 I'm going to tell you about one of the biggest marketing transformations that I've been a part of, and it was for a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company. They were using paid search for lead gen campaigns that were collecting contact info for people with a common medical condition. It's really exciting stuff. When I took over paid search on the account, I got right to work on paid search optimizations, things like keyword strategy and ad copy. And after the first month, we saw some decent progress. There are more registrations at a lower cost per acquisition. But we saw phenomenal results after the second month. You can see registrations went from the low 100s to more than 2,500. This is essentially a year and a half worth of leads that they got in just 30 days. Meanwhile, the CPA was down 95%. Now, results like this can be game changing for a company, but these results were not because of paid search optimizations. In month two, the client rebooted their entire strategy. They launched a much better offer. They rolled out a whole new website that had stronger landing pages, and this led to better ad copy and targeting. Everything was working together to drive the results that we saw. Now, paid search management is just one part of a larger engine that drives success. Good collaboration gives us a mechanical advantage. And if we're not working together and there's no mesh, then we're operating in silos and we lose our advantage. So we're gonna look at three of the main ways that having siloed teams can hurt your success with paid search. And this is not the talk that tells you that you need to get rid of departments and titles. Like, you'll be back to work at Thursday with the same job, right? We hope. What we are gonna do is a little triage because when we're siloed off, we're using incomplete or incorrect data. And this can lead to some really common paid search mistakes where a new framework could be useful. Now, I'm assuming most of you in the audience aren't doing paid search. If you are, great. Even if you're not, this talk is for you. Now, the only real solution for not working together is to work together. But that's tough when we don't speak the same language. So if someone's talking at you in acronyms and you're not sure what they mean by conversion, it can be hard to build that bridge. So I'm gonna give you some entry questions that you can use to start paid search conversations and get on the same page. So let's kick things off with silo symptom number one. Silo's cause bad goals and KPIs. And this happens a lot when paid search goals are set without including the paid search team. We'll have busy leadership teams setting new goals that are based on last year's goals and marketing managers inherit the goals which sales teams agree to because they're trying to get a contract signed. And what these goals are often based on is traffic. We want paid search to drive more traffic to our site. And here's the problem with traffic based goals. We end up with reports like this that look like wins. This report was given to my client Beth by her former marketing agency. And based on best goals, the numbers looked good. Clicks were way up and impressions were up and CPC was down, which meant the account was more efficient. But what the report didn't show was that the cost was up 900% almost. Well, the supposedly most successful keywords that were featured in the report were actually losing 80 cents on the dollar. Now best team didn't realize this because they thought that if you solve for traffic then sales take care of themselves. And that's not true. A lot of you in SEO deal with this as well. The problem with paid search is that not only is paid traffic not a goal, paid traffic is inevitable. And it's because every single click that we get through AdWords is revenue for Google. Now just like any company, Google's trying to grow its revenue and it's very good at doing that. About 90% of its revenue comes from advertising and you increase revenue by raising your prices or selling more. And with AdWords, we know that CPCs can and do go up. But more pervasively, click volume goes up, which is how you can 9x what you're paying Google even though you lowered your CPC. Now this slide might feel overwhelming. It does for me. But AdWords is always releasing new products and settings that will drive even more clicks just by default. So while with SEO, you're dealing with SERPs that aren't showing those organic blue listings above the fold, in paid search, we're trying to fight a tidal wave of traffic. And remember our case study where we saw registration skyrocket? During that same time, we actually had fewer clicks because when we're looking at goals that actually matter for business growth, traffic and clicks just become less important. You wanna avoid traffic-based goals. They are great for growing Google's revenue but they might not be growing yours. Now focusing on the wrong metrics is another paid search problem. I had a client where we tripled the ROI and they tripled the revenue and they had a better ROI. But the CPC was up six cents and the client was fixated on that. Now AdWords is an auction and keywords that drive sales typically cost more. But if your ROI is up, then higher CPCs really don't matter. And yet our client wouldn't accept our plan to drive more revenue because she wanted us to be working on fixing this CPC problem. Now too often we end up with goals and KPIs that are based on metrics and processes like these that really don't support business growth and they're often at the expense of business growth. And we'll gently suggest maybe better different KPIs might work well and we're told things like, well we can't force anyone to buy but we can make sure we're never below position two. But your business doesn't grow from being in position two, right? You grow from quality leads and sales. So secondary and tertiary metrics only matter to the extent that they contribute to business growth. You don't wanna make them your priority and it can be really easy to get caught in the weeds but our accounts do so much better when we're focused on the big picture. This is one of my favorite clients and they're killing it. Six years ago they were driving 29,000 a month in AdWords revenue with a very strong ROI of 14. This year they're hitting just over 2 million with an ROI above 50. Now I know it's way too easy to tell you that they grew because they had the right KPIs, right? They're doing a lot of things right. They're an excellent company. And my client is focused on growth. He does not care about CTRs. We report on secondary metrics but we don't obsess over them and we run non-revenue campaigns but we tie our efforts back to the larger sales cycle. Letting go of metrics that don't even matter works really well. You need to stay focused on your real primary KPIs which should measure what needs to happen for your business, not how you want it to happen. So your silo smashing question here is how do our paid search goals support business growth? And this is something you can ask in planning meetings if your paid search team either wasn't invited or they're there and they're not speaking up or you can ask it in client meetings that are getting derailed by vanity metrics. Sometimes project leads aren't sure if they should weigh in on stuff like this and there's some back and forth but steering things back to focus on really what matters can really help your team provide better results for your clients. And if your paid search team is pitching weird stuff you can ask this of them, like everything about your paid search efforts should drive growth. Now the second outcome of silos is bad human experience and paid search specifically is so guilty of focusing on automation and scripts and programmatic ads that we can completely miss the big picture of the human beings that we're trying to reach. Search engine marketing is really just human marketing, right? Just starts on search engines. So if we wanna grow we need to create experiences that are good for our visitors. Remember paid search is not just a traffic source. Paid search puts your best offer in front of your target market when they're most ready to take action and your offer is a big part of that. Think about the offers that your company is using for paid search. Are they built to meet the needs of your visitor? We see so many offers that are just afterthoughts, just random gated content or incentives that don't tie back to core services or no real offer at all. Now in our pharma case study the original offer was a company newsletter. Like if you're Googling a medical problem you're not looking to get on someone's mailing list, right? But with a reboot the new offer was for a free heart healthy recipe book and this is something our visitors were looking for and they were happy to say yes to. We get our best results when we provide value to our visitors both in what we give them and how we frame the benefits. And there's a lot more that can be said here but the fix is you don't wanna just call visitors to action give them reasons to take it. Now let's talk landing pages. There is a growing belief that all paid search campaigns need to be using dedicated landing pages which have one call to action and no links or navigation. And dedicated landing pages can help improve performance especially when the alternative is terrible like with our pharma case study. The original campaigns were driving to a very bad home page where it was hard to find the CTA. In the reboot we drew redrove to a clear offer page that has an easy form. This is a classic use case of a dedicated landing page. But driving to a simple form is not always what your prospects need to take action. I had a fitness center client that was driving sign ups for a seven day free pass and paid search was using a dedicated landing page but it wasn't the best experience for our visitors. They weren't just looking to work out for a week they were shopping for a gym. They needed to know locations, hours, schedules, classes, amenities, childcare. They needed that information that was on the website. So we switched our paid search traffic to drive to the home page and we saw our year over year conversion rates double for the next 12 months after we made that change. Websites versus squeeze pages is not the real issue. What it comes down to is that pages that answer visitors most important questions outperform pages that don't. Now your silo smashing question for the human experience is do our visitors have what they need to want to take action? And this can make or break your paid search performance. Everyone who's involved in landing pages or traffic or testing or signing off on any of those needs to be able to speak to this. Now the third problem with silos is bad data and this can be inaccurate, not enough or too much data. SEO and paid search both deal and keywords and serves. If we're not sharing learnings then we're missing out on important data. And there can be some rivalry, I know this and sometimes they're just heads down but we should be working together so that we can supplement or pull back on coverage and use actual performance data to drive strategy. Now we end up with no data when tracking either isn't installed or it goes missing which is surprisingly common. Though we changes to GTM or psychote and tracking just goes down. Or our analytics manager changes goal configurations without realizing that paid search is tracking those goals as conversions. Now this may be the most obvious thing you hear all day but it's important. Don't change code unless you know how the page is tracked. Now it's obvious why not having data is bad, right? We can't optimize on it. But why would having too much data be a mistake and what does that have to do with silos? Well when we don't understand how everything's working together it's really hard to be strategic and it's really easy to just punt and say let's just let the data decide. But here's the thing, data does not make decisions. In paid search people can think they're being data driven but they're really just creating a data disaster. We end up with paid search campaigns that look like this where we have literally thousands of unique ads before we can do any analysis on the keywords or placements or audience segments that were most effective. We're trying to just pivot all this data but we don't have valid tests and we're stuck measuring everything and learning nothing. Most digital marketers are not statisticians. Yes they can tell you that three is more than two. Yes they can tell you that ad A has a higher CTR than ad B but a lot of marketers are making inferences on far too little data because of hyper segmentation and too many variables and we need a plan for this. We want to use our data to inform and validate our strategy not to replace it. So the silo smashing data question I have for you is a bit self-reflective. Do I know what we're tracking and why we're tracking it? If you don't know then you can ask a person that does. Now I've talked a lot about the dangers of silos but there's something else that I should mention. My dad's a clinical psychologist and he always says that before we can change behavior we need to understand why we engage in it. Silo's have advantages. They keep us focused and operating in our zone of genius and they let us go home at the end of the day but we can still be experts at our own thing and also be able to see the big picture of what we're helping to build. When we smash silos we don't become cogs. We become teams of superheroes or democratized right? We keep our own strengths and together we make better decisions and we can solve tougher challenges and we can accomplish so much more than we could on our own. Now Wednesday at lunch if anyone's interested I'll be running a birds of a feather table about practical tips for overcoming marketing silos so if you wanna talk more about that, happy to. I wanna extend an invitation to all of you to start a conversation with your team and see how your company can grow from smashing silos. Thank you.