What is Userfly.com?

Userfly is a very simple java based web usability monitoring application.

You simply add a single line of Java script and Userfly enables you to capture videos in real time of what your users are doing on your site.

You can then later revisit Userfly to play back these captured videos and start understanding what users are doing on your site.

Why will Userfly.com help you?

Knowing what a user does on your website is simply crucial to any online success you wish to have.

Usability testing can cost you thousands of pounds, with the use of focus groups to determine how your site is interacted with.

For a very small price per capture, you can begin exploring what users are doing on your site.

Although any Analytics programme will help build an understanding of this, watching actual playbacks of user’s movements on your site offers unlimited opportunities for you as an advertiser.

How Userfly.com can help your online marketing efforts?

If you invest heavily in PPC and / or SEO, Userfly’s application could be worth its weight in gold.

Simply watch what a user does when they land on your site.

• How are they converting? - could you tweak the conversion process based on how long it is taking a user to convert?
• Where are they dropping off the site? - although Analytics programmes will inform you of bouncerates etc - how useful would it be to see what is forcing the user to exit the site? Are they searching for something which is taking too long to load? Are they scrolling around a page without being able to find what they are looking for?

Having more insight into the two above factors could be priceless. Every advertiser wants to convert more of their traffic, could Userfly be the answer?

A demo video on Userfly:

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

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There are millions of blogs in existence and we mean tens of millions!

Blogging (and Social Media for that point) is a tool widely adopted now for SEO success.

It is no surprise then that hundreds of SEO’ers are active in the blogging world.

The SEO industry is a mini community and many are active within it. They participate iin the forums and interact on the various blogs and many share with one another their latest SEO offerings, thoughts and views.

But, How Much Should You Blog?

You do not find the established names in the industry writing fresh content everyday.

Their reputations are established and their respect from their peers is guaranteed.

So, what about up and coming SEO’ers? How do they get recognised in a social media orientated landscape? How do they achieve cut through and prominence?

They turn to blogging of course!

They use blogs as a way of proving they know SEO, proving they can manipulate SERP rankings, know how to write killer content and garner the best links.

Is this the right approach?

At OnlineMediaLimited - whereas we try and embrace the communities we find ourselves in now - we do not deem it necessary to share all our killer tactics and tricks. Why should we?

Why Does The SEO Community Share So Much?

This is by no means a blast at some of the more prominent SEO bloggers.

It is just our opinion that to know Search Marketing and to know how to use the channel to make money for clients, it is not necessary to blog everyday about the subject.

We feel that the best Search Marketers are the ones spending more time with their clients.They are the ones analysing and mining every bit of data. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts and finding new ways of achieving results.

We are not saying that SEOs should not blog or that blogging is in someway unproductive.

I guess what we are saying is that SEOs should 1) not give their hands away too easily and 2) start providing unique, innovative content.

Linkbuilding guides and ‘how to Twitter effectively’ type posts are SO 2008!

It is time to step your game up SEO’ers!

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Online media is becoming more sophisticated. It is becoming more fragmented. And it is becoming more challenging.

Ad Exchanges offer a viable avenue for advertisers to start taking more control over their display advertising campaigns. It will start giving advertisers more control and more flexibility.

For those that are unsure of what an ad exchange is, I will first explain what makes an ad exchange and how it all works (as simply as I can!).

Ad Exchanges - What Are They?

An Ad Exchange is a virtual marketplace whereby advertisers (and networks) have the opportunity to purchase ad inventory that publishers wish to sell.

Why Is It Different From A Network?

With a network, you can buy inventory across a variety of different publishers (often blind) for a set price. An Ad Exchange however lets you compete in some cases against other publishers and advertisers for inventory on certain publishers. In some cases, it could be seen as cutting out the middle man.

Why pay network A £1CPM for inventory on site A when you could buy it yourself for £0.60CPM?

Ad Exchanges Can Offer A Greater ROI

Ad Exchanges can offer advertisers a much greater return on investment. With a network, not all inventory you buy will work for you. A good network will ensure you spend as much as possible whilst also delivering against your KPIs

What if however half that inventory is wasted and doesnt convert, merely inflating your ROI?

On an ad exchange, you can bid higher for the inventory that is working for you and bid less or terminate all spend on the inventory that is not. It is an auction model and operates much in the same way that PPC used to.

Alot of media is now becoming fragmented and ad exchanges allows you the opportunity to purchase this long tail of inventory on a profitable, scalable platform.

Working on ad exchange platforms does require a certain level of nous. This is why many response focussed agencies and advertisers should be looking to significantly increase the level of investment they have with ad exchange platforms.

Why Are Search Engines Getting Into The Ad Exchange Market?

Yahoo purchased Right Media (the largest ad exchange platform), Google purchased Doubleclick (who also have a similar platform). It is clear that the display advertising market is something that Search Engines intend on investing in further. They have too!

Search volume will always be finite. Users are searching more these days (typically increasing the volume of searches per every purchase online) but the volume can be argued as being finite.

95% of users time online is browsing content. It is to a certain extent untapped gold for Search Engines. They must invest in this market to continue to scale their respective businesses.

Do Networks Still Have A Role To Play?

Networks still have a role to play and always will. They provide mass reach to specific target markets and are critical for aggregating online audiences.

Networks offers scalable solutions that advertisers in house may simply struggle to match. Firstly, you would need a team dedicated to run an ad exchange programme. As an advertiser are you geared for this?

They also have bags of experience in buying media, with sophisticated tools to underpin the performance of a campaign. Again, as a single advertiser, can you compete with this?

Lastly, they will also have access to inventory that can not be bought on an exchange. Remember, not all inventory from publishers will be accessible to individuals such as you and I.

Ad Exchanges are certainly becoming more mainstream. Display advertising is certainly becoming more sophisticated. Whether the two go hand in hand for all advertisers is another matter.

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Why Should You Optimise PPC Ads?

Optimising an account to hit and deliver upon certain KPIs should far beyond bidding up or down on a keyword. Bidding up or down may be limiting the volume an advertiser could be getting. You reduce bids, you reduce visibility, you lose clicks and you lose business. Ad Optimising can help advertisers avoid this.

PPC ad optimising also allows an agency to grow spend whilst maintaining revenue for the advertiser. It is a simple solution on how to improve PPC Performance. In doing so, you can possibly increase spend, which again helps raise revenue for the agency.

How Could You Be Optimising?

Although bid management has evolved over time, with more portfolio based approaches becoming more prevalent, an extremely simply way of bid optimising is shown below (assuming the target CPA is £20).

Keyword	CPC	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	1.25	15	£30	£450
Keyword 2	0.9	55	£11	£600
Keyword 3	0.75	75	£10	£750
Keyword 4	0.56	87	£9	£800
Keyword 5	1.87	20	£50	£1,000

For the purpose of this demonstration, let’s assume that we have already considered other influencing variables such as average position, conversion rate, average time to convert, average time / day of converting keywords

On the above terms, using simple bid management rules, you would want to increase visibility / bids on keywords 2,3 and 4 right? More traffic means more conversions on the super efficient terms (all things being equal).

You would also want to lower CPC on keywords 1 and 5.

However, what if you can’t increase the visibility on the efficient terms? What if they are already maxed out?

What if decreasing spend on keywords 1 and 5 is going to drop the overall spend significantly, meaning the client under spends (if you are agency side) and your overall revenue for the agency decreases?

There is where PPC Ad Optimising becomes an extremely important component of PPC management.

PPC Ad Optimising Example

Let’s see an example then of what impact ad optimising could have on the above inefficient terms, keywords 1 and 5:

Keyword	Ad	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	Ad 1	5	£60	£300
Keyword 1	Ad 2	10	£15	£150
Keyword 5	Ad 1	5	£150	£750
Keyword 5	Ad 2	15	£17	£250

Now I hear you shouting “ads are served at ad group level, you can’t optimise ads on a keyword basis!”

Whilst there is some truth in this, it isn’t the whole ad group that we are focussing on, a few inefficient keywords.

After running some ad analysis at keyword level it is best to see how the ads are performing against the overall ad group. If there are only a couple of keywords not performing in the ad group – you should probably have removed them into an ad group of their own anyway (or a separate campaign all together if they are crucial terms).

Impact of Optimising the PPC Ads – with more numbers!

From the above example we can see that Ad 1 in both cases is spiking the overall CPA.
If Ad 1 had not been served at all the next month, we would have seen the below results (potentially, assuming that all things stayed equal with the increased volume).

Keyword	Ad	Sales	CPA	Cost
Keyword 1	Ad 2	30	£15	£450
Keyword 5	Ad 2	59	£17	£1,000

In this example (if only PPC worked in such a ‘perfect world’ type of way), by optimising the ads, the following month, the Keywords 1 and 5 would see their respective CPAs drop from £30 and £50 to £15 and £17 respectively.

In this example, the client is happy as you improved the cost efficiency and grew the overall volume.
Your boss at your agency is also happy as you have maintained the spend on the account, maintaining the revenue gained.

The benefits of optimising PPC Ads are here for all to see!

Lastly, I will quickly go over the top 6 testing variables of PPC Ads. The following examples are the best ways of optimising PPC Ads:

• Heading
• Description Line 1
• Description Line 2
• Display URL
• Destination URL
• Promotions and Offers

To effectively test ads, you need to split test with one control ad.

When testing, ensure you limit to one variable at a time, for a fair and even test.
Ensure that the ads are served equally and ensure they reach a decent threshold of impressions before making judgements and changes.
(*this threshold will vary by industry and you need to use your own judgment for this – that said 10,000 impressions in a car finance industry would not be enough but 10,000 impressions on ads selling red roses might be!)

The above is by no means the full extent of ad optimising as you need to consider all influencing variables when undertaking any optimising. It is also using examples that are perfect world situations which as we all know, PPC rarely is. It is purely meant to serve as a demonstration of how simple ad optimising could be immediately improving your PPC performance without making a single bid change!

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Since the announcement 15 months ago there’s been much commentary about the implications for clients, agencies and search budgets in general.

Google BPF - Will We Miss It?

Publicly most of the large agencies announced the decision was “welcomed”, one going as far as to say, “ it is in line with our proposals”.

But let’s be realistic here.

Best Practice Funding hasn’t in all cases been used by agencies to fund best practice. Many of the big players have in fact used it as a sweetener for clients, passing it in part or in whole back to them.

Some agencies have even hosted clients’ accounts under their MCC to qualify for the BPF, passed back a percentage of the BPF to the clients yet not actively manage the accounts on the clients’ behalves (but we’ll leave that one there!).

Ultimately, clients that are currently receiving a percentage of the BPF are going to have to pay more to get the same service next year. So what does this mean for agencies, clients and the search budgets?

Implications of Google Abolishing BPF

• This will fuel some clients to debate whether or not they should bring their search marketing in-house. We’ve already seen a number of clients take this decision, no doubt encouraged by a) the fact that many agencies aren’t transparent with the search data they share b) the reluctance of some agencies to handover an account to another agency (therefore losing all their account history and quality score) c) the same tools are available to clients to run their accounts directly and many think they can do as good a job
• Agencies will have to start charging more and really justify their added value / cut back on overheads – we’ve already seen one of the market leaders make substantial redundancies earlier this year
• Search spend could decrease as clients have to find additional funds to support the increase in agency fees
• SEO spend will increase. Whilst the overall SEO spend in the UK is still dwarfed by the PPC spend, its’ growth shows no sign of dwindling as more and more clients wise up to the long-term benefits of a damn good SEO programme
• We could (and I’d be inclined to say are likely to) see an increased amount of search business up for pitch as clients renegotiate fees / want to ensure they are getting the best service and expertise available to them if it’s going to be costing them more in fees

One thing’s for sure, there is change afoot in search land and no doubt a shake up for some agencies.

But even in these troubled economic times, where advertising budgets will no doubt be cut back country-wide, if you’re doing search well the return more than justifies the investment and search should be the last thing feeling the pinch.

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More and more content is added to the web everyday - most of which will be indexed and ranked (sooner or later) for specific terms.

More and more advertisers are increasing their investment in SEO - more and more competing for specific phrases in the SERPs.

To rephrase the first line - success in SEO is getting harder.

Longtail SEO - The Answer?

Longtail SEO provides a solution to the short-tail challenges presented to small businesses (this is not to say that Longtail SEO is a practice that only small businesses can benefit from - although it is easier for the large advertisers to be competitive on generic, broad terms).

What is Longtail SEO?

Longtail by definition is a classification of search query which is 3 or more words. The phrases are very specific any as such tend to drive a more qualified user - the user is specifically searching for what they want. They are closer to the purchase stage, rather than at the initial research stage (dependant of course on what the actual term is!).

Although longtail traffic tends to be low (when compared to similar generic terms), optimising for a large volume of longtail traffic can actually pay dividends.

Why Do Small Businesses Need Longtail SEO?

As mentioned previously, SEO is becoming tougher and it is becoming harder for new sites or unestablished sites to rank for generic competitive terms.

7 years ago - it was easier to dominate the SERPs for generic terms. However, the sheer volume of content on the web now means it is alot harder. We found an interesting tool that looks at the volume of results pages for certain terms in 2001 and 2008. Although the tool was designed to highlight the emergence of Web 2.0 companies such as Digg and You Tube, terms such as Laptop show interesting results.

A site wishing to rank for the term ‘laptop‘ in 2001 ‘only’ had 1.4million other pages to compete against. Today it has over 205million! The term Notebook shows similar results.

Lets look at the following examples:

• A site stocking new and used laptops wishes to sell a Toshiba Laptop.

• The number of competing pages for the term ‘Laptop’ is over 200million.

• The site then decides to optimise for the term ‘Toshiba Laptop’ - this however still has over 2.5million results pages!

• The term ‘Toshiba Satellite Laptop’ however has roughly 700,000 competing pages - this would be a sensible term to optimise for

The volume of searches for the above 3 terms (in October 2008) are:

• Laptop - 13.6million
• Toshiba Laptop - 450,000
• Toshiba Satellite Laptop - 110,000

Although the term Toshiba Satellite Laptop has circa 350,000 less searches than Toshiba Laptop a month - the term is more specific, the user is actively in the market for a specific type of model and therefore probably more likely to convert on this term than the other two. *This term may not necessarily be regarded as a real longtail term, but used purely for the purpose of this exercise*

Another point to note is that users are becoming more savvy and the volume of longtail search terms is increasing - users are simply better at ‘Googling’ these days. If you start investing time and resource into longtail now - it will pay even more dividends in time to come.

Does Longtail SEO Result In Less Business?

At a keyword level, the answer to this is yes. However, as you can rank for a larger volume of terms easier, combined with the increased CTRs and conversion rates, you should still be able to drive a comfortable volume of business.

Example below:

The example above applies the logic that with decreased volume of searches (and more longtail in nature) comes an increase in CTR and an increase in conversion rate.

As the results show - by opting for the longtail approach you could still drive a decent volume of traffic but more importantly, a sizeable amount of sales / conversions / leads for probably less effort than optimising for one truly large volume driver.

How To Optimise for Longtail SEO?

To effectively optimise for longtail SEO - you do not need to create bespoke pages and content for each longtail variation. This would be un-manageable and simply wierd for the user to read!

If you are focussing on one particular term (or two) then you do not actually need to create individual content per extreme longtail term.

If you have a page that is semi-relevant to your list of targeted longtail terms and it is already indexed and ranked - then you can simply add the other terms into the existing content at a later stage. This process is explained in further detail over at ragepank.

For instance, this post may be targeting the term Longtail SEO, however once the page has been ranked, we could easily rank for related longtail terms such as:

• How Longtail SEO Benefits Small Businesses
• Longtail SEO Can Increase A Businesses Sales
• How Do You Optimise For Longtail SEO

The important point to note is that the longtail terms should be included into content sensibly - do not simply stick them in a list or in the middle of a sentence if it is not relevant. This is not best practice and would simply not appeal to your users.

Longtail SEO is something that should not be sniffed at. It will be easier for smaller advertisers to get rankings on and drive subsequent traffic / sales. It can also be an easy way of larger advertisers getting incremental traffic from.

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One of the biggest parts (arguably) to affiliate marketing is relationships.

Having a product / service that is desirable obviously helps. A site that converts will obviously attract affiliates. A recognisable brand will also be conducive in the initial affiliate recruitment stages.

Above all else though, having a close working (and often personal) relationship with your affiliates is fundamental to any affiliate marketing success.

They need to feel professionally respected and desired - otherwise why else would they promote you? Why else would they risk their own resource and money in promoting you?

Affiliate Success Stories from ‘Little Brands’

There are many examples of successful affiliate programmes from brands which you might not necessarily think of as ‘large, well known’ brands. The reason for this success is because they know how to treat their affiliates well!

Examples include:

• Prezzybox
• Sunshine

Prezzybox Affiliate Programme - Award Winning

Prezzybox resides in an extremely competitive market - gifts and gadgets. However, due to the success of their affiliate programme (driving 35% of their business!) - they have enabled to become established as a true market leader.

Zak Edwards - the managing director of Prezzybox, clearly knows the power of affiliate marketing and how you need to treat your affiliates to keep them motivated to work for you.

Prezzybox has a wide affiliate base and due to their committment to constant communication with their affiliate base on various blogs and forums - they are able to continually grow their base. They also recognise the power of Super Affiliates and how to incentivise them.

Offering new innovatory methods has also ensured that the programme continues to be a programme of choice for many affiliates. In 2007, Prezzybox launched a new content item for their affiliates - Vidiboxes. These were product videos contained in creative formats and were hugely popular among the content affiliates - not least because of their great CTRs!

Essentially, Prezzybox’s committment to innovation and committment to keeping their affiliate base happy ensures that their business is safeguarded, even in the worst economic climates!

Sunshine.Co.Uk - Wordpress Plugin!

At the recent A4U Expo - Sunshine.co.uk revealed their completely new revolutionary tool - a wordpress site plugin. You can simply create your own travel based site on wordpress. Simply get a domain, install wordpress and away you go.

The plugin includes an XML feed of all the offers, an image media tool and content structure. The result is essentially a ready made site!

Why have Sunshine gone to such lengths? Simple. To make it even easier for affiliates, who may not necessarily tried their hand at the travel game previously, to get involved in promoting their programme.

The initiative really is revolutionary - it has created alot of buzz and PR in the affiliate community and I am sure it has already started to grow a large affiliate base for them.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - Improving Affiliate Relationships

There are numerous ways in which relations with affiliates can be improved - the most important thing is to understand your affiliate base, understand what makes them tick and tailor your incentivising to them.

Ways of improving affiliate relationships include:

• Tiered or incentivised commissions (giving your super affiliates a higher tiered commission works well)
• Tailored Landing Pages - ability to customise to the affiliates strengths must be taken into consideration. Tailorin landing pages for them where you remove any leakage points, remove phone numbers etc (give the affiliate what they want - within reason obviously)
• Specific Phone Numbers - if telesales is a strong sales channel for your business, consider giving your top affiliates their own specific phone numbers. This ensures you are completely rewarding their efforts.
• Brand bidding / closed set of brand bidders - consider allowing your top affiliates to brand bid. Consider the impact this will have on your own volume and implement strict rules around this (ie keeping below your own brand). If you are a large advertiser that already suffers from a host of competitor brand bidding - a strategy to force competitors out and push them off the front page is to let 2 or 3 affiliates brand bid.
• General Rewards - Many advertisers often treat their affiliates to special events and days out. This could be something small from taking them Go-Karting for the day to treating them to a holiday abroad. Having larger prizes and rewards running for a set amount of time ensures it keeps your affiliates motivated and incentivises them to promote you even harder.
• Creative Innovation - For content affiliates, innovation in displaying product feeds is essential. Creating completely new formats (like Prezzybox) ensures that the affiliates are able to monetise their traffic better, thus driving more volume for the merchant.

General communication is also fundamental in the management of affiliates. Answering affiliate’s questions, paying affiliates on time, updating on any new business changes and general personal communication. Get to know your affiliates personally, take them for a beer, treat them like real people! This just helps build long term, effective affiliate relationships.

If you have a site that converts, you operate in a profitable sector and know how to treat your affiliates like Kings (or Queens) - then you really are on to a winner.

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The rapid improvements in targeting technology however contribute to the growth of the more standard types of display advertising.

Behavioural Targeting - What Is It?

Behavioural Targeting is the process adopted by online publishers and ad networks and utilised by advertisers to serve more relevant advertising to the audiences most likely to respond to them.

Behavioural Targeting - How Does It Work?

Different behavioural targeting providers utilise slightly different methods. However, the most common method is:

• Website / Web Page Visited - users who often visit sports based sites and read sports based content on major news sites, are cookied by ad networks when they enter their ‘network’ and would be identified as a sports segment. If an advertiser wanted to target a sports based audience, the ad network would deliver the impression the pool of users (cookies) that had been grouped into the sports pool

Why The Emergence of Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural Targeting has emerged to the forefront of media plans in recent years, mainly because of the reasons mentioned earlier in this article - to improve the relevancy of advertising served to users - specifically with the intention of improving both the CTR and conversion rate of a campaign and thus improving the cost efficiency of a given campaign.

Advertisers are moving away from targeting their audiences on specific sites that demographically match their targeted audience - they are moving to a concept where you buy audiences and not sites (make no mistake, site specific buys are still prevalent in online planning, but networks are growing and the inventory available to networks is driven by the ever increasing remnant inventory not sold on specific sites).

The benefits to doing this are:

• Cheaper access to your audiences
• Larger reach - reaching them across multiple touchpoints
• Greater control over optimising

Personally, our experiences with behavoural targeting have been somewhat mixed. Although it is more cost effective - reaching an affluent ABC1 user will be cheaper on a network utilising behavioural targeting than buying inventory on the FT.com - on more generic, mass market the uplift in results from behavioural targeting sometimes does not justify the increased cost of media compared to a standard blind network buy.

Retargeting - The Real Winner

An element to ‘behavioural targeting’ is something called retargeting / re-messaging (although they are so different they really should be regarded as completely different entities).

What Is Retargeting and How Does It Work?

Retargeting is simply serving advertising to users who have previously interacted with your advertising or who have previously expressed an interest in your product / service by visiting your site.

The process works like so:

• A cookie is dropped on a user when they land on your site
• When they re-enter a specific network, that user can be retargeted with advertising.

Retargeting is another way of making your advertising more relevant and more effective. It is serving ads to ‘warm prospects’ rather than cold. new prospects.

In my experience, I have often see a CTR 100% better than standard targeting and it also converts between 50 - 90% better. There is a premium on the price of retargeting but the uplift in CTR and Conversion Rate often justifies the rate increase.

Retargeting Considerations

Although retargeting can drive a fantastic ROI (despite paying upwards of £1.50CPM for it), you do need to consider the following:

• The volume of traffic your site receives
• The volume of the booking / impressions being bought.

Firstly, if your site receives very little traffic, there is therefore an insufficient pool of users to retarget against. This is why secondly, the volume of the booking needs to be realistic and the volume of impressions being bought needs to be considered.

Take the below example:

• Site Receives 70,000 unique users a month

• Impressions being bought - 2,500,000 (on a £5k spend @ at a rate of £2)

In order for the booking to be delivered in full - every user will on average be served an ad 35 times!

Important note - only sites with enough traffic to retarget should consider retargeting as a profitable, viable route to incremenal volume.

Search Retargeting - Taking It A Step Further

Another form of retargeting is that of Search Retargeting. The concept is pretty self explanatory - you are retargeting your search traffic. With some ad networks it is possible to append your URL redirects to include a certain piece of code which enables the ad network to identify the user has come via a search engine and those users can then be cookied and retargeted.

The obvious benefits to this is that you are not just retargeting any one who may arrive at your site but taking that relevancy even further by retargeting the users specifically looking for your brand (or product / service).

However, the uptake of such technology has been slow. The reasons for simply are because you need to receive a hell of alot of clicks from a search engine to build a large enough pool of users to retarget against - similar to what was discussed above. The method could and should be tested by the truly large brands such as MoneySupermarket, O2 etc but do not even think about it if your volume of clicks from search is under 100,000 a month!

Behavioural targeting and retargeting has its obvious benefits and can and does work. However, like with any venture into the display advertising arena, the cost of media and the ability to optimise are critical to any success.

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You may assume you are but think again:

Are you really tracking the entire user journey through to sale, monitoring and analysing every single touchpoint along the way?

Until now, the concept of complete holistic tracking unfortunately has been restricted by limited technology solutions.

Online Marketing Tracking - How Has It Been Done Up To Now:

Many advertisers to date utilise a unique URL solution, creating ‘folders’ that track individual users once they land on the site. The user is cookied and whatever has been the last click that attributed the sale, was awarded the full sale.

The URLs may look something like:

www.examplesite.com/landingpage/source?=banner/size/placement

www.examplesite.com/landingpage/source?=email/creative/list

Some advertisers we know of have gone further than this and utilised third party ad serving such as Doubleclick and ad served every single channel of their online marketing.

This has enabled them to completely dedupe across every channel and even attribute post view conversions from Display advertising where there has not been a click based conversion.

More recently, advertisers may even be implementing click weighting (mainly from their PPC activites) within their bid management / third party tool. This enables advertisers to get a feel of what clicks led to the conversion. Using the example of Cosmetic Surgery it may look something like:

Click 1	Click 2	Click 3	Click 4	Click 5
Liposuction	Liposuction london	Liposuction on finance	Harley Medical Liposuction	Harley Medical

This is becoming a more common practice - analysing the entire search journey and identifying trends in semantic search behaviour.

HOWEVER, THIS IS STILL NOT ENOUGH

As online marketing becomes more sophisticated, advertisers need to increase the sophistication of how value is attributed to media channels. To be more precise, how we begin to track beyond the last click.

Beyond Last Click Tracking - Do We Need To Move Past It?

Currently, the last click wins (for most) - however, does this give a true reflection of how users are interacting with your marketing and more importantly, what is driving them to the sale?

If working to the last click rule, how can brand terms be allocated for example 60% of volume in a PPC account when it has been proven that circa 70% of search activity is carred out against generic searches.

The above is taken from a study from Yahoo - it shows the search journey from week 1 to week 12 and the final conversion.

Advertisers are in danger of overstating the reliance on brand terms and may be unfairly optimising generic searches out of the game. If these generic terms are assisting the final conversion - optimising them down or out will inevitably negatively affect overall volume.

Beyond The Last Click - Who Else Wants To Move Past It?

We are not the only ones who think the last click rule is slightly outdated:

• Eyeblaster -  a cross channel, digital advertising technology and services provider and traditionally a rich media ad server - recently launched their “channel connect for search”. Although the product seems only limited to the relationship between search and display (discounting all other channels), its intent is to allow its users to identify the impact display has onto search conversion.

• Atlas Solutions (another large ad serving technology company owned by Microsoft) more recently launched their “Engagement Mapping” tool out of Beta. The tool allows users of Atlas to evaluate the role and impact every single touchpoint that the user passes through on the way to a conversion.

In light of the above, it is clear that this issue of conversion attribution is making its way into the mainstream.

How Should You Be Tracking?

Firstly, you need to identify how many intermediary touchpoints there are on the way to a conversion.

The fewer the touchpoints, the more value we place on each one, as the impact of each could be considered stronger. Ie. if there were only 5 touchpoints - the value of each would be higher than if there were 10.

You then need to attribute values to each of these touchpoints - we choose to make them total 100% - it may look something like this:

Touchpoint 1	Touchpoint 2	Touchpoint 3	Touchpoint 4	Touchpoint 5
35%	10%	10%	10%	35%

As a rule we tend to place more importance on the first and last touchpoint - the trigger and closer of a conversion.

However, if there 10 touchpoints, the percentiles would be less and more dispersed between the touchpoints.

This is not finished though of course. Ie. if a network impression was at the start of the journey and an affiliate click in the middle this of course require a slightly different attribtuion of value.

The next step to take is to identify the following variables and also factor these into the formula:

• Time Lag to conversion - if the process had 5 touchpoints but took 2 weeks to complete the conversion, the value of each touchpoint would be higher than if it took 6 weeks to complete conversion.
• The different media touchpoints - each one of course has a different value:

1. Impression - Network
2. Impression - Portal
3. Impression - Niche / Site Specific
4. Click - Network
5. Click - Portal
6. Click - Site Specific
7. Click - Affiliate
8. Click - Brand Search
9. Click - Generic Search
10. Click - Generic + Brand Search
11. Click - Longtail Search

We then assign different values to each touchpoint depending on when they converted, what type of media touchpoint are they, how many steps to conversion were there.

We are currently developing a tool which will plugin to our adserving solution and seamlessly assign percentile values to each conversion touchpoint. We will then analyse the overall aggregate percentile of each individual media placement and truly identify what drives ROI!

Potential Flaws To Moving Beyond Last Click

The above approach to holistic tracking has its obvious benefits but with it, has its obvious flaws.

The process of assigning values to each converting touchpoint is somewhat subjective - it is arguably your own interpretation - nothing completely scientific to determine whether a search click is more valuable than an email click.

It will also be near impossible to have some industry wide, standardised metrics. No agreed metrics in place presents obvious problems to the affiliate industry!

Although Not Perfect, It’s A Start!

Our approach to tracking online marketing is by no means ideal and flawless however, we believe it is a start into assigning logic and intuition to attributing media value beyond the last click.

To stand a chance of executing such methods however needs FULL integration. If seperate pieces of media are shared amongst various agencies, they REALLY need to all be singing from the same hymn sheet.

Can you really imagine up to 3 or 4 different agencies sharing data and working towards only one common goal?

Being On The Right Tracks Is Easier Said Than Done. But In Online Media, Can You Really Afford Not To Keep Up?

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The move is somewhat of a u-turn but one that was widely expected by some in the industry.

Google Gambling Ban - Background

To give some context to the story, in 2007, Google UK imposed a ban (following the lead from the US) on all paid, gambling related ads. The move was originally made globally in what seemed like Google trying to align itself with growing criticism of the industry and be seen to preserve the integrity of its service to its user base.

16 months later - the SERPs are already littered again with gambling advertisers - google “online poker” and see for yourself!

Google Gambling Ban - Why The U-Turn?

The cynical among us (myself included) will say: Profits, Profits, Profits.

Google recently released this official statement:

“Google AdWords allows online gambling advertisements to target Great Britain (England, Scotland, or Wales) as long as the advertiser is registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number.

Advertisers based outside the UK and within the European Economic Area who wish to target online gambling ads to England, Scotland, or Wales must be licensed to advertise online gambling in their respective country.”

James Cashmore, Google’s industry head also commented:

“Dennis Woodside (Google VP and MD for UK, Benelux & Ireland) and the team have been reviewing policies both from a legal and user need point of view at a local level,” he said. “I definately think that local markets will make more decisions in the future”

The above could be interpreted differently however.

The UK’s economy problems have been well publicised and the entire FTSE has seen much of its value written off in the past couple of months.

So could the above statement of “local markets will make more decisions in future” allude to this fact?

To ensure that Google’s forecasts for the UK market remain strong and healthy when at a time when the rest of the nation is gripped in a ‘recession’, the search giant lets one of the biggest spending online industries back into its world…coincidence??

Who Benefits From Google’s Gambling Ban U-Turn?

Google of course!

But besides Google, who else can benefit from the lifted ban?

• (Very) arguably you could say that the user benefits from having circa 10 additional choices whenever they search for something gambling related (assuming it is not a really, really longtail term).
• Gambling advertisers of course stand to benefit. Despite the amount of competition gambling PPC will incur, search volumes have remained strong in the current credit crunch. This incremental volume will no doubt be of benefit to many gambling based companies.
• Smaller niche gamling advertisers also stand to benefit to some degree. Although they will not have the deep pockets of the likes of Party Gaming and 888, if they mine the longtail well enough (and there are still a healthy volume of searches in the tail of this industry), they should be able to positively grow their volume of players.

Who Does Not Benefit?

Firstly, Yahoo and MSN stand to lose.

As soon as the gates of Google were completely closed in 2007, the gambling world flocked to Yahoo and MSN. Despite the volume of searches being significantly less, the demand was far outstripped by the supply of advertisers waiting for any search.

The result of this was healthy, inflated CPCs across two of the lower tier, premier engines.

The impact of Google’s move however will see gambling advertisers decide that they can no longer run Yahoo and MSN at a higher CPA than its volume is worth. Greater efficiencies will be sought on these engines, with more budget moved into Google as it is proven to drive more volume.

The Display Market also stands to lose potentially. Despite gambling companies having to rely on Yahoo and MSN more in the past, they also flooded into the display advertising market (even more than they were originally). They again were probably allowing for CPAs higher than ideal, mainly because they knew volume had to come from somewhere.

Again, expect gambling advertisers to become more ruthless with their display advertising campaigns. Publishers, who may have been carried slightly with previously above targeted CPAs, are likely to be binned.

Lastly, affiliates could either win or lose. SEO affiliates now have to content with 10 other advertisers on the large volume driving, head terms. This is bound to impact their volume sooner or later.

However, having mentioned above that some spend may be pulled from the likes of MSN and Yahoo, could this present an opportunity to affiliates. Less competition on certain terms = more gains to be made!

What Next?

Typically, the first 10 days saw spiked bids where the novelty value of being back on Google was high. Bids have started plateuing out, much like they did when Google opened trademarked bidding.

However, gambling was and will remain a highly competitive industry, up there with finance. Demand is there and so is supply - gambling advertisers know the lifetime value of their players!

In the short and medium term, Google rakes in the chips and keeps their profits growing and growing. The knock on effect this may have on the SEO gambling industry and indeed other industries remains to be seen.

One thing is for certain though:

Google Will Always Win. You Can Go ‘All In’ On That Fact!

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