Category Archives: Digital Marketing

The Pressure’s On and the Cracks are Beginning to Show

First published September 10, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Some time ago, I wrote a column saying the fallout of the economic crisis would be a rapid evolution in marketing practices, speeding the transition from the old way of doing things to a much more dominant role for digital. In that transition, search would play a bigger role than ever. In the past few months, I’m seeing exactly that come to pass. People are serious about search, from the bottom right up to the top corner office. This isn’t playtime in the sandbox anymore; we’re suddenly moving front and center.

“I’m Ready for My Close Up, Mr. CMO”

The reason people are so interested in search is that it comes with the reputation of being highly measurable and accountable. This isn’t anything new, but lately, it’s coming with some additional baggage. Now that the C-Level is involved, performance isn’t being judged simply on a trial campaign with a limited budget. Suddenly, search is being tested to see if it’s worthy of taking a starring role in the marketing mix. And that is adding a lot of pressure to those of us toiling down here in the search trenches.

Search, by its nature, isn’t all that scalable. It comes with a built-in inventory limitation. You can only reach people who have raised their hand, indicating interest in something. Once you tap out that inventory, search loses its bright shiny luster. Search is effective because it’s a signal for consumer intent. You can’t use search to create intent where none exists.

“You Bid on What?”

Management of search isn’t very scalable, either. It’s a lot of heavy lifting and obsessing over thousands of tiny little nitty-gritty details, which, if you overlook them, can suddenly blow your ROI right out of the water. Just ask the PPC manager who forgot to set the appropriate budget cap and comes in on a Monday morning to find they’ve just spent several thousand dollars of a client’s money on a broad match for the word “lube.”

Also, the new breed of client is expecting more than just a limited tactical approach to search. Suddenly they’re using words like “integrate” and “holistic” because, well, because those are just the kind of words you use when you get to the top of the corporate food chain. You get paid the big bucks because you can toss “synergistic” around in a board meeting and actually be serious at the time.

Back to the Drawing Board

Right now, people across this great land are pulling out their white boards and sketching out the rudiments of “Marketing Plan 2.0.” They know something important has shifted in the marketing landscape; the economic belly flop has made it all too apparent that there must be a better way of doing things.  I haven’t seen any huge waves of budget pouring into search yet, but I know there’s a lot of talk out there, and much of it is about search.

Generally, I think this is great news. I’m the first to complain about the tactical bias of search marketing.  I think search has a much greater role to play — but I feel it’s only fair to warn search marketers that this isn’t going to be a painless skip down the path to a lucrative retirement. Anytime there’s a big shift, it comes with an accompanying pendulum effect. After being restrained too far on one side of equilibrium, the pendulum has to correct by swinging too far in the other direction. As budgets start to come into digital channels, including search, we’ll learn that, in many cases, it comes with a set of expectations that are seriously out of whack.

Survival of the Fittest

There are some search marketers that are ready, willing and able to take search to the next level, the one it rightly deserves. There are many others who will use impressive words in the sales pitch (words like holistic, integrated and synergistic) but fall seriously short on delivery. The path ahead is going to have a lot of casualties, both on the vendor and client side. But then, evolution has never been a particularly gentle process.

Just ask any ichthyosaurus.

Search: The Verb

First published September 3, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“And now the times are changin’Look at everything that’s come and gone”

Rob Griffin’s thought-provoking column on “The Death of Search”  started by poking fun at my summertime nostalgia, likening it to Bryan Adam’s lyrics. Well, Rob, two can play that game.

Search: More Than an Industry

Here’s the thing. In the column, and the resulting feedback, Rob and others talk about search as an industry,  a channel,  a technology. All these things are way too limiting: search is a verb. Search is something we do. And, as such, it reaches past technology and channels and even Google. The only reason search became such a strong channel is because it’s so well aligned with our intent. We want to find something, and search is the way to do it. Trying to pigeonhole search into a “snapshot in time” definition that relies on technology is pointless and a little silly. It’s like trying to explain communication by the definition of Twitter.

What Rob does put his finger on is the speed of shift that technology is enabling, and if we use the definition of our industry as supposedly stable ground, we’re fooling ourselves. It’s the wrong reference to set your bearings to. What you have to do is look for the common denominator, and as I, Kaila Colbin, and others have always said, there’s only one: people.

Balancing Asymmetry

The reason that search is so powerful in consumer interactions goes back to a paper written by economist George Akerlof in 1970 called ” The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Akerlof introduced us to the idea of information asymmetry, the problem that arises when the seller has more information than the buyer. That dynamic has been in place for the entire history of marketing. It’s the foundation that advertising was built on. But the Web is changing things  by providing an explosion of information — and search is the means by which we can reach out to connect all this info. That’s why search is so powerful.

If we’re being asked to part with money in return for something, human nature will dictate that we try to balance out information asymmetry. Our acceptance of a reasonable balance depends on how much risk is in the purchase. The more risk, the more information we’ll need. To seek that information, we’ll take the path that has proven to be the most reliably informative in the past. Right now, for most of us, that’s Google.

There are two solutions for information asymmetry: signaling and screening. Signaling is when we accept signals in lieu of personal knowledge about a purchase. For example, if we’re buying a used Toyota, we don’t know the mechanical reliability of the car in question, but we do know (through our research) that Toyotas are generally reliable and have a high resale value. That’s a signal. Screening is the process we go through to learn enough information (whether or not the other party is willing to share it) to balance out the information asymmetry. Again, in the case of the used Toyota, taking it for a mechanical inspection would be an example of screening.

If All Else Fails, Look At People

Forget about search as a technology, or a channel, or an industry. For a moment, think about search as a verb, namely, “searching” for information to help me make the right purchase decision. That human objective isn’t going anywhere. You can count on it. Now, all you have to do is look at the new ways we can do that.

I suspect Rob is right. Search as the industry we know has days that are numbered. That’s why it’s important to keep looking at people, not technology. Technology has already changed in the time it took to read this column. But people’s basic and inherent drives are remarkably consistent.

Summer Stories: How I Got into Search

First published July 23, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This time of year always causes me to look backwards. My birthday is in the summer, so the increasing tally of years is hard to ignore. But it was also summer, specifically the summer of 2004, when I wrote my first Search Insider column, called “The Growing Pains of Search.” That was 213 columns and about 180,000 words ago (I’m rapidly closing in on David Berkowitz and his 224 SI columns). And, finally, it was the summer of 1999 when Enquiro (then Search Engine Position) was born, so this marks my tenth official anniversary in the biz (I’ve been playing around at organic optimization since 1996).

All this preamble brings me, finally, to my point: I really don’t want to write about Bing or Google or Yahoo today. In fact, for the next few weeks, I want to go public with a few of the stories that usually only get told at Enquiro staff parties when I’m feeling a touch nostalgic (or a touch inebriated).

This week: How Danny Sullivan first got me into search…

As I said, it was in 1996 that I first started playing around with organic optimization. As the owner of a small, fledgling ad agency, my clients (in this case, a hotel in Kelowna, BC) started to ask whether I designed Web sites.

“Of course I design Web sites…”

How hard could it be? Soon, I had FrontPage and was trying to figure out how to get a sliced image to stay together in a table. After much trial and error, I had a Web site that was good enough (by 1996 standards, which thankfully weren’t too stringent) to go live. There’s still a reasonable facsimile of the original design at archive.org (check out the funky animated gif of the rotating diamonds). Inevitably, the next question came…

“So, when does everybody start booking online?”

Ooops! I hadn’t thought about traffic. If you build it, aren’t they just supposed to come? That was when I first started thinking about search engines, which at the time were Infoseek, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite and AltaVista. How the heck do you get on those things? I submitted the site, but it seemed to have little impact. The hit counter was ticking over at a rate slightly slower than Continental drift.

At that time, I was also a regional reseller for an online yellow pages site, which was supposed to be the “next big thing.” I remember going down to a reseller meeting in Vancouver, B.C. where an outside consultant was introducing a new service we could sell: search engine positioning.

“Hmm, this sounds intriguing.”

The guy, who was counting on this new business to finance a semiretired lifestyle, passed out an information sheet explaining what he did, along with what he charged, which was several thousand dollars per site.

“How hard can this be?” I said to myself (yes, it’s a recurring theme in my life). I looked over the information sheet….

“Meta tags. I know what those are. Alt tags. Yep. I know what those are too. I wonder…. ”

I took the sheet home and decided to check out this “search engine positioning” thing. The verbiage on the sheet seemed impressive. The guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about. But the sheet was very short on detail. There must be something else out there on this search “stuff.”

After some stumbling around the Web, I happened on a site with the title “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.” And there, verbatim, was all the stuff from the sales sheet. This “consultant” had simply cut and pasted sections from it. The great part was that everything was there, all the things you needed to do to optimize your own site. The guy was charging thousands for doing the same stuff that was laid out free for anyone on the Web. I was so grateful I actually became a subscriber to that site so I could lend some support.

I immediately started optimizing the client’s site. A few weeks later, they broke the top 10. And by the end of the month, they were number one for their top key phrases. For those of you who have been around as long as I have, you may remember playing Infoseek “Leapfrog.” Because Infoseek indexed almost instantly and updated results, you could use it to test your SEO skills and see what happened, ratcheting up the rankings against your competitors. Using the Webmaster’s Guide as my base, I soon figured out the fundamentals of search positioning (as it was then commonly called).

“What the hell! This stuff actually works! Maybe there is a business idea here after all.”

It took me a few more years to actually get the guts to focus exclusively on search, but that’s how I got started. Of course, the author of the Webmaster’s Guide was Danny Sullivan, and it later became Search Engine Watch. It would be 2001 before I ever met Danny, at my first Search Engine Strategies event in Boston. I didn’t get the chance to say it then (or since), so I’ll publically say it now: Thank you, Danny, for getting me into this business. It’s been more fun than I ever imagined.

SEO Success: Sign of a Healthy Corporate Culture

First published July 9, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been working with companies on SEO for over a decade now, and there’s one thing I’ve noticed: all things being equal, healthy companies with great cultures seem to do much better in organic search results. And by organic success, I mean the good, white-hat, Matt Cutts-approved kind of success. I bet that if you found the companies that do well in organic search, you’d also find companies that Jim Collins (author of “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”) would be proud of. This correlation can’t be coincidence, so I’ve outlined some reasons why this might be so:

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it’s a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company’s overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that “get it.” C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They’ve been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering “antennae” and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn’t hopelessly mired in “old-boy” thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it’s still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they’re working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I’m guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they’ll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I’ve seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, “organic” rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

Get It or Die: Online is Your Core Business

First published June 11, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a recent survey, we asked B2B buyers how they prefer ordering the things they order all the time. Sixty-three percent said they prefer to order them online. The next largest group was the 15% who would go the traditional route of ordering from a local office over the phone. Another 12% said they’d prefer to order from a real live sales rep. In a recent presentation to a client, I kept that pie chart of results up for a while, allowing it to sink in, because I think the implications are astounding.  After it sunk in, I asked what I believe to be a fundamentally important question: “Look at the chart and ask yourself, how closely does your company’s strategic direction and resource allocation match that pie chart? That’s where your customers are going, and they’re moving fast. Are you going to be there when they get there?”

“getting it” vs. “Getting It”

Lately, I’ve also talked a lot about “getting it.” To me, there are two levels of getting it.  There’s the safe level: the proficient e-business unit that understands search and executes effectively, realizes that online strategies have to be planned across channels, is struggling to put attribution models in place that work, and is continually testing and optimizing landing pages. If we look at digital marketing alone, they understand it and are skilled practitioners. This level, “getting it” with a small “g,” is rare, although there are several examples to look at.

But then there’s “Getting It,” with a capital “G.” This is the company that realizes that online forms the core of the customer experience and that everything else has to support that — if not today, then in the very near future. This is the company that is rapidly and aggressively moving to digital as its primary way of doing business, that is already making the painful but required transitions and is willing to cannibalize its traditional core in order to support the move to online. Outside of pure online plays, this level of “Getting It” is so rare as to be basically nonexistent.

Digital Butt-Covering

Companies pay lip service to “getting it,” but they’ve hedged all their online bets. They have treated online as an incremental revenue channel, putting in rigorous ROI thresholds so that it can be separated from the core business and risk can be balanced against returns and investment, thus minimizing it. E-business is a siloed sandbox, relegated to the sidelines so it doesn’t rock the mother ship.

What these companies fail to realize is that this safe, incremental approach to moving online is probably the riskiest thing they can do. Here’s why.

Online is a discontinuous innovation in consumerism of all kinds. It’s a huge step forward for the buyer in almost every way imaginable. It’s easier, more convenient, more useful and more effective. If people aren’t buying online, they’re researching online. And no matter how much they’re doing both those things, they would like to do more. The only thing holding them back is a lack of destinations or a quality user experience on the destinations they do have to choose from.  Your customers are adopting online at an incredibly fast rate.

By easing towards online at a safe, incremental rate because you’re mitigating risk to your core business, you’re allowing your critical mass of customers to get in front of you. Whenever a mass of customers is underserviced, someone will fill that gap, and you can bet it will be a nimble, online pure play that’s moving at light speed compared to you.

Internet Speed Defined

Jim Lecinski from Google’s Chicago office has a chart he loves to show in client presentations. It slaps you upside the head with the reality of “Internet speed.” He first recounts a typical conversation with a client that falls squarely in the first category of “getting it.”

Jim: “What are you doing with your online campaigns?”

Client: “Oh, we have a lot happening. We’re expanding our keyword list next quarter and we’ll optimize that campaign over the following quarter. In Q3 and 4 we’re going to run some experiments with social media that we’re excited about. For the next fiscal, we’ve built more into the budget for better tracking and attribution. That will help as we move to cross-channel optimization because we’ll get great data showing us what’s working and what’s not. That will also allow us to step up our landing page testing and optimization.”

Jim: “So, you’ve got your plans set out for about 18 to 24 months ahead?”

Client: “You bet. We’re moving very quickly.”

Then Jim shows them the Google Trends graph that reminds them that both YouTube and FaceBook went from zero to Internet domination in under 24 months. Further, few people had heard of Twitter 12 short months ago.

That’s Internet Speed.

That’s “Getting It.”

A Tale of Two Houses

First published May 21, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I have a difference of opinion with Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. Actually, it’s not so much a difference as a question of context. He believes there’s room for more visual branding on the search results page. I believe this is a potentially dangerous area that has to be handled very carefully on the part of the engines.

This issue came up during the opening session of day two at the recent Search Insider Summit, when I posed a question  two different ways to the audience. First, I asked them, as marketers,  how many would like to see richer branding opportunities on the results page. Almost every hand went up. Then I asked them the same question, but this time as users. Some hands went down immediately. Many others wavered noticeably, as the paradigm shift exposed underlying hypocrisy. Others remained resolutely high on the idea.

The reason for the mixed reaction was that, for users, the ideal search experience depends on the context of the situation. Visually richer is not always better. There’s some subtle psychology at play here. So let’s explore it in a story.

It’s a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood

Imagine we both live on the same street. In fact, we’re next-door neighbors. I travel a lot. I happen to know you might be thinking of taking a vacation this summer. So begins the story of My House and Your House:

Your House

In this story, the reason I travel a lot is because I’m a commissioned travel agent. I get paid if I book you on a trip somewhere. And you don’t know it, but I get paid a lot more if you go to Disney World. So every morning, I come over to your house and knock on your door wearing my Mickey Mouse ears, carrying in one hand a portable stereo blasting “When You Wish Upon a Star” and in the other a fistful of Disney travel brochures. Each day, I visit with a determination to book you on the next flight to Orlando.  Now, if Disney is in your travel plans, perhaps this isn’t as obnoxious as it sounds. But if two weeks in the Magic Kingdom sounds as appealing as the Bataan Death March, my neighborly welcome will wear a little thin. Sure, I got your attention, but you also listed your house for sale shortly after my visit.

My House

Now forget all of the above. This time, I travel a lot because I’m worldly, adventurous and wise. I’m also wonderfully informative. Over the backyard fence, you mentioned that you might be thinking of taking a vacation this summer. In neighborly fashion, I invited you over for a coffee and to ask me any questions about past trips I’ve taken, in case any of my previous destinations might be appealing. You take me up on the offer and ring my doorbell. We sit down and I ask, “So, any particular areas you’re thinking of visiting?”

“Hmmm, I’ve always dreamed of the Mediterranean. Perhaps the French or Italian Riviera?”

“Cinque Terra is wonderful, so is Nice, Cannes and Monaco, but don’t rule out Spain or Portugal. I’ve been to them all.”

A House Divided…

Think of your reaction, first in your house, then in mine. As you no doubt realized, your house represents typical advertising; my house is search.

And the context is different in subtle but important ways. That’s why it becomes dangerous when we start trying to combine the two. In my house, you’re engaged and curious. You’ll ask me what I love about Portugal, or why I didn’t recommend Cannes more enthusiastically.  And you’ll trust me more if you know you’re getting my objective opinion. After I know a little about your preferred destinations, you might be interested if I introduce you to my friend, the travel agent.  You would even find that helpful. You’re open to a sponsored message, as long as it’s relevant to your interests and fits into the rules of the overall experience.

All this gets to the context of my difference of opinion with Gian. Visual richness is appropriate if it’s relevant and welcome. It’s annoying if it’s intrusive. And that line would be in the control of the engines and the advertisers.

If I come to your house uninvited, my job is to convince you to open the door. But if you come to my house, my job is to inform and help. You came through the door on your own. The house we live in is a great place, but there are rules we have to live by. Otherwise, no one will come to visit us.

The Search Insider RFP Panel: Truer than You Know

First published May 14, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Another Search Insider Summit is in the can. And one of the most interesting panels we had was the one put together by Aaron Goldman about the RFP process in search. Aaron picked up from where he, Steve Baldwin and Janel Landis left off in a string of columns talking about the frustration of RFPs and RFQs. Aaron posed the question of whether the RFP process was fundamentally broken to a balanced panel of clients (represented by  Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit and Tom Bombacino from Restaurant.com) and agencies (represented by Tom Kuthy from Resolution Media and Janel from SendTec).

It was a fascinating session. We heard from both sides about the challenge of finding the right search partner. Panel members said the RFP process was overly rigid and bureaucratic, an attempt to avoid risk that ended up putting agencies and marketers into an adversarial relationship right from the start. Tom Kuthy said he often refuses to play the game, either trying to change the rules to a more mutually enjoyable alternative or just picking up his ball and going home. On the client side, Olivier was sure that RFP stood for “Request for Pain.”  Surely, the panel agreed, there has to be a better way.

Where Have I Heard This Before?

I found the panel so enjoyable not because of Aaron’s able “steermanship” — although he was his usually engaging self — but because the stories of pain we heard rang so true to my past experience.

As luck would have it, Enquiro is midway through an extensive webinar and white paper series on organizational buying behavior. It caps off several months of research that involved talking to hundreds of B2B buyers about how they make purchase decisions. And what I heard on Friday afternoon at Captiva was exactly what we heard time after time from these people. B2B buying is a huge pain in the butt.

There’s a sales maxim that is often quoted: “People want to buy, but they don’t want to be sold.” While this is generally true, there’s an interesting variation in the B2B world, which, as vendors, we all live in: “B2B buyers definitely don’t want to be sold, they’re ambivalent about buying, and the only thing that really matters is covering their ass.”

Here’s the Rub

When we buy things for ourselves, there’s usually an element of risk, but also one of reward. Human decision-making balances the two against each other. And we do it by gut instinct. There’s often a degree of rational deliberation, but the engine that drives consumerism is emotion: the thrill of possession vs. the fear of loss. There is a yin and yang to most purchases that carry an element of pleasure. That is why we love to buy. But some purchases, like life insurance, carry no inherent reward. There’s only risk to consider. Buying life insurance is no one’s idea of fun.

Most B2B buying is like life insurance. There’s no reward side to the equation, only risk. If we make the wrong decision, we can lose our job. If we make the right decision, we don’t get a new car, or a TV, or even a new pair of shoes. We just get 10 tons of ball bearings, or a new search agency. Where the hell is the fun in that?  Avoiding risk is all there is to most B2B buying.

Buyers and Doers

Now, some people are occasionally thrilled about B2B purchases. These are the people that get to use the new equipment, or software. They’re the ones that get to work with the new search agency (fully staffed by exceptionally fun people), taking a huge burden off their shoulders. Surely there’s an element of reward in it for these people? Yes, and that’s why they almost never give the final OK to a purchase. They’re too highly motivated to buy, so somebody needs to apply the brakes. In our research, we call the people wanting to buy the “Doers” and the people applying the brakes the “Buyers.” It’s the Buyers who insist on the RFP process. As far as the Doers are concerned, RFPs are a waste of time.

Tom and Olivier were “Doers.” They had little time for the ass-covering pretense of RFPs. On the vendor side, no one likes an RFP. But what we were missing on Aaron’s panel was a “Buyer.” I’m pretty sure the procurement people at Intuit are in no great rush to scrap their RFP process.

Live from Captiva: The Digital Divide

First published May 7, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Gian Fulgoni has a better view of the online landscape than most of us. As the chairman of comScore, he has access to a massive database that captures every click of online activity from over 2,000,000 panel members. So when it comes to spotting trends, Gian’s got a pretty good vantage point.

Online Branding for CPG

As you’re reading this, Gian’s probably giving the opening keynote at the Search Insider Summit  on Captiva Island in Florida. I’m not sure what Gian will be covering, but he did share a few slides with me and I’m sure they’ll make their way into his keynote.  They’re the results of a study that showed the relative effectiveness of online and television advertising in driving purchases of consumer packaged goods ranging from cookie mixes and pizza to toothpaste and deodorant.

Eighty-two percent of the online campaigns showed positive sales or unit lift, with an average lift of 18%. Further, short-term online campaigns matched the effective lift of long-term TV campaigns (9% lift with online, 8% with TV).

Consumers Don’t Differentiate, So Why Do Marketers?

What is interesting about the study to me is the artificial line we still tend to draw between online and offline marketing.  And when I say “we,”  I mean “we” the marketers, not “we” the people. The chasm between online and offline is slightly narrower than it was before, but I find true integrated marketing only exists in the sales hyperbole of agencies, with little evidence of it in the real world.  With the advertisers I’m familiar with, the online marketing department barely talks with the offline Marcom folks, let alone sits down with them to plan out an integrated strategy.

Consumers don’t do this. If a consumer is considering a purchase, she pursues the most effective means necessary to research the purchase. Offline awareness leads to online consideration. Online consideration leads to offline visits to a retail location. Offline visits can lead to online price checking. We as consumers jump back and forth across the digital divide with ease, yet for marketers, the chasm seems unbridgeable. Why is this?

Part of it is attitude. Traditional marketers ignored online until it was too late. Their tardiness left us digital folks free reign to set up shop, thinking it would be, at best, an incremental channel that would never threaten the main event. But now, just a few short years later, you’ve got studies like Gian’s coming out saying that online might just be as effective as TV in driving sales of potato chips and pop. Hard to fathom, but true.

Branding: One Search at a Time

Even more startling, lowly search seems to have some brand-building chops of its own, at least when measured at one critical consumer intersection, active consideration of a purchase. My company has done a number of studies for Google, in seven different product categories and markets from Australia to North America showing the brand lift of search. Guess what? Lowly search, described by some as the ValPak of online, consistently delivered brand lift numbers averaging in the double digits. And that was before consumers even got to where the real brand building happens, the manufacturer’s Web site. Just a search ad alone lifted brand awareness, brand affinity and likelihood to purchase. Not bad for a handful of words showing up somewhere on a results page.

I have no idea what the “buzz” of Captiva will be, but I suspect we’ll spend at least some time talking about this ridiculous divorce between online and offline. Ironically, it seems like the recession is finally bringing the two sides a little closer together. I don’t understand why we marketers are taking so long to get it. Buyers seemed to figure it out a long time ago.

Measuring Success After The Click

First published April 23, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Avinash Kaushik speculates that Bounce Rate might be the sexiest Web metric ever. Scott Brinker has a whole blog dedicated to post-click marketing.  I believe it was Craig MacDonald at Covario who said bad landing pages are where good leads go to die. And I’ve been quoted as saying (categorically, no less) that the single most important thing we can do for the client happens after the search click.

Start Swimming Downstream

It always amazes me that search marketers spend huge amounts of time tweaking everything to do with the search page and very little time worrying about what happens downstream from it. It’s symptomatic of the siloed nature of search, a marketing practice that sits apart from other channels and the online user experience itself. Yet, what’s the point of a good search campaign if we end up dumping all those leads onto a poor Web site?

Perhaps the reason we don’t spend more time worrying about user experience is that it forces us to learn something about the user. You have to take responsibility for connecting the dots between intent and content, reading the user’s mind and trying to deliver what it is he or she is looking for. When it’s all said and done, maybe it’s easier just to worry about maximum costs per click or generating more link love.

But everything that matters starts with the search click rather than ends with it. That’s the first introduction to the prospect, the first opportunity to make a good impression. And from that moment on, the success of that blossoming relationship depends on the success of the user experience.

Post-Click Live at Captiva

 At the Captiva Island Search Insider Summit in a few weeks, we’ll actually be talking about the world of opportunity downstream from the click in a panel I’m very excited about. “After the Search Click” will be a live, clinical look at the success of the onsite experience. Enquiro is even bringing our eye tracking lab down so we can do some on-site testing and share the results with the group. The aforementioned Scott Brinker from Ion Interactive and Lance Loveday from Closed Loop Marketing join me. I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a stage with both of these gentlemen multiple times in the past.

Students of Human Nature

 To me, the immense gray area of the onsite experience has always been infinitely more interesting than the more black and white tactics of search marketing. For me, the latter is simply the means to an end, and the end requires you to be a student of human nature. For example, I’m fascinated by the subtle but distinct differences between how males scan a page and how females scan it.  Or the difference in behavior between those who grew up in the online world versus those who have adopted it and adapted to it as adults.  And if I showed you the heat map of a visitor who went to a Web site with one specific task in mind, as opposed to those who are just there to browse, the difference would astound you. But how often do we stop to think of these things as we put our search campaigns together? All too often, those leads are dumped on a generic home page or an anemic landing page with nary a scrap of relevance to be seen anywhere. Of course, even a good landing page is no guarantee of success. It’s just one more step to the end goal, a journey that could be cut short by poor site search tools, bad navigation or an overly inquisitive form.

I could make a blanket statement saying I see far more bad sites than good sites out there. But really, that’s not for me to say. The success of a site depends on the people using it and what their goals are. It should be a clean, well-lighted, well-labeled path.  I can say, as a frequent online user, it’s very rare that I’m impressed by a web experience. So in that regard, there’s much to be said still about improving the post-click experience. Join us for the discussion in a few weeks in Florida.

Microsoft’s Talk vs. Microsoft’s Talk

First published April 9, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Not so many columns ago, I urged Microsoft to do something amazing in search. Last week, they did. But it wasn’t in a good way. I was on the road last week, and I saw three different things land in my inbox about Microsoft and its search efforts. With each email, my frustration mounted. Finally, Friday as I was sitting in Seattle airport, I couldn’t contain myself anymore. I sent an email to the most senior person I knew at Microsoft Search. The gist of the email was “don’t do it,” Yesterday, I got an email back thanking me for my “honest” feedback. Yet somehow, I don’t think it will make a difference.

Here were the articles I saw:

One – Google can’t innovate but Microsoft can, according to Bloomberg.com:

“Being the underdog in the Internet- search market has one advantage for Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer: He says his company can experiment, while rival Google Inc. plays it safe. ‘Google does have to be all things to all people,’ Ballmer said… Our search does not need to be all things to all people.'”

I believe Ballmer is right here, in theory. What’s happening in reality is something very different. But let’s hold that thought for a moment.

Two – Search isn’t solved, according to Arstechnica.com:

“We’re not at where we’d like to be,” Weitz [Stefan Weitz, Microsoft Web Search Team] began, and then dove in to explain that people are generally happy with how their search engine is working, until the data shows that they are not.”

Nobody is arguing that the 10 blue links is the pinnacle of search, especially Google. So it’s hard to disagree here. We judge relative to what we know, but we’re on the brink of blowing that away.

So far, Microsoft is saying all the right things.

Three – Microsoft to spend $100 Million in advertising new search engine, according to Adage.com
“Industry executives expect JWT, part of WPP, to unveil an estimated $80 million to $100 million push for the new search engine in June, with online, TV, print and radio executions.”

What? This was the email that drove me over the edge. $100 million? On Kumo..or Kiev or whatever they call this? This is wrong on so many levels, I hardly know where to start.

I’m not going to pass judgment on a search interface I haven’t got my hands on. I don’t think it’s fair to make a call on a few leaked screenshots.   But I will say that I’ve seen nothing revolutionary about this. And that’s the point. As I’ve said over and over and over, Google is a habit. You don’t break a habit with $100 million in advertising. You don’t break it with promises of search usage kickbacks. And you certainly don’t break it with a marginal and incremental change in the search experience. Microsoft is right to introduce categorized search. They’re right to explore changing the search interface. No arguments there. But this is not the time to draw $100 million in attention to it. Best case scenario: no improvement to market share. Worst case, the biggest drop yet, if the usability aspects haven’t been fully thought out.

If you accept the message in the first two emails, Microsoft needs to be a search start-up: bold, nimble, visionary, passionate and rebellious. And there’s no way in hell that will happen on the Redmond campus.  Bold, nimble, visionary, passionate rebels are nowhere to be seen.

The First Step is Admitting the Problem

So accept what you are, and more importantly, accept what you’re not. Tweak your search product to improve experience, catch up and try to stem the market share bleeding. There’s nothing wrong with that. And stop with the rebranding. Every time you do that, you’re breaking the established habits of your own users and giving them the chance to go elsewhere.  This strategy will blow up in your face.

At the same time, stop worrying about winning the 10 blue link search war and start planning for the next battle. That’s when the Google habit will be broken and where you have a chance to change the game. Here are the things Microsoft needs to start thinking about:

–       Stop worrying about relevance and start worrying about usefulness.

–       Understand that search patterns represent a complex system and look at ways to discover emergent behavior from that system. Use your findings to improve everyone’s search experience (this is an element in Stephen Wolfram’s Alpha project)

–       Use every signal at your disposal to interpret user intent in an implicit way. Embrace personalization, behavioral patterns, the social graph, task context and anything else that helps uncover what’s in a person’s mind.

–       Reinvent the interface. Embrace how humans follow information scent. Use more intuitive interface tools to allow us to choose, filter and drill into promising paths. And make it workable in much less real estate.

–       Make a better search experience personal and portable, seamlessly transferring from the desktop to the mobile device.

–       Hold Google’s feet to the fire. Follow your own advice and innovate faster and better than they do.  Because you’re right, it’s difficult for them to innovate and risk alienating their user base. But here’s the flipside to that. It’s easier for them to take that risk when there’s no strong alternative to go to.

Before You Say No, Just Listen…

If Microsoft really wants to spend $100 million on search, here’s my suggested plan. Take $20 million and fund 10 start-ups for $2 million each. Give them a one-year mandate to reinvent search. Take the remaining $80 million and use it to develop a TV reality show. Call it “Google Killer.”  Get Steve Ballmer to host. He can throw chairs, do the Monkey Dance and lead the audience in a chant of “Developers, Developers, Developers.”  I guarantee you’ll get a better return on your investment.

And if someone at Microsoft is listening, I’m free to discuss the development deal for the show. Hell, I’ll even be one of the contestants.  Call me anytime.