Snag that Seat: My Digital Marketing Bucket List-2

Last week Google released its Q2 earning report. The search giant made a handsome $14.11B, pushing its earning by 19%. Yet the results also revealed a continuing softening in the cost-per-click metrics that is at the core of its revenue (more about the report here).

AdWords is a wonderful uber tool that is of enormous help to businesses in acquiring, targeting and converting prospects. Its success comes from the fact that the ads appear when the searcher's intent is very high. The platform gives controls, dials and knobs if you will, that a marketers needs to tweak and develop a predictive marketing model. 

It is also very generic!

The tool itself is agnostic to the industry/vertical/domain. It does not care whether the person wielding the knife is targeting businesses, or wish to reach directly to consumers.  That  flexibility in targeting are left to the advertisers.

While this model has worked well, it also throws up challenges for small businesses including mom-and-pop shops. The flat auction based model does require significant budgets and a healthy dose of perseverance to attain attractive ROI.

A custom AdWords model for SMB?

How about an auction platform specifically tailored for small businesses/around-the-block diners/massasuse/spa services, who would love to get more business when they need it, and in the manner they want it?

Let me explain this a bit more. An owner of a small restaurant should be able to participate in the bidding process, to get patrons at the time when the business is likely to be slow, and should be able to control the volume!  

You would argue that Groupon was banking exactly on this need when they launched their “daily coupon deals” using social networking effect. However, as noted, they went astray and focused on getting users that demanded almost bank-breaking discounts from the business owners. The incremental traffic was  usually a short lived spike, which never converted into stream of loyal returning visitors.

A business should be able to select time-windows when they know that business will be slack, the additional numbers they are looking they are looking, the deal they are offering and the value they put on the table. 

Such an offer will essentially be time sensitive and would capture the essence of “now”. 

It is not very hard to see that this can tie in very nicely with voice based search agents (aka Siri). Imagine you are driving through a new locality and ask your voice assistance to search for the top 3 restaurants in the area offering Chateaubriand at a great price.  Siri can respond back with the names of the joints, number of seats still available and their deals, and can book a seat at the place that also throws in your favorite dessert!

 

Firmly in control!

 

Such a platform will put the small business owner firmly in control of the marketing budget,  the deals they can afford (with the ability to tie the deal with time-of-the-day, day-of-the-week…..you get the picture!) and restrict the numbers they want. Additionally, they will not be competing against other out of town bidders who are not part of the locality. 

And since search volumes are rising on smartphones, promise of a robust ROI will bring in healthy competition and move the needle on the CPC metric.

Fantasy? Not really! All the bits and pieces, that that need to go into, already exist. Everything that was described above is well within the realm of possibility.

Just last week,  Quartz reported an article, euphemistically titled, High Frequency Dining. Now hungry hackers  in San Fran are writing bots to grab the favorite seats in restaurants!  I am not suggesting that eating joints should follow the much deride practice by some airlines to price the middle seat differently. But the news points out that it is very well possible to count and bid for seats algorithmically.

My Digital Marketing Bucket List-1

Americans are ok with it. Europeans have strong trepidation about it.  No it is not about stimulus package or the massive global, invasive surveillance program.

It is literally about the “cookies fight” or online profiling to enable finely targeted ads… 

You agree to barter your personal information and browsing behavior for free access to content and well-timed ads. While we, on this side of the pond, accept the implicit blurring of lines between being a “consumer” and a “product”, our brethren, on the other side, balk at the idea. And they have tightened the cover of “cookies jar” (pardon the pun!).

This message prompts you when you visit any website in UK or European Union!

 

Massive amount of data and profile patterns have become life-sustaining nourishment for the digital marketers.  And it is Google, Facebook  and Yahoo that have, undoubtedly, the biggest heaps of  “big data”.

Of the three, Google has the most advanced advertising platform. Its AdWords program let marketers determine the search queries and build the ads that deliver the best performance.  However, the ads, once created, are shown to every individual performing search on those queries, regardless of the demographic profile or the search intent.  You can, of course, set up separate campaigns for each geography, or resort to day parting. But if you are running a large campaign, such slicing very soon becomes major and expensive headache.

Targeting can go deep(er)

Since Google has amassed petabytes (soon to become exabyte or even zettabyte) of data on individuals, it would be relatively easy for them to develop fairly accurate profiles (demographic including information like occupation, station in life and so on) of its users.  Now, if an avid AdWords marketer has the ability to develop multiple ad-creatives and target to the desired user profiles, it should not be too difficult for the search giant to match and present the most relevant ads.   

It is easy to see that such ads will attract relatively more clicks (pushing up the click-thru-rates or the CTR). And if the marketer is savvy enough to direct users to well designed landing pages, the Quality Score of the campaign can go up, reducing the cost of acquiring traffic and increasing the satisfaction all around.

To be fair Facebook has demographic targeting but you will need to set up multiple campaigns if you want the message to be differentiated.  Google's display network does offer some flexibility in targeting, but everyone knows that their search campaign delivers better results. Bing sports age and gender targeting, but as Search Engine Land reported,  decided to remove the exclusivity citing “inaccuracy” in data and lack of volume!

 

It is apparent that digital marketing technology is moving from generic to specific…very specific!

Maybe it is just a question of time.

Search Engines still a Frontier?

 

Flurry of “activities” related to search engines and website optimization drew me  to the digital marketing world.  The current hot flavor (actually has always been) is digging out the factors that Google (supposedly) takes into account in order to rank websites higher in the SERP.  

Mining activities range from the task of compiling 200 factors based on what SEO pundits have been talking about  (more importantly what is coming from Google’s Spam Master +Matt Cutts) to running yearlong correlation experiments on a large scale (I wrote about deconstructing the ranking factors last week in my other blog post) . 

Then there is an elegant “Periodic Table” compiled by +Danny Sullivan (from Search Engine Land) that groups and lays out these factors. 

                                                   (See the bigger version at SearchEngine Land)

The idea of second guessing Google is not very attractive (and may not be very productive as well).  It is obvious from the constant series of algo updates from the search giant, that it  is  maintains the integrity of the Page Rank  jealously, and is thwarting all attempts to outfox its search results.

There is one aspect that deserves some thought though. Google has always been consistent in its advice that the website owners should stick to creating quality content that is useful to users, unique and engaging. The attempts cited above should be better aimed at finding factors (and parameters) that help the website content and usability measure up against that goal. 

It may be more useful to gauge the visitor's view of your website than to focus on outsmarting searchbot's clinical perspective.

Playing with just mechanics results in a constantly moving goalpost.