Originally I considered Ruper Murdoch a blow hard in his attacks on Google.  I mean, give me a break.  Almost 15 years into the world wide web and search engines bringing content free to seekers, the tide seems to have already turned. It is like Britain taking up the cause to bring the US back into its fold over 234 years after the revolution. Though, there is a bit of a point to be made that is finally coming to the surface outside the Australian mud slinging.  Content produced is an asset for news organizations. In any other media industry such as TV, movies, and music, copyright protection laws preserve the asset. Why not news content?

Compare online media to television media.  TV is not free as consumers have to pay for the connection on average of $600 per year and as high as $2000 depending on the service.  Fees are pushed back to service providers from the content network of about 3¢ to 25¢ per subscriber which is included in this subscription service.  Google on the other hand acts as a service provider like a cable tv company and pays nothing.  In fact, it makes money off servicing advertisers both in delivery of advertising though PPC  and through Doublclick by placing ads on content provider sites such as News Corp’s.  MSN/Bing and Yahoo! are the same.

Now you can say that News Corp makes money by selling placements on their websites but as we see, this doesn’t pay the bills.  Revenue from subscriptions dwindles and isn’t re-cooped through fee collected from Google or any other search engine or advertising network.  They can add more placement space but this diminishes the experience and dissuades visitors in the long run that can actually hurt their advertising revenue stream with reduced visitation.

There are a few ways to alleviate the issue:

• Google and other search engines pay fees to content networks.  However, how do you distinguish a News Corp from a blogger?  At least in tv there are limited number of content creators.  The web has millions.
• Internet service providers collect fees in their subscriptions related to “premium” content and manage access to sites similarly to cable or satellite services.  Although today, ISPs are not necessarily set up or have the infrastructure to do so.
• Google is looking at limiting search results to content on sites like those of News Corp.  This will only go so far and may actually hurt ad revenue in the long run.
• Content providers can add code to block search engines but again, this can hurt ad sales by blocking ad networks and PPC.
• News sites can turn their websites into paid sites to recoup subscriptions.  While sites like the Wall St. Journal, Harvard Business Review, and others do this, revenue is modest and may not ultimately sustain the industry.

Balancing fairness of access to asset content is not an easy proposition.  On one hand the access to news consumers have today is a huge benefit.  On the other, quality news content costs money to produce.  I may not buy a paper or magazine to get my news anymore, but I still highly value quality unbiased information.  I will pay for my news, but news should be widely available to keep us educated and informed.

Tough call.  For now, I’ll rely on Google “pirating” content.  What else is there to do?

When kicking off data management initiatives a large and key component is establishing the data stewards that represent the data that is collected, managed, and leveraged in business intelligence.  By having these data stewards, and subsequently a data management committee, companies feel safe that the proper data governance practices are going to be put in place.  Not so.  Ownership (=Stewardship)  does not equate to governance.

Many factors contribute to governance and business boundaries can quickly be broken down if you approach governance in business silos.  As you walk through your process of data collection you’ll quickly find that what is considered the preferred source of data may not be generated by the team that determines what should stay, what should be modified, and what should go.  In fact, depending on how you view the data, conflicts arise as to what is considered accurate, appropriate, of the contributing factor in decision and business point of view.

This is something I’ve run into recently when building a business intelligence solution for web analytics.  Even within my own department of advertising executives, views of what transactional data should be considered the record of source is up for grabs depending on who is the recipient of the information and how it is used.  Levels of accuracy vary depending on when data is needed, how it may be used for marketing optimizations, or if it will be used to actualize spending for billing.  Throw into the mix that data feeds coming from vendors are constantly changing as they actualize transactions over the course of days, weeks, and even months, and finding the truth in the data becomes a challenge that defies religious opinion on the subject.

Sorting through the challenges of governance to determine what makes data reliable requires looking at a variety of factors and allowing for multiple views and uses.

• Reliability of source
• Time of collection
• Actualization
• Business process affected/use of data in decisions
• Degree of accuracy required

If you will notice, I do not include ownership.  This is the artificial governance.  Ownership in establishing governance only serves to create a framework around the above factors that creates credibility.  Ownership, and then the transformation to stewardship, serves to continuously monitor, enforce, and improve governance around data needs.

Start your data management off on the right foot, don’t confuse ownership with governance.

Web analytics is as much about customer and market intelligence as it is about marketing performance.  Too much focus on the tactic and the marketing funnel and you begin to loose sight of who you are marketing to and why you want to.  This is a trap that many companies fall into and why web analytics is relegated to back room technical types and not at the forefront of helping to define strategies and drive business objectives along side strategy, market research, and customer intelligence.

The anonymous web is not so anonymous.  In fact, there is more known about a customer through web analytics than what you will learn in CRM systems.  Even if you don’t have a name, email, or phone number, there is a lot to be learned about how to engage and convert the right customers because customers explicitly tell you what they like, dislike, and what makes them tick by what they click, comment on, search, and purchase.  So, why are we only using web analytics to measure the marketing funnel?

Customer segmentation is a recognized cornerstone in marketing.  Market research and customer analysis has always provided a rich segmentation of our market and customers but failed because behavior and personas never matched into clean distinctions from a demographic perspective.  Direct marketing and sales organizations require age, income, size of company, industry, location, etc. to filter and pinpoint communications.  Without this data, web analytics is left with the behavior and persona.  That incremental business that was elusive through traditional efforts is now attainable through web marketing and measurable through web analytics specifically because these efforts take into account behavior and personas.

Today, web marketing is still founded and modeled on the fundamentals of direct marketing efforts.  The problem with this is that the rich information of behavior and personas is only lightly touched upon in a keyword or offer copy.  This surface level perspective is only followed up on in acquisition efforts during optimization, thus a simplification of a simplified approach.  A broader categorization and management of targeting and behavioral data needs to be created in order to not only improve conversion, but to also better understand our customers.  Through categorization we have the means to segment on behavior and persona just as we had created segments in market research of our markets.  The benefit here is that the connection is made, you truly do know your customer, and this information can be pushed back up into the overall marketing strategy addressing message, position, offers, as well as targeting.

As companies shift their marketing dollars to online tactics and in turn driving more business through these online efforts, web analytics can no long be about campaign optimization and performance alone.  There are significant customer and market insights that can be gained augmenting and improving marketing strategy to do more than keeping status quo, it can help you gain incremental business by better positioning to your market.

It struck me as ironic that a leading technology company puts in motion an engagement strategy that hinges on a brick-and-mortar foundation.  Microsoft opened it’s first store in Scottsdale, AZ today specifically as a way to better connect to customers.  While it may be an attempt to be on a level playing field with Apple (I hear the Microsft store has a similar format), the fact remains that in each case, these two companies founded on technological innovations feel the need to invest in direct connections with consumers.

What about the promise of social media?  This is where the customers are, online.  This is where and how you need to engage with them.  Blog, create fan pages, converse on Twitter.  Brick-and-mortar is dead as is TV, print, and all other traditional marketing efforts.

The fact is, if you want to grow and maintain your business, you need to offer multiple communication and connection points to your customer.  You need to be where customers are regardless if it is digital or tangible.  Some of your connection points are highly scalable, some are more intimate.  Each serves a purpose in your marketing arsenal.  Each can compliment each other.

I don’t know that Microsoft stores will be successful in the long run.  Gateway, Dell, and other technology companies have tried the brick and mortar model and failed or at least haven’t done well.  I think it depends on how Microsoft defines success of the stores.  If the over-riding strategy is truly to create customer connections over stellar store sales, then the storefront may well prove its usefulness and ROI.  Staying on that course though will be challenging when sales may be low and operating costs are not balanced out.  If sales are important, the coming holiday season may be an indicator if Microsoft made the wise investment.

Usually not my style if you read my posts regularly, but here is a rant on Twitter spammers.

It has taken a long time to grow my followers on Twitter.  I don’t have that many and I follow fewer.  The number of followers is vastly lower than the number that signed up to follow me to begin with.  Some of this has to do with how I use Twitter in general.  I converse with those that I find interesting (small number) and lurk on those that seem to always point out great posts.  TweetDeck is my preferred tool it it helps me track and bucket to keep things organized.

The problem I have is the spammers.  At first it was comical.  ’Trixie’ tries to entice me to follow her with a sexy picture and nothing to say.  Sorry, this girl – me – isn’t interested, I’m happily married and my husband even laughed at your picture.  Then it became a nuisance with get rich quick schemes using Twitter.  Now, I’m starting to feel a bit militant.

The spam reporter on Twitter has become my best friend.  Just in the past 15 minutes I have had 9 new followers, some with the same picture and different name, and all spouting how to make money on the internet or Twitter.

Oh wait, now there is 10 – one just came in…

It has been this way ever since I posted legitimate news of revenue generation using social media.  Maybe they think I’ll be their new best friend and promote their trash.  Or, maybe they think I blog and Tweet for money or want to, which couldn’t be further than the truth.

What concerns me is that I miss too many of these spammers, or ones that are more sophisticated and harder to spot. I worry that that this causes people that I actually want to follow me and maybe follow and communicate with to not follow, unfollow, block, or even report me as a spammer.  The reason I say this is I look at the people that follow me.  I want to see that there is something to share and gain from the connection.  I look not only at people’s tweets but, I also look at their profiles, companies, and the people they follow.

Oh god, another one just came in…

I’m a marketer and work at an agency so I ‘get’ the need for promotion and advertising.  I know there are the spammers out their that haven’t got a clue they actually are the bane of my industry’s existence.  It is the one’s that clearly are bottom feeders that make Twitter at times unbearable.

That makes 12…

I’d given the benefit of the doubt to some as everyone has had to learn how to use Twitter and make it effective for them.  Although, at this point, I’m glad Twitter has grown up and provided spam blocking.  I don’t need to grow my follower list beyond quality connections.  I also want to protect my reputation as a non-spammer.  I guess with every marketing communication tool out there you get the spammers.  I just wish my follower list and email box wasn’t full of it.  What concerns me mostly is that Twitter becomes obsolete as a network because of the spammers.  I’d hate to think that Twitter could turn into another MySpace.

13 just came in…

Looks like a long day of cleaning my Twitter follower list.

I was thinking about the structure of marketing organizations today.  Maybe it was because of Forrester’s point of view on how marketing organizations need to change to serve brands better.  Or maybe it was because it struck me as odd the disconnect between online and offline marketing efforts.  Regardless, there is something drastically wrong with the way we organize our marketing efforts.

In the end, if we have silos in our marketing organizations of online and offline, how is that really serving the better good of driving awareness, engagement, revenue, and customer value?

This divide between online and offline is now becoming more fractured as companies search for ways to transform into social media marketing initiatives.  Digital marketing is now being divided.  There is also the fracture of offline between communications and direct marketing.  We seem to be creating organizations around tactics rather than organizations around strategy.  Having centers of excellence with subject matter experts is certainly important.  Flawless execution in the end gets you to your goals.  Although, why start with the ‘what can be done’ if you don’t know what you are driving to do? This organizational divide of marketing enhances and exposes the weakness in our strategic ability.

Companies that have gotten it right and have leading marketing groups have program offices responsible for marketing and campaign strategies.  They leverage field, creative, and internet marketing organizations as internal agencies and services.  Program offices are the glue managing the value proposition, message, and coordinating the tactical strategies of subject matter experts.  Those companies that market in silos tend to stay in secondary market positions and languish chasing their competition.  One silo gets all the attention and creates a lopsided marketing approach.

It is necessary to grow our organizations and shift to take advantage of new technologies and approaches.  I’m just not convinced that creating organizational silos are the right way to make marketing efforts successful.  It may be the easiest way to get things started and track success.  Yet, in the end, a cohesive marketing organization will get you further.

Now there is proof.  You can generate revenue from social media marketing – and it is big!

CNN reports that an $11,000 indie movie ‘Paranormal Activity’ grossed $7.1M this past weekend and landed in the top 5 with a limited distribution across 200 theaters.  They did it through word of mouth marketing efforts heavily leveraging YouTube and Twitter.

By: Trendistic

What is most interesting about this is that the call to action was not a coupon or offer.  Buzz drove attendance.  In addition, as the first attenders watched the film, buzz peaked and carried through to quick conversion.

Now, I also tried to get data on YouTube trends but was only able to grab total visitations, which as of this morning were 1.9M.  However, search stats on Google showed a similar trend as Twitter so I’ll make a leap assumption that YouTube views were probably following a similar curve.

The reason I’m honing in on this so much is that awareness marketing has really taken a back seat as lead generation and direct revenue models have become the rage.  We look at social media marketing and can’t accurately measure the grey area of word of mouth to revenue generation.  So, we adapt social media to fit our tried and true direct marketing efforts – ie. using Twitter to mail out coupon codes.  The reality is that social media does have a place in our revenue generation mix close the point of sale.  It just takes us into a realm outside our comfort zone.

As you consider social media in your marketing mix, consider tests that introduce word of mouth marketing efforts close to the point of sale.  You may learn the trick to leveraging SMM in your specific revenue generation mix.

When I talk to my fellow search and online display marketers about web analytics, they look at me like I have two heads and crossed eyes.  They focus on optimizations made at the conversion – its the old marketing funnel. I care about who is converting and who is not.  Internet marketers say, “Who cares if you hit your target conversion volume at the right price when they could be the people that will leave you in a heart beat rather than be real customers with ongoing revenue?  Customer satisfaction, customer retention, that’s the job for Customer Service.”  Well, you should care.

Internet marketers need to think like their program marketers.  They need to be asking the same questions and align to their organizational goals.  The way to do this is through analysis of converter profiles and behavior analysis.  This way you do what we all say we should do:  target the right people, at the right time, with the right message/offer.  It isn’t enough to drive volume, you want to drive quality in that volume.  It is much more expensive to acquire new unfamiliar customers than it is to convert those that are already considering you or are you customers.  This is true whether it is internet marketing or offline marketing.  Why convert customers that will make a small purchase, then dump you later when you can convert a customer that is interested in your products now and later on?  Keep the short-timers in the mix at an optimal rate to maintain revenue, but it’s the long term customer that will be profitable in over time.

Think about your over arching marketing plan.  A key component is who your ideal customer is and how do you bring them in, keep them, and grow their value.  Somehow this is getting lost when you put in your big ad spends on paid search and display advertising.  In the tactic, the measure is at the ad group, placement, key word, creative, offer/call-to-action.  It is all about optimizing increases in conversion volume to site at the lowest cost.  We need to flip this over and go back to also looking at if we are converting the right people.

Converter Analysis

Take your campaign analysis down one more level.  Look at who is making a purchase on your site and what they are purchasing.  Are the purchaser profiles aligned to your broader targeting strategy?  If you were going after 30-something new mothers in affluent metros, were a high proportion of those purchases in this group, or were they 50-something grandparents in retirement communities?  The first may offer repeat purchases as new mothers will continue to purchase items over the growing years of their babies.  Grandparents or relatives may only complete a one-time purchase for the baby-shower.  You’ve already done the research to say where to get the most opportunity short term and long term, make sure your internet marketing effort supporting this.

Behavioral Analysis

Now that you know what your converted customer looks like, move upstream to their internet behavior.  Analyze your ad groups and key word searches and compare customer segments.  Recognizing attribution as it pertains to segment targeting will allow you to optimize more surgically.  On the surface particular tactics may appear to be driving the greatest conversion.  But, this may not be the case as it pertains to who you want to attract.  Through behavioral analysis you’ll better position your ad spend for behavioral targeting and optimize your online display dollars.

Becoming a better internet marketer is as much about effectiveness as it is about efficiency.  Effectiveness comes not only from volume of conversions but having the right volume of quality conversions.  Optimize not only to the volume.  Optimize to the segment you wanted to reach in the first place.

Ssshhh.  Come here.  Let me tell you a secret.  Those numbers you just presented.  The presentation you spent hours on.  The meeting that immediately after you got kudos for.  It was crap.

How do you know?  Remember that presentation you gave showing the incredible lift on sales by the optimizations made in your messaging strategy?  Turns out, there was an article that provided data conflicting with your methodology and results.

The standard slice and dice of numbers to prove the ROI of ad and marketing spend doesn’t cut it anymore.  There are plenty of others out there that are ready to pounce on your methodology and offer a better way of doing things.  They’ve found a way to take a complex methodology and turn it into a turn key solution or service that makes it easier to track and positioned as more accurate. The pitch: You have results instantly and can act on them with new messaging, offers, creative and strategy.  Oh, and by the way – check out that lift!  Even if you used an advanced analytic technique, someone has a better one to sell.

What should you trust?  What should your managers and executives trust?  Well, that’s your job – create credibility in the numbers and be prepared to defend the results.

Sorry, there is no silver bullet in any testing methodology or analytic modeling.  Each serves a purpose and each mitigates one issue better than another.  No manager or executive wants to be burdened with the fine points of the statistical model you use.  Less is more after all, and they only care about results.  The answer to the secret is how you position your results and anticipate questions that may be brought up during the presentation or after as it has had time to soak in.  Assume stakeholders will look to better inform themselves after your presentation.  They want multiple data points pointing in the same direction to confirm or disprove your recommendation.

Regardless of whether the stakeholders understand a test or modeling method, you should.  The strengths help you tell the story of results.  The weaknesses are where the astute will hone in.  For instance, if you use a sampling methodology, be prepared to present your insight in a manner that underscores not just the the positive impact noticed.  Your listeners will always look for the tarnish in your insights and you need to show why sampling was still accurate and the effect of selection was not a contributing factor to a change in results if ignored.  This doesn’t have to be in the presentation, but you need to be prepared to put the question to bed.

The other aspect is presenting enough of the information.  Incomplete data is a deal breaker.  In attempts to simplify, there is often the risk of over simplifying.  Again, the balance is providing enough in the presentation to satisfy the obvious needs for information and having the details in your back pocket.  First, this creates the the right focus for discussion.  Second, being up on the details makes  you look prepared and informed.

In the end, it isn’t just the insight you bring to the table.  It is your expertise in presenting your findings and creating confidence that is sustainable beyond the opinions and guidance of others.  Leadership in analytics is as much about the obvious insights as it is in covering your bases.

If you trust the numbers, make your stakeholders as well.

I sat across from a client the other day discussing how they measure digital marketing efforts. They had just committed and entrusted millions of dollars in online ad spend to our agency only weeks before. The SEM and Display Media teams had already come in to discuss ideas and strategy. Now it was my team, web analytics, to come in to measure and prove that we could get the most conversion out of these ad dollars. On the line – display dollars and social media.

As marketers, we know that display is the hidden lift behind search and conversion. We even realize that social media, beyond the hype, has as much if not more value than the a creative placement. It is intuitive. And, to be honest, executives get it as well – they just don’t know why they have to pay so much for it.  Yet, I still get the questions I got the other day, “How do we defend our display budget?  Is there really ROI in social media?”

Here’s the thing, if as online marketers we are in doubt, a definitive ‘NO’ is going to come down from above.   Research conducted by such reputable firms as ComScore Networks and eMarketer isn’t enough to change minds.  It wasn’t enough to convince the marketers across the table from me.  They wanted to know if display and social media spend was working to the advantage of our other clients.  If so, how did we know?

The current approach has been pick a few tactics, launch, and measure.  Results come in and they are lack luster; we chalk this up to not working and move on.  Why the test didn’t work is not always assessed.  The results tell it all.  Not really.  The results only tell us the outcome of the test.  It does not tell us the validity of the test.  This is the beginning of defining attribution to our display and social media tactics.

The Reality:

Not all campaigns and applications are made equal.  The trick with display and social media tactics is that you know what you want them to do for you.  What is the goal, awareness, drive to site, engagement, or conversion, or all four?  Once that is determined, what is the role of display and social media in attaining these goals – direct or supportive?

The Application:

It pays at this point to think out of the box.  Social media as commonly thought of – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – is only an aspect of social media.  What makes social media work is the communication, proliferation, engagement, and connection it drives.  The venue of a network or blog is only a placement, the components that facilitate the experience of the venue are the engines.  Display as well is more than a billboard. Approaching display like you would an email campaign with a targeting strategy, crisp copy and creative, and a strong call to action is the key to making display work.

Next, taking into account how these tactics support the goals will define measures and metrics.  Saying that click through rate for display and social media are indicators of conversion is only a small portion of the value.  As seen, click through rates are dropping dramatically for display and marketers have yet to directly connect social media interactions with conversion.  It is not to say that conversions can’t or won’t happen.  It is just that the likelihood is much lower.  So, you need to measure how awareness and perception contribute to conversion.  And this is the crux of the matter.

Test, Test, Test Again:

The test at this point should be more clear.  You know what you will launch and why.  You have a perspective of how to measure performance and its link to goals.  It is time to develop the test plan.  Here are a list of things to keep in mind when developing the test plan:

1)  Know your baseline.  This is more than having a control.  A control segment assumes you have tested a baseline.  Don’t assume that several weeks prior or even a few months of data is representative.  You will need to measure a baseline of performance over a period that allows for seasonality, marketing cycles, and market forces.

2) Consider how long your display and social media campaigns need to be in market to be able to measure impact.  You need to attain a threshold of measurable sample and you need to take into account the length of time required for exposure.  You may reach a sample that is significant but if it was attained in a week and a display or social media standard is 3-4 weeks in market for impact to be felt, you don’t have a viable test.

3)  Start simple and progress to advanced.  Applying a simple in market – out of market approach can get you headed in the right direction and give you what you need.  As you begin to exhaust simple testing methods, this is when attribution analysis can kick-in and allow you to apply complex strategies.

4)  Got results?  Test again.  This is an iterative process.

5)  Those results you got, leverage them elsewhere.  Insights you gain from one set of tactics or a campaign can seed an expansion of activities.  Then, test assumptions in the new application.