Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

I’ve been in professional publishing since God was a lad, so I have a particular perspective on copyright and the rules for accessing content on the web.

As you might suspect, the “if I can get your copyrighted material off the web for free that’s okay” attitude that many people have really bugs me. I don’t pretend to be neutral about this. These people are stealing my paycheck.

I recently found a site that was giving away some of the stuff I sell at work. This particular site has a “report abuse” page, so I clicked through and found a lengthy set of requirements they expect you to fulfill before they’ll even consider your complaint.

This one was particularly amusing.

State that the information in the notice is accurate, under penalty of perjury.

So … these bastards steal our content and then they have the gall to require us to submit our request for them to stop “under penalty of perjury.”

There is no practical way for copyright owners to police all this nonsense, or to submit each site’s silly forms, or to file lawsuits, or whatever. Even if you get one site to stop, they’d just set up business under a different name and do it again. Or somebody else would.

What’s necessary is an appropriate market-driven way to punish them, and I know how that could be done. (I’ve posted something like this before, but it’s on my mind today so I’m at it again.)

Somebody with substantial market power on the web — like Google — should set up a copyright registry for legitimate publishers. The publisher would submit its copyrighted material to the registry along with a list of the sites authorized to display it.

If a site violated those terms and displayed copyrighted content without the owners’ permission, (1) it would disappear from the Google search listing, along with any ads that link to that site, (2) the authorized contact at the copyright owner would be notified, and (3) the company that controls that site’s DNS entry would be notified with a recommendation to redirect any traffic to a copyright violation page.

We don’t have to rely on the FCC or some other bloated and inefficient government agency to police these things. There is echnological solution, and I don’t think it would be that difficult.

Google, are you listening?

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

There are a few web design mistakes that particularly annoy me.

• moving the login / logout buttons around on the page
• disabling the back button
• not providing a search option

But I think my #1 complaint with web designs is a printer-friendly page that isn’t printer friendly. I.e., it clips off the copy on the right margin.

Here’s a thought for web designers: If you go to the trouble of making a printer-friendly page, you might at least have the courtesy of making it printer friendly.

Greg Krehbiel website design What do you think?

A professional marketing that I know says that “marketing ROI” is mostly nonsense. He says you really can’t accurately attribute marketing costs to sales. There’s just too much chaos to pretend that a simple formula really works.

I’m not quite as skeptical as he is, but I do agree that it’s a far more complicated problem than our models and spreadsheets and projections would indicate.

The “marketing ROI” entry in Mother Goose’s Book of Marketing Fairy Tales, might say this is what happens with your ad campaigns.

1. A prospect sees your ad and clicks on it
   • The ad server (e.g., Google Adwords) drops a tracking cookie that corresponds to that effort
2. The prospect goes to your custom landing page and through the purchasing process
   • Your page is coded to match that effort so your back-end system knows the source of the order
3. Your new customer gets a “thank you for your order” page
   • The conversion code records an order from the ad

   • Your back-end system records an order on the corresponding priority code
4. All the codes match up nicely. Yeah.

In Grimm’s Nursery Rhymes for Real-World Marketing, this is what happens with your ad campaigns.

1. A prospect sees your ad

2. Life happens
3. Your new customer purchases
4. Your codes are all screwed up

Digging into step #2 a little deeper, here are some examples of the kinds of things that can happen to make the conversion code from your ad campaign different from the code that gets into your back-end system.

Scenario 1 – the no-click conversion

1. Your prospect sees your ad but doesn’t click on it

2. The prospect googles some of the words in your ad, clicks on a natural (not-paid) search result and lands on some other page that has nothing to do with your ad campaign
3. Your new customer purchases the product from the wrong landing page
4. Your back-end system records an order on some irrelevant code
5. The money you spent on the ad seems to be wasted.

Scenario 2 – the click and print conversion

1. Your prospect sees your ad and clicks on it
   • The ad drops a tracking cookie that corresponds to that effort
2. Your prospect reads your customized landing page with all the right promotion codes on it, prints it out and shows it to his boss / wife / palm reader.
3. The boss approves the purchase.
4. Your prospect goes to your site and navigates to a generic order page with the wrong promotion codes
5. Your new customer purchases and goes to “thank you” page.
   • The ad system records a conversion, because the customer got the tracking cookie and made it to the “thank you” page.

   • Your back-end system disagrees because the order came in on a generic order page.

Scenario 3 – the click and delete cookies conversion

1. Your prospect sees you ad and clicks on it
   • The ad tries to drop a cookie, but your customer has them turned off, or deletes them later
2. Your prospect goes to the custom landing page and purchases
3. The thank-you page can’t record a conversion because the tracking cookie is gone.
4. Your back-end system shows an order, but the ad interface doesn’t.

Scenario 4 – The “can I find a better deal?” conversion

1. Your prospect sees your ad and clicks
   • The ad drops a tracking cookie that corresponds to that effort
2. Your prospect reads your customized landing page with all the right promotion codes on it, then wonders if he can get a better deal on another page.
3. Your prospect spends ten minutes searching the web for a better price and ends up on some other page with coding that doesn’t match your ad campaign.
4. Your new customer purchases and goes to the “thank you” page.
   • The ad records a conversion, because the customer got the tracking cookie and actually purchased.

   • Your back-end system disagrees because the order came in on a generic order page.

Scenario 5 – The 30-day cookie conversion

1. Your prospect sees your ad and clicks
   • The ad drops a tracking cookie that corresponds to that effort
2. Your prospect reads your customized landing page with all the right promotion codes on it, then gets distracted by something and gets on with life.
3. 29 days later you send an email to this same person promoting the same product. The customer thinks, “yeah, I want to buy that,” clicks on the link in your email and goes to a custom purchase page – for the email campaign.
4. Your new customer purchases and goes to “thank you” page.
   • The ad records a conversion, because the customer got the tracking cookie and actually purchased within 30 days.

   • Your back-end system disagrees because the order came in on an email promotion page.

Scenario 6 – The “I don’t buy online” conversion

1. Your prospect sees your ad and clicks
   • The ad drops a tracking cookie that corresponds to that effort
2. Your prospect reads your customized landing page with all the right promotion codes on it, but wants to purchase by phone, mail or fax.
3. Your back-end system records on offline order. The online ad gets no credit.

All these scenarios happen all the time, and as you can see, there are any number of ways that the tracking from your online ad system can get messed up — either in its own right, or in its relationship to your back-end system.

The conclusion is that you have to hold on to your marketing ROI calculations somewhat loosely.

It’s fair to compare the ROI of two campaigns within the same system — for example, two different keyword campaign in Adwords — because it’s reasonable to assume that all the chaos mentioned above would happen about equally to both of them.

But it’s not necessarily reasonable to disbelieve the conversion statistics from an online marketing campaign because your back-end system isn’t showing the same results.

It’s important to track things as well as possible, but at some point you just have to believe that it’s working something like what the reports are saying.

Greg Krehbiel Adwords, Analytics, Display ads What do you think?

Here’s a helpful little video the good folk at ExpertClick have prepared that shows how you can automatically have content from an RSS feed show up in your twitter account.

The video is specifically about their news wire service, but you’ll easily figure out how to use the same technique for any RSS feed.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

If you want people to read your articles online, most of your visitors are going to find you through search, so you need to use words people are going to be searching on. Especially in the headline.

For example, I was writing a post on my home brewing blog and my marketing hat suddenly slipped onto my head. I thought, “Hey, optimization boy, take some of your own medicine.”

So I started to use various online tools to make sure I was picking the right words for the title of my homebrewing blog post. Then I realized I should blog about that process over here.

I was writing two posts at the same time. One on homebrewing and one (for this blog) on how I picked the right words for my homebrewing blog. I was going to title this post “Before you write that blog post,” and then — again — I realized I wasn’t following the right seo principles.

“Before you write that blog post” would sound good enough for a pre-qualified audience — i.e., people who are already interested in how to write a blog post to get maximum traffic. So if you’re writing a newsletter to people who want to know about that, fine.

That’s not the way blogs work. (Who searches on “before you write”?)

So off I went to google again to see which words to use for this post (on how to pick words for blog posts).

The first thing to do is dream up a couple options. I wondered if “article” or “headline” got more traffic, so I typed them into Google trends and found that “article” gets a lot more search.

But … what about “blog”? I tried that, and it’s no contest. “Blog” gets way more search than “article” or “headline.”

What other words should I use? Should my title be “blog headline” or “optimize blog” or … hey, what about “blog seo”?

That was killer. “Blog seo” creams “blog headline” and “optimize blog.”

I would like to be able to test “blog seo tricks, blog seo ideas, blog seo how to,” but google trends doesn’t show any results for those phrases, so I just did “tricks, ideas, how to” — and “how to” takes the field.

Now there’s no guarantee that “blog seo how to” is the best phrase, but it’s sure likely to be better than “Before you write that blog post,” and it only took me about a minute to figure that out.

The lesson is — before you write an article for the web, do some research to see what words and phrases work best!

Now then, back to homebrewing, which is what got me over here in the first place.

I was about to blog about my son’s new porter recipe, which I am enjoying as I type.

I write a weekly post on homebrewbeer.biz about home brewing.

So then. What words work best for an article about a porter recipe?

There isn’t a synonym for “porter,” so I’m kinda stuck with that word.

I do have to decide between “home brew” and “homebrew.” Consulting google trends, “homebrew” wins.

Now this is where the editor and the marketer have to come to terms, because from time to time the editor will say that X is better, and the marketer will say that Y gets more search.

You’re going to have to make up your mind. Do you want to be the lonely little correct guy in the corner who’s ever-so proud of his grammar, or do you want people to find and read what you’ve written?

I thought so.

Now — as you experiment on google trends you come up with some odd ideas. For example, my first thought for a headline was something like “Ben’s Home Brew Porter — an intermediate homebrew recipe.”

(Note that I slipped “home brew” and “homebrew” into the same title to cover my bases.)

But what about “how to”? It killed on blog optimization. So I tested “homebrew recipe” against “homebrew how to,” and … “how to” killed again.

People seem to search on “how to” quite a lot. There might be a lesson in that.

Anyway, are the people who search on that phrase the right people for my article? Are people who are searching on stuff like “homebrew how to” looking for beer recipes?

(It turns out there’s this Nintendo “homebrew” thing that has absolutely nothing to do with making beer at home.)

But the good old wonder wheel guided me on this one. When I typed in “homebrew how to” it was clear that most of the sub-topics are related to making beer at home. That’s all good.

So I settled on Homebrew how to — Ben’s Mild Porter Recipe.

I could have spent some more time on this and tweaked it a bit more, but … hey, home brewing is just a hobby of mine.

Nevertheless, it’s always worth five minutes of your time in the google tools to pick the right words. And “right” (in this context) means words people actually care about and search on.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

Sometimes an experiment just keeps dragging on because the difference between the winning and losing page(s) hasn’t passed Google’s criteria for significance.

Generally speaking, I think it’s a good idea to keep going until Google announces a winner, but sometimes the pattern is clear, and you really want to move along to your next test, so it’s worth it to call it done.

Here’s what I mean.

I don’t think anything’s going to change in this horse race.

The winning page isn’t a slam dunk, it but it’s good enough to call this race over and move on to the next idea.

Greg Krehbiel Google Website Optimizer What do you think?

Consumer product marketing isn’t my thing, so don’t expect any great insights here, but I thought I’d post a quick note about a campaign I saw this morning on the streets of D.C.

Nescafe is firing back at Starbucks’ new instant coffee. Reps were handing out samples outside the metro this morning.

The package says “Nescafe, the smart choice” on one side. On the other are two opposing cups of coffee. One says “a lot of hype” on a mocked-up Starbucks cup; the other says “a lot of flavor” on a Nescafe cup. It looks somewhat like this web page.

The bottom of the package says “taste for yourself” and inside is a collection of various Nescafe versions of instant coffee.

I’ve tried them both (Starbucks and Nescafe), and I think they’re both good. The Starbucks version has that characteristic burnt, strong flavor, and the Nescafe version is milder.

All other things (like price) being equal, I’d pick one or the other based on what grabbed my fancy at the time. Sometimes I like that burnt, strong Starbucks flavor and sometimes I don’t.

Nescafe seems to be capitalizing on the down economy.

“Why pay extra for hype?”
“Get a lot of flavor for less.”
“It’s the smart choice.”

And that seems like smart marketing to me.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

This link is only open access for a little while, so go look at it now.

Behavioral Economics in Marketing: 7 Insights to Lift Results

People who study the brain and decision-making often come to some very disturbing conclusions — for example, that we often make decisions un- or sub-consciously and later rationalize them. We wrap a story around our decision to justify it, but our story isn’t really why we made the decision.

The article linked above points out some ways marketers can use this phenomenon to sell products.

This raises the question whether it’s wise to use such tactics to sell subscription products. If all you’re after is one sale, it might make sense. But with a subscription, you’re relying on renewals, which means the person has to actually like the thing.

So a subscription marketer that uses tricky tactics might want to check to see if renewals for people who purchased from the tricky offer differ from renewals off the standard offer.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

Do display ads really work? If so, how can you know that they work, and how can you know much of an impact they have?

There are studies that show lots of interesting things about display ads. For one thing, most people don’t click on them, but the ad still affects behavior. For example, a person might see an ad and then type in your site’s URL, or he might google one of your brand terms.

The folks who sell ads know this, and they know that ads simply don’t pay for themselves based on clicks. So the ad salesman wants you to measure the effectiveness of their ads based on “view-through conversions,” which is a misnomer. Just because the ad was displayed on the user’s browser does not mean the user saw the ad. “View-through conversions” should really be called “display-through conversions,” and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to take them at face value. It’s way to easy to imagine a scenario where an ad has been displayed and the person purchased for some other reason.

This leaves us with two rotten metrics for ads. Clicks undervalue the effect of a display ad campaign, and display-through conversions over-estimate the value of the campaign. What can you do?

The simplest thing to do is believe the studies, bite the bullet and invest in display ads anyway. If you’re the owner of the company and want to do that, go ahead. It’s your money. But if, like most of us, you’re spending somebody else’s money, you need to show some return. And even if management believes the general idea that display ads increase direct traffic and brand-related search, that doesn’t help to much. How much do you need to spend in display ads to get the effect you want? What is the proper proportion of spend on display ads vs. spend on search? The studies aren’t going to tell you that — at least not for your industry and your product line.

Another (not) solution to this problem is to compare the behavior of people in a “display network” with people outside that network.

Here’s how that would (not) work. As you know if you’ve ever run a spyware problem on your computer, display networks cookies people when they go to a site that show their ads.

Here’s a scenario. I go to D.com, an ad gets displayed on the page, and the ad system writes a cookie to my browser recording that fact. Later I go to your website and buy your product, and your “thank you” page has a tracking pixel that reads the cookie and says, “Hey, look! We showed this guy an ad and then he purchased. Yipee!”

Sounds good, … but … something isn’t right here. The ad might have had nothing to do with the sale. Maybe I got an email that led me to your site. Or maybe I was going to buy anyway. Or maybe I saw the ad and my wife (using the same computer) bought your product.

If you push this, the display ad salesman will say how smart you are and offer something like this.

“Oh, but we can compare the behavior of the people in the network with the people out of the network.”

What he means is this. If the tracking pixel on your thank-you page looks for the cookie and can’t find it, it records that conversion as an “everybody else.” Then, the (phony) argument goes, you can compare the behavior of the in-network and out of network people.

The trouble is that a fraction is made up of a numerator and a denominator, and you have to have a real value in both places. You can’t compare X conversions over Y people in the network with A conversions over “everybody else.” It doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, you can assign a real number to “everybody else.”

You need to be able to do a split. You need to be able to take a definable universe of people, show the ad to some of them and not to others, and compare the behavior of those two groups. This doesn’t resolve every conceivable objection, but it gets pretty close.

Here’s how you do it.

First, you need a definable group of people. The most natural group is “people who visit your website,” because (1) they’ve shown some level of interest in you, and (2) you can set a cookie on their browsers.

Second, you need to split this group in two. You do that with a google optimizer experiment. Version A drops a retargeting cookie, Version B does not.

Third, you set your “thank you” page as the target page of the google experiment.

Presto. Now you have a defined group of people that you can split in two, show your ads to one group and not the other, and compare the behavior of the two groups.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

I was thinking about declining ad revenues today, and it got me wondering how a print publication could make a better connection between the printed page and the online world. Getting somebody to type in a URL isn’t that hard, but it’s also not that sexy or exciting.

How long will it be, do you think, before printers can mass-produce little USB drives with a couple K of data on them?

Imagine a blow-in 3×5 card with a little USB port on the edge. That would open up lots of possibilities.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?