As a future environmailist™[sic], please tell us a few things about yourself so we can make our list a little greener.
– USPS, www.mailgreener.com

Anyone else find irony in the USPS sending a bulky direct mail piece on “how to make direct mail more environmentally friendly”?

Errrr… how about “mailers: send less unsolicited mail”? Funny USPS didn’t mention that one…

Here’s the envelope that came today:

The package: heavy paper envelope and thick BRC. The paper is 30% post-consumer-waste, but it is still pretty darn thick.

Regardless of your politics, would you wear would wear an “en•vi•ron•mail•ist” t-shirt? If you want one, get yours online here. Organic cotton. Free. Which begs the larger question: why is the USPS spending revenue on t-shirt give-aways?

I also wonder: does the USPS pay postage, or do they mail free?

And finally, the most befuddling part:

What’s the marketing idea behind sending me beer coasters?

Yep, that’s right. The mailing includes four beer coasters.

Jack Potter assumes mailers are handling the postage hikes by drowning their sorrows at the office? You got me.

USPS direct mail often leaves me a bit befuddled, and this piece doesn’t disappoint.

Bidding and the analysis that goes into fine tuning a flexible bidding system are critically important to a PPC program and are often neglected. Folks tend to spend too much time flipping copy, and not enough time studying the numbers. There is much more money to be made with the latter than with the former. I used to think the issue was simply not knowing what to with the numbers, but now I realize that some systems don’t really give folks access to the raw numbers needed for meaningful analysis.

In any analysis, step 1 is “Gather the raw data”. What happens if that data is hard to access, takes time and requires lots of manual manipulation to bring together in a useful format? The answer is obvious: not much analysis is going to take place.

Yet a number of professional SEM firms are in exactly this boat. Many SEM systems don’t use the atomic (ad level) cost and click data from the engines. They use estimates, and periodically do data pulls from the engines for reports back to the client.

This came as a total shock to me. How could it be that big companies — much much larger than us, who’ve been in this game longer than us — not get this right?

If the sales data is on one server and the cost and click data is on another server doing the analyses that are critical to success becomes impossible. Pulling the data together should take moments, but will take hours if numbers have to come from different servers.

An important technical question to ask any prospective SEM agency is: Do you have an API connection with each engine, and if so, do you store the daily ad level costs on your server? If their answer is “no” and you’re looking for first class results, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Apologists for the industry will argue that coupons help tip consumers who might take their business elsewhere to close the transaction on your site. Others will say that affiliates simply siphon traffic that was heading for your cash register through their system, giving discounts to users who would have purchased without them and then charging commissions for “driving” the sale.

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Below are six tests to help get a better sense of whether affiliates are doing more harm than good to your business.

Most retailers prohibit affiliates from advertising on their brand name and trademarks. That’s smart. Not only does such advertising drive no incremental traffic, it raises the cost retailers incur for running their own brand ads. In some instances, retailers allow this as a means of pushing competitors off of their brand terms, which may make sense in some markets, but not in most.

However, forbidding advertising on trademarks doesn’t actually prevent it. Here are two tricks to catch the cheaters:

1. Time of Day: some affiliates have learned that running ads on your brand at night is a good way to avoid detection and make a lot of easy money. Take a look at affiliate orders as a fraction of total orders by hour. You may find that affiliates are driving a larger chunk of the total at night and on the weekends when the cat is away.
2. Geographic Targeting: Similarly, some vipers have figured out that by running ads on trademarks everywhere but where the corporate headquarters is they can break the rules with little chance of being caught. We recommend asking your industry friends, and/or Aunt Lois in Missoula to search on your trademarks periodically and send you screen shots along with the “properties” text of the links. You can also use Google’s Ad Preview tool to see what things look like elsewhere.

I’ve spoken with some retailers who issue warnings to offenders. I don’t understand that. How many warnings would you give to an employee who was caught embezzling?

On the broader question of whether affiliate sales are incremental or cannibalizing natural search, consider the source of traffic. How do your top affiliates generate traffic? If the answer is that search on your trademark yields natural search results for “Acme coupons” right after your link, then you may have your answer. Four useful tests to determine the source of an affiliate’s traffic:

3. Conversion Rates: Take a look at the conversion rates of traffic from each affiliate. If they all share the same source code target them by referring domain. Compare the conversion rates of the affiliate traffic to conversion rates of PPC traffic on your brand terms and on your non-brand terms. We all know that traffic on brand PPC terms converts at 5 to 10 times the rate of non-brand traffic — these are “lay-down” orders. If a given affiliate’s traffic converts at rates approaching your brand terms the reason why should be obvious.
4. Click to Order Time: Do a similar comparative analysis on the mean and median intervals between the affiliate click and the eventual order. If the affiliate intervals are markedly shorter than non-brand PPC, this indicates folks have already made a purchase decision before they sought out the affiliate.
5. New-to-file Percentages: Defenders of affiliates will often point out that while the “new customer” fraction is lower than other channels, it’s not zero, therefore affiliates are driving incremental business. Hold the phone! New-to-file does not mean “incremental.” When your loyal customers tell their buddies to shop at your store, those folks shop by your brand name. They’re new, but neither your PPC program, your organic search program, nor your affiliate program should get credit for driving that order. Compare the New-to-file percentage of your affiliates to your brand PPC ads, if they’re about the same, that says a lot.
6. Coupon Percentages: What fraction of affiliate sourced orders come in with discounts/coupons? For these coupon buyers, what’s the lifetime value? Given all that we’ve seen above the greatest apologist for affiliates would have to conclude that there is some cannibalism here. What fraction of the coupon orders would have to be incremental to offset the cost of the discounts given to the cannibalized orders? Does that fraction seem plausible given the rest of the analysis?

Ultimately, determining what is incremental and what isn’t is tough. One interesting data dive might be to track three numbers over time: Online sales attributed to Brand PPC, online sales attributed to “natural search”, and online sales attributed to affiliates, each as a percentage of total site sales. Since the start of the affiliate program, has the “growth” in affiliate sales come at the expense of the other two? Does one of these three go up when the others go down and vice versa? These patterns can also be indicative of problems.

There are certain classes of affiliates that unquestionably drive incremental traffic, and I’ll discuss those next week. Unfortunately, for most retailers, those account for the minority of sales.

Happy Hunting!

Waiter: Good evening, sir. What style of food would you enjoy tonight?

Diner: Vegetarian, please.

Waiter: Yes. [points to menu] Here are our vegetarian offerings.

Diner: I’ll have the lasagna.

Waiter: Excellent. One vegetarian lasagna, coming up. [Exits, returning 10 minutes later with meal]

Waiter: Your lasagna, sir. Bon appetit.

Diner: [irate] What the hell!?! You’ve garnished my plate with hamburger!

Waiter: [confused] Sir? Is anything wrong?

Run the scene again, this time with Google’s “Search Within The Site” (SWTS):

Google: Good evening, sir. What are you searching for?

Searcher: CDW, please.

Google: Certainly. [delivers SERP in 0.14 secs] Here’s a SWTS search box leading to all our CDW organic results.

Searcher: Laptop, please.

Google: Excellent. One “laptop” search on the CDW site, coming up. [Returns 0.10 seconds later with refined SERP] Your organic “laptop” CDW site search results, sir. Bon appetit!

Searcher: [irate] What the hell? My screen is covered with links to HP, Dell, Lenovo, TigerDirect, and OfficeDepot! I said CDW!

Google: [confused] Sir? Is anything wrong?

Serving competitor ads against SWTS serps is a bad user experience, Google. You’re ignoring what your users asked for. I don’t care that folks are clicking on these competitive ads. We know they are, and that’s no justification. We’re seeing referring URLS like this

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=keyword+site%3Acompetitor.com&btnG=Search.

in our PPC logs for various clients. Sure, advertisers win a little when their paid search ads steal a click away from an organic SERP intended to be just about their competitor. And advertisers lose a little when the reverse situation happens. Don’t argue those two effects cancel out. That’s not the point here.

Serving competitive ads against SWTS results is simply bad user experience. When someone asks for results from X.com, don’t toss ads at them for Y.com and Z.com. That’s tossing burger at vegetarians. Yes, you pick up additional revenue doing it, but don’t be evil.

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PS “laptop site:cdw.com” is just one particular example; ad serving currently occurs on all SWTS searches.

By Thursday, an exact search on google for “RKG Duck”, with the search phrase in quotes, brought back over 2000 results.

2000 new pages in 48 hours! Boy, those webmasters must have burned the midnight oil generating valuable novel content about our software and…

Nope.

Almost every one of those 2000 are the output of the scraper parasites built to exploit advertisers via Google’s content network.

“MFA”, or “Made For AdSense”. Trash pages set up by spiders run by Bad Guys to rip off online advertisers.

Yuck.

Last year, a decidedly unscientific experiment suggested about 8% of all pages on the web are MFA trash. My intuition is that estimate was low then, and is wildly low now.

Because of the business model Google established, AdSense spam flourishes. Google’s battle to keep Bad Guys out of content increases in difficulty every day.

Historically our agency has found the content networks weak, but interestingly we’re seeing signs of some improvement from Google content clicks during the last quarter of 2007. We take that as evidence that Google’s getting better at keeping trash sites out the content network.

We look forward to a future when when content click fraud vanishes, when advertiser-funded Google checks stop flowing to trash MFA publishers, and when spiders stop harassing our duck.

Quack, quack.

Related links

• AdWords vs. AdSense Click Fraud — Why Do So Few Get It?
• Content Spam At 8%?
  google, made for adsense, mfa, Rants, rkg duck, scraper, search spam, spam, spider
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  ]]> http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/01/25/mfa-duck/feed/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/01/13/reghack-to-stop-windows-from-opening-folders-in-new-windows/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/01/13/reghack-to-stop-windows-from-opening-folders-in-new-windows/#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:19:28 +0000 Alan Rimm-Kaufman Rants CodecodeHebert Jeremyopen folder own windowRantstechrepublicwindows registry http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/01/13/reghack-to-stop-windows-from-opening-folders-in-new-windows/

  Something broke on my computer last month and thereafter Windows insisted on opening all folders in new windows, even with “Tools >> Folder Options >> General >> Open Each Folder In Same Window” checked and “Applied To All Folders.”

  This was really annoying. Doing any work cluttered up the desktop with hordes of reproducing folders.

  Hebert Jeremy of NZ offers a solution on TechRepublic that finally fixed the bug.

  1. Create a text file with these contents
     
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell]
@=”none”


  2. Rename the text file “folder.reg” (Name doesn’t matter, just the “.reg” extension.)
  3. Save a checkpoint in case your snarl up your registry: “Start >> Help And Support >> Undo Changes With System Restore >> Create A Restore Point”
  4. Click on “folder.reg” and confirm “yes” at the “Are you sure you want to add to your registry?” prompt

  I don’t know much about Windows, so I can’t say that this fix is free from side-effects. The usual caveats about manually messing with the registry apply. Be advised a snafu can trash your system.

  Thanks, Herbert!

  A minor annoyance fixed.

  code, Hebert Jeremy, open folder own window, Rants, techrepublic, windows registry
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  ]]> http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/01/13/reghack-to-stop-windows-from-opening-folders-in-new-windows/feed/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/29/firebrand/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/29/firebrand/#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:26:02 +0000 Alan Rimm-Kaufman RantsRants http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/?p=557 Great PR, in the blogosphere as in the real world, is about relationships.

  Done well, PR isn’t spam. But done poorly…

  I got this email last week. I’ve never met Mr. Abraham. Nothing against him or Firebrand, but this flavor of canned PR rubs me the wrong way.

  Hey there Alan,

  I have been bursting to tell you about Firebrand but I have been under embargo until the big press conference in New York this morning. Well, since the embargo has been lifted, both you and I are free to talk or write about Firebrand until we’re blue in the face, so here’s what Firebrand is …
  Firebrand is a new, opt-in entertainment and marketing destination that gives consumers interactive access to their favorite brands, products and promotions. Firebrand programs the “coolest” TV commercials the way MTV used to program music videos and its multi-platform network, slated to launch on October 22, is the first to go “live” simultaneously on TV, the web and mobile. Firebrand even has CJ’s (commercial jockeys), the same way MTV had VJ’s, who will contextualize the commercials as art and entertainment, and guide consumers through playlists, contests and promotions.

  We’ve created an online social media release especially for bloggers. Click over to http://press.firebrandtv.com/smpr for all the key facts, plus easy access to lots of multimedia assets including logos and screenshots, promo videos, our Facebook group and more.
  If you’re as excited about Firebrand as I am and think it will appeal to the rkgblog community, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to let your audience know all about it.
  Either way, we’re also letting bloggers into our private preview in a few weeks, so that you can have a sneak peek right before Firebrand opens to the public – but you’ll need to reserve your spot.
  So let me know if you’d like to be added to our private preview list, and feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

  Cheers,

  Chris

  I’m sure glad I am now free to “talk or write about Firebrand” until I am “blue in the face.” Ugh.

  For contrast, here’s a PR email with a friendly positive tone. Neil is also a stranger to me.

  Hi Alan,

  As a frequent writer on email marketing, we would like to offer you a trial of MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector at no cost. Just drop me an email and I will set up an account for you and credit it with free reports.

  The Inbox Inspector produces a report for each campaign showing how an email will render in the 16 most popular email readers as well as providing feedback on how the top spam filters react to the content. You can take a look at the reports online here and a video demo here.

  This past week we began offering the Inbox Inspector as a stand alone application. Now you can sign up just for Inbox Inspector without creating or sending any campaigns through MailChimp.

  Regards,

  Neil

  Polite, short, no hype, and relevant.

  Rants
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  ]]> http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/29/firebrand/feed/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/18/sem-agencies-in-crisis-good/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/18/sem-agencies-in-crisis-good/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:43:23 +0000 George Michie Rants Web Marketing SEMagency feesdid itPasternackRantsSEMsem pricing http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/?p=546 David Pasternack’s piece “SEM agency crisis: who’s to blame” is a not so subtle attempt to thwart price erosion in the SEM business.

  He argues that pressure to “win” big accounts forces some agencies to drop prices below the point where they can cover the costs associated with delivering good results.

  Smart SEM agencies think very carefully about where they set this fee and whether it’s negotiable: if it’s set too high, they’ll price themselves out of the market. But setting a fee level that’s too low will not provide enough income to support the resources required to deliver favorable results for the client. Why? Because running an SEM campaign that actually delivers results is an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor. Sure, campaign automation systems can take care of the grunt work, but software is just a starting point. The real challenge involves “wetware” (brainpower). Without skilled human analysis and judgment, no SEM campaign can be expected to deliver. Agencies must expend time and money to attract the smartest people, and the media management fees cover (or should cover) this expense.

  It’s a compelling story, but it’s not accurate. We think a more honest answer to the question — why are only 21% of companies happy with their SEM? — is that most SEM’s provide lousy service and results. We know, we’ve seen their clients’s data.

  From everything we’ve seen Did-It provides excellent service and results, unfortunately we can’t say the same for many of our competitors.

  Did-It knows the truth, that the real issue is competence not compensation, so why the sob story? Simple, to defend the uncapped fee structure, which is rightly coming under fire.

  Clients are starting to look for ROI not only from their media spend, but from the agency they hire as well, and while “wetware” is expensive, you don’t need more than one really sharp analyst with great tools and algorithms to drive fabulous results for even the largest accounts. Given that, it’s hard to justify the expense of uncapped fees.

  For retailers spending $1 million per month, what would you get from an agency with uncapped fees of say 10%? Hopefully, 6 or 7 full-time analysts. But if the real direct marketing piece can be done by a single smart analyst with superior tools, what would those other analysts do?

  If the goals of the program are strictly to drive online sales, the answer is “they’d waste your money.” If the goals are mostly to complete large task lists to satisfy internal constituents then we’d still argue that you only need one sharp analyst and a bunch of less expensive gophers, and you can probably hire those folks directly for less.

  SEM agencies as a class will respond to demand, eventually. The demand for excellent service at a fair price is strong and growing. In order to compete in 2008, the agencies of 2002 will need to learn how to provide great service cost effectively. The Did-It folks are smart and will figure this out, but for some this will be a very tough new trick to learn.

  George

  For reference:

  A fair pricing model
  Why task lists hurt results
  How to use “wetware” efficiently

  agency fees, did it, Pasternack, Rants, SEM, sem pricing
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  ]]> http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/09/18/sem-agencies-in-crisis-good/feed/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/23/brand-ppc-a-waste-of-money/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/23/brand-ppc-a-waste-of-money/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:08:33 +0000 George Michie Rants Microsoft Web Marketing SEMmicrosoftRantsSEM http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/?p=529 The Microsoft/Atlas study reminds me of the famous Mark Twain quote: “There are 3 kinds of untruths in this world: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

  New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers who are en route to their sites anyway. Listings tied to such “branded” keywords, typically a company’s name or products, eat up about half of search budgets, Atlas estimates.

  “The reality is those people are already intending to go to your Web site,” said Young-Bean Song, vp of analytics for Atlas, formerly part of aQuantive and now a unit of Microsoft. “What you’re really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing.”

  Atlas studied 30 search ad campaigns reaching 120,000 users on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. It found that nearly half of clicks on ads came from people who had already visited the advertiser’s Web site. Moreover, about 60 percent of visits came from “branded” words, like the company’s name, while just 29 percent were from people who searched for generic terms and had never been to the advertiser’s Web site—the type of new customers search is meant to attract.

  – Brian Morrissey, AdWeek, Are Search Ads a Waste of Money?

  I hate to be snippy, but whose search programs did they study? Our 100+ clients aren’t spending anywhere close to 50% of their money on brand ads. The average is about 5%. It does get higher for folks who are manufacturers competing against their distributors on their brand name, but to suggest that 50% is the norm is irresponsible!

  Either these folks were studying incompetently managed PPC programs, or they were looking at Hitwise traffic reports that don’t distinguish between paid and organic traffic. In either case, they should know better than to issue misleading statistics, and if they don’t know better…

  To the question: is it worth any money to advertise on your brand name and trademarks? I think the answer is ‘yes’.

  Granted, by and large the people searching for you by name are likely to find your site and buy from you regardless of whether you have an ad running. However, by spending a little money, you can:

  1. Control your brand message
  2. Tout short-term offers to steer their visit and add urgency
  3. Prevent brand squatting by your affiliates, saving commissions to those thieves, and
  4. Prevent “Broad Matching” algorithms, and unscrupulous practices from putting your competitor’s ads above your natural search link for brand searches

  Are these benefits worth a fortune? No, but they’re worth something.

  microsoft, Rants, SEM
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  ]]> http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/23/brand-ppc-a-waste-of-money/feed/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/06/16/getting-your-resume-read-or-why-office-2007-is-not-your-friend/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/06/16/getting-your-resume-read-or-why-office-2007-is-not-your-friend/#comments Sat, 16 Jun 2007 12:16:46 +0000 Alan Rimm-Kaufman Rants Microsoft Business MiscellanyBusinessconvert word docdocxmicrosoftMiscellanyRantsresumevistaword 2003word 2007word incompatibility http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/06/16/getting-your-resume-read-or-why-office-2007-is-not-your-friend/ Your marketing message can’t be effective if your prospect can’t read it.

  A slightly off-topic rant on Office 2007:

  Leading a growing paid search agency that’s hiring regularly, many resumes flow into my in-box each week. My current hiring pet peeve is receiving resumes in Office 2007 format. These are files which have the “.docx” extension.

  I can’t open these resumes with a click, so into the trash they typically go, unconsidered. Apologies, but true.

  Now, I happen to have Vista and Office ’07 at home (ugh), but I do not have these at work. Our IT folks are holding our firm on XP and Office 2003 as long as we can hold out. On the OS side, Vista isn’t baked enough, our IT gurus believe. On the apps side, I fear the productivity slowdown of switching to Office 2007, when for the first week or so our amazing crew of power Excel users won’t be able to find anything anymore. (If you’re not using 2007 yet: all the Excel menus changed. A lot. You may pull out your hair just finding pivot tables in Excel ’07, or trying to format several graphs in parallel. Argh.)

  Job seekers: hiring managers are moving fast. Hiring managers looking for a reason to zap your resume. You win when you make life easier for the hiring manager.

  Sending a resume just in “.docx” is almost rude, in my opinion. Seeing just a “.docx” resume makes me wonder if the candidate is out-of-touch (because she/he doesn’t realize Office 2007 isn’t broadly adopted yet), or not technically savvy (because she/he doesn’t understand file types), or perhaps self-absorbed (because she/he assumes that everyone is using the latest-and-greatest out of Redmond, like him/her). Truly, I don’t spend much time on this wondering, as usually I’ve moved on.

  My nickel suggestion: send a resume in multiple formats.

  • Plain text, in-line in the email below your sig, is always good. (I also like to see a resume well-presented in plain ascii – that suggests the candidate will be able to compose good-looking text emails.)
  • PDF attachment is also good — it shows the candidate cares enough to control the page layout and typography. (Suggestion: if you use PDF, don’t PDF an ugly resume – ugh.)
  • Or use Word if you want, but be smart and use Word 2003 (“.doc”, not “.docx”). 2007 Word can read 2003 Word seamlessly, but not the reverse, so use 2003.

  Just avoid “.docx” as a sole resume format.

  As with any marketing message, you win when you make life easier for your prospect.

  Business, convert word doc, docx, microsoft, Miscellany, Rants, resume, vista, word 2003, word 2007, word incompatibility
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