Internet Marketing and Website Promotion

Evan Magers - iSearch Media, LLC

January 31, 2009

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Evan Magers, Co-founder, Partner, and the man responsible for the ISM PPC operations, learned how to manipulate paid search platforms while working at Google, where he was the first AdWords dedicated optimization specialist ever hired straight to the position. His sole task was to build and optimize the accounts of Google\\\\\\\'s blue-chip advertisers to get them the biggest possible bang for the millions of bucks they invested annually with AdWords. To date he\\\\\\\'s the only PPC specialist in the industry who was trained on PPC strategy by the source itself.

Prior to joining Google, Evan worked as a writer and editor. He went to college on the Foundation Fellowship, the state of Georgia\\\\\\\'s most prestigious academic scholarship, then straight to grad school as one of the youngest students ever accepted to Boston University\\\\\\\'s fiction-writing Master\\\\\\\'s program.

Background:

Covered pretty well above, but I’ll give a few more details here. 1600 on the SAT, full academic scholarship to college, majored in English and made Phi Beta Kappa, went straight from undergrad to grad school at BU, after finishing my thesis was kept on by BU as an adjunct professor; then I moved to California, where I made my living for a while as a freelance writer and editor before taking a job at Google and diving headfirst into a career in online marketing.

I got into online marketing sort of by accident.  I went straight from undergrad to grad school for fiction writing, figuring I’d be able to jump right from that into a wildly successful and lucrative career as a novelist.  That’s still my long-term ambition, but if grad school taught me anything it was that at age 23 I wasn’t ready to step into the ring with Hemingway and Tolstoy.  Not yet, anyway.

So on a lark I moved to San Francisco, and kept myself afloat doing freelance writing and editing jobs here and there.  There’s not a ton of money to be made in that game, though, and California’s expensive.  So I figured it was time to get a “proper” job.  My strategy was to fire out resumes in a shrapnel-shot fashion.  I’d heard that Google was a great place to work, so I decided to apply.  I got an interview for an AdWords account manager position, but at the end of the nine or ten interviews they put me through, they said, “You know what, we’re building out this new team in AdWords, and we think you’d be perfect for it.”  And just like that, I became the first optimization specialist they’d ever hired to the role.  

It was the ideal training ground for a PPC specialist, and I realized relatively quickly that I could do better farming out that expertise in a consulting capacity.  That’s how ISM first came about.

Main services:

Our bread and butter services are search engine optimization and PPC management, but we touch anything and everything necessary to increase our clients’ exposure and profitability online—whatever the job requires.  Sometimes that can mean a full website rebuild.  In other cases, all that’s needed is a PPC account makeover and close analytics-focused optimization.  We’re proficient in all aspects of website and campaign optimization.

What makes us different from other SEM firms:

We’re a boutique, extremely personal search marketing firm.  Obviously there’s no shortage of companies out there doing what we’re doing—we’re not inventing the wheel here—so we have to differentiate ourselves in small ways.  Of course first and foremost you have to be excellent at what you do on the execution side of the business.  You have to be able to make money for your clients.  That goes without saying.

But beyond that, for us, service is the key.  Most of our clients come to us because they feel that their vendor isn’t giving them proper attention, like they’re too small a fish in too big a pond.  Everyone at our company collaborates on every project we take on, and we make sure our clients feel like they can really reach out and touch us, like their account truly matters.  We don’t lean on technological solutions to problems that technology can’t solve.  Our process is heavily human-intelligence focused.  After all, this is marketing—it simply can’t be automated completely.

Our firm’s success story:

We started with zero funding, no capital investment at all.  We just put a few ads on Craigslist for free, leaned heavily on my Google background, and cut our teeth working with local businesses and small startups.  Since the beginning, we’ve stayed very focused on customer service, and that’s served us really well.  If you drive results, people pass your name around, and that’s what’s started to happened and has continued to happen, time and time again.  So the train just kept rolling down the track, we kept getting more and more organized in terms of process and better and better at what we do in terms of execution, building up our client roster and taking on more complex and challenging jobs.  Now we’re in a place where we’re able to pick and choose our clients, work with interesting companies on really interesting jobs.

Questions a business owner should ask SEM firms he/she’s thinking about hiring:

1. How do you price?
2. If you charge based on ad spend, what’s to prevent you from jacking up budgets just to pad your pockets?
3. Who’s actually going to be making the decisions about how my online marketing dollars are allocated? A junior-level account manager, or somebody who actually knows what he’s doing?
4. What technologies do you use, and how do they fit into your process?  (subtext: Do you just toss your clients’ accounts into a piece of software, or do you use your technology intelligently?)
5. How many people will be dedicated to my account, exactly who will those people be, and how many other clients will they be responsible for?
6. What’s your process for optimizing my account after it launches—in other words, if you charge an ongoing management fee, what do you really do to earn that money I’m paying you?
7. Referrals and success stories, please.

Myths in the SEM industry:

1. Online marketing can make up for a lousy website/business model.
2. Successful PPC advertising requires high-tech solutions.
3. PPC doesn’t matter as long as organic rankings are strong.
4. A number-one ranking, either on paid placement or organic listings, is essential for success.
5. “But we’re successfully brand-building” is an acceptable excuse for high impression and click volume driving few conversions.

How we develop skills in this constantly changing environment:

We read, religiously, the industry blogs, forums, and publications we trust.  Since I used to work at Google, I have a ton of friends who are still there, and I make sure they keep me abreast of any new developments in the Googleplex.  The most valuable element of our ongoing SEM education, though, comes through first-hand experience: we measure and track success incredibly meticulously, and from our findings are able to extrapolate trends as quickly as the data begin to reveal them.

Future of the industry:

At the moment, SEM firms benefit tremendously from the fact that a lot of their clients don’t really know what the hell they actually do for them.  Won’t be the case forever, though, and soon enough agencies are going to have to deliver quantifiable results that justify their fees.  The level of oversight on the client end is still really thin.

This industry’s bound to become more organized, more dependent on verifiably credentials, and the wheat will continue to separate from the chaff.  Tools available through the PPC interfaces themselves will get more sophisticated, making the agency’s job easier in a sense.  On the other hand, this will also make it easier for companies to manage accounts in house, and SEM firms will have to keep innovating and improving in order to earn their keep.