Google gave an all-access pass via-YouTube to check out their annual Google I/O keynote. It’s a massive 3.5 hours on the future of search from Google’s perspective. (Great photo moments from the keynote are found here - thanks ReadWrite.)   I’ve plucked out three search-related takeaways for upcoming products and services that Google announced during the keynote.

Answer, Converse, Anticipate: The Future of Search at Google

Google has come right out and said it – they’re working on search beyond keywords. The mantra pushing them forward:  Answer, Converse, Anticipate.

Knowledge Graph is the initial technology that is propelling them toward this vision. The ultimate goal of the Knowledge Graph is to understand unique entities as well as the connections and relationships that exist between them.

An example they gave to show off this technology – a simple web query asking for the population of India.

Not only will Google answer your question without having to leave Google. They now also anticipate your next question and provide extra information within the context of the initial question. For the query regarding the population of India, Google also shows the population of China and the US, along with a trend-line comparing the three countries.

In terms of conversing, Google’s ultimate goal is to have searchers ask Google questions just like one would ask a friend. Their voice recognition and natural voice understanding features have been pushed across all devices through Chrome. This is all done through what Google calls, “no interface”, meaning Google can be activated through voice only – with the command “OK Google…” Ask your question, and Google will speak the answer back to you.

If you ask a follow-up question, Google is able to answer with the context of the previous question in mind. The demo Google gave of this was a woman planning a day trip to Santa Cruz. First she asks Google – “Ok Google, show me things to do in Santa Cruz.” Google recognizes her query and pulls up search results associated with Santa Cruz.

She is slightly worried about the drive time for the trip, so for a follow-up question she asks, “OK Google, how far is it from here?”

Google responds “The drive from your location to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is 73 miles.” This is a pretty amazing response to a query that uses no identifying location for “it” and “here”.

Google Wallet to Battle Mobile Purchase Abandonment

Mobile abandonment rate on purchases is around 97%. The average check-out process is 21 steps on your phone. These are staggering metrics, and obviously, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Google’s looking to standardize check-outs across all devices. Through Google Wallet and Chrome, they’ve cut the number of steps down to three. Google will sync all purchasing info between your devices so that when you go to check-out you simply press checkout, review billing and shipping, and then hit submit.

Google+ Experience Upgraded

Google+ just got a nice upgrade across all devices. You’ll now see a multi-column layout, allowing for increased visibility with your content. Along with design changes, Google has also rolled out a number of new features and components for Google+. They’ll choose your best photos out of large sets by eliminating those that are blurry, duplicates or poorly exposed. They are now able to dynamically recognize your location based on landmarks, as well as pinpoint the individuals that are in the photos with you if they are within one of your Google+ Circles.

Overall, the keynote was an impressive showcase of the Google feature and service roadmap. Larry Page made it very clear in his closing remarks that they are definitely “just getting started.”

If you’d like to discuss how your business aligns with the future of search, please contact our Webtrends Performance Marketing team by emailing Ryan Humm at Ryan.Humm@webtrends.com.

At Webtrends, we’re all about constructive criticism.  So, when a customer queried us on Twitter recently about password security we began asking ourselves about why and how we do our best to ensure the highest level of password security.  And then we started to think about what lessons everybody out there might be able to learn about their personal data security – as well as their enterprise account security – from our standards.

And, trust us, data security is an increasingly important issue what with there being one new identify theft victim every three seconds last year.

First off, something that we think is important here at Webtrends is that we provide our clients with settings to let them control the level of security for their account.  Settings that, of course, meet a baseline of security requirements:

Some of our default Analytics/Segments security settings are:

• By default, allowing users to save login information on a local computer is disabled
• Users can set how many days of inactivity triggers automatic account lockout between 30 and 999 days, but this setting is by default disabled
• Users can customize the number of previous passwords disabled for re-use between 1 and 10 – our default is 5
• Users can also configure the number of days between required password changes (between 15-999); our default is 90 days
• You can set how many failed log in attempts trigger a lockout (between 3 and 10); the default is 3 (so be careful!)
• Most importantly, we require – and enforce – what we consider to be strong passwords

What goes into a “strong” password?  Our passwords must comply with the following rules:

•  At least 8 characters
• Both upper- and lowercase letters (a-z, A-Z)
• Contain at least one number (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
• Contain at least one symbol (` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + -={ } | [ ] \ : ; ? , . /)
• Not be part of your username
• Not contain your first or last name
• Not contain spaces
• Not exceed 20 characters
• Not match your 5 previous passwords – can be set between 1 and 10)
• Initial temporary passwords must be changed within 8 hours.

Bonus tip for everyone out there: at Webtrends we encourage employees to use passphrases instead of shorter passwords.  Passphrases are longer strings composed of random words separated or not by spaces, and sprinkled with numbers and or symbols, such as “blue Horse 5wimming mercY”.

Strings like these composed of real words interspersed with symbols or numerals in place of letters “sound” more natural in our minds and are therefore easier to remember.  They’re also simpler and faster to type.  The length and additional odd characters increase the difficulty of cracking the passphrase/password.

However, as hackers have shown again and again, there is no online Fort Knox.  And while some speculate that advances in processing power and computational speed are steadily deteriorating password security, passwords still remain the most universal, cross-platform authentication mechanism in practical use.

And, as you can see above, we strive to make ours strong.  New password and encryption approaches are constantly being experimented with and Webtrends monitors these developments closely to stay at the forefront of data security.

Meanwhile, passwords remain the industry standard for data security.  Take a moment to review our standards above once more.  Do your personal passwords meet our definition of a “strong” password?  If not, do you think it might be worth it to take a few minutes to meet those standards?  After all, the average identity theft case costs about $630 and 33 hours to resolve. 

Here is our official Privacy Statement. Let us know if we can help answer questions about privacy and the protection of your data. It’s important to us.

When I was in graduate school, I took a Marketing class that, though I did not realize it at the time, has shaped the way I look at every marketing engagement that I encounter. We had to develop one marketing plan every week for 15 weeks. That’s 15 marketing plans. The framework for these plans was always the same. The first step was to develop objectives. These objectives were specific, measurable and had to have a time frame associated with them. The next step would be to create the strategies and tactics to achieve the objectives. I’m going to focus this post specifically on objectives because you can’t achieve anything without a specific measurable goal.

All objectives must be SMART:

1)     Specific

2)     Measurable

3)     Attainable

4)     Relevant

5)     Time-bound

When I started my career in the advertising agency business, my boss would always say to our clients, “what’s it going to take to get an A on this assignment?” When I first heard it, I thought it seemed pretty elementary. But as he repeated this over and over with every new client and engagement it began to make sense. What he was trying to get out of the conversation was a SMART objective so at the end of the client’s campaign we knew if we had achieved their objective. If we hit their goal then we would have a happy long-term client. If we went into the engagement without an objective, how could we measure success? A pretty website or an award-winning campaign that doesn’t drive to a business or marketing objective isn’t going to get you repeat business or make your client look like a hero to her boss. However, achieving defined and measurable objectives such as a 10% increase in website conversions within a year after launch, or a decrease in cost per conversion by 15% in three months because of effective campaign strategies, will.

This may seem like ‘Marketing 101′ to some. But all too often, when I ask a client or potential prospect “What are your marketing objectives for the year, or, what are your marketing objectives for this campaign?” they are not able to articulate the correct answer. I get responses like, “Our budget is $xxx,xxx” or “We want to create more engagement, or increase our conversions, or increase our cart size” without any specific number in mind. When I push for specifics, I get a blank stare and a repeat of what they just told me.

Below are some SMART objectives we here at Webtrends are currently working toward and how we are measuring them.

Objective: Increase click through-rate from .5% to 1.75% by April 1

Measurement: Webtrends leverages our Webtrends Ads platform to optimize to multiple KPIS, one being click-through rate. We have achieved our objective for the quarter and are now working toward a 3% click-through-rate for July 1.

Objective: Achieve 15% social share of voice by April surrounding a set of keywords

Measurement: Webtrends leverages our social listening platform to determine the clients’ share of voice around a set of keywords. Our client is in red. As you can see we are almost at our desired objective and we report progress to our client on a monthly basis.

 Objective: Search Engine Rankings      

• Achieve position 5 or better for keywords 1,2,3,4,5,6
• Achieve position 10 or better for keywords 7,8,9

Measurement: Webtrends leverages our search engine ranking solution to monitor and report our search engine optimization efforts.

If you’d like us to help you achieve your digital marketing objectives, please contact our Webtrends Performance Marketing team by emailing Jared Roy at Jared.Roy@webtrends.com. The Performance Marketing team starts every engagement with specific, measurable and timeframe-based objectives and reports our progress weekly to our clients. This way we know we’re headed for that A on the assignment.

Last week, Mike Ricci and I attended the Mobile Marketing Association Forum conference in New York. Having a background in Mobile, this is by far my favorite conference. Mostly because its subject matter, attendees and sponsors tend to be more sophisticated in the Mobile space. It is good to rub elbows and have discussions with people who are interested in taking their Mobile initiatives to the next level as opposed to those looking for ways to get involved in the Mobile arena.

This was the first time since I’ve been at Webtrends that I attended as simply an attendee and not as a sponsor or speaker. So it was awesome to be able to sit in as many sessions as possible and soak in the knowledge being shared. Here are some of the over-arching themes I was able to pick up:

Relevance, Speed and The Cross-Channel Experience

Every speaker came back to the same mantra or derivative thereof: If you deliver relevant content at the right time to a targeted consumer you will have higher engagement and a better experience with the brand. Now while that may not seem all that profound, it is a HUGE struggle for Mobile marketers. With this, everyone acknowledged that Mobile is not a silo or stand-alone channel but rather a cross section of the cross-channel experience. You can’t be successful in Mobile marketing if you aren’t taking ALL of your other channels into consideration.

If I could have had $5 for every time I heard the following words I would have walked away a millionaire:  Mobile, Social, Measure, Relevance, Optimize, Engagement, Target, Ads, ROI, Relationship, Privacy and Data. The white board below, drawn during one of the  sessions, really says it all as far as overtones of the day:

Leveraging Data is Crucial in Mobile Marketing

It was hard to find a session that didn’t either focus on or mention the importance of leveraging data in Mobile Marketing. While it was a popular topic it was also a source of frustration for pretty much everyone. One of the main reasons it is a hurdle is because of the lack of cross-departmental collaboration within organizations. The Social team has objectives they are measuring, the Sales team has objectives, the Lead Gen team… and so on and so on. And guess what? Mobile falls smack dab in the middle of all of this. So while a department may have a small data set to focus on, it is blind to everything else that is contributing to the brand at large. The question of “how are things working together?” is one that requires internal collaboration and disciplines that are hard to establish at the rate of Mobile growth and complexity.

On the topic of Mobile data, the day before the official conference began, the MMA held a series of workshops – one of which was the MMA Analytics Committee of which Mike is a co-chair and I am a member. When Mike presented, this was the slide that everyone in the room kept taking pictures of:

Naturally a slide like this spurred a lot of conversations – all of which Mike captured as a way to evolve this slide for the Analytics Committee moving forward. It was nice to see Webtrends at the forefront of the Mobile Measurement conversation driving the vision.

Adverting is the lifeblood of Mobile marketing, and privacy is in its way

Delivering more relevant ads to consumers will always be a hot topic. With Mobile it seems the advertising opportunities are nearly endless with the ‘always on, always on the go’ consumer. But there also seems to be endless challenges. One issue that continually was brought up, was understanding the user’s behavior across multiple devices. So if a consumer looks something up on their laptop, then grabs their phone on the go to continue that experience, how do Marketers know this is the same user?

Much like all marketing, advertising is the lifeblood and usually the stats on future advertising spend are the key indicators of how serious you should be taking your Mobile marketing efforts. The ever-changing landscape is the main reason why many attendees come to the MMA conference – so they can figure out ways to be more efficient in reaching their targeted audience.

Mobile adoption continues to climb beyond comprehension

I think it has become tradition for speakers, myself included, to start talking about their topic by reaffirming that Mobile is on fire. At this point no one was bold enough to say “this is the year of Mobile!” since that saying has been driven into the ground every year for the past decade or more. However, the message of “Hey guys, I think we’ve got something here and you should take it seriously!” is still strong.

The numbers are staggering. Here are a few from the AT&T Adworks team:

• 248.8MM U.S. Mobile phone users in 2012
• Non-Smartphone users: 127MM
• Smartphone users: 115.8MM
• Projected growth of Smartphone users in 2013: 137.5MM
• Currently there are 108.6MM tablet users

Oh, and this was the most popular “WOW” picture shared and talked about at the conference that shows the 2005 announcement of Pope Benedict XVI compared to the 2013 announcement of Pope Francis. Nothing says “Mobile Adoption” quite like this pic:

The MMA released the “Economic Impact Study”

On the topic of Mobile adoption, the MMA released the first objective and comprehensive overview of U.S. economic performance across the Mobile marketing industry. The research was conducted by Peter A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Joseph Plummer, Ph.D., of mLightenment with Google, mBlox, The Coca-Cola Company, Target and ExactTarget sponsoring the study.
You can view the study here.

Here are some highlights from the study to show just how fast this channel continues to evolve:

• In 2012, the Mobile Marketing ecosystem generated $139 billion of incremental output to the U.S. economy. With a projected annual growth rate of 52%, that number will rise to $400 billion nationwide by 2015.
• Despite a recessionary economy and unstable job market, Mobile Marketing created 524,000 jobs in 2012. Focusing on the next five years, Mobile is predicted to generate 1.4 million jobs across the U.S.

• To highlight Mobile’s impact on the marketing community, we measured Mobile Marketing spend by industry category. In 2012, marketers and retailers spent $6.7 billion on Mobile Marketing with a projected increase to $19.8 billion by 2015.

• Marketing Impact Ratio (MIR) was also calculated by measuring Mobile sales impact against marketing expenditure. MIR peaked at $20.77 in 2012. While we were reviewing the MIR data, an unexpected insight was raised. It seems as though Mobile Marketing has yet to experience the law of diminishing returns. Though this observation requires further exploration, it has the potential to distinguish Mobile as one of the most valuable marketing platforms.
• The “MMA Mobile Marketing Impact Study” also introduces a critical concept, the “Mobile-enhanced economy,” in which mobile converts every object into a medium and every place into an opportunity for a message.
• It would be impossible to evaluate Mobile’s economic impact without addressing privacy and the current legislative climate. In order for Mobile sales, employee resources and marketing spend to continue to grow, the Mobile industry needs room to evolve responsibly and foster innovation without undue constraint from legislators, regulators or private sector bodies.

Other key points from the conference

• Responsive and adaptive design is taking root rapidly and email marketers are beginning to utilize these approaches to remain relevant on the Mobile screen.
• There was a lot of focus on the importance of optimization for Mobile Apps and Mobile Web for the small screen. More and more marketers are realizing the importance of optimization to drive greater engagement, relevance, conversion and ROI.
• Fascinating focus on real-time bidding and Mobile Ad networks. Players like Turn, X+1 and Rubicon Project were all front and center talking about using data to find given users on Mobile. Real-time visitor-centric technology like Webtrends Streams can be vital to the evolution of these ad networks.
• Brands like Home Depot, Target, Starbucks and Macy’s were present and talked about how they now lead with Mobile as a part of a larger omni-channel strategy. The presentation by Home Depot’s CMO Trish Mueller was especially fascinating because she spoke about all the key roles that Mobile is now playing in assisting their customers’ shopping experience and serving localized content (store inventory and locator info, relevant offers, push alerts, etc.) to their Mobile-centric users.

Overall it was an A+ conference and I am already looking forward to the next. Maybe I can convince Webtrends to send me to France in June for the next MMA conference?

- Mr. Diggles

]]> http://blogs.webtrends.com/2013/05/mobile-marketing-forum-2013-the-ricci-recap/feed/ 0 http://blogs.webtrends.com/2013/05/more-clicks-less-conversions-valuable-insight/ http://blogs.webtrends.com/2013/05/more-clicks-less-conversions-valuable-insight/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 22:58:10 +0000 Stacia Secreriat http://blogs.webtrends.com/?p=20466

As we announced a couple weeks ago, we’ve been experimenting with our ‘Contact Us’ button on our solutions pages to try and increase clicks (and ultimately, conversions to fill out a contact form).  Our first round of testing resulted in a successful 205% lift in clicks, so we were eager to try out more styles and see if we could get that number even higher. After all, we were high on a “mess with success” rush and couldn’t wait to get more clicks. What ended up happening was actually a bit more complicated than that.

This time around we used our new button in the left hand navigation as the control. Feeling confident that the specific messaging of “I’m interested in <solution>” would convert to qualified leads, we decided only to test those button styles to make them more noticeable. Here’s what we tested.

For the right side button, we chose the winning button style from round one but decided to play with the wording. We thought that “find out more” might have gotten such high clicks because the text was misleading. Perhaps visitors were clicking through expecting to get more information or download something, not fill out a form. So we changed the wording to a more concrete step in the sales process, “get started.” Here are the scenarios we ran on the right side of the page.

The winning combination ended up being option B on the left side (13.20% lift) and option F on the right side (96.21% lift). The combination together brought a total overall lift in clicks of 96%. Not bad after our previous 205% lift, but digging deeper into the data told a more discouraging tale. While our overall lift in clicks is up over the first test, our conversion to form fills actually decreased. In the first test we not only got 205% lift, but we had a 34% conversion of those clicks to completed contact forms. In the second test however, we got an additional 96% lift, but our conversions to completed forms decreased to only 22%. Even the numbers of conversions themselves were lower, not just total percentage of conversions. This was discouraging news. On the one hand, we’d achieved our goal. But it had actually hurt our lead numbers.

So what does all of this data tell us?  The moral of the story is that you have to find the right mixture of success for your marketing efforts. While our original goal was to increase clicks, that doesn’t get us very far if we are actually losing out on conversions to leads. It’s important to look at the whole picture and decide what metrics are important to you (in our case form fills) and what metrics you’re willing to let go of (we’re taking a hard look at whether clicks is as important as we’d originally thought).

We still aren’t sure exactly what about this combination led to decreased form fills, but we’ll keep testing until we find our right mix. Now that we’ve gotten significant lift in clicks, we’re going to shift focus to this mix for success. We’re currently evaluating the user behavior on our solutions pages to see what other actions are compelling for people who click to contact us. What steps do they take first? What are our top referring pages? How long are the converted visitors on the page before they click? At the same time, we are re-evaluating our form itself, to see if the problem lays somewhere in length or look of the form. As always, we’ll keep you updated about what we find.

Get more info on this test series and check out our other testing topics at Webtrends Backstage Access.

Last Wednesday, Webtrends was honored to have been one of a selected handful of companies that were invited to Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer Summit at their Menlo Park offices.   As with any of the partners that were invited to this Summit, we’re bound by an NDA that prohibits us from sharing most of what was presented there.   But, “the Social Network” has been in the news quite a bit this week and most of it relates to what’s unfolding with the mobile monetization story and some of the new ways in which Facebook has chosen to look at itself.   Since this course was set in motion long ago at a similar Developer Summit, I feel safe in commenting upon how well they’ve embraced these new realities and honestly – they have executed extremely well on their strategy.

Most of us will recall all the attention that was placed on Facebook’s less than illustrious IPO.

The stock quickly tanked after many analysts looked at the explosion of mobile-related Facebook traffic and questioned whether the company had a viable monetization strategy.   Ironically, a similar Developer Summit, which happened prior to that, set in motion a slew of innovations around mobile ad units (app downloads, sponsored stories, etc) that were often the collaborative efforts of many partners in their critical developer ecosystem.

Fast forward to this past Wednesday; while I was on campus, Facebook was also releasing it’s latest earnings ($1.46bn vs $1.44 expected) to Wall Street, and while they exceeded expectations it was how they did it that got everyone’s attention.  In their release, the company disclosed that 30% of its total advertising revenue now stemmed from MOBILE advertising.  So, in less than a year, a plan set in place at a previous Developer’s Summit has paid very large and important dividends.

What was also interesting was to see all the critics line up to pile their criticism on Facebook’s recently announced “home”.   Home is essentially both device and Android OS user experience.   Critics called it Facebook 24/7 and wondered openly how many mobile users would embrace this kind of “in your face” experience and wondered whether Zuckerberg and Facebook may have “laid an egg.”.  While that remains to be seen, I honestly wouldn’t side up with the skeptics because most of them were the same people saying that Zuck had no plan to monetize mobile.

What the critics are missing is the fact that Facebook’s users have become HIGHLY mobile and HIGHLY engaged.  In fact, here’s a few points which underscore that:

• The company recently disclosed that it now has approx. 1.1bn USERS WW.
• Americans now spend more time on Facebook Mobile than they do on the website.
• WW their Mobile Active Users (MAUs) have increased from 488m in Q1-12’ to 751m in Q1-13’.
• The amount of users connecting to Facebook via mobile only has grown from 83m in Q1-12’ to 189m in Q1-13’.
• The amount of time spent with mobile is growing at 14x the rate of the desktop web (eMarketer Oct 2012)
• Of all time spent in apps, nearly 40% of it now stems from “social” and the vast majority of that is Facebook (eMarketer – Feb 2013)
• 3800 developers used Facebook’s new mobile app download units to drive over 25m downloads (Facebook earnings released from WED)
• Facebook is now the 2^nd largest mobile display advertising network – behind only GOOG – and that all took place in a tiny amount of time.

With some of these facts in mind, understand that Facebook HOME is all about:

• Capturing even more new Facebook users.  The more users FB adds, the more ad dollars it continues to attract.
• Increasing the amount of interactions with “The Social Network” and ultimately delivering more available ad units.

Now, will HOME be a smash success or begin to encroach on the marketshares of stallwarts like APPL, GOOG, RIM or MSFT?  Absolutely not; nor do I believe that Mr. Zuckerberg sees himself as necessarily competing in that space.   Instead, he’s come up with another ingenious means of immersing the user in a mobile Facebook experience that allows him to serve rich media advertising experiences on a highly targeted basis.   In that vein, he will have succeeded well beyond what these skeptics are projecting and don’t be surprised if a year from now those same critics are scratching their heads and wondering how he did it.

Facebook’s continued success rests on the fact that they have very adeptly embraced a few key realities:

• Mobile is SOCIAL and SOCIAL is mobile.   It sounds trite but a large majority of mobile traffic is socially focused and FB not only understands this but has created an acceptable means of serving ads into this environment that appear to be news (sponsored stories) or invite you to like or download something your friends have.
• Facebook does not see itself as a platform, a publisher, an OS provider, an app developer or anything other than a premier MARKETING solutions provider.   And as their performance in this past year suggests – they are well on their way to executing on this vision.
• They understand the world is going mobile at the speed of sound and they want to own the lion’s share of the social traffic that stems from these devices.

The success of any social program is ultimately determined by its ability to connect on a 1:1, human level. But what does it actually mean to be human in social media?

Is it having a fun and engaging brand? Speaking in everyday, colloquial language? Establishing a more relatable – even intentionally non-corporate – online presence?

To an extent, but these are surface symptoms. The core issue lies much deeper, in the nuances of how we interact with one other.

Specifically, there’s a phenomenon in linguistics known as “code-switching.” It refers to when a person alternates back and forth between multiple languages in a single conversation. Recently, a team at NPR has dived into this concept, elevating it beyond linguistics and identifying its prevalence and significance on a cultural and sociological level.

One writer, Gene Demby, points out how most of us do this every single day at work. We adopt a corporate tone when speaking to our superiors or coworkers. Then a friend or family member calls and we morph into an entirely different – perhaps even seemingly completely opposite – persona. The key, though, is that both voices are still inherently us. As Demby writes: “Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves…hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities – sometimes within a single interaction.”

The implications of this in social media are massive. Social already blurs – and is on the way to obliterating – the line between professional and personal. Combined with our nature to code-switch, that means two huge shifts in how we need to approach social as brands:

1. Understand users don’t approach corporate content solely as corporate people.
Code-switching not only illuminates the fact that we express various aspects of our personality at different times, but it also reveals that all of these aspects are – at all times – fundamental parts of our make-up. By extension, all of these components of our personality come together to affect our decision-making, preferences and actions.

In other words, when a user comes across your Twitter handle or Facebook feed, they don’t suddenly transform into a “professional-only” mode that consumes, filters and reacts to content based 100% on their company and career. No, their professional persona may take center stage, but their entire thought process is also influenced by the less apparent parts of their personality: the fact that they’re a parent, enjoy rock-climbing, are coming off a rough week or live in a city.

As marketers, we need to embrace this fundamental nature of user behavior; namely, that people act, engage and respond not solely as professionals, but as nuanced human beings. Users are not simply – and absolutely cannot be solely treated as – potential sales. Our campaigns, programming and offers must be built to connect with users on that human level – which encompasses, but is not wholly defined by – their professional status.

2. Learn the art of authenticity.
Understanding the complexities of code-switching users and the need to connect on a human level doesn’t mean we abandon our marketing objectives, though; we still have businesses to run and revenue to generate. But it does mean we rethink how we communicate and present our brands.

Think about it: if connection needs to take place at a human level, then our brands must also become human. Connection only occurs when there is a convergence between two parties who find something in common. If the user is approaching from a professional-and-personal perspective, and we only approach from a professional one, we’ve already limited how effective our engagement can be.

Being a humanized brand means learning the art of authenticity. It means being genuine, being passionate about whatever it is your brand is and does. Just like in everyday life, people respond most to others who are perceptibly and consistently real. And that’s why it’s an art, not a formula. Authenticity, in the long run, can’t be manufactured or faked.

What This Means For Your Brand
Every corporation, no matter how buttoned-up, no matter its product or service, has a unique personality. Being human in a social media, then, involves identifying all aspects of that personality – even the less obvious or less corporate ones – and embracing them as a whole. From there, the surface symptoms we referenced at the beginning of the article – tone, language, aesthetics – will be easier to define.

The beauty, though, is that there’s always room for a brand’s personality to expand and express itself in new ways. Just as various parts of our individual personalities can evolve – without compromising who we are at the core – brands can similarly introduce concepts and experiences that reveal more of what they’re passionate about, without deviating from their key values, objectives or principles.

It won’t happen overnight. It may even be painful. But discovering how to be authentic, to be genuine, is an exercise that will only help a business in the long run.

Because at the end of the day, people connect most with real.

This week, I have been recapping key content presented at the recent Forrester Forum for Marketing Leaders. In my first post, I highlighted the event’s focus on Mobile as the future for digital marketers and consumers. In  my second post, I discussed the importance of mobile measurement, going forward.  In this concluding post, I will recap Nate Elliott’s closing session on the Perpetually Connected Customer and provide key takeaways from the event.

In the closing keynote of the event, Forrester analyst Nate Elliott focused his session on explaining how the Perpetually Connected Customer (PCC) is changing everything for marketers.  He offered up the notion that the 100+ year old “purchase funnel” is no longer a relevant means for marketers to look at the relationship with their consumers.  In its place, he offered a new model that takes into consideration the reality that is the new digital world.   He calls it the Customer Journey Lifecycle – meaning that customers are generally in one of four key stages (Discovery, Exploration, Buy, Engage.) Nate also stressed that there are distinct channels that are most effective in reaching the consumer in each of these stages.

For instance, when customers are in the discovery and buy phase, they use laptops and desktopsand are engaged with activities like search and exploring the brand’s website. Likewise, they may also be spending a good deal of time in a “bricks and mortar” retail store:

When consumers are in the engagement phase they are typically interacting with the brand via email, Facebook, Twitter or perhaps via a branded mobile app:

With this new marketing reality, Mr. Elliott encouraged marketers to embrace a new approach to their marketing programs that he described as ‘RaDaR’ (reach and depth and relationship) and he encouraged marketers to look at that in the following way:

Mr. Elliot went on to recommend that marketers stop organizing around channels as they historically have.  It’s an increasingly obsolete model that looked like this:

In lieu of that approach, he encouraged marketers to organize themselves around the RaDaR model:

In summary, the Forrester Marketing Leadership forum offered marketers the following key takeaways:

• Mobile has fundamentally transformed the landscape; going forward, marketers need to embrace this reality and stop treating mobile as a sideshow. As the picture from the Pope’s announcement  in my first post underscored, in the future, it’s all about mobile.
• Measurement is mission critical to success in the new world order. Enlightened marketers understand that “omni-channel” measurement is the correct approach. Embracing point solutions perpetuates data silo-ing and gets the brand no closer to understanding it’s customer across all the digital touchpoints.
• Big Data has become an obsession with marketers and most are paralyzed in their ability to think about how to begin to tackle this problem. The right approach is to think about using real time data to inform action systems and drive higher relevance, greater conversion and increased ROI.
• The purchase funnel is irrelevant in the new digital world; instead, it’s time to look at the entire Customer Journey and appreciate that different tools are relevant for each stage of this journey.
• Testing, targeting and site optimization are critical to success more than ever before. Marketers understand this in the web but they also must understand that it’s equally vital to success in the mobile arena where relevance and personalization are everything.

The content shared here is excerpted from many of the terrific presentations by some of the brightest minds at Forrester Research. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone who is interested in far more detail to reach out to Forrester and obtain copies of these key pieces of research. Likewise, if you haven’t attended one of their Marketing Leadership Forums then certainly make the time  - you’ll gain an invaluable education on how to look at the marketing world that is quickly unfolding.

As I  reflect on the learnings from the Forrester Forum, I am excited to see how Webtrends has aligned our development around these key drivers.  Last week we were awarded New Technology of the Year for 2013 by the Digital Analytics Association for our newest solution, Webtrends Streams.  Streams enables marketers to understand individual customer intent in-the-moment and allows them to take immediate action on that behavior – thereby driving the customer experience with relevant content and offers.  Effective Customer Journeys are not about Big Data, but understanding customer intent across touchpoints and  delivering the right message at the right time to maximize ROI.  And with the release of Action Center, marketers can now react in the moment to the intelligence provided by Webtrends Streams with personalized, relevant emails to drive conversion and build loyal relationships with customers.

Upgraded sitelinks in enhanced campaigns display on the SERP page the same way normal sitelinks do but offer advanced settings and reporting that marketers have been wanting for years. Here are three great tips I have for taking advantage of these new features.

         1.  Target at the Ad Group Level

With upgraded sitelinks in enhanced campaigns you can target at the ad group level. Previously, sitelinks were only available at the campaign level so each link had to be relevant to every keyword within your entire campaign. Now with upgraded sitelinks you can create links that are more specific to the keywords in a particular ad group. Here is how it looks in AdWords:

So let’s say you have an ecommerce site that sells athletic clothes and you are running a campaign for yoga clothes. With legacy sitelinks you probably had links for yoga tops, yoga pants, and other broad yoga categories, such as seen in this example ad:

But now with upgraded sitelinks, you can create sitelinks for your yoga pants ad group and link to each of your most popular yoga pants, such as this ad is doing:

The second use of sitelinks is more targeted to the searcher’s query of “yoga pants” and can help the searcher get the pages they are looking for even faster.

        2.  Use Advanced Reporting to Optimize Sitelinks

Upgraded sitelinks offer a deeper level of reporting and maintain their performance history after being edited. With legacy sitelinks any edit you made to a sitelink created a new extension and started new metrics. Also, these metrics were not broken out by individual link so you couldn’t easily see which link was clicked most or not at all. This made it difficult to optimize sitelinks.

But now with upgraded sitelinks we can easily see that information. All you need to do is view your upgraded sitelinks extensions and segment by “This Extension vs. Other.” This will break out individual link performance. Here is how it looks in AdWords:

With this information you can test special offers as links or try out different link text and easily see which perform best for your business.

        3.  Schedule Your Sitelinks For Promotions

The last tip I have for taking advantage of the new features of upgraded sitelinks is to schedule them to show during times that you’re running promotions. An example from Google is to schedule your “15% off on Wednesdays” sitelink to run only on Wednesdays. Not sure how many companies offer such a promo, but it could also be helpful if you’re running a promotion for a holiday. Instead of manually removing the sitelink after the holiday ends, you could schedule it to turn off automatically. Either option is available with Upgraded Sitelinks. Here is a screenshot of how to set it up in AdWords:

By default, your extension will run during the times your campaign is scheduled to run. These fields allow you to choose a Start and End date or schedule specific days and hours.

Hopefully now you can’t wait to upgrade your legacy campaigns to enhanced and put these three tips to use for your business!

If you would like more information on upgraded sitelinks, or if you need assistance migrating your current legacy campaigns to enhanced, please contact our Webtrends Performance Marketing team by emailing Chase Wells at Chase.Wells@webtrends.com.