Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Why (Insert Your Brand or Product Here)?

True story. I’m on the subway heading downtown in NYC. I notice an ad for Fiji Water. It was a picture of the bottle and this copy:

Message In A Bottle

FIJI water is from Fiji

What caught my interest most of all was the question “WHY?” handwritten in black pen next to the bottom line. They say the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls…

Why? It’s a great question. Works for anything really, but this next generation of marketing and advertising needs to be able to deliver this answer and in a way that will attract the user’s attention.

Why? Why was FIJI water from Fiji? Is the water cleaner there? Is there some sort of special element besides hydrogen and oxygen contained in it? Do people from Fiji have an average life expectancy of 95 years? Why would I want to buy FIJI instead of another brand? The subway scribe had it right. This ad answered not a single question. It only raised questions. That’s poor marketing. Your ad messaging needs to be the answer to the question why.

With so many marketing messages being absorbed in user’s brains each day they have ad overload. Add to this the fact that users trust ads less and less. Ads that attempt to answer “why” can cut through the noise because they actually help user’s fulfill their goal. Nowhere is this more evident than in search.

Daniel Rose and Danny Levinson’s seminal Yahoo study Understanding User Goals in Web Search directly correlated the goal of the searcher with the answer to the question why.

The “why” of user search behavior is actually essential to
satisfying the user’s information need. After all, users don’t sit
down at their computer and say to themselves, “I think I’ll do
some searches.” Searching is merely a means to an end – a way to
satisfy an underlying goal that the user is trying to achieve.

Satisfying the user’s information need is the key idea here. It’s clear that search facilitates the obtaining of information magnitudes greater than anything that came before it. In fact, search is the most adopted and useful intelligence tool ever known to man. Am I overstating this? It is because of this that in a few short years search has created a marketing paradigm not conceivable and certainly not wanted by marketers (especially brand marketers) even ten years ago.

There are new rules. There are new measures of tracking, performance and accountability. There are new ways of delivering contextual relevance. The beautiful thing about all of this is that it benefits consumers. Actually to be effective in this new paradigm it must benefit consumers. After all, this is user-controlled media. So where is the easiest place to begin strategizing the messages of your product and brand? The easiest place to begin with this is to answer that simple question.

Why?

Ads and marketing messages that don’t answer the question why will not be effective. So hand over the benefits messaging quickly. If it’s cheap, tell me. Why do you deserve my attention? I’m pretty busy doing things I want to be doing…maybe I even need to be doing. What good reason do you have to make we want to stop what I’m doing and give you my time and attention?

Here’s a very simple example from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart understands better than just about anyone why. Their new TV ads have the tagline “get smart before you buy” and show an attractive 50ish woman talking to a salesman and explaining that she already knows what 1080i resolution is. She’s only interested in one thing, the best price.

This ad works on many levels. First of all, Wal-Mart gets how the web has fundamentally changed brick and mortar retail. That’s a story that hasn’t been told enough but is gaining some traction this holiday season with agencies (Circuit City is another major retailer advertising the benefits of web research and user generated content in their TV spots, but surprisingly not on their website). What really makes this ad work is the answer to the question why. Why Wal-Mart? Answer: Low prices. Yes, it’s that simple.

If you are not messaging the answer to “why” at every consumer touch point you are going to lose the consumer. It needs to be the core messaging your company brings to users across all mediums. From TV to radio, from search ad to landing page. Reinforce it constantly. On every page on your site. In every touch point with a user. The prophet’s optimize, and prophesize…

“Still the searcher
must ride the dark horse.
Racing alone in his fright.
Tell me why, tell me why.”
-Neil Young

I will be speaking on these ideas and presenting a case study on work done for Audible.com at the ad:tech panel Next Generation Strategies for eCommerce, November 7th in New York. Stop by and say hello.

The Death of Best Practices

Best practice by definition is the best possible way of doing something. Most marketers look at implementing best practices as executing standards to make improvement. Unfortunately, this one-way, one-size fits all standardization mentality is not an effective practice for digital marketers. It’s lazy marketing. Old school. Our world needs to be ruled by looking at our audience as different segments, not homogenous masses, and delivering relevance. What we learn from doing segmentation is that what is best for one audience does not always work for another. There are no standards. There really is no such thing as a best practice.

Can there be best practices within a segment? The answer is no, and yes. Even within a segment behavior can vary based on a number of factors. There are just too many variables from vertical to vertical, audience to audience, site to site, and page to page to feel confident that something that has worked for somebody else’s business, even Amazon.com, will work for you online. However, through testing and optimization you can discover best practices specific to your audience segments.

Also, people just don’t do what you think they will. Over the past few years through testing I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve observed and analyzed in online behavior is counterintuitive. Expect the unexpected, prepare for the unexpected and be able to act on the unexpected.

Let’s look at Social Media as an example of the absence of best practices. Facebook tells us a best practice for social media properties is to have gated groups. MySpace tells us the best practice is to have an open access. Clearly some users find one preferable to the other. Some users are not aware that alternatives exist. Some users are motivated by outside influences (peers). These dynamics are not that different than any other digital presence or vertical. Granted, these are core business models, however I have used these to exemplify and magnify how even within verticals best practices for your business are unique. So you can do one of three things. Copy, differentiate, or test. There is of course only one way of finding what is optimal and that is testing.

But here’s where it gets tricky (and where we say some more prayers for best practices). Optimal is changing all the time. With the spread of Rich Internet Applications the web becomes a much more dynamic and engaging place. So too is the way people interact with it changing. This is the natural evolution of user interaction and experience. Those that study HCI observe continued change and can see distinct differences in behavior among segments. Bottom line is that the web is just too dynamic and evolving too fast as a medium to say what is good today will be good tomorrow. Or what worked for you will work me.

So what to do when we don’t know what will deliver the best results?

Get off your butt and think. Create. Ideas can be good or bad but to prejudge them before they are placed in front of an audience is just not smart. Take the time to brainstorm and overcome the hurdles to act and measure your ideas. The best practices that I preach are not the specific layouts or messages that the clients are asking for, but rather methodologies to provide relevance like segmentation, simplicity, reinforcement and testing. These serve as the foundation for discovery. It takes some work before we can implement actionable insights for the client's business to derive benefit but when we do they have the best practice for their audiences and their business…and the results to prove it.

I’ll be speaking on the ideas of “best practices” and presenting a case study where we improved AOV over 50% for a client at the ad:tech panel Next Generation Strategies for eCommerce, November 7th in New York. Stop by and say hello.

Yahoo Crosses Over with Panama

Last week’s pre-release of Yahoo Search Marketing’s highly anticipated and much needed “Project Panama” means that after a couple of years as a second thought, Yahoo will have to be taken seriously again as a search-marketing channel. Ideally, Panama will be more stable than Yahoo/Overture, which routinely plagues advertisers with data issues. The big win here though is the emphasis Panama places on the need for relevance and some basic optimization and reporting tools that will be part of Yahoo Search Marketing.

Why am I excited?

Reason 1: Naming Conventions
With Panama, Yahoo has unified naming conventions across the two major channels. This is a major step forward. If we don’t all talk the same language as marketers our clients have trouble understanding the marketing. It also further isolates Microsoft as the third channel with their moronic “orders” instead of “AdGroups” ala Google and Yahoo.

Reason 2: AJAX
Yahoo’s leading edge Ajax team, led by Bill Scott has put an Ajax user interface in front of every marketer. This makes it easier for marketers to use the system and hopefully allows them to be smarter and more productive deriving greater benefit from the platform.

Reason 3: Quality Index
Any measure of relevance is a huge improvement over what Yahoo/Overture had before (nothing) and will be a boon to users and advertisers. Title and description testing will be more important and landing page relevance seems to a factor as well, especially with contextual ads.

Reason 4: Targeting
Little known to many, Yahoo has been a leader in targeting for some time with their Impulse system that targets display ads based on search history. Yahoo seems to have a bunch of cool geo capabilities in Panama. Geo targeting has the potential to be the single most important segmentation to deliver relevance and advertisers are only beginning to leverage the benefits of geo targets for things like seasonality, language and offline conversion. One only has to look to Japan (where Yahoo has a 63% market share) to see the way geo targeting will continue to grow, especially as a tool for delivering contextual relevance with mobile search.

Reason 5: Ad Optimization
Creative optimization will now be similar to Google where it shows the ad with the best CTR (is that really optimization?). Panama will also have the ability to generate tracking URLs with parameters for source, query and keyword. There is also the ability to track CPA & COAS. I imagine they will continue to build out feature sets for this.

Reason 6: Reports
The reporting features appear to be a huge leap forward, even from what Google has. This again not only helps us as marketers but our clients understand the impact being made to their business. Yahoo smartly realizes that this level of understanding and insight coupled with performance sends more ad dollars into search.

Of course Panama is yet to be battle tested but she looks to be a scalable major marketing platform. If there was any lingering doubt about the viability of search Yahoo has now solidified the search space by pushing search marketing and namely campaign optimization forward within a second major channel. These are big wins for businesses, marketers and users. Hats off to Yahoo!

How Starbucks Segments and Targets its Brand

The lead story in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section this Sunday was “The Starbucks Aesthetic” and it’s worth a read. It actually would have been better placed as the lead story in the Business section. What the story made clear is that Starbucks has successfully expanded its product offerings, revenues and brand value by using two core principles readers of this blog will be very familiar with, high impact segmentation and simplicity.

Starbucks is focusing on what it calls its “core customers,” college educated, average age of 42, and average income of $90k. Starbucks has identified through market research that this is the segment that will generate the greatest impact to their business and they have targeted them with products.

The article also makes clear the targeted product strategy. Starbucks presents a narrow range of products geared towards this segment. By limiting choice and presenting a few products Starbucks leverages the trust factor the brand has with users and further reinforces it by being a tastemaker. This is something that is very appealing to this time-starved demo.

Naturally all these concepts can and should be done in online marketing. It’s no wonder then that Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks said the most important part of Starbucks future business will be the Wi-fi access in their stores. Cool beans.

Google's Website Optimizer: Optimization for the Masses

I’ve been receiving lots of calls the past 24 hours about Google’s “release” of their multivariate testing tool called Google Website Optimizer. Here are my thoughts:

• Since you need to have Google Analytics to use the tool this immediately places the tool as a small to mid-market product. I’ve spoken about analytic platforms with hundreds of leading businesses and not a single one of them has Google Analytics or would ever consider using it.

• The tool only does full factorial testing. Full factorial tests require LOTS of data to achieve confidence. This means lots of clicks and spending lots of money on ads to get the conversions needed to reduce margin of error with the results. This is great for Google but not so great for its users (see above) who likely have limited ad budgets. It could take some customers months to see results from a test. In dynamic markets and ones with seasonality this could render some results worthless...after waiting so long to get them. This is the big mistake Google has made with this tool. Had Google used Taguchi methodology and fractional factorial tests along with less data needed for confidence they would have been able to offer the speed and efficiency that I believe comprise the best testing methodologies that are based on sequential improvements via iteration.

• Testing is better than not testing. However effective testing and optimization is a practice. You need to know what to test, where to test, and how to test in order to get the best results. This is partially comprised of a certain design aesthetic around testing and creation of test elements, an understanding of users and their goals and pure marketing acumen. Google says they offer support through their partners but I wonder what type of support. I hope there will be a mass of people that get really interested in testing and optimization. They will only stay interested if they get results.

• The tool only handles site side multivariate testing, not AdGroup title and description testing.

• The tool only handles single page tests. Not really sure why they call it "website optimizer." Web page optimizer is more like it.

Google has been working on this product for at least a year. I actually heard it was going to be released at SES San Jose back in August. I’m kind of surprised Google didn’t make a bigger hoopla about it and announced it at E-Metrics. It seems to me like the announcement was a knee-jerk reaction to Yahoo’s announcement of Panama and the targeting and quality score features that will help optimize campaigns. I'm also surprised at the relative lack of interest in the announcement in the search world.

Overall, I think Google's entrance into testing and optimization is analogous to Ford's introduction of the Model T. Google Web Optimizer is a basic, utilitarian testing tool for the masses. The same way the Model T grew the market for autos, a larger market for testing and optimization helps users, businesses and even us optimization guys. I wish them success because that will mean lots of people are testing and optimizing and the web is becoming a better, more relevant place.

Choice Kills Conversion

Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy.

When confronted with choice user response will slow, users become unsure of themselves and many times they will fall off their task. As soon as you present choices you introduce consideration. As soon as you introduce consideration you force analysis. Forcing analysis drives the user further away from their goal. If they are ready to buy why would you message anything that could send them back to that consideration netherworld of searching, researching and comparison?

Users are coming to your site or landing page with a goal in mind. Optimization is the work of anticipating that goal and finding the right messaging so the user knows this is the place to fulfill it. Optimization is not about asking questions or presenting choices. Nor is it, in my opinion, about trying to persuade users to behave in a certain manner. You should have done that work BEFORE the user got to your page. In “buy” mode they are trying to find what they have already decided they want (the key words being “find” and “decided”). They are now navigating the murky waters product searches and comparative engines. Your work is reeling them into an experience that is relevant to their goal.

These are concepts I’ve been aware of since I was working at Creative Good. When you actually watch and observe user behavior as I did for a couple of years, you are privy to understanding the latent needs of users. Many times those unmet needs consist of a desire for the simplicity and clarity that comes with the reduction of content and choice. So it was with great pleasure that I watched my friend and Creative Good CEO Phil Terry share last week’s Shop.org’s keynote presentation with Barry Schwartz, professor and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.

Barry presents great proof of concept in his book and shared some examples.

- College students were given a choice of a free pen ($2.50 value) or $2.00 cash.

75% chose the pen.

- College students were given a choice of a free pen ($2.50 value), two pens ($1.25 value each) or $2.00 cash.

40% chose either of the two pen options.

As soon as there was a choice of pens, the pens became less appealing.

Here’s another one:

A U.K. jam maker did a supermarket tasting. The first day they had 23 different flavors of jams available for tasting and purchase at their table.

The second day they had they exact same display and amount of bottles on the table but with only six flavors.

Result? Sales day one were 1/10th of day two.

Here are Schwartz’s three reasons why choice makes people miserable:

1. Regret and anticipated regret. If there’s a choice many times you wonder if you made the right one…even if you are happy with the choice you made. Consider the implications on customer retention.

2. Opportunity Costs. The example above of the pen giveaway.

3. Escalation of expectations. Everything suffers from comparison. The more choices you leave behind the higher expectations you have for what you picked.

One of the most interesting parts of the keynote and another part that I am familiar with from my optimization experience is the point of diminishing returns. It’s not that no choices are always the best. Think about a category page. If you only had one item it doesn’t seem likely that would increase conversion. There is however always a tipping point where having more choices does harm. Schwartz called this “finding the sweet spot” and it is something that I work with clients on all the time. This is because the only way to find the sweet spot is to test.

Shop.org was a great show. My participation was moderating a roundtable discussion with So Young Park of Musician’s Friend on the how, where and why online retailers should test free shipping promotions. The “why” of course is that there isn’t an easier promotion for users to “get” than free shipping. The “how” and “where?” Well that’s all about finding the sweet spot.

What choices are you giving your audience? What are your sweet spots and how are you determining them?

R.E.M. Reshaping E-Metrics (or Revolutionizing E-Marketing)

Marshall Sponder’s blog WebMetricsGuru had a post with comments from a recent Eric Peterson’s e-consultancy interview that caught my attention. The conversation is about the present difficulties for analytic vendors and display advertisers in the face of rich-internet applications (RIAs) and feeds as they continue to proliferate on the web. Sorry if I don’t shed a tear.

Murmur
The impression has been the metric du jour since the inception of the commercial web. Advertising and reporting models, products and services have all been built around delivering and measuring impressions. The problem is that impressions (and its twin brother the page view) do not measure interests, intents or actions. To me, that’s a pretty worthless metric. Also since they occur so infrequently, click through and view through rates from display are also pretty worthless metrics. Making maters worse, display ad models are better served by (and sometimes created for) poor user experience. Thankfully for most of us these models and metrics are becoming remnants of a bye-gone era.

As long as we’re throwing out page views and killing CPM let’s make sure there’s room in the trash bag for panels as a form of measurement. This relic is from the days of that analog device known as television. There have been some incredibly valid points made the past week on this. The IAB who voiced these concerns is also at a crossroads and bears some responsibility for lack of foresight to comfort the industry (disclosure: I am a former member of the IAB Research Committee). Action in the face of changing technology is not one of the IAB’s strong suits. Committees are very large and consensus and action take far too long in a medium as dynamic as digital.

Reckoning
In stark contrast stands the cost/action/result advertising model. Once action or interest is expressed a series of events are initiated to deliver relevance matching the user’s goal with a fulfillment opportunity. As digital mediums pervade our lives our ability to track, measure and improve the context of relevance increase. The brainpower, money and technology fueling the development of this by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft is like a modern Manhattan Project…and they will not be waiting for marketers or agencies to figure out how to deliver, track and measure any of this. They’ll be building this into their ever-expanding solutions and inventory.

The digital advertising and the metrics industries may need to adapt to these technologies but there’s no reason marketers need to wait around for that to happen in order to be successful. The success and failure of RIA use can be easily ascertained with A/B testing. Multiple design patterns can be tested against each other to see which one moves users closer to their goal. Our success or failure with these strategies is easy to determine and we are and should be held accountable for the results. This level of accountability requires us to understand data and distinguishes us from traditional marketing and older mediums. What hasn’t changed, but is amplified is that good user experiences are the key to successful long-term brand building and immediate conversion and the place testing has in creating effective marketing strategies.

Fables of the Reconstruction
Still, the display world has been trying to convince advertisers that everything is going to be better with Behavioral Targeting. They claim analytic and data driven delivery is going to make display, well relevant. Yes, BT is better than just blasting out media however it is flawed because it is targeting based on past actions and previous intention assumptions. It’s nowhere nearly as effective for ROI as targeting to a current or engaged action as is done in SEM. Nor does it address the largest problem facing display, drawing the context of user focus with great creative and messaging.

Ironically one of the few places I have seen display provide a measured online success is when used in a marketing mix that includes search. Using search impression data we can measure the interest that display advertising creates. At SES New York this year I presented research collected Sony’s launch of a new a digital camera showing how a branded display campaign increased brand impressions in search. Others like Cam Balzar at Performics have presented similar findings. Clearly display can be used to increase branded keyword inventory. This can be a huge benefit for advertisers as these low cost/high click keywords are usually the most important in the portfolio.

However, the search world and the display world have and continue to reside in different universes. Why? One requires understanding of how to spend money. The other requires understanding of how to make money.

Life’s Rich Pageant
We are only scratching the surface of what RIA and metrics driven marketing will do and mean to analytic vendors and ad buyers. There will be a sea change. But businesses and marketers need not worry. As with the rest of the next-generation changes to the web progress is not only inevitable, progress is good and brings with it opportunity. If there is one thing that this new paradigm is about it is about doing more with less. Those are metrics everyone should be happy with.

*The Emetrics Summit is October 16-18 in Washington DC

Social Media Optimization & Branding

Pathways to Experience

Your brand value is in large part made up of the many different experiences your users have with it. The value increases as more new users have good experiences and your existing user’s expectations are met. Our job as marketers is to create the awareness and expectations that feed user desire to experience your brand. Ultimately, brand-marketing success should be judged by our effectiveness getting your brand into the hands of users.

In my presentations on Branding and Search at SES I have talked about the amazing and underappreciated power of search to brand since it is “the pathway to experience.” Increasingly however, pathways to experience occur outside the control of businesses and brands. Such is the power of social media. In order to be successful building your brand in this second form of user controlled media it is imperative, as with search, to understand the power of social media and optimize around it.

Box of Legos

I recently had a great conversation with Jamie Roche and John Atkins who’s blazing some of these trails at Jobster. We were discussing a favorite topic, how the website is dead. We concluded that digital content, be it articles, reviews, products or widgets are just like Lego pieces. Since you are the first one to play with the Legos, you get to decide what you want to make with them. You may choose to create a dinosaur with your Legos (and many have ;). This is how you present your content and your brand to the world…take a look at my dinosaur!

But that is increasingly not the optimal way to construct a digital business. Do you really want to limit the ability to reach to users and generate interest in your product or service by only making dinosaurs yourself? There is tremendous power in giving users access to your Legos and letting them construct them in different ways. Some people might prefer to make a submarine out of that same Lego set. Some people may want to build a dino-marine. It’s natural to assume that some users may prefer the submarine to the dinosaur. It’s also safe to assume that people looking for a submarine would never have thought to look for a dinosaur.

If you retain control over your content your ability to create interest and reach new audiences is limited. If you let everyone play with your “Legos” you are truly leveraging the power of social media. You are allowing and fostering the creation of more pathways to experience. These paths create exposure and deliver relevance. That is the heart of Social Media Optimization.

What’s Old is New

So the question becomes how to practically optimize in this dynamic?

There are many ways we can measure the power of branding. Every expression of interest has value as a measure of brand especially volume metrics like search impressions and conversion. We can also give actions like TOS, PV, CTR, view-through and latency defined values and begin to measure brand ROI. If we can measure we can test. If we can test we can optimize.

We can discover what uses and forms of the content are creating interest in certain audience clusters. Is there a mashup of our content/product or service that has generated interest? What does this tell us about our brand? About our audience? How can we refine or provide additional content that can create continued interest? Might this be different by audience? Was there an organic viral element? Who influenced this and how?

In reality SMO is nothing more than affiliate marketing 2.0. This is the way many online businesses grew in the late 90’s and Affiliate Marketing Directors played an important role. I expect we’ll see a new position, Social Media Director, become a key position in the digital marketing departments of the future.

Finding the right places to distribute your content where it makes the greatest impact is nothing new. What’s new is the idea of embracing users to shape and uncover new relevant pathways to experiencing your brand.

Optimizing Your Content Pages

This past week at OMMA New York I spoke to content providers. The session was titled “When Every Page is a Landing Page.” This indeed is the case and exemplifies the power of digital marketing (namely search) to deconstruct traditional forms of media and the long held practices around them.

The idea of presenting content in sections and in a linear fashion has been the model since long before the printing press. Understandably, websites were crafted with this information hierarchy. No one in 1995-1998 at the birth of the commercial web could estimate the impact that search engines would have on the way users sought, received and consumed information. This type of reference had never existed before.

Search has the unique power to fracture content. The ability to deliver relevance in 0.04 seconds will do that. It has changed the way we interact with content in new and interesting ways that have just started to be recognized and appreciated.

With the value of content skyrocketing and the hyper-competitive nature of mindshare these sites are beginning to see the need to strategize around delivering relevance that fosters engagement. We know users want bits and pieces of content that they deem relevant and we know users will always gravitate towards the ability to immediately access relevance. With this behavior predominate, content providers have no choice but to strategize each page like a landing page and optimize accordingly. Also magnified is the need to get more RSS feed subscriptions through testing and optimization.

So how should content providers strategically think of their content pages as landing pages?

The goals for content providers need to be threefold:

1. Segmentation
Dividing your audience where it makes an impact

2. Relevance
Delivering relevance to foster engagement

3. Engagement
Enabling further consumption on user's terms

It’s much easier to provide relevance and meet user goals when you can segment your audience. If your landing page does not have the content that helps the user fulfill their goal of information discovery than you have missed an opportunity to engage.

Once you have provided that goal fulfillment for the user you can try to fulfill your own goals as a business by trying to further engage the user with additional relevance. This can be accomplished in a number of ways.

Let’s look to the retail world for clues to how this should be done. Below are examples from “category” pages from Bluefly and NY Times.

Let’s take a look at another example. This time from Paid search for “Pope Benedict” who has recently been in the news. Interestingly, both ABC and CBS bought the keyword. As you can see, both networks have the content that will possibly fulfill the user goal. One of the networks provides relevance on the landing page to help not only ensure goal fulfillment but also continued engagement while the other does not.

The strategy here is really very simple. We are intelligently changing content based on the source of a reader and his or her behavior. The challenge for content provides is being able to leverage the amount of content they have now and will have more of in the future.

Digital marketing strategies are evolving at a breakneck pace, especially in the areas of content. Content providers need to proactively look to optimize their sites in the same way that retailers do. You content is your product. Optimize it!