Failure is a natural part of the search marketing process, but it doesn't have to be a fatal setback. See how to convert your clients' failures into a rich source of information for future success.

Time management guru Alan Lakein once said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Sure, his sage message extends to writing the next great business or crisis communications plan. But failure is part of our everyday lives in search marketing, too. The world of search engine marketers revolves around testing to find "winners," resulting in a large piece of what we test never making our -- or our clients' -- radars as anything other than "didn't work." As a result, few of us ever think about talking to our clients about how we, as service providers, are planning to fail. But should we?

Failure is the giant elephant sitting in the middle of the meeting room -- it's there whether we want to admit it or not. As we discuss the artistry of keyword testing, multivariate landing page optimizations, message rotations, keyword list expansion and so on, everyone becomes hyper-focused on finding the "winners." However, we should not ignore the simple fact that some of what we will try will fail. Instead, we should consider embracing those failures, discussing, analyzing and, in some cases, re-testing our failures. 

Imagine the power of being able to monetize your failures. Marketing and advertising are rife with waste. Trying to create the zero-sum plan to eliminate waste results in micro-focused programs that have no room for growth or never have a chance of creating critical volume for a company. 

So should SEM professionals be discussing a plan to fail with our customers? The answer is different for everyone. In my experience, there are two variations of the conversations that we can have: one with ourselves and one with our clients.

Conversation with ourselves
I am not going to tell you anything new, but I am suggesting a new way to think about how you architect your SEM campaigns and analyze the subsequent results. Here are the four rules my team uses when planning to fail.

1. You simply can't succeed without failing. Get used to it. And get your team used to it. Embrace failure as a process that contains a wealth of new information, and then break it to the client -- gently.
2. Develop a complete strategy around failure. "See what doesn't work and then go from there" is not a strategy. Try to anticipate where your failure points will be and think beyond them. Instead of setting up an A/B scenario, try A/B, A/C, B/C, and C/A. Your ability to triangulate onto what made something fail or succeed will greatly improve. This may take longer than your standard A/B test, but is worth it in the long run.
3. Test and don't assume. Stop accepting winners as winners just because they meet some numerical standard (CTR, ROAS, CPA, etc.). Instead, explore what happens in all facets -- from "true intent" to quality scores and beyond -- then test those assumptions along with your assumptions around failure.
4. This process is not for every client campaign and budget. Sometime the answer just needs to be "A was better than B."

Conversation with clients
At first blush, divulging to clients your anticipation of failures may sound a bit odd. However, it is really nothing more than good old-fashioned marketing sense -- with a big paradigm shift thrown in. Rather than just seeking and accepting winning creative, keywords, landing pages or combinations thereof, we can also plan out how we learn from what does not work. There is a wealth of information we can glean from SEM programs, but much of it is buried in what didn't happen; results are often tossed into the "didn't work" file and left for dead with little or no examination.

The outward facing process when planning to fail is just that: a process. Here is an overview of five steps that we take our clients through.

1. Accept that you don't have all the answers. However, you can ask all the questions you want. Make a list of what you want to know and then prioritize it in order of importance to your business. We also make a list of assumptions that we would like to test.
2. Maintain laser focus. Ask your client, "If you could only get one thing out of your paid search program, what do you want it to be?" Be ruthless here -- don't accept ambiguous answers, such as "sales." You need to be as specific as possible.  How many sales? What is the minimum dollar value? Do backorders count? First click or last click? It is important to understand that laser focus does not mean simple. You may not be able to define all parameters, but more is better. Remember that your ability to claim success or failure hinges upon a razor sharp definition of outcome.
3. Set divest and reinvest points with your client and within the campaign. This ties in closely to step No. 2. Ideally you get enough detail out of the client (before they got too exasperated!) to help you set some pretty sophisticated points. In an ideal world, you have enough information to set divestiture for every single keyword in your program. But even if you simply walked away with blended CPA number, know that you are still ahead of half of the SEM planning world.
4. Evolve faster than the competition. This means aggressive, ongoing optimization of your campaigns -- no "set it and forget it" here. Ongoing human analysis of machine logic optimization produces the best results -- just make sure you are optimizing on a regular basis.
5. Analyze, analyze and analyze. Want in on a nice secret here? Have someone who did not execute the campaign do the analysis. Outside perspective bypasses our instinct to look for answers we think we know, suspect or want to find in our own work, and it often produces much deeper insights.

Now you know why you should plan to fail -- and how to discuss it with your clients. You gain real insight into that fraction of testing dollars that most people would normally discard into the "didn't work" category. You not only have a better chance of leapfrogging your clients ahead of their competitors -- you have also delivered far more value on their advertising dollar. And it ultimately changes the perception that failure is something wasteful and bad, but is instead a rich source of information for future success.

Ingrid Nielsen is online marketing director at Clear Ink. Read full bio.