Tag Archive for ROI

Kenshoo SmartPath[TM] Unveiled to Deliver Dynamic Cross-Channel Attribution with Intelligent Bid Optimization




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SAN FRANCISCO, February 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ –

Global Digital Marketing Technology Leader Extends Track Record of Being First to Market With Meaningful Innovations

Kenshoo, a global leader in digital marketing technology, today unveiled Kenshoo SmartPath[TM], a new product that is the first form of algorithmic conversion attribution designed from the ground up to improve digital marketing bid optimization. Kenshoo SmartPath applies sophisticated mathematical modeling to automatically optimize bids and help marketers make better decisions about where to invest their budgets. The product launch represents the latest in a long line of innovations pioneered by Kenshoo focused on solving marketing problems through disruptive technology.  

     (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120907/559592 )

“Successfully optimizing for a consumer’s true path-to-conversion is one of the holy grails sought after in online marketing. As such, it’s critical to apply the best investment strategy across all digital marketing channels to achieve optimal performance. That cannot be done without the right attribution methodology,” said Gordon Magee, internet marketing and media manager at Drs. Foster and Smith. “Kenshoo SmartPath dynamically looks at each click and conversion across multiple channels and determines their true business impact. As a result, we’ve been able to meet and exceed our return on investment goals.”

Through a patent-pending methodology, Kenshoo SmartPath creates a unique model of value allocation for each interaction in any given conversion path and dynamically adapts over time based on customer data, market changes, and media mix effectiveness. This provides marketers with an understanding of the actual impact of all interactions and delivers unprecedented accuracy in value-based digital media optimization. Kenshoo SmartPath considers many different factors to measure the contribution of each interaction to a conversion, including causality, synergy, and value of customer loyalty. Through its integration with Kenshoo Portfolio Optimizer (KPO), Kenshoo SmartPath activates more informed media forecasting and bidding.

“For too long, marketers have been forced to pick a static, pre-built attribution model that applies credit to interactions and directs investment strategies, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution,” said Moti Meir, senior director and head of research at Kenshoo. “With Kenshoo SmartPath, marketers can leverage dynamically-calibrated attribution that is tailor-made from their data to reward each interaction for its true contribution and inform automated bidding accordingly. We’re proud to put this game-changing solution in the hands of our clients.”

For more information about Kenshoo SmartPath, visit http://www.Kenshoo.com/SmartPathWhitePaper and download a complimentary copy of “The Conversion Attribution Revolution.”

Kenshoo’s long history of digital marketing technology innovation began when the company launched its next-generation search marketing platform in 2006. Today, Kenshoo continues to provide the most advanced solutions available to advertisers, and was recently named “the only leader” in a bid management software evaluation by independent research firm, Forrester Research Inc.

Other results-driven innovations introduced by Kenshoo over the years include:

“At Kenshoo, we foster a can-do culture of innovation and our team of multi-disciplinary scientists and engineers make up more than half the company, so we’re able to move quickly from concept to product when we identify solutions that will really make a difference to our clients,” said Alon Sheafer, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Kenshoo. “In the case of Kenshoo SmartPath, we heard from chief marketing officers that they didn’t have a reliable view of their conversion funnel across channels, and 20 to 40 percent of their revenue was not appropriately attributed to the proper media investment. These are the types of problems Kenshoo loves to solve.”

About Kenshoo

Kenshoo is a digital marketing technology company that engineers premium solutions for search marketing, social media and online advertising. Brands, agencies and developers use Kenshoo Enterprise, Kenshoo Local and Kenshoo Social to direct more than $25 billion in annual client sales revenue. The Kenshoo Universal Platform delivers automation, intelligence, integration and scale to make better marketing investments. With campaigns running in more than 190 countries for nearly half of the Fortune 50 and all 10 top global ad agency networks, Kenshoo clients include CareerBuilder, Expedia, Facebook, KAYAK, Havas Digital, Hitwise, iREP, John Lewis, Resolution Media, Sears, Starcom MediaVest Group, Tesco, Travelocity, Walgreens, and Zappos. Kenshoo has 16 international locations and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Arts Alliance and Tenaya Capital. Please visit http://www.Kenshoo.com for more information.

Kenshoo is a trademark of Kenshoo Ltd. Other company and brand names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Kenshoo

Article source: http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/kenshoo-smartpathtm-unveiled-to-deliver-dynamic-cross-channel-attribution-with-intelligent-bid-optimization-191079431.html

3 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Marketing

While newer social networks such as Pinterest and Google Plus may be growing in popularity, marketing on Twitter is still an effective way for many organizations to reach their marketing objectives. In fact, 32% of all Internet users are on Twitter (source: MarketingLand), and 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter (source: Digital Buzz Blog).

In advance of the online workshop I am teaching today, January 31 on Twitter marketing (learn more about the interactive workshop here), I put together 3 ways you can improve your Twitter marketing in 2013.

1. Interact and Engage with Your Audience

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy for marketers to fall into the trap of simply tweeting thought leadership content and promotions. Sharing content is helpful, to be sure, but the real value in using Twitter is the opportunity to develop relationships with your audience. So interact with people, reply to their tweets, ask questions, and start building new relationships.

Example: How Zappos Can Improve Their Efforts

3 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Marketing image zappos21 300x185

Follow and engage with happy customers who Tweet about your product—these people are already promoting your product, for FREE.

For example, let’s say you are Zappos and one of your goals for marketing on Twitter is increase sales by strengthening relationships with your current customers. You can setup an alert for whenever someone Tweets with a combination of the keywords “received”, “Zappos”, and “order”. (SproutSocial is my personal favorite solution for monitoring conversations like this.) Then, you’ll see when your customers Tweet about your orders, and be able to thank and acknowledge them. See tip 2 below for advice on keyword monitoring.

Monitor Customer Tweets

To demonstrate this, I did a quick search on Twitter for those exact keywords, and came up with a reasonable number of Tweets, from both happy and dissatisfied customers. This is an incredible opportunity for Zappos to build deeper relationships with their satisfied customers, and also handle complaints from unhappy customers.

Engage with Satisfied Customers

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Don’t ignore customer complaints on Twitter—use them to create a better relationship with your customers.

For the positive Tweets from happy customers, Zappos could reply with something simple like “We’re thrilled you received the order. Let us know how you like the shoes”, and add that customer to a list that they can engage with in the future. The more they acknowledge customers Tweeting about them, the more likely they those customers will be to Tweet about them in the future, as well. Make it easy for them to promote your brand.

Acknowledge Unhappy Customers (and Turn Them into Raving Fans)

As for the Tweets from unhappy customers, there is no better way to turn an unhappy customer into an evangelist than by acknowledging complaints publicly. Based on the activity in the Zappos Twitter accounts, I don’t see them spending too much time on it, but at the least, they could allocate 1 hour a day replying to customer Tweets. Even without the hard data, I know the ROI for engaging with and acknowledging your customers for 1 hour a day is there, especially if you are solving complaints from customers that would otherwise use customer service resources, or never purchase from you again.

2. Monitor Conversations and Relevant Keywords

Monitoring keywords is a great (and easy!) way to find targeted people to follow, offer timely advice, and stay on top of industry trends. Get started by monitoring the following types of keywords, in order of priority:

Brand Mentions

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Monitor brand mentions, including Tweets with the domain of your website

Start by monitoring mentions of your company and brand, including @mentions and Tweets with your brand and product name(s). For example, Cisco would want to monitor mentions of the Cisco brand and Twitter handle, in addition to variations of individual products, such as “WebEx”. I consider monitoring brand mentions critical, regardless of resources and priorities.

If you are a larger organization with an unmanageable amount of mentions, tools such as Salesforce/Radian6 can help you filter through the noise and focus your efforts on the most important Tweets.

Links to Your Site

Make sure to monitor when people tweet links to your website, even if they don’t mention your brand name or Twitter handle—you can do this by simply setting up a search for the domain of your website. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet the keyword “onlinemarketinginstitute”, because that is the domain of our website.

Pain Points

Monitor conversations directly related to the solution your problem solves—use the jargon they use to describe your need. For example, if you are an email marketing vendor, you can monitor when people Tweet with keywords such as “improve open rates” or “improve deliverability”.

Related Businesses and Competitors

Expand your efforts by monitoring conversations related to complementary businesses and competitors. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet about Marketo and ExactTarget, because they are solutions that are target audience uses, and people we could potentially engage with.

You can also monitor people Tweet about your competitors, and follow them as well. This will provide great insight into your industry and business, and may even allow you to engage in a conversation when it is relevant (but not creepy).

Interests of Your Target Audience

Finally, once you’re successfully monitoring the above keywords and need to grow your efforts, start monitoring conversations about your industry and topics your target audience is interested in. For example, an email marketing vendor could monitor conversations related to events that their audience would attend such as the Online Marketing Summit, or publications that their audience reads, such as the OMI blog or ClickZ. They could also monitor conversations about social media or digital marketing in general, because a marketer that would purchase an email solution would likely be interested in those topics, as well.

3. Grow Your Audience

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Unfortunately, fake Twitter accounts usually don’t have budget for your product or service (or know anyone that does, either).

Now that you’re engaging with people and monitoring conversations, start to find new and interesting people to follow to increase your reach. Focus on building a community of potential customers, partners, influencers, and evangelists. Don’t pay for followers or automate the process of growing your audience unless fake Twitter accounts actually buy your product or service (or know someone that will).

Find New People to Follow

To start growing your audience, find and target new and influential people to follow. You can find these users by 1) monitoring keywords and conversations 2) reviewing the followers of people and businesses in your industry and 3) reviewing lists that other related Twitter accounts have created. Don’t worry about only following people that are potential customers—what you want to do is focusing on building a relevant Twitter community. This includes social media partners, related businesses, evangelists, influencers, and of course, your target audience. Even if many of these people may never buy your product or service, they can still help you amplify your message and achieve your marketing goals.

Add These Twitter Users to Lists

Once you start finding new people to follow, I recommend adding those accounts to a segmented list within your social media management tool. For instance, if you identify 20 key influencers or 20 potential customers and add them to a list, you can easily focus on consistently engaging with just those users over a certain period of time.

More Activity Leads to More Followers

As a general rule, the more you Tweet, the more followers you’ll have, the more you engage with the people you follow, the more likely they will be to follow you back. Effective Twitter marketing takes time—you can’t automate it. And you won’t achieve your goals by simply Tweeting once a day or once a week (in fact, inactivity can do more damage than good). But with a solid plan and effort, Twitter may prove to be on of your most effective marketing channels.

Join me Thursday, January 31 at 2pm ET for a virtual workshop on effective Twitter marketing. I will share proven ways to improve the ROI of your Twitter marketing, and will conduct live reviews of submitted campaigns as well. If Twitter is part of your 2013 digital marketing plan, you can’t afford to miss this event. Register now.

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3 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Marketing image

This article originally appeared on OMI Blog and has been republished with permission.

Find out how to syndicate your content with Business 2 Community.

Article source: http://www.business2community.com/digital-education/3-ways-to-improve-your-twitter-marketing-0393178

Targeting The Consumer: Comparing Tablet to Desktop Paid Search Performance

In my world, we think a lot about reaching affluent audiences with targeted rich media. Of course, rich media isn’t the only way to reach luxury buyers – search engine
marketing is also incredibly effective and complimentary to the rich media experience. Since search is extending well beyond the desktop, brands now have to think about targeting audiences by device
as well as by keyword phrase. To talk more about this, I’ve invited my friends at Morpheus Media, who’ve just completed a study on tablet search
behavior across five luxury brands, to join me here.  Basheer Bergus, Paid Search Strategist at Morpheus, shares what they’ve learned:

Morpheus Media Studies
Search Behavior on Tablets Across Five Luxury Brands

As new devices and technologies surface, the evolving landscape of digital media planning can become increasingly more
cost-efficient and worthwhile for those who understand how and where to invest. Our study in tablet advertising spanning July – September 2012 across five luxury brands shows the tablet
user’s paid search behavior is significantly different from a smart phone user’s, and the most successful brands in tablet advertising will dedicate 10-20% of their desktop budgets to
branded keywords on tablets specifically. 

Behavior by tablet users more closely resembles desktop usage than smartphone so we will focus strictly on the comparison of tablet
vs. desktop. Including tablet in your “mobile” budgets tends to be too broad to drive actionable insights and results, and budgets split between smartphone and tablet advertising tend to
be too small to create a successful campaign.  Approximately 2% of advertiser’s budgets are currently spent on tablet advertising. Considering the opportunity to drive to a mobile-enabled
site is more cost-effective on tablets today, advertisers should reconsider their allocation of funds.

Percentage-table-A.

Developing
tablet-specific benchmarks

Average order sizes and values are higher on tablets than on desktops, possibly due to the relative affluence of the audience. According to Pew,
47% of households with an income greater than $75,000 owned tablets. At the same time, the spend required is lower to qualify success. Considering these factors, ROI for tablets is significantly
higher: Tablets saw a 28% higher ROI than desktops. Tablet users also purchase a greater volume of items—often with higher price tags. Tablet targeted campaigns reported a significantly higher
AOV—28.66%—than similar campaigns run on desktop.

Negotiating branded vs. non-branded keywords

On tablets, users searching for
branded terms tend to click through more often than in the same searches on desktops. Tablets saw a 48.91% increase in CTR on paid search ads. In addition, searches for branded terms on tablets had a
lower CPC and higher AOV than similar searches on desktop. This makes branded terms the safest bet for brands looking to run tablet advertising for the first time.

Determining budgets

Advertiser spending on tablets is more efficient, 10.8% less expensive CPC on average.  The tablet advertising space is less
crowded because it sees minimal investments from many brands. Without as much demand, high trafficked placements can go for much less than they would in the desktop space. For brands looking to
efficiently increase traffic to e-commerce with a smaller budget, tablets should receive a larger percentage of that spend. 

Bringing learnings back to the
brand

The tablet landscape presents different challenges than the smaller screens of smartphones and desktop’s crowded ad space. Brands will need to address issues
with mobile site optimization before considering tablet advertising, and may need to consider third party development to achieve the luxury feel their advertising requires. 

For brands with a mobile presence, the next step is to set aside a separate budget for branded and non-branded initiatives on tablets. Having a presence for your branded keywords should be
your top priority, but as confidence develops, begin cautiously expanding budgets into non-branded campaigns.

Key Takeaways for brands looking to increase SEM efficiencies
with tablets

  1. Average Order Value is significantly higher for tablet targeted paid search campaigns

  2. ROI is higher for
    tablet campaigns

  3. CPC for tablet targeted keywords is typically lower than the same keywords in desktop campaigns

Article source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/192219/targeting-the-consumer-comparing-tablet-to-deskto.html

SDL and Specialty Fashion Group Create Winning Project

PRLog (Press Release)Jan. 15, 2013SDL (http://www.sdl.com/) (LSE: SDL) today announced that its client, Speciality Fashion Group (SFG), has won the Customer Engagement Award from Retail TouchPoints in the category of Cross-Channel Analytics, powered by the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite.

SFG is Australia’s largest women’s apparel group, delivering mass personalization to over 7 million loyalty members across 6 brands in 893 stores and 7 transactional websites.  By implementing the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite, SFG was able to drastically reduce production times for electronic direct marketing from 24 hours to less than two hours. The company then leveraged this improved efficiency to interact with data captured through customer interactions in new ways. For the first time SFG was able to gain a single-view of their customers and deliver personalized, targeted communications based on the behavior of individual customers. Since implementing the SDL solution, SFG has seen an ROI of 2,200 percent on its most recent electronic direct marketing campaigns.

“We are thrilled to congratulate SFG for their foresight and vision in creating what can only be described as an ‘omni-channel’ approach,” said Bob Hale, CEO of SDL Campaign Management and Analytics Division.  “SFG’s results are impressive and show how retailers can optimize individual customer experiences and drive engagement by looking at a single view of customers across the multiple channels.”

“SFG is honored to be recognized by Retail TouchPoints,” said Alison Henriksen, CFO of SFG. “Data is a critical component of our business, but too much data or the wrong data can be detrimental to our relationships with our customers. Working with SDL, we are able to better understand our customer data and as a result deliver promotions and information through the right channel at the right time.”

The Retail TouchPoints awards recognize retailers for their unique customer engagement strategies and analytics. Winners include large, national retailers as well as smaller, regional companies.

“We are proud to honor retail companies that have embraced customer engagement and implemented solutions and services that are delighting customers and improving the bottom line,” said Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief of Retail TouchPoints. “The award winners are ahead of the curve and are achieving business success in this increasingly competitive and challenging marketplace.”
About SDL
SDL enables global businesses to engage with their customers in the language, the media and at the moment they choose. We help businesses manage their brands, drive global revenues, accelerate speed to market and enrich their customers’ experience. SDL’s enterprise-ready innovative technology and service solutions span the entire customer journey and include social listening and marketing analytics, campaign management, language management and services, video and written content creation, web content management, dynamic technical documentation publication and eCommerce. SDL solutions drive global reach across multiple languages, cultures, channels and media. SDL has over 1,500 enterprise customers, 400 partners and a global infrastructure of 70 offices in 38 countries. For more information, visit www.sdl.com (http://www.sdl.com/).
Contacts
Rusty Warner

SDL Campaign Management Analytics

rwarner@sdl.com (mailto:rwarner@sdl.com)

Vicky Ryce

SDL Corporate Headquarters

vryce@sdl.com (mailto:vryce@sdl.com)

Article source: http://www.prlog.org/12059430-sdl-and-specialty-fashion-group-create-winning-project.html

Paid Search Dayparting for the Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Special thank you to Dane Manning for his work in creating this post.

When marketers hear the term “Dayparting,” many think of the standard time frames established in radio and television programming for demographic advertising considerations.  Digital marketers know that dayparting in the online space operates very differently, and is an important budgeting and profit maximization tool for the smallest and largest of search marketing budgets.

As you may know, both of the major search engine marketing platforms (Google Adwords Microsoft/Yahoo Adcenter) provide an advanced settings feature allowing you to automatically adjust your keyword bids based on the day of week and/or hour of day.  If you aren’t taking advantage of this feature, then your ads are showing on all days and at all times (until budget is exhausted), but the reality is they probably don’t need to be.

This post is written to help search marketers, novice to expert, get started on an ad scheduling program that fits best with their business and target customer, and helps maximize digital marketing investment.

Beginner Level – Addressing the Limits of Your Business

Can your website fulfill orders on the weekend?  Do you receive a lot of call volume as a direct result of your web efforts?  If so, when will someone be in the office to answer the phone?  These are some of the simplest of considerations to be made when adjusting your dayparting settings.

Think about your customer and when you are able to provide them with the ideal multi-pronged buying experience.  For example, if your website’s primary goal is to drive calls to a call center that is staffed Monday through Friday, consider pausing your efforts on the weekend when ROI will be non-existent and user experience will be less than ideal.

Suppose you own a pizza delivery shop and close at 11 pm every evening. Don’t waste valuable clicks on late night cravings while your delivery man is fast asleep. Consider decreasing your bids to 0% during these hours.

If you are already implementing these basics into your strategy and would like to continue to build upon your efforts, the next sections will examine the application of analytics to ad scheduling settings, concluding with the combination of daily and hourly adjustments.

Intermediate Level – Understanding Your Pay Per Click Goals and Applying Results

Hopefully, when you first launched your pay per click campaign, you had a good idea of what you intended to gain from it, and what you were willing to pay to get it.  In many cases, advertisers leverage pay per click ads for increased site traffic and increased online sales/leads to supplement direct and organic search traffic.

Chances are you also have a way to track your program’s ability to drive conversion/revenue, whether that’s a third party analytics tool or Google’s Conversion Tracker. These tools not only help you understand when site traffic peaks and dips, but more importantly, conversion activity.  And because you don’t have an unlimited budget (yet), you want to focus your dollars on the highest-converting periods.

If you find that certain days drive more orders or leads than others or you tend to run promotions on one particular day, consider getting more aggressive with your keyword bids on these days to make your website more visible. Automatic ad scheduling allows you to do that without having to manually increase bids and then reduce them the next day.

Let’s assume, for example, that you are an online ticket reseller. You notice after collecting several weeks of data that conversion rates peak on Fridays and Saturdays during football season, as fans look to grab last minute tickets for Sunday’s game.  You might decide to increase what you are willing to bid for your selected keywords during these days to ensure premium placement and visibility during these high-converting times.  On Mondays, however, your business is closed and you are unable to fulfill order requests.

Your ad scheduling settings might be as simple as this:

*Tip – If utilizing ad scheduling to plan ahead for a one-time sale or event, don’t forget to revert settings before that day comes around again.

Expert Level – Combining Day of Week and Hour of Day to Create an Advanced Dayparting Strategy

Determine if your analytics tool has the capability to report conversions by hour of day and day of week.  From this information, you can pinpoint the exact hours of each day when your customer is ready to purchase and adjust Google’s ad scheduling accordingly to increase what you’re willing to pay for a click and ensure that your ad is highly ranked and visible during these times.

For more advanced users, map the data out in a spreadsheet using conditional formatting to easily identify areas of opportunity for increasing coverage or trimming excess fat.  In this example, the advertiser might consider turning off pay per click ads completely during early morning hours and bid more aggressively mid-week, especially during the afternoon hours.

Although slightly more complicated, this type of strategy will be the best fit for advertisers looking to capitalize on strengths and minimize weaknesses at the most granular level ensuring that their pay per click program is working to its maximum effort at every hour of every day.

*Tip – To apply identical settings to multiple campaigns, save time by making the desired changes to one campaign in the online Adwords interface, download changes in Adwords Desktop Editor, and copy to remaining applicable campaigns.

Other Considerations

Time Zones – When making changes within an engine, make sure you’ve verified the time zone of your account. Also, keep in mind your West Coast audience (if applicable) and the effects of your Eastern Time zone adjustments or vice versa.

Engine Functionality – The hour/day combination strategy above is easily applicable to Google Adwords, which allows the ability to customize bids by hour for each day:

Bing/Yahoo Adcenter, however, is still somewhat trailing in their dayparting capabilities.  Shown below, Adcenter does offer bid multipliers by day of week and hour of day, but you cannot not overlay the two options. Day of week settings apply to all hours and hour of day settings apply to all days.  Furthermore, their hours are bucketed into time periods rather than individual hours (e.g. evening hours 6-11).

Seasonality – One should revisit their dayparting data and engine settings on a regular basis.  How often depends on your business and target customer.  Consider a clothing retailer targeting teens and young adults. Conversion data is likely to change drastically between the summer and fall, for example, when children are back in school and dayparting settings must be adjusted accordingly.

Summary
Dayparting is just a small piece of a successful digital marketing strategy and with limited time and resources, may not be at the top of everyone’s priority list.

With a basic understanding of your business and target customer, however, you should be able to make a few simple adjustments that could have significant impact on your ROI and ensure that your marketing dollars are working harder and smarter than ever.

Integration across Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

There are several benefits to using pay per click advertising in conjunction with your other online marketing efforts.  Studies show that there are significant incremental gains from having both an organic and paid presence for a given keyword.

Pay per click does, however, offer unique levers and a level of agility that organic search lacks.  Ad copy and landing pages can be quickly updated to reflect new site messaging or user experience.  Geo-targeting can be used to fine-tune your target market, and dayparting can help focus your visibility for when it is most profitable.  But the clicks aren’t free and, therefore, you should take advantage of any opportunity to squeeze the most out of each one.

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Article source: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2013/01/14/paid-search-dayparting-for-the-beginner-intermediate-advanced/