Category Archives: Digital Marketing

What’s Up with Verticals?

First published July 27, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

You probably haven’t given a lot of thought lately to vertical search results, that thin sliver of search real estate that is sandwiched between the top sponsored ads and the top organic ads, and generally shows a few lines of news results, or local, or products. I have. Don’t panic, there’s really no reason why you should have. It’s really just a sad comment on my day-to-day activities. But I’ve noticed some things, and I think it’s incumbent upon me to share them with you. So let’s get vertical for a few moments, shall we?

In a Location Near You

First, this is prime real estate. When vertical results appear on the major engines, they appear smack in the middle of the hottest part of the page. After a number of eye tracking studies, we can say with a degree of certainty that most searchers (upwards of 80 percent) at least look at the top sponsored ads and the top three or so organic ads. That means that vertical, wedged in between, will be at least grazed over by a lot of eyeballs.

But position is not enough. Working the vertical angle is not just about grabbing some prime real estate. Verticals have to offer information scent. The information, links and visual cues they offer have to align with the user’s intent. In one bizarre example we saw during our latest study, somebody searched on Google for “digital cameras.” For some reason, Google saw fit to return news results for digital cameras. Now, just what percentage of the over two million people who searched for “digital cameras” last month (a quick estimate courtesy of Yahoo) do you guess would be looking for the scoop on how Nikon had to recall 710,000 digital camera batteries? Maybe the ex-product manager from Nikon, in between looking for new jobs on Monster, but that’s about it.

Hopelessly Devoted to OneBox?

While we’re on the subject, what’s the deal with Google and verticals anyway? Search pundit Greg Sterling said in a blog post some time ago that Google had an “almost religious devotion to OneBox,” its vertical label of choice. Could be, but it seems that a few in the temple of Google are questioning their religious affiliations. OneBox results have been a little sketchy of late. The reason this came to light is that I’ve just looked at 100-plus sessions in Google for a recent study, and there were surprisingly few of those sessions with OneBox results showing.

First of all, they hardly ever show for product-based searches. Try it for yourself. I must have tried over a dozen different common product searches before I got one that returned Froogle results via OneBox. Now why would that be? Well, for one thing, OneBox real estate competes with top sponsored ads, and perhaps advertisers are starting to resent the increased competition in their neighborhood for highly commercial searches. If that theory is correct, it flies in the face of Google’s goal to provide the most relevant results for each query, no matter what the source of the results. Another reason might be that Froogle has never really gained traction as a shopping engine. Maybe Google’s quiet dialing down the rate of appearance of Froogle results on the main page is their way of admitting that these results aren’t adding value to the user experience.

Doing Vertical Right

If you’re looking at a good example of Vertical execution, Yahoo seems to be currently leading the pack with its Shortcuts. The display of vertical results is consistent, and they seem to be one step ahead of the competition in aligning results with user intent.

Here are some examples we saw in a recent study:

One of the tasks given was to research the upcoming purchase of a digital camera. This resulted in a number of related queries being used, ranging from very general (“digital cameras”) to very specific (“Canon Powershot A530”). When these queries were thrown at Yahoo, the engine was able to differentiate and return appropriate vertical results. Broad generic phrases returned vertical results that compared known brands or allowed browsing by features. More specific queries returned links that led to reviews and best prices for that model alone. It was a great example of results matching intent, and we saw the interaction with these results go up dramatically as an example.

One very bright thing that Yahoo does consistently in its vertical listings is provide a 5-star rating scale. It appears for products, some local results (restaurants, hotels) and in various other places. When it comes to attracting our eye, nothing does the trick better than a visual cue that promises ratings. We love lists that sort from most popular to least popular. It’s the paradigm of the consumer researcher, and it’s something that reeks of scent. We saw eyeballs attracted to these icons like search marketers to an open bar (come on, I know many of you are already scoping out the cocktail network for San Jose).

A Vertical Future

I still believe that verticals mark a path into search’s future, but until the engines do better at disambiguating intent, either through personalization, behavioral tracking or just really smart key phrase parsing, they will be relegated to the thin sliver of real estate they currently occupy. Their success in luring users into what Sterling called a “Page 2” vertical experience will lie solely in how well they deliver on intent.

The Rule of Three in Search

First published July 20, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Once again, I find myself up to my earlobes in eye-tracking data. I have no one to blame, as I got myself into this mess when I made the well-intentioned but poorly thought out promise to have the first draft of a study done by the time I head out on vacation at the end of the month.

In wading through the sessions (about 420 of them) sometimes new insights rise to the top–and sometimes my eyeballs just roll back in my head as my hands jerk spasmodically on my keyboard and drool runs down my cheek. Luckily, this week it was the former.

In this study, we are looking at interactions with Google, compared to MSN and Yahoo. Recently, one finding in particular seemed to be screaming out to be noticed. Being a compassionate sort of researcher, I listened.

When we looked at interactions with the top sponsored ads, there was a notable difference between MSN, Yahoo and Google. On MSN and Google, the percentage of clicks happening on these top ads seemed to be in line with previous studies done both by us and by others. But the amount of activity on the Yahoo ads seemed to be substantially higher. We started out by looking at first fixations, or the first place people looked on the page, even for a split second. Here, the engines were all in the same ball park, with 83.7 percent of first fixations in top sponsored ads for Yahoo, compared to 86.7 percent for MSN and 80.6 percent for Google.

Then, we looked at where the first activity on listing happened; where on the page did people start actually scanning listings? Google held a good percentage of eyeballs, keeping 12.4 percent of the users, while MSN had a significant defection issue, losing 36.6 percent of the people who first fixated in the top sponsored ads. But Yahoo lost the fewest, with only 5.5 percent choosing to look elsewhere. And finally, Google had 25.8 percent click-throughs on these ads, and MSN had 16.7 percent (yes, this is low, but MSN was dealing with a number of issues at the time of the study). Yahoo led the pack with a 30.2 percent click-through rate. In fact, for the first time ever in our research, a sponsored link (the number one top sponsored) out-pulled the No. 1 organic link, at click-through rates of 25.6 percent vs. 14 percent. This was a complete reversal of the click-through ratios we saw on the other two engines.

For whatever reason, Yahoo’s top sponsored ads seemed to be locking searchers into their part of the results page to a much greater extent than Google and MSN.

Why? What the heck was going on? Better ads? Not really. If anything, Google’s ads seemed a touch more relevant.

Location, Location, Location

Part of it was real estate. Another interesting comparison we did was to look at the percentages of screen real estate devoted to various sections of the page. Yahoo has gone out of its way to make the top sponsored ads the dominant feature on a results page at 1024 by 768 screen resolution. At this size, the ads take up 23 percent of the real estate, compared to approximately 16 percent for Google and Yahoo. This pushes organic listings on Yahoo perilously close to the fold.

And there, as I stared at the screen shots of fully loaded (maximum ads and vertical results showing) Google, MSN and Yahoo results at standard resolution, a possible answer revealed itself. On Google, three top sponsored ads, three OneBox results, and three visible organic listings. On MSN, the same three:three:three presentation. But on Yahoo, there were four top sponsored ads, three vertical results, and just one and a half organic listings were visible.

The Rule of Three

Hmmm, three, three and three. There was something there, niggling in the back of my mind. Quickly, I did a search for the “Rule of Three” and sure enough, there it was. We humans tend to think in triplets. Three is a good number to wrap our mind around, and we see it in all kinds of instances. We tend to remember points best when given in groups of three, we scan visual elements best when they come in threes, and we like to have three options to consider. Think how often three comes up in our society: three little pigs, three strikes, three doors on “Let’s Make a Deal,” three competitive quotes. It’s a triordered world out there.

So is it coincidence that search results tend to be presented to us, neatly ordered in groups of three? I think not. It strikes me that this engrained human behavior would probably translate to the search engine results page as well.

The Ruler-breaker

MSN and Google tend to adhere to the rule of three in their layouts (depending on whether or not Google serves three top sponsored ads). Our choices are conveniently presented in neat trios, with logical divides between each.

Yahoo breaks the rule by tipping the balance in favor of the top sponsored ads. First, it provides four results, not three. Does this mean we need to spend a little more time up in these results, trying to fit one extra one into our limited memory slots? That appears to be the case, with people spending an average of 4.6 seconds in the Yahoo top sponsored results in our study, compared to 2.4 seconds for Google and 1.73 seconds for MSN.

Second, it only gives us one visible organic listing to consider. It breaks our natural desire to have three alternatives, thereby reducing the Promise of Interest for the organic listings. In effect, on the screen of results most people would see on Yahoo, we only have one alternative, the top sponsored ads.

An earth-shaking discovery? Perhaps not. But cut me some slack. I’ve been looking at eye-tracking data daily for three months now, spending about three hours each day looking at interactions with the three engines. I think it’s time I took the three other members of my family on a three-week vacation, during which we’ll be visiting three countries. Wait a minute! Do I sense a pattern developing?

Branded Terms in Search Results: Pre-Mapping in Action

First published July 6, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two separate occurrences in the last little while have lent credence to a behavioral occurrence we’ve seen in many of our studies.

First, I was sitting in on a meeting where an agency (not ours) was reporting on the performance of its sponsored search campaigns and was ecstatic with the performance of its branded term phrases, which were outperforming every other keyword bucket both in terms of click-throughs and conversions. While giddy with delight, company executives were at a bit of a loss to explain why.

On a similar track, a search marketing firm has recently released some results that looked at cannibalization of search campaigns when you are buying terms where you also hold top organic position. Again, they found this is most likely to happen when you’re buying branded terms.

While neither of these examples should be surprising to a seasoned search marketer, we’re all interested to know the reasons behind this interplay between organic and sponsored, particularly on branded terms. The answer, as it so often does, lies in looking more closely at what the search user is doing.

Pre-Mapping: A Theory

After looking at thousands of search sessions in detail, one thing is becoming clear. Searchers are incredibly adept at focusing in on just the portion of the results page that interests them. The time required to relocate to the prime real estate is literally a fraction of a second. Yet that real estate isn’t always the same spot. It varies depending on query and intent. It also varies by user, but even the same users will navigate the real estate of the listings in very different ways, depending on what they’re looking for.

Pre-Mapping supposes that we’ve interacted with search results pages enough to know the sections of real estate we typically deal with. We know where the top sponsored ads are and what they are. We know about where the top organic listings start. And in our minds, we already have a good idea of the type of site we’re looking for and approximately where we expect it to appear. Before the page ever loads, we’ve already mapped out the sections that would appear to hold the greatest promise to deliver on our intent. As the page loads, we do a split-second scan to get our bearings (orient in the top left corner, see how many top ads there are, see where organic starts) and then we go to the part of the map we’ve predetermined to be our best starting point.

Theory in Practice

Let’s run through a few examples. Imagine you’re looking for the possible side effects of a medication. The types of sites you would be looking for would be authoritative information sites, either the official site for the medication, a recognized health portal or possibly a government information site. In this case, you may be leaning more towards objective sites, rather than the pharmaceutical company’s own site. After launching the search (the name of the drug) you’ll quickly filter out, or thin slice, any commercially oriented sites. In this type of interaction, you’ve determined through pre-mapping that your area of greatest promise is not likely to be in the sponsored ads. You also expect the official site to rank No. 1 organically, so your area of greatest promise is probably in the No. 2 to 5 organic rankings, where you expect the types of sites you’re looking for to sit. In a split second, you’ve narrowed the real estate where you’ll start your active scanning to about 10 percent of the total real estate.

Now, let’s say you’re looking to renew your auto insurance. You’ve already checked out a few quotes online, but before you commit to any, you want to see how your current carrier compares. You’ve also pre-mapped the page in this case. Here, you expect your company to be bidding for the term ( “Brand Name auto insurance”) and because it’s a commercially oriented query, you assume that the sponsored listing would take you to a page where you could get a quote. Your area of greatest promise is the top sponsored ads. Again, you do your orientation scan to find your bearings in the upper left, but in this case, you would start right at the top sponsored link and work your way down the page until you find a link to the carrier in question that offers the promise of giving you a quote.

Theory Applied

Considering these two examples of user behavior, you can easily see what was happening in the two anecdotes I cited at the beginning of this piece. Brand terms will convert like gangbusters in the top sponsored location, because when a brand term is used, it’s very likely that the user has pre-mapped and is expecting to find that site in those top sponsored spots.

Similarly, you will find significant cannibalization because when users have pre-mapped, they start at the top and work down. They’ll hit the sponsored result before they hit any organic result that might appear. They’re looking for the quickest route, and in this case, the sponsored listing is giving it to them.

The likelihood to pre-map, and what this means for interaction for the page, lies in that deep dark place where all the answers to search engine success lie, the mind of your target prospect. Spend some time exploring it.

Wise Words about Branding from the Usability Sage

First published June 29, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Jakob Nielsen knows a lot about usability. He’s perhaps the world’s foremost expert on how people use Web sites. I finally had the chance to meet Jakob face to face last week (we’ve been trading e-mails for some time) in San Francisco at his Usability Week Summit. I was down there to sit in on his one-day session on eyetracking.

No Graphics for Nielsen

Jakob takes a pretty austere view of the user experience. One can tell this from his own website, useit.com. Perhaps his most famous quote is “Flash: 99% bad.” He takes a similarly dim view of animations and large graphics, which lead to “banner blindness,” he says. In fact, other than the obligatory head and shoulder shot on his bio page and a small arrow glyph used to indicate hierarchy in his breadcrumb navigation bar, there are no graphics on useit.com. He goes on at some length about this. Why no graphics? He’s pretty adamant that they add nothing to the user experience. We’re not in complete agreement about this, but I get his point.

Jakob’s Nielsen Norman group has recently added eyetracking to its usability arsenal. If ever you’re looking for justification for not using large graphics on a site, look (sorry, no pun intended) no further than eyetracking heatmaps. In session after session, users skirt around large graphic blocks, focusing their interaction on text and navigation. It can be a rude slap in the face for most graphic designers (there’s a rather amusing anecdote about one such encounter that happened at the session, and an example of the phenomenon I’m talking about, on my blog).

Experience, Not Exposure

In the session, Jakob tossed out a line, the import of which I’m not sure was fully appreciated by the audience. When responding to a question from the audience about the seeming contradiction between the need for building of brand exposure and best practices for usability, Jakob said that online, brand value is built through experience, not exposure.

Whoa! There’s a world of wisdom in those eight little words! Beneath them lies a whole different way of looking at online engagement. It sums up something I’ve been hammering away at for years now. A successful user experience builds brand equity in a way that hammering visitors over the head with Flash or streaming video never could. Every single thing on a Web site should have one purpose, to make that user experience more successful. If it’s there solely for the gratification of the designer, or the CEO, or the CMO, it’s there for the wrong reason. And before you dismiss this thought, saying it doesn’t apply to you, take a look at your home page and ask yourself, why are the elements that are on the page actually there? Think through the decision process that placed each element on the page. How present were users in the process? Who was asking them for their opinion?

User Success In Search

This is a best practice in any Web site’s design, but it becomes particularly true when looking at search-generated leads. Search visitors reek with intent. They are incredibly single-minded in their purpose. They’re looking for a clear path ahead to their intent, and they’ve cast the first few steps down that path through their search query. They’ve come to the site not because they’re engaged with your brand, although that may have helped sway them in your direction, but because they’re engaged with a task. Get between them and the successful completion of that task at your peril. Every time you throw something at them that’s not aligned to that intent, you decrease their chances for success, eroding the value of your brand in their eyes. If you make them wait 20 seconds for a Flash file to load, that’s 20 seconds of ticking on a time bomb that could blow your brand to smithereens. If you throw in a large stock photo with the typical generic smiling face that takes up 70 percent of your home page, you’re wasting prime real estate. But don’t feel bad, it happens to the best of us. At least Jakob practices what he preaches on his site. What would you see if you went to the home page of Enquiro? A generic smiling face. But I’m working on it!

Metrics that Matter

There have been a few stories coming out lately about numbers and metrics. In our business, we tend to drown in the numbers. Just yesterday, I had a meeting with our team here to talk about the issue. The thing to realize is that not all of us are numbers people. For many of us, myself included, I’m more comfortable with stories than columns and columns of numbers. I love data, but not for the data itself, but rather for the story that’s hidden inside that data. I recently received a presentation from a very well known research company that was presented to a client. Inside the slide deck, there were tons of graphs and charts, all chock full of numbers. But after looking at almost 60 slides, I still couldn’t figure out the story. When we work with numbers day in and day out and get caught up in the micro stories within those numbers, we tend to forget to take a step back and get a look at the big picture. As Bill Wise from Did-It said in a recent column, often in search, it’s the bigger numbers that are more important.

Also, we have to realize that the same numbers can tell different stories to different people. As search marketers reporting to our clients, we have to first know what story each stakeholder wants to hear, and then interpret the numbers to see if that story is true or not. All too often we present reams and reams of numbers, without trying to find the story within them.

That’s my issue with most analytics programs. There’s no shortage of numbers, but there is a distinct lack of meaning. Most analytics programs needs someone skilled to analyze the numbers, distill out the meaning and help us understand it. I’ve talked to John Marshall at Clicktracks about this previously, who takes a refreshingly “big picture” view of analytics. In a recent e-mail summit, John suggested that perhaps marketers are a little too fixated on ROI, and should step back a little to gain a better perspective.

Like all industries, search marketer has a number of metrics that are unique to us. At the practitioner level, each number is important, but only as an indicator of a bigger whole. When you report on the number of links built, or keyword density on a page, or even average bid amounts for a keyword bucket and cost per acquisition, you tend to start focusing on those numbers as the ones being important. But it’s useful to step back and remember that ultimately, you’re going to be reporting on this campaign to someone who doesn’t care about links, or occurrences of keywords on a page, or the fluctuation in bid prices for your number one term. All they’re going to care about is how the campaign added (or detracted) from their bottom line. Ultimately, that’s the story you’re going to have to tell.

At Enquiro, we’re really working hard to keep focused on the story, and not lose sight of it in a maze of numbers. We call it “metrics that matter” Our analytics specialist, Manoj Jasra, has done some writing on the subject. Check out his blog.

Search and the C-Level Ceiling

First published June 15, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What is the No. 1 thing that keeps the sales teams at Yahoo, Google and MSN up at night? It’s not click fraud, it’s not capping of bid prices, and it’s not counting their stock options. This is another “C” word. I call it the C-Level Ceiling.

No Keys to the Executive Washroom for SEM

In corporate America, there’s a vast distance between the front line and the top management in most Fortune 500s. The C Level sees rolled-up dashboards, while front-line practitioners are up to their earlobes in masses of detail. Both bring their own kind of blindness. At the C Level, aggregation of metrics means senior management might not see the small emerging factors that could make a big difference if applied more broadly. And practitioners get swept away in minutiae, sometimes not getting the luxury of seeing their contributions as part of the bigger picture. Somewhere between these two extremes, search is caught in the land of the “trial” budget.

Search just hasn’t broken into the spotlight at the top of the corporate ladder. Senior execs don’t get search, they don’t want to get search and they certainly don’t want to move significant budget to search. As you move down the corporate ladder, the love affair with search gets more ardent. At the front-line practitioner level, it’s a full-blown romantic obsession, because the front line sees in gritty detail how well search can perform. But as you move away from the front line, the search story gets lost in a maze of numbers, being rolled up into one category after another, until it all but disappears at the highest level of reporting.

Search is a blip in the total marketing picture, a rounding error in most budget allocations. Despite the best efforts of the big search engines, the industry has been unsuccessful in getting the C Level to buy into search. So why is that?

I’m Too Sexy for This Channel

First, even if you don’t “get” something, you can still be interested in it. Everybody at the C level loves to get involved in the new corporate TV ads, because that’s sexy. If you’re launching a sponsorship of a NASCAR race, or the Olympics, or the World Cup, or a Rolling Stones Concert Tour, that’s sexy (with room for differing opinions on the sexiness of the Rolling Stones). If you’re doing product placement on “Survivor” or “American Idol,” that’s sexy. Search just isn’t sexy. Never was and never will be. The CEO or CMO is just not going to give up a weekend yacht trip to approve the latest search ads.

So, the first thing against search is there’s no sex appeal to draw in corporate execs, whether or not they “get” it (and most times, they don’t).

Use Me, But Please Respect Me

It’s estimated that there are about 630,000 C-Level executives in the U.S. If you asked them where the most effective place to reach them with an advertising message would be, they would tell you the Wall Street Journal print edition. And, according to a new study by Ipsos, there’s some validity in that. The Journal reaches 46 percent of the market. This is the place C Levels turn to get detailed information and opinion. They respect the Journal.

But an even more effective intersection would be search. The most dominant medium these executives use to stay in touch is the Internet. 55 percent use it at work, and 34 percent use it at home. Now, unless C Levels use the Internet in a totally different way than every other human, that means they’ll be using search a lot. So the very same executives that continue to allocate huge budgets to TV and print, and teeny tiny budgets to search, use search, a lot! Way more than they watch TV. Why is that?

The Generation Gap

A generation gap exists between the C Level and the front-line practitioners, and the executives at the top just haven’t accepted the fact that the world has changed right under their very feet. At the C level, despite tons of evidence that confirms the world is turning online, they’re still stuck very much in an offline world when it comes to budget allocation. And it’s not that they aren’t aware of the quantum shift in our society. It’s a comfort level issue. They know customers are wired, but they’re not exactly sure how online marketing works. The rules are still being written. At least with television or print, there’s the comfort of knowing they’ve been doing it for years. There are budget line items that are rubber- stamped each year, media buyers and agencies that are more than happy to take the money, and media outlets that are hanging on tenaciously to the budgets. For executives allowing the status quo to continue, the question they reassure themselves with is, “How could the world change so radically that the things we’ve done for the past 3 decades could be no longer valid?”

We saw an example of this recently. A travel company that targets young adults (18 – 30) continues to spend millions each year to produce huge, glossy brochures. At the practitioner level, this company has initiated research that shows that the vast majority of their target market does their research online. Yet the entire online budget is a tiny fraction of the print budget for the brochures that nobody reads anymore. Everyone who works on the front lines of this company knows they are seriously out of step with their market, but no one has been able to convince executives to cut the budget on print and swing it into online. The word hasn’t been able to get past the C-Level ceiling.

Search Delegated down the Ladder

With the meager budgets going to search, we can count on the responsibility for these campaigns being passed far down the line. Executives spend their time looking at the things that have the greatest impact financially on the company. If search is 2 percent of the entire advertising budget, but television accounts for 45 percent, the CMO is going to be spending a lot more time with television. That just stands to reason. So the future of search lies lost in the middle management layer, cut off from the budget allocations that can make a real difference.

Hammering the Message Home

So, what will shake up the status quo? Well, the shift has already begun. Calls for more accountability in advertising are great news for search. Someday in the not-too-distant future, the CMO, looking at the detailed report on the search campaign, will scratch his head and ask the fateful question, “Why can’t we get these kind of metrics for all our channels?” And there, in that one sentence, the battle will be won. It won’t be a quick win, but it will be tremendously satisfying.

Engaging Conversation about Engagement

The AAAA, ARF and a lot of other acronyms out there are all waxing on eloquently about engagement being the new metric. Over at iMedia, David Smith says it’s not really a metric, but more of a psychographic.

I’ve had bones to pick with the trotting out of engagement as a one size fits all metric myself, and talked a little about this in one of my Search Insider columns. When you look at ARF’s existing media model

  • Vehicle exposure
  • Advertising exposure
  • Advertising attentiveness
  • Advertising communication
  • Advertising persuasion
  • Advertising response
  • Sales response

One thing strikes home. This doesn’t really work very well for “pull media”. It’s all about push. ARF’s aiming at adding engagement to the mix. Same thing holds true. That’s a brand metric that is relevant when you’re pushing messages at a market, rather than having them request the messages from you, via a search engine, for example. It’s a completely different dynamic, and needs a different set of measurements. Let me guess who’s driving the ARF MI4 agenda: big agencies perhaps?

Friday’s Fodder Folder Clear Out

After almost 2 months of blogging, I’m started to get a system. Usually, when I see items of interest come through my inbox or have interesting conversations, I file them away for a future blog post in a folder called Blog Fodder. Well, the folder is overflowing, and I don’t have time to do full posts, but I did want to pass them along, so I’m cleaning house today.

More Search Research

The Daves (Williams and Berkowitz) and the rest of the gang over at 360i and SearchIgnite released a study looking at the value of multiple clicks on a search ad. This is an interesting indicator of the complexity of the search interaction in a purchase life cycle, something that needs a lot more light shone upon it. I remember Greg Sterling and I talking at one point at a SES session about the messy and twisting nature of a consumer’s online path in a purchase cycle. I’m happy to say that research companies are starting to focus on this Gordian knot (and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t named after me).

ComScore is one of those jumping on board with a recently announced study to look at the influence of online research on offline purchase. The value here is huge, just never quantified that well (or at all) and the ComScore study should be a step in the right direction. I’m hoping to chat with VP James Lamberti more about the study next week. If I’m able, I’ll drop a few tidbits about what they’re looking at.

OMD and Yahoo also released a study looking at this, called the Long and Winding Road. Speaking of Greg Sterling, he’s got a look at the study on his blog, with links to the press release and a few columns. Not sure how publicly available the study is. If you’re interested, perhaps contact your friendly neighborhood Yahoo rep. Fascinating reading!

The Bulls of SEM

Sapna Satagopan from JupiterResearch is bullish on the future of SEM, saying as the number and size of companies moving into search continues to increase, it will drive SEM outsourcing. At first glance, this seems to contradict the findings from the annual SEMPO survey, which indicates that more companies are bringing this in house. Steven Rappaport, a writer who’s currently working on an online advertising field guide for ARF, asked about this in a conversation this week. I explained that the two seeming different viewpoints are two stages in the same cycle. As companies dedicate more attention and budget to search, they do want to gain control in-house, so they are looking for search expertise to bring on board. While these new “directors of search” oversee search activities, they look for experts in specific areas to outsource to. It’s not really efficient for companies to set up an entire search marketing division in-house, and many companies realize this after going down this road for awhile.

Long Tail and other Musings

Cory Treffiletti wrote a column on the Long Tail model of business that has been exploited expertly by Amazon, eMusic, iTunes and the king of long tails, eBay. This is an idea I’ll have to come back to, as it has fascinating implications for retail. But until then, consider, an internet etail model doesn’t have any of the physical limitations of a traditional store. With virtual inventory, provided by direct suppliers, the store, or site, simply acts as the connector. And with expert use of search, the primary connection vehicle, it becomes possible for an online story to carry everything, but with the inventory infinitely segmentable. This brings about the idea of a mega-online shopping site, which is close to what eBay and Amazon have become. Tie this in with smarter shopping search tools and the social networking WOM power of a MySpace, and you’ve got a convergence model that’s mind blowing in its implications.

Tom Hespos takes a stab at a favorite subject of mine, the transference of control over brand messaging from the advertiser to the consumer.

Welcome to the Search Marketing Sweat Shop

First published May 25, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the latest Business Week, buried on page 70, there’s a story about outsourcing in search marketing. The story is titled “Life on the Web’s Factory Floor,” and it’s about the thriving business in assembling search marketing ads.

From the description, it sounds like search marketing is nothing more than a big Scrabble game. You throw a bunch of combinations of words up in the air, see how they land. and cut and paste them into your ads. In fact, in the story a search marketing specialist is defined as someone who “types phrases to drive ad traffic.” One gets the mental image of the proverbial room full of monkeys sitting at typewriters. At least the writer, Burt Helm, called the process “slightly creative.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to SEM…

I admit there are companies, some thriving, who take this sweat-shop approach to search marketing. But every time I see the mainstream press reduce my passion to this elemental level, I die a little bit inside. I’m already having enough trouble explaining what I do for a living. Just this past weekend, I was trying to explain to an importer/exporter the rapid growth in search marketing, and what I did most days between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. He had no idea the search marketing industry existed, and when I told him it was a $7 billion dollar a year industry (just guessing at where we’ll be this year) I could see the question in his eyes. “How the hell can $7 billion change hands in an industry that doesn’t seem to be based on anything?” I’ve been struggling with this attitude for years now, and had finally thought that I was past it. But in one short weekend, with the help of a two-page story in Business Week, I’m right back where I started.

Perhaps the problem is that most users’ touch point with search seems so simple. I type in words, I see words come back–and not a lot of them, either. Most messages are 15 to 20 words at most. How hard can it be? It’s this prevailing attitude that has made search the bastard child of the online ad space. We get no respect. From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new director of search marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring.

HELP, I need somebody (preferably a search marketer)…

As an aside, I always find it enlightening to sit at a table during lunch at a Search Engine Strategies show where I don’t know anyone. As introductions are made around the table, you can bet you’ll flush one of these newly minted search marketers out of the crowd. The story is usually the same–the boss thought it would be good to come to the show and “get up to speed.” They look at you with hapless confusion, shell-shocked with the sheer amount of data to digest. Four days, four tracks crammed with information. That’s well over 100 sessions and 400 individual presentations, all dealing with some nuance of search marketing. Before the show, these people thought they had search pretty much pegged. At best, they thought they’d pick up a hint or two. They come back from the show realizing they’ve just jumped into labyrinth of arcane knowledge and tactical expertise.

I Fall to Pieces…

It’s the sheer volume of minutiae in search marketing that makes it such a daunting proposition. I’ve been immersed in it for over 10 years now and I can tell you, there’s no way one person can stay on top of it. That used to be possible, but it’s not today. Even Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman can’t keep up, and they work unbelievable hours to try.

Search is advancing on all fronts at once. You’ve got Google, Yahoo and MSN trying to gobble up new online territory at a frightening pace. You’ve got new players like MySpace emerging (for the first time, ComScore has included MySpace in its search share numbers). You’ve got new ways of using search, for broadband, on mobile devices and for finding local advertisers. And on top of that, we’re just starting to understand how, when and why consumers use search. I remember once in high school chemistry a classmate spilled a bunch of mercury on a workbench top. A hundred little globs of quicksilver scattered everywhere, proving impossible to round up and contain. That’s what search is like, multiplied by a factor of 100.

It’s Only Words, and Words Are All I Have…

I suppose when you pick search apart at the single message level, it can look pretty simple compared to other channels. Consider the time required to put together one message for one key phrase, compared to what it takes to put together a television ad.

We know that there’s this whole sexy industry behind television ads, with actors, special effects, huge buys and (sometimes) brilliant brand strategies. Now that’s something to admire. They’re like little tiny movies, and we all love movies. But a search ad is, well, just a few words thrown together. What we forget is that every key phrase is its own campaign, infinitely controllable and measurable. For the big search advertisers, that can mean millions of individual campaigns. We buy customers by the penny, building business click by click in a grueling marketing marathon.

There are a lot of moving parts to each of those campaigns, including page placement, maximum bids, messaging, landing page performance and other conversion factors. We obsess over numbers, fine-tuning each campaign to provide maximum performance–or at least, that’s what search marketing should be. It’s this incredible granularity that makes search such a challenge to execute properly.

Search is not easy. Given the choice, I think it would be far easier to consolidate your marketing strategy into a few television ads that are measured on an ephemeral “brand lift” metric, rather then fragment it into millions of individual campaigns, each measured down to the click.

I realize there’s a paradox here. I know it’s this incredible amount of detail that gives rise to the web factories that Burt Helm talks about in Business Week. There’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done. But don’t discount the entire industry by simplifying it down to a room full of people throwing words together. That’s one rather unfortunate aspect of an incredibly dynamic marketing channel. “Typing phrases to drive ad traffic.” Give me a break!

Lights! Camera! Google!

Google will be rolling out user initiated video advertising across it’s AdSense network.

Broken record time. I applaud Google’s decision to keep engagement with the video in the hands of the user.

But on a more fundamental level, I have to question the whole level of engagement with display advertising on sites. It seems like the harder advertiser’s scream, the more determined we are to ignore them. On a recent eye tracking study we did for MarketingSherpa, we were absolutely amazed with the small amount of scanning done in the typical ad positions on a page. Less than 10% of visitors even looked at these sections (top banner, right and left rail) of the page. Now, the purpose of the study wasn’t to look at this aspect specifically, but the scan patterns were undeniably clear. Interestly, text based ads that appeared within the flow of the main content had higher scanning levels, even when they appeared well below the fold.

Of course, these numbers are probably not terribly surprising, given the fact that visitors aren’t there to look at ads, but it makes you question the whole idea of paying by impression. If you’re buying based on a CPM model, realize that for every 1000 impressions, only 60 or 70 people are actually seeing the ad, even for a split second. Suddenly, those low clickthrough rates start to make sense.