rkgblog » Web Marketing

RSS Is About Content, Not Presentation

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:05:17 +0000

Last week we thought it would it be interesting to embed an AJAX poll in the body of a blog post, Selling Via Content: What’s Your Opinion of Dell Lounge?

We forgot that the majority of our readers follow this blog via RSS feeds or via email. Feedburner rendered the poll as a simple unordered HTML list, stripping the interactivity. We also used a smidge of CSS to hide the poll title auto-generated by Democracy. CSS doesn’t reach the feed, so that minor tweak was also lost.

Neither change mattered in this case, but the marketing takeaway is clear: RSS is about content, not presentation. Keep the markup in your feeds simple. Avoid embedded code. Make it easy for your content to fly free.

Blogging, democracy, feedburner, feeds, markup, rss

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Rising Gas Prices and Your Marketing Message: Can Fear Persuade?

Larry Becker — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:17:36 +0000

Earlier this week on the Shop.org blog, Scott Silverman started an interesting thread discussing whether online retailers benefit from connecting rising gas prices to the stay-at-home advantages of shopping online.

As Scott puts it:

With the prices as high as they are right now, I think we’ve reached the tipping point. The question then, for online retailers, is whether you make “buy online, free shipping, save money on gas” part of your marketing message. Is it helpful to remind people that they are spending so much money on gas?”

Commenting on the post, one pureplay retailer reported modest success with a pain-at-the-pump email campaign. Other reactions ranged from enthusiastic embraces of this tactic to concern that that such messaging could hurt the bricks-and mortar arms of multichannel retailers, or simply serve as an unintended reminder that purse strings should be tightened due to the rising cost of fuel.

I think the “reminder” piece is the crux of the biscuit. There’s already some early research suggesting that rising gas prices could be good for e-commerce. And if you’ve done any direct selling, you’ve probably learned that expressing empathy for your prospect’s misfortune can build rapport that leads to the sale.

But there’s a difference between echoing bad news as you make your pitch (”You’re broken? Bummer, dude. Can I help?”) and being the one to bring up the sore subject (”Dude, You Are Broken. Can I help?)

So are marketers wise to introduce (or re-introduce) unpleasant topics? I read the Shop.org post the same day I was thumbing through a new book co-authored by Robert Cialdini. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive is a bit lightweight when compared to Cialdini’s classic Influence, but still offers several useful nuggets.

Here’s what “Yes!” has to say about the ability of fear to persuade:

For the most part, research has demonstrated that fear-arousing communications usually stimulate the audience to take action to reduce the threat. However this general rule has one important exception: When the fear-producing message describes danger but the audience is not told of clear specific, effective means of reducing the danger, they may deal with the fear by blocking out the message or denying that it applies to them.”

If a retailer reminds a prospect about soaring gas prices and the economic crunch, will “no driving and free shipping” (plus desired product, plus other components of the retailer’s value prop) serve as sufficient means of “reducing the danger” or will the shopper simply block out the entire pitch, the prescribed remedy as well as the irritant?

As one marketer pointed out in the Shop.org thread, this is all certainly worth a test. Outcomes of such experiments will no doubt vary by product category and site, and I’d predict that dramatic results are likely to occur sooner, not later: if images of gas pumps become ubiquitous in homepage banners and email leads, shoppers may ultimately become desensitized and the fuel crunch could become just another themed promo opportunity, like “Memorial Day Savings” and “Back to School.”

Does that make me sound a bit jaded? I’m not, but I guess I am biased: beyond groceries, I already do just about all my shopping online.

web effectiveness

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PPC Bid Management: Requirement #3, The Feedback Loop

George Michie — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:41:46 +0000

For many companies, the true value of a transaction can’t be measured at the time of a sale. Because of this, maximizing the opportunities of PPC advertising requires feeding that post-transaction information back into your bidding system so that your bids are based on the truest possible picture of an ad’s value. Not all systems can handle this backfeed loop, so if this type of post-sale information is material to your firm you may need to find a new system.

Let’s walk through some examples that have been valuable to our clients:

Margin Data: For any retailer with variable product margins or who are highly promotional businesses, bidding to actual margin dollar efficiency rather than sales dollar efficiency is critically important. However, some of our clients don’t have the COG data available at the time of checkout. By providing us this data in an off-line feed, we get the benefits of margin bidding without the client having to re-engineer their website.
Lead Valuation: For any business using its website to collect leads it’s important to incorporate back-end data on the ultimate value of those leads into the bidding and analysis. For banks and lending institutions that lead quality may be measured by account creation and funding, credit scores of applicants, or other well established indicators. For businesses with long sales cycles the information may be more qualitative and can be as simple as a “Good” or “Bad” flag based on the initial call with the sales rep. Any information that can meaningfully distinguish between the more promising leads and the less promising ones will be valuable to a good bidding system.
Customer Type: Some companies cater more to businesses than consumers. They know that the lifetime value of a business customer is much greater than that of an individual. Knowing that certain types of keywords drive more business customers than others is therefore an important consideration in setting bids and evaluating success metrics.
Credit Allocation: As with margin data, some clients pass us information in the pixel about which marketing program their systems think drove the order. Others pass us that information after the fact. We prefer to “see” all the orders regardless of the client’s order allocation so that we can help add insight into those difficult allocation issues. Our clients have benefited from discussions to the effect: “We noticed that X% of orders your system is allocating to affiliates came through non-brand search ads within 30 minutes of the order — does that make sense?” We can then credit or discredit those orders as the client sees fit.
Match-Back Data: For good reason, many catalogers and other direct marketers are more interested in attracting sales from new customers than existing customers. If this is important to your firm, feeding that information into the bidding process, so that more value can be placed on ads that tend to generate more new-to-file customers, can be a big win.
Frauds and Cancels: Many retailers, particularly in electronics and jewelry, see relatively high fraud and cancel rates. Using a back feed to knock out credit for orders that didn’t stick can be important, particularly if some types of keywords are more susceptible to these problems than others.
Anything Else: There aren’t many limits here. Whatever information relating to the above, some combination thereof, or anything else that differentiates value can be handled with back feeds.

A top-tier bidding system sets bids based on the observed value of the traffic generated by each ad, phrase, or collection of related phrases. For many advertisers, the true value of the traffic isn’t perfectly clear at the time of the order. The ability to take information after the fact and fold it into the bidding algorithm can be the difference between success and futility in PPC advertising for these firms.

Previous posts in this series are here:

Bid System Imperative #1: Strong Statistical Foundation
Bid System Imperative #2: Deep Flexible Tracking

google, SEM

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Selling Via Content: What’s Your Opinion of Dell Lounge?

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:10:44 +0000

Dell’s direct marketing has always been impressive, but this recent full page branding ad in the New Yorker left me befuddled.

[enlarge]

In the ad, Dell promotes a new band, but somewhat tongue-in-cheek. No mention of anything like laptops, desktops, servers — you know, the stuff Dell sells. The only call-to-action is “Hear The Boxmasters At The Dell Lounge”. So, over to delllounge.com to check it out. The closest thing to a “what is this site?” explanation is the email signup blurb:

Live the life. Sign up. From the coolest shows to creative contests to sweet prizes — there’s so much going on at the Dell Lounge. Be the first to hear about it. Sign up and we’ll send you updates on what’s happening. Are you in?

(As an aside, the home page is hard to use. Items which are typically hyperlinked aren’t. Artist images and article headlines aren’t clickable. The only way to go deeper into the site are tiny “GO” links.)

Unlike the New Yorker ad, the delllounge.com home page does advertise Dell product. A single 350×125 tile promotes the XPS 420. But that tile is below the fold.

Dell grew through direct-to-consumer manufacturing and marketing. I’d wager a substantial chunk of Dell revenues still come from the direct-to-consumer channel.

What do you think?

Does Dell Lounge help Dell sell computers?
Does Dell Lounge help Dell sell more computers?
Yes, I think it does, directly, via ads on site.

Yes, I think it does, indirectly via building the Dell brand.

No, I don't, but I think it is good marketing strategy nonetheless.

No, I don't. I think this is a bad marketing strategy.

You're asking the wrong question. See my comment below.

View Results
Can you name retailers with stand-alone content sites that you think are effective?

Business

Web Usability

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Times They Are A’ Changing: Larry Joseloff On Affiliate Marketing

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:34:33 +0000

It is an important time for the affiliate industry. A lot of retailers are starting to question where affiliate marketing fits in their world. Four to five years ago, affiliate marketing was the “golden child.” Now, more multichannel marketers feel like their brands are being damaged by what is happening in the affiliate space.
– Larry Joseloff, Shop.org

Following up on all the interest in George Michie’s IR Affiliate talk, here’s the illustrious Larry Joseloff of Shop.org offering a balanced perspective on the affiliate game.

affiliate, Blogging, george michie, internet retailer, IR2008, IRCE 2008, larry joselof, larry joseloff, shop.org

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Tips for Selling High-Ticket Items via Paid Search in Today’s Tough Economy

Mia Brennan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:11:40 +0000

When you’re in the business of selling a product that is usually purchased with discretionary income, today’s economy is extra frightening. So I decided to do a little digging – are consumers still shopping for my client’s product in the same way, or are they looking to get a deal? I looked at the impression traffic of two clusters of keywords – general, non-occasion related terms and clearance/sale/value related terms – over the past 15 months. Notice that the first two spikes (winter holidays & Valentine’s Day) are nearly identical. After Valentine’s Day the general terms taper off, with less variation in the quantity of impressions/week. The clearance related terms behave quite differently. In fact, at the end of May they reached peak holiday levels. Folks are still shopping, but now, more than ever, they are shopping around for a ‘deal’.

***Note on both graphs below, the clearance terms are based on a secondary y-axis for the purpose of scaling them to a level where trends can be observed***

That’s fine and dandy, but what we really want to know is if our customer’s are still buying, and if so, what types of terms are closing the sale? I pulled sales data for the same time period above and confirmed that increased traffic on clearance terms is, in fact, converting for us. We’ve seen three times more sales on clearance terms so far in 2008 than we saw in all of 2007, including the holidays. The only question left now is: what are they buying when they are looking for a deal? I compared the AOV of general terms thus far in 2008 to the AOV of the clearance terms over the same period. No big surprise here – AOV of the clearance terms is 12% lower than the general terms.

People are still shopping for deals and buying high ticket items during these tough times; they are just trading down for less expensive goods. If you’re managing a search program, be sure to:

Keep a close eye on AOV trends and on clusters of terms that may be performing better than usual due to current state of the economy.
Make deals easy to find on your website – include a sales tab/link that is highlighted to stand out, make offers prominent on the homepage, and be sure to have a smart search results pages for sale/clearance terms.
Plan offers to raise not lower AOV - incent customers to add extra items to reach an additional discount tier - but be sure that the tier is about twice your AOV.
Set PPC bids intelligently on your discounted terms - consider margin-based bidding or defining different econ targets for specific clusters of terms.

We do this for our clients when appropriate; you should make sure whoever is managing your PPC campaigns does this as well.

SEM

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New Video: Save Time On Your PPC Projects Using RKGDuck

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:41:48 +0000

RKGDuck is a handy free tool that can save you considerable time on small SEM projects.

RKGDuck slides a snippet of perl (or a big honking mass of perl, should you so need) into the Windows cut-and-paste clipboard buffer. This lets you do powerful text transformations within and between all Windows apps, using the familiar Control-C (copy) and Control-V (paste) mechanism.

After cajoling your local perl geek to write a tiny filter for your task, you can share that functionality easily with less-technical users, and you don’t have to install perl on the end-user machines.

Here’s a new RKGDuck video showing how in a couple minutes you can write a powerful filter to help clean up keyword lists.

You can watch other how-to videos and download the app itself on the RkGDuck homepage.

RKG provides RKGDuck free to the community under GNU General Public License. RKGDuck us distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose.

If you’ve found RKGDuck helpful and can share your experience, or if you’ve hit any snags, do comment below.

Quack!

code, RKG , SEM

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Paid Search Wisdom Distilled From Email “Hot Stock Tip” Spam

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:15:50 +0000

I received a curious piece of spam this week. It merits comment as it illustrates a critical concept in direct marketing: list-offer-package. The L-O-P concept also applies to running paid search marketing effectively.

Here’s the spam:

—–Original Message—–
From: gsemlinger@famfontana.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 8:24 AM
Subject: Mar’ket wacth

Now -you can see what we ” were saying.

Fir,m: An gs trom Mico syste ms
Buy as: amgs.ob
Strongly R ec ommend
Rece”nt: .4_0
Vloume: 331,48-5

Atfer the gerat news last week, volumed traded hit 331,485.

Mroe great things to come, t,he cli_ent base is growing and production is boimong A-G,MS is the one to watch.

Stlil a low investment thresh.ol”d, purchase Ang strom in the morning on Teusday.

OK, this is clearly a pump-and-dump stock scam for a penny stock, AGMS.OB. But to defeat Bayesian spam filters, Gsemlinger ran the email through some sort of obfuscation filter, which sometimes tossed in extraneous punctuation (Rece”nt) and sometimes permuted some letters (stlil, Teusday, gerat, boimong).

You can still make sense of the email, but it reads as if it was composed by a moron. Seriously, who in their right mind would take stock investment tips from anyone who writes that poorly?

Hold a sec. Let’s assume that SpamBoy Gsemlinger isn’t stupid. Let’s examine his marketing strategy.

Gsemlinger consciously degraded his response rate (the typos make humans less likely to act on his hot stock tip) in order to increase his list size (the typos make Bayesian filters more likely to let the message pass).

Why?

Why not instead send a beautifully composed long email, effusively and compellingly touting Angstrom MicroSystems, the wonder stock?

Perhaps Gsemlinger knows the List-Offer-Package rule, or L-O-P. Offer trumps Package, and List trumps Offer. It is takes less effort to win by growing the universe than by growing the response rate.

What do I mean by L-O-P? In direct marketing in general and in paid search in specific, who you are talking to (List) matters more than the details of what you are selling (Offer), and how you present your offering (Package) is the least important factor.

This doesn’t mean direct response creative and copy aren’t important; they certainly are. But creative and copy are less important than the offer itself, than what you are selling — the price, quality, and uniqueness of your merchandise; your service, guarantee, support, and shipping policies, etc. And more important than that is the quantity (sheer numbers) and quality (relevance, targeting, prior purchase history) of the prospect universe you’re addressing.

George Michie hits the nail on the head when he discusses how paid search analysts should spend their time to get maximum benefit.

Truly horrible PPC copy can hurt you, yes, but there’s small incremental sales benefit going from “decent” copy to “great” copy (low single digit response lifts, if that).

Truly horrible PPC landing pages can hurt you, true, but the incremental benefit between “decent” and “great” landing pages is small (typically single digit response lifts, if changes are just design and layout).

By all means work on copy and landing pages, particularly if they’re sub-par. But place your emphasis on the size and quality of your marketing universe. It is far far easier to grow your List by 10% or 20% (perhaps even 50%). If you can keep the quality up, increasing the number of individuals to whom you’re marketing increases your sales proportionally, and your profits hyperproportionally. Dollar for dollar and hour for hour, increasing the number of quality prospects with whom you’re speaking is the most cost-effective and time-effective marketing lever you can pull.

Gsemlinger faced an either/or tradeoff, where he opted to buy List (circ) at the cost of Package (response).

Happily, in paid search, we don’t need to degrade our ads to get more volume. In PPC, getting more qualified traffic translates to compulsively-extensive keyword lists, judicious use of match types, and razor-sharp economic-based statistical bidding algorithms.

Keywords, bids, and matchtypes — those are the big levers of paid search. To get your PPC programs generating maximum profit, focus there first.

Or as our friend Gsemlinger would advise: Keywodrs, bids, and match”types — those ar-e the big levesr of pa,id serach. To get your PP-C program,s genertaing maximu.m profit, focus tehre first.

Business, SEM

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Customer Type Matchback Analysis & Lifetime Value

Matthew Mierzejewski — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:32:17 +0000

Looking at the orders and sales driven by each marketing channel gives you a quick look at how effective they are. Or does it? Are all orders created equal?

In general, many catalogers and retailers tend to place a higher value on orders recorded as new customer acquisitions. Traditionally, direct marketers have often been willing to lose money to acquire new customers up to a one-year value metric, while they expect to turn a profit on their existing customer base. How much you can afford to invest may depend on the lifetime value (LTV) calculations for each channel.

The first step in measuring the value of paid search orders against your other marketing initiatives is to perform detailed matchback analysis. Have your SEM agency provide a list of PPC order numbers taken over the last 90 days. From there, run an audit of those orders internally to determine if the customer placing the order was new to file or existing. You should now be able to send the list of orders back to your SEM agency for follow-up analysis. Reports can then be generated to show what percentage of customers are new to file in paid search, how that number differs across Brand and Non-Brand keywords, what types of keywords/categories drive more new customers, effects of seasonality/catalog drops/etc on new customer acquisitions – the list goes on and on.

Comparing these results to other marketing initiatives might shed some light on which channel may be most effective on the next dollar invested. It might be the case that catalog prospecting averages $20 per new customer acquisition, while non-brand paid search is hitting a $15 mark in aggregate. When deciding which channel should receive the next advertising dollar, it seems reasonable to pick the one with the lowest cost per acquisition. Ignoring averages and looking at the next dollar in, we may find that the incremental dollars given to catalog will produce one new customer acquisition for every $21 in spend and $25 in paid search. Look at each channel’s ability to capture new to file customers on the next dollar spent when deciding where to invest additional funds. Also, you’ll need to measure the one year value of non-brand PPC customers vs. those acquired from traditional marketing methods. Ultimately, it is these calculations that will determine what you can spend and, most importantly, what each channel’s acquisition targets should be.

An interesting question can be raised about the value of an order resulting from a non-brand keyword search. For example, an existing customer searching for “desktop computers” is bombarded with competitors’ ads along with your own. Is there incremental value in existing customer orders resulting from non-brand keyword searches? We think so. Remember that many of your loyal customers are also loyal customers of your competitors; you need to consider share of wallet here. (More on that, in a previous post). The matchback analysis is not an initiative to discredit keywords, or the program at large, for existing customer orders. The intent is to look at the overall influence of paid search in conjunction with your new customer acquisition goals.

Acquisition, Business, housefile, Lifetime Value, LTV, Matchback, SEM, share of wallet

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Bid Management in 2008: Requirement #2

George Michie — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:11:18 +0000

Bid Management Requirement #2: Tight, Deep, Smart, Flexible Tracking

Tight Tracking: Avoid javascript tags in favor of redirects if possible. A quick, database-free, redirect provides the tightest tracking of sales available. The reasons are straight forward:
- Javascript tags have to be in the footer of every page. For image laden, slow loading pages, a fraction of the visitors will leave the page before the javascript loads and therefore before the tracking cookie can be applied. We see javascript tracking losses vary between 10% and 40% of traffic depending on the client and the landing pages. Be particularly careful with “search results” landing pages as users are more prone to leave these pages quickly, often before the footer loads.
- Javascript tags have to be on every page, and we’ve seen many instances of special promotional pages having a different footer or no footer at all, thus destroying the sales tracking.
Deep Tracking: Item Level tracking provides granular insights on what products sell best after general searches. This information can help inform page design and merchandising decisions. If coupons and handling charges are treated as individual items analyses can reveal what keywords tend to attract discount/coupon shoppers versus full-price shoppers.
Smart Tracking: What to count and how to count it matters.
- Cookie windows should be calculated based on observed data and offline marketing efforts, and choices should not be limited to 7, 14, or 30 days. For some of our clients a 2 day cookie makes sense, for others it’s 10 days. The limits of the system shouldn’t dictate this important component of the metrics.
- The tracking system should understand the difference between brand and non-brand traffic. While the fraction of customers clicking on both a non-brand and a brand ad is relatively small (2 - 6% of brand purchases for most retailers) we think credit should be given to the non-brand ad regardless of the order in which they were clicked.
- Some day, retailers will have a really smart credit allocation mechanism that will allow them to construct infinitely complex rules for assigning credit for orders. There are a number of companies heading down this path and we wish them Godspeed, though we may try to beat them to the punch with the first really good system. To date the tools are pretty rudimentary and inflexible, though they’re getting better. When this day arrives the Bid Management system should be able to absorb partial credits seamlessly.
Flexible Tracking: Goals and internal visibility shouldn’t be limited by your search provider.
- The system should support, to any level of depth, other internal analytics packages both by passing tracking to that system and by accepting source codes from that system for use in credit/ no credit calculations.
- The system should be able to handle Sales or Margin or Leads or Catalog requests or hybrids of these, such that keywords that generate few sales but lots of quality catalog requests are bid according to a truer picture of their value.
- The system should be able to incorporate additional data after the time of purchase that may reflect on the value of that transaction, whether that’s frauds and cancels, or account funding information. We’ll talk more about “backfeeds” in the next post.