Category: advertising

Frost & Sullivan: Search Engine Marketing vs. Pay Per Click

I’m sitting next to Jeremiah at this Frost & Sullivan interactive session, which is being led by Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing. It’s on “Balancing Paid and Organic Search.” She promises the following key takeaways:

  • SEO vs. PPC decision criteria
  • Compelling reasons to integrate/implement both methods
  • How to isolate and measure results
  • Tips on maximizing your ROI

Craig Oldham from Allstate is one of the thought leaders for this discussion, too; she’s joined by Carrie at GMAC Mortgage.


Jeremiah is blogging the presentation, too, and his thoughts are here.

The key point is it’s not really SEO vs. PPC, but SEO and PPC. SEO is a lot like PR, whereas PPC is marketing. Just as you don’t have final control of the message with PR, you don’t with SEO either. But organic search results and media stories have higher credibility – and costs are less.

Most businesses wouldn’t pit PR and marketing against each other, and only do one or the other. The same point holds for search engine marketing and Pay Per Click.
SEO vs. PPC decision criteria include budget, speed to results, control over message, flexibility, longevity, credibility and competitiveness of your market. SEO doesn’t require a media budget for each click, but it’s not free. Speed to results is a big advantage for PPC, whereas natural search can take longer. PPC gives more control and flexibility, while longevity and credibility is better for organic. And depending on the competitiveness of a market and the number of bidders for a given search term, PPC can vary widely in cost per click.

Offering real value on your site is important to get people to link to you. The number of real links is what drives search engine results, and the way to get links is to offer value. In the end, that’s what drives links. If your content is worthwhile, people will link to it.

Google has webmaster tools that let you submit a site map during site redesign, so you don’t lose ranking. That way the spidering happens more quickly and efficiently. Optimizing press releases also helps speed the SEO process.

Compelling reasons to integrate/implement both methods – with PPC you can control the exact message, but some people have a much higher propensity to click organic results, distrusting the ads. And why wouldn’t you do the relatively cheaper thing, SEO, if you’re doing PPC?

Sites that require customer logins hurt their search engine rankings because the crawlers can’t get there, so Patricia asks her clients to decide which pages really need to be behind the password-protected area, and which ones are available to the world (and the search engines.)

Ability to turn on quickly is an advantage of PPC; you can take advantage of current events or mass media appearances (as Sheila from Siemens mentioned about an Oprah appearance by her company.) Optimized press releases also can do this quickly. You also can buy terms for competitors or adversaries on a key issue.

(As an aside, I need to check out a service Jeremiah mentioned, which uses a USB device to get wireless internet access via cell phone. He’s got a cool card that lets him liveblog this session and do multiple posts; I have to go somewhere to connect to wifi between sessions. He mentioned that Thomas Hawk has a device he uses for his Mac. This would be really good for me to have wireless access on the bus each day. If anyone can tell me what that service or device is, I want to buy it.)

Patrick from Outrider mentioned PPC as a message tester, so you can see what words or phrases people actually click. “Search is a fabulous focus group,” Patricia says. Jeremiah says looking at tags in del.icio.us is a good way of seeing what attributes consumers are applying to your web site.
Tips on maximizing your ROI – we discussed that if your organic search is good, you can possibly pay less for 4th or 5th position in PPC, and get good results at lower advertising costs.

Thanks, Patricia, for a great job in facilitating, and going where the participants were interested.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , , , , ,

MSNBC Dropping Windows Media Player

MSNBC is moving to all Flash and away from Windows Media Player in its video delivery environment. That’s one of the most interesting tidbits from the just-completed session, and it comes from Kyoo Kim, VP of Sales for MSNBC.comThat’s actually quite stunning when you consider that the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. But that’s what the marketers and customers are demanding/accepting.

In the end, customers really are royalty.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , ,

Rich Media Marketing

Notes on Rich Media Marketing from the Frost & Sullivan session moderated by Chris Young of Doubleclick, which was entitled “Brand Building: Engaging Your Target Audience with Rich Media and Video.” Kyoo Kim from MSNBC ad sales, Barbara Cerf from New York Life, and Craig Oldham of Allstate Insurance were the panelists.

Two different formats typically used include pre-roll ads and “in banner,” an ad within a page. Barbara is testing on-page ads because she finds pre-roll irritating. Kyoo mentioned heavy.com, which gave him his “aha!” moment, when he saw that it is possible to create rich media flash players instead of annoying users with the pre-roll. Craig uses :15 pre-rolls instead of :30s. He hasn’t seen video ads do better than the “dancing clown” so far, so it’s hard to prove that creating content specifically for online channel advertising is worthwhile. Most pre-roll is currently re-purposed TV :30s.

Kyoo says ads need to be proportional; a :30 in front of a brief YouTube video doesn’t make sense, but the same ad in front of a long-form documentary is a huge value for the customer.
Check out Spotrunner.

Scale (reach and frequency) is harder to get on the web than through TV advertising. On TV, for instance, you can reach several million people at once. There isn’t enough inventory for reach and frequency. Craig doesn’t think reach and frequency matters; what he cares about is how many people in his target audience see the ad, and whether they take action. Reach and frequency is putting an old media paradigm on new media.

For the B2B market, this tonnage really doesn’t matter. As Rick Short said (he’s in the semiconductor market), being on the Today show is irrelevant for his business: there might be three viewers who could possibly buy his product. But he can go to an industry-focused web site and reach 15,000 likely customers, for much less money.

I asked whether the panelists are doing anything to create ads that people actually want to see, instead of the interruptive, intrusive ads that annoy. Chris said DoubleClick is contracted with Digital Broadcasting Group, which produces original webisodes. For example, THQ has a video game called StuntMan coming out soon, and DBG is producing 3-minute episodes of a guy going around doing crazy stunts that THQ is sponsoring and is syndicating around the web.

rich media marketing
Jeremiah Owyang asked about whether they have pursued consumers creating advertising (He’s blogging the conference here), and how the marketers are defining and measuring success. Doubleclick is pioneering something with webcams that lets users insert themselves into ads, and forward them to friends.

Craig says Allstate is exploring how to make car insurance something that people would even be interested enough in to want to create user-generated content.

Objectives for Rich Media Marketing could include brand awareness, direct response or, in the case of film marketing, having 8 weeks to create instant brand awareness before opening night.

Measures include click-through rates, percent of video viewed, brand awareness. For entertainment 19.2 seconds of a :30 is viewed; cars are about 21 seconds. Click-through alone isn’t enough, because people who see videos but don’t click through to the site have still seen the branding message.

Kyoo is interested in finding a way to measure “engagement” because he hears a lot about that from ad agencies. Jeremiah says he is developing a formula in the videoblogging space; hopefully he will post it.

Chris says he’s looking at who clicked on the ad, who sent it to a friend, interaction rate, time spent with the ad. For example, they had a Tiger Woods golf putting contest ad that had an 89-second time spent. The Odwalla Ken Jennings spelling contest, which I mentioned earlier here, is another one that likely has a long “time spent” factor.

I really like the panel format that Frost & Sullivan used for this, as compared with the overly interactive brainstorming groups like this one. Certainly there is value in both formats, but I would have liked to hear more from Craig from Facebook yesterday, and the format prevented it. We got to connect after the session, though, which was helpful. The panel format was still really interactive, with lots of good give and take, but we had one group conversation instead of six separate ones.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , , , , , , ,

These columns must be mixed up

That’s what I thought at first when I logged on to my Wells Fargo on-line brokerage account today and saw $27.39 as the increase for the day for my aQuantive (AQNT) stock.

“That must be the stock price, not the increase,” I said to myself. “It’s been trading in the 30s. A $27 increase can’t be right.”

picture-1a.jpg
Then I read the daily news and found out Microsoft had agreed to purchase aQuantive for $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium over the previous day’s close. It’s all over the blogs, too: here, and here, and here, and here.
Good for my IRA.

It just goes to show what a BIG deal on-line advertising will be. With Google having announced a deal for DoubleClick, Microsoft needed to buy a seat at the advertising table.

I first bought AQNT stock (but unfortunately only 100 shares) because of trends I had been following in media and advertising. Spending on TV ads is huge, but audiences are getting smaller and people are skipping the commercials. But so far there hasn’t been anywhere near enough on-line ad inventory for current TV advertisers to buy. So I figured companies like aQuantive would have a great long-term opportunity for growth as they figured out how to create advertising opportunities.
In this investment, I was partially taking advice from two money people I respect, and partially going against both. Phil Town in his Rule #1 Investing suggests purchasing single stocks in industries you follow and understand. That I did. This is an area I work in and blog about.
Town says, however, you should look for companies with long track records of earnings, but which are currently trading at a significant discount to projected future earnings. That wasn’t true for AQNT, but the long-term market upside looked too good to wait until this stock got cheap by his standards.
My real financial hero, Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt guru, says you shouldn’t buy single stocks, but instead should invest in mutual funds with a long track record. He rightly points out the examples of Enron and others, in which employees who had all their retirement eggs in the company stock found themselves financially ruined.

So because I like the Town tactic and the Ramsey rule, I just try to, in essence, create my own mutual fund by limiting each individual stock to no more than 10 percent of my IRA. That meant I had to sell Apple because it had gone up enough that it was too big of a part of my portfolio.

Yes, I’ve had my share of losers, too. Nortel hasn’t been great (and that was one that did have accounting problems that whacked the stock.) And then there was the STUPID Tax I paid by falling for a “hot tip” on Pangea Petroleum (PAPO). But because they were small percentages of my account, they were just aggravating, not devastating.

aQuantive isn’t a Peter Lynch 10-bagger for me (although if you had bought it five years ago, it would have been), but having it go up 130 percent in six months, and 78 percent in a day, makes up for some mistakes.

TechnoratiTechnorati: , , , ,