Ad Sales Blog

Do your media reps ask about paid search?

If your sales staff sells traditional media, understanding how paid search works is a big plus. Today, about half of all online ad dollars go to search, so it is important to understand where most of online money now goes.

The first step is for media reps is to ask clients how much of their ad budget goes to search. Many are surprised at how much of the marketing plan goes to an advertising form that started in its current form only 12 years ago, as 2000 was the year Google first started selling advertising based on keywords.

The year search really broke out was 2008. In that year Google indexed a trillion web pages, but more importantly, acquired web analytics giant DoubleClick enabling them to, "dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurably and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies."

Leveraging the resources of DoubleClick, Google was able to improve the metrics for advertisers and offer "more precise metrics in order to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns." With improved metrics came better documentation of the effectiveness of search and and improved sales.      

The year 2008 was also the year B2B print advertising, a medium challenged with documenting results, started to falter. Coincidence? Hard to say.

But lets look at the present. A recent study of B2B marketers from Marketing Sherpa showed budget allocation for paid search is now ahead of print advertising, no small feat for a medium whose ads often cost between 30 cents and five dollars each. Think traditional media does not compete against search for ad dollars? Think again.  

Do your media reps know how to position their prodcuts against paid search? It would be best if they could.      

 

Learn how we train media sales people

 

How interactive digital magazines could give "search" a run for the money

Since “search” accounts for about half of every online ad dollar spent, the extent to which interactive magazines affect search is an important consideration for any media buyer. When an interactive magazine enters a market, it eliminates part of the functional need for search by consistently providing its subscribers with current and ongoing content. This is finding #8 from the study "The Case for Advertising in interactive Digital Magazines":

Over one third (34.2%) of interactive digital magazine readers report that they use search less after subscribing to an interactive digital magazine

When readers do not use search, they bypass exposure to both organic and paid search listings, as well as search ads. With over a third of interactive digital magazine readers reporting that they use search less after becoming regular subscribers, there is potential for marketers to miss targeted customers. Further, since subscribers to an interactive digital magazine would likely be among a market’s most engaged customers, the potential for advertisers to miss that market’s best customers by using search alone is very real.

This is why interactive magazine advertising works well as a complement to search. Ads in interactive digital magazines reach subscribers whose informational needs are being satisfied by an ongoing stream of content, and so are searching less often. Tom Winsor, publisher of HorseLink, has some thoughts on why interactive digital magazines can displace the need for search: “When a knowledgeable editor sorts through everything going on in a niche and gives her readers only the most important things, she is acting like a search engine for the reader’s interests.”

The Internet has millions of destinations, and searching for the right content can take time. Eroin McSorley, editor of Monkey magazine, sees his mission as a time-saver: “When you’re surfing the Web, the only time constraints are ones you set for yourself. With Monkey magazine, we take a little chunk of 25 or 30 minutes each week and cover all the aspects of what young men would be looking on the Web for anyway.” When editors of interactive magazines anticipate their readers’ needs and deliver content to them on an ongoing basis, readers have less to search for, thus making search and interactive magazines a complementary media buy

Download "The Case for Advertising in interactive Digital Magazines"

Profit on the web is about audience not traffic

At the recent Digital Magazine Symposium, Gordon Borell astonished the audience by blowing up the notion that building that largest base of online readers is the key to ad revenue. 

   After surveying the financial results from thousands of local media Web operations for the past eight years Borrell concludes there is no direct correlation between large amounts of traffic and large amounts of money.

For example, Borrell tracked a wedding Web site in one of the top media ten media markets making nearly as much money in Internet advertising (in millions of dollars) as the #1 ranked TV station website in that market. The TV site gets about 600,000 unique visitors per month, the wedding site gets about 60,000, or 1/10th of that traffic. How can this happen?

Borrell says that online, the best advertising is content. There was a time before the Internet (my kids are shocked at this statement) when the top way consumers learned about products was through advertising. But the Internet has become a far more efficient educator. Many of the most profitable websites make money because their content functions like advertising did years ago, as a customer educator for product sales. According to Borrell, visitors of these sites are “leaning forward” to read the content while probably ignoring the banner ads. 

Some print publishers are still trying to win the print circulation/CPM battles online. But that battle is over. They lost. Online, search, which now accounts for over half of all online advertising dollars spent, has won. A media buyer can always buy more clicks per dollar buying search. 

While the online CPM battle is lost, the war for publisher profit can be won. Borrell shows us how with an example: “Compare radio, a $15 billion media segment, with the yellow pages, a $9.8 billion segment. About twice as many people listen to radio compared with those who use the printed yellow pages. So those ad dollars seem just a little out of whack, right?  Now consider this:  For radio, average weekly time spent listening is about 20 hours.  For the yellow pages, it’s about a minute.  An industry that reaches less than half the audience of radio and gets about 60 seconds of quality time with them every week – compared with radio’s 20 hours a week – can still attract about 65% of the ad dollars as radio?  That’s because the yellow pages, like the Internet, are a lean-forward medium where people see the advertising because the advertising is the content."

At the Digital Magazine Symposium, when Borrell laid this out, everyone in the audience was taking furious notes.

To further support Borrell's points, the chart below illustrates the dollar value of a unique visitor at some of the best known websites. To estimate these numbers, Silicon Alley Insider took the full year revenue for 2009 for each of the companies below and divided them by the number of their average monthly worldwide unique visitors.

As per Borrell, the more "wallet ready" the unique visitor is, the more dollars generated. Search gets the most per visitor, then display, and then social. 

Google's uniques (search) are the most valuable: $18 of revenue per monthly unique per year. Facebook's uniques, meanwhile (social networking) are worth a paltry $3.50. Twitter's uniques are worth almost nothing.

Understanding this, publishers, even small ones, can compete. For example, check out HD Camera Guide which attracts  a relatively small but valuable "wallet ready" audience.

Jaffe vs Joel: Should digital marketing or social media run maketing strategy?

Mitch Joel (left) is President of the “traditional” digital advertising agency, Twist Image. Joseph Jaffe (right) is the Chief Interruption Officer of Powered which bills itself as a social media agency. As the two debate over which kind of agency will best serve brands, the issue of how social media fits into the overall marketing plan comes into sharp focus. You can listen to their debate HERE

Throughout the debate Joel describes today's marketing challenge as managing a client's message through a variety of digital channels with social media providing some new ones. “At the end of the day where does the output of all of these social media activities happen to be? They are happening online. They are happening in the digital channel.”

In contrast, Jaffe sees social media as more than a source of new channels, he sees it as a new source of strategy, “This is a different way to market. This is a different way to do business. This is a different set of rules of engagement and terms and conditions and new metrics are going to be required.”

This contrast alone would not be that meaningful if the overall new strategies Jaffe advocates were not so provocative. During the debate Jaffe offered three hypotheses that contrast his vision:

“Three hypotheses; one retention becomes the new acquisition, two customer services becomes not just a but the key strategic device differentiator, and hypothesis number three the real role of social media is retention not acquisition.”

"Retention is the new acquisition?" This is a radical departure from most digital marketing strategy which is based on results, measurably, and ROI. But in a world where most clients can be easily identified  and their loyalty is worth far more than acquiring yet one more customer elsewhere, is Jaffe on to something?

For most companies, Joel’s approach will require fewer adjustments in the marketing plan as social media is simply blended into the existing marketing mix. Jaffe's approach requires a new way to look at the marketing equation.

But ultimately this debate will not be settled on how comfortable clients are made to feel, but  how successful these approaches are. Ultimately, the market will decide as consumers respond more to one or the other. I highly recommend listening to the debate, at the link I posted above, it's great fun. 

My eclectic summary of the great debate:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can “search credits” save the newspaper and magazine industries?

I have never believed that newspapers had a problem charging for their content. Newspaper content has always been free or nearly free. When I was growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts I remember being shocked to hear that the 25 cents we paid for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette barely paid for the delivery boys. It actually cost a couple of dollars to print and deliver that daily paper and money to pay for it came from advertising.

But if advertising is lacking in a newspaper’s business model why not restructure so newspapers are paid for their original content creation based on the “Internet currency” easiest to monetize; attention delivered. Simply stated, if newspapers could get more attention/eyeballs, they could get more online readers, and more ad revenue. 
The arbiter online “attention delivered” is search. Google, Yahoo, and Bing, determine where vast majority of online attention is directed. But search is blind to many things, among them, whether content is original or aggregated. This “blind evaluation” heavily disadvantages original content publishers and favors aggregators.

It is hard for original content producers to become aggregators because it is hard to aggregate content from direct competitors. Ironically, it is easier for organizations that generate no content, and compete with no other media, to be aggregators.
So here we have an unsustainable model: the people aggregating content are getting the majority of the traffic, and therefore revenue. The people creating the original content get less traffic and revenue.

Addressing this issue for the news business, media consultant, Arnon Mishkin, partner with Mitchell Madison Group, says,

 “The vast majority of value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by a news organizations that get linked and scraped. We did a study on several sites that aggregate purely a menu of news stories. In all cases there was at least twice as much traffic on the home page as there were clicks going to the stories that were on it. In other words a very large share of the people who were visiting the site were merely browsing to read headlines rather than using the aggregation page to decide what they wanted to read in detail.”
Long term this is an unsustainable model. But I propose it can be made to work with “search credits.”

 I propose we reward original content creators with “search credits” which would raise original content higher in competitive search rankings than the same content posted as aggregated content.  

There are already people in place who could make this happen. Most original content producers have SEO staffers who would be delighted to tag their content as original if it meant higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search engines could adjust their algorithms to respond those those tags.

With aggregators and original content producers alike often getting a majority of their traffic from search, giving “search credits “ to original content creators would justly reward content originators and assure their survival. Their survivial is also good news for content aggregators. 

Newspapers, and other original content producers, would find their search rankings rise, their web traffic rise, and their revenues rise.
I challenge Google, Yahoo, and Bing to consider the harm they are doing to original content producers by giving the same search rankings to original and aggregated content.

Can content producers such as, magazine and newspaper publishers organize to insist that original content be prioritized higher at search organizations? I'd be willing to help out anyone at the MPA, ABM, or the NAA who wants to start the conversation.

Read Arnon Mishkin's post, "The Fallacy Of The Link Economy" on the Paid Content website

"Online media is bought on religion or politics"

Susan Bratton’s “DishyMix” podcast came up with up one of the funniest and succinct descriptions of how media gets bought during her interview with media metrics guru, Jim Sterne (photo at left). Sterne is the founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits where online wizards gather to interpret data from online programs and ad campaigns.

In the world on online ad metrics you would think that the numbers would speak for themselves and there be little room for the human element. Wrong. When Sterne talks about how media decisions get made, metrics and all, the human element is still very much present.  

According to Sterne media is bought on either "religion or politics." According to Sterne, “If it’s religion, your CMO 15 years ago was good at buying television. So television gets all the money ‘cause that’s what he knows. Or, she really was a brilliant “search” marketing person, so search gets the focus. She’s the hammer and everything looks like a nail.”

“Politics is where the corporate search guy is going to get more money because he has known the CMO longer or has more power.”

Sterne summarizes, "You know it’s religion if they say, 'You know I’ve always done it this way and it’s worked for me.' It's politics when they say, 'Gees, we don’t have enough resources and this seems like the best way to go."

Click to listen to or download the DishyMix podcast featuring Jim Sterne here

Are blogs the new buyers guides?

In previous posts I have stated the conventional wisdom that blogs are a tough sell as ad sponsored media goes. Unless you have a celebrity blogger or are blogging against an important event, ad sponsorships are hard to sell. In those cases, it can be argued, the celebrity and the event are bringing in the value, not so much the blogging itself. 

But now comes evidence that blogging may have value in it's own right. A study from BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch that focused on the behavior of heavy blog readers finds them relying on blogs for information previously thought to be in the benefit list of search and buyers guides. From the study:       

"Blog readers do not appear to rely as heavily on search as a means to find new blogs as compared to consumers of traditional online media. According to the survey, one in five general blog readers (defined as consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months) use blog links to discover new blogs. Further, the study suggests blogs are not consumed in isolation, but experienced as part of a connected conversation – nearly half (49 percent) of blog readers and 71 percent of frequent readers read more than one blog per session. Key findings include:
•    Links more powerful than search: For frequent readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who voted for Web search.
•    Links signal trust: For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39 percent of survey participants). 
•    Blog search not yet mainstream: Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6 percent of general readers and 11 percent of frequent readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.

Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence
•    Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
•    Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.
•    Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
•    Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).

It’s Buy Time: Where Blogs Sit in the Purchase Cycle
According to the study, blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.
Blog readers also replied around blogs’ influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
•    Decide on a product or service: 21 percent
•    Refine choices: 19 percent
•    Get support and answers: 19 percent
•    Discover products and services: 17 percent
•    Assure: 14 percent
•    Inspire a purchase: 13 percent
•    Execute a purchase: 7 percent

This story has some traction, here is a link to a short summary of the that study ran in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/22drill.html?_r=1

Read the entire Buzz Logic press release:

 http://www.buzzlogic.com/press/news.html?postdate=1225203064

Is the Golden Age of "web as direct response" over?

The "Internet advertising as direct mail" model, with click throughs the only meaningful metric, has been dealt a blow. This is great news for content publishers, whose advertising sell is based more on relevance and engagement, and less on delivering boat loads of click troughs. 

As I have said many times on this blog, if you are staking your continued online media sales on delivering click thoughs alone you are toast. For online media buyers, there is always a cheaper way to get more click throughs. But media relevancy is making a comeback. The driver? Social media that engages more and more visitors while giving them the power to  block advertising.     

According to recent post on the Harvard Business Review:  

"Early in the Internet era, it looked as if successful online marketing would follow the model of direct marketing. Data profiling and digital media would allow for deeper targeting and more intrusion into consumers’ lives than broadcast marketing. At last, it seemed, marketing would become a branch of social engineering with the marketer firmly in control. Ten years later that view looks to have been quite wrong. What we did not anticipate was that the technology that enabled intrusion would also enable defense against intrusion. From Tivo to Caller ID to social media, consumers have found ways to keep the invaders at bay. Marketers no longer rule the market. They are invited guests. If they are provocative, pertinent and entertaining they get to stay. If they are overbearing there are ways to shut them out."

The article goes on the give a terrific example of how this approach is being used to sell soap. Yup, Dove soap! 

"But some brands are cracking the code of social media and discovering how to thrive in the disenchanted environment of Web 2.0. Consider Unilever’s Dove, which has added $1.2 billion to its brand value over the past three years...

The principle made plain by Dove’s success is that in social networks brands must seek to provoke conversation not to dominate it. The locus of control in the marketplace shifts from marketer to consumer, and success is built on a model of co-created meaning. In Web 2.0, marketers accept that it is enough to rouse, to stimulate, to stir.

Dove's strategy was to move away from functional claims and to present itself as a brand with a point of view. It advocated that the beauty industry was contributing to the destruction of self-esteem in girls and young women by propagating unrealistic standards. With its Self-Esteem Fund and The Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove placed itself at odds with its competitors. Consumers loved the conflict. They lit up the digital media, generating millions of pass-along clips for YouTube, clips like Evolution and Hates Her Freckles."

See the Dove campaign website: http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/

Read the whole post on the Harvard Business Review, "How to Build a Brand on the Web? Ask Unilever"

Should content publishers compete with search?

Maybe not. When David Churbuck, Vice President, Global Web Marketing, at Lenovo spoke at the Folio show earlier this week he showed the audience this slide showing how this major PC maker spends its ad dollars. As with many marketers these days, "search" is the largest spend.  

All magazine publishers have felt the impact of marketers’ moving their dollars online and most magazines have online products to sell. But the 800 pound gorilla online is search.

After the speech I asked Churbuck how the content publishers in the audience should pursue his online ad dollars in light of the big spend on search.

His advice was for content publishers not try to compete with search but to develop their offerings in a different direction. He uses content based media, both online and print, to brand his company while using search to drive sales. He is more interested in doing business with content publishers who offer him media to help his branding efforts than just lead generating.

Atlas study bombshell: 71% of search is navigational only

A study released from the Microsoft owned Atlas Institute says that 71% of searches are for navigation only. Why should you care?

Many marketers believe that when a customer uses "search" to visit their website they are in a critical stage of the buying process as they source, research, and evaluate products. If true, search is extremely important and deserves a huge piece of the online ad budget.  

But what if this is not true? What if most searches are just a lazy way to navigate to familiar websites? Too lazy to type in that whole exact URL? Forget it! Type a familiar few words into a search engine and you get there with less effort. This view of search sees it a lazy man's navigation tool used to get where you were already going. There is no contribution to buying decisions so it is of little use in the marketing of products.      

The Atlas study tried to figure out which of these were true. They studied what people actually type into the search engine and how often they did it. Here is what they measured: 

1. Repeat visitors
According to Atlas:
"If a user clicked on multiple ads leading to a given advertiser’s web site, we considered
each instance after the first to be a repeat visit. We considered repeat visits to
be navigational because they imply prior knowledge of the advertiser."

2. People who type a brand name, URL, or website name into search engine.
“A click was assigned to this segment if the key phrase associated with the click
included the advertiser’s brand name or explicitly matched the advertiser’s web site”

For example, if you want to go to acme foot savers at www.acmefootsavers.com you would fall into this category if your typed in:
acme foot, acme ft, foot savers, acme savers, etc.

Here is how Atlas came up with the 71% number:

Only 29% of search users were first time, non branded users.... or 71% were navigational only users.

On a sales call.

If you sell advertising for a content publisher the online ads you sell are always in the shadow of search. Nationwide search accounts for 41% of all online ad revenues. Never 'dis" search. Search is an extremely valuable service that all marketers should be using. But often search gets more credit for sales than it deserves and gets credit for the influence your publication's brand is delivering. I have called on accounts that "have no online ad budget" because all their online $ went to search. You can use this study to help put this into perspective. Search is important. Media form content publishers is important. Your online media buy should include both.    

Download a PDF to take on your next call

http://www.atlassolutions.com/uploadedFiles/Atlas/Atlas_Institute/Published_Content/dmi-NavigationalSearch.pdf