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Monday, February 08, 2010
"This is not about measurement, but about organizations and their capacity to manage this changing real world of reputation. They find it hard to do this, because they're stuck in an old-world broadcast model."
The speaker: Bryan Eisenberg. The setting: a past SES London conference, at an All-Star Analytics panel.
This year's SES London is, once again, particularly heavy on Analytics all-stars. As it should be. Search marketing is accountable, performance is king, and any digital marketer can improve their lot by doing a better job with the analytics toolkit.
But some people and some companies will confuse that importance with a blind faith that the measurement gurus can solve their larger strategy problems. Even the esoteric ones. Like the above question that came before the panel, roughly speaking, asking: "Hey super smart panelists, can you tell me some metrics that will help us decide whether our social media is WORKING?"
The inside-the-box answer is: measure this, measure that, and adopt the same approach to social media as you do to other channels. If you "scored," it's "working." Of course, you can measure a lot of these types of things -- just not with Omniture. Remember, the old public relations world, where a "positive mention" in the "Washington Post" is something you can count? You don't need Jim Sterne or Steve Rubel to tell you that. Nor can these experts help your organization get really good at all the stuff it needs to do to get there.
The out-of-the-box (Bryan's) answer to the social media measurement question is: sure, we'll get around to the measurement piece -- but if you're looking to "hit targets" with your social media spend, or to measure whether "it worked," maybe your organization has given you the wrong marching orders. We don't need more statisticians in this realm: we need more companies who are willing to fundamentally transform the ways in which they communicate.
I say again: (or actually, the panelists said it last year): "Can you put a dollar value on a conversation?"
Sure, you can. But let's start with getting your organization aligned with the idea of a conversation first. The only social-media-savvy company initiatives that will typically hit short-term targets are those that are architected on a broadcast model, so they defeat one of the key purposes of public relations, which is to change perceptions. And to put specific content into the public's awareness of you. To position your organization to carry on conversations that lead to business results, throughout the organization, over time, as a matter of course. Setting up your campaigns based on thin measures of short-term success might actually spur more negative conversations than positive! Or just not get you anywhere fast. You can measure that you're not getting anywhere fast. Great.
Reputations are built over time. You'll never get there if your organization has a bias for shutting down the conversation channel early because "it isn't working." Or you're insulting members of your community by being too goal-directed in online conversations, because you've incentivized your community manager by paying them a bonus for warm leads or upsells.
Am I saying you can't or shouldn't measure PR 2.0? Of course not. But if the milieu is vastly different, then you may have a lot of trouble measuring the impact, and you should probably be measuring something very different. Something that might not even be readily available in today's Google Analytics platform. "Engagement" can't just be about spending 3:28 on a website, or deciding whether someone visited the "About Us" page... as important as those may be in the ordinary course of your marketing planning.
Or to be blunt: before going out to hunt for a next-generation tool to measure "how you're doing out there," you should be actually getting out there, and doing it. If you're not? There are a bunch of free tools like Yahoo Site Explorer, Backtweets, and Google Search itself that will tell you in a couple of nanoseconds if nobody's linking to you, and nobody's talking about you.Labels: social media, web analytics
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
How are things? Trick question: it's a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how you frame things.
Hardly anyone searches for "february blahs" (you can look it up on Google Insights for Search), so full steam ahead? Not so fast. The number of people searching for "winter blahs" eclipses that by what looks to be a hundredfold.
And that's nothing. Queries for Seasonal Affective Disorder outstrip searches for winter blahs, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, who knows. :(
But then again, if yo u compare *that* to fun, active queries like "super bowl 2010" or "vancouver olympics," SAD isn't even on the radar.
Go team! Enjoy the rest of your week, either dreaming of spring, or making the most of winter -- whichever it is you do.Labels: keywords
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
It's becoming a truism that search engine marketing as practiced by busy in-house marketing managers, and others in similar positions who may drift in and out of direct responsibility for those initiatives, need serious "brushing up" every year or so. That used to be described as "changes in the search ranking algorithms you need to keep up with." Now the issue is broader, with changes in the paid search algorithms, new search products, blended search, and more.
Much like going to the dentist, it's polite to claim that you go in for a refresh every six months, and it's polite to tell the dental people that you really do floss every day. But if it's been one, two, or three years since you took a close look, well (cough cough), we'll look the other way and point out that it's what you do next that matters most -- not how many months or years you've been away.
How silly are some of the outdated paid search theories of the past? Well, I couldn't quite believe it when I came across this old piece by myself, pre-Quality-Score, in 2004. (As an added bonus, it was published on a site by my friend Mike Grehan (then being called Mike "Merlot" Grehan) and with associate editor Christine Churchill, another great in the biz.) The piece talked about a narrow tactical debate about high CTR's and whether racking up a strong account history based on overbidding might actually get you discount prices to stay in high spots later on. The CTR history would create a "seal," insulating you from competitors for a long time, unless they bid ridiculously high.
In reality, it was a flukey and inconsistent strategy at the time, as Google already made it clear that CTR (important in the PPC ranking algorithm) was "normalized for ad position". In other words, just because CTR's are naturally higher in 1st ad position than they are in 5th won't make it impossible for you to rise up through the ranks if you spend some initial time testing the waters in 5th. You don't get undue "credit" for hanging out in 1st spot, either.
That's evolved even further, in a couple of ways. Quality-Based Bidding is now 4.5 years old and the algorithm is more opaque and more complex than Bid X CTR. A separate quality check, of your landing page and website, has been working in the system for 4 years, ever-evolving. Well, about 18 months ago, a bunch of folks over on the SEO side discovered all of this and promptly started handing out bad advice that paid search quality scores somehow depended on tweaking landing pages for keyword relevance. Not a terrible idea, but terribly misleading advice.
The second change, related to the first, is that account strategy today needs to be more comprehensive. The auction is mature, most every company that is going to show up in some industries has already showed up, and so you have to get all the moving parts right. Back in the old days, you could listen to someone at Google give you best practices like "don't use a call to action," "you must use a call to action," "capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad," and other warmed-over, highly inadequate snippets of advice.
In reality, paid search isn't a game of gimmicks. High bids, low bids -- neither are magical. Landing page testing is for conversion improvement -- not to magically improve your quality score.
How do you cut through the sea of bad advice if you're new or just returning to the space? Short of reading a 400-page book, I hope that this 40-page ebook, Google AdWords - A Brave New World - I released a few months ago is still helpful to folks getting their feet wet, not wanting recycled advice from 2004, or tips from SEO's trying to sell SEO tactics to people who really need marketing strategy. (There's no charge for this ebook, just opt-in email signup.)
To stay really up to date, though, people do need to pop into the SES conferences for a refresher. Upcoming we have SES London, SES New York, and SES Toronto, to name a few.
For those seeking full immersion in a one-day workshop environment, I'm pleased to announce that Page Zero will launch a paid search training day in conjunction with SES New York, on Monday, March 22, 2010. The full day session will be led by Mona Elesseily and myself. It's aimed at intermediate level (not advanced) digital marketers who want to dig deep and get the fundamentals bang on, and then stretch out and get introduced to a range of intermediate level ways to improve performance.
I really look forward to seeing you at one of these events, whether you're a returning visitor or newer to the game.Labels: paid search
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Monday, January 25, 2010
Jason Calacanis, the notorious web entrepreneur of Weblogs, Inc., and Mahalo fame, recently raised a flap by telling everyone to boycott comScore and indeed, to sell or short-sell its stock. I'm glad I came to my senses and decided not to get caught up in that catfight, though I sometimes have questions about the accuracy of comScore's numbers (which is the real point needing more sophisticated debate, but also more transparency on comScore's part).
Observers have been quick to distance themselves from Calacanis, but in fact this underscores an important point: bloggers, journalists, and company owners in the space are afraid to agree with Jason because they perceive some kind of threat of being ostracized or singled out in some way.
Watering down the fervor just slightly, I won't tell you what to do, but I'll tell you why I won't invest in the following growing Canadian digital media company when it goes public.
Avid Life Media, the notorious owner of infidelity dating website AshleyMadison.com, is looking to raise $60 million through an initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
As much as many investors and underwriters will have turned up their nose at the share offering for moral or optical reasons, what it really comes down to is that you're buying into the people who run a company, and their attitude towards risk. You're also trying to gauge their likelihood of telling the truth, the whole truth, about the business and how it operates -- now, and in future years.
That's why I noticed the part of the story that states that part of the deal would involve a merger with Moxy Media, "an online advertising sales company based in Guelph, Ontario." Moxy Media is made to sound pretty big: $192 million in revenues in 2009, dwarfing Avid's $30 million.
The combined company plans to go public using the RTO method, finding a shell company already traded on the exchange.
Moxy Media's predecessor, TrueLocal, is legendary in the industry for making a lot of short-term money on something called "click arbitrage". Hint: what you found at the home page of TrueLocal had nothing to do with TrueLocal's actual business. Like their successor, the new, improved, Moxy Media, TrueLocal had a network of 300 websites (or actually, more like 3,000) "each providing consumers with information and access to products and services," as the Moxy Media site states. Meaning: TrueLocal built topical pages of (largely Yahoo driven) paid links, sending inexpensive Google AdWords clicks to pages that were well-engineered to create a high proportion of clicks on ads. Those ads would eventually get a user to a paying advertiser's website; vendors like fireplace manufacturers and bridal gown retailers would be typical targets.
For years, Google's top management has been against these "click arbitrageurs," because the user is being deceived and ultimately winds up dissatisfied with the extra clicks it takes just to find a vendor. All the extra clicking created revenue for Google, Yahoo, and TrueLocal alike, but at the price of dissatisfied users and dissatisfied Yahoo advertisers (at least, those who twigged to the problem).
In addition to that, arbitrageurs, like many affiliates, are "lowballers" in the Google AdWords system. They only wish to advertise if they can get a click for a very cheap price. Google's landing page and website quality guidelines were designed almost entirely to scrub such advertisers from the system, especially in the most mature market (the United States). While lurking in the sub-30-cents click arena, the arbs & affiliates can clog up Google's system with an incredible amount of data as they're willing to bid on pretty much unlimited numbers of keywords.
Few in the industry know the TrueLocal story, so even fewer are bound to look twice at the (cleaned up, less arbitragey, but still boilerplate) Moxy Media sites and question whether the story told about them is accurate.
Much the same as the owners of the company might have called Gator/Claria a "targeted contextual advertising product of an opt-in nature" (that company, once on track for a big IPO, went the way of the dodo when it proved closer to true that the industry saw Claria as a "scumware" company), or, for that matter, the owners of AshleyMadison.com might call their website "a dating site for funsters who just happen to be of an adulterous bent," it's possible to describe Moxy Media's business in bland terms of websites, ad sales, earnings, and EBITDA without explaining what really makes the business tick.
In the past, what made the business tick was Google's willingness to accept those lowball bids on clicks (but that was largely shut down), and Yahoo's continued willingness to partner with arbitrage sites to distribute these ad links to less savvy advertisers (this will undergo a review as the Microsoft partnership proceeds). Those assumptions are no longer valid. Anyone investing in Avid Life Media - moralizing aside - should be aware of those risks.
Now, some investors will be fine trading some stock based on putting one company they don't understand together with another company they don't understand, all run by management they don't respect because they seem strangely cool with advertising for infidelity on subway billboards. But I don't see Warren Buffett piling in anytime soon.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Google's impressive Q4 2009 earnings report makes certain aspects of the business clear for all to see. For example, they report that revenues of $2.07 billion in revenue was generated by "Google partner sites through its AdSense program," and that "amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners" totaled "$1.47 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009".
Misleadingly, the report states that "TAC (traffic acquisition costs) as a percentage of advertising revenues" is 27%. True, but as a percentage of same-channel advertising revenues, it's 72%. There are virtually zero TAC's for "Google-owned sites."
Speaking of those Google-owned sites, they generated $4.42 billion, or 66% of Google's revenues.
In these numbers is the usual picture of impressive strength -- including the fact that the overall number of paid clicks rose 13% YOY (indicating continued success in optimizing page layouts while satisfying users) while click prices rose just above the rate of inflation, at 5% (indicating a leveling-off). But coupled with that strength is the interesting point that financially speaking, Google continues to provide only the illusion of a diversified company. It continues to do well, very well, based on its core cash cow. Elsewhere, it serves as a relatively polite intermediary that continues to face downward margin pressures.
The growth picture is an interesting mix: heavy investment in new areas like mobile (a longer road to profitability), and a relatively smooth path to continued growth simply by enjoying the great upside that remains in international markets in its core strength.
Which, in case anyone has forgotten, features the catchy advertising product: "Google AdWords."
The financial picture for GOOG remains very bright, but mainly because its core strength has such high margins, and Google (needless to say) owns the key "publication" (Google Search) outright.Labels: goog, google adsense, google adwords
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Hey there! If you've attended SES Toronto in the past, you should have received an email offering a deep discount off the price of a pass to this, the world's best Canadian search engine marketing trade show coming up June 9-11, 2010. This early bird discount is so great, it doesn't make sense for you or your company to pay the higher rate.
The offer expires Feb. 1. If you didn't receive the email, ping me and I'll try to hook you up with the Right People.Labels: ses toronto
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I just paid $100 for an extremely targeted information package, written and recorded by an affiliate marketer, about a very specific element of Google AdWords advertising (hint: it's in the content network).
I've seen this working already in practice, and I figure his tips will mean a lot more than $100 to my business, so I bought it right away.
"My business" isn't an affiliate marketing business. It's for clients. Even better. They have bigger budgets.
Let's be clear: he promises that for most affiliate marketers (especially clueless ones), this technique could add up to peanuts. Many campaigns will try as best as they can and spend only $5/day.
So I paid $100 for it?
Yep, because I understand the value. I know it's valuable info.
The other curious thing is I rejected all the add-ons, freebies, and accoutrements that could have come with it. I didn't want to accidentally sign up for something that turned into a renewing contract, and besides, I didn't want to get distracted from the core information I wanted.
Here's what impresses me. Legions of would-be experts and helpful souls will offer up mounds of information this year in an extremely helpful, and free, fashion. Doesn't info want to be free?
And yet this relatively unknown affiliate marketer, proverbially working from his basement... should clear about $75,000 this month from this information product. It may not have huge legs, but it got the job done for him, income-wise. And the value is real. Many really good authors will earn less than that this year, needless to say.
So what impresses me is not that you can make more from specific information, but *how* specific the information is. This product covers a *tiny* sliver of the marketing universe. No one will grade the author on how well he grasps marketing as a whole. Not even how well he grasps AdWords as a whole. Just whether he taught one specific technique in decent enough detail so you can try it: $100.
Will his "loophole" close? Maybe. But in this game, if you can't squeeze $100 out of something before the loophole closes, you gratefully accept the chump label and move on.
I learned the lesson along ago: when I burped out the Google AdWords Handbook in 2002 it was a semi afterthought after 18 failed months attempting to put together a magnum opus on SEO best practices (or something like that). It did great.
In 2004, while I was writing the first edition of a more serious grown-up book on Google AdWords with a big publisher, several times I got panic calls from the publisher. They'd read one of those negative stories about Google's business, and they figured that AdWords was a flash in the pan. This continued through 2005! Really! I'd have to reassure them that they were seeing some very odd (if seemingly respectable) journalism. And that Google's advertising program was not too small to go to press with.
What's stunning to me (but it should not have been) is that a book on Google AdWords is almost too broad today. There's room for books that cover a broad topic. But they don't get people to whip out their credit cards to pay $100 online, do they? Odd paradox. Less is more.
I don't have any New Year's resolutions on the books, but if I did, I bet it would be to try to go to market with an incredibly specific piece of information. And, for a change, screw "free." In Chris Anderson's book, he actually reminds us that the real quote was something like "commodity information wants to be free, and scarce information wants to be expensive." Labels: free, google adwords, google adwords book
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Thursday, January 14, 2010
After enjoying nearly three years writing monthly columns in the paid search channel at Search Engine Land, starting tomorrow (Friday), I'll be writing a column every other week at ClickZ.
For Search Engine Land I wrote 37 columns, starting with one about paid search "slaying dragons and back-checking" and getting little respect in return. In open forums no one wants to discuss the unsexy channel - they just quietly do it in real life, because the digital economy basically revolves around it. Beginners will still mis-prioritize efforts and risk wrecking their companies by installing costly Meatball Sundaes.
Whether it be at Search Engine Land or ClickZ, or at conferences and seminars, whether it be in discussions of tactics or high level budget strategy conversations, my goal remains: dissuading companies from installing those costly Meatball Sundaes to the exclusion of making performance marketing work for their bottom line. There is nothing wrong with spending heavily on "the basics". "The basics" also don't "just work" for just anyone. They aren't "tried and true" unless you try and try and try, and make them true. There is nothing turnkey about paid search and related basics.
To many digital marketers, neither Search Engine Land nor ClickZ need any introduction.
The latter, ClickZ, was founded in 1997 by Andy Bourland and has channels for every aspect of digital marketing. Increasingly, under the rejuvenated stewardship of Incisive Media, it is the flagship brand for content about digital marketing and strategy. It's also finding its way out onto the conference circuit, underscoring the importance of integrated digital strategies moving forward.
Search Engine Land, the "upstart" search marketing publication, was founded under the rubric of Third Door Media by Danny Sullivan and partners about three years ago, and has done phenomenally well ever since that time. Danny Sullivan is of course no upstart in that he, for all intents and purposes, launched the whole idea of tailored conferences and trade publications in the search marketing industry back around the same time ClickZ was getting founded. If you have to look up who Danny Sullivan is, that must mean you're new to the business. Tip: Danny is not a race car driver.
I'm excited to join the ClickZ team. Friends and colleagues I respect have been writing there for many years, some nearly since inception -- Bryan Eisenberg being a shining example. Debbie Weil is one friend I recall writing some pioneering stuff on ClickZ. A column called "to blog or not to blog" was written in 2001! I'm not sure how some of the current crop of experts get away with recycling Debbie's material :).
As the focus of ClickZ leans towards the agency and bigger-company crowd, I'll try to move in a slightly more strategic direction. The column, appropriately, will be called Paid Search Strategies.
My Page Zero Media colleague, Mona Elesseily, is still going strong at Search Engine Land in the paid search channel. I'm pleased to note also that Matt Van Wagner, a good friend, has joined the SEL columnist roster to add his experience to the paid search channel.Labels: andrew goodman, clickz, incisive media, search engine land
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Google is reporting through its Chief Legal Officer David Drummond that it's ending the censored version of its site in China, and considering pulling out of the country.
This is a gripping development.
Google's so big, they almost face the same dilemmas as a country trying to trade with China -- almost.
Summing up, purists argued that Google shouldn't go in in the first place, and certainly in our response in January 2006, we felt Google was being naive, but agreed that there was complexity in trying to initiate political change by being open to a partner that was far from perfect. We added that if it didn't pan out, they could leave. We figured they could set a time limit, then leave if the human rights situation didn't improve.
Six months after that, Sergey Brin was already expressing misgivings, and no doubt the company has been thinking about the relationship ever since.
Although the current shift in policy seems to be triggered by episodes of Chinese government hacking and espionage to spy on human rights advocates, no one episode need to explain the desire to pull out; certainly it doesn't seem like this is the only issue at hand.
Indeed, the US government has been alarmed at widespread security breaches of the Pentagon and other federal institutions dating back to at least 2007, clearly traceable to China. The early denials by China have given way to regular confirmations from well-placed security experts.
Google, as a private company, turns out to have the luxury of pulling out of a country if it doesn't like their policies. They can even chalk it up to "regulations" that make it "hard to do business," if they wish.
So, Google isn't a nation-state just yet. While there will be forgone revenue, the repercussions are likely to be relatively mild, and Google answers to its shareholders, stakeholders, and customers.Labels: china, google
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Monday, January 11, 2010
Given the prevalence of studies that prove a certain lift in sales from costly display ad campaigns -- often showing indirect impacts of sales increases in populations "exposed to" the ads -- it's refreshing to have someone report an instance where the campaign had zero effect.
I've always been wary of the flaws in these studies. In general, you'd like to know what the overall campaign cost, at least. But in addition to that, being "exposed to the ads" to me still means you're also "exposed to the websites" and "exposed to certain communities" (or rather than being exposed to them, your likelihood of seeing these ads is driven by your membership and interests, which you had in the first place). The causal weight of the ads is still in question, if content and community are potential causes of sales patterns as well.
In this SF Chronicle piece about Yahoo by reporter James Temple, we hear of a national retailer joining forces with Yahoo to measure sales lifts associated with a major display ad campaign. The good news: sales lifts came in at 5%, 93% of that coming in-store. The bad news: the sales lift figure for buyers under 40 was... zero.
If you're going to report the good, it's only fair to point out the bad. At least the ads didn't lead to a drop in sales. Labels: display ads
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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