Grizzly Republic

From what I’ve seen 2006 is shaping up to be the year of behavior marketing being pushed to the next level. Many of the conferences I’ve attended this year have focused on the behavior marketing analytic technologies and the supposed “best practices” of using them. Search marketing was vaulted to the stratosphere out of the ashes of a dead CPM banner model based on the success of a simple behavior marketing relationship. Advertisers predicted that customers would want “x” when they searched for “x”. Users who suffered through the dull pain of non-targeted television commercials actually said out loud “that’s not advertising, that’s what I’m looking for” when they were questioned about the text links that they clicked on. We will look back and say “in the beginning behavior marketing was good.”

But today Web analytic companies have taken the significance of user activity out of the server logs that before never saw the tint of a monitor light into a real time response through a data feed API that can return custom responses to Web sites as well as trigger email campaigns. Some marketers who leverage this technology well will continue to elate customers with the “that’s what I want” feeling but I’m convinced that there will be a growing number of customers who will shut down their computer with a “this fucken thing is stalking me” Behavior Marketing Gone Bad feeling.

So the customer profile built in the analytic platform is the marketer’s drivers seat for the behavior marketing experience. Here we can define a series of user behaviors that will trigger a custom campaign to be executed by email or on the Web. At the 2006 Email Marketing Summit in Chicago, I heard a good presentation on how HP had built a behavior marketing campaign around users who clicked multiple times on a particular product but did not complete checkout. Users who exhibited this behavior were sent promotional email with the same product at a discount. Not much word about customer feedback on this campaign and I imagine it won’t be long before customers realize to mimic this behavior just to get the discounted coupon. HP did say it was the most effective behavior marketing campaign they tried.

At the 2006 Ecomertry Conference in Miami I heard a marketer gasp when a Blue Martini driven site displayed a custom promotion for a free necklace on a dress purchase that came up after a user clicked on the third dress.

At the Future Tends panel of the 2006 LinkShare Symposium 2006 a weary customer shared this example - I want to buy my wife a necklace so I go into the jewelry store and look around for a while. But before I decide to make a purchase I get hungry and go somewhere else to get something to eat. At the bagel store I see them pulling out jewelry on the display rack. I leave because they are stalking me and never go back to the bagel or jewelry store in question.

Many customer’s will feel like the privilege of their business is being abused by these new technologies and leave like fish swimming away from kids throwing rocks. But - if the jewelry store had provided a snack at the right time of day they could have closed the deal.

It’s like a Waldorf School festival I went to last year where the kids were all walking around with trays of iced lattes and slices of pie. Believe me they knew what the parents were looking for.

So keep an eye out for marketing campaigns that pop-up in response to a unique behavior. Come back and share an example if you find one that is particularly bad or good. The best practices for this technology have yet to be written.

If the Internet is the New Wild West, then the major pay-per-click search engines are shooting it out in the OK Corral. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Adcenter are all just shoveling in cash from search. But which one of the three has the best guns, aim, and bidding strategy against each other?

If you haven’t heard already, brand rules search for conversions. When people don’t know what they want they search for general keywords, when they have their hand on their credit card and they’re ready to convert they search by brand. I’ve done enough paid search marketing to know this by heart.

So to get a sense of the June 2006 search engine shootout I share with you my results of how the top 3 search engines are bidding for their most likely to convert keywords on their own engines and their competitors.

The gunfight - Google bidding on “adwords” & “adsense”, Yahoo bidding on “sponsored search” and Microsoft bidding on “adcenter”.

The Winner: Google

They won but they did not have a clean sweap of bidding on their branded terms across the major search engines since they were nowhere to be seen on AdCenter. I gave them extra points for bidding on “Microsoft Adcenter” through their own engine. Also today none of the engines were crafty enough to bid on each other’s brands through another’s engine. Google’s paid results show us that they understand where the value is in search. The ecommerce knowledge gained from their Urchin purchase appears to reverberate through the company at many levels. I always tip my hat at Google for buying into Web Analytics when they did. Somewhere inside MSN and Yahoo I bet someone is thinking about buying out an analytics company like CoreMetrics. Synergy baby.

Google had some pretty snappy copy running in their paid results:

So Google came out on top as far managing thier brands but that is not to say they have everything figured out. Google would do well investing some of their cash into an eyetracking study to improive their landing page. See the ones around the beta version of IE 7 for a data-driven landing page based on eye tracking studies. We all need IE anyway to run AdCenter and you may as well use 7.

Whose Sort of Figuring it out? Yahoo

Yahoo has some strategic bids for their brands on both their engine and on Google. With a $50 free credit to prove its value I know a lot of small businesses are giving it a try. But they were not bidding on “paid inclusion” anywhere I could see. Yahoo is not the only ones having a hard time marketing this search medium.

Interestingly Yahoo’s listing on Google for “sponsored search” came up in the 8th. I’ve read several studies that suggest this paid position area is the most “economical” for conversion. But as a search engine themselves I’d think they want to show up in the top three, as Google’s results do.

Whose there in spite of themselves? Microsoft

Yes, Microsoft did not grow up as a search engine and it shows in their search campaign for Adcenter. Microsoft struck out on Google, Yahoo, & their own engine with no paid keywords for “adcenter”. While this can be likened to a horse dealer who chooses to walk to the auction, it is also a sign of how fast search is coming of age and new we all really are to its potential.

That said Microsoft is stepping up the pace to embracing the culture of search. Under the hood at AdCenter I was really impressed with the open search query logs and the geo-targeting. I’m keen to blog more about the open query logs available for keyword popularity research. I used to rant about this at LookSmart and always wished the database wells of WordTracker went deeper. Kudos to MS for digesting what WordTracker did into their query logs and making it better. I feel more comfortable with MS handing over our query logs to the Feds if they will also provide the same information to us. I so wish Google would do this.

So what can we gleam from this gunbattle of the titans of search? Certainly the war for search will not be won by engines bidding on each other’s brands, though the war for the dial-up market - maybie. From this study we can see who practices the same cultural values in search that they sell. It appears no one has it all together yet and our west is still very wild.

Web site design based on Web analytics, email marketing, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, portal shopping relationships, affiliate marketing, strategic linking, contextual advertising… All these topics and more will be the main subject of my blog - Grizzly Republic.

I’m an Internet Market professional who has worked for LookSmart (in it’s day a major search engine) for six years as a strategic account executive. More recently has moved to a Director level position for several catalog companies where I construct Internet Marketing, Web Development & Web Operations. I look forward to sharing the best practices and industry expertise I’ve generated as well as learn more from the community who visits Grizzly Republic. I’m currently employed full time but may be interested in consulting and other projects. I live with my wife, two children and two huskies in California’s Gold Fields of the Sierra Nevada Foothills.