Just a little tidbit I recently was able to lay out in a semi-succint fashion:
Allow the new concepts that come into your online marketing mix to remain that way. In other words let it be an entity unto itself, don't try to hammer it into an existing concept that you already have in the mix.
So if you decide twitter is right for your company, actively engage in the twitter community and create relationships with your audience using that vehicle, but don't try to take your email strategy and just apply it to twitter.
If you are just getting into email but have been doing direct mail for a long time, don't just move your DM creatives, lists and strategies to email, apply those DM learnings to the new channel, but allow email to be its own entity.
By doing this you will be able to more easily spot what the new concept is and isn't good for. You will be able to troubleshoot and otherwise leverage both old and new better.
Keep the Concept New
Free Google Analytics Plug-In for Microsoft Excel
Want to use your Google analytics data in excel with no problem? Excellent analytics hast the answer with this new tool/plug-in that let's you import the data and manipulate it at will. It's a great time saver and frankly about time!
Excellent Analytics Google Analytics Plug-In
Great Reporting Article
Check out this article on ClickZ for answers to some of the most common reporting questions:
http://www.clickz.com/3632977
Honestly every person involved in online marketing today should read this.
Competitive Edge
More and more the online research tools that costed agencies thousands and provided a small barrier to entry have become free or affordable. Here are a couple of great tools that you may or may not know.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool (FREE but you need to have a google account and have adwords set up)- Get keywords, cpc pricing and inventory estimates straight from the horses mouth (so to speak)
This has replaced the often used Overture Inventory Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Quantcast (FREE)- Estimates a site's traffic, demographics, top keywords, competitors etc
http://www.quantcast.com
Compete.com (FREE for basic but you have to pay for the goodstuff)- In depth analysis on a sites traffic sources, keywords and other highly coveted information
http://www.compete.com
More on how to use these tools later...
Network Optimization and Pixels
Obviouslt one of the most important (if not THE most important) aspects of optimization is properly attributing conversion to the effort/spend.
If you run a lot of networks in your media campaign your pixels may be overwriting or wrongly attributing data. What happens is this: you launch a CPA, CPC and CPM campaign in the hopes of reaching your target audience and producing revenue at a specific ROI. You add in a high reach retargeting network because it makes sense and past tests show it has a high ROI. The results come in and the only buy working is the retargeting buy. You think wow that's really the only thing working...Here is where you are more than likely wrong! It's not that your other buys aren't working, it's just that the high reach retargeting buy is overwriting the cookies because it is the last ad the user viewed before the purchase. This doesn't mean the user actually clicked on it, it just means it was showed to them after the others, probably because the network has that much inventory and since you aren't frequency capping it is just hammering your audience with ads.
Moral of the story is make sure your ad server is attributing the cookie to the appropriate impression, you are watching/testing your frequency caps and maybe most importabtly you are planning your intiatives so they can be analyzed and optimized.
Great Take on Ad Spending and Networks
May 20, 2008
Quote of the Day: Jupiter's Emily Riley on Ad Networks
"Advertisers will move their budgets around and around the web, forever. Ad Networks serve a huge percentage of all of the display ads shown online, so even if advertisers test smaller sites, or different sites, they could not possibly make enough spot buys to equal the sheer volume they can get from one or two network buys. In addition, networks represent the most measurable portion of display advertising: therefore it is the most immune to economic downturn."
-Jupiter Research analyst Emily Riley, writing on display advertising during a recession.From the Clickz Blog
http://blog.clickz.com/080520-82553.html
The right tool for the job
I can't remember if it was my dad, Scottie from star trek or bob villa but it's a well known fact that things work out best when you use the right tool for the right job, well the same is true in marketing.
When looking to optimize an online campaign it always helps performance to use the right tactic for the right goal. For example trying to drive direct response with a branding placement or attempting to drive awareness with a demand absorption program just wont work.
Even if you have aggressive ROI goals its important to align the tactic to the objective and set reasonable achievable goals. This doesn't mean each tactic or program has to come in under your ROI goal it just means that each portion of the campaign contributes to the overall success.
View Through Vs. Click Through
I realized I started ranting about conversion attribution without really getting into the View Through Vs Click Through debate...
Most online marketers attribute the success event or "conversion" to the last ad clicked or viewed (as stated in the earlier blog), but what does this really mean?
If you utilize a third party ad server (i.e. Atlas or Doubleclick) for your banner campaigns they cookie users when your banner is "served" to them, because of this if you want to know how many people saw your banner as the last touchpoint prior to purchase you can. In the same way you can set the ad server to record how many people clicked on your banner as the last touchpoint.
Most ad servers will allow you to use one metric for reporting but still pull in the other metric for analysis, it has been my experience that the vast majority of conversion come from the view through users, meaning that if you use click through you are under valuing your banner campaign a lot. Now depending upon what type of banner campaign you have running this could just mean you are doing a good job at targeting your audience, because if you are serving ads on the right sites (same sites as your target audience) then whether or not the banner motivates them to come to the site and purchase view through will make it look like they saw an ad right before they came. This is particularily troubling if you engage in a lot of retargeting, since that tactic allows you to follow around your users very efficiently and with a very high frequency.
There can be a lot of opinions around which method is more accurate, normally the online marketers like to use view through while the traditional marketers lean towards click through. Which one is right for you? Well, that all depends on what the goal of the campaign as well as overall goal is. As always the best metric is to look at is the total spend and total performance of the site and business...
Conversion Attribution
Most online marketers attribute success/conversion events to the last click and make subsquent marketing decisions based on these metrics. This is not the best way to measure an online advertising campaigns true impact on the target audience as their are many more touch points that drove the final click.
Currently there isn't a turn key solution for conversion attribution but Omniture, Atlas, double click and probably plenty more vendors are out there touting it and have it on their road maps for the near term.
Omniture Summit 08
Just leaving salt lake after the Omniture Summit 08.
Very well done conference with highly relevant and informative sessions very knowledgeable presenters and some really fun nighttime activities.
For me some of the best information was relayed during the Retail fundamentals and advanced session, it helped reinforce some of the most important variables (sprops and evars) to set in your code and how to use those measures to improve your overall web performance (marketing and site side).
Zaaz as usual wowed everyone (and had such a big response to the session they had to change the room) with their strategic approach to online optimization. For those unfamiliar with their approach you can read more on their site: www.zaaaz.com. Basically they start with business objectives and align online goals to them. They also have a great methodology for monetization of site activity.
Lance Armstrong spoke on Wednesday night and they also had Flight of the Concords play that night.
All in all a great informative conference...
Manage Crisis
The internet allows information to travel fast, therefore as smart marketers looking to optimize our online presence we need to move just as fast. But how can we as humans ever move as fast as the combined technology of the internet....The problem is the solution!
Use technology to ensure you are ahead of or at least on the curve.
Set alerts (through google, yahoo etc) on your company, products, industry or other relevant information to ensure that as soon as something happens you know. This may mean wading through irrelevant alerts on a regular basis but isn't it worth it to be in front of possibly damaging information.
Once you have the information you can take the appropriate steps: pull banner campaigns, swap out banners/landing pages, change search copy, put out press releases, write a blog...whatever might help
Shopping Engine Optimization
For retail ecommerce shopping engine optimization can be a real challenge. We are all trying to hit our ROI and revenue targets so being in a competitive pricing environment isn't always the best vehicle.
Fear not their are some ways to improve your shopping engine rankings and performance.
1 - Enhance and optimize your data feed
Whether you push the feed or you have a partner scrape your site for your data feed, look at what is being sent to the engines and enhance it where necessary to ensure that you are being categorized correctly, your product description is clear/enticing, your images look good, the language being used is what a consumer would actually type in (especially important if your merchants write your product descriptions) and/or you are pushing products that you actually have stock in. You can think of your data feed as being able to control organic search listings within the shopping engines themselves, therefore monitor and adjust as needed to reap better performance.
2 - Bid for higher placement
Follow the same strategy and tactics as your paid search campaign, although you might have to increase your ROI tolerance due to the competitive shopping environment.
3 - Insert your logo into your feed.
Most engines charge a premium for this but it helps the listing stand out and improves consumer confidence.
Final thought on feeds: It normally doesn't matter if you push the feed directly out of your site's backend or you have the site scraped as long as you are monitoring and actively optimizing the data feed.
SEO 101
It never hurts to cover the basics of Organic Search Engine Optimization as that is where most new comers to online have questions.
First let's start with a basic over view of how search engines work...Most search engines work on the same fundamental principle of spidering site content processing the content to determine relevance and then ranking it against user searches.
So what is Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is the practice of designing a website to achieve top ranking for a set of relevant keywords. This involves changing the design, content and the way site is coded. You will also need other high quality sites linking to you.
Can I submit my site to be crawled?
Yes but there are no guarantess that you will come up for your chosen keywords unless you have relevant content.
You can submit your site to Google, Yahoo and MSN through the following URLs:
Google
http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
MSN
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
New Customers Only
Retargeting is great and as already discussed can really help drive ROI when done correctly, but it doesn't always help increase new customers. For just about any business one of the key objectives is increasing the customer base in order to maximize revenue through the lifetime value of customers, this means continually growing the customer base while retaining those customers and their lifetime value. Retention is a topic for another day as I would like to introduce the concept of reverse retargeting.
What is it? It is utilizing retargeting cookies from the networks and excluding those users who have already visited the site, when ads are served. This means that only people who have not visited the site (new visitors) are shown ads. By doing this the retargeting pool is continually grown and can be evaluated for what it really is, a targeted marketing campaign towards return visitors/customers.
Why won't they open our emails?
So after completing a comprehensive email acquisition focused online marketing campaign you begin mailing your precious leads only to find that they aren't opening your emails. What could be the reason for this, after all you spent loads of time identifying who they are, where they go and what message would motivate them to sign up...
Well the answers could come from multiple causes
1) Email acquisition
How were the names acquired? Were they incentivized with a sweepstakes? Were they gathered via co registration? Either tactics will result in a lower quality (but lower cost) list of addresses
2) Assimilation
Were expectations set upon registration? Did the customer receive a welcome email setting the tone and reinforcing expectations? Welcoming the customer and letting them know what to expect will help them make a decision on whether to stay on the list and/or open the emails.
3) Content
Did you make good on your expectations? Is the customer recieving content truely valuable or just a string of promotions, discounts and sales?
Today's internet savvy customer demands customized/personalized (whether by behavoir or selections) material and will reward the companies who provide it and shun the ones who dont.
Careful with that retargeting
Most direct response focused online marketers have already found what appears to be the silver bullet of online media: Retargeting. But beneath those rosey ROI metrics lies a nasty truth...
Some of those sales were already heading to your site. Most ad servers use view through metrics to measure banner conversion, which means that a user doesn't have to click on the banner to become "cookied", they just have to be shown the ad. Couple view through conversions with the root of retargeting (marketing to customers who have already been to your site) and you can begin to see that perhaps all those conversions were already on their way.
Goals
It seems a bit redundant, but the more online companies and projects I work on the more I run into resistance with setting and aligning goals. When it comes to optimizing a program having a quantifiable goal is of paramount importance. At the onset of every initiative the goal should be clearly defined so that success metrics and key performance indicators can be developed. Once you know what you are trying to do, it is a lot easier to "optimize" the performance.
Closed Loop Online Advertising for Ecommerce Sites
For ecommerce websites one of the most effective strategies is what I like to call closed loop or 360 degree advertising. Basically it involves getting in front of the potential customer/target audience anywhere that may be relevant. This means driving awareness with targeted media buys, utilizing a comprehensive paid & organic search campaign to absorb the demand being generated, securing exposure on all relevant shopping engines and engage in retargeting/behavioral media to continue to reach the customer.
This approach allows retailers who traditionally don't advertise to do so online within ROI constraints.
What is online marketing optimization
With the increasing adoption of all forms of online marketing (SEM, Media, Widgets, Consumer Generated Media, Video, Email, etc), advertisers are increasingly demanded more return for online marketing expenditures.
This blog will focus on all the various ways to optimize online marketing as well as some of the basics.
