Exchanging How for What

I had an enjoyable meeting with a large advertising agency yesterday. The EVP I was meeting with told a familiar tale of how agencies often do their best thinking before they land a piece of business. This is true because that’s the only time that they’re only thinking and not doing.

He went on to explain that once an agency lands the business, the minutia of the day-to-day takes over. At that point, the how has overtaken the what. The thinking is overwhelmed by the doing.

We both came to the realization that this is more true in digital than anywhere else. How you’re going to do something takes 95% of your effort. What you’re going to do gets the 5% that’s leftover.

In order to do great work and generate high return on advertising spend (ROAS) for your clients, you need to focus on the what. That’s your where your value is. You need the how to take care of itself.

Figure out how to have your how and your what switch places. Put 95% of your effort into thinking about what will work best for your clients. It’s good for your business. And good for your sanity.

Moving search agencies to the top of the value chain

This morning Media Post published a commentary of ours Is a search agency’s biggest competitor Google? I know, one normally thinks of Google and search agencies working in allegiance together. And while that is true at one level, when you analyze the relationship through the lens of “vertical competition”, you realize that Google wields tremendous power over search agencies.

The reason Google has such power in the search marketing supply chain right now is because most agencies sell clicks, and those clicks are mostly sole-sourced from Google.

Unchecked, this arrangement puts search agencies in a tenuous position — Google can change its prices and policies at will, and search agencies can be stuck in the position of absorbing the blow. The solution is to have search agencies elevate their role to selling conversions, not clicks, and become the king of the hill in delivering end-to-end, pre-click/post-click experiences.

Google doesn’t sell post-click marketing, so agencies can be at the top of that supply chain. Conversions have much greater value to the CMO than clicks. And since there’s much more room for differentiation in post-click experiences than the 130 characters of search engine ads, this is not a commoditized service.

Post-click thoughts from SMX East

Last week, I participated on the Landing Page & Multivariate Testing panel at SMX East in New York. This was a little ironic, since although we’re big advocates of landing pages and testing, we’re not particularly enamored with multivariate testing (MVT). Generally it is overhyped and, in practice, generates more confusion than improvements for most marketers.

So my portion of the session was not on MVT at all, but instead explained how marketers can use multi-step landing experiences to dramatically improve their conversion rates — why 2 clicks are better than 1.

However, to my surprise, none of the other panelists really focused on MVT either. Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media and Jon Diorio of Google both emphasized how easy it is to get started with testing landing pages. They also demonstrated examples why it’s hard for marketers to predict which version of a page will be the winner of a test. (I actually consider that to be an example of how there are often multiple audience segments lumped together in a test — and that the biggest increases in conversion rates are actually achieved with segmentation.)

Peter Ernst from ZAAZ also passed on MVT, but instead talked about the importance of usability. Sometimes an overly narrow and obsessive fetish with testing can blind marketers to the bigger picture of the overall experience for users — the flow from the ad, through the landing page, to the rest of their interactions with the site and the company behind it. He emphasized that while testing can show people what works, it’s up to the marketer — through the eyes of usability — to understand why something works, to be able to leverage that learning in a strategic and directed fashion. Great presentation.

Since this was the only session at SMX that covered post-click marketing — what happens after you win the click — I think it’s a testament to the industry that the discussion was less about in-the-weeds testing methodologies, and more about the strategic role of testing in online marketing.

On the other hand, the fact that there was only one session about what happens after the click — here at the end of 2008 — seemed almost surreal to me. By now, search marketing shouldn’t just be about getting clicks, but about getting the right clicks to the right places. There’s a symbiotic relationship between pre-click and post-click.

Yet talking to a number of agencies and in-house search marketers at the show, I was shocked by how many continue to treat the process of getting clicks as something completely divorced from what you do with them once you get them. In at least one company I met with, the search marketers don’t even talk to the people who do the landing experiences that those respondents are sent to.

Certainly this is crazy — insane! — from a funnel perspective: what you do at the top of the funnel (search marketing) is only successful if it ultimately leads to conversions further down the funnel (post-click marketing). Otherwise you’re just wasting money, buying clicks and throwing them away.

But search marketing isn’t just a one-way funnel towards conversion. Respondents’ behavioral choices on landing experiences, if you’re paying attention to them, also provide tremendous insight into how to improve top-of-funnel placements and creatives — especially for identifying promising new segments/niches in The Long Tail.

To reach its full potential, search marketing needs to be an integrative discipline. Some search marketers are already there, but it’s time for the rest of the industry to catch up.

SEM crisis of confidence

I just read Steve Baldwin’s editorial in Search Insider: Crisis of Confidence Threatens Everyone in SEM. Steve works at Did-It, one of the early SEM agencies founded by Kevin Lee, and he’s terribly concerned about the trend of CMO’s rejecting search agencies and bringing their search marketing in-house.

“The problem that we in the SEM agency business face today: people don’t think we add value anymore; they’ve been burned too many times…”

His concerns fall into three buckets:

• There are no real barriers to entry to someone opening up shop as an SEM agency, so you get a lot of neophytes muddying the waters. He thinks the answer may be licensing or certification, although for existing agencies, I would argue that a more effective barrier is a track record with name-brand companies.

• Search is perceived as an undifferentiated commodity business.

• Search engines (i.e., Google) are indifferent to industry (SEM agency) plight.

I think these are valid concerns.

Steve ruminates about a solution of agencies insuring their clients against poor performance. I’m the first the agree that agencies should be held accountable for their performance — that’s why they call it performance marketing — but after the past week on Wall Street, I’m not so sure that “insurance” is the answer. Aside from complicating things, that won’t really address any of his three buckets of concern.

I believe the only real answer is for agencies to deeply embrace post-click marketing.

I know, we’re a post-click marketing company, so of course I’d say that. But read the latest research from Compete — how post-click marketing can have a 500% or greater impact on the outcome of online advertising. And think through the logic yourself:

• search ads are limited to 130 characters — there’s inherently a tight limit in the space an agency has to differentiate its ads — but landing experiences have no such boundaries, and they can be as creative and as differentiated as an agency can imagine;

• ads and landing experiences are part of the same flow in the mind of respondent — when they’re not part of the same flow on the planning and production side of the equation, you get continuity problems and broken expectations — and this happens all the time in search marketing today; a search agency that unifies advertising and post-click marketing can deliver tremendous value to its clients;

• excellent post-click marketing can’t be done just by anyone — it requires more strategy and creativity than buying keywords and typing in headlines — so serious search agencies can creative a substantial barrier to entry by hiring top-notch designers, copywriters, marketing strategists, and building their own advantage with post-click expertise;

• testing is important but not sufficient — agencies whose post-click services are limited to running tests of existing or cookie-cutter landing pages (which headline is best? which image is best?) aren’t delivering any differentiated value either: testing is only as good as the ideas you’re testing — the value is in the strategy and creative that’s being tested;

• if segmentation and Long Tail strategies have been one of the successes of SEM agencies on keywords, can you imagine how much low-hanging fruit awaits in segmentation and Long Tail strategies in post-click marketing — where today most landing experiences are unsegmented and unspecialized;

• search agencies are going to be measured by conversion rate and ROI — that’s the new reality, and it is good — and unless they proactively take the reigns in post-click marketing, there is simply no way that they’re going to have positive control of their own destiny and their clients’ successes; you can’t have great search marketing matched with poor post-click marketing and not have the outcome be unsatisfactory.

Steve, if you’d like to give us a call, we’d be happy to help.

An open letter to the CEO of WPP

Today AdWeek ran Scott’s open letter to the CEO of WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell. Inspirational food for thought for all post-click marketing followers and fans.

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