Suzy Sandberg

Facebook’s Advertising Challenge

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Suzy Sandberg

On the eve of Facebook’s IPO, many will be watching closely to see what happens with the stock. In the coming days, we’ll see the price fluctuate and eventually, settle in to where it will remain more stable than it will be in the first days of trading. With only a lucky few able to get in on the IPO, there is hope that Facebook will be as hot a stock as Google was early on with a steady increase in the stock price over time. To that end, once all the hoopla surrounding the IPO dies down, talk will turn more definitively to Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook’s ability to generate revenue will be necessary in order to move the needle on the stock price.

Google had an attractive model when it when it first went public. In fact, it was a cash cow out of the gate. Comparatively, Facebook’s revenue prospects right before going public are good but not as clear. As an online marketer who has bought advertising from both Google and Facebook since they both began selling it, I can affirmatively say that what Google offers is phenomenal and what Facebook offers is ho-hum, so-so, really not that great. Google continues to bring in new buyers at efficiency rates as good as and often better than that of the top tiers of the other direct response channels. Facebook, on the other hand, has not impressed many marketers on the advertising side from a performance standpoint.

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Posted in Google, Online Marketing, Paid Search, Search Marketing, Social Marketing | Leave a comment

5 Things That Frustrate Us About Google

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Suzy Sandberg

The news that the US government has hired an outside prosecutor to represent it in an antitrust inquiry against Google is ratcheting up the discussion of whether and how much Google abuses its power. Google has 66% market share for search and is the largest traffic-driving source for most online marketers. The heart of the issue is whether or not Google is giving preferential placement on the SERP to Google-owned properties, ranking them above their competitors. This action by the government indicates as serious a commitment to investigate as it did with Microsoft 14 years ago, and there has not been as high profile an antitrust case since.

What the government is focusing on is worthy of looking deeper at;  however, there are other issues with Google that we all know about that are questionable, too.  While we may have become accustomed to them, they remain egregious.  In our own dealings with the myriad of people we work with at Google, we regularly express our dissatisfaction in some or all of these areas.  Our agency’s feedback to Google has helped create some significant changes over the years.  As such, we continue to push where we can.

1.  Black box pricing in AdWords – Nobody knows how the starting price of the auction is determined. There is much cynicism in the industry about Google giving themselves a raise, when needed, by systematically increasing bids by a penny or so.

2.  Black box ad placement with AdWords - Search marketers understand the pillars of Quality Score (bid, relevancy and CTR) and how Quality Score affects placement of paid ads. However, there isn’t an empirical formula that maps it out, not to mention that determining “relevancy” is completely subjective.

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Posted in Search Marketing | Leave a comment

Attribution Defined: What Every Marketer Needs to Know Now

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Suzy Sandberg

I am just back from MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit. Always a great event! Great job to Laurie Sullivan of Media Post for pulling together fantastic content and a great agenda! A topic that got a fair amount of coverage was attribution. Someone at the conference tweeted a link to an article explaining the difference between attribution and optimization as it pertains to paid search and online marketing. I am unsure what one has to do with the other, but I am guessing that some people use the terms interchangeably which is indeed incorrect.

Since I live and breathe attribution and optimization, I thought I might try clarify what they are and why they are important.

In regard to attribution, I am continually surprised at how many direct marketing professionals don’t understand what it means. I recently saw the word “attribution” on a buzzword bingo card at a trade show. It is not a buzzword! Or a fad. It is critically important to the health of a business.

Attribution has to do with how revenue is allocated across sales channels (either in the case of just online or offline to online) or keywords (in the case of paid search) or devices. Once the revenue is allocated appropriately, the marketer can calculate an ROI to understand the profitability and true contribution of each sales channel. This information informs investment decisions.

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Posted in Online Marketing | Leave a comment

Paid Search Geotargeting: Putting Your Catalog Zip Code Model to Work

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Suzy Sandberg

PM Digital congratulates our client, The Sportsman’s Guide, for winning eTail’s Best in Class award for Paid Search. They were awarded the prize for their innovative use of geotargeting to improve the performance of their paid search campaign.

The Sportsman’s Guide’s  hunting and fishing merchandise appeals to a more rural audience, so we wanted to refine marginal ad groups by targeting where people were more likely to buy. If we could improve the performance of these ad groups,  we would be able to expand the reach of the campaign overall.

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Attribution Modeling, Part 2

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Suzy Sandberg

For multi-channel marketers, how revenue is attributed to online marketing campaigns can have a profound effect on budgeting and source allocation.  Direct mail matchbacks and clicks to bricks studies (for those who can afford the latter) have provided direction on how to allocate offline to online and/or online to offline revenue.  Most of these studies are periodic (some weekly, monthly, or quarterly), and the output defines the business rule for how the revenue will be attributed until the next study overrides it, and so forth.  Essentially, the findings keep validating and/or overriding the one before it.  After years of debating how to properly establish business rules, there is consensus that no cookie cutter model exists that can be applied across the board.  The myriad of tactics a marketer employs offline and online, combined with the particulars about what the company sells, require a unique set of rules for everyone.

Solely relying on matchbacks and clicks to bricks studies to determine how to best attribute revenue no longer cuts it for many reasons.  Among them:  1)  Paid search media spends are too big to rely on loose rules;  2)  Non-brand paid search cpcs have risen so high that they are close to knocking a lot of marketers out of the category altogether unless the math can be looked at more deeply;  3)  A proliferation of more affordable and better performing display media now exists for direct response advertisers if we can just get the numbers to work;  4)  While analytics still aren’t where we’d like them to be, there have been some fantastic evolutions to facilitate more sophisticated attribution of revenue.  Some examples of this are ClearSaleing, Google’s Big Funnel Beta, and bid management systems, many of which can now accommodate different attribution rules and models.

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Non-Branded Paid Search: How to Attain Steady Growth Through Attribution, Part 1

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Suzy Sandberg

For most retailers, the art of search engine marketing consists of the ability to grow sales from non-brand campaigns. Depending on how a retailer attributes their sales, for some this growth is getting harder.  In fact, the inability to see meaningful growth from non-brand paid search is the number one area of angst right now for marketers of paid search campaigns.  As an agency, we have so many discussions on this with prospective clients, current clients, industry analysts and others that I thought I’d sort out some of the issues and hot topics in a two-part post. This one illustrates the state of the state and Part 2 will cover attribution as it pertains to growth of sales from non-brand.

Paid search has an 80/20 rule in which 80% of an advertiser’s paid search spend goes toward non-brand keywords while generating only 20% of the revenue.  For some advertisers it’s a little more, and others a little less, but 80/20 is on average.

Advertisers have long abhorred paying the search engines for their trademark terms but since anyone can bid on any company’s trademark, a competitor or affiliate can siphon off sales meant for the advertiser if the advertiser is not present on the trademark keyword.  This is especially so given that the paid search trademark ad is shaded and quite enticing at the top of the page, in that it contains four deep links to desirable promotions and parts of the site that the organic listing doesn’t.  Because of these factors, most agree that letting the natural search result be the gateway to sales from all searches from  trademark terms is too risky.

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JCPenney and the Evolution of Facebook E-Commerce

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Suzy Sandberg

PM Digital builds and manages Facebook pages on behalf of our clients, and last year, we invested in technology that enables e-commerce to be done directly on the Facebook brand page by housing all the client’s merchandise in a custom tab.  From a pricing standpoint, the options to facilitate e-commerce on Facebook range from inexpensive to very costly.

Overall, the volume of sales generated from Facebook e-commerce tabs has underwhelmed us.  Conversely, we are seeing volume picking up from referral links in Facebook posts going to the main website, resulting in sales.  We are learning what moves the needle in driving sales from a content perspective.

I wasn’t surprised when I read that JCPenney put their entire catalog of merchandise online in a shopping tab on Facebook. This tactic provides another avenue to put product in front of customers.  In other words, it can’t hurt, and unlike smaller retailers whose acquisition investments are designed to yield acceptable profitability, JCPenney most likely has ample R&D marketing dollars enabling what is an experiment to gain learning and flourish in the long term rather than requiring the initial investment yield an acceptable ROI out of the gate.

When a high-profile retailer like JCPenney launches an effort like this, the questions abound about whether or not it’s a best practice and one that should be emulated by other retailers.  There are pros and cons, but ultimately, assuming JCPenney’s deeper resources, this is a test; I believe it would be best for most retailers to take a wait and see approach.

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Posted in Social Marketing | 1 Comment

Pay Days Yield Above-Average Sales for Search Engine Marketers

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Suzy Sandberg

One of the ways marketers can improve their paid search performance is to ensure that they are in competitive positions on the search engines for whatever days of the week typically perform well for them. Most paid search advertisers see consistent trends in this regard that are unique to their businesses.

In addition to the patterns of when sales come in based on the natural rhythm of the customer base, securing high positions on the search engines is also important when emails drop, when catalogs are due to be in home, when sales are running, and peak holiday days. On these days,  results will be stronger than normal, so it’s necessary to inflate bids and override bid management algorithms, if necessary, to maximize the share of impressions.

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Holiday 2010: Lessons Learned from Online Shopping

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Most e-commerce professionals of consumer goods spend the majority of their year preparing for the holidays.  In fact, as hard as it may be to comprehend in this relatively slow week between Christmas and New Year’s, in just a few weeks we will be back at ground zero for 2011 holiday planning.  To set the stage for that, here are some trends from 2010’s online shopping that may help shape strategies for the coming year.

Growth – Per MasterCard SpendingPulse, online sales surged 15.4% this year with some key pockets growing faster than others (apparel at +11.2% and jewelry at +7.2% were two notable categories).  Despite best efforts and lessons learned in prior years, some websites still couldn’t handle the sustained traffic generated on key holiday shopping days.  There needs to be an effective way to test for this earlier in the year with plenty of time to work out problems associated with overloading the site.

Online Advertising Budgets - The volume of online shoppers back in Holiday 2009 took a lot of marketers by surprise and budgets were expended before shipping cutoffs.  As a result, lots of advertisers had to shut down their online campaigns which resulted in less competition and lower CPCs during key shopping days.  Because of lack of budget, few advertisers were able to leverage those favorable factors.  This year, marketers budgeted appropriately and built-in flexibility to scale as needed so as not to have ad campaigns go dark on key shopping days.  This is a particularly important safeguard since conversion rates and average order values are higher during the holiday than at other times of the year, and marketers definitely do not want to leave extraordinarily great business on the table by going dark.

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Posted in Online Marketing, Paid Search | 1 Comment

Using Web Analytics to Troubleshoot Weak Sales

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Every year during the week of 4th of July, we hear from a handful of retail clients that demand is unusually low.  The initial suspicion is that there is a problem with the online marketing campaigns adversely affecting sales.  After noticing a fairly consistent pattern over time, we have learned that there’s usually not a problem with the campaigns. Rather, our experience has shown that consumer interest is unusually low this week.  Vacations, travel, entertaining, the beach, and the heat are likely reasons.  Apparel retail is at the tail end of the summer stock, with most merchandise on sale and Fall lines not yet in.  Back to school is still a week or two away.  Basically, in the past, this particular week has seen a deep loll in consumer interest in shopping.

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