This panel discussion got our me and my fellow Covario colleagues thinking; it’s great to know what elements fuel SEO, but what about the elements that fuel the search marketers themselves.  And as employees of an analytics company, my team went about looking for that data and we found it.

On Monday night June 6th, SMX Advanced held their Meet & Greet Cocktail Hour.   We were one of three sponsors of the evening event.   So with a little help from the nice folks at SMX Advanced and Bell Harbor Conference Center, we were able to get a statistical breakdown on what exactly the search marketers in attendance chose to fuel their conference week and with that data we put together this Infographic.

Of the 637 beverages consumed by search marketers attending the Meet & Greet Party, we learned that only 2% were non-alcoholic.  This was much lower than we had anticipated given the unrelenting Seattle sun and the slightly uncomfortable heat we all found on the conference center’s Ocean View Terrace.  Only 15% of search marketers chose to stave off heat stroke with a nice glass of wine, but as expected the majority of the wine drinkers (57%) went with white, while 43% stuck with red.  The biggest question we had was whether the cocktails or the beer selection would win the hearts of attendees and many of us had really thought that beer would be the clear winner. Interestingly enough, beer was the SMX favorite by only a plurality with 44%, while cocktails accounted for 39% of the beverages consumed at the event.

Perhaps the most interesting of the data was the breakdown of the cocktails consumed.  SMXers who had cocktails preferred Vodka drinks only marginally more than Gin (a huge surprise to us) and significantly more than Bourbon and Rum with Scotch and Whiskey just behind and Tequila in dead last.

We had thought that there would be a very clear winner here overall with one drink really standing out from the rest, but it seems that search marketers (or at least those that attend SMX Advanced) are a pretty diverse crowd, especially when it comes to their consumption habits.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

What Fuels Search Marketers – Case Study

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Rochelle has helped position The Washington Post Company as a leader and innovator in this “new media world.”  As Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing at Washington Post Digital, Rochelle is responsible for the company’s digital marketing strategy and all related programming.  Under her leadership, Washington Post Digital has deployed a variety of innovative and integrated digital marketing programs – leveraging social media, search engines and a host of other digital channels – to further extend the reach and readership of the organization’s world class news products.

Rochelle received an honorary Stevie Award for Excellence in Digital Advertising.  The award was presented by Craig Macdonald, CMO of Covario.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Rochelle Sanchirico Recognized at 6th Annual Stevie Awards

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Intel’s “Sponsors of Tomorrow” campaign named as one of three finalists for “Best Digital Integrated Campaign” and one of two finalists in the category of “Best Search Campaign”.

The DPAC Awards honor overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in Digital Publishing and Advertising.  The awards  are presented by DM2, the publishers of digiday:DAILY.  Winners will be announced at The DPAC Awards Gala on December 8th in New York City.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Intel’s Sponsors of Tomorrow Campaign named Finalist for Two DPAC Awards

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• First, an interesting tid bit.  In the history of humanity through 2003, there has been 2 exabytes of information recorded and stored.  In 2009, 2 exabytes of data are created EVERY 2 days. So every 2 days, humanity creates as much exigent information as humans did in all of pre-2003 history.  Sobering.
• Second, technology is shifting the balance of power around consumer transactions away from the advertiser and toward the consumer.  Specifically, advertisers have a continuous test of brand value.  The ability of the consumer to get reviews and comparative pricing information in real time, and leveraging mobile devices, at the point of sale, puts a risk on advertisers if they have an inferior offering. However, the ability to influence those individual transactions has never been greater – through search advertising, through targeted display advertising, and through social media.  Winning brands will survive the “information explosion” and see this as an opportunity and organize themselves to take advantage of this “new order” of branding.
• Third, mobile is a huge focus for Google. Mr. Schmidt indicated that the growth in mobile, and the opportunity it affords advertisers, is staggering.  He said that the people at Google are challenged to think about the entirety of the opportunity mobile presents – given its ability to not only provide an advertising platform that is aware of a consumer’s location, but through leverage of their past behavior, can predict their actions and make real time recommendations (see Minority Report!).  He used an example of the airport, where the mobile device will be able to tell a passenger, upon checking in for a particular flight, the on-time percentage of the flight, its ETD, its ETA, and can predict the “level of frustration” a passenger will likely experience.
• Fourth, this fits into his overall approach – that advertising will ultimately be transparent, local (personal), scalable, and measureable.  He pushed the audience to consider these four factors in designing and executing any campaign – and if the advertiser/agency ecosystem is unable to execute on these processes, they risk losing out on the future dynamics of the brand battle.

I found it amusing that the first question from the audience was a question on Google’s foray into traditional advertising media “so what happened to Google Radio and Print?”  Google has a great perspective on this.

Each advertising channel has a different “quality of measurement” –with search, it is extremely high quality, with radio and print it is of lower quality.  Mr. Schmidt said that they pulled back on radio because Google was unable to offer a significant improvement for the media buyer over the current process.  Why?  There was no way to get a return signal on the effectiveness of the advertising.  This is not the case with Google TV.  Since Google is leveraging Echostar to do the TV placements, the “box” that satellite users have acts like a feedback computer to see whether the ad is actually viewed by a household with the appropriate target demographics for the brand.  There is feedback.  HD Radio will provide the same capability ultimately, as will the Kindle (if you can consider the Kindle rendering of “print” to be analogous to the traditional “print media”).  He expects this effort to revive itself as the technology evolves.

The last point is that Mr. Schmidt said that his ideal system would provide advertisers with the dashboard of performance for all their media channels, with the correlative impact each channel has on driving brand awareness or brand purchase.  This is a vision shared by Covario – and not surprisingly, it springs from organizations that dedicate themselves to search.  Search has a privileged position in this conversation given its “last click” fulfillment of the buying funnel.  We see the same from all of our clients – search is not just a media channel, it is an enabler of effectiveness across all media channels.  Ultimately, as Covario (and Google) integrate data together on advertising and marketing, the ability to do direct statistical analysis on behavior, and “fuzzy logic” on behaviors that cannot be directly measured – the ability of marketers to advertise transparently, locally, at scale, and with complete measurement.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: Advertisers need to develop a comprehensive mobile strategy for 2010.  Execution may not necessarily take place in the US for all brands, but testing should be most aggressive in Scandinavian countries, Japan and Korea where cell phone use is more advanced.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2: As Search Marketers, with an understanding of the power of measurability, we are in the best position to help drive the necessary change in our organizations to embrace the principals of transparency, personalization (locality), scalability and measurability.  This is a big issue, but the technology exists to allow this transformation to begin and it is imperative to having a winning brand 5 years from now.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Digital Scores A Comeback

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Being a digital advertiser, one would think the big topic would be the increasing way in which consumers have fragmented their approach to learning about brands – from search, to display, to blogs, to viral marketing. This morning’s sessions featured presentations from a number of CMOs of leading brands – McDonald’s, WalMart, MillerCoors and Verizon. They all gave excellent presentations on how they are building their brands – through that tried and true media form… the television commercial spot.  TV ratings continue to slide.  Viewership is particularly low with younger audiences, who embrace “new media” moreso than older populations.  Innovation seems to mean focus on cultural segmentation (i.e., run TV ads in multiple languages).  Conversations I’ve had show that the top issues being faced by the ANA Board of Directors are around negotiations with SAG actors for controlling TV ad creative development costs and how to get FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) to recognize goodwill on the balance sheet as the “value of marketing” – a classic issue that was being debated when I went to business school in 1994.

Survey question – what percentage of advertisers lowered spending in 2009?  51%.  How many migrated media from traditional to digital?  14%.  This is a symptom of being able to measure the impact to the bottom line – and when the going gets tough, the budgets get going.   Clearly, marketers in general have not sold the benefits of marketing to the organization – CFO and CEO.  Digital marketing in specific has not shown its value to the CMO – so hand wringing about the “accountability of digital and search” gets lost in these conversations.

The elephant in the room is how brand managers bring focus to this large scale transition of consumer brand awareness moving from TV to online.  74% of the audience says that they see marketing as an investment in the future of the brand.  If the future is digital, and CMO’s aren’t talking about how they are planning for this, then predicting future winning and losing brands becomes straightforward.

This even fits into the ANA’s big issue – recognition of accounting goodwill.  Best way to grow it?  Focus on online brand building.

More to come from the afternoon sessions – which include IBM and Google.  My prediction – they will bring this critical issue to the fore.

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

TV Ads – 4; Digital – 0

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We updated this analysis in August with a post on Actionable Insights that predicted paid search advertising growth in the 5–10% range in 2H’09 over 1H’09 levels.  This projection was correct, as growth in Q3 was 7.7% globally.

Many of our customers are undergoing 2010 budget planning at this time, with specific emphasis on the budget allocations for interactive advertising.  Our advice to customers, based on both the dynamics we are seeing in the 2H’09 data and on our conversations with customers is that paid search advertising budgets for the high tech sector will be 10-15% above 2009 levels — and advertisers will need to maintain at least this level of budget growth to maintain online market share.

We expect CPCs to go up in 2010 by 10-15%.  The CPCs have come down significantly since last year due to pull back in using search engines for branding campaigns.  However, as additional spending comes into the market, we do expect the price of ads to rise.

Last, using our new analysis of CPAs, we have seen the cost of acquisition through search decrease by 15% from Q1 this year.  This means the average ROI for our customers has increased by 15% so far.  This is a key variable when making the business case for funding in 2010.  Search clearly is measurable — however continued improvements in effectiveness make additional budget quantifiably defensible for advertisers.

Some of the other key findings from our Q3 Global Paid Search Spending Analysis include:

• It is 2010 budgeting season, and with Q3 paid search spending increasing in line with previous predictions, Covario is recommending to its clients to increase budgets by >15% in 2010 in order to grow market share.
• The majority of that budget should continue to go to Google, and in fact, a growing amount in every geo except APAC.  CPCs continue to decrease rapidly, making inventory more affordable, and Google’s CPA index continues to improve.
• The Q3 announcement of the Bing/Yahoo deal has had little impact on changes in spending levels on the networks — both showed slight upticks in growth.
• Purchasing click Inventory continues to become more affordable, as average CPCs in the high tech market fell to a 3 year low — $.60 on average — from $.82 in Q2.  CPCs on Yahoo and Bing have plummeted.  We expect that additional spending will drive CPCs back up later in the year, and in 2010 — but there is no evidence of this yet.
  

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Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Tis The Budget Season. Expect 10-15% Growth in Paid Search in 2010

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From Covario’s press release this morning…

SAN JOSE (SES 2009) San Diego CA – August 6, 2009 – Covario, Inc., the leader in interactive marketing analytics, today at Search Engine Strategies San Jose announced that three of its clients – Intel Corporation, Procter & Gamble and Washington Post Digital – have been named finalists in the 2009 Search Engine Watch (SEW) Awards. Designed to recognize excellence in search engine marketing, inspire innovation and encourage new ideas, the SEW Awards acknowledge outstanding marketers in 14 different categories. Reviewed by a panel of over 30 industry experts, campaigns were judged in four key areas: innovation in methodology and execution, achieving success goals, excellence in tactical execution, and overall approach and category relevance.The Covario clients named as finalists include:

• Intel Corporation “The Sponsors of Tomorrow” for Best Integration of Search with Other Media

o Intel’s “Sponsors of Tomorrow” campaign launched in May of 2009 and is ongoing. It has a global reach (25+ countries launched within first 45 days) and targets multiple audience segments by leveraging and integrating a host of media channels including TV, print, retail, digital OOH, events, banners, video, blogs, bulletin boards, and search marketing. Search marketing including development of ad creative, landing pages, purchase of keywords, and A/B testing for creative elements provided a comprehensive, unified and quantifiable foundation for all sub-campaigns.

• Procter and Gamble for Most Innovative Use of Search Engine Optimization

o Procter and Gamble engineered a highly scalable, global Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program to support hundreds of brands, literally thousands of websites, and a multitude of search engines, languages, conversion models and technologies. The global program has delivered impressive results to the organization by designing and deploying best practices, selecting AORs for search, and leveraging technologies to automate as much of the SEO process as possible. 

• The Washington Post for Most Innovative Use of Search Engine Optimization

o Washington Post Digital faced a significant challenge – capturing a larger share of the newsreaders online while porting over four thousand pieces of content daily. To deal with this challenge, the company built out a highly innovative and scalable SEO program that includes a centralized team of internal search experts, Covario™ Organic Search Insight, as well as the content developers and editors in the newspaper. Success for this team has been achieved on the final metric – driving increased readership to the content, and on all the key interim measures of success necessary to make the website visible to searchers.

“We are honored to have multiple client campaigns and programs recognized by this year’s Search Engine Watch Awards,” said Russ Mann, chief executive officer of Covario. “Each of these programs illustrates the creativity, innovation and results that are possible when you combine advanced analytics and software automation with high caliber search marketing professionals like those at each of our clients and within our own team at Covario.”

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario Clients Nominated for Search Marketing Excellence

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Harvard Professor Harry Dent suggested that the baby boomer “age wave” would result in an employment, economic and stock market crest between 2007 and 2009, when baby boomers would reach their peak career years in their early 50’s, and then our largest single demographic would start to retire and decrease their spending.

Most of the literature around online marketing and the ROI of advertising has discussed the changing nature of consumer media consumption habits.  There have been a lot of pixels spilled noting that Gen X, Gen Y and the Millennials/Gen Z now consume over 60% of their media on the internet, but less than 20% of global media spend and effort is on the web.

While the new Generations X-Z changed their media consumption habits due to major innovations in technology and media, the Baby Boomer Generation still held the office of CMO in large companies and the Presidency at large agencies—and they held the purse strings as well.  The earlier Baby Boomer generation is unfortunately stuck in the business models and media types of the past. While Millennials are “digital natives” and Gen X and Gen Y are “digital immigrants,”  the Boomers are being left behind labeled as the “digital ignorants.”   These are the folks who grew up with the Marlboro Man and Mad Men. “Creative” ruled the day.  When business results were down, a CMO called up the ad agency and ordered up another TV commercial.

Over the next 5 years,  however, the age wave impact will truly occur.  The current 50-to-60 year old Baby Boomer CMOs will retire and be replaced by 35-45 year old Gen X and Gen Y CMOs.  Not only will a new generation of CMOs be taking office, they will take office at a younger age than their predecessors. These new CMOs will have grown up with Apple computers at school and Ataris at home, and will have come of working age in the mid-to-late 90’s, at the dawn of the first internet boom. The new CMO won’t need to learn how to use current technologies or embrace new ones, because agility and speed and innovation, coupled with math, science, computers and analytics, are part of their genetic makeup and their schooling.   The new CMO is also a CIO, CTO and CFO as well, and they will be more comfortable doing more in-house, running the numbers, and not requiring big media or big agencies to get the work done and make results happen.

Most importantly, the new CMO will demand accountability and ROI from their staff, their spend and their partners.   “Marketing is the new Finance,” says Ann Lewnes, CMO of Adobe.   The new CMO will know how to facilitate conversations but not dominate them, they will simultaneously be global and local, they will use more highly targeted and sophisticated messaging through more nichey and organic channels to influence specific constituent personas.

Intel’s Sean Maloney and Adobe’s Ann Lewnes, are examples of this younger, digital-savvy CMO, and it only makes sense that the first wave of the new CMOs would appear at the largest technology companies.  We are also seeing Gen Xers appear, however, at more traditional companies as well, such as  P&G’s new  Marc Pritchard.

In the next 10 years, the face of marketing will change even more dramatically than it has over the past 10 years.  Not just because consumer tastes or technologies will continue to evolve, but because the first wave of the truly digital, Gen X CMO will be taking office, and they will be the ones writing the checks and driving the decisions.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: If you are a search marketer or digital marketer in a company with a Gen X CMO, then you’re in luck.  Focus on ROI, analytics, and financial metrics when pitching for budget.  Provide cost-benefit analyses, tradeoffs and risk assessments.  Don’t be afraid to push for software and personnel to get things done in house, rather than outsourcing.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2: If you are a search marketer or senior interactive executive in a company with a more traditional CMO, then you have a few options.  Focus on the creative aspects of search and digital and how they enhance and extend the value of the traditional media such as TV, print and radio.   Expect to leverage the agency of choice of the CMO, or provide “options” of which agencies you prefer, with some leaning more toward technology enablement and some leaning more toward pure service.   Make sure to be aligning yourself with any up-and-coming potential Gen X CMOs, or be prepared for one to be brought in from the outside—the average tenure of a CMO is still less than 2 years.  If you are feeling more aggressive or you think YOU are the Gen X or Gen Y CMO that’s next in line, you can always pitch your CFO or go straight to the CEO on the benefits of paid and natural search and digital marketing overall, and make a play to get more budget and prove it.  This is a risky career strategy, however, for those in large traditional companies!
At the end of the day, if you do great work—both creative and metrics-based, you let your work speak for itself, and you make others around you (including your CMO) look great and achieve great results- then your time will come soon enough and you will become one of the next generation CMOs that are driving global changes in marketing!

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

The Introduction of the Gen X CMO

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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.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Search Grows Up

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Adobe has won the 2009 ad:tech Limelight Award for Best Search Marketing Campaign Strategy!  The award will be presented tomorrow night (April 21st at ad:tech San Francisco) in recognition of the data-driven strategy and unprecedented results demonstrated by their recent campaign titled ‘Shortcut to Brilliant’.  The campaign, spanning 28 countries and localized for 17 languages, leveraged advanced analytics and a variety of search engine marketing services provided by Covario, Inc.  Results from the campaign exceeded revenue objectives by 217% and conversion objectives by more than 400%.

CONGRATULATIONS to the entire Adobe team!

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Adobe Wins Ad:Tech Limelight Award

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