This webinar discusses tactics for optimizing AdWords spending through data visualization, controlling for time, and using game theory and agile research. It presents examples of visualizing keyword performance by campaign and conversions over time. It argues that understanding competitors and expected customer values is important for strategic bidding. The case study outlines how Emperitas helped iFreedom Direct grow its AdWords spending through a data-driven approach involving visual analytics, API data, and CRM integration.

1. Stop Burning Your AdWords Budget:
Simple Optimization Tactics To Make
Your Spend More Effective
Emperitas Webinar March 10th
2016
www.emperitas.com / 801.810.5869 / 4609 South 2300 East Suite 204, Holladay, UT 84117

2. Hi, I’m Luciano Wheatley Pesci…
Founder & Director, Utah Community Research Group (UtahCRG), Univ. of Utah
• Teach microeconomics, statistics, applied research & data analytics, and American
economic development & history.
Co-Founder and CEO, Emperitas
• Team of analysts, data scientists, and economists who find actionable business
intelligence through marketing analytics and agile research to help our clients beat their
competition.
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3. Allow Me To Introduce My Cohosts…
Tyler Calder, Emperitas
• Director of Analytics, leads the Advanced Concepts Team in automating analytics,
insights and reporting for clients.
Savannah Paterson, iFreedom Direct
• Business Intelligence Analyst, oversees and mines the company’s data ecosystem in
support of marketing, sales, and operational strategy goals.
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4. My Basic Argument Today
• Power of Visualization: most people are visual learners, AdWords
data can best be expressed through simple custom visualizations.
• Controlling for Time: the effectiveness of your AdWords spend
changes by the second, understanding the role time plays is critical.
• Game Theory & Agile Research: you don’t bid in isolation,
understanding yourself and your competition leads to effective
spending.
• iFreedom Case Study: data-driven AdWords bidding and agile
research is helping veterans live the American Dream.
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5. The Power of Visualization

6. People Are Visual Learners
• Two of every three people (66%) are visual learners, which means they can’t process
written information (like reports) as effectively as a visualization.
• There’s been an explosion of do-it-yourself visualization
tools like R Shiny, Tableau, Gephi and D3.
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7. Moving Beyond The Dashboard
• The AdWords dashboard is a great place to start with visualizations, but it
doesn’t allow for deeper mining, especially at higher dimensions.
• Aggregate values put you at risk of missing deeper
patterns like outliers, variability, and multi-modality.
• You need to get the raw data.
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8. Getting The Raw Data
• Through the AdWords dashboard you can create a
report and then export the corresponding raw data.
• You’re limited to the existing AdWords metrics.
• You need to be clear what you want, which means you
need to understand how you plan to use the insights.
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9. Example :: Keywords Per Campaign Visualized
• Here’s an example visualization using
Tableau that shows:
• Clicks (y axis)
• Conversions (x axis)
• Campaigns (colors)
• Cost (size of bubble)
• Each bubble is a keyword.
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Keywords A
Keywords B
Keywords C

10. Controlling for Time

11. Timing Can Be More Valuable Than Money
• Campaign performance depends on more than the keywords, your quality score,
and your max bid price.
• Everything Google uses to determine bidding happens at a
specific time, so if you have historical data (more than a year)
you can find seasonal trends at the day/week/month/year level.
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12. Example :: Conversions By Month Visualized
• Here’s another example visualization
using Tableau that shows:
• Conversions (y axis)
• Time (x axis)
• Campaigns (colors)
• The height of each bars show total
conversions over time for the
different campaigns by month.
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Campaign X
Campaign Y

13. Game Theory & Agile Research

14. AdWords is An Auction, Which Uses Game Theory
• Google hired one of the greatest living applied Economists, Hal Varian, to build the
Adwords auction.
• Since it’s an auction it uses game theoretical methods.
• The way you pay makes collusion with competition
impossible because given any quality score, those who are
willing to pay the most end up ranking higher (and pay a
lower cost).
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15. It’s Pretty Competitive Out There
• The outcomes of any bid depends on you AND on your competitors.
Game Theory gives you a foundation for strategizing before you spend.
• Things you’ll need:
• Ability to measure expected value of leads.
• Who you’re competing against,whattheir spend is, and (ideally) their revenue and
production structure.
• In competitive markets you can often assume symmetry to yourself
if this information isn’t available (but it usually is).
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16. Needing To Know Expected Values
• Integrating with a CRM gives you critically important financial information
on the value of a customer or segment.
• The Pareto Principle says 80% of your revenue is coming from
20% of your customers, so identifying that group is high priority.
• If you don’t have a CRM, or it isn’t integrated, you can use
the expected (average) value as a proxy.
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17. You Wouldn’t Drive By Looking In the Rearview Mirror
• Dashboards and A/B testing are reactive: they tell you what’s already happened and
usually fail to explain why something worked.
• Agile research helps your competitive bidding by providing the
necessary information that doesn’t reside in AdWords.
• This is not a one-shot endeavor, and requires constant
testing and validation if you are going to stay a step
ahead of your competitors.
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18. iFreedom Case Study

19. iFreedom Case Study :: History of Company
• iFreedom Direct Corporation is a mortgage lender that’s served the nation’s military
community by specializing in government-backed VA home loans since 1996.
• Helped 100,000+ borrowers obtain the American Dream of homeownership,
and is a nationally top ranked VA lender.
• Direct to consumer lender so the marketing team carries most
of the responsibility for generating loan opportunities.
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20. iFreedom Case Study :: Why AdWords?
• We’ve been running AdWords since 2006. When competition was low we were
able to create a robust and optimized campaign with a very high ROI.
• As competition dramatically increased we were forced to scale
back monthly AdWords investment to maintain efficiencies.
• We engaged with different third-party firms specializing in AdWords
account management, but were unsuccessful in finding a partner
that met our objectives.
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21. iFreedom Case Study :: Why A Data-Driven Approach?
• We have big plans to grow our sales force in the next few years.
• For the marketing team to sustain this growth, we have more pressure
than ever to produce quality opportunities at an efficient cost.
• We’re focused on growing our monthly AdWords spend.
Due to heavy competition when bidding on clicks we know
a data-driven approach is the only way for us to compete.
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22. iFreedom Case Study :: Working With Emperitas
• We’ve been impressed with how Emperitas learned our core business, the landscape
we compete in, and tailored a data-driven approach to our unique AdWords needs.
• Emperitas is exceptional at creating visuals that allow for easy comprehension of
insights to all members on our team and the bi-weekly reporting constantly supports our
efforts.
• We’re excited about the next phase of our collaboration, taking optimizations to the next
level by incorporating data from Google’s API and our CRM to analyze the rest of our
sales funnel beyond initial lead conversion.
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23. Let’s talk…

24. The Conversation Doesn’t Have To End Here…
luciano@emperitas.com / 801-810-5869/ EmperitasSG / 4609 South 2300 East Suite 204, Holladay, UT 84117