But does this overlap really exist, and does 1+1 really equal 3, or does is it actually just equal 2?

In order to find out the answer, I recently asked several experienced figures within our industry for their insights and comment.

• AKQA Media – Drew Wahl, Director of Business Development
• Booyah Advertising – Emily Iverson, Director of Display Media
• ethology – Jeff Pruitt, CEO (and former President of SEMPO)
• iCrossing – Chris Wallace, SVP Media

Each of these people are knowledgeable in both types of media, and are actually involved in the oversight of plans or teams where both display planning and search engine marketing are occurring, and our thanks to them for taking part in this discussion, the conclusions from which are published below (the full, unedited responses can be viewed in their entirety here).

Each contributor was asked the same two questions:

1. Is there really an overlap between search and display that benefits campaigns, or is it just hypothetical?
2. If there is, what are those benefits and what advice would you give a search marketer to capitalize on them?

A Convenient Story

Early in my agency days, I remember adding a slide to my overview display deck that stated (in a big, bold font of course) that ‘1+1=3’ and would wax lyrical about how we had an integrated media offering. I stood by my slide, believing that marketing across SEM and display as isolated channels could not be the right approach. In my mind, each channel had a halo effect on the other and this surely must create additional value for the advertiser.

I would quote the usual studies that demonstrated this uplift in return of anything from 2.4x to 10x when adding a display buy to a search program, but true behavioral insight always seemed to be lacking in those studies. And so a question remained in my mind as to why and how this effect occurred, and what strategies were best at making it happen.

1+1 = Something More Than 2

All our contributors report seeing real benefit from running display and search programs together in ways that help explain the mythical halo effects we have seen for years, but also that reveal themselves with quantifiable measurements.

At ethology, Jeff reports seeing that individuals will search multiple times on multiple keywords before they make a decision. This consideration window is clearly prime time for a marketer; it is the “opportunity to expose [individuals] at different points during the research experience with very targeted display that result in a higher likelihood to take an action”.

With each individual performing more searches than ever before, this window is broad, creating a greater chance a competing brand could steal that customer for themselves. Display is a tool to combat this potential leakage.

The effect of this window is measurable too according to iCrossing’s Chris Wallace. They have seen situations where this repeated exposure has led to an increase in branded search queries that has “an efficient and meaningful impact on digital campaigns”, a logical outcome when we think about how during that research phase an individual will often start with a broad query (“chicago hotel”) before narrowing it down to a solution (“doubletree hotel Chicago rates”). And if that is the case, it means we can look beyond generalizations and start to quantify.

Whilst these points suggest that display is merely increasing the frequency of an event that was occurring anyway, AKQA Media have built a digital analytics platform that is seeing users across multiple channels and is showing cases where individuals are performing brand searches that would not have done so without first having the display exposure. Clearly these agencies are able to prove today that the benefits are real.

Universal Advice – Measurement Matters

In terms of advice from the experts of what you should do, the message is loud and clear – measurement is going to be critical to understanding the overlap, but it is also not going to be easy.  The ideal solution is an attribution model that can see all your marketing investments and sort through the results to understand how each one influenced every transaction.

In previous articles,we have discussed though how this is often not possible, and at the very least is cumbersome.

With a need to measure something though, you must cut through the clutter and find something that works for you, a process that involves understanding the difference between on site and off site interactions.

At Booyah Advertising, Emily’s team will look at standard metrics such as CTR and CPA but also carry out incremental lift studies with partners like Chango in order to examine the percentage of interaction from each channel that is incremental – this helps to get a read on the maximum potential impact one channel could be having on another.

Clearly this is a good starting point, and is probably the easiest for you to report on internally – “we launched display and saw a a 20% increase in our CTR in search” for instance.

These metrics are primarily occurring and being measured off site though, they are at the point of exposure to the campaign itself. Agencies iCrossing and AKQA both responded to the questions with points that demonstrate how the behavior of individuals changes for the better ON the client’s site if they are first exposed to both search and display campaigns.

This can be measured by looking at ‘engagement metrics’ from incoming traffic such as time on site, pages visited and a very interesting point from ethology, the time to convert.

Be Prepared

So now we know that the overlap exists, that it is quantifiable, and even where we should look for the signal of evidence, should you go out and add display to your search program immediately?

Chris thinks not, and instead would “advise marketers to consider a measurement strategy BEFORE campaign launch that will be used to evaluate search and display’s combined impact during the campaign – this method allows for adjustments to made before campaigns terminate and allows for improvements to had within the campaign flight period.”

This is sound advise, especially given that in order to be looking at the overlap you must make use of unique IDs that can be read across channels, something that requires technical investment and careful planning.

Conclusion

The result of the equation, 1+1, does indeed equal more than 2, and with careful thought and measurement, quantifiable metrics can be discovered that will help you understand the exact answer for your own campaigns – best if planned in advance.

Clients working with AKQA Media, Booyah Advertising, ethology and iCrossing are benefitting from working with experienced and integrated teams who know how to bring these things together, and advanced techniques like search retargeting capitalize on the best of both of these worlds, and are helping all 4 agencies take this integration a step further.

According to Jeff, “advertisers that don’t take the next step to build or obtain systems that allow the search advertisers to manage the two channels in a centralized technology that appropriately attributes the impact each channel has on performance and conversions, will not be fully maximizing their advertising spend and the resulting actions.”

Feel it’s a lot of work? As Emily plainly states, the overlap is real, and if you don’t believe it then “pause one of your campaigns (search or display) and measure the drop in your key performance indicators, see for yourself!”

When the principle was first explained to me, I was running an agency display media team at a search agency that was focused on direct response clients; I was therefore interested in tactics that involved precise data points as a way to focus on user intent.

Search retargeting seemed to fit the mold perfectly: target just those individuals with display ads who have actually searched for the terms that were relevant to the client, eliminating nearly all wastage from the plan.

We were building what we called the agency’s “foundation layer” of display: site retargeting to fix on-site conversion, search retargeting to prospect and plug the leak from SEM, and social retargeting to add further scale to the audience. So we picked five clients who had a pre-agreed testing budget and rolled out search retargeting with an early vendor, only to see four out of five of the campaigns bomb!

The primary reason was that in Search Retargeting 1.0, there was no scale in the data and little effort invested in the media placement. The campaigns were great when spending $100, but as soon as the vendor tried to scale to fill the budget, they would have to broad match and lose the relevancy, and of course the ROI.

Growing The Data – Search Retargeting 2.0

But sticking with it, campaigns began to perform better over time, and in almost direct correlation with the quantity of data that was available. Now we could focus more on the relevant terms and ignore some of the broad head terms. And as any search marketer can tell you, volume comes from the broad terms, but ROI comes from the specific. With data volume no longer such a problem, search retargeting 2.0 was on the horizon.

The theory states that search retargeting should outperform most other display placements because of its accuracy, and even come close to the performance of your search marketing efforts — as an industry it simply was not there yet.

But with the intersection of search and display looking like the future of digital, I left the agency to go help make this work.

The Data High

Too many marketers went through a phase of being high on data, believing that a single reference point was all that was needed to generate great DR results. They lost sight, in their excitement, of the continuing importance of creative messaging and the context of the media placement. Knowing who to talk to is important, but doing that in the right environment and with the right story really matters.

As popularity in search retargeting grew, so did the funding, which allowed the successful players to build their own DSP (Demand Side Platform) technology to manage the quantity of data and build in these essential elements. Marrying thousands of keywords with thousands of potential ad placements is not easy though, particularly when you have to do it in real time and at the keyword level.

Advanced Optimization — Search Retargeting 3.0

In a recent Chango search retargeting campaign from a large retailer, the need for keyword level optimization is clear:

Search retargeting example 1:

• ‘clothes shop’ — CTR of 0.87%
• ‘clothes shopping’ — CTR of 0.25%

Search retargeting example 2:

• ‘shoes mens’ — 0.16%
• ‘mens shoes’ — CTR of 0.21%

The search marketer is used to a world where this type of analysis is commonplace, but what is different is the choice of media sources.

In SEM, you choose from two major engines and then can add the extended network, usually by just ticking a box and forgetting it. But with real-time display, including search retargeting, we can buy in excess of 100,000 QPS (Queries Per Second — a simple measurement of media capacity).

Therefore managing search retargeting campaigns today is complex. Typically a campaign will need to be optimized manually once a day, but then “machine learning” must be used to balance the multitude of options available.

In our examples above, the term “clothes shop” clearly had a better type of intent that “clothes shopping” for our client, but that could only be determined by analyzing the placement on tens of thousands of sites. The balance of people and technology provide the scalable solution (but interestingly also blur the line between agency and vendor).

In addition, search retargeting 3.0 leverages dynamic creative, but unlike a typical dynamic setup, there is actual search data to work with, producing richer and more relevant experiences for the end consumer. Search retargeting sprang out from a sea of providers buying on the exchanges, but now seems to be leading in terms of what can really be achieved.

A Blessing & A Curse

Search retargeting would probably not be the name our micro-industry chooses if it got to choose again. When media planners hear it they immediately get excited, as they know a good media plan should always include some type of retargeting. But their first assumption is that it targets their existing site visitors. Many conversations begin by saying this isn’t the retargeting you thought it was!

But once marketers understand, they see its value for the long term. Like site retargeting and the SEM program itself, it typically becomes an evergreen program, running continuously as a reliable source of revenue.

In Summary …

Search retargeting arrived on the media scene less than two years ago, and less than one year ago for most media planners. It leverages the power of search and executes it with the scalability of display. It is enormously complex because of the volume of both keywords and media placements, so early campaigns were often not successful (v1.0). But as the industry grew, so did the data, and with it came a certain amount of reach (v2.0).

Today, major brands invest hundreds of thousands per month on evergreen and seasonal campaigns in search retargeting thanks to the results that in-house DSP bidding technology allows for true keyword level granularity. Machine learning, dynamic creative and lots of experience means that version 3.0 is upon us … and growing.

Using the real-time environment of the media exchanges, ‘search retargeting’ is one of several techniques that has created a safe bridge for SEM marketers to move into display and see almost instant results, and it is the SEM budget holders that are trying it quicker than the media planners (and who often sit in the same agencies!)

Source: Chango.com

This week, we are going to explore the use of search retargeting in more detail and why the optimization work you have already done in your SEM program can be used to drive significant results from a display campaign, save you budget and find new prospects.

As an example, we have a client today who is in the final stages of constructing their back-to-school campaign. They are new to this particular market and so have no real SEO presence, a budget that doesn’t allow for a heavy presence on SEM head terms and they don’t yet understand the dynamics of their new customer.

Building The Campaign Structure

Like any good SEM program, structure for search retargeting is critical to getting the best results. The goal is to create manageable sets of keywords that mirror to your business, facilitating budget decisions, optimization strategies and measurement. Where some keywords might be on an evergreen strategy, others might be seasonal or receive only occasional funding.

For our back to school client, they have a layer of critical terms that are ‘always on’, but will soon be activating a new set of campaigns to hit this seasonal window – Backpacks, School Supplies, School Clothing and Small Electronics for College Students.

There is no need to duplicate your previous efforts though. In this case, all the campaigns and ad groups can be imported directly, overcoming 80% of the work.

Next, the program must take into account the areas where search retargeting behaves differently to your search program. In a recent infographic by WordStream, the top 20 most expensive terms on Google AdWords were listed and ranged from $27.80 CPC (for ‘cord blood’) to $54.91 (for ‘insurance’). But, these are all terms available for between $0.50 and $3.00 CPC in the less competitive world of search retargeting.

With testing, there will be head terms such as these that no longer make sense to include in an SEM program, consuming large percentages of the budget. Instead, they can be moved to this new type of targeting, creating a presence in the mind of the searchers on contextually relevant sites.

For the back to school client with small budgets, terms like ‘school’, ‘term’, ‘clothes’ and ‘laptop’ have been moved over completely.

Compete With The Big Boys & Build Brand Cost Effectively

We know that customers are already shopping on the big name sites for common school items like backpacks and clothing without giving our client a second thought. By adding in competitor brand terms, they can build a presence during the research phase cost effectively and steal some of those dollars.

However, that alone will not be enough for them. When I was on the agency side, we would regularly have requests to ‘build a national brand campaign for a new audience’ using a budget that was painfully too small!

Whilst a true ‘branding’ campaign costs real dollars and a sustained period of time, search retargeting can be used to create a short awareness program for a fraction of the cost of other techniques. Display planners have long used the ‘takeover’, the idea that a single website can be owned for a day, giving the campaign a big hit in one go. These are costly though, and contain a significant amount of wastage.

By selecting a core set of terms, you can build an ‘Intent Takeover’, creating a heavy presence in front of all those people who are actively in market for back to school products. You can have the benefit of the page or site takeover, but for a fraction of the cost.

Learning From Search Retargeting

For a new client like ours, there is much to be understood about who their customer actually is, and so learnings are very valuable.

With keyword level reporting for search retargeting, a client like this can test many approaches at low cost by building out large keyword lists and seeing how the audience responds. This data can then be fed back into the SEO and SEM strategy.

In a recent retailer example, the term ‘vintage clothing’ was a surprise winner, and with the back to school client, early tests are showing video game terms are getting them in front of the right people.

Use What You Have

As a search marketer, you are armed with all the right tools and skills to jump into display, and techniques like search retargeting will be most familiar, and will capitalize most on the hard work you have already done.

Start by setting up your campaign using your SEM ad groups and insist on optimization at the keyword level – just as with SEM, each keyword carries a different message of intent and naturally has to be treated uniquely.

Next, look at creating new groups of keywords that lack a proper presence in your search program, such as competitor brand names or broad head terms.

Once the campaign is live, data will start to flow back showing the sites and keywords that are driving the best results – go back to your SEM program and use this information to your benefit.

The first step to a successful behavioral targeting process is finding the right targets. It is not always obvious which users should be “bucketed” together. Creating effective buckets requires knowledge about the site and a careful analysis of the data. It is important to have clear objectives; this way we can pinpoint the type of person we are targeting, measure our success and optimize for maximum effect.

This can be done using any web analytics tool that provides advanced segmentation. But you also need to think hard about the marketing implications of segmentation and persona creation. I chose to use Google Analytics in this example since it is free and it provides a very powerful segmentation feature.

What exactly is a persona?

According to Wikipedia, “A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users.” This definition meets the objective of behavioral targeting as provided in my last article: create a unique experience for each visitor. If users have different goals and behaviors when they come to a website, why should they have the same experience?

Web marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg is among the pioneers that introduced personas into the online world as a way to segment users on websites and provide personalized experiences. This technique requires understanding the website objectives and users very deeply. As Bryan notes in some of his writings, personas can be used to optimize websites and target users in pretty much every aspect of online marketing: campaign creation and expansion, competitive analysis, offline advertisement and onsite content targeting.

It is important to differentiate between pure segmentation and persona creation. While segmentation is critical to behavior analysis (or, as Avinash Kaushik says, analyzing data in aggregate is a crime), personas cannot be achieved by clickstream data only. This requires a deep marketing analysis: understanding who is your market and what they want from you. Behavioral targeting takes advantage of both techniques. We can target different segments, such as new visitors, returning buyers, Canadian returning visitors, or any segment that shows a special behavior. And we can target different personas, trying to show different content to people coming with different goals to the website.

Creating personas

Building personas is a deep marketing exercise: you must understand your audience and the product you are offering. Although data should be used (as seen below), the structure should come from the company’s understanding of the market and the customers. Bryan Eisenberg provides a series of helpful questions on measuring personas for success, which can be very useful to get started and build your personas. Below are a few of them:

• What does this persona do on a daily basis?
• What’s the persona’s life mantra?
• What’s this persona’s unspoken question regarding this product?
• What does she expect from this product?
• What information will this persona need to be persuaded to take action?
• Why is she motivated to take this action?
• What actions do you want this persona to take, and how will you persuade her to take them?

You can also take a look at this nicely formatted persona sample (PDF) to get an idea on how to create a document to convince management of the value of this exercise.

Creating your persona using Google Analytics

First of all, it is important to note that it is very difficult to translate a persona into a measurable segment based on clickstream data, but it is possible to reach an approximation. Let’s suppose we want to develop a persona called Danny Sullivan which I believe represents the kind of people that visit my site. I would start by trying to answer the questions above about him, and I might as well try to find a person that has the same lifestyle as Danny to help me (Jim Sterne?). Then I would go about trying to find some metrics and dimensions on Google Analytics that help me pinpoint the persona and turn them into an advanced segment. Here’s an example:

Click for a high resolution image.

As you can see above, I believe that Danny (the persona) has the following behavior patterns:

• Since he is always on the road, he probably visits the site using his smart phone (iPhone, Blackberry or Android)
• Usually in the United States
• He has been to the website before, so he is a returning visitor
• He reads many blogs using feeds, and probably gets to one of my posts through Feedburner (see new integration between Feedburner and Google Analytics)
• Since he comes to my site every day, ‘Days since last visit’ equals 1 or 2
• And since visiting my site is probably the first thing he does in his daily routine, his visit probably happens before breakfast, or at least earlier than 10am.

This is a somewhat simplistic example, but it shows that it is possible to create personas using Google Analytics to understand how each targeted audience is behaving on your site. This shows us what we are succeeding or failing to provide to each kind of person on the website.

I’ll illustrate how we will use the information above to feed the behavioral targeting cycle in my next post.

According to Wikipedia, there are two principal types of behavioral targeting:

Onsite behavioral targeting is a technique that uses visitor behavior to target certain content that is proved to be more relevant to a segment of visitors. It should be preceded by an encompassing analysis of users and their characteristics (using web analytics tools). We can either define hard rules (for example, offer a special deal to anybody that adds any two or more products to a shopping cart) or use an engine to dynamically learn about and then target high-converting groups.

Offsite behavioral targeting is technique used by advertising networks to increase advertisement targeting. For example, Google is using this type of targeting to profile visitors to their website network according to subjects they like (their “interests) and then uses this info to provide users with targeted ads across the entire content network.

In this article I’ll focus on the first type of BT, onsite behavioral targeting, the type of technique used by website owners to improve user experience by delivering the right content to each person. Companies that current provide such a solution to website owners are:

• BTBuckets (free tool)
• Sitebrand
• Amadesa
• Omniture Test&Target
• SiteSpect

From tracking to behavioral targeting

Web analytics has been constantly developing since the 1990s. In the beginning there was data, and initially the struggle was to collect it accurately and provide reports on the state of websites, usually from an IT perspective. Then, with the turn of the millennium, analysts felt the necessity to turn numbers into insights, and the field evolved from simple data reporting to analysis. Today, marketers increasingly understand that testing is the way to go when it comes to design and implementation of websites (in other words, intuition-based decisions don’t really work well). Said another way, the customer should decide what works and what doesn’t (this phase is still rapidly evolving).

In the last two years, marketers, analysts and executives have started to understand that customers should get what they want without having to ask for it. That’s what behavioral targeting is all about: delivering the right content to each visitor to a website. It moves the current focus on overall results to segment results. It enables the website owner to understand which visitors are struggling and which are succeeding with their objectives. It helps marketers build more relevant campaigns to target the right market, be it through search, content, media, or emails. These insights and actions should not come at the expense of website testing, but in addition to it. Testing is very important to recognize the low hanging fruit that is ready to be plucked. It is also a great way to persuade management of the importance of investing in both testing and targeting.

Analytics guru Jim Sterne defined the benefits of behavioral targeting as follows:

“We can attract prospects with customized campaigns according to their interests, engage site visitors with dynamic content in response to their conduct and desires, and put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. We can create a more pleasant and more individual buying experience. We can quickly identify the offers that will more likely convert those prospects to buyers.”

However, the market is still not completely ready for this revolution. Recent research from eMarketer suggests that American internet users are not very fond of behavioral targeting techniques. As seen in the chart below, one of the conclusions of the research is that “respondents showed somewhat more interest in receiving personalized discounts and news, but still, less than one-half of Americans wanted any tailored Web content at all.”

Concluding, we can see a strong trend towards using behavioral targeting to provide web users with richer web experiences. But this will require a market education effort so that users don’t perceive companies using these techniques as not respecting user privacy.

In my next article I will go over a few examples showing how to implement behavioral targeting and analyze its results to increase website conversion rates.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/behavioral-targeting-creating-a-unique-experience-for-each-visitor-30015/feed 1 http://searchengineland.com/report-most-people-dont-want-online-tracking-even-if-it-means-relevant-ads-or-savings-26800 http://searchengineland.com/report-most-people-dont-want-online-tracking-even-if-it-means-relevant-ads-or-savings-26800#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:10:20 +0000 Greg Sterling http://searchengineland.com/?p=26800 Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google.

The NY Times discussed the report, released today:

The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the Web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.” The results were later adjusted to reflect Census Bureau patterns in categories like sex, age, population density and telephone usage.

Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents. Then the respondents were told about different ways companies tailor ads: by following what someone does on the company’s site, on other sites and in offline places like stores.

The respondents’ aversion to tailored ads increased once they learned about targeting methods. In addition to the original 66 percent that said tailored ads were “not O.K.,” an additional 7 percent said such ads were not O.K. when they were tracked on the site. An additional 18 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked via other Web sites, and an additional 20 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked offline.

Lawmakers have been ready to regulate “behavioral advertising” for some time and the FTC has signaled that it did not believe marketers were doing a good enough job with self regulation. However, the new economic and political climate, more favorable toward regulation, combined with public frustration and anger generally have set the stage for regulation of some kind.

Search will largely be exempted because of the way it works — keyword matching rather than data mining —  although the search engines’ data retention policies are implicated by the report (which I quote a bit more fully on my blog). Yahoo is using search queries as part of its behavioral targeting and Google not long ago implemented “Interest Based Advertising,” a euphemism for behavioral targeting.

However, Google’s privacy and preferences management could become a kind of model in some new regulatory regime.

Very soon lawmakers will introduce legislation to more aggressively protect consumer privacy. One member of Congress, Rick Boucher of Virginia, recently wrote:

Because consumers need an assured level of control over the collection, use and sharing of information about them, a statute providing those assurances is now called for. That goal should be achieved by legislation, which reflects best industry practices and requires that they be followed by all websites that collect information from Internet users. Legislation assuring Internet users that their online experience is more secure will be a driver of greater levels of Internet uses such as e-commerce, not a hindrance to them.

In my view all this points to “when” rather than “if” and the question is: what disclosure and data management burdens will imposed on marketers and publishers? As I said, I think search will largely be unaffected but display could be profoundly affected.

If people are required to be given an “up front” opportunity to “opt-out” of targeting a majority likely will: “Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents.”

]]> http://searchengineland.com/report-most-people-dont-want-online-tracking-even-if-it-means-relevant-ads-or-savings-26800/feed 1 http://searchengineland.com/sempo-releases-survey-data-revealing-state-of-sem-17247 http://searchengineland.com/sempo-releases-survey-data-revealing-state-of-sem-17247#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:04:42 +0000 Greg Sterling http://searchengineland.com/?p=17247 SEMPO formally released data on the state of search engine marketing, its annual survey of agencies and marketers. This year’s survey consisted of 800 respondents from all over the globle. However 68 percent of respondents were from the US, with 20 percent coming from a range of countries. Seven percent of respondents were from Canada and 5 percent from the UK.

The respondents/clients represented a range of industries. The top sectors were “retail, business services, electronics manufacturing and financial services.”

As part of the findings and related report SEMPO forecast that SEM spending would grow from a projected $14.7 billion in 2009 to $26.1 billion in 2013. SEM is defined broadly as all spending on search-related marketing including SEO. Consequently it represents more than the share of online ad revenues that the IAB assigns to search.

The report is lengthy and extremely detailed. Among other things it explores what marketers are willing to pay for specialized offerings or enhanced targeting including behavioral, local and mobile. Here are some of the high-level findings:

• In the past three years, offline channels are most frequently cannibalized to move budget towards SEM. This year, the top marketing channels advertisers are shifting budgets from are print magazines (26%), direct mail (21%), and print newspapers (19%).
• However, the degree to which certain channels are cannibalized is a bit lower than in last year’s survey. Only a quarter of advertisers (26 percent) report they are shifting budgets from print magazine advertising (down from a third last year), and only 15 percent of advertisers are cannibalizing their web site development budgets. Other channels affected by a shift in spending include TV advertising (13 percent), conferences (10 percent) and print yellow pages (9 percent).
• Organic SEO has always been the favored search marketing tactic among advertisers, but its popularity has risen significantly, from 80% in 2005 and 76% in 2006, nine out of ten advertisers using it the past two year.
• Advertisers are most willing to pay a premium for targeting consumers based on behavioral metrics followed by demographic targeting
• There is growing interest in new platforms for search marketing such as video and mobile search, and growing willingness to pay more for these emerging vehicles

In the context of the debate surrounding whether search is a branding or direct response medium, one of the most interesting findings was that respondents said “brand awareness” was the top goal of paid search, which took over from “sales” in the previous year’s report. The larger the firm the more the goal shifts from sales to brand awareness, which makes a certain amount of logical sense. Still I found it interesting.

Some charts from the report:

Where are marketers transferring budgets from to support paid search?

Source: SEMPO/Radar Research (2/09)

Overall the report shows the search industry to be maturing and increasingly sophisticated, diversifying into a range of related digital media.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/sempo-releases-survey-data-revealing-state-of-sem-17247/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/privacy-concerns-online-ad-targeting-on-collision-course-16943 http://searchengineland.com/privacy-concerns-online-ad-targeting-on-collision-course-16943#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:39:43 +0000 Greg Sterling http://searchengineland.com/?p=16943 Call it the “Cuban Missile Crisis” of online advertising: consumers and publishers are increasingly at odds over online ad targeting and behavioral targeting (BT) in particular. While that may be a hyperbolic characterization, the majority of US internet users appear uncomfortable with online tracking and targeting at a time when publishers and search engines are more aggressively embracing it.

Most recently, Google introduced BT as “interest-based advertising” on the AdSense network. Yahoo, which has been using BT for quite some time, started factoring search queries into the targeting mix. Microsoft and AOL use BT as well. And online newspaper sites, early champions of BT with Tacoda (now part of AOL’s Platform-A), are using it increasingly via the Yahoo APT platform — if they’re part of the Yahoo Newspaper Coalition.

Publishers and ad networks use it because it works. And SEMPO’s 2008 survey indicates strong interest in BT among search marketers.

Yet consumers seem to be more aware of online ad targeting than in the past and more concerned about it. For example, the New York Times yesterday reported on the results of yet another survey about privacy and online ad targeting, this time by TRUSTe involving 1,000 US adults.

Here are some of the top-level findings according to the Times:

• 28 percent said they were comfortable with BT; “more than half said they were not.”
• Just over 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “The Internet is not well regulated, and naïve users can easily be taken advantage of”

As further evidence of growing privacy concerns:

41 percent of respondents said they use a web browser that deleted cookies and the history of the sites they had visited. About the same number used software to use the Internet anonymously. Around one-third of respondents said they chose “do not track” options on Web sites that offered them. Eleven percent used a proxy server to mask the Internet address of the computer they were using, and 36 percent gave false information when registering for Web sites.

Another recent consumer survey conducted by Burst Media, originally discussed in the Google BT post, is consistent with the TRUSTe data above:

The study found that a vast majority (80.1%) of web surfers are concerned about the online privacy of their personal information such as age, gender, income and web surfing habits . . . [and] over 60% of respondents are aware of the tracking, collecting and sharing of information that occurs as a result of online activities. In addition, respondents did not see value in ads targeted to them based on their web surfing behavior – even if it improves their web surfing experience

The contrast between the increasing use of BT and the growing awareness of the practice and apparent discomfort among consumers is striking. The two trends appear to be moving in opposite directions. It could well be that consumers are concerned because of uncertainty about how their search/surfing histories are being stored and used, and whether or how that data may surface in the future.

While the online ad industry has escaped FTC regulation (for now it would appear), it needs to do a better job of educating consumers and providing privacy assurances. With credible assurances of privacy and an obvious way to opt out, more consumers might be comfortable with targeting and BT.

Google’s introduction of a prominent “opt-out” feature in its interest-based advertising program is a good step. But in reconciling the divergent sentiments of consumers, publishers and advertisers, it would appear there’s a long way to go.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/privacy-concerns-online-ad-targeting-on-collision-course-16943/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/sempo-report-cuts-search-ads-forecast-16848 http://searchengineland.com/sempo-report-cuts-search-ads-forecast-16848#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:06:02 +0000 Greg Sterling http://searchengineland.com/?p=16848 SEMPO’s new report, due to be released this week, cuts its forecast for search advertising. The results are based on a survey of almost 900 agencies and search marketers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report scales back previous growth projections considerably:

[SEMPO] says North American search marketing spending will increase only 9% to $14.7 billion in 2009 from $13.5 billion a year ago. Its previous estimates, made in early 2008, called for the industry to grow at more than twice that rate this year, from $15.7 billion in 2008 to $18.8 billion in 2009. The new forecasts call for the industry to reach $19.8 billion in 2011, down from a previous estimate of $25.2 billion for that year.

But even as the economy hits search spending fairly hard, other media are faring worse. Search, widely regarded as the most efficient form of online advertising, is still benefiting from advertiser and agency budget shifts to online:

Search is continuing to steal from traditional ad budgets, according to the survey. More than a quarter of advertisers reported that they were shifting budgets into search marketing from print magazines. Nineteen percent said they were shifting their budgets into search from print newspaper advertising.

The paradox of these shifts is that they express a simplistic view of consumer behavior, which has become increasingly complex and relies on many sources of information and ad exposures, both online and offline. However, many marketers are starting to see with greater clarity the convoluted consumer path to conversions. Search remains perhaps the critical component of online advertising; however a search-only strategy is somewhat myopic.

Here’s an excerpt from findings from Atlas’s (Microsoft’s) recent “engagement mapping” report entitled The Long Road to Conversion: The Digital Purchase Funnel:

The large number of ad exposures consumed prior to purchase may come as a surprise to marketers who are used to discussions of frequency that revolve around site  or campaign metrics. Measuring only the last ad in a  conversion history conceals the true length of the relationship an advertiser has with each consumer. When we focus our view on individual converters’ histories and apply the funnel concept to their ad consumption, we discover that their histories are much longer and richer than typically assumed. These results confirm other research showing that advertising reaches consumers from multiple advertising campaigns and across channels . . .

Yahoo’s increasingly integrated search and display platforms are consistent with this more sophisticated consumer behavior model. And the SEMPO report apparently does find some interest in search retargeting accordingly.

We’ll explore the findings of the SEMPO report in more detail after we have a chance to review it.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/sempo-report-cuts-search-ads-forecast-16848/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/post-click-marketing-for-search-marketers-16587 http://searchengineland.com/post-click-marketing-for-search-marketers-16587#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:16:16 +0000 Scott Brinker http://searchengineland.com/?p=16587 Over the past year, the term “post-click marketing” has come up more frequently in search marketing discussions, especially in the context of improving conversion rates and overall search ROI. At SMX West earlier this month, Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro unequivocally declared that post-click marketing moves the needle for their clients more than any other aspect of search marketing.

So what exactly is post-click marketing and how can you leverage it in your search marketing program? Here’s a brief introduction.

Post-click marketing > landing pages

The simplest definition of post-click marketing is this: it’s how you engage with respondents after they click on your ads.

Of course, since the entire customer lifecycle happens after the click, post-click marketing is usually narrowed to mean the experience a respondent has between click and conversion—particularly an experience tailored to a specific ad and/or a specific group of respondents, rather than general site optimization. (Lead nurturing and re-marketing campaigns are good too, but they’re further down the funnel—call them post-conversion marketing.)

Landing pages are the most common kind of post-click marketing.

However, one of the motivations for coining the term post-click marketing was to encourage people to think outside the box of a single page. Traditional 1-page landing pages—I call them “plain old landing pages”—usually have a predictable, and frankly boring layout and structure. What a wasted opportunity, especially when you consider that text search ads are all pretty much visually homogeneous. The design and flow of the first few pages after that click are a marketer’s best—and often only—chance to establish a compelling brand and differentiate themselves from the pack.

Post-click marketing embraces a continuum of creative possibilities for the experience served to respondents: landing pages, 2-step landing pages, branching conversion paths, microsites, mobile nanosites, contextual applications, etc. These experiences can include Flash objects, videos, interactive widgets, social media interfaces and more. You’re constrained only by your imagination in crafting an experience that will “wow” your audience.

But post-click marketing is about more than any one great experience.

Post-click marketing emphasizes segmentation

If there’s one overarching strategy in post-click marketing, it’s audience segmentation: identifying the distinct strata of respondents in your market, with as much granularity as possible, and serving them post-click experiences tailored to their needs and perspectives.

The post-click marketing mantra is: all clicks are not created equal.

Unlike traditional landing page optimization, which usually focuses on testing which pieces of content work best across all respondents, post-click marketing aims for segment optimization—”determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.”

Search marketers often thrive by using long tail strategies in keyword bidding. But if you’re not segmenting respondents to different post-click experiences, then the long tail of keywords and ad creatives ends up crashing ignominiously into a short tail of a few landing pages and deep links. This causes message mismatch, where the relationship between the ad and the landing page is unclear to the respondent—probably the single biggest reason for triggering the back button bailout.

Post-click marketing employs a variety of methods for segmenting respondents, ranging from the keyword phrase a user searched on, to geo-location and domain information implied by that user’s IP address, to behavioral choices made by the user on those first several pages after the click. Note that behavioral segmentation dovetails nicely with deploying multi-page landing experiences to engage in productive up-front dialogues with respondents, to quickly move from the generic to the specific.

Post-click marketing encourages systems thinking

In online marketing, we talk a lot about the funnel—how respondents start with impressions, then clicks, then engagement, then conversion, and so on. This progression has a clear directional flow, from the keyword to the ad to the landing page to post-conversion fulfillment.

However, this one-way flow of the user experience can cause marketers to overlook feedback loops in the opposite direction—using information revealed from later stages of the funnel to optimize activities at the top of the funnel. Good post-click marketing tracks and analyzes different conversion rates by segment, mapping conversion rates back to behavioral choices and then back to the original ads and keywords.

This helps identify which niche audiences are driving real ROI in a campaign, and it suggests specific ad/segment combinations that are ripe for improvement and experimentation. Instead of a one-way funnel, your search campaigns and corresponding post-click marketing become a circular ecosystem.

In the spirit of systems thinking, post-click marketing also elevates post-click experiences, such as landing pages, from being ad hoc, under-the-radar productions to being executed with a more efficient and integrated process. Instead of treating each landing page as its own one-off experiment, which tends to be slow and costly, an organization with good post-click marketing capabilities can rapidly deploy dozens or hundreds of segment-specific landing pages.

This scalability is achieved by putting in place a certain amount of post-click marketing infrastructure—or leveraging your web site infrastructure for this mission: content management, a digital asset library, re-usable page design templates, defined proof/approval workflows, standardized data collection and analytics, ready-to-roll testing frameworks, etc.

You know your post-click marketing is firing on all cylinders when your average concept-to-completion deployment cycle for a new landing page is less than 1 day—which is what it needs to be to be able to keep pace with the inherent fluidity of search marketing.

You’ve always known that landing pages and other after-the-click tactics were important. The reason post-click marketing has been gaining traction is because it’s a way to frame the discussion of those tactics at a higher and more strategic level.

If you don’t yet have a structured post-click marketing program in place, this could be one of your big wins for 2009.

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