Here’s the gist of the article: for two of GM’s automotive brands, GMC and Buick, consumers can now go to their website and utilize a vehicle-configuration tool, and then post the custom car from the tool to their Facebook page to solicit feedback from friends.  In addition to seeing responses from friends on Facebook, consumers also can see them in the configuration tool.  GM will be in essence spying on this activity to see what configurations are “liked” by consumers and their friends, and then “will also be able to tie those metrics to purchases.”

I’m curious HOW they plan to tie those metrics to purchases, as they then go on to say they they do NOT “have mechanisms in place to remarket to consumers who build and share a vehicle, other than messaging to those who “like” the brands’ Facebook pages.”  At least GM acknowledges that “likes” on a Facebook page or playing around with a configuration tool are not ROI:

“The ultimate gold standard is to be able to connect how people are engaging on GMC.com and with the tool and ultimately be able to lead that into sales and how this tool helps to facilitate sales at the bottom line.”

Since GM doesn’t tell us how they’re doing it, we can only speculate.  What we do know is that GM obtains permission to access consumers’ basic profile when the user connect their vehicle design with their Facebook account, and GM may use some of this information shared publicly to tailor future marketing communications.  As an exercise I want to think thorough examples of how ROI can be measured in this situation.  I will further break it down into soft ROI and hard ROI, as well as what metrics I’m certain GM can access and what is my speculation (noted by asterisk).

Soft ROI

• # of “likes” on the brand pages
• # of consumers who use the auto configuration tool on the websites
• # of consumers who share their custom car design with their Facebook friends
• # of Facebook friends who “click,” “like” and “comment” on the custom car designs
• # of Facebook friends who “pass-along” the content from one person to another*
• # of variations of car designs
• # of likes per variation (qualitative “comments”can also be coded)
• segmentation of most liked car designs based on other gathered information (e.g. male/female, age ranges, geography)
• # of configuration tool visits and duration of engagement
• source of traffic, other pages visited and in what order
• whether the brands/the promotion are being talked about online (e.g. tweets, blogs, press)
• whether the brands are being talked about more than competitive brands
• # of consumers who visit a dealer month over prior month, year over prior year
• # of consumers who use the configuration tool who own a GM car currently*
• # of consumers who submit or call for more information on their dream car*

Hard ROI aka the “Gold Standard”

• # of consumers who visit a dealer and show a copy of their dream car or mention the tool*
• # of consumers who already pretty much know what they want, due to the tool, saving agent’s time*
• # of consumers who redeem coupons/offer codes*
• # of buyers who respond in a follow-up survey that the tool had a significant bearing on their purchase*

In summary, there are certainly a lot of opportunities to measure the soft ROI of social media marketing integration and, while more challenging to link these activities to hard ROI — money earned or resources saved — it’s not impossible.  If you have any thoughts of your own to fill out these lists, I’d love to hear them!

Here are some examples of marketing messages taking advantage of these dual drivers of human behavior.  Note how much more often pleasure seeking is used than pain avoidance, simply because it’s more effective.

Pain:

• Trying to scare you with what has happened to someone else due to the same negative behavior you’re doing.
• Making you imagine yourself in an awful situation to stop a negative behavior.

Pain or Pleasure:

• Trying to get you to accept their opinion as a belief.

Pleasure:

• Making you laugh, thus trying to transfer that emotion that theirs is a ‘fun’ brand/product.
• Trying to ‘wow’ you with cool imagery, thus trying to link the ‘cool’ factor to their brand/product promise.
• Trying to inspire you, thus trying to link the ‘awesome’ factor to their brand/product promise.
• Using the awww factor—animals and babies (often combined with humor)—thus trying to create the ‘halo’ effect toward their brand/product.
• Then, of course, the always-popular sex sells technique.

The problem is that most of us base our decisions about what to do on what’s going to create pain or pleasure in the short term instead of the long term.  Yet, in order to succeed, most of the things that we value require us to be able to break through the wall of short term pain in order to have long term pleasure.  Remember it’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain.  And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief—our sense of certainty—that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure.  We’re not driven by the reality, but by our perception of reality. ~Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

Although pleasure seeking is the stronger driver of human behavior, pain is our most effective creator of behavioral change when going down the wrong path. I learned recently from Tony Robbins that the best way to create change in yourself when doing something that you know is bad for you in the long term, but pleasurable in the short term, is to create so much pain in your mind around that thing that you have no choice but to make a decision to change.  The only way to do this is to “scratch the record” that goes round and round in your brain by feeding it lots of new, negative information about the long term effects of the pleasurable thing.  The down side, when a marketer tries to use pain to change a pleasurable behavior instead of the individual seeking this out for themselves, is that it’s far too easy to ignore if the person isn’t open to hearing it.

Marketers must know if they are trying to create a short term or long term consumer behavior change.  If trying to create a short term affect—e.g. buy our artery-clogging hamburger today—then marketers shy consumers away from the long term affect of their choice and focus on the pleasure (for those who eat meat) of today.  If creating a long term behavior change—e.g. buy our low-fat sandwiches today—then marketers pin their message on the long term affects of healthy eating habits.  This is why Subway recently surpassed McDonald’s in worldwide store units.  Focusing on long term positive (rather than negative) affects is more effective in capturing long term consumer loyalty; however, there are also plenty of folks who focus on today’s pleasures and don’t want to think about the negative affects of their choices in the future.

On another side of this issue, marketers who claim to focus on positive long term behavior changes—e.g. join our fitness gym today—often woefully focus on their short term goals instead.  As example, I called my local Bally Total Fitness to see how much they charge to join ($66 for 2 months upfront), their monthly fee ($30), for classes ($3 each or included in the monthly fee, depending on the class) and for personal training, which was like pulling teeth to get a straight answer.  The first guy I spoke with about personal training said “about $60 an hour” but he really didn’t know(!) and when I asked to be put through to someone in the personal training area, he hung up on me(!).  I called back, undeterred, and was put through to one of the trainers.  Rob also wouldn’t give me a straight answer. Finally, after much annoying back-and-forth about my fitness goals and experience, he said that when you join you can buy a package of 12 classes for $33 an hour but it goes up after that to “$49 to $99 an hour.”  I asked what criteria made the price $49 or more, and he said it “had to do with your fitness goals” and felt that mine, to tone up, would “put me at the lower end of the scale.” So the message Bally is sending to consumers is if you don’t want to spend a ton of money at their gym than don’t have high fitness goals to achieve.  I would like to see gyms include personal fitness training in their price, realizing that helping people achieve their long term goals and not creating a confusing, sliding scale—that even employees don’t know how to communicate—is not good for business.  It seems to me that Bally is focused on their short term goals of getting a minimum of two months out of people, figuring they’ll quit after that, instead of helping their customers achieve their long term fitness goals and making this financially feasible.

Compare Bally to a gym an acquaintance made me aware of recently, which I’m considering joining…Pop Physique is a dance-oriented woman’s gym, which appeals to me as I’ve always hated the gym but love to dance, and their small class sizes offers what is in essence a personal trainer.  Their pricing structure is straight-forward and on their website: $100 for the first month of unlimited classes and $150 after.  They also offer a single class for $20, and packages of classes that don’t provide much of a price break ($1 to $2 each).  If I want to go at least a couple of times a week the unlimited classes are the cheaper option, which is obviously intended.  Overall, it seems to me they are focused on my goals, to break through the short term pain of exercise for the long term benefits, to have fun and obtain the benefits of personal attention.

In summary, be aware of the power of pain and pleasure principals in your marketing efforts.  If your objectives are to help people achieve long term pleasure, you can address the needs of your customers in overcoming any short term pains.  If your objectives are to give consumers short term pleasures that can lead to long term pains, then you can give them other options also, e.g. smaller portions, healthier alternatives and clearly communicate the unhealthiness of the choice so that it is used infrequently.

Happy ROI hunting!

In summary of the article, an individual in the Avis customer loyalty program (lesson #1) hadn’t used their services in awhile but thought they might again for a personal trip, so they logged into the Avis site (lesson #2) to review their options, only to abandon the effort for another day.  A few days later, the person received a postcard from Avis that said their email bounced (lesson #3) and if they logged back in and updated their email address (lesson #4) they would get a free upgrade (lesson #5).  This multi-channel marketing effort converted the browser into a buyer; not only due to the free upgrade but because they were so impressed with the effort.  And then, they happened to work for marketing news site MediaPost and wrote about their experience (lesson #6).  Lastly, now here I am writing about that person’s experience (lesson #7).

Avis knew that having a clean database of email addresses is the most effective way to market to their lapsed customers, and also that direct mail still has its advantages.  As much of marketing has switched to email, postcards stand out more now.  Avis leveraged a predetermined process where an abandoned transaction triggers the next steps of a reminder email and, if that fails, a postcard to the last known mailing address, both with an offer to close the deal.  All this can not be done, of course, if customers are not first enrolled in a program to identify that person and their activity on the site.  What Avis was unaware of in their establishing this multi-step process is the resulting loyalty it would create, as well as the press they would receive from it.

Other companies would do well to follow Avis’ lead and think through where their customers may abandon a purchase in the buying cycle, what offer could encourage them to follow through, and how exactly to administer that offer.  If there are many reasons and points where an abandoned shopping cart could take place, and if there is no way to, or reasons for, a customer to enroll in a loyalty program, I recommend the company should survey its customers and prospects to map the buying process out and determine the best offer to cinch the deal.  Understanding all the opportunities for customer touches, having multi-step processes in place, and knowing what concessions may be offered to encourage the purchase, is key to success.

Happy ROI hunting!

On a personal note: I’m bacccckkkkk….from my blogging hiatus.  Sometimes one has to turn inward for a bit in order to once again turn outward…a marketing lesson in and of itself!

The man in the commercial is focused on getting his morning coffee and nothing else.  He dismisses everyone, including the cashier at McDonald’s, until he is presented with his coffee. The coffee guy represents everyone you want to talk to, whether you are targeting consumers or businesses.  He doesn’t want to hear anything else until he gets his coffee, just like prospects don’t hear anything from you that isn’t relevant either.

Marketing and sales people often approach people in all the wrong ways.  They only think about themselves and what they want to accomplish, rather than thinking about what is going on in the mind of their prospect.   People in general mostly care only about what is going on in their life, how they feel, what they need to accomplish and what they need in order to do that.  In order to reach people and present what you have to offer, you first have to try to understand those things for them.  After you determine that, in order to get their attention, you need strong value propositions.

Here are a couple of examples of bad approaches.  In this voice mail rcvm128_2010082508395100, Jennifer doesn’t clearly articulate what company she’s with and simply says she “has a couple of questions.”  She’s only thinking of herself, what she wants to know to move her sales process forward, and doesn’t state any compelling value proposition to entice me.  In this voice mail rcvm128_2010082515292500, Kirby says what he specializes in, lead generation and appointment setting, and does give somewhat of a value proposition but it is very weak: to “expand your client base in getting clients.”  Again, it’s mostly focused on himself.  So what can we do to better position ourselves, and not be a Jennifer or Kirby?  Take the time to do your market research and be thoughtful in the way you present your information.

If targeting consumers, you can read secondary research or do a custom survey to find out what’s important to them so you can be relevant.  You can also test your marketing messages before investing a ton of money in various media  (as aside, I work in market research at C.A. Walker if you need assistance in this area).

If targeting businesses, you can evaluate the people you are trying to reach by studying job postings for all the titles.  Print a bunch of them (Indeed.com works great for this) and create profiles for each.  You need to understand their responsibilities, their involvement in decision making, who else may be involved (target them all), their measures (metrics) of success, and their business drivers.  Then study the company looking at their website, articles, investor reports and presentations.  You should be able to pick up from these resources their current plans and issues in order to craft relevant messages.  You may also want to conduct your own survey to better understand these people and test your messages as insurance that you’re doing the right thing (as aside, C.A. Walker can also target specific business titles in surveys).

To create marketing ROI, you have to have the mindset that you are there to serve others.  The more you can understand your targets’ current needs and stop focusing on yours, the better.  Like the coffee man, you must try to insert yourself at the moment that they have a need (“I can give you coffee!”).  Good value propositions help people see that you understand them and can help them achieve their measure of success or fulfill their need, while focused on their issue (“I know you really need your morning coffee.  I can give it to you cheaper than Starbucks and it’s convenient!”).

It is a bit of a guessing game, but if you did a good job on your research it is likely you found many issues that you can address.  I suggest trying to find 10 things you can talk about.  You can then contact your target with 10 different value propositions over a period of 4 to 6 weeks.  If you did this right, something should “hit” because it’s what they are dealing with.  If none do, then you can move on and come back to them in a month or so when you have something else you can talk about.  You may also come across articles that relate to them, which you can share to help them stay on top of trends in their industry.  The best part of this technique is that you never have to feel like you’re bothering someone, contacting them multiple times, because you are offering them value that is targeted to what you’ve learned about their needs.

Your Turn:

What are your ideas for marketers and sales people to be more engaging?

First off, you should watch their demo to see how Google AdWords Display Ad Builder works.  When I first log into Google AdWords, I am presented with  “create a new campaign.”  I enter a name for the campaign and then select where I would like the ad to be seen. What’s interesting here is that I can choose to target businesses if I am creating an ad for a B2B operation.  If so, I can then connect to the Google Local Business Center, if a business owner, or add addresses manually, if not.  If a B2C operation, I  can instead choose to target by demographics, male/female and age range only.

I then select the networks I want to run in and on what devices, desktops/laptops and/or mobile.  I then decide if I want to pay on a CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.  If I want CPA, it directs me to setup conversion tracking on the Reporting tab, meaning, I will pay only if there is a sale, signup, lead generated, or view of a specific page.  This step provides conversion tracking code that has to be added to the web page.  I then enter a budget for the campaign per day, if CPC I enter a bid limit, and start and end dates.  Lastly, I can also choose to cap frequency, meaning, the same person won’t see the ad or “ad group” more than once per day, per week or per month.

Once I have saved my options, on the next screen I can choose to create a text, image or mobile ad, or select Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.  I then enter keywords (and negative keywords) manually or upload a spreadsheet (see my blog post Free Keyword Suggestion Tools for help with this step).  Pressing the “estimate search traffic” button, I will see what Google figures my average cost per day would be, given the maximum CPC and budget entered previously.  Lastly, I can enter specific websites that I would like to show the ad (see my blog post Manage Your Advertising ROI with Google AdPlanner for help with this step).

Finally, I’m now at the step to create the display ad.  My options are: create an ad for a currently hosted YouTube video, place a 15 or 30 second video ad within video publisher content, create a click-to-play video creative, create a “roll-over showcase,” “tabbed showcase,” “scrolling showcase,” “peel effect,” or slideshow.  They also have various templates for seasonal ads or for companies that specialize in education, entertainment, financial, retail, technology and travel.  Lastly, they offer “people” ads with, what else, people in them doing things like pointing, running, hugging and dancing.  You can even select to see those ads that offer the highest click-throughs.

If you’re wondering where these ads will show up, there is information here on the Google Network, Gmail, Search Network (Google search results pages and the search results pages of Google’s search partners), Content Network, and Content Network Partners.  Also, remember you can specify locations in the earlier step.

A new development in Google AdWords Display Ad Builder you should be aware of is their recent acquisition of Teracent.  You will soon be able to setup “intelligent display advertising” to have multiple elements within the same ad that can be targeted to the recipient based on geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.  While dynamic ad serving is exciting, it will also create more work for those setting up campaigns and we will once again return to talks of multivariate testing (see my last post How To Test Landing Pages for more on this).

A couple of useful articles:

• How to link Google Analytics goals and transactions to AdWords Conversion Tracking
• How to import Google Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN

Lastly, if you have website content that is new every day or can be used frequently, such as a blog, news feed, map, calculator, videos or games, you might consider creating a Google Gadget ad.  There are multiple ways to go about building a Gadget, including using their templates and wizards.  It says on their site, “To get started, all you need is a basic understanding of HTML. We will teach you all you need to know about XML to write gadgets. Later, as you write more sophisticated gadgets, you will probably want to learn some JavaScript if you’re not familiar with it already.”

If you use the tools that I have shared with you today, I’d love for you to come back and tell me your experience and how well it worked for you in achieving marketing ROI.

You may have heard of A/B or A/B/n Testing (“n” refers to the number of “cells” or groups of people who will see the landing page).  In this type of test, you create minimally two differing versions of your landing pages “A” versus “B” (and “C,” “D,” and so on) to see which outperforms.  You then serve the landing pages on an equal basis to the cells, and use cookies to make sure someone sees the same page again if returning.  Typically those who use A/B tests are testing wildly different landing pages, including number of images, copy and paths.

Multivariate testing involves testing the same landing page but with different elements on the page.  Essentially, you are swapping out images, buttons and text when you are certain you’ve chosen the best design layout from your A/B tests.

It is important to consider statistical significance when testing landing pages.  You want to make sure that you have served the landing page to a large enough sample size in each cell before inferring any conclusions. The company I work with, C.A. Walker, provides a sample size calculator on its site that is helpful for this.  First, you enter the confidence level – typically 90% or 95%  – then enter your maximum allowable error – typically 5% or 10%.  If you’re not sure which to use, go with a 95% confidence and 5% error level.

Population size is a bit more tricky.  You can try searching online for a population size, e.g. “population size of [target] in [your city or nation],” and see what research surfaces that you can use.  If you are in the U.S., you can try finding your population size on the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates page.  For example, if I want to geotarget an ad to Los Angeles women, I can see from the Age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin estimates under Population Estimates that there are 9.8 million people living in LA and 4.9 million of them are female.  Plugging this into the  calculator, the sample size is 384.  Therefore, I would need to test each landing page on a minimum of 384 women in order to infer conclusions.

Another way to look at this is using Marketo’s Landing Page Version Calculator, which allows you to enter the number of expected conversions per day and your confidence level to get back either the number of test versions you can have or the length of the test you need to allow.  If I enter 100 conversions per day at a 95% confidence level and 30 days for the test, it says I can run 13 versions of a landing page to generate statistically valid results.

Google’s Website Optimizer is a free tool you can use for landing page testing.  To do so, you setup a “new experiment,” choose either A/B or multivariate testing, create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs, and then also create and publish a “thank you” page that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion.  You then add tags to your pages so Google can track.  From Google’s Adding Tags help page, “If you’re running a multivariate experiment, you’ll need to add tags to both your test page and your conversion page. If you’re running an A/B experiment, you’ll need to add tags to your original page, all test page variations, and your conversion page. You can find detailed instructions for adding all the tags in our Installation Guides for multivariate experiments and A/B experiments, as well as information about how to deal with tags in relation to shared headers and existing HTML code.”  Website Optimizer will then provide you with a report on your tests to see how well each combination or variation is performing.

If the idea of creating multiple landing pages and managing tags sounds about as much fun as a root canal, then consider your paid options.  I recently demo’d ion interactive’s LiveBall product, which does much of the work for you and is fully hosted on their site.  Their pricing starts at $1,295 a month for unlimited number of landing pages and 10,000 visitors per month, and goes down if you get more traffic than that.  For that price, they start you off with 12 landing pages complete with forms and images relevant to your industry; all you have to do is add copy.  They also include 15 templates that you can use to change the look-and-feel of your pages on the fly. The templates are designed around 1 theme for each brand, for each season, or for each client (if doing this for multiple clients) and include 1 stock image gallery for each business (or you can use your own images).

If you want them to design your landing pages for you, they offer that service for an extra monthly fee or on an ad-hoc basis.  They say some of their clients opt for the extra service for the first several months in order to build up their library and then do it themselves from there.

When you log in to their service as a client, the first thing you see is a dashboard to monitor real-time results of your landing page effectiveness.  Your landing pages are represented by bubbles on a grid:  the larger the bubble the more traffic you’ve received for that particular landing page, and the higher on the grid the better the conversion rate.  In addition, the bubble are “live” meaning you can click on them for greater detail on that campaign.

To use the LiveBall system, you first create a “portfolio,” then “campaign,” then add a “path” to the campaign that is either new – chosen from the optional “frameworks” provided – or you can choose to copy a path over from another portfolio or campaign.  A “path” is simply the series of pages that a person sees during the conversion process, which can be as simple as Page A and then the “thank you” page, or you can add intermediate pages that tries to upsell other products. I’m not sure how exactly, but was told their system also segments users to deliver robust landing paths/experiences. 

To add a page, you select from the pre-determined master pages provided, change out the nonsense text and remove areas you don’t want to use.  In addition, 3 forms are provided for you but are easily editable.

The last step is selecting the traffic source, e.g. Google, and it creates a unique URL for each traffic source for you.  Here you can also choose to “auto-optimize” your landing pages, meaning that the system will determine when the pages reach statistical significance and pull poor-performing landing pages for you.  You can also set it up to send people to another page when statistical significance is reached for that particular traffic source.

They also provide for you “advanced rules” (conditional logic) on the page or content level – 20 conditions, 15 actions.  They are useful for geotargeting – substituting content on a page based on the region coming from – or previous action,  such as adding the user’s specific search query into the page text or sending them to another page if they didn’t convert the first time they visited.

For reporting, you can view how a campaign is performing on a portfolio level, go into an individual campaign, or into individual paths.  The dashboard is dynamic, meaning you can easily switch from viewing your results as a tag table, a respondent funnel, a pie chart, or other options.  You can see other views there as well, such as which keywords are working best for you.

So that’s my primer on how to test landing pages and what some of your free versus paid options are.  Some other resources I recommend on this topic are:

• 7 Best Tips to Create Landing Pages for PPC Campaigns
• The Cost of Landing Page Optimization
• Landing Page Testing: How to test and what to test
• Autonomy’s Best Practices for Optimizing Landing Page Performance, who have their own landing page solution
• SiteSpect’s Best Practices for Site Optimization, who have their own landing pages solution

Happy ROI hunting!

I want to share with you the following free keyword research tools that I found to be helpful in developing keyword lists.

• iSpionage – gives you 25 free keyword results than asks you to sign up for a 7 day trial for $1 to view more.  After the 7 days, they ask for $49-$199 per month depending on the maximum daily query.  This one gave me some good suggestions to add to my blog.
• PPC Web Spy – download this Firefox add-on and then do a keyword search in Google.  In the bottom right corner of your screen there will now be the words PPC Web Spy, which you can toggle on and off.  When toggled on, all sponsored/paid search engine results will now have the button underneath “View Keywords,” which will allow you to see which terms that site is bidding on, the position of the ad on the keyword (the ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position), average and maximum CPC (cost per click), which is helpful if you are doing PPC, clicks on that keyword per day and cost per day.  The limitation is 10 keywords before they want you to pay for the tool, but still it’s pretty insightful.
  • Note when downloading the free tool, it asks two or three times if you want to accept a discount  now to upgrade to the full version.  At the bottom of the pages you can bypass this.
• SEM Rush – Once registered, you can search on a domain or keyword to get a list of 11 results before they ask you to upgrade.  It provides Volume (average number of queries of this keyword in a month), CPC, Competition (competition of advertisers in AdWords for that term, the higher the number the higher the competition), and Results (The number of pages in search results for this query).  To view more results they want $20-$500 per month depending on the maximum daily query.
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – Simply enter a keyword in their search bar after you register to  get a list of keywords terms, powered by Wordtracker, being searched on in Google, MSN and Yahoo and their daily estimates of traffic.  The keyword terms in the results are live, meaning you can click on those you feel are appropriate to delve further into those terms.  I like this tool and have used it quite a bit, but a couple of drawbacks: after a certain number of searches it will ask you to answer really simple questions (they give you the answers) in order to make sure you’re not a “bot,” and their “sign up for blog updates” thing keeps jumping from the bottom to the middle of the page.  You can scroll to get it back down at the bottom but it’s annoying.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool - Of course Google has their own keyword tool, which provides comprehensive results for a domain or keyword term.  It gives you Competition (shaded green bar as a general guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword), Local Search and Global Search Volume (searches per month – currently October – specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type menu – broad, exact, etc.).  You can also choose to add a few columns such as Estimated Ad Position and CPC, but when I tried to add one it crashed Firefox.  Lastly, from here you can also add the resulting terms directly into your AdWords account if you want to bid on them.

A final comment that I’d like to make is to be sure to consider negative keywords, those you want to exclude from results.  From Negative Keywords are Vital for High Search Marketing ROI, it says “From a pay-per-click perspective, negative keywords are terms that might match your ad but which you don’t want to bid on. For example, if you’re running a PPC campaign for a stationery store, you might have an ad group for the keyword ‘notebooks.’ If you’re using the broad match option to catch long-tail variations like ‘bulk reporter’s notebooks’ and ‘back to school sale notebook paper,’ you run the risk of matching for unrelated search queries like ‘notebook computers.’  To ensure that your ad doesn’t display for such irrelevant searches, you need to designate ‘computer’ as a negative keyword in addition to ‘laptop,’ ‘PC’ and other computer-related terms.”

I hope this post was helpful in developing or reworking your keyword lists.  Next week I will be talking about developing landing pages for when you use your terms for PPC advertising.

Undeniably, the importance of traditional advertising has diminished as we have gained greater access to what our friends think, via social media.  People naturally place more weight on their experiences and their friends’ experience with brands and products than on ads.  At the same time, our ability to block advertising is on the rise as well.  So what is a marketer to do to catch the attention of prospects and create a positive ROI on their marketing investments?

First, we have to understand why people behave the way they do when it comes to decision making.  In Advertising on the Brain it states, people “have an emotional and a physical reaction, before we engage in rational thought.”  In other words, we feel first, react second, and think last (sound like anyone you know?).  Emotions are the connection between our feelings and our actions.  In the same article it says, “It would really come in handy to have a yellow highlighter pen in your brain that says ‘This is important, remember it.’  That’s what emotions are; a yellow highlighter pen in your brain. We can’t make decisions without them because emotions are our brain’s way of signaling importance biochemically.”  Bottom line, marketers have to affect people’s emotions in order to get them to act.

Most advertising fails to elicit positive emotions, which proceeds action.  Any negative emotion felt, intentional or not, is carried over as a negative towards the brand/product.  As example, I often see in my neighborhood an ad on bus benches that states “All work and no play makes Jack a great realtor!”  Every time I see it I want to pick up the phone and tell Jack that his ad stinks and he should hire a real marketer instead of trying to do it himself! The problem here is that we all know the phrase from childhood “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” When I read Jack’s ad, I am reminded that he is a “dull boy,” and quite honestly I would never hire anyone who is “all work and no play.”  He must be burned out by now, and certainly is not one I’d entrust the purchase or sale of a home to.  Maybe he’d fall asleep in the middle of a transaction.  This was unintentional eliciting of a negative emotion, but what about intentional?

An ad on TV right now for the ASPCA with a Sarah McLachlan song playing in the background is intended to elicit a negative response, to get you to pick up the phone and donate to the organization.  The only problem is, I can’t stand it!  I have a weak spot for animals, and I will mute the TV in order to not cry.  Does it make me want to donate?  Not really.  I have enough pets that I “donate” to living in my own home, and I have trepidations about ASPCA because they are a kill-shelter.  If I had the funds to do so, I would rather donate to a no-kill shelter who I know is not taking my money to kill animals.  If I were them, I would take a different tactic to show me feel-good stories of the before and after of their animals being placed into homes successfully.  If I saw enough of those types of ads, I may change my feeling that the ASPCA kills more animals than they place, and they might actually open my wallet someday.  Or they could talk about community programs for low or no-cost spay/neuter and shots, and I’d be more inclined.  Or they could work hard to change apartment rental policies to not discriminate against pets, as they currently can’t against children without risking getting into trouble.  Anything but showing me horrible images of pathetic animals with sad eyes, that make me cringe and change the channel!

The rise of engagement advertising is simply this – marketers have to be mindful of the emotional reactions that they create, be authentic in creating positive emotional reactions, and make it easy for people to try their brand/product, thus (hopefully!) solidifying the positive emotion that makes them talk about their experience with others.  In Charting A Shift from Communications to Engagements it says, “The new marketing is about creating 360⁰ brand experiences, not messaging.  Consumers should buy into to your brand’s ideas, not just your product.  Instead of defining ‘Reasons To Believe’, you need to define ‘Reasons To Be.’ “  Brands no longer are “contained in any communication or campaign, but rather is understood through its many touchpoints.”  Create enough positive touchpoints, and you create positive ROI.

Of course, creating multiple positive touchpoints requires a creative mind. You have to be willing to risk failure, and ideally allow a minimum of three months to test any marketing/advertising ideas to see what works.  It takes using your intuition, something women seem to utilize a little better than men, which explains to me why so many more women are in the marketing field than men.  No judgment here, just observing the facts. However, as stated in Reinventing the MBA: 4 Reasons to Mix Business With Design Thinking, “An over-reliance on intuition is every bit as limited as management by the numbers.”  Really it takes both intuition and analytical thinking to create excellent engagement marketing experiences.  In addition, also stated in the same article, it takes humility and team-building skills as well as a willingness to be “always ready to praise…colleagues and friends.”

One of the ways we can utilize the principles of engagement marketing is through the use of “tryvertising.”  From Trendwatching, tryvertising  is defined as “[incorporating]…’obvious’ activities like handing out product samples, and more subtle, integrated product placements that are part of an experience or solution. It’s everything from new-style sachets containing single servings of liquid products, to hotels partnering with luxury car makers to offer high end model test drives to guests during their stay…The challenge here has always been a certain lack of relevance: there’s no guarantee samples are tried out at the right time, in the right spot, and by the right target audience.  So what about more targeted, more relevant new-style tryvertising? Product placements that become part of the landscape, part of the real world where consumers hang out and certainly don’t mind trying something as long as it makes sense to them?”  Read the rest of Trendwatching‘s introduction to tryvertising, to know how Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Mini Cooper, IKEA, Nike, Starbucks, HP and other brands are using it.

Experiential marketing is another way of saying engagement marketing.  As an aside, you may want to join the Experiential Forum, as I did, to join in the conversation about the latest-and-greatest in experiential marketing.  In The Last Campaign: How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising it states, “65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.  Of course, brands that were ‘born digital’ intuitively know this. Google and Amazon are pioneering experiential brands. That’s why Amazon continues to pour money into improving its customer service rather than run traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, ‘We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.  Zappos…built its brand the same way, as has Facebook.”

Experience matters.  A lot.  If you have an amazing engagement campaign, but your retail staff aren’t plentiful enough, don’t know where anything is, or how to help you resolve your problem (Orchard Supply Hardware, this past weekend!), it matters.  A lot.  If your customer service reps don’t know how to handle the frustrated customer and act snotty, it matters.  A lot.  If your website makes it difficult to find what the person wants and see the price before they put the item in a digital basket, it matters.  A lot.  As marketers, we often have to step back, look at the entire process and be critical of how it works through the eyes of the customer.  It matters.  A lot.

Lastly, I want to talk about guerrilla marketing, which is also a form of experiential or engagement marketing.  The term guerrilla marketing has become a catch-all phrase for non-traditional marketing, but it really is its own form of disruptive marketing and we have opportunity as marketers to bring it into the world of digital media that we are now in.  As stated in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Tweet, “People are focused on social media; they’re walking around with their smartphones and updating their statuses and tweeting. The more we give people opportunities to do that, the more exciting it is, such as creating art at an event where people can save it to their profiles…The more we can incorporate social technology into real-life events, the more people get excited about it.”

Marketers should be on the prowl to incorporate promotion of art into their work.  After all, art creates positive emotion, which begets action.  Not to mention, it helps those who are less business and more creative-minded earn a living.  To read more about guerrilla marketing tactics that companies are now using, I recommend the blogs Guerrilla Gorilla and Guerrilla Communication Blog.  Google “guerrilla marketing” and you are sure to find much more.

I hope this post helped your thinking about creating positive emotional and experiential marketing tactics, resulting in the positive ROI you are looking for.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m entering a phase where I look at advertising ROI, since so much of marketing ROI hinges on measuring advertising.  I came across Google AdPlanner recently, and want to understand how it can help a marketer with their online ad planning to maximize returns.

The first thing I noticed is that as a Publisher, I can offer information that is pertinent to potential advertisers for my blog.  Clicking on the Publisher tab, I entered my site’s description, relevant categories, and what type and size advertising I accept.  I then allowed it to pull from Google Analytics my number of unique visitors, page views, total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on the site.  At bottom of the Publisher page, it gives you the option to post a “badge” on your site.  I copied the generated code for the badge, went into my blog’s current Ads generated by the WordPress Advertising Manager plugin (see my previous post for details) and edited the Google AdSense ad.   There is a space to enter code either before or after the ad; I put it after.  I also entered a break (<br>) before the code to push it down one line.  You can see the results on my blog, under Google AdSense, the button that says Google AdPlanner. This now allows someone who may be interested in conducting advertising to view my site’s information.

Back in AdPlanner, I clicked on the tab Research.  From here, there are two tabs, Search by Site and Search by Audience.  Search by Site allows you to search on specific websites that you are interested in advertising on.  If they are in the AdPlanner system, the basics entered about the site–description, categories, what ads they accept–show up.  What is different about this page than the one generated from linking through the badge, however, is the button “Add to Media Plan.”  It won’t do anything, however, until I create a Media Plan.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I click Create Media Plan, and entered a name for it.  Clicking back on Research, I can now hit the “Add to Media Plan” button and it shows up as a line item on my plan.  I could keep doing this website by website, but I want to  Search by Audience.  Here I see 50 of the top websites, with the option at bottom to change the view to see as many as 250 at once.  They order by largest number of unique visitors – Yahoo shows up first on the list with 130 million unique visitors, then Facebook (110M), MSN (56M), Myspace (50M – still?!), and it goes on from there.

There are options next to Audience where at each step the sites shown are reloading to match what is entered.  The first is by Geography (down to metro and then city level).  In interest of my friend’s hair styling business as previously discussed (see two posts ago for details), I selected Venice, Santa Monica, Inglewood, Los Angeles and Marina del Rey.  Under language, I selected English and Spanish.  Under demographics, I entered the target my friend and I decided upon – women 25-54, with at minimum a high school degree, earning $25,000+.  The next, Sites Visited, is interesting as my friend wants to do styling for weddings, so I could choose to enter here that they have visited certain sites such as theknot.com.  For my purposes today, I’ll leave this alone. The next, Keywords Searched, I could enter keywords such as “wedding planning,” “wedding dress,” and so on.  Again, for my purposes today I will leave this blank.  The next, Load Audience, holds predefined audiences to help you out, such as “Affluent $100k+,” “Auto Buyers,” Baby Boomers,” and so on.  Oh good, “Bride to Be” is in there – I will keep that in mind but left this blank for now.

The resulting list of websites from my filters are shown in order of largest percentage reach.  The top 5 are: Yahoo at 76% reach,  Facebook at 62%, MSN at 35.3%, Live (which is now Bing) at 31.9%, and Amazon at 31.4%.

Under the Filter section, I can choose to rank them instead by Composition Index. If you don’t know, an Index is a way of looking the data where the result shows the number of times that a website delivers an audience, for example, the first on the list, LAmag, shows an index of 4000.  Divide 4000 by 100, and the resulting figure, 40, means that you are 40 times more likely to hit the audience that you are intending.  The next four on the list are LApublichealth.org at 3700 (who would have thought?!), themls at 3700 (the real estate directory), discoverlosangeles at 3300, and losangelesrestaurants at 3100.  IMHO (in my honest opinion), I feel that the use of indices is better than the use of percentage reach.  In the case of my friend’s hair styling business, I feel I would throw out the themls and losangelesrestaurants, including instead the next two on the list, LA411 at 3000 and losangeles at 2800.

A third way of looking at the results is to choose to Filter > Best Match, which says “Displays a balance of large and small sites.”  The top five are themls, LAmag, discoverlosangeles, ralphs, and losangeles.  IMSO (in my subjective opinion), I will go with the Composition Index results.  I am only selecting six, as my friend doesn’t have a ton of money to spend.  With my background in advertising, I know that my friend can’t spread her money too thin.  I may cut it down once I see the cost and ROI on each site, but six seems a good place to start.

Under Filters > Add Items, I can choose to also view Subdomains, Ad Placements, and whether the site is “In Google Content Network,” in addition to those items already selected for you: Domains and Accepts Advertising.  I selected Ad Placements.  This now changes my Composition Index view so I can see the indices for each of the placements, so now my top six sites are: LAmag (4400), LA411 (3700), themls – skipping, MyFoxLA.CityVoter (3700), LAlife (3400), daytrippen (3400), LAeater – skipping, and discoverlosangeles (3300).

Under Filters > Category I can further refine the results.  Here I can select Beauty & Personal Care > Beauty Magazines, Hair Care & Products, Spas & Beauty Services.  My top sites have changed again, and my top six are now Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), bellasugar (310), womenshealthmag (280), totalbeauty (280), fitsugar (280), and hairboutique (280).  Although my indices are now smaller figures, my friend doesn’t have a lot of money to spend so these may prove adequate as far as value – reach vs. cost.

Under filters, ad specs, I can select the type of ad she will run and the size.  From my prior experience at AOL, I know that 728×90′s (aka leaderboards) and 160×600′s (aka skyscrapers), tend to perform best.  I’ll select Flash ads since I know how to develop in Flash.  Once again, my top six sites have changed: Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), totalbeauty (260), elle (210), hairfinder (210), beauty.about (210), and dailymakeover (180).  I will now accept these and Add Selected to the plan I made earlier.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I can see now these line items and the expected impressions per day for three out of five.

From here, I can now export the plan to a CSV file or to a MediaVisor CSV.  MediaVisor is a system put out by Doubleclick that lets media planners research, plan and host ads for their advertisers.

Under Media Plan > Profile, I can also look at who this particular ad plan reaches.

Good stuff, right?  As for actually placing the media buy, AdPlanner does not yet support this ability.  I would now have to contact each of the online publications, providing my specs and filters, to find out what they would charge.   Unfortunately it also doesn’t allow you to export the filters you chose along with the media plan, so I submitted this to Google as a feature request.

Frankly, I never would have guessed those sites suggested by AdPlanner would be most beneficial to my friend’s styling business.  I hope this helps you understand how you too can benefit from using AdPlanner to plan your online advertising campaigns.

I will be sharing specifically how to setup Google AdSense and AdManager for a WordPress blog such as this one, but many of the steps are the same no matter what type of site you are managing.

1. Log into Google AdSense using a Google Account (if you do not have a Google Account, create one first).
2. Click on the My Account tab and make sure your contact information is accurate.  Here you can also specify payment details, but Google won’t let you change where to receive it or provide tax information until you’ve accumulated $10 in earnings.
3. Hopefully you’ve already setup Google Analytics on your domain and have been gathering visitor data.  If not, go do so now and return to Google AdSense.  On the Reports tab, click on Link to Your Google Analytics account and follow instructions.
4. Click on AdSense setup tab, then AdSense for Content.  You have a choice here whether you want an Ad Unit or Link Unit.  If you like me prefer Ad Units, hit Continue, and Select the Size Ad you want to display.  A tip – originally I chose a 250×250 ad but Google AdPlanner called this size a “Square Pop-Up” for some reason, so I switched to a 200×200 “Small Square” so as not to confuse potential advertisers that I’m willing to serve pop-ups (more on AdPlanner in a future post).  Make any other changes you desire for colors, corners, etc., and hit Continue.
   
5. Setup any desired Channels for your site, such as Business, News, Sports, etc. or ignore this and hit Continue.
6. Choose a name for your AdSense ad or accept the one provided and hit Submit and Get Code.
7. Now that we have the code to display the ads on your site, we need to add the functionality to the site to accept it.  For a WordPress Blog, I found a plugin called Advertising Manager that works great.  I simply downloaded it, unpacked it,  uploaded it into my Plugins folder, and Activated it.  If you are not using WordPress, watch this video on how to add AdSense for a website and then skip to the section on AdManager.
8. In WordPress I now have a new drop-down menu in my left side column in Admin called Ads.  Clicking on Create New Ad, I now have a field to paste the code given in AdSense.  Click Import.  I did not do anything on the next page except under Max Ads Per Page I put 1.  I allowed it to display All Ad Types including text, image and video ads but you can change this.  Click Save.  Now we want to place the ad on the page.
9. Click on Widgets under Appearance, and you will now see a widget called Advertisement.  Drag and drop the widget where you want it on the sidebar and change the drop-down menu under Select an ad to #Google Adsense.
   
10. Hit Save and you’re done.  It may take about an hour for Google to begin loading ads, as it first will crawl your site to determine the best types of ads to display given your content.

Since it would be nice to not only display AdSense ads but also to sell advertisements, I then accessed Google AdManager, which helps you to manage and sell your online inventory.  I found it helpful to watch this video on how to get around in it.

1. The first step you do is to setup your Ad Slots on the Inventory tab.  I setup two opportunities, the Homepage and Content pages.
2. I then setup my Placements on the same Inventory tab.  Again, I setup the Homepage (select Adds Appear On: Homepage button) and where the ad is located, middle right.  And then the Content pages (select Adds Appear On: Other button – type in Content), middle right.
3. Also on the Inventory tab, click on Network Settings and make sure you’ve enabled “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense” so if there is no ad to serve, you will serve AdSense ads.
   
4. I then click on the Order tab.  Here I can Check Inventory on particular Ad Slots, including defining Geography.  You have to wait to do this step, however, as it won’t work right away after setting up a new account.
5. Going back to the Order tab, I can setup a New Order, list the advertiser, start/end of the campaign (called a “flight”), and billing information and click Save.
6. Now we want to add line items to the campaign.  Clicking on New line item, we can name it (e.g. Homepage 200×200), select the inventory to be used, and put in the CPM (cost per thousand – tip:  M means 1,000 and MM means 1,000,000 when using abbreviations) or CPC (cost per click).  We can also add targeting criteria such as Geography, select Delivery Priority, and Delivery Options.
7. For Delivery Options, you will typically use Even delivery to allow the system to space ads out over the lifetime of the campaign.  However, if you have multiple campaigns going at once you may find that another advertiser’s ad is delivering more often because they purchased at a higher CPM (rate determines priority).  Therefore, you do have to monitor delivery of all campaigns to make sure that they are delivering at the appropriate rate.   You do this by clicking on the campaign’s line item.  Review the delivery bar under the ‘Delivery’ column:  If the line item is on schedule, the delivery bar is green.  If there’s a moderate risk of overdelivery or underdelivery, the delivery bar is orange.  If there’s a high risk of overdelivery or underdelivery, the delivery bar is red.  If you find you are risking underdelivery, you may choose to override the system and deliver “As fast as possible.”  However, if you do this keep watch on it daily because it can deliver so fast that you will run out of impressions before the end of the campaign and your advertiser won’t be happy.  As soon as the campaign is on schedule, turn Deliver fast as possible off.
8. You may get an advertiser who wants to pay a premium to take over your site’s ads for a particular promotion, in which case you can also select under Deliver Creatives to “Takeover (fill all possible slots).”  This will override the delivery system to not deliver any of your other advertiser’s ads.  Of course, this also means you have to keep close eye on delivery of your other campaigns that you fulfill the number of promised impressions in those contracts.  The system should adjust for a Takeover to fulfill the other advertiser’s contracts, but you may have to employ Deliver as fast as possible towards the end of the campaign to help it along.
9. Also Under Deliver Creatives you can select a Frequency cap, meaning, you won’t keep delivering the same ad more than the specified amount to the same person.
10. Under Deliver Creatives, you can optimize campaign creative delivery.  If an advertiser is running several versions of an ad, you can deliver them Evenly, you can Optimize them to deliver the creative that is garnering the best click through rate more often, or you can override the system with Manual Weights, for example 50%/50%.   Using Manual Weights is helpful if the advertiser wants to test two or more creatives throughout the entire campaign and wants to compare results equally over that time period, or if they predetermine to run one more often than another you can do that also.
11. Now we want to upload the Creatives associated with each line item in the campaign.  Clicking on a particular line item, we select Upload Creatives, fill out the needed info, upload a test image, and enter a test click-through URL (under Creative Type select hosted – redirect means that the ad resides on an advertiser’s server).  When doing this for real, be sure to look at advertiser provided click-through URLs to make sure they are correct.  Here you can also provide a fall-back static image if the ad is a Flash ad and the user’s browser doesn’t support them.
12. If the line item has rotating ads, click on Upload more creatives.  When done with this process, you will Approve and Activate the line item as ready-to-go.  Upload creatives for any additional line items, Approve and Activate.  If the line item status now says Ready, that means it is Activated but not yet delivering ads.
13. The last step that AdManager will direct you to do is to generate Ad Slot Tags, the code that makes the ad display on your site.  Click on the Inventory tab, then Generate Sample HTML, select “Add” Homepage, hit Generate Sample HTML.  For WordPress blogs – copy the SCRIPT ONLY between <head> </head> then in your blog under Advertising Manager hit Create New, paste the code.  Go back to the code in AdManager and copy the SCRIPT ONLY between <body> </body>, go back to the blog and paste it under the previous code.  Hit Import.  On the next page,  name the ad (e.g. HTML Homepage) and change the default ad size to whatever it is.   Under Website Display Options > By Page Type select the pages you want the ad to show up on (in this case, Homepage).  Save.
14. Return to AdManager, “Remove” Homepage and “Add” Content Pages, hit Generate Sample HTML.  For WordPress blogs only – copy the SCRIPTS ONLY between the <head> and <body> tags into a New Ad.  Hit Import.  On the next page,  name the ad (e.g. HTML Content) change the default ad size to whatever it is.   Under Website Display Options > By Page Type select the pages you want the ad to show up on (in this case, all except Homepage).  Save.
15. Click on Widgets under Appearance, drag and drop the Advertisement widget under the first we created earlier, change the drop-down menu under Select an ad to #HTML Homepage. Hit Save.
    
16. Add another Advertisement widget under the second, change the drop-down menu to #HTML Content.  Hit Save.
17. You should now be able to test the widgets and see your ads show up.  In my test, I uploaded a lotus flower to my homepage and a water lily to my content pages.  Check it out – my “flower campaign” runs through November 22.  Once you see it’s working, you can remove the first AdSense Advertisement widget as the ads will replace AdSense for as long as the flight is running (I’ll leave mine up so my readers can see it in action).

Lastly, you may also notice under my Google AdSense box a button that says “Google AdPlanner.”  In my next post, I will delve into AdPlanner – what it is, how to use it, and how to add that nifty button.

I hope you have enjoyed learning how to setup your blog/website for Google AdSense and AdManager.  Now do me a favor and click on my AdSense ads!  Haha.