Beware Broad Match + Dynamic Keyword Insertion

We all know by now that dynamic keyword insertion can be a great tool.  Users are often more likely to click on an ad if it contains the wording that they used in their query, because it suggests a high level of relevance (of course, that relevance only goes as deep as the ad headline, not to the landing page). Recently however, I got a reminder that the technology on its own can lead to some unintended consequences if not carefully monitored.

Shortly after a client released a new promotional offer which we supported in paid search, an ad from a competitor appeared offering the same product.  Of course, this led to all kids of fears about corporate sabotage and bid wars, especially once we discovered that the competitor has no such product on the site anywhere.

To make a long story short, the query was for "category term + offer item" and the competitor was bidding on "cetegory term" on broad match with dynamic keyword insertion, leading to an ad headline that made it look like an ad for a specific promotional product(this is hard when I can't give any actual information out). 

The result is that right now that competitor is providing a terrible user experience, driving users to their site who will be frustrated by what essentially amounts to false advertising/bait and switch tactics.  Even worse, they are paying money to create a bunch of irritated consumers.  Worst of all, they apparently haven't realised that they are doing it, and it has been two weeks.

Example:  You have a company that makes gun racks.  You come up with a boss new gun rack for mounting in that little back window of a pick up truck, so you run on the keyword "pick-up gun rack" with an ad that talks about your product, and leads to your website.  Perfect.

Meanwhile, Chevrolet is bidding on the keyword "pick-up" on broad match, and using dynamic keyword insertion without any negatives.  So when someone types "pick-up gun rack" into Google, they see an ad like:

Pick-Up Gun Rack
Find Out About Big Savings on the 2012 Chevy Silverado Today!
www.Chevrolet.com/Silverado

Users will see this, go to the website, and then realize that they have been duped!  Chevy didn't start making gun racks, they just forgot to have negative keywords around their broad category terms.  They aren't tricking users on purpose, they just didn't consider the risk of dynamic keyword insertion.

As paid search marketers, we need to consider all possible outcomes when using any automated technology like dynamic keyword insertion.  It's easy to become complacent on matters like this, but it highlights how often we need to pull search query reports to scan for trending keywords that we need to add negatives around.  I can say for sure that at least one company hasn't done it in a couple of weeks for a brand, and that it is costing them money and goodwill.

I will be more careful in the future

Content: Curation Versus Creation

Looking back to an earlier post, I touched briefly (sort of) on the shift from a monolithic system of branded content creation to a more diffuse system in which the end user can also generate media that ties back to or directly represents a brand.

As this diffusion of publication capability through social media has made every consumer a potential creative force, media has become as much of a horizontal process as it was vertical in the past.  Media is no longer simply created by a handful of agencies and pushed out through narrow channels to an end point.  It is created at downstream points as well as upstream, and can be passed easily from one person to another.

The dream has been realized; everyone can find any information and themselves contribute to the global discussion.  Some will get to write for the Huffington Post, or get mentioned in a Penny Arcade comic.  Maybe you will meet Mitch Krpata sometime at a convention, and hear some pretty smart things (you could read them at Insult Swordfighting also).  You can debate writers from The Economist now on their site, and brands like Ford are actually launching new product promotions entirely using social media,with the new Fiesta.

This change has led to the rise of the importance of the concept of "curation" alongside "creation."  Marketers and social media companies have to become aggregators and collections management specialists as much as creative agencies.  With all of this content being created and spread on the web, organizing it, packaging it, and making it accessible is a big deal, and a big business.

The issue for me is that after spending all of this time getting to a point where the end of the content production chain is no longer a dead-end at the consumer, the channels by which we access all of this media are quickly consolidating.  New boss might be the same as the Old Boss.

All we see these days are stats and articles about how big and how fast services like Facebook and Twitter are growing.  Facebook is unapologetic about wanting to be the connective tissue for the entire internet.  Think about it this: how often do you read articles now that you didn't come across via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Digg?  I admit, aside from the NY Times and the Economist, I get most of the rest of my news from links that come from those sources.

Granted, the obvious argument is that these content aggregators simply provide the vehicle, and that the sources of information that I get are actually myraid, since there are people behind those tweets.  Still, most articles that trend online are those that get passed around and around, tweeted and liked and re-tweeted, in something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am afraid that as we become more passive media consumers again, allowing information to be given to us rather than seeking it out, more and more editorial power will come to those services that are the conduit, even if they don't exercise it.

I get nervous when a handful of private enterprises, now matter how benevolent they claim to be, or even are, have so much control over the content that we see.  Hopefully, I am worried about nothing, but even if it isn't a matter of some vast conspiracy or information monopoly, I just worry that fewer sources channeling information will inherently lead to a narrowing of worldview on the part of the people who depend on them. 

When everyone reads the exact same articles that circle the social sphere, the conversation gets boring fast. 

Don't Fight the Data, Marketing People

Why do people find it so hard to change their behavior, despite evidence that they have been operating under assumptions that turned out to be false?  Maybe I have simply been lucky enough to spend much of my life in a world where data flows in a nearly unlimited stream, to be recorded and calculated by computers.  Answers to questions, and more numbers and information than we will ever have time to analyze are never more than a few clicks away at this point.  Yet still, once an idea has become entrenched, it is surprisingly hard to pry it loose.

An example which immediately shows my bias is the difficulty in getting companies to recognize the value, or even the necessity of devoting a portion of their marketing dollars to paid search, or even general digital advertising.  Plenty of studies have been done demonstrating the beneficial effects of having both online and offline media, or how search captures the interest generated by television, etc..  Nielsen itself, the king of measuring TV advertising reach and effectiveness, has produced these studies, even specifically calling for TV dollars to be re-allocated to online media for a more efficient marketing mix.  Yet still, in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, marketing professionals who are used to traditional media don’t acknowledge what’s right in front of them.

The best parallel that I can draw comes from baseball, which in many ways reminds me of search marketing.  In both cases, compared to either other sports or other media channels, baseball/search is much more easily measured and quantifiable.  Between engine data and onsite tracking, the consumer journey through search can be quantified as a series of discrete actions, just like a game of baseball.  Looking at football or TV commercials, there are just too many variables to accurately attribute the effect of any one moving part.  With baseball however, like search, every play is recorded, and has been for a hundred years.

Where am I going with this?  Bunting.  I have made this speech a million times, but I will make it again for the one person who reads this who hasn’t heard it before.  If you watch enough baseball, especially in the NL, chances are you have seen a fair few sacrifice bunts in your time.  It has been a respected tool in the managers toolbox for a long time, and is celebrated by baseball purists everywhere.  The problem is that it is a bad decision, and it turns out that it always has been.

With so much available data, it turns out that you can really learn a lot about a subject.  By using linear weights based on every single play over a given period of time, you can create a very accurate run expectancy matrix (it turns out that you want a sample size of at least 3 years to get a model that follows the real results closely).  What this matrix does is tell you what the expected number of runs a team will score on average in any given game state (i.e. ‘a man on second base with two outs’).

Brass tacks: With a man on second and no one out (the most common, and conventionally ‘best,’ time for a sacrifice bunt) the run expectancy is around 1.166, which means that a team in that situation will on average score 1.166 runs in the inning.  With a runner on third and one out, which would be the result of a successful sacrifice bunt, the run expectancy is 0.976.  So if the sac bunt is executed perfectly and all goes according to the manager’s plan, he has created a situation in which his team’s run expectancy has dropped by 16.3%.  Keep in mind, that’s about the most defensible situation in which to bunt.  When starting with one out, or a man on first, the decline becomes much sharper.

Now, I am not saying that no one should ever under any circumstances order a bunt.  There are a variety of factors that come into play and they all need to be considered.   My point is simply that most of the time when you see a sacrifice bunt it is the product of a mindset that simply refuses to acknowledge the value of the data.  When no one had done the math it was an interesting argument, and now it just seems quaint and a little backwards, like chewing tobacco or fights where no one gets punched.

This is what I think of when companies believe that they are doing fine because they run some TV commercials and newspaper inserts.  A study found that about 90% of the CPG (consumer packaged goods) target audience watches TV, and about 81% go online.  Yet about 80% of CPG companies’ marketing dollars go to TV ads, compared to about 3% spent on OLA (online advertising).  

Why do people and industries insist on being behind the curve?  Not wanting to fall for a fad is one thing, but this here internet isn’t exactly new, or a flash in the pan.  In 1915, you could make a case for building horse carriages, in case those darn automobiles didn’t catch on.  In 1940, not so much.  What about the guys who swore that the talking pictures would never replace radio dramas?  Or dinosaurs that figured mammals were never going to be a big deal?

Not knowing something because the information wasn’t available to you is one thing, but willfully ignoring the data that is right in front of you is another.  Consumers are doing everything online, so be there when they are. 

And quit bunting so much.

Is Over-Efficiency a Problem Within the Solution?

Ask most paid search marketers the fastest way to the most efficient campaign possible, and the answer will be some form of “Pause everything but your top few brand terms with the highest conversion rate.”  Sometimes it will be even more stark, something along the lines of “get one click on your brand name and then pause the campaign.”  The response is, of course, a joke.  You can always get one conversion for a very good price, and then if you stop spending, your campaign averages will be fantastic.  It is a matter of volume, and to get that you have to live with some inefficiencies.

Chances are, the keyword “2011 Chevy Malibu Dealership Locations” has a lower cost per conversion for Chevrolet than “cars for sale,” but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be running on both.  We recognize that the most efficient thing isn’t the best in the majority of cases, as long as you have the resources available.  When it comes to money, we recognize that the optimal is related to, but not synonymous with, the most efficient  distribution.

But what about time?  This is the other resource that we have to manage.  There is practically speaking an infinite amount of work to do on any search marketing campaign, because in addition to running it, you have to study it, understand it, and optimize it continuously.  There is always more that can be done, so in some ways time is more of a limiting factor than budget, as there is no 100% Share of Knowledge.  As the services we offer always outstrip increases in man-power, we turn to time saving efficiencies to do the same work on more campaigns with fewer relative man hours.

Bulk sheets, Excel formulae, macros, campaign management software, APIs: we always want to find ways to do the same work faster, and with great success.  The problem is, we seem to be losing sight of the greatest tool in any workforce’s toolbox: elbow grease.  Now, right before I go tell some kids to get off my lawn and walk to the store through two feet of snow, let me go on record as loving technology and what it does for us.  However, most great things were accomplished not through efficiency, but huge amounts of hard work. 

The point of diminishing returns is big part of what we do, and what everyone does.  We know that efficiency and spend intersect, and that there we find our optimal point.  When the unit of volume is time rather than dollars however, I would argue that we have been looking at the graph wrong.  We still use the point of diminishing returns to evaluate how we spend our time, in a world where tasks are frequently triaged in order of urgency and necessity.  Something that could help us increase efficiency in our cost per conversion by 3% isn’t done if it is a slow, laborious process that increases the number of man hours needed by 10 hours.  We look at it from a “PoDR” standpoint and determine that it isn’t worth it.

What if the idea is flawed?  Dollars are an external limitation placed on us by the people who pay us.  Time is a resource that we control, and last I checked, we don’t get paid by the hour, so the two don’t intersect.  The company gets paid a set fee to provide a minimum number of man hours and services.  Salaried workers get paid to provide the best product or service they can, and while there is a limit to how much a company can make its people work, there isn’t a limit to how much we as individuals can work.   Target can make a piece of furniture far more efficiently than my great-grandfather could, but that set of hand-joined wood drawers has lasted, and will continue to last, far longer than any massed-produced piece of particle board flotsam on the market today. 

Obsession with efficiency can lead to an inferior product, even if the first degree return on investment is higher.  Adding man hours to an account by increasing personnel costs money, but adding man hours by working harder, and working longer, is free.  In that situation, there is no point of diminishing returns because the lines don’t cross.

You can’t be compelled to go above and beyond, but why wouldn't you?

Reader Feedback Day!

I started to respond to a comment in the comments section, but somewhere around paragraph five, I realized that that section wasn't big enough for me and my soap box.  Still, I can see both sides of this argument, so please feel free to weigh in, and tell me how wrong I am.

The initial comment was:

"I would also buy the tomatoes. That being said, I'm a little disappointed that you consider the WSJ a trusted source. Regardless of politics, have you not heard anything about the massive scandal currently unfolding?
"But what initially began with allegations that Murdoch's British News of the World had illegally hacked scores of Brits' phone messages has widened from a sordid tabloid tale involving a murdered British teen to a burgeoning scandal with broad political, criminal, ethical and business ramifications for Murdoch's far-flung News Corp."http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-07-11-Rupert-Murdoch-News-Corp-phone-hacking_n.htm "

The user name is suspiciously spam-like, but as this is first person to comment here, I am going to give him/her the benefit of the doubt.

First, I want to point out the humor in citing USA Today in an effort to undermine the credibility of the Wall Street Journal.  I'm not making an argument there, it's just funny.

Moreover, I have indeed heard about this scandal, and read a lot about it.  However, I have yet to see, in the article that is linked to or any other, a single connection to the WSJ, aside from the fact that Rupert Murdoch owns it.

The very brand respect that they have earned over the years, and the standards of journalistic integrity that (I believe) they have maintained, prevent me from assuming guilt by association.  Is the commenter suggesting that the WSJ editorial staff was involved in the scandal?  Or the writers?

I am not prepared to tear down a long-standing edifice based on rumor and innuendo.  If new evidence comes to light of wrongdoing taking place at the Journal, my opinion can change, but for right now, I don't see how the scandal mentioned affects this brand in particular.  News Corp perhaps, but not every single one of its components, not yet.

Additionally, let's not lose sight of the fact that this scandal is about the means they used to gather information for stories.  Means which I do not defend and solidly condemn as abhorrent, in light of the subject matter and the newsworthiness of the data in the first place.  Nonetheless, the accusation is that they published information that was illegally/immorally acquired, not that they fabricated it.  Decency is in question, but they aren't making things up to print at least.

I'm not even going to get into the part that we the public play in this, and how our hunger for lurid details encourages papers to go to great lengths to invade the privacy of anyone who we will pay to read about.  Still, on the face of it this is a simple question:

Does the Murdoch scandal inherently taint the contributions of every part of his empire?  Does the value tied to a brand give it the benefit of the doubt?  Let me know.

Brands and the Language of Symbols

Branding is nothing more than symbolism.  A logo, a name, a set of letters; these inert forms can be imbued with a life and meaning, made to represent far more than the product that they are printed on.  Mercedes and Chevy both make cars, mechanically they are extremely similar, and they serve the same basic purpose, but those brands have very different connotations.  Chevy invokes muddy construction sites, men in hard hats and denim throwing bricks into pick-up trucks.  Mercedes conjures images of business suits and sunglasses that appear from behind darkly tinted windows.  This isn’t an accident; it is the result of years’ worth of deliberate branding to appear as either blue-collar or refined, familiar or exotic. 

The associations that we have with brands are important to us, as they allow us to communicate in subtle ways about products and companies.  When someone talks about Apple or uses them as a reference point, your brain automatically assumes pleasant aesthetics and an intuitive interface.  There is a language implicit in branding that most people can understand, and for many brands the icon, whether it is an image or a name, is the cumulative reputation of the company expressed visually.

The reason that I am talking about all of this is that this symbolic language is something that we take for granted, and can change the way we view things.  I was reading something a week ago and it referenced a study that was done recently (I don’t recall what the study was), and the citation for the information said “WSJ” along with a date.  I remember being a little surprised at the claim being made, which was why I checked the source in the first place.  However, seeing what I thought was an attribution to the Wall Street Journal, I decided there might be some merit to the statement.  For better or worse, the Wall Street Journal is a trusted source, and they have earned that brand credit by maintaining consistently high journalistic standards, whether you agree with their politics or not.  So, I went to their website and spent twenty minutes searching in vain for this mysterious article.

To make a long story short, it turns out that the citation was in fact referencing the Winston-Salem Journal, not the Wall Street Journal.  Now, I have no opinion on that publication, and I am sure that it is a fine one.  However, to most people in the world, “WSJ’ is shorthand for the Wall Street Journal.  If I saw a sign advertising the NYT for $0.25, only to go into the store and discover that they meant “native young tomatoes,” I would feel that I had been misled (though I would buy the tomatoes).

Obviously, there are plenty of interpretations for a lot of abbreviations and initials, but there is usually one dominant interpretation based on context.  If you are talking about a business-related study and cite WSJ as the source, 99% of people are going to assume that you mean the Wall Street Journal, and I have a hard time believing that someone making such a reference wouldn’t know that.

Using Twitter for Branding Isn't Hard

Like most Twitter users (89.4%, according to a new study by eMarketer and Lab42), I follow a number of corporate brands.  The only brand to immediately follow me back?  Huggies.  That’s how you build brand loyalty.  Opening up a two-way communication with your consumers is crucial, and Huggies is the only brand I follow that did so.

They produce more content, and solicit more responses from their followers, than all of the other brands, and they recognize the value in engagement.  People like feeling as though they matter, they (we) collect Twitter followers like baseball cards, and each new one is a tip of a cap.  Humans are social animals, and the desire to feel liked is strong.  I am not particularly social at all, but seeing that Huggies went out of their way to follow me gave me the same endorphin kick as anyone else.

The result is a blog post like this, and it is the perfect example of earned media.  Suddenly, by doing something as simple as following a twitter account that was already following them, they get free advertising.  This isn’t much of an authority site, but maybe 5 or 10 people will see this.  I will mention it on twitter and the other people who follow me will see it, and I will throw a link up back to the brand website (diapers, and a full baby resource!)

Studies have shown that one of the strongest incentives for consumers to purchase is the opinion of online friends.  All the commercials and banner ads in the world won’t trump the words of people you know and trust.  Brands need to recognize this, and leverage every piece of media at their disposal to not only reach their audience, but turn that audience into a legion of goodwill ambassadors.

Content is King (of Kings)

As a man who was trained not in marketing, but in history and sociology, I often end up viewing paid search and online media through a somewhat different lens than my peers.  I can’t help but look for the patterns and symbols embedded in user behavior, and like a good structuralist I believe that those currents reflect the same basic needs and feelings that all societies have had.  After all, don’t the members of the internet using world make a society at this point?  The very emergence of the “social space,” “social media,” and other such terms tell me that they do.  Like-minded people band together online just as they do in the physical world, communicating and trading with one another, and linguistics and resource economics are two of the main pillars of any cultural study.  Therefore, I don’t find it far-fetched to think that anthropological lessons can be applied to digital advertising, in the same way that art history majors were brought into print marketing in the last century to ensure that the correct symbols would be used to appeal to a consumer’s unconscious.

So it was that while I watched Scott Sorokin deliver a presentation on the rise of user generated content and what the engaged consumer meant to brands that I began to think about the relationship of the masses to content and information in the digital age.  He made point that until very recently a company controlled the flow of information to the consumer, and that it was a one-way stream and extremely limited in scope.  As the internet grows and we move more into a world where content and information are both limitless and accessible however, the connection between a brand and consumers has become reciprocal.  What was once a monopoly on the part of the brand company is now an open platform, where user reviews, Facebook likes, YouTube videos and more not only respond to brand-created media, but augment (and in some cases stand in for) content that a company generates.

The importance of this shift in the fundamental relationship between consumer and brand cannot be overstated.  The move from a monopolistic to a reciprocal distribution of power is extremely rare and nearly impossible to reverse.  Generally you would expect the examples to be political, harkening back to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century, or the toppling of hereditary monarchies in the 18^th century, but these sorts examples fall well short.  Changes in political or technological control over information in a society do represent the movement of power, but the authority in such cases is always fleeting and illusory, because the society in question is not part of the loop.  Submitting to authority is not the same as granting authority.  A citizen of the Soviet Union who drove a Zaporozhet was not brand loyal, they simply weren’t allowed to buy a Ford.

The relationship that consumers have had with brands for the last 50 years has been voluntary though, if one-sided.  The information that you knew about a product, and the associations you made with the product, were (for the most part) based solely on what the company spread through media.  Now however, most savvy consumers can find all the information they need on a product without ever visiting the brand site.  What’s more, they can produce media of their own, be it a tweet or a 20-minute video, which provides a personal, positive or negative impression of a brand.  And with the accessibility of this content online, the difference is that now the brands need that content.  In the old days you could write a letter about a poor experience with a product to the company, or mention to your neighbor that you liked a commercial, but companies didn’t need that feedback, and it didn’t change what flowed the other way to the consumer.

What all of this triggered in my brain was the shift from polytheism to monotheism in the western world two thousand years ago.  When you study any society, one of the most important relationships that you will learn about is that between a people and their deity.  In most early, polytheistic cultures there is a very direct and personal relationship with the gods.  You generally don’t find a large hierarchical church structure serving as an intermediary, outside of a few priests or shamans.  This is where you have a sacrificial system (not necessarily the type of sacrifice that the word conjures up), which is simply the mechanism by which a society expresses their end of a reciprocal relationship with the deities.  In order to keep the god of fertility happy so that the crops will grow, you in turn provide the first and best results of the harvest, as a trade.  In these belief systems the gods are very close to humanity, and they are a reflection of the society and its needs.  These gods were petty, greedy, and humorous, and above all they wanted the same things that the people did, which provided the believers with something to contribute to the relationship.  This is the sort of relationship we are coming to now between the consumers and brands.  It is a close, two-way system in which both sides need something from the other, and where the connections between them are interwoven, the boundaries thin.  It is no surprise that words like “organic” and “holistic” are used to describe the new direction of marketing strategy, the same words applied to naturalistic polytheisms.

We are moving in the opposite direction as religious beliefs, and that transition was based on the requirements of a more structured and hierarchical society.  In a monotheistic culture God is remote, obscured behind layers of ritual and clergymen.  One of the issues that early missionaries faced was getting non-Christians to understand that the sacrificial system didn’t work because God didn’t want anything they had to offer.  The relationship was no longer reciprocal, because an all-powerful Lord can provide himself with anything he wants, and cannot be contacted directly.  God passed his messages down through a chain, whether in book form or the words of his earthly representatives, in the same way that a brand would disseminate its media through its channels.  Here is our product, here is what we want you to know about it, and how we want you to think about it.  What you thought about a product as an individual wasn’t really important, because there were plenty of other people who were happy to buy it.  In contrast with the druidic, diffuse nature of the polytheistic power exchange, monotheism was institutional and monolithic, a relationship that could be mirrored by centralized political authority, consolidating authority with the rise of “the state” as opposed to tribalism.

As consumers we have finally made the journey in the other direction.  Apple users now form a tribe that is distinct from pc users, where once there were just people who did or did not own computers.  There was once a segment of the market that was simply made up of car owners, but now the Ford Focus has a Facebook page and thousands of friends.  As the pendulum swings, the importance of embracing this new paradigm should not be lost on those brands who wish to become successful.  Users seek to engage with a brand because they have something to offer that is valuable, and in return they become an asset, a supporter, a (twitter) follower.  In a tribal system, you really want to have the biggest tribe.

Edit:  There is no intent here at blaspheme, nor am I attempting to elevate any belief system over any other.  I find this topic to be an interesting one, and I plan to go a little further into the matter and flesh it out, so that it is more than just idle ramblings.