If you haven't checked out the March issue of Business 2.0, try to pick up a copy. I just read a really great article by Paul Sloan titled "The Quest for the Perfect Online." The article is about how web advertisers are moving beyond search and using science and algorithms to figure out what you want to earn your click and ultimately earn your business.
We hear about behavioral targeting and various methods for ad serving on a regular basis--especially if you attend any of the industry conferences. In his article, Sloan offers some really interesting technology practices you might not be aware of yet depending on the size of your company or agency. Carla Hendra, co-CEO of Ogilvy North America talks about the agency's interactive arm--one of the fasting growing operations they have--and how most of their new hires must come with a deep understanding of analytics. It seems Ogilvy has a pretty cool in-house optimizer that enables the company to run thousands of calculations to evaluate the performance of an ad campaign AND pull or modify the underperforming ads in real-time. So if the background or an image isn't working, the system can automatically change it--or if the copy isn't pulling, they can swap it out of the ad.
Usama Fayyad of Yahoo--a former NASA rocket scientist and the original founder of Revenue Science--has models that process more data on a daily basis than the entire Library of Congress--12 terabytes flowing into Yahoo's servers a day. If you didn't already know, Yahoo has an option to buy ad space throughout their sites based on behavioral targeting, not content. Which translates to Fayyad being able process and determine within 75 percent certainty who will or won't purchase a particular product. Pretty impressive stuff...
From Ogilvy to Microsoft to Right Media, everyone is chasing clicks--and finding new and different ways to entice users and optimize ad performance. Which brings us to our favorite question at ion--what happens after the click?
If you read our blog regularly, then you have heard us ask this question before. As a matter of fact, we are continually urging marketers to take a look at what happens after the click. We call it post-click marketing. All the ad-serving science available in the world and the inter-workings of Yahoo and Google will not help convert your users after they click. It's up to you to do that.
I could say it again a few different ways, but instead, let's revisit some of our favorite blog postings:
Message Match
Leads or Inquiries?
What is a Conversion Path?
Be Confident, Be Sure
Thoughts About Early Segmentation
- Susan Delz
