Traffick

Twinkies References in Zombieland Cause Major Sugar Spike

2009-10-28T15:34:00.004-04:00

Google Searches for [twinkies] surged in the US and Canada in October, coinciding with the successful release of Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, a (non-Zombie) survivor character obsessed with Hostess' sugary snack.

The effect was more pronounced in Canada, perhaps because Canadians search less for Twinkies under ordinary circumstances. It's interesting to speculate, though, about which populations are more likely to pursue searches in response to offline advertising and strong themes in media.

The top "related search"? [fried twinkies], which just happens to appear prominently in the movie as well.

The rival snack in Zombieland, the delightfully pink and coconutty Sno Balls, doesn't register much of an increase, and in any case attracts very few searches in a given year.

For the record, the real Woody Harrelson is a vegan.

BlackBerry "Doomed"?

2009-10-28T11:17:00.003-04:00

The current wave of Research in Motion naysayers all seem to point to one primary reason for the future demise of the BlackBerry: the relative lack of apps for the BlackBerry as compared with the iPhone, and that, caused by it being much more difficult to develop those apps for the BlackBerry.

The people making these claims are typically developers, American, or both.

If you were Canadian, and in particular, a Canadian consumer, this would seem like no big deal to you. It's about having the patience to wait for things, because quite frankly you have no choice. Even though you're tantalizingly close to a place where you don't have to wait for things, and at least one or two cities that never sleep.

Want Google Voice in Canada? Can't have it. Yet.

If you wanted an iPhone in Canada... you had to wait. Until you could get it.

The Kindle? There's no carrier deal in place yet. Ergo, no Kindle for Canada. Yet.

BlackBerry users (not just in Canada, but globally) are pretty loyal. So - there are only 5,000 apps for the BlackBerry. And 85,000 for the iPhone. Maybe next year there will be only 7,254 apps for the BlackBerry and 41,000,000 apps for the iPhone. For me personally, as a user, this won't make much of a dent in my thinking. I figure that BlackBerry will improve that aspect of their business, while maintaining their solid understanding of the needs of the corporate user. I figure that sooner or later, the apps I really need, made by companies like Google, Yahoo, Yelp, and the PGA Tour, will become available. As a consumer -- whatever the frustrations may currently be for the developer community -- it's not enough of a catastrophic issue for me to switch devices.

Sure, not all the apps for the BlackBerry will live up to the coolest iPhone apps. They won't vibrate, shake, and blink in quite as satisfying a fashion. But there's a solution to that, too: my wife has an iPhone.

New Google Analytics Features Inject Intelligence Into Marketing

2009-10-20T09:39:00.008-04:00

Amy Chang, Group Product Manager for Google Analytics, notes that when GA was bought and launched by Google, it was "all about democratizing web analytics," bringing more powerful web analytics functionality to a wider audience of businesses than ever before. Mission accomplished. Books will soon be filled with tales of Google's awesome data management capacity (they'll be dry books... but books, nonetheless). Providing such a massive exercise in computing to so many millions of customers -- with multilayered segmentation capabilities -- is a task nearly no competitor could accomplish, least of all for free.

Today Google continues its aggressive pace of development for GA, releasing a long list of enhancements. They'll delight power users and laypersons alike. Chang notes that the more customized (as opposed to customizable) features continue to be part of the trend of analytics moving out of its old role as the sole preserve of IT departments, and putting intelligence directly in the hands of marketers and managers.

On the power user front, we get more custom variable capability. This was available in the past, but it's becoming easier to use. To take an example, GA is now making it easier to track segments like session attributes (logged-in vs. not-logged-in users) or visitor characteristics (member vs. non-member, or even demographics like gender). Don't expect setting this up to be easy, but it's getting a lot easier.

For the rest of us, Analytics Intelligence is evidently the culmination of extensive product development. Rather than having to customize a "what's changed" type of report yourself, or having the canned report be limited to vanilla categories, this alert functionality is tuned so that it's better at predicting which change alerts are the most likely to cause a marketing department, specifically, go "eeek!" (or in other cases, trade high-fives around the M&M's dispenser). Note the slider in the screen shot below: you can set the "alert sensitivity" to "high" or "low". As Google aptly notes: "Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done."

Other new toys include the ability to set 20 goals instead of 4, and custom engagement metrics considered as potential goals, as opposed to clunky custom segments you had to cook up from scratch.

And that good old IT person who formerly had the only set of keys to your marketing statistics, and sent them to you in whatever format she felt appropriate? Expect a lifelike facsmile to be staring vacantly into the camera for the Official GA Photographer, looking every bit like the lonely Maytag repairman.

Social Media as Signaling Strategy

2009-10-15T11:04:00.006-04:00

So, so, so much ink has been spilled on the "proper use" of social media for business.

And as I continue to replace football season with my new pastime, reviewing friends' marketing books, I expect to be seriously schooled soon by some of the best. I have three books by amazing social media experts on my shelf. It could have been fifty, no doubt.

So much ink on such a new topic. As Mitch Joel has noted, not a single "social media expert" has put in the Gladwellian 10,000 hours in the field that would be a prerequisite to being a true virtuoso. (Translation: hire one of them and place too much faith in them, and they could be fishing what's left of your company's debris out of the Pacific.)

I'm not a social media "expert," but for now, I can still be right about this.

In this glut of commentary, how does anyone make an original statement? I think perhaps by going extreme. Imagine Zero Social Media Usage. Imagine generating business without it.

In Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin went the polite route. He warned companies that grafting social media sprinkles on top of your existing organization would create a disconnect at best.

But in real life, Seth's reality speaks volumes. He's got one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has published dozens of books, probably a dozen bestsellers. And he doesn't tweet. Number of followers, zero.

So let's think about that extreme position applied to your company.

What if you just didn't do social media at all, and kept on doing the things you know generate leads, partnerships, repeat business, etc.?

Like email. Like buying advertising. Like "good old fashioned" word of mouth. Like trade shows. Like hiring people who are respected, who act as shining beacons for your company (and yes they are allowed to use social media in their own way, which creates a 'signaling effect' I discuss below.) You're telling me you've got all those channels figured out and fully optimized?

I hear what you're saying to yourself. Other people are saying stuff about you in social media: it's a huge task to manage this! You need to manage your reputation, both reactively and proactively. OK, fair enough. You need to *monitor* social media, and you need to maintain a good reputation. It's starting to get more complicated. But most of that falls into place if the individuals in your company come with the right toolkit: they're inherently approachable and online-communication-savvy. My point earlier when I wrote about Google, Zappos, and the "New PR," was that you can't credibly develop a company-wide PR 2.0 strategy, because social media is inherently about people, not companies. It may be agonizing to think that everyone in your company had better "get" the new reputation management, from the CEO right down to the engineers or baristas. But that's the way it is. Nothing -- no social media usage -- is better than letting someone screw it up royally, or artificially doing it as a "company." Remember? You can still sell beer on TV and software at trade shows?

In case it isn't clear, then: you'd better get the right people on the bus. You can't fake "people". Your people will either be good or horrible at social media brand creation. If horrible, then zero social media use is preferable. What about using it to promote themselves over your company? Do you think you can legislate that in your company? Sure: you can make all the draconian rules you want, if you pay six figure salaries and have free range quail in the lunchroom. Or maybe not even then. Maybe that's a separate post about the Art of Letting Go, and on that I may just disagree with @MarkEvans. If you had the right people on the bus in the first place, though, they wouldn't embarrass you horribly with online oversharing and drama. That eventually turns into a firing offence in many companies, whether or not anyone admits it.

I know what you're saying #2: good social media mentions may help you rank well in search engines in the future. Sure, that's an extension of off-page factors (such as links) that search engines use to figure out how to rank your content, etc. True. Important and fundamental. And you don't get everyone falling all over themselves to tweet about you overnight. It's part of full engagement with your marketplace, and creating something unique and valuable.

I know what you're saying to yourself #3: what if we wake up two years from now and it turns out we really should be using social media to win new customers, or for some other reason? Won't we be screwed? It takes time to genuinely build those loyal follower lists. Aha. Now, you're making sense. You do need to figure out social media as a hedge against being completely left behind in two years.

Most companies today go through that reasoning, and then they do it wrong. They put logos on their avatars. They talk about their new low calorie beer, ostensibly to customers who have opted in to hear all about it! They diligently try to build really big follower lists, waiting patiently for the day they can broadcast their marketing messages to everyone. Bzzzzt! Wrong! Why not just buy ads?

That's not how Tony Hsieh did it.

So that gets us back to the main point: the most impressive corporate uses of social media have not been for outbound marketing. They've been to make the individuals who run the company look like they get it, and to make companies more like people: approachable.

(There's nothing new about that. Media was social before it was "social media.")

Like being good-looking, toting a new smartphone with the latest apps, refreshing your website design, or choosing a good office location, social media savvy signals to the world that you've developed enough mastery of the world to be able to conduct business or personal relationships without tripping over your own shoelaces or running short of breath.

There's one more thing it can do for you. Help you plug into knowledge and further your career: as an individual. Smarter, more connected individuals don't just help themselves. They help their companies.

So that's it: social media can help you look hot, or at least to seem approachable. And it can assist you in your ongoing research so you don't look clueless, since networking plus information in the digital age is research on steroids. It can strengthen your "personal" brand(s), and help you to run with the pack, savvy-wise.

But as for using it for outbound marketing? Save the spam for later. Or how about never.

My hypothesis is that a handful of our experts may say just that in their books. Kevin Ryan once said it off the cuff to a room full of 400 marketers, or so I hear. Let's see if any experts really do agree with this. Saturday morning, the fall reading session commences.

Edit: I did a search for the title of this post to see if there were any exact matches of it online. Turns out Google had already indexed it, and (like Twitter) can tell you it was published "four minutes ago." The immediacy of social media, and the rush of real-time search, is cool too. Question though: did it make either of us money, or did I just waste my time posting this screen shot?

But seriously, that take is too prosaic by half. If everything happens much faster, then the cautious, laborious "targeted message" mentality of traditional public relations is fast growing obsolete. Social media savvy signals success. And those who panic under pressure (highly likely until we all have our 10,000 hours) aren't going to be great ambassadors for your company.

Major Mea Culpa Manifested in Yahoo Class Action Settlement

2009-10-13T10:24:00.003-04:00

Today Yahoo is sending out details of a settlement in a Class Action lawsuit about its negligent and sloppy provision of partner traffic to advertisers, dating back through the Overture days and all the way back to GoTo.com, before Yahoo even owned a PPC engine. The story is presented as a minor hiccup by a couple of news outlets as of this writing. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land points to the $20 refund component, though by my reading that's only reserved for any company that is now "out of business."

In the letter, Yahoo makes the usual noises about a settlement not being evidence of any admission of guilt.

But the description of what advertisers give up if they opt into the class reads like a detailed overview of every nefarious practice in pay-per-click advertising sales since the beginning of recorded time. (After the jump, the cut-and-paste.)

More important than the small refund is Yahoo's agreeing (1) to give advertisers a tool to fully control partner placement; (2) to better disclose online on the "Traffic Quality" portion of their website where traffic may come from; and (3) to enhance something called the "Click Investigation Request Tool" advertisers use to request information on specific traffic partners.

This non-admission-of-guilt will seem to many advertisers like a full recap of the often slippery relationship Yahoo has maintained with reality, especially in the realm of partner traffic. It comes as an albeit hollow victory for the many advertisers who were treated as an ATM by click arbitrageurs, rogue publishers, and Yahoo themselves.

And now for the ugly stuff:

"The Settlement will release Class members' Released Claims against Yahoo!. The complete definition of "Released Claims" is set out in the Settlement Agreement, which is available atwww.inreyahoosettlement.com or from the Claims Administrator. In summary, and without limiting the definition of "Released Claims" set forth in the Settlement Agreement, Released Claims include any and all claims, causes of action, demands, rights, liens, obligations, suits, appeals, sums of money, accounts, covenants, contracts, controversies, attorneys' fees and costs, expenses, losses, damages, judgments, orders, promises whatsoever, known or unknown, matured or unmatured, suspected or unsuspected, concealed or hidden, whether sounding in law, equity, bankruptcy, or in any other forum, from January 1, 2000 through and including September 22, 2009, that have been or could have been asserted in the Action. This release includes without limitation any and all claims concerning domain parking sites and pages; typosquatting sites and pages; bulk-registered domain name sites and pages; software applications; downloadable applications; pop-ups; pop-unders; "sliders"; "sidebars"; "injected ads"; adware; spyware; malware; malicious software; error implementations and pages; email campaigns; clicks that result from self-targeting; untargeted or random placements within the Distribution Network; ads displayed on sites or pages that lack any bona fide content, or any content at all; or ads shown to Internet users who have not conducted a search or viewed bona fide content related to a Yahoo! pay-per-click text advertisement."

Badly-Managed AdWords Accounts -- Worse for You Than for Google

2009-10-12T11:06:00.004-04:00

With a few high-profile exceptions, water always flows downhill. If you want to calculate which way a river flows, all you need to calculate is which end is on the high ground, and which on the low ground, and there's your answer.

Similarly, the flow of advertiser dollars from other channels into paid search platforms like Google AdWords has been predictable over time because of one factor: measurable performance when compared head-to-head with other channels.

In accounts where that condition hasn't been satisfied, companies don't increase budgets for paid search. They don't always shut off their accounts, though. So the end result is an account that sort of wanders along, hoping for the best, performing far below potential.

At different points in time, this state of affairs might benefit Google a lot or a little. The times when it benefited Google less were when their relevancy incentives (mostly CTR-based) were set in a dogmatic sort of way. If your account was really lazily and loosely targeted, eventually stuff would get "disabled" or "deactivated." That would kill volume for you, but you were probably doing horribly anyway, so it was actually a savings. Google, meanwhile, didn't get to exact as much of an "idiot tax" out of you. So they had to rely on other mechanisms, such as ego bidding or a hot economy, to further their profitability.

It's not quite like that now. Google has a sophisticated set of mechanisms for selectively allowing you to screw things up. They may not particularly like your fuzzily-targeted ads, but they're willing to show a certain percentage of them in certain verticals as long as your bids are sky high.

The end result of a low-volume, fuzzily-managed campaign, of course, is a poor ROI for the advertiser. But here's the curious thing. If the company has invested something in people and plans to run ads in this channel, they don't shut it off completely. They treat it like their other underperforming channels: shrug their shoulders, hope it gets better, turn the budget down a bit so it doesn't cause significant harm. From day one, I've suggested that this isn't a true savings, but a squandering of potential. "All in" or "all out" should be the advertiser's mentality. It is difficult, but not impossible, to optimize your campaign so that increasing the budget is feasible. If that's not happening, why run it at all?

The fuzzy, meandering, high-CPC-low-return campaign is not a negative scenario - short term - for Google's revenues and profits. These inefficient campaigns collectively spend heavily, smoothing out the ups and downs of the keyword auctions where advertisers are managing more tightly to customer responses. That's one of the reasons why, in the near term, Google's revenues will continue to rise gradually or at least be flat, avoiding the severe hits that other advertising media have taken during the recession. Look for proof of this with Google's upcoming Q3 2009 earnings release on October 15.

At Page Zero Media we inherit such accounts fairly often. There are two common targeting errors that companies make in the early days of planning AdWords campaigns:

(1) Loose and broad targeting, particularly of the type that addresses a mass market when you're going for a niche market. A company will say to themselves (perhaps having watched Conrad Hilton in Mad Men saying he wants to put a Hilton "on the moon"): "We want someday to be the biggest and best insurance company in the world!" But for now, they're just focusing on being top-of-mind in car insurance for high-risk drivers, especially those under the age of 25. Somewhere along the line, possibly in a text message from a golf banquet with impressive friends, the CEO forced the associate to the assistant marketing director to try broad matches for the words "insurance" and "car insurance" in the campaign. They're still eking along, in select markets, costing the company $18 per click whenever they are clicked, eating into the allotted budget for all the good stuff.

(2) Insider thinking. Companies get into their own jargon, right down into the regulatory mumbo-jumbo from arguments in Congress about all the players in their industry. The next thing you know, there are ad groups containing all the jargon about high-risk drivers -- jargon that's only ever come up in those Congress debates, in board meetings, and expensive consulting reports. People click on the ads occasionally, but they're inevitably just looking for information, not a car insurance vendor.

As these cardinal errors continue to eat away at the overall budget, the ROI for the whole campaign looks poor. The budget stays where it is. And the company concludes that the channel doesn't match the hype.

--

I got a note from a colleague who has spent years building out paid search campaigns that have formerly failed for the above reasons. Here's his tale of woe - the industry sector changed to protect the innocent:

If I can lend a "yes this is the way it works" rule to any PPC work for [insurance] that we should inscribe into our core being: Seth Godin needs to be read by every one of the people who do campaigns for them. Most of the time (probably CEO driven) they focus on the whole "getting their name out there" thing. Each new one I see is a broad, undisciplined mess. They constantly target information seekers with words like "best insurance" or "top insurance companies". The people who click those 1) Already have a vendor and are satisfied with them; and 2) Are simply looking for ideas; 3) In no way are targeted properly. The kicker is that those words are $5, $6, or $10 a click. They might as well spend that money on a TV commercial because that is akin to interruption marketing, PPC style. You can get fooled as well, because if someone has an article on top insurance companies on their site, like our client does, people will read it and stay. The bounce numbers tend to be pretty low, so if you are looking at that only, you get a false sense that the words are working. But when you look at signups, they are very close to 0%. I am not sure many of them do it, but content and blogs should be king for these sites, for those words; and they should spend that money on writing content. If you have and write articles based on all the key buzzwords like "car insurance comparison", you should get bang for that on organic search for $0. Example: "Best [(competing but ultimately very different type of) insurance]" and so on. Our new client spent $22,000 on those words via adwords. They got one person to sign up for an account. ONE! [Edit: we did more checking, and it might have been two.] Conversely: Targeted to their selling proposition of [doing more research on individuals in high risk insurance categories to offer them a break on rates if possible], those words [all having to do with insurance rates, unfair insurance rates, demographics of insurance rates] and so on, with a good ad, had $4000 spent and they got 20 people to sign up. OK, long story short: For financial services, not unlike others but especially for them, being targeted to exactly what you do if you are spending $4 a click or more is so vital it is not funny.

--

Google has worked themselves into a situation where the "idiot tax" helps Google's bottom line. So although they'd prefer it if most advertisers improved the relevancy of their advertising, the current system is built to hedge against idiocy. That being said, then, Google doesn't stand to gain a whole lot as advertisers become savvier and more efficient. In the past, the genius of the ad platform meant that Google's earnings and profits raced ahead faster than expected. During the recession, they're outperforming everyone else. But as the economy recovers, this current efficiency also means that you may not see Google grow as fast as you expect. They've wrung a lot of cash out of relatively wasteful advertising. Less wasteful practices will definitely help individual advertisers... a lot. They won't help Google nearly as much.

The Echo Chamber (Bad) and the +1 Culture (Bad and Good)

2009-10-10T10:08:00.004-04:00

Mercifully, readers, I didn't have time to post on specific topics this week.

But gathering up some high level responses to the ongoing rush of events, two stand out:

1. Struggling Against the Mirror Effect. Many pundits have warned that in setting up our social media environments using only our instincts and the technology as intended, we risk surrounding ourselves with people we already know well, or agree with, just deepening prejudice against modes of thinking outside our immediate circle. Guy Kawasaki's advice to "defocus" your Twitter relationship-building is a helpful antidote against this. "Defocus" means attempt to pick up some eclectic interests. On Twitter, I've tried this quite a bit, but talking to friends, I gather that many users can't see why they'd do that in the first place.

Anyway, I've allowed the voices of conservative commentators, nerds promoting obscure causes like walking trails on railway right-of-ways, aficionados of a specific mountain, and a variety of self-described famous digital divas who inevitably tweet about the egg yolk that just got into their hair, into my life. But after awhile, inevitably, you have to pare things down. You get so annoyed by some people, you give up on the defocus experiment and just unfollow the schmucks who seem a little too distant from your immediate concerns and tastes. I know that's what I tend to do, and I'm actually trying not to.

So on the whole, I do fear that our approaches to social media will lead to more and more strident debate in the public realm, and narcissism about personal tastes, and in the end, talking past one another.

2. The +1 Culture?

Speaking of dittoheads: Canadians like to pride themselves on independent thought vis-a-vis their gigantesque neighbo(u)r to the south. But you'd never know it from much of Canadian management culture.

In online forum parlance, "+1" is a cute, self-deprecating way of admitting that your post is just about to echo what the last person, or the thread-starter, just said. Through the gentle use of irony and shortening it down to two characters, you're at least cognizant of the fact that you could potentially be taking up more space than you're worth.

[Origination: According to Wikipedia, "A way of voting on mailing lists and forums, used by the Apache Software Foundation and other open source organizations. By extension, a way to signify "yes" or agreement (often with a quoted post) on internet forums and similar media." Hat tip to Jodi for pointing me towards the first meaning.]

Insofar as many Canadian executive positions - not least in the digital space - are merely tack-ons of a local nature managing the regional economy in a templated way on behalf of a large, impressive US-based company, long articles quoting the heads of these entities regurgitating what the firm's leadership and PR heads out of California or New York just said ... might usefully be shortened to the two-character "+1". We'd save some trees.

People (Canadian people) who are actually thread-starters - folks like the Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, and RIM co-founders Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis - are such curious creatures here, that's why at least some of us pay so much attention to them. That's not to say that as a whole, Canada particularly respects them or wants to foster them. If you want to be part of the "club," it's simply easier to join up with the +1's.

That being said: being part of a moderate, +1 culture has its benefits. Here we seem like mere +1's when it comes to joining up with American wars and causes, but in fact (as +1's to Obamamania), there are a few areas where moderation itself leads to advances. In the 17th century, Hobbes posited that avoidance of extremes -- less war, squabbling, haggling, and strife (bland consensus, even at the price of personal autonomy) -- was a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to build a nation's prosperity and commerce. Like the air we breathe, consensus is necessary to (if not sufficient for) survival. To quote one of Canada's most successful managers (namely, a political head of state known as former Ontario premier Bill Davis): "Bland works."

And sure enough, among other things, "bland" has created things like universal healthcare, the largest auto-parts supplier you'd never heard of, Magna International, and the prescient frameworks built by intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan. While there is much to be said for originating brilliant ideas and game-changing companies, there is economic value in the ability to observe, refine, perfect, and stay out of trouble in the process.

By reflecting on all this, I'm able to dampen my personal impatience with the +1's.

Bryan Eisenberg (.com): Guru, Teacher, Dad, Friend... and Just Plain Right

2009-10-01T19:56:00.008-04:00

It's unusual to post on the launch of a blog from someone you may have already heard of - in this case Future Now founder, prolific author, and globally recognized conversion improvement (Persuasion Architecture) speaker, Bryan Eisenberg.

For example, I never got the chance to say - hey guys, Seth Godin's got a blog, you should check it out! That would have been absurd. You would have found it yourself.

I probably mentioned Danny Sullivan's blog, Daggle, when I found it, because he writes so much professionally that many in the industry found it fascinating how much personal insight he snuck in over at Daggle. Just illustrating the wide range of sensibilities people bring to the mix between personal and professional. There aren't any hard and fast rules here.

Having the chance to catch up with Bryan in Norway (on a 2 hour fjord boat tour, among other things), I certainly had a great opportunity to take in the personal side. It isn't to Bryan's taste to share much of that publicly, so BryanEisenberg.com, his new site, is strictly for professional purposes.

Despite Bryan's caution with oversharing online, audiences and colleagues like Bryan for more than just what he says. They take in the full spectrum of who he is: passionate about personas, obsessed with conversions, innovative in business models, but also, Brooklynite, newly-inspired lifestyle guru, dad, and a confident speaker with a wacky sense of humor (who never fails to derail the momentum with that gross dog diarrhea example... j/k Bryan). And the reasons for him shifting the locus of operations to the website with the personal name is connected to what makes him tick today. His primary passion is speaking, writing, and teaching, so it stands to reason that to get more quality speaking gigs he should have a website that says, "hey guys, it's me, Bryan Eisenberg".

I learned a few things hanging out with Bryan last week. They fall into a few categories. The first was just some kind of confirmation about how many regular global speakers share the same attitude towards the travel thing and the places they visit. They don't party too much (it's all relative), because on their day off they want to hit the ground running and walk for many miles to take in every sight they can. And when you're walking with them, aside from the local culture and business topics, they invariably talk about family. Well, of course. They miss them!

I also learned that you can make an immensely good living if you figure out what you're passionate about and focus on that without comparing yourself to anyone else. This may be nothing new, but either the dot com bust in 2001-2 or the current economic malaise got a lot of people. Waylaid them on their march to global supremacy. Made them ask, to cite the Po Bronson book title, What Should I Do With My Life?

It just may be that Bryan's next book would be a good sequel to Bronson's. Stay tuned for more on that from Bryan.

Bryan is no longer going to work 15 hour days grinding himself into dust. He'll work more efficiently and take time out to relax, be with family, and religiously follow his new exercise and diet regimen. You guessed it: Bryan's new life dovetails with the title of a forthcoming (marketing strategy meets personal empowerment) book he'll be working on: "Trim the Fat!" In the end, I bet he winds up earning more in his newly streamlined lifestyle. But in the meantime, he'll also have strengthened his whole life, to say nothing of his heart, lungs, etc. He's lost 50 lbs. since March... and is still going.

More practically, hearing Bryan confirm his persona as a sought-after speaker was a reminder to me that there is a marketplace for fantastic, value-adding speakers. In his groundbreaking book, Free, Chris Anderson recently related the Stewart Brand clarification that "commodity information wants to be free, and scarce information wants to be expensive." Combine scarce with motivating and mobilizing, and that's information that businesses will pay for and travel for.

I tend to think the conference circuit worked itself into a glut of events overfilled with so-so speakers who are pretty fair at putting out eight minutes of material. That's OK, but there's just too much of it. Like Bryan, I don't have any intention of contributing to the glut of 8-minute sound-bite-style presentations any more than I have to in the coming years. (That's part of why you'll see me delivering a full 45 minute standalone, Advanced Paid Search Brain Candy, at SES Chicago in December.)

None of this friendly stuff would matter to most of us, though, unless Bryan's material was constantly inspiring us to test new things with our websites, whether it be using a formal tool like Google Website Optimizer in concert with tips in the book he co-authored, Always Be Testing, or applying principles more broadly to different forms of problem-solving. Bryan's brain is the main thing that motivates me to hover nearby. :)

From time to time I'll offer more concrete examples here, no doubt. But for brevity's sake, just one for now. Persuasion Architecture puts much stock in the typology of four types of information searchers based on the dimensions fast vs. slow, and emotional vs. logical -- resulting in four basic personality types: competitive, methodical, spontaneous, and humanistic. My personal take is that as psychology, this is very rough-edged. But it is also very germane psychology when it comes to our task as interface designers and marketing communicators. Eye tracking studies showing the behavior of the four types are almost hilarious in how evocative they are in showing how people's searching and comparison shopping behavior differs. Those doggone methodical people stare down every link and heading on the page!

So in Q&A after his keynote talk in Oslo, I was curious to find out why a variety of "competitive" elements (of marketing copy, interfaces, etc.) seem to repeatedly test out so well in the direct response world (Google AdWords, landing pages, purchase conversions). Is the world becoming more competitive? Are frequent purchasers skewing towards more competitive types of people?

In Bryan's view, overall the trend is for buyers to use logic more than they once did, and less emotion, at least using online interfaces. (So, competitive is a subset of that use of logic, it's just the hair-trigger version.) This may be chicken-egg. Certain interfaces prompt us to be more logical and especially competitive as to how quickly we can get to the "right" solution for us. The tools are better. Those of us who are even slightly predisposed towards this are not easily taken in by that cute hero shot - though humanistic elements may lurk in the background to support the strength of brands. In our behavior, we flit from site to site. Finding best deals, comparing from bigger inventories. Finding more unique products from companies with niche (but better) products, and being able to buy quickly while getting to know the designer (OK, so that's just a tad humanistic). We're wringing every bit of performance out of this "buy now machine" called the digital world that we possibly can.

Going against that trend may prove expensive. In a naked digital world, your customer may be wearing a more dispassionate hat than you expect. And the definition of "in a hurry" keeps changing. Everyone gets faster, even the methodicals. Hide the banana and yet another of your prospects just may puke before you can finish the sentence "my bounce rate sucks."

An Open Letter to Couples Resort in Algonquin Park

2009-10-01T14:49:00.003-04:00

To the proprietors:

I just got an email from your company today. Why? I'm on your list, because I'm a would-be customer. Because I attempted to book accommodations online. That should mean I actually stayed there, but nope. So you sending me the email is rubbing a little salt into that wound.

We planned a last minute three day holiday in early summer, in late June -- at the height of the recession, mind you.

Thinking of something a little bit different, I started doing searches for a few places right inside beautiful Algonquin Park. Most of them were booked up with groups or just expected weekend travel to kick off summer. But one, Couples Resort, had availability. It was certainly luxurious, maybe a little over the top. But let's live a little, I said! So I did the booking online, and it was done.

A desk clerk called me the next morning at 9:00 a.m. to tell me the booking didn't take, because the room I'd seemingly paid for with my credit card online, somehow got booked by someone else doing the exact same thing, perhaps a few nanoseconds before. She then tried to upsell me on whatever else was left -- up a couple of notches, as I recalled. "No problem," I said, feeling magnanimous. What I was thinking, though, was "this is a huge problem." You don't go to bed having paid for a room and want to wake up hearing that you don't have one.

I suggested that because we were in the deep depths of a recession, and because their snafu had screwed me over royally, we'd be more than happy to fill their monster standalone cottage on 24 hours' notice if they'd be willing to knock the price down by 30%. Not like they were going to sell the room now anyway.

I would have taken 10-15%. Any type of gesture. The rooms at this place are all pretty much outrageously priced, still evidently riding on fumes and memories of the boom. As someone who uses Hotwire to get 4-star hotel rooms for 55% off or better, I have limited patience for companies that talk about recession pricing and then try to sell you $400 rooms on 24 hrs. notice, without so much as a haggle.

The clerk told me there was zero (0) flexibility on the price of that huge room we didn't want, because the "computer" told her what to do.

I laughed and said no dice.

My search turned to more reasonably-priced Prince Edward County. We somehow figured out that The Inn at Huff Estates Winery is the best, most luxurious resort in all of The County. So Huff Estates it was. We enjoyed great local dinners and wine tasting, plus a lengthy walk through the dunes at Sandbanks Provincial Park.

FYI: After October 11, bed and breakfast at the Premiere Suites at Huff Estates (complete with whirlpool and patio) will only be $159 a night! What a deal!

Couples Resort, receiving your email today makes me wonder how you can stay in business. Look around you! While you talk about the recession, most everyone else in your industry adjusted to it. Purveyors of luxury four and five star accommodations truly would be empty this year without major cut price incentives.

Oh, the economy will bounce back, but some of you guys won't.

In case you forget, here was your letter to me, your "customer":

This harsh recession is ending now and it has caused a lot of heartache for many. I hope we all are doing better soon and looking forward to a much better 2010.

Like most of you, we have lost a significant amount of revenue this year. We have certainly reduced prices greatly this year in order to adjust for your pain and to help retain our occupancy. Guest stays at the Resort were down very little on the full year. As the saying goes, "We have squeezed the Nickel until the Queen Screamed" and reduced our costs significantly to meet the lower prices offered.

Thank you for doing your part and understanding our changes so that we all may enjoy this Resort for many years to come. We are pleased that as the economy is starting to stabilize we can add back in the Free Breakfasts in Bed, a highly valued service to you.

Well, thanks for the free coffee and donuts, Couples Resort. But the damage has already been done. To anyone reading, I recommend instead you check out Huff Estates Winery in Prince Edward County. You'll need to get out of bed to go to breakfast, but you can haul a plate of breakfast across the courtyard to your patio... in case your partner wants to stay in bed or near the fireplace, bring a couple of extra melon slices. All that for $159. Apparently the "computer" doesn't tell Lanny Huff and his staff what to do.

To Ev and Biz: Click Arbitrage Tips for Twitter

2009-09-25T15:34:00.005-04:00

Hi Twitter,

In light of your impending $1 billion valuation, juxtaposed with Bill Tancer's observations that Twittermania might just be leveling off, we thought we'd propose an easy, short term way that you can cheer up your investors and slow the burn rate on the large sum of cash they're about to fork over. Slower losses, less buyer's remorse for the investors... while you get the business model really figured out.

The beauty of it is, our method increases your traffic and member base, rather than demotivating your existing user base.

Since everyone from Google to Seth Godin to Iran has been donning hats ranging from grayish to dark black this week (Sidewiki, Brandjacking, and nukes, respectively), we figured our plan might not even get labeled evil. Ethics, schmethics.

The idea is simple. Buy Google AdWords keywords on every topic under the sun and run them globally, avoiding the US where the Quality Score bar may be a bit higher. Bid low. Use a lot of automation and dynamic keyword insertion.

Let's say someone is reading an article about the fashions of the G20 leaders and learns that one of them was wearing a Hermes tie. So for some strange reason, they go to Google and search for "G20 Hermes Tie." You are using an automated tool to build ad groups around broad matches of major breaking news items, like G20. So of course, you've got this one covered!

Example ad:

G20 Hermes Tie
Tweet or read tweets about
G20 Hermes Tie. 140 chars. only!
http://twitter.com

Now, you set up a custom landing page loaded with relevant text ads (from another CPC ad network, say, Yahoo), and hope the resulting ROI on the arbitrage is at least breakeven. As a secondary goal, you hope more people sign up for Twitter accounts. Insofar as this turns a profit, you can even cut into the monthly cash burn.

Target average CPC on text ads in USD: 19 cents
Target average revenue per click on same ads: 25 cents

Profit on ten million clicks per quarter: $600,000
Profit, minus management fees: $450,000

Annual revenues from ads: $10.0 mm
Annual profit: $1.8 mm (gotta start somewhere)

Annual traffic increase: 40mm visits

Presto, now you're monetizing and adding visitors without even placing ads on existing pages. Just like eBay does!

If you run into Quality Score problems - no problem. There is still a massive content targeting inventory you can use. That's a legitimate way of building an audience. And oh, so, so, so much cheaper than Yahoo's $100 million planned ad campaigns.

Your traffic and user counts will resume growth, and Mr. Tancer will have to admit as much.

Good luck with it! We know you don't need the money, but we sure are curious as to how you will eventually monetize the Twitter juggernaut. You could charge corporations for some way of putting a shiny face on their brand reputation, but something tells us this could blow up in your face.

Sincerely,

The Team

P.S. - You're welcome.

Adam Lasnik: Super Top Secret SEO Takeaways

2009-09-24T12:04:00.002-04:00

When Google spokespeople for the organic search side, such as Matt Cutts or Adam Lasnik, share their thoughts in Q&A's on the conference circuit, typically what you expect to get is three parts official Google philosophy, and one part personal insight. Sometimes you get that little extra interpretation that helps you sort out where things really are now with the algorithms, and where they may be headed. In that regard, Adam didn't disappoint in his talk yesterday here in Oslo at the SEM '09 conference, hosted by IAB Norway.

Leaving aside a relatively well-traveled topic, underscores vs. hyphens in URL's, Adam explained a couple of other interesting nuances in the Q&A part of his talk.

He put this into overall context by saying (paraphrasing here) that there are often points made by speakers at conferences where he wishes he could jump in to discredit a myth or otherwise set the speaker straight. So often, it's possible to overanalyze something and take it in a direction that just doesn't stack up with how Google's technology really works.

On that front, Adam seemed to take issue with the overall point (jumping off the SEOmoz expert survey of ranking factors, and correlations with what appear to be real rank) that keywords in URL's and domains help with rank. He suggested a couple of other reasons why this coincidence occurs (other actual causes that are actually in the algorithm). I think the point is valid, and could think of a couple of other reasons why savvy companies who happen to be putting keyword-rich URL's into the public domain happen to do several other things well; and it's these things that really cause them to gain higher rankings. IMHO a disproportionate number of high organic referral type companies (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Kijiji, etc.) have the keywords-in-URL thing covered. These guys rank well for all sorts of reasons. And as a proportion of high ranking pages, they take up a large number of 'em. So there's that skew. It doesn't follow that any old company will see a great ranking benefit from pursuing relatively trivial changes to their site architecture or nomenclature. It's a small piece of the puzzle at best. But the mindset that causes companies to do it (user experience) is the right mindset to have.

Adam went on at greater length about why H1 and H2 tags, etc., don't correlate with rank. More to come on this. It's time for dinner.

First Impression: Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain

2009-09-22T12:36:00.002-04:00

I've had the chance to race through Richard L. Brandt's new book, Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain. It's a compelling read.

Because Brandt uses no groundbreaking method (no brain scans, for example), and didn't get insider access to the Google cofounders, I was worried that there would be no original or interesting material here. That fear proved unfounded. Others around them, including Eric Schmidt, are pretty talkative. That combined with dogged, traditional research, and a judicious way of selecting the important parts of the past ten years of Google history, provides an original insight into what makes Google tick. In particular, it's a bracing reminder that Larry and Sergey alone created or fostered most key aspects of this company and (with much help of course) continue to review a vast array of innovations, technology decisions, and operational decisions at the company.

Industry pros, in particular, should read this book to sharpen their game and to improve the accuracy of their assessments of the company's motivations and intentions. The relentless innovation and product focus sets Google miles apart from competitors not only on search and advertising as a whole, but right down to individual feature decisions in a wide variety of emerging product areas.

As someone who has watched the ad auction and the search products, in particular, emerge, I'm struck once again by just how far behind and how dismissive Yahoo and Microsoft were at various stages of innovation, on key areas like how the paid search auction worked, but also, in how much to prioritize search and paid search in overall company priorities.

Mentally "sitting in" on Google's intimate decision-making meetings helps us to remember just why it is we, and consumers, adopted their superior solutions. The others weren't really trying.

The others also lacked a moral compass at many stages of evolution. It's interesting to notice how "in sync" Google was with the zeitgeist of the industry, and with the clearer thinkers and analysts who defined terms for others to debate (such as Danny Sullivan, on the issue of paid inclusion). Google was, many times over, prepared to walk away from money to treat the search engine user experience the way they felt it should be. The founders were always interested in reaching business success, but they were also extreme idealists around core principles.

In their first talks with AOL in 2000, Sergey Brin reportedly marched out of a meeting asking for a can of gasoline and a match to "burn the scum of these people off me." It's little wonder the company was so grateful at the arrival of eventual CEO Eric Schmidt.

Watching the competition unfold today, you get a recurring sense that many of us out here are being too forgiving of Microsoft and Yahoo for their fuzzy focus and follow-the-leader approach over the years on principles, features, and transparency.

Entering the Google mindset, you just want to see people buckle down and work on a product, for heaven's sakes. That's why we rallied around the YSM "Panama" development team, hamstrung as they were by weak management support. That's why we are generally excited about Bing, as a no-nonsense, full scale product effort.

But on the flipside, I think (staying within that mindset) we have every right to be impatient with dithering and corporate-speak. We have every right to feel vindicated when we look back at highly-touted search engines (like the first generation of Ask Jeeves) and conclude that compared with Google, they weren't really doing much except talking.

Staying within the Google mindset makes me very impatient with their competitors on a whole number of fronts. Microsoft's promising efforts are offset by annoyances like the CashBack program for search - a cynical program that flies in the face of why many of us showed for work in this sector in the first place. The quiet shutdown of Microsoft's analytics project, Gatineau, makes us question the true pace of product development.

I'm not a fan of quibbles, so I'm happy to look past the odd factual error or weird turn of phrase in what is otherwise a highly instructive and entertaining book. If it does have one major shortcoming, it doesn't probe enough into the dark side of Google's current power, and the sinister potential inherent in nearly unbridled idealism. It takes Eric Schmidt to say that the founders have mellowed and are more likely today to compromise on major issues of principle. Is he just saying so to appease our fears?

At the end of the day, none of us asked for a single entity to build the next Great Library of Alexandria or to organize and make universally accessible "the world's information." Anyone who believes in decentralization of power, and sound institutional design to prevent a dangerous concentration of power, would agree that the mission in itself -- conceived as the mission of a single, powerful actor -- is inherently a much greater threat than Google would like us to think.

Maybe that's why it's so irritating when Google's competitors, let alone publicly funded institutions and traditional libraries and media, won't work harder and focus better on their products and platforms.

Sorry-We're-Not-Google Campaign #385

2009-09-22T11:54:00.002-04:00

Do you, uh, Yahoo? Yahoo hopes you do, and is spending perfectly good advertising money to remind you: hey, we're out here!

Yahoo's often fallen behind when it comes to technology, but one thing's for sure: you're mighty important to them. Whatever it is you want to, uh, make of that.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Myth (2009) and Reality (2012) of Display Ad Market Efficiency

2009-09-18T10:29:00.005-04:00

Google has finally launched DoubleClick Ad Exchange with full plans to integrate the system with the AdWords platform. Although a long-anticipated development, it's still a "wow" time for our industry.

Google joins a number of other true exchanges of note, companies that have pioneered the idea of a true "bid-ask" system on display ad inventory. The most notable of these are ContextWeb, having gone so far as to dub their system "ADSDAQ," and Yahoo-owned Right Media.

The designers of such systems are the best ones to provide detailed explanations of how ad exchanges differ from ad networks, but transparency of bid and ask prices is probably how to sum it up. If you're a publisher in an ad network like AdSense or the thousands of others that have graced the industry since the 1990's, there is no direct communication with ad buyers. The intermediary tells you what you're going to get on a CPM or CPC basis, either in advance, or after the fact. You don't get to enter into a direct transaction with the buyer, and you don't have any clear sense of what the intermediary's "markup" is. That might lead publishers and advertisers to want to make a lot of individual transactions with one another, to cut out the intermediaries.

And that leads to a patchwork quilt whereby inefficient individualized ad buying and selling is taking place on "premium" inventory, and networks are stereotyped as buyers and sellers of "remnant" inventory only.

Meaning: the state of display today combines two unattractive qualities: a lack of transparency and a lack of efficiency. That there are too many networks just adds to the inefficiency problem: it's an industry ripe for consolidation.

Jonathan Mendez, in one ("The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising") of a series of complex posts, seems to agree that this is the sort of problem facing the display advertising sector. He also, however, predicts that the new exchanges will only make the problem worse: they'll "drive down media costs even further and become a new haven for performance advertising at the expense of [publishers]." If so, I suppose that's great news for advertisers. But there could be a different long-term dynamic at work. Mendez's point seems sound in that he integrates it with a perspective that shows market forces from search advertising being rudely applied to the formerly fat and happy world of display. In short, direct response is what drives much of paid search, whereas something else entirely (brand integration) is supposed to drive display, like it does on radio and TV. If display is being forced to play in the direct response world, those who formerly profited from that channel are at a loss as to what to do next as their margins (and raison d'etre) fade. If I interpret even 10% of Mendez's message right, it's sobering food for thought, regardless of how many brand channel strategists Google layers on top of its direct response and search-savvy core.

Perhaps, though, it's simply far too early to make this call. I'm drafting a potential counterpoint to Mendez's analysis that roughly says: maybe the display ad market today is simply prehistoric and inappropriately organized as far as buying and selling dynamics goes; what if it's like Google AdWords in the pre-CPC, fixed-CPM, non-tested, non-measured, clueless-buyer era of 2001? What if the number of participants in a well-designed auction matters a lot to publisher revenues, and we simply need more? What if measurement and attribution right now are in the dark ages, and the introduction of assists will help? What if new technology (features) to rate publishers, classes of inventory, characteristics of content, got built into the system for either manual or automated use? But that could be another 1,500 words.

For now, a few more thoughts on where the DoubleClick ad exchange may take us.

Here are some principles to consider:

Interoperability of networks: ecosystem sensitivity
Continued migration of ad dollars away from inefficient media
Applying the efficient auction principles of paid search to media buying as a whole
Chicken-egg scale issues
What kind of market is this? Will Google win with a capital W?

First, if a variety of networks can plug into the exchange and act as buyers, publishers may have a decent floor on their middling and remnant inventory. A "buyer" for a particular ad impression, then, could be any number of direct bidders participating in the DoubleClick exchange, or it could come in through outside networks who are also publishing in the DoubleClick exchange. That could mean a dual role for Google: (1) on one hand, hoping to create "the" platform for buying and selling ads, that improves the overall viability of the industry as it grows in size; (2) on the other, keeping the better outside networks in business, allowing them to buy and sell and even play around with arbitrage opportunities.

Second, the trend that won't appeal to traditional ad agencies and traditional publishers: dollars that can show clear ROI will be happier, so they'll be spend in this medium. The ongoing stampede continues.

Third - and this point is either scary or a forgone conclusion depending on your perspective - these principles will apply to all media someday: billboards, television, radio, product placement, etc. If you're a company like Google or Microsoft, you're thinking about organizing a platform to run that. Google did a pretty embarrassing job of doing this the first time around (radio, newspapers), which just proves you don't just snap your fingers and accomplish something like this. It's very early days.

Fourth, it looks like the early exchanges were sort of unsatisfying in the sense that their scale was understandably limited by how many participants were on either side of the transaction. If the buy isn't big enough, it's not worth the time to monitor your involvement with the platform. Signing up "sellers" (publishers) is a major prerequisite to making this work. And the pitch to them has to say something like: "we have millions of advertisers eagerly logging into our platform every day". Pretty much only Google (and maybe one or two other companies...maybe) can say that. This is a game-changer, potentially.

Point 4.5 is simply along the same lines, but it's probably important not to sidestep this issue. You don't draw up "market maker" logic in the abstract and then from there find great success. If the results to advertisers or publishers are lukewarm, they won't hide that fact, they'll simply stop using you. And unlike traditional ad networks and traditional media buying, your whole principle is that the exchange technology itself drives liquidity and sets prices. If that isn't working, you can't fall back on the sales team to grease the wheels; that would be incoherent. To date, some existing exchanges have suffered from the critical mass problems. Others have meted out condescending treatment to ad buyers, reverting to salespeople who promise to make a custom buy on the system, or work the system for you, as long as you commit to a certain budget. Hey guys, if you're trying to prevent me from logging in directly, then you're a mutual fund salesman exacting a fee; same old, same old.

So, point 5: is this a market like the one Amazon took by storm - a winner-take-all market where Google will enjoy market dominance? Or is it a market where first and second movers continue to do well (like the browser market, where Google only has 3% share, or the -opedia market, where the Google upstart product knol has nowhere the brand adoption of the original, Wikipedia)? How will Yahoo and Microsoft respond? For the record, I caught up with Jay Sears, EVP of ContextWeb, and he said: "We welcome Google to the ad exchange business. It's a terrific market validation to now have the two top exchanges in the market, including one that is independent."

We'll see how things shake out.

Something to think about: interoperable networks -- those less evolved creatures -- may do better in this ecosystem than competing exchanges. A clash of platforms is a true clash of superpowers; non-superpowers die. At most 2-3 leading platforms will win. Meanwhile, "app" creators (sub-players in the system) that work well within the leading platform are non-threatening to the leading platform makers, and don't need critical mass to be profitable within that environment.

In any case, to conclude by explaining what I meant by the title of this post: the display ad business is in a frustrating state, as every company developing products and services to serve that market seems to tell you in their booth pitch. The problem is that virtually none of these companies solve the problem; most make it worse, or sell you a futuristic solution adorned with "truthy" FAQ's, and then revert to old-school methods. In 2009, it's simply a myth that there is any satisfactory display ad system that is built to scale with a scaled-up marketplace of buyers and sellers. If that scale is reached - and I don't think it will be before 2012 - we may be in a quantitatively new ballpark.

Pump. Dump. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

2009-09-11T16:09:00.002-04:00

No company is too small or too close to the end when it comes to investors taking one last kick at the can, trying to talk other suckers into betting on a rebound.

A couple of years ago, we commented here on LookSmart (LOOK)'s not-dead-yet act. A few would-be investment gurus chimed in with comments, asking us to "look again" at the company's bright future.

As expected, a dead company became even more dead in the ensuing years. The ugly results are plain to see. Since our little chat, investors would have lost 65% on the investment, had they bought that day. One of the company's bright spots, a minor partnership with IAC, is ending soon, as announced in May. Even optimists will have trouble disputing that this company is winding down.

The Concept of Paid Search Auction Pliability

2009-09-09T17:18:00.003-04:00

Not everyone who follows this feed reads all the columns over at SEL, so I thought I'd draw attention to a core concept in my recent review of Google's new Bid Simulator tool for AdWords: PPC Auction Pliability. That is, on any given keyword, how much resistance is there in terms of bidders above and below you in the auction. Is a change in your bid likely to make a significant difference in your performance, or is it all jammed up so you're more or less stuck where you are, assuming you understand your campaign economics?

There are many ways to optimize paid search performance. I favor an integrated array of techniques, heavy on response testing.

But the "old school" concept of finding "sweet spots" in the auction, keyword by keyword, is a nice way to do a little extra legwork to decide whether to bid higher or lower in certain instances.

It's not always a good idea to look for so-called sweet spots, as some formal academic theory might suggest that in many cases, especially if you use enough automation, there aren't any. But the ideal world aside, it might be nice to know if there are a lot of "bids overhanging the market," as they say in the financial world. If a keyword auction is particularly "busy" above your bid, then you'll have to raise your bid an awful lot for little improvement in volume.

On the other hand, if you're stuck in between a couple of bidders but there isn't much activity above or below them, I consider those auctions to be more "pliable." You could go up a bit in your bid and reap volume associated with higher ad positions on that keyword. You could go down a lot and not lose too much volume (with the caveat that Google is under no obligation to serve your ad in every auction if your quality score won't support low bids, so lowball bidding can reduce volume if Google really doesn't want your dime that day). The more pliable the auction, hypothetically the more room you have to pick a bid strategy that suits you.

Case by case, it gets interesting. Take, for example, an account where you figure you've done a great job whittling average CPC's down to 23 cents. Now on a lot of the keywords that you're getting for 15 cents, you're not doing great ROI-wise, but you're reasonably content since the price is low by historic and industry standards, you don't feel like risking the effort to go down to 11 cents.

I think the bid simulator may be helpful in helping advertisers decide when to take risks like that. Shaving those few pennies on lukewarm keywords, across several hundred keywords and a thousand clicks a day, can add up to a lot of saved cash you can then turn around and devote to better performing keywords or channels (or simply, profitability).

I'm told that the Bid Simulator is now in limited release. So despite the fact that you may see it in your account or several client accounts right now, it's not in full release by any means. Its impact on Google's revenues, and advertiser performance, isn't likely to be felt until 2010.

"Old school" PPC auction jockeying may not be everyone's idea of fun - but different strokes for different folks. We're also keenly interested in when Bid Simulator data might be available through the AdWords API. This might be helpful for (for example) running dramatic one-day volume tests across an account, based on more keyword-by-keyword auction intelligence to help decide where to shake things up.

The Recession in Opportunity

2009-09-02T17:53:00.004-04:00

This is a bit high-level to be a post here, but far too long for 140 characters. So here goes.

The past couple of years in the economy has been a period of extremes not seen in many decades. To anyone familiar with historical financial indicators it will be no surprise that there is far-reaching fallout.

Standing beside the more obvious indicators, there's extreme cyclicality happening in a variety of aspects of the labor market.

During the bubble - for some people - we saw an excess of compensation, title inflation, reward for appearances as opposed to demonstrated expertise, etc. When the economy was hit hard, a lot of highly paid, widely-lauded, highly-positioned people landed in the job market. It takes time for those folks to find similar challenges in new positions. And for the undeserving, it takes time for them to adjust to more ordinary pay scales and harder work.

But that can swing the other way, as it now seems to be doing. For the most recent graduates, if this recession persists, a number of outstanding candidates won't be getting the opportunities they need to progress into responsible, upwardly mobile roles in 3-5 years time. Languishing too long in underemployment and unemployment skews the distribution of opportunity to make one's mark and "learn one's way" up the ladder.

Of course, I'm optimistic and I see plenty of jobs for the right people. But rationing out great opportunities to only a select few won't cut it. Every generation deserves a fighting chance at relevant entry-level opportunities, and the economy functions better if they get it.

That's why I tend to be an advocate of the "hold your nose and bias towards stimulus" approach, and we can't declare victory just yet. I'm no fan of the way the bubbles got created nor of the horrendous decisions to reward automakers and Wall Street for the troubles they got themselves, and us, into. But the alternative to a continued search for creative ways to jolt the economy out of freefall is no good: one of the best-educated, flexible-minded crops of recent graduates in history, sitting around gathering dust.

Sorry, Starbucks, but I'd rather see fewer baristas, and more skilled knowledge workers entering Creative Class occupations. I can get my own coffee for awhile.

What About Getting Me More Leads? Tangential vs. Tactical Conference Topics

2009-08-26T13:43:00.004-04:00

I'm trying to get into the heads of business owners. Specifically, those who come to marketing conferences to learn how to get more business, tomorrow, at a lower cost of acquisition. But I'm thinking about the needs of all growing businesses, in the end. Those who do not attend events may not attend because it doesn't seem to sync with their immediate priorities. That's important information in itself.

So I just went through a major conference agenda with a scoring system in hand. The criterion is simple. I ask if each session satisfies this condition: "Talks about how my company can get more leads or sales."

The way that's worded, it will certainly assign a lower score to sessions that could be characterized as "Important, but not Urgent," and may overrate some sessions that focus on "quick tips" that make people money fast (supposedly) while neglecting to situate those tactics in the context of priority-setting and overall grounding.

Still, as brutal as this scoring system is, I think it's a good way to identify session material that may only be there because of a sense that the topic might be hot. Or material that found its way up there because insiders debate it a lot to show off.

The scoring system goes from 0 to 4.

0= not at all.
1= very indirectly.
2= somewhat.
3= pretty well indeed.
4= yes, entirely. this session totally talks about how my company can get more leads or sales.

At a high level, the first thing you notice is that sessions that discuss industry politics, tugs of war in and across organizations, vendor priorities, etc. are going to score low. Sessions about the state of the law in some aspect of marketing are going to score low on this scale as well. Surprisingly, "advanced" and "technical" tracks also often score low. "Advanced" shouldn't just be used as a cover for someone getting up on stage and showing off. (We're all guilty at times.)

There is no doubt that many business owners need and want their people to be attending a diversity of sessions. But I certainly hope that this isn't to the exclusion of the low hanging fruit stuff that really makes people money.

In the end, both sides are important. If you don't understand search algorithms and fundamentals, you are completely out to lunch. But for conference organizers, if you start stacking the program with sessions that seem of merely academic interest, you risk turning it into a whole different type of event. Some attendees, unfortunately, will take that as a cue that the show's really about a few days off work, instead of about optimizing business when they get back.

Findings

Are you kidding? I don't think I want to get into trouble today. It's just too nice out. Here's a few thoughts though - consider them to be based a composite sketch of search marketing conferences.

Sessions that rank 0-2 on my scoring system, but people need to go despite that:

Anything about information architecture or search engine friendly site design
Universal & blended search
Quality Score
A limited selection of SEO topics that address technical issues like 301's and major no-no's that could haunt your organic presence for months or years to come

Sessions that rank 0-2 that frankly may bore you, and often bore me, at least if I'm trying to figure out how my clients are going to increase their bottom line tomorrow:

Anything about agency politics, organizational process, etc. Oh, it matters. But then again, if it doesn't apply to you, it really, really doesn't matter.
Squabbling about attribution and getting "credit" for sales
Meeting the vendors, especially from second and third tier traffic sources
Um, I'll just come out and say it. PageRank Sculpting.
Arcane legal debates
Debates about what color someone's hat is

At the other extreme, sessions about conversions, actionable insights from analytics data, specific tactics (especially when labeled "amazing"), and pretty much anything with "ecommerce" in the title ranks closer to the "4" end of the scale. Take that for what it's worth. No matter what the session is called, chances are they aren't handing out money in the aisles (with the exception of Tim Ash). When they are, you should take it.

Canpages Acquires Gigpark

2009-08-24T09:42:00.003-04:00

As an avid watcher and sometimes participant in the Toronto startup scene, I was excited to hear today's announcement that local search provider Canpages acquired Gigpark, a social networking platform that helps consumers recommend service businesses to like-minded friends. Canpages has been on the acquisition trail, making other small acquisitions of late, including what was left of Ziplocal after it ran short of cash.

Gigpark's traffic numbers are currently dismal, ranking it only 139th on the Techvibes Canada Startup index, so the acquisition must be motivated more by the quality of the platform and the team than by current user numbers.

There are several oddballs on the Techvibes list, in any case (several mature companies, standalone utilities like AjaxWhois, etc.), and it's fair to say that its compilation of numbers from Alexa, Compete, etc. offers only a very rough guide to user growth and startup potential. Some sites listed fairly far down the list have sound business models (software, ecommerce, dating) and are known quantities (Acquisio, Well.ca, Freshbooks, PlentyofFish, RedFlagDeals); others are growing but may still not be getting nearly enough traffic to be profitable yet (NowPublic); and some rank quite high but still not good enough to be considered anything but also-rans or pleasant hangouts that have lingered on past their "hot company" expiry dates (Suite101.com). (Disclaimer: I'll keep it to no comment about HomeStars, a company I am associated with.)

Cheering Section Grows for Bing, The Little Microsoft Engine That Could

2009-08-18T15:46:00.003-04:00

Naoise Osborne packs a lot of insight into this column "Bad Decision, Engine: The Problems with Marketing Search (and why Bing needs the tech vote to survive."

Osborne's key premise is that Bing is a pretty good search engine, and a healthy cross-section of users are already delighted by it. But the marketing positioning about it being a "Decision Engine" is potentially running at cross-purposes with the simple flow of communications.

It's true - for most people a search engine is a way to look stuff up on the Internet. So it's a search engine. The details may delight, but that's not something you put in the ads. New categories confuse people.

Cars have been around a very long time. And for many decades, all anyone needed to know was that Jack had just bought himself a beautiful car. The latest model. Better than last year's "car."

After 80 years of mainstream consumer acceptance of the concept of building a better car, sure, you can invent a whole new category - the "minivan," the "SUV," and reinvent that industry.

Similarly, brooms and mops are so familiar to people that a Swiffer sweeper can actually invent its own category. That type of thing's a longshot, but in the Swiffer case it worked. I'm not sure Microsoft is looking to take a longshot style bet here, though.

People have only been "searching" for 15, 10, or 5 years. Mainstream products should have mainstream positioning. So "search engine" it is.

I find this a bit strange, almost as if people's curiosity has gone in reverse as Google's product has gotten better. A pretty sizable portion of the search audience in 1996-2000 was interested in the differences between search engines. The Ask Jeeves (if it really were natural language search) technology. Metasearch so you can "search all the engines." Proportionally fewer people have time or patience for these things anymore. But that's a function of the fact that the search audience is much bigger now, and much more dependent on search and navigation, than it was in 1998.

Osborne seems to contradict himself by looking for geek acceptance of Bing, though. That's how Google succeeded (if you count journalists and librarians as geeks, given that they were the hubs in those days), but isn't Microsoft's positioning different? How are you going to win geeks over with this thing, truly? Especially if you're trying to keep that effort consistent with the very fact that you plan to lean very heavily on a $100 million TV ad campaign?

A gem near the end of the piece: "Hire John Hodgeman � people love him. If you haven�t realized it yet Microsoft, everybody hates the cocky Mac guy, and everybody loves the adorable PC guy."

Ain't that the truth.

On Benefits of Microhoo Search Scale, Disagreeing with Hal Varian

2009-08-16T14:12:00.004-04:00

I disagree somewhat with Hal Varian's (Google's Chief Economist) criticism of the theory that combining Yahoo and Microsoft in search will lead to improvements based on scale, data, etc.

Statistically, for sure, scale is already high enough that more won't apparently lead to significant improvements in either search performance or ad program performance due to the impact of data on improving relevancy. That's on paper, in the lab.

Off paper, in the real world lab:

Yahoo's reported 20% share is fiction. Globally, it's much lower. In the US, the real number is actually lower.
Data is highly granular in a number of ways. So to start, Yahoo and Microsoft have different search shares in every language and every country in the world, and different search shares in sub-regions of the world. In many, one or the other currently hold share of 1% or less. By bringing both up well over 1% and closer to say, 3%, you get a significant increase in useful data.
Even the tools that Microsoft provides for advertisers will improve markedly with a doubling or tripling of available data across all major markets, because usable data also comes in the form of highly granular data about keywords. Google doesn't have every last useful tool for researching keyword and consumer behavior: Microsoft has and will develop some really useful ones. Currently, as an advertiser trying to use the tools, you get "insufficient data".
And though this may stray somewhat from the subject of how to improve a search engine's relevancy... what about something super real-world and practical: running an ad rotation test for a group of keywords and trying to select a winning ad from a field of eight? Isn't that search marketing? Right now, no one is testing very much on any platform other than Google. I suspect they'll be more likely to try tests specific to the Microhoo audience now, rather than just porting all of their consumer feedback driven campaigns over to the Yahoo and Microsoft platforms. The current way is just guessing: really testing in the actual auction you're buying the media in, is more precise.
By "now," of course I mean when the Microsoft-Yahoo platform consolidation is complete in around a year's time.

I believe that Varian's assumption is mainly wrong because he's giving his competitors credit for having more consistent share across all major segments than they actually do. Aggregate numbers look impressive, but the information is less consistent as you drill down. Doubling or tripling the available information in any given segment, especially small ones, is bound to be helpful.

To double predictive accuracy, Varian suggests you need "four times as big a sample". Well depending on whether you're looking at it from the standpoint of Microsoft or Yahoo for any given teeny tiny segment, the number of instances where one of them now has "four times as big a sample" is going to be very high. Doubling predictive accuracy on teeny tiny segments - either as a search advertiser or a researcher looking into search trends - is our bread and butter out here. We'll take the "bogus" scale of the Microhoo deal any day.

P.S. I loved Varian's other insights, including the interesting note on the emergence of the "micro-multinational" type of growth company. Though I might have to take a run, at some point, at the recurring Google theme about "communication costs basically going to zero." The costs for collaborative tools have gone close to zero. But...

Google, Zappos, and the "New PR" - Communications Savvy Must Be Distributed Across Your Company

2009-08-15T10:59:00.005-04:00

This isn't really a post about Google per se, but working with different Googlers at different levels, and reading their various public statements and blogs, and hearing Googlers speak and interact with the public, definitely hammers the point home. It's a huge company. Their people are well trained, well spoken, and well scripted. But everything can't be scripted, and they'd come across as awfully spooky if they walked around "muzzled".

Typically in the good old days, public relations messages were controlled. And people in companies were supposed to communicate sparingly and always "check back to base" before sharing with the public.

In companies still controlled by traditional top-down PR concepts, this seems like the right thing to do. To everyone else, it seems not only old-fashioned, but unworkable.

The Zappos legend is one of radical openness - one of allowing reporters to walk around and talk to any old employee. No surprises, no secrets.

I thought of this again when posting a response to a customer on a consumer review site I work with. A little part of me said, well maybe I should be collaborating on the team before I post my responses, to make sure we are all on the same page. But you know what? If we always did that, our responses would sound canned and we wouldn't sound like real people. And the speed of the business would slow to a crawl. Especially in the digital world, a slow business is a dead business.

What it comes down to is this: everyone in your organization needs to be someone you can trust to do a good job of representing your brand and helping out a reporter or customer when they're seeking information or ideas. Scary from the standpoint of traditional PR, but most of all, an opportunity to reflect on whether your people have your full confidence: do they know their stuff, do they have good judgment, are they social media savvy, do they know how to make it clear that there's a difference between them thoughtfully considering an issue in their unique human way and official company policy, etc.? And if they aren't quite up to speed on all that, maybe there's an opportunity for company-wide education - not about how to stonewall, but how to naturally reach out to the ecosystem based on the relative transparency of the "new PR".

When more people are qualified and willing to speak on behalf of the company at a moment's notice, you can get more done. You can draw customers into the dialogue, and solidify your role as a partner. It's a mistake to imagine that there is any other way to go about it. That's especially true in companies that have all sorts of responsible people working on hundreds of products, in dozens of divisions.

The "letting go" attitude also strengthens accountability and responsibility in more people in an organization and even outside it. That reinforces the idea of partnership. Think about the difference between two celebrities or CEO's who come to a major interview. One has had his "people" control which questions can and cannot be asked, and wants their bio to be structured in a certain way. The other has her people inform the magazine that (unflattering photos aside) the choice of questions and biographical portrayal are in the reporters' and editors' "capable hands". Who do you think is going to think harder about their real role as a responsible journalist? The one who is told what to say? Or the one who is asked to exercise their judgment?

Google Asks for Feedback on Future of the Advertising Programs

2009-08-13T11:24:00.002-04:00

Comments or questions from all advertisers are being solicited by Google as they enter a new era of planning. Nick Fox provided a URL in yesterday's keynote that is the home of a new forum area - the SES Keynote Feedback Forum - where Google's advertising team will interact with anyone interested in this ongoing discussion.

Fox's Ad Insights (I)

2009-08-12T17:20:00.002-04:00

In his SES keynote today, Nick Fox rolled out new material. If not news announcements per se, the talk contained high level talking points about fresh directions the Google advertising programs will take, as well as a review of some possibly outmoded assumptions that have driven the ad formats, keyword auction, and product mix to date.

Two of the key takeaways for me at this juncture are:

Small local businesses like plumbers (but importantly, many other types of businesses) shouldn't necessarily have to mess around with custom keyword research. Their business type and advertising objectives should theoretically translate more seamlessly into a media buy, at least removing some of the intermediate steps and experimentation so many of us are accustomed to. How quickly Google moves forward with ad programs that reflect this principle is anyone's guess. But it's quite possible you'll see a mix of parallel offerings: more attention paid to classifieds, product feed uploads, etc.

The end of the Model 'T' ad format? Nick mentioned the Henry Ford "you can have any color, as long as it's black" analogy, tying it to the current search ads format: "you can have any kind of ad, as long as it's got a blue headline, two lines text, and a green display URL." He seemed to imply that Google could begin experimenting more radically with ad formats, even on Google's own sites, and maybe even on the core AdWords inventory - search results pages.

Perhaps noteworthy: in a recent post here, I compared the current state of Google (in need of more easy-to-follow search listing processes and ad buying that ordinary businesses can understand) to the Progressive Era (roughly the same era as the Model T).

Nick Fox Nude

2009-08-12T15:33:00.002-04:00

In about 20 minutes time I'll have the distinct pleasure here at SES San Jose of introducing Nick Fox, Google's Business Product Management Director for AdWords. Nick won't actually be nude, but the headline is a bit catchier than my alternate, "Quality Score Revealed by Nick Fox Fully Clothed."

And given that no one has yet tried to rank on the phrase "Nick Fox nude," I thought it was high time someone did. I do, however, refuse to bid on the phrase. Organic rank is free, right? ;)

I'm looking forward to Nick's influential insights, as always.