Presented by Nancy Bhagat, VP Sales & Marketing Group, Director Integrated Marketing, Intel

Cost of media is low per person, but is unfocused.

There is a 300% growth rate in timeshifting TV.  But TV is not media, it’s a delivery.  Video will continue to exist, just in different places through different delivery strategies.  Behavior has changed in how people interact with ads.  56% say skipping ads is important part of timeshifting.

Technology is no longer about who is tech saavy and who is not anymore.  It is about the desire to purchase.  80% turn to Internet for information to make a purchase decision. Our targets are online.

People are looking for a person like them, but they don’t need to see or know them directly.  This is defined much differently than previously.

Great brands are no longer the brands that tell the best stories, but are the brands that have the best stories told about them. (needs source)

Power of online marketing:

• Impact
• Agility
• Targeting
• Scale

Leadership requires flexibility and focus. Online vehicles offer speed and flexibility to test multiple content types in one place and to determine what content is best.

Success metrics are shifting away from traditional impressions and CPC. The ability to evaluate success is critical.  Content is increasingly delivered through social media which is difficult to measure.  We now need to measure what matters - user engagement, behavior, movements & trends.  Data that is not actionable is meaningless.

We need to know what place people are in the buy cycle/qualification.  Data without valid business context is meaningless. We need to understand what activities are valued.  And if things don’t go well in those activities, we need to know what and why.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, analytics, end to end marketing, internet strategy summit forum

Presented by Mike Moran, Distinguished IBM Engineer

Yes, an engineer talking to you about marketing.

You need to watch what your customers are doing so you know what to do next.  While there are a lot of things out there that you can’t measure - there are about 20% that you can measure that lead to a sale.

You have a website out there which probably eventually leads to a sale.  What things do you do that lead to that sale?  What things does the customer do that leads to that sale?

Measure ROI in terms of (Gain - cost)/cost. For transactional ROI look at how many transactions you have.  What was the ROI for everything you had to do to make that transaction happen.  For relational ROI, how much did it cost you to acquire this new customer.

Take a look a direct marketers. They understand what works and doesn’t.  How?  They create multiple versions of every marketing piece and analyze the results.  They test the responses to multiple designs and adjust everything based on those results.

Apply this to your website. Define numeric objectives.  Try different approaches.  Get real feedback and constantly look at performance to see what’s working.

For example, you want to increase sales.  For your website there may be two ways to accomplish this - get more people to come or to persuade more of the people that do come to buy.  Measure based on the increase in traffic or the increase in conversions.

Sometimes it’s not clear what metric to use, so just choose one and stick with it.  You’re looking for a trend so just consistently measure the same thing.

Conclusion - Respond to your customers. Change things until you see something start to work.  Do it quickly.  Instead of trying to figure out what to do, just do something.  Let the market tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, anaytics, internet strategy summit forum

The New York Times is speculating [no longer speculation] that an announcement from Google at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting this week will unveil a new product called AdPlanner.  Details are understandably sketchy, though the NYT quotes an anonymous source on the product as saying it will help Ad Agencies to find demographics that match an ads target audience.

Valleywag, though, makes the logical connection by envisioning a tool that could eliminate the need for Ad Agencies all together.  If Google is successful and all the data that an Ad Agency needs is available through this tool, it could easily be rebranded for the direct market.   This is certainly within SOA for Google; they use technology to eliminate redundancy and establish direct, dependent markets.  Some of these efforts like AdSense, AdWords and GMail are clear winners.  Others, like Google’s little know newspaper and radio ad placement drive, are mired in the mud.

My personal opinion is that Google will succeed in creating a very useful tool that will in no way replace the unique talents and skills of Ad Placement Agencies.  This is going to raise the bar for Ad Agencies expectations on reporting and information within content networks which can only be a plus for the Ad Agency’s clients; business owners buying up online ad space.

Web Analytics World discusses some web analytics tools (free) to take a look at, including Woopra, Crazy Egg, Enquisite, 4Q, and ClickTale - 5 Great (Free) Web Analytics Tools You May Not Know About Yet.

No subject is more controversial to a group of web professionals than Web Statistics. The advertising industry is still a little sore with us after we promised early on that Web Stats would give them all that invaluable information they could never get from TV, Radio or Print. This was not a lie, per se, as some sectors are able to mine tremendous amounts of quality information from their web traffic, session login, and cookie data. For most of us, however, the reality has fallen far short of the promise. Continue Reading »

Once you understand the different types of online ads and the advantages and disadvantages of rich media ads, it is important to know how to measure the effectiveness of these ads (especially since you’re probably paying a premium for their creation).

Just like display ads, these metrics are important:

• Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
• Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website - remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Unique to rich media ads, this metric is also important:

• Interaction time: Or an average of how long people interacted with the ad (clicked on it, moused over the ad, played the video, etc.). How long this time is will depend on what interaction the ad has in it. If it is just a mouse-over that displays more text the interaction time will be much less than an ad which contains a game (usually).

Since rich media ads are usually more expensive to produce and place on a website, measuring their effectiveness is extremely important to reaching the goals and return on investment (ROI) you have for the ad. Most ad servers will have the first three metrics. The third is becoming more available, but usually requires additional programming into the ad for proper tracking.

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, online advertising

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s - the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, analytics, personal analytics

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B

In previous posts here and here I have discussed Content Delivery Networks in general. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper.

CacheFly is a price-point based Content Deliver Network provider that has positioned itself as the CDN of first consideration for small businesses and first time adopters. Their business strategy seems to reflect this on their website by openly promoting prices, something few other CDNs do. They seem to have aggressively positioned their services into the larger pool of start-ups, cost conscious companies, and focused industries who need fewer services. This could make them a good partner to consider for a B2B company looking to start out with a CDN. I have a different opinion, which you can read under ‘Personal Take’.

Their moniker is ‘Stop Hosting - Start Delivering’ which may mean something to their core audience but to this network engineer is a distinction without a difference. It may be a reference to their more fixed package service offerings; a unique feature of what I will term a discounted CDN service. Many CDNs will try to mold packages of their offerings into solutions that are meant to apply broadly for specific customers. CacheFly seems to have taken a different approach, whereby customers often know what they want and need and simply select the package of services that fits. For companies more traditionally comfortable with solution providers than technical sales reps, this can be a bit jarring. Many online service providers are using this model, however, so it does behoove you to look closer at this style of partnership.

CacheFly has four categories of service: Software Downloads, Web Performace, Streaming, and Podcasting. Each of these categories uses the foundational technique of distributed hosting servers, discussed in the first post. A demonstration of how CacheFly applies the technology can be seen here. A deep discussion on how the TCP stack handles windowing would great fun, and I welcome anyone to email me if you are looking for more technical explanations on how it all works. They have a light-weight crib on the subject to get you started.

Software Downloads - This service is what you would think it is. If you have files that you want to get to your user base you usually put them up somewhere on your site. The larger the files become, the larger the number of files and the more people downloading them all add up to high bandwidth usage on our host site. That high bandwidth may both cost you excessively if you are over a threshold or delay your customers significantly in downloading the files.

Website Performance - All websites are not created equal. The prevailing trend in websites recently has been to offer constantly updated content, backended by a database and a Content Management System (CMS) For sites like these, CDNs are not of much help. If, however, your site is of a more static nature you can some or all of the pages hosted at the CDN for rapid response times. Many B2B have small, flash based sites that can greatly benefit from a CDN’s hosting network.

Streaming Media - See my earlier post for information on Streaming Media and where it can be used. Here, CacheFly is offering Progressive Downloads as their service for streaming, which is a bit of a misnomer in my book. Still, with the popularity of YouTube using HTTP Progressive, their core market likely has also focused on that type of video offering so it makes some sense.

Podcasting - Not much different than Streaming Media or Software Downloads. Here the target file is either audio or audio/video.

Personal Take As this is a review site, I like to interject my personal opinion of the products and services I review. CacheFly is a well priced option. Pricing is available here. There are lower priced CDNs, but none I would consider as reputable. I have personally used the CachFly technology recently and have had good results with the hosting. There is a downside with them, however. As is common with discounted service providers, their customer support is mediocre at best. Email only options for contact are, in my opinion, acceptable for only a smaller subset of technically savvy customers. Even the emails were delayed in response, indicating to me an over subscribed support system. They handle very large tech podcasts, like Diggnation from Revision3. The success of these shows may be over inflating their customer base, I don’t know. My personal recommendation is to not try CacheFly as your first introduction to a CDNs. If you are a veteran, then they will save you money. For all others, the waters are just too choppy to be doing it without a reliable life jacket.

Addendum (4/17/08) - CacheFly does have 24/7 phone support. Customers using their customer portal, as we were, did not see this option. This has now been fixed.

Need Help with Choosing a CDN for your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

One of the enduring myths involving CDNs is that paid service providers are for suckers. Free options in online media distribution markets are making compelling, though in most respects short sighted arguments for using their services. Many free providers advanced their list of features to attract more of the business market away from paid service. YouTube, for example, is releasing in June an additional white label option to its API that will allow businesses to rebrand the YouTube service for videos hosted with them. This on top of YouTube’s excellent user interfaces, fast response time for content hosted with them, and low low price of nearly nothing. Some believe the recent addition of better statistic tracking and analytics could signal the end of paid video delivery networks. Here’s why it won’t.

Understand their business model: Personal opinion of present day startups aside for a moment, for-profit companies do have business models. If a business model can tell a customer anything at all about a company, it should reveal how it intends to use your patronage to make money. This can be devilishly difficult to weasel out of some online companies; enough so as some pragmatists may suspect nothing more than a game of three card monty with a VC’s capital investment. Most online companies, however, are quickly categorized. YouTube’s focus is clearly centered on the end consumer. Their technology is dialed into the online video market for short, poor quality video content created mostly by the user community. It is a testament to their success in their core market that B2B customers would consider YouTube for their videos. The two are a complete mismatch of markets. Business to Business needs to deliver high quality, long running, small dispersal video campaigns to discerning clientèle. YouTube will never have your needs in mind for their systems.

Own your content: Your content is your own. Giving control of that content to a free CDN provider is a bit like handing over promotional work for your hot new concept car to a demolition derby organizer. Sure, they will get the word out for you for free, but you may not like how they end up using your property. We again look at YouTube as a test case. YouTube is extending their API to corporations because it makes business sense in their model. They want all videos available on their home page for people to search. Those eyeballs drive ad dollars into the pockets of Google, YouTube’s parent company. Any video you host though their service will also be viewable through their site. Google searches will find the page rank for viewing your content on YouTube’s site unsurprisingly higher than on your own site, driving traffic away from your front door for your own goods and services. This can also open up your copyrighted material to both harmless and malicious uses by pranksters and competitors. Imagine your largest competitor had their latest promotional video up on YouTube with an open, anonymous comments board right below it. Would you leave a comment? Would your competitor in the reverse situation? Paid service CDN’s give you more control over how your content is used and viewed.

Streaming vs HTTP Progressive Downloads (Technical): There is a technical distinction between what YouTube offers for video and what Network TV companies offer on their web sites. The former, called progressive download, saves video on your harddrive in a FLV file with a recorded format called H.263. This form of video is easily stored, replayed and redistributed. The latter, called streaming video, does not save anything on your harddrive and is viewable only while you are on the site. As you can see, there is a very good business justification for TV Networks to not use progressive download as their distribution method. In their world the content is better controlled when it is streamed. Streaming video has a large following in the B2B arenas, especially when used in webinars and online presentations. Paid service CDN’s handle streaming video as one of their cornerstone services.

YouTube can be the perfect solution for your company. When you need short, low-res 320×280 video hosted nearly instantly and globally, they are the best in the business. It is when your needs fall beyond this narrow band that it is time to consider some professional, paid help. I will delve deeper into CDNs by profiling a couple in upcoming posts. CacheFly and LimeLight Networks.