Manhattan Marketing Maven

Serving Searchers & Surfers

Psychological research conducted by Kevin Wise, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and published in the Journal of Media Psychology, suggests that how you find information online affects your reaction to that information. The implication for marketers and publishers is that you have to anticipate how people find you and address audiences differently on the basis of their glide path.

This notion is significant because on any given day about 1/3 of all Internet users either search for something specific or come across content by random surfing, according to the Pew study on the Internet and American Life. People invest different types of energy and emotion into finding content online. Surfers undertake what academics call "ritualized" use of media. They flit from thing to thing, sorting one against the other until something catches their eye or captures their imagination. This is a random process that requires less intention, investment and brain processing.

Searchers are "instrumental" users of media determined to seek out and find a specific content and evaluating search engine results against each other to figure out which is most relevant, on-point and worth reading first. Evidently this requires more attention, brain power and more functions from each searcher's CPU. 

To prove this Kevin and his team wired up 92 freshmen in an introductory advertising class to measure heart rate, skin conductance (sweat to us) and electro-magnetic activity (a surrogate for brain processing power). They set up a site filled with awful photos and descriptions of a shooting rampage at an elementary school in Utah. Apparently disturbing images prompt more distinct responses and can be better mined for content, recall and reactions.

Having run earlier research studies to understand the inter-play of getting there versus being there or in regularspeak --finding stuff versus reacting to stuff -- Kevin wondered if how you got there influenced what you found, remembered and how you reacted. Here's what he found:

Heart rates for searchers accelerated more than those of surfers. Purposely looking for content cranks up your ticker faster than stumbling across things. Maybe this suggests a greater investment in the process which leads to an eagerness to find and consume the content.

Searchers remembered more details than surfers. You expect the directed searcher to pay more attention and care more than the casual surfer.

Searchers had more skin response. Searching and finding gets you more hot and bothered than coming across something worth checking out.  There's probably a lesson for keywords in here. Though the result isn't shocking; it's the directed dude versus the laid back dude. DItto for EMG activity.

Searchers were more disturbed  by what they found than surfers. They rated the content as more unpleasant. People looking for something specific add a dose of intensity to their reading or understanding of the searched object? Could this be a self-fulfilling prophecy because we invest ourselves more in the stuff we've invested time and energy to find?

The data suggests that different ways of getting there drive how people react and respond online. The implications are that marketers have to weigh the intensity of searching versus the serendipity of surfing as they design and display information and/or craft keywords and phrases. Assuming intense and invested searching behavior puts the impetus on copywriters and designers (not to mention SEO jockeys to hyper-serve searchers while spreading around enough bait to reel in the random surfer.

4 Reasons the MSFT-YHOO Deal Doesn't Matter

The highly publicized Yahoo-Microsoft deal doesn’t matter.. It’s a corporate strategy, balance sheet and market share play for the participants. There’s nothing in it for those of us marketing products, services or ideas online.

Here’s four reasons why you can safely ignore this development, just like Wall Street did.

It won’t change search traffic patterns. Google still rules. There’s no reason to believe huge numbers of well-trained Googlers will switch to Bing-Yahoo. There’s no technical improvement, no consumer incentive, no perceptual difference and no reason to think that we will have exposure to bigger or qualitatively different search audiences.

Google will still have a dominant share. I’m not only talking share of search. I’m talking about of advertiser and agency share of mind. The deal might motivate Google to love buyers and middlemen more but they’ve been on a love jihad for the last couple of years and already have a robust set of tools and a pipeline filled with new ones. Their early arrogance has been tempered with a corporate sensitivity to agencies and advertisers. We are not feeling oppressed by an ogre nor are we yearning for relief from a Ballmer in shining armor. 

There’s no price deals. The auction mechanism doesn’t put any more money in our pockets. We have no financial incentives to change our behavior. 

It will take a while to close. We’re struggling day-by-day to stretch budgets and deliver more ROI faster. There is no quick impact to the deal or savory short term benefits because it will take months of regulatory scrutiny before this becomes real.

 

 

Seeking Answers in Search Results

Frustrated at trying to find a list of the top 10 all-time best selling women's fragrances on Google, it dawned on me that increasingly we are looking for specific answers to specific questions rather than a trove of documents on a particular topic. It forced me to think about the changing nature of search and how quickly search has become an almost automatic reflex.

And while we often focus on the accuracy of using search to target customers, we don't really spend much time analyzing the accuracy of search results. After all Google has set our baseline expectations with "good enough" search that's fast and free. So who are we to question how they get results? In fact, most of us are so focused on the instant gratification that we don't really know or care how it came about. But as search becomes completely integrated into our thinking process differences in the way data is found and the immediate relevance of the data presented will become more important to us. It seems like a natural developmental path; that as we use and understand the tool we want more from it and want it to be even better. 

Maybe this is the implication of  new research from Hitwise that indicates that longer search queries are growing fastest. Search queries of 6 words or more increased between 8 and 20 percent over the last year while one and two word searches posted slight declines. To some extent this has to reflect increased understanding of how to search. It also suggests that people are using more words in an attempt to refine or better define the query in the hope of getting more accurate results faster. Its a yearning for the answer; not for the source documents. As we get used to the idea that vast amounts of knowledge are available, we want our clicks to zero-in and present the answer to us. We want search engines to go the last mile for us.

It's not just that we are greedy or ungrateful. This idea of fishing out the answer has intrigued computer scientists forever. It has led Kosmix to build complex taxonomies to sort through and cluster data. It has driven the creation of high powered math to mine and organize relational databases that underlie Freebase, Powerset and Hakia. And it promises to leverage the promise of semantic search in the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha tool which is being hyped as the super-searchable digital library of Alexandria on steroids. Yet in spite of all this promise, search still needs to discern instantly what millions of people using the same vocabulary and syntax actually mean and actually want. 

To that end, all this philosophizing suggests a few concrete things marketers should be doing in designing SEO or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Compile Answers. Look at your business and develop a list of the most frequently sought answers. Build the answers into your sites, press releases, videos, etc in ways that can expedite search.  In many cases these will be obvious and are probably already there in some form but not necessarily served up succinctly. Consider simplifying and expanding your FAQs.

Test Longer Search Phrases. Analyze your traffic and mirror customer and prospect search behavior. Experiment with longer, alternative ways to describe or explain your goods or services. Test different words and word sequences to see if they return more relevant results.Longer phrases might also be cheaper than shorter phrases especially in categories dominated by generic or name brand terms, at least until everyone catches on.

Use Terms that Impact Sales. For most things there are predictable sales stages and inflection points. If you think carefully about these stages/points and buy or embed the phrases that reflect them you can more directly influence the awareness-consideration-conversion sequence. Maybe more descriptive, more accurate or more complex phrases can bring prospects through the pipeline faster. 

Psyching Out the Searchers

The fun and the frustration in search marketing is trying to understand and anticipate how people think. The mental processes by which people try to find things are often thought to be predictable, but new research in the journal Cognition, reported in Business Week, suggests that people file, sort, filter and associate words and ideas much more individually that previously thought.

On one hand the individualized processing model makes sense. Each person has their own personal and squirrelly system and syntax for putting ideas together. Just think about how people come up with passwords or how they choose to set up file folders and sub-folders. On the other hand, you'd imagine that public education and standard teaching approaches and textbooks in reading, basic math and language skills ought to net out broadly used word associations and tactics for retrieving and pairing data and information.

Ther prevalence of individualized associations and perceptions of similarity and difference have several implications for search marketing and requires marketers to be creative in linguistics and taxonomy..

1. Cover the Basics. Articulate and embed basic words that describe your product or service and the benefits end-users can expect from using your brand. Be as expansive as possible. Think of as many ways as saying the same thing as possible.

2. Cover the Mistakes. Be sure to plan on searches that misspell or use plural forms of your brand name and the product names. Embed and/or buy all the mistakes, variations, regional nuances (e.g hero, grinder, hoagie, sub, submarine sandwich) Assume that nicknames, idioms and even derogatory words will be used in the attempt to find you efficiently.

3. Cover Product Cognates. Plan to embed or buy all the products that naturally go together (peanut butter & jelly) and as many of the variations (peanut butter & marshmallow fluff, peanut butter & bananas) as you can think of. Be as expansive as possible and use both brand and generic names of product sets to be sure the customers find you.

4. Cover Product Details. Huge numbers of shoppers surgically search and shop. They want a medium-sized red cotton v-neck sweater with 3/4 sleeves. Each and every SKU needs to be specified this way to optimize the likelihood that they'll find the product on your site and that you'll maximize the value of your SEO or PPC effort.

5. Cover Trigger Associations. Think like a sitcom writer and try to anticipate which ideas, needs or stimuli might trigger product or service associations. Fall prompts thoughts of Thanksgiving. Football cues beer. And there are millions more. Remember you are trying to psyche out millions of individuals who process information in zillions of different ways.

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Twing: Mining Online Forums & Communities

The great promise of the Internet is that we can access the encyclopedic experiences, opinions, insights,  lessons, data sets plus the sum total of human wisdom with 2 clicks.

Imagine if we could test, research or validate our hunches, opinions, and ideas or solicit  insights, recommendations and best bets from people who share our interests, have direct knowledge and experience on topics that matter to us and who roughly reflect our own psycho-demographics? Better yet -- imagine if you could get to this motherlode anonymously without having to actually see or engage these people, hear their whinny voices and funny accents or see their bad haircuts and off-beat fashion choices. How great would that be?

This notion embedded in the idea that "everything is a conversation" was probably first articulated in the Cluetrain Manifesto. Now years later everyone from Google to Cuil is struggling with the idea of delivering on this promise and constructing artificially intelligent technology to solve the disambiguation puzzle; essentially the quest to create a thinking machine that can understand and discern nuances of meaning, usage and idioms in common language, much like you and I can.

A variation on this theme is the search for the"real, deep and ongoing conversation" that sets the popular, political or personal agenda for consumers, incubates cultural phenomena or influences popular tastes, drives brand marketing and CRM or creates self-perpetuating communities of people with common interests.

These communities have been interacting on the Internet on discussion boards and forums since the mid-90s. An estimated 50-60 million people either read or post to this many-to-many communications tool and there is some evidence and some opinion to suggest that they are used and valued as much or more than blogs.

Now a start-up called Twing.com has created a vertical; search engine to find, rank, rate and celebrate them. I spoke with Scott Germaise, the Director of Product Management who explained the raison d'etre as "Twing is built to find and index forums. Nobody else focused on them; so we did." It debuted in beta during March 2008 and is going mainstream and full speed ahead now.

Designing their search technology to scan, measure and score forums at the post level, Twing zeros in on conversation threads weighting content, taxonomy, usage, key words and number of interactions to produce faster, better organized access to 10,000 carefully categorized topics of interest and a billion individual posts. Twing is, or aspires to be, to online forums what Technorati is to blogs -- the preferred access and search gateway.

The promise is simple -- type in the topic and in a few clicks find a bunch of interactive forums on that topics. Consumers can beeline to their favorite things and hurl themselves into the conversation.Marketers can easily find forums  related to their brands and start sniffing the air for trends and monitor and manage their reputations. The Twing guys added a few tools to jazz this process up; they rank the growth of forums so you can pick an active beehive or a backwater. If you register, you can save searches and compare results over time. And using the "Buzz Graphic" feature you can comparatively map a topic, a name or brand against as many as 4 others to quickly see what's hot or what's not. 

As a dedicated Chowhound voyeur, I can vouch for the wisdom and accurate information that emerges from communities and forums. And who knows? Just maybe Twing will help us get a little closer to accessing the complete font of human wisdom.

Strange Signals from SEO Land

The science of search engine marketing, specifically natural search which is using the SEO moniker,  seems to get more esoteric each day as the smartest hackers do battle with each other.

Google and others try to program spiders and bots to map and rank cyberspace. And the other side -- the contenders-- generally the side I'm on -- are madly trying to psyche out both the programmers and their digital droids to achieve high rankings and the eyeballs and clicks that naturally follow.The process is like trench warfare; bit-by-bit, day-to-day moves and counter moves are made. Subtle differences are introduced and timed to influence the not-so-predictable passes of the spiders much like missile silos and air bases are camouflaged or counter programmed to avoid or to confound the prying eyes of reconnaissance satellites..

A few hours with Assaf Zmirly, Zvika Alon and Gidi Pridor of Whiteweb -- the ultimate countersearch team for marketers -- convinced me more than ever that SEO is a dark art requiring instincts, wizardry, craftiness, proprietary tools and databases and way more tech and mechanical understanding of the digital landscape than I'll ever have. If you are serious about search rankings you'll find yourself doing all kinds of things that seem extra, out of left field or simply crazy in attempts to influence rankings. Many sites create whole sections of mostly meaningless blab all designed to manipulate the search devices and psyche out their programmers and strategists. 

But if you are managing this process, especially the natural search effort, consider these factors and the trends surrounding them.

Content. You have to be what you seem to be. Content is scored according to its natural language and keywords, but overdoing it trips a trigger which denigrates your ranking. If your site is about poker or boxing or sewing, it has to be about that and the more content, the better. New content matters and sites that stay true to themselves and feature consistent content with regular new additions are rewarded with higher rankings. At least they are for the moment.

Links. Its not the number its the quality. Though numbers still matter for broad scale validation, its the content at the end of the click that adds to your relative ranking. Since many sites dramatically expanded inbound and outbound links in an effort to align themselves with an earlier programming preference on Google's part, the spiders reacted to link loading by testing the relevance of those links so that quality beats quantity. So now you must have an awful lot of links that are naturally related with similar content ( or content that the bots think is similar) to use this tactic to advance. And you have to watch your Ps and Qs about internal links since they too are assessed for relevance and for the numbers and types of words and tags loaded into or behind them.

Images & Video. These items are still not fully spidered or understood so it remains a gray area. And while this kind of content may add immeasurably to the experience your visitors enjoy, its not clear that they help you rank higher or drive more traffic. There are also issues of clickability and tracking that further complicate the use of these assets.

SEO is not a game for the weak or the weary. Its digital 3-dimensional chess best left to experts and managed by big picyure marketers with healthy budgets for this task who fit this tactic into a broader branding and direct response paradigm. 

Pay-Per-Click Dayparting Didn't Work

In the evolving world of Pay-Per-Click many of us, especially those older than 35, try to adapt media tactics from traditional media to the business of adwords and clicks. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t.

In the case of dayparting, a tactic for optimizing budgets by attacking an audience when they are actively engaged in a medium, the results are mixed according to my favorite PPC jockey “Silent Jeff” Petrosillo of Solid Cactus.

Our client has a well known brand name. Management has little or no understanding of PPC and even less cash to spend. By looking at e-Commerce buying patterns we determined that they did the vast majority of their online business from 11a till 8p Monday through Friday. We reasoned that if buyers were active in this midday day part so were prospects. So we concentrated our spend and limited the campaign to branded keywords in this smaller time frame.

Previously we were running a 24 hour schedule of branded keywords and achieving an ROI of 23:1 where our average cost per click was twenty cents. But our dayparting strategy depressed our results in two ways; our ROI dropped to 14:1 and our conversion rate dropped from 5.06% to 3.77%.

It seems that a constant exposure yields more total impressions and perhaps repeat impressions against active shoppers which boosts average conversion rates, while the more limited time window reduces our shots on goal. I still want to test time-sensitive offers but in the short run we’re returning to a longer rotation and better results.

 

Finding the Optimal Search Marketing Partner

Finding the right search engine partner is tough. There is no barrier to entry in this market. Brand name  agencies have no significant competitive advantage over unknown geeks madly trying to psyche out their counterparts at Yahoo or Google. Number of employees, revenue, location, number of accounts, or volume of media spending -- the usual criteria used in finding media partners -- are not particularly useful indicators of expertise or success. 

Having just hired a great, under-publicized team from Solid Cactus located in Silicon Nowhere -- Wilkes Barre, PA -- allow me to suggest three criteria for evaluating prospective search engine marketing partners.

1. Tools are Table Stakes. Managing organic SEO and pay-per-click keyword purchasing requires sophisticated software to assess where you're at, the competitive landscape and to plan, buy and manage campaigns. No tools equals no sale.

There are only a few universally used 3rd party tools like Alexa and Google Analytics, so for the most part these are homemade tools with a wide range of capabilities and an equally wide range of value to clients. And unless you have software development skills its hard to assess the claims or the code underlying these proprietary tools. Look for firms that use a mix of 3rd party and proprietary tools. See how they combine free tools with tools they've invested their own time or cash to build. Ask what the tools do. Then ask yourself if these functions actually help you work faster or smarter.

But the real insight comes when you road test the tools. Demand sample uses of the tools to understand what they do and why they'll be useful and valuable for you. If you don't learn something you don't already know or if you aren't surprised or blown away by the information they reveal walk away. Zero in on the guys who can demonstrate the benefit of the tools for you and who can show you how the tools will impact your business.

2. It's the Thinking Not the Tools. Your success is not about the tools. Too many SEO jockeys are so wrapped up in their own world that they can't focus or understand yours. There is a heavy Walter Mitty-meets Dr. Geekazoid factor among SEMers. If they can't explain it in a simple English sentence its a negative warning sign.

The best players understand business; specifically your business. They actually think for you and can map their magic to your business objectives and your budgets. Look for the team that understands your business objectives and can help translate them into the wild and woolly world of SEM. If they can't show you what you'll win in terms of traffic, cash and ROI --- forget about it.

3. Assess the Tactical Game. To win at search engine marketing you must focus on the short game. If you don't, Google laughs all the way to the bank and you end up with meaningless clicks. The game is won by carefully watching each move, calibrating words and buys, continually assessing what words people punch into search engines and what words you use to describe your merchandise or services. Played well its a fast-moving game of arbitrage.

You can squander your money in a blink. Your partners have to be in this game on several levels. You need a smart field general who sees the big picture, preferably your big picture. Then you need the digital marketing equivalent of a chess master + stock trader + bookie to concentrate, think 3 moves ahead and make your moves day-by-day and dollar-by-dollar. If you don't have somebody hunched over a laptop or nosed into their flat screen monitor thinking about how many cents to bid, which days or hours work best for you and how to spell each word you're optimizing, you are losing the game.         

An Amazing Cyber Monday Deal

Here's an amazing customer-centric offer to my readers from Boris Mordkovich.

Get 67%OFF a one year subscription to SEARCH MARKETING STANDARD by using  the coupon code HOLIDAY67 before DECEMBER 10 and clicking on this link

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But wait -- there's a charity tie-in! For each reader who parts with $4.95 (the discounted price) Boris will give $1 to Toys for Tots. Is this a deal or what?

You get the publication, you get much smarter about search engine marketing. The kids get the toys and they stop whining. There's free shipping and free parking. And Hanukkah is still to come. 

So dear readers, help me prove that I'm not just pissing in the wind. Help Boris get rich and help those kids get those toys. CLICK EARLY and OFTEN.

The Latest SEO Intelligence

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is marketing alchemy. Everybody wants it, Nobody knows what it really is or how it really works. And the hype served up by agencies hawking it is impenetrable.

Enter MarketingSherpa, once again soliciting and organizing the collective insight of practitioners and selling it back to us as the 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. Here are the highlights of this year's survey of 2475 marketers and 711 agency pros as interpreted by yours truly:

Natural search, the cat-and-mouse process of changing keywords, tags, headers and burying clues for spiders behind the presentation layer that is becoming synonymous with the term SEO, is being done by one-third of marketers lead by the big guys, who are doing it 30% more than the rest of us.

45% of us are betting our pay-per-click (PPC) chips on Google, which for all but the top spenders is the whole act. 84% of the little guys and 75% of the big guys, those who spend more than $25K on search, see Google as having a well deserved dominance with the best ROI for the money. The big guys are buying Yahoo, MSN and vertical players mostly to average out their cost-per-clicks (CPC) and because they have the cash and the patience to experiment with the wannabes and also-rans.

Search is perceived to pay off better than PR and direct mail, way better than the all-but-dead banner ad and 4 times better than print ads. Though search isn't seen as strong as banging away at our house e-mail lists. Maybe that's why PPC claims just 40% of online marketing budgets, which are less than 1/4 of overall marketing budgets. Despite the relatively light investment levels, more than half of all respondents think natural and PPC search is a strong tactic with a good ROI -- just don't ask us to prove it.

Measurement is still a big issue. We are counting clicks something ill-defined called "actions" orders, page views, unique site visitors and time spent on site all by way of trying to understand what searchers do, what separates buyers from tire-kickers and what justifies handing over hard cold currency to Google?

We are slowly training a cadre of in-house people to do search marketing. Between 34-44% don't think finding in-house full-time employees is any more difficult than finding other skilled marketing players. That said a lot of us a eager to outsource this process which is labor and software intensive when done properly.

So far the survey says our best tactics to improve search effectiveness appear to be (in ascending order of potency)

1. Create clear buttons to click on and easy forms to fill out

2. Display trust symbols like Hacker Safe

3. Build in the phrases people actually use when searching into your natural search terms and buy the phrases as keywords. Mirror the way your customer thinks, talks and searches.

4. Don't let searchers leave the page. Remove the navigation. Force them to either buy or abandon.

5. Create dedicated landing pages for each search term. Take clickers exactly to the product they clicked on. Then romance the product, make them an offer and call the question.