Continued Client Education: PPC for EDU AARON NICHOLLS Senior Paid Search Manager

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CONTINUED CLIENT EDUCATION: PPC FOR EDU Continued Education goes for any type of client regardless of vertical, and it is always important to gauge the level of PPC understanding your client has at the beginning of an engagement. What our agency has encountered consistently in the For-Profit EDU sector is a severe lack of understanding of the PPC media channel, which results in micro-managed strategy that doesn’t make business sense and a never ending cycle of the same conversations. What we try to do in order to remedy these issues is regular PPC education. Once a quarter our team develops a deck that goes along with the Quarterly Business Review that actually dives into some SEM basics and allows us to have a conversation about recurring topics in an attempt to have more meaningful conversations about strategy and performance throughout the ensuing quarter. In this paper I’d like to dive into is some of the typical pain-points we run into in the hopes that it allows you to get out in front of these particular subjects as well as gets you to start thinking about other pain-points specific to your business that need to be addressed. • Rank vs Conversion • Leads for programs we don’t offer • Geo-Targeting • Account Wiki (Geos and FAQs) • Landing Pages & Testing

AD RANK VS CONVERSION A recurring theme with Campus Stakeholders is that they want to see their Ads in the first position for every query at all times. These stakeholders tend to think that they can improve popularity of their program through this tactic, but without identifying profitable keywords with data, this strategy is detrimental to the ultimate goal of a campus: students in classes. We have had problems getting past this issue but testing this unrealistic goal and reporting on the inevitable loss of conversion volume is a sure fire way to handle a passionate stakeholder. At the beginning of this conversation we always articulate that we are optimizing our campaigns to Conversion and not to Rank. We have found that while there are certainly incremental gains for some keywords when you attack rank, the terms that a campus wants to rank for do not always make sense. In such a competitive vertical it is irresponsible to attack rank above all, because we often exceed a $40 CPC and ranking first for an unprofitable keyword comes at the cost of conversion volume and enrollment volume.

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BELOW IS SOME OF THE LANGUAGE THAT WE TEND TO USE TO ARTICULATE THIS SITUATION BEFORE WE RUN THE TEST: Ad rank is not a true representation of account performance. We optimize to conversions (inquiries), not Ad Rank. Chasing Ad Rank is expensive and can be time consuming to manage. This results in other areas being neglected and monthly budgets pacing hot, causing us to overspend or go dark altogether. This tactic eventually comes at the cost of inquiry volume and enrollment volume. Battling for Ad Rank requires increased spending, and will require more budget to capture more queries and more rank.

LEADS FOR PROGRAMS WE DON’T OFFER This issue comes up from time to time, when a campus contacts a PPC lead and the prospect is looking for a program that the campus does not offer. Inevitably, the campus wants to know why we would promote such a program and we explain the following: Our account is structured to keep from targeting irrelevant queries, but when looking for new opportunities through broad-match keywords, this can happen. When we identify a recurring irrelevant query, we add it to our extensive set of Negative Keywords. If the campus has identified a specific program that does not make sense for them, our team can act on that information to include the appropriate

negative keywords. At the end of the day, our creative and our landing pages are very clear about what programs a campus offers, and if a user calls or submits a form for one of those programs but then asks for something different once contacted, there is little to be done to better qualify them. Explaining this dynamic to the campuses can be difficult, but typically adding all queries of concern to your negative keywords list tend to put their mind at ease. If the irrelevant leads continue to come in, the campus has to trust that you’ve done the best you can to eliminate them.

GEO-TARGETING Often times a campus believes to have an intimate knowledge of how far their students are willing to travel. This does not however mean that you should be targeting a 50mi radius unless you can justify this PPC spending with actual data of enrolled students. With our EDU clients we map enrollments on a quarterly basis to determine the areas that make the most sense to target. In general the campuses that we manage do not have the monthly budget to attack a 50mi radius, therefore

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we try to identify the zip-codes that generate enrollments and try to scale within these geos before expanding. I wrote a separate white paper about this topic called “Enrollment Mapping for Thoughtful Geo-Targeting” that discusses this topic in greater detail. I encourage you to check that out if this is something you are dealing with. ACCOUNT WIKI When managing a complex account, like those for school groups with 40+ ground locations, it is extremely valuable for all stakeholders to you develop a Wiki document to illustrate campaign settings and active creative. Our Wiki documents are separated by campus and include a

snapshot of Geo, Ad Creative, and Landing Page Creative. These documents save the SEM team a lot of time answering questions like “Hey, what is the geotargeting for the Dallas Campus?” Do everyone in the organization a favor a build a document that lives on your customer portal or even a PowerPoint that documents these types of settings for anyone to reference when a question comes in. This also goes for FAQs. Our account team sings our praises on a regular basis for our creation and upkeep of an in-depth Client-FAQs. Both the Account Wiki and Client FAQ documents are significant time savers and allow our SEM team to focus on optimization of their accounts.

Enrollment Map example

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LANDING PAGES & TESTING The Education vertical has a myriad of legal hoops to jump through and nowhere is that more apparent than with Landing Pages. It is of the utmost importance that every piece of creative goes through a detailed legal review at the brand level. When you are working on a school group with over 40 ground campuses and more than 35 degree types that is a massive amount of content, and can be extremely time consuming. This is an important issue to consider when building a timeline for a creative project. We find it extremely valuable to spend a lot of time on optimizing content and going through rounds of edits internally before sending along for legal review to reduce

back-and-forth as much as possible. Take the time to do it right the first time to ensure that you are not having to pause campaigns or delay any of your marketing efforts while legal approves you changing the Submit Button from “Request Info!” to “Let’s Go!”. Besides taking your time to submit large content edits all at once, we also like to do a massive creative audit in Q4 to road map any major edits or changes in preparation for the first of the year. Q1 is the biggest time of year in For-Profit EDU and therefore getting all of your big edits done in Q4 is very important to ensure that you are prepared to capture that “New Year’s Resolution” crowd.

Account Wiki example

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Another major part of Landing Pages is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). If your client is behind on PPC, then there is a good chance that CRO isn’t even in the equation. We have had to work very hard on securing buy-in for this effort, and Kayla Kurtz at Hanapin wrote a great paper called “6 Tactics to Plead Your Case for Conversion Rate Optimization” which I encourage everyone in this situation to read. One of the points that Kayla illustrates is exactly how we push for any new tactics

and especially CRO. Show analysis of the current page and present a plan of what you would test. We come ready to walk through the first 3-6 tests along with our high level philosophy of an “Ongoing Testing Environment” which tends to go over pretty well. Once you’ve secured buy-in and begin testing it is important to keep your stakeholders in the loop and always consider Legal Approval as a piece of your timeline for each test.

CONCLUSION These are just a few of the issues that we run up against and the ways we look to stay in front of our clients and focus on our day-to-day operations while providing a world-class level of service. We would love to hear about some of your stakeholder hardships and the tactics that you employ to keep everyone informed and bought into your strategy.

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