Tag Archives: sem

Bing Ads to take fight to Google in Australia

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Mi9 has announced the introduction of Bing Ads to the Australian market, bringing renewed investment in the challenger to Google’s dominant platform and opening up cross-border opportunities for Australian search marketers.

Control of the development and monetisation of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will move to Mi9, the local joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co, in July.

Currently, advertising on the Bing platform was offered through the ‘Panama’ platform run out of Yahoo Search Marketing. But a global decision in 2010 by (then) Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz to focus on its core strength meant getting out of the search business.

As Microsoft’s local venture, Mi9 is attempting to capitalise on the still-fast-growing search advertising market.

It’s about taking the fight to Google, says Steve Sirich, global head of Bing advertising at Microsoft. “For marketers, it’s about giving them a choice. We believe innovation is a function of that choice. We continue to innovate and provide differentiation with our Bing web search experience.”

Part of the move will see 12 specialists hired within the Mi9 team in sales, operations and product.

Sirich says the most noticeable difference for search marketers will be in the selling channel, with a centralised sales team bringing efficiencies. “The account managers that now represent the Mi9 digital suite will additionally represent the Bing product, so it’s a nice audience extension, especially to the performance products.”

The move also opens up cross-border opportunities, both ways, for Australian and international search marketing campaigns, Sirich says, an aspect Yahoo!7 didn’t push aggressively. “It opens up markets that Australian advertisers can now purchase that traffic in.

“So if advertisers do have an interest to purchase US traffic or UK traffic or India traffic… they’ll now have that ability.”

On the functionality of the platform, Sirich says Bing Ads will function in a similar way to Google’s product. “It is to our advantage the advertising product operates in a similar way to Google Adwords,” he says.

Roland Irwin of advertising platform Marin Software says he’s welcoming of the move, saying that increased competition will be good for the market.

With Bing’s reported 5.5 million monthly unique users in Australia and global numbers suggesting 20% are unique to Bing, that means approximately one million Australian Bing users do not use Google. “They have a unique audience so there are opportunities there,” Irwin says.

“Australian advertisers are not as acquainted with Bing due to less interaction with it compared to Google so will experience a learning curve initially,” he adds. But softening that learning curve are two things. First, the similarities between the systems means platforms such as Marin’s can be updated to incorporate both. Second, Google’s block on copying search campaigns from its platform has now been lifted, making it easier for marketers to duplicate campaigns across both platforms.

The launch of Bing Ads was announced this week and will come into effect in July.

 

Aussie named 8th Biggest Search Geek in the world

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Australian agency exec Lawrence Yang has earned himself the title of eighth ‘Biggest Search Geek’ in the world in a global search marketing contest.

The performance director at FirstClick Consulting competed against a global field in Marin Software and Search Marketing Expo’s (SMX) ‘Biggest Search Geek Contest’, placing eighth with a score of 65%.

Yang says he hopes to take out next years’ title. “As a professional marketer, winning the next annual Biggest Search Geek title would truly be a testimonial of my skills in the industry. I think I can bring home the gold for Australia later this year.”

The contest comprised an online quiz of 20 questions about some of the most granular aspects of search marketing. An American, Adlucent account manager Renato Del Vento, took out top honours with a high score of 84%, finishing the quiz in five minutes and 39 seconds.

Marin Australia is calling for more Aussies to enter next years’ competition. “It would be such a coup to see an Aussie take the title out later this year so we are encouraging more Australians to step forward and get their geek on,” managing director at the digital ad management software provider, Nick Gill, says.

As winner, Renato picks up a return trip for two to SMX West and an iPad mini. Second- and third-place getters, Ashley Kennedy of Amplify and Michael Freeman of Shoretel, also received iPad minis.

A record number of competitors entered this year. The quiz is still live for search marketers wanting to test their SEM knowledge.

 

Google’s new ‘Enhanced Campaigns’: what it means for search marketers

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Recently Google announced the rollout of ‘Enhanced Campaigns’, a major AdWords product release that attempts to simplify the management of campaigns across devices. With enhanced campaigns, search marketers will be able to target consumers based on device, location, and time of day through a single campaign. However, for search marketers that currently leverage separate desktop, tablet, and mobile campaigns, Google’s enhanced campaigns will remove some of the control and transparency we’re used to having. Additional details on enhanced campaigns can be found here.

What does this mean?

To understand the implications of Google’s enhanced campaigns, let’s review the benefits and concerns.

 

Benefits

  • Mobile-preferred creative: Search marketers will now be able to create mobile-preferred ad creative that is delivered to users based on their device or when they’re searching.
  • Consolidated and simplified bid management: Search marketers can now leverage bid adjustments to manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, and more from within a single campaign.

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  • Enhanced ad extensions management: Search marketers can now assign ad extensions at the ad group level and display ads across devices with the appropriate ad creative, sitelink, app, or extension, without having to manage multiple campaigns for every combination of device, location, and time of day. Furthermore, ad extensions can now be scheduled to turn on and off, such as during times when phone operators are unavailable.
  • Advanced sitelinks management: Search marketers can now report on the performance metrics for individual ad sitelinks and monitor their approval status.
  • New conversion types: Search marketers will now have the ability to track and report on calls and app downloads, enabling the optimisation of campaigns based on these conversion types.

Concerns

  • Device-specific budgets: In combing all devices into a single campaign, budgets will also be combined, eliminating the ability for search marketers to set separate, device-optimised budgets across desktop-, tablet-, and mobile-only campaigns.
  • Mobile-only campaigns: Without the ability to opt out of desktop/tablet device targeting, search marketers will no longer be able to leverage mobile-only campaigns. This may significantly impact advertisers, like mobile app and gaming companies, who only wish to advertise on mobile devices.
  • Tablet specific optimisation strategies: With tablet device targeting now combined with desktop, search marketers who have specific tablet strategies in place will lose that functionality.
  • Bidding on mobile keywords: Since mobile bids are boosted by a percentage of desktop/tablet bids at the campaign level, search marketers can no longer calculate individual mobile keyword bids based on performance. Furthermore, bidding to a preferred position for specific mobile keywords to combat the limited real estate on search results pages on mobile devices is no longer possible.
  • Bid multipliers: The requirement to layer bid multipliers based on device, location, and time of day introduces significant complexities for calculating optimal keyword bids. Furthermore, since bid adjustments are applied at the campaign level, separate time of day multipliers can’t be set for separate locations. For example: +20% for New York and +50% on Saturdays, and -20% for Chicago and -50% on Saturdays.
  • Targeting mobile operating systems: Search marketers can no longer target campaigns to a specific mobile device or device operating system (eg. iPhone, HTC, iOS, Android).

 

Google plans to roll out enhanced campaigns across advertisers over the next few months. As a result, advertisers may not have immediate access to this feature within their accounts. By mid-2013, all campaigns are expected to have been transitioned to enhanced campaigns.

 

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The search marketer’s ‘return from break’ checklist

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With Google’s product listing ads seeing increased adoption and mobile devices continuing to garner the attention of consumers and advertisers, 2013 should prove to be yet another challenging, but rewarding year for search marketers. With the busiest part of the holiday shopping season behind us, it’s time to firm up your paid search programs for success in 2013. This four-point checklist will help search marketers optimise and prioritise their 2013 campaigns.

1. Review keyword bids

To acquire more revenue and in anticipation of increased competition, many retailers boosted their bids during the busy pre and post-Christmas shopping period. These boosts are typically implemented when there are short increases in revenue-per-click (RPC) or conversion rate.

As people continue to head back to work and the peak shopping period comes to an end, RPC and conversion rate are likely to drop. When this happens search marketers should adjust keyword bids to align with the present-day RPC or conversion rate. Waiting too long to dampen these bids can lead to wasted ad spend and poor campaign performance. This strategy also applies to B2B and lead generation companies. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be spending more per click for less relevant or under-performing traffic.

2. Pause holiday-specific promotions

Did you promote any discounts or free shipping offers? Is there any holiday or New Year themed content for your ad creative or landing pages? As holiday promotions end and the period comes to a close, review your active ad creative and landing pages and ensure that they align with your promotional calendar. Nothing hurts the shopping experience more than an outdated content or expired promotional offers. Last year, I recall coming across post-Christmas search ads with expired discounts. Don’t be that search marketer! Pause or schedule any holiday period ad creative and revert landing pages back to their standard theme. In fact, activating default creative can sometime improve overall performance depending on their historical quality scores.

3. Adjust campaign budgets

During the holiday period, most campaign budgets were expanded to support an increase in traffic volume. Review your campaign daily budgets from 2012 and ensure that appropriate budgets have been set for 2013. Be sure to factor in projected spend increases to your paid search program and allocate budgets across your campaigns accordingly. Forgetting to adjust daily budgets to align with seasonality could end up costing you a significant chunk of your budget.

4. Generate reports

Generate keyword level reports to understand how much RPC or conversion rates changed throughout 2012. And compare campaign budgets with their actual spend levels to better allocate budgets in 2013. Make sure you also generate raw search query reports to uncover additional negative keywords or new keyword opportunities. After all, being successful in 2013 means understanding what worked and what didn’t work in 2012, and these reports will undoubtedly aid you in doing exactly that.

 

By following this checklist, you should be able to ensure your paid search program is prosperous in 2013.

 

Did you know: in each issue of the print edition, Marketing includes the very best opinion articles curated from our huge industry blogging community, as well as exclusive columnists writing on the topics that matter? Becoming a subscriber is only AU$45 for a whole year, delivered straight to your door. Find out more »

Call is out for the biggest search geek in Australia (and the world)

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Digital ad management software provider Marin Software and Search Marketing Expo (SMX) are calling for search marketing geeks to come forward and prove their SEM chops.

The Biggest Search Geek Contest is an online quiz to test marketers’ industry knowledge, and this year expands to include Australia and the UK, after last year attracting 2000 participants.

The contest is open to anyone willing to test their mettle, and includes 20 questions on search marketing topics from ad bidding, quality score, the history of search, SEO, Facebook, mobile and retargeting.

But be warned, search marketers, the contest gets harder every year, reflecting the increased competitiveness, growth and complexity of the industry.

“Marin have made no exceptions to the toughness of this year’s SMX Biggest Search Geek contest. We hope that Australian search marketers get onboard and have some fun with this competition. We would love the winner to be an Australian so we can put Australia on the map as the stomping ground of the world’s Biggest Search Geek,” says Nick Gill, managing director of Marin Software Australia.

And despite the global expansion, reigning champion Tomislav Maric, director of performance marketing at Beeby, Clark + Meyler is confident of holding onto his title, after scoring 90% last year in 24 minutes: “I’m aiming to do something never done before and repeat my win of the Biggest Search Geek contest… I’ve been brushing up on my Adwords and adCenter knowledge, my algorithms, and campaign management tricks. I look forward to setting the bar once again.”

The winner will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to SMX West 2013 and an iPad mini, with the contest open from now until 16 February 2013.

 

Forrester: Social media ‘barely negligible’ as a sales lead

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Social media has a “barely negligible” impact on sales for online retailers, according to a study conducted in the US by Forrester.

The analyst firm’s ‘Purchase Path Of Online Buyers’ report, which tracked 77,000 purchases to identify the most fruitful sources of sales, found that only 1% of sales came from links placed in social media.

The value in social media is more in its slow burn effect, the report’s author, senior analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, writes: “While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in ecommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers.

“The reality is that even the most popular social image-sharing sites (like Pinterest) have failed to move the needle with respect to sales for most retail sites.”

Social media and other ‘top-of-the-funnel’ methods, such as display advertising, are more likely to play a role in the influence chain when it involves multiple touchpoints, which Forrester estimates occurs for 33% of transactions from new customers and 48% of the time for repeat customers.

As a direct source of sales, web marketing mainstays of search and email continue to be the most fruitful despite changes to the interactive marketing landscape and the growing number of shoppers, the report says.

For new customers, the most common single source of sales were direct visits at 20%, organic search at 16% and paid search at 11%. For repeat customers, direct visits at 20%, email at 13% and organic search at 6% brought in the most sales in a single touchpoint interaction. In multiple touchpoint transactions, they remained the most influential with the addition of display ads.

social media forrester

Mulpuru recommends perfecting email marketing techniques, a continual focus on search engine marketing, caution in overestimating the impact of social media and actively promoting simple URLs across a range of channels in order to play to today’s online influence model.

 

Five questions to ask when selecting a paid search agency

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Search has become an incredibly complex and competitive industry, where the slightest of mistakes can lead to significant revenue losses. Companies will spend in excess of $35 billion on paid search marketing this year alone, and many advertisers spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars every month on keyword campaigns.

With so much at risk, marketers often turn to agencies to help them manage their paid search programs. These agencies range from small shops that do simple keyword bidding and campaign management to integrated digital agencies who manage all aspects of multimillion-dollar online advertising programs for brands.

If you don’t find an agency that’s right for your brand’s needs – on an operational, technical and philosophical level – your paid search programs will suffer. Selecting the right agency is critical and working with the wrong agency could potentially result in lost sales opportunities, long-term damage for your brand, and wasted resources.

Before you begin to search for a new paid search agency, I would always suggest you ask yourself whether you need an agency to run your entire search program – from strategy, to set up, management, bidding, optimisation, measurement and reporting, and ongoing services – or whether you want an agency to run only a piece of your paid search program, such as managing bidding and optimisation.

If you’re looking for a strategic agency partner to run a large-scale paid search program for your brand or brands, however, then you’ll need to conduct a thorough search to find the right partner. You need to ask each contender the tough questions – and if they can’t answer, they will clearly not be up to the task of running a large-scale search program. The five questions I would suggest asking agency prospects are:

How will you enhance my existing programs? This question will reveal how well an agency understands your business, current efforts, and the industry you operate in. As I previously mentioned, you will want to make sure your agency partner is aligned with your objectives and seeking their perspective upfront should give you an indication of their expertise, potential fit and how much effort you’ll need to expend in getting them up to speed on your business.

Are you focused on the strategy or the execution of plans? Your agency isn’t just there to execute; they should be partners in devising, progressing and achieving your core goals. Make sure your agency will be able to help you agree on and reach key revenue and business objectives – instead of just focusing on the nitty-gritty of bidding.

How do you measure long-term customer value? Your chosen partner should think of your customers and potential customers as their own – they should have the technical, marketing, and messaging expertise to use paid search to cultivate a long-term, revenue-generating relationship with each individual customer. Make sure you establish if the agency focuses on a single transaction model to acquire new customers via paid search, or instead creates value with each new acquisition over the long term? Your partner should have a strategy to build customer lifetime value from the very first click through to repeat sales.

Which technology platforms do you use? There are heaps of sophisticated, robust advertising management solutions in the market today – some capable of only an ad-hoc paid search program, while others are highly optimised to meet or exceed ROI goals, and continue to achieve acquisition, sales, and branding targets. Find out the tools an agency uses, but also make sure they are adept at leveraging them to get optimal results. You want to make sure your agency’s teams aren’t wasting too much time on execution, and are instead focused on building your business through strategic campaign planning and optimisation.

Can we see some references? Always contact a few clients that the agency works with to ask them specific questions about their experience. Find out what it’s like to work with the agency on an everyday basis, and what value they add on a strategic level. Ask them outright if they would recommend you use the agency and if there are any ‘watch outs’ you should be aware of.

Don’t leave finding the right paid search agency to chance. Make sure your decision to work with an agency isn’t just based on an initial chemistry with the team who attend the pitch, and instead that they can provide thought-provoking, innovative responses to each of these five questions.

 

ACCC wins appeal against Google for deceptive paid search results

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Advertisers who used competitors’ names as keywords in Google AdWords campaign landed the search giant in hot water with the Federal Court five years ago, where it was cleared, but the case raised questions about the role of search engines and their responsibilities around paid content.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) appealed that decision and this week announced it had done so successfully, with the Full Court declaring that Google, by creating and serving the advertisements on result pages of the Google Australia website, engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive, in breach of the Competition and Consumer Act (formerly known as the Trade Practices Act).

The advertising in question involved the use of competitors’ names in keywords and in the actual advertisement headlines served to users. The ACCC alleged these advertisements contained representations that by clicking them the user would find information on the competitor, rather than the advertiser.

The original case went in Google’s favour because the judge found Google did not ‘make’ the representations but merely communicated them, even though some of the advertisements were misleading or deceptive.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims says the ACCC appealed because, “it raises very important issues as to the role of search engine providers as publishers of paid content in the online age.

“This is an important outcome because it makes it clear that Google and other search engine providers which use similar technology to Google will be directly accountable for misleading or deceptive paid search results,” Sims says.

The Full Court upheld the ACCC’s appeal, concluding that Google is responsible as it created the messages in question: “Google’s search engine calls up and displays the response to the user’s query. It is Google’s technology which creates that which is displayed. Google did not merely repeat or pass on a statement by the advertiser: what is displayed in response to the user’s search query is not the equivalent of Google saying here is a statement by an advertiser which is passed on for what it is worth.”

The Full Court also stated that, “the enquiry is made of Google and it is Google’s response which is misleading… Although the key words are selected by the advertiser, perhaps with input by Google, what is critical to the process is the triggering of the link by Google using its algorithms.”

Google will now possibly have to pay civil pecuniary penalties and the ACCC’s appeal costs and introduce a consumer law compliance program. It’s next avenue of response would be an appeal to the High Court.

 

E*TRADE’s mid-GFC search marketing campaign

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Campaign: E*TRADE Australia mid-GFC search marketing campaign

Client: E*TRADE

Agency: dgm Australia

 

Background

Online share trading site E*TRADE Australia emerged post-GFC into a flat market in 2010. The marketing team realised that a brand refresh was in order, which included a renewed campaign for online customer acquisition.

The business had seen a dramatic drop in new leads coming from the online channels, including search and display. As part of the refresh E*TRADE asked its online marketing agency, dgm Australia, to review the target audience segmentation. It was revealed that the ‘mums and dads’ approach was alienating the brand’s active users.

The decision was made to refine the audience segments to target both active users and people new to investing. This was combined with a more targeted pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that was to kick-start with the brand relaunch in November 2010.

Objectives

Online customer acquisition is a central strategy for E*TRADE, and the new campaign had to build the numbers back to pre-GFC volumes. The keywords in the PPC campaign also had to reflect the new audience segmentation strategy.

In addition, the campaign had to take into account the competition from other players such as CommSec, Westpac and NAB, which were all facing the same market conditions.

Strategy

The E*TRADE marketing team refined their target audiences to better reflect the segments that new customers were coming from, and instructed dgm to adjust the PPC strategy to align with the new targets.

The new target segments were ‘active online investors’, ‘dormant investors (no trading for 12 months)’ and ‘non-share owners who intend to buy shares’.

While the client had previously bid on non-brand keywords on an ad hoc basis, the new strategy was to use aggressive bidding on these keywords. The keywords were identified as giving the client the ability to dominate its competitors.

To coincide with the brand relaunch in November 2010, dgm commenced a program of new copy and keyword testing to establish a baseline for the campaign, to determine the necessary budget, and to allow for continual optimisation of the campaign.

The tests outperformed expectations and encouraged the client to increase the budget for the PPC campaign.

dgm worked with E*TRADE on specially developed landing pages that were designed to take the PPC activity a step further – from the search engine sites onto the client’s website.

The agency recommended a range of different landing pages with each one featuring copy and other elements to align directly with the search terms. Two main target audiences were identified for the landing pages – active traders and new traders.

Seven different landing pages were created with headlines, price information, awards won by E*TRADE (the inclusion of awards has been demonstrated to increase consumer trust in the brand), the company’s new offer, and a prominent call-to-action button. Each page used the same language and search terms that the user input into the search engine.

Execution 

With the baseline results of the November 2010 testing phase as the starting point, dgm devised a three-part campaign of expanding and refining keywords. This process of continual optimisation of keywords took place in January/February 2011, April/May 2011 and July/August 2011.

The keyword expansion and refinement process was designed to reflect the new target audiences. Refinement was based on isolating the high-converting search queries. It’s important to note that the optimisation was focused on search queries, not keywords, which means it was based on users’ behaviour, what they are inputting into the search query box, to convert. This isolation allowed the agency to use specific, highly optimised copy in the campaign.

Throughout the campaign period, the keyword list was refined with up to 10,000 negative keywords added to control to which search queries the ad was served.

New ad copy was applied to emphasise the new brand messaging and to respond to the searcher’s intent. This helped to drive customer self-segmentation according to the new target audiences.

Site links were optimised to focus on the client’s core strengths. All new creative was tested and refined, and the structure of the campaign was continually revised to ensure relevant copy was served to each ad group.

This process was helpful when the client was determining the budget allocation as well as reporting on the campaign.

The copy was tailored to landing pages for ‘About the Markets’, ‘Beginner to Pro’, ‘Buy Shares Online’ and ‘First Trade’.

Results

While the world was slowly recovering from the GFC, the E*TRADE brand refresh and new customer acquisition strategies exceeded targets both in terms of new customers to the service and a significant reduction in cost to acquire those customers.

The key results were:

  • 40% increase in conversion rates year on year – visitors to the site that became customers,
  • 64% increase in total conversions year on year,
  • 30% decrease in the cost per acquisition (CPA) for new customers – a significant achievement given the extra investment made during the campaign, and
  • 267% improvement in conversion rate for non-brand keywords – specifically, the keywords that were targeted in the relaunch and strategy.

   Graphs: Improvement in CPA year on year. CPA improved by 29% despite spend increasing by 35%.

A key challenge arose in March/April 2011, in the form of some aggressive paid search activity from leading competitors such as CommSec, Westpac and NAB.

The effect of the competition was a period of higher cost for E*TRADE, in cost-per-clicks and thus CPA. The agency responded to this competition with creative changes to include more aggressive and stronger calls to action which allowed the client to achieve higher click-through rates.

The conversion rate was almost 50% above targets, and the CPA was 14% better than the target. The PPC channel outperformed other channels, including online display advertising, and was the key channel that helped the client buck the trend in a flat market.

Matthew Loughnan, head of retail at E*TRADE Australia, said, “E*TRADE executed a brand relaunch in November 2010. Our online agency, dgm, integrated the new brand with our existing paid search campaign and showed excellence in understanding our marketing objectives. Off the back of this launch, our paid search campaign has delivered results above and beyond the targets we had set at the beginning of our financial year and are continuing to improve in a flat market.”

FindTheBest.com is wrench to search’s hammer

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It has been described as starting off where Google failed with its ‘Squared’ structured data and semantic search experiment.

FindTheBest is a ‘comparison engine’ that extracts product information from web sources and adds in human curation to present the user with an easy to use, graphical interface – “stripped of any marketing influence.” In plain English, it allows users to compare similar products and services side by side.

Redesigned last month to look less like a spreadsheet it now presents items in a easy to use, normalised, graphical display, allowing quick comparison of, well, pretty much anything. Immediate examples such as electronics and other consumer products are there, of course, but it also extends its reach into travel, plastic surgery clinics, financial advisors, universities, dog breeds…

Comparing itself (*chuckle*) to travel comparison site, Kayak, FindTheBest uses a combination of human curation and data sourced from public databases, primary sources such as manufacturer websites, and ‘expert sources’ which may include you if you have expertise in a certain area. A team of researchers check entries for accuracy.

For marketers, the site has been able to find out some interesting insights into what influences purchasing decisions. Founder Kevin O’Conner (who also founded ad serving technology DoubleClick, which was bought by Google) told TechCrunch, “We want to tell companies what drives decisions.” For example, the top filter for ski resorts is not height above sea level or average snow fall, its the presence of a ski school for kids.

Digital footprints

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This feature first appeared in the September 2011 issue of Marketing magazine.

 

They say if you really want to get to know a person, you need to walk a mile in their shoes. Matt Granfield talks to some of Australia’s savviest digital marketers and finds out how they’re tracking the digital footprints of the nation and then using that information to lead consumers to the checkout.

You’re being watched. Every move you make is being tracked.

Keep your head down. Stay calm.

Whatever you do, don’t look behind you. That’s not where they are. They’re in front. In the screen. In the computer. They know everything. Everything.

Sit down. Go to google.com/history. Log in. There it is. Everything you’ve ever searched for. How to yodel – the number to order a pizza – the answer to the pub trivia question you were asked in June 2006 (the capital of Turkmenistan is Ashgabat, in case you’ve forgotten). Google hasn’t forgotten.

And that’s just one website. There are thousands, perhaps millions more. You have been watched since the moment you first went online. The news knows what news you like. Facebook knows who your friends are. Your bank knows when you last checked your balance. Your favourite charity knows precisely what time you read your email. You will be watched tomorrow. If you’re on a computer, or a mobile device, you are being watched right now. Don’t worry though. They’re watching you for your own good.

They’re watching you, so they can help you.

Does it sound creepy? You’d want to hope not, because you’ve probably done a bit of watching yourself.

You’re a marketer. You use Google Analytics. You know where your visitors are from. You know how long they stay. You know what keywords they use to find your site and you know which pages they visit. Whether you realise it or not, you’ve been placing cookies on their computer so you know when they come back. It’s all good though, cookies are cute. Cookies never hurt anybody.

Actually, that’s a lie. Maureen Govern was hurt by cookies… 650,000 of them, in fact. Govern was the chief technology officer at AOL in 2006 and she was in charge when the company publicly released the search history of 650,000 users for ‘research’ purposes. The users were identified only by a number, but The New York Times did some snooping and discovered that it was fairly easy to connect a person’s search history to a person. They released some names, and let the world know there were people out there searching for ‘Beauty and the Beast Disney porn’, among other more sordid queries. Govern resigned.

Your search history may be vanilla by comparison, but that doesn’t make your digital footprints any less interesting to marketers. In fact, as the world’s information shifts into a digital cloud, smart marketers are getting more and more sophisticated in the measurements they take – if you can learn to read the cloud properly, you’ll know when it’s about to rain money – and the technology is getting a lot more sophisticated than Google Analytics.

 

The shift from website analytics to customer intelligence

While Google’s website visitor analysis program (or its earlier forefathers) was the first stepping stone on a path to online enlightenment for many marketers, companies like Experian have made multimillion-dollar businesses out of showing companies a lot more than just the IP address of a user. In fact, online customer behaviour is now starting to drive innovation in areas as diverse as product development, supply chain management and purchasing trends.

Matt Glasner, general manager of Experian Marketing Services, explains how the world has changed. “Australian consumers are spending more and more time in the online space. The increase in digital media usage has subsequently increased the collection and analysis of data, which was very difficult in an analogue world,” he says.

“Not only are organisations now capturing customer data from online activity, they’re also analysing and drawing insights from the activity. The data that this consumer activity provides can drive innovation through the detailed measurement of customer and market data that is more readily available in a digital world.

“Businesses can take this data and use it for not only product development, but also marketing material. For example, (budget electronics retailer) Kogan recently launched above the line ads based on recent real-time social media feedback, so they are taking the sentiment of their existing customers online and replicating this to their target audiences on a larger scale above the line.

“When businesses harness the power of these technologies and interact directly with consumers online, they provide a faster, more relevant and responsive way of engaging with existing and potential customers.”

And that engagement gets a whole lot more profitable once you can lead it down a sales funnel in an online shopping environment.

Paul Downs is the co-founder and director of Hitworks, an ecommerce consultancy that helps retailers make the most of their online stores. A former CIO (chief information officer) of City Beach, he decided to start Hitworks when he realised just how little Australian retailers knew about what was actually possible when they started tapping into the data available online.

“One of the biggest opportunities online is in the wealth of data you can capture through the transactions your customers are making,” says Downs.

“The data allows you to get a much better understanding of what your customers’ buying patterns are, and you can start a dialogue with them and you’re then able to tune promotions to what they’re looking for. Through continual harvesting of information on their buying patterns, and by talking to them, you can start to do that. You can get to a level of sophistication where your ecommerce system tailors the products that are presented to the customer when they come to the site. The Utopia is that you end up presenting the right product at the right price to the right person at the time they’re looking for it.

“Amazon is a good example. When I log in to my Amazon account, it recommends me products because it knows what I look at and it knows what I’ve bought. So, rather than me logging in and just cruising around looking for stuff, it says, ‘Hey, you might be interested in this’.”

Downs says smart retailers are doing more with user data than just deciding which products to show people. Smart marketers, he believes, use data to profile their customers in detail and then use that knowledge over time.

“Great retailers in this space understand their customers’ consumption behaviours and are therefore better placed to understand what a certain type of customer will spend in a given cycle, say annually. That then drives the level of discount and offers presented to that customer to drive increased sales.

“My experience with a number of Aussie retailers is that they are a million miles away from the concept of customer intelligence, let alone the execution of it – which means there is a fantastic opportunity for those prepared to embrace what Europe and the US have been doing for some time.

“For example, if you know customer type ‘A’ spends a few thousand dollars with you a year, you’re more likely to give them a 20 percent discount than someone who shops with you once. The software and platforms to do this are available now.”

 

Remarketing

But it’s not just website visitors who are providing marketers with digital footprints to follow. Tracking technology is now being applied to online advertising, allowing brands to target ads to people who’ve visited their website once they’re long gone.

In 2010, Google launched an innovative ad product called Remarketing, which allows advertisers to show ads to users who’ve previously visited their website as they then go on to browse the web. It works by allowing a company to tag pages of its site that correspond to certain categories it wants to promote. For example, an electronics retailer could add a ‘TV’ tag on all of the pages where it sells televisions and then create an AdWords campaign to show messages to people who’ve visited these pages as they browse TV-related sites across the Google Display Network (publishers who have elected to display Google ads on their web pages).

Google Remarketing product manager Aitan Weinberg says companies have been quick to embrace the technology.

“We rolled out Remarketing one year ago across the Google Display Network, and we think we have a hit on our hands,” he says. “In 2010, the total number of advertisers using Remarketing grew an average of 113 percent every quarter after launch.”

He adds that Google is continuing to develop the product and is beginning to use complex algorithms to mine user data for the best results.

“In the year since launch, we’ve boosted performance and scale with three key enhancements to make Remarketing even more powerful for the largest to the smallest of advertisers. First, we now enable you to show a relevant ad right after a potential customer leaves your site, when our internal analysis shows they’re most likely to click. Second, we’ve improved the algorithm that helps determine, in real time, how much you should pay for each impression in order to maximise the possibility that a user will click on your ad. Finally, the growing reach of the Google Display Network means you can reach your customers on more and more sites across the web.

While Google can’t point to any specific Australian case studies, Weinberg highlights three US firms that have experienced success with the program:

  • the Yankee Candle Company, which used Remarketing to re-engage shoppers and increased conversion rates by 600 percent while cutting cost-per-conversion in half
  • Lenovo, which increased sales by 20 percent and lowered its overall expense-to-revenue ratio by 14 percent in a campaign that included Remarketing and display across multiple networks, and
  • etrailer.com, an online towing parts retailer that saw twice the click-through rate at a 75 percent lower cost-per-click with Remarketing, compared to its typical display advertising campaigns.

 

Digital footprints in email and B2C communications

While the retail industry is starting to get display advertising runs on the board by utilising smart data, it’s still the one traditionally struggling to get its head around how to communicate directly with consumers without being labelled as spammers.

Lisa Arthur, chief marketing officer of marketing automation software company Aprimo, says that satisfying educated consumers requires that marketers provide the right information, when, where and in what forms these educated consumers want it.

“The blast campaigns of the past produce low response rates, and just a half a percent spam complaint rate will start to get you blocked by major mailbox providers all over the world,” she explains. “As a result, marketers must master new ways to answer critical, long-standing questions about the overall effectiveness of both traditional and new interactive online marketing programs. For example, what level of interest was generated by last week’s special offer? Is the marketing program reaching the desired demographic regions?”

Arthur says that to take full advantage of interactive marketing, B2C marketers need to adopt a holistic approach based on the simplification of processes and the integration of deep customer intelligence.

“Email blasts of the past have been replaced with online marketing that creates a dialogue with consumers, requiring the creation of custom content that can hold the attention of the educated consumer,” she says.

Arthur outlines three key ways a B2C marketing strategy should be using data to achieve maximum results:

  • built-in capabilities for triggered/event-based email marketing to allow marketers to personalise content and introduce rules-driven communications that can be scheduled to meet campaign objectives
  • interactive dialogues that can be triggered from email or landing page responses, as well as web-browsing history on company website properties, and
  • the ability to quickly and flexibly set up m-sites, landing pages, and forms to suit each project.

Arthur says that interactive marketing also requires marketers getting access to the right information – particularly in heavily ‘siloed’ organisations where IT, customer service and marketing all keep different sets of data on who is interacting with the brand.

“Customer data is typically gathered and managed by multiple departments and organisations within each business,” says Arthur. “Many marketing tools limit the amount and type of customer data that can be referenced. B2C businesses must fully leverage deep data drawn from multiple channels from offline connections to email response, form and survey data and company website browsing history. As a result, marketers can create highly focused content for uniquely engaging customer experiences.”

Successful campaigns, she says, should be able to segment users into groups based on the frequency of marketing communications they respond to, send ‘win back’ messages to those recipients who aren’t engaging, use social media to invite opt-in subscription requests from new fans and followers, and create interactive experiences on dedicated landing pages to engage users.

“Clearly, to build trust and loyalty, you can’t spam your customers and their contacts. The era of the educated consumer is here, unleashing revolutionary changes in how B2C marketers must interact with audiences. Nowhere is this new balance of dialogue, education and selling more evident than on the web,” concludes Arthur.

Google+ makes changes to Pages as engagement flounders

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The transparent approach to Google+’s evolution continues, with changes to Google+ Pages announced on Google’s blog on Monday. In the weeks since launching pages, Google has listened to feedback and implemented the most requested changes for Page owners.

The changes are part of a raft of improvements to the social network. For Pages, three changes have been implemented:

  1. Multi-manager support: You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page
  2. new notifications flow: Notification are now visible whether the page owner is viewing Google+ as themselves or as their page to make it easier to keep up with activity taking place on the page, and
  3. unification of +1 and circles: Follower numbers now aggregate the count of users that have +1’ed your page or added it to a circle to give both page owners and visitors an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with the page.
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These changes come as research reveals that engagement on Google+ remains low. According to Mashable, US research company BrightEdge found that 77 of the top 100 global brands (as determined by Millward Brown’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2011 list) now have G+ pages.

Meanwhile, another researcher, Simply Measured, which looked at Interbrand’s Top 100 Brands, found 61 had Google+ brand pages.

However, Simply Measured’s research found that only 13 of those top brands had followings of 5,000 or more. Of non-Google brand pages, H&M, Burberry, Dell and Amazon are among the most-followed, but comments, shares and ‘+1’s across the brands involved in the study remain low.

Closer to home, Tourism Australia is one of the local brands that has started a page on Google+.  According to executive general manager of marketing at TA, Nick Baker, engagement with the Australia brand on the network is low.

“Engagement is pretty low and not much is going on at the moment, but we sense that it will come,” Baker says.

“We are looking to the future and still experimenting with it to work out how it will fit. There are some interesting areas on it in the way that Hangouts and Circles are used. It is a question of how they will develop for consumers.”

Google hasn’t released a figure for Google+’s total membership since October. At that time, the company claimed that the social network had 40 million users.