Manhattan Marketing Maven

Benchmarking the Online Magic

Every CEO and CFO wants their marketers to benchmark and measure the magic. And with the publication of MarketingSherpa's first ever Online Advertising Handbook + Benchmarks marketers will have a fighting chance.

The lovable geeks, zods and nerds at Sherpa, led by Research Director Stephan Tornquist, have collected 211 pages of data from across the advertising industry including survey data from 577 online advertisers at a wide range of companies of many sizes and sectors.

Anyone who needs numbers to sell in ideas or to justify a campaign or to learn from others' mistakes ought to have a copy of this book. At $497 this fact book is a steal. If you hired a consulting firm to get you this information, it would cost 50 times more and be half as good and much less candid.

These guys aren't afraid of the truth. They write, "online there's a great deal of bad advertising...Where there could be genuine stimulation through interaction there are bad static ads. In a medium that allows micro targeting, there is still mass advertising." They know that only by sharing ideas and information can we collectively harness the real potential of this evolving medium.

Recognizing the infancy of online advertising they have the balls to remind us that online advertising still adheres to the fundamental principles of. advertising. In the executive summary they remind us that branding, placement, frequency, content, targeting plus sight and sound are the critical variables for effective communication and persuasion. And they display, in pedestrian charts, the data to prove it.

Within the extensive data sets there is subtle and not-so-subtle guidance on issues affecting everything from creative units to targeting to media tactics. If I haven't sold you the book yet, consider these tidbits:

• No more than 28% of viewers ever see an ad below the fold
• Display ads earn half the ad revenues of search ads
• 30% of online marketers don't spend a time on behaviorally or contextually targeted ads while another 30% believe these tactics yield the greatest ROI
• Almost 70% online ad analysts say A/B tests yield the best improvements in ad effectiveness
• 53% of marketers think adding pictures make online ads more effective
• 300x250 pixel banners have the best click-thru rates
• 46% of heavy gamers see in-game ads an inevitable
• Without frequency capping you blow your ad exposure too fast on the wrong prospects

   

The Rich Are Just Like You and Me ... Online

Guess what? Millionaires are online doing the same stuff you and I do. That's the conclusion of the 2008 HNW Wealth & New Media Study produced by my friend and former Digitant Stacey Haefele.

The significance of this data is aimed at busting up the notion that the really rich are clubby old white farts sipping tea or swigging bourbon or sniffing cocaine in private clubs or huddling unobtrusively nose-to-nose with their accountants and advisers in the privacy of their estates, yachts or Gulfstreams. The top end of the financial services market have been reluctant to embrace any kind of digital marketing tools but this data should give them reason not only to reconsider but to act. This is especially true for the younger generation of heirs and heiresses who never made the money but are eager to preserve it so they can squander it at will. This target audience includes Paris Hilton and those wacky and wonderful Johnson & Johnson heirs. 

The big news is that 31% of the 44-54 set, the boomers who might have actually earned their boodle,  visit social networking sites and almost half (48%) of those 45-64 use instant messaging. Fifty-two percent read blogs and 20% say they actually posted a comment or a response. So much for the old foggy money image. As you can imagine the numbers skyrocket as you move down the age scale.

The average respondent is online 13 hours per week and has been so for more than a decade. Who said rich people aren't early adopters? And while you're thinking, okay they're online searching for love and buying socks, the survey also found that 93% say they get investment and financial information online.

The implications for everybody from the Bessemer Trust to lawyers, financial advisers and insurance agents in high net worth zip codes are:

1. Supplement your face-to-face pitches with online and digital marketing.

2. Provide rich guys with relevant digital tools and data to help them test drive your products or services.

3. Acquire leads on line by using social networks, blogs and other emerging digital formats to intercept or to meet and greet the financial elite.

What eTailers Learned This Christmas

The Holiday 2007 post-mortems are in. The lessons are being gathered, shared, socialized and baked into 2008 budgets. The bottom line is that we still have far to go to meet customer expectations and to realize the upside of online retailing.

Below is my reading and synthesis of survey work from a bunch of sources including 421 marketing responders to the adtech tactics and budgets survey, 721 consumer responders to Allurent, as reported by MarketingCharts, the 101 insights from MarketingSherpa's "2008 Marketing Wisdom" compilation and 167 merchants responding to Lauren Freedman and the e-tailing group's 6th Annual Merchant Survey.

The results are not new or surprising. Maybe they will help all of us keep our eye on the prize.

Perception is Reality. Everybody knows technology is getting better, cheaper and faster. So why is it still so hard and so frustrating to buy stuff online? Customers don't really have the patience or the interest to understand our systems or our problems. They figure if you are promoting your site, you've got it together. If you don't they leave and hate you.

They want stuff to work easily and simply and fast. They don't want to wait around while a page renders or an photo downloads. They want to intuitively shop and have fun buying cool stuff. And they want to be in control by using persistent carts, order histories and checking out in one page. More than half prefer to download a virtual catalog to their desktop and shop at their convenience. 

Anything that disrupts this retail rapture prompts them to dump their merchandise and split  which also gives them a bad taste for the brand. Merchants have one chance to make a strong impression either way.

Conversion is 3% And Needs Work. Its no surprise that of all those unique visitors making all those page views, just 3% or less actually buy. No wonder CFOs are screaming that its an awful big cost to sell an awfully small number of customers.

There is considerable evidence that internal site search might be a key conversion tool. Almost everyone is conscious of site search. One in three shoppers go right to it when they arrive at a site. Improvements in the underlying logic, definition tables, the ability to punch in either SKU numbers or slang terms relating to products can make a considerable difference in sales and customer satisfaction. There is nothing more frustrating than punching in a search term and not quickly finding your desired object.

What's odd is that so few merchants are using tools to improve conversion. 48 percent spent less than 10 hours a week sifting through the numbers even though 55 percent claim they are going to upgrade their analytics software to integrate online and offline tracking and enable multivariate testing. There's a lot of talk but not much action.I suspect analytical talent is thin in most merchant organizations where 2/3rds of businesses run their multi-channel direct to consumer retail operation with 10 people or less, none of whom are number crunching page trackers.

Equally odd is the lack of attention to shopping cart abandonment. 75 percent of merchants don't interact in any way with folks to put stuff in a cart and then bail out. And 29 percent don't have a way to save carts so they can't use e-mail or pop-ups to lure shoppers back. This seems like an investment no-brainer. If customers are already half-sold it makes emminent sense to install the tools to help customers follow through to complete the transaction.

E-Mail & Search Sell Best. It's the house e-mail list against pay-per-click for fastest best acquisition tool while natural search, now generally considered SEO, claims the ROI prize. As the cost of words and the search for golden phrases intensifies and automates, merchants fall back on the house list which can be counted on for regular ka-chings.

Short, simple offer oriented e-mail with subject lines 36 characters or less work best. Just like DM a second blast against non-responders yields about 50 percent of the first response wave. There is growing evidence that if you concentrate on the responders you can optimize returns even if you end up with a smaller list. Remember its not the size that counts, its what you can do with it. 

There's Lots of Segmentation Talk. Testing and segmentation is everyone's stated intention. 81 percent of merchants say they have some or rudimentary levels of sophistication in customer segmentation. So they know what they should do even if they don't do it.

Nobody knows who is really doing it or which segmentation approaches yield the best results. My hunch is simple segmentation based on product purchases, frequency, gender and dollar value probably trump more sophisticated and costly schemes. Its funny how online marketers are just beginning to embrace 50 year old DM orthodoxy.

Many merchants are challenged by system and organizational silo issues which limit how much anyone can truly do vis-a-vis segmentation. Plus fighting the conventional wisdom is a bitch. Everybody is committed to end e-mail carpet bombing because its inherently bad even if it reliably works week after week.

Bells & Whistles Are Out. Rich media, pop-ups and pop-unders enrich agencies but yield very little in terms of sales or customer satisfactiont. They are being abandoned by merchants and marketers at a strong clip. Mostly they annoy customers who then bail out. There is very little rich media functionality that is persuasive. Just because it can be built doesn't mean its worth building. Equal skepticism is warranted for social networks which are creating a lot of talk but no demonstrable sell-throughs.

The new agency panacea is viral video, games, virtual worlds and mobile media. But the smart money isn't biting especially in a recession when budgets are cut and merchants have to fight the natural inclination to hunker down.          

Natural Born Clickers and Online Brand Building

For years anyone working with ROI-oriented clients avoided banner ads. Now courtesy of Tacoda, Starcom and comScore, we know that "Natural Born Clickers" are aimless losers madly clicking on ads way out of portion to their importance as consumers.

Just 6% of the online population make 50% of all the clicks on display ads. Close to 70 percent of all the people online never click on anything. Banners rather than being eye candy are just a blooming, buzzing eyesore; the digital equivalent of roadside billboards. This is borne out by the absence of a correlation between clicks and attitude toward the brand. The noodniks who click don't care any more about the brands they click on than the average netzien who generally and consistently ignores the brand banners.

Its not surprising that heavy clickers don't look like anyone you want to market to either. They're 25-44 in households earning $40K or less. They spend four times more time lingering and randomly clicking online than normal folks. They haunt auction, gambling and career sites and I'd guess porn sites, too.

Greg Rodgers of Tacoda thinks these guys click more because they are exposed to 5 times more ads. Maybe. I think they click more because they don't have much else to do. It has the same relative impact as click fraud, where clicks are counted but they don't really matter.

Now the point of this study and the involvement of all these heavyweight organizations is that "click performance is the wrong metric for the effectiveness of brand building campaigns." Well ... duh!

The business development objective of the participating firms is to convince gullible advertisers that rather than count clicks they should have faith in banner ads to expose branding messages to the great unwashed online. This protects their franchise and shifts the metrics to avoid embarrassment. In joint press release they argue, "For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what's really important and generating clicks is an ancillary benefit. Ultimately judging a campaign's effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding ...."

Pay no attention to anything like online metrics. Rely on pre-and post awareness measures or standard brand awareness measurements, spend heartily with us and all will be well, they plea.

How about an alternative hypothesis ... brand building using banner ads is a chimera, a joke and a waste of time and money.

Synching Retail Channels : The Hard-to-Do Imperative

Sam Walton supposedly said "You have to be able to sell a customer any way, any where and any time they want to buy." According to a new study by the DMA, its easier said than done.

This simple reasonable injunction is now in the province of multi-channel integration, the official topic of the aforementioned study whose conclusion is ... retailers need to work harder at it.

And while retailers are madly embracing all digital forms of commerce and marketing, spending as much as $172 billion on direct marketing in 2007, they haven't really nailed the process of going to market with a single consistent brand or promotional voice across channels. Nor are they particularly able to track, measure and learn from customer behavior among and between the channels. Getting things in synch becomes particularly important as customers take the reins of retailing and as online-only retailers begin to play a more important role in the overall retail mix.

Websites, direct mail and e-mail are the triple threat for driving retail business and generate considerable customer data. Websites look like they are beginning to edge out brick and mortar stores as retail revenue generators. But optimizing the mix and parsing scare investment dollars is the on-going challenge.

According to the study, formally titled "Channel Integration and Benchmarks in the Retail Industry," retailers are least likely to embrace mobile media, probably because they lack the technology to optimize it and don't believe that pinging anybody's cell phone will bring them anything but grief. And while 8 out of 10 segment their customers based on demographics and 7 out of 10 look at purchase frequency and purchase details, only a third can aggregate all this data across channels to get a 360 degree picture of customer behavior, to discern cross-channel or sequential shopping patterns or to identify and super-serve their best customers.

This is the next holy grail for retailers since we all know the channels cross pollinate each other though there are no reliable rules of thumb to guide us in making smarter marketing plays. Nobody really knows which channel drives the others or which is the research medium and which is the purchase mechanism. The truth is that all three play different roles at different times for the same customers.

The absence of valid generalizations gets really interesting in larger organizations where each channel has its own budget or P&L so they use the data against each other to fight for turf, cash and the ultimate say-so. It also has a direct impact on our ability to zero-in on best customers to make them offers, to give them rewards, to keep them coming back or to convince them to refer friends and spend more.

In an ideal world, every brand communication would look, feel and communicate the same message across channels. The brand would approach promotions, sales, rewards and loyalty with enough consistency and design similarity to instantly cue customers to recognize their favorite brand and response accordingly. All the data would flow into a single system where it would be manipulated and analyzed by the biggest brainiacs who would reveal all the hidden shopping patterns and secrets that would allow us spend every penny wisely to drive 50:1 ROIs.

But that's the ideal world.

In the real world, where you sit determines your reaction to this study. If you are a senior manager, you roll you eyes and think "some day". If you are a software guy you crank up a pitch. If you're a database marketer think about divining the most insight out of imperfect information. And if you are a marketer or a merchant you structure enough tests to try to get directional ideas and cross tabulate whatever data you can to yield the poor man's version of channel integration.    

 

The Promise of Help Vs Genuine Help

The promise of an answer is much less engaging than an actual answer. When you contact a web site publisher or an online merchant, the quick no-answer answer leaves me feeling unhappy and unloved. I don't want a vague pledge of interest, especially if I've taken the time and made the effort to enroll and use the service or even more paid for the privilege of doing so.

I sent Plaxo an e-mail. And got an auto-generated promise of help in 2 business days. . But not before they interrupted the e-mail sending process to offer FAQs and to generally try to dissuade me from actually contacting them. When I read the support e-mail it indicated that if I was a premium user and presumably a premium payer, I'd get attention in just 24 hours, I guess it's good that I don't need Plaxo desperately because I could be dead and gone in 24 hours or 2 business days.

You have to wonder what they were thinking when setting up this CRM approach.

Do they have so much traffic and are they so busy that every agent is engaged to the max thereby delaying the response to a simple question by 48 or more hours? With 2.5MM page views a day, according to Alexa, its doubtful.

Do they feel that what they offer is so valuable and vital that customers ought to be eager to wait for an extended response? It is a calendar and an address book basically, so probably not. Or have they just cheaped it out on systems and people and are hoping to mask this with some fast-acting prose? It's anyone's guess.

Effective customer service and support is about creating a psychological mindset conveyed through an interactive experience. It's about giving the customer a sense that you care about them and that you will take care of them. And frankly FAQs and extensive online help centers don't get a brand across that psychological threshold.

Here's the ugly truth: To make people feel genuinely taken care of you have to do the work for them not just point them to the answers.

FAQs are just one element. If you invite customer interaction, the implication is you are ready, willing and able to provide it in whatever form customers want it. You have also signed up to deal with customers in their moment of need. That's why smart players offer 800 numbers online, IM capabilities and even live chat interactions to catch customers in that moment of need; that golden moment of angst and frustration -- that convoluted instant when interest, desire and confusion mingle with each other. That moment frequently decides a brand's fate. In a nanosecond you win or lose brand loyalty and advocacy or win or lose repeat business and referrals.

With loyalty and life-time value at stake can anyone afford to wait 2 business days to respond?

Marketing Predictions for 2008

Its that time of the year when all true mavens whip out the crystal ball and attract attention with pretentious prognostications. So here's my valedictory analysis of 2007 and forward predictions for marketing and advertising trends in the new year.

Mobile will Meander. There are very few genuinely useful Mobile applications that ads or marketing messages can piggy-back on. The New York Port Authority is offering bridge and tunnel alerts and American Airlines has a great service for pinging me when my plane is late. But the fantasy of messing me as I pass a Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Mickey D's or other establishment and cuing me to buy hasn't materialized.

Most people feel doubly intruded upon when you SPAM their mobile or their PDA. I'm not expecting mobile media to emerge strongly in 2008. Maybe somebody will surprise me, but I'm not expecting a local retailer, my breakfast cereal or any of my favorite brands to be reaching out to my mobile phone with any meaningful or motivating messages anytime soon.   

Brands Will Experiment With Social Networks. This is not my boldest prediction. But consider the fact that in spite of the hype there are few real cases of brands achieving awareness or sell-thru spikes from early experiences with social networks. And while some brands can claim first mover bragging rights, I'm not sure what they have to show for the effort. Terns like engagement and relationship-building are tossed around but definitions and quantification are hard to come by.

Lots of brands played around with and invested big bucks Second Life but hardly anyone has much to show for it. Some feel that being part of a simulation lends credence to real-life activity others opted for being part of the latest and greatest. Its a great example that just because the technology enables an activity it doesn't necessarily follow that the marketing activity is worth it or useful.

My experience is that social networks are an amusement for anyone who doesn't actually have something to do with their time. I have no reason to believe that cyber friends mirror real-life friends or that what people put on their sites accurately reflects who they are or who they want to be. Social networks have unleashed the aspirations and fantasies of a generation and placed a lot of silly and salacious material into the public domain. I'm hoping somebody will invent a utility tool that will allow you to load or update words, images or video on your page on several networks at once.

LinkedIn continues to disappoint me. Recently I explored my 28 connections to an individual I wanted to meet only to find that none of the people i knew really knew this person. So I guess my million man network isn't much more than a social illusion. But now that Spock has found me I'm counting on the Vulcan mind-meld for a better experience. Facebook continues to crank the hype machine and MySpace continues to generate press. But so far the promise outpaced the marketing productivity.

I'm not sure anyone has figured out how to really make a difference in awareness, attitude or action by leveraging networks. We all suspect they have a communications and relationship building value so I predict we'll continue to play around with them, spend money on them and develop creative for them in hopes of unlocking their value for our businesses.

More Video Coming. In 2007 we rediscovered video. It was on the Internet. Yet after you've ogled YouTube and YouPorn you realize that the Swifter Girl and others got their 15 minutes of fame and then faded away. And even while we anticipate Shoe Tube, I'm not aware of any sustaining audience for web-only serials and while we've taught people to look for cool branded stuff on video sites, I'm not sure how this attention contributes to brand or demand building.

Websites are adding video, marketers are factoring video clips into every campaign launch and the number and variety of of online video sites has expanded significantly. There is some data to suggest that seeing is believing and their is clear evidence that something really wacky, bizarre or funny-looking can generate huge viral pass-along. I'm not sure though that we've figured out how to wield this tool to achieve planned results.

Search is About Optimization. Google got rich on our experiments and our inefficiency. Now we are onto the game but everyone still believes they are overspending and under-performing search. The trick is carefully analyzing the yield and using efficient tools to monitor, measure and manage lots of words or campaigns simultaneously. Look for marketers to manipulate every variable from branded words to time of day in the search to make the medium work harder and not to leave any money on the table.

Google reigns supreme and vertical search hasn't made enough of an ROI case to steal some of their zillions. Look for more varied efforts to understand the business impact of search and to carve out search tactics to achieve specific competitive, conquest and category objectives.

Email Will Still Be Enormous. By far the most cost-effective and proven medium opt-in e-mail will continue to be a medium of choice for marketers. ROI has been established in almost every industry and category though surprisingly embedded video and the use of personal URLs (PURLs) has not really caught on. Marketers will continue to police lists and refine templates to be both CAN-SPAM compliant and to finesse increasingly sophisticated SPAM filters.

Waiting for WOM. We've all experienced effective word of mouth campaigns and we've all received those ubiquitous e-mails or been directed to see some nutty video. But nobody has discerned or distilled the formula for starting or for sustaining a viral campaign that's anything more than a flash in the pan. Many of us have achieved pass-alongs of 6:1, 8:1 or 10:1. Far fewer of us have achieved ROIs with like ratios. But we'll keep on trying. It will happen for someone next year but it will most likely be a fortuitous lightening strike rather than a planned burn.   

We'll Lust After Loyalty. There are way too many one-time buyers and we all spend inordinately to get them. Points, rewards, CRM tools and tricks, incentives and experiences are all being tried to bring 'em back and turn 'em into brand advocates. This process will continue with new wrinkles in the new year.Look for more private sales, early or exclusive access to goods and services, special discounts and incentives and design-your-own rewards to find resonance among marketers looking to sell more stuff to the people they've already brought into the brand franchise.

I expect that while some of these will work, the long-standing share-of-wallet fantasies of many marketers will be frustrated by consumer's natural hedging strategies. Very few people are truly willing to put their eggs in one basket no matter how pretty, colorful or profitable that basket is or has been. Its a fundamental psychological barrier that we continuously confront and creatively attempt to overcome. Few have succeeded and few will.

2008 will be a tight economic year. With a weak dollar, a global credit crunch and the political uncertainty characteristic of an election year ROI, no matter how you define or measure it, will be used or wielded as a weapon to impact spending.

Have a happy and a healthy new year.   

 

eCommerce 2007: Four Lessons Learned

Here's what I learned from another hectic, exciting and fun-filled year of working with b2b and b2c ecommerce brands:

1. Monitor the Flow of Business. Its an interactive world. You can change the patterns of interaction. The critical variables are page views, conversions and pathways. Watch them like a hawk and intervene aggressively at the first sign of softness. Every business has discernible patterns. Its your job to find them and do something about them. There are plenty of free tools to help you so there's so excuse not to watch the front door and the till of every online store.

Also remember that its an interactive medium. You can act in real time and respond to behaviors and choices made by your customer. Setting up thresholds or benchmarks, monitoring activity to identify spikes or variations and having Plan B hypotheses on the shelf for quick test-and-learn opportunities will make you more competitively agile.

2. Make it Easy. Its much easier to get site traffic than to convert visitors into buyers. Focus all your UI and detective skills on getting the conversion. Make everything as simple, intuitive and prominent as possible. Hip art direction is the enemy of effective eCommerce. Simple, big and colorful rule the day. Its a sight and sound medium. Use them to create emotional involvement. Site visitors still need to be oriented, reassured and directed to take the desired actions. Don't be afraid to limit the navigational choices to focus customer options and choices.

Invest in technology that adds to the easiness factor. Buy more ability to store orders and carts, ability to share orders/carts, more views that illuminate how the products look, feel or wear. Watch click streams carefully and pave prospect's way down the yellow brick road to a close. There are zillions of emerging tech choices. The only buying criterion that matters is; will it make customers find and buy easier?

3. Website as Encyclopedic Catalog. Use your website as the marquee repository of your brand and all its assets. The price of printing and postage will only go up. Use print and other ad vehicles to drive customers and prospects to the web. Be all that you can be and show all that you are on the web.

On the site provide encyclopedic detail about product features, benefits, uses, care and all your policies. You are laying out a Chinese menu of ways to anticipate, respond to or psyche out your prospective customers who come in all sizes, shapes and sensibilities. Number of pages viewed and time spent on site are the data points that index the relative level of customer engagement. Audio and video tools plus the ability to interact, review or comment all add to the experience and ratchet up consumer's engagement with your brand and your offerings.

The early evidence suggests more is better in terms of product/service information. Customers expect to research products and make preliminary sorts by visiting your site. Since you can't ever really know what gets you across the line, give them enough data and enough different dimensions of information or insight to sort you into the consideration set. If you can -- do this graphically with icons, colors, numerals or other devices that can be read, understood and acted on instantly.

4. Rely on New Media for Traffic.  SEO, blogs, affiliate programs and e-mail are driving the majority of my business. Each is becoming almost a discrete science but all are worthy of investment. Brand plays a surprisingly important role in SEO and those with less brand recognition or awareness have to be savvier buyers or spend more to vector generic keyword traffic to your site.

Every niche and segment has bloggers and with a little effort you can identify, reach and persuade them to write about you. Affiliate networks require manpower and a willingness to test-and-learn but can have remarkable returns. E-mail is the dominant drive-to-site tool, though it seems to stimulate responders to visit the site rather than drive sales of the specific items presented. If they've opted in they will tolerate much more frequency than you think; they'll just ignore the offers that don't resonate without hating you. Keep your list clean, take anyone who wants off immediately and be sure you are CAN SPAM compliant, a necessary niggly chore.   

Yahoo! Screws 40,000 Online Merchants --- Then Stonewalls

The Yahoo Stores platform crashed on Cyber Monday screwing 40,000 online merchants. Yahoo has no idea why or won't say what happened but "deeply regrets" the outage.

And you thought the big Cyber Monday news was the $700 million in online holiday sales or my incredible subscription offer! But here's a classic case of a corporate step-sister self-destructing by both technical misdeeds and customer service and public relations bungling. Here's the first part of the story:

Sometime early Monday, exactly when is in dispute, the store crashes. The Yahoo Store is essentially a huge shopping cart that smaller merchants hitch their websites to. The consumer can't tell exact where their favorite online store and the Yahoo functionality link up. 

Customers browse, shop and load up carts. When they try to check out --- ZAP. Nothing happens. The merchants who pay monthly and per-transaction fees anted up for their customers to be frustrated and to miss the big anticipated ka-ching. The error message presented on computer screens gave customers the impression that their favorite merchants hadn't properly anticipated the forecast Cyber Monday traffic. So  the merchants paid Yahoo! not only to lose money but to be painted as idiots in the eyes of their customers.

Meanwhile Yahoo didn't tell the merchants what was happening.They had to find out on their own, usually because their email accounts and 800 numbers were going crazy. A few tech savvy merchants figured out that an earlier version of the shopping cart actually did work, so they took a giant step backward to try to save the day's receipts. Some shared this trick with their friends. This naturally led others to conclude that bugs in the upgraded cart caused the crash; a notion Yahoo will neither confirm or deny. It also bred conspiracy and cover-up theories about the origins of the crash.

After 6, 9 or 15 hours, depending on who you believe, of outage and outrage the giant shopping cart was back in business.

Now the story gets really interesting ....

Rich Riley, the head guy in Yahoo's Channel Division, acknowledges the problem when its raised by reporters. He said "We continue to investigate the cause of events" and asserts "we are moving mountains inside Yahoo to see why and how this happened and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and our shoppers." No real information.No acknowledgment of culpability. No expectations of explanations or redress. Just corporate speak. This guy clearly learned his craft from the Bush team.

As you might image the aggrieved merchants go nuts. So Yahoo issues an e-mail through its merchant contact channels saying " By now you've heard about the problems that occurred with checkout manager yesterday."  Can you image the screaming and cursing this little bit of wordsmithing provoked? The e-mail goes on with the fantastic assertion "This team is dedicated to your success. Like you we push to have these situations resolved as quickly as possible." Do they live on the same planet as we do? Does some drone in Sunnyvale think a single sentient being is buying this act?

Fast forward to 48 hours later. I get on a call with my Account Manager, the guy at the bottom of the food chain who sounds like he's about 14 years old. He stonewalls. He recites the script and weathers a moderate amount of bashing. Again no admission of responsibility. No information. No promise of when, what, why or what they're gonna do about it.

So we are left to our own imagination to speculate about what happened and why Yahoo feels it can ignore and abuse its customer base. Does anyone believe that Yahoo, the former darling of Wall Street, doesn't have technical back-ups, the ability to figure out what happens in their own infrastructure or a modestly competent crisis PR plan? Do Jerry Yang and Susan Decker even know they have a Merchant Solutions Group?

So left with a void in information and responsible corporate behavior, I propose to fill it with rank speculation. Here are a few of my guesses:

1. Yahoo Stores is a Bastard Step-Child. The ass-end of the Yahoo empire is staffed by the losers and cast-offs from the other, real or important units. This gang of geeks, zods and left-over nerds are using technology from 2001 that even third world countries rejected. Since the total; revenues of all 40,000 merchants is less than afternoon's worth of ads served, nobody knows or wants to know because nobody cares.

2. Somebody Big is Covering Their Ass. Its a software screw-up that layers of incompetent managers are scrambling to cover-up, explain, side-step and otherwise distance themselves from. There's probably an ambitious, rising, wunderkind asshole generalist manager behind it who over-ruled the gearheads and now is madly scrambling to assign blame before it catches up with him or her.

3. Because they Can. Beaten and humiliated by Google, subject to continuous takeover rumors and direction less compared to Microsoft, Yahoo lashed out at the weak and the dependent to pump itself up and inject a dose of adrenalin into its collective ego. Knowing that tens of thousands of little guys have no choice and can't afford to abandon them, Yahoo decided to shower its love and attention in the form of abuse. 

This is a great example of why Yahoo must and will die. Their response to the technical and customer issues is a veritable step-by-step numbnuts playbook; prime evidence that the internal disorganization and politics exposed in Brad Garlinghouse's "Peanut Butter Memo" last summer have not been rectified or addressed. Everybody and nobody's in charge and the rest are asleep at the switch. And soon those harmed will bring a monster class action suit against them and later make their way out the door.   

Sherpa's Updated Landing Page Handbook Has Landed

The Landing Page Bible has been updated with inputs from 3800 marketers whose opinions plus research plus self-reported data have been expressed in 54 charts, 114 examples and 273 wire-bound pages. Its a veritable cornucopia of best practices. Huzzah!

I spoke to Tim McAtee, a senior research analyst at Sherpa. This puppy was his first project since joining Sherpa from NeoOgilvy in August. A typical stat guy with a background in online media at StarCom, Tim spared me the trouble of padding through all those pages by cutting to the chase and calling out the key take-aways from this $497 report. Here's his POV:

1. Keep it Simple. A landing page should offer only 2 choices: convert now or later. Strip out the navigation and force the visitor to act. Make the forms simple.Don't get too nosy. The more you ask for; the greater the abandon rate. Create individual landing pages for each e-mail and each keyword. A templated page that expresses your brand and orients the visitor but is specific to the keyword or keyword phrase searched or the e-mail contents or offer yields the best conversion results.

Usability trumps design. Citing Craig's List as an example. Tim argues, based on the accumulated data, that less is always more. The ideal landing page marries a simple interface to complex but unseen technology. Imagine the continuing internal battles they've had at Google to keep the home page as simple and effective as it is.

2. Keep Testing. Evidently testing new stuff always yields better results than sitting on your laurels or your duff. In fact the simple, cheap tests get the biggest percentage increases and uplifts while the costly multi-variate tests often yield a much smaller or incremental improvement in performance. 

Incremental A/B testing, done on the DM model, where individual components are tweaked and measured in isolation over time works and works well. But Tim is impressed with marketers who carve off a discrete hunk of traffic and test something totally different because he sees evidence that the bigger the test risk, the bigger either the likely payoff or flop.