As Paid Search advertising continues to grow and the industry continues to expand, its processes are becoming overly complex and complicated. With added keyword competition, seemingly endless enhancements to Google AdWords, the merger of Yahoo! Search and MSN adCenter and other platforms like Facebook Ads and Linkedin getting into the mix, it has become increasingly difficult to effectively manage the paid search suite of products in a way that consistently produce desired results.
Producing consistent ‘up-and-to-the-right’ results takes time and when you add to the mix countless blogs, tweets, diggs and sphinns you read to keep yourself updated on paid search, affiliate marketing, SEO and other channels to your list of daily responsibilities, there is less time to focus on doing things that add value and, ultimately, that the customer really cares about.
So how can you become more time efficient and take time out of processes so your daily routine becomes more balanced with the things that add value for the customer? One proven approach is performing a value added flow analysis of your processes to understand what value is and what waste is.
But how do you know what adds value? According to Ed Hay and John Guaspari in their video “Time: The Next Dimension of Quality” there are three basic questions you can ask to validate whether or not value is being added at each step of the paid search advertising process:
1. Does the customer care? If the customer doesn’t care then there is no point in proceeding with whatever it is you are doing.
2. Does the process step physically change the thing you are working on? If the thing, in this case say your Google AdWords campaign, does not physically change then everything you do up until you add or remove new keywords, ad group or text ads to the campaign is considered a form waste.
3. Is the thing you are doing completed right the first time? If you implement a task but it requires review before launching or rework afterward, you are not adding value to the process.
By asking these questions it is possible to take as much as 75% of time out of any process. Taking time out of any process adds quality to what you are doing. Beyond that, taking time out of a process allows you the ability and flexibility to add value to your clients in ways you may not have even begun to imagine. It helps you to be more responsive, innovative, build better team collaboration and be more competitive.
Value Added Flow Analysis of Paid Search
So how do you do a value added flow analysis of a paid search process? The first thing you need to do is to get rid of the old mind set of ‘this is how it’s always been done’. Because people are busy does not mean the process is efficient. If nothing is happening to the thing in the process then you are wasting time. You need to change the way you think about a process or you’ll never perform at the level that keeps you competitive and your customer satisfied. Changing the mindset is the hard part.
The easy part is actually doing a value added flow analysis. The trick to doing the value added flow analysis is that you need to it as the thing going through the process. If you do the analysis from your perspective you may have a biased view of the entire process. If you work on a team you may only truly understand your part of the process but since the thing going through the process is touched by many people it is better to do the analysis from the things point of view.
For example, say you’ve been tasked with adding a promotional campaign to your customer’s AdWords account. Think about all the steps involved to complete this one seemingly simple task. Consider everything from the initial meeting with the customer, to the internal discussions, to the layout of the campaign and its ad groups, the keyword research, the ad creative writing, the URL tagging, the bidding strategy all the way up to the launch of the campaign and ask yourself, as the thing going through the process, Does the customer care? Does the thing change? And was it done right the first time? As you do this and put time against each step in the process you may begin to see an ugly picture unfold. Typically only 10-15% of all steps in a process actually add value which translates into 1% of the time you are actually doing work that matters!
When all is said and done, all of these steps I’ve mentioned will have multiple sub-steps most of which may be necessary but do not add value to the process. The reality is, of the multiple steps there are to adding a new campaign there are only two the customer should truly care about – taking their ‘request’ for the new campaign and launching the campaign in active status. The customer cares, the account physically changes – hopefully for the better, and the launch was completed right the first time. Everything else to the customer is non-value added and takes valuable time away from doing things that matter.
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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).