Connected Advertising Blog

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.

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.

As always, randfish has great SEO insights into the components and relative importance with regards to organic page rankings for Google. 

In the early 90′s, one of the clients I had was an auto after-market repair chain that was a mix of corporate owned and franchise locations. The corporate client opened a new store not too far from a franchisee. The franchisee was up in arms. He shouted that the corporate location was stealing his customers, and as proof he showed a decreasing sales trend vs the prior year. The client asked us to run some numbers. Since we were ‘third’ party and both had business with us, the analysis would be accepted by both.

Well, to combat the corporate location, the franchisee began a series of promotions. x% off brake jobs, every x oil change free, free labor on exhaust installation, etc. The promotions worked really well… at lowering his average sale. It turns out, he was just running the promotions in store. There was no out-bound advertising to draw people in (or very little actually). So, while the corporate location did virtually nothing to decrease his customer base, his promotion-focused ‘solution’ did a lot to decrease the value of that base.

So, this is the lens through which I read the clickz article, “Promotions Could Overtake Display and Search Says Report” According to the study, search and display will peak, then decline while promotions will overtake them. The study was done by Borrell and Associates ( CEO Gordon Borrell) According to the study, display advertising is flat at about $12.6B and will decline by 1/2 over the next four years. “What’s driving it is an overall dissatisfaction or nagging feeling on the part of advertisers that their advertising isn’t working, or that they’re overspending on it,” said Borrell. “With the Internet, they can go straight to consumers. If they’re having a sale, they can put it up on their Web site and consumers will come to them, and if their Web site is good enough, consumers will keep coming back.”

“With the Internet, they can go straight to the consumers.”  I am not sure how. Decrease the display advertising, decrease the search
advertising, and anti spam laws are terrifying companies. How exactly do they go straight to the consumers with the promotions? The answer would appear to be, ” put it up on their Web site and the consumers will come to them..”. So, they are not attracting as many new customers (if any at all), and for any  customer that would come to the site anyway, they will give them a discount – promotion.

Now, contrast Gordon Borrell’s perspective with that of Jon Brancheau,(15 minute video) from GM.  GM’s director of media operations, Jon Brancheau, reveals the truth about the company’s digital budget allocations in a frank chat from the 2008 iMedia Driving Interactive Summit. He is bullish on the digital space.  Far from seeing digital as not working, this is a place to push the boundaries.

I cannot see a 50% decline in display advertising. As for it being flat the past 2 years, there has been an inventory influx with social media over that time. This has been high volume, low CPM inventory. Contrary to a retraction, as behavioral targeting improves and the niche value of the individual areas of inventory are identified, I believe this will increase. These low value segments will fine their place in the advertising ecosystem and help it grow.

I am not sure that Gordan Borrell believes in the ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ myth that was debunked years ago. But the general sense of the article would lead one to believe that this is nearly so.

If we believe the advertising is not working, then we should fix it before we start leaving money on the table with unadvertised promotions. There really is no reason for any online advertiser to wonder if their efforts are working. We can track minutia. If we are unsure of performance, it is not a lacking of the media, but a lacking of our imaginations. There are many ways to tag metrics to our advertising. And it will probably cost less than running unadvertised promotions.

At AdTech last week, I was going to meet some folks for dinner. I knew the
name of the restaurant and the street name, that’s it. No address. So,
I pulled out my blackberry, went to Google, and wham! nothing. There
were some reviews, but not a listing. Next Yahoo! Go!. nothing. Again,
some web sites with reviews. Then Live. Bingo. No websites, no links.
just Name, Address and Phone number. Then click, a map. Oh, and I was
probably just a few feet from a yellow pages directory in the room. But, I wanted to use the technology. To me, this would seem like an obvious search. A mobile device and a specific restaurant name. Live knew (or guessed) exactly what I wanted. The other two were clueless. 

The way I see it, local search is not just about a technical definition, it is a mindset. I started out in local search and at the time, the technology was not quite what it is today. But as I said, its as much a mind set as it is a technology. 

In November last year, I wrote a piecefor SEMPO
Global Search Blog regarding the plateau that I see for Google. Earlier this month, I
submitted a piece to Search Engine Watch which included my belief that
there will be a reduction in Google share by  Q4. I was wrong. It
actually happened in December 2007. Google is down slightly to 56.3% in December from 57.7% in November.

Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

Why does this matter? Well, considering that Google is and will remain the
leader in search for the foreseeable future and that search will
continue to grow, it doesn’t really affect the numbers in any negative
way, yet. It does, however, provide an opening. One through which we
can see that other options are viable and profitable. As this happens,
more opportunities can fall upon Microsoft and Yahoo!. I believe that the market needs the competition. Even as analysts call (SEW) for Yahoo! to break off search and outsource to Google, I think there is a long term benefit even to Yahoo! shareholders in the dedicated Yahoo! effort to search. With more brand dollars being
considered for search, and the search product itself expanding to
potentially include images and different ways to deliver results, these calls for divesting the core technology are premature.

Planning for any marketing campaign is challenging. Most of what we
read about starting the program is focused on keywords, campaigns, urls,
etc. These all should be. But there is a missing element. In today’s
dynamic business environment, there is a lot that search marketers need
to coordinate along with the campaign itself.

I have read about launched campaigns being rejected or with an
inflated min bid because the site was down. Or the product page text
was not search engine friendly, or the offers did not match up. So, a
quick review of things to proactively get into.

1) Server Maintenance Schedule. Most maintenance does not
necessarily take down the sites. However, this is the time when the
site is very vulnerable. If something is going to happen, now is the
time.

Why care. Don’t launch just before or during these times. The
engines are going to inundate your servers with bot hits to get content
and assess access. Depending on your campaign, this can be significant.
While normally not an issue, if something happens with maintenance,
these hits can complicate it. It also will be a problem for your
campaign’s validation and quality score assessment if the server goes
down.

2) Production schedule. This is important in two areas. One, like
server maintenance, this is vulnerable time. But, it is also a time
when hidden problems can happen. Where content or pricing is not what
you thought. This is particularly true with dynamic content or product
sites. In my view, it is best to closely coordinate this effort and
confirm the target page content prior to launching any new campaigns.
With existing campaigns, this is a time to double check the landing
pages.

3) Marketing campaigns. As we move products and services through the
development cycle at an ever increasing pace, the opportunity for the
outbound messaging to fall behind the product offering also increases.
By not waiting for new offers or product information to be given to you
and working your way into the pre-launch discussions, you’ll be sure that whatever you’re launching is in sync with the products.

4) Site design and development. How many times have you launched a
product only to learn that the landing page is generic, or full of
images and no or little text relevant to the product? Anyway, long
before the launch of any search campaign, you need to involve yourself,
at some level, with site design and development.

5) Analytics, reporting and application development. These are
related to each other and usually are in place well before the process
of creating search campaigns even begins. This is all the more reason
why search people need to be well ingrained in the overall business. It
is too late to raise your hand as you put your campaigns together and
ask for special development, reporting or analytics support. Again,
insert yourself in the long range process involved with these areas.

I have said many time that search marketers need to be more than
just search marketers. They need to be good marketers and involved in
there company’s business. Get involved beyond search.