10 signs you don’t understand web analytics

June 11th, 2009
Harnessing the power of your metrics

Web analytics has always been an important aspect of digital marketing, but only recently has it been considered critical to success. The data mined through savvy analytics tracking can maximize any marketing budget by driving conversions and results; however, this only comes to pass if you understand what the data are telling you.

Web analytics is critical to measuring the success of your website as you identify opportunities to improve your business and marketing initiatives. Most marketers are confused with business implications of analytics reports, so it ends up being simpler to track what you know.

Web analytics has made great strides in the past decade, from when hit counters were the most sophisticated metric trackers in use. But there is still a long way to go before analytics is used to its full marketing potential. In this article, I hope to articulate ways that marketers can maximize their analytics solutions. To do so, I will discuss the top 10 signs that the power of analytics is still eluding your company.

Sign 1: You bought the tool a year ago, and you’re still not measuring your business objectives.

You were sold on the lure of data. You bought a web analytics tool, have dashboards sent to you every week, and have no idea what they’re supposed to be telling you about your business. You know there is great information contained in these reports and dashboards — but you cannot decipher how it helps achieve your goals. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The overabundance of data makes it difficult to sync graphs with meeting agendas.

There are several avenues marketers can explore to align analytics with business objectives — not the least of which is your analytics teams. Keep everyone in the loop as changes occur and reevaluate reporting on a regular basis to ensure marketers have the ammo they need to create educated strategies.

For example, one business objective for a B2B website is to increase the number of qualified leads that come through the site. Measuring the total number of leads is one relevant measurement of this goal, but it’s more revealing if compared with comprehensive traffic numbers. Additionally, if campaigns are driving traffic, monitoring conversion rates will track whether website visitors reflect target audiences.

Sign 2: You still have to remind the executive team what your company’s KPIs are (hint: key performance indicators).

It is understandable that analytics jargon is not mainstream yet. As more CMOs ask for reports and sound reasoning behind digital marketing decisions, terminology will become more commonplace, and this point will be inconsequential. Until that day, keep framing campaigns, objectives, and goals within key performance indicators. This will keep everyone on the same page. It will continue to drive home the importance and value of grounding decisions in quantitative data. You can start one person at a time — and the sooner you begin, the sooner you can make a difference. Prove that web analytics and KPIs mean something by suggesting sound improvement opportunities based on data. Your executives will be impressed and memorize any acronym you throw at them.

Sign 3: You create these beautiful dashboards, and no one knows what they mean.

Ah, the infamous dashboards that have been defined to include only the most important key metrics, yet you manage to cram in every possible minute detail, making it impossible to read. Pause a campaign, write more blogs, or increase an SEM budget? You still feel like you are flying blind.

The answer: Throw it away and start over.

Refine and redefine your business objectives, and assign a KPI to each. Understand what influences your KPIs, and how fluctuations affect the success of your business objectives. Once this is established, dashboards start to look different and useable.

Sign 4: Your boss is always asking about the number of “hits” your company’s website is getting.

This has not been a valuable success metric since the ’90s, and it is like nails on a chalkboard to any analytics professional. Potential consumers are not “hits” — they are people who expect valuable content and a quality user experience when they visit a website. This goes back to point No. 2. Education is needed if we are to evolve beyond basic metrics and start unearthing valuable user insights.

The next time your boss asks how many “hits” the website is getting, simply respond with a smile and say, “I don’t know, but since we began optimizing the checkout process, our conversion rate has increased X percent, resulting in an increase in $X dollars last month. Do you want me to look into those ‘hits’ for you?”

That will likely be the last time you are asked about a hit count.

Sign 5: You’re still scratching your head wondering what you should segment and how it will help.

A great place to begin is to differentiate between new and return visitors. How do they behave differently, and how do they convert differently? What are some insights that you could glean to help increase conversion rates? Analytics can also help segment out users who are not looking for your website. To do so, create a segment that does not include your target audience and learn what your true conversion rate is — and optimize from there.

Continuing with the example from point No. 1, segmentation also provides value in measuring your business objectives. I mentioned that the conversion rate can help assess if the target audience is who is arriving on a website. Segmentation can help provide insight into identifying new and returning visitors. New visitors may not fill out a lead form; however, they may download a couple of white papers, and returning visitors may fill out the lead form on their second or third site visits. All of this information can help marketers target their audiences appropriately.

Sign 6: Even though your homepage has an 80 percent bounce rate, your boss doesn’t want a change because he/she likes the way it looks.

This is a classic push-pull battle. The difference is that one group is comprised of potential consumers who are the key to a company’s success. To convince decision makers to trust their data, run tests to prove that the reports reflect consumer preference. Remain persistent on the implications of what not changing it could do to your business goals. If bounce rates improve, there will be little left to debate.

When evaluating a homepage for performance and deciding what needs to change, there are a few things to keep in mind: What is the value proposition? Why should a visitor engage further with the site? What is the call-to-action? Where are you trying to drive visitors within the website? Does the homepage have a clear navigation path for various user types? If the answer is “I am not sure” to any of these questions, you’ve found a great place to begin testing.

Sign 7: You’re running multiple online marketing campaigns, and you have no idea which performs better.

For the first time, marketing campaigns can be measured to show their direct correlation and impact. Start from the beginning and tag online media campaigns so that you can measure how well each drives traffic to your site and how it converts. Knowing where to move your marketing dollars will become obvious once campaigns are tracked individually.

Google Analytics provides a URL builder for those who are not familiar with tagging campaigns. However, analytics solutions vary, so it would be best to check your implementation guide to clearly understand the requirements. The following is a hypothetical example of a campaign parameter using Google Analytics:

www.mysite.com/landingpage1?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=may

The “?utm” portion of the URL lets Google Analytics know that a variable is being passed from a campaign. The source ID will let Google Analytics know where the visitor is coming from, the campaign medium, and other useful statistics. These variables can be established to reflect whatever data make sense for a particular campaign.

Sign 8: The one time you ran an A/B test, a winner was chosen — but no improvements ensued.

Testing is only one part of optimization, the next — and most difficult part — is implementation. Optimization is a continual process to make sure you are putting your best foot, ad creative, and messaging forward. What improves conversion rates today may not be as effective three months from now. With analytics, marketers are equipped to do more than just keep up with their consumers, and doing so will help attain goals and drive business.

A/B and multivariate testing are widely used in search engine marketing to determine the most effective ad creative. If most of your sales are completed offline, run testing with ad copy including phone numbers/store locations versus creative without it. Track conversion rates to see if prominently displaying this information on search engine ads makes a difference.

Sign 9: You still can’t figure out why total site visits don’t add up in all the reports.

It’s important to understand that web analytics is not perfect, and sometimes 1 plus 1 equals 3. This does not mean that the information is inaccurate, but with an infinite number of variables and moving parts, numbers do not always match up. Web analytics data are still extremely valuable and important in gauging how a website performs. Remember to look at trends and major changes in key metrics. Continue to investigate what may have caused drastic changes until you have an answer.

A metric that is often used to measure audience mix is a comparison of new versus returning visitors. This metric is calculated as the total amount of new visitors divided by the total amount of returning visitors. A small number (0.3) indicates that the website has a healthy retention of visitors, while a higher number (5.2) indicates that the website has an abundance of new visitors. Marketing strategies that are in place determine the optimal rate for this metric. If an acquisition campaign launches and the goal is to drive qualified traffic, you should expect to see the ratio increase — hopefully not too much, as you want to see the new traffic return.

Sign 10: You still design with HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) standards in mind.

Great design drives conversions, so it needs to be strategically crafted to contribute to marketing goals. What worked on a previous project or competitor’s site does not necessarily translate to your company. I am not advocating that you discount people’s opinions or blindly follow analytics — it is important to take both into account. Data are a great unifier and can help keep people on the same page in board meetings. By combining objective and subjective points of discussion, it is easier to come to sound marketing decisions. Even if the topic on the table is outlandish, cutting edge, or uncharted territory, at least data can be a place to initiate the conversation.

In conclusion, combining marketing insight with data is an extremely powerful and successful strategy.

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Study: Local Search Firms Need Biz Model

June 10th, 2009

While the business of search advertising is booming, a recent report questions whether its popularity is based more on “potential” than “payoff.”

According to a new report from Borrell Associates, client churn rates for companies selling search is close to 60 percent, with most of the attrition by the third or fourth month. As many as 80 percent of clients may be gone in 12 months. Some companies lose as much as 90 percent of their clients.

The Borrell report commissioned by Clickable and released Monday (June 8) outlines ways companies can capitalize on an ad segment that didn’t exist nine years ago but today represents 4 percent of all advertising expenditures.

“The quick emergency of the multibillion-dollar paid-search industry has spawned unrealistic expectations among local businesses eager to turn the Web into a cash register and a cottage industry of companies eager to bolster that dream,” the Borrell report said. “SEM [search engine marketing] has no doubt been oversold and mismanaged by resellers, leaving many local businesses disillusioned with a product that holds so much promise.”

For businesses that can offer a scalable platform to advertisers, the potential is considerable, especially in local advertising. Local search is projected to grow 29.5 percent over the next five years, from $4.1 billion last year to $5.3 billion in 2013.

In contrast, small and medium sized businesses are forecast to decrease ad spending on yellow pages, newspapers, radio and direct mail by 19 percent, representing average annual decline of $3.4 billion. While spending on paid search by local advertisers is forecast to rise 39 percent, representing average annual increased of $242 million. Other interactive media affiliated with local search, such as video and email, are forecast to increase at triple-digit rates by 2013, adding $1.1 billion per year to interactive media spending.

To harness the numbers and control churn, companies offering SEM services will need to develop better business models. “It has yet to scale,” the Borrell report said. “What the industry desperately needs are analytical tools that advertisers can use to assess and recalibrate how they spend their dollars.”

Source: MediaWeek

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Twitter to verify accounts to eliminate celebrity impostors

June 10th, 2009

Twitter is planning to crack down on celebrity impersonators who post messages on the service as if they were the real thing.

The San Francisco company said over the weekend that it will introduce a verification system to ensure that famous people are who they say they are.

Twitter has long been a playground for people pretending to be Hollywood stars or high-profile political figures. It left other users confused about whether they were actually following updates by their favorite artists and athletes or just some 12-year-old with too much time on his hands.

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa went so far as to sue Twitter last month in San Francisco Superior Court for allowing an impostor to create an account in his name. (The account was subsequently deleted.) Musician Kanye West has also complained. An account in the name of the Dalai Lama was suspended earlier this year.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post that the company will start testing a verification service this summer for public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation. Their accounts will get a verification seal so users will be able to see that they are legitimate.

Twitter has long had rules against impersonation and will suspend fake accounts if notified. But some who complained said they were ignored or that the suspensions took too long to implement.

The upcoming test will not include businesses. Twitter said that it does, however, see opportunity in this area.

By the way, Stone had a few things to say about the La Russa suit, calling it “an unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous.”

Highlighting Twitter’s tough stance, he said that Twitter hasn’t settled that suit - contrary to some published reports. Moreover, he said that the company believes that its “terms of service are fair and we believe will be upheld in a court that will ultimately dismiss Mr. La Russa’s lawsuit.”

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Who’s Watching Your Online Reputation?

June 10th, 2009

Business reputations often take years to develop, but can be undone with a single Tweet. Solution providers should engage with the same social media as their customers to both promote and defend their reputation.

There has been a lot of discussion about how businesses and individuals need to participate in social networks to get their messages out, but there is little discussion related to managing online reputation.

Vehicles such as Angies List, Facebook and YouTube are prime locations for your customers to share their positive or negative experiences related to your company. There are also thousands of blogs that are sharing information with customers every day on what they liked or disliked about their experiences with businesses.

If you are still not convinced that your online presence is important consider that women are nearly twice as likely to use blogs than social networking sites as a source of information (64 percent), advice and recommendations (43 percent) and opinion-sharing (55 percent), according to a recent 2009 Women and Social Media study.

From somScore, the data figures for video views from November 2008 finds more and more people are watching videos—about 146 million or 77 percent of the U.S. Internet audience. This is up over one-third year over year.

Your customers are online and not just looking at your Web site and Facebook page for information about your company. What took you years to develop in local reputation can be brought down in a day with negative commentary. Therefore, it pays to protect your brand where ever consumers are offered a degree of interaction.

It’s important that either you have an employee who conducts comprehensive online reputation management to ensure that your brand attributes are protected across all social channels. Another option is to hire an outside company to regularly monitor for negative commentary and, if any is found, combat it by researching the situation, discerning if any action is required, and then engage the problem.

A good response will provide facts and ask for corrections if required. This is where your company blog or those of your employees and customers can be invaluable. Opening the conversation to as many sides as possible and broadening the discussion.

Some key areas to consider when dealing with your online reputation management:

Do not get defensive: Even if your customer is not correct in what they wrote, you cannot criticize them. You need to reach out, listen, try to understand their perspective and then work to resolve their concerns. How you handle a situation is often more important that the actions that caused or resolved the situation. In the social networking world, style counts.

The best defense is a well executed offense: You do not wait for a virus to attack your network, so why would you wait for negative postings to protect your online reputation? Begin with your customer service. It is always easier to work with a happy customer than it is to negate and unhappy one. Proactive postings on a regular basis through blogs, Twitter, and other social mediums can go a long way. Don’t forget to share good news as it happens as well. When appropriate a shared press release between you and a customer goes a long way to bolstering your reputation in the marketplace.

Hire an objective source: It is hard to be objective when it comes to your own brand and reputation. Just as it is difficult to evaluate your own work, it is challenging at best to understand outside perceptions of your business. Many outside companies assist with keeping your business top of mind with existing and potential customers.

You do not need to invest millions, or even thousands of dollars in your online reputation management, but you do need to pay attention to what is being said about your business. An investment of just a few thousand dollars can go a long way to building and protecting your brand and business.

Source: ChannelInsider

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Agency Taps YouTube For Corporate Use

June 10th, 2009

The majority of ad agency Web sites contain the following components: an “about us” section, executive bios, case studies and a portfolio of work, past and present. And Flash, don’t forget the Flash.

That being said, agencies are searching for a way to tell their story in a non-cookie-cutter format. We’ve seen Modernista direct site visitors to its online properties, like its Facebook profile, Wikipedia page, flickr page and YouTube playlists.

Now, BooneOakley, Charlotte, N.C. has turned its Web site into a series of YouTube videos. Typing BooneOakley.com into a browser now takes you to a YouTube video, deemed the BooneOakley.com home page. The main video tells the story of Billy, a marketing director who meets a tragic demise because he chose a run-of-the-mill agency to create his company’s ad campaign.

The video concludes with snippets of the agency’s print, TV and online work. The main video contains four embedded links that bring visitors to different parts of the agency site, or, in this case, different YouTube videos.

Work by client; work by medium; news, bios, etc. and contact us lay out company information in separate YouTube videos. The agency vision video is a must-watch.

Navigation isn’t what I’d call user-friendly; once you’re finished watching an embedded link, you essentially have to start from the main page, unless what you want to watch can be found on the previous video. Users can click on the previous video link or begin at the home page.

The home page had generated 201,777 views as of this morning, with various sub-videos collecting anywhere from 4,488 views to 30,477. It took the agency two months to build the site.

“We figured the best way to tell our story was to make our Web site one,” said Jim Robbins, copywriter at BooneOakley. “Our original idea was to do so by making our site a single video that could live anywhere on the Web. But soon we realized that YouTube’s embeddable annotations granted us the opportunity to create something much bigger,” continued Robbins.

Expect the site to remain as is for the foreseeable future, with new videos to be added regularly.

According to Robbins, overall site feedback remains positive. “We knew being on YouTube could help us, but we didn’t know just how much Twitter would help. The advertising community was slightly more critical, as we expected. But they also weren’t our target. One major benefit of building a site on YouTube is that it becomes a part of a community, something that is more accessible to the general public,” concluded Robbins.

The Web site even generated a video response,  in BooneOakley format, from Jason Rapport, an unemployed agency creative whose response served as a video resume. Rapport said the video took six hours to create and he was contacted by BooneOakley, but unfortunately, the agency isn’t hiring. Hopefully, someone else is.

Source: MediaPost

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Dedicated Social Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need

June 10th, 2009

Don’t Repeat the Mistakes Direct, Media Planning and Digital Made

You know that social-media department you just built? Go and dismantle it right now, because this stuff is too important to be left to the experts.

Every time an apparently foreign object is identified in adland, it seems the inhabitants split, roughly speaking, into two parties — those who fear the foreign body and those who are excited by it. The excited annex the object and create their own nation around it. The fearful homelanders breathe a sigh of relief and go back to doing whatever it was they were doing — albeit with just a few nagging fears about the ambitions of the fledgling country being built next door.

Before digital media it was media planning; before media, it was direct marketing. And if we want to go back through the history books, we can see that the same happened with TV and even radio. On each occasion, the newbies create their own jargon, their own law-making associations, their own cultures, their own ways of measuring success.

There are, of course, good reasons for separating new and old. There is money to be made for the prospectors and existing business to be defended. By dedicating resources and attention to the new medium, discipline or, in social media’s case, idea, those who work in the field are able to quickly advance it and ensure that it prospers.

The problem, however, is that the new and old states cannot exist successfully without the other, a fact they realize after they have set up separate and often competitive fiefdoms that barely speak the same language.

Direct marketing splintered off, taking important data-driven processes and analytics expertise with it. Yet now, it wrestles with how to reintegrate the creative, emotional thinking it left behind. Media planning’s separation from ad shops erected a wall between the thinking about medium and the thinking about message, which many are still trying to break down today. The rush to online as entirely separate from offline led to mainstream ad shops without the talent needed for today’s digital world and a host of new digital shops that had great tools and talent but were quickly frustrated by only getting to work on one part of the integrated effort.

It’s happening again with social media. Marketers are constructing social-media departments, social-media agencies are popping up everywhere, there are already too many social-media associations to make sense, and there’s an ever-expanding list of social-media measurements and measurement tools. In the last few months, we’ve heard dozens of marketers identify themselves as “wanting” or “doing” a social-media campaign.

This will prove to be the wrong approach — again. Social media isn’t a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It’s about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company. It’s about realizing that consumers are running the biggest recommendation service in the world and that, as has been tiresomely often repeated, they define the brand (no, this is not new; yes, this is becoming more obvious and important by the day). All thinking about product, customers and communications, needs to take this into account — it cannot sit in a silo.

Sure, there are a bunch of new two-way communications tools at marketers’ disposal, and they’re all going to have to learn when to use them and in which combinations. And yes, there are definitely important roles for experts to offer guidance on this. But the social-media experts need to live among the experts in all the other marketing tools rather than in a new nation that adland will spend the next 20 years trying to reintegrate.

Source: AdvertisingAge

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Case study: A Facebook Campaign that Connected

May 29th, 2009

Article HIghlights:

  • Adobe wanted to increase awareness of its discounts for college students
  • The company created a game in Facebook that challenged users to spot doctored photos
  • The campaign also made use of Facebook engagement ads
  • Results surpassed all of Adobe’s expectations

In this age of transparency, it’s no secret that college kids aren’t big fans of brands that are “fake.” Most of the time, that is.

Last fall, Adobe, the maker of popular software titles such as Photoshop, Acrobat, and Flash, worked with interactive advertising agency Traction to create a social media engagement initiative. The core of the campaign was a game that asked fans of the Adobe Students page on Facebook whether they thought a series of images were “Real or Fake?”

And users responded, with more than 11,500 plays in the first two weeks — 6 percent of which culminated with the user clicking “Buy Now” for the product promoted on the final game page.

The challenge
The business problem Adobe was addressing was very clear: It wanted to increase awareness of Adobe discounts for college students. We wanted students to know that Adobe offers college students up to 80 percent off the full retail prices of the Creative Suite 4 products with Adobe Student Editions.

Adobe already understood the popularity of Facebook among college students and had established a company page on the network about a year earlier. The page had attracted 11,500 fans, but a static message and lack of interactivity did little to encourage return visitors.

To drive page traffic and overall awareness for the new pricing offer, Adobe and Traction set out in late 2008 to engage the student market with a more interactive user experience.

Real or fake?
Adobe products like Photoshop are great tools for modifying photos, so we created a game in Facebook called “Real or Fake?” Each week, five images were provided, and users were challenged to decide whether they were original photographs or whether they had been doctored. Of course, the entire game was designed and developed using Adobe Creative Suite products — Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Flash.

Answer screens for the Photoshopped images included links to tutorials, which showed users how the effect was achieved using Adobe’s product.

At the end of the game, users were presented with a promotion for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Student Editions and a button to “Buy Now,” as well as options to “Play Again” and “Share” the game with their friends. In-game and end-of-game messaging further encouraged return play by letting users know that five new images would be posted each week.

The game was prominently featured on the Adobe Students Facebook page, and a discussion board post on the page encouraged users to share their scores and talk about the game.

In addition, during the first two weeks after launch, Adobe placed a Facebook engagement ad, which targeted students by major and demographic, linked to the game, and allowed users to become fans of the Adobe Students page directly within the ad.

The results
The campaign results surpassed all of Adobe’s expectations. “Real or Fake?” — which launched in November 2008 — ran for one month. During that time, the game was played more than 14,000 times, including 5,469 in the first week and 6,160 in the second.

During the first week, 40 percent of players returned to play again that same week, 22 percent checked out the tutorials, 6 percent clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6 percent clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game.

The Adobe Students Facebook page also received 3,000 new fans and more than 53,000 page views that week, compared with an average of 5,057 views per week prior to the campaign.

Numbers also remained high in the second week, with 21 percent of players accessing the game tutorials, 4 percent sharing the game with friends, and another 6 percent clicking “Buy Now.” Week two also brought in an additional 2,500 new fans to the Adobe Students page and almost 50,000 additional page views.

Lessons learned
Engage, engage, engage. The Adobe Students page had featured the student pricing message for some time before the game was launched, but the engagement factor just wasn’t there. Having engaging content on the page was a way to bring students to the page and clearly communicate this, and to support the launch of the Adobe Student Editions. By deploying the application, Adobe not only generated new awareness for its offer but also introduced a fun, interactive feature to the page. The game itself was particularly effective because it captured user attention with an interaction that clearly demonstrated the value of the product.

We also crafted game-related messaging to appeal to the student population and draw users in, often challenging them with gritty wording — such as “Can you spot the real from the fake?” on its engagement ad and “Gotcha! This image is fake. Mother nature doesn’t do mohawks” on one of the puzzle answer pages.

We wanted to engage students where they are and in a way that they enjoy — not just push the product out to them. With any company, when you’re going out and trying to talk to a segment like students, who see through corporate-speak and deal with a lot of media, the challenge is how to be clever and still be true to the corporate brand. We were able to do both.

Use an integrated push strategy. Another key reason the game was successful was because we allowed one of our social ads to be dedicated to promoting the game. Simply launching an application does not guarantee engagement, no matter how cool the application.

Many companies spend a lot of money building the coolest widget, game, or application. However, if they don’t actively do something to drive traffic and awareness of it, then they are not likely to be successful. That was an important learning for us.

With so much competition for user attention on the Facebook network, it’s important to take a multi-pronged approach to let users know what you’ve put out there. For Adobe, this was achieved by using targeted ad placements in combination with key placement on the Adobe Student page, where the company already had around 11,500 fans.

Encourage return visits. Adobe was able to further increase engagement by giving users a reason to come back to the application each week. It ensured users knew that new images would be available each week by posting messages throughout the game. Having the ability to “share” was also critical to the campaign’s success.

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Google Unveils a Conversation Service

May 29th, 2009

Google Inc. previewed a new communications service that combines features of email, instant-messaging and document-sharing to facilitate multiperson conversations online.

The Google Wave service caps a years-long project to come up with a way to break down the barriers between different types of online communication services, said Lars Rasmussen, the Google engineer who led the development of the service along with his brother, Jens Rasmussen.

The service, which won’t be open to the public for several months, will allow users to start a conversation, called a “wave,” and to invite their contacts to join it. Any member of the wave can put photos, notes or other content into the group, which updates in near-real time.

People see an “in-box” with the most recent waves they have joined and whether others have added any new notes or content to them. They can click to scroll through the wave and see what content has been added to it. Dozens of Internet companies, including Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are racing to come up with new methods for sharing and organizing online information.

Google, which announced the new service at its developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, envisions Wave as not only a way to share messages with friends and colleagues, but also to share and access a variety of information online. For instance, a user could create a wave that is an article he or she wrote and then invite people to read and comment on it.

Mr. Rasmussen said it is too early to tell how consumers will use Wave, but he expects that the various applications and services Google hopes developers will build on top of it will be a big draw. Videogame developers could build a game that began as a wave, for example, and Google will allow other Web sites to embed waves into their Web sites.

He added that Google hasn’t thought much about how the service could generate revenue. “One of the great luxuries of Google is that we get to not think about that yet,” he said.

Source: WSJ

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Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends With a Bing

May 29th, 2009

A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire. That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.

Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt. Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group. And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it. Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.

“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”

Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that more directly connotes search. “Bing has no equity; it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.

Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Wednesday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.” Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”

Source: NYTimes

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When Will Marketers Boost Spending?

May 29th, 2009

ANA survey says most firms will rev up activities 3-6 months before recession ends

Will ad agencies need to wait until the recession has certifiably ended before they see a rebound in their clients’ spending? A survey released today by the Association of National Advertisers gives a glimmer of hope that marketers’ expenditures will turn upward sooner than that.

In online polling last month among members of the ANA’s Brand Marketer Leadership Community panel, 68 percent of respondents said they plan boost their media budgets as the economy recovers; 41 percent said they’ll increase their spending on social networking/word of mouth. As for the timing, 73 percent said “they would ideally implement these increased marketing activities three to six months before the recession ends, and an additional 16 percent as soon as it ends.”

A renewed focus on long-term brand-building will represent a shift from what many marketers have been doing as the recession deepened. The ANA’s report of the findings says two-thirds of marketers “have shifted their emphasis to more short-term strategies in the last six months.” Such a shift is reflected in the answers respondents gave when asked to cite the areas in which they’ve cut back. Fifty-six percent said they’ve cut media budgets, and 41 percent said the same about sponsorship/events activities. The activity most likely to have been increased amid the recession: “pricing deals,” cited by 47 percent of respondents.

For all the flux in marketers’ use of media, TV remained atop the standings when respondents were asked to say which media are effective for building brand equity. Sixty-four percent cited TV. Though down from 80 percent in a similar February 2007 poll, that still put TV ahead of online (61 percent) and “guerrilla/word of mouth/buzz marketing” (57 percent). Lagging farther behind were magazines (51 percent, down from 67 percent in 2007), radio (30 percent, down from 36 percent), outdoor (26 percent, down from 35 percent) and newspapers (19 percent, down from 36 percent). Social media garnered the most mentions as “the media channel that marketers would like to use but have not yet been able to implement.”

Elsewhere in the survey (conducted in conjunction with marketing-services firm ‘mktg’), respondents were asked about the factors they watch most closely as indicators of “brand health” — i.e., the degree to which brand equity is increasing or declining. “Customer experience/satisfaction” was cited by 48 percent of respondents — up from 37 percent in the 2007 poll. “There is less focus on traditional metrics such as brand image and awareness, which tend to be lagging indicators of brand health,” says the ANA report of the findings.

Source: AdWeek

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