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What makes a great SEM? I’ve heard a lot of answers to that question since starting at PPC Associates in August, and I think the most common ones are, in some order: dedication to the client; a balance of attention to detail with a strong prioritization system; the ability/desire to learn quickly; math/statistics skills; and creativity.

Here’s the one I rarely hear but that permeates every minute of an SEM’s career: competitiveness.

It’s wanting not to just meet goals but to beat the crap out of them (which has the fundamental effect of delighting the client). It’s the thrill of watching your ads creep (profitably) up the ranks. It’s the satisfaction of seeing CTR improve thanks to new ads you just created. It’s even in the complexity of attribution (that click did work!) and in the hunt of retargeting.

Yup, we’re in it for our clients, and that will always be the primary driving force. But the fire in the belly to do a job well, to claw past competitors and beat targets — that’s not far behind. Which, since some clients come and go, has to be the backbone of great SEM. It keeps us fresh and it keeps things fun (even our company’s fun stuff, like the very heavily used ping-pong room and fantasy football leagues and the Fitbit ROI Challenge, are all about competition). It’s also evidenced by the fact that we have a decent proportion of former college athletes in our ranks.

Image credit: popularadvise.com

And, I think, it’s why Monday mornings aren’t mopey around here. There’s adrenaline in the air, a little sizzle of buckling back in for the week (don’t worry, clients — we do plenty of weekend work) and taking the controls.

While I don’t do much SEM work in my job, I can say the energy is contagious. It makes me want to come in on Mondays, to figure out what we’re doing this week that’s cool and worthy of trumpeting (and tweeting) to the masses. What kind of stature our clients are getting that leads to a series of behind-the-scenes high fives.

As our CEO, David Rodnitzky, likes to say, TGIM. And have a great week, everyone!

- Hillary Read, Marketing Manager

“A discovery that took me quite a while to understand is that your productivity doesn’t come in hours. It comes with the energy you have every day.”  Leo Widrich, co-founder, Buffer

Breathe in, breathe out, improve accounts...

Inspired by our Company Fitbit Challenge and this very important, revealing post, “The Importance of Sleep in a Startup,” I’ve decided to share my sleep /exercise routine with the world.

Apart from nights out at rock concerts and the like, I’m usually in bed by 9:30pm. I’m usually up by 4:30 AM. In other words, I get a minimum of seven hours of sleep each night.

Every day, I do at least one hour of cardio exercise at the gym (elliptical, treadmill, or a combination of both). Two or three times a week, I do weights for about 20 minutes. An “off” day for me is an hour-long outdoor walk.

I do my workouts in the morning before I begin my workday, so although I am reading through my feeds & answering email while I’m drinking my coffee prior to heading to the gym, I don’t officially “work out” for my clients until I’ve “worked out” for myself. I start my day at roughly 8:30am, and other than a short lunch break, I work pretty much “straight through” until dinner time. Once dinner is done, I do check my email and respond to urgent issues, but otherwise, I’m off the computer for the entire evening.

My work style is a definite contrast to people who say they work 70+ hour weeks and get by on 4-5 hours of sleep each night. Some people even brag about doing this.

I say that those folks are idiots and they are doing a disservice to both themselves and their clients.

The main differentiator between an excellent paid search account manager and an ordinary one are their insights and intuition. A person needs his/her full allotment of sleep, exercise, and nutrition in order for the brain to work at an optimum level to glean the sorts of nuggets that will allow clients to achieve maximum ROI. Furthermore, a disciplined person working at peak mental condition who knows that they are going to work a “normal hour” work day is forced to work at an optimal level of efficiency in order to achieve maximum productivity. When the mind is sharp, that’s easy to do.

There are occasional days that I’m forced to work on “short rest.” When this happens, I go out of my way to avoid any mission-critical tasks for my clients and just focus on busy work. On these days, I’m working with “impaired judgment” (as if I’ve had a couple drinks), and with the well-being of my client’s businesses at stake, I do not make campaign-critical decisions until I am well-rested.

The other interesting nugget about my work routine that I can share is that very few of my high-level PPC insights occur during the work day while I’m at the computer. Almost all of them occur either at the gym, while driving, or while watching television (particularly while watching movies, but never while watching sports). Even if my body is working normal-length work days, my mind is working 24-7 for my clients.

In closing, if I were slaving away at my computer for 70+ hours a week, I would be a very unexceptional, perfunctory account manager unable to offer clients the “value add” that our agency prides itself on. With plenty of sleep and exercise, my mind and my insights are razor-sharp, and my clients get all that benefit.

P.S.:  Here’s a healthy, energy workday concoction that works well for me.

- Todd Mintz, Senior SEM Manager

Last week at Search Insider Summit (SIS) in Captiva, Florida, I was fortunate to host a roundtable discussion on integrated marketing. SIS is truly a high-brow event where brands send senior marketers and agencies send their CEOs, and this roundtable was no exception; I would hazard a guess that no less than one billion dollars in annual online spend was represented by the 20 or so people sitting around the table (brands like Zappos, Target, and Virgin America, for example).

As the discussion heated up, there was little debate about whether integrated marketing – that is, a unified approach to paid search, display, mobile, video, tablets, email, SEO, and social – was a good strategy, but there was plenty of debate on how to actually attribute value to different parts of an increasingly complex conversion funnel.

Keep in mind, these are some of the smartest minds in online marketing with some of the biggest budgets and vastest arrays of technology and human resources to interpret data. Most if not all of the people around the table had built their own data warehouses, engineered custom attribution algorithms, purchased best-of-breed business intelligence and Web analytics, and invested in robust Hadoop “big data” solutions to quickly harness gobs of data.

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And this is where things got a bit ironic: the more data these companies had access to, the more difficult it became to be confident about the data. When your only option for measuring conversions is a “last click” javascript pixel, you go with what you have and put a stake in the ground. When you can start to play with “first click,” “last click preferred,” or “linear” attribution models, suddenly you have to justify your decision, and you are always questioning whether your decision was the right one.

When different marketing channels are all siloed in a company, every channel only worries about its own performance. In an integrated marketing scenario, suddenly everyone has to agree on who gets credit for what, and once the marketing departments agree, you then have to convince C-level executives that everything they once knew about marketing measurement is now wrong (to that end, one company said that they just stuck to last-click attribution – even though they knew it wasn’t correct – because it was just too hard to try to convince the CEO of a new model).

In other words, the more data we have access to, the more tough decisions we have to make, the more political battles we have to fight, and the more angst we have to handle about whether our interpretation of the data is even correct to begin with. As one person in the group put it, the message to marketers who don’t yet have the privilege of having so much data is: it gets worse.

Ultimately, the solution, to quote a former boss of mine, is to not let “the perfect get in the way of the good.” Over the next few years, access to data is going to increase dramatically for all marketers, and the “wide tail” of multiple marketing channels is going to force online marketers to move beyond text ads on desktops and care about display, video, and text on laptops, desktops, mobile, and tablets. More data and more channels but likely not many more people in the marketing department; we’re all going to have to relax, take a deep breath, and learn to put a lot of asterisks next to the reports we deliver to the C-suite!

- David Rodnitzky, CEO

Image credit: runawayjane.com

Throughout my career I’ve held a number of different roles – everything from entry level to senior leadership in and out of the search marketing space. There’s been a common aspect of every position I’ve held, though: service. In every job description, there’s been something to effect of “provide exceptional service for….” I never thought much about it early on in my career, but as I progressed I realized that the folks writing that into a job description had not given it much thought either. I started wondering: what the heck is “exceptional service,” and how do I provide it?

As I started to form my opinions on what it meant to provide exceptional service, I started with a simple foundation: the primary focus should be in the areas that have the most impact. Put in SEM terms, this is the equivalent of focusing on the 5% of keywords that generate 90% of your profit/volume. Sure, the other keywords count, but if you want to make a substantial impact on an account, focus on where the action is. It’s no different when it comes to providing exceptional service in any other arena; your initial focus should be in the areas that will have the most significant impact. Over the years, I’ve boiled those areas down to three key buckets:

Because you never get a second chance...

1. The Beginning
It’s a bit of cliché, but first impressions count…arguably more than any other impression you’ll ever make. If you’re in a client services role, those first interactions with a client are critical!

2. The Problem
It will happen. You can be the most awesome service provider (pick a service, any service) in the world, but you will still run into a breakdown/issue/problem with your client or clients. How the problem is resolved is a critical point in the service provider/service recipient relationship.

3. The End
Part ways on good terms, don’t burn bridges, finish strong, leave no doubt…pick your motto, but the message is the same: how you end things are just as important as how you start them.

Over the past few weeks, I have seen a number of examples in my day-to-day life that have reinforced the importance of these three areas. While not SEM-specific, all of these examples relate to services and, in my opinion, are great examples of how important EVERY one of these areas can be. Win on 2 and fail on 1, and you may likely have an overall loss.

Example #1
A few weeks ago I took a flight to San Francisco to spend some time with the PPC Associates team in San Mateo. For the first time, based on a recommendation from a frequent traveler that I trust, I flew Virgin America. I had a great experience all around and would recommend the airline to anyone. I don’t know that everyone shares my opinion; though; here’s why. On the flight to San Fran there was a lady in the row next to me who was flying Virgin for the first time. As she boarded (she was last and we were all waiting for her), I heard her mention how appreciative she was that they didn’t leave without her. The flight was packed but everything went well and as we were leaving the plane I heard her telling other passengers how impressed she was with the overall experience and that it her first time flying Virgin America too. +1 for a great beginning!

That was Monday; I was flying back on Friday. The same lady was on the return flight and was again in the row next to me. This flight was only 75% full, and the row behind me was completely empty. She asked a flight attendant if she could move, and they said no problem, enjoy the extra space. She had the whole row to herself and had plenty of space to catch a nap and in general just relax on the flight home. About 30 minutes before landing, she asked the flight attendant for something (couldn’t hear what), and without even looking up as she passed the flight attendant sort of snapped back, “You need to order it on the screen.” I heard the lady behind me mumble something that included the word “rude.”

Forty-five minutes later, the plane’s on the ground, and we’re pulling our bags from the overhead. We’ve landed about 20 minutes early, and the plane is de-boarding pretty fast. I kick off some small talk with her, and the conversation quickly shifts to what we thought of Virgin America. Despite a great beginning and a great end, she said, “It was OK, but the staff is kind of rude.” That was a total 180 from what she was telling people on the flight to San Francisco. The takeaway here: you can start strong and finish strong, but if you don’t deal well with the problems in the middle of the relationship (and every relationship will have problems at some point), that may very well be how the customer or client remembers you. I suspect that if asked, the lady in this story would not highly recommend Virgin America.

Example #2
I’m in the market for a new roof for my house. Fairly significant expense, so I’ve been talking with a lot of different companies to get the best deal. The first place I called came highly recommended from two different people. I called them at 9 one morning and never heard back. I called again the next morning and never heard back. I called on day 3 and someone actually answered the phone. While we were talking, I mentioned having left messages over the last two days, and to my surprise she actually said, “I heard those, but we have been too busy to return calls for the past few days. Sorry about that.” Can you guess who will not be bidding on my roof replacement? Terrible beginning, so they won’t get a shot at resolving any problems or parting on good terms.

Image credit: sodahead

Example #3
I’ve lived in the same area for about 5 years. About once a week, it’s pizza night for the family, and we order in. We have been ordering from the same place the entire time and until about 3 weeks ago have never had any issues with messed-up orders or anything else. Talk about a great beginning!  3 weeks ago they delivered someone else’s order by mistake. We called, and – no questions asked – they had a replacement order at our door in 15 minutes. Awesome problem resolution!

Last week, they messed up our order again. (I’m a reasonable, and loyal, guy. 4 years of perfection buys you a couple mistakes.) My wife called, and they asked her what we received. They took her on and off of hold for almost 10 minutes and then finally came back and said we had someone else’s order and ours was still in the delivery car. What they said next actually shocked me: they said our order would be delivered in 15 minutes (by that time it would have been sitting in the delivery car for more than an hour), and they asked for the other pizza back so they could deliver it to the people who ordered it! As promised, our cold, hour-old pizza showed up in about 15 minutes, and they took the other pizza that had been sitting in our house for almost 30 minutes to deliver to another customer. I’m not a germophobe, but the thought of a pizza that I ordered sitting in some stranger’s house for 30 minutes before being delivered to me is disgusting. I also thought it was poor form to say the least to make us wait that long and then give us cold, soggy pizza. I wasn’t about to take it out on the driver but did call the owner the next day. I politely explained what had happened and what my concerns were while also mentioning I had been a regular customer for almost 5 years. His response was basically, “Mistakes happen; if you don’t like it, take your business elsewhere.” No apology, no coupon, no request to try and make things better.

They had a great beginning, and while the problem resolution could use some work, the owner could have fixed it at “the end” by simply being a little humble and offering to resolve the issue to my satisfaction. He didn’t, though, so guess who won’t ever receive an order from this household again?

If you’re reading this blog, odds are you are in the services industry. You know very well that providing service can be exhausting. At some points in time, you probably feel like providing exceptional service is the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of what you do. There’s a good reason for that feeling: it’s true! Service is what defines you and your organization. It’s what your customers and clients will remember for years to come. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose focus of what it means to provide exceptional service. In those times, do what I do: think about the beginning, problem resolution, and the end. They are arguably the most important times in a service relationship and often are what makes (or breaks) a relationship. If you have stories or examples of great or terrible service, please share in the comments.

- Jeremy Mayes, Account Executive