Missing Link Marketing - UPDATED

The New Landscape - It's an ocean out there. 

The new landscape into which advertising and marketing programs are launched today is dramatically different from the "old world" of one-way media such as TV, print, and radio advertising. 

The "ambient information" available today also empowers customers to do as much (or as little) research as they want before they decide to make any purchase. 

The "always-available-ness" of this information makes it more useful to consumers because they can find it when they want it rather than be hit with it when they don't -- e.g. when checking email, watching TV, etc.

The Modern User's Expectations and Habits - Give me what I want, when I want it, where I want it. 

That said, "too much information" also presents a challenge for modern consumers -- how to hone in on the right bit of information that he or she needs at that moment in time from the ocean of available information. 

In the new landscape, modern consumers have developed habits and finely tuned skills to help them find and use information as well as cope with its abundance, variety, and differing levels of trustworthiness and timeliness. 

Consumers ... if they can't find your information on the first few pages of search results, you don't exist. 

If answer to the missing link is not found, they may simply not buy, postpone buying, or just buy what they know (previously purchased product, service, or brand). 

The right info, at the right time, to the right person, through the right device.

So, couldn't every person have a different missing link? Yes. Doesn't that mean that it would be very hard if not impossible to identify every customer's missing link, let alone solve it? Yes. And even if we could identify each user's missing link, wouldn't it be cost-prohibitive to get a message out to each individual addressing his missing link? Yes.

All of the above would be unfathomable in the age of one-way media. But in the new digital landscape there are new tools, services, and methods which can help solve these missing links

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Original article from October 22, 2007. 

http://mktsci.com/missing-link-marketing-executive-brief.htm

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Page views or time spent - hey Nielsen, both are worthless

Augustine: extremely insightful piece by Allen re: metrics used far and wide today and account for billions of dollars of advertising spent.

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

So the big buzz over the past day is that Nielsen/Net Ratings will no longer use page views as their telling metric, replacing it with time spent on site. Yawn. My post yesterday describes the analytics apps we use on CN.

Let's take a brief look back at metrics. In the mid-90s, sites used "hits" as the primary metric. I remember the days at CKS when a newbie would run around the office talking about how many hits his or her client Web site received. I just laughed from my Aeron chair. Then to prove a point, I took a client site, added 100 blank images and the next day showed them why hits was a stupid metric. But I couldn't change the industry so I just kept working. I also remember beta testing the first WebTrends version and emailing the product team about how poor hits were as a metric. CKS rocked though.

Then in the late 90s, the shift moved to page views. Another joke of a metric. On the surface it seems better than hits, right? Now we are only counting each view of a page no matter how many images and other items are on it. Not so fast bub. In 1999, a large percentage of the big players realized that this could easily be manipulated by splitting content into multiple pages. There went page views.

Now comes word that Nielsen is moving to "time spent" as the default metric for reporting. Sounds good right? So if someone spends 10 minutes on my site, and only 5 on yours, my site should appear to rank higher, correct? Let's push out the easy issue here which is that sites are sometimes hard to navigate which will artifically raise your time spent on site. If you and I serve the same content but it's 40% easier to find it on my site vs. yours, then you appear bigger. Love that! Now we will see half-assed sites coming out just to scam this "new" metric.

Here is the real issue. We need to go back to the drawing board, erase everything we know about metrics and analytics and start over. Using a metric that has already been used and abused won't cut it. But Nielsen knows where their bread is buttered and when companies like Microsoft change their web site to reduce pageviews by 30-40% (by my estimation), the page views metric would have to be changed to satisfy their clients.

So how does this new metric reporting system handle YouTube with regards to watching videos? Is that considered time spent on site? Is an embedded video counted? What about RSS feeds and widgets? Content vs. application sites? It sure feels like Nielsen just put all of their currently tracked metrics into a hat and pulled one out.

Some others discussing the news:

• Scott Karp has an interesting perspective from the Google side of things. Scott notes that Google uses clicks as their metric.
• Andy Beal makes an excellent point about tabbed browsing - I hadn't thought of this!

The bottom line is simple - It's time for new standards and systems for reporting. As opposed to 1996, we have so many new ways of communicating and I would think starting the discussion should be easy. While it may take a long time for us to agree, let's get the conversation started.

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Advertisers disappointed with Facebook's CTR

BizReport : Social Marketing : July 16, 2007

More reports are circulating of disappointing click-through rates for advertising placed on Facebook. Should marketers persevere or concede that social networking sites aren’t yet the place for ads?

by Helen Leggatt

Earlier this year the Valleywag blog reported that media buyers saw Facebook as a “truly terrible target”. At that time they were experiencing click-through rates of just 0.04 percent. Around the same time, GigaOM’s Robert Young commented that, “Word on the street, Madison Avenue that is, is that advertisers who have experimented and bought ads on Facebook are universally disappointed with the results.”

It would appear that not much has changed in the intervening months. A recent entry on the Reach Students blog expresses disappointment at their recent Facebook flyer campaign for which, coincidently, they also only managed to achieve click-through rates of around 0.04 percent.

Lots of reasons have been put forward as to why the click-through rates are so low. Some believe that a high number of tech-savvy students on Facebook are using ad-blockers and some that the younger generation are good at ignoring commercial messages.

However, while Myspace and other community networks are all about content, Facebook is more of a communication tool, like IM or a closed forum for friends. On MySpace users spend time browsing through content on various webpages whereas Facebook users spend their time absorbed in dialogue. The difference in user behaviour could well account for the disparate click-through rates, as Myspace has a click-through rate of around 0.1 percent, according to Valleywag.

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