Category Archives: Digital Marketing

Search Supercharges Ad Platforms but What’s In It for the User?

Seems like all the innovation lately with the search engines has been in rolling out sophisticated ad targeting platforms. Yahoo’s the latest to blow their horn about their own back end (and I realize that paints an ugly picture).

I’m a search marketer, and I love the advances that are being made in being able to target geographically, demographically and behaviorally, but I can’t help but think, “Who are we targeting?”. While the engines try to woo advertisers with better tools, what good is it doing if their market share is dwindling because they’re not giving the user a reason to use the engine?

I have not seen a significant improvement to the every day search user experience from any of the big 3 in years. One may argue that if you take advantage of search history or other enhancements that have debuted in beta, it offers more value to the searcher. But that does nothing for the vast majority of searches that happen every day on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nobody has upped the ante. Ask is the only engine I’ve seen that made some significant changes on the interface (more about that later today).

As a search marketer, it’s all about market share. It takes time to target and strategically plan a campaign, and while the new platforms offer some impressive capabilities, they also add time required to manage them. Am I going to use that time to target 11% of the search market, 23%  or 50%? It just makes sense to use your time where it gets you the biggest return.

A word of advice. Worry about getting the users first, then worry about the tools to target them.

Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool Broken?

Quick question. Is anybody else getting really strange results out of the Keyword Selector Tool at Yahoo? I just did a search for Los Angeles, and apparently all people are searching for are cars. These were the results I got:

Searches done in April 2006
Count Search Term
 350883  toyota los angeles
 333459  honda los angeles
 280591  bmw los angeles
 279022  chevrolet los angeles
 238133  ford los angeles
 226776  mercedes benz los angeles
 181748  nissan los angeles

Either everyone in Los Angeles is buying a new car, which could be, or the inventory tool needs a complete engine rebuild. Just wondering if anyone can shed a little light on this.

Did a quick check on Google based on keyword popularity and here’s what this tool gave me as the top variations:

los angeles, los angeles hotels, los angeles ca, los angeles california

That seems to make more sense

Ooops! It Really is a Small World After All

The Traffic Power guys are really too much. I had told you about the complaint that came my way from them. Seems these guys are also implying to prospective customers they have an “in” at Google because of a friendship with certain head engineers. Which engineers you ask? Well, the name Matt Cutts seems to be bandied about.

Hmmm..I know Matt. Wonder if he knows certain SEO’s are using his name in this manner? I just happened to have an email from a Traffic Power rep forwarded to me from a client that hinted at this special relationship. And I may have accidentally forwarded this to Matt. Ooops.

Matt’s words, “Extremely uncool”. Yeah..I’d echo that one. Come on, our industry has enough challenges without this. If an SEO tells you he’s friends with Matt Cutts, or any other person at any of the search engines, that’s one thing. It’s a small biz and we’re all pretty friendly. But if anyone hints that the keys to the church are for sale, based on a personal relationship with Matt or anyone esle, don’t believe them. Matt’s helped us out on occassion in understanding how Google indexes a site, just like he’s helped thousands of webmasters. That’s his job. But when it comes to influencing search results, there’s a church/state divide that just won’t be breached. Nuff said.

Tivo Now in the Search Game

This just in: Tivo is going to let viewers search for the advertising content they’re interested in!

Brilliant! Imagine, letting consumers chose to look for product information when they’re actually interested in it. I think this has far reaching implications. Imagine if we could do something similar with websites..some sort of thing where we could search through all the content on the web so if there was a product we were interested in, we could find the right site. We could call it a…search engine!

But seriously, there is one quote from the story that reinforces everything I’ve been saying about search:

Users will be able to search through ad and product information spots ranging in length from 1 to 60 minutes from five different ad categories like finance, travel, and lifestyle.

See the word “search”? That’s the key. Consumer control absolutely requires search. Whether video search is done through Tivo or a search engine (and search engines will win this battle) the act of searching is the important thing. It’s that simple, fundamental concept that will power the entire future of marketing. It’s the connection that makes everything else possible.

Another interesting tidbit was the major brands jumping on this “brand”wagon. It was probably an easy sell, unlike search branding has been. But then, search isn’t nearly as sexy as being able to tap into a new generation of ad zappers.

Relevancy Rules in Sponsored Search Ads

First published May 4, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let me quote some rather startling numbers to you from a recent eye tracking study we did. In the study, we examined where people first looked on a search results page, where they first scanned a listing, and where they eventually clicked.

First of all, we gave participants a number of different scenarios that involved looking to a search engine to help them make a purchase. We used Google, Yahoo and MSN in the study. In all cases, on all 3 engines, the vast majority of people first glanced at the top- sponsored listings. In eye tracking parlance, we call this a fixation, or a momentary pause of the eye. On Yahoo, 84 percent of the first fixations were on the top sponsored listings when they appeared, on Google it was 81 percent, and on MSN it was 87 percent. So, almost nine out of every 10 people start looking at the search results page by at least glancing at the top sponsored listings

The next thing we measured was active scanning. This is where participants started reading a listing. On Google and Yahoo, there was strong correlation with the first fixation point, with 79 percent of the first reading activity on top sponsored for Yahoo, and 71 percent for Google. MSN was another story. While 87 percent of participants first glanced at the top sponsored ads, only 55 percent started reading there. Almost 32 percent of our participants immediately relocated past the sponsored ads.

Finally, we recorded where the eventual clicks happened. In Google’s case, 26 percent of the clicks happened in the top sponsored ads, with Yahoo it was 30 percent, and MSN came in with 17 percent click through on top sponsored.

Here’s what we took from the numbers. On Google, although over 80 percent of searchers started in the top sponsored, only 26 percent found something relevant and compelling enough to click on, and remember, these were commercial, product oriented searches. On Yahoo, 84 percent started in top sponsored, but in Yahoo’s case, about 30 percent stuck around and clicked an ad. And with MSN, something entirely different was going on. It seems that MSN users have a bad case of banner blindness when it comes to top sponsored ads.

Scanning Follows Relevancy

The reason top sponsored ads are effective is because they’re placed in the highest traffic portion of the page. We orient ourselves in the page on the upper left. Our destination is the top organic ad. Top sponsored ads are placed in the middle of the most popular real estate on the SERP. This is shown by the high percentage of fixations that happen in this section.

But our interactions with the SERP are not all about position. We can, very quickly, determine if what’s there is relevant to what we’re looking for. We quickly scan titles to see if the ads presented match our intent. And when I say quickly, I’m talking fractions of a second. We start picking up relevancy without even having to read the listings by determining scent. If the listing has “scent” and it’s a good match, we’ll not only hang around and start scanning the listing, we may even click on it. Otherwise, we do what we intended to do in the first place and skip down to the organic listings. That’s what’s happening on Google and Yahoo. MSN is another story.

The MSN Two-Step

During the study period, MSN was in experimentation mode. It was in the process of dropping Yahoo ads from the top listing and substituting its own advertising, which in most cases wasn’t keyword-driven to the same extent that the Yahoo ads were. This usually meant that the “scent” or relevancy match wasn’t as great. When this happened, we saw almost immediate relocation down to organic results. Users could determine the existence, or in this case, absence of scent in a fraction of a second and relocated down. In effect, it was an example of banner blindness, where they were determining that the top sponsored results weren’t relevant.

The lesson from this for the search engines is that you can’t take position for granted. You have to deliver with relevancy and the greater the relevancy, or at least, the perceived relevancy, the better those top sponsored ads will perform.

Yahoo’s Relevancy Capitulation

Yahoo has learned this over time. In the beginning days of GoTo/Overture/Yahoo, position was determined solely by bidding. When Google came on the scene, it offered a blended approach, where click-through rates also helped determine position. The theory was, the higher the click-through rate, the greater the relevancy.

Yahoo has recently announced integrating click through rates and relevancy into the sponsored positioning algorithm as well. This is the beginning. Soon, message and landing page relevancy will also be factored into the position equation.

When it comes to capturing a searcher’s click, you have to deliver relevancy. It’s not all about position–and this fact will become more true in the future, not less.

You Get the SEO You Deserve

Yesterday I decided to be a good Samaritan, and almost got taken. Let me tell you the story.

Yesterday morning when I got to my desk I had a voicemail message. There was an upset person who claimed they had been taken by an SEO company. A representative from the company in question had put a link to our eye tracking research at the bottom of his email signature, so this “victim” was seeing if we were connected in some way. I returned the call and found out that this guy had paid $2000 for a doorway domain but wasn’t receiving any traffic. Like most people, I automatically assumed the SEO company was the culprit. Wanting to restore this guy’s faith in our industry, I offered to take a look at the site and maybe offer a little free advice. He sent me the link.

White Hats, Black Hats and Dunce Caps

And now, I must digress for a minute. When I first met Matt Cutts at a Webmaster World he did an impromptu site clinic and when somebody called up a particularly egregious example of spam he said, “That’s worse than spam, that’s stupid spam”. The site that this SEO firm put up definitely falls into the category of stupid spam.

In the SEO ecosystem, there is a place for black hats and white hats. I happen to be a white hat and we provide a service to our clients, who for various reasons have chosen not to employ black hat tactics. That’s cool. There are also clients in ultra competitive categories that can’t rely on white hat tactics alone. These are clients who are willing to risk domain banning in return for higher rankings, and black hat tactics are the only way they’re going to get them. These clients go in knowing what they’re looking for, and there are black hats willing to provide the service. While possibly not the same degree of cool (in that spam degrades the search user’s experience) at least everybody is going in with eyes wide open. But it’s stupid spam that really bugs me.

The site I saw had tons of crappy text, inelegantly jammed with irrelevant keywords, was embedded in a clumsy link farm, and the link through to the client’s site was an ugly and totally useless Flash banner. The best black hats are at least elegant in their spam. This was ugly, pointless and stupid. And that pisses me off.

Good Samaritan Gone Wrong

So, I thought I’d bring these guys to light (and I will, bear with me) and offer to go to bat for the guy. I fired off an email seeing if he was okay with letting his name stand. He jumped at the chance. But something was niggling at me. The text on the page was at least partially relevant to his business, and it was written in first person. Where did the text come from?

I got him on the phone and asked him the question. The text came from him. Hmmm…my innocent victim doth protest too much. He had picked the keywords, which were ultra competitive and either marginally relevant or not relevant at all. And in the conversation, he exhibited more than a passing knowledge of SEO. The minute the site went live, he knew it was spam. He only got mad when after 3 months, the spam wasn’t working for him.

Then, he started working me. If I was either going to blog or write a column about it, he wanted to make sure he got a link to his main site. He went on to tell me that he could generate some “real business” from this exposure and how guys he knew in the same biz were pulling in $800,000 to a mil from their websites. I pointed out that the reason I was doing this wasn’t to make him rich.

At this point, I’m thinking that I was really hoping I’d find an innocent victim, but instead I found an accomplice. He was looking for an angle when he retained these guys, and it wasn’t the fact that it was spam that he objected to, it was the fact that it was spam that didn’t work. He is now pursuing legal action as well as filing a complaint with the BBB.  He’s spending a lot of time and energy tracking them down. Perhaps he should have shown this diligence before hiring them in the first place.

My point? We are all quick to point the finger at the SEO’s, but let’s remember that it’s clients like this that allows these companies to flourish. A quick investigation of the link farm showed hundreds, if not thousands, of clients that seem to think this is the way to use search. That too pisses me off.

Finally, a quick shout out to Matt and the Google spam squad. A few searches showed the bogus site had been already tossed from the Google index. It was the fact that the Google spider no longer came knocking that prompted our “victim” to start complaining. However, this site is actually ranking for some of the terms on MSN. Just one more example of how the gang at Redmond really has to get their act together if they want to compete head to head in the search space.

So, who is the SEO in question?

They go by various names, but some are 1p.com, and 1stinternetadvertising.com

Want to see an example of their work? Check out http://www.my1sthomebizsite.com/ (and no, this isn’t the person who complained. This is another site in their network.)

And to 1p, or 1stinternetadvertising, or whatever your name is, please stop using a link to our research in your email signature!

Addendum

Since the first post, I’ve discovered that 1p.com is actually Traffic Power. Of course they are! Thanks to Graywolf and MC for the info.

Branding, Search and the Definition of Engagement

First published April 13, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Currently, the Advertising Research Foundation has an initiative called MI4. Its task is to create a cross-channel measurement of advertising effectiveness that can foster more accountability and facilitate multichannel marketing measurement. They have decided on the concept of engagement. It is a noble endeavor, and one that is much needed in our new, highly fragmented marketing world. But I fear there may be a fundamental chasm that one metric will be unable to bridge.

Joe Plummer, ARF’s Chief Research Officer, offered the group’s first draft of a working definition, “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”

The Two Sides of Engagement

The problem, from a search perspective, is that there are two very different forms of engagement seen with consumers, and brand plays a very different role in each.

In most marketing, brand engagement is essential. You have to form a relationship between a brand and the latent or expressed needs and desires that lie with the consumer. Engagement is essential, because you have to form an emotional bond that can rise to the surface and express itself as top-of-mind awareness when consumers are ready to actively consider their options. In this instance, engagement is emotional, intuitive and often subconscious. It is this level of engagement that I think ARF is trying to define by somehow quantifying this emotional bond, referred to in market speak as being “turned on.”

But there is another type of engagement: engagement with the actual act of purchasing. Here, the consumer is engaged with a product, but not necessarily a particular brand. This is the typical point when a consumer will interact with a search engine. And with ARF’s working definition of engagement, I don’t think search will do particularly well in a multichannel comparison.

Branding and Search

One of the issues with search has been its value as a brand-building channel. The prevailing wisdom is that search is not a particularly effective brand-building marketing medium. I believe this to be true, but it’s because we’re trying to apply the first definition of engagement, the idea of engaging with a brand, not a product.

Consider a typical brand engagement measurement. If I did a brand lift study with a typical page of search results, where I showed a consumer the page, some results with brand messaging included, and determined if brand lift occurred, the results would probably be less than stellar. First of all, the act of searching is done with the left brain. It is a rational, logical interaction, not an emotional one. That’s why text-based advertising does well, and graphic or rich media doesn’t. We’re intellectually engaged in a task, and we’re looking for information that will help us succeed in accomplishing that task. We’re not looking to be influenced by an emotionally charged message. In fact, we block anything that smacks of overt commercialism or looks like advertising out of our consideration. We “thin slice” it out of the way. We are not emotionally connected. We are not looking to be “turned on.” We are evaluating our alternatives with a rational view.

When a consumer is interacting with a search engine, the time for brand engagement is already long past. That job had better be done already. Here is how branding does work in search.

Engagement with Buying, Not Branding

When I use a search engine for consumer research, I’m thinking in terms of the specific thing I’m looking for, not a specific brand. Generally, when I start, I will not use a branded search term. I am building a consideration set. Yes, I likely have brands I have an affinity for, but I won’t explicitly include them in my query. I’m looking for the search engine to provide me some alternatives to consider. Typically, searchers will look at four to five results before making their selection. These are usually the top sponsored, and the top two or three organic, results. This represents the prime and very limited “shelf space” of the search results page. If a brand appears that the consumer has an existing affinity for, the chances are good that the site will capture a click-through. If the brand doesn’t appear, the company has likely lost the opportunity to connect with a consumer that will soon be ready to buy.

Search: The Consummation of a Consumer Relationship

So, for brand marketers, the question is not, “does search actively engage the consumer in my brand messaging” but rather, “am I prepared not to have my brand present when my target consumer is looking to buy (or at least, research to buy)?” To me, it’s as elemental as not stocking the store shelf with your product. The consumer is not looking at building a relationship with a brand, he’s looking to consummate that relationship. Wouldn’t you want to be around for that rather important event?

So, to go back to ARF’s working definition of engagement, I don’t think it works for search. That definition of engagement is about building a relationship with the brand for “some day,” implanting a brand message for the time when the prospect turns into a shopper. When the shopper turns to search, that brand message is already planted. But if the brand isn’t present on the search results page “store shelf,” the message will be forgotten as the consumer clicks on the link of the next alternative.

I applaud ARF’s effort to define one all-encompassing metric, but when you have real people interacting with products and messaging in two very different ways, I’m not sure engagement, at least the way it’s currently defined, will be able to bridge the gap and do the job.

The Real Cost of SEO: It’s Not Budget, It’s Believers!

First published January 26, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Not too long ago, I was moderating a panel of search marketing experts who were comparing the merits of sponsored search and organic search optimization. We were unanimous in our support of organic optimization; none of us could think of an individual case where the cost- effectiveness of organic didn’t far exceed every other marketing channel our clients had tried. From the audience came the question, “If organic optimization is so effective, why isn’t it a more common strategy?”

Great question. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t an easy one.


Requirement One: Corporate Understanding

The problem with organic optimization is that it can’t be owned by any one department in a larger organization. While a sponsored campaign can be launched by a single department–or by an individual, for that matter–with no impact on any other department, organic optimization needs buy-in throughout an organization. This is why we generally see the best optimization on sites where C-level executives are close to the front lines, believers in optimization, and can give a single go-ahead that will open the required doors for organic optimization to happen. The bigger the organization, the more unlikely it is that this will happen.

Usually, the need for organic optimization is recognized by someone in the marketing department. Here’s the typical scenario: marketing has been convinced to try sponsored search. They’re generally happy with the results, but then they read an article or attend a conference where someone (and I happen to be a prime culprit) tells them that 70 percent of the clicks actually happen in the organic results. “Wait a minute,” they say. “I’m spending $4.28 a click and I could get more traffic with a free listing?” They immediately run to the nearest computer and see how they rank for the terms they’re currently buying. Nothing on the first page, or the second, or the third. Ah, there they are! Number 48 for their term–stuck in no-man’s land.


Requirement Two: A Friendly IT Department

In the next step, the marketing guy usually visits the IT department, which has technical ownership of the company Web site, and begins with the question, “How come we don’t rank on the search engines? What’s wrong with our site?”

You want to create a sworn IT enemy for life? This is the way to do it. And if this doesn’t work, follow up with the comment, “If you guys can’t do it, we’ll have to find someone who can.” This is generally where my company comes in, right in the middle of a vicious turf war between marketing and IT.


Requirement Three: No Sacred Cows

Now, the SEO experts (that would be us) start saying that the Flash on the front page has to go. Suddenly, marketing is not so sure. “We love that Flash, and it cost us a lot of money!”

It gets worse. The entire navigation structure of the site has to change, we need a lot more content, we’re going to want to create separate topic areas for our main offerings, we have to reconfigure our CMS, and we have to strip out all the Javascript we have on every page and reference it as an external .js file. Suddenly, marketing is second-guessing us, IT is up in arms, legal is having a fit because none of the additional content required has been vetted, and the C-level executives are wondering what the hell hit them.


Requirement Four: Champions with Perseverance and Thick Skins

At this point, our marketing champion, who got the whole ball rolling, is on everybody’s most- wanted list, and not in a good way. Everybody’s thinking, “You know, on second thought, maybe it would just be easier to stick to our sponsored search campaign.”

There is a cost to doing SEO. It’s not the budget required, which is minimal relative to other marketing initiatives. It’s the time and patience required on the part of one person to get the buy-in that’s needed to make SEO happen. That’s a price that many companies have been unwilling to pay up to now.


The Payoff

Let me give you some reasons why it’s worth it:

  • What’s good for a search engine is good for humans. The changes that make your site easier to index are almost always changes your visitors will appreciate as well. More content, less unnecessary Flash, standard navigation options and cleaner code will bring you in line with long-standing usability guidelines.
  • Organic traffic is not dependent on budget. This traffic base goes on, day after day, whether you’re topping up your AdWords account or not.
  • Organic optimization gets less painful as time goes on. Once you make the commitment, the painful part can be over relatively soon, but you’ll be reaping the benefits for years to come.
  • You’ll reach a whole new market segment. People tend to look at organic listings when they’re in the research phase, higher in the buying funnel. This gives you the chance to intercept consumers earlier and build a relationship that can last a long time.
    Ode to an Ex-Client

    I’d like to close off with a painful real-world example to prove my point. We had the CEO of a company bring us on to help with organic optimization. But rather than pave the way for success, he threw us to the lions and quickly exited the scene. We identified the issues keeping the company from higher visibility on the search engines, outlined our recommendations, and handed them over to the IT team for implementation.

    And there our suggestions sat, and sat, and sat. Meanwhile, the IT team pursued its own agenda, spinning its wheels on minutiae while ignoring the fundamental issues that had already been identified. Our frustration level rose, as did the CEO’s, who was wondering why there was no improvement. Guess who the internal IT team pointed the finger at? Eventually, we parted ways with the client. We couldn’t win, and the client was getting no value from recommendations that no one would follow.

    Wee usually monitor activity for a period of time following the termination of a contract. Eventually, this client did get around to doing one or two of the things we recommended. These were relatively easy fixes, but the results were dramatic: a 448 percent increase in visibility in the organic listings. Of course, at this point, no one remembers who made the original recommendation. All they’ll remember is that they only saw improvement after they got rid of their SEO company.

Targeting Your Search Campaign: Seeking 42-Year-Old Female In Kalamazoo

First published December 8, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Search marketers love granularity in campaign management. Correction: we love the results of granularity. That’s an important distinction. Do search marketers want to spend 98 percent of their remaining time on earth manually tweaking a 50,000-keyphrase campaign? Not me. But we also don’t want to set on the broad match “auto pilot” and let the campaign fly itself. In a marketing channel as measurable as search is, we can’t get the highly optimized success rates we’re looking for unless we roll up our sleeves and get dirty.

So here we sit, awash in spreadsheets and rule-based bid management tools, with metric acronyms (ROI, CPA, ROAS) up to our earlobes, wading through a tsunami of numbers, hoping at the end of it all that there will be a bottom-line result that brings a smile to our client’s face. Some are born to numbers, and some of us have numbers thrust upon us.

Search marketing by the numbers. So, at Chicago’s SES show, it was with interest that I sat in on the session where Jed Nahum from MSN adCenter provided a peek at his company’s new demographic targeting tools. Suddenly, search marketers have a whole new level of complexity to deal with. It’s not enough that we do keyword by keyword management. It’s not enough that we have to watch our competitors’ bids, the time of day, and the day of week. Throw geo-targeting into the mix for good measure. If you’re lucky enough to be included in MSN’s beta, you can now target by age and gender.

As panelist Kevin Lee from Did-It pointed out, if you took full advantage of all the permutations and combinations, you would end up with somewhere around 7,500 possible campaigns, per keyword! The arithmetically challenged amongst us in the audience felt the anxiety pangs in our chest.

It all depends on how you look at it. Numbers like this can be daunting to crunch, if you look at the entire universe. But the whole point of targeting is not to reach everyone; it’s to reach the right person, at the right time. If you start from the potential customer and work backwards, targeting provides a level of power unavailable before. It just depends on your perspective. If you’re looking at the work involved to manage a 50,000-keyphrase campaign, additional targeting options can look like a colossal pain in the butt. If you’re looking at the optimum way to reach that ideal customer, it will be your best friend.

The prerequisite here is getting to know ideal customers, intimately. Know who they are and what their intent is. Know where they live and where they work. Know what they’re looking for when they use a search engine and how they’ll search for it. And most importantly, know what they’re looking for when they end up on your site. If you have firm answers for all these questions, you’ll love the new targeting features that MSN is making available, because they will provide the shortest possible path to your best prospects.

Targeting in action. Kevin Lee added more sage advice: you always want to buy your best clicks first. The eye tracking research undertaken by Did-It, Enquiro and EyeTools showed that top sponsored positions deliver substantially higher visibility and click-throughs than do the side sponsored positions. You’re looking at a visibility multiple of 3X to 4X, and a similar boost in click-throughs. But for competitive words, those positions come at a premium that may be beyond the reach of many advertisers. Now, if you can boost your bids for your carefully selected prime segments through pinpoint targeting, you can gain those top spots for just the right prospects, and then drop out of the top for less desirable segments.

You can’t target everyone… yet. Obviously, MSN can’t deliver targeted search ads to every user of MSN Search. To enable age and gender demographic targeting, users have to volunteer some information about themselves, either through signing up for a Hotmail account, a MSN Passport or some other Microsoft account. Nahum was pushed for what percentage of MSN’s user base this might be. His answer was a coy “larger than you might think.” While the transparency of the answer wasn’t what the audience was looking for, moderator Danny Sullivan made this salient observation: “Look, compared to the targeting you can do through television or almost any other medium, this is a quantum leap forward.” Hard to argue that one.

Get used to it. In the recent full speed game of one-upmanship that the search engines are playing, it won’t be long before Google and Yahoo! have introduced their own targeting tools. This will be the new reality of search marketing. It’s somewhat ironic that a marketing channel that took off because of its self-service simplicity is now becoming one of the most complex media-buying challenges in advertising today. But with complexity comes power, and there may be no channel available to marketers today that’s more powerful than search.

Measuring the Impact of Google Analytics

First published November 30, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google’s recent announcement of a free analytics tool has sent shockwaves through the online community. There’s nothing surprising about this. What is surprising is the impact and where it’s being felt.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach this story for almost two weeks now. This is my third attempt at this column. I rewrote most of it the day of my deadline. I suspect if I had a few more days, the story would rewrite itself at least a couple more times.

Here’s what I thought the story originally was. The giant, Google, launches a free service and in the process decimates the online analytics industry. I happened to be at a show a couple weeks ago where I had a chance to chat with John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks, a highly respected analytics provider. Wonderful, I thought, an interview with a victim. This would be great: pathos, tragedy, conflict. I had me a column. John didn’t play along. This wasn’t a tragedy, he said. This would be good for the entire industry. There we had the first twist of the story, and the first rewrite.

I asked John what he thought when he heard Google’s announcement.”My first thought was that I was wrong,” he said. “I didn’t think you could provide Web analytics for free because you can’t afford the cost of support. Customers need a lot of hand-holding. Then, the more I thought, the more I realized that I may not have been wrong. Google is only providing support by e-mail. I don’t think that will be enough. There isn’t a single sale we make where the customer doesn’t have questions during the process. “The main limiting factor in analytics today isn’t technology, it’s people and brain power,” he added. “The fundamental challenge that remains to be solved is the interpretation of the numbers. There just are not enough people who can look at the numbers, get the message and implement the required solutions.”

“If you’re right, and not enough people know what to do with the numbers, won’t Google introducing a free tool ultimately help?” I asked him. “There will be more people than ever exposed to analytics reporting, because there’s no price barrier anymore. Granted, many will be lost, but many will also learn through trial and error. Will this build the overall demand for analytics?” “Absolutely,” he answered. “Google Analytics will ultimately be good for the entire industry. It will boost adoption. More people will use analytics. You have to remember, there have been free tools before. Analog was one of the original analytics programs, and it’s open source, free. In fact, it was developed by the CTO of ClickTracks. We know all about competing with free. We’ll gain more than we lose.”

OK, I thought. John’s putting a positive spin on this. But surely, when Google introduces a free product with a pretty good feature set, it will cause bloodshed. I wrote my second draft, which was along the lines of Google becoming the Big Box of the analytics industry, and wiping out a lot of independents. Thinking I had it locked, I emailed a draft to John for his feedback. My view was that while the chances looked good for quality tools like ClickTracks, there would still be significant pain.

Much to my surprise, John e-mailed back a totally different story. In the one week that had passed since we first spoke, business had never been better! Damn, another rewrite, with the column due in a day.

Here were some of John’s primary points.

First of all, people don’t seem comfortable with the fact that Google is holding all this data about their sites and its performance. “The privacy backlash has expanded in online forums and is creating a groundswell of concerns. Interest in our products is quantifiably higher than before!” wrote John. “Customers are simultaneously aware of Web analytics AND aware of data privacy concerns. The degree to which customers are coming in the doors here at ClickTracks and opening discussions with ‘is my data private?’ has surprised us.” The concerns about privacy have not been restricted to the US., he added. “Our products are popular in Japan where, like the US, there is huge skepticism towards centralized data collection. In our experience, customers want to own their data. Customers are suddenly savvy enough to ask this question before signing up”

Secondly, Google has clearly stumbled out of the starting gate, failing to scale quickly enough to meet demand. “Google is clearly struggling to support this service,” John wrote. “This raises concerns about data integrity and accessibility in the long run, especially for a service where the customer has no recourse.” John’s feeling is that the Google Analytics approach goes a step in the wrong direction, moving closer to third-party collection of visitor data. Google always maintains the same position on privacy. “Don’t worry,” they tell us. “We would never do anything evil with this information.” But they never get around to really telling us what their intention is.

As many are pointing out, the data could be used as intelligence to bump ad prices up or allow for cross site profiling of visitors. Sophisticated customers are aware of this and are asking a lot of pointed question before they commit to an analytics solution. I’m sure Google has been surprised by the impact of its announcement. Demand has been so great that Google has had to lock out users until they get a chance to catch up. But they probably weren’t prepared for the degree of concern over privacy of information, or the emerging portrait of Google as Big Brother.

At this point, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this will be a topic for at least one or two further columns in the future. But for today at least, this column is done.