Andrew Girdwood, Head of Strategy

Hi, I'm Andrew Girdwood, Head of Strategy at bigmouthmedia. This means it's my job to stay up-to-date with the latest ideas, tactics, strategies and trends so they can be applied in meaningful ways to your digital campaigns.

I've been in this industry a long time. In the old days geeks would optimise sites, pushing them to the tops of search engines like AltaVista just for bragging rights on Usenet. Personal email addresses weren't so common back then. Universities would run out of storage space after a few kilobytes and were prone just to deleting the whole account. As such we early computer geeks discussed our digital conquests in the public Usenet forums. Let's just call that an early form of social media.

What started off as geeky showmanship turned into actual money making opportunities when affiliate marketing and display networks hatched into life. You did not need to sell your own inventory online in order to make money - you could sell other companies and services or simply your page impressions.

So it happened; what began as a hobby, transformed into a cottage industry and grew until it became the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. Digital is still growing, how impressive is that?

I contribute to both the bigmouthmedia site and Econsultancy when I can, as well as maintaining my own blog and Twitter.

Digital Marketing in 2010

On the site last year was a Q&A on my thoughts on digital marketing in 2009. I talked about the rise in the importance and the interest in integrated search, Google cracking down on bad linking tactics and how social media was surging forward, apparently with the promise of linking everything together. This year I asked some clients for some more questions. This is what we got.

What’s the best way to integrate SEO with PPC?

I think the best way to approach this is by planning to test. In my experience different brands, verticals and even different site designs have different SEO and PPC integration strategies that work for them. The easy example to make is that for some sites bidding alongside a strong SEO result makes no sense whereas for others we get huge benefits from doing exactly just that.

If you don't have the same agency running both then one recommended tactic is to KPI the agencies on working together. The power of the three letters K. P. I. never ceases to impress me when it comes to agency management!

What's this new way to do affiliate marketing you mentioned in the Digital Insights newsletter?

Ah yes! Glad you asked. I don't think it's all that new to suggest that affiliate marketing might not be best deployed when it cannabises sales from other channels. I spin that around and say; affiliate marketing should be used to get sales you wouldn't have otherwise have got.

I draw this with two circles; the close zone (inner circle) and the reach zone (outer circle). The close zone represents those sales a brand can generate with its own marketing activities. Affiliate marketing should focus on the reach zone; this can be done by not just picking affiliates from that zone but also by empowering affiliates to generate sales from that zone.

The twist in the tale is usability. Usability is already important (but often neglected) in affiliate marketing as you need to work hard on those conversions (a high converting site is not just good for you but it attracts better affiliates too). Once you start targeting those sales the brand would not have otherwise got then there's an extra usability challenge in conversion marketing too. In fact, sometimes I talk about "Reach Marketing" meaning the combination of this form of affiliate marketing and usability.

What's with your bid management?

I'm really a supporter of tools that empower people to get things done more quickly, better and more thoroughly. The best of bid management does that.

When I've been quoted in the press sounding anti-bid management it tends to be about specific features or history.

It's worth keeping in mind that the first generation of bid comes from an era before Quality Score (even, on some engines, where you could see competitors actual bids in money terms). Back then you could peg your ad to be just above or just below a competitor by changing your bid amount. That's not possible any more.

The next generation of bid management software used portfolios mainly because Google's API token system required it. Back then, however, PPC ads stayed in the PPC silo. These days you might find PPC ads in Google Maps, alongside pictures of products in the SERPs as well as having to compete with Universal search (video, images, etc) in the natural results. There's no way for a machine to tell that an ad is appearing beside a positive or negative video result. Keywords from the same portfolio produce different Universal results too.

The generation of "management" software that's coming next will focus more on cross-digital (especially de-duplication), inventory and social/real-time management. In 2010 it'll be more important to change your creative based on your stock levels or a Twitter trend than to spend an API token (that costs money) to lower your bids by 5p over lunch. This is especially true as Google offers dayparting for free and because those lunch time clicks which might not result in an immediate purchase may be key in the buying cycle. Everyone knows that last click shouldn't always win these days and bid management software will catch up on that too.

What's your top SEO tip?

Be an authority. Find an area - a niche, if you will - and become well known there. Become so well known that people reference your site while talking about that subject. That's your start. Your SEO strategy is to grow that niche into a larger, wider, more profitable subject.

Watch Andrew answer 5 questions on the latest issues affecting digital marketing.