Yet Without Information, We Are Nothing

A new study, conducted by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) and students at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, "24 Hours: Unplugged," asked 200 students at the College Park campus to give up all media for 24 hours. After their 24 hours of abstinence, the students were then asked to blog on private class websites about their experiences, to report their successes and admit to any failures. The 200 students wrote more than 110,000 words, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.
Susan D. Moeller, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda which conducted the study, noted that "We were surprised by how many students admitted that they were 'incredibly addicted' to media... but we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family."

The absence of information, the feeling of not being connected to the world, was among the things that caused the most anxiety in students as they sought to learn about the role of media in their lives by completing an assignment that asked them to spend a day without using media.
They cared about what was going on among their friends and families; they cared about what was going on in their community; they even cared about what was going on in the world at large. But most of all they cared about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet.

According to this study, students get their news and information in a disaggregated way, often through friends texting via cell phone, or Facebooking, emailing and IM-ing via their laptops. Students are aware of different media platforms, but students have only a casual relationship to actual news outlets. In fact students rarely make fine distinctions between information that is "news" and information that is "personal."

Students reported in this study that, while they missed their music and their movies and their TV programs, they found that going media-free resulted in a greater, all-encompassing loss... missing "information." And information, they discovered, was a precious commodity; one that they used to define themselves in comparison to their peers. One student said he realized that he suddenly had less information than everyone else, regardless of whether that information involved "news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project reported that "text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends... noting that... half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month."

The ICMPA study noted a similar phenomenon, although the college students, close to 20 years old on average, were even greater senders of text messages, with a number of participants in the almost 200-person study reporting that they sent over 5,000 text messages a month, and one woman reporting that she sends over 9,000 a month.

Two years ago, in 2008, Pew reported that the Internet had overtaken newspapers as the primary source of campaign news in the United States, and that, for the first time, younger Americans sought national and international news as much from online sources as they did from television news outlets. Today, University of Maryland undergraduates not only rarely mention television and newspapers when discussing their news consumption during Media Literacy classes; they show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform.

A student wrote, "This technology craze has become so deeply ingrained in each of us we know no other way of living our lives, but to rely on our cell phones, laptops, televisions, and iPods to keep us occupied and connected with the world around us... "

Students may differ in their dependency on different devices and their appetite for different media, but an undeniable common denominator that came through in their comments, says the report, was their demand for and dependency on instant access to information, information so omnipresent that it has become the essential background to their lives.

The report summarizes three elements of the conclusion by separating suggested "takeaways" into a focus on academia, innovators and the media:

• For universities, the takeaway is that those who teach must have a basic comprehension of how students find, share and experience media so that students can be taught about the role of media in their lives.
• For developers of media technologies, the takeaway is that the most important thing to students is whatever latest technology can connect them the quickest to the people they most value.
• For journalists, the takeaway is that the readers and viewers of the future see them as both irrelevant and indispensable. Students don't care about newspapers or TV news broadcasts or even blogs, but covet the information that comes to them through a diverse and circuitous pathway of devices, platforms, applications and sites.

The participating class, JOUR 175: Media Literacy, that undertook this 24-hour media-free assignment, is a "core course" for the entire student body across all majors. It is a class of 200 students, characterized by a diversity of age, race, ethnicity, religion and nationality. The students self-identified themselves and claim their own demographic characteristics:

• 75.6% of the students in JOUR 175 self-identify as Caucasian/White, 9.4% as Black, 6.3% as Asian, 1.6% as Latino, 3.1% as Mixed Race and 3.9% as Other. Students who self-reported themselves as non-American, said they were from China, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. Women outnumbered men, 55.9% to 44.1%.
• 44.1% of the class said that their parents or guardians earned over $100,000 or more; 28.3% that their parents or guardians earned between $75-$100,000; 22% come from a household with an income between $50-75,000; and 5.5% said that their families' income was between $25-50,000.
• 40.9% were first-year students, 40.9% were sophomores, 11% were juniors, and 7.1% were seniors or beyond. Most students reported their ages as between 18-21; the average class age was 19.5.

For a report summary click here

Choosing the Right Search Engine for Your PPC Ads

We often get questions from customers about which search engines would be best to run their search ads on. What search engines, they often ask, present the road most likely to get them to advertising success? While in most instances the answer is “optimize across all three major search engines to get at the best possible results”, for some businesses it may make sense to focus on alternative strategies. But how?

In order to answer this question, let’s think about what you are looking for in a search engine and what pay-per-click (PPC) advertising objectives you’re trying to reach. The answer usually includes some variation of the following:

You want…

exposure and results – leads, sales, strong word-of-mouth, etc.

at an…

affordable cost-per-click and a profitable return on investment.

I’m sure it’s not breaking news, but this scenario can often be quite a challenge for many businesses — particularly small businesses — to achieve. Most businesses just starting out on PPC advertising try out Google because it’s well-known and because, let’s face it, it generates about 65 percent of the total search traffic on the Web. But there are some alternatives out there that may produce results as good as or better than Google at a lower overall cost per acquisition. Sometimes, in other words, it’s best to consider the road less traveled. Try thinking about your options like this:

1) The Interstate – Google

What’s possible: huge exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: bigger budgets (i.e., $1,000 per month for less competitive keywords; tens of thousands of dollars or more per month for very competitive keywords) and hard work.

For exposure and volume of visitors, this is the place to be seen. And Google is more than capable of bringing in very good results. However, it is also the winner in the categories of highest cost per click and budget you’ll need for exposure. Because there is such high traffic and competition on Google, they’ve had to institute some very stringent measures in the form of a quality score system, which can be tough to understand and navigate if you are not an expert.

So, although it’s a big wide road with lots of traffic, Google isn’t a casual Sunday drive. This search engine requires a detailed map with lots of turn-by-turn instructions to actually achieve real results.

2) The Side Road – Bing

What’s possible: decent exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: a medium-size budget (i.e., starting at $750 per month for less competitive keywords in less competitive markets).

Though a side road, Bing is no bumpy byway you use only to avoid heavy traffic – in fact, we’ve found Bing can be a shortcut to great online advertising results. Our recent experience with PPC ad campaign results from Bing is, quite simply, “Wow!” If you haven’t tried it yet, it would be well worth your while to give it a shot.

Bing very often provides a lower cost-per-click than Google, which means a lower budget is required for full exposure. Bing also offers a much easier on-ramp since its quality guidelines are much less opaque than Google’s. With Bing, you can just turn on something basic and get good results without all the hassle of divining what your quality score is and why. We’ve also seen very impressive traffic quality and conversion results from Bing over the last couple months. It looks like Bing is certainly on the rise as a search engine and should not be underestimated.

3) Well Off the Beaten Path – Business.com

What’s possible: modest exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: smaller budgets can suffice (i.e. $250 per month for less competitive keywords).

While everyone has heard of Google and Bing, not everyone has considered Business.com. Many businesses just don’t have the budget to compete for the keywords in their space and markets on Google and Bing. Many of these advertisers, however, have found PPC advertising success with Business.com. It’s the exact same style of advertising as conducted on Google and Bing, but for much lower costs, while still delivering results. So if your budget is too limited for Google and your space is too crowded on Bing, try out Business.com.

4) Off-Road – Facebook

What’s possible: targeted exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: small-to-medium size budgets.

Though not exactly the same sort of PPC advertising as the others, the ad platform on Facebook is similar in many ways to what you will find on Google, Bing and Business.com. On the Facebook platform, you specify keywords that folks you’re targeting use in their profiles and updates, and you can also specify demographic, psychographic and geographic characteristics to further target your ad. While mostly text, Facebook ads can also include a single graphical element, which its easy-to-use system helps you to incorporate into your ads step-by-step.

Facebook is vying with Google to be the most-visited website in the world (it may have already surpassed Google, in fact), and it’s a traffic source that should not be overlooked. Because it’s not exactly the same kind of thoroughfare as the search engines listed above, you do need to spend some time understanding the differences and nuances involved. But don’t let that deter you from experimenting with this potentially rich source of traffic to your website.

5) Uncharted Territory – Yahoo! Search

What’s possible: good exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: larger budgets.

Later this year, Bing and Yahoo! will integrate search engine operations, and Bing will begin providing results for searches completed on Yahoo! Currently one of the top three most visited sites in the world, with an enormously popular email system and some of the best-trafficked content portals on the Web (think Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Personals or Yahoo! Autos), Yahoo! Search should not be overlooked. Still, it’s clear this search engine is in a state of massive transition. It can be tough to optimize campaigns on Yahoo! and its rules are in many ways quite dissimilar to those in use on Google and Bing, which means you need to bring a whole different intuitive sense to using the system. And costs-per-click for your keywords are often similar (or identical) to Google’s, though you can get some bargains on Yahoo! Finally, in our experience traffic and conversions from Yahoo! have fallen behind Bing’s performance of late, so while there are still opportunities on Yahoo!, it’s probably best not to use Yahoo! as a primary search advertising conduit until the Bing-Yahoo! integration is completed late this year and early next year.

Currently, the Yield Web Marketing Suite makes it both easy and profitable to coordinate and optimize your PPC ad campaigns across Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing. And we’re actively looking at how to expand to include additional PPC ad platforms. But let’s face it: in most cases, the best road map for acquiring traffic at the lowest possible cost is optimizing your PPC campaigns across the three best-known, most-used engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. Our services experts are always available to you to help you to get the most from your pay-per-click advertising campaigns and to provide objective advice about roads less traveled, so never hesitate to ask for help.

How pay-per-call advertising can complement other channels

Bill Dinan is president of Telmetrics (www.telmetrics.com), a provider of advertising call-measurement solutions. “Straight Line” recently asked him about best practices in pay-per-call advertising.

Straight Line: What is pay-per-call and how does it work?

Bill Dinan: With pay-per-call, advertisers pay an incremental price for each call generated by an ad. Phone calls are captured and measured through the use of unique phone numbers displayed in each ad or campaign.

Pay-per-call advertising can be used in all media types to measure the direct response of a specific campaign. This includes display ads, online directories, landing pages and e-mail marketing campaigns, as well as traditional media. The beauty of pay-per-call is, like any other performance-driven ad model, it can be a low-risk option for advertisers, since they only pay if the ad provides qualified phone leads.

SL: How does pay-per-call integrate with other marketing channels?

Dinan:: Pay-per-call is both similar and complementary to pay-per-click advertising. Used together, they provide a more complete picture of the lead-generation impact of a specific ad, a medium type or an overall campaign by tracking both online and offline activity.

With more than 83% of customers using the Web first for research, then contacting a business offline, tracking online behavior alone is not capturing other valuable activity from marketing initiatives. Pay-per-call closes this gap.

SL: Explain a bit more about metrics?

Dinan: Incoming phone calls are a known, tangible metric with true lead-generation impact. Beyond that, pay-per-call provides more complete visibility into ad or campaign performance, allowing marketers to use the data to better allocate their budgets. It is easy to discern the best performer when you track calls generated by a unique phone number in one campaign and you track a separate unique number in a different campaign.

SL: What factors are most important in implementing a pay per call program?

Dinan: The most challenging part is defining a billable call. Each vertical industry has a different sales time line and process that goes into determining the value of an inbound phone call. For example, the value of a call to an office cleaning company is different than the value of a call to a dentist.

To price appropriately, marketers and advertising brokers must understand such things as the value of an average sale, or how many calls it takes to close a sale, and set benchmarks for the duration of a billable call. Also, call durations are relative to different media types and must be thought of that way when setting benchmarks.

SL: What trends are you seeing with pay-per-call?

Dinan: I see growth ahead as marketers and agencies incorporate inbound phone calls into their performance models to complement other metrics. One reason is it can help enable digital media to capture and present a more holistic view of advertising performance that is easily understood.

In the natural evolution of the model's growth, there also will be a closer evaluation of what can be done with the performance data that are generated. As an example, advertisers using pay-per-call have access to demographics information, call duration, call content (via call recording) and repeat callers. Marketers increasingly will explore new ways to use that data.

Perils of PPC Click-Through Rate Analysis

As a core component of paid search quality score, a strong Click-Through Rate (CTR) is vital for ensuring lower costs per click and higher ad visibility. If you are seeing your CTR decline over months or years it can be concerning, but not necessarily an indication of a problem with your copy or PPC program as a whole.
Compared to other data points, CTR is a relatively unreliable metric for judging the health of a paid search program over time because there are so many factors that need to be accounted for, some of which the advertiser has little to no control over.

If you’re worried about how your CTR looks month to month or year over year and are considering widespread copy changes, here are some factors to consider first:

Search Network Expansion:
For many, traffic from the engines’ search networks is growing faster than traffic on the engines themselves. Click-through rates on this partner traffic also tend to be significantly lower, by as much as 50-90%. If you were to make no changes to how your ads were syndicated, you would see a lower CTR just from the expansion of the search network. The upside is that the lower network CTR should not affect your quality score on the core domain. As Google states: CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google.

So, if the network traffic is otherwise performing well, no changes are necessary, but its effect on overall CTR should be noted during trend analysis. To get a more consistent view of your CTR over time, parse out the network traffic in the engines’ reporting tools.

Competitive Landscape Changes:
An ad’s position on the search results page has a major impact on its click-through rate for obvious reasons. As Google’s Fred Vallaeys succinctly puts it: An ad in a higher position is predisposed to get a better CTR. If a high-bidding competitor swoops in and bumps you down a spot, you are virtually guaranteed to see your CTR fall.

If you are bidding based on efficiency and not position, as RKG recommends, you are left to accept the lower position or work to improve your quality score or conversion metric to try to overtake the competitor. Copy or landing page changes could help, but if you’ve already optimized in those areas, you may be better off working to grow the program where there is a greater potential return on your sweat equity. With any luck, the competitor will find they are overspending and you’ll see your position and CTR improve when they reduce their bids.

Note that Google’s Quality Score is normalized to account for the expected click-through rate differences in different positions, so all else being equal, falling a spot due to changes in the competitive landscape should not hurt QS.

Broad Match Expansion:
The engines, particularly Google, are regularly tweaking how their broad match algorithms function. This requires them to balance ad relevance and revenue, but in recent years, the short-term revenue side has been winning out. A broader and broader definition of broad match leads to keywords showing for more distantly related search queries and click-through rate suffers as a result.

The upside again is that Google is smart enough to take this into account when determining Quality Score, which is based only on the performance of the keyword when it matches the search query exactly. (Consequently, changing a keyword’s match type from broad to exact will not improve its Quality Score.) So, seeing a lower CTR due to increased broad matching is not a great reason to make copy or match type changes in and of itself. At the same time though, this scenario may indicate that your account could use negative or tail keyword additions (with better targeted copy and landing pages) or increased parsing of exact and broad match traffic, assuming the broad match traffic converts at a lower rate.

Ideally, in our analysis we would account for the wider scope of broad match by looking only at CTR data when the search query matched the keyword exactly, regardless of the keyword’s match type. Unfortunately, that’s not an easy task at adgroup or higher levels unless you are running mirror campaigns under different match types. Even then, there may still be some bleed over.

Other Considerations:
Portfolio effects: If you are frequently making keyword additions and bid changes, you may see your high level CTR stats improve or decline based on the type of keywords that receive more or less traffic after the changes. In other words, click-through rate trends at an account, campaign or even adgroup level may not be telling you what you think they are. For instance, growing incremental traffic while maintaining target efficiency is the goal for most advertisers, but it will lead to a lower account CTR as brand traffic with its higher click-through rates will make up a smaller proportion of the program. Make sure to use as fine a level of detail as necessary to get an apples to apples comparison over time.

Efficiency target changes: Aiming for a different ROI is likely to result in changes to your average ad positions and your CTR will change as a result.

Content: Impressions from contextual ads can fluctuate wildly, so content traffic should be parsed from search traffic by all means.
For an indication of what advertisers are up against, here’s a chart of RKG’s observed year over year change in Google Search impressions for a basket of well established clients versus the Y/Y change for Google Sites traffic under Comscore’s Core Search Report:

Even though we are taking regular steps to reduce poor quality broad match traffic, we have still seen our Adwords impressions balloon faster than clicks and much faster than traffic to Google and its partners as represented by the Comscore figures. We’ve heard others recently ascribe lower CTRs to changes in consumer behavior during a weakened economic environment, but that would seem to be a minor effect relative to the changes coming from the engines.
Bottom line, if you are generating more traffic at the same efficiency despite lower click-through rates, chances are your program and copy are still in decent shape. That’s not to say you should ignore the CTR metric, just be sure you know what the data is really saying before you change your optimization priorities. Ideally, PPC advertisers would have access to a more precise reading on quality score to steer by, but we’ll have to make do with what we have now.