Engagement mapping: good article, and links to more information and resources

About two months ago, I blogged about Microsoft's Engagement Mapping (see post here) and how it could change the industry, since it's a more accurate representation of how online ads really work.

Here's an interesting new article about engagement mapping written in MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider. It does a nice job of breaking down a couple recent reports and white papers on the topic. The article also links to some resources on engagement mapping provided by Atlas, such as a white paper, two webcasts (one for advertisers and another for publishers), and an FAQ about engagement mapping.

Buying advertising from ad networks versus individual websites: Which is the better approach?

Online advertising networks have been around for a long time, but they've recently seen a resurgence. An increasing number of website owners are selling their inventory through ad networks now, which I think is due to several factors. Targeting on ad networks has gotten better than it used to be, social media has increased the amount of ad inventory (particularly what I'll call "non-premium inventory" because ads on social sites typically have much lower click-through rates and engagement rates), and advertisers are more likely to pursue The Long Tail of their audience.

From an advertiser's perspective, should you be running your ads on a network or should you deal with individual sites for your buy?

First of all let me say it's a complex question that depends a lot on your particular targets, the types of sites in your market, and a number of other factors. But whenever possible, I believe advertisers will get the best value for their advertising dollars by dealing directly with sites that reach their target market, rather than buying inventory from an ad network.

This is true because most site owners know their audience well, and they can make recommendations for how to reach the audience more effectively. Sure, there are lots of site owners who aren't willing to help you, might not want to give you insight into their audience, etc. But I think the majority of online publishers realize it's a win-win-win when they work closely with advertisers. Their audience is better served by seeing ads that are more relevant, the advertisers are happy because they're getting better performance, and the publisher is able to keep its advertisers happy which leads to repeat business.

For example, at IndustryWeek we see both types of advertisers: The ones who truly want to partner with us on a campaign and really care about making their campaign fit the site's audience, and also the advertisers who are buying ad inventory and applying a one-size-fits-all approach. I'm sure you'd expect to see the former group's campaign results outperforming the latter. But I'll bet you'll be shocked when I tell you how dramatic the difference can be -- it's often 10 times better! That's right...if an advertiser does a good job customizing its buy, creative approach, and watching and optimizing the campaign, they can get 1,000 click-throughs on an ad when other advertisers might only be getting 100 clicks. It's all about being relevant to the site's audience.

A lot of media buyers -- whether they're buying for their own company, or working on behalf of an agency for a client -- say that online ad networks are important because of scale. They might say, "We'd need to buy from dozens or even hundreds of individual websites, and it would be so cumbersome that it's much easier to deal with an ad network." This is certainly true, and I'm sure there are lots of advertisers who run into this situation. In many of these cases, ad networks might be the only way to effectively deploy a large-scale ad buy. But before you opt for a network buy, think about that 10x return I mentioned in the paragraph above. If you're able to get ten times the return for maybe two, three, or five times the work, often it makes financial sense to opt for the more custom, more personal relationship directly with websites -- even if it means throwing more resources (time and people) at the campaign.

Use customized pages or DHTML pop-ups to keep searchers on your site longer

One of the reasons Google is such an effective site from a usability standpoint is that it's able to get users to the information they're looking for in as few clicks as possible, and with as little effort as possible. Your website should strive to do the same, whether it's reducing the user's path to a particular piece of content, or by making suggestions for content that you know a particular user will find relevant.

An idea I've been advocating for quite some time is customizing pages on your website based on the
entry path to your site. So for example, if the person comes to your site after doing a Yahoo search for "widgets", why not show them a page that says "Welcome Yahoo user! Thanks for searching for 'widgets'. Here are several links that might take you to what you're interested in." Of course the content on that page itself is usually going to be relevant to their search on widgets, but why not customize the experience and offer them more information that might help?

Back in March I stumbled upon a great example of this. Forbes serves a dynamic HTML (DHTML) pop-up for traffic that's originating from a Google search. The pop-up offers a welcome to Google users and links to several stories that are related to the user's search on Google (probably powered by Forbes' own site search). This image shows an example. I did a Google search on "logistics" and clicked the Forbes link, and here's what I saw when I reached the Forbes site.

I don't know how long Forbes has been doing this -- perhaps it's something they've been doing for a long time and I've never seen it before. But I tried it again today and it still worked, so they haven't given up on the tactic. So that leads me to believe it's effective at extending the visit length of site users, since I'd imagine they would have discontinued the practice by now if it wasn't.

You could easily implement this practice for traffic that's originating from other major sources -- perhaps a partner's website, someone who links to you and drives a lot of traffic, other search engines or directories, etc. Forbes is doing the same thing for Yahoo search traffic, and possibly others as well.

Should we be producing LESS content on the web?

Scott Karp wrote a fascinating blog post about cutting down on the amount of content you produce, to avoid polluting the web. He advocates that writers reduce the amount of "stuff" they put out there, using effective linking strategies instead so as not to duplicate something that's already available on the web. His reasoning is why should you regurgitate, when a simple link will suffice?

It's something I've never thought of before. There's unlimited space on the web, right? (Ignoring things like the cost of storage, server costs, etc.) But Scott is saying there is a cost involved, and that cost is the amount of time people waste when they're trying to filter information.

It reminds me of a lot of the spam I used to get a few years ago. I haven't seen one of these in a while, but perhaps some spammers might still use this. The footer of the spam message would say,

Please Save the Planet, Save the Trees! Advertise via Email. No wasted paper! Delete with one simple keystroke! Less refuse in our Dumps! This is the new way of the new millennium.

Yes, that's true -- spammers don't waste paper to print direct mail. But countless hours of productivity are wasted each year by spam. (I'm sure someone has a study out there somewhere that quantifies how much time the average person spends weeding through spam, but honestly it's going to be such a big number that it's near meaningless anyway, so I'll conserve resources by not trying to find a link!)

So just like countless hours are wasted each year fighting spam, Scott asserts that since there's so much content out there, it's wasting people's precious time to go through it. Wow...producing less content? Can our Internet society handle such a radical idea?

So here's another way to look at it:
The answer isn't writing about less things, it's simply writing less about the same amount of things. According to Jakob Nielsen's recent column, users are reading at most 28% of the words on the average web page.

So if content creators identify the 72% of wasted words and don't write them, the problem is solved and everyone is happy! Everyone still gets to communicate, but there's no waste. Brilliant!

But like the old advertising adage goes, "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half," how will writers know which 28% of their content people are reading?

(If you haven't already figured it out, this comment is at least 28% tongue in cheek...)

Webcast audio: Avoiding Murphy's Law

A few months ago, after a particularly rough webcasting week, I sent an email to one of the leading bloggers who covers the webcast field, Ken Molay. Ken writes in a couple webinar blogs, here and here.

Here's the original email I sent to Ken, asking for his opinion on a nagging problem that has affected every webcast production veteran at least once or twice:

My group produces about 60 webcasts each year. No matter how many redundancies we build into our processes, there’s always the fear in the back of my mind that a phone line will get dropped. I’m always afraid that we’ll lose either one of the presenters’ lines (bad enough, especially if they’re speaking when the line is dropped) or the audio streaming line, in which case the audience loses audio to everyone.

A year ago, after two major snafus and several other minor ones with a certain large teleconferencing vendor who I won’t name, we fired them and switched to a different company. The new company has been rock solid…until yesterday. They dropped the streaming line yesterday, so our audience had their audio interrupted for about 5 minutes until we could get the webcast vendor reconnected.

One of my colleagues in a different division of our company had a similar thing happen to him earlier this week. Different telecon provider, same end result.

After a problem occurs, there’s usually little or no resolution. The audio vendor often says "It wasn’t within our control because the failure occurred outside our phone network." Of course there’s no way for us to easily prove otherwise. Even if we could prove otherwise, fault isn’t the issue, it’s reliability. It seems like dropped audio can happen to anyone, regardless of the telecon vendor. I have yet to see or hear about a company that never drops calls.

I’d love to hear any suggestions you have (or your blog readers have) for error-proofing webinar audio. How do you prevent dropped audio?

You can read Ken's response here, where he also brings in Christopher Dean to weigh in on the topic.

Since then, I haven't had a teleconference provider drop a call, but I've seen a couple other interesting and unpleasant situations:

• Last week, the teleconference provider messed up all of our dial-in numbers and passcodes. It took one of my team members a good hour to straighten everything out at the last minute, right before everyone was about to dial in.
  
  
• About three weeks ago, we suddenly lost audio during the last minute of a webcast. It dropped at about 2:59pm Eastern, just as we were wrapping up. But this time it wasn't the teleconference provider, and really it wasn't the webcast vendor's fault either. From what I understand, a utility crew was doing some digging on the street, reasonably close to the webcast vendor's building. The crew cut a trunk line, the major phone line connecting a large number of buildings in their area.
  

So even if your teleconference provider and your webcast vendor are rock solid, Murphy can still get you.

Arby's super-targeted direct mail campaign? Not quite

Shortly after making this post yesterday about a college's laser-targeted mass media campaign, I started going through my mail at home. I pulled out a direct mail piece that really caught my attention.

I am rapidly approaching my 30th birthday. So when I pulled a mailer from Arby's out of the stack and I read "Save big on my 30th birthday!", I was excited and curious at the same time. Arby's is my favorite fast food restaurant, and for a few seconds, I thought they were doing some sort of clever customized mailer to people who were hitting milestone birthdays. (Especially since targeted mass media campaigns were on my mind, after writing that blog post!)

But then I read further. It turns out Arby's Beef 'N Cheddar sandwich turns 30 this month, and they're doing a special $.30 sandwich promotion to celebrate. So much for targeted mass media.

Wilkes University's super-targeted ad campaigns, and can they work online?

You may have heard about Wilkes University's unconventional ad campaigns. This is the second year the Pennsylvania school is using super-targeted ads aimed at a handful of top seniors. It's placing ads like "Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)" These ads are appearing on billboards, on TV, and even on pizza boxes. See AP article here, NPR story here (audio), and one of the TV commercials embedded below (also linked here).


These are the first college advertisements I've ever seen that don't make me yawn. They're smart, they convey the intended message (Wilkes cares about getting to know you as a person), and they clearly generate a lot of buzz in the community. Of course, their effectiveness at recruiting some of the top talent to the school is just one facet of the campaign's objectives. They're meant to get those students' friends, classmates, teachers and staff, and members of the community to talk about Wilkes -- and to get this lesser-known school on many Pennsylvania seniors' short lists.

It got me thinking about customized online ads. There's the "Find a mortgage in insert your community name here" ads that you see on many sites today. Those are customized based on your IP address and other technology that helps the ad figure out your location. The first time I saw one of them, it made me say wow, but it also creeped me out in a way too. It seemed a little big brother-ish, even though the site really doesn't have any personally identifiable information about me. These types of ads aren't even in the same league as the Wilkes ads, but they came to mind first.

Then you have some of the more targeted campaigns that I've occasionally seen in the B2B world. A while back, one of my colleagues got a direct mail piece. If I remember correctly, it was in a plain, hand-addressed envelope. Inside it had an invitation that had a customized URL with his name as the subdomain (for example, http://johnsmith.xyzcompany.com). When he went to that particular URL, the page was customized with his name, our company name, and a demo or pitch for a product that was somewhat built around him. After he showed it to me, we discussed it for a while and tried to figure out how they had built the program. It seemed like the kind of campaign where they had taken a list, micro-segmented it down to a couple hundred prospects they were interested in pursuing (either that or they spent a lot of time and money to make it seem that way), set up the custom URLs which probably took a little time but I'm sure was database-driven, and then of course hand-addressed the envelopes to get the personalized factor on the outside too.

Wilkes' ads make me think about the concept of The Long Tail and how the Internet is enabling companies and organizations to pursue a niche strategy. Although Wilkes is using mass media, the university is using it in a much more targeted manner than the "photo of the three students sitting under a tree with laptops" that's prevalent in most college ads. The Wilkes approach is an interesting combination of a Long Tail strategy but in a mass media way. I have a feeling many other companies and organizations will be experimenting with this type of ad campaign soon.