Episode 22: Interview with Jeff Allen

Our today’s is with Jeff Allen. Jeff is working in Online Marketing for more than 13 years. A surprising and rare masterstroke, as he says about himself. As president of Hanapin Marketing he is in charge of a dozen accounts of medium-sized businesses up to billion bollar companies. As one of the leading authors, Jeff is also contributing articles to the well-respected blog PPCHero.com, which is one of the most influencial blogs about PPC in the USA. For recreation Jeff enjoys fine single-malt scotch or an India Pale Ale craft beer.

Andre Alpar: Ok, it’s time for another OMreport, this time with Jeff Allen. Jeff, can you please introduce yourself.

Jeff Allen: I’m Jeff Allen. I’m with Hanapin Marketing and I write for the blog PPC-Hero. And we also have our own conference in the US called Hero Conf.

Andre Alpar: So PPC-Hero, is it an open blog. So it’s not just you guys writing, not like a corporate blog. So all different kind of PPC-guys are writing about it, right?

Jeff Allen: Well, it’s about 75 % of people who work for Hanapin that are writing there and the rest are all people from all kinds of big brands, other agencies and things like that.

Andre Alpar: So how do you come up with a good blog post? I mean, you had some pretty astonishing ones. I mean, that’s why we invited you here to Berlin. So how do you come up with a good topic? Do you have something like a session once a month, a creative moment, where you come up with topics and then try to fill them or see if they are realistic? How do you do it?

Jeff Allen: It’s a little of both. Sometimes Google helps us out by asking if we want to do one of their big enhanced campaigns. Then they came pretty easy to us of course. But outside of that I personally knew once a month or figured out what I wanted to write about in this particular month and then try to break it down into a couple of blog posts. So when we for example write about ad copying you might talk about the creative process with coming up with a new ad. Then you might talk about implementing it in a scientific way and then you might talk about measuring the results in a third post, or something like that. We also see it as a team and try to give each other ideas because we post every day and that can be pretty hard to stay on top of things.

Andre Alpar: So do you know how much time goes into writing blog posts? Like ten percent of your time or twenty or less?

Jeff Allen: Well, It’s probably about ten or twenty percent. It takes me four to six hours to write one post or at least one good post.

Andre Alpar: So how come that you are so willing to share. I remember this one blog post about enhanced campaigns and it was quite open with stats, facts, the truth, in your face. How come? I mean, this is not the average blog post. The average anglo-saxon blog post would be something like “The 5 things you need to take care of with ad copying.” But that was not the average blog post.

Jeff Allen: Well, this blog obviously brings us some clients. So since it’s a way we get a lot of clients, it helps us to attract the right clients, writing the right, good blog posts that are in depth and open and honest. Because a part of it is that we want clients that are open and honest and share information with us. So if they come in the door knowing that we are going to do cool stuff on your account, so other people will know about it, then you have to be ok with that. It’s probably attracting the right people into our business, the right employees to work with and everything like that.

Andre Alpar: So do you work a lot internationally? Do you see differences between PPC in different countries? What are some remarkable things that always come up on your mind, when you think about that topic?

Jeff Allen: Yes, very much so. Cost per click and click through rate are usually the two biggest things. So around here in Europe people say “Man, costs per clicks are really high. They are 1 or 2 Dollar for this keyword.” And in the US that same keyword might be 20 or 30 Dollars. So it’s a pretty big wide gap and click through rate is the same thing. For us a good click through rate might be 3 percent. In a lot of European countries it’s 20 percent. And so it’s really interesting. I think that’s the main difference. Maybe the US is getting a little more competitive, a little faster.

Andre Alpar: And you think it still pays off, even if it’s that competitive? I mean if the gap is that big, does it really pay off? …

Jeff Allen: It depends on the client.

Andre Alpar: …Or is it like a strategy so that they want to gain market share and overspend?

Jeff Allen: Yeah, I think if the clients are looking for a lot of top-line revenue growth, it is still good. Profit margin matters a little less. If it is a well-known brand it usually is a little easier to be competitive in the space and get more clicks and cheaper clicks and things like that. But there are also clients that are small and don’t have high margins and it still makes a lot of sense for them because the industry they are in does not have something like a major player. So they can spend big money and all that.

Andre Alpar: So they can probably be the biggest (player). So how do you usually work together with your clients? Do they pay like a fixed fee or do you get a chunk of their revenue extra that you made them? Or do you have like a target CPL or CPA or anything like that? How does it usually work?

Jeff Allen: So easy answer, it’s kind of all of the above. It’s pretty specific to the client. Sometimes we work on an hourly rate where we say “Hey, you only need a project-on so just buy a block of hours from us and we will work on that project”.

Andre Alpar: So coach an in-house team of something like that?

Jeff Allen: Yes, training. We do a lot of training and things like that. At other times it’s pure percent-of-spend and whatever the percent-of-spend is, then we negotiate that. That’s what it ends up being.

Andre Alpar: But how do you know what the right medicine is for the certain specific client? Do you have a preference how you like it best or are there different ways how to charge? How do you prioritize it for yourself? Or are there certain business models? So for example does e-commerce call for a different setup than dating or brands? Do they do something different? What are factors that influence how you work together with clients?

Jeff Allen: Yeah, I think there is no perfect pricing model, no matter what. Either you miss the lines of percent-of-spend you promised since you obviously try to drive spend while the clients try to drive profitability. But even with a pay-per-performance model like percent-of-revenue you don’t control all the other factors that go into that. For example you could drive a lot of really good leads but the call centers don’t close any of them. You don’t manage the call centers so there is nothing you can do. So there are kinds of pros and cons to every side of it. I think it really depends on the businesses’ model. Percent-of-spend works well in a lot of cases because you can just pad the percent-of-spend into the overall spend. So if your fee is 10 percent you just add that onto the total spend and then you calculate your cost-per-acquisition on the total cost to the client. So a lot of times that makes it the easiest, the simplest, the most streamlined but every way does depend on the instance.

Andre Alpar: Do you use tools that are available on the market or do you have your own tools? How does that work with you guys?

Jeff Allen: So we use Acquisio, that’s kind of our platform of choice. But we also developed some of our own tools. So they are actually on the blog, on PPC Hero. You can get to the site and there is stuff like quality score and ad testing and things like that. Do we use internally then we are defining and developing internally and releasing slowly to the rest of the people. Once our team uses them and likes them then we release them to other people as well.

Andre Alpar: Very nice. So in the United States Bing is much more important than over here in Europe. How much of your time do you spend on PPC in Bing and how much time do you spend on Google AdWords. What’s the share of your everyday work, also depending in correlation to this market share that we can usually read about? From your point of view, do you really spend 30 percent of your time on bing what’s the supposed market share or what does it look like? Do you do only AdWords or what does it look like in your case?

Jeff Allen: So we definitely do it. I would probably say on average in an account we spend 5 to 10 percent on the time doing it and we probably get 10 to 15 percent lift in results from it.

Andre Alpar: Ok and how much of the budget do you spend? Also 5 to 10 percent or is that just your time.

Jeff Allen: The budget is even slower actually. So it might be 5 to 10 but closer to 5 which is how we split our time then.

Andre Alpar: So how come that the market share is larger but you don’t focus so much on it as the supposed market share?

Jeff Allen: I think it’s a couple of things. One is that they are just starting to make it easier to work with. We are an All-Mac-office and they don’t have a Mac-version of the desktop. So we have one PC, it’s a lonely PC that we had to ask for and people just use it when they have to.
So we are working on that. I know Bing is working on creating that. So that will help us to spend more time with it, absolutely. But it is also, some of the testing we do is in Google and once it works we put it in Bing. So it is test first and then put it in there.

Andre Alpar: Because the testing is also difficult to do, even with your area PC?

Jeff Allen: Yes, a little bit.

Andre Alpar: But you think that they are going to catch up in the next year or two or what do you think what’s coming up?

Jeff Allen: They have made some crazy strides in the last couple years. …

Andre Alpar: They are really innovative when you look at the search side. I mean, I’m not sure about the PPC side but on the search products side they are very innovative. They are including foursquare, Quora and what not. So they are including quite some good stuff into a search engine.

Jeff Allen: Yes, the thing I always say is that they seem to focus on user experience and advertiser experience whereas Google seems to focus on money. So I feel like Bing is coming along with some really cool tools. I mean, they are catching up both in parity, making it easier to use and making it more similar to AdWords but also finding ways where AdWords has always not been as good and finding ways to resolve this.

Andre Alpar: What would be such a typical thing, where AdWords has always not been good?

Jeff Allen: The biggest one is service. AdWords service is a sales team, right? So they really try to push spend, new products, betas and stuff like that. And with Bing I tend to feel like I ask about a problem and someone will actually get into the account and fix it for me.

Andre Alpar: Has it been different once with AdWords or has it always been like that?

Jeff Allen: My experience is, it has always been like that.

Andre Alpar: It’s crazy because you must be spending zillions every day…

Jeff Allen: close to gazillion

Andre Alpar: … a million less than gazillion but then again, they are not providing you the service you should have? As a business man it’s a bit confusing to act like that.

Jeff Allen: I think what they need is more technical support. Because the service team, from a sales standpoint, is really useful and really helpful. I really like people and everything like that. They do not necessarily have technical support that is really helping with the account automatization and troubleshooting and finding opportunities and stuff like that. So I would say AdWords has probably gotten better on the sales side while Bing is just more focused on the service side, which, for an advertiser, is what I need. Because I know enough about what is happening on the marketplace. I don’t necessarily need to be told what is new or changing and things like that. I just sometimes need help implementing it or troubleshooting or something.

Andre Alpar: So you also lead your PPC team. How do you coach them? Do you like to check out the accounts a day and say “Ah, this is bad and you got try this” or do they mostly coach each other or how do you do the internal learning curve, making sure that works out?

Jeff Allen: So our team is highly collaborative. So it’s all of the above. So I sit on the floor with everyone else…

Andre Alpar: How many guys are there?

Jeff Allen: … There are 20 people on the paid search team specifically. So I sit in the team with them and if they have questions then they come directly to me. I do trainings with everyone and so we train on that.

Andre Alpar: Do you still manage accounts on your own or are you managing the guys who are managing them?

Jeff Allen: No managing accounts. If I am managing an account it is just for a very short period of time, if it is a brand new account or something critical. But beyond just me we have really crazy talented people on our team who all can step in and do the training.

Andre Alpar: You should not name them. Otherwise they probably get hired by someone else.

Jeff Allen: That already happened, Google actually poached one of our account managers.

Andre Alpar: But then you would have somebody great in their service team. So you probably should allow it.

Jeff Allen: Yeah, exactly. That’s what we are hoping for. We are training their service team. No just kidding. I don’t want to overstate it. They really have great service people.

Andre Alpar: Do you hire juniors who have never done it before?

Jeff Allen: We hire of the range. I had 11 years of experience when Hanapin hired me. We have had people with nine years, six years, five years. But we also hire people, young, straight out of school, who do not and just use the rest of the people to train them and coach them and start them out and support…

Andre Alpar: So how long do they need to manage an account on their own or at least a small one?

Jeff Allen: For a small one it is usually around six months, maybe a little bit less depending on how quickly the grasp, if they have a background in technical stuff or marketing or something like that. Big accounts usually have them being support on them, so not to say to be the lead account manager but maybe helping make changes and stuff like that. Tell about the first year and then they might be ready.

Andre Alpar: So do clients understand that people, who know what they are doing, don’t fall from trees and you have to invest in that? Do clients figure that, it’s not a problem to them?

Jeff Allen: It’s a challenge and we also have an associate director of paid search, the person right below me, who is on every account for the first 90 days. So he makes sure every first impression at Hanapin…

Andre Alpar: So he is the quality assurance

Jeff Allen: Exactly! And then we do updates every week on the accounts and everything like that. I think clients understand, yes, talent doesn’t grow on trees. You have to develop it. I think we develop it pretty quick comparatively but we also have a lot of systems in place to make sure that there is some high level inside growing in every account and that we don’t put someone with just six months of experience on an account and say “Good luck, have fun, make it good!”

Andre Alpar: Thanks so much for your interview and your time.

Jeff Allen: Thank you