OMMA Gawd, This is Gonna Be Good!

In a couple weeks, I'll be moderating a panel at OMMA Global in San Francisco. This conference is put on by MediaPost and, for the first time, track sessions will be free to the public.

Rather than sharing the topics and questions for my panel in the rear -- like I did for last week's CIMA event -- I thought I'd put 'em out in advance so people can get a sense for what we'll be covering and weigh in with feedback prior to the session.

Now I can check the buzzwords "transparency" and "crowd-sourcing" off my to-do list. (Speaking of transparency, I should point out that I'm compensated by MediaPost for programming the search track of this conference.)

Below is the prep sheet I just fired off to my panel. I'll be sure to update this post after the session with the highlights. Meanwhile, let me know what else you think we should hit on.

And, if you happen to be at the event, instead of Buzzword Bingo, we're gonna play Freestyle Fodder. Print out this post and keep track of how many Q's I actually ask versus ad-lib.

OMMA Global
Marriott Marquis
55 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA

March 18, 2010
11:30am

Is Your Company Spending Too Much on Search?

Search may be the last click for customers who are buying what you have to sell. But that click often comes at the end of the consumer’s online marketing journey -- which includes exposure to banners, video ads, mobile messages and various other marketing techniques. Up to now, search has gotten much of the credit -- and the budget -- for making the sale. Smart search experts, however, recognize they don’t operate in a void, and more of them are studying and reporting how their discipline works in conjunction with other forms of marketing. They believe that by showing you the impact of marketing dollars spent "upstream," they can accurately address if your company is spending too much or too little on search. Others, however, are not so sure. This panel will discuss the unpredictable effects of search’s evolving upstream approach. Could it be a minefield for the search industry or will search finally step into the role as your strategic adviser? Find out what you have to gain either way.

Panelists:

Chad Baldwin, VP, Sales, North America, Kenshoo

Gerry Bavaro, VP, Managing Director, Resolution Media

Mike Moran, Chief Strategist, Converseon

Esco Strong, Director, Analytics, Microsoft Advertising

Moderator:

Aaron Goldman, Managing Partner, Connectual

Questions for the Panel

(Note: I will not get to all of these and won’t ask them in this order so be ready to improvise with me!)

Update 3/19: Well, I made it through half the Q's. See below in italics for choice sound-bytes from the panel. All in all, it was a great session. Thanks to my panelists for sharing their wisdom and to everyone who turned out in the audience!

Role of Search in the Mix

Before we can talk about proper budget allocation between search and other channels, I think we need to talk about the role of search in the marketing and media mix. Now, of course, this will be different for each marketer but give our audience a framework for how to think about the role search can play for their business? What part of the purchase funnel does search address?

Chad: Over 50% of new customer acquisition comes from search

Gerry: Search is part of a long trail. (AG: Hopefully it’s a happy trail!) You have to walk before you run.

Mike: Search is not a tool, it’s a moment in time. You don’t ask what the role of the telephone was in driving sales, do you?

When we talk about “spending too much on search,” we can be referring to many different things -- media costs for paid search, labor costs for natural search, technology costs for both and, certainly, opportunity costs for both. How does the approach to this conversation change if we’re talking about paid search or SEO? Or does it not change at all?

Gerry: Think about bucketing media into paid, earned and owned

Chad: Need to track every single event to conversion

Esco: It’s not about asking if I spend too much on search, it’s am I spending it in the right way or am I spending enough on other channels?

Mike: When it comes to SEO, many people don’t think about it until after they build the website. That’s like building a house and saying, “OK, now we need to figure out the plumbing.”

Big Picture

Mike reminds us that before we get into discussing advanced attribution modeling, we need to consider that most businesses that sell their products and services offline can’t tell what happened online to result in a sale. What are some basic best practices for these companies?

Mike: Too many clients think, “We went into marketing to get away from the math.” Don’t focuse on numbers, focus on answers or insights.

Best Practices

As we move into the online arena, where tracking is most robust, it’s clearly a challenge to isolate the impact each touchpoint has on your brand from search to display to social to mobile. How does one get started on building a basic attribution model?

Mike: Do it wrong, quickly. Whatever you do will be better than doing nothing.

Once you have a working model and data coming in, what’s the best way to analyze and act on that data? Is it just about redistributing credit for sales? Or are there other ways to apply this data?

What’s the biggest challenge to getting attribution right?

What’s the biggest mistake you see people make when it comes to attribution and budget allocation?

Can you share some examples of companies that have successfully created and applied attribution models to drive more marketing ROI? What typically happens to the credit for sales that search gets in these situations? More, less, same?

Players

Who needs to be involved in the allocation and attribution conversation? Which departments internally within the corporation? Which external partners? From an agency standpoint, who needs to be involved?

Mike: as few people as possible!

Ultimately, who should have ownership?

Tools

What tools and technologies are available for marketers and agencies looking to determine the proper budget allocation and attribution models for their business?

Chad: it’s a statistical problem. At Kenshoo (alert: sales plug!), we have PhD's working on technologies that can help solve it.

Will we ever get to the point where we can take people out of the equation and the technology can “do it all?”

Esco: it’s equal parts art and science.

Future

How do you think the attribution conversation will change in the coming years?

In 5 years, what will we be talking about on panels like this at conferences? Will we still have attribution and allocation panels at conferences?

Audience Q: How do you get everyone at the table to tackle these thorny issues?

AG: Free food!

Thoughts on Adobe Buying Omniture

OK, here are the relevant links:

Omniture Press Release

Adobe Press Release

And I'll let my tweets speak for themselves...


























































Update 9/16:

Did Google Buy DoubleClick to Squash Conversion Attribution?

Image Credit

Serial Theorist

I'm a huge fan of conspiracy theories. I've always been fascinated by the JFK assassination and the various angles that have been explored around that tragedy.

When it comes to the business world, though, and digital marketing in particular, I'm no less interested in conspiracy theories, just less convinced by them -- maybe that's because it's one topic I actually know something about.

Last month, I debunked the myth that Google Chrome OS was part of a plot to keep Microsoft from locking Google out of Windows-based PC's.

Just when I thought I'd heard it all, last week, a friend and longtime industry colleague told me he heard rumblings that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick was a ploy to limit the effectiveness of conversion attribution tracking and give more credit to search.

Last Click Home's a Golden Egg

Basically, the theory goes that if Google can make it difficult for advertisers to line up their display and search data side-by-side, they won't realize how much overlap there is between the channels and how much search (and Google) benefit from getting credit for being the last ad clicked.

Now, anecdotally, I've heard that DoubleClick's exposure-to-conversion (E2C) report is a lot clunkier and more difficult to make actionable than Atlas' engagement mapping product. But I find it hard to believe that this is intentional on Google's part.

Of course, for Google, the motive to squash conversion attribution is clear. Quite simply, the more credit given to search, the more likely advertisers are to invest in that channel at the expense of others. But, as any advertiser that has tested turning off other media channels knows, you need the upper-funnel tactics to stimulate search demand at the bottom of the funnel. It doesn't take fancy exposure-to-conversion attribution reports to tell you that your brand and trademark search queries decrease when your display and offline media support are down.

Nonetheless, as evidence that there might be a pattern here, my "source" pointed to this Econsultancy post that takes Google Analytics to task for its default 6 month cookie window which means that "every visit a user happens to make to a site for the six months after having once visited that site via Google is ascribed to the search engine."

Sure, this may lead to search getting more credit but cookies are a very personal thing -- just ask my wife! -- and the proper window is going to be different for every business based on their sales cycle. A default is just that -- a default. It can easily be changed. Unlike DART's E2C reports which requires -- last I heard -- some serious heavy lifting to interpret and act on.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

I suppose the best way to refute this or any other conspiracy theory is to offer up a better alternative. In the case of the Chrome OS, my rationale was that it's all about the queries, baby!

In regards to DoubleClick, I actually think Google bought it, in part, to help improve conversion attribution. Work with me here...

Currently search only gets credit for a conversion when a paid or natural listing is clicked on. Why? Because it's not possible to 3rd party serve a search listing. Since it's a text-only placement, there is no image pixel to fire when the ad is served and, accordingly, no way to track post-view activity.

The post-view conversion is something that display folks have touted for years as proof that their ad placements have latent impact down the funnel. I'm not sure why but some publishers and networks still get away with charging CPA advertisers for post-view acquisitions.

If search were 3rd-party served -- and, did I mention DoubleClick is the world's largest 3rd-party ad server -- then search could start taking credit for all those times when someone searched, was exposed to an advertiser, but didn't immediately click.

There have been plenty of studies showing that merely being in the search results gives advertisers a boost in metrics like brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent. But, without apples to apples post-view metrics, these assertions are falling on deaf ears -- and budgets!

So, yes, I do think Google bought DoubleClick so that search could get more credit but not by squashing conversion attribution, rather by bowing 3rd party ad-serving. So, please, Google, prove me right here. I've only been waiting for this for 2 years!

Update 8/25: Right on cue, today @Matt_McGowan tweeted that Google has begun embedding video ads in search results. The example cited is for the query "Extract." No word on whether this placement is 3rd party served but it's certainly a turning point.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there's a plus sign under the text listing to initiate the ad and the player expands down pushing the natural search listings lower.

Tilting the Tweet-o-meter

My Search Insider column (and, as I pointed out to @oliman on Twitter, I use the term "column" loosely) ran today. First time I've run on a Tuesday. MediaPost had a last-minute lineup shuffle in the wake of David Berkowitz heading to the Social Media Insider. Not to worry, I'll be back to my every-other-Wed. slot in 2 weeks.

As promised, this edition recapped the top 10 buzzwords from the Search Insider Summit.

Here they are:

1. Twitter
2. Attribution
3. Exchanges
4. Last-Click
5. Bless You, Gezundteit (tie)
6. Economy, Recession (tie)
7. Free, SEO (tie)
8. Affiliates
9. Social, Mobile (tie)
10. Osprey

In terms of my predictions for how the Buzz-o-meter would shake out, I batted .400 -- not bad for a baseball player, pretty lousy for a Search Insider. Oh well, as a true Cubs fan always says, wait til next year!

Search Insider Summit: Who's Ready to Catch a Buzz in Captiva?

In today's Search Insider column I break form from past conferences and offer a predictive Buzz-o-meter for next week's Search Insider Summit.

Here are my speculative Top 10:

1. Twitter
2. Google
3. Recession, Opportunity (tie)
4. Attribution, Post-Click (tie)
5. Local
6. Microsoft, Live Search, MSN, Kumo (tie)
7. Social Media
8. In-House
9. RFP
10. No-see-ums

As always, my next column will reveal the actual topics that had everyone buzzing. And I'll be sharing all the best sound-bytes on Twitter so make sure to follow me if you don't mind a dizzying array of tweets.

There's No Buzz-ness like SIS Buzz-ness

In today's Search Insider, I recap the Buzz (and lack thereof) from last week's Search Insider Summit. Here were the top 10 buzzwords from the show.

1. Google
2. Economy, Recession (tie)
3. Data, Analytics, Attribution (tie)
4. iPhone, Mobile (tie)
5. Microsoft
6. Relationship, Transparency (tie)
7. Strategy, Tactics (tie)
8. Bid Management, Quality Score (tie)
9. Omniture
10. Social

Honorable Mentions: Long Tail, Hope, Integration

Traction in Tracking

MediaPost has coverage today of Nielsen's new "Convergence panel" that monitors TV and web usage in the same household. Here are some of the tracking features cited in the article:

* Time spent by consumers on television and Internet on a daily basis.
* Simultaneous usage of television and Internet.
* The relationship between viewing content on television, streaming content, and surfing the Internet.
* Cause and effect - how usage of one media drives usage of the other.

Tracking the interplay between TV and digital marketing has been a hot-button for advertisers for some time. Today we use metrics like search query volume to attribute impact of TV campaigns on web activity. While the sample is small (a few thousand households) and panel methodology is always suspect, this is nonetheless a step forward in enabling holistic marketing analytics.

Yahoo Beats Microsoft to the Punch

Today Yahoo announced that it was releasing a free web analytics tool. Here's the skinny:

"Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs."

While Yahoo's a bit late to the game here -- Google Analytics has been freely available for quite some time -- it was able to trump Microsoft in this department.

Microsoft has been rumored to have a web anlytics tool in development but, as far as I know, nothing has been released. This seems like a huge miss on their part. Microsoft has many products for businesses and a web analytics tool would be a great add on. It could also help drive usage of adCenter and Atlas if there was seamless integration.

As I mentioned in a recent Search Insider column, making Atlas free and building in web analytics would give it a huge USP over Google and Yahoo.

Only time will tell how the folks in Redmond respond but kudos to Yahoo for not rolling over (despite its share price dipping below $14 -- man, those guys have to be kicking themselves for not taking Microsoft's $33 when it was on the table) and continuing to innovate.