Joel Pinkham

The other day I read a story on the NZ Herald about the hard times ahead for Google. I doubt this guy really knows what he is talking about, search advertising spend can’t really be looked at the same was as more traditional advertising.

I don’t think that Google will be hit as much as Mr Pauly is making it out to be. They may face trouble with a lack of consumer buying (following through to a lack of searching), but not from marketers cutting their budgets. Here’s why:

1. Search marketing budgets are tiny compared to other media spends by well known brands
2. It’s certainly one of the most measurable – and usually profitable
3. Reducing search marketing budget is going to directly reduce revenue
4. Branding budgets are used to grow a brand – wouldn’t it be most logical to cut back on growth/less measurable expenditure first?

It’s fairly safe to say that a Google budget should be the last one cut.

By the way: NZ Herald, you’re lazy for publishing this article. If you’re not going to write your own content, at least publish articles by industry experts, not opinion columnists.

How nice would it be to take benefits of online advertising to offline?

I’ve just come back from Napier for Easter weekend. As well as enjoying wine and Jack Johnson, I got thinking about the ton of roadside signs attempting to get you to stop for their cafe (Coffee Addicts Ltd) or second rate tourist attraction (Puzzle World). They get a ton of traffic driving past and seeing their signs, what if their message is completely missing people? What if it’s attracting people who want to buy a single drink instead of a family buying a meal? Same principal applies to more than just roadside signs, they’d never know without testing and measurement. The kind of things I guess online marketers take for granted.

Most of these places have no evidence of a brand or reputation so they rely on their signs being seen at the right time and giving people the push they need to pull over. But surely an optimised message could show huge improvements on their revenue.

If only they could setup something to measure the number of cars driving past – something similar to what I’m sure Transit use. Then they could compare this to either the number of cars actually stopping and the sales figures. They could then calculate metrics like Pull over Rate (e.g. 0.1% of traffic visited the shop) and Sales per Vehicle (e.g. the store made $3.25 per 100 cars driving on SH1).

Once they’ve got a benchmark they could begin testing different signs. Maybe in a few years it could be done digitally when a giant LCD is cost effective for a tiny roadside cafe, but for now they could try 3 different signs up on core flute and see how the figures are impacted. I’m certain they would see obvious results, with the traffic numbers being so large especially over holiday periods they’re going to get statistically significant figures in a short amount of time.

This is one of the best quotes I’ve read for a while:

The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.

This comes from Jakob Nielsen, the godfather of web usability. While I definitely think he’s taking a bit far, he does make a very good point and gives marketers something to think about.

I think advertising has it’s place on the internet, so long as you actually have something that adds value to the users and isn’t too intrusive. This is why search marketing is so effective. It adds value to the user by giving them extra solutions for their problem they are looking to solve. It isn’t intrusive and doesn’t distract the user from their goal.

Wall Street Journal reports that Google are soon to launch a free ad-serving platform which will meet the needs of small to medium sized publishers.

With this platform combined with DoubleClick, Google will soon have even more of a wealth of knowledge about cross site behaviour of users. Between Google Search/Services, AdSense, Ad Manager and DoubleClick they’ll have their services on a huge number of websites. They’ll be able to use this information to serve ads in more effective ways. If Google are willing to take the risk on the privacy issues surrounding behavioural targeting (with a bit of caution and Google sly) this will have huge benefits for advertisers, as well as Google revenues.

Behavioural targeting is still a baby, and won’t reach small ad markets like NZ but it provides a great potential to have insanely targeted options for advertising and to serve extremely targeted ad creatives. Because of the ‘insane’ targeting options, there are of course huge privacy issues. Google already knows me too well, and this will make them know me and be able to target me that much more effectively.