Connected Advertising Blog

When the worst happens, people often show their best. From Katrina, to the tsunami to the Haitian earthquake, we see how quickly people from around the world can come together to help as best they can. Over the years, our ability to act upon our inclination to help has been greatly enhance by the communication made possible in the digital age.

Though it seems macabre, being able to see what is happening on the ground in a disaster provides us with a real sense of the need, a motivation we may otherwise lack. From reports on the official news sites, and blogs to tweets and Facebook updates, our ability to stay informed about the realities on the ground are made possible, and made available on line or on mobile, by the tremendous advances in digital technology. This “connect-ability” helps us understand the importance of our personal involvement to assist those in great need.

But, by its very nature, the connection we have is two-way and allows us to act upon our inclination to help. Virtually any digital contact point provides us with ways to help.

Email allows disaster relief agencies such as the Red Cross to keep subscribers informed about the most recent developments and needs. We can easily donate funds, or find opportunities to volunteer.

Mobile communications make it easy for mass amounts of people to donate quickly. As with so many good intentions, the longer it takes us to act upon them, the less likely we are to act at all. Over 700,000 donations of $10 each were provided to the Red Cross in two days, and continues! As I tell my kids almost every day, “little things lead to big things.” $10 became $7 million in two days.

Twitter provides quick snippets which we can easily pursue. This has been a great way for aid agencies, media and individuals to get the word out, inform and ask for assistance.

Facebook has numerous pages developed by relief agencies to help keep fans informed of what is happening. This covers not only the problems on the ground, but what is being done to help people (using the donations provided by contributors from around the world).

Blogs personalize the reality. Help us see it from and individual perspective and give us an emotional connection not possible in the world of mass media of just over a decade ago.

Every day, we work with this great communication tool to help our clients grow their business, and that is important. It is through the growing commercial use of the technology that it can be financially supported and be ready to facility our desire to help others when disasters strike. Now, when used to help others, is when the real value of the digital age becomes apparent.

According to Vovici, Customer Experience Management (CEM)  is seen as the number one Differentiator among business leaders.

When asked about greater consistency at every customer touch point, only 36% believe this area of the customer engagement is benefiting their organizations.

From an online marketing perspective,  consistency is a critical factor. It is impacted by what we say, how we say it, and how we manage it. One of the things I have emphasized with my online teams is that “experience needs to meet expectations.” If they don’t, you wasted the spend, and much more importantly, you may have permanently lost your customer.

If consumers click on a search ad about a specific type of shoe, and the landing page is about clothing in general, we blew it. If they click on an ad about a certain model car, and they hit the OEM home page, we blew it.

Managing the customer experience starts with the first touch point.

Open Call Access

It amazes me to see how quickly forward looking companies like Google resort to backward looking  defenses to avoid regulation. By trying to pretend that regulations should be applied as if technology and business models of today were more like those of 1980, Google is trying to avoid being governed by the same rules as other companies providing telecom service.

Common Carrier Laws provide for open access and are in place to ensure that providers of services (telephone in this case), allow consumers unfettered use at a reasonable rate. AT&T is using this law to petition the FCC to make Google open it’s Google Voice service, allowing users to call all numbers. Currently, Google blocks the calling of some numbers based on local carrier charges (in those areas) to Google. Their justification is not unreasonable on the surface. You can see their post here.
In part…

“Google Voice’s goal is to provide consumers with free or low-cost access to as many advanced communications features as possible. In order to do this, Google Voice does restrict certain outbound calls from our Web platform to these high-priced destinations. But despite AT&T’s efforts to blur the distinctions between Google Voice and traditional phone service, there are many significant differences:
•    Unlike traditional carriers, Google Voice is a free, Web-based software application, and so not subject to common carrier laws.
•    Google Voice is not intended to be a replacement for traditional phone service — in fact, you need an existing land or wireless line in order to use it. Importantly, users are still able to make outbound calls on any other phone device.
•    Google Voice is currently invitation-only, serving a limited number of users.”

ATT is arguing that Google should be forced to behave like a carrier based on Common Carrier laws.

“whether a carrier is a common carrier . . . does not depend upon whether its charter declares it to be such . . . but upon what it does.” US v. Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, 249 US 296 (1919).

While the distinction Google makes may seem appropriate, I only have to look back over the past year to see the impact of parsing words rather than recognizing intent.

In the financial service markets, one of the common paths around regulation was the ability to declare a company as one form of institution and being subject to the regulations thereof, while conducting activities that are clearly that of a different industry, and avoiding those regulations. As President Obama rightly stated, we need to regulated activities regardless of the companies by which they are conducted.

If you want to provide phone service, you should be regulated by the same rules as any telecom. While Google is providing this service “Free” and to a “limited number of users,” we cannot view this for the short term. As they further said, “Google Voice’s goal is to provide consumers with free or low-cost access to as many advanced communications features as possible.” This implies growth in the intended offerings. I would further argue that, since Google is a for profit firm, “free” is not the same as unprofitable (at least in theory). The Google model is to create services which increase its audience, thereby also increase its value to advertisers. The mode of monetizing the service should not be the measure of the applied regulation, the service itself is the subject.

The rules are for the services provided, not the type of company providing them. I hope we can transfer knowledge gained in the financial services mess to other areas of our regulation.

It is also a shame when companies that show such vision in the development of unique business models and application of technology fall back on the same old-company legal tactics.

AT&T’s prompting has moved lawmakers and the FCC to take some steps in this debate.

When I was in a large agency years back, we were told by researchers that consumers were healthier, conscientious about their weight, and eating better. Yet, when you looked at IRI scanner data from the supper markets, chips, cookies and candies did not take a hit. In fact, they were out pacing other food categories.

An article in Vovici reminds us that we have to be vigilant in our attention to what the consumer does as well as what they say they do. The example is the mp3 player. Engineers think gigabytes of storage, consumers think number of songs. Who’s right?

Well, both. When we look at search queries, consumers don’t search for “500 song mp3 players,”  they search for “4GB mp3 players”. But, when you look at the qualitative research, according the the article, consumers are thinking of song capacity.

Though traditional search tactics tell us to match ad text closely to query strings, we need to be more sophisticated. A user may query in GBs, but read ad copy in “song counts” for mp3 players. Perhaps they have been trained to think one way and speak another. Or perhaps, we are really missing an opportunity.

Either way, understanding the qualitative data of consumer thinking, and the quantitative data of consumer behavior, can lead to unique and better converting combinations of keywords and ad copy.

Okay, so this is not really about search. But it is about relationships, business relationships. Seth Godin had a post about concealing things in marketing. It is more consumer focused, but widely applicable. It got me thinking about a problem I have seen repeatedly in nearly 20 years of marketing. Agencies try to spin results, shading numbers and show the good, while hiding the bad. I recall my first experience with a client service director at Leo Burnett in the early 90′s who actually did NOT do this.

Metrics seem to be an obvious component of any SEM program. Unfortunately, it is too easy to set up quick metrics and call it a day. Some of the more common ones are:
-Click through rate (CTR)
-Cost per click (CPC)
-Impressions
-Page views
-Time spent

Some often talked about but seldom used, I mean truly used are:
-Conversions
-Cost per Sale
-Margin
-Units per Sale
-Revenue

In short, metrics tied to real ROI.

It’s funny, but I have been in conversations with heads of marketing and advertising for some large companies.  They pushed us as an agency to prove the ROI of our program, which we were perfectly willing to do (this was off-line). We could set up unique tracking right into the store and online. They would simply have to provide sales related to the tracking. This is when they balked. Despite all the talk of ROI, most companies are not set up to truly track sales-to-efforts.

With search, we should be able to close the sales-to-effort gap. The preferred Methods are the direct methods. These include attaching source information to each visitor and tracking where they go and what they buy. 

While every company is about the sale, not all online activity is.  So the question to address is, “why are you doing search advertising?” Somewhere your activity online is expected create or assist in a sale. Are email newsletter subscribers your target? How about inquiries or phone calls (click to call on site, or track-able phone number)?  If you can only get as far us measuring visits, then nail down specific pages, or page views or time spent which tie as closely as possible to the sale.

Then know the percent who buy and the average amount of purchases or life time value.

You must also figure SEM’s role in generating the sale.  Ask, “if we weren’t doing SEM how many of these sale would have come any way?” And.. . “If we didn’t have radio, direct mail, display or other Brand and promotional marketing, how many sales would SEM miss as a result?” Both are extremely difficult to answer.  But both should evoke a line of thinking that helps define the metrics that are as close as possible to real ROI. 

The ultimate goal here is to define your activities in terms of revenue generated or margin contributed rather than on some cost basis. Below are some scenarios based on direct sales and email newsletter subscriptions. These may reflect closely what your program is, or they may not. The point here is to let these help you figure a way to set metrics that truly show the value of your efforts.
 

The closer you can come to isolating your efforts and focus on your margin the better. But, we all know there are other factors, so you will avoid issues if your metrics account for these up front. If you have a good analytics group, they can help you out here. If not, build a consensus among other stakeholders in marketing, advertising and sales. Some methods are Unique sale – answering the question about how many sales does SEM generate that would not happen without it; Assigned Value which provides the amount, or value other media have on each sale, and the indirect where the action is not a sale, but will lead to sales.

  
Most likely, these will be estimates. But, if you continually monitor these assumptions, you can keep these numbers close to reality and show real value.

Beyond the ability to show the value of what you do, developing a margin based approach can open a different risk paradigm that allows you to find more opportunities. A while back I went off on the whole risk thing.

After you figure the metrics, the next step is setting up your tracking… more to come.

Optimizing SEM for Google and Yahoo!, I mean really optimizing it, requires a wide range of tools. As I thought about some at my posts I realized that some of the tactics which seem basic may require core skill sets which are not so basic, or tools that are not used as commonly as I assumed.

So, over the next week or so, I will cover some of the tools we use, or have seen other use, and what they can do for your SEM. This is definitely not all- inclusive so any ideas you have please feel free to post. Also, one of the challenges I have is determining if these fall into the arena of basic or advanced SEM. Since both will be covered, I will try to keep each section to a pattern of starting basic and elevating to advanced. This will be interspersed with commentary about the value of escalating SEM sophistication.

We’ll start with outlining and defining Categories of SEM strategies and tactics for which we employ tools. Then in following posts, will delve into the resources, tools and techniques to tackle them. Broadly, some of the areas I’ll hit on are:
   
-Keyword Selection
  Creation and evolution of keywords, Match types and their association to specific ads   and landing pages.
-Bid management
  The process of adjusting bids to optimize cost relative to a target event.
-Conversion -Tracking – Reporting 
  Setting up conversion metrics that are based on real margin / profits rather than click CPC and CTR.
-Copy Optimization
  Creating copy which improves conversion and front end CTR. 

Okay, there is one post that I did a ways back that I think will be good for starting the Keyword selection. If you’re not familiar with developing keyword lists, or just want a perspective on it, check it out. Then, also take a look at Google’s estimator tool. Based on your site, it can help identify keywords and provide estimates (without the proper match type , negative, etc, it can be far off on the estimates).

More to come…

added 5/23:Setting the metrics

Added 5/26: Tracking