Google’s Slash and Burn Agriculture

There is no point covering the detail, or linking to a certain chart that has been doing the rounds. It has all been done, and in exhaustive, nah, excruciating detail. I guess the most interesting thing about this update that has not been beaten to death is exactly what Google is talking about when they say stuff like “low-quality sites”.

I don’t think we’ll really know for a little while, at least until Google is done with tweaking it. But that does not stop people from being really sure they know what Google means. I had a fun filled conversation with one of these recently.

As it turns out, according to someone with stronger opinions than mine, a content farm is a site that is optimised for search and doesn’t provide deep content. I guess IMDB is in trouble than. Also, they are sites that prevent company and brand websites from appearing higher in search.

Apparently this is a major issue. Companies and brands have a god given right to all the free, organic, traffic they can handle, and it is the evil google and SEO cartel that is preventing them from having what it rightfully theirs.

So there you have it. The more you know.

Yahoo!7 The Banner Network

I got an email the other day from Yahoo!7. It was about an awesome new ad unit that they are selling. Apparently it is super effective. They did not really elaborate on the super effective part of the email.

I am assuming they mean super effective against idiots.

it is something called “Rich Ads in Search” (RAIS) and as the subject of the email promises, they would let me “own your search terms, enhance branding and increase click through”.

When it comes to increasing brand and product awareness, small and large businesses alike need to continue to be innovative in their marketing.

Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) allows you to deeply engage your target audience through images, video and multiple direct links to your site from your RAIS ad. For the locally owned business, RAIS is also an opportunity to be listed above larger competitors in the market for specific search terms.

For $1,000, you can own your own RAIS category for up to four months that’s just $250 per month*.

This means you will be the only RAIS advertiser featured for your list of selected keywords and will be the only north listing on Yahoo!7 Search. Your ad can contain a branded image or video asset, a search box and links to up to four pages on your website. This allows consumers to search your site directly without leaving the search page and enables them to click through direct to certain content on your site.

A local car window tinting company recently ran a RAIS campaign and achieved an impressive click through rate of 18%, increasing qualified traffic to its website.

It’s simple to set up your RAIS campaign: we’ll build it for you, all you need to do is provide us with the links and assets.

I am not really a fan. To start with, it is practically a return to the 90’s, with a spot on a web site being purchased for a period of time. Yahoo! can’t seem to let go of their portal glory days.

Oh wait, I forgot, Search is a portal. In fact this bears repeating; Search Is A Portal. Don’t believe me? Look at Google an Bing, how they are cross promoting their own content and how they deal with the big verticals like travel, finance, news and general trash media topics.

Yahoo!s problem with RAIS isn’t that they are pushing a portal style ad model, it is that they are not hiding it.

But they will be gone soon anyway, as soon as Microsoft AdCentre hits Australia.

The tyranny of the gentle upwards curve

Businesses love to track trends. You know, sales, traffic, impressions, fans, and Facebook likes. It is all about the trend. Now the fun part of this is when you’re own performance is always compared to some metric from a previous time period, like a month, a quarter, a year, or some other arbitrary time span. As long as you hit your X% over last time span you are fine.

But here is the problem; the myth of constant growth.

“Why is this a problem?” I hear all the internet marketers, both client and agency, cry. Well, I say that, but we all know it is just a rhetorical tool. back on topic. The problem is this as follows.

Lets say that your sales targets are set by some obscure formula that always seems to set a target of 10% over last year’s numbers. Now, hypothetically, lets say that there is about five different things you can do to a site to improve its organic rankings, and a few untouched query spaces available for SEM campaigns. Do you:

A: Do everything you can in the first 2 months to increase traffic (and sales, if you don’t suck.). Or
B: Do just enough to reach the 10%?

Now if you choose A, congratulations, I certainly hope you can get out and into a new job before you need to do 10% better than that first, golden year.

If you did B, you really are a bit of a political animal. You’ll be able to play the bonus scheme game for ages.

Social Capital Cost

Social Capital Cost is what you lose when your actions directly affect a community. Its the number of people that block your page from their news feed when you promote products. Its the unsubscribes on your podcast when you have a new sponsor. Its the whine thread on a forum about the adsense ads.

In two minutes of searching, I could not find anyone else using this phrase in this context, so I call dibs. Sorry, its mine now. It is a very useful concept and I think in an environment when everyone still seems to be discussing engagement, co-creation and the rest of this vast pool of catch phrases and buzzwords,it is worth examining.

Social media spend needs to create a return for business. If there is no return, there is no point, and the resources are just better spent on developing product or servicing customers. Social media can be a part of this too, but that is not the point of this post.

Social Capital Cost should be assumed to be a cost of seeking a return from a community. If the return outweights the value of the lost Social Capital, you are ahead, if it is lower you are not. Social Capital Cost can be seen in lose of existing attention and in a lose of ability to build the community.

Sometimes the cost is acceptable, sometimes it is not.

Efficient or Inefficient? Part 2

You can not discuss the return on advertising without looking at branding. Personally, I do not see a lot of value in paying just for branding activity. The return is hard to quantify and like any activity without a clear-cut call to action, mostly hard to track. Most metrics used seem to only have the most tenuous relationship with generating more revenue.

Things like recall, measuring top of mind awareness, intent to purchase and all the rest do not equal actual revenue. In fact one issue with collecting qualitative information is the impact the act of soliciting these responses has on the actual information. People are social animals, and a lot of the time the information that they communicate may reflect something other than their actual thoughts, motivations and feelings.

Linking advertising budgets to something with a soft value like branding can lead to over spending. Especially if the economy, the actions of competitors, new product or other activity creates an increase in revenue. Branding in a good economy might even seem like it makes sense, provided your slides look good enough.

Ultimately this can cause inflation in the value of attention. Something that I believe we saw in mass media last century. Given the unclear nature of the value of brand and branding activity, I would say it’s value is a product of an inefficient market.