Interview with John Crestani

This is part of a study that aims to create a practical guide for PPC educators and learners as well as an academic article based on inputs of PPC professionals all over the world. Caveat: these notes are based on my understanding of our conversation. All mistakes are mine. — Kahlil Corazo

PPC Professional Background
John Crestani is a PPC professional based in Los Angeles. At the time of the interview, he has been in the PPC field for 5 years, had managed more than 120 accounts and more than $25M of total ad spend, and has trained 12 people. Aside from managing accounts of his clients, he also spends $1k — $2k daily for his own affiliate marketing PPC ads.

Core Skills
John considers the following as the core skills needed by a PPC professional:

• Structuring campaigns — more details below.
• Statistically significant optimization based on data — includes landing page optimization.
• Conversion strategy — understanding a business and how to best use online marketing for it.

Important but non-core skills:

• Niche-specific skills. For instance, in eCommerce, working with data feeds is an important skill.
• Display campaign. It is important to note that display campaigns are very different from search campaigns. Managing display campaigns require understanding of the probable psychology and demography of visitors based on the probable websites that the ad would appear in for a particular level of targeting (eg, an ad group). Managing display campaigns require a “marketing 6th sense,” which essentially answers whether an ad would work with a certain group of targeted websites. Some key inputs from John: “social media has very low CTR and conversion rates,” “everybody should be doing remarketing,” “but for ecommerce sites, remarketing is the only kind of display campaign that should be run,” “anyone who is doing lead generation should do display campaigns.”
• Copywriting. Understanding motivations behind search terms and writing copy based on this. For instance an apparently small diference in a keyword would either show that it is from someone who wants to save money or increase profits (in terms of basic emotions, fear vs greed). Copywriting also includes techniques which could give slight increases to the CTR — eg, using symbols and numbers. Subtle differences in the psychology behind search terms is a key watch out for people advertising in cultures which they don’t have an intimate knowledge of (eg, non-Americans advertising in the US).
• Keyword research

How John does PPC training

• Explanation of key concepts (eg, statistical concepts)
• Show examples of actual campaigns and explain its design
• Hands-on exercise on account structuring
• Comment on the work of the students
• For larger groups, to comment on each other’s work
• Run real campaigns
• Help in analyzing results of campaigns
• Usually takes 4–8 weeks
• “Always Be Testing!”
• On motivating students: expertise in PPC helps you reach your life goals (a good life for your kids, your dream house, car, etc.). PPC is one of those things that if you just work hard enough, you will succeed. (John said this is a much more motivating way than I write this…)

Top resources

• PPC Hero blog — “this reveals my secrets” “if everyone read this, PPC would be much more competitive”
• RKG Blog
• Acquisio Blog
• Search Engine Land

John comments that there is not enough discussion on conversion strategy.

John’s account structure strategy
John structures accounts based on enabling one to find out what is working and what is not working. His optimization is based on ad groups which do not overlap in targeting. Optimization based on ad groups is also more manageable than optimizing based on individual keywords. He suggests 8 to 20 keywords per ad group, 80% exact, 10% modified phrase, 10% modified broad. No general “money keywords” in exact match. This structure gives a high quality score. Keep in mind however that “every ad group is different.” “Ad groups are based on a modified broad keyword with 2k — 10k monthly exact match searches.”

Additional tips
These came from my question, “What should I have asked you?” My main takeaway from our discussion was on how one should deal with Google. Like any business, Google’s main driver is profit. There are many areas wherein the interest of the advertiser aligns with the interest of Google. Advertisers must be wary of areas where Google’s interest may not be in full alignment with theirs. Here are examples (again, these are not John’s exact words, but my recollection and interpretation of our conversation):

• Manual vs optimized ad rotation — it is Google’s best interest to show optimized ads. However, this is countered by the opportunity loss of waiting for a high level of statistical significance. Spread across billions(?) of keywords, this loss could be significant. The level of statistical significance in the best interest of the advertiser may be higher than that of Google. Thus, optimized ad rotation may not be in the best interest of the advertiser.
• Demographic advertising — traditional advertisers have a huge demand for this, resulting from advertising habits of organization running for decades. Google has no way of knowing demographic data on an individual viewer. (This feature has been retired the last time I checked).
• Enhanced Campaigns is in Google’s best interest but may not be in the advertiser’s. For instance, one could not opt out of tablets. What if advertising on tablets are not good for you?

Bottom-line: just like any business, Google optimizes for revenue and profit. Sometimes these optimization may not be in the best interest of the advertiser.

Other tips:

• Simply copying campaigns to Bing usually brings in 20% more clicks and 20% more conversions.
• The weakness of PPC software (eg, Marin, Acquisio) is that they work through Google’s API, which is incomplete, infrequently updated and missing core features. The PPC software business is essentially a B2B sales and support game (Google does not go around cold calling businesses).
• Topic targeting in the display network — limited success
• How many ads in a ad group in any one time — 2 to 3
• Interesting reports that people usually don’t look at — under the Dimensions tab: cost per conversion by day of the week, by country, by state, by hour of the day, by destination URL, etc.
• A unique destination URL for each ad group? No. Better bring to the traffic to a few landing pages to have better data for A/B testing.
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion — Likes it.

Originally published at www.corazo.org.