Seeking new value in search marketing - iMediaConnection.com (1)

Seeking new value in search marketing - iMediaConnection.com

Although digital media and marketing may be relatively new in the scheme of things, the fundamentals of search behavior could not be older or more basic to our collective human nature.

Humans have evolved in part on the basis of their innate curiosity and their inventiveness, which has been fueled by a seemingly insatiable appetite for information and entertainment. We are effectively hard-wired to seek out information that meets our needs and desires -- whether those needs are for food and shelter or for education, news, product reviews, or bargains.

That's the good news for marketers: As a species, we are in "always-receive" mode, whether or not we are also in "send" mode.

The bad news for marketers lies in the fact that there is simply too much information out there that is readily available to us. We have gone far beyond the point where a brand can stand out and make an impression on the basis of a reasonable level of creativity and media spend.

The internet effectively creates a problem at least as great as the opportunities it presents. After all, there is more information available and accessible than anyone could possibly want, need, or have a use for -- let alone navigate.

Without the range of search-related tools and behaviors available to us, finding any particular piece of information would be like trying to find one specific grain of sand in the ever-shifting landscape of the Sahara Desert. Not what one would call the most user-friendly of interfaces.

So it was inevitable that the search industry would be born and that what was originally known as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in February 1994 would go on to bigger things in the shape of Yahoo and spawn plenty of similar ventures.

Since that time, search has grown up rapidly. While it continues to evolve and grow in response to the evolution of the digital ecosystem to which it is so essential, search in the marketplace has gone a very long way to being established as a part of the marketing mix, with its own specialists and budgets.

While recognizing the outright dominance of the search giants, it is critical to acknowledge that while they are generally defined in terms of how they work, what they do, and how they make money off their share of search, their success is not fundamentally based on the algorithms, software, and server farms that they run on.  These things are merely the technological commodities that allow them to play and stay in the game.

Fundamentally their relevance -- and even their success -- is rooted in the human behavior that defines the need for their existence. Naturally, management makes or breaks a company in any space, but the willingness and ability of that management to shape their business around a deep understanding of the attitudes, motivations, needs, and behaviors of their users will be what ensures success going forward.

Historically, such concerns have not been at the forefront of the search industry's mind.  A business dominated by software engineers will inevitably default to concerns relating to the product itself, rather than to the user. We can all draw on examples of conversations where programmers and engineers blame the users for failing to work out how to navigate an interface or to master some other business-critical task.

Perhaps the best case in point with regard to the search industry is the way information is presented. While there have been recent innovations in the sector, for years uses have been presented with what amounts to little more than an ugly list of largely undifferentiated links laid out like a shopping list. The list has been unfeasibly long, offering massive redundancy and, of course, many users know that the links at the top of the list have paid for the privilege to be there and aren't necessarily the best available link for them.

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MediaPost Publications Putting The People Back Into Paid Search 04/20/2011

MediaPost Publications Putting The People Back Into Paid Search 04/20/2011

Last week at ad:tech I presented a new approach to SEM called, "Putting the People Back in Paid Search." The thinking is that putting too much focus on the keyword instead of the person behind the keyword can prevent you from capturing the insights needed to fully optimize your paid search and other marketing campaigns. 

Power to the People

As Facebook marketplace ads gain popularity among search marketers for their ability to deliver high volumes of targeted exposure and traffic via real-time bidding, we're reminded that interests matter just as much as intent.  

With Facebook, ads that can be targeted to individuals based on their stated interests and creative units can (and must) be tailored to match what advertisers know about each person. Furthermore, bids can (and must) be based on the predicted value of engaging that person with one's brand. 

With paid search, ads are targeted to keywords, a subtle but important distinction. Keywords are not people. Rather, keywords represent the intent of a person at a moment in time. Nonetheless, marketers have become adept at tailoring search ads (and bids) to meet the anticipated need of each individual based on the keyword he/she is searching. 

To date, intent has beat out interest in terms of driving direct return on advertising spend. I spent a lot of time dissecting why this is the case in chapter 3 of my book  -- but, for now, suffice it to say that "mindset matters." However, relative to intent, interests represent more volume (after all, there are only SO many people out there searching for things that are relevant to your business) and opportunity for long-term brand engagement (after all, a search is fleeting).

Best of Both Worlds 

What if you could have your cake and eat it too? What if you could target paid search ads based on interests? And what if you could set bids based on the projected lifetime value of each customer or prospect?

Achieving this would require an understanding of the person behind the keyword -- his/her (and figuring out if it's a "him" or "her" is certainly part of the equation!) demographics, lifestyle characteristics, motivations, etc.

Enter Acxiom, a global marketing services company that has data on everything and everyone. Acxiom has developed PersonicX, a series of 70 audience clusters that roll up into 21 life stage segments. Based on the insight that life stages are proven predictors of consumer behavior, Acxiom has classified people into manageable groups more likely to respond to similar marketing messages.

An example of such a cluster is "Sitting Pretty." Acxiom has identified 19 million households that share these characteristics -- financially secure couples, on the verge of retirement, living in outer suburbs, and enjoying a luxurious lifestyle. These folks fall into the 45-65 age bracket and boast a net worth of $250-500,000.

For a company like Extra Space Storage (disclosure: Kenshoo customer), "Sitting Pretty" is a highly valuable audience segment, as these people are very likely to have more stuff and, therefore, a greater need of extra space for storage (hence the name, btw).

But how can Extra Space know if someone searching for its brand or a related term (which are often one and the same, btw... hence the name) is "Sitting Pretty" and thus representing a high lifetime value customer? If it were able to distinguish these searchers from others, surely, Extra Space would bid higher and tailor ads and landing pages accordingly.

Don't Call Me Shirley!

Indeed, that's just what Extra Space found itself able to do. After a thorough analysis of over 185,000 transactions, the Extra Space customer base was mapped to Acxiom PersonicX clusters, with up to 1,500 demographic elements appended per individual.

The next step for Extra Space was to match the clusters with specific paid search conversions and the keywords that triggered them. Now, Extra Space can understand the people behind the keywords and not just optimize campaigns based on demand metrics (clicks, conversions, leads, CPA) or even margin KPIs (profit, ROI, marginal ROI)  but actual lifetime value as projected at the time of the search query, based on the density of a given keyword to an audience cluster.

Putting this into play with paid search, Extra Space can determine if certain low-performing keywords represent high-value segments and optimize creative, landing pages, and bids to capture these conversions rather than just cutting them out of the campaigns completely.

Going one step further, Extra Space can determine which clusters perform best via paid search and look for other marketing channels to engage these people, such as display or even offline ads. Acxiom is integrated into comScore, allowing marketers to find web publishers with high compositions of various PersonicX clusters and prioritize them for display ads or sponsorships. 

It's Marketing, Stupid!

Every now and then we need a reminder that the M in SEM stands for marketing. As we geek out over line items in reports, it's easy to forget that the data we're looking at represents real people, not just keywords. And, when we're marketing to people, it's critical to consider everything we know about them as people when creating ads, on-site experiences, and assigning value to them based on their potential, as people, to become customers and brand loyalists.

Integrating Acxiom's PersonicX clusters into your paid search efforts is one of many ways to put the people back in paid search. To be sure, there are other companies such as Experian andTargus that provide the ability to map data to individuals or households and take action. And there are many emerging outlets that boast similarities to paid search (for example, Facebook marketplace ads and display ad exchanges) but rely on understanding people and their interests rather than keywords and their intent.

As Glenn Fishback put it during an interview for my book, "Sometimes, you have to step away from the spreadsheet." That's sound advice whether you're optimizing your marketing campaigns or your marketing career. 

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MediaPost Publications Search For Buzz 04/19/2011

MediaPost Publications Search For Buzz 04/19/2011

How do marketers put a price on the volume and the quality of buzz? These predictors and influencers of brand performance can go a long way when attempting to brand a product or service. It turns out the Q1 Top Global Brands Report from General Sentiment released Tuesday provides the latest analysis. The top five spots go to three of the world's largest companies focused on search engines, along with one device maker and content provider, and another to an automotive manufacturer.  

The report analyzes brands with the most significant impact online in the first quarter of this year. Apple took the top spot for the fourth straight quarter, followed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ford, respectively.

Conversion metrics allow General Sentiment to measure what it calls "Impact Media Value" by assigning a dollar value to all online mentions. The scale determined by the media-measurement company values Apple at $952 million; compared with Google at $704 million; Microsoft, $522 million; Yahoo, $259 million; and Ford, $251 million.

The report suggests that Apple products continue to create the most buzz on the Internet. The release of the iPad 2 and the iPhone on Verizon lit up social media with discussions of new product features. Greater expansion in the market typically creates this. Steve Jobs also took a third leave of absence from Apple, leading many consumers to wonder about the future of Apple products.

General Sentiment points to the technology sector as dominating the Top 10 Global Brands. Consumers tend to closely follow these companies and discuss products and trends across social media sites, which also impacts search engine rankings.

Social signals continue to impact search rankings on engines. But what signals are Google and Bing counting, and how much influence do these social signals have on the search results? SEOMoz Founder Rand Fishkin analyzes the influence Facebook "Likes" and Twitter "tweets" have on search engine rankings.

Fishkin tells us in a blog post that the data examines the top 30 ranking results for 10,217 searches performed on Google in late March, following after the Panda/Farmer update, using top suggested keywords in each category from Google AdWords data. He explains what the data compares and the correlation of values that apply to Google results.

The lengthy post reveals some pretty interesting findings. While Fishkin steps through the valuable takeaways, I found two points particularly interesting: Twitter may be less powerful than first believed, and "shares might be more valuable than likes." Fishkin explains that in Facebook's own environment, a "like" of content will show up on your own "Wall" and in "Most Recent" (a new feature as of last week), but it rarely shows in "Top News" where most users scan and click.

The financial impact of buzz -- not only determined by General Sentiment, but what Fishkin found in analyzing search data -- might be enough encouragement to share vs. like to increase buzz.

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MediaPost Publications Understanding Content And How It Drives Site Traffic 04/18/2011

MediaPost Publications Understanding Content And How It Drives Site Traffic 04/18/2011

As I discussed in the first of this series of posts on content strategy, marketers increasingly must think about their jobs in terms of major media companies -- producing constantly updating streams of media that engage, inform, entertain and result in widespread sharing among audience networks.  In future posts, we'll get to how these activities can lead to bottom-line-oriented outcomes, but today I'll focus on the various definitions of "content" and why each is important to your strategy.

Proprietary Content 

This category of content is the most important and will form the basis of SEO, social sharing, and lead- and demand-generation objectives.  It's the stuff your teams produce, completely original and owned exclusively by you. It's the stuff you write for blog posts, press releases, e-books, conference presentations, original research and static Web site copy. It also includes your proprietary video, audio, webcasts and animated demonstrations.  This content also includes your information graphics, illustrations and photos. Whether in-house teams produce this stuff or you hire third parties to produce it on your behalf, proprietary content can only be called that if you own all the rights to it.

Central to the development of all proprietary content should be three considerations (there are others, but these are primary):

1.  Your audience, their interests and tastes, and the ways in which they look for subject matter related to your business.

2.  Your keyword strategies and SEO objectives.

3.  Rising and falling memes and how those relate to or can be leveraged in your own content.

Because it is completely original and owned just by you, your proprietary content is the stuff that will be indexed by the search engines; linked to by bloggers, social sharers and the news media; and referenced in places like academic research or conference presentations. It takes priority above all other forms of content.

Syndicated and Third-Party Content

Syndicated or other third-party content can be a great way to augment proprietary content. This might include subscriptions to Getty Images, research from places like Altimeter, Forrester or IDC, and even targeted news feed services from places like Reuters.  Subscriptions may seems expensive but, when compared with the effort to produce enough original, proprietary content on a daily basis, may present an effective alternative that is also authoritative and of very high quality.

Fair-Use Content

Services like Daylife, Moveover and OneSpot make it easy to aggregate, categorize and curate an enormous volume of free, fair-use media from tens of thousands of sources all over the Web. These services also make it possible to present these sources by media type in attractive modules arranged around your proprietary content to bring constantly updating context and perspective from around the Web. These include modules with rivers of headlines, snippets and associated thumbnail photos; photo galleries; video galleries; pull-quotes; timeline graphics; and rivers of topically appropriate social-media feeds from Twitter and others. They can also help large enterprises with multiple content management systems in place to lasso, organize and present their own, proprietary content more efficiently and effectively. 

Movement Marketing 

Though this category of content could be a series of blog posts by itself, I'll summarize it by saying brands increasingly turn to movement marketing as way to effectively engage audiences around issues or ideas both value in common.  Movement marketing enables you to produce content and engagement activities that leverage memes adjacent to your brand -- environmental or green issues, for instance, or breast cancer awareness -- and to appropriate the associated keywords in an authentic way that creates a win for you, for your audience and for the cause you both believe in.  And, it's a great way to capture images of your audience interacting with your brand and its representatives --  to humanize what might otherwise be a completely corporate face. 

In such limited space, I've no doubt left out important ideas here, so please feel free to add your own in the comments space below, or to offer additional clarification and feedback.  In the next post in this series, I'll be discussing my favorite mantra: Produce once, repurpose many!

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MediaPost Publications Stats Point To Google's Year For Mobile, 2011 04/15/2011

MediaPost Publications Stats Point To Google's Year For Mobile, 2011 04/15/2011

Two years from now, if someone googles "when did mobile search and display advertising become a reality for Google," the year "2011" will likely return in the search query. "The mobile Web is growing eight times faster than the desktop Web did 10 years ago," says Karim Temsamani, global head of mobile at Google.  

There are 2 billion people online with 5 billion mobile phones, but not all have smartphones with full-browser capabilities. Not yet, anyway. That will change this year. By the end of 2011, more than half the U.S. market will have full-browser capability to access content, Temsamani says.

Temsamani talked about how smartphones will "change the world" earlier this week at the ThinkMovie event in Hollywood. A little corny, yes -- but Temsamani acknowledges that the convergence of cloud computing and mobile trends will enable advertisers to become more creative. The cloud turns mobile into "super computers" by allowing the mobile devices to concentrate on processing power rather than storage, similar to dumb terminals and mainframes, which I reference in past Search Marketing Daily posts.

A move toward consumers increasingly using mobile devices will foster the need for more video. Fifty-eight percent of people accessing YouTube on mobile devices remain on the site more than 20 minutes engaging with content, Temsamani says.

On Thursday, Susan Wojcicki, Google VP of advertising, told analysts and reporters during Google's Q1 2011 earnings call that AdMob, the display network Google acquired last year, has more than 150 million iOS and Android devices making requests per month. That's 50% more in the past four months, which provides insight into the speed with which mobile display advertising is growing.

Many Google advertisers have begun to run mobile-only campaigns, rather than bundling it with desktop campaigns, Wojcicki explains. They have mobile landing pages and campaigns that incorporate location. "For example, how far away is the advertiser from where you are standing right now?" she says. "These custom-made stations, again, get us to the perfect ad on mobile, since users also want to have location, or they want to have a phone number."

Google has also seen click-to-call take off, with more than 500,000 advertisers using this feature. As a result, the mobile-only campaigns are seeing an increase of 11.5% when they run a mobile-only campaign as opposed to a bundled mobile-desktop.

In a research note published Friday morning, Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster wrote: "As search matures, Google's fast growing businesses like Android and mobile advertising, display, and YouTube are still not big enough to meaningfully pull overall growth rates higher. We do believe new CEO Larry Page could become a catalyst for growth by aggressively investing in new products and/or acquisitions that could fuel growth, but expect compressed margins during at least the next three quarters."

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MediaPost Publications Searches And Paid Search Budgets On Rise 04/14/2011

MediaPost Publications Searches And Paid Search Budgets On Rise 04/14/2011

Google bounced back in March, gaining U.S. search market share, according to comScore. Some view it as a sign the search giant has begun to regain its footing after weeding out irrelevant search results and finally getting regulatory approval to close on its $700 million offer to buy ITA Software, a travel data company.

As consumers head into the season of summer travel, the ITA acquisition will become more valuable to Google and marketers who market travel-related goods. While the search industry should expect to see incremental gains in paid search during the coming months, comScore notes Google took 65.7% market share in March, up from 65.4%, reversing two consecutive months of slight declines.

Good news for Google, but the Mountain View, Calif. tech company wasn't the only engine to gain share. Bing's market share rose 11.8% to 13.9% in the month, gaining the highest sequential gain after rolling out a travel flight predictor for prices.

Google and Bing took share at the expense of Yahoo. The sites for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company ranked No. 2, but its share of the search market slid to 15.7% from 16.1%. Combined, Bing and Yahoo took 29.7% of the search market share, according to comScore. Microsoft Bing now powers the backend search feature for Yahoo's sites. Ask Network accounted for 3.1% of searches, followed by AOL with 1.6%.

Those searching for information on engines in March drove up sequential volume by 10% to 16.94 billion explicit core searches, which exclude contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results. Google Sites ranked No. 1 with 11.1 billion searches; followed by Yahoo with 2.7 billion; Microsoft, 2.4 billion; Ask, 520 million; and AOL, 272 million.

In the United States, Google Sites accounted for 64.1% of total core search queries; followed by Yahoo with 18%; Microsoft, 13.6%; Ask Network, 2.8%; and AOL, 1.4%, according to comScore.

In a research report Covario will release later today, the search engine marketing firm provides insight into paid search buying trends. For the past two quarters the company has been suggesting its high-tech clients increase their budgets for paid search. Two-thirds of the increase in spending in the fourth quarter in 2010 and the first quarter in 2011 will combat a 4% rise in cost per clicks (CPCs) on major search engines globally, particularly on Google, which experienced a 6% rise in CPCs between Q4 2010 and Q1 2011.

Click-through rates, however, varied per search engine. CTRs on Google and Yahoo rose to 2.9% and 1.8%, respectively, in Q1 2011, from 2.5% and 1.4% in the prior quarter. Bing fell in Q1 2011 to 2.5% from 2.8%.

Covario analysis point to Google Instant as the culprit slightly driving up CPCs, whereas Bing and Yahoo have caused a short-term increase in spending, and therefore an increase in CPCs, as advertisers reallocate budgets and re-optimize programs. In China, Baidu CPCs continue to rise as a result of reduced competition in China as Google's market share dwindles.

With larger paid search budget coming online, advertisers have little choice but to invest in relatively more expensive "generic search terms" to build top of funnel search impressions, according to the Covario report. 

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MediaPost Publications The Call for Smarter Search Analytics 04/13/2011

MediaPost Publications The Call for Smarter Search Analytics 04/13/2011

Search marketing and data analytics have always been connected at the hip. Even during the early days of search, part of the attractiveness of the channel was its transparency. It quashed the old adage that marketers don't know which 50% of their investments are worthwhile. Search represented this new advertising vehicle that demonstrated ROI really clearly -- and enabled smart analysts to drive incrementally higher returns if they acted properly in response to that data.

As search matured and more advertisers and organizations entered the fray, an environment of hyper-competitiveness for desirable clicks emerged. That competition spawned hundreds (perhaps thousands) of star-tup companies that sought to develop analytics technologies aimed at bringing greater visibility to search marketing performance and the mechanics behind managing programs properly.

Yet, despite the profound impact these technologies have had on the industry, many SEMs still rely on basic technologies like Microsoft Excel to help manage sophisticated programs. This is primarily the result of a fragmented marketplace for the search analytics buyer, one where needs often go unmet.

Driven in part by frustration, I decided to list four of my top (missing) features that would make for great additions within a definitive search analytics toolset. A couple of these features do exist within modern platforms, but don't get the universal appreciation they deserve. Other features are ones I would happily pay for access to, if they existed.

All you aspiring software entrepreneurs, take note:

Query Mining

Search query mining is one of the most under-appreciated elements to best practice paid search program management. Query mining is the process of identifying raw queries which were mapped to keywords within the search auction, and then extracting long tail derivatives and negative keywords to be explicitly introduced across the programs to enhance overall performance. This is an essential tactic for advertisers who rely on broad match keyword portfolios or are launching new programs.

Think of query mining as a way to help eliminate the unqualified noise, while enhancing the keyword portfolio with more precise phrase and exact match keyword targets.  

Search Attribution

The entire attribution category is hot right now, and for good reason. With billions being poured into digital advertising, it's becoming crucial to understand the entire range of influences and touches that ultimately result in a transaction. Legacy attribution models like last-click no longer cut it, yet we've been forced into accepting many such methods for attributing conversion by the analytics tools.

Rather than solve for the more complex multichannel attribution, search attribution is focused on the range of keyword queries that eventually motivated our audiences to take action. This is important for two reasons:

1)    Properly crediting early touch keywords for playing an influential role during the fact-finding phase; 

2)    Understanding consumer behavior as search queries are refined, even absent a click-through against the original query.

Keep in mind too that Google will serve carry-over ads from the original query to subsequent ones under the guise of "session-based broad match." Smarter search analytics would enable the advertiser to better understand where and why prospective customers refined their queries.

Audience Demographics

There are times when we know we need to pursue very broad keywords, despite having limited insight into whether those terms reach our intended audiences. A very timely example from one of our clients is for the keyword "cloud computing." We know that term belongs in our portfolio, we just don't know whether the clicks we are receiving against it are from those we were hoping to communicate with in the first place.

Understanding search-referred audience demographics mitigates that problem, and would allow for more meaningful messaging to be authored which would speak in a relevant way to discrete audiences. That discrete messaging may mean we have to set aside click-through rate and Quality Score as potential program KPIs, but it should yield higher engagement and conversion rates in the trade off.

Organic Search Rank at the Time of the Click

The solution to the ongoing debate around the utility of traditional keyword rank reports would be "rank at the time of the click." This metric would address the many factors known to influence natural search positioning across the results pages: personalized search, regional biases, new +1 results. SEOs could leverage that intelligence to make smarter re-optimization decisions, based on resultant on-site behavior patterns.

For example, if my site consistently lands within the top three positions yet engagement and conversion are both low, then perhaps I should pursue different keyword targets. Conversely, for keywords that drive high engagement and conversion, it may be possible to improve my position across the SERPs and receive higher volumes of traffic.

And this wish-list item isn't far-fetched either: Google is already passing this information in its referral string when the search engine user is logged into a Google account.

Though search analytics technologies have certainly advanced over the years, many more innovations are needed in order for SEMs to forever set aside the spreadsheet. These four are my biggies. I'd love to hear yours.

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