SKOPOS Digital Insight has been providing bespoke market research studies for such a purpose for a number of years, for companies including major financial institutions.

Surveys can be conducted pre, mid and post campaigns to assess the effectiveness. Surveys obtain unprompted (spontaneous) as well as prompted recall... and can include evaluations of latest campaigns by insertion and display of the ads (in any form, jpeg, gif, .avi, etc.).

Samples representative of all net users and/or the target audience(s) are obtained via our expansive opt-in survey panel, OpinionPeople(tm).

Detailed reviews of (online) campaigns can be conducted via our qualitative i-groups and i-forums.

Data analysis is conducted via our in-house team of statisticians, and synthesised results and advice given by our sector experts.

Do let me know if we can be of any further assistance.

Kind regards,

Darren Noyce MMRS

Founder and Managing Director

SKOPOS Digital Insight

www.SKOPOS.info

T: +44(0)2027 953 8 359

E:

Hi Malcolm

I'm interested by your final point / rant. I've also thought (mostly intuitively) that bidding on your brand name if you also had the top natural search results seemed to be a waste of money. (assuming of course you'd stopped competitors bidding on your brand name if you can).

However, look at point 3 in my recent blog post at http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/364043/etail-uk-a-few-notes-of-interest-from-the-conference.html - this suggests otherwise. Or this market / audience / product dependent?

I've also seen data from Google (perhaps not surprisingly..!) saying that the 'double whammy' approach generates an overall uplift that is much higher than natural search alone. Also, now with quality score much more important for PPC then there is an argument to pay for your brand name clicks to improve your overall quality score in order to pay less for your other clicks...? Guess you'd need to do the maths to see if that one worked out.

Presumably you have access to some of the data above? Can you see on an anonymous basis across your clients whether perhaps there is some ROI/value in brand PPC bidding after all?

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

Something that we've found interesting on search terms and how to assess ROI on what you bid on is related to the length of the cusotmer research-buying cycle and, therefore, in your analytics on the durations over which you analyse / set your cookies etc.

Clearly this will vary a lot depending on the product / service. The buying 'window' for a CD online is around 30 minutes I believe, somewhat longer for a mortgage...

However, we often find that over a 3 month period for example an end-buyer/customer/subscriber of ours might:
- Search on, say, 'affiliate marketing' and click on a paid search ad that we are running. This costs a fair bit to us as this term is quite generic in our niche world. The user arrives at our site, roots around a bit, likes what they see, but leaves without buying.
- The user then refines his/her search and searches again on, say, 'affiliate marketing best practice guide' and clicks through to us again on a natural search result (where we rank very well - the Long Tail). Again he/she looks but doesn't buy.
- Having liked what he/she has seen of E-consultancy, the user then searches the web on "E-consultancy" to 'check us out'. You wouldn't want to be a fool and buy off some brand you'd never heard of would you? They probably then browse around a bit on various sites that talk about us (NB the importance of online PR and reputation here...).

And then, finally, he/she clicks through on a search on 'E-consultancy' (could be paid or organic) and buys.

This could happen over the course of an hour, a day, a month, or 3 months.

Equally, we often see lapsed subscribers re-subscribing but they get to us, or are reminded about us through a search on something else.

All of which is to say that it is dangerous to place all the ROI and conclusions/analysis on the 'last click wins' approach and only to look over a short time period. Things are a lot more complicated than that unfortunately...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

On 12:48:41 26 September 2007 MalcolmDuckett wrote:

Sadly, I am not able to give the actual examples for reasons of commercial confidentiality, but in at least two major transactional B2C sites with strong brands we have analysed the value of the PPC v organic search results and there appeared to be little benefit (in terms of customer value) in buying the brand name directly... Conversly I have seen a major national carrier who's in-house squash team was better listed than the company!

I think we also saw evidence that the "average value" of sessions originating from organic search was better than via PPC. In one case this appeared to be a reflection of an SEO campaign apparently focusing on "low-cost" messages when in fact the supplier was significantly "premium" in actuality, and this just resulted in a lot of visitors arriving and spending excessive amounts of time trying to locate the "low-cost" offers that they were expecting given the SEO messaging. In another case a costly and specifically engineered SEO-friendly "micro-site" generated tiny ammounts of actual business, suggesting it had been a significant waste of time and money

In another environment where we undertook real visitor scoring (e.g. assigning value to individual visitors based on behaviour, location, organisation, recency, frequency etc.) it was very noticeable that brand-name related organic search ("brand awareness") was very effective at catching the right audience  and looked commercially very attractive in terms of ROI when compared to other forms of paid on-line marketing- but perhaps that's obvious...

But that leads on to what may well be an apocryphal tail - I am told that BMW managed to get themselves blacklisted by Google (see news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4685750.stm ) but that this resulted in almost no change in traffic to their site, as customers unable to find the site on Google, just “guessed” and got it right… sounds plausible doesn’t it!
 
The net message from SPEED-TRAP's perspective is that it pays not to guess or to take "expert opinion" at face value - we always try to maintain an open mind and let the numbers speak for themselves and sometimes they say some really interesting things!

Malcolm

Malcolm, Ashley,

It's lovely to hear like minded people exchanging information that firstly confirms that my method of evaluation is likely to be correct and secondly, thank you for helping me prove to others in my organisation that changing the way we calclate ROI is not the sessional click to buy process they once believed it to be.

I don't know about you, but it isn't an easy method by which to actually report a return and most notably how on and offline stats can be reported in line with one another. Any ideas?

Abigail

On 11:21:12 27 September 2007 MalcolmDuckett wrote:

Ashley, your scenario matches well with what we see at SPEED-TRAP... and it happens both in the longer term (days, weeks, months) and in the shorter time frame (within a browsing session)...

Our approach is to track two sorts of "campaign" in respect of visitors... Firstly we have "originating campaign" - this being the campaign that drives a visitor to the site at the "start" of a browsing session, and then "visit campaigns" which might cause a person to return to a site WITHIN a single session... This is common on organic (or PPC) search where visitors enter a "generic" term into a search engine, and then set about clicking each of the results in turn, returning to the site several times in the course of the browsing session.

This behaviour also results in the building of strong  "brand awareness", as the user realises that their query is continually returning them to the same brand (even if they had not realised that the link in the search results actually pointed to the same organisation.)

Link this with the longer term visitor profile and the campaigns which originate sessions and drive visits within sessions historically and you get a complete picture.

We then leave the site owner to draw their own conclusions and apply their own business rules to who they "attribute" the sale to... some customers who use affiliate marketing go for a "last click-thru wins" rule, and ONLY pay if the visit leading to purchase came from a click thru from an affiliate, and pay no one for "brand aware" visitors, others attempt to "share the awards"... The first approach might seem "unfair", but it can be argued that it favours advertising with a strong "call to action" effect, and they also can pay more for a "win", as opposed to a "brand awareness generating" campaign click-thru.

Your comment about timing of this cycle being product dependant is interesting and true, but sometimes the results can be surprising. In the specific case of mortgages we have seen that the "research" phase can be completed in one or two days (which I guess is closely linked to the process of finding the "dream house" and wanting to make a fast offer)....

To turn in another direction on this, it is also interesting to understand how people search for products, in certain markets this can be quite counter intuitive... An example we have seen is where the customer is already committed to a suppler/product (e.g. phone service provider brand  or brand of games console) and their searching then starts with this.(rather than the title of the game or phone features or names).. e.g. they are only interested in games which run on their Brand of console, not the "latest" games, or only interested in phones supported by T-Mobile etc.

It's a fascinating subject....

Malcolm

Hi Malcolm

Sounds very interesting what you're up to there. We're similarly working on something for our new site (don't get too excited yet, not due until mid next year...) which is based on a customer (profile) value modelling approach.

We assign a weighted score based on a whole load of variables to work out the 'value' or propensity of a customer to decide what form of marketing is most appropriate.

The two things I find most interesting about what we're doing (which isn't new by any means) are:

- Although a lot of this scoring can be done automatically (e.g. RFM type stuff) we're still allowing for manual intervention. For example, we have a positive value score for a customer who is an 'opinion former'. That's hard for machines to work out but much easier for us. Or even assigning strong potential value - harder for machines to work out than humans. We can just about make this work because, being in a B2B niche, it is all about quality / value and not about quantity / volume.

- We're assigning scores/value based on behavioural data that are gleaned from web (and e-mail, chat, RSS etc.) interactions. So we can infer or attribute value (or potential value) based on what someone does, or indeed does NOT do. This is exciting to me because it applies standard marketing approaches and thinking but leverages the unique data afforded by interactive channels, specifically around behavioural insight.

We haven't quite got as far as exploiting attitudinal data but I think that's a really interesting area - particularly for us working broadly in the 'knowledge' field with a strong network of opinionated people!

We've played a bit with this on what we did with Synature (have a look at our E-lucidator) but haven't really exploited that yet. However, I think the notion of connecting with people who share views or opinions could be very powerful.

Guess that's what we're doing here in a good old fashioned threaded discussion forum ... ;)

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com