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In another article we looked at large scale SEO with Bill Hunt. We also sat down with Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting at PubCon, who talked about enterprise PPC. 

"There’s some things that change when you get to a very large account, whether it’s greater than 50k a month spend or greater than 100k a month spend, you know, whatever it may be," he tells us. "The campaigns tend to get very complex. You are going to have a very competitive environment. You’re going to have a need for some sort of bid management tool."

"Those tools aren’t enough," he adds. "You can’t just throw the tool in place, set it, and forget it. It doesn’t work that way. It requires a lot of work on top of that."

There are plenty of mistakes and misconceptions about enterprise PPC going around, and that means a lot of missed opportunities.  "People don’t realize the way bid management tools work," says Enge. "They use algorithms (that’s probably fairly obvious) to do what they do, and if you think of like a single keyword that’s getting ten conversions a day, it’s pretty easy to measure how much you’re spending and whether you’re making money on it based on what you’re bidding."

"If you want to say you want an ROI of 200%…it goes and does it and you’ll be really close, but in my view, most of your keywords aren’t going to have enough data by themselves and smart solutions…do portfolio management to group them so they can treat groups of keywords as an entity and get something that’s manageable, but even after you’re done with all that, in my own estimate (and it’s not scientific, it’s really just kind of a gut feel thing) is if you go into your campaign and fish around, probably 30% of every bid you look at will be wrong," continues Enge. "It’s a statistical game, but as it turns out, if your goal is to have 200% ROI for your whole campaign, it will get you close to that."

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"You’ve got to be prepared though for the fact that a lot of things will be out of whack," he warns. "And how you can help that and how you can drive it in a variety of ways…is by using human input. You can actually see things, and you can provide guidelines, so a very simple one is implementing negative keywords, which is a fairly obvious thing to do in pay per click, but a lot of people don’t do it."

"It’s really straightforward to do," he points out. "You just have to go into your account, and see which search queries are generating clicks, and you can look at it without any trouble – very quickly be able to recognize things that are generating volume of clicks, and your chances of getting conversion are bupkis."

"Ad optimization is another really big area that people overlook," he says. "What they have to get through their brain is…you have a bunch of smart people sitting in a room, they figure out what the ad is…you put it up…the chances that you picked the best ad…zero. The way you work on that is you test it."

That one might seem obvious too, but a lot of people just don’t do it. Testing can make a world of difference in just about every facet of marketing.