Connected Advertising Blog

Quattro Wirelss released its assessment of mobile Brand advertising, and we have some strong CTR performance coming from well targeted advertising.

As seen in the chart, CPG is indexing over 250 (2.5x better than the average mobile CTR), followed by strong performance from Communities, finance, dating and food.

By way of explanation, Quattro Wireless says

On the mobile platform, these marketers are often using ads to drive a response (click to coupons or recipes or find out information about rates and loans).

In addition to looking at CTR, the assessment of CPMs show a very wide range, driven in part by the level of targeting being used.

As in online advertising, the creative execution also has an impact on the performance. Animated ads had a 71% lift in CTR over the average mobile ad, and 63% over static banner ads.

The Quattro Wireless study provides good directional (and intuitive) information. Well targeted, relevant call to action, attention grabbing advertising improves performance. The question for advertisers remains, can you provide all these and do so at a CPM that makes sense? Of course, this depends on your objectives.

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.

To me, social media is an important part of consumer communications. But, with all things new, we need to avoid getting caught up in the hype. If we are focused on those who use social media, then we obviously need to base our decisions on what we know about them from our experiences and research. Where I have a concern is when we make broad, market wide strategic statements based on research that applies to a specific tactic (such as social). As we dive deeper into these specific tactics, particularly hot ones, we run the risk of magnifying research numbers beyond their true size and implication.

A recent release from Nielsen, if not read carefully, can create just such a scenario. In part, it reads…

…  “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media…

and

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way.

These are two very broad statements. Taken at face value, one might assume that we should shift a large share of resources away from search (for example) and into Social media.

[Nielsen divided respondents into three groups: Searchers (37%), Portalists (34%) and Socializers (18%).]

User Content usage

A more accurate depiction of the data would be to state that,  for Socializers  15% said that blogs are a trusted source of information online. Or,  Socializers ( 18%) who think blogs are a trusted sources (15% of the 18%) make up 2.7% of those surveyed.

To be fair, blogs were also sited as trusted sources of information for about 9% of Portalist and 6% of Searchers, or a about of 8% of those surveyed.

Taking a look at the survey graphs, you can see that the number for “facebook or Twitter” as trusted sources is even lower… among all groups.

Okay, enough with the percentages of percentages, the bottom line is read the detail of any survey, research or statement… about any media.

My final take on this is about the methodology. The survey method is a fine, valid way to get input from consumers or users. However, two points: First, the results that were quantified are based on the source the users “started” with. It does not speak to the overlap of sources used. So, even among those 18% that are heavy Socializers, there is nothing in the stated research results to suggest that they are not using other sources. Often, there is overlap between primary and secondary source usage, but there is nothing here to let us know either way. Second, be leery of self reported behavior. Again, not invalid, but needs to be backed by other data (observed). A good, recent perspective from Vovici.

I am not knocking social media. I believe in it as a way to keep up with the general perceptions of consumers, a way to provide feedback and develop more meaningful contact points. But, marketers need to engage social with their eyes wide open. Look at all numbers from a critical perspective.

Market Share report from Net Appliance is being quoted as showing google getting eighty percent of the search share.

However, before anyone starts quoting these things, they should be aware of the methodology.

The first skew is that the measurement is not of search, but of visitors to specific sites that happen to deploy NetApps tools. Knowing nothing substantive about these site, we cannot assume the visitors are truly representative of the search engine users.

Additionally, how the sites market themselves also makes a difference. With 76% actively marketing in PPC, the strategies they employ have a great influence on the profile of the searchers.

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.

43% are commerce sites

18% are corporate sites

10% are content sites

29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..)

Nothing NetApps is doing is wrong. My concern is with media outlets that cover them without, at the very least, articulating the methodology of the data gathering.

InformationWeek quoted the results. Then, PCWorld sited InformationWeek. InformationWeek also quoted another share measurement report that was based on a similar type of set up. However, this company kept talking about “hits.” Not sure, but in our area, hits as we define them (every element on a rendered page is a ‘hit’) has no real meaning. Perhaps it does, but without clarification, we cannot assume so.

Finally, Danny Sullivan pointed out several years ago at SEW (sorry, I couldn’t find the link), search share shifts are not terribly important until they demonstrate a clear trend that also crosses a threshold. So, seeing Google move from the 40-50% share range to the 50-60% range share and then 60%+ share, this is meaningful.  A -0.2% move in share (Bing) is not only insignificant, it is not worthy of space in any column…Unless the headline reads, “FLASH… nothing’s changed”.

People only talk about a product or company when they have a complaint, or at least that was the common wisdom. A study done by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury appears to tell us things are different. At least on Twitter.

According to Jensen

“A lot of the brand comments were positive,” he said. “There are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with.”

With 20% of the tweets requesting or providing information about products, we re-affirm the importance of engaging with people in the social media space. But, something to emphasize is that consumers are talking to consumers about their experiences. So, if you are going into the social space, you have to be genuine.

By keeping true in your off-line actions to the message, persona… brand, that you are promoting online, you reap the benefits;  positive input for other consumers. In the reverse, they can have some really tough words (classified as ‘wretched’) . eMarketer has a summary of the numbers.

Peering into the brain to figure out what triggers specific reactions and how to motivate consumers to buy is part of the Neuromarketing practice that is being explored today.