Search Grows Up

Last week I attended MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit conference.  I wanted to share the major discussion points from the sessions and make an observation — that the majority of the conversation was not about search marketing as a stand-alone discipline, but rather about search marketing’s role in overall marketing and its integration into the process and measurement of advertising.

These are the panels that I thought had the most valuable takeaways.

Attribution Modeling. Ben Hanna from Business.com, Sissie Hsaio from Google, and Roger Barnette from SearchIgnite discussed this subject.  Organizations continue to try to position attribution modeling as a “technology issue,”  buy a widget and the problem is solved.  The group agreed that this approach is overly simplistic and that there are three dimensions to attribution modeling problem:

• Web Analytics. The most effective way to drive attribution is to ensure an appropriate amount of investment in tagging through your existing web analytics environment or ensuring that DART/Atlas tags are appropriately configured.  Most organizations already have these systems deployed — so this tactic leverages existing investment.   Very little need for “another system” to do attribution modeling.

• Testing Methodology. This is a key point from the panel — having a testing process in place, to systematically vary campaign tactics and measure impact on projected business results, is necessary to determine what the attributions should be.  Common metrics are thrown around – like “testing should comprise 10% of media budget” but few actually do this.  We discussed several concepts — that for a $1M PPC  budget, $100K should be used to do geographically split tests (that run concurrently) to look at varying levels of spend on display v search, on generic v branded terms, etc.

• Governance Issues. This was a big discussion point, and one that gets under appreciated often.  Search is the beneficiary of “last click attribution” and attribution modeling is all about taking that search ROI and moving it to other forms of media — specifically display and TV.  The result will be lowered ROI on PPC programs — which if not appropriately positioned, could be an issue for SEM agencies and SEM professionals.

What’s Next for Search. Gary Milner, Director of interactive Marketing for Lenovo, and Rob Griffin of MediaContacts (Havas) were on a panel about search futures, and this too was a very solid panel dealing with how search is being tightly integrated into other programs.

• Gary related several tests done by Lenovo designed a.) to make traditional media self-service — they did their own TV ads leveraging spot buys through Google TV and b.) to measure TV’s impact on Search — specifically Monday Night Football ad runs and ad runs from last summer’s Olympics in Beijing.  The results were very positive, as expected, however this is a key challenge to the agency model – if Google TV actually works.

• Rob  Griffin acknowledged this threat, and said that the agencies clearly have to find a way to differentiate that does not include “bulk media buys” — he suggested that the differentiation comes down to the analytics provided and to creative provisioning.  This is spot on.

• Rob also described some of the innovative concepts that Havas is doing now to tie display and search programs together.

I moderated a small breakout panel as well on attribution modeling.  When asking each of the participants what the number one issue was that prevented adoption of new attribution concepts — the unanimous answer was not technical – it was the governance issue.  The “metrics people” in the organization, who control the reporting to the CMO and the executives, are extremely reticent to change ROI stats as it breaks trending on performance info.  The question is — how much value has to be squandered by optimization and reporting to compromised metrics in order to justify “breaking the trend?”  The question goes unanswered.

There were other panels — but I thought these two captured the spirit of the conversation.  Search insider Summit tends to attract more sophisticated search professionals than other industry events — and it seems like more organizations have solid programs in place.  The struggle now is getting search tightly integrated — from a process standpoint, from a metrics standpoint, and from a technology standpoint.

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