As we look ahead, we’ve spotted six things that anyone involved in digital marketing should take note of… here goes:

1. Mobile Finally Delivers

It is common to get premature in excitement over new technologies. For example: the dot-com bubble was burst on the delay between the promise of the eCommerce revolution (2000/2001) to the actual fulfillment of that promise (from 2004 incrementally to today and beyond).

The same is true of mobile – yes, we’ve all replacing our old titchy ‘just call and text’ handsets with funky new smartphones for the last 3 years or so, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an immediate payoff.

Expensive data plans, clunky interfaces, steep learning curves and lack of confidence in security has meant that many have not used these devices to their fuller potential. Now, that has changed. The devices are better, the pricing is much more competitive, the user-experience is tight (and not just the Apple iOS platform any more) and social media is driving increase in use.

Here are some stats for you to consider. By the end of 2011 these were the stand out numbers:

• Over 30% of emails are now opened on smartphones / tablets, over 50% at weekends (evenings)
• Over 40% of posts to Facebook are from mobile devices
• When incorporating tablets into ‘portable PCs’, Apple will become the world’s biggest portable PC supplier (volume and turnover)

If you have not planned for the mobile revolution then make sure you do this year. Ideally this quarter!

2. Bing Comes Second… A Good Second!

And that’s no bad thing when position one is secured by Google. You can be sure that Microsoft are going to be pressing hard to increase market share but their merger (read: takeover) of Yahoo! Search and Search Marketing, plus their ‘relationship’ with Facebook means that Bing has got a bright future and enough traction to take an increasing share of the advertisers’ buck.

3. The Social Backlash

There is no doubt that Social Media continues to gather steam – growth, use, time on site – whatever metric you want to use, it wins.

There is no doubt that IF you want to engage, speak with, understand better, relate to you customers and prospects, then Social Media is an excellent place.

However, where there IS doubt is how brands, products, services and companies can make this work to their advantage for two main reasons:

• Lack of imagination: we don’t know how many businesses do this, but many have the ‘Field of Dreams’ approach to their Pages (‘build it, and they will come’). Er – no they won’t… build it, put no creativity thought into it, and they won’t come. And for the few that do will leave. This is a social media, you need to think socially
• Narrow focus: you cannot treat social media like direct marketing and measure response and revenue out of it. If you do it this way you will fail for too many reason to mention in this article (TBC at a later date!)

At the same time, these principles need to be accepted: a ‘Like’ is worthless unless it becomes a ‘do’, impressions on your social pages are worth less than impressions on your own website, social media advertising is patchy at best (particularly LinkedIn) and the true cost of social media is the time spent managing it.

So the social backlash will mainly consist of businesses who thought (or were persuaded into) that either it would be self-fulfilling, or that it’s a straight marketing tool. Or, it may be that you have outsourced it to incompetents.

4. Companies Will Work Even Harder to Ringfence and Reward their Clients

It has always surprised us how little SMEs work to support their existing client base and reward them for their loyalty. Given that we can expect another challenging year, the competitive business will work as hard as possible on their existing contacts and make sure that they retain custom from as many as possible.

The smarter ones will also use techniques to use their existing customers to leverage further opportunity.

This will be the opportunity for true CRM – the management of actual customer relationships through a combination of media, not CRM as Salesforce describe it (sales channel – CRM with a silent ‘relationship’).

5. Limitations of Automation Will be Revealed

We get approached by many agencies purporting to have automated various things – from pay per click performance, to email response. All offering, for a monthly fee, to make our lives easier.

For the buyer this is serious compelling as the more automation, the cheaper and more scalable the services are. So, if it works then quickly, with little staff resource needed, then the benefits are clear.

However, the main question is: ‘is it better?’ And we believe that for marketing – the answer is a firm ‘no’. The main reason being that strong marketing needs two things: creativity and market knowledge. Give us a strong ad copywriter any day over an automaton: better copy, better click through, better quality score, lower spend, improved performance.

So, if you buy into automation, be very careful and test against a ‘human managed’ (ideally experienced) alternative. You may find that the only thing you’ll be scaling is your losses.

6. Performance of Apps Will Come Under Scrutiny

We’ve always maintained, when approached by clients wanting apps, that this is no gravy train… in fact, far from it, it’s more like a Ponzi / Pyramid / MLM scheme where the winners are deliberately PR’d to create the illusion of success. Yet, Apps are a thin layer of great success, covering a very deep ocean of failure.

Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon will court you, create a convention just for you, present bold plans to you, bring you into their carefully controlled circle and, if you’re very lucky, even get you a signed Zuckerburg t-shirt.

What you have to remember is that they’re taking about 40% of everything – and every app ties your users into them (as much as you, of course). So, the more apps they have, the better their reward and, actually, it doesn’t really matter which ones make it.

So, you can see why focusing on Rovio (developers of Angry Birds) and not the 100,000+ other games that die a death hides the true picture. Recent research suggests that the average Game in the Apple App Store takes £4,000 in total revenue to the developer, and games is supposed to be the most successful category.

So, we wish you all the best for 2012 and if you want any advice or help, then please call 01962 605 000 – we’re more than happy to have a chat.

1. If the adverts in the search results were less relevant to the search term, then the search engine itself would seem to be less accurate
2. If the advertising network gets paid on click-through, then to allow poor performing adverts to dominate because they’re willing to spend more means that lower revenue would be realised

So, Quality Score was Google’s smart balancing act. The premise was that if you worked hard making sure that your keyword, ad copy (in Google) and website landing page were more relevant and compelling to the reader, then you would be able to bid less for a keyword because your advert was better.

What Google SAY Quality Score Is

“The AdWords system calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

You can read further details on the Google Adwords Help Pages. The factors include (again from the Google page):

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Now, whilst that all seems legitimate and helpful, there’s a lot that can happen behind the scenes… after all, who is to say which of these factors has much or little influence? And, just give further freedom to Google, ‘other’ is a very broad term!

What Quality Score REALLY Is

So there is a lot that can actually be changed ‘under the hood’ without any perceptible change, or even any need for Google to change it’s bullet list. What we can reveal is this: that Quality Score has changed substantially recently and these are the things you need to know

Of high importance are:

• Historical click through rate of the keyword
• Historical click through rate of the display URLs

Of low importance are:

• Account history
• Quality of landing page
• Relevance of keyword to the ads in the ad group
• Relevance of keyword to the search query
• Accounts performance in geographical region (a small enhancement of overall CTR performance)

Of unknown importance are:

• Other relevance factors

Because ‘other’ cannot really be defined.

How do we KNOW This?

Recently, we setup a test campaign for a specific service – ‘telemarketing‘. We used all the normal relevance factors: great optimised landing page on a very relevant well established site promoting telemarketing, relevant advert copy specifically promoting the telemarketing service, and a suite of well-filtered very relevant keywords promoting specifically telemarketing services. In fact, we called our Google Account Manager and they said ‘there’s nothing more you can do’.

It was pretty surprising, therefore, with all this attention to detail, when we saw that most keywords in the ad group had a Quality Score of 3. That’s right… 3 out of 10.

What it tells us really clearly, is that you can do all you can to make all the elements of the campaign and website relevant, but ultimately 70% of the score is about the Click Through Rate.

Why is this IMPORTANT for Advertisers?

The reason why this is critical is that there’s a problem here that few are aware of. The Quality Score Formula was supposed to balance spend based around click through rate.

It was not supposed to be driven by click through rate. But now, it is another name for click through rate. If you have a high click through rate, you have a good quality score, if you don’t, then they will hammer your quality score.

The problem with this is two-fold:

1. The encouragement is for adverts which drive clicks, however most successful PPC campaigns are about getting high quality traffic in – these two objectives can be, in many campaigns, incompatible
2. The message to advertisers from Google has changed from being about relevance, to being about SPEND – about revenue to Google

WHY Has it Changed?

We don’t know for sure the reason, but this is our best guess. Until recently Quality Score was to help competition for places – so that the small guys could compete with deeper pockets and if they were smart enough, then they would benefit from investing more energy and time into their campaigns and websites.

However, now that virtually any search has at least 2-3 adverts, most have many, and (we estimate) about 50% of searches are full of adverts, there is no longer the need to be generous. So, they’re starting to turn the screw – after all, shareholder value must be met.

Which is why they are also looking at limiting the amount of adverts on a page by removing the right hand column of adverts. We call it ‘search engine optimisation‘ not of positions, but of revenues.

What’s the REAL Message

So, that’s why Quality Score is no more – it is there, in name. But it is no longer what it was and certainly we would challenge their assertion in the final line of their description of quality score:

“In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

It is not a measure of quality of keyword, advert, or landing page (or website). It is now merely a stick to beat you with to make you cough up more.

Spread the Word / Find Out More

If this post has helped you, then please spread the word on Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook / Google+ below. If you’d like to find out more about how you can combat this unwelcome development, now that we’ve identified the problem, just get in touch – contact us, or send us a mention to discuss @johnnymb.

Worse, you may never discover that a little attention could double your performance. So here are our five ways…

1. Make it obvious what is wanted

Too many forms suffer from not making it clear which information is mandatory – the common symbol for a mandatory fields is an asterisk (*). However you can now apply ticks (or crosses), field colour highlights or even tooltips (friendly text prompts) to assist with a form fill, like this one:

Can you see how, with this simple prompt, you avoid user frustration and increase conversion?

Also, make sure your descriptions are easy to understand. You may know what you want with a phrase like ‘Confidential Address’ – but is that business, home, email?

2. Make it inviting

Many forms also suffer from being bland or, in extreme cases, seemingly disinterested.

If you would genuinely like someone to contact you, then say it! There’s no reason just to put a stack of fields and nothing else.

Moreover, we recommend you actually make sure that the person knows what they will get out of it. You need to answer the ‘what’s in it for me?’ if you want someone to share their personal details with you.

Finally, make sure they know what they’re opting into, or not.

If you don’t rent or sell your list, then make it clear that you don’t. If you plan to send emails out, then give them the option to untick the ‘further contact’ box. Again, be polite about it.

3. Trim the fields

If a field is non-essential, remove it. The fewer fields there are the more likely a form will be completed.

For example, if you’re following up leads anyway, then don’t ask for the full details in the form – just enough to contact that person and then complete their details over the phone.

4. Never trust your developer to get it right

Most developers and designers only care about making sure a form functions. They won’t consider the user-experience, they won’t care about conversion rates. You need to make sure that you specify the form fields needed, the field descriptions, and then test it.

Here’s an example of how it goes wrong. It’s a search field, but the ‘save as’ and ‘save search’ are in the wrong place meaning that the search button (which is the main action button) is not triggered properly when the ‘Enter’ key is pressed:

Not only that, but what is the ‘View All’? And why is it next to the Search button? This form is from a large email marketing business who should know better!

5. Use Your Forms

Go on, try your own form or, if you’re too familiar with it, get someone you trust to take a look at it.

Ask them these questions:

• Was it easy to use?
• Did you understand what information was requested?
• Did you understand what you would get out of filling out the form?
• If you made a mistake on the form, did it guide you to what you needed to change?

Bonus Point…

We always like to offer a ‘bonus’ – here’s a tip: measure your forms! Find out what proportion of visitors to a specific page then go on to complete your form. Make some changes (based on the above) and see how it affects your conversions – you’ll find that you will get more opportunities and be more successful as a result.

If you’d like this kind of thinking applied not just to your forms, but to all of your site, then please take a look at our form – we believe it stands up to scrutiny – fill it out and we’ll be in touch with you.

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We’ve already covered some of the pitfalls in our first two articles: never commit to a monthly SEO contract and 5 critical keys to managing your SEO supplier. These give you the groundwork to understanding SEO better.

In this article we now give you the ammunition to manage your SEO supplier (rather than them running rings around you).

Before we start… important note… to make this work you need analytics. We’re working on the assumption that you’d choose Google Analytics, but any analytics package which can measure visits and search terms for those visits will do.

In fact, even more importantly, do you like driving with a blindfold on? No? Then get some analytics and then look at it regularly, or just give up on your web marketing!

So, onto the job in hand… Steps 1-4 can be done before the SEO visits, steps 5-6 in negotiation to reach agreement.

Step 1: Measure Your Brand Visitors

Firstly, importantly, identify searchers for your brand or sub-brands, or people working for your business. for these two reasons:

1. You will come top for this without ANY help from a SEO, and
2. They are not ‘new’ business as they have heard about you before

Step 2: Measure Your Current Organic Traffic

Secondly, identify your latent organic web traffic – the number of searchers who are already visiting your website (this will be your total organic traffic minus brand searches from above).

Step 3: Value a Visitor

This is very easy if you’ve done any Pay Per Click (Adwords) marketing. If you spend on clicks you will, almost certainly know what the cost is of your average visitor, if not, then  estimate what a visitor is worth to you.

Step 4: Target Relevant Keywords

Using your analytics and through your own business knowledge, you will know what keywords and phrases are relevant to your business. You will also see from your current analytics that you do get a number of visits on rather spurious keywords. So concentrate on keywords which are relevant and are likely to bring in relevant visitors.

Step 5: Meet (Suitably Prepared) With Your SEO

So, when you go to meet your SEO, then you can have a proper discussion with them. Set the ground-rules:

• All brand searches, past or future, are not a part of the SEO’s service, so when it comes to performance, these will not be included within the SEO’s measurements
• Your current organic traffic is where you are today. Again, the SEO has not contributed so they need to improve on this and should be measured on the improvement over your current visits and not be given credit for your current ones
• Any non-relevant keyword visits will be ignored as these are ancillary to the job in hand and a good SEO should be able to get you ranking for relevant phrases

Listen carefully to their reaction to these items. These are all fair, they won’t like it, but they are fair! And hear from them how they are going to go about gaining you extra traffic.

Step 6: Agree Targets with your SEO

You will then be able to give your SEO a target: tell them that your ‘break even’ SEO performance for you is their fee (almost certainly monthly) divided by your average cost per click.

For example, if they want to charge you £300 a month, and your cost per click estimate is £0.50 then they will need to give you 600 additional visits a month to break even in terms of performance.

If they cannot commit to this, then it speaks for itself: they are not able to deliver you enough traffic volume to cover their fees. Therefore they should not be appointed.

Step 7: Measure, Measure, Measure

We would support any SEO in two respects: firstly that improvements don’t happen immediately, and secondly that there’s no value in a ‘free lunch’ – you have to pay as you’re expecting them to work hard for this, probably harder than they do on most of their clients!

Tell your SEO that you will give them a three month trial to get to this target figure of monthly visitors from their work, and that you will pay them during this trial. If they achieve your target then you will continue working with them, if not then the trial is over.

Furthermore, tell them that once they’ve achieved this target you will be expecting further incremental improvements until they at least double this figure per month – because one of the myths of SEO is that your need to continue spending to maintain your rankings. This is barely true and only in a select few competitive business areas. If you cancel the contract, unless they have been using ‘black hat’ techniques, your ranking should be maintained.

As you measure your visits in analytics, you should start seeing improvements in SEO within a month and, even if your SEO doesn’t hit the full target, if they’re close then you should give them the benefit of the doubt… if they’re a long way short, either renegotiate until they hit the target or cancel.

In this way, you can manage your SEO rather than letting them run rings around you.

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Here are five ways to make sure that you can manage your SEO and ensure they’re going to deliver for you.

1. Don’t Focus on Position

Do not, we repeat, NOT, fall into the ‘Page 1 of Google’ trap. This is usually the domain of the lazy SEO. They will guarantee a first page position and, as soon as they get it for you, they’ll down tools and just bill you monthly.

Getting a page 1 position is easy. What’s hard is getting it for a high traffic keyword. Most SEO’s who play the ‘Page 1 trick’ won’t like questions such as:
“How many people search for that a month?” (you can find this in the Google Keyword Tool), or
“How much traffic will that get me a month?” (the answer can be found in your analytics software)

So, don’t focus on position, focus on traffic.

2. Relevance is Everything

One of our clients had a blog post which was all to do with mouse pointers, but which was nothing to do with their core services business. They got to page 1 and had about 10 visits a month from people interested in mouse pointers.

One of our more popular posts about Tree Surgery and Leylandii (there is a connection – it’s about valuing your clients) and we’re position 8 on Google UK for ‘Leylandii Tree Surgeon‘ – do you think that’s relevant to a digital marketing agency? Will that position win us business?

Here’s another ‘classic’ illustration:
We pitched a business who targets central London clients with a top tier professional service. We explained why SEO would not work for them – the local ‘expert’ (ahem!) wanted to rank them for ‘[Professional Service] in Hampshire’.

OK – so that’s a ‘triple fail‘. Why?

1. Because their target market in London won’t search for Hampshire
2. Should potential clients visit the site, they would be put off with Hampshire being plastered everywhere when they want services delivered to them in London
3. This particular keyword phrase has fewer than 100 searches a month (across the UK!!)

So, make sure the keywords you rank for are relevant! Make sure that your SEO supplier knows your business well.

3. SEO is NOT Free

You pay for SEO. It is not ‘free’. It has to be measured in exactly the same way as other forms of marketing.

4. You Can Stop Your SEO and it Won’t Damage Your Rankings

If you use a SEO supplier and they ‘threaten’ you that everything will crash and burn if you stop using them, they’re wrong. Very little if anything will happen (positively or negatively) over the course of time.

If, on the other hand, you do see your rankings being badly affected, then it’s almost certainly because they were engaging in underhand methods to boost your results; trust us, you’re best clear of them anyway as you were probably a blacklisting candidate (where Google pushes all your positions down, say, 30 places for as long as they feel like it!).

5. Be Reasonably Patient

Your SEO will tell you that it takes time for Search Engine rankings to materialise. That is true – give it 1-2 months, possibly three. No longer than that… if your SEO is playing the ‘time’ card after 6 months: give them a red one!

We hope this is all useful stuff, please share this post with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ … we’ve made it really easy for you: nice chunky buttons below! And if you want us to help you evaluate your SEO, then talk to us today.

You May be Told that Your Site is Only the Start

For many businesses this is not true – you may get a high or page one ranking just by doing ‘on site’ optimisation and never need to do anything further.

If you are a niche service, or already have a popular website with a good number of inbound links, then further link building may not make a huge amount of difference.

You May be Told that You Need to Spend to Retain Rank

For most online rankings, again this is not the case – once rankings have been achieved they are relatively self-sustaining and by focusing on improving content, your site should retain it’s position.

If it does require further work then this should be done – but on a more ad-hoc basis rather than every month. And you need to set clear parameters for your SEO supplier to meet (number of links, increase in traffic etc.).

To give you an idea, here’s a popular site where we have done no SEO for the last 18 months… does that look like a downward trend to you?

You Will be Told That Link Building is Crucial

This was the case when the only off-site measure was inbound links. But now it is less so.

Google and others take a great number of metrics into account when they evaluate the SEO of a website and it is likely that as their measures get more advanced, then they will be less interested in inbound links.

In any case, the number of link-builders who can’t even get the basic ‘on site’ optimisation right is eye-opening [and if your SEO doesn't even talk about your site, then you can be certain they don't know what they're doing].

Your SEO May ‘Front-Load’ Their Effort

If you commit to a monthly fee, your supplier will front-load their effort. Possibly just do some on-site work and very little link-building and then reap the medium and long-term rewards of doing very little (if anything) for you.

Important Note: This is not true for ALL businesses.

There are some types of site where ongoing spend will work. If the category of business you are in contains really high traffic search terms and valuable keywords (like ‘Car Insurance’, for example) then it is worth spending to stay at or near the top.

However, for the vast majority of businesses, despite all the promise, SEO is not the key to unbridled success – it’s just something you should do well on your site and seek other, more profitable, revenue generators.

If you want us to show you more evidence, please contact us, or call 01962 605 000.

This is true when it comes to social media too. With Google+ just about a month old, we’ve seen the two common responses you’d expect from this kind of launch:

1. The Enthusiast: your typical ‘early adopter’… just sooo excited by this new entrant that they’re gushing about anything it does
2. The Critic: much keener to take a contrary position and to be perceived to be knowledgeable precisely because they aren’t excited about the launch, they prefer to criticise from a distance

And, in Google+’s launch these have been polarised. The enthusiast talks up adoption rate, invites friends, promotes through other channels; the critic avoids at all costs and, often, hasn’t even tried the service in the first place.

However, in the instance of Google+ these two positions are both supportable – because it’s not going to ‘beat’ Facebook or Twitter, it’s just trying to carve it’s own furrow. Some will use it, some won’t – but the effect it has on both Facebook and Twitter will be measurable and long-term.

So, who should be most nervous about Google+?

In our view it’s Twitter. Why? Well, for two main reasons:

ONE: Because it is struggling under an ocean of mainly junk and drivel content. We love Twitter, but it’s just ‘overdose’ and as it grows in popularity, things get worse. But Google+ can do what Twitter can do in a much more managed way. Following is just one small part of Circles and Circles is way better than Lists, and

TWO: Because there’s little else to it – it’s simplicity is also it’s weakness. Whereas Facebook is a hub of social, sharing, gaming, commerce, etc. etc. etc., Twitter is just bulk communications with a little one-to-one interaction. So, if Google+ does things better than Twitter, it has nothing else to fall back on.

Will it mean Twitter disappears? We think that’s unlikely, but I’m sure there will be some furrowed brows at Twitter HQ as Google+ develops. Our view is that 100m accounts will be the key tipping point to volume communications getting going in Google+ (estimated to happen Q4 2011).

Note to Web: Google+ Hasn’t Even Got Going Yet

Google+ is still in a managed roll out phase. You can’t sign up directly – you need to be invited. Recently our personal account was limited to 150 invites and no more.

Not only that, but the linking of search to social is much easier for Google to do given their dominance of the former.

Also, Google is holding back on various roll outs we can be certain are coming:

• Business pages: which we’re confident will be better connected with Search and Advertising than Facebook or LinkedIn’s clumsy efforts
• Realtime search v 2.0: why hook up with Twitter or Facebook when you have your own platform? It comes with a massive search volume that blogs, merchants, advertisers and people want to get in front of
• All the other Google services: they’re not quite tied up as yet, but things like Google Docs will add some very interesting spice to the mix
• Mobile: Hands up who’s got a mobile platform AND a social network? Precisely!

Wrap Up

Google has had two failed attempts at social – Wave and Buzz. Wave was let down by difficulty in access / promotion and also being before it’s time – it wasn’t easy enough to comprehend and use, yet we will see Wave functionality but in other forms (like Docs). Buzz was just a weak attempt at ‘doing Twitter’. However we believe Google has learned from these two mistakes by developing an accessible and user-friendly platform which improves on what’s out there.

It’s not really Twitter or Facebook. It’s email 4.0… the start of proper unified communications that non-users can plug into (thus the need for a Gmail account). The trend is clear – email’s popularity is on the wane and social, chat and messaging is taking over – and Google+ is right in this space. And, as first efforts go – it is very good!

For smaller businesses much of what they do has to involve some educated guesswork, but it is encouraging that the bigger fish, with all their access to focus groups, beta tests, online research and user feedback, also make mistakes.

Strategic Mistakes – Microsoft…

It is our view that Microsoft is currently treading a very fine line around a customers’ patience. This mainly revolves around their inability to support (or recognise) any browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Have you tried ‘Skydrive‘ – their online document storage facility? In Explorer it works, in Firefox it’s all over the shop! Yet there is no obvious reason for this happening – apart from the ‘optimised for Explorer’ mantra coming from Microsoft. Yet, with Google Docs already being the online file storage and management of choice, you can’t help feeling that they’ve pulled the trigger before taking the gun out of the holster!

This ‘blind spot’ also came to a head last week when our head of search was invited to join an online webinar on the Yahoo! Microsoft merger for search marketing. Did it work on Firefox? Of course not – it’s being run by Microsoft.

Yet, again, what this means is that we’re not as educated as we need to be for the new product and are less likely to take full advantage of it for our clients. So, again, they lose.

Does the world revolve around Explorer? We don’t think so.

Specific Problems – Yahoo! Prompts

One thing we are looking forward to from the Yahoo! Microsoft merger is the final putting to bed (/out of service) of the Yahoo! Search Marketing online interface.

If ever there was a case of not learning from the competition, then this is it. Changing campaigns, adverts and ad groups takes twice as long on this system than with Google Adwords or MSN AdCenter. Reporting is basic and unhelpful. The conversion tracking is unreliable (and in favour of Yahoo! of course)…

If it were to be summed up in a nutshell, then we’d point out this little box. It appears EVERY time you change an advert in a ad group with only one advert in it. You can’t turn it off, even though you have read the message. Not only that, it’s untrue. It must have been clicked 10,000 times by us. We can’t wait to never see that again.

Errors of Judgment -Waitrose

Waitrose has discerning customers, and they can spot a lemon a mile off. The very expensive re-design of the Waitrose website has backfired massively on customers.

It seems that even with an interstellar budget, the project was late and hurried out and had several major problems:

• Search results are too long: unless you were very specific in your searching, you often got pages and pages of results meaning a time-consuming trawl to find what you’re looking for
• Navigation: customers found it harder to find ‘shelves’ of items using the new navigation, often having to hover or click up to three items to find the area they wanted to be in. Once you got where you want to be, it wasn’t easy to find your way back
• Slow loading pages: almost certainly not due to server capacity, we fear that this is probably down to the amount of users spending longer on the site and performing more searches. We really hope that it’s not down to their shiny new technology – now that would be a disaster!

This comment summed it up:

“New Waitrose £10m website is most successful industrial espionage stratagem ever devised by Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda”

Want to see a small sample of the vitriol? Why not! Let’s hope they get it right in the end.

So, when it comes to websites, you need to bear the user in mind – because without users who actually USE your website, you have visitors, but not customers!

If only people were that predictable… sadly even in the larger and better resourced of businesses there still exists people who don’t play by the rules and therefore suffer the consequences.

Case 1: Diaspora – the Social Network for the Private (eh?!)

We remember hearing that they wouldn’t offer ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ as the options for Gender – but had a free text field instead. There’s no point going with the argument of ‘well, you’ve got to be one or the other’ because it doesn’t work like that in Diasporaland. So, ‘focused’ (if that’s the right word!) are they on offering freedom to the individual and not pre-judging gender (because they ‘love’ everyone, even if they are unlike anyone else on the planet) they have retained this option.

So, what does that mean? Well, it means that they don’t have 1′s and 0′s, they have complications. Sure, you could argue, they can still filter by male, or is it masculine, or man, or homme, or… hmm… do you now see the problem? In any case we predict a few ‘Jedi’-gendered to join the network which allows them the freedom to make it up as they go along.

Zuckerberg must be chuckling about this one. He even put 0.0001% of his daily income into this particular ship. He almost certainly realised it wouldn’t sail, just don’t mention the PR it gave him (hey, he cares about the little guys)! But even for ‘the Zuck’ there is no immunity from this kind of problem. Let’s look at …

Case 2: Facebook Places – FourSquare Without the Fun

We visited a bar in London called ‘The Fire Station’ and thought, ‘hey let’s check in here’ – so we looked up our Facebook app, logged into ‘Places’ and searched in the area. We found ‘Fire Station’, and ‘Fire Station Waterloo Road’, and ‘The Fire Station’… and that was just the first few.

This is the same problem again, just with different stripes.

So, why is this a ‘problem’? Well here are a couple of immediate issues that spring to mind:

1. Facebook Places is about socialisation. When we logged into it, we found two people also checked into ‘The Fire Station’. But six more checked into the other ‘Fire Stations’ (note: there is only one!!). So, there could have been nine check-ins to the same location. But there weren’t.
2. This makes it impossible (as it stands) to start having some fun – if you own ‘The Fire Station’, which group do you communicate to? If you become ‘Mayor’ (or the Facebook equivalent) of one, then what if it’s the least popular. Does that make you ‘Mubarak’ in a sea of Borises?

The human mind, left to it’s own devices, sadly, isn’t as thorough as it could be. We need the firm guidance of a computer to ensure we don’t go astray. Without such guidance we are prone to just doing whatever we randomly think is best. If nothing is done by the end of 2011, we expect there will be double-figures of ‘The Fire Station on Waterloo Road’ in Facebook Places.

This process needs one of two things:

• A proper database to cross-reference with, or
• Timely human editorial intervention

However, because they were in a rush to get a location-based solution out there, we have much more confidence that Facebook will get it right, and will start merging locations in due course to bring everything into line. Diaspora’s problem is more severe as it is not an oversight, it’s in their DNA. Sadly we fear that this will be a self-inflicted wound to come on top of the general lack of interest and enthusiasm in their offering. As we look around for Facebook ‘killers’, if it isn’t too late already, Diaspora won’t be one.

When it comes to social media it can be too easy to think that anything goes. It’s true, the content can be as varied as the people it represents, but the web and the means of navigation that allows us to get there must be logical and precise, or it’s built to frustrate and will turn users off.

There is no antidote to muddled thinking.

Real World Learning No.1 – Your Website IS Your ‘Store’

We are often asked by clients to ‘fix’ their Pay Per Click campaign, or to get more traffic to their website and yet when we visit the site, it’s clear that the site needs attention first.

Why Put the Site First?

Simply, your site is like a ‘change’ machine and your marketing is like sliding a £10 note into it… you put the money in (marketing) and you wait for your return.

Income < Expenditure?

A site that returns in less than £10 in change to you tells you a very simple message: your site is not optimised and you will lose money if you don’t sort it out.

Therefore your action is not to drive more traffic to it, but to scrutinise your website and work out WHY your site is not performing for you. Look in these places first:

1. Are visitors finding the ‘product’ easily (this can be an actual product, or a service, or a contact form)?
2. Are you charging enough for the product?
3. Do you have the right range of offerings?
4. What are your competitors promoting / offering?

Income = Expenditure?

So, you suddenly start to break even, and for every £10 plugged in, you’re getting £10 out. You’re OK, aren’t you?

Sadly, no, you are not OK. In many respects this is a worse situation to be in than losing money. Why? Because at this level there is a danger you will persevere with your marketing without still addressing your website.

Your action should still be to develop and improve your website. In our opinion every website could do with improvement – so don’t settle too early for ‘mediocre’ – expect more!

Income > Expenditure

OK… now it’s clearing profit and so you think, “this is where I spend more heavily on marketing”. True, it should be BUT the question is HOW. The two observations on marketing spend we would offer to you are these:

• Spending more in Pay Per Click, and other online bid-managed advertising, generally reduces margin. So if your gross profit margin is tight, then don’t go upping spend too much, there is normally a threshold where profit starts reducing so make sure you don’t overbalance when it comes to being more aggressive
• Diversify when increasing spend. Don’t just stick with a narrow range of sites or marketing media, find other routes to market and other means of placing your offers

Not only that, but don’t forget your site. It’s too easy to sit back and believe that you’ve got it made once there is some profit. Continue to work on your site, improve, fine tune and tweak – squeeze as much performance out of it as you can get.

It is like the real world in that respect. Shop, catalogue and direct mail all measure the performance of their marketing and their main focus is first on the proposition and how it monetises interest and potential customers: scrutnising conversion rate and spend.

You’ve got to look at your website in a similar way!