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Even if search has matured incred­ibly over the last few years, both from a tech­nical point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coördin­a­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all levels of the organisation.

Earlier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Huddle. This was an intim­ate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was roun­ded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the latest devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­ment­als right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gible dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his exper­i­ence of man­aging inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­por­ate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­it­ate increased own­er­ship and sub­sequent coördin­a­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­res­en­ted by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent innov­at­ive fash­ion. With the object­ive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selec­ted part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­no­logy as it was about com­mu­nic­a­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­no­logy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest factor to suc­cess is still the people driv­ing it.

With search engines char­ging for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­ic­ally being con­sidered a dir­ect response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s little need to optim­ise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity factor to determ­ine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if object­ives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an import­ant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­ev­ant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge advert­isers per click, their rev­enue increases.

The fol­low­ing chart out­lines the main factors that determ­ine the qual­ity score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This qual­ity score is then used in an algorithm that determ­ines click-cost and pos­i­tion.

Due to this, it’s very pos­sible that an advert appear­ing in top pos­i­tion is pay­ing less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course max­im­ising their rev­en­ues by the higher num­ber of aggreg­ate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more com­plex for advert­isers, con­sider the fol­low­ing scen­ario: an advert with lower CTR is con­vert­ing very strongly on the web­site, as it effect­ively pre-qualifies the traffic. In com­par­ison a high CTR advert for the same cam­paign con­verts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to fil­ter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the land­ing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to cal­cu­late the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depend­ing on objective.

In prac­tise, it’s dif­fi­cult to make this type of dir­ect com­par­ison on a live cam­paign, due to the ever-changing nature of com­pet­i­tion, qual­ity score, pos­i­tions and costs. How­ever, from exper­i­ence, typ­ic­ally for b2c the bene­fit of a higher qual­ity score from optim­ising ad cop­ies towards CTR (with res­ult­ing lowered CPC and higher pos­i­tion) out­weighs the altern­at­ive, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.

One of the big themes of our upcom­ing Sum­mit is going to be the import­ance of con­tent when it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads. My favour­ite quote on the topic comes from the people over at the advert­ising giant JWT, who pro­claimed when relaunch­ing the agency that we needed to “stop inter­rupt­ing what people are inter­ested in, and be what people are inter­ested in.” Two years on and it still rings true as a clarion call to our industry. But the fact remains that the bulk of demand gen­er­a­tion spend­ing still gets piled in to intrus­ive, inter­rupt­ive marketing.

I believe that’s because so many of the prin­ciples and think­ing driv­ing mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions are still derived from the old advert­ising world. The more atten­tion spans have shortened, the more time we’ve spent agon­ising over the single ‘killer’ concept that’s going to stick in people’s heads, the arrest­ing visual that’s going to grab their atten­tion, the call to action that’s going to make them click or pick up the phone.

By com­par­ison, most agen­cies tend to spend very little time think­ing about what they’re actu­ally driv­ing people to. Typ­ic­ally, a land­ing page with a visual and head­line that per­haps match the DM piece. A col­lec­tion of all our ana­lyst white papers and product data­sheets. And forms ask­ing cus­tom­ers to tell us everything from their budget to their waist size.

What if we were to chan­nel more of our energy and cre­ativ­ity into devel­op­ing the con­tent that actu­ally helps people decide whether our product or ser­vice is right for them? Bet­ter still, help them to get stuff that mat­ters to them done. We are look­ing at re-writing our cre­at­ive briefs so that we force ourselves to think about the con­tent before we dive into the com­mu­nic­a­tion. The simple logic says if we first make the des­tin­a­tion more attract­ive, then design­ing the sign­posts that get people there becomes so much easier.

We’re really excited about an upcom­ing event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded part­ners. On Novem­ber 4^th we’re launch­ing the European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit in part­ner­ship with Google, Elo­qua, Bright­TALK and Mar­ketOne. It’s going to be held in Lon­don at Alti­tude, which is on the very top floor of Mill­bank tower with views across Lon­don. Speak­ers include Amanda Job­bins, Omniture’s Neil Mor­gan, Jeremy Bevan from Nov­ell and Justin Gale, a senior online mar­keter from HP.

So why are we doing this? Well we’re really see­ing a major change in the way demand gen­er­a­tion is mov­ing. More import­antly, the way in which pro­spects and cus­tom­ers are respond­ing to cam­paigns. The frag­ment­a­tion of media chan­nels, increas­ing cyn­icism and res­ist­ance to push ‘mar­ket­ing’, coupled with empowered cus­tom­ers who search for whatever they need and would sooner be talk­ing to each other than vendors. OK, so this doesn’t neces­sar­ily make us mar­ket­ing vis­ion­ar­ies, but at a time when everyone’s begin­ning to feel the pinch (or wait­ing to feel it) — it makes it more of a press­ing issue than it has been for the last year. Best start plan­ning sooner rather than later.

We figured it would be a good start to gather together some experts from across the industry. Not just our fel­low hosts, but some of our cus­tom­ers and their peers who are actu­ally tack­ling some of the chal­lenges we’re all facing… How to develop con­tent that people want to engage with and map it to the buy­ing cycle; how to tar­get timely, rel­ev­ant com­mu­nic­a­tions to someone whose name you don’t neces­sar­ily know; how to har­ness emer­ging and social media; and how to turn cus­tom­ers into advoc­ates, either online or face-to-face. Then of course there’s the small mat­ter of meas­ur­ing return on all these mar­ket­ing investments.

Over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to the event I’ll be pick­ing up some of these themes and expand­ing on them. In the mean­time you can visit the event site here. It’s open to mar­keters from tech­no­logy and tele­coms com­pan­ies, B2B and B2C. A bunch of invit­a­tions should be going out in the next day or two so keep an eye on your in-tray and in-box.

We all know that the pace of change today is get­ting faster and faster. It’s almost incom­pre­hens­ible to me that going back a couple of dec­ades or so, when I first got into tech­no­logy, there was for most people no inter­net and no mobile phones. PCs were just get­ting star­ted prop­erly (my first PC had no Win­dows OS, an awe­some 30Mb of hard disk space and floppy disks as big as your head). And if you wanted to find some­thing out, your local lib­rary was prob­ably the best bet.

To put where we are today into some con­text, take a look at the fol­low­ing video:

While the pre­dic­tions will undoubtedly be false as they always are, the exist­ing stats on their own are pretty impress­ive. The one that got me: if myspace was a coun­try, it would be the 11^th largest in the world.

One of the things that this drives home is that flux is a per­man­ent state of affairs. There is no cer­tainty about any­thing – and all the focus groups in the world will not provide the answers. Everything is in beta and the suc­cess­ful com­pan­ies of tomor­row will be those that chart their own des­tin­a­tion but who also remain flex­ible about exactly how they get there.

This is the age of plan B.

Life­hacker points to a handy new site – with yet another ridiculo.us name – popuri.us. Essen­tially the site aggreg­ates a bunch of sources to give you a pic­ture of how pop­u­lar your site is. So you get its PageR­ank, Alexa rank, Tech­nor­ati links and a bunch more. See the BBC example below:

While this isn’t rocket sci­ence, it does bring it all together in one place. One for the bookmarks.

This is a rather lovely piece of film.

Pro­fessor Michael Wesch (who’s Assist­ant Pro­fessor of Cul­tural Anthro­po­logy at Kan­sas State Uni­ver­sity) has put together a four and a half minute piece tra­cing the path from text on paper through hypertext/HTML and on to XML in a really charm­ing and enga­ging way. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about being in tech.

Source: Another plan­ning blog

Pipex has announced its second com­mer­cial trial of WiMAX in the UK. This is great news. Well it is if you live in War­wick. Oh and work for War­wick Coun­cil. You’ll be able to get an 8meg con­nec­tion wherever you roam (within War­wick that is). They also plan to roll out the trial to those out­side the coun­cil as well as to that digital hot­bed, Leam­ing­ton Spa.

WiMAX is often talked about as the holy grail of last mile / ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity. The abil­ity to have a robust broad­band con­nec­tion wherever, whenever. We’ve already covered Singa­pore’s plans to offer full WiMAX cov­er­age to every single per­son and busi­ness by 2015. It’s an ambi­tious plan and has some way to go (espe­cially if like me, users can’t get speeds over 20 kB/sec when down­load­ing from their site).

What I like about the Singa­pore approach is that there is a clear vis­ion behind it. A sense of the greater good such a pro­gramme can achieve. Pipex’s, by com­par­ison, seems to be all about tech­nical feas­ib­il­ity and com­mer­cial viab­il­ity. These are both good things, of course, and to be expec­ted from a com­mer­cial organ­isa­tion. They’re just not that excit­ing (and the pro­spect of the ser­vice being pro­moted even­tu­ally by David Hassle­hoff frankly makes me a little nauseous).

But, you have to hope the pro­gramme is a suc­cess and spurs other pro­viders to launch sim­ilar plans. And the pro­spect of high-quality ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity is excit­ing. Of course, if you’ve paid out mil­lions on a 3G license, it might be a little less so.

Sources: Telecoms.com (regis­tra­tion required) and The Register

It’s an old tenet of the inter­net, inform­a­tion wants to be free. And for the most part it is. Some­times over­whelm­ingly so. The deluge of inform­a­tion that hits our inboxes/feed read­ers every day is vast. Even when you screen out the mes­sages invit­ing you to get pre­scrip­tion meds / buy stocks / grow your penis by two inches, there is still more com­ing in than many of us have time to deal with.

I remem­ber years back first dis­cov­er­ing the BBC news site. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘everything I need in one place.’ But there are times you want a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive, so you flit around from site to site. Then came Google News which nicely aggreg­ated across sources and News­Now which updated every 5 minutes.

But, of course, this was all con­trolled news with an editor decid­ing what I needed to know. Where’s the fun in that?

Now we have social news, news by the people for the people (well OK for the most part links by some of the people for some of the people). The prin­ciple being that col­lect­ively, people are pretty smart (a Wis­dom of Crowds thing). So we have user-driven sites such as Digg – with it’s cur­rent con­tro­versy around users bury­ing stor­ies they dis­agree with – and News­v­ine (my per­sonal favourite).

And now we have Spot­back which claims to be a new breed of per­son­al­ised news ser­vice. Spot­back is tag-based, you set in what you’re inter­ested in when you first go to the site. Then, with a bit of AJAX wiz­ardry, the site gen­er­ates your per­sonal news page which essen­tially looks like many oth­ers. But, the thing about Spot­back is that it learns what you like. You can rate stor­ies, indic­at­ing your pref­er­ences, what you’d like more of and less of. The the­ory goes that over time Spot­back will deliver just the kind of inform­a­tion you want. It’s a nice inter­face which can be eas­ily cus­tom­ised and can deliver news in an RSS feed.

Of course, when I have a ser­vice that can pre­dict pre­cisely what I want to see, feed­ing me the kind of news that I’m sure to agree with, the fear is I’ll miss out on the unex­pec­ted, the chal­len­ging, the down­right uncom­fort­able even.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the BBC.

With so many com­pan­ies join­ing the rush to pay-per-click (PPC) advert­ising, click fraud is becom­ing an increas­ing issue for advert­isers. Essen­tially, click fraud is where a per­son or PC pro­gram repeatedly clicks on a PPC ad to cre­ate a false cost for the advert­iser. It is also an area where the advert­ising net­works provid­ing PPC ser­vices haven’t exactly shined in their attempts to deal with the prob­lem (some spec­u­late that this might have some­thing to do with the fact that they bene­fit from every click).

Asso­ci­ated Con­tent has a good intro­duct­ory art­icle on the sub­ject and has some recom­mend­a­tions on how to pro­tect your­self against the prob­lem. Worth a look.

Other use­ful art­icles can be found here, here and here.