It’s been a while since my last taste of snowy alpine goodness and even longer since my last post on Connect and so thought I would get myself back in the swing of things with a post combining two of my favourite endeavours; snowboarding and paid search.

Now, I appreciate that to some people the connection might not be immediately apparent, and others may even think it tenuous, but bear with me and all will become clear.  And if, like me, you very much like paid search and snowboarding, then you’re in for a treat!

Now, without further ado…5 ways in which you can use snowboarding best practice to improve your PPC ROI:

1. Check your bindings are secure before you launch  /  do your pre-campaign checks

When you’re barrelling down a mountain and carving a track through a group of unsuspecting skiers, the last thing you want to do is look down and realise that the binding which is keeping you bound to your snowboard is flapping loose, causing you to lose concentration and your edge and face plant into a drift of snow.   Such a calamity can be avoided by taking the time at the top of the mountain to ensure that all those vital straps are tight and secure before you set off.

For paid search, it’s no understatement to say that the set up is the single most important time of a campaign and as such there are commensurately many checks to go through before you go live and start spending the big bucks which will help you avoid an ROI related disaster.   My top 5 easy pre-launch checks are:

• Do a test purchase to check that the tracking has been installed correctly and ensure that all URLs are appended or encoded correctly.
• Double check all destination URLs are the best match for their respective keyword to ensure maximum relevance
• Ensure all the language and geography targeting settings are as per your campaign specification and not Adwords’ Editor’s default
• Spell check your ad copy (nothing looks shoddier than ads which contain typos)
• Ensure you split out the Google’s content network into a separate campaign for evaluation in isolation to the search network

2. Allow your board to run flat before initiating a new turn  /  allow a new strategy chance to build up data before changing tack

To successfully initiate a turn when snowboarding it’s imperative to first allow your board to run flat and true down the fall line of the mountain.    Failure to do this will pretty much guarantee that you catch an edge and slam face first into the snow.

The consequences of failing to hold your nerve when making a change to your paid search campaign trajectory are less snowy than when riding, but if you don’t allow a new strategy to unfold and garner some results, you will never truly develop insight and learning.   This is point is pertinent because many people try to be creative and decide make a campaign change only to completely reverse it at the first sign of poor results.   Yeah, some new strategies start flying right away but most take evolution, tweaks and refinement – none which is possible if you don’t allow a new tactic to accrue enough data to make statistically valid decision on whether or not to can it.

3. Hit the mountain early after a dump to get fresh tracks  /  keep an eye out for tactical paid search opportunities

To snowboard is to ride miles of deep virgin powder; truly there are few better experiences in life.  However to do this so usually requires commitment and an early rise.

In paid search there is also a payoff for the proverbial early bird in catching the worm of a breaking news story and thus benefiting from first mover advantage and deliciously low CPCs.   That’s right, for the fast-thinking, committed and agile paid search manager a breaking news story represents an opportunity to capture new search volume at rock bottom CPCs.  The catch is of course that not every news story is going to be applicable for your business to piggyback on, nor does a single news story comprise a long term strategy, but the more you do this and think about the opportunities that come along then you’ll be surprised at the chances that present themselves.

4. Start your rotations small and build from there  /  build paid search success from a small and manageable base

Let’s face it, if you look to start your snowboarding trick repertoire by mastering the tomahawk ^[1] it’s going to hurt.    The same principle applies for a successful paid search approach;  you simply must start from a solid base and progressively build to a huge ROI.

A few common mistakes when starting out a new paid search campaign which relate to a pursuit of quantity over quality which you should avoid include:

• Building out keywords list out to an unmanageable and irrelevant degree through a lack of thinking and a surfeit of permutation (thus hampering subsequent optimisation and development)
• Adding broad match keywords on a wholesale basis to an account without sufficient effort put into phrase and exact match combinations
• Making an initial tracking specification so complex that it leads to confusion, delays and errors in installation (initially it might be sufficient to focus only on tracking conversion events)
• Splitting a limited budget between too many search engines such that you dilute optimisation efforts and are unable to achieve market penetration in any one area (where budgets are limited it usually better to get one area performing well first and roll out incremental coverage).

5. Check your speed in flat light conditions

In snowboarding flat light means essentially that you can’t really see where you are going; and of course this greatly increases the chance of your mush hitting the piste (are you noticing a pattern here?)  The simple solution is to take things just that little bit slower and accept that ‘low viz’ might take a touch off your top speed.

The equivalent of flat light in paid search would be a poorly configured or non-existent (!) tracking mechanism.  Thankfully the days of non-existent campaign tracking are all but over (although it does happen – you know who you are!) but more frequent are those occasions when developers “didn’t realise that code should be there” or “Jim in IT says it’s going to have to wait until the next release schedule to get this installed” – which is inconvenient to say the least.   Such occasions are a fact of life and my advice at these times is usually the same: employ the concept of prudence.   If you can hold off a campaign launch until the tracking is installed and you can “see” what you’re doing, then do so.  Similarly, wait on rolling out that big budget increase until that small but crucial bit of code is resident on your site so you can actually analyse the effectiveness of the increased expenditure; you will thank me for doing so, later.

So, there you have it – how snowboarding can improve your paid search.   Next week, how ballroom dancing can turbo-charge your SEO…

Image Credit: by rhys logan ^[2]