10 Years of Bidding, 10 Lessons Learned: Large Enterprise Advertisers Ian Lopuch Vice President, Customer Acquisition, eHealth #SMX | @ianlopuch

Ian Lopuch: About Me •  10 years of digital marketing experience •  $200 MM+ career spend •  Bidding, Bid Technology Enthusiast

§  Experience with manual bidding, building bidding platforms/technologies, leveraging enterprise-level bid management systems

•  Stanford Computer Science Major

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Lesson #1: Traditional CPA-Based Bidding Is Bad

•  What about the lifetime value of your customers? §  Will they come back and buy

more in a month?

•  What about attach rate? §  Did they purchase multiple

products?

•  What about relative value of different products? §  Did they buy the $100 product

or $200 product?

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•  CPA limits your ability to optimize. It may have worked in the past, but is unlikely to work as well going forward as competition increases.

Not this kind of CPA!

Lesson #2: Traditional CPL-Based Bidding Is Worse

•  CPA misses the full picture, CPL misses even more.

•  Not all leads are created equally.

•  If your business requires a long, offline sales process, build a quality based feedback loop into your CPL-based bidding. §  With aggressive account

segmentation, leverage a multiplier-based feedback loop.

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Quantity Does Not Equal Quality

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Lesson #3: Modern CPA and CPL-Based Bidding (With Aggressive Feedback Loops) Works

•  Have granular tracking in place.

•  Track conversions on your back end, and consistently score their effectiveness.

•  Pass feedback into your bidding in the form of a multiplier, differentiating keywords based on the true value of the conversions (or leads).

•  This solution is an approximation of revenue-based bidding.

The Faster The Loop The Better

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Lesson #4: Great Account Structure & Segmentation Makes Your Bidding Excel

•  Before you even start bidding, invest in a solid account structure.

•  Segment wherever possible. §  Geo, network (search vs.

syndication), match type, keyword theme, device

•  Incorporate differences in conversion rates and back end performance (see prior feedback loop tip) when bidding.

Quality Foundation & Framing, The Basis For A Strong House

Lesson #5: Revenue-Based Bidding Is The Future

•  Why are we here? What do we do as digital marketers?

•  We acquire, retain, and develop customers.

•  Ultimately, we drive revenue with the lowest possible cost.

•  Find a way to incorporate revenue into your bidding on a keyword level. Incorporate current revenue and future projected revenue discounted to present value.

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Skyrocket Your Bidding Into The Future With Revenue Integration

Lesson #6: Buy A World-Class Bidding Platform

•  On an enterprise level, it’s really expensive/problematic to bid manually.

•  Building your own platform requires huge overhead, and you’ll become obsolete.

•  How do you keep up with the future, such as revenue-based bidding, with lowest possible investment?

•  Leverage the world-class bid management platforms.

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Let Your Platform Do The Heavy Lifting

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Lesson #7: Think About The Entire Stack; Search Bidding Cannot Be A Silo

•  The market is competitive, and will consistently get more competitive.

•  Search technology is not a standalone application anymore. §  What about integration with your

website analytics, retargeting, and email?

•  Digital marketing is multi-channel and fluid, the stack creates value and drives conversions.. §  Search is expensive; the stack

optimizes media yield. The Future of Digital Marketing Technology, The Stack

Lesson #8: No Sales Yet? Leverage Your Data Layer

•  Your analytics platform has so much data. §  Time on site, pages viewed,

shopping cart full, checkout process started, for example.

•  How do you bid keywords that haven’t driven sales revenue yet? Those incremental touch points (yes, even leads) add value to your bidding strategy. §  Just scale down credit given to

intermediate steps and limit exposure.

•  Great technology stacks make this easy.

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There’s Immense Bidding Value In Your Data Layer

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Lesson #9: Search Clicks Provide Some of the Best Value Around

•  Search clicks are incredibly valuable.

•  If you just look at last click attribution, you are missing half the value of Search and will bid too low.

•  Have a great attribution strategy in place to give value to those assisting conversions. §  Quick hack: Have your conversion

pixels loading persistently.

Search Clicks Are Pure Gold

Lesson #10: Avoid Competing With Yourself

•  Search bidding drives incredible brand awareness and long-term residual value.

•  Large company with partnership deals?

•  Coordinate with your business development and affiliate teams. Don’t get into a situation where you’re competing with yourself.

•  Internal campaigns are always better.

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Don’t Compete With Yourself!

Bonus Lesson #11: Be Careful, Things Can Go Wrong

•  Enterprise-level digital marketing is a high stakes game.

•  Bid and budget changes create risk.

•  Have the right safety precautions in place. §  Test plans, rollback plans, 24/7

monitoring, conservative budgets, avoid testing during seasonal peaks, only work with trusted platforms, give out your API key very sparingly.

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Avoid Bidding Mistakes, Be Careful

Thank you!

• Questions?

•  Contact me: §  @ianlopuch §  ian.lopuch@ehealth.com

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