Brief discussion: Ideas for building search promotion accounts in the ToB industry

Some time ago, I chatted with a group of old friends who are in charge of traffic. One of them told me that he had just taken over a Baidu account a few weeks ago. The number of inquiries fluctuated greatly. He didn’t dare to move the account and didn’t know where to start. He asked me if I had any experience to share.

By checking the search terms and keyword reports and having a brief conversation, I gave short-term manageable suggestions: high-conversion terms (parts of speech with purchasing intent, such as manufacturer terms, etc.) should be used to stabilize the ranking (no matter what the existing quality is, the budget must be in place), and secondary conversion terms, such as product terms, competitor terms, and long-tail terms, can have their budgets appropriately reduced.

As the chat was coming to an end, I added that from a long-term perspective, the main problem of your account is that the structure is a bit chaotic and difficult to manage. In addition, the budget is limited and the budget is not divided well, which has led to some plans being delayed, affecting the normal promotion of the main product.

A good account structure not only allows you to know at a glance what the competitive costs of products are, but also helps you maintain relative advantages in subsequent battles with competitors until you outlast your opponents.

I have said a lot, I hope you can forgive me. Let’s officially return to the topic and briefly talk about the ideas of search bidding for product promotion in the ToB industry.

First of all, let me share my personal views on the characteristics of bidding accounts in the ToB industry. The customer acquisition cost is high, the traffic is not large, and the leads are unstable, but there is a certain fluctuation pattern. If this fluctuation pattern is unstable, you may need to consider whether your account is a healthy account.

A good account structure is the basis for good bidding. At the very least, it will not be so tiring to maintain, and the efficiency of account maintenance will be improved to a certain extent. You can focus more on thinking about how to do better than your competitors.

1. Conventional account structure

Launch equipment + products

The plan is divided into [product] and [delivery equipment] , and the word-part division unit of keywords; (the example is shown in Figure 1 below)

Figure 1: General account structure

For regular partners, I mainly use products and deployment equipment as the basis for division plans. Why do I make such a division? There are several main points;

1. The ROI of different products in the ToB industry varies greatly. By dividing plans by products, you can intuitively control the ROI by controlling the plan budget, word bids, etc. After all, different products have different average order values, some are high and some are low.

2. Baidu PC and MC are two delivery channels (in most cases, the click price of the same word is different); for most companies in the ToB industry, the difference in customer acquisition costs between Baidu's PC (computer) and MC (mobile) is still quite large, due to the "stingy" habit of spending money wisely.

For regular customers, the units here are mainly divided by parts of speech, just to let potential customers who search for the same intention see the corresponding creative ideas and enter the corresponding landing page to form a coherent connection. It is also easy to maintain.

In fact, dividing the units by parts of speech has another advantage, which is that when you have a limited budget, you can quickly control the budget and allocate the main budget to main words, such as manufacturer words and price words (these words have a strong purchasing intention); product words are expensive and have a large number of invalid clicks, so they can be appropriately reduced.

Speaking of units, here's an obsessive-compulsive technique. For units of the same part of speech, if the length of keywords in the unit varies greatly, you can divide it into more units based on the length of the characters. The main considerations are the length of the creative copy and the user experience. This can reduce the problem of some words with too long characters not being able to get exposure. This obsessive-compulsive technique is more suitable for mobile plans. After all, the creative copy for mobile devices cannot be too long.

Note: How to set up a plan to only run on PC, as shown in Figure 2. The current version of Baidu can solve this problem directly by setting the mobile bid coefficient to 0. The old version could only be set to 0.01. I give a thumbs up to Baidu for this update.

Figure 2: PC side plan delivery settings

2. Hybrid Account Structure

Launch equipment + product + region

Some ToB products may encounter high click costs due to fierce competition in certain regions, which in turn affects the customer acquisition cost. This can be done by extracting regions with greater competition into independent plans, conducting regional bidding, and reducing click costs; such as product D in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Hybrid Account Structure - Region

Of course, there are special cases. Suppose your competitors all have nationwide distribution. This phenomenon is more likely to occur when there are only a few competitors. I have had the honor of encountering this and have a deep understanding of it. In this case, the architecture only needs to remain in the conventional [distribution equipment + product] architecture.

So how do we judge this phenomenon?

First, you can use a third-party tool to check the number of competitors of a certain product. Then, under the [delivery device + product + region] plan, after a period of testing, you may find that the cost per click is not much different from before. It is highly likely that the competitors of this product have adopted a regional unified delivery method. (Note: In fact, many traditional ToB companies will seek outsourcing. The biggest problem with outsourcing is that they are not familiar with the product market and are not so detailed)

Okay, according to the habit of writing essays, now is the time to write the ending summary.

The above opinions are just my personal views. The article is more colloquial and contains a lot of chat. I hope it can help people in need. After all, different bidders have their own unique thinking. However, as a bidder in the To industry, understanding the product is very important. This is one of the reasons why some bosses would rather hire their own bidders than outsource.

After you become familiar with the product, you can build a separate plan based on some special products in the promotion process (as for how to discover the special features, data reports are very important). For example, if you find that some products have regular patterns in certain time periods and large fluctuations in click prices, you can try to call out some plans and use a certain time period as the basis for the bonus plan, and then build the materials.

Of course, there is also a crowd package targeting method. This method is a bit like information flow. I don’t use it much, so I won’t elaborate on it for fear of saying something wrong.

Author: Zheng Yifan

Source: Zheng Yifan