colours is likely to lead to eventual dominance in new customer acquisition no matter what the marketing team does.
- Add a raft of Audiences to Google Ads campaigns (especially “in-market,”) and inaccurately bid them up and down with no understanding of how they’re composed.
Plenty of marketing activities beyond core bidding, auction economics, and related levers are, of course, important. Collaboration, education, reporting, and research definitely funnel into successful account management. Competitor research can be helpful, until it isn’t.
Forget getting fancy
My point, though, is that core activities and best practices are being shunned on a regular basis in our industry. And I’m certainly not the only one who is shocked about the triumph of “getting fancy” and “keeping oneself amused” over “doing one’s core job well.” On Google Ads certification exams, quite a number of the questions are intended to head off “getting fancy” in favor of “just do your job.” (For example, in areas like how the PPC auction works, what kinds of paid media and which campaign types are appropriate to which client needs, and what sensible campaign structures look like.)
Despite the power of online advertising platforms, then, (I trust the past 49 parts of this series have been enough to illustrate some of that massive horsepower), so many practitioners, and so many businesses, are underachieving.
Why?
It’s because many don’t yet know how. Some never will. They aren’t well trained in anything in particular; quality experience is of course chicken-egg. But in many agency and in-house environments, the pressure is on to “do” – as opposed to “learn, then do.”
In hollowed-out organizations, top management and owners can’t mentor anybody. “You’ve got some education and experience – get to work!(You can probably learn what you need to know… somehow…)”
Job candidates we speak with increasingly reference “watching YouTube videos” as a way to learn about Google Ads features, and other digital marketing trends, when stumped. That isn’t inherently bad, but which videos? By whom?
One candidate replied: “This guy named Neil?” Oh… no……
There’s a mentorship gap in our industry. There’s a training gap in our industry.
There’s also a fear of specialization (understandable, when young people are in the “not sure of my career yet” phase). Knowing a little bit of everything seems like a hedge against picking the wrong thing.
You know what, though? At some point, in some profession, you have to plunge in. Nurses do. Pilots do. Professors of statistics do. Plumbers and architects and lawyers and pro golfers and pitchers do.
The vision thing
Unofficial as the designation may be in this case, ADD is a trap and a monopolizer and distorter of time, resources, and even conversations. Sure, we fall victim to it as well – no one is immune. For example, our virtual water cooler conversations are sometimes themed as “tech talks.” Tech talks inevitably ramble into speculation about what the “media landscape” might look like in the future, what the great, time-wasting masses will be doing with video games, virtual reality, the Internet of Things, etc. By definition, in certain forums, novelty is what the situation demands.
And don’t we always want to address that ever-fascinating, ever-evasive theme: “what is the future of media”? I say “evasive” because some folks make pondering this question their full-time job. And beware of engineers on podiums (especially, those who resent their tour of duty honing digital ad platforms). Their vision of the future includes “none of that dreaded advertising at all.” (But thanks for the money we made while it was still OK.)
On a related note, Facebook’s stock (META!) is trading at about half the multiple of its Big Tech peers. Perhaps because analysts and shareholders aren’t that keen to invest in one man’s ponderings about “the future of media.” They’d rather place their bets on the past, present, and future of media rolled into one. Especially the present. Like George H.W. Bush, Wall Street perhaps doesn’t get “the vision thing.” Perhaps that’s prudent.
Facebook’s ad revenues, especially in North America, are enormous. For the foreseeable future, despite a concerning decline in user growth and engagement, that’s enough for advertisers to focus on. Get good at buying that media – or stay good at it. But surely I should care more about figuring out how people will consume content ten years from now? Perhaps I should write the next piece about just that?
“Not gonna happen.”
I love water-cooler talk. But the right to spew BS and clown around needs to be earned through performance.
“The Blue Jays sure have a lot of fun. Look, Alejandro Kirk is wearing the home run jacket again!” Yes, and Alejandro Kirk is the best starting catcher in baseball in every offensive category, and is going to the All-Star game!
Get good. Then have fun.
Did you hear the news? This series is complete, but I yearn to continue. On no particular timetable, but aiming for SOPPC 100, I’ll continue to publish articles on specific aspects of the science (and art, and culture) of PPC. To be notified of key developments, such as a “pro tips” e-book I’m working on (distilled carefully from the rambly pieces published here), do sign up for our email list, if you haven’t already. You can subscribe for updates below. Communication will be respectful and infrequent, and of course your privacy is respected.
