There seems to be a common trend in marketing (and probably throughout a lot of business sectors) that people seem to be adamant that they can have their cake and eat it. That is, having two things that are mutually incompatible.

 

Here are a few examples I have come across -

 

1. Paying for an advertising medium with a specific pricing metric/ model and then measuring its performance against another. For example - paying for ad space on Google on a CPM basis then measuring its performance on a CPC basis, or a CPA basis. While it is acceptable to work out how valuable it was across a variety of metrics makes sense, assessing performance on anything but the bar you were paying them to jump over isn’t.

 

2. Paying for an advertising medium with accountability, transparency and measurability and rather than expecting to pay more for the accountability - expecting to pay less because it is easier to accurately attribute value to the medium and disregarding the lack of transparency in other mediums.

 

3. Buying marketing communication and expecting that you are buying sales - ie the difference between paying for ad space and paying for a salesman.

 

4.  Using the term SEO to mean “Free SEM“and expecting that manipulating your organic ranking in Google is as easy as managing a SEM campaign, only that it refers better traffic, and it is free.

 

All of these are examples of people looking at the world and ignoring the realities of the balancing forces that make the market work. The main point I want to focus on here is point 4, because I have heard a few people talk about running SEO campaigns. The problem with this mentality is that you simply can’t run an SEO “campaign”, at least not effectively. You need to have an SEO “strategy”. Having an SEO campaign is like saying “I need to have a logistics campaign for Christmas” when what you really need is an ongoing logistics strategy that is continually refined making supply chain management all the more efficient.

 

SEO is essentially split into 2 parts, on site and off  site. On site is just building the right architecture and signage for your website so that all of your information can be easily accessed by humans and crawlers. The easier this signage is to understand, the better you will rank for it over time. Off site is another ball game, and for simplicity, I’ll just say largely out of your control - just add value and people will link to you. Being listed in authoritative directories in your field is probably the best off site thing you can do. Following that, participate in relevant social communities.

 

SEM however, is your almost guaranteed (paid) fast track to search front page bliss, and if you have decent landing pages, then the amount of these that you have is the only limit for your search term breadth. For SEO, you really have to target much more niche keywords as you don’t have the opportunity to take hold of the dominant traffic driving keywords, unless you have a really clever strategy or you are prepared to put in a lot of hard work.

Changing process of things you already do is usually the best approach to SEO - that is why they call it an “Optimisation”, rather than a “Campaign”.

One example of this (or even try here) is that I have noticed that the offers that stay on Lasoo for longer periods of time, seem to get better traction in Google organic results - despite Google’s hunger for dynamic content, the historical information it can build for longer term URL’s add to Google’s understanding of a page’s relevance. It also allows social communities, and other websites to build links into the page, thus increasing the page rank.

This shouldn’t be the main driver in how you sell things (Product pages achieve a similar kind of result) however, people love offers, and they love linking to them, so having some long term deals might be a good move on specific loss leading items. So if you are an online cake eater, this is just some food for thought….mmmm…. thought.

 

 

 

Posted: August 21st, 2008 under SEO, Marketing, General.
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Humanity is currently engaged in a search for the most fundamental particle of physics, the Higgs Boson - and marketers should be seeking the analytics equivalent, the impression (achieved when attention meets information). However, it seems many people are still stuck at an atomic level of analytics, or worse.

Why are offer impressions a better metric than a catalogue page view?

 

Offer Impressions are a better metric than a catalogue page view for many reasons that can best be appreciated when looking at the short history of the web. Initially, the metric that was used as common currency for doing apples to apples comparisons of web real estate was the “hit” – the number of client requests to a web server. This was quickly outdated as pages became more sophisticated and “hits” were being registered when every asynchronous element refreshed (widgets etc), tracking servers were called and a myriad of other activities resulting in “hits” took place.

 

Then, to replace this came the Page View metric. Marketers decided to disregard how many “hits” there were since it was no longer one page = one “hit” and it was more valid to see how many page views there were. However, this metric soon became outdated as well when AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) became the standard for usability in the Web 2.0 world. Now, more than half of a page’s content could change without a new “Page View” ever being registered since the URL remained the same.

 

So, the impression was born to be the apples to apples comparison metric for marketers. Regardless of what all of the information on a page was doing, how many servers where “talking” to produce a complete page of information, the one thing that would remain constant and relevant to marketers across all mediums was – how many times did my offer appear in front on the eyeballs of a consumer.

 

Catalogue Page view’s suffer the same drawbacks as page views with regard to performing accurate analysis for a marketers spend – despite being the common currency in the analogue world where “offer impression” granularity is hard to come by since offers per page vary from page to page. However, ad space inside catalogues is still sold at the offer level, indicating that more granular metric is the more relevant one to marketers.

 

We can track catalogue page views, yet, if this is all that is looked at, then the offer impressions that appear in search, and not on a catalogue page view is never counted, despite this being the more relevant and targeted advertisement. Some may think you could just measure both and report this, but now you are dividing what would otherwise be a consistent metric, making it harder to understand and do accurate analysis on. What is the point of looking at a report that may say

 

100 Catalogue Page Views

13 Search Listings

813 Offer Impressions

 

Rather than

 

813 Offer Impressions

13 Search listings

 

Where catalogue pages are evident inside the more granular metric?

 

The result of this approach is that when comparing to other media and you are looking at

 

Print:                                     Circulation

Print:                                     Readership

Print/ catalogues:            Distribution

Viewership:                        TV

Listenership:                      Radio

Visits:                                    Web

 

You have one universal metric to apply to your ROI calculations.

 

 NB: This will become much more important when we look forward to a more convergent Internet as described here by Kevin Kelly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 2. Using a universal metric when calculating ROI? The offer Impression

 

Reducing offline media to a universal metric – the offer impression, is fairly intuitive, but has some intricacies in finding the correct estimates for certain variables.

 

Offer Impressions = (Circulation x (wastage factor)) x (probability of reaching ad page depth) x Offers per page

Offer Impressions = (Readership x (wastage factor)) x (probability of reaching ad page depth) x Offers per page

Offer Impressions = (Distribution x (wastage factor)) x (offer impressions per person)

Offer Impressions = (Viewership x (wastage factor)) x (offer impressions in TVC)

Offer Impressions = (Listenership x (wastage factor)) x (offers in radio commercial)

Offer Impressions = Offer Impressions

 

Now you have an apples to apples metric to begin calculating ROI (In fact, you could even work out offer impressions per unique visitor – however, this is a different yardstick compared to the other media that are largely absent of any tracking).

 

The next thing required is to establish the quality of an offer impression in each medium with respect to sales. This is the responsibility of the marketer, not the ad network. The job of the ad network is to generate the highest quality offer impressions in the greatest quantity possible for the lowest possible price.

 

The general formula then for establishing media effectiveness would look something like

 

Media Effectiveness = Sales per offer impression = Sales / Offer Impressions

I.e.         Sales = Offer Impressions x Media Effectiveness

 

This can now be ascertained per media channel.

 

ROI = Sales/ Dollars Invested

 

 

Hence, your ROI can be predicted and measured by

 

ROI = (Media Effectiveness x Offer Impressions)/ Dollars Invested

 

Now, to get a relevant statistic for this you really need to run a control set of offers, probably simultaneously across different media that is unique to each state – eg Radio in Melbourne, Search in NSW, TV in Queensland, and then assess what the performance was in each medium so that you can ascertain what the Media Effectiveness was for each channel. If you have eCommerce enabled, you can get an idea of the effectiveness of online channels by seeing the quality of different traffic streams on online sales. However, this totally ignores web to store conversion which research has indicated counts for up to 95% of online traffic on the eCommerce enabled sites.

 

Posted: July 31st, 2008 under Future, Marketing, Data analysis.
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 Measuring the effectiveness of offline campaigns or even how prominent your brand is in consumer mindshare can be tricky. Traditionally, this had to be measured purely from sales data, or through research companies. Finding a quick gauge just to measure the pulse of your brand has always been a little bit harder.

However, as with pretty much everything digital, tracking these traditionally unquantifiable things is becoming more of a concrete science. There are a few handy tools you can use to assess you brand equity.

Google Trends and Hitwise (both pictured below) are fantastic for measuring how many people are searching for your brand. Considering about 17% of all searches are “navigational” (by people who know where they are going), you can get some idea from this trend line of what your brand is doing in the collective consciousness.

Another interesting way to look at how much penetration your brand has gained is through a little known tool called Lexicon (from Facebook), which allows you to see not how many people are searching for your brand, but how often it is mentioned in conversation – and surprisingly this is a very different story:
Looking at the dips and spikes will give some indication of the impact of certain events. However, just because you are being talked about, doesn’t necessarily mean your brand value is going up – but usually it is better than not being talked about. The best way to see exactly what your brand stands for among the populous is with this little tool named Brand Tags – however currently it is only focusing on US brands.

Posted: July 22nd, 2008 under Marketing, Data analysis.
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