Let's Talk PPC with Priscilla Victorin

Opening

AnDrae Jones: Well, hello out there to all you marketing professionals. Welcome to In My Expert’s Opinion, the podcast where we answer all your questions related to strategy, paid media, SEO and analytics. On this show, we're going to get to the bottom of all the questions that keep you guys up at night. And at the same time, give you a glimpse into how our team here at MKG approaches marketing. I'm your host, AnDrae’ Jones, with the totally made up title of CQA or Chief Question Asker. I've dubbed myself this because I'm going to show up every episode full of curiosity determined to get the answers to all the burning questions that you guys have when it comes to the world of digital marketing. But whenever you're faced with a challenge, the most logical thing to do is to ask an expert, someone who's been there, done that. So today the expert that I've brought to the show is Priscilla. Priscilla is our paid media expert. We call her P Money around here because all the paid media campaigns that she builds make money. So it’s a very fitting name. Together, P Money and I are going to demystify the world of marketing one question at a time.

Conversation

AnDrae Jones: Welcome to the show,Priscilla. I've got some questions for you. And I know that you got some answers. But let's start off by telling our audience who you are and why you're qualified to speak on such topics.

Priscilla Victorin: Well, thank you very much, AnDrae’. I’m Priscilla aka P Money. And I've dubbed myself “The Princess of PPC.” I come with over 15 years of digital marketing experience, including SEO, a little bit of link building and HTML and all that fun stuff. I've been doing Google paid ads since 2007. Gosh, I'm aging myself. And I've done mostly B2C, to be honest with you. This is my second position where I've done B2B. And I have to say, Google ads is my favorite marketing platform. I've been on it the longest, so maybe I just have a bias towards that. And yeah, I'm ready to receive some questions.

AnDrae Jones: Alright, so the questions that I have for you are questions that are related to paid media that we get from potential clients. A lot of them we get asked multiple times, so I figured it'd be good just to ask you. So we can put it out there and finally get some answers for everyone. So when it comes to paid media, how do you approach building out accounts?

Priscilla Victorin: Well, it depends on the client goal. But we do want to make sure that we have the architecture properly prepared and laid out. So once we know all the factors that we need, we have to frame it in terms of the best way to organize it and you know, roll out the strategy. So it depends on the channels we're using. It depends on the goal that the client has, and also depends on the budget and the audience retargeting. Some audiences are better in one channel versus another. And again, the budget is also a big factor. But targeting is one of the main components aside from message. And the keywords that we're going to use. If we're doing paid ads, or pay per click, which is the keywords. If we're doing LinkedIn, which is targeting based on the audience. We have to get all our ducks in a row. I like keyword research because it teaches me what will find the client and how we're going to find them. I use a bunch of different tools. In Google, there’s keyword planner, but there's also SEMrush. I've used SpyFu before. So we have different tools that we use to kind of make sure that we're targeting the right people, we know the ideal customer profile for the client, and then we can build it out accordingly.

AnDrae Jones: Okay, let's talk about MKG’s approach to building the architecture of the accounts with a specific focus on the cybersecurity vertical that we work heavily in. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Priscilla Victorin: Well, we will take into account the kind of cybersecurity because it's a very big space. So there's threat detection, there's cloud, there's all kinds of different ways to lay it out and categorize it and build it out. So let's say we have detection and response in a world of security. We have the typical cybersecurity keywords. We'll have that in its own bucket, and we'll have different keywords. And we'll kind of group them together in campaigns and then separate them out with negative keyword lists targeting audiences. And we'll look at what's worked and what hasn't. Again, we have the knowledge of how to either audit the current campaign, or use what we've had in our wheelhouse prior. We have a set standard of best practices to use. I'm not going to give away all the secrets because we don't do that here. And then we have to look at the goals. There's different bidding strategies for the different channels and different campaign types.

AnDrae Jones: What is your point of view on match types when it comes to search?

Priscilla Victorin: Oh, this is such a thorn in my side. Broad match modifier used to be the go to, but Google took it away because Google likes to be difficult. Essentially, what broad match modifier did was if you put a plus sign in front of like two or three keywords, those keywords had to be in a search query. So we're talking strictly Google and the Google search engine. If the user types in a search query with, you know, whatever keywords… But those three that you’re bidding on, if you had a plus sign in your platform, you would come up for that term. Or your ad would. They took that away. Broad match is what Google prefers because it's the most expensive. It’s the catch all. We don't want to do that because unless you have a really good, full extensive negative keyword list, it's a lot of wasted money. Because we do have that in place, we do tend to launch that. And also Google is getting better at machine learning. So their mechanism, their algorithm, they're taught to look for keywords that makes sense. So now broad match is kind of like what the previous phrase match was. And phrase match is kind of like another catch all. But whatever keyword you have in phrase, it has to be in that order for it to trigger the ad. Exact is not really exact anymore. It's kind of working like the way phrase used to. So again, if you have exact, it'll catch that. But it’ll also kind of give you close barriers, because Google will try to understand the intent and what you're trying to provide.

AnDrae Jones: Okay, perfect. The other question that we get is, How do you report on leads? For example, I had a potential client last week. They said that they had over 700 leads in Salesforce, but then they only see 150. What do you think that could be?

Priscilla Victorin: Well, okay. So no two platforms are going to provide the same number. Depending on how you qualify a lead, the platform conversion might not be the same as the CRM conversion or lead. So there's the MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), the Sales Qualified Lead. And we do have different buckets in terms of reporting. We can have the platform conversions. And we can set them up the way we need to, but sometimes the salesperson… Once we deliver you the conversion, whatever that conversion is defined as from the platform. After we send you that, your sales team has to nurture it. So you have to tell us whether it's a good lead or not. And if we connect to your CRM, we can also optimize and then target better for the next time. But we do report both. So we're able to report on the platform conversion as well as the lead once that's given back to us. So we do provide that info. But it's tricky, because if we have to connect to your CRM, it's kind of sensitive data. So we don't want to violate anybody's trust. It's cybersecurity so we have to make sure that we stay on our P's and Q's, but we can report on all lead types. It just takes a little explanation after the fact.

AnDrae Jones: Cool. Next question here that we got is can you run paid activity globally? EMEA, APAC, etc?

Priscilla Victorin: Yes, currently I do. Labeling, excel, macros, and budgeting. It's all a fun part of the mix. That's why I love what I do. You can label your budget and kind of slice it and dice it any way you like. So we have the exact budget for the exact location and the channel. I am currently doing three regions, which is North America, EMEA, and APAC for my clients. So I have labels in Google and we have campaign groups as well. So it's easy to organize and kind of take care of that particular region at a time. And then we have our own budgeting methods and formulas that we get to make sure that we're budgeting properly and pacing correctly.

AnDrae Jones: Okay, cool. Can you give me a little nugget of intelligence about branded search campaigns?

Priscilla Victorin: It's like my first go-to. My three first go-tos are branded, remarketing, and competitors. So if you have a branded campaign, keep all your branded stuff there. And then whatever other campaigns you have, whether it's non branded, a category, whatever. Make that brand, that exact brand term, a negative. So that your brand campaign is the only one catching your brand name, because it's the cheapest one to go. I know that people don't necessarily like to spend money on that, but for the most part, it’s not that expensive. And it tends to generate a lot of conversions at a very low cost. And you can also build out more words that way. You can have your brand and whatever the service you're offering is. It's a great way to get to the people that are looking for you at a much lower cost. And you can even have a different marketing ad for that.

AnDrae Jones: Perfect. Bot traffic…

Priscilla Victorin: Sorry, I forgot to mention to put a trademark. The trademark name, those little circles where you have the actual copyright or trademark. Put that in your ad also.

AnDrae Jones: We had a question about bot traffic here recently. How does MKG handle when bots are filling out forms?

Priscilla Victorin: We yell at the screen.

AnDrae Jones: Hahahaha

Priscilla Victorin: Honestly, it's an occupational hazard. There's ways to block it. Within the campaign itself, there's placement exclusions that we can put. There's a vendor we work with called Click Guard. They have IP Block lists for known spammy traffic. So we have those as well. You can also have your client put a CAPTCHA in the lead form, so that it kind of gets rid of whatever bot traffic that it can. It doesn't catch everything. And Google is getting better at blocking those out. And they also do their own fraud prevention, and they refund fraudulent clicks. But I think the best way to do it would be to make sure you add the CAPTCHA form if you're able to. And there are also a lot of known bad IP addresses and websites. So you can put those as replacement exclusions and IP exclusions.

AnDrae Jones: Perfect. Well, I think that's all my questions that I have for today. I do want to ask you is there any other nuggets that you can give us or anything that you're seeing trending right now that you'd want to speak on? Anything else to add?

Priscilla Victorin: Well, what I see trending right now is a lot of video and display media. So make your marketing advertisements or your paid ads, make them visually appealing. And don't make them too long because social media has made us really bad with attention span. Less than 15 seconds is my tip for the day.

Outro

AnDrae Jones: Well, that is the show for today everybody. Big thank you to Priscilla for showing up and showing us how you work your magic when it comes to paid media. Of course, I want to give a big shout out to all the marketing pros out here listening because without you guys P Money and I would just be sitting here talking to ourselves. So thank you guys for giving us an audience. But most importantly, if you’ve got any questions or comments or if you just want to say hi, I do invite you guys to drop us a line in the comments here. Shoot me a message on LinkedIn. That way we can get your questions included in the future shows here. Thank you guys for tuning in. And remember, stay curious, my friends.