Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
Fake Internet Money
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, advertising, marketing, revenue models
I have tons of fake internet money. And I’m planning to get a bunch more, my question is what is everyone going to do with all their fake internet money. Alot of businesses out there are converting thier giant audiences into real money, but what are the large sites doing to monetize their views and return their investors money. Rounds C and D are exciting and there were alot big numbers thrown around last year and earlier this year, but when is that all going to come around. I’ve got a hunch that it isn’t.
Youtube became so succesful because it was free to its users, no money and no interuption cost of advertising. Facebook continues to be successful with its users because it limits the interuption cost as much as possible, but I would consider Facebook to be the field-leader in monetization. There are alot of competitors in an increasingly crowded space launching new platforms after their second and third rounds of funding all going after the same ad dollars (Zvents, outside.in, and many more). I’m not the only one who warns of seeking the same ad dollars with similar audiences.
I’m just curious who will be funding these companies in 6-8 months, will the economy pick up, or will ad networks save the day. There is some data showing a slowing online advertising atmosphere, however there is much more optimism towards online ad growth. I can’t see all of these local search competitors succeeding down the road, but the ones that do will own large shares of local markets and have a palpable relationship with these local markets. I cringe when I see “People Love Us on Yelp!” stickers - for a reason, they’re there and they are good.
The Power of Hype
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, marketing
And why its actually useless.
Last week my (never met him before or interacted with in anyway whatsoever, but read so much of what he thinks that I usually think to myself “what would Seth Godin say about this” whenever I do anything) friend Seth Godin wrote a valuable post about “Grand Openings” and how they are not so grand. I laughed when I read it because I was scheduled to attend the Grand Opening party of an old restaurant that had closed and re-opened under a new owner/management that evening.
It was Saturday when I realized the value of the Hype, the artificial pumping up of events, products and companies. I was at the Belmont, in hopes of witnessing history in the form of the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.
You had to live in a cave to not know about this event. The trainer was everywhere, the horse was everywhere, a big dollar investment was made and a multinational company purchased a first of its kind endorsement. Big Brown came around the final turn and stopped running. The most heavily favored horse to go off at Belmont Stakes in decades, the sure shot, became the first Triple Crown contender to finish dead last.
More than twice as many people watched the stakes on television this year over last year and over 100k people braved the heat to watch in person. People were excited, then they were disappointed. Massively disappointed.
When things don’t live up to the hype, people remember the bad, the letdown or they don’t remember it at all. Eitherway, all the press, all the hype that was put into the event was a waste of many and probably will hurt the brand/event/promoter in the long term.
Don’t try to live up to the hype, let the hype try to live up to you. Make the hype follow the event, let people talk about how great it was, because if something was really worth all the hype, you won’t need to put all that hype into it before hand.
At 5 o’clock vendors were selling Big Brown tshirts for $20. At 6:30 they were selling those same shirts 3 for $5. Of course, if he had won, those shirts might have been selling for $40. Perhaps the Belmont Stakes is not the best example, but it made me think about what we do in order to hype things up and get people to pay attention. As Mr. Godin commonly puts it, make something remarkable - worth talking about, and people will talk about it.
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Just Do It. Walk the Talk. Moral of the story, instead of talking about doing it, go ahead and buckle in and do it. Because almost never was, and probably never will be.
Its late now, and I’m going to stop hyping this post.
My Top 5 Brands
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under advertising, marketing
I was thinking about how several different brands are really able to reach a large audience, with a long term campaign and I thought I would do a little research and put together a list of the 5 best brands out there today. Based on longevity, current and past campaigns, and their ability to capture significant segments of their markets.
- Nike: The brand that Phil Knight built out of a waffle iron in his garage now controls over 30% of the worlds athletic shoe market and does over $16 billion a year in sales. “Just Do It.” captivates audiences around the world, from Portland to Paris, from Michael Jordan to the World Cup to Tiger Woods, Nike continues to bring powerful campaigns all centered around the same slogan from the 70’s.
- Coca-Cola: The current Coca-Cola logo was originally designed by Frank Mason Robinson in 1885. Today, over 120 years later, the logo still graces the pages, screens and stadiums of locations all across the world. In 1918, Robert Woodruff - Coke’s first President - said he wanted to “ensure that everyone on Earth drank Coca-Cola as their preferred beverage.” Now over 25% of the worlds $250 Billion soft-drink market belongs to Coke.
- Apple: A brand doesn’t have to be centuries old to be great, but after hovering just above obsolete during the 90’s, Steve Jobs returned to bring Apple back to glory. Using an extremely simple advertising campaign, just the product, music and a little graphic design shows how “cool” their products are. The new “Mac vs PC” campaign is brilliantly simple and the iPhone commercials simply show several different features of the product. Did I mention how cool their products are - who doesn’t want an iPod? (Oh man, I forgot to mention the 1-3 connection: Nike + iPod)
- Lexus: I don’t drive a Lexus, and probably never will (I am an Audi guy) but as a marketer I love their brand. They use simple luxury and sheer performance as the key ingredients to all of their campaigns and they always keep them simple. The Pursuit of Perfection (Cadillac recently ripped this right off..). Of course, Toyota is no slouch either.
- Sony: HDNA. My first stereo had to be a Sony. The Sony Walkman, and then the Discman were the iPods of their day. The Bravia TV’s are in most everyone’s top 3 sets. When I was in Video Production in high school, almost everything we used was a Sony product, the cameras, the monitors, the VCRs, the speakers, the mixers, etc. Their current HDNA campaign (with your favorite “all sell anything” football star spokesman Peyton Manning) is brilliant - it gives you many compelling reasons why you should use their products to facilitate your HD experiences. Granted I think Sony should have seen the MP3 craze perhaps a little better than they did considering their dominance in mobile music prior, but they have transitioned through 5 generations of technology and as we begin to transition into a new one, I see Sony having a large presence in what ever future markets develop.
These were just a few of my thoughts on some of the best brands, based on their historical prevalence, current advertising campaigns and over all brand management. I’d love to hear some other brands grabbing your attention.
Early Adopters and You/Me
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Mobile, Small Businesses, advertising, marketing, revenue models, social media, web 2.0
Today’s Fast Company Big Idea is:
“Anyone who says early adopters don’t matter needs to go back to business school. Facebook and Twitter are beginning to impact business just as much as advertising ”
I follow these daily thought provokers from Fast Company because they are usually fairly interesting. I think this one is excellent. I don’t consider myself to be an innovator, but a late moving early adopter, I am becoming more early in the adoption cycle, but still I’m typically a little behind (particularly in the larger technology space, which I am still new to).
But the importance of early adopters has never left my thoughts. The early adopters are the business owners we seek out first when entering a new market, and they are precisely not the end users that we seek to reach on our website. They are the people who determine whether new technologies fail or succeed and build momentum for those that do. So I wait for the early adopters to try things out see if they fail. Early adopters are the front line in end user technology, and they need to be taken seriously.
A few days ago, I mentioned Lewis Black (ok, I’ve been a little harsh on Lewis, but I’m actually a huge fan) and his mocking of internet addicts - essentially early adopters. Again, a prime example of the lack of understanding most people have of how new technologies can help us do things better and faster, or sometimes just have more fun doing them. MySpace, turned into Facebook, then Twitter became the next hot thing.
Many of my clients are now “working” on a Facebook page, and already have a MySpace page. Do these pages help them at all? Not measurably, but the point is that even these late adopters and slow moving businesses now see that they “really should” be on Facebook. Do a quick google of “Facebook Marketing” (an auto suggestion in firefox!) and you can see that people are making entire businesses out of advertising consulting for Facebook.
But now, the innovators are moving elsewhere, which means the early adopters will be soon to follow. Where will they go, and what will be that next cool technology that will be affecting the way people to business? I would say mobile, but the iPhone already happened and the flurry of 3G phones coming out this summer will blow that away. Its not a new social network, because I believe people are getting fatigued. Semantic Web 3 dot 0, fancy buzz words? I think we are a year or two away from anything drastic coming across the radar.
Any thoughts…
Targeted Traffic, Bounces and Your Dollars
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, advertising, analytics, marketing, measurement
Today’s post comes after a hectic week, many miles of travel and a post by Seth Godin (Silly Traffic).
His post talks about a 75% bounce rate and the value of doing the best you can with the other 25% of the people who actually stay on your site. While I agree that maximizing conversions with the bulk of your traffic is important, a believe that in this day of niche and segmentation you shouldn’t be operating (and probably won’t be for long) a website that turns away 3 quarters of your potential traffic.
We run online city guides. Naturally we target our SEO and our paid links to reach people searching for what our content is all about. For the keyword “Restaurants in Providence, RI” our bounce rate for organic clicks is 8.3% (according to Google Analytics) and our PPC bounce rate for that keyword is even lower - 4.4%. I know those are really good numbers, and we do have entry keywords that bounce 40-50% of potential traffic (sitewide the bounce rate is 38%), but our top 20 keywords all have bounce rates under 12%.
My explanation of this is targeting. While some websites might have hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of products - tons of information, our sites have specific, segmented content that is designed to reach people searching for exactly what we offer. I don’t think any lightbulbs are going off in anyone’s head here, and I’m certainly not the first person/website to target specific traffic, but what are people doing with a website that turns away 75% of your traffic?!?
If you have a site about golden retrievers, and you target your SEO keywords and placement towards anyone searching for dogs, you are missing out on your core audience - golden retriever lovers. I feel like this is right up Seth’s alley, and was I very surprised to read his last post. He brings up excellent points in the second half of his post, but he seemed to contradict himself a bit.
75% of all unfocused visitors leave within 3 seconds.
He then says that “unfocused” could mean a digg link or even a Google search, but that 75% is ok.
The beautiful thing I’ve found about the internet is that you can get people to your site, targeted, focused people, by optimizing your site for certain keywords - in other words, focused traffic. Well I’m quite sure that more than 75% of people searching for “Siberian Buddhist Colonies” would bounce if they came across my site, but why would they come across my site looking for that.
They most likely wouldn’t and if our team is doing our job, they won’t. We want targeted traffic on our sites. People searching for the information our advertisers are paying to have found. So perhaps Godin’s point is overall correct, that you need focused traffic to succeed, but suggesting that it is wise not to worry about a 75% bounce rate is contradicting the whole point of search engines - to find what we are looking for.
We have succeed by building targeted and focused traffic on our sites, and by keeping our visitors on our site longer to maximize potential exposure to our advertisers. Ultimately in our space (my thoughts), you need to build a website that gets focused traffic, maintains a low bounce rate (<20%) and retains these visitors for an extended visit session with quality related content.
Our advertisers’ success is driven around our ability to provide them with targeted leads, and focused traffic. But if 75% of our traffic left in 3 seconds, our advertisers would not be far behind.
Analytics, Where did you get these?
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, analytics, measurement
In a recent fit of analytic interpretation, I really started digging down into our different analytical programs. Google Analytics is the most comprehensive we have, we use two different programs based on log files, and several script based tools.
Going back a ways to a post by Darren Herman, Numbers Don’t Lie, Except When They Do, he touches on a very important point in the measurement of visitors, which set of data is accurate. While there have been recent reports on deleted cookies increasing measured visits, there have been opposite accounts of under reporting.
My recent experience here evolved from a conflict that was directly affecting my advertising budget - Adwords was not agreeing with Analytics. In the process of tracking which Adwords keywords were resulting in the deepest visits into my site, I discovered that while Adwords was sending X amount of clicks per day, analytics was reporting fewer. In one keyword, Adwords charged us for 57 clicks, while Analytics was only reporting 43. Now that is a major discrepancy. While the value of this is not huge (at $.17 CPC) but at a percentage of difference this is major. For one particular campaign Analytics reports 1,049 visits from that keyword over the course of March, Adwords is reporting 1,246. These aren’t showing up as bounces, or repeats, these are just clicks from Adwords. If I was dealing with 5700 versus 4300, now we are talking major dollars, and major pains.
So then I head over to my AdSense account, and of course page impressions are different again. Google has responded with a fairly ambiguous explanation of log files versus scripts and varying reporting methods, but nothing on their own methods and why they disagree, conveniently to my disadvantage. I am certain that if they noticed my Adsense account was receiving more clicks than it actually was, they would fix it.
But back to the issue at hand, how are advertisers and agencies supposed to gather the correct data. One of my sites gets about 250k page views a month. According to Google Analytics - 60k. That discrepancy does not compute. Deleted cookies might inflate my unique visitor count, but how does that account for 45 GB of data transfer. And thats not email solely traffic to our website.
In December our sites crashed due to a server overload. What happened, did the 145 visitors that Google Analytics reported cause that? I doubt it. Quantcast, Alexa, SiteMeter… they are all way off. How do these all work. It is a learning curve for me, although I’ve been learning for a year and a half now, I still don’t get it.
Log files reported 120k visits to my network in March with over 750k page views. QuantCast reported 16k with 80k page views. Who am I to believe? Perhaps more importantly, who are my prospects going to believe?
Local Search Content Syndication
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, Syndication, advertising, revenue models, sharing applications
How do large search networks gain their local insight into the real world? Syndication of content from various internet providers, yellowpages, superpages, ultrapages, all kinds of pages. But mostly, out of date pages. Businesses that no longer exist, phone numbers that are no longer valid and addresses that have changed.
How can I the local consumer place my trust in these large companies having up to date, local information on what I am looking for? That is an excellent question, and one that I as a local business man, believe is a question that these jumbo portals don’t have the right answer to.
Smaller, local search companies can monetize their wealth of small business information by expanding paid syndication through these larger outlets. Building a better database of small and local businesses is what these local companies do, and is exactly what they can do for these larger national and international portals.
In these new days of local search, and local information, more and more small business are transitioning their marketing and their budgets online. As this market grows, more information will be available online, and search engines in particular will hold a lot of power over this information. So how can the consumer get the best information infront of them as quickly as possible? Rely on locally based portals who actually operate in the cities they represent.
If there were a way to capitalize on the huge power and reach of these large portals, by incorporating the value of this local information together in a Search Engine Friendly site, giving searching consumers quick and easy access to up to date, accurate and relevant information, this new model would be very valuable indeed.
Now if only I knew someone who could code like a champion…
The 5% rule
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, analytics, measurement, revenue models
I’m not sure that there is much scientific data to back this up across the board, but in my experience this theory/rule works. There is alot of click-through data, and conversion ratios that would support this as well.
My 5% theory is that ultimately about 5% of your efforts are ultimately going to succeed. Whether it is converting a lead in sales or converting a purchase on your website. And sometimes 5% is very good. The best online stores convert <5% of their visitors into a purchase, 3 - 4% is often considered excellent.
Now, this theory has alot to do with a lack of focus that many people, and most businesses have and is a by product of the long build up of the mass market. As the internet has grown in influence and instant communications have flattened and shrunken the world, the mass market is largely disappearing in favor of small, segmented niche markets. These markets are allowing niche businesses to succeed wildly by focusing on people who want, need and have a strong desire for their products or services.
My self learned lesson (recently and thanks to a little inspiration from Seth Godin), is that in business and in life, it is tempting to throw cast the wide net and see who we can catch. However, it is often quite to your advantage to focus on what you do best.
On the other hand, not every product has a tiny niche market that you are able to reach. There are many factors that might prevent you from reaching that market (technology, scale, personnel, etc), and sometimes you are better off going after a larger piece of the pie.
What I am essentially getting at is that in life and in business you need to focus on that 5%. Whether you choose to narrow your focus on a 5% niche, or you choose to take the 5% conversion rate you have and focus on increasing that. Instead of casting a larger net, focus on landing a high percentage of your casts. Maybe you narrow your business, or maybe you get better at it. Either way, the rest of the world operates at 5%, and you (and me) need to find a way to make that 5% more valuable.
So take a look at what you do, and see if you can do it better, grow that 5% into 98% or to 8% one way or another, the 5% rule will make sense in what you do.
