**by David Roth**
On the heels of launching Yahoo campaigns in three countries in eight
days on an incredibly tight timeline, it makes sense to take a small
step back and jot down a few thoughts about what went right, what went
wrong, and how to improve next time.
Going global with SEM
I think this phrase is misleading. It's not like you can take an
SEM (or any kind of) campaign and globalize it. Going global really
means going local in a dozen (or more) different markets. Sure, there
are some elements of the campaign that are universal, but the real
work lies in duplicating the franchise across a large number of
diverse markets without deviating from the core message.
To go in-house vs. outsource?
Outsource. Don't be a hero. Don't even think about running this
in-house. Unless you are an SEM agency promoting your own brand,
definitely look for outside help. Even then, you might want to
contract with an agency that specializes in this kind of work, as the
sheer volume of details can bog you down. Your existing SEM agency may
have the skills and experience to pull this off, but I wouldn't take
it for granted. This is not your father's SEM. If you are
considering using your existing agency, make sure they have case
studies ready to show you. If they don't, then don't force it.
Move on. There are a number of agencies that have the chops to pull
this off. Find them, interview them and pick one that you like,
because you'll be spending lots of time with these people, and it
gets pretty intense.
Budgeting
You need to look at your budgets in two different ways to make sense
of them. First, take a top-down approach. Find out what your total
media budgets are for the campaign and look at how they are
distributed by market. You'll probably have a big chunk of the media
being spent on the US, and smaller percentages in EU and emerging
markets. Take another metric that's representative of SEM budgets in
relation to other online (or offline) media. These days, you can use
40-50% as a placeholder for SEM as a proportion of total online media.
Now you have some budgets by market. Next, you want to take a
bottom-up approach. Once you've worked with your agency on basic
keyword lists, find avails for the list in each of your target
markets. Then run three scenarios based on share of voice (share of
search) in each of those markets. Now compare your bottom-up estimates
to your top-down approach and see how they line up. Hopefully they
intersect somewhere. If not, no big deal, you will either bump up
against the share of voice totals (if so, congratulations!) or will be
limited by overall budgets and will have to trim your share of voice
to fit the limited budget.
If you find yourself in the latter group, you'll be managing
trade-offs, so here is a tip. Break your reduced budgets down into
components like brand, product, etc. so you can spell these trade-offs
out clearly and explicitly to management.
Building it out
So here's how brand campaigns normally work for SEM. You've got a
brand message. In our case the brand message is "It's Y!ou." So
we have gobs of media out there—broadcast, radio, out of home,
online display, you name it. Like all good campaigns, we have
microsites and landing pages in all major markets that speak to this
message, that invite users in to interact with our brand and guide
them through the brand experience and the products that support the
brand promise. So how does SEM play into this? Simple.
First, write as many ads as your brand message (and associated web
assets) will support. Take your brand keywords (and misspellings!),
attach the new brand ads to them, and point them to your microsites,
landing pages, or whatever web assets you have to support your brand
message. Put your brand keywords in their own campaign, so you can
manage the budgets carefully (this is especially important for big
brands, as high search volume can eat through a ton of budget). Now,
build another keyword list of all the terms associated with the
message itself. There won't be too much search volume there, but
you'll want coverage on these terms to ensure if anyone (inside your
company or out) searched on these terms. Attach the same ads to these
keywords. If your have product offerings that support the brand
promise, you'll need to tailor some ads to these products. Make one
campaign for each product, again, so you can fine tune your budgets.
Asking permission vs. forgiveness
At some point you are going to need to get approvals for your
campaign builds. Depending on your organization, this could include
brand and product folks in a number of countries. That's a lot of
back-and-forth. So a couple notes here. First, have your agency build
approval templates that are easy to read. Second, review all the
campaigns first and weed out the obvious problems. Now comes the
tricky part. Depending on how highly-compressed your campaign is
(think leadtime), you may or may not be able to get everyone to
approve your builds before they go live. Don't panic. This is where
you can once again be thankful you are a search marketer. Go ahead and
launch if you have to. Once you're live, set up meetings with all
the stakeholders and bring them up to speed. Get their feedback, and
impress them with the speed with which you can make the necessary
changes to your ads and keywords.
That's all for now. Tune in next month when I'll write about
launching multiple campaigns in multiple markets, as well as measuring
success.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
David Roth <http://searchengineland.com/author/david-roth/>
is Director of Search Engine Marketing for Yahoo!, Inc.
<http://www.yahoo.com>
. The Industrial Strength
<http://searchengineland.com/lands/industrial-strength.php>
column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land
<http://searchengineland.com>
. <http://searchengineland.com/author/david-roth/>
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