Paid Search Value Added Flow Analysis & Time

December 27, 2008 |

AS SEARCH ENGINE marketing and paid search continues to grow and the industry continues to expand, its processes are becoming over complicated. With added keyword competition, endless updates to Google Quality Score & the desktop editor, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s increasingly archaic web app, and the improved cool-if-it-mattered MSN adCenter excel plug-in and their desktop editor, it becomes increasingly difficult to effectively manage the paid search suite of products in a way that consistently produces the desired results. Making search good and providing consistent up-and-to-the-right results takes time and when you add to the daily mix the countless blogs, twitters, stumbles and sphinns you read to keep yourself updated on paid search, affiliate marketing, SEO and other channels that impact your total marketing system you now have less time to focus on things that add value and that the customer really cares about.

So how can you become more time efficient and take time out of processes so your daily routine becomes more balanced with the things that add value for the customer so you can still keep up with all your twitter pals? One proven approach is performing a value added flow analysis of your processes to understand what value is and what waste is. The question here is how do you know what adds value? According to Ed Hay and John Guaspari in their video “Time: The Next Dimension of Quality” there are three basic questions you can ask to validate whether or not value is being added at each step of the process:

1. Does the customer care? If the customer doesn’t care then there is no point in proceeding with what ever it is you’ve planned.

2. Does the process step physically change the thing you are working on? If the thing, in this case say your Google AdWords campaign, does not physically change then everything you do up until you post new keywords, ad group or ad creative and it’s live is waste.

3. Is the thing you are doing completed right the first time? If you implement a task but it requires review before launching or rework because you’ve tagged the destination URL for Google when in fact you should have tagged it for Yahoo! then you are not adding value to the process.

By asking these questions it is possible to take as much as 75% of time out of any process. Taking time out of any process adds quality to the thing it is you do. Beyond that, taking time out of a process allows you the ability and flexibility to add value to your clients in ways you may not have even begun to imagine. It helps you to be more responsive, build better team collaboration and be more competitive. This is where the innovative ideas that promote sustainable growth that your customer is paying for come from. They are not paying for review, rework, revisions, approval, questioning and idle time – the roadblocks of innovation and growth.

Value Added Flow Analysis of Paid Search

Okay, so this all sounds good on paper (on screen?) but how do you do a value added flow analysis of a paid search process? The first thing you need to do is to get rid of the old mind set of ‘this is how it’s always been done’. Because people are busy does not mean the process is efficient. If nothing is happening to the thing in the process – it does not physically change, or it’s not done right the first time or the customer doesn’t even care about it you are wasting time. You need to change the way you think about a process or you’ll never perform at the level that keeps you competitive and your customer satisfied. Changing the mindset is the hard part.

The easy part is actually doing a value added flow analysis however you need to do it right or it’s not going to matter and you will be analyzing the process the wrong way. The trick to doing it right the first time is to do the value added flow analysis as the thing actually going through the process. If you do the analysis from your perspective you may have a biased view of the entire process. If you work on a team you may only truly understand your part of the process but since the thing going through the process is touched by many people it is better to do the analysis from the things point of view.

For example, say you’ve been tasked with adding a promotional campaign to your customer’s AdWords account. Think about all the steps involved to complete this one seemingly simple task. Consider everything from the initial meeting with the customer, to the internal discussions, to the layout of the campaign and it’s ad groups, the keyword research, the ad creative writing, the URL tagging, the bidding strategy all the way up to the launch of the campaign and ask yourself, as the thing going through the process, does the customer care? does the thing change? and was it done right the first time? As you do this and put time against each step you may begin to see a really ugly picture unfold. Typically 10-15% of all steps in a process actually adds value which translates into 1% of the time you are actually doing work that matters!

When all is said and done all of these steps I’ve mentioned will have multiple sub-steps most of which may be necessary, but do not add value to the process. The reality is of the multiple steps there are to adding a new campaign there are only two the customer should truly care about – taking their ‘order’ for the new campaign and launching the campaign in active status. The customer cares, the account physically changes - hopefully for the better, and the launch was completed right the first time. Everything else to them is non-value added.

Related Articles & Resources

Pay-Per-Click Management | It’s About Time

Time Is The Answer to “How” | Tracking Time for Paid Search

How to Manage Your Tim with an Online Business

Seven Wastes of Paid Search Marketing

Time: The Next Dimension of Quality DVD

Value Added Flow Analysis