An unscientific approach!!!

One of my favorite tools to see trends, patterns and seasonality associated with search terms is Google Trends. It lets you see trends associated with specific keywords and compare up to 5 keywords together.

With all the buzz around the democratic primaries, it was only fitting to use Google Trends to see if we could see patterns that could shed some light into the outcome. The results, although not scientific are pretty revealing. First off, here’s a comparison of searches for the terms “barack obama” and “hillary clinton” over the last 12 months. We’ve obviously filtered out the international traffic and the results are shown in the figure below.

The interesting trend here is that Obama was behind Clinton in terms of searches till January of 2008. January 3rd happened to be the date of the Iowa caucuses which showed a surprising win by Obama and one can speculate put him on the map as far as the general audience is concerned. To test the hypothesis, lets look at a similar comparison, but this time between “huckabee” and “mccain” and interestingly, we see a similar pattern.

Within the GOP front, we see a spike in interest for Huckabee prior to the Iowa caucuses and a decrease after McCain gains momentum from consequent wins.

How accurate is this?

So you’re wondering, how accurate is this? While Google Trends is a great tool for search engine marketing, it is simply not built to forecast elections and markets. For example, if you look at the breakdown by states, you can see that the term “barack obama” gets higher traffic than “hillary clinton” in all states, including Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Ohio – where Hillary Clinton won by a large margin. This is shown in the image below.

In fact, in terms of popular vote, both candidates were neck and neck. And you can make the argument that most people did not know much about Obama before the primaries began and therefore what we’re seeing is people educating themselves about the candidates. But it’s certainly fun to see the trends in terms of peaks and valleys around some specific events such as the start of primaries and caucuses.

The purpose of this post is not to endorse any one candidate or make market predictions, but rather showcase what you can get from Google Trends. The information can be very useful in determining peaks and valleys in user interest associated with specific events of relevance to your business.

The Tealium team is proud to bring closed loop marketing to the masses. Once an undertaking feasible only to large organizations with deep IT investments, WebToCRM lets you integrate your online marketing and web behavior data into your CRM solution – for free. That’s right: free.

WebToCRM works independent of your web analytics or CRM platforms and requires no integration between solutions. It is a JavaScript based solution that lets you push your online campaign parameters into your CRM solution in real time.

WebToCRM comes in three editions:

• The Free Edition lets you capture your online marketing campaign parameters (up to four) and pass them to your CRM or internal database once a lead capture event occurs.
• The Plus Edition provides what’s available in the Free Edition, plus session referrer, page view and time spent during session (aka engagement metrics) upon the lead capture event.
• Finally, the Custom Edition lets you capture custom data points that you can use within your CRM solution for lead scoring purposes.

WebToCRM is completely independent of your web analytics platform: Google Analytics, IndexTools, MS Gatineau, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, Xiti or any other provider.
Additionally, it can pass the data collected into any CRM solution including Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite or your own internal databases.

We will be posting additional posts soon on uses and best practices associated with the WebToCRM solution. In the meantime, feel free to configure and download your free version of WebToCRM. What do you have to lose?

In the traditional offline media (TV, radio, print), agencies typically charge 15% of the marketing spend as their fees. So for example, if your company is spending $100,000 on print advertising, the agency that you’ve hired gets $15,000 for their services, which could include ad design and creation, media engagement, etc.

I recently came across a great column by Kevin Lee mentioning that because of all the optimization work that has to be done around SEM, the 15% fee may not be enough and clients should be willing to spend more on agency fees. Kevin is right. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in the area of SEM optimization. Here’s a few must-dos for an effective campaign:

• Research the list of potential keywords to be targeted
• Select the keywords to be targeted through SEO, those through SEM, and those through both
• Create the right ads for keywords. You simply cannot use the same ad for all your keywords and the rule applies as you go from one outlet to next
• Determine the budget to be allocated to each
• Create specialized landing pages for each ad
• Well, you get the idea …

This becomes especially an issue with smaller clients since they won’t be able to leverage the economies of scale and scope enjoyed by larger clients who spend more money on more keywords.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice the disincentive between CPC and agency fees. I understand why agencies use a 15% fee on offline ads – there’s no viable measurement beyond the output. You can only reasonably measure the number of times and the money spent on ads. But in the online world, things are different. You can measure the entire visitor cycle – from impressions, to clicks to conversions.

Think about it: would you rather spend $10,000 and generate 10 leads or spend $1,000 and generate 50 leads? Of course you’d like the latter, but in the world where agencies are paid by CPC, their incentive is to spend more money. They’ll benefit from having you spend $10,000, whether the campaigns are optimized or not, whether the conversion funnels are streamlined or not.

Ideally, agency incentives should be the same as the clients: get the most you possibly can from your marketing budget. This means that their fees should be tied to your conversions – online purchase, leads, registrations or whatever they may be. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying agencies should not be paid for all the optimization work that they do. They absolutely should. But perhaps it’s time to introduce more complex pricing schemes that do every body justice: a one-time fee and maintenance fee to cover the work to be done to get the campaign going, and a conversion/engagement bonus that gives the agencies the incentive to outperform.

This way, the agencies will get compensated with all the leg work necessary to get started and will be incentivized to constantly outperform, to constantly work on ways to increase their campaign conversions.

I’d also like to hear about some of the payment schemes you’ve used that have worked for you.