What a Deal!

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People will buy anything if you tell them it’s 75% off. No offense; I am guilty of it too. I bought a tool kit the other day because it said it was 60% off – I don’t even know how to build things. It’s as if consumer desire to react to what is seemingly a great deal outweighs normal buyer evaluation, in which opportunity costs are identified and pros and cons are weighed out. This is why limited time deals are so cunningly effective, forcing us to satiate our craving for cheap stuff before the deadline hits. Groupon and LivingSocial have made a living off coupons, so to speak, and are taking advantage of the public’s penchant for steals by being the biggest innovators in the daily deal marketplace.

These online coupon providers are having such astounding success, and are moving into new venues accordingly. LivingSocial just launched a test for its new venture Instant Deals – a mobile feature that allows consumers to discover deals within a half-mile radius. These offers will compound the local search aspect with a much more limited deadline, encouraging immediate in-store traffic to businesses. Other companies, such as AT&T withShopAlert, are getting involved with mobile location-based special offerings (quite the mouth full) as well.

These new services underscore the rising importance of both location based and mobile marketing. They are constantly ranked the most promising new areas for the future, and adding the limited time deal facet intensifies the formula. Google rolled out mobile coupons a couple of years ago; a tool that is probably underutilized. The quality, one-deal-at-a-time nature of these specialized coupon providers creates a sort of aura that consumers can’t get enough of. It looks like they are successfully assisting in opening up a very promising market that has yet to be fully conquered.

-Kenneth Hurta

Tips for your Mobile Strategy

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Smartphones are predicted to be in the hands of half of all Americans by the end of 2011, according to GigaOM. The growth of smartphones is impacting how we stay connected through social media, how we discover new restaurants via local search, and even the way in which we donate to charities after natural disasters, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. With the onset of QR codes, phone applications, and other mobile advancements, users expect businesses to, at the very least, have optimized websites for mobile use.

Many CMS platforms, like WordPress and Drupal, have a mobile plugin, making it super easy to adapt your website content to be mobile friendly. For website owners not managing their own websites, it’s time to consult your IT departments on developing a mobile-specific site.

Here are some best practices for creating and optimizing a website for mobile devices.

  • Consider your mobile strategy, which should be centered around one main goal, such as increasing sales conversions, sign-ups, phone calls, etc. Then make this call to action very visible on each page of content with a well-sized button or tab.
  • More is less on mobile because users don’t spend lengthy periods of time reading through pages of content on their cell phones the way they do on desktops. Use Google Analytics to help determine what the big draws are on the current site so that you can transition only the most popular or highly-searched content over to the mobile site.
  • Test the website on multiple handheld devices to make sure the site design looks good and performs well across all devices.
  • Mobile users don’t have the patience to wait for your page to load or to navigate through pages of scrolling content to find what they are looking for. Be brief and avoid all Flash.
  • Submit a mobile sitemap to Googlebot-Mobile to make sure the content is indexed correctly, and thus, easy to find in general search queries. This will also help Google identify when a user is performing an Internet search on a mobile device versus a computer and will then redirect the user to the most appropriate version of your website.
Once you have a mobile-compatible website, you can start thinking about your mobile marketing strategy and how to use SEO and SEM tactics to drive traffic to your sparkly new mobile site.

What’s in a Report – Continued.

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Earlier this week we discussed what you should expect from reports that you receive from your online marketing partner.  We wanted to provide you with a few more updates and urge you to work closely with your agency to get the exact type of report that meets your needs.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – It can be important for some advertisers to receive this information, but for other advertisers just knowing the total cost and number of conversions is all that is needed. Before requesting this metric, I would suggest that you think about your overall goals that you are interested in – because many profitable campaigns have CPA goals that step outside the boundaries of what some may consider an acceptable CPC.

Example: You have a target cost/click of no more than $4.00 and a target CPA of less than $80.

·         Keyword A – Costs $3.50 for each click

·         Keyword B – Costs $6.75 for each click

·         The conversion rate for keyword A is 3%

·         The conversion rate for keyword B is 9%

·         The CPA for Keyword A is $116, while the CPA for Keyword B is $75.

Tell me again why you would not want to bid on Keyword B? Setting CPC goals without taking the full picture into account can produce undesirable results, so tread lightly if you want to view this metric.

Click Thru-Rate (CTR) on various keywords – Some advertisers find this information useful, but this information must be taken in stride. For example, a CTR of .02% in some cases could be considered good, while a CTR of 2.1% in other cases could be in need of improvement. Although, CTR can be used to help find areas of improvement in ad copy or keyword relevance.

Average Position of Keywords – Average position is a great metric for many advertisers and can be a metric that must be reported in other cases. For example, if you have ads that must appear below the manufacturers ad within pay per click search results – you will want to make sure this metric is included within the reports you receive by your search team.

Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate is is a metric that your search team can provide information on – if your website is configured with the correct tracking codes. Bounce rate is often not shared with advertisers, because very few advertisers are willing to make changes to lower the bounce rate on pages, as this metric can help pin-point landing pages that may need to be updated.

​Placements that are working – If your agency is targeting the content network you should receive updates if certain placements are working out extremely well. At times it may be advantageous for you as an advertiser to go directly to these sites and negotiate advertising with them directly. Your search team will lose some revenue by making this suggestion – so be sure to reward them with referrals or an extended contract. This is certainly a partner that you will want to work with for some time to come.

Transparency

Some agencies give you 100% access to your search account, while others have limitations to the amount of access you have to your paid search account. Whether you have access or not to your account – your search provider should happily and quickly provide you with a download of any information you request.

Example requests could include

List of all keywords within your account – Beware this list could be in the thousands!

Ad Text – This is a great way to find out which slogans are working for offline advertising initiatives.

Performance of your account by time of day – This report can be very useful if you have a need to know when additional staff would be needed at your business. Maybe you will find that half of your staff can come in early to help staff for an influx of calls from the East Coast.

Performance of your account by Geo Location – This is another great metric to view if you have the ability to provide support in particular geographic areas that many of your potential clients are located within.

Anything you want – A good agency should speak with you about your overall goals and objectives and provide suggestions or solutions to help you meet your needs.

What’s in a Report?

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Working with an Agency – Reporting Expectations

In a recently conducted survey, we noted that 25% of the clients that we work with have never worked with an agency before. While working with an online agency can be exciting, you may get more out of the experience if you know what to expect and what you want out of the relationship.

There are many posts available if you do a quick Google search on what to expect work-wise, but what should you expect in terms of reporting? Reports are often one of the only ways that many businesses know what is working within their Pay Per Click account.

Frequency

Our agency used to report on a weekly basis to our clients. We found that this period of time was too brief, and often small daily fluctuations would show as spikes or decreases in overall weekly performance for our clients’ accounts. We have now found that providing our clients reporting every fifteen to thirty days is more actionable for our clients businesses. We still perform our more frequent internal reporting to make needed changes and modifications, but we do find that our mid-month and end- of month reports are a win-win for both our client and our agency.

Content

In February 2011, Google made updates to what type of information certain agencies should provide to clients. Google’s newly updated policies state that:

Third parties should at minimum provide advertisers with monthly data on Adwords costs, clicks and impressions at the account level.

While we agree that this is a nice start, there are many other metrics that you should receive in the periodic updates that your search team provides.

Cost/Conversion (Sometimes notated as CPC or CPA) – The price paid for each new conversion or acquisition. Conversions can be defined by the client as a sale, lead generated or visit to a particular page on a site. We suggest that instead of seeing a total lump sum for total CPA across your entire site, that instead you ask your search provider to provide this information on a product level that is more manageable. This is needed because the CPA that your business is willing to spend to acquire one overnight visitor at your hotel versus a convention may differ.

Later this week we will look at additional content that should be included within your reports and also the level of transparency you should receive from your agency.

Contextual Evolution

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The world of online marketing has allowed advertisers to become targeted in their efforts to reach their audience. Contextual advertising has taken this a step further by allowing an advertiser  to reach thier audience while they are thinking about them.

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising that appears on websites or other online media.  These advertisements are distributed based on their relevancy to the content displayed on the site. For example, an advertisement for ‘24hr Fitness” might appear on a Health and Fitness website.

Google has been doing some sort of Contextual advertising since 2006, when they first rolled out the Display Network. In its early life contextual advertising began with using only semantics and keywords as a means to place ads on relevant site. That is to say that in its early stages contextual advertising was a veritable cluster of formulas aimed at finding the best placement.

In layman’s terms let’s say you have a website for earphones and wish to advertise them. In order to do this you would create and ad group with keywords like “ear buds” and “head phones.” Those keywords would then be used to place your ads on a variety of different sites within a network that had content that fit the theme of those keywords.

While this method is still widely used today by Google and other contextual ad networks, the formulas used can and sometimes do yield a less than desirable result. For example, let’s say that ‘24hr fitness’ wants to begin a contextual advertising campaign, this campaign is built using keywords that are relevant to the health and fitness vertical. Most contextual networks would then display an ad for ‘24hr Fitness’ on any website with relevant content. However, this relevant content is an article on Lance Armstrong and his ubiquitous steroid scandal. I am willing to bet this is not the type of content ‘24hr’ had in mind when they decided on contextual advertising.

This example is a prime example of the new dilemma in contextual advertising. What should you do when the content is relevant but not helpful?

Many new players have introduced another layer of to this process by trying to understand the intent of the user before an ad is displayed. This is done by crawling each individual webpage and crawling it for one, two, and three word concepts.  These concepts are used to definitively match ad placements with the actual concepts that brought users to the page.

Content is Key

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Maneuvering the social media landscape can be a tricky business: DON’T link your Twitter to your Facebook account; DO feed your blog. DON’T deactivate commenting on your fan page; DO monitor the conversation for inappropriate or offensive comments (which you are responsible for managing.) DON’T self-promote; DO send out valuable content and engage with your customers. There’s a lot to remember, and the fact that it’s constantly evolving with new best practices being developed almost weekly, using social media as a marketing and branding tool has become a full-time job.

Research shows that social networking sites aren’t the best medium for advertising… yet. Users are still resistant to social media ads as being intrusive in this particular space. If social media is one of the most effective marketing tools but advertising isn’t being well-received, then it’s engagement that customers are seeking.

Content is key to effectively building a brand and generating word-of-mouth. Some recent stats published by eMarketer show inbound marketing channels as the most cost effective approach to generating leads over outbound marketing, with LinkedIn and blogs being at the top for successfully turning leads into customers, meaning brands need to allocate funds for creative and valuable content creation. There’s a good 70 / 30 rule of thumb that branders and marketers should follow when publishing updates on any social media site. Only 30% of status updates should be self-promotional content while the remaining 70% should be valuable content that is interesting, educational, or sparks a dialogue with followers. It’s also a good idea to monitor the frequency of status updates depending on which platform you’re utilizing. For example, it’s common practice to tweet 3 – 5 times a day, whereas Facebook and LinkedIn only require your attention once a day.

As Jeffrey Eisenberg summarized during his keynote at PubCon last week, “meaningful interaction with your audience will result in conversions and a positive relationship with the customer. –Marketing Pilgrim

High Mobility

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According to Nielson, by the end of the year the majority of US mobile phone owners will have a smart phone. Morgan Stanley estimates that sales of smartphones will exceed those of PCs in 2012. Forrester Research forecasts mobile marketing spend surpassing $1 billion in the US this year. Indeed, the ubiquity of mobile shows no sign of slowing, and it cannot be ignored by marketers. Mobile search has been a nebulous topic so far, with no clear, definitive method for success having emerged. However, everyone is doing it. In fact, the IAB found that only 5% of marketers have not yet included mobile advertising in their budgets. Do not mistake this with one of those “just because he’s mobile marketing doesn’t mean you have to! Would you follow him off a cliff?” Jump on the bandwagon people.

People used to not be able to put down books. Then they were unable to turn the volume on the radio down. Then their eyes were rapt by the television. Now, I don’t even think about interrupting my friend during a game of Fruit Ninja. All of the innovative luxuries that waved through the past have finally crashed into a handheld device. For marketers, understanding how your potential customers are using the mobile channel is of utmost importance. There is a theme developing in the industry dubbed “mobile appropriateness,” which focuses on eschewing internal predilections in favor of providing the best experience for the user. As Razorfish’s Matt Cava puts it, “features and functionality might make internal stakeholders happy, but users would find awkward trying to engage with on a smartphone.” Create a clear strategy focused on the mobile user, stick to it, and do not compromise on the experience.

There is a lot of worry that mobile applications will eventually become so prevalent and popular that mobile search will become irrelevant. I don’t believe it. The web can do just about anything that can be done in an app, and it is becoming increasingly more efficient at it. The notion that the two are competing against each other is a misconception; apps and search will continue to work together to augment consumer experience. It would be wise for marketers to dabble in both areas to discover which approach fits best with which respective realm of business.

I see the next big thing in the mobile arena being Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows a mobile phone to receive data from another device or NFC tag at close range. This technology has tremendous potential in various respects. The most promising is contactless payment, where a customer simply taps their phone on a tagged device and the purchase is completed. NFC could change the way mobile phone users interact with each other as well; just touch phones and start playing a two player game. NFC is like the fancier version of the QR Code, whose novelty will turn out to be outweighed by user inconvenience. Some other cool futuristic stuff that NFC could allow: wireless headset-to-phone link, tap phone to printer to print, phone becomes bus/train/plane ticket, swipe-to-check in Foursquare locations. How about if a business owner placed a NFC tag just outside his business, so that when consumers touch their phone to it a coupon appears, ready to use immediately. What an exciting time we live in!

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145325

https://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/mobile-technology-trends-for-2011-according-to-forrester-research-12801/

https://www.dma.org.uk/news/nws-link.asp?id=5175&t=Mobile+”will+be+the+fastest+growing+platform+for+next+five+years”

https://mashable.com/2010/05/06/near-field-communication/

Kenneth Hurta

What a Deal!

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People will buy anything if you tell them it’s 75% off. No offense; I am guilty of it too. I bought a tool kit the other day because it said it was 60% off – I don’t even know how to build things. It’s as if consumer desire to react to what is seemingly a great deal outweighs normal buyer evaluation, in which opportunity costs are identified and pros and cons are weighed out. This is why limited time deals are so cunningly effective, forcing us to satiate our craving for cheap stuff before the deadline hits. Groupon and LivingSocial have made a living off coupons, so to speak, and are taking advantage of the public’s penchant for steals by being the biggest innovators in the daily deal marketplace.

These online coupon providers are having such astounding success, and are moving into new venues accordingly. LivingSocial just launched a test for its new venture Instant Deals – a mobile feature that allows consumers to discover deals within a half-mile radius. These offers will compound the local search aspect with a much more limited deadline, encouraging immediate in-store traffic to businesses. Other companies, such as AT&T withShopAlert, are getting involved with mobile location-based special offerings (quite the mouth full) as well.

These new services underscore the rising importance of both location based and mobile marketing. Both of these services are constantly ranked the most promising new areas for the future, and adding the limited time deal facet intensifies the formula. Google rolled out mobile coupons a couple of years ago; a tool that is probably underutilized. The quality, one-deal-at-a-time nature of these specialized coupon providers creates a sort of aura that consumers can’t get enough of. It looks like they are successfully assisting in opening up a very promising market that has yet to be fully conquered.

– Kenneth Hurta

The Search Low Down

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The Lowdown on Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter

Google AdWords: Google is currently the largest and most popular search engine in the world with an approximate market share of 67% as of January 2011.  The AdWords program has always been an innovator in the paid search arena and sets the bar for other platforms.  Of the search engine advertising programs, Google AdWords is the most feature rich and user-friendly.  Google’s partnership with smaller search providers and hundreds of thousands of websites means that an advertiser has the opportunity to reach an even wider audience than that provided by Google.com.

Google AdWords:

o Google estimated market share of 67% ( January 2011)

o Most feature rich and user-friendly paid search platform

​MSN AdCenter:  The recent merger of MSN and Yahoo Search has greatly expanded AdCenter’s reach in the natural and paid search world, though it’s approximate market share of 28% is still considerably lower than Google’s.  Both MSN and Yahoo are legacy search engines with origins early in the era of popular web use.  As such, these engines have a relatively large number of ‘grandfathered’ users who have been loyal to these platforms since early in their own online ventures.  With the introduction of Bing in 2009, the MSN search market share has pulled out the steady decline it experienced through the early 2000s and Bing has since grown into the flagship product in the MSN line.

MSN AdCenter:

o Market share of 28% (appx.) is considerably lower than Google’s

o Recent MSN/Yahoo merger – both legacy engines w/loyal users

The Differences:

o Click and impression volume lower for MSN

o Top positions cheaper and easier to obtain in MSN

o MSN has fewer features and targeting options

o MSN users tend to be older and have a lower household income

o MSN users are more often female

Kate McGuire

Make Sure your Bids are in Order!

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Google recently made an update to bidding that you should be aware of. In an email sent to our team this morning Google stated that:

Starting on March 15, 2011, we’ll be removing the managed placements default bid in your account.

This move is to simplify bidding options, but this could cause spikes in cost if you are not familiar with what could happen if you fail to act and make the updates.  Most specifically for this scenario if “you don’t have an ad group default bid and are only using a managed placements bid, we will copy the managed placements bid over as the new default bid. Any managed placements with individual bids will still keep those bids.” Considering managed placement bids should convert a higher rater and are thus more valued, you will most likely be paying more for this bid, than you would ever dream for a default bid.