I’ve just read an article on Ad Age about new legislation in the UK.
Essentially the new law makes it illegal to:
Not disclose that you are being paid to write a blog post about a product
Pretend to be a consumer
All in the name of consumer protection. I must applaud the law makers over in the UK, we might get a law like this in New Zealand in 2025.
It’s a nice time to be a consumer, where companies are needing to be transparent to be competitive.
In my experience with banks and insurance companies – transparency is not usually a term they know about. The financial services industry has the biggest challenge with ‘new marketing’ in my view. They have made screeds of money over time that they aren’t as likely to get away with now. Somehow they need to be transparent and add more value for consumers – great customer service isn’t going to be enough. Although they’re spending a bunch of money online – they’re not embracing new marketing and instead dishing out a meatball sundae.
NZ Marketing Magazine and DLB (NZ Marketing Association) seem to be constantly regurgitating messages about “embracing new marketing” at the moment, so I apologise for the cliche.
Getting onto the first page of Google for organic search results is usually going to be quite a challenge. That’s where Google AdWords comes in – and it’s the easy way to get that ranking.
However, these days are coming to an end and it seems that ranking on paid search results is becoming more and more of a challenge. Especially with a quality score to filter out the terrible ads that don’t actually add value for users.
I recently have been working on a campaign for a client – targeting highly competitive terms. I did all I could on the campaign in terms of optimisation and bid a huge amount on the keywords. The result? The ad showing up a tiny portion of when it should, driving 2 clicks a day, a huge cost per click and a ‘Poor’ quality score.
So I discussed with issue with a Google Optimiser – and they essentially said there was no solution but to wait for improvement. But in doing so they gave me a good description of the way quality score was working in this case.
Here’s a summary of the impact of quality score in this situation
When you don’t have enough data for your own quality score – you get the average of other advertisers for that specific keyword. In my case, there are a ton of dodgy advertisers which will not be relevant for users so overall have a poor quality score.
When there’s lots of competition, you absolutely need a good quality score to get displayed. My ads were put in the place of a bad ad and therefore not showing up.
The only way to improve quality score is to prove that your ad is of quality to Google. You can only do this by showing valuable clicks and beat the average performance for that keyword by other advertisers.
This basically means I’m stuck in a rut, as I’m sure many other advertisers are who actually are selling a good quality product. No solution yet either.
To start with; “Chief Blogger” is a wanky title. Hiring someone to blog is essentially the same as hiring someone to manage PR which defeats the purpose of blogging in the first place.
The best thing I’ve seen in company blogs is the passion that comes out of them. Google has their geeky engineers talking directly to other geeks. We love it. It’s not someone blogging trying to manage the brand; it’s the Google engineers being the brand. Sure the chief blogger could be passionate and be a part of the company, but he/she would still be out of the front-line where sometimes the best insight comes from.
I was lucky enough to get a Mac in my last job, but now I’ve finally bought my own.
After using a Mac I grew fond of it all, but now I understand the true satisfaction to actually own one. As lame as I sound, part of the elite.
Apple do a hell of a lot to ensure post-purchase satisfaction with nice extras like Apple branded polishing cloths. Everything inside the package, right down to the polystyrene is ‘cool’. Only Apple could pull off ‘cool’ polystyrene.
I don’t ever remembering subscribing to AA Travel (I am an AA member though), but today I received their newsletter.
Top line of the message contained one of those “this is why we’re emailing you messages” explaing how and when I subscribed. This time it’s a little different though.
You are receiving this email from AA because we want to keep you informed of special Membership travel offers
So they’re emailing me because they want to keep me informed? That’s not how it works, and it’s pretty much admitting to spam. Good work AA.
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:
Search marketing budgets are tiny compared to other media spends by well known brands
It’s certainly one of the most measurable – and usually profitable
Reducing search marketing budget is going to directly reduce revenue
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.
It’s not exactly the friendliest welcome when you have to take off your spike boots, put them into your gym bag and leave it outside on the ground with your bike. Ridiculous.
Searchme is a new visual search engine which is currently in a private beta. I’ve just signed up to try and get onto it, so I’ll let you know when I can comment on my experiences with it.
They’ve already got invesment from Sequoia Capital who was an early investor in Google and YouTube.
I have to admit the features and appearance of Searchme do look impressive, and it’s always nice to see innovation in the search arena. It looks like it’s all AJAX based and the beautifully displayed visual search results are returned quickly using the Apple cover flow design used in iTunes.
It also uses category filters, kind of similar to Ask.com. So if you searched something like “nets” Google will traditionally show what it considers the most relevant and a big part of this relevance is importance. New Jersey Nets completely dominate these results, but what if you were actually searching for fishing nets? Searchme would present category options to you, so you could either choose to look at basketball category sites or fishing category sites.
Take a look at their introduction video
Will it catch on? For a new search engine to catch on it has to be necessary and more useful than Google to give people a good reason to change, or at least use in combination. While Searchme looks good, I don’t think it’s necessary. The reason why Google is so popular is because of the quality of it’s search results and the simplicity to get to them. Googles search results are based on the fact that content is King, and trust is it’s Queen. How useful would Google be if it ranked results with a design factor?It’s a common assumption among SEO’s that Google already considers user behaviour after a search. Higher click through rates of your organic listing if you’re in second place, will show people like your listing more than the 1st place which proves it to be more relevant. Also once you click through from a search result, and hit the back button straight away – Google will know that the page you saw didn’t match what you wanted to see. Based on this it’s fair to say Google doesn’t judge these sites ‘by their cover’ which is exactly what Searchme will encourage.The other main feature it has is the category filters. In my example above I talked about fishing nets and the New Jersey Nets. If you were searching for fishing nets and searched for “nets” and got results for the basketball team, wouldn’t you just try again but this time be more specific and search for “fishing nets” instead?
If it does catch on, what effect will it have? Design will be king. If users can see your site before clicking on it – it needs to look good. Not only does it need to look good, but it will also need to appear extremely relevant. You would need to have quite specific pages to match specific search results. You should be doin this already, but it would take it to a new level.I’m not sure how Searchme will rank it’s search reulsts but surely it won’t be as complex behind the scenes as Google, so most likely not as high quality results. It might be a more useful idea if it was actually just a new way to display results, using the backbone of Google technology. Perhaps not a possible business model though.
Overall I think the idea is ‘cool’ and might come in handy for certain searches and industries. But no one will have to take it too seriously, at least not for a while.
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.
AdAge recently reported about chief bloggers being a new trend with corporates. 
