Adam Jewell – Search & Affiliate Marketing

When you run online media programs do you know what you are really getting or paying for? Over the years behavioral targeting or “BT” as it is often referred to in the industry has become an extremely popular method of targeting these programs.

There are many diferent definitions of “BT” and what media vendors call BT. Some are as simple as tracking people who come to a website and do or do not perform a specific action. When the person visits a site within the ad network, that person is shown banners for the site that is running the media campaign. A company might want to follow people around the web who have been to the site and not checked out with the shopping cart, they might choose to (re)target all consumers who have been to a website or even specific pages of a website.

Some more advanced types of behavioral targeting may pick up demographics of an individual including age, sex, marrital status and income among other things who have been to certain sites or categories of sites and have (or not) performed certain actions online and target those consumers with ads for a particular product or service.

If you have a home computer and your wife shops at Lane Bryant, when you log onto the computer and get shown Lane Bryant ads on all the sports sites you visit, it is because one or more ad networks are tracking and recording the activities perfomed by the Internet browser on your computer.

Typical click-through rates on banner ads these days are about as close to zero as you can get in most cases. This is especially true for banners on general content sites. Even banners that are behavioraly targeted often get click-through rates just that are just a fraction of 1%.

In traditional media where nothing (or very little) is tracked and it is primarily demo targeted impresions that are purchased, there is no expectation of any direct response to the ads since they are simply broadcast to consumers.

With all the tracking capabilities available on the Internet it is possible to show the return associated with banner advertising. Whether it is a good investement or no depends on how it is measured. When you run a PPC search campaign on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com or one of the other 3rd tier engines, the success of the campaign is generally measured by the amount of sales revenue generated in relation to the amount spent on advertising. Sales are only tracked when people click-through the ad and subsequently make a purchase, fill out a lead form or perform some other activity that takes them a step or two closer to completing a transaction.

In order to justify the cost of media campaigns when nobody actually clicks on the ad, the “view through” metric was concocted by the ad networks and media companies to attribute credit to the media campaign. If someone merely loads a page with an ad on it (whether they view it or not in many cases), the ad server sets a cookie and if a person subsequently makes a purchase within the duration of the cookie window (typicall 30 to 90 days), then the media campaign is credited with the sale.

This brings up the question – if the consumer has already been to the website and not made a purchase, would they have purchased regardless of whether or not they were subsequently exposed to the banner ad? It is likely that there is some lift, but it it anywhere near enough of a lift to justify all the costs associated with a media campaign?

While there are tons of “studies” that say banner/online media is effective (all put out by the the ad networks and companies that stand to profit when you buy online media), it doesn’t seem than any neutral party has evaluated whether onine media really has a significant effect on consumer behavior.

If anyone really wanted to test out the effectiveness of online media, at least from a retargeting perspective, they could run a test in the following manner.

Pick a site with significant site traffic such that a large retargeting pool would be available.
Setup the campaign as one normally would with all the different actions and behaviors that result in a consumer falling into the retargeting pool
Serve the banner to half of the people in the retargeting pool
Set the cookie that would normall be set when a person views a banner but not show the banner to the other half of the retargeting pool
Look at the difference in behavior between the people who were exposed to the banner and those who were cookied as if they say the banner

If there is a significant lift in sales or other conversion events associated with the portion of the retargeting pool who were served the banner and not just cookied, then we can infer that the media campaign had a positive effect on consumer behavior and quantify the value. If there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups of consumers, then we conclude that the media campaign had no positive effect on consumer behavior.

Other variables including the creative, the number of impressions served per person and the frequency with which they were served and the length of the campaign would obviously affect the results, however the campaign could be let to run long enough to determine at what threshold of campaign frequency and duration is required to see some noticable difference. Is there an ad network out there that would run an experiment like this and agree to publish the results regardless of what they were? Probably not since it could rather conclusive prove that either onine media does not work or that the size and scope of the campaign would need to be so big that all but the largest brands with multimillion dollar budgets would be wise not to invest in an online media campaign.

In order to take advantage of the opportunities paid and organic search offers CPG advertisers, CPG companies need to recognize how the web works and adapt their mindset to the realities of the new marketplace. Search is not a mass medium in which to broadcast a message the same way television is.

When consumers turn to search engines, they are asking a question in the form of a keyword search. Nothing more, nothing less. They are focused on performing a task to address a want, need or desire. They have a problem and it is up to the advertiser to anticipate the intent behind the query and find a way to answer it. A search ad does not brand. A positive experience from the time a person performs a search, clicks on an ad and accomplishes the task at hand results in a positive brand experience, elevates the perception of the brand and may make the consumer more included to purchase the products of a given CPG company. Unfortunately it is difficult to conduct research into this whole process and everyone except the CPG company benefits when search ads are blasted out into the maketplace and success is measured based on clicks and impressions.

Lets say a company sells whole grain pasta. If the consumer searches for whole grain pasta, then it would make sense for the CPG company to advertise on keywords like “whole grain pasta” and take that opportunity to introduce their whole grain pasta to the consumer, present them with some recipes on how to make great pasta dishes and then present them with a coupon to get the consumer to make a purchase. The Intenet is a SALES medium, not a marketing or branding medium.. That is not 100% correct, the banner or search ad is generally not a good branding tool unless it is relevant to what the consumer wants to accomplish at the time the ad is presented to them. Search can target a consumer when they are actively looking to perform a task, banner advertising can not.

Have you ever noticed that new metrics have to be invented in order to justify most display (banner) advertising programs online? People are blind to banners and they don’t generally respond to them. Media programs are often behaviorally targeted so that the ads are shown to people who have already been to the website. In order to justify the expense of the banner programs, sales are credited to the program when people view an ad 30-90 days before they make a purchase. It generally doens’t even mater if the person saw the ad. If the ad was at the bottom of a page that the consumer loaded and a cookie was set, then the banner campaign is credited with the sale.

Lets go back to search. In order for CPG companies to take maximum advantage of the power of search, they need to embrace a different perspective. While demographics and psychographics are fine for mass media like print and TV advertising, they are generally not available in search advertising campaigns and don’t matter much anyway.

In order to make all their marketing and advertising efforts work and sell more stuff, CPG companies need to approach marketing in the following way:

Perform the standard market research that incorporates demographic and psychographic data. This can help determine who the audience is, how much income they may have and help identify the different personas the marketing and advertising campaigns must cater to in order to develop collateral to the people research shows are most likely to buy the product.

Perform keyword research to see what consumers are looking for and how they express their needs and wants. Keyword research can also provide direction for creative concept development. Are people looking for office comedy, tarot card readings, fortune tellers, grocery lists, specific types of games, recipes, or other types of entertainment or online applications?

Once there is an idea of who the consumer is likely to be, it may be possible to infer what types of activities, applications or entertainment these people may be interested in and what types of creative concepts can be developed into applications that this audience will search for.

The name of the product and the language used to describe the product can also be based on the keyword research conducted.

When the site is developed, there is now hard (or at least harder than some agency creative type wild ideas) data on what the consumer is interested in, who the consumer will be, what types of entertainment or applications the consumer may be interested in and how they will search for and describe the product when they search.

Before any designer touches anything, before any programmer sets out to develop a site and strikes the first key to develop code, the site features and architecture need to be laid out to mirror the way the consumer if likely to think about and search for the product to be sold.

Now, when the site launches, the site will naturally integrate with a paid search campaign and if the developers are technically competent and can buld a search friendly site, the site will have a much better chance of getting organic search traffic and a PPC search campaign will snap in place easily and quickly.

Once the campaign is up and running, the focus of optimization will be optimizing the website performance in tandem with the PPC search campaign. Are consumers taking steps on the website that will lead them to a purchase? Which keywords are performing best? Where is there additional marketplace demand that new content and site features can be created to fulfill? Where do people drop out of the site and why do they drop out? What site elements result in more site registrations, more interaction with the site, more recipe downloads, more sharing of content, more printing of coupons?

“Integration” has become a big buzzword in online marketing and advertising and the type of integration everyone writes about and focuses on doesn’t make any sense. Everyone is focused on “integrating” their search and media (banner) campaigns.

There are two types of integration that need to happen:

Site content and features need to “integrate” with the way people search.
Creative concepts on the website need to integrate with the look and feel of the website to present a consistent and relevant message.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is. Welcome to the Internet. If you are in CPG and you want the online channel to work for you (i.e. you want to sell more stuff) it is time to start doing things differently. You may need to shake up your organization, your agency selection and adopt a different mindset. Stop taking the “studies” and “articles” you see from the major Internet marketing publications as facts and THINK. These are press releases and “studies” designed to get you to flush more money down the toilet in the name of “branding”.

At minimum, track your search campaigns beyond clicks and impressions and measure what people actually DO on your website(s). Once you take that first step, the light will start to go on and you may start to think differently.

Prior to the arrival of the Internet, branding was most closely associated with images which evoked feelings and emotions associated with a particular brand of products or even a category of products like (got) milk. It was the type of advertising where one faced the dilemma noted by the famous Philadelphia department store pioneer, John Wanamaker “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.“? Babies were shown crawling around in tires to evoke images of safety, Coke associated its products with everything from celebrities to Polar Bears

When such advertisements first appeared on television, they enjoyed a captive audience. People gathered round the television to watch one of the few television stations available at the time and most likely enjoyed the commercials, at least at first. The media world was relatively uncluttered, life was relatively simple and advertisements had far fewer competing messages than they do today.

During the era of traditional (i.e. non-Internet) media print, radio and television advertisements were distinct from the products they promoted. The impression or association was created away from the product, away from the store. Advertisers had control over what they wanted to say and who they wanted to show it to. The consumer didn’t have a choice. They could sit and watch televison and the accompanying commercials or not watch television. Branding and brand experience were two distinct elements of the consumer experience.

In traditional media, there is still some separation of brand advertising and the brand experience; you can’t buy from television commercials…yet. Online, there is rarely such a separation but most companies still haven’t realized this. Consumers now choose whether or not they want to respond to or even see advertising in many cases. Get relevant or get out is the message.

Because the the line between “branding” and the “brand experience” is essentially one and the same, marketers need to see their online advertising and their website as one experience that also integrates with search engines. There is no such thing as “branding” online as defined solely by an ad agency or in-house team running an online advertising campaign, though rich media may once again make this possible.

On the Internet, the touchy feely brand experience immediately connects with the website. A great online advertising campaign can work wonders if and only if the brand experience that results from the consumer interation with the website is equally delightful. A great online advertising campaign can crush a brand extremly quickly if the site does not deliver on the perception portrayed by the advertising campaing.

The same is true for search engine marketing campaigns. Many marketers still seem to think search campaigns exist in a vaccuum and wonder why they achieve less than stellar results from PPP search capaigns when the site does not reflect the explicit or implicit promises made by the copy in the search ad.

Sooooo, what is online branding?

Quite simply, it is the integration of the entire online buying, browsing and conversion process into one continuous string of communication that is relevant to the consumer.