Avoid “anticipointment”: bridging the gap from ad to site

A cou­ple of days ago at the Medi­a­post OMMA Behav­ioral Insider event, I pre­sented to the audi­ence about what should be the best friend of behav­ioral tar­get­ing net­works: site opti­miza­tion and site targeting.

I took the stage imme­di­ately after indus­try leg­end Dave Mor­gan, whom Steve Smith, the host of the event, called “Mr. Behav­ioral Tar­get­ing.” Dave’s larger-than-life his­tory includes found­ing Real Media and then Tacoda, sell­ing to AOL, and becom­ing their SVP for Global Ad Sales.  I have long admired Dave, and have met with him a few times over the past 5 years to dis­cuss how behav­ioral tar­get­ing and Web ana­lyt­ics could work closely together. From the first cup of cof­fee we shared in New York 5 years ago, we agreed that both the ad side and the site side were co-dependent.

So, being care­ful not to offend the media buy­ing and advertising-centric crowd that was sure to make up this event, we talked about the need for the online adver­tis­ing folks to not only real­ize that the site is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of every cam­paign, but to start evan­ge­liz­ing for inte­grat­ing site opti­miza­tion to increase cam­paign suc­cess as part of their efforts.

As the total inter­ac­tive ad spend grows from its cur­rent $20 bil­lion to the $61 bil­lion that For­rester esti­mates will be spent by 2012, we are begin­ning to see smart mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives real­ize they must invest more in the site. After all, ads fun­nel vis­i­tors to the site — with­out a site that hums, noth­ing is sold, and no mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship is built.

That means that the ads actu­ally depend on the site for ROI. But cur­rently, the money in inter­ac­tive spend still skews much more towards the ad-spend side than the site side. If you con­sider that the typ­i­cal web site for a com­pany receives the major­ity of its traf­fic from non-paid sources, one could argue that the spend is weighted on the wrong side for strate­gic value.  Some may say that this is because mar­keters are still learn­ing how to mar­ket using this new chan­nel, and buy­ing traf­fic is a rel­a­tively easy process — eas­ier, at least, than tack­ling the multi-dimensional strate­gic design, voice, flow and usabil­ity of a web site.

Think of an ice­berg: the tip of the ice­berg, which rep­re­sents ad spend­ing, is more vis­i­ble and easy to focus on. The tip is also what is eas­ily seen, and what there­fore first engages a new audi­ence. How­ever, the mass of the ice­berg, as we all know, is 90% below the water. In other words, 90% (or more) of the process of turn­ing a vis­i­tor into a cus­tomer hap­pens on the site.

The ice­berg is a sin­gle entity — the 10% above the water and the 90% below are indeli­bly con­nected to each other. From the visitor’s point of view, the ad starts a brand impres­sion that is con­tin­u­ous, from view to click to site visit to con­ver­sion to repeat visit. Vis­i­tors don’t view the ad impres­sion as a sin­gle step from the media team which then hands off the site to the site team. They view the whole encounter as an ice­berg, a sin­gle brand expe­ri­ence with you.

Cus­tomer expec­ta­tions are on the rise with the Web Chan­nel, and when they see an ad that is rel­e­vant, their antic­i­pa­tion grows that the next click will deliver even greater value.  When the next expe­ri­ence leads them to a place where the con­ver­sa­tion is for­got­ten or worse, where the con­ver­sa­tion goes com­pletely side­ways and is dis­jointed, the antic­i­pa­tion leads to dis­ap­point­ment and the vis­i­tor leaves.  We call this unfor­tu­nate series of events “antici­point­ment.”  Today the chasm of antici­point­ment is great for most com­pa­nies, and the real costs in low con­ver­sion rates, lost brand value add to the poor cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in still to be tack­led effi­cien­cies of the Web chan­nel for marketers.

To offer solu­tions to the prob­lem of antici­point­ment, we have been work­ing hard to build out our online mar­ket­ing suite over the past 18 months.  There is a con­cept called the Online Mar­ket­ing Value Chain that we are dis­cussing quite a bit.  The idea is sim­i­lar to the ice­berg metaphor.  The vis­i­tor sees a mes­sage whether it’s in the form of a behav­iorally tar­geted ad, a tar­geted email, or a search result, and they decide whether there is enough value in that mes­sage to engage in the next click.  If they do, and they arrive on your site’s land­ing page or home page, they are look­ing for more value with each click they make, as they 1) engage deeper in the site, 2) make their way through the con­ver­sion oppor­tu­nity, and 3) become a loyal customer.

Com­pa­nies today are invest­ing in a host of tech­nolo­gies to deliver more value to the cus­tomer and enhance their expe­ri­ence and engage­ment in the site, from efforts such as land­ing page opti­miza­tion using MVT or AB test­ing, or on-site tar­get­ing, or on-site search, wid­gets, cus­tomer reviews, sur­veys and rec­om­men­da­tions.  These appli­ca­tions have the right intent but need to be part of the log­i­cal cus­tomer dia­logue and not just another exam­ple a one-way dis­jointed con­ver­sa­tion from the com­pany talk­ing out­ward.  To make this a dia­logue with each cus­tomer that makes sense, a com­mon cus­tomer dataset must be shared across all of the appli­ca­tions so each appli­ca­tion knows what level of engage­ment the cus­tomer had with each other appli­ca­tion and takes that into account as it is invoked, so it con­tin­ues the same con­ver­sa­tion and doesn’t change course or start it all over again.

We used the ice­berg anal­ogy, and talked through the Online Mar­ket­ing Value Chain at the OMMA event, and the audi­ence seemed engaged the whole time. They seemed to agree that they were ulti­mately depen­dant on the site itself for con­ver­sion and ROI suc­cess. Still, it was clear that most of the folks don’t have respon­si­bil­ity for the site — so while they agree, they feel they aren’t really in a posi­tion to do much about it.

As a dig­i­tal indus­try, we can’t accept this state of affairs. We need to go far­ther than nod­ding our heads and then going back to the same con­ver­sa­tion we had yes­ter­day. Dig­i­tal indus­try folks need to start inter­nal­iz­ing and evan­ge­liz­ing that the site is A CRITICAL com­po­nent in every cam­paign, and we need to plan, buy and exe­cute every cam­paign with both own­ers in the room work­ing together. The site needs traf­fic to hit its growth num­bers, and behav­iorally tar­geted traf­fic has been proven time and time again to be among the high­est yield­ing traf­fic an adver­tiser can drive. That same traf­fic needs a site that con­tin­ues the con­ver­sa­tion in a rel­e­vant man­ner, from land­ing page through to con­ver­sion, which in many cases takes a few vis­its to occur.

At the end of last year, a group called the Cor­po­rate Exec­u­tive Board came out with a report called “Iden­ti­fy­ing the Dri­vers of Dig­i­tal Effec­tive­ness”, in which they eval­u­ated the four major areas of dig­i­tal invest­ment in mar­ket­ing: dis­play adver­tis­ing, email mar­ket­ing, search mar­ket­ing, and the web site itself. They found that the most strate­gic area for invest­ment for most com­pa­nies should be the web site. The report didn’t get much media atten­tion, prob­a­bly because the media that report on dig­i­tal love to talk about the sexy side of the busi­ness — which tends to be ad-centric rather than site-centric.

So all in all, we were really pleased with the warm wel­come we had at the con­fer­ence, and we look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing the con­ver­sa­tion with the online adver­tis­ing indus­try in future events.  But we believe there’s still a lot of work to do. Every pro­fes­sional in the dig­i­tal indus­try needs to begin break­ing down the silos between the ad side and the site side, and real­iz­ing that silos are a huge pre­ven­tion to the age-old mantra we all learned about in our first jobs: inte­grated marketing.