Category Archives: SEO

Search May Not be Sexy Anymore, But It Pays the Bills

First published August 5, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It’s been months since we’ve had a good, ruckus-raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That’s the best you can do? Yawn.

Is it me…

I suspect that it is, in part anyway, me. To be honest, I haven’t been much of a “Search Insider” lately. In the past few months, precious little of my time has been spent pondering the industry. I’m way behind on industry news and haven’t attended a search conference or event for a few months. My days have been full with the busy-ness of running a business. I’ve had other things on my mind.

My first Search Insider column ran six years ago and since then, I’ve written 276 columns, counting this one.  That’s a little over 220,000 words — most of them at least tangentially relevant to search. Perhaps the well has just run dry.

Or is it search?

But then again, perhaps it’s the industry.  Maybe search just isn’t that sexy anymore. Remember the day when Google was going to change the world? Remember how marketers just couldn’t wrap their heads around this “search” thing? Back then, I could get righteously indignant and bang out a column wondering when the world would “get” how important this it. But now, they’ve got it. It seems silly to proselytize search now that Google has become a verb. Search has come, has conquered, and we’ve all moved on. Again…yawn.

Sure, there are always new search entries in the marketplace, but when’s the last time somebody used the words Google Killer? Is it because Google is invincible, or is it just that we really don’t care anymore? Even Aaron Goldman, who surely has squatter’s rights on “Google Killer,” hasn’t squeezed it into a column since last May. In the last year, only three Search Insider columns have used the term. When we Insiders stop caring about the world after Google, imagine how disinterested the rest of the population must be.

Search and the Oxygen Cycle

As I watch my family’s day-to-day routines unwind, I realize that search is like air. We use it without thinking about it. We just accept it. And so, the industry that lies behind the query box falls into the same category as the biochemical process that ensures we have oxygen. I don’t care how it works, as long as it does work.

So, maybe search is boring. Maybe it’s lost its luster, ceasing to be a bright shiny object. Maybe the cool people have all moved on to social media and mobile, where they attend conferences wearing block logoed T-shirts, sipping free mimosas and talking about how no one gets Foursquare. It’s the same group you used to see at the search shows, waiting to board the bus to the Google Dance.

But I can’t help thinking that perhaps this is a good thing. You can only be cool for so long. Sooner or later, you have to grow up and do some real business. It’s the difference between a bar pick-up and a marriage. Social might be sexy, but search pays the bills and puts food on the table.

On second thought, maybe a little diversion is just what the doctor ordered. Look over here, all you journalists and financial analysts! Look at what’s happening where the really cool people play. Ooh and aah at these social widgets and nifty apps. Meanwhile, we search people will drudge along, cranking out a few more billion in search revenues.

A Farewell to SEMPO

Today, the election for the new board of SEMPO is open. It’s a little bitter sweet for me. For the first time in 7 years, you won’t find my name on the ballot. I’ll be stepping down from the board and letting new blood take over.

I’ve been privileged to serve on the SEMPO board since 2003. Only Dana Todd and Kevin Lee, both founding members, have put in a longer tour of duty. In that time I’ve served as Chair of SEMPO for two years and have been the Research Chair, along with Kevin, for almost the entire time. I’ve seen SEMPO grow along with the industry to the point today where it has hundreds of members around the world. Not bad for an organization that started with a handful of search marketers meeting after the sessions had ended at an industry conference, looking to create a shared voice and gain a little more respect. I would say – mission accomplished!

But there is still so much more to do! I’ve had the opportunity to help the current executive start to define what SEMPO’s role could be in the future. The challenge, as it is with anything involving search, is trying to define the scope of what constitutes our reach. Search in the last decade has morphed and seeped into every aspect of our lives. Defining the role of an organization that tries to wrap it’s arms around that has been an ongoing challenge. And this is a challenge that isn’t going to get any easier.

SEMPO has never had a dearth of aspiration. We have dreamed big! We have consistently punched above our weight. We have ridden over rough patches of controversy and dissension. SEM’s are an outspoken lot. Most have us have heard first hand the uproar that ensues when you get a bunch of search marketers in the same room. Imagine, then, the challenge of trying to be the global voice for those loud, passionate, stubborn and thoroughly glorious marketers. Passion has infused SEMPO from day one, from the drive of Barbara Coll to the amazing and ongoing dedication of SEMPO leaders including Dana Todd, Kevin Lee, Jeff Pruitt, Massimo Burgio, Chris Boggs, Bill Hunt, Sara Houlobek and many others. I have been privileged and humbled to serve on the board with all of them. They will always be my mentors and friends. We have been on an amazing journey.

This is not the place for a list of the accomplishments of SEMPO. This is just a place for me to say thank you for the opportunity. And in offering thank yous, I would be remiss if I did not include some of SEMPO’s amazing administrative support team at Virtual, Inc, especially Amanda Pierce, Paula Hunter and a man I hope I can always call friend, Andy Freed. There are others, but those are the ones that I have spent the most time with.

In an industry that’s a fractious and quick to criticize as this one is, it’s always easy to point blame. It’s much harder to stop bitching long enough to dig in and and do something about it. I can tell you from experience, SEMPO boards have always had the interest of the industry firmly at the core of what they do. Not one member I have ever served with has been in it for their own glorification or interests. Not one. Because after 7 years on the board, I can tell you there are much easier ways to grab the spotlight than to serve on SEMPO’s board. The amount of dedication and commitment required is substantial, and, at the executive level, nothing short of monumental. We, each one of us, love this industry and are here to push it forward. We have struggled with the best way to do that, given that our dreams are consistently much bigger than our resources, but our motivations have never been in question.

I have my own goals and plans for the coming few years and knew it was time to step down, both for my sake and for the sake of the organization. As tough as it is for me to personally turn this corner, I know it’s the right path to take. When you cast your vote, I ask you to do so with careful consideration. We need a strong and healthy SEMPO, because the organization has provided a respected voice for this industry. Search marketing now has a global footprint and that voice has to continue to be heard. It has to be heard from Beijing and Oslo, from Milan and Buenos Aires, from Osaka and Sydney. And it has to be heard from Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle

I like the saying Farewell, as it really embodies my wish for SEMPO. Fare well in the future. Continue to Dream and Do. Continue to be passionate. Continue to talk, connect and be heard.

I’ll miss you.

A Look at What Might Have Been

First published December 17, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve stated before in this column that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is perhaps my favorite holiday movie.  Yesterday, as I was having lunch, I had my own George Bailey moment. I had a chance to see what my life might have been like had I not made the decision to go into search 14 years ago.  I was thumbing through the local newspaper (yes, I still do that on occasion) and the lead story in the business section caught my eye. The title was: “Ad Agencies adjusting to the new economy.”

Kelowna, B.C.  is a small town (although larger than Bedford Falls). It supports three full-service ad agencies. I know the founders of each of them fairly well. A long time ago, in another life, I was one of these agencies, working with a handful of clients, many of which were in real estate.  In 1996, frustrated with the challenges of dealing with small-town budgets and attitudes, I decided to move into the online space, which subsequently took me into the world of search. That allowed me to work with clients outside my market.

I guess, given what’s happened to these three agencies, my decision to move online proved to be the right one. In the last year, one agency has gone from 12 full-time people to just the founder, who has become an independent consultant. Two of the agencies saw a split between two long-term partners and a drastic reduction both in clients and staff.

These are the facts. One can read between the line to get a glimpse of the heartache and soul-searching that came with these very difficult business decisions. At least two of the agency founders said they were going through a personal discovery journey and were looking at pursuing other “more rewarding” professional endeavors in the future. Not to be overly cynical, but I find the frequency of these voyages of “self discovery” are usually inversely related to the success of your business. With a few notable exceptions, not many people reevaluate their professional lives when their businesses are rocking.

Suddenly, Search Seems Rosy

2009 wasn’t a banner year for my company, but compared to these stories, it was a skip down the Yellow Brick Road. We grew top-line revenues by 14%, added nine new jobs, opened a new sales office, maintained or increased client satisfaction levels, gave our employees healthy pay raises and managed to stay on the right side of the ledger sheet.

I paint these contrasts not so much to say how great we are in search, but because they present a microcosmic view of the shift in marketing. While traditional budgets were being ruthlessly slashed throughout 2009, digital and search budgets bounced along and managed to keep from being swamped by the economic storm. I certainly have talked to several search marketers who had a tough year (some of whom are also looking at their own personal “voyages of discovery”) but I would guess that the incidence rate is far less than you would find on the other side of the digital divide.

All Aboard!

The other interesting thing I gleaned from the story in my local newspaper is that all of the agency founders are paying more attention to what’s happening in the digital domain. As the demand for real estate brochures and print ads dries up, they’re only now realizing that something surprisingly robust and healthy appears to be happening online.  Suddenly, strategies including Facebook and Twitter are starting to show up in their pitches to local clients.

Having made my decision to move online almost a decade and a half ago, I would caution these people that becoming a digital “guru” may not be quite as easy as it appears to be. As became abundantly clear at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, we’ve still got a long way to go before we understand the various online gears and levers of a truly integrated campaign. You’re more than welcome to jump on the digital bandwagon, but be prepared — it’s moving a lot faster than you might think!

What I Took Away from the Search Insider Summit

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

I’ve had a few days now to reflect on what came out of the Search Insider Summit in Park City. It was an interesting perspective: Avinash Kaushik telling us that the majority of search marketing “sucks”; Mark Mahaney prophesizing that search is poised for a big climb in 2010; Rob Griffin warning us the entire industry is going through the throes of change; Chris Copeland showing us that social media is inextricably linked with search activity; and Mike Moran cautioning us that CEOs and CFOs worship at one altar and one altar only: profit. If we want to sell search, we have to speak that language.

Adding to this, I climbed on my usual soapbox, arguing that we spend too much time with data and too little time with our customers. In the panel exploring how to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches, the panelists were asked how they differentiated the two. For me, the answer is this: Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.

SEM’s Call to Arms

So, when you mash this up over 3 days and distill the essence, what do you end up with? I think SEMs heard a distinct call to “up their game” last week in Park City. Sure, there are tough problems to tackle. Marketers are demanding more from their budgets than ever before. As Avinash said, attribution causes many marketers to “cry like little girls.” Determining user intent and matching it in our ads is tough. Matching it on the landing page and beyond is even tougher. Trying to wrap our heads around the shifting tide of social media gives us all a migraine. And if our jobs weren’t tough enough, Google just gave SEO a slap upside the head last week with personalization of all search results. Thank God the bar was open after the sessions wrapped up.

But we search marketers are a resilient bunch. The people roaming the hallways of the Chateaux at Silver Lake didn’t look morose. In fact, they were almost giddily optimistic. There was a sense that as rough as the ride was in this boat we all chose to set sail in, at least it was heading in the right direction. Rob Griffin put it this way: “If you’re any good, you might not have the same job title or be doing the same thing in a few years, but you’ll be employed. That’s more than a lot of other people will be able to say.”

I’m Not Sure Where We’re Going, but Follow Me!

I look at it this way. The market has already shifted. And where the market goes, we marketers have to follow. Somebody has to figure this stuff out. And, as I remarked to someone over drinks after the sessions wound down, I’m constantly amazed by the number of people in marketing who have impressive titles on their business cards but simply don’t get the magnitude of the behavioral shift we’re in the middle of. Avinash is right. A lot of what I see in the digital marketing landscape “sucks.” We have to get better. We have to get smarter. We have to do a better job of listening to the people we’re trying to market to.

I know we will get better. Really, do we have a choice? And the advantage search marketers have is that we have chosen to work in the one area of online that has been an unqualified success. Everyone is looking to us as an example of digital marketing done right. And we’re looking at each other saying, “Okay, that worked. Now, what’s next?”

Wrenching Changes in Ad Revenue Models

This week, I’ve talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding online behaviors and our interactions with content, the fact that we don’t really think our way through online interactions, but rather navigate through instinct and habit, and yesterday, how different intents lead to different levels of engagement with ads. All of this has been to show how Rupert Murdoch and other publishers are seriously off base in trying to put walls around their content to protect their obsolete business models.

The Planting of Intent

But, as comScore Chair Gian Fulgoni commented on yesterday’s post, does all this mean that display ads have no value? Yes, we agree, ads aligned with intent, such as search and relevant text ads, are the ideal, but something needs to plant that intent in the first place. Something needs to create awareness, which sparks need and kicks the brain into gear to go seek information. In Gian’s words:

there’s another issue that needs to be addressed: not all consumers search for information via an online search query. They’re just not all that rational. As a result, using display ads can get an advertiser a far higher reach against the target audience. And that higher reach can cause the total sales lift from a display campaign to rival that from search – even if the sales lift among those exposed is higher in the case of search.

There’s also another even more important point that we need to consider: brand building. That needs to occur even when the consumer isn’t foraging for information in support of an impending buying decision. Otherwise the value of an individual brand name isn’t going to be as meaningful to the consumer when he / she is in the shopping / buying mode. CPG manufacturers know this well. Every week, their special prices (“temporary price reductions”) are shown in the local newspaper feature ads. Placed by the retailer but funded by the manufacturer. The consumer can pick and choose the products they intend to buy and where they will buy them (and, incidentally, store loyalty is not the norm). This information – delivered by old media still, but, I would argue, aligned with consumers intent to shop and buy – determines, to a great extent, the store at which a consumer shops and the brands they buy in a particular week. But the important point is that the CPG manufacturers don’t just leave it with running these types of feature ads. They understand that they need to be supplemented with “branding” advertising that they run themselves because they need to make sure that their brand value has been firmly established in the mind of consumers before they compare prices across brands at the shopping / buying stage. This type of branding advertising is delivered via TV, print and radio – and increasingly today, via the Internet. It’s a critical part of brand marketing, and I think it should remain that way even in today’s Internet world, because — as one of our clients recently said to me — “God forbid that price becomes the only determinant of consumers’ brand choice!”

I voiced similar opinions in a previous post, No Search is an Island. Search itself has a naturally limited inventory. If no one is searching for a term, there is no inventory to buy. This lack of scale and reach has been the single biggest limiting factor in search marketing. If you suddenly cut out all awareness advertising, you’ll eventually find your available search inventory dwindling in lock step. Gian’s points are well taken, and indeed, one of the biggest questions for me is how much residual branding value is derived from an ad that is noticed but not clicked. As I said yesterday, I think it depends on how pressing the user’s intent is. If they’re browsing content, my suspicion is that the residual value would be higher than if they’re on a focused information finding mission.

Differing Shades of Gray

As is most transitions, the truth is there there is no absolute answer here. One is neither right or wrong, black or white. What is happening is a shift from one type of behavior to another. The answer is gray, and each day, that shade of gray is gradually shifting more from black to white. Murdoch won’t suddenly find his revenue model shutting off one day. But what will happen (and there are dozens of newspaper bankruptcies to support my case) is that the revenue model will gradually erode. In fact, it has been happening for some time. As we switch our behaviors from a destination information economy to a just-in-time information economy we’ll spend less time casually browsing content and more time taking brief forays through search to find specific pieces of information. And when we do so, all the challenges in ad engagement I addressed yesterday will have to be dealt with. Murdoch’s revenue model won’t shut off tomorrow, but it will gradually melt away to the point where it’s unable to support the business. That is why there’s more than a hint of desperation in his rantings. He knows the ship is sinking and he’s lashing out at what he thinks the cause is: Google. Unfortunately, he’s lashing out at the wrong cause. The real cause is his reader’s changing behaviour.

Brand Building = Fence Painting?

The other point I would make about brand building is this: Gian is right, we need some way to build brands in public consciousness. But even the options for building brand are rapidly shifting. It used to be that mass media was the most efficient choice. It offered reach and frequency. It was scalable and could be measured in GRPs. The market was treated like a fence to be painted. What was the most efficient way to apply as much paint to as much area as possible? The answer, the biggest possible spray gun. It was a pretty simple equation: Area of fence X density of paint = complete saturation. The spray gun didn’t even need to be that efficient at painting, we just had to keep pouring in more paint. Which was fine, as long as the fence was all in one place. But now, the fence is scattered over an impossibly large area. There are fragments spread everywhere. Suddenly, the spray gun isn’t working so well anymore. We need a new approach to brand building, and we’re beginning to explore new techniques, such as tapping into social networks and word-of-mouth. It seems in today’s world, Tom Sawyer had it right..the best way to paint a fence is to enlist an army of recruits to do it for you.

You Can’t Put a Wall Around News

The challenge advertisers face now is trying to find a way to reach an increasingly fragmented market who is spending less time with traditional media and are increasingly seeking information in bite-sized pieces, rather than sitting down to a full meal. And that’s a challenge that traditional media, represented by Rupert Murdoch, seem unable and unwilling to face. Their answer seems to be to rant, rave and hope the whole mess will go away. If people are increasingly seeking information through Google and not looking at my ads, fine, I’ll just lock out Google and lock in my audience by forcing them to pay. Murdoch is skiing down the wrong side of the adoption curve. And, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his Search Engine Land post, you can no longer put a fence around information and keep it proprietary, especially in the news industry. Breaking stories will break in hundreds of ways online – through Twitter, networks, blogs and news aggregators. Even if the Wall Street Journal breaks a new story, they can’t control it. People don’t care about the source anymore, all they care about is the information. Even if Google is locked out of Murdoch’s content, it will find it somewhere else and will index it. And people will go where ever Google lets them go. For this reason, I disagree with Danny about the viability of a mutually exclusive relationship. Google doesn’t need the Wall Street Journal, but I do believe that the Wall Street Journal needs Google.

So what about the deal with Bing? Is that the answer to Murdoch’s woes? After all, you still get search visitors and you control your content. Again, for all the reasons I’ve stated over the past week, I don’t think this is any answer at all. It may look good on paper to two companies that are entrenched in command and control thinking, but it doesn’t reflect the real world at all. And if Murdoch would take a few minutes to glance at the latest search market share numbers, even he might see why it doesn’t make sense to kick the elephant out of bed to make way for the mouse (okay..perhaps a small dog).

In the final analysis, we have people changing their information consumption habits, which is giving advertising a wrenching kick right in its revenue model. The dramatic success of search was indicative of the power and speed of this behavioral change. The successful model of the future will understand and embrace the reality of information foraging and will leverage the changing habits of people. The search part, aligning with consumers when intent is present, is the easy part to work out. The challenging bit will be to swim upstream and figure out the pieces that have to be in place to spark intent and put the mental train in motion. My suspicion is that mass solutions will no longer work. We’ll have to figure out how to brand build one prospect at a time, one relationship at a time. None of this is good news for traditional publishers, but hey, if everyone won in evolution, the world would be a much more crowded place.

Aligned Intent: A Different Ad Engagement Metric

On Tuesday, I talked about the importance of information foraging in understanding our online behaviors. Yesterday, I talked about how we navigate online based on habit and instinct, keeping our thinking to a minimum. Both of those behaviors are threatening  traditional ad revenue models. The very nature of engagement with advertising is undergoing a dramatic shift. Today, I want to talk more about that shift, because at Enquiro, we’ve seen dramatic evidence of it in our research over the past few years.

The Traditional Model

Let’s begin by exploring how advertising has worked up to now – the model that Rupert Murdoch is still pinning all his hopes on.

In the past, we used a “destination” based information gathering strategy. We depended on someone to gather the information and get it to us at a destination that would become a mental landmark for us. This was the model that gave rise to our traditional news industry. We trusted our favored sources to cover the world for us. It was their job to stay on top of what was happening, interpret it and present it back to us. Publishers developed editorial voices and we grew to trust those voices. We didn’t have time to cover every possible news channel, so we short listed it down to the information sources that best matched our interests and personality. We picked our favourites and trusted these few sources to keep us informed. These favorites formed the most visited locations in our mental information “landscape”.

Once we had our list of a handful of information sources, we would set some time aside every day to stay informed. It was a different paradigm of information gathering. We treated our sources as destinations and made the trip worthwhile by investing some time in it. We’re read the paper in the morning. We’d watch the news at night. We’d listen to news radio. In each of these cases, we’d take a discrete and substantial chunk of our available time and devote it to “staying informed”. There was no specific piece of information we were looking for. We trusted our information sources to serve us something interesting. Our intent wasn’t tied to any particular topic, although there might be sections that we favored (sports or business). Our intent was simply to spend some time with our favorite information source. Just like a trip to a physical destination, we understood that this journey would take some time.

This relationship, that of a favored source, then offered the published a willing set of eyeballs without any set agenda. The audience was there to browse through the content offered. That was the objective. And that objective allowed publishers, and through them, advertisers, to make some safe assumptions: the audience would be there for awhile, the audience had no other urgent priorities, and the audience could be safely categorized by the characteristics of the ideal audience of the channel. One could assume that the reason they favoured the channel was that they matched the target profile. All of this formed the foundation of traditional advertising as we know it.

The publishers job was to amass the audience. By doing so, they could then go to advertisers and deliver the audience. And it was the advertiser’s job to catch the audience’s attention. Again, remember, the audience had already set a significant chunk of time aside to spend with the publisher and the audience had no specific intent other than visiting their information “destination.” This mindset is critical to understand, because it forms the “before” state of the shift I’ll be exploring. The audience had to be distracted by the advertising, but the distraction was a minor derailing of our attention. Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Yesterday, I talked about the switching on and off our our neural autopilots as we do any mental task. Our attention and the full power of our brains only get focused when we need to. The rest of the time, we’re subconsciously scanning to see if there’s anything that merits our attention. The arousal of intent, the mental embedding of a clear objective, kicks the brain into high gear and causes us to focus our attention, including the full power of the frontal lobes – what we can consider the turbocharger of the brain. With those mental mechanics understood, let’s look at how we might browse a newspaper.

Newspapers, or any traditional information source, look the way they do because over years of trial and error, publishers and advertisers have discovered what it takes to catch a few fleeting seconds of a brain’s attention while it’s idling on autopilot. As we pick up the paper, there is no intent which has aroused the full power of the brain. It’s doing what it should be doing, idling as the eyes scan the headlines, graphics and other information cues, looking for something of interest that merits the brain kicking into a higher degree of engagement. What catches our eye depends totally on what we’re interested in. With no set mental agenda, when we look at a newspaper, a story on major crime, a business report on a company we know, a box score for a team we’re a fan of or an ad for a car we’ve been considering all stand a good chance of dragging our eye balls to them and jolting our brain from it’s semi-slumber. The typical display ad (at least, the effective ones) have been honed by years of experimentation to be very good at this. Their entire purpose is to stop the eyeball just long enough for a fragment of the message to sink into the brain.

The Just In Time Information Economy

Now, let’s look at what’s shifted. Through the ubiquity of information online and the reasonable effectiveness of web search in making that information instantly available, we’ve changed the way we gather information. We’ve moved from a “destination” to a “just in time” information economy. Let me return to our food foraging analogy for just a second to illustrate this.

When you shop for groceries, you probably have a favoured store. You trust this store because they have a good selection, the produce is fresh, the deli counter has your favourite cheese, the prices are reasonable, the location is convenient and the staff is courteous. This store becomes your primary food destination, just as a newspaper could become your primary information destination. For certain items, prices may be a little cheaper elsewhere, the produce might be a little better at an organic whole food store and the deli counter may be amazing at a little store you know across town, but it’s just too much trouble to go to all these destinations. You compromise and stick with your store, giving it your loyalty.

But let’s imagine that you could build a pick up window right into your kitchen. Through this pick up window, you could order any food item and it would instantly be delivered to you from any store in the world, right when you need it. No travel was necessary. The idea of a destination suddenly becomes obsolete. Food comes to you, just in time. What would this do to your foraging strategies? How often would you visit your favourite store? Perhaps there would be occasions when an item from your store was offered by your magic “food window”, and you might order it. You might even feel twinges of old loyalties. But the nature of the relationship has forever changed. You’ve become store “agnostic”. Now all you care about are the food items you order. And your intent has also changed. Previously, you went on a “shopping trip” for an hour to a store to pick up a list full of items. Your intent was focused on the store, not an individual item. But with your magic window, if you’re making a recipe and suddenly find you’re out of shallots, your intent is focused on the item you need, not the store you get it from. All you care about is getting the best shallots at the best price. It’s an important mental shift.

That’s what search has done for information. We care much less about the source of the information and more about the nature of the information itself. Also, we have shifted our intent away from the source of the information and to the quality and relevancy of the information itself. This has a profound effect on the nature of engagement with advertising that may sit alongside that information.

The Alignment of Intent

The Just in Time Information Economy has implanted intent in the minds of online users now, dramatically raising the attention threshold that must be bridged by advertising. Think of our mental process as a train. If the train is idling through a rail yard with no particular destination, it’s not that difficult for a hitchhiker (which is what most advertising is, messages interrupting you just long enough to hop on your brain for the ride) to jump on board. But if the train is going full speed towards a destination, the hitchhiker had better be a very fast runner. The Just In Time information economy has meant that many more visitors to online information sites are speeding express trains with a firm destination in mind, rather than than idling in a rail yard. We visit sites because we’ve come through a search engine looking for specific information. The site that hosts that information is secondary to our intent.

In the past few years we’ve done a number of studies of engagement with advertising that have yielded some surprising findings:

  • When it comes to ad awareness (participants remembering seeing an ad on a site) display and video perform best, search and text ads perform worst.
  • When it comes to brand recall (participants remembering the brand featured in the ad) display and video still perform better than search and text, although the gap is dramatically less.
  • When it comes to click throughs, search performs best, followed by text, display and video
  • When it comes to purchase intent, search and text are substantially better than display and video.

Ads that are relevant to the information they sit beside (as in Google’s AdSense network) also have this strange inverse relationship:

  • For ad awareness, non contextually relevant ads performed better than contextually relevant ones
  • For brand recall, it was close to even, with contextually relevant ads having a slight edge
  • For click throughs, contextually relevant ads blew the doors off non contextually relevant ones
  • For purchase intent, again, contextually relevant ads were the clear winner.

Why Ad Awareness Does Not Equal Ad Effectiveness

This is counter intuitive. If an ad is noticed and recognized as an ad, it should have done it’s job, right? According to the old rules, that’s all we ever asked an ad to do. But somehow it seems the rules have changed. Suddenly, ads that often don’t even seem like ads (after all, they’re just a few lines of text) are drastically outperforming more traditional ads where it counts, motivating a prospect to take action. We’ve tested a number of traditional best practices, including more effective creative, increased exposure both through frequency and more channels and this inverse relationship held: search and text outperformed flashing graphics, blaring video and looping audio. What gives?

The answer is the introduction of intent. By having intent planted in the minds of the prospect, by focusing their attention on an objective, the rules of interaction with ads has suddenly changed. When we have intent, we plant a mental objective which narrows our attention and focuses it only on relevant items that get us closer to the objective. Anything not aligned with that intent suffers from “inattentional blindness”. In eye tracking, we see this often has people scan a page, looking directly at an ad for several seconds yet afterwards swear they didn’t see the ad. The most famous example is the video “Gorillas in our Midst.” The unsuspecting are asked to count the number of times the basketball is passed in the video. Once attention is focused, most viewers don’t even notice the man in the gorilla suit walking right through the middle of the teams. If you haven’t seen this, I just spoiled it for you, but you can still try the experiment with your friends.

If a visitor lands on a page with a specific intent, their interactions look much different than those with no intent. They’re laser focused on relevant content. They spend almost no time looking at content that’s not aligned with their intent, including ads. Often, a single glance to identify it as advertising (thus the high ad awareness recall) is the limit of interaction. And the more an ad looks like an ad, the quicker it’s eliminated for consideration. The visitor becomes blind to it.

But if an ad is aligned with intent, it ceases to be an ad. It becomes a relevant information cue, a navigation option, a link laced with information scent. It becomes valuable because it matches our objectives. The user evaluates it along with all the other relevant navigation options on the page. This is exactly what happens with search ads, and the more relevant a text ad on the page, the more likely this is to happen.

Why This Does Not Bode Well for Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch, and for that matter, everyone else who still depends on a revenue from a “Destination” based ad model, will lose in this transition. The ones that will win are those that effectively leverage the alignment of intent and the “Just in Time” Information economy. Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the specifics of why the “Destination” ad model is doomed.

Mindless Online Behavior: Web Navigation on Autopilot

One of the biggest problems with Rupert Murdoch’s view of the world is that he’s assuming people are making conscious decisions about where they go to get their news and information. He somehow believes that people are consciously deciding to get their information from Google rather than one of his properties, and Google is encouraging this behavior by indexing content and providing free “back doors” into the WSJ and other sites. In other words, Murdoch has a conspiracy theory, and Google and online users are co-conspirators. The truth isn’t quite so evil or intentional.

Our Stomach’s Autopilot

I talked yesterday about the importance of information foraging and how we use the same strategies we use to find food to find online information. But tell me, how conscious are your decisions about where and what to eat? How long do you deliberate over eating a piece of toast in the morning, a sandwich at lunch or a plate of pasta at night? If you’re hungry, how often do you find yourself standing in front of the fridge, staring inside for a quick snack? It wasn’t as if you had a detailed series of decisions here: Hmmm..I’m hungry. Where would be the best place in the house to find food? The bathroom? No, that didn’t work. How about the bedroom? No, no food there. Hey, this kitchen place seems to be promising! Now..where in the kitchen might there be food? In this cupboard? No, that’s dishes. Down under the sink? Ooops..no, I don’t know what the hell’s under there, but it’s definitely not food. Hey..what’s in this big steel box here? Ah…Bingo!

Okay..it’s a ridiculous scenario, but that’s my point. It only seems ridiculous because we’ve found a more efficient way of doing it. We don’t have to go through these decisions every time because we’ve done it before and we know where to find food. Even if we went into someone else’s house, we would know that the kitchen is the best place to find food, and the fridge is probably the surest bet in the kitchen. We don’t have to think, because we’ve done the thinking before and know we can navigate by habit and instinct.

Where Do You Keep the Cockatoo Chichild Fillets?

But what if you visited the Jivaro tribe of South America, where the culture is so different that we have no cognitive short cuts to follow? Much of the food they eat we’ve never even seen before. And, as one of the most primitive cultures in the world, there are not a lot of kitchens or fridges to act as hints about where we might find something to eat. If we were suddenly dropped into the middle of a Jivaro settlement with no guide, we would have to do a lot of thinking about what to eat and where to find it. And how would we feel about that? Anxious? Frustrated? Uncertain? We don’t like it when we have to think. We much prefer relying on past experience and habits. The brain heavily discourages thought if there’s a more efficient short cut. It’s the brain’s way of saving fuel, because mobilizing our prefrontal cortex, the “reasoning” part of our brain, comes with a big efficiency hit. The PFC is powerful in a “single minded” way, but it’s also an energy hog. The way the brain discourages unnecessary thought is through stimulating unpleasant emotions. If you’ve spent much time in foreign cultures, you know the constant stress of finding something to eat can quickly go from being exciting to being a complete pain.

Here’s the other thing about our brain, it isn’t discriminating about when to kick in and when not to kick in. It usually takes the path of least resistance first, relying on past experience rather than thinking. The more familiar the environment, the more the brain feels safe in relying on past experience and habit. What does this mean? Well, when you’re hungry, it will mean you suddenly find yourself standing in front of the fridge with the door open without even knowing what you’re looking for. When you realize you actually want some crackers (i.e. when your brain finally kicks in), you swing the door shut and go to where the crackers are kept. Online, it means you go to Google and launch a search without thinking through what your actual destination might be.

Google, The Information “Fridge”?

So, I’ve gone fairly far down the path of this analogy to make a point. According to Pirolli, we use exactly the same mechanisms to find online information. We go first to the fridge, or, in this case, Google, because nine times out of ten, or even 99 times out of a hundred, we find what we’re looking for there. And, if we don’t, we start to get frustrated because our brain is suddenly called into service and it isn’t at all happy about it. There’s no conscious conspiracy to screw Rupert Murdoch, there’s just us following our own mental grooves. And these grooves dictate a huge percentage of our online activity. There’s been little neuro-scanning research done on how our brains work during online activity, but the little that’s been done seems to indicate a regular shifting of activity from the “reasoning” to the “autopilot” sections of the brain. I suspect strongly that this is especially true when we use search engines. If we can navigate on autopilot, we will.

This principle holds true for almost all online interaction. I keep hearing about the “joy” of discovery online. I believe that’s largely crap. As online becomes a bigger part of our lives, we depend on it to do more and more and we don’t have the time for “discovery”. We don’t have the time to set aside 2 hours to browse through WSJ.com, meandering through the content and providing a willing set of eyeballs for all those ads. We want to find what we’re looking for, get in and get out. There are occasions when we’re willing to invest the time for a long voyage of discovery, just as there are times when we will go out and graze our way through a smorgasbord buffet, but it’s not the norm. As I said in the last post, Google and search has given us a “just in time” information economy and we have forever shifted our concept of information retrieval. How the providers of the information make money from that remains to be figured out, something I’ll spend some more time talking about tomorrow.

Murdoch and Bing: The Sound of Two Dinosaurs Dancing

This morning in Ad Age:

Why Murdoch Can Afford to Leave Google for Bing

The author, Nat Ives, reasons that Google traffic doesn’t translate into revenue for Murdoch anyway. This is true, but the logical conclusion that you can afford to kiss this traffic goodbye is seriously flawed. I’ll explain why in a minute.

Yesterday in Search Engine Land, Danny offered his thoughts on “The OPEC of News“. He approached it from the flow of information and indexing cycle perspective, and I think he did a good job of hitting the salient points. From the mechanics of the search space, Danny’s right, but what’s more interesting to me is the human behavior that sits behind all this.

The biggest reason why this is a stupid deal is that it’s out of touch with where the market is going. I touched on this in a previous post, but I’ll expand on it this week in a few posts that will tie together Enquiro’s past research and other seminal research :

Today – The Primacy of the Patch – Why Information Foraging is the Key to Behavior

Wednesday – The Mindlessness of Web Search – How We Don’t Think Our Way through Online Interactions

Thursday – Engagement with Online Ads – The Importance of Aligned Intent

Friday – Tying it Together – Why Murdoch and Bing’s Logic is Fatally Flawed

Search Insider Sneak Peek: The Three-for-One Keynote

First published November 19, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, will be kicking off the Search Insider Summit in just two weeks. I had the opportunity to chat with Avinash last week about what might be in store. As anyone who has heard him before would agree, it won’t be-sugar coated, it will be colorful and it will probably wrench your perspective on things you took for granted at least 180 degrees. Here are the three basic themes he’ll be covering:

The Gold in the Long Tail

Avinash believers there is unmined search gold lying in the long tail of many campaigns. The secret is how to find it in an effective manner.  I’ve talked before about how longtail strategies must factor in the cost of administering the campaign, which can be a challenge as you expand into large numbers of low-traffic phrases. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory assumes frictionless markets where there is no or very low “inventory management” costs, such as digital music (iTunes) or print on demand bookstores (Amazon). In theory, this should apply to search but, in practice, effective management of search campaigns requires significant investments of time. You have to create copy, manage bid caps and, optimally, tweak landing pages, all of which quickly erode the ROI of long-tail phrases, so I’ll be very interested to see how Avinash recommends getting around this challenge. I’m sure if anyone can find the efficiencies of long tail management, Avinash Kaushik can.

Attribution Redefined

For the past three Search Insider Summits, attribution has been high on the list of discussion topics. Avinash thinks much of the thinking around attribution is askew (his term was not nearly as polite). All search marketers are struggling with attribution models for clients with longer sales cycles; often these models are little more than a marginally educated guess.  I believe simply crunching numbers cannot solve the convoluted challenge of attribution. The solution lies in a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. This, by the way, is the topic for another panel later in the day, “Balancing Hard Data & Real People.”  Avinash, despite his reputation as the analytics expert, always drops the numbers into a context that keeps human behavior firmly in focus.

Search Data Insights

The third topic that Avinash will be covering is how to take the massive set of consumer intent signals that lie within the search data and leverage it to not only improve your search strategies, but every aspect of your business. We chatted briefly on the phone about how unfortunate it is that search teams are often separated from much of the day-to-day running of a company. Typically, search marketers and their vast resources of campaign and competitive intelligence are not even connected to the other marketing teams. Avinash will show how the “database of intentions” can be effectively mined to provide unprecedented insight into the hearts, minds and needs of your market.

Any one of these topics is worthy of a keynote slot, but at the Search Insider Summit, you’ll be getting all three! See you there in just two weeks!

Rupert, meet Reality. Reality, meet Rupert.

rupert_murdoch_tokyoRupert Murdoch’s rantings are so out of touch that they’re bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He’s mad that his old revenue model isn’t working anymore. Maybe, Rupert, that’s because we’re in a new era and people have changed their minds. It has nothing to do with search engines being kleptomaniacs. It’s people doing what they do..finding the easiest path to information. This boat has sailed, dear Rupert. You can jump up and down and stamp your feet, but the only people to really get made at are your readers. They’ve found a new way to get information, and unfortunately, it bypasses your monetization model. You are no longer in control.

Murdoch’s answer is to throw a subscription model in on all his publications and stop Google and other engines from indexing it and “stealing” his precious content. Hmm..let’s see now. The entire world navigates through search. Every day, billions of eyeballs go to Google seeking content. You have content. So what do you do? You lock Google out. And you try to lock customers in by hijacking their wallets and leaving them no choice. Let’s recap: Lock the world out and lock your customers in. Isn’t that what East Germany tried to do with the Berlin Wall? Let me know how that works out for you Rupert.

Murdoch’s not alone in this. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson took Google’s Marissa Mayer to task for encouraging digital promiscuity. Apparently, Google has built a virtual “red light district”, threatening the stability of the sacred union of readers and struggling publishers. Again, maybe it’s because the readers aren’t finding what they’re looking for at “home”.

This denial of a dying industry is nothing new. History has repeated itself over and over again in discontinuous shifts in the marketplace. Yet somehow the behavior of the terminal industries never changes. George Bernard Shaw nailed it a century ago:

” If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

I guess it’s understandable, really. We’re looking at evolution and when the environment shifts, dinosaurs can’t suddenly decide to become gazelles. Somehow, it helps to rant, rave and rail against the unfairness of it all. Oh..and perhaps it’s also beneficial to call the gazelles names like “kleptomaniacs”.

THIS JUST IN…

Techdirt has a gritty little post showing all the Murdoch owned sites that “steal” content as an aggregator. So, apparently it’s okay to be parasitic as long as you’re on the right side of the relationship.