Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Links vs. Cookies: A Tale of Two Web Economies

 

I credit Jonathan Strauss of link analytics company awe.sm with coining the phrase “the link as the cookie.” I’ve been borrowing that expression for the past year because it not only describes his service and the meta concept of linked data, but it also encapsulated what intelligent landing page optimizers had been doing for some time – taking parameters from URLs and using them as rules to dynamically deliver relevant and persuasive content.

Strangely though, the data revolution, at least as it relates to advertising, seems to have passed the link by. The cookie is where much of the excitement and focus around new data sources for targeting and optimization rests. “BlueKaing” data (a term I heard for the first time a couple of weeks ago) has now become a verb to describe the re-emergent cookie economy. This unbridled buzz caused Andy Monfried of Lotame to caution the display community last week to look beyond the cookie for targeting.

“The holy grail is not just cookie targeting, but to see the linkage between the top of the funnel and the bottom.”

Yet the cookie is being used by every color of advertiser including (or especially) Google to target campaigns to “audiences” or to “in-market” rather than to specific sites. Some of the excitement around cookie data is justified but it is also fraught with a host of challenges to publishers and advertisers, almost none of which protect the best interests of either.

In contrast, the link economy is immune to the issues swarming around the cookie economy, even furthering my consternation about why the link economy is so grossly undervalued and under-hyped. The reality is using the link as a set of rules for content/ad delivery has implications much more far reaching than landing pages and URL shorteners. As anyone who has made money on the web through transactions can attest, since the inception of the commercial web, the link is its most valuable currency.

The first thing to realize about the size and value of the link economy is that the engines of it are the three of the largest web properties in the world - Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second important point about the link economy is that it is natively cross platform - search, email, mobile, social - links can get distributed and can work anywhere. The third important point about the link economy is that it provides an immediate trigger for any media object - video, audio or text. The last and maybe most important value of the link economy is that it is both realtime and lasting. One link can get you a million visitors in a day – it can also get you million visitors over three years.

Contrast the link’s value to cookies that are driven by a small percentage of online media spend, are not cross platform, have no native trigger mechanism to launch media and whose value decreases quickly until it is zero. This is why it blows my mind that BlueKai can raise $20M when in the scale of these two web economies a company like bit.ly commandingly leveraging the link economy should be seen as creating incredibly more long-term value. Somewhere there is a huge disconnect happening. Maybe it's just happening in my mind, though I doubt it.

I doubt it because we have already witnessed the link build three of the largest and most effective media channels on the web; PPC, email & affiliate. Links also serve as the core logic function for facilitating every major transactional site from Amazon, to eBay, to Craigslist. I have no doubt that the value and economic impact of the link will continue to increase exponentially over the coming years far outpacing any media value cookies are creating. In fact, as many of you may already be thinking, it is really not a fair comparison. But as a marketer who has built a career off the link, I often find myself wondering where is the buzz, where is the appreciation, where is the strategy, where is the technology* for the most simple, native and valuable web attribute of all, the link?

* VigLink and their competitor Skimlinks are two new and cool technologies I've seen recently.

Analytics APIs Will Be Our Bridge to Intelligence

Eric Peterson has a kick ass post titled “The Coming Bifurcation in Web Analytics Tools.” 

In it he defines the bifurcation issue: 

“I believe that we are about to see an increasing number of companies in the coming year drop their paid vendor’s “basic solution” in favor of Google Analytics and, at the same time, seriously consider adding their vendor’s high-end offering.”

Though he does not highlight it, he also mentions what I believe will eventually bridge this predicted bifurcation. That is, the ability to leverage the Analytics API to create more robust and relevant tool sets, not only for workflow and insights, but most importantly for action. He does mention ShufflePoint as an example of a company building off the Google Analytics API and while being a killer workflow add-on it barely scratches the surface of what can be done via an analytics API.

So, I firmly believe that the bifurcation Eric writes about will be temporary. In addition to cost, the API is GA's big competitive advantage in the enterprise.  Google is positioned well and experienced for this future. Over the next few years third parties insanely focused on adding value to "numbers" will create added layers of data intelligence to the core analytics data much the same way bid management and MVT companies added actionable intelligence to the core Search data over the last 5 years.

Though I understand their protectionist mindset, I've been disappointed that Omniture has held back API access to their customers through tokens and the like (though I believe they recently have opened up higher degrees of access to their Genesis partners). I think at some point over the next 12-24 months and as a direct result of Eric’s prediction coming true, they will have no choice but to fully open their API. This will really usher in the next wave of analytics and add serious value to an already insanely valuable medium.

What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and a third party (advertiser, restaurant, etc.) is required to create value. This is where these services fall short for me and thanks to recent tweets from my friend and SEO guru Natasha Robinson I’ve finally realized why.

As Natasha says, the check-in links syndicated through social media verge on unclickable. The reason is rather simple. The landing pages provide no value to the referrer. Yet, the landing page is the spot where the triangulation of goals must align. The whole value chain for this product converges at the landing page.

While we can clearly see the potential of these services to provide tangible value to the establishment where check-ins occur and some (for now less tangible) value to the Mayor McCheeses and people doing the check-in, I would argue that the service only works if there is strong value being created in the stream. Without this newfangled linkbait, the fish ain’t gonna bite.

Let’s take a look at each of the content areas on Foursquare’s landing page and see what is and isn’t working for a referrer and the value triumvirate as a whole.

  

1) As a referrer I already know from my stream the name of the establishment. I already know that the person that has checked in here. There is huge immediately actionable value for the establishment though. Many locations would benefit from an announcement categorizing everyone who entered it. Of course that can provide parallel value to the person checking in.

2) The amount of check-ins and visitors does not really tell me much, especially for a new service that is building scale -- it’s very difficult for a naïve user to asses this value. Again, most of this value rests for the establishment.

3) The images of the Mayorship and the people who’ve been here have negligible transactional value to anyone.

4) Maybe most interesting for a location based service the map has very little value. In most cases the address above is sufficient information for a referrer at the moment of landing. The establishment and check-in already know where they are.

5) Tips can be helpful but their value is tied to a small segment of temporal traffic (the moment or prior to check-in). While this value is highly dynamic tips have the most shared value among troika of user, establishment and audience.

6) Tags are fairly generic. They likely provide the most value to Foursquare to provide classifications however it doesn’t appear that many users are adding tags. Also it appears there are some negative aspects to user tagging that can affect the value chain.

So the question remains, and of course has become heightened with Yelp adding a location based feature to its service last week and others soon to enter the fray, what improvements can Foursquare and other services make to encourage CTR on their linkbait and then create value from all from those visitors. That’s a rather big question so I’ll just tackle it form the referrer perspective.

As a landing page the primary success metric needs to be converting visitors to register for the service. As the product grows there are many more success metrics that can add value for optimization (e.g. new visitors to location pages that eventually check-in). For existing users there are also important metrics to optimize on against bounce rate/use. What good is a notification service if those notified don't take action?

As mentioned in the dissection above there is nothing on this page that is persuasive and inexplicably there is not a call to action. Is this a game? Then tell me what makes it fun or challenging. Is this a place to make plans? Then what are the tools that make that helpful and easy. Why do I want to use this service? What are the benefits to me? Until the answers to those questions are obvious landing on this page has no value for a referrer and products like this are missing a golden opportunity that may be as temporal as the very content they distribute.

The Value of Search Ads for Brand Keywords

On Search Engine Land today I saw a nice post on understanding the dynamics of Paid vs. Organic (or Natural) search.

As David Roth explains it:

What keywords are we really talking about? Those that match exactly with your brand name or branded product name, where there is generally no competition. So if you are Acme Widget Company we would be talking about keywords like “acme” and potentially “acme widget.”

A couple of years ago I put the questions of the value created by branded keyword ads to the test. The posts were very popular and I still get asked these questions all the time. Since there are probably a ton of new marketers and followers that missed it the first time and in light of the renewed interest David's thoughtful SEL post might bring, I thought I would bump this three part series back to the top.

Part 1: Do I Purchase My Brand Keywords or Has Google Improved So Much I Don’t Need To?

Part 2: ROI Factors of Brand Keywords: Paid vs. Organic

Part 3: Buy Branded Keywords? A Case Study on Traffic, Conversion and RPV

I followed this series of posts with a the following presentation at SES San Jose on the Ad Testing Research & Findings panel.

SES San Jose Ad Testing Research & Findings

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

Of course the question that comes out of all this data is why. Why were the ads in this instance (and this is not the only one I've seen, just the one I could share) so helpful to improving results? Some of my early thoughts are in Part 3. Since then I've come to think that the influence of Google itself has something to do with it too. Remember, (as @aarongoldman reminded me a few weeks ago) 62% of searches are unaware of the differences between paid and natural results. The copy in the ads is a much an endorsement from Google (the #1 brand in the world) as the company themselves. That's persuasion based off a brand-leverage strategy at it's finest.

I hope you find these thoughts and data helpful. If you still don’t know the answer by now about whether you should run PPC ads on your brand keywords, it’s test!

Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010

Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was a good moment to take a personal snapshot and share it with you. In no particular order, the areas of digital media & advertising that I’m most excited and interested in right now.

NWA – Numbers with Answers: There was incredible amount of M&A consolidation in the world of web analytics from 2003-2006. The result over the past few years has been a dark period with little innovation. The basic data retrieval systems, log-files, .js and packet sniffing have been in place a very long time yet the reporting output of these systems has not progressed much. Making matters worse many C-level execs, creative agencies and digital verticals do not trust analytics (newspaper sites reported not believing Omniture/Google Analytics data in the 9/09 ITZ Publishing survey). The bottom line is this: insights and actions are just too hard to cull. Presenting the data in more interesting ways has become vogue but this is not the answer. Legacy analytics solutions are asking (in the best case) old questions and (in the worst case) wrong questions. I sense that not only the questions but more importantly the answers will begin to change in 2010.

China - The Supernova Market: The Search and Display advertising opportunity in China has never been better. It will continue to gain velocity over the entire decade. There are 350 million Chinese on the Internet (vs. 200mm US).  Half of them are under the age of 25. Almost all of them (94%) are on broadband. That colossal user number...it is only a 25% penetration rate (vs. 72% US). Commercial web transactions are now starting to shoot through the roof.  There are some incredibly exciting web companies emerging from China and some really interesting US start-ups that are co-located in China. In 2010 I plan on being much more active in understanding this market and looking for opportunities in it. In fact, I’ve started already. It is simply shortsighted strategy not to.

Testing Reaches Critical Mass:  In the two years since I left Offermatica/Omniture I’ve been approached by about twenty start-ups in the testing and targeting space. Some of those companies have launched already and a good number more will emerge over the next year. This makes sense because two things have happened in the market. 1) Similar to Analytics, almost all the major players have been acquired leaving a void of innovation; 2) More marketers (especially mid-sized) understand the need to focus on post-click optimization. It seems pretty clear that this space will undergo a renaissance beginning in 2010 with a focus on lighter, faster and more simple solutions. I’m excited to continue having a role in the evolution of the testing & optimization space both on this blog and in my advisory capacity with a couple of emergent players including Performable.

Local Zooms In: This could just as easily been a blurb about the Facebook-Google war that has been going on now for over a year. Clearly Google has stepped up its game – its local pages have never been better and the UGC continues to increase in volume and curatical efficiency. I see this battle as critical to Facebook’s future. Yes I know how big they are and their growth rate, but their RPV (revenue-per-visitor) is incredibly low. They can’t sustain their business as a voyeuristic photo site for many more years. The key to their success is tied in developing local business pages attached to social graphs with the requisite search advertising capability. One of these two companies will crack this nut to the tune of $20B of incremental revenue over the next few years and $100B by the end of the decade. We’ve always known local is the Holy Grail. My bet is on Google because at the core all this local stuff is search, but it will be fascinating to watch this play out over the year.

New Display Formats: Without a doubt display advertising performance suffers from standardized sizes. The IAB has eighteen standard sizes for display ads yet 90% of ads are created in three of those sizes. The effect of this compounded with standardized placements of those sizes creates an insurmountable challenge for the attention of users. Part of the onus of solving this problem is on publishers. As masters of their domain they have the ability to innovate. Two start-ups I’m involved with are working in this area and seeing incredible results matching a data layer with breakthrough creative formats. The challenge of course is getting this to scale but the performance (we’re talking CTR of 10-20% in some verticals) warrants tremendous excitement as these companies go from bootstrap to chinstrap in 2010.

POS Closes the Loop: Two of the most mind-blowing conversations for me this past year were speaking with companies actively involved in using offline POS (Point-of-Sale) data in the digital marketing loop. This is “first-party” data at its finest. After learning about how they are working I have no doubt that the future of targeting, re-targeting, eCRM and increasing LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) rests in this area. The verticals where this data can be effective are limitless. The platforms where it can be used are ubiquitous. That is one giant market that can’t be ignored. This is but one space where I think we’ll see dollars shift from soft metrics to hard metrics around retention and increased customer value. The über competitive nature of 2010 and beyond demands it.

 

2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

"A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." - Emerson

2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can follow me here). Many ideas that in the past would have become full-blown posts got tweeted into the stream (or is it an abyss). As a result my pieces tended to be more thought out, longer and less frequent. Also, my subject matter took a distinct turn. Last year I mainly blogged about challenges facing advertising while this year my focus was on the challenges facing publishers. So in case you missed something the first time or want a refresher I have curated a years worth of posts and shared my favorites below.

The Publisher's "Penta-tech":

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

Reaping The Ads You Sow

People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

Pubs Need to Get the Performance $ignal

Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

Other Stuff:

API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next

Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

Presentations:

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

Interviews:

Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

Interviewed by AdExchanger

Lastly, happy and healthy holidays to all my readers, commenters and subscribers both old an new. I truly appreciate and value your interest in what I have to say. See you in 2010.

Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary.

Attribution quickly formed the business models for the new medium -- traffic buying, affiliate marketing (have we forgotten how Amazon got to be Amazon), SEO and Email are all channels that emerged based on one principle. You could count what you got in return.

In measured media, performance becomes its driver and thus optimization became the obligatory next progression. However for much of digital media, namely site content/user experience & display advertising, it has been a long slog towards optimization. A medium capable of being optimized to deliver persistent relevance may only be (by my best estimate) about 5% there.

Of course if we want to look for optimization inspiration we look at Google. Paid Search serves as our shining example of what optimization is capable of. Many are trying to emulate their models for success but search is only a small piece of our digital experience.

Still, there is one important lesson we can take away from search. We can optimize the medium up to the point of diminishing returns. This is simply amazing. Yet, most “experts” and certainly C-level execs don’t even realize this is possible. Most clients will not believe it. But it is an economic law (and one that data and ad exchanges will put to the test).

Not to be lost in all the dashboards and spreadsheets is what we are counting - the experience of people. Performance is based on the actions that control the medium – content, experience and people’s response. There is of course the ability to optimize the buy-side however if we have learned anything as performance marketers it is that the sell side optimization factors most highly into optimization. In this regard we can simply define our goals as optimizing the presentation and delivery of content.

This feedback loop is one reason the web experience has the amazing ability to be optimized and should improve for years to come…if we can get there. Optimization is hard. It requires some measure of testing and analysis -- from bidding systems to creative performance. And data is a funny animal. There is no such thing as a perfect data set and often there are outliers. As we’ve seen this past year, even the world’s best systems are unable to prevent market forces from skewing predictive models to the point of rendering them useless.

There is also the “Predictive Paradox.” As we witness everyday in real-life people’s behavior is simply unpredictable over short periods of time. Yet incredibly and more often than not, over longer periods of time the differences in behavior normalize without significant variation. What this means to behavioral marketers is two things: 1) it is really hard to accurately assess wins that take place over short periods of time & 2) it is really hard to improve results by a large margin over a long period of time.

The other difficulty with optimization besides statistical significance is quality of data -- how much noise is in the data set. Optimization of ads or any content has so much to do with the surroundings. Content, layout, visitor source, visitor familiarity with site, and probably about another hundred or so factors. With so much noise the more complex the testing the more false positives in the numbers. Yet for some reason we’ve been led to believe complexity is sexy when in fact it is accuracy that is sexy.

There is one last thing we should never forget as we spend more time optimizing digital media and it may be the most important aspect. Counting tells only part of the story - it tells you what people did. It does not tell you why.  It does not provide answers or shed light on the actions people never realized they could take. To a large degree these answers can only be achieved through testing methodologies and observational research. Be wary of any predictive or targeting system not continually validating its assumptions with these methods…and good luck optimizing.

Previous Relevant Posts:

Expert Guide to Multivariate Testing Success

Capturing the Gorilla: New Ways to Quantify the Value of Search

On-Site Targeting: Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy

The Power of Brand to Influence Outcomes or Why Brands Will Always Rule Digital

Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

Display advertising, which at one time looked like the web’s glorious channel is now a glory hole for direct marketing. In many respects brand advertisers have themselves to blame, not believing that a click is branding and fumbling around with poor microsite driven strategies that have zero ROI. The fact of the matter is an interaction experience anywhere (in our case the click) is an opportunity to create an emotional attachment with your product or service.

So while half the blame for the display implosion rests with strategy the other half rests with technology. Listening to the display industry of late you might believe that the worst is over – that a second coming of display is upon us. Emerging from the wreckage are two saviors that marry new technology with emergent strategy to blend performance with brand. Let’s call them Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Thing 1: The new mode of buying display ads is about buying an audience

Thing 2: The new mode of buying display ads is about using data to optimize

If you recall in The Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2 fly kites around to amuse the advertisers err, children. Ultimately the kids capture the Things and the Cat in the Hat cleans up the mess that was created. Then they all disappear.

In our story Thing 1 and Thing 2 will not clean up the mess that is display advertising either and the disappearing part is ominous. I will follow up soon with a post on issues around data and optimization (in the meantime here is a great look at the challenge from AdExchanger.com) but first I want to first examine Thing 1 - the idea of buying an audience vs. the old way of buying impressions.

Audience: Audience is a group of people collected together in a single place and time. They don’t need to have similar attributes but they share some common interest defined by expressed actions or attendance. The presence of audience is by itself worthless (unless they have bought a ticket – subscription & pay4play models). The value resides in the emotional state that allows for the success of persuasive efforts. This disposition is almost always temporal in nature and as such is something that is most effectively targeted in realtime systems (like search). This is one reason why display consistently fails.

Audience information is useful to target messaging that triggers a response but the underlying emotional state is best mined deep inside the publisher’s content. Search works in a large part because it is content driven. But make no mistake, the dynamic content delivery controlled by the user is still present in publisher environments. What is not built in is effective solutions to derive revenue from the goals of the user and leverage that moment (the kairos).

So if at its core an audience is about interest, intent and action how does this fit in with the buying models now being touted? Data and observation have taught us that online demographics & personas are meaningless for optimizing performance. The web is a user-controlled medium so just like the actions that define people we need to segment and target based on what people are doing, not who they are (as defined by what they’ve done).

Don Norman calls this Activity-Centered Design. He also rightly points out the weakness of human centered design approaches to dynamic sequences -- the very backbone of the event driven medium that is the web. My own optimization work has only validated these same ideas qualitatively and quantitatively across dynamic content and advertising. People are not predictable, but their actions can be a window of predisposition to certain messages and information.

Impressions: If we are being honest with ourselves as an industry the only reason we are moving to audience buying after a dozen years is that impression-based buying/selling has run its course. The problem with buying impressions in display is only that no one actually clicks on the ads. The strategies and platform are of a different time and medium and consequently the ads suck. If we knew CTR would be this bad no one would have ever built this type of system.

On the back-end most of the problems stem from the different goals each participant (publisher, advertiser, visitor) has. This causes multiple inefficiencies or optimization conflict. Display as it exists now is further expanding the delta between the value of publisher’s visitors & content with the revenue generated from third parties. This is not sustainable business for anyone. Eventually in digital optimization no one wins unless everyone wins.

The funny thing with impressions is that when the ads are good you can actually give away the impression for free. In Search the goals of the users (relevance) the advertiser (ROI) and the publisher (revenue) work in lockstep, each helps optimize the success of the other. Search validates the idea of activity targeting vs. audience targeting. This is realtime and dynamic -- what people are doing and what is effective in persuading them to do something.  Proof that audience targeting isn’t needed? Besides language the Google homepage is the same in all 233 countries and has grown to dominate global search. 

Cleaning Up: As the web has become more complex band-aid after band-aid has been added to try and make display work.  Everyone has known about its poor performance for a decade yet few have done anything about it. Those few that have successfully created new ad platforms have not surprisingly had huge exits. However that innovation is now 5-10 years old. The “lost decade” for VC in digital advertising was due to investment in layered approaches to an underlying faulty system rather than brand new ad models (though entrepreneurs surely share some of the blame). 

It’s never too late to build new systems and it seems the need is becoming more obvious. Just yesterday Bernard Lunn of RWW made his siren call. It is my belief that in order to work new solutions must have a ground up approach where the core inputs are content and realtime events and the trigger mechanisms are visitor attributes. Just like the timing needed for ad persuasion, the current rise in APIs, realtime data, IR, semantic tools and desperate publishers signal that the time may now be right for a different conversion event.

More Thoughts:

Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

The Power of Brand to Influence Outcomes or Why Brands Will Always Rule Digital

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

The Brand Optimization Revolution - The Metrics are Coming! The Metrics are Coming!

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years.

As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been paranoid though, they’ve been sleeping through the transformation of the digital media landscape. Wake up! You can’t operate strategically the same way for 5 years in a row in digital. The technology moves too fast.

While content channels like search, mobile and social continue to rise and technology like APIs, JavaScript, XMP & RDF continue to advance publishers have made little to no investment innovating to provide better experiences with their content or revenue generation for themselves. Instead, they sat there like fat cats measuring all the free search traffic and impressions of countless display ads on their pages – and God forbid they do anything with that data.

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What’s become clear in the morass of low CPM and poor performance is that publishers can no longer rely on third parties to deliver revenue. The plunge has magnified an online ad ecosystem fraught with multiple inefficiencies – creative agencies, media buyers and planers, ad ops, networks, and on and on. Recent innovations like yield optimization and real-time bidding are only anesthetic on a wound bleeding from both sides.

Solving the revenue problem requires publishers to look in the mirror and take matters into their own hands. There have been small moves in this direction with marketing technology/services acquisitions by Cox, Glam and Meredith. Still, too few publishers understand to survive they need self-reliance.

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Ironically or not, the best example of these ideals for publishers springs from the same area as Emerson himself, TechTarget (full disclosure: TechTarget is a previous client while I was at Offermatica).

If you don’t know Tech Target your sys admin does. They operate over 50 websites in the IT space. Here’s a brief description of the company:

TechTarget Inc. is a provider of online content for buyers and sellers of corporate information technology (IT) products. Its product offerings address both lead generation and branding objectives of advertising customers.

That’s right, TechTarget has its own product solutions for advertisers. They are marketers as much as they are publishers, an agency as much as they are authors. They understand the traffic on their site, there to view their content, is theirs and the onus is on them to find the best ways to monetize it.

Really, who better to do it? Who knows more about their audience than they do? It makes perfect sense then to discover and then help meet the goals of their audience. With all the explicit and implicit data about their audience shouldn’t they be able to do this better than anyone else?

Once you have that mindset everything changes. You focus on the goals of your visitors, not the goals of your advertisers. You focus on gaining expertise on page optimization to derive the highest revenue per visitor. You focus on loyalty by knowing who your visitors are and what interests them. Your buyers become partners, not faceless networks and agencies. You do it yourself and you keep all the rewards, never for a moment aligning with revenue streams that don’t properly valuate your visitors and the content you created for them.

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Don’t tell me this will not work outside of B2B. While content may differ the user goals of information recovery and discovery and the ways to optimize and monetize them are agnostic to verticals.

I shed no tears for publishers. I’ve been beating the drum for three years that every page is a landing page. We even had a name for it at Offermatica, Content Merchandising. It never really caught on like we expected but then again it didn’t matter. There were lots of performance-based businesses that needed our services. Not surprisingly there are even more of them now (both optimization tools and performance marketers). Publishers can’t continue to be run into the ground by these savvy marketers exploiting the delta between the value of the publisher’s content & audience and what they are paying for it.

I see no other option. Use your content as the basis for your own advertising and marketing services. Be innovative, control your destiny, own the page, own the next page and deliver relevance, great experiences and utility with every pixel. Most of all help your visitors to make decisions and take actions with your content. Inherent in those actions resides the value of your content.

Related Posts:

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Mashing Up the Value of Ads & Content

How Semantic Apps Can Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent

Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed to try it again. Two weeks ago, Google followed-up with announced change of URL parameters. Some good and some bad. This week Google again seems to be rolling out AJAX SERPs this time more extensively for Firefox users. Something is happening here.

It has become clear that we are all Google’s Mr. Jones. The Google Mothership seems to be leaving and we can choose to get onboard for the data ride (Google Analytics would likely still be able to capture queries and the like) or we can live in a netherworld of insufficient data. With some sites getting 50% or more of their traffic from Google natural search not using GA in this scenario relegates them to a sort of third world of data and renders their subscription-based analytics platforms limp.

There is no question in my mind that Google owns this referrer data though I have heard it argued otherwise from the analytics vendors. The click action takes place in the Google domain and though the link data is generated from publisher content, publishers are under no obligation to have their sites indexed. There is also no question to its value. Huge. It is worth mentioning that much of the URL shorteners now driving an ever growing amount of web traffic pass even less useful referrer parameters to the linked sites.

This is Google's nuclear option to the world of web data. The fallout will be an analytic winter for many. The face of the analytics, SEO, online publishing, testing, targeting and even the public markets will all change. Does the very fact that Google has so much data leverage mean they are likely to use it to their advantage at some point? Would it be so bad to live in a world of (free) GA? They have made great strides with segmentation and continue to add data visualization. Of course there are plenty of reasons ethical, historical and rational that Google must leave their URL passable and parseable. It appears now less likely than ever to happen.