|
|
|
Bad management.
Marketers ought to tinker and tweak. They don't.
By Marty Beard
In the off-line advertising world, the grunt work behind media planning and placement draws to a close once the advertising actually appears.
But online it’s a different story.
An effective internet campaign requires constant fine-tuning to guarantee that the right consumers are seeing and responding to the ads.
People involved in online campaigns usually claim to know this. But if they do many aren’t doing much about it, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.
"I was shocked at the percentage of marketers who are not really actively managing their campaigns," says Jim Nail, the report’s lead analyst. "Maybe once every couple of weeks or once a month they look at reports."
The implications are significant. If internet ads need to be vigorously monitored and tweaked on the fly to be effective and yet largely aren’t, when the ads are not effective marketers may assume incorrectly that the web itself doesn’t work as an ad medium.
According to the Forrester report, 30 percent of advertisers don’t take actions to make the most of their online campaigns at all. Such actions include monitoring where responses are coming from, gathering data on the respondents’ traits, and then determining how to attract more of the right kinds of respondents.
Forrester found that a mere 11 percent of marketers optimize their campaigns from the very beginning; 17 percent wait two weeks; 18 percent wait until after a certain number of impressions, and 24 percent wait one week.
One way that marketers are under-managing their online campaigns, according to Forrester, is by relying too much on generic demographics as a way to reach potential customers.
Forrester says that, in addition to demographics online, advertisers should consider what it calls the "action profile."
The action profile defines a web user’s state of mind regarding the action the advertiser is seeking through the advertisement, whether it’s buying a product, registering on a site, or clicking on an ad.
Web users generally fall into one of three action profiles, says Forrester—ready, motivated or qualified.
Advertisers that have simply used demographics to get near an audience of qualified prospects will not find their campaigns to be all that effective. What Forrester recommends is a campaign specifically designed to reach a mix of qualified, motivated and ready-to-act users that accompanies them through the decision-making process.
Each action profile calls for a different media strategy, message and metric (see chart).
This approach arises in part from the reality that ready-to-act consumers have turned out to be all but impossible to find and target specifically.
"The retailer needs to engage that person so they can be there when that consumer is ready," Nail says. "But you can’t make the consumer ready. The consumer’s only ready when the consumer’s ready."
The action profiles identified by Forrester can only be exploited by advertisers who take control of their campaign-execution tools, continuously improve their campaigns on the fly, and display a readiness to experiment and explore.
"Marketers really have to get with someone like Avenue A or DART so they have their hands on the levers, on the controls, of the campaigns," Nail says.
Outsourcing ad-serving saves time and money that marketers can spend on tracking responses well beyond mere click-throughs. Transactions can be tracked through completion; branding campaigns can be researched to measure recall and purchase intent.
And by constantly evaluating a campaign’s results, advertisers and marketers will be able to determine what’s working and what’s not and then modify their ad placements accordingly.
That tactic, according to Forrester’s report, helped Eddie Bauer drop its cost per new customer by 74 percent as it refined placements, offers and messages over a three-month period.
That means that marketers and advertisers must analyze consumer behavior not only across particular sections of a web site but also across times of the day and days of the week. This involves testing and feeding the knowledge gained back into the campaign.
Needless to say, this involves a different approach to media buying than has been developed in traditional media, notes Nail.
"Marketers are used to saying, ‘I’m going to be on this TV show because this is my demographic and I have all this great data to back it up.’
"In this world, you have to let the data tell you when and where you should be. So marketers have to let go of that particular kind of control," he adds.
So if an ad isn’t getting results, Forrester suggests that the marketer figure out why and do something about it.
The report cites an instance in which an Agency.com client was showing low conversion, despite having strong click-through rates. When the agency examined its site logs, it found that customers weren’t clicking on a link that would take visitors to a promotion.
All it took was moving the link up by half an inch to improve its visibility. The number of conversions rose by 50 percent.
For advertisers to better understand and respond to web users, however, they must also improve their self-understanding, notes Nail.
"The biggest problem for marketers right now is to be able to define exactly what they’re trying to achieve," Nail says. "They’re used to saying, ‘We’re trying to build awareness.’ What the hell does that mean? In this medium, you can say, ‘I’m trying to increase awareness of my product by five points.’ You can set that as a metric to measure against the goal and go do it.
"The internet can be effective at any marketing goal," he says. "You want to brand, you want to sell stuff, you want to generate leads for your sales force--the web does all of those things really effectively."
|
DIFFERENT
ACTION PROFILES |
|||
|
Action Profile |
Media Strategy |
Message |
Metric |
|
Ready |
Use optimization |
Action |
Sales |
|
Motivated |
Target behavior |
Engage |
Response |
|
Qualified Prospects |
Define audience |
Brand |
Impact |
| Source:
Forrester Research
|
|||
April 30, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
Send to a
Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact
Us
