This work by Matt LeVeque is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Nov
7
Time is the Answer to “How” | Tracking Time for Paid Search
November 7, 2008 |
Quality is the answer to What. Customer is the answer to Why. Time is the answer to How - It’s About Time: A Fable About the Next Dimension of Quality
CONTINUING THE DISCUSSION about making paid search profitable I wanted to stress the point about time and it’s role in the process. As the quote about states, time is the answer to how to make search or any job function profitable and increase customer satisfaction.
Time, or more precisely, the amount of time it takes you to perform any task is directly related to quality. Quality in this case is related to both the actual quality of your work (the value it provides) and its perceived quality. The perceived quality maybe more important because this ties directly into how your clients view the speed in which you can turn-around requests. Your work may not be any better or worse than the competition, but if competitors can pull together a paid search strategy or build a new paid search campaign for a last minute promotion fast than you can, their quality of work is better from the client perspective.
Time Tracking for Paid Search
At Commerce360 we have adopted the Agile use of a kanban board to plan our month long sprints and estimate the amount of time it will take to complete each task. Tasks are then prioritized by their effectiveness to meet the client goals for each month. To make planning and the kanban board useful it is critical to accurately track the time it takes to do anything from keyword research and ad creative writing to account reviews and building dashboards. For example, we estimate that it should take about 1.5 hours per week to generate a client dashboard either through AdWords, Google Analytics or Omniture’s SearchCenter and to provide high level analysis. The weekly dashboard time is subtracted from the total time we have allocated each month for each client. If for whatever reason it takes longer, say 4 hours to generate the dashboard because third party excel tools fail to work over and over again…, that is 2.5 hours less time we have to do work that actually adds value towards the client goals.
In most cases we do not penalize the client because it took longer to update the dashboard - we still complete the planned tasks (and more), but we are less profitable for it. And again, the idea of planning these tasks, estimating the time and tracking time accordingly is to ensure we are not only profitable, but that we are also providing a quality service.
In order to track time, in some industries, a simple stop watch is the tool of choice. In this industry where our laptop’s, pc’s and macbook’s are our tools, something a little more 2.0 makes more sense. I recently came across a link of web-based time tracking resources by the Chris Tingom and the guys at Track the Time and Brain Fuel and I am testing the RescueTime application they recommend. From their website
RescueTime is a web-based time-management tool that allows you to easily understand how you spend your time. One of the coolest things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. You install a doohicky on your computer and we magically track all of your time usage.
I just started using RescueTime this week so once I have some data to report I’ll be sure to share it with you.
It has been interesting to see how much of my time has been spent using my daily selection of tools like Excel, Outlook, adwords.google.com, AdWords desktop editor, etc., but this information is somewhat limited in that i cannot tie this back directly to each client I am responsible for. One thing that would be extremely useful would be to have a time tracking feature built directly into the web apps for Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search, MSN adCenter and all the other analytics applications, even Omniture… so that time can be more accurately charged to each client. At least the time spent using those applications for each client would be more accurately accounted for. Christmas is almost here - maybe Santa can make my wish come true.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Comments
2 Comments so far
Hi there! Thanks for leaving a few links to Track The Time and BrainFuel in your post!
I agree, Rescue Time is really cool. I’m using it currently and it tells me I spend most of my time in Photoshop!
[...] Time is the Answer to “How” | Tracking Time for Paid Search [...]