When I was 19, before I left for college I worked at the Jolly Rancher factory in Wheat Ridge, Colorado (before it was closed down and shipped off to Canada) to save money for school. Like most recent high school graduates I wasn’t too motivated to do much and thought the $11.95 an hour sounded like a pretty sweet gig. Turns out working at the Jolly Rancher factory was the most mind numbing job I’d ever had. Watching candy go by on conveyor belts for 10 hours straight (I was working overtime to get paid time and a half) made me think I was going to go crazy. And then I realized that most of the people I was working with had been doing this for 10 to 20 to 30 years! It caused an identity crisis. Like a ton of bricks I realized that working in a factory was not me and from then on I was that much more incentivized to get an education.

One’s sense of identity is a huge motivator for change, and brands are constantly trying to get people to buy their stuff for the first time, or persuade them to buy their stuff instead of their competitor’s stuff. A major factor in opening the mind to change is the realization that you are no longer the person you wish to be and discovering the person you do want to be.
I recently finished reading the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath (a good read) where they point to research by James March who says:

When people make choices they tend to rely on one of two basic models of decision making: the consequences model or the identity model. The consequences model assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh the costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that maximizes our satisfaction. In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions: Who am I? What sort of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what’s missing: any calculation of costs and benefits.

Bad marketing uses rational, analytical incentives. When I say bad I mean it will train your customers to be eager to switch brands to save a buck.

Good marketing will cause an identity crisis: “I do not want to be the kind of mother who always nags her kids.” “I want to be a person my colleges can depend on, not a procrastinator.” “I want to be a size 8 again–size 16 is just not me.”

And then what happens next is identity theft, (because of this brand’s product or service I see myself as): “I’m the kind of mother that nurtures her kids to be amazing people.” “I’m the kind of dedicated professional that makes things happen.” “I’m the kind of person who cares about their outer beauty and inner beauty”.

Once you cause the identity crisis and identity theft you move onto earning and cultivating attention on top of a movement. People don’t want to connect with brands, they want to connect with other people. So brands need to seek out groups (people who have committed the same identity theft) that want to be connected and work to become the connecting the point. Brand marketing can facilitate that. So…

How do customers use your product to tell the world (and themselves) about who they are and their point of view? How can you give the audience ways to connect through the brand?

Sorry for the lack of “data driven-ness” in the last couple posts, this is stuff I’ve been thinking about lately and wanted to get it written down.

There are many people who blame doctor’s fee-for-service compensation models as one of the reasons of increasing health care costs; costs which are pushing the country towards bankruptcy. The problem is that doctors are incentivized to do more than is actually needed, since the more care they provide, the more money they get. In addition, expensive procedures earn them even more money which drive costs higher still.

Are advertising agency’s incentives also poorly structured in a way that is causing unhappy clients and poor results? Paying a percentage of the total media cost to the agency can incentivize agencies to choose media that is more expensive rather than effective. Paying an hourly fee means the agency is rewarded for the amount of time spent on the work, not the quality of the work. And just like a doctors expensive procedures, agencies like to pick big expensive ideas to wow their clients even if it’s not the best fit for their needs.

In a recent article in Businessweek, John Windsor of Victors & Spoils explained where he sees the current state of advertising:
“Advertising is all about relationships, and at the heart of the client/agency relationship is trust. That trust has been eroded by a lack of transparency and, often, resistance to change. Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time with the chief marketing officers of Fortune 500 companies. The theme is consistent. They tell me stories of being charged $10,000 per second of video editing for clips to go on YouTube, $1,000 for a single foamcore presentation board, and $25,000 for event banners; an unwillingness to collaborate; and myriad indirect charges for parties and travel.

Somewhere along the way, the big-agency business became a lifestyle. But clients, who want the best creative work, don’t want to pay for it anymore. And they’re figuring out that they don’t have to. Smart agencies need to adapt their business models and fast, or they won’t have the opportunity to rebuild these relationships.”

I get the feeling that agency compensation models are outdated and the majority of agency/client relationships are steeped in an “us versus them” mentality rather than a trust mentality like John talks about. How to fix this? What about pay-per-performance? Or an agency could be treated more like an in-house marketing department where they are paid a set amount and expected to reach a certain level of results. I think an agency should leave the client better off than they were before, not just in terms of increased marketing share, but in terms of organization of company goals and direction, higher level of education and understanding of the market and better ability to take care of themselves. These ideas aren’t without their problems but eventually someone is going to figure out the right mix and make a lot of money adding value to the client, not just ideas and spent money.

I’ve been messing around with the new Search Funnel Reports in AdWords trying to figure out how to use the data that it provides. Here are a few conclusions that I’ve come to that I think are actionable.

Path Analysis
Under Top Paths in the left hand column, drill down to “keyword path (clicks)” under the dimension drop-down box. This will show you the keywords that people used to click on your ads and how many times that happened before a conversion. Different paths can mean different user behavior which can give you clues on things to change on your landing pages or site. For example:
1. Head Keyword to Tail keyword Paths: Are visitors able to easily find what they are looking for on the site? Maybe improve site browsing and site search would keep them from going back to Google to refine their search.
2. Tail Keyword to Head Keyword Paths: May mean merchandising problems. If you don’t have very much specific product for the keyword, include more general product on the landing page too.
3. Same Term Multiple Times Path: Maybe they are comparing you against other retailers with the same product. Urgency in the offers may help close the sale sooner.
4. Unrelated Terms Path: Is there enough cross selling on the site? – you like Nike shoes, you might also like Nike shirts.

So with these ideas in mind take the top 500 rows of Top Paths and export it into Excel. This is where the manual part starts. What I do is build out the spreadsheet so I have a column for each one of the example paths above, then I look at the path and put a number one in the column that matchs the kind of path (see the image below). Once you go through this and add up the amount of conversions each path has you can get an idea of where the PPC landing pages are strong or weak.

Assisted Conversions
If you want to go out on a limb and try some broader keywords, the search funnel report will help you see if those keywords are helping to get more people started in the conversion funnel. Keywords can be either introducers, influencers or closers. Instead of only giving credit to the last click closing keywords, you can give some credit to the broader introducer and influencer keywords that educated and lead the user to the sale, which is worth something. Using the Assisted Conversion report in AdWords can also help define which keywords fall into the three categories. Keywords that do a lot of assisting should be given credit by building an assisted conversion metric into the CPA calculation like below. The tricky part is deciding how much credit to give those assisting keywords. In my example I gave 30%.

I dig the 100+ Old Spice Man videos made by marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy, targeted towards individual social media people. They fit pretty close to what I imagine that future of advertising online will be like – I wrote about it previously in my post Rocket Ship Marketing.

You can read that post for more detail on what Rocket Ship Marketing is. In this post I want to point out how what Wieden + Kennedy did fits in with the Rocket Ship idea.

1. They made over a hundred videos. Instead of one big Rocket Ship, or one big idea, they did hundreds of mini rockets. These are cheaper, fail faster and uncontrollable; therefore they were able to spread out and find their niches.

2. More videos makes for less risk. Some worked better than others but since none of them individually required a big investment it didn’t matter. All of these niches in the long tail together were enough to be equivalent to being a big budget hit but without the risk of just being one idea by itself.

3. The Old Spice ads are very personalized, made to individual people. Instead of making something that tries to target as many people as possible (one big Rocket Ship), which makes for bland and unremarkable ads, they were hyper-targeted and super relevant (many small Rocket Ships). When the intended recipients received these messages they let everyone know about it. That’s what relevant targeting does. It’s not perfect for everyone but for those who it is perfect for, it delights them and it spreads.

4. They gave up control. According to the article on Read Write Web, “Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.” Usually the brand wants to own the message and all appendages to it. But in the Old Spice case, they let go and allowed people to comment, re-send and participate with it. This can be scary (what if it backfires and gives the brand a black eye?) but at the same time its the only way to let multiple ideas go out, be discovered and send back what they find.

With cost of production going down thanks to improved technology and the increasing ability to target very specific audiences, I think this model makes a lot of sense: 1. Make a bunch of mini-rockets each with a specific message for a specific group. 2. Fire all the rockets at once. 3. A few rockets are bound to miss but don’t worry, you’ll quickly find out which ones suck and you’ll be happy you didn’t invest everything into that one idea 4. Measure the results and discover which good ideas are spreading. 5. Give more money to the good ones that work and less to the bad ones that don’t. 6. Repeat.

I made a dashboard for tracking SEO in excel. The link to download it is at the bottom if you’re interested in playing around with it. I tried to make something that not only shows what the current state is at-a-glance, but also allows for discovering insights for diving deeper. There’s also a little section for goals, although I think that should be bigger since tracking the outcomes of SEO is the real end goal, not just ranking higher.

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Starting in the top left coroner is the rank of your top 10 keywords which you can compare to each other by clicking the check boxes. The graph next to it is total traffic, bounce rate and conversion rate from non-paid search traffic. Seeing bounce rate going up and conversion rate going down would be cause for concern and you would want to look at top referring keywords to see who is driving the crappy traffic. Below that graph is conversions, sign-ups and revenue (or whatever other micro-conversions you want to track) from all non-paid search. I have spaklines in-cell graphs for those metrics to give an idea of where they are trending.

Next to those metrics are the total backlinks and indexed URLs metrics. I would pull these metrics from Google Webmaster Tools but there are others tools that can give you the same information. The more indexed URLs the better the chance you have to get more traffic from those pages and tracking the number of backlinks is important since that’s how pages rank higher.

If you expand the plus box you can see the top 10 most linked to pages. And on the other side, conversions, sign-ups and revenue are segmented by those same top 10 keywords.

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Beneath that is the amount of traffic and revenue split up by search engine (not sure what kind of insights knowing this would give other than where to focus your efforts). And next to that are the goals which are custom formatted so that if the week-to-date number is below the goal it will turn red. Expanding the second plusbox shows traffic trends for the three engines and the other graph shows total sign-ups and revenue.

Download the SEO Dashboard.

Let me know what you think and what is missing from this dashboard in the comments.

If you like this post you may also like my PPC Dashboard and eCommerce Planning Dashboard posts.

I really like using goals as advanced segments to find out what is working on the site.

Say your Goal #1 is a lead generation goal to get email sign-ups from people who want you to contact them later for more information. Set up an advanced segment for Goal1 Completions and then add it, and only it, to your report.

Now you’re looking at everything that went just right with these visitors: 1. Their expectations of what they were going to see before they clicked matched what they saw. 2. What they saw was engaging. 3. They trusted you enough to give you a chance and then they converted. Here’s some ideas on how to figure out what those 3 things were so that you can make it happen more often:

1. What kept these visitors from bouncing was that what they were expecting, by clicking on the search result or link in a referring site, is what they got. This can be found under Traffic Sources. What keywords and referring sites are driving these visitors who convert? I’m going to try to maximize the traffic from these sources especially to the page that they landed on. Under Content > Top Landing pages I can find out which landing pages worked. Make more content like that with those same keywords. Include those keywords in your SEO efforts.

2. How engaged does someone need to be before they convert? Back to Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Depth of Visit you can see how many pageviews it it takes on average before someone converts. If the sweet spot is between three and four pages then I can start trying out strategies for getting more pageviews per visit. More up-sells (people who like this also like this) and more links to similar content to keep people on the site.

3. The amount of trust it takes can be found under Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty. Here you can see how many visits on average it takes for someone to convert. Once I see how many visits it takes before someone trusts me enough to convert I can set a goal to get those repeat visitors. Creating content more frequently and maximizing the ways people can get alerted to new content (Twitter, RSS, Facebook) can help get repeat visitors.

Inspired by Avinash’s last post on ensuring a clear line of site with web metrics, I took a stab at creating a web analytics framework for a medium sized eCommerce site. This theoretical site is using the following marketing channels: paid search (brand and non-brand keywords), comparison shopping engines, affiliates, email, display advertising and social media (Facebook and Twitter).

I tried to figure out where each of those channels would fit into the what matters most diagram from Avinash’s post (I know I’m missing some so I left an empty space below each segment for additional ideas), and then those channel’s strategies, KPI’s and KPI Targets.

Click to Enlarge

I really enjoyed this exercise and get how effective this would be for any organization to get everyone on the same page. It gives the people at the top an accurate idea of what the site is really worth and it gives the analysts a direction to start doing segmented analysis to discover problems to fix what directly affect net income.

Download the Web Analytics Framework.

Here’s a little SEO tool built in Excel for getting an idea of how difficult a keyword will be to rank well in Google. It comes with a couple big caveats** but I think the overall idea works. Here’s how to use it:

1. Put your keyword choices in column A.

2. Use Google’s keyword tool to find the Local Monthly Searches (local means it gives you the results based on the specified location and language above the search button) for that keyword and paste those in column B.

3. Do a search for those keywords using the allintitle: operator and paste the amount of results into column C. Use the allintitle: operator so that you get a more accurate number of sites you’ll be competing with that use your keyword in their page title. Also put in a quote like this: allintitle:” so that it keeps your keyphrase together.

4. The spreadsheet is pre-formated to calculate the average popularity and competition of of those keywords once you do steps 1 -3 and will highlight in red the ones that are harder and green for the ones that are easier.

Download the SEO keyword competition tool in excel.

Let me know what you think!

*If one of the keywords is much more popular than the others it will skew the average quite a bit which all the other keywords are based on, so try using words that have similar popularity.

* The amount of search results for a given keyword is not the only factor for the competition of a keyword. The amount of backlinks to those pages is just as important, if not more so.

The best marketing tactics I know of are 1. earning attention instead of buying it and 2. making stuff for your fans rather than finding fans for your stuff. Those tactics work even better when built on top of a movement. When the attention being earned is from people who identify themselves as part of that movement and want to be connected to other like-minded people. Then the brand works to become the connecting point.

My favorite part of this strategy is that it fits online perfectly, cost little and size of the business doesn’t matter.

Earning attention is about thinking of yourself as a publisher of helpful content related to a movement that people want rather than a marketer who is trying to interrupt. This content is then spread (if its good) throughout the group that identifies themselves as part of the movement and invites them to come back and sign up. Then the brand has the ability of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to the people who want to get them. Repeat.

I’m going to write more about the different tactics of this strategy in upcoming posts so stay tuned.