Display + Search

Digital marketing suffered a loss last week. I hope we didn’t lose it for good.  You may have missed it. Facebook eliminated conversion tracking.  The explanation was something along the lines that they didn’t feel it was relevant to the social nature of their ads and they think it’s more important to track their social metrics like “shares” and “fans”.

Hmmm, what!!??!  What’s the whole point of what we’re doing?  Our goal is to get people to actually buy something!  So we need to measure it.  Not to maximize some interim step like becoming a fan.  I am a fan of Tankfarm Clothing and I haven’t bought anything from them, ever. I am a fan of Panera Bread and my “fan-ness” had nothing to do with me eating at Panera Bread, and never will.

Another excuse I’ve seen is that Facebook advertisers weren’t placing the pixels properly.  To that I say “So what?”   Major agencies and advertisers still mess up pixel placement.  Train them. Explain why it’s important.  Give them tools to QA the pixel placement.  Google’s hundreds of thousands of search advertisers seem to place pixels properly.

Let’s think about what might have been.  Had Facebook been a little forward thinking here and really embraced conversion tracking and made it something unique and designed specifically for social media.  Worked on it, evangelized it, encouraged their advertisers to learn how to use it.

Admit it, we all wonder if this social marketing really does anything.  We believe it should and probably does, but we don’t really KNOW.  Especially us quants who want to see numbers that prove it out.  We know search works all the time.  And we know display works most of the time and if measured properly.  But we don’t KNOW if social works.  And please, don’t tell me that your recent social campaign generated 150,000 fans on Facebook.  Awesome, good for you, how did that drive ROI for you or your client?  Hmm?  I love the Old Spice Ads.  I’ve shared the videos and searched for them and their derivatives.  But I still buy Gilette products when I go to Duane Reade.   Sorry Isaiah Mustafa

With conversion tracking in Facebook, we actually had the opportunity to learn if this social stuff really worked.  Some of the comments I’ve seen say that since we can track click-based conversions from Facebook using site-based web analytics, that it was redundant in Facebook.  But this misses the point.  First, it’s not just the click, especially in social(!), it is consumers’ interacting with your brand and building a relationship.  Second, by measuring on the site you lose all the granular data about what actually happened on Facebook and in the social graph. You simply know that someone came to your site from Facebook, you don’t know why.  If done properly, Facebook conversion tracking could have told you that.

The power and promise of social marketing is that one interaction can spawn a wildfire.  In both search and display, one consumer interacts with the ad or not and then it goes away.  You get what you pay for.  In social, one interaction between advertiser and consumer can be transformed into hundreds of relationships with consumers via sharing and liking; favoriting and friending.

The question is – what does all that even mean without true measurement of the bottom line effect?   Your product’s facebook page may have 150 fans and may have been shared 300 times, but did it result in sales?  If a page is shared, does anyone buy?

What’s tragic here is we could have been able to measure all of this. Facebook could have enabled measurement within the Facebook advertising UI of the true effect of every ad purchased.  Not just the impact of users who click on the initial ad, but the downstream effect of all of that sharing and friending and favoriting.

Think about it.  We could have been able to determine if friends that user shared the ad with converted. We would have been able to track if people who became fans went on to perform an action on the advertisers site, whether they did it through a link on Facebook or just typed in your URL and went there.  Social advertising, which is now a bit of an “art” could have become more of a science and the quants would have come rushing in and begun optimizing Facebook ads to maximize their downstream social impact.  What fun!

Wouldn’t that be amazing? And incredibly compelling?  Couldn’t that have moved a large number of advertisers to spend in social?  Could social have been the new search?

But no, we won’t have that.  We’ll have to continue to live in the darkness.

Facebook, please reconsider this. You won’t let us use 3^rd party ad tags in your system, so we can’t do this ourselves. Even if we could, we would not be able to get to the granularity you can give us.

And if you won’t try again, there is one more chance.  There is another dominant social network where people share things and brands want to “talk” to their customers.

Hey, Adam Bain, you’re new at Twitter, please add conversion tracking to Twitter ads AND please go all out and allow marketers to track events after every type of interaction with a brand.   Events after tweets, retweets, replies, reads, everything!! Now that would be awesome.   The quants would rejoice and the dollars would flow in.

Google Instant is cool.  But here’s what I want.  I want the ability to measure the impact of search suggestions on subsequent action.  Basically, I want view-based attribution on instant search suggestions.

What I mean here is that if I type the first letter into Google and a major brand pops up as the suggestion – will I then later search for that brand, use that brand, buy that brand?  At a minimum, I’m aware of that brand.  Do the rich get richer? Do big brands start to takeover through liminal or subliminal reminder while we type our searches?  As I type in my search for “bars east village”, flashing before my eyes is the results for “Bank of America”.  Will I now be more likely to use BofA?  At a minimum, I’m more aware of them, right?

By the way, despite the fact that Google Maps ended my usage of Mapquest, I think it’s kind of nice of Google to let Mapquest appear when people type “M”. I would prefer it to be “Mannino”, but Mapquest being there is a nice bone to throw to the dog whose ass you just kicked. And Mapquest remains the suggestion until I get to “maps” at which point Google Maps takes over.

Back to the main point.  We need a way to measure this impact.  Let’s call it “Instant Search Attribution.”  What’s most interesting here is that, in this case, search is becoming more like display(!).  Think about that for a second.  All along, we’re trying to make display more like search.  To make it perform as well, to make it as easy to manage, to make it as automated and algorithmic.  And lo and behold, Google does something that makes search more like display.

This means that search could now have all the same challenges that display faces.  The biggest of these is attribution.  Many search people will tell you that the click is the most important event and is all that should be measured.  It’s somewhat self-serving but it’s no more self-serving than display people who say “clickers are bad” simply because there is some click fraud out there and display struggles to generate clicks.  And let’s be honest, everyone is right – clicks are most important in search, and not that important in display.

But now, suddenly, clicks might not be the most important thing in search.  Well, not really, but at least clicks have lost a little of their lead and other events (eg, impressions) have gained a little ground.

So what we need is a way to measure this.  Only Google could enable this since the first event happens on google.com.  And the answer is not for Google to just enable this within Dart or Google Analytics.  Google proclaims they want an “open and inclusive” display ecosystem.  Plus, they obviously very much want to grow the display market.

There needs to be a way for search advertisers to drop a pixel when their ad shows up as part of a suggested search and an impression is counted.  The pixel should be able to be from any Google certified ad server or pixel server (remember, the open ecosystem).  This would allow advertisers to evaluate the value of being tops for certain keywords and terms.

This would increase spend in search. But it would do something more. It would begin to shift the mindset of search buyers towards recognizing that impressions without clicks do have a value.  Suddenly, view-based attribution would mean something to the search marketer.  This would do wonders for the convergence of search and display and result in more dollars going towards both.

Measurement.   Better measurement is critical to display advertising being managed like search.  Google this week announced the launch of an exciting new tool that will allow display marketers to better measure their results.

The product is called Campaign Insights.  It sounds pretty slick.  Basically, they are taking information on the ads consumers have seen and matching it up, somehow,  with searches consumers with the Google Toolbar make.  Now unless it’s magic, which is entirely possible, there has to be some sort of common key to enable Google to match the ad to the search – so I guess that means the toolbar is recording the ads we’re seeing (or the ad is recording a toolbar ID of some sort).  Doesn’t scare me but I wonder what the privacy hounds are thinking about this.

Regardless of how it’s done, receiving this data easily and in a timely fashion should accelerate investment in display advertising.  Numerous studies show display impacts search.  But display attribution to consumer search during a campaign is pretty ad hoc.  Analysts pore over keyword traffic in analytics reports to try to see if an increase occurred when a display campaign is launched or changed.  Despite hard work by smart people – the results of this type of analysis are rarely conclusive in either direction.  Dynamic Logic brand studies are done to show lift in awareness, but they are useless for optimization because the results come weeks after the campaign. Plus they are expensive, difficult to execute, publishers hate them, and I have to believe that people who fill out DL studies are a unique lot.

This tool should give the display marketer the ability to analyze and make quick decisions to impact the campaign now.  Suddenly a marketer may be able to justify much higher CPMs in a display buy because they can directly attribute that spend to increased searches.

Google’s continued push into Display is pretty impressive.  Display is not like search in that it cannot be dominated based purely on consumer habit.  Seriously, I’ve tried to use Bing and it’s hard to get out of the habit of going to Google.com to search.  So to rule Display, Google is providing marketers with all the tools necessary to make buying display advertising as simple, easy and effective as buying search.  The Doubleclick Exchange is one piece, Campaign Insights is another. More is down the pike.

If I were Dynamic Logic, I’d be a little worried right now.   DL’s primary value is to help advertisers prove value in display advertising investment and Campaign Insights seems to make that much easier and cheaper.  Hmm, yeah, I’ll take Campaign Insights plus a Vizu study both providing me real-time results over a DL study that I’ll get a month after the campaign.  Not much of a decision there.

I’m hoping to get a demo of Campaign Insights in the next few weeks – shout if you can give me one.

Finally, while my daughter is a dinosaur for halloween, I am going to dress up as what Google knows about us. Boo!!