What to Do if Your Client's Site Goes Down

Whether from an unexpected surge in traffic, malicious hackers, or hardware issues, it's an unavoidable fact that sometimes websites go offline. When your site goes down, it can be a nightmare - especially if you're spending money on digital ads that are driving traffic to a dead site.

If you've made it through a busy season without your site going down, congrats. Either way, there isn't a better time than now to prepare a contingency plan for the next time disaster strikes.

Step 1: Catching Issues

There are several ways to flag when your site goes offline. Your IT team is probably already leveraging them - but they may not think to let you know when an issue arises. Reach out to them and ask to add relevant emails to any site alert distribution lists. This could include an e-commerce director, agency contacts, and anyone else who controls advertising spend. Make sure they're also checking mobile and tablet versions of the site if you have unique versions.

Another way to catch outages is by listening via social. If a customer comes to your site and it doesn't load, her next destination will likely be your Facebook or Twitter page. Reach out to whoever manages those and have them alert you when someone reports a problem with the site.

If you want even more reassurance, there are a number of free or low-cost programs and websites that can help monitor your site. Some ping your site every few minutes and send a text alert to your cell phone in case of a problem; others help you identify whether an issue is widespread.

Step 2: Communication

Communication with the IT team is imperative when trying to find out why the site is down and how long it will be down.

It's important not to jump into action too quickly in case the issue is only a momentary hiccup. If the outage is a minor annoyance that will be quickly fixed, there's no need to rush around pausing campaigns.

In the event of a larger issue (or if the cause of the outage is unknown), the next step is to communicate with everyone managing your advertising spend. Start off with a phone call, since it will likely be seen before an email (especially if the outage happens on a weekend).

Follow up the call with a quick email to all relevant contacts to keep the whole team informed and to maintain a "paper trail" of action taken.

Step 3: Take Action

The following criteria is used to determine when it's time to start making calls and pausing ads:

The outage is projected to be extended (more than 30 minutes).You don't know how long the site will be down.You're unable to reach the IT team to get answers and the site has been down for more than 10 minutes.

If any of the above is true, it's time to take action.

Your first step should be to call and email display media vendors and let them know about the issue. Many are able to pause remarketing, behavioral targeting, or other network buys in the event of an emergency. While this type of service often isn't specified in contracts, most companies are happy to help out - it never hurts to ask.

Next up is paid search. Start by noting which paid search campaigns in both AdWords and Bing Ads are currently paused. This step is crucial - you don't want to follow up one crisis (website outage) with another (wrong campaigns accidentally turned back on once the site is back up!).

The easiest solution is to download a bulksheet of all active campaigns, for future reference. You could also leverage AdWords Labels to mark current campaign status. Once you've completed that important step, pause all currently live campaigns.

Another option is to use paid search to address your customers about the outage. Leave core trademark keywords running and load a new ad speaking to the issue and providing a customer service phone number. Make sure all other ads are paused. Note that this is a temporary solution, as your ads may eventually get disapproved for having a landing page that doesn't load.

If you have the IT resources, don't forget to address natural search, especially if the outage will be extended. The best way to avoid a loss in organic search rankings when a site is taken down temporarily is to set up a 503 HTTP status code. Unlike a 404 status code, which tells the search engines that the page has been removed permanently, a 503 status code tells both the search engines and users that the site/page is only down temporarily. The 503 status code is also able to tell both search engines and users when the site will be republished.

Make sure you've posted about the issue through your social media channels, and respond to any messages they leave.

Step 4: Up and Running Again

When the site comes back online, test loading repeatedly for several minutes to ensure it's back for good. Then reach back out to your IT contact to confirm that the issue is resolved - often the site will work temporarily while IT tests solutions.

Once you've confirmed the issue is resolved:

Contact your display media vendors and let them know it's safe to reactivate your campaigns.Reactivate all paid search campaigns paused in the above step. Make sure you don't activate any campaigns intentionally paused before the outage!If you executed the optional paid search step above, delete the temporary ads, unpause any ads you paused, and unpause any paused Sitelinks.If the issue was due to a malicious attack, make sure to add any relevant paid search negative keywords ("hacked," etc.).Remove any 503 status codes (SEO).Post updates on social channels.Monitor the site closely for the next 24 hours to ensure the issue doesn't return.

If the outage was extended, adjust media plans to reflect any necessary changes to budget plan or performance projections.

The most important piece of advice is to put together a plan ahead of time, and communicate it to all parties that will be affected by a site outage. Then when crisis strikes you'll be ready to respond in an organized manner.

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Where Is Search Heading? Check the Map

Nothing excites a crowd in the digital space quite like maps. Remarkably, after spending more than a decade in the search space, people are still awed by the visual evolution of a once-flat environment. Case in point - Apple announced earlier this week that the company was releasing its own 3D mapping capability and, in the process, removing Google as the default provider. This is news for two reasons. Obviously anything Apple does, especially if it has a material impact on a rival like Google, is going to be a story. Given the Android vs. iOS battle, it's only surprising that the move has taken this long.

The longer term piece is not breaking news as much as it's validation of many stories from the past year. Apple is clearly doubling down on the importance of local. On the heels of the Zagat integration and shift to the Google+ Local approach, the role local is going to play in determining brand viability and success cannot be understated. At the outset of 2012, GMS Local (a service of my company) research showed a surprising number of brands with significant local footprint under-investing in the local space.

For brands to be successful in search within a mobile-first world, there can be no greater priority than a well-curated local presence. Reviews, be it from Zagat or Yelp, will become a linchpin of business. A new onus will be put on businesses to empower in-store staff to solicit on-the-spot feedback via tablets vs. automated toll-free phone systems. Beyond reviews, the great visualization, and all other local elements, is a single item that strikes me as being the next great game-changer that people must consider when they think about search optimization in an Apple-centric world: Siri.

For years, the search industry has pontificated on what Apple search would and should look like. The answer was never going to materialize as 10 blue links, and I think we can now see that it, by and large, will not include many of the traditional elements we have come to think of as search. Apple is pushing "cards" of information off pins users have placed, or results for a given search, but that's a short-term position. Long term, the answer of discovery on Apple devices is spoken or possibly just understood based on proximity and preference.

Foursquare, a company I've long thought would look better inside Apple than as a standalone, is trying to move this way with its newest app upgrade. Search established the importance of consumer intent for brands. Now proximity and past behavior can be layered onto the equation, giving brands a greater opportunity for more relevant responses and consumer engagements. For brands to realize this they have to start asking the question of what assets are needed and how will they be organized in a Siri world?

Search has always been personal. Everyone suspects it's becoming more social, but maybe if you turn the map a different way you can see it become more about the moments that matter, and the places and brands that can help facilitate those moments.

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Why Facebook Search Will Make a Lot of Money...and Be Completely Ineffective

Inspiration for writing columns comes from many places. Sometimes it's from timely news surrounding companies or new research, and sometimes it's from something completely benign, like a horse head mask for sale on Amazon.

On Black Friday, one of the fine employees in the office posted that horse head mask on Facebook as his pick of the day for best deal online. As is the case with Facebook and inane items, a few people liked his post and a couple more commented - and suddenly it became a Facebook Sponsored Story being shared with his network. (You can tell he's a search expert by the witty pun in the copy.) In this model, Amazon is paying for the push of a horse head mask. I'm going to leave the ROI calculation of that alone for the moment.

Instead, let's think about how Facebook Search might evolve the model, generate a boatload of cash, and still be largely useless to consumers and brands.

Why Facebook Search?

Money. Next question.

Why Would Users Benefit From Facebook Search?

Think about the sheer volume of questions being asked by individuals on a daily basis to their Facebook network, and think about the potential of marrying that hand-raising with more informed responses. For example, you want guidance on the right car or diaper to buy, and your network, via association with brands, surfaces "liked" choices. Or you enter a query into the oft forgotten Facebook toolbar and it would return to you not only people and pages, but ads. There are forms of this already in play with Sponsored Stories, but the explicit association is the next step and could be beneficial to all…maybe.

What Prevents Facebook Search From Working?

There is a mindset around social search that suggests that your friends are highly influential to your decision-making. That's why you ask for their opinions in the first place. If you go to Facebook versus a comparison shopping engine for reviews, you are prioritizing your network over a network of random opinions. This is why Sponsored Stories include the friend that liked the horse head mask over a standard ad.

But, is your network better than a comparison audience? Facebook is built on the social graph of your friends. The wisdom of that crowd is skewed based on how they became "friends" in the Facebook sense. Most Facebook friends are high school, college, and work connections, which means they may not have opinions worth considering on many topics of interest to me. On a one-off basis, sure, but does knowing two of my friends like a car brand constitute an endorsement worthy of action?

Social search starts with that base, a social network. To steal a concept from Google, it's not a circle of enthusiasts around a given topic that I am searching for opinions from. Google works in no small part because it is able to algorithmically decipher what is most relevant based on my query. For Facebook Search to work it needs a much heavier dosage of interest graph or it needs to properly align with a true search engine that makes the basis of the process search, and then layers in seamlessly the social component it does so well today.

Anything else and it's a bit "cart before the horse," with brands and consumers in search of horse head masks and other queries to feel like the horse's rear instead.

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Why Your Online Marketing Department Is All Screwed Up

Most online marketing organizations are more siloed than a train ride through Kansas. Each silo - email, paid search, whatever - has a lead person that manages the people who get things done. These folks understand the technical platforms, workflows, and do the "heads-down" work necessary to get out emails, manage affiliates, run search campaigns, write for the website/blog/Facebook page, put up and manage data feeds, and so on.

In a nutshell, the current online marketing org looks like this:

At the top is the director or VP of online marketing, whose main job is to manage her lieutenants. Straightforward reporting, KPIs, and web analytics help evaluate each manager against goals and optimize each tactic.

Not every company has every silo, or every tactic, or every software platform, but the overall pattern holds true.

The good news? It works reasonably well, and has for a while now. To be honest, for about 10 years not much changed in the online marketing space. At least, not enough to warrant a major organization or strategic change.

The bad news? The nice, neat online marketing ecosystem that was pretty stable for years - complete with its analytics, roles, and responsibilities - has been blown to bits by mobile, social, and evolving user behavior and search algorithms.

Tectonic plates are shifting and the organization no longer matches the jobs that need to get done - and things are only going to get worse.

Illustrating the Problem - Search Engine Optimization

In search engine optimization (SEO), what used to be the bulk of SEO tactics are now only a small part of what is increasingly a cross-group exercise involving content marketing, social media work, API integration, and business development challenges. In fact, as many in the industry have pointed out, it's better to think in terms of "inbound marketing" as an umbrella concept that includes but is not limited to SEO.

It has become clear that search ranking algorithms are becoming so complex that the holistic methods needed to influence them are becoming near-impossible for some brands to implement. SEO recommendations now go way beyond on-page content and meta data to address the impact of social, mobile apps, local results and review sites, and the Knowledge Graph or semantic web effort to define and standardize information into machine-readable ways. These types of recommendations are beyond the ability of clients to execute.

Another Perspective - Web Analytics

The other poor silo most impacted by the changes wrought by social, mobile, and local is web analytics. The so-called "no-referrer," "no-keyword," and "dark social traffic" problems continue to grow. Brands are getting web visits that don't include much information about where they came from or what keyword they used. Visitors are coming from mobile apps, shortened URLs, and viral or social spaces that are non-media based and pass little information to the web analytics platform.

Adding to this is the common refrain that web analytics people face increasing complexity and role creep - they are being asked to do things they cannot or should not be doing: business analytics (BI/dashboards/predictive models), testing, marketing analytics, and competitive intelligence. That's in addition to traditional web analytics tasks and adds to the headaches caused by dark traffic and missing referrer data from the mobile/social/local revolution.

Putting it all together, users are finding and interacting with brands in a much wider range of digital places, and these contexts are harder to understand and influence. Meanwhile, existing roles and silos are under strain to cope with current complexity, much less get ahead of the environmental changes.

Given these two examples, let's assume the problem is real, it's accelerating, and it needs attention. Now.

Breaking Down the Problem

Essentially there are two components to be solved for:

The organizational issue related to reliance on the silo structure and tactic-driven roles.The change management issue related to dealing with the fact that emerging digital marketing tactics will continually challenge whatever organizational structure you settle on.

The Organizational Problem - Guiding Principles

First off, stop thinking silos and start thinking about keywords, content, and context. Think about whose job it is to live outside silos and think about ways of getting people to work together, to use emerging tactics, and to insure that content is optimized, keyword-focused, and wired or fed into every platform, application, and community.

In theory, the director of marketing might be expected to be doing this kind of thing, but they rarely do. They are too busy with budgeting, managing lieutenants, and getting major projects pushed through.

So the director of marketing needs help, and it needs to be from the right kind of person. But who? And what does this person do?

The Less-Screwed-Up Online Marketing Department Emerges

Call the new guy the "inbound marketing analyst" - the person who thinks of search, content, and social as a single process. In a perfect world, inbound marketing people are storytellers, content creators, and marketing manager types who understand the various silos and their platforms and love to work cross-group to make sure every keyword, campaign, post, event, and landing page is aligned, integrated, and search- and discovery-optimized.

If money is needed to "promote" content, then the inbound director works with the media team to get it done, but the focus is on holistic non-media (earned and owned) tactics that drive inbound results.

So the first step is to create an inbound analyst role - staff it up and give it resources and oversight over everything that's non-media and acquisition-minded.

The inbound analyst works with the rest of the marketing org and their various platforms in this sort of fashion:

The Second Problem - Dealing With the Pace of Change

The second and harder part of the problem to solve involves dealing with the accelerating pace of change. An inbound analyst role must be inherently evolving, and should be held accountable for knowing, understanding, and having strategies and tactics for environmental changes affecting the marketing org. This is the kind of person who has the fire and passion for knowing the latest digital trends and seeing the potential of new technology and new user behaviors.

The inbound analyst must be a change agent. They must continually bug people (in a good way) and get them interested and excited about creating that new API or doing that inbound-link-driving real-world event or live in-store performance (driving to a digital landing page and email capture of course).

How to Get There From Here

Smaller companies are already acting along these lines. They have content marketing people who do more than just write for the blog - they know about SEO, they host real-world local events, they understand analytics, and they know when to ask for paid media support.

Look for people like this in your org. If you don't have them, find them. Back in the day we used to have marketing managers who did it all - maybe we need to have them again. Groom these folks for senior roles; they will know everybody and know what tactics move the needle.

Don't Lose Your Experts

I recommend you don't pull people out of their existing silos and try to get them to do this new thing. Keep the experts where they are and find the right person who knows how to work cross-group, win friends, and influence people.

Big companies have management-training programs where high-potential people rotate through different roles to learn the business. This is the kind of person and professional development process marketing departments need to get going.

The Big Ending - Back at the Beginning

Now is the time to stop thinking SEO, media, content marketing, web analytics, and Facebook posts and start thinking holistically about inbound marketing that brings it all together.

Brands started simple - just a mark or a symbol that everyone could recognize. Then they got complex, and the job of managing them got complex along with them. Let's get back to basics and start thinking of brands and marketing tactics as integrated, simple, and holistic. Users look at brands holistically. Search engines look at brands holistically. Let's start managing them that way.

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YouTube Paid Advertising - a Beginner's Guide

Now that we have covered how to win the search game on YouTube through organic video search, video optimization, and video analytics, let's take a look at the world of paid media on this powerful video search engine.

Video viewing is up and continues to increase as people subscribe to YouTube channels and discover engaging content they enjoy. According to YouTube, over six billion hours of video are watched each month on the video search engine (up 50 percent over last year), and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

This presents enormous opportunity for brands to promote their goods and services to a worldwide audience through video advertising on the world's second largest search engine.

YouTube has a wide variety of advertising opportunities, and to my surprise, most brands are not fully aware of the different programs available. In this column we'll take a general look at the video search engine's TrueView platform, which offers a great deal of flexibility for advertisers and viewers.

Note: There are other advertising opportunities on YouTube that are not part of TrueView; for this column we are only looking at the TrueView program which, in my opinion, provides a superior experience for brands and viewers for different reasons.

Advertising via TrueView Offers Greater Flexibility and Reach

At its core TrueView is a pay-per-view model; advertisers pay for their video ad only when a viewer chooses to watch it.

Rather than pay for impressions, which are difficult to quantify (did they really see it?), advertisers pay for actual views, which also provides a wealth of YouTube analytics data to inform advertising strategy and ad placement.

TrueView ads offer tons of brand visibility because they are viewable not only on YouTube.com but also on YouTube's mobile, connected TV, and game console properties, the Google Video network, and embedded YouTube players.

Brands can use TrueView in three different ways, depending on budget and search marketing goals: in-stream, in-search, and in-display. It's possible to use them separately but combining them together creates a much larger, more powerful online video presence and stronger advertising effort.

Where does the user interact with the brand?Pre-roll on partner's YouTube videosBefore, during, or after partner's YouTube videosOn the brand's watch/channel pageOn the brand's watch/channel pageNext to partner YouTube videos

TrueView In-Stream

TrueView in-stream ads are similar to television commercials. As the name infers, in-stream ads are part of the video stream, before (pre-roll), during (mid-roll), or after (post-roll) the ad partner's video. However, unlike a television commercial, YouTube's in-stream advertising is a video search marketing tool that reaches a brand's target audience with greater precision due to the use of select keywords, interest targeting, and video optimization. This is a tremendous asset to advertisers.

Viewers may watch the entire ad, part of it, or skip it after at least five seconds of play. The advertiser pays only when at least 30 seconds or the entire ad is viewed (whichever is shorter). TrueView in-stream ads may be any length, which offer advertisers greater leeway in terms of creative format for their message (tutorial/how-to, infomercial, entertainment, interactive, etc.).

Why use TrueView in-stream ads?

Viewers have the option of watching or skipping the ad - this helps retain viewership of the selected video and reduces fall-off.Advertisers can maximize their ad budgets by delivering the right message to the right audience.No maximum ad length restrictions. Longer ads allow greater flexibility in terms of ad message format and message delivery.

In-stream for mobile. Mobile viewing makes up more than 25 percent of YouTube's global watch time, with more than one billion views a day. Therefore, advertisers cannot afford to omit mobile-specific ad campaigns in their YouTube media mix. In addition to the TrueView in-stream ads described above (pay-per-view), mobile advertisers may also choose two other in-stream options (which are also available for desktop):

Standard in-stream. These ads are not skippable and are limited in maximum length (up to 15 seconds or up to 30 seconds). They run pre-, mid-, or post-roll. Advertisers are charged when the video loads.Select in-stream. These ads play before the partner video. They can be up to 30 seconds long and viewers have the option to skip after five seconds. However, advertisers are charged no matter how long the viewing time.

TrueView In-Search

These online ads are where organic search, YouTube analytics, and video advertising converge. Brands can target their video ads as a search result by choosing search terms that appear in YouTube. Similar to a Google AdWords campaign, in-search ads appear in a special promoted section of the search results pages on YouTube and Google, above or to the right of regular results. Advertisers pay per actual view (charged only when the viewer chooses to watch the video), not per impression.

A call-to-action overlay is available to direct viewers to the brand's website, splash page, or other digital marketing asset.

When viewers click on your ad, it takes them to your YouTube channel, where they can subscribe and watch your other videos at no charge to you, the advertiser. You are paying for that initial view and if you provide viewers with relevant, engaging video content on your brand's channel, you will greatly enhance the value of that original cost-per-view. Therefore, high-quality, relevant video ads will give advertisers a strong ROI.

TrueView In-Display

These are videos that show up on search pages alongside other YouTube videos or on the Google Display Network that match your target audience. A click-through on the video ad directs viewers to your YouTube channel. As with in-search, you pay only when a viewer chooses to watch your video. Make sure your video ads are well-optimized to boost their in-display results.

The TrueView formats allow advertisers to target their messages by search terms and interest; drive more traffic to their brands' YouTube channels or their websites; enhance their online visibility, view counts, and signal greater brand relevance to Google and YouTube; help boost search results; and make this earned media search engine into a powerful place to put advertising dollars.

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12 Hidden Pitfalls in PPC Campaign Automation

In a previous column, I discussed how limiting your exposure to "small stressors" and trial-and-error testing can lead to corporate fragility. This can be what happens when you stop testing, and cede optimization activities to black box campaign automation tools that optimize to "results" without you, the analyst, gaining an understanding of how these results are generated.

Of course, there must be a role for automation in marketing, just as there is a role for grocery stores and drive-throughs in satisfying our daily nutritional requirements. I'm not suggesting you head into the woods with a hunting knife every time your stomach rumbles, any more than I would suggest you should make 5,000 bid adjustments daily, one at a time. But just as eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day by cruising through the drive-through in your comfy SUV could shorten your life, a completely automated approach to marketing will cause your analytical abilities and corporate capabilities to atrophy. Getting the mix right is important.

Campaign automation tools can have some serious pitfalls. If you perform a postmortem on an account that had one or more campaigns running using, for example, Google AdWords' "Conversion Optimizer" (hereafter referred to as "the system"), you may notice that the following serious flaws and strategic errors have crept into the mix. Whether you were aware of it or not, the following may have been happening in these campaigns:

Look deeply into Search Query Reports, especially if you've made significant use of the broad match type. CPA and volume targets may have been achieved only superficially, by means of aggressively cannibalizing "easy pickings" conversions from other campaigns; notably, on brand terms. By "easy pickings," I mean terms that you're already optimizing for and getting low CPAs on in their own dedicated ad groups; typically high-converting phrases like your brand terms. Pulling these into another campaign doesn't actually improve your account, it just assigns credit to the "system" for hitting targets you were already hitting.Even worse, if you didn't set up the campaign structure to separate display from search, the system might have experimented wildly and wasted significant funds in the display network, making up the difference with low-hanging fruit on the search side.The system tends to get a few well-priced conversions to even things out for the weird experiments, but doesn't aggressively pursue volume. So volume could be down by 15 percent, but since you were setting and forgetting you barely noticed the overall conservatism and lack of business dynamism in comparison with more agile and engaged competitors.New conventions and tacit knowledge around keyword optimization, keyword expansion, match type, etc. were never applied as the account was outdated and coasting. You stuck to a comfortable range of so-so performance on an outdated keyword set.The system knew which keywords to negative out, right? Usually. When it felt like it. Eventually. What a horrible waste to leave it to its own devices!You don't like to sit in ad position 1 or 1.1. Yet the system had no compunction about this. The resulting overspend was gravy to the publisher. Even better, if several advertisers ran automation at once without being mindful of ad position, they collectively bid CPCs up a few notches! By contrast, if most everyone had tried to stay out of position 1 most of the time and actively managed their accounts so that they didn't have too many position 1s in their account unless the return was sky-high on those keywords, the auction would have weakened and everyone would have enjoyed lower (and fairer) CPCs and better ROI.The system never aggressively pursued "goldmine" publisher partners by using managed placements when they were discovered, but instead judiciously fed you the odd conversion from such "plum" publishers here and there, and then kept right on watering down your success with too much of the weaker spray-and-pray inventory. Gotta be fair to all the advertisers, right? The system learns a lot in theory, but doesn't hand over all the fruits of the learning to you. :(Even if there wasn't a conservative bias to the bid calibration, you might find that the account only grew in line with industry growth or growth in search queries on this keyword universe. Given that competitors were actively tinkering and experimenting and becoming strengthened via trial and error (while aiming to hit CPA targets), you might well find that your account gradually got smaller…as did your market share.Nobody tested any ad creative for the time you ran things on autopilot. You've learned nothing on that front.The system ran a lot of the conversions through a limited set of (mostly broad-matched) keywords. You never got a feel for the true relative bids for different match types, many query avenues weren't tested hard enough, and you haven't learned much about user intent - but the owner of the system has.You haven't built a comprehensive, increasingly predictable response dataset asset for your company through trial and error…but by inducing hundreds of thousands of companies to allow multiple forms of black box automation to run amok in their accounts, and using those companies as guinea pigs, Google has now built a gargantuan asset of this type…which it needn't share with you.Sorry, but you weren't allowed to set bid factors by country or region (as is now available under Enhanced Campaigns). You trusted the system to get the right bids for China, Pakistan, and Ireland…eventually. Trust? No. Verify? You must.

The good news: even if you were a victim of most of the above, you're in way better shape than a company that relies primarily on SEO search query data in its analytics reports. If you pay for clicks, you still get lots of historical query data and lots of other great segments to optimize around, even when your strategy is passive or flawed.

Feel free to chime in with some of the things you may have encountered using automated tools.

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12 PPC Resolutions for 2013

2012 be a tough year for many pay-per-click (PPC) search marketers, a class of which you may be a member. Google and Bing have added additional functionality in both ad formats and targeting, and these new capabilities are likely to make your life more complex by making it more difficult to optimally prioritize your tactics and experiments. Mobile traffic (across both smartphones and tablets) is exploding and the emerging set of hybrid tablet/laptop/notebook machines is further confusing the marketplace.

In addition, every indication is that cost-per-clicks (CPCs) across the desktop/laptop segment, as well as the mobile segment of users, are starting to rise. The last couple of years saw a stabilization of laptop and desktop CPCs. This stabilization was driven to a great extent by new ad formats in Google AdWords that asymmetrically raised Quality Scores among the more aggressive advertisers, thus reducing their billed CPC or enabling them to achieve top position at a lower bid. PPC sitelinks and other extensions were the primary drivers of the increased click-through rate (CTR) (all other things being equal) and, therefore, the drops in CPCs.

Many of you benefited from this and experienced similar or better conversion rates, thus contributing extra profit to the bottom line, or - if the keywords you were bidding on were elastic (bid price increases resulted in position change) - an increase in position with an accompanying surge in profitable volume.

Most retailers running product listing ads (PLAs) advertising had a happy holiday despite the challenges associated with managing a separate PLA management system in tandem with AdWords. Advertisers who managed PLA effectively reaped the rewards and those who didn't handed customers to their competition.

As CPCs rise, as the traffic mix becomes more "mobile," and as new Ad Extensions are rolled out across Bing and Google AdWords, you may find it helpful to heed some 2013 PPC search advertising resolutions.

Quality Score, Quality Score, Quality Score! (These only count as one resolution.) I can't overstate the importance of high Quality Score on the success of a campaign, as well as its positive impact on the staying power for your campaign as the CPCs start to rise again. Top positions are easier to attain if your Quality Score is high, because the bids required to obtain the positions are lower.Consider using different KPIs for mobile campaigns. Mobile searchers, particularly those on smartphones, have different needs from desktop and laptop users. As a business, you should consider whether or not the same success metrics you use in your main campaign apply to mobile.Separate mobile campaigns. Regardless of whether you use separate campaign objectives for mobile vs. desktop, you still may want to separate out campaigns because:The winning ad copy may differ.If you don't have dynamic landing page creation capability, you may want to specify different mobile landing pages.Conversion rates and values will differ, necessitating different bidding strategies.Separate mobile landing pages. Tablets sometimes render your website fine and are navigable even for users with fat fingers. However, as the percentage of tablet traffic grows, a tablet-specific landing page may make sense, starting with those serving as landing pages for high-volume keywords. The smartphone user experience suffers even more from sites not optimized for their form factor and resolution. Also, consider the differing needs of mobile searchers.Know when to use separate targeting. Should you use hyper-geo-targeting to refine audiences, target by device, operating system, and carrier? Depending on the size of your campaign and the materiality of some of these segments, it may make sense to either clone an entire campaign or take specific high-value, high-opportunity portions of the campaign and use separate targeting.Know your ad extensions. Ad extensions are great for driving CTR and volume, but they aren't always warranted for every ad. Match your campaign objectives against the things that each ad extension delivers best.Thou shalt not have bad ad copy. The first thing the searcher sees in a regular PPC ad is your ad copy. Even in PLA ads, one has a bit of control over how your products are merchandized and you should use this control to provide the best messaging you can.Weed those ad groups; tune match types. Most ad groups have too many keywords in them. Take a look at the similarity of those keywords and decide whether or not to treat match type traffic differently for exact vs. broader match types.Wean yourself off DKI. Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can still be useful. However, Google recently announced some policy changes that make it clear that overuse of DKI is discouraged. Automated tools can augment, but never substitute for genuine human intelligence.Take a fresh look at landing pages. You've seen them in someone else's campaign as you surf around. Don't let your campaign suffer as well. Take a fresh look at landing pages. Start from your most popular landing pages (sometimes shared by more than one keyword) and work your way down.Look for volume first. Search your campaign analytics for opportunities to gain volume. Sometimes a high-opportunity keyword in a low position can afford a higher position with better ad copy or a better landing page.Consider adaptive design and personalization. If 2013 is a year in which a new website is being planned, consider adaptive design. Not only will adaptive design work well to tune user experience based on device, but it can also be effectively based on personalization.

Start the year off right but also be vigilant. Campaigns need TLC all year 'round. Search engine marketing (SEM) is not a "set-and-forget" advertising medium even if your campaign management software is killer.

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