Optimizing yourself out of a brand

This week at SES Chicago, I had a couple of discussions that reminded me of the danger of the optimization cart leading the marketing horse.

First was a conversation with David Szetela, PPC guru and frequent speaker at SES. He was talking about purchasing keyword/bid management tools for search marketing and was emphasizing the need for accurately tracking “attribution”. In this case, attribution means which ad — or ads — get credit for the conversion.

In search marketing, it can be tempting to view ads and their landing pages in a vacuum. Someone clicks on a specific ad, they convert on that specific page — then that ad and that landing page must be the winners. You should increase spend on them and reduce spend elsewhere.

But in the real world, of course, life can be more complicated. People may do multiple searches, at different stages in the buying funnel, from awareness to research to specific purchase intent. You may have had multiple ads and multiple landing pages that didn’t convert, yet their touch points with the prospect — and the (hopefully positive) brand impressions that they created — may very well have been an integral part of the marketing equation that eventually led to conversion on some later ad and landing page.

Microsoft made a lot of noise about this earlier this year with their engagement mapping model. If you “optimize away” those early ads and landing pages, you may actually reduce the overall effectiveness of your search marketing.

It’s an important point, and the bigger lesson here is that analytics by themselves rarely tell the entire story. You need to still use every channel and touchpoint you can to understand your customers and view analytics through the lens of customer empathy. Interpreting and explaining analytics is still a decidedly human enterprise that benefits from right-brained pattern recognition as much as left-brained quantification.

Brands are more than the sum of their clicks.

Which brings me to the second discussion, on the panel of Ad Copy Continuity Clinic. One of the audience members volunteered their ad associated with the phrase “downtown chicago hotels”. The volunteer was a marketer on behalf of the Palmer House — an elegant and historic Chicago property that is apparently under the Hilton umbrella.

There was some debate on the panel and in the room even about the ad itself, which had “Palmer House” as its headline. All the other ads on the page pretty much had “Downtown”, “Chicago”, and “Hotel” in their headlines, and a number of folks thought that “Palmer House” was an outlier. They said it as if it were a bad thing.

My opinion was exactly the opposite: in a bland sea of cookie-cutter corporate hotel brands and travel aggregators such as Expedia and Orbitz, “Palmer House” was a beautiful contrast — arguably without competition on the SERP — and extended a tantalizing brand promise of an experience, not just a commoditized box with beds and baths.

The second line of the ad promised “Our best rates. Guaranteed.” I’m not sure that’s the strongest point to make, less of a differentiator than characteristics such as timeless ambiance and legendary guests. But the big objection in the room was that “our” was a wasted filler word — it should be just boiled down to “Best rates. Guaranteed.” (The marketer actually changed it at the session, as the screen grab to the right reflects.)

Now that may be true, but at this point I was starting to feel that a rote set of rules — headline must have keyword, filler words must be removed, Og like fire, Og like shiny object — were being blanketed as a kind of search marketing homogenization. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for best practices and learning from experience, but when it comes to differentiating brands and experiences, homogenization is not the way to go. Maybe — just maybe — a more conversational tone in the ad copy, instead of purely staccato minimalism would help build that brand differentiation. Certainly worth testing in context.

The schism of opinions widened when we clicked through on the ad, which, unfortunately, simply went to the hotel’s home page, with no continuity about the best rate guarantee. We all agreed that a message matched landing page would be better. But the big difference of opinion was about the proposed content for such a landing page.

I actually loved the core content of the home page, a beautiful Flash carousel of interior and exterior photographs that truly captured the elegance and historic charm of the property. I’d absolutely carry that idea into the landing page, especially if the ads are differentiated from competitors by emphasizing the experience of the hotel.

Other folks, though, seemed to think the photos were a distraction from respondent goals: seeing the rates, checking availability, and quickly engaging into a booking engine. Yes, in theory, those are the ultimate optimized goals. But the “soft” marketing involved in building the brand for the respondent may be a critical — albeit far less quantifiable — step required for success here. You can’t automatically go leaping for the close without properly setting up the value proposition.

These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive objectives — brand-building and goal-enabling. A well-designed landing page — or multi-page conversion path — should be able to balance communicating the experience of the hotel while still providing actionable choices that keep continuity with any goal-oriented promises in the ad (i.e., best rates) and move the flow towards conversion.

Again, I’m not saying this experiential approach applies to every hotel. Frankly, if they were to decide to emphasize the Hilton branding of the hotel — which people might choose more on auto-pilot because they can trust it for a consistent, if not unique, travel experience — then prioritizing rates and availability probably makes more sense. This is where marketing judgment is invaluable. The experience of the landing page should maintain continuity not only with the immediate ad but with the implicit/explicit expectations associated with the brand.

Anyway, my two takeaways:

One: don’t optimize yourself out a brand.

Two: don’t let best practices equate to homogenization.

Or, put another way, good marketing and branding should leverage optimization, but they shouldn’t be dominated by it.

Comments

[Steve Baker]

Hi Scott,

Totally agree with you with the advert text - too many agencies look at their advert campaigns in a vacuum, without seeing what the competition is doing.

You get a relevancy 'bonus' for including the search query in your advert, plus of course, it's emboldened, but if your clickthrough rate suffers, it costs you more than it's worth.

An example I highlighted on my blog (http://www.adwordsprofessional.com/google-adwords-campaign/advert-text) highlights the same thing for injury compensation. Everyone has the same USP's (!?), so nobody's advert stands out - great news if your advert appears top, bad news otherwise).

It's critical to bear in mind Quality Score, clickthrough rate and conversion rate (i.e. qualifying your traffic) when writing adverts - it's frequently a balancing act, and you need to see what the competition are doing to strike a good balance...

Steve

[Scott Brinker]

Hi, Steve.

Good point about the relevancy boost, but I agree with you that what really matters is the net outcome: what gets you the most clicks, the right kind of clicks, that end up converting at your best possible CPA.

Metrics are great, but there's always the danger of optimizing one disproportionately at the expense of another -- and Quality Score is probably one the bigger culprits in that regard.

Thanks for the link to the example on your blog! Great post you've got there.

Scott