by Knute Sands

Last Friday the Hello Viking team immersed ourselves in a 14-hour Google Adwords training session. Search history. Platforms. Tools. Keyword research practice. Ad-writing. Negative filtering. The works. We had 10 people sitting around the table——no one was excused.

Anyone who has dabbled in search marketing knows how managing a single PPC campaign without proper guidance can prove endless, and create some severe dark circles under the eyes.

Search is the great marketing equalizer. It’s also a ruthless gauntlet for copywriters and strategists.

So what did we learn?

That there’s a lot to learn, and the rules are changing fast.

Running effective search marketing and Adwords campaigns takes hours of swimming through competitor keywords, bidding, adjusting pricing, tweaking, launching, optimizing a quality score and of course, brewing a really big pot of coffee.

We’d run our fair share of Adwords campaigns before the training, so we had a lot of questions for Rodrigo Stockebrand, our trainer. Questions like, how can an Adwords campaign support an existing product line or marketing initiative? Why do some users pay so much per click for high volume search terms when others pay next to nothing? How can you leverage negative filters, geo-targeting and exact versus broad match to deliver useful consumer research, as well as effective placements?

Nevermind the whole realm of integrating the work you do in AdWords with custom landing pages and SEO.

14 hours is a long time.

The discussion was thorough, and fascinating. The art of running Adwords is in the details. It rewards the mind of a math wonk mixed with a copywriter mixed with a programmer mixed with a statistician.

Armed with new knowledge, we’re looking forward to further incorporating and acknowledging Adwords campaigns with all of our clients.

Last night I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with Meghan Wilker and Nancy Lyons from Geek Girls Guide and Nathan Almquist from Webknowledgy at Brookfield Properties’ Boutique Retail Roundtable. It was refreshing to hear consistent responses from our panel—the industry seems to be coalescing around key elements: Listen to and observe your customers and competition before speaking; Have a story to tell (e.g. Figure out what your brand is all about first); Encourage and nurture your employees and clients to participate.

We decided to scrub individual presentations and just take questions from the audience of retailers. So, here’s the presentation I had been asked to prepare. (Note: Many of the images and words in the slideshow are clickable and lead to further information.)

As a writer, it’s hard to beat London creative legend Dave Trott for honest clarity.

I’ve only recently come to know his work and his blog, but for my money, literally each post is a gem. Even while on holiday, Dave Trott delivers the goods.

“When does solving the practical problems kill the magic?

When does it stop being an improvement and actually just make it more like everything else?

When does it take away everything you loved about it in the first place?

You like it because it’s different.

And the first thing you want to do is change what makes it different.

Fix it up and improve it.

So that it becomes more like everything else.

And it stops being different.

For creative people it’s always a tough call.

Where do you draw the line?

Some changes are reasonable and will make your idea better.

And some changes just kill the magic.

How do you know when to stop?”

Perhaps this is the eternal quandary in developing advertising.

Creative people must confront, embrace and love the unknown. To continue to provide the value we hire them for, they must continue to push. But as someone said, “Half of writing is editing.” So, at what point does the editing reduce the creative to less than its full potential?

If anyone will figure this out, it’ll be Dave Trott.