Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Standards Are Coming

July 18, 2009 |

BEFORE I BEGIN I want to make it clear that I have no insider information about standards for Pay-Per-Click (PPC, paid search) advertising but I think there is a serious discussion about standards to consider.

I’ve often said that it is very important to look outside of your primary discipline to gain perspective and engage creativity to make what it is you do better. For me I often look to the quality (lean, six sigma) industry for process improvement and analysis ideas, the manufacturing industry to better understand tactical and strategic process and to behavioral sciences to gain insight into customer connection and change management. Within industry I also keep current on how paid search work in the bigger online marketing system along with SEO, email marketing, affiliate marketing comparison shopping engines display advertising, etc. This weekend I started reading Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond by Aaron Walter to better understand the how the function of develop feeds into the extended system of online marketing.

First of I’d just like to say that in reading Aarron Walter’s book, it’s clear he gets the importance of having the various disciplines like SEO, Information Architecture (IA) usability, developers etc., absolutely need to work together better. I have very strong opinions about the disconnect I see between these disciplines which I’ll vent about in a future post.

So I’ve thought about this before and it’s becoming more clear that, in time, standards for paid search programs will be required. Web developers have the W3C standards to follow for writing code and there are Section 508 accessibility standards to follow for disabled internet users. SEO has ’standards’ which are more like best practices that search engines look for when crawling a website in order to get the best understanding of what that website is about. And the reality is, as Aarron discusses, the better developers and SEO practitioners work together (early and often) when building a website using web standards and best practices the more findable that website becomes. When all of these standards work in unison the search engines typically reward you with better organic search results (PageRank, etc) which has the potential for a better return on investment.

So if all these other development and online marketing parts of the system why should we not expect the same for paid search? In a way we already have ’standards’ that if followed result in a better Quality Score when using Google’s AdWords platform. Quality Score is an indicator of how well organized for relevancy your account is. Some may not consider organization of campaigns> ad groups> keywords an important part of paid search because work arounds and classifications can be implemented when pulling data for analysis. I disagree and say standards for organization are desperately needed.

Imagine for a moment if Google, Yahoo! MSN and other paid search platforms crawled your accounts like a website is crawled for PageRank. Similar in trying to understand what a site is about, paid search crawlers would crawl your campaigns> ad groups and even ad creatives to understand what you are trying to advertise and give you a score, in addition to Quality Score, based on its findings. For example, if you are advertising laptop computers and you label your campaigns Campaign #1 or X01GTB, etc. and have ad groups and keyword sets that are even less descriptive or relevant it would make it nearly impossible for paid search account crawlers to understand what you are trying to advertise. It also makes managing a disorganized account more time consuming and that is a form of waste. I come across plenty of disorganized or illogical paid search accounts that typically require some form of re-work which is also another for of waste. There is no value added to a paid search program by wasting time or rebuilding campaigns for relevancy.

Of course, as I mentioned, Quality Score is an unofficial standard of sorts and you are rewarded for well organized and relevant accounts. What is needed is a core set of standards like web standards or ISO standards that are communicated and taught to all paid search advertisers. Ultimately having a formalized approach to paid search standards will eliminate the non-value added activities and leave more time for working on things like testing which has the potential for higher returns.

Following standards also has another potential result and that would be the ability for advertisers to make generate more revenue, leads, etc. at a lower cost. I guarantee you that there are more paid search advertisers doing it wrong which drives up cost for all advertisers. If standards for paid search are formalized the paid search platforms also have the potential to generate more revenue because lower costs will allow more advertisers into the game. Standards are an important part of the industry and its time paid search follow suit.

Comments

2 Comments so far

Alan Mitchell on July 22, 2009 10:47 pm
Nice idea, but won’t formalising standards remove creativity and freedom? As you say, Quality Score already rewards advertisers who have relevant ads and give users a great experience, so doesn’t that already provide a good enough benchmark for advertisers to strive towards?

Just like in offline marketing there is no ‘best’ way to create a TV commercial or run a PR campaign (which encourages freedom and new ways of thinking), I don’t think there should be one for PPC. I think Google (and other search engines) have got it right with the amount of restriction and guidelines they currently have in place and any more could be a hindrance for creativity.

Best-practices, on the other hand, I’m all for, but they shouldn’t be enforced by the search engines.
Matt LeVeque on July 23, 2009 6:30 pm
Alan -

Thanks for your comment. I think the opposite is true in that standardized work actually promotes creativity and forward thinking. For context, looking at paid search in a broader scope, wouldn’t it be more efficient if Google, Yahoo! and MSN’s platforms were all standard so there is less time spent on the extra work it takes to duplicate a campaign from Google into Yahoo? Also, at least here in the States, there are still plenty of advertisers that do not follow well known best practices like organization for relevancy which is why creating standard work is so important.

Also, standardization of processes is not meant to be restrictive - its just the opposite. Standardization eliminates the variation of a process like campaign structure design so less time is spent on re-work and more time is spent on the creative/innovation side of things.