Suzy Sandberg

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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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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Keyword Selection for Paid Search

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

It often seems like a race to keep up with the escalating complexity of paid search. From an agency perspective, changes to process, technology and training are frequently necessary in order to accommodate the evolution. Many of these changes enable us to move the needle here and there on leveraging performance, but the core of a solid paid search campaign hasn’t really changed that much.

Paid search is fundamentally about presenting a relevant ad to someone who enters a keyword in a search engine. Every month, 60% of the searches on Google are brand new. With the keyword list being the pillar of the paid search campaign, keyword selection is essential. Technology now exists to scrape a page and cull a list, but the fundamental strategies for effective keyword selection remain the same now as they have been for years. Here are some of the basic keyword selection tactics that apply to the retail vertical.

Top Sellers: Site analytics can determine the top selling products through direct load and natural search. These words should be part of the paid search campaign.

Top Searched Products on the Site: Site analytics can inform what people are searching for on the site, and these words should be included in the paid search campaign. Products being searched for but not sold by the merchant should be given to the merchandising team to potentially expand the product line.

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Google Remarketing: CPC Pricing Model Has Edge over Competitors

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Google has launched a remarketing product with similar functionality to what the other big remarketing providers offer (Acerno, Dotomi, Advertising.com, etc).  The technical implementation is about the same.  A Google pixel needs to be installed on the advertiser’s website which facilitates the remarketing.  When a visitor comes to the website and leaves without taking the desired action (buying, inquiring, etc), the person will be subsequently shown display (or text) ads in an effort to lure the person back to the site. These ads will follow the person around the internet provided that the sites they visit are within Google’s network.  The size of Google’s network is on par with that of the other big ad networks, so from an audience perspective, the reach is competitive.

The way Google has chosen to price this product, however, sets it apart from the other remarketing providers.  Google’s structure is CPC, whereas the other companies charge CPM or CPA.  Cost-wise, the CPC model has a clear advantage.  Comparatively, the cost savings to the advertiser can be huge.

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Google Betas: Paid Search Enhancements Are Welcome and Long Overdue

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

In 2009, Google released a slew of paid search betas mostly to support retail advertisers.  These betas are, where applicable, being rolled out to other verticals too.  Examples include GAN Product Ads, Product Plus Box (renamed Product Extensions) and Ad Sitelinks which we wrote about late last year.

Google is heavily diversifying these days, rolling out a smorgasbord of new initiatives.   Tangentially, most enhancements are related to where search is now and/or where search is going in the future.  These are welcome innovations in that they focus on how paid ads are displayed to searchers.  Up until last year, paid search display had been remarkably stagnant:  one to four shaded sponsored listings at the top of Page 1 and the rest running stacked along the right.   

Google Paid Search Display

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Facebook CPC Ads: How Big Can They Be in the Media Mix?

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Facebook CPC advertising, which started to gain traction with advertisers last year, resembles the early days of paid search marketing.  Launching a campaign is done in a do-it-yourself interface, and that interface is where bidding is established, payment is done by credit card, ads are created and messages targeted.  Also akin to paid search circa 2001 is that the execution of a campaign is mostly a manual process (as of yet there is no API).

As we saw with search, there is no doubt that Facebook’s features and tools will become more sophisticated and radically improve over time.  Facebook would surely like to monetize its 450 million users, and we know there are enhancements to the program already in the works.  With the attractive CPC pricing model, Facebook and would-be Facebook advertisers are lined up and waiting to sync up with APIs or at minimum, get easy access to reporting and some kind of bid management tool.

Looking into the future, could Facebook CPC ads ever become a force to be reckoned with in the media mix, matching or even exceeding paid search as a proportion of total online spend?

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