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Clickstream analysis…sweet clickstream analysis

And on the 8th day, G-d made clickstream analysis and it was awesome!

Up until recently (about 2 years ago or so) online marketers had to rely on was the last click before conversion when tracking results.

To illustrate what I mean by this this lets pretend you’re Sir Phillip Green and just before taking your Friday afternoon private jet to Monaco (as you do every Friday), you decide to look at your Adwords campaign and see how your keywords are doing. You notice that on the keyword “womans fashion” you are getting 1000 clicks a day at a cost of £1 per click. This keyword also returns you only 10 sales a day. Now you decide to look at your keyword “Topshop” and you notice whilst you only got 100 clicks they only cost you £0.05 a click and you made 20 sales.

So if you were a traditional old school type of marketer you would say au revoir to those nasty generic terms and bonjour to more brand terms.

Right?

Wrong. So any online marketer worth his salt will tell you. Why? Because anyone who has ever bought anything online will tell you that most purchases start with broad generic searches. It is only over time and through exposure to several brands and products that the decision is taken to buy. And once this happens either the brand or product is put in the search bar and the sale is made. So to look at the last click is to exclude yourself from the consideration set that one needs to enter at the beginning of a search.

This has been touted as common sense, the only problem up to now has been putting a cost on what terms drive your brand into the consideration set. Knowing how likely a keyword will lead to a purchase 3 or 4 clicks down the line is a key determinant in working out how much I am prepared to pay for it.

The technology exists to do this either through Dart or Atlas, but the quantitative analysis needed to drill down into the mass of search data, makes this sort of insight available only to those with the budget to pay for it.

I saw a presentation today on some clickstream analysis that was done for one of our clients. It was so beautiful it made me want to cry. We have some serious quant jocks at the agency I work at and they trully did what is easily the most complete piece of clickstream analysis I have ever seen.

The analysis showed that for every online sale, there was a research time of 2 weeks on average in which the average sale took place after 4 clicks. (and the majority of last clicks being on brand) By knowing this and what keywords were used at different stages of the buy cycle, we were able to adjust our bidding and our messaging to target buyers with critical messaging earlier on in the buy cycle. The change we saw was immediate. The average clicks per sale dropped to 2 and the amount of sales on generic terms went through the roof.

Such a clever piece of analysis coupled with actions that drove value to the client…… *sigh* its the stuff sweet and profitable dreams are made of

Since Google bought Doubleclick we have all been expecting to see additional features being rolled out within Google Analytics that would give us this kind of insight. It makes sense from a Google point of view for advertisers to be able to see the value of any given click instead of the spray and pray approach we all have to our paid search generic campaigns.

The oil of this industry is numbers. Hard, cold, honest numbers that set this type of marketing apart from any traditional techniques. Clickstream analysis, or at least the lack of it, is one of the few final frontiers of uncertainty with regard to the true effectiveness of any online campaign. We need to know how all the pieces of our digital jigsaw fit together in order to assign value to our spend. Once things like IPTV become more mainstream and as mobile phone handset technology begins to allow richer ad formats begin to be served, knowing the true value of how the media meshes together is going to be fundamental to taking this industry to the next level.

SMX SHMESH EM EX

I meant to post this Wednesday but got distracted with some last minute bits…

What a let down. With some really big names on the roster I was pretty excited when I got there this morning.

However, my excitement held about as long as the Arsenal defence did against Stoke this last weekend.

In our first talk about Building a brand and online reputation management, Mel Carson from Microsoft evangelised about how Microsoft took the time to speak to the little people, the ones who dont even spend all that much with them and still treated them with respect and proactively answered any complaints raised in forums. The content left a big “so what?” hanging in the air and it felt more like one huge plug for the sweet, sensitive folk over at Adcentre rather than a meat and potato’s approach to reputation management.

Next up was Jan Cise. Now I dont know if Jan was high or was taking part in a bet to see how many disconnected slides and concepts he could throw out in presentation, but without doubt the worst piece of presenting and I have ever seen. He started off by mentioning that having loads of “buy now” buttons on ones site was important in building ones brand, that sex no longer sells as it distracts consumers (distracts from what?), heat mapping photos of how guys look at other guys packages when seeing a picture… (I know I do) and that through registering chemical activity in the brain, G-d is now considered the biggest brand. Good news, now I dont have to take any more knocks on my door from the men in suits.

Seriously Chris et al, we paid over a £1000 for these tickets. I know this was in the bootcamp stream, but this wasnt even 101. This was weird-01 and an absolute waste of time. You only need to look at his website here www.jancisek.com to see what I am talking about. It shouldnt come as a surprise to the organisers that his talk was a load of twaddle.

As for the rest, the secret techniques talk descended into a plug for SEOMOZ’s Link Exchange and some tool that seemingly made a mountain of data out of analysing links. (only for the hardest of the hard quant jocks out there – I would love to see you explain that to a client) Massimo from GSI was pick of the speakers for me. He gave a really good demo of Tubemogul (www.tubemogul.com) which is a submission tool for video sharing platforms. Definitely worth a try.

I sat through a session on buying websites which was moderated by evilgreenmonkey and featuring Dave Nailer. You guys scare me. I say no more.

The last session I sat through was what to measure outside of CPA and the usual KPI’s. Need less to say, all the first speakers spoke about was goals and increasing conversions. Worthy topics to talk about, but this was not what was advertised on the program. I thought I was walking into a session on possible brand metrcis and the role of search in measuring engagement or something sexy like that. Not to be. First 2 speakers spoke beautifully about how to increase conversions through multivereate testing *Yawn*, then plugging their own ways of testing and analyses (seriously the guy from Unica’s deck had about 7 slides out of 20 on how important Unica are)  *yaaaaawwwwnnnn* and then continued on how tozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………………

And so few people… I dont know what the attendance was like compared to last year but this looked really small. (maybe 80 people max)

Overpriced and small.

Come on Search Engine Land. I love your site. Danny, you have inspired me for years through your rants and points of view. This sucked serious balls. The content was wrong, the speakers spent too long plugging their own bits and it was way too expensive for what we walked out with at the end of the day. Sort it out. We speak all day about how to market other peoples sites and businesses, how can we do this if the people who are at the top of the game cant market and provide value for themselves?

Most search technology is a pile of crap

There I said it.

I was sitting with a potential client last week and had to listen to them wax lyrical over a piece of “Search Software” he had seen a demonstration of the other day. The look of disappointment on his face when faced with my reply that we were a search agency, not a technology development company and that we do not have a “Googlebuster 5000″ with which to optimise his campaigns told me 2 things:

1)    I was not going to get his business this time around
2)    I would most probably be seeing his company in 6 months time to pitch again (probably not seeing him though)

Whilst sitting there during the discussion my mind began to wander and I remembered the good old days of bid jamming on Overture. For those who remember, you got to see how much your competitors were bidding on Overture and the principle was that you only paid £0.01 more than your competitor. Out of this evolved a concept of bid jamming. This was where if I saw my competitor had left his bids too high, I could inflate my bid to just a penny underneath his to make him pay a lot more than if I kept my bid as to what it was. If you were using automated bid software such as Atlas you could set a rule that automatically found bid gaps to jam and that could detect when you were being jammed and automatically dropped below this point.

I played about with the software and whilst using it for a client I realised that you could outthink it pretty easily.  It wasn’t long before I was manually going through my top 20 keyword lists and setting my bids £0.03 below my competitors rather than the £0.01 so that those who were using this bid software would never pick it up, thereby maxing their budget out. At the time I remember laughing to myself and thinking I would need to check the next day and probably find the dame thing had been done to me. To my surprise, over a 6-month period not one competitor who was using the technology ever checked.

It occurred to me then, as it occurred to me during the meeting that people will always look for the easy way out, for something to help them sleep a bit better knowing that a machine has it all under control. But the reality is that all there is to well optimised search campaign is hard work. Even if you are going to use some bits and pieces to help you put larger campaigns together, the meat and potatoes needs to be manually controlled and watched like a hawk for real success.

So knowing all this I began to think about the current reports of doom and gloom within the finance industry and how there are those among us who have laid their bed in the face of the recession that is about to hit us.

Whilst the banking industry has been targeted as a hotbed of greed and the cause of the crisis in which we find ourselves, this is only because the current crunch has yet to be felt in other industries. For now, let’s point fingers at those horrible, greedy city types that put faith in instruments and products that were not robust, nor as safe as they claimed they were. But other industries have done the same thing. There has been so much money to go around they have been able to make hay in the sun without delivering any real value. And as the reaper smiles at financial institutions that gambled and lost, so too will those companies that have been selling snake oil for the last few years be hit by increased scrutiny over their accountability as cash becomes scarce.

Search marketing is as guilty as any industry on this count. I cringe when I hear prospective clients tell me how they have spoken to another search agency who has this tool that reduces minimum bids on Google Adwords whilst optimising the page for the best CPA and makes them a cappuccino at the same time. The idea that there is this “technology” that is available that cracks the hard work the search engines have put in to keep people like us guessing, is the type of stuff that belongs on infomercial channels. It’s the equivalent of developing those six pack abs you have always wanted, by attaching electronic pads to your stomach as you sit on the couch watching TV and eating your pot noodle.

Not possible.

Google and all the other search engines employ some really clever people and spend huge amounts of money to make sure that they stay ahead of anyone who threatens to figure them out.

Even if the search agencies were able to devote some serious budget to developing the kind of technology that could do everything that they say they do, Google would just change the rules in a way that would make them more money.

Especially considering that the companies who solely focus on developing this type of software and who have significant investment on their behalf, their kit, when you really get under the hood, for the most is part is just ok. Not brilliant. Not revolutionary. Not blow your brains out. Just ok. Works for some clients, doesn’t work for others and breaks more often than they would like to admit.

And yet search agencies continue to bang on about CPA tracking software, dynamic campaign optimising and other pieces of absolute made up rubbish, as if G-d Himself had come down and spoken to them in a dream informing which was the righteous way to optimise campaigns. This recession is going to hit us in search a lot harder than we give it credit for (no pun intended). Yes we may come out less blistered than say our cousins in offline media such as print and TV, but make no mistake we are still going to take a shoeing. It is true that we are not a mature industry, that we are yet to hit our ceiling point in term of how far we can grow and that search is still the most accountable and ROI focused media around etc ad nausea. However, the current crisis is because there is less money floating around.  Therefore unless our clients resort to paying us in clams, we are going to take a knock on how much we can deliver and as a result it will impact our bottom line

However, I hope that this downturn creates a need from the client’s side for more transparency and greater accountability from agencies. I hope that clients realise they cant place their faith in an automatic pilot that is on offer, but rather have to spend time getting to understand the medium and know what they are paying for. Most of all I hope that the very people who sold their “Googlebuster 5000” are made to answer for the utter rubbish they have evangelised for so long about.