Online media planning: May 2008 Archives

Firefox 3 is now in its first Release Candidate version prior to full public release and I'm still very impressed by its 'awesome bar' functionality - which lets you use the browser location bar to search through your web history.

As I have previously blogged, that could threaten the surprisingly high proportion of branded search traffic through search engines which represents repeat visits to sites - almost 37% of all search traffic according to research last year from Atlas.

But Atlas also reports that 22% of traffic via search engines is first-time visits to sites from branded searches - people searching for 'dell' or 'dell.com'.  I think it would be quite simple to offer a version of Firefox with a database of brands and URLs pre-populated into its SQL Lite database.

That way, a search for 'tesco insurance' would create a dropdown like this...

I populated the database in this instance by browsing through to the relevant sites.

I'd say that this is easier for the user than bothering to do a search for the brand - and is clearly better for the brands who would no longer need to pay a handful of pence to Google for each click on a trademarked search term.

Ah, haven't blogged for a while, but luckily Precision Marketing has come to the rescue by publishing an article I wrote on digital's over-obsession (I think) with data.  Here it is:

Data, data, data. Everyone in digital marketing loves data. All those beautiful ones and zeros, streaming in realtime from websites, banner campaigns, email and all the rest.

Sadly some of that data isn't quite as solid as we might hope.

"Take something as simple as a visitor to your website. No two analytics companies have precisely the same definitions for a visitor, or a unique visitor, or a repeat visitor. So it is pretty much impossible to run two different sets of analysis on your website, and to get the figures to agree.

Avinash Kaushik, Google's analytics evangelist, writes about customer pathway analysis: "What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing." He is equally scathing about one of the most quoted online metrics, the website conversion rate.

When it comes to allocating sales to online activity, the standard rules for calculating cost per acquisition are just plain silly. To use a fight analogy, the last punch wins - which means that the last recorded click on a banner or text link gets all the credit for the sale. In truth, the 'fight' was won by a long and random combination of editorial, online advertising, Web searches and any amount of offline activity.

I suggest that once in a while the digital industry ignores its mountains of precious data, and instead bases its decisions on nothing more scientific than hunches and instincts.

We might just start thinking that eye-catching display campaigns on leading portals have more brand value than text links on dozens of affiliate sites. We might believe that search marketing is about as good for building brands as a small classified ad or that online advertising which is fun, involving and relevant is also more likely to build positive brand attributes.

As an experiment, ask your agency or web team to report on digital activity without touching Excel or Powerpoint. Ask them to tell you a story about how your customers felt before your campaign, how they were moved by it, and how it made them feel afterwards.

You just might discover more insight in that story than in the next million cells of Excel.