Read the rest of my article in The Make Good

The Make Good – Content Marketing and the Measurement Conundrum by Nathan Levi

Advertising guru Sir Martin Sorrel talked about the ‘four grey swans’ affecting the global economy when he released WPPs quarterly figures last week.

Grey swans being known issues and black swans being unknown, unpredictable events. It was Rumsfeld-esque.

If we zoom into our own world there is a long list of things for marketers to be thinking about in a digital world which is changing more rapidly now than at any time in the last ten years.

But for me there is one big ‘grey swan’ – and that is how we measure value.

Despite the modern challenges of big data and a proliferation of technologies, marketing remains a very simple beast at heart. One of the things I talk a lot about is ‘media optimisation’, the process of making budgets work harder, not just in paid media but across paid, owned and earned.

And there is always one starting point. There is always one thing that I think every marketer should worry about more than anything else – measuring value.

What do we mean by measuring value? Of course you already ‘measure value’ in some way by tracking spend versus a wide range of metrics like impressions, clicks, leads or sales. But one of the biggest opportunities to uplift performance is by being better at measuring value.

That means thinking about all the valuable events that a customer could perform (not just a sale) and all the things that contributed to that event happening.

Of course there are some things we can track and many things we can’t track but being better at measuring value means moving your business closer towards what is technically possible. By doing so you will spend more of your marketing budget on what is really valuable and less on what isn’t.

So here are five questions which might help you work out where you could be better at measuring value:

1. Are you measuring real and relative value?

What is a ‘conversion’ for your business? How closely does that match how you really make money? For example, if you are a credit card company and you measure your media to a cost -per –application then clearly that is not aligned to how you make money.

Many applications are instantly rejected or referred for further evaluation. Even if you only count accepted applications that acquired customer will only start to make the business money at the end of the ‘free’ balance transfer period or if they go on to buy other products.

Is this ‘real value’ data being fed back into your marketing?

Most traffic to a website doesn’t convert. Are all the people who visited your website and did not buy worth the same? Of course not. Some are close to buying and others are not planning to buy at all. Lots of people could be in between.

To account for this are you measuring the other valuable interactions outside the hard conversion event? Someone who spends more time on your site or looked at certain pages might be relatively more valuable than someone who didn’t.

A user who viewed the store locator could be about to visit your shop and buy offline. Did the user make a phone call or download a brochure or watch a video or simply not bounce on the home page? You don’t have to know the real monetary value of all these interactions but its worth thinking carefully about their relative value.

2. Do you have a single view?

By single view I mean a single cookie view rather than a single customer view. There’s a distinction. The modern customer journey for many brands is non-linear and complex, it’s across multiple devices, it’s online and its offline, the real influences are many, so it’s good to start off with what we can do.

Focusing on cookies as a proxy for people isn’t perfect of course but it’s much better than tracking some channels through analytics, some channels through your ad server and some using completely isolated systems and data sets.

Bearing in mind most advertisers use a last click attribution model, getting a single cookie view of the online user journey including ‘organic’ touch points like SEO is a step in the right direction.

3. Have you closed off the big data leaks?

Where are the leaks? How much of a difference might that missing data make? Could it be the difference between a piece of media being positive or negative in terms of ROI?

Online to call centre is certainly a loop you must tie up with call tracking software if your business drives significant revenue through its call centre.

There are different levels of call tracking depending on the integration and the software being used but first base is knowing the channel mix that delivered the call as a ‘conversion event’ (from which you can apply an average call centre conversion rate for a rough approximation) or better still, track the real value of that sale by passing the revenue and margin data back through the software.

Research Online Purchase Offline (ROPO) measurement is more of challenge but it’s about steps towards understanding value in areas like this rather than a final solution.

4. Do you ‘share the love’ in your attribution model?

Once you have moved your metrics closer towards how the business really makes money you might want to think about how you share the value of that ‘conversion event’ between all the touchpoints that contributed towards it. This is attribution.

Of course, if most of your conversions happen in one touch point then attribution is never something you need to worry about! If that’s not the case then remember that attribution can mean many things. Cross device, across online channels and ROPO for example.

The first one and the last one are a major challenge. The middle one is easier and should be your first step away from a last click model once you have your single cookie view in place.

In terms of attribution across the online user journey think about the value of each touchpoint. Is the touchpoint active or passive (i.e is there engagement like a ‘click’ which means it’s ‘active’ or it is something like a ‘view’ which is ‘passive’).

Thinking about search touchpoints, do you attribute brand in a different way to generic bearing in mind brand is largely navigational? Is the touchpoint the first, the last or somewhere in the middle? Is it recent or less recent?

Just as in the first point the right attribution model simply considers the relative value of these touchpoints and shares the credit for the ‘conversion’ accordingly.

5. Can you act on what you know?

Finally think about application. Measuring value more intelligently requires active application rather than passive analytics. Unless you can apply all of the above to move your media spend towards the areas that are driving real value then what’s the point?

Ideally the platform you use to deliver your single view and your attribution model should be the platform that is managing your media and as programmatic buying becomes more prevalent this connection will be increasingly important. Sucess in biddable media is entirely based on an accurate calculation of value in the auction.

So is measuring value the ‘grey swan’ of marketing? I’d love to hear your views and I hope some of these questions are helpful in forming your plans for 2013.

I firmly believe that the closer your measurement to your reality in terms of value, the better your marketing will perform. And with Sir Martins ‘four grey swans’ looming over us all that has to be a good thing!

As featured on Econsultancy

A curious thing happened shortly after these acquisitions; it appeared for a time that the power was moving away from ad servers. There were so many things ad servers could not do that we needed, including rich media, dynamic banner advertising, ad verification, attribution modelling, bid management, even billing and reconciliation, I could go on and on. Whilst we continued to use an ad server to traffic ads, our reliance on them lessened. Ironically the introduction of the container tag by the likes of Atlas and Doubleclick seemed to compound their seeming downfall. Other technologies were now able to ‘piggy back’ their data and play a more valuable role in the media buying process. Take DSPs as an example, which can sit within the ad server’s container tag but piggy back this data to actively buy media using 1st party cookie data. Technology that collects data is much more powerful when it can actively make decisions and use the data to improve performance in whatever capacity. The ad server had for so long not been able to do that, unlike the bid manager or the DSP.

The downfall of the tag manager is that you cannot actively manage the data you’re collecting. So whilst many of the tag management providers have attribution as a function, one cannot actively buy media based on the data they collect, it’s completely passive and therefore redundant. Couple that with the fact that a container tag is about as much of a commodity as a free newspaper in the digital media world and that ad servers are now providing free tag management services and attribution modelling (it’s not only Google that are playing this game), stand-alone tag management products’ day are numbered. The fact that Google did not buy one of the existing providers should also be a warning sign to them. If Google didn’t want to buy one and thought it simpler to create its own, it’s unlikely anyone else will. VCs who have invested here might want to cut their losses now.

The same might be said of ad verification tools. A good one will be able to tell you if an ad has been seen or not seen (is in view or out of view). You cannot however actively manage that data without using another technology like a DSP or an ad server. Doubleclick now provides ad verification for free, allowing you to see the role viewable impressions play in the buying cycle versus those that are not in view. The same goes for dynamic advertising platforms like Criteo and Struq. Flashtalking and Mediamind now both have the capabilities to dynamically target users based on certain behaviours using live data feeds. As ad servers they can actively manage the optimisation of these dynamic ads within a much larger data set making them more useful in the long term.

Data rich technologies like ad servers, bid managers and DSPs are now all building in the capabilities of these other standalone technologies, and actively managing the data they collect. For example, Doubleclick’s integration of Teracent means it’s now possible to see which dynamic ad rotation or sequence converts best in the path to conversion. This would not have been possible prior to the acquisition.

There are a few themes here.

1. Media technologies which actively manage data will eventually rail road those that cannot. This is why bid management technologies are still so prolific and are building out capabilities beyond their traditional uses.
2. There is a race by the big players to ‘see the whole picture’ or to have the whole data set. This is why Google has created a tag manager, because they were still a missing part of the jigsaw. The tag manager ultimately decides what data to collect and what not to collect. Google wants to be the main decision maker here.
3. Things have come full circle for the ad server. The technology that serves the ad, is the one that collects the most data. The ad servers have now developed capabilities to actively manage that data to drive performance. They lack the algorithm and buying capabilities of DSPs and bid managers but have become a key player in the digital media technology space. Tag management is now just one string to their ever expanding bow.

As featured on The Makegood

Mark Zuckerberg generated some headlines last week by saying that ‘at some point’ Facebook wants to be in the search business.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, ‘The Zuck’ said that Facebook is generating around a billion queries a day already “and we’re not even trying”.

His comments pushed the Facebook share price up by more than 4%. So could Facebook be a Google killer? Is search the answer to its share price malaise?

Facebook certainly has the audience and a billion queries a day, if that’s accurate, is an impressive number. But if it were all about volume of users then Facebook would already be a bigger business than Google.

The reason why it’s not and why it may never be is down to a few obvious fundamentals.

The question of user intent

The first and the most important of these is intent. The intent of users on Facebook is different to those on Google. That’s a simple and obvious fact.

That is the sole reason why Google finds it relatively easy to generate forty billion dollars in revenue every year from its advertising program and why Facebook finds it relatively difficult to achieve one tenth of that.

The audience is the same on both websites, the same people who use Facebook use Google and vice versa. But we use Google when we want something specific and we use Facebook when we’re checking in with our friends (real or imagined).

So user intent changes everything and the challenge for Facebook is that they may find it very hard to ever get around this fact.

Let’s go back to the billion queries that Facebook generates every day. People are looking for people on Facebook. Not products, not services and not brands unless they are pushed or incentivised to do so by other activity, so the queries inherently have a much lower commercial value and, being a walled garden, they will always be several steps from a shopping basket.

Facebook has developed a number of different advertising products but they have to be push, not pull (unlike Adwords) and so it always feels like they are tip toing around their user base trying not to annoy them with too many ads.

Fundamentally Facebook users don’t want ads, they don’t want to be friends with brands and they don’t want to get into a conversation with a washing powder. The click-through rates and eCPMs back this up.

Facebook and search

So Facebook has a fundamental challenge in commercialising its user base, because of their intent.

And it works both ways. Google can’t get its users to engage with its social networking product and despite several attempts, not many of us are forsaking Facebook to create ‘circles’ and have ‘hangouts’ on Google+ with our friends (real or imagined). So is there really an opportunity for either company to eat the others lunch?

And therefore how excited should we as marketers be about Facebook and search?

The Zuck was very careful to point out that if Facebook did move into the search space it would not be with a copycat Google product but it would focus on the space where search is evolving.

It would be a product that would build on Facebook’s strengths of social data and the huge potential of referral and recommendation from people in your social circle or those you trust. He cited an example of someone of getting answer to a question like ‘What sushi restaurants have my friends visited in New York in the last six months – and liked?”

That would be powerful stuff undoubtedly but if you listen to the interview there’s something in there that feels like this is very much a vision rather than anything that is close to being a reality.

Will Google lose any sleep over this? On the one hand its desperate to prove it doesn’t have a monopoly in order to get the regulators off its back so anyone who is big and in this territory is actually pretty good news. Facebook’s plans in search are as much a threat to Google as Google+ is a threat to Facebook – i.e. not very much.

The future for Facebook advertising

Facebook has an incredible user base and a data set that is perhaps unrivalled in its potential advertising value. Imagine layering the Facebook demographic, location and social data with recent search and other behavioural data sets that we can already integrate through Data Management Platforms (DMP) and Demand Side Platforms (DSP) to laser target your audience?

The privacy issues may mean this potential is never fully realised but recent developments point towards the intriguing prospect of giving Facebook cookie data to retarget users on their platform.

Google and Facebook are advertising funded businesses and in that respect Google will always have a distinct advantage. Google lives much more towards the ‘business end’ of the purchase cycle than Facebook and even its announcement this week that it is to charge advertisers for product listings in Google Shopping and at the same time drop an extra billion dollars of revenue onto to the balance sheet overnight is frankly the stuff of dreams for Facebook.

Facebook IPO’d in May and since then its shares have lost roughly half of their value. From an investor’s point of view Facebook could and should have done a lot more to generate revenue. I still hold out hope.

Facebook’s share price is based on the fact that, whatever its mistakes, very few companies are in the position it is in to benefit from cracking some of these challenges.

If we are talking about direct response and I’m being very pithy, I tell my team that Facebook is where you go to find Google users when they don’t want to buy anything. Of course that’s not always true but the fact that it resonates with many people illustrates the scale of the challenge for The Zuck in keeping users, advertisers and investors happy.

As featured on Econsultancy

There’s been a lot of talking recently regarding domain crowding. Ever since the rollout of Bigfoot, for some reason, Google has deemed it a good thing to fill the SERPs with lots of results from a single domain. I’ve seen plenty of examples of this, but I’ve just seen one example that is literally insane.

I was doing a search for “Star Wars blog”. It’s a long story that I’m not going to explain here, but as of 3pm, on 20th August 2012, the first page of Google results were as follows. Make note of the highlighted domain, http://starwarsblog.starwars.com:

On the first page, http://starwarsblog.starwars.com gets 4 out of 10 results due to domain crowding. Please note, my SERPs were set to showing 10 results per page.

On the second page, they get 5 out of 10 results:

On the third page, they get 9 out of 10 results. Hopefully, you’ll start to get the idea, but page by page, the following table demonstrates the amount of SERP real estate taken up by this domain:

That means that out of the first 100 results in Google, a single domain takes 80% of those results. I don’t care what Google say about this, but this isn’t what I was searching for, so this isn’t the best user experience. It looks like a bug to me.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, and look at some Google search results from 2000 for the query “buy domain name”:

Kinda similar, huh? Have we really gone full cycle, and gone backwards 12 years in terms of search quality? I hope that Google acknowledge this as a bug, and fix this soon. My hunch is that it’s a brand issue. I’m currently seeing an almost identical pattern when searching for “tripadvisor blog”, which could mean that Google are determining that the results you want to see should be more like a Google site search. It’s just that it’s the wrong intent in the “Star Wars” example, where I was actually seeking domain diversity.

The source of its persistent isolation has been the distorted reality that Google and other engines have maintained for so long in their search results. Partly maintained by the SEO community itself in their constant efforts to out-do each other, the unreality exists because search engines have judged the world of digital content by different criteria to those used by human readers.

Every signal that the search engines have found to differentiate good content from bad, whether it be keywords, links or a thousand other permutations, have all been jumped upon by the SEO industry and over-optimised to the point where the engines have had to refine their usage of them, or abandon them completely.

Some niches and industries were so heavily affected by the distorting presence of extreme SEO that it was impossible to gain any traction without resorting to the tactics used by the incumbents, but even those bastions of unreality are now crumbling too.

By closely watching the behaviour of billions of people as they conduct billions of searches and interact with billions of pieces of content, search engines have distilled out some core truths about what people want and what makes great search results – and it turns out that it’s great content and great experiences that they can enjoy themselves, and share with friends or colleagues.

This is a world away from the made-for-SEO content designed only to impress search engines and fool algorithms, and the skills required to create this content are very different to those required to truly engage with a human audience.

So where does this leave SEO? Is it redundant? No. It is still a vital interface between content producers and search engines – the internet’s single largest source of the most cost-effective traffic, and often the difference between profit and loss for online business. Search engines are getting smarter but they are still wrong-footed remarkably easily by simple technical or content changes. From a search engine perspective, there is almost always a right way and a wrong way to do things – from the way that you configure your web servers, to the layout of your page templates.

SEO is a layer that should go across all owned and earned digital media making sure that what you create, how you create it, and where and how you publish it meets with the approval of the search engines. This won’t be changing any time soon and with the engines asking for ever more complex work from content producers to help them understand their content, who wrote it, which languages it exists in, which semantic entities it discusses, and which part of the planet it is relevant for, SEO is evolving faster than ever.

However, the risk with SEO like any other tool, is that when you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There is a bigger picture, which is that SEO isn’t free, and marketing directors need to know where it is really delivering value, how it fits into the overall strategy and how to manage it. We believe that SEO should be part of a wider approach to online marketing, which we call Digital Media Optimisation (DMO).

DMO takes the view that every channel can be optimised, and every piece of media within each channel can be optimised, but that the whole can be managed intelligently and resources allocated accordingly across paid, owned and earned media. For SEO, granular data and meaningful metrics make it a channel that can be optimised like any other down to the level of individual keywords, and like every other channel there comes a point of diminishing returns – even when the correct strategies are applied to each part of the long tail – but this is only half the story.

SEO also has broader skills which can be applied across PR, social, and content creation to ensure that everything they do works well for the search engines, but collisions are inevitable between different teams with different objectives. DMO provides a framework which allows all the channels to coexist and be judged by the right criteria, where SEO can play to its strengths and amplify the work of all the other channel specialists.

For fear of being vague on this subject I wanted to outline some of the key ingredients to digital media optimisation, or DMO, as we like to call it at VCCP Media. The first part of this blog entry discusses the first five ingredients of DMO.

The first and most important element is having a single customer view across all media channels. Optimisation is impossible without it. Attribution, de-duplication, cross-channel analysis, all pre-requisites for optimised media spend. Investing in a technology that can do this is key.

The second is to make attribution work in the real world. So much of what I hear about this subject is theoretical and/or impractical. There is no perfect attribution model; attribution is affected and altered based on so many conditions. Attribution models, like human beings, are mutable. Being practical when it comes to attribution is key.

The third element is about automating as many processes in a campaign cycle as possible, from bid management to processing IOs. The less time you spend on commoditized tasks, the more money you can save your clients. Automation is critical for successful optimisation. Choosing the right technology to automate as much of the planning, buying and optimisation as possible should be a focus in vendor selection.

The fourth is to centralise retargeting for display. Allowing multiple networks and/or DSPs to buy retargeted media unnecessarily hikes up costs and allows them to claim credit for sales that would probably have happened anyway. It is now possible to retarget at ad server level, this saves on media spend and gives you more control of a tactic that all too often annoys the user rather than enhancing the customer journey.

The fifth one is dear to me because it reiterates in many ways the ethos of ‘How Brands Grow’ by Byron Sharp. Your main focus as a digital media marketer should be to find new customers online. Retargeting is a tactic, not a strategy. Being able to find new customers is what separates a good agency from a bad one, a good marketer from a bad one. Spend 80% of your time on prospecting and the rewards shall follow.

In my next blog entry I shall be discussing the next 5 ingredients for DMO. Thanks for reading.

Back in 2006, I set up VCCP Search with David Midgley, our CTO. It’s been an amazing six years. We started with two desks in a creative agency, no team and no clients. People told me at the time that search marketing was dominated by big agencies and that we would find it tough to compete.  Well, we did find it tough – but we did more than compete. In six years we managed to build an agency that stands out as one of the leading specialist search companies in the country.  Today I want to say a big thank you – to everyone on the team, past and present and to some wonderful clients that it has been our pleasure work with. Cheapflights, News International, MTV, Sage, O2, Totaljobs, Virgin Money, Dyson, Microsoft to name but a few.

Today we open a new chapter with the launch of VCCP Media. It’s going to be a real challenge. There are some great media agencies out there. The plethora of marketing technologies grows every day. The media landscape is changing rapidly and that will change the way that services are delivered, the way media is planned and bought, even what we currently think of as ‘media’. There are many other challenges. The media world isn’t very transparent. There are lots of players in the ecosystem between advertiser, media owner and consumer. Many media services are commoditised, we could go on and on… A challenging environment, stiff competition and rapid change. That’s what excites us about launching VCCP Media.

We can do a lot of things that very few other companies can do. We don’t do everything well, but we are very clear about where we can make an impact and where we can’t. We’ve added some really experienced media experts to the team, with specialists in video, content, social and real-time bidding.  We’re at the forefront of cloud based technology development and our focus is on how technology in media can be a game changer. Whether that is multi-channel tracking and attribution to deliver a single view across paid, earned and owned channels or the media optimisation technology to act on this data across the biddable media spectrum from search to social, to video and display.

It’s going to be an exciting time. We are on the lookout for talented and ambitious people to join our team. Developers, planners, strategists, analysts – some roles we haven’t even created yet. We want to work with clients who get excited about the same things as we do. Clients who want more intelligence, more innovation, better results.

We’ve been told that the media world is dominated by some big agencies and that it will be tough to compete. That feels like a good sign.