Do you live in the 'Bot-infested Badlands' ?

News Corp announced last week revenues of $2.18bn for the last 3 months of 2017. But aside from the 3% year-on-year improvement, the biggest headline grabbing phrase was reserved for CEO Robert Thomson describing the dysfunctional digital environment as "The bot-infested badlands".

This is clearly him positioning his brands as the quality online publishers and the opposite of the digital locations that are "hardly a safe space for advertisers, whose brands are being tainted by association with the extreme, the violent and the repulsive".

https://newscorpcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/q2-2018-press-release_final_02-08-2018-1230pm.pdf

PPC : change nothing and nothing changes

I've helped a lot of organisations over the years optimise their digital advertising campaigns. This means I've seen a number of different ways of setting up and configuring paid search in services like Google AdWords, Microsoft's Bing Ads (previously Yahoo's own Search Marketing efforts) and others.

In several notable examples the PPC (pay per click) campaigns had seemingly reached their peak and the organisations concerned were happy to carry on doing the same thing day after day. In nearly every case the person managing the activity was happy to spend a very similar amount each day or month and deliver the same amount of visitors. (If I'm honest, they were almost scared to make changes once they found a set-up that worked).

Unsurprisingly, this infuriated the heck out of me for various reasons:

1. There is never an optimum way to build PPC campaigns. If you think you're doing the best paid search you ever could, then you're sadly mistaken.
Note: If your digital marketing agency says there is and that they've found it... They are trying to either get an easy ride or hide something

2. Google, Microsoft and the rest of the search engines never stop evolving their products, so failing up change your paid SEM will only risk leaving you with outdated approaches and techniques.

3. New competition comes into the market all the time (and some leave) and the current ones get smarter or more determined. More competition for the same terms will therefore push the bidding price up in systems such as AdWords.
Note: Your clever competition knows that change is good and how it can help to improve customer acquisition costs... Do you?

4. Websites change and therefore variables such as Google's Quality Score vary over time. If you're directing prospects to a site where the content and catalogue information is changing all the time, you can bet your QS is fluctuating too (it might even be changing when you have a static site!).

But more importantly than all if these should be the urge in every online marketer to improve on what is there... Not necessarily by making huge changes to your PPC account on a daily basis, but by the use of incremental changes and small experiments that test new ways and wording.

After all... Don't you want to learn and find out more about paid search? Do you want your skills to stand still in a market place that rewards talent? Don't you want to compete against your peers out there, all intent on bettering those CPC and conversion rates ?
(Or are you just happy to take your employer's or client's money for the short term?)

Multi-channel digital attribution – what's next?

If you had read the recent eConsultancy report called‘Making Sense of Marketing Attribution’, you would know that the majority of websites are either not carry out any form of attribution or are still apply a last click approach. In this report the client-side marketers responding said that only26% were doing marketing attribution beyond last click … where the last channel used gains all the credit for the acquisition.

The online sector has been gradually moving towards digital multi-channel attribution, although it is still early days. The aim of these efforts is to understand the different online channels or touch points used by customers in their online paths to conversion on eCommerce sites, but:

• There is still little maturity of the attribution market, meaning there are several bespoke offerings and no real common standards between suppliers

•  The current attribution methods used are basic in their mathematical modelling

•  They are online-only, with no consideration for other non-digital channels (e.g. TV or outdoor)

In my experience, there is very little being done to look at the bigger picture that appropriately considers not just the journey and interactions across the disparate online channels, but also the offline ones…and it is here I think there is an opportunity.

I really think that businesses and their agencies need to move away from single channels of data (e.g. website analytics. TV viewing figures, etc.) and also beyond the basic online only attribution models. They need to understand the entire user journey that leads not just to a transaction, but to a longer-term relationship. Only then can business truly understand the influence that different devices, channels, proportional activity and other factors (such a peer recommendations) have on purchasing and subsequent behaviour.

Quality Score & on-page optimisation

Recently I've been a bit of a Quality Score fanatic, trying to get it as high as possible in my Google based PPC campaigns.

Although this has been a quest to find out the best way of optimising marketing budgets, it's also been a method for understanding just what does and doesn't affect on-page Quality Score.

As you probably know, Quality Score is calculated by Google via a mysterious combination of the advert, keywords used and the page you're directing users to. The more relevant Google thinks these are to each other, the better your QS. The best is 10 and the worst is 1. 

A quick point, if you want to find out your Quality Score, you can by looking at the 'keywords' tab in the 'campaigns' tab in your PPC account. Clicking on the white speech bubble  next to any keyword's status will reveal this calculated figure.

So what on-page attributes makes a difference? Well officially the three important factors affecting landing quality score are: relevant & original content, transparency and navigability (although page speed has been mentioned in several blogs, I'm uncertain about its actual influence in this metric).

Helpfully Google publishes its own advice on how you can optimise your site to make your Adwords efforts more cost effective:

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2404197&from=46675&rd=1

The digital marketing toolkit

If you have read my recent post on The digital PR toolkit and the slightly older one about the AIDA customer acquisition process, then this one on the toolkit available to digital marketers will come as no surprise.

To quickly recap.... if we follow the AIDA customer acquisition steps as shown below, then there is a relevant role for digital PR, Marketing and Conversion specialists throughout the entire process.

The second circle shown above is what I believe is the scope of the online marketer's role in the steps to obtaining customers (I'll hopefully talk about how you keep them in subsequent postings). And taking just this circle on its own, we can show the different tools available.... again with the on-site tools shown within the sphere and the off-site ones placed outside.

The first thing you that regular readers of this blog will realise, is that there are some tools mentioned here that were also covered in my previous Digital PR Toolkit posting. This is because the roles of online PR, marketing and conversion have now blurred.

Here's a breakdown of the respective tools:

Off-site:

• Online Advertising:
  Media such as animated banners and buttons may have gone out of vogue somewhat, but there is still a lot of online media inventory available out there and its now possible to target the site or demographic sector you are after reaching. With the general ubiquity of greater broadband speeds now available, other richer formats such as video or interactive adverts are now gaining greater prominence on a lot of pages.
  
• Affiliate Marketing
  Sometimes seen as the murkier side of the industry, there is no doubt that paying someone a commission to grow your sales for you is of significant benefit. Yes, there are the downsides in that you could end up competing with affiliates when running your own activity, needing the obvious communication and management between both parties.
  
• Search Engine Marketing
  Advertising through Google, Yahoo, Bing and the like is a directly-attributable way of growing website traffic and leads for your business. Making sure you have identified the correct keywords and setting the right budget is something pay-per-click specialists know all about!
  
• Search Engine Optimisation
  Why pay for traffic when you can gain prominence in search engines results for free? If you have focused an entire marketing budget on directly measurable clicks (e.g. via PPC), you would probably have missed the opportunity to promote your site up the organic rankings as well.
  
• Micro-sites (or one-page microsites)
  Sometimes you either don't want to or just cannot make changes to the main organisational website to support a customer acquisition campaign. This could be for a number of reasons, including: timescales, budget, flexibility of design or just because you want a different campaign-specific URL. Then a microsite (or even just a clever one-page site) is often the most practical approach.
  
• Email Marketing
  Email was one of the first Internet applications and is still an effective tool for marketing to new and existing clients. Just make sure your email marketing campaigns area working as hard for you as they possibly can. (Hint: Just because its an older technology, it doesn't mean you should stop being innovative in its use)
  
• Competitions
  Some may see this purely as a tool for gaining leads (or email addresses) and to a certain extent that's true. However a clever competition can be sponsored or contain various questions that could segment your audience better (Hint: to be able to market to them better in the future). There is also a huge opportunity missed by so many online competitions to drive customers through to websites at the end of the competition form.
  
• Sponsorship
  Although many see sponsorship as a brand-building exercise rather than a marketing one, in the online world sponsorship on some sites can contain clicks through to the target website and help in the customer acquisition process.
  
• Social Media Marketing
  In the last few years, advertising spend has started to follow users into social media. And with one main reason... that's where Internet users are spending so much of their time. Sure, there needs to be a mindset change in creating a two-way dialogue with consumers rather than just a one-way monologue as conventional marketers do... but the integration of paid advertising with social media engagement creates a potent mix that most online marketers will not be able to ignore.

Old school advertising is getting left on the shelf

I'm glad its not just me that thinks the old days of advertising going all the "talking but no listening" are dying out.

This commercial sums it up for me:

Tesco thanks its staff and suppliers

The trend towards quicker and more reactive newspaper advertising continues, with this 'Thanks You' ad that appeared today in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

Its also interesting to note the store locator URL put at the bottom of this advert, which makes me think that it will also be appearing as an online ad anytime soon (if not already).

Online advertising spend overtakes TV

It had to happen (but even I'm suprised by how quickly this has occurred) online advertising spending in the UK has overtaken television.

According to a study by the IAB , PWC & World Advertising Research Centre, online advertising now has a 23.5% market share, now making it the biggest ad media.

Unsuprisingly mainstream media is sticking its head in the sand on this one. Lindsey Clay from the TV marketing body Thinkbox says:

it’s interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of
online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it.

And apparently the World is still flat as well..... See the larger article in New Media Age

Growth predicted in Interactive Advertising

Despite all the doom and gloom of the current recession, Forrester Research are predicting that interactive marketing spending will hit $25.6 billion in 2009. This will be an increase on the 2008 total of $23.1 billion by 11%

Even better news that Shar VanBoskirk predicts:

We expect marketer spend on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to reach nearly $55 billion by 2014.

However, this growth witll not come without casualties, mainly from direct mail and print advertising.

The full article is here:

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/05/interactive-budgets-are-growing-at-the-expense-of-offline.html

T-Mobile takes over Trafalgar Square

T-Mobile, in a reprisal of their famous Liverpool Street flash mob dancing advert, took over Trafalgar Square in the middle of London on Friday evening and the actual advert screened last night on UK TV.



Although this didn't perhaps have the impact of the previous one, it continues the "Life's for sharing" theme.

Regulation for Online Behavioral Marketing

It has been reported yesterday that prominent members of the UK Online Marketing industry have now agreed to regulate Internet advertising that uses behavioural techniques.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUKTRE5225JR20090303

This must go some way to address the concerns raised about Phorm trials last year. However it will not stop Phorm being introduced in 2009 and may not entirely stop some of the less-than-genuine behaviour that has been seen from them recently.

Internet Video Overtakes TV for 18-24

In their 'State of the Industry' research report, online video advertising company LiveRail say that US-based 18 - 24 year olds now spend more time watching internet-distributed video content than “traditional” broadcast television

Although these figures are mainly based upon their own ad-serving figures, they do predict US online advertising spend increasing by 55% in 2009 and 40% in 2010.

Stranegly I can't find any figures for similar UK-based Generation Y or millenial activity....

Twitter and revenue

There's been a lot of speculation this week about Twitter possibly charging for its service. And I've been guilty of keeping this speculation going by discussing the subject online & offline. The basis of this dialogue has been whether they will possibly charge brands, companies or individuals.
Well, now the subject has been addressed by the folks at Twitter, who have clearly stated:

"Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities, etc."

So whilst they have nothing to report just yet, its a useful exercise to ask this Top100 UK websites and the 7th most popular UK social networking site how they are actually goinf to make any money.

Because, surely it HAS to start making money eventually? It can't just eat $20m in funding and keep asking for more... can it? That would be like the 'good old pre-.com bubble days' where nobody actually cared about the revenue model... until the money run out.

If the rumours are true and it turned down a £500m offer from Facebook, then it must have other plans..... right? How about?

• Contextual advertising (e.g. AdSense)
• In-tweet advertising (e.g. Magpie)
• Collecting/processing/selling information? (Perhaps, but doesn't Facebook have more to sell? )
• White-labelling its service to closed-user communities or verticals
• Selling any remaining 'vanity' user accounts (like personalised vehicle registrations) or at least charging for ther transfer
• Offering a paid-for 'premium' service (e.g. to see all your previous tweets, etc.)
• Charge companies for interfacing with its API
• Sell to Google for more than Facebook's offer

Any more ideas?

Adverts now target YouTube audience

TV is getting more and more aware that Internet advertising is eating its lunch (Online Marketing spend is now second behind TV and now ahead of Newspaper, Radio and other main-stream media).

But you can't help but feel that recent TV adverts such as those done by T-Mobile or Cadbury's (see below) have been done as-much for their online viral capacity as for their immediate viewing impact.

Barclaycard have now gone one step further and set up a competiton for people to create their own advert, based upon the very popular (and memorable) 'waterslide' campaign.

Rather than YouTube being a Parasite, could it be that TV adverts developed for an online / multi-channel audience are the saviour of the commercial TV networks?

T-Mobile and the buzz

Those who are not from these shores ("what shores?" I hear you ask, "a pint please" is my reply), will not have seen the flash-mob-dancers of the T-Mobile TV advert that is costing the mobile telco a fortune right now.

If you haven't seen it (or if T-Mobile haven't already copied the format to another country), take a look here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

So? What makes this campaign so interesting? Well its getting a lot of very positive mentions online, e.g. on Twitter:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=t-mobile+advert

There's even a YouTube tutorial video of how to do the dance:

Newspapers - trouble ahead

eMarketer states that newspaper ad revenues dropped 16.4% in 2008. But before you shed a tear, please remember that is still $37.9 billion in income. (However the estimations are that by 2012, this will be $28.4 billion.)





Carol Krol, eMarketer senior analyst says

"they face the same transition problems that plague other traditional media,
such as TV, and so far they have not been able to crack the code”

"Online advertising is a fad" says Wigan Courier boss

Regular readers will know I like to mention the gradual demise of the traditional media now and then. However, its been a while now since I found such a funny quote (courtesy of the Press Gazette Blog) by a member of the press about all this online stuff, that I had to post again today (that makes 3).

Mark Ashley, Managing director of the Wigan Courier has stated:

"the current obsession with internet advertising and Facebook will gradually go the way of all the digital fads over the last few years"
and
“There is still no substitute for a colourful, well-designed advertisement in a truly local paper.”

This wonderfully insightful comment came after the paper increased its circulation by 2,500 copies to 34,900 (I make that a whole 7% increase) after “continued requests from advertisers and members of the public”.

A social media crisis for Motrin

Word has reached these shores of a Social Media backlash to the TV adverts for Motrin a painkiller in the US.

The ad targetted mums who carry their child in a sling on their body and went on to mention how this this is fashionable and gives you back pain. They haven't gone as far as to say "your child is a pain in the neck", but a lot of people took offence to the clip, blogging about it:
(e.g. http://shakethesalt.com/2008/11/motrin-the-anti-mom/ ) and using Twitter. (At this time of writing, the http://www.motrin.com/ website is even down).

Judge for yourself :



This is a warning to every brand. Your customers could take offence, even at your highly-researched campaign, especially if it targets a sensitive section of the population (e.g. new mums). Make sure you have plans in place for how to deal with this sort of crisis and learn from how other companies respond.
(Note to Motrin: Perhaps taking down your own website at a point like this isn't the best policy?)

Online Newspaper Revenue... still dropping

But instead of blaming their monetisation strategy or a declining product, what have they claimed is the reason? .... According to the New York Times the reason is that they have too many adverts.

So, despite online advertising revenues growing, newspapers claim that with a huge site with lots of adverts comes the awful burdon of generating sufficient advertising dollars across all of it. Those days of generating huge online editions that were not only copies of the paper-based product, but enhanced versions with loads of additonal topics/opinions/comments, may be a thing of the past.


Yes, you did read that right. Newspapers online are considering reducing the size and number of adverts they display (and some are already doing it) .

Note: The problem apparently comes when everyone wants to spend money buying up the homepage, but don't care about the rest of it. Therefore newspapers struggle to find the right online ad sizes that they can sell premium advertising revenue for.

To quote media economist Robert Picard,

"newspapers keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner. This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."

Does this mean...

• That newspapers have to buck the current trend of blogging and building social networks to create inventory?
• That they have forgotten about seriously monetising their long-tail of niche content?

Perhaps. Or just possibly as Robert Picard says, "they are just trying too hard".

Marketing & Product

There's a fantastic presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of Advertising, Brands, etc.
http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/whats-next-in-marketing-advertising-318143

He tackles the issues of product, communication and marketing, but frankly puts forward the idea that those who are not engaging.... "are screwed"

Content is the new currency and Engagement is the new Marketing... discuss.