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Online Strategies August Issue Now Available!
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Click here to read Online Strategies magazine’s August issue!
Bing One and Bing Two: Double Takes on Microsoft’s New Search Engine
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Microsoft’s new search engine has garnered a lot of media attention as it seeks to directly compete with Google, especially in a time when it seems no one in their right mind seeks to compete with Google.
The giant of the search-engine industry has its fingers in every possible pie, and it’s very rare that it doesn’t come out ahead. So what are Bing’s advantages and disadvantages?
Here’s two ways of gauging its chances of survival:
1. The Product Advantage
Bing is supposed to yield more relevant search results, which may actually sway consumers over to its side. The advantage to advertisers in that relevance is more precise, target marketing, which could change their game plan as well - if, that is, Bing’s searching is in fact superior to Google’s.
The content-driven approach helps sell that relevancy claim, as the system also adds consumer comments and reviews on the search results, e.g. getting customer reviews on a restaurant from services like Yelp.com.
2. The Marketing Advantage
Google has rarely spent money on advertising its own products. Consumers are ready to jump on just about anything that Google puts out, which means that the usual big spenders in a marketing budget are moot - television ads, for example. Microsoft’s Bing may have an advantage here, as the company seems to be willing to pour a near-endless stream of funds into promoting its new product.
It’s not a bad strategy, especially since nothing short of full media saturation is likely to sway loyal Google enthusiasts. Since they have no competition in many of their outlets, it might just give Bing a chance to play with the big boy.
Peter Koeppel is a Wharton MBA and president of Koeppel Direct, a full-service media buying agency based in Dallas.
Landing Page Neglect – Are You Losing Money?
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
In the online marketing world, a lot of time and resources are spent buying media, tracking pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, driving organic traffic via search engine optimization (SEO), and installing and customizing web analytics software to properly track all online marketing activities.
Dedicated in-house or agency staff craft keyword lists, write ad copy and manage keyword bidding to achieve the proper profitability, cost per action (CPA) and return on investment (ROI). Copywriters adjust our sales copy to improve click-through rates (CTR).
But we’ve almost completely ignored our website and landing page. Sure, we occasionally do facelifts, or even wholesale redesigns of our sites. But these changes are rarely tested and are simply assumed to improve the situation. They are just a cost of doing business.
Missed Opportunity
In almost every other area, performance is scrutinized under a microscope as we drill down on mind-numbingly detailed reports. Once someone converts, extensive retention e-mail campaigns are set in motion to persuade visitors to deepen their level of engagement.
We worry about every single word in our e-mails as we test headlines and offers. We analyze “bounce rates,†“open rates†and “unsubscribe rates†with almost religious fervor in order to extract the last penny of revenue and profit possible over the lifetime of our interaction with someone.
Even though we spend obscene amounts of money to buy traffic, the effort devoted to the landing pages to which that traffic is sent is negligible. A couple of hours of a graphic designer’s and copywriter’s time are often all that the landing page merits. With a cursory review by the higher-ups, the landing page goes live.
Worse yet, we assume that the quality of the landing page can’t be changed, so we don’t even look for ways to improve it. We turn all of the other knobs and dials at our disposal and continue to neglect the biggest profit-driver under our control—the conversion efficiency of the landing page.
This is costing a lot of money in the form of missed opportunity. Double- or triple-digit conversion rate gains are routinely realized through engagements. Yet, there’s still a widespread perception among online marketers that their landing pages are already solid and can’t be improved through testing.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
There are three important activities in online marketing:
• Acquisition: Getting people to your website or landing page.
• Conversion: Persuading them to take the desired action(s).
• Retention: Deepening the relationship and increasing its lifetime value.
But not all of these receive equal weight or attention in most companies.
Because of the large amounts of money spent on acquisition and retention, sophisticated systems have been created to maximize the ROI of these activities. But the efficiency of the website or landing page has been largely neglected. Many companies are beginning to understand that website and landing page conversion can have a dramatic impact on online marketing program profits. That’s where the new battleground is in the coming years.
You can meet with Tim Ash of SiteTuners as he optimizes e-commerce sites for increased revenue live at ERA’s eRetailer Summit on Monday, March 2, from 3:00 p.m.—4:00 p.m. Register here! To have your company’s website considered for a makeover, contact Ashley Cavell at acavell@retailing.org or via phone at (703) 908-1020.
Billions Wasted on Paid Search Every Year
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
If you manage $50,000 or more per month on paid search advertising, evidence suggests that as much as one-third of it is wasted due to sub-optimized search marketing campaigns. Does this mean you are a bad search marketer? The answer is, unquestionably, no. However, the following statistics are sobering and suggest you may want to look at how you manage and optimize your campaigns:
· Paid search advertising is getting increasingly competitive. It makes up nearly 45 percent of all global online advertising expenditures, and JPMorgan forecasts that spend to reach $30 billion in 2008.
· Keyword inflation continues to rise due to competition and the market. Industry studies show Google has surpassed 70-percent share in searches for the first time, and a likely deal between Yahoo/Google may increase Yahoo’s pay-per-click search rate by 22 percent.
· Optimized campaigns can achieve the same results at 69 percent of the cost. WebTrends clients—who previously used a combination of manual methods and bid management tools—experienced an average return on advertising spending improvement of 44 percent only 90 days after switching to WebTrends’ new automated SEM optimization solution. In the past, they essentially wasted 31 percent of their paid search spend.
What’s a retail search marketer to do? In order to continue generating positive returns, today’s search marketers must be smarter, faster and more efficient than their competitors. They must continue to experiment with new campaign variables (ad text, landing pages, geotargets and many others), build a long-tail keyword inventory and stay on top of messaging. Search engines themselves are offering more sophisticated user segmentation and targeting options, resulting in the typical paid search program now having almost limitless possibilities for testing different variables. Each new variable exponentially adds to the number of factors and mathematical performance data that must be tracked. For example:
· 10 keywords, 10 positions, 1 creative = 10^2 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 5 creatives = 5 x 10^4 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 10 creatives, 2 landing pages = 2 x 10^5 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 10 creatives, 2 landing pages, 3 networks = 6 x 10^5 combinations
The real problem, and underlying opportunity, with search engine marketing optimization is that today’s methods and solutions rely on a human to do most of the heavy lifting, from a/b testing, reporting consolidation and results analysis to the seemingly never-ending bid rules creation and adjustments. The expansive keyword portfolios and the sheer number of campaigns that large advertisers manage require a new way of doing things. Forward-thinking marketers will need to discover the optimal balance between what machines do best—handling the constant cycle of analysis, testing and updates across an organization’s paid search portfolios—and the insight and perspective into external industry events and business drivers that humans can bring. In the future, automated SEM optimization solutions will help strike this balance.
Alex Yoder is WebTrends’ president and CEO.
The Evolving Online Morality
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
If you’re an events manager with a death wish, invite Jason Calacanis to deliver the keynote address at your next conference. Sure, Calacanis—a serial Internet entrepreneur who made the bulk of his fortune with the sale of his company Weblogs, Inc. to AOL—will deliver an engaging, thought-provoking and sometimes flat-out inspirational talk. But then again, he might just start a riot.
After all, this is the guy who, at SES Chicago in 2006, announced—to a group of search professionals—that “SEO is bullshit!†and compared those engaging in SEO to “snake oil salesmen.â€
It didn’t go over well.
Having escaped Chicago, living to speak another day, Calacanis recently addressed a room full of affiliate marketers at the Affiliate Summit West. Apparently unruffled by the flap and furor over his SEO comments, Calacanis explained to the affiliate folks that the rest of the industry saw them as the bottom rung of the food chain, wired to make the quick buck.
There was no standing ovation.
But to be fair to Calacanis, he’s not some sort of egomaniacal misanthrope who gets a perverse pleasure out of standing on a stage and belittling the audience. (Actually, he might just take a little pleasure in it.) In fact, the point he’s trying to make is a valid and intriguing one.
First of all, Calacanis was over-generalizing for effect: he sees value in ethical SEO and understands that there are legitimate best practices to follow in designing, maintaining and promoting a site that will allow it to rank higher in search results. And he certainly doesn’t see anything wrong with the fundamental concept of affiliate marketing: engaging a group of websites to help sell product or generate leads as a sort-of extended sales force.
Calacanis has a problem with those interested in gaming the system to make a quick buck—whether it’s the black-hat SEO firm that exploits a weakness in a search engine algorithm to garner a temporary high rank for an undeserving website (until the search engine closes the loophole and the site plummets off the search results page) or the affiliate who steals content to game the search engines to generate more traffic and commissions, or the marketer who floods blogs, message boards and social networks with paid posts.
According to Calacanis, it’s all borne out of a misguided ethic that has pervaded the Internet since the mid-’90s: if one is technically capable of doing something, then it’s OK.
But he—and others—see reason for optimism. As more and more black-hat marketers exploit the various systems, these systems eventually break down, to be replaced by ones that are more resistant to gaming. Consumers are helping to drive change, too. We leave MySpace to go to Facebook and then to LinkedIn as policing technologies are developed that help eliminate spam or fraud. Sites like Angie’s List—a ratings and reviews site for home-improvement contractors—take off because they are curated to ensure the reviews’ (and reviewers’) legitimacy. In other words, because they earn our trust. Calacanis himself has developed Mahalo.com, a search engine that uses human beings to find and organize the best links for given search terms—and to filter out irrelevant or spam results.
A new ethic is evolving: trustworthiness is good for business.
Tom Dellner is executive editor of Electronic Retailer Magazine and editor of its supplement, Online Strategies
