The real question is how much and for what. Friends and acquaintances need personal information to maintain relationships; Facebook requires it for access to their platform. An email address is standard currency for admittance into most social websites and Google uses location, search history and much more to provide a more meaningful search tool and more relevant ads.

Google’s newest product, Google Instant, also relies on this user data. The live blog of the launch event posted on Readwriteweb.com hinted at past user searches being used to generate SERPs as the user enters their query for very real performance benefits.

How does Google scale this? Optimizations: prioritizes searches that are the most likely. Checks if users is doing searches on another server. Results cached.

Where this deal breaks down is if the information is used in a way the user was not expecting. Entering an email address to post a comment is no big deal, but if it is then used to distribute spam, there is a problem. This surprise and betrayal of expectations is a large part of why Facebook’s users reacted badly to most of the site’s changes, and the same again with Google Buzz. The other issue is a lack of universal agreed value.

One degree from evil

It is the fluid nature of these transactions that has created campaigns and conversations like these. One of the more interesting exchanges was between this defense of Google and this subsequent rebuttal.

Users will always exchange their private information for benefits. How much they are willing to give up will vary from person to person. One thing is consistent though: expectations for how the information will be used need to be set, managed and met, or they might find that what you have is just not worth the price.

All communication is a marketing communication, including customer service. This is even more critical in public spaces like the Internet. However there are still a number of important points to be considered when determining if a response is needed, and what form it should take.

• What is the nature of the complaint?
• Where is the negative commentary taking place?
• What is the company’s relationship with the affected parties?
• Who is exposed and potentially will be exposed to the negative commentary?
• What action, if any, has already been taken on the issue?

What is the nature of the complaint?

Reasonable, articulate or funny negative commentary can have the greatest impact through credibility and potential to spread. Inarticulate, abusive and unreasonable complaints usually do not gain much traction, and will attract more attention if they are given attention.

Where is the negative commentary taking place?

A brand’s presence on the Internet is not limited to a single site any more. Most brands have a fragmented presence spread across a number of platforms, sites and mediums, either perceived as being under their control, or operated by a third party.

Dealing with complaints in managed spaces, such as a Facebook page, will more often require direct action than a comment on a small community forum. Legitimate complaints can be an opportunity to explain or demonstrate a product, answer a frequently asked question or express a brand value to the touchpoint’s audience. Any response given does create a reasonable expectation that should another issue be raised in that space, the company will need to address it too.

What is the company’s relationship with the affected parties?

The more involved the customer is with the company or brand, the less likely they are to be a troll and the more the relationship is worth to the company. However, new customers with legitimate complaints should not be ignored.

Who is exposed and potentially will be exposed to the negative commentary?

Does the negative attention have a large or small audience? Is it indifferent, supportive of the brand or hostile? Someone saying bad things about a brand to other people who already agree and are not your customers should probably not be your first priority. Trolls trying to start a flame war with brand advocates are another situation that probably does not need direct engagement.

What action, if any, has already been taken on the issue?

Customer complaints, legitimate or otherwise, often have a history. Social media is not always the first point of contact between the brand and the customer. Often there is a history to any complaint. Ideally the complaint would have been resolved before it entered a public space, but sometimes these things happen.

Very rarely will a brand benefit from engaging with a troll. The attention will often make the problem that much worse, and give them more credibility and consequently attention. While potentially almost any form of content can reach a huge audience online, not every tweet, post, video or blog will. Dealing with legitimate problems in a public space can be an excellent opportunity to to explain or demonstrate a product, answer a frequently asked question or express a brand value to an audience. Responding to trolls does not support any of these objectives. Choosing who to respond to, where and how is an important part of a Social Media Engagement strategy, and should be treated as such.

Why the Site

Devoting all content creation and administration resources to single site or community is no longer the best strategy. Internet users seek out different content in different formats for different platforms. What meets their needs on their mobile phones will be different to what they want on their desktop computer, or their netbook, web-enabled TV, or tablet device. After all, social media is just people being people online, and what they use and how is a result of this.

The kind of platform and task they want to complete changes how they search for, evaluate and use content. From asking their social network for advice, to searching for product demonstrations on YouTube or store locations on Google Maps.

There is a need for the ‘Big Website’ and campaign or product specific microsites. While there is a need for control over a hub to facilitate list building, acquire links and generate direct navigation traffic, sites and microsites will be a part of the mix. While Facebook is not likely to suffer the same fate as Blogetery, developing content on external platforms also comes with a certain level of risk.

Being visible across multiple, relevant platforms, sites and communities gives brands the chance to manage the user’s experience of the brand. Providing compelling content and engaging with customers, the brand can develop on its campaigns further, ensure that customer service queries can be responded to and clarify information about their products.

Creating brand touchpoints like fan pages is an “as well as”, not an “instead of” developing microsites and promoting the the brand’s main web presence. They are an opportunity to put content in front of the customer in the place that they already are, and in a format tailored for the situation. A YouTube channel, Second Life store and a Facebook page are not a substitute for the spaces online that the brand controls.

Winning at PVP in EVE Online

Wining at Spreadsheets in Space

PVP in EVE Online is not fair. In fact the challenge in PVP in EVE Online is in setting up these unfair encounters. In most MMORPGs, the actual act of combat consists of a few mouse clicks and some waiting. EVE Online is no different. It is the risk of losing stuff that makes players focus on everything before the actual combat a lot more. It is taking the right mix of ships, avoiding being out-numbered and cornered by a superior foe and acting before the opponent even knows they are in a fight where player skill starts to make a real difference.

Why SEM is like EVE Online PVP

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in very similar to PVP. It is a zero-sum environment where operators compete for a resource through actions governed by a set of rules and environmental factors generated through user behaviour. There are a few principles that carry over from EVE Online PVP to SEM.

• Situational awareness is king
  • Know how the advertising network works
  • Understand competitive activity
  • Understand how the market behaves
• Observe, act and assess
  • Analysis without an accompanying action is useless
  • Assess the effectiveness of activity & reassess decision making model
  • And repeat…
• Know where you can compete and where you can’t
  • Don’t waste time & resources competing directly with advertisers intent on outspending you
  • Find alternative ways of reaching potential customers.

Information is the key. Understanding how the query space works, having good situational awareness, and knowing where in the sales funnel certain terms are is valuable. It won’t save you from the SEM equivalent of a gate camp (high margin and ‘branding’ campaigns with large budgets), but it is essential for remaining competitive without burning through your budget.

Google has just announced that Ad Sitelinks are now available for any campaign and the introduction of seller rating extensions. Getting Ad Sitelinks to display is still dependent on the ad meeting certain criteria, most probably relating to the spot on the page the ad displays in as determined by bid, competition and click through.

Ad Sitelinks provide alternative points of entry to the site aside from the main landing page, allowing the advertiser to offer alternative offers. Links to areas such as “Store Location”, “Quote Calculator” or “Product Reviews” can appeal to viewers who might not have responded to the main offer.

Search can be a powerful indication of intent, but with more generic terms, the action or information sought by the market can vary between individuals. With branded or descriptive terms the visitor might be seeking further information beyond the noun and a price point. Ad Sitelinks makes it possible to provide this at first glance, and generate traffic where the user may otherwise have continued on to the organic listings.

Using the same visual language of the organic results also makes the ad appear more authoritative and trustworthy. The addition of seller ratings can create the same effect. Creating richer content in a format closer to what the user is trained to look for on a SERP gives the advertiser the opportunity to disrupt their normal search and engage with the ad.

Social media is just people being people online, but with better tools. Nothing has changed in their behaviour; it is their ability to be found and heard, and find others who think the same that is new and significant. Social media and the internet amplify the voices of those who publish content online, whether they love you or hate you.

Sometimes people will say things that businesses would prefer them not to. The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and spread this material. Sites like Facebook and WordPress make it easy to tap into an existing audience, or get indexed by Google and appear in brand searches. When a product or service has a branded social media presence or community, it can give them access to a highly relevant audience for their dissatisfaction, ire and angst, which can disrupt the business’ promotional activity and damage the brand.

It is hard to completely avoid this risk without losing the benefits from fostering conversation and building online communities. Here are a few ways a business can prepare to address these problems if or when they arise:

• Anticipate the negative responses and plan on how and how not to respond
• Make internal stakeholders aware of what can go wrong
• Communicate response plans and processes internally with key stakeholders
• Ensure that those with the authority to respond in negative situations are easily reached
• Make staff aware of relevant policies

If no thought is given to what might go wrong, there is a greater risk of the company responding badly, and inflaming the situation further. Planning for problems that may arise before the fact ensures that the business’ response will most likely be timely, articulate and appropriate.

Toy Story 3 Promoted Trending Topic

Twitter has already rolled out promoted Tweets, and the first sponsored trending topics also appeared. Toy Story 3 has appeared as a sponsored listing with the site’s trending topics today, as reported here, here, and probably dozens of other places all over the web.

The ad itself drives traffic to a Facebook page, where people can order tickets or enter contact details for a chance to win. The real point of difference offered by Twitter for this campaign is the user’s ability to retweet the ad, and to see other people discuss the subject by hashtag.

Pinning the message to the top of the stream coupled with Twitter’s tools for sharing content means that the Toy Story 3 promoted Tweet will get repeated again and again, and not just in the narrow window around when it was originally posted. The conversation revealed by the hashtag provides social proof of the subject’s interest and encourages participation through exposing other thoughts surrounding the topic which may resonate with the viewer.

Toy Story 3 Promoted Tweet

For potential reach to kick-start conversation and begin to generate interest, Twitter advertising looks like it might be very powerful.

Toy Story 3 Landing Page

The data generated by a campaign is not a true representation of the population. The data is a snapshot limited by the markets targeted and the visibility available for the budget spent. Any single campaign can be exposed to direct competition over the whole market or specific subgroups. For example, just because “Campaign A” does not get traffic from Victoria does not mean that no-one in that state is searching for “Keyword B”.

A competitor could simply be focused on that market and value the traffic more. Other factors to consider are the effectiveness of the competition’s creatives and offers, the appeal of their product, efficiency of their site in turning clicks into sales and how much they return per conversion. All of these factors will influence their budget, and how much they are willing to spend per click or impression. Tools provided by the advertising networks that increase the efficiency of campaigns like Remarketing are also worth considering.

According to Wikipedia, a confidence interval is defined as:

…a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter. Instead of estimating the parameter by a single value, an interval likely to include the parameter is given. Thus, confidence intervals are used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. How likely the interval is to contain the parameter is determined by the confidence level or confidence coefficient. Increasing the desired confidence level will widen the confidence interval.

In use here, it is assumed that between similar competitors, the average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) within the group is likely to be within a 95% confidence interval of the known CPA.

Confidence interval and estimated CPA

Confidence interval can give you an estimate of what other bidders may be paying for a conversion, assuming they are operating as efficiently as you are. In the graph included above, confidence interval of the CPA is used to estimate the most likely highest possible CPA a campaign can still compete on. In conjunction with Cost Per Click data, it is fair to assume that the competitors in the query space are willing to spend over the highest likely observed CPA. Reasons for their bidding strategy can vary from shutting out competitors by absorbing a short term loss, to a higher sustainable CPA. In a query space where a number of different verticals are competing for the same traffic, this metric is considerably less useful and your mileage may vary. For comparing CPA campaigns, creating a model for understanding the market, or simply to assess which ads are potentially performing a lot better or worse than your target in the face of direct competition, it is a useful tool.

Confidence interval can be a guide to how much your competitors expect to spend per conversion, assuming a lot of similarity in product and business practices. Arbitrage and industries with heavily commodified products are prime candidates for this, as well as campaigns with a very aggressive high cost bidding strategy, such as those competing directly with another member of your industry.

Even through the web, the methods used to locate and consume information are diverse. From search to portals to socially generated recommendations, there is a huge range of navigational nodes online that shape the user’s experience. Focusing on what information is consumed and where, rather than on what the user is trying to do, can be very myopic.

Find music with only the Internet, Click for full size.

For example, what if the user wants to listen to music? With access to a computer and a browser they may go to YouTube, or the site of a band recommended in an email from a friend. With P2P software like a BitTorrent client they may use inbuilt search tools and download it via a peer network. They could also use iTunes to find, choose and purchase a song without touching a browser. Ultimately all these methods use the Internet, but only one is dependent on the World Wide Web.  This does not even start to consider devices other than a traditional computer.

Nodes and Friction

Each mode of content location and acquisition uses a different set of nodes and they can range from invisible to obstructive. Each one is another opportunity for the gatekeeper of the node to create friction and shape experience. Search and social sites have contextual advertising, Internet Explorer treats incorrect URLs as search queries, DNS services can redirect mistyped or incorrect URLs and the iPad does not support Flash.

Nodes such as portal sites, search engines, social networks and applications such as Steam control and direct attention in different ways. Each gives the user different tools to discover content, with different levels of friction placed between the user and what they wish to do.

Some sites use a disruptive model and place ads in front of the user, using available data to tailor their ads. Applications like iTunes and Steam operate as shopfronts and work to minimalise frictions between the user and the buy button. They help the user find, acquire and consume the media with the least effort, and generate sales in the process.

Why attention matters more

The internet is an environment where there is almost limitless content and space to display it in. The scarcity is with attention. The limits on the size of the audience and the amount of time they spend online are far more immediate than potential advertising inventory. Unlike traditional media, the Internet does not have a page limit, nor is it restricted by spectrum or the number of hours in a day. The low cost of storing and moving data, the asynchronous nature of most content and the ability to generate more content automatically or through user activity changes its value. There is no value in just existing; there is no ‘only two papers in town’ or ‘only three TV networks’ online. Online, the value of a node is in how much attention it affects. Each one is an opportunity to distribute attention among the next group of nodes in the chain.

Why the Task Model

How most people use and access the Internet has changed over the last few years. The ubiquity of Internet capable devices is as significant a factor as the prevalence of fast and wireless home connections. While the Internet on a phone in some form is not new, large numbers of people with fast and easy access is. A proliferation of applications designed to give access to content independent of the World Wide Web is significant too.

Social networks, both formalised like forums and Facebook, and ad hoc such as email, will remain a factor, as well as portal sites like Yahoo! and search engines. These tools for content distribution and discovery are not being replaced, they are just being supplemented.

The user’s aims and knowledge determine their actions online. The channels they use do have an impact on the kinds of information they access, how they access it and how they locate new material. As the Internet becomes richer in content and tools, it will also continue to fragment and change. We have gone a long way from the Internet being tied to a desktop computer through just a browser or email client, but the user will always have a want or desire that they wish to meet, and they will use whatever tools are available to do it.

When you look at the phrases that actually trigger your ads, such as in an Adwords Search Query Performance report, you will start to see patterns emerge, the most interesting being terms that are common across phrases that triggered conversions. Taking a closer look at Clusters of Queries like these can reveal a lot. Most SEM campaigns will have a subset of keywords that might not even be set up in the account itself that correlate strongly with sales. There will also be phrases or words that obviously do not fit or inflate the campaign’s CPC by crossing over into another industry with an aggressive SEM space.

Keyword performance will always be influenced by a number of factors. The effect will vary depending on other descriptive and qualifying terms. Some queries will naturally return more on investment, yield more traffic or be genuinely cheaper. Not all of this will be the product of consumer behaviour. Competition within the query space is incredibly important, especially once you start to examine the performance of specific clusters of search terms.

For example, suppose a pet shop called ‘I Like Turtles’ has set up a campaign to sell turtles. The landing page, with a strong call to action and a robust cart has been built, and a campaign built around phrase match on species terms like ‘Box Turtles’ has been launched. The traffic is not performing as well as expected. The CPC is unsustainable and the traffic is not engaging on the landing page at all. A quick look at the searches triggering the ads suggest a long list of additional negatives and reveals that some descriptive terms are performing better than others, while some are not even appearing at all. The same is true for locations. Reported first page bid levels can provide a guide to what is happening in the market, but it won’t reveal the reason.

What ads are triggered for a long search phrase?

There are a number of different ways one campaign can compete with others in the same query space by either bidding directly on the same keywords or bidding on other keywords that appear in ad triggering search phrases. There are a few that can create a skewed impression of the query space for any single account. Campaigns targeting specific areas within a larger query space for another coupled with specific geographical regions, devices and time periods can aggressively reduce the larger campaign’s visibility in otherwise profitable spaces.

Either through less wasted coverage leading to a better return or a more aggressive bidding strategy one can lock a more general campaign out of lucrative query groups. These competitors do not even have to be selling the same product to the same people; there can be a lot of overlap in terms used for the SEM campaigns of different businesses.

For ‘I Like Turtles’, their targeted query space may also have a toy store using “Buy Turtles”, travel and accomodation companies targeting the name of their city, a conservation organisation raising awareness on river conservation and a DVD store selling Ninja Turtles movies. These companies do not need to be selling the same product to have an impact on the ‘I Like Turtles’ SEM campaign. Travel companies may bid higher than the pet shop and be less precise with their negatives, and increase the CPC. The DVD store might time their ads to run for the weekend, and periodically bury the pet shop’s ads, and the conservation company and toy store may increase competition on terms that often form a part of a search that would trigger an ad for ‘I Like Turtles’. Each of these actions can increase the effective cost of bidding for the campaign and make it harder to appear for one of the higher converting search strings.

Increasing bids around peak buying times can place ads in front of people more likely to buy for certain products. Any increase in return on traffic can increase the amount spent per click. The same applies for more efficient landing pages and sites, and effective targeting geographically and by device. The more likely a sale, the more that can be spent per click.

This activity within a more general campaign can have an effect on how effective certain query clusters may seem. It can also reduce a campaign’s visibility for certain terms. A Search Query Performance report does not tell the full story of what is happening with your campaign and the targeted terms, but it can hint at competitive activity.