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Be relevant or be gone.

Consumers are expanding the definition of what they consider spam.

More than one-quarter of consumers in Asia-Pacific believe that promotional e-mail or newsletters that were opt-in—but no longer engage them or address their needs—are spam, according to the Epsilon/Return Path "2008 Consumer E-mail Survey."

More than four out of 10 respondents said that instead of just unsubscribing, they reported legitimate e-mails to which they had subscribed as spam, using a "Report Spam" button or link.

Consumers in Asia-Pacific were not hostile to all e-mail marketing. More than one-half of respondents said they would use e-mail coupons. More than seven out of 10 had made direct purchases as a result of receiving relevant promotional e-mails.

In fact, two-thirds of respondents said they would divulge personal information in order to get more relevant e-mails.

But consumers can be merciless when they do not want to get more e-mail from a marketer. In Japan, Webmail provider and portal goo found that more than six out of 10 e-mail newsletter subscribers would unregister altogether from the site of the merchant who had sent the e-mail when they were finished reading.

Considering how much effort marketers put into getting permission to avoid spam filters in the first place, it is clear that e-mail needs to be continuously reviewed for relevance.

The link between e-mail relevance and legitimacy is not limited to Asia-Pacific. One-third of Internet users in North America interviewed in April 2008 by Ipsos for Habeas said that an e-mail's content contributed to its legitimacy—about three times as many as mentioned third-party seals of approval.

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Price beats brands when times are tight.

More than four out of 10 US nonbusiness travelers surveyed expect to reduce the number of trips they will take in the coming year as a result of the economy, according to a June 2008 Destination Analysts' "The State of the American Traveler" survey. Nearly three out of 10 said they would spend less for their recreational trips in the next 12 months, nearly double the percentage that said so 12 months ago.

In the past 12 months, 23.6% of leisure travelers said they had taken a "staycation"—a vacation spent at home—in response to gasoline prices. Nearly three out of 10 said they planned to do so within the next 12 months.

"With more than half of travelers saying they will actively look for travel bargains and discounts and another third saying they will visit less expensive destinations, affordability is certain to be top-of-mind," said Erin Francis, managing partner at Destination Analysts, in a statement.

Several types of travel services were researched and purchased online by at least one-third of respondents, including destination information, hotel rooms and airline tickets. Only about one-fifth of recreational travelers went online for car rentals.

Fully 72.2% of Internet users in the US named the Web as their primary source for travel research in June 2008, according to a Prospectiv study.

The focus on value matters because price trumps brand in an economic downturn, according to a survey of consumers in the UK conducted by Loudhouse and RightNow.

Nearly eight out of 10 Internet users surveyed said that prices drove their purchase decisions during times of economic uncertainty. More than seven out of 10 also said that price and good online user experience were the second-highest-influencing factor on where to buy a product. Brand pedigree, product uniqueness and reputation were listed as least influential.

"Brands selling directly to the consumer be warned; as the credit crunch deepens and spending decreases, offering 'sweeteners' to consumers is only half the survival story," said Joe Brown, general manager at RightNow, in a Travolution article. "They won't tolerate corners being cut when it comes to customer service."

Although most travelers are getting budget-conscious, the luxury travel segment has yet to feel a slowdown, according to a July 2008 USA Today article.

The article cited D.K. Shifflet & Associates' claim that households earning $100,000 and more now account for about one-third of hotel stays.

"High-end is holding its own right now," Doug Shifflet, CEO of D.K. Shifflet, told USA Today. "But if the economy doesn't improve some, then it's going to start to see an additional slowdown."

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If you're in the middle of a homepage design review like we are here at MarketingSherpa, you know there's a lot to consider. Here's a handy checklist of eight improvements worth testing.

1. Refocus 80% of the page on a single primary audience.
Although your home has to serve everyone -- prospects, press, investors, customers, HR recruiting, partners/distributors, etc. -- dividing the real estate into even sections for each constituency will create such a mishmash no one can find anything.

Instead, pick the audience you most need to impress with your homepage (I'm assuming it's prospects you hope to sell to) and dedicate the vast majority of the page to their needs. Note: I'm NOT saying "dedicate it to marketing to them" but rather "to their needs," which is something else entirely.

You can serve your secondary audiences by means of simple tab navigation across the top of the page or hotlinks in unobtrusive places, such as your footer or the top right corner of the page. Examples of this approach range from NetFlix.com to the Virginia Beach Visitor's Center at VBFun.com.

2. Move your most useful links into the "small window-fold."
The horrible truth is that many visitors don't open windows all the way to see your whole homepage. This is especially true if they're surfing from search engines or e-mail. Your analytics stats can't tell you this, but usability clinics will in short order. (Alternatively, just walk around your office looking at your co-workers' computers. How often do they have several windows open, none using the entire computer screen?)

This means the classic page fold, which all Web designers work so hard to get critical content above, has moved higher than you think. Unless you are in e-commerce or media, however, it's my experience that the hotlinks your primary audience needs are rarely above that fold.

Instead, many sites use that critical top-and-center real estate for vanity content created by the marketing or branding department. You know it on sight: a big graphic with, perhaps, a tagline. Useful links are often under that -- under the fold. It's now time to move this vanity content elsewhere.

3. Use your internal search reports to rewrite navigation links.
Cut through your internal political battles about what should be on the nav bar, how to word it and in what order it should appear in one simple step: review your site's internal site-search stats. Key, first have all searches from company-owned IP addresses (i.e., your own employee searches) removed. They probably don't use the same wording as your customers and prospects.

Then just look. What are visitors typing into search? Can you use those exact same words in your navigation bars and other hotlinks on the homepage? If it's an incredibly popular term, can you use it twice as both a button and a hotlink in the text? For example, look at the Cars.com home page to see how they repeat the hotlinked keyword term "Sell" in multiple places and formats.

4. Dump extra columns.
Got more than three columns, including your nav bar? Dump one. Trust me, test it. Easiest way: combine two short columns to create one longer one.

5. Dump external ads and banner-style ads.
Unless your business model is driven more by external banner advertising (or AdSense revenue) than it is by whatever else you hope visitors will do on your site, dump the ads.

Don't let the Webmaster sling up Google AdSense "just to make a little more revenue on the side." You can do that on your blog or on other pages that aren't supposed to be dedicated to your company. Your homepage is to help visitors navigate based on their needs in relation to you.

Also, don't let the marketing department create (or re-use) promotional banners to post to your Web site. People are coming expecting to find useful links for what they need and to learn about what your company offers. Usability studies show that banners that look like external marketing banners (using colors, typeface, images, etc. that would not normally flow with your site design) are subject to "banner blindness" and, frankly, can be annoying.

It's just unprofessional. If the marketing department has a special on -- especially if that promotion is being blasted on other media channels (TV, postal mail, radio, etc.), definitely reference it, even using a graphic and headline that's directly from the external campaign. However, put that promotional content into a format resembling your site's format. It should look like it belongs there, not like your marketing department bought an ad on your site.

6. Bigger typeface.
I see this a lot on B-to-B homepages. They use 60% of the page for one massive rectangular graphic and a large headline. Then, they squish all of the remaining content, especially useful hotlinks, into teeny, tiny type. Come on, guys! Body copy that's under 10 points (preferably 12 points) is hard to read and probably wasted.

Consider Web 2.0-style design that's now sweeping the cooler corners of the Web. These sites, such as Mozilla.com, use bigger type both for readability and for personality. They effectively say: "This is a clear, easy-to-understand place. Welcome."

7. Fast load time (for at least half the screen above the smaller fold).
Not everyone is on a super-speedy line like you have in your office. Some are still on dial-up, and some (like me) are on "high speed" lines that aren't so high speed when everyone in the house or neighborhood is using them to download movies.

I understand if your CEO wants to look super-cool by having Flash or video on your homepage. It's probably not a good idea given usability concerns but, hey, it's a political battle many marketing departments lose to the forces that be. So, fine, give in. Let them stick Flash on the homepage if they really, really want to.

However, relegate that Flash to one side of the page -- preferably the right side, although you'll want to test it. This way anyone who opens your homepage with a small window can read useful information and click on useful links immediately if they want, while the Flash takes its sweet time to load on the other side.

A site that does a fantastic job of this is ClearInk.com. Another useful tool for your internal design-vs.-load-time battles is the (free) Web Page Analyzer tool over at: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

8. Are your basic info links getting too much traffic?
Ask your Web analysis team to divide your traffic into newbies versus repeat visitors. Then ask them what the most clicked links for newbies are. If "About Us," "Products" or "Services" links on your homepage are getting more than 10% newbie traffic, then your homepage copy has a problem.

Your homepage should clarify for new visitors what your company does and what your major product lines or services are. It should also provide easy-to-find (above the smaller fold) links to the most popular of these. If newbies are looking at your homepage and not finding this basic information and then, in desperation, digging further into generic info pages to try to find something relevant to their needs, you have a copywriting problem.

Your homepage real estate is being wasted. Rewrite your copy based on what people need to find to take the next step and post it up. Then, as soon as you have another 500 newbie visitors, review the analytics again. Have you gotten more people directly to where they need to be from the homepage, or are they still wandering confused to generic information?

Yes, I know this is enormously easier to say than it is to actually do. I'm on that homepage revamp committee for Sherpa right now, remember? Now we have to put our own words into action. Gulp!

P.S. If you would like to see Sherpa's latest research study into homepages -- we had 60 business execs visit real-life homepages of companies such as Oracle, IBM and Sun, it's available at: http://www.sherpastore.com/b2bbenchmark08.html?8966

Anne Holland is Founder and Content Director of MarketingSherpa Inc., a research firm publishing Case Studies and Benchmark Data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. To surf our 750 exclusive Case Studies, go to: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/casestudies.html?8966

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Chief marketers tell me they consider tracking the competition one of their most important tasks. All marketing is fundamentally competitive, and consumers can only engage with so many concepts, brands or products. In search engine marketing, the consumer’s attention is largely focused on three or four items at the top of a search results page. Getting into those high impact slots requires knocking someone else out… and doing it in a completely fluid environment where minute by minute adjustments and multiple factors keep the head-to-head action going 24x7.

From a senior marketer perspective, search engine benchmarketing presents some unique challenges and opportunities. Unlike other channels, search has no easy answers to the bottom line metric, “How much are my competitors spending?” You used to be able to see exactly what marketers were willing to spend per search click on specific keywords. But with recent changes to Yahoo’s bidding model, that bottom-up data source is also gone.

However, the action in search plays out every day on a public stage, and there are some great tools available to track competitive activity: what keywords drive traffic to a specific site? How much traffic is each keyword driving? What is a competitor’s reach and share of visibility and traffic from specific keywords?

The question may have occurred to you, why do I need to benchmark in search marketing? Since my own campaigns are so trackable and performance can be optimized in real time against hard results, why spend scarce time and energy watching the other players?

Isn’t ROI its own benchmark?
A common misperception among senior marketers is that competitive intelligence for search engine marketing isn’t necessary in an ROI-based campaign where their own bottom-line performance is the ideal benchmark.

First, it’s a simple matter of making sure you’re not missing an opportunity another marketer has discovered. It’s possible to identify virtually every major keyword your competitors are using to connect with consumers. And those competitors can — and probably are — looking at the same information about your campaigns. This type of data helps marketers achieve more within their existing ROI goals by driving tactical adjustments to paid search campaigns, or focusing effort on the right keywords for natural search optimization projects.

Second, while you might be experiencing great success based on your ROI goals, are you sure your ROI goal is the right one? Competitive intelligence can open your eyes to how competitors apply different ROI measurements to their campaigns. Many search campaigns are measured on a very strict definition of ROI, considering only the last click leading to conversion, and counting only online conversions occurring within a limited timeframe.

If a competitor applies more sophisticated ROI methodology to account for store visits, phone leads and other fruits of the search marketing effort, though, this competitor could be much more aggressive in bidding, budget levels and the types of keywords used to engage consumers.

And what about my brand campaign?
Without competitive intelligence data, marketers that use search for branding cannot evaluate missed opportunities or determine how successful they’ve been. If you want to be known as the place to buy luxury vacations, for example, how can you gauge your success in search if you don’t know how often you’re showing up on your core keywords?

Competitive intelligence helps marketers determine share of visibility or share of voice in these programs, helping them understand just how effectively they are reaching potential customers searching on a core keyword. Think of searchers as in-market consumers that explicitly express interest in a particular topic or product, and the goals of search branding campaigns become clear.

These campaigns focus on maximizing exposure/impressions and engagement points across a full spectrum of keywords any time those consumers are actively engaging.

Competitive data enables marketers to measure visibility levels against competitors in both natural and paid search. It clarifies how well your program performs according to rank and frequency and also provides comparison points to individual competitors or your industry’s entire competitive set. You can also measure results by determining your share of clicks or share of traffic for a particular keyword or set of keywords versus a single competitor, multiple competitors or the entire competitive set.

I’m sold. Where can I find this data?
While there is not a comparable single data source to TNS Media Intelligence in search, there are many sources out there where you can get this valuable data. Next time, we’ll cover some of the competitive intelligence tools DoubleClick Performics uses to benchmarket for our clients’ ROI and branding campaigns.

Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick Performics (www.performics.com) and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at cbalzer@doubleclick.com.

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Chief marketers using paid and natural search engine marketing often ask, “If we rank well in the natural search results for the brand name, should my search team also buy my brand terms in paid search?”

Although a fair question, the answer is not as straightforward as it might seem. Think about these tactical and strategic considerations when weighing the value of paid search clicks on brand-name keywords.

Tactical considerations
Do other advertisers show up on your brand searches? Some marketers with unique, unambiguous brand names do not have resellers, affiliates, or competitors bidding on their brand terms. Others find, despite taking appropriate trademark protection measures at the search engines, that they must address the issue of other advertisers bidding on their brand and appearing in brand-name listings. Manufacturers or suppliers, for instance, often have legitimate resellers, affiliates, and channel partners buying their brand names. For large retailers, eBay or comparison-shopping sites may show up.

With recent enhancements to its “quality score” relevancy model, Google has cleared away many of these ads from brand searches, but other engines still frequently display multiple advertisers. If you face direct competition on your brand-name keywords, you will most likely benefit from maintaining a paid search presence on these keywords.

Even without competition in paid listings, other traffic and distribution considerations exist. How well does your natural search listing represent your brand? Does it rank first on each engine? Are the title and the description informative and in your brand voice? Are there other less favorable sites, negative reviews or PR, or even competitors prominently listed in the natural results? If any of these factors are less than ideal, you need to strongly consider how a well-written paid search ad can improve the situation.

Also remember that a lot of paid search clicks come from sites other than the engine’s or portal’s primary search site. Google AdWords listings reach other search sites ranging from AOL to Web search pages on NYTimes.com and even to domain parking sites. Yahoo! similarly distributes its paid search ads to a large network of search sites.

The amount of traffic coming from these nonengine pages varies greatly by keyword, but this traffic may not be directly replaceable with natural search. Be sure to quantify the volume and quality of this source of paid search clicks when evaluating the benefits of paid search brand clicks.

Consider a complementary paid search strategy
Think about the thousands of people who search for a popular brand name such as “L.L. Bean” or “Kohl’s” in a given day. They do not all think the same, so why should natural and paid search ads all look the same?

This simple insight suggests a segmentation strategy: Segment online and local/offline audiences by clearly differentiating the messaging in your paid and your natural listings. Give users a specific reason to choose one listing over another.

For instance, for consumers simply seeking your Website with a navigational or general intent, consider adding the “.com” form of your brand to the title of your home page. This will subtly differentiate the natural search listing as the best way to get to your online destination.

Next, satisfy other searchers’ more-specific expectations with well-crafted paid search listings. Multichannel merchants with multiple store locations, for example, should consider running ads catering to local shopping intent. Instead of the “Brand – Official Site” ad that often runs in parallel with a mirror-image natural listing, attract locally oriented searchers with a “Brand – Stores Near You” ad linking directly to a store finder page. Or better yet, create individually geo-targeted ads for each major store location with specific location words in the title (“Brand – Chicago locations”), the display URL (www.brand.com/Chicago), and ad copy that highlights local specials, store hours, or phone numbers. The ad will practically leap off the page to embrace users seeking this information, creating a strong sense of a brand by anticipating their needs and going the extra mile to connect with them.

This strategy can also reduce overall spend on paid search clicks by shifting purely navigational clicks to the natural search listing.

You and your search team can embrace this approach to better engage consumers, improve your program’s cost-effectiveness, and gain a leg up on the competition. Don’t shortchange your brand by simply considering how much you might save in click costs by relying solely on natural search clicks. Instead, decide on the best combination of ad messages and landing pages to directly engage a wide range of searchers with potentially vastly different intentions.

Cam Balzer is vice president of strategic planning at DoubleClick (www.performics.com) and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at cbalzer@performics.com.

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Multichannel Merchant A bit of number crunching speaks volumes about the quandary many search engine marketers find themselves in. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO, SEO), during the past two years spending on paid-placement search engine marketing has increased from $4.7 billion to $8.6 billion, or a little more than 70%. At the same time, search query volume has increased only 23%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Because spend is growing faster than query volume, advertisers are spending more on average per query, which translates into costlier keywords.

So marketers with tight budgets may find themselves slipping lower and lower on the search engine results pages, if not off them entirely. But they can't afford to idly sit by and watch competitors steal market share on their best keywords. This leads to a paradox: They can't afford to be in search, and they can't afford not to be in search.

The way out of this paradox is to manage keyword bids intelligently. An intelligent bidding strategy starts by ensuring that you're making money and continues by looking for ways to increase your profit. It entails 1) knowing the true value of your keywords, 2) managing your bids based on a conversion metric, and 3) proactively adjusting bids to segment your audience.

Calculating keyword value
Smart marketers assess the value of their keywords based on conversions, but many of them don't look beyond the average value of an immediate conversion. The truth is, however, that a lot of conversions happen well after the initial click.

Indeed, a comScore study released last year determined that, on average, 25% of searchers bought an item directly related to their search query — but of those buyers, 63% converted offline. Of the 37% who converted online, some may have done so at a later date, or from a different computer, or by phone.

You need to understand these lagged conversions and to credit them back to the initial keyword. Only then will you understand the keyword's true value.

While it's clear that keywords are more valuable than their immediate conversions, figuring out exactly how much more valuable is tricky. For offline conversions, try tracking how many times your site visitors use your store-locator function on your Website. You can also present special offers with printable coupons that have different codes for different keywords and engines. Putting those two together should give you an estimate of how many searchers are converting offline on a keyword basis.

For phone orders, consider setting up a phone tracking system with different phone numbers or extensions assigned to different keywords. You should also track how many times your searchers visit your “contact us” page. Again, combining these two data sets should give you a rough estimate of your keyword-referred phone conversion volume.

Many of your searchers may download a white paper from your Website or sign up for your e-mail newsletter, and a certain percentage of these users will ultimately convert. Use whatever data you have available on these alternate conversion actions to help you credit an appropriate percentage of these conversions back to their keywords.

You should also take into account the average lifetime value of a customer. And bear in mind that though some keywords may bring in fewer conversions than others, due to order sizes those few conversions may have a greater overall value to your business.

Managing bids based on metrics
Once you know what your keywords are worth, it's time to figure out parameters for managing them. Let's start by looking at a couple of common mistakes.

The first is managing by position. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN enable you to request the top position all the time. But while that position will give you the most clicks, those clicks will be expensive, and those clickers may not convert. In fact, you leave yourself vulnerable to the “compulsive clicker,” the person who immediately clicks on the first link he sees without regard to what the link says.

Another common mistake is managing by clicks. Google has an automated bidding manager that will optimize your bids to get you more clicks. The problem is that clicks don't make you money; they cost you money. Conversions are what make you money. Therefore you should manage your keywords around which ones convert best, in terms of both conversion value and conversion rate.

There are two general approaches here. The first is, if you have a fixed annual budget, to increase your bids on the listings that give you a higher return on investment and to take money away from your poor-performing ones. That will guarantee that for your best keywords you remain competitive on the results page.

The second approach is, if your cost per order (CPO) cannot exceed a certain limit but your overall budget is generous, to look for ways to eliminate waste. With this strategy, as long as you're meeting your CPO target, your campaign should be profitable. This gives you the opportunity to reinvest your earnings back into your campaign to increase your market share — and a self-funding campaign should be quite attractive to your chief financial officer.

You should also look for opportunities to raise your bids in such a way that your ROI may decline and you may exceed your CPO but you will nonetheless increase your net profit. Let's say you have a listing that, at position six, has a cost per click (CPC) of $0.50. You get 100 clicks a month, for which you pay $50, and one conversion with a total profit of $500. That's a CPO of $50 and a 10-to-1 ROI — not shabby!

But what if you double your CPC, to $1.00? Let's say that gets you to position three and boosts your click volume to 500 a month, costing you $500. If you have the same 1% conversion rate and $500 conversion value, that will result in five conversions for a total profit of $2,500.

Granted, you have a lower ROI at five to one and a higher CPO at $100, but you have five times the net profit you had before. We call that net search profit (NSP). And that may bring an even bigger smile to your CFO's face.

If you have a long keyword list across multiple search engines and different conversion actions with varying values, you may want to license an automated bid management technology or hire an agency that uses one. A good technology can not only manage bids based on a conversion-oriented success metric, but it can also assign weights to different conversion options.

Let's say you have one particular keyword that drives some searchers to purchase outright and others to sign up for your e-mail newsletter. You know that one in every four of those who sign up for your e-newsletter will eventually make a purchase. The right technology will count four newsletter sign-ups as one conversion and manage your bids accordingly.

Adjusting bids to segment your audience
Any technology that adjusts bids based on a success metric will adjust bids reactively. And reactive adjustments won't necessarily reflect that not only are some keywords worth more than others but also that each click on a given keyword has a different value.

To really bid intelligently, you must be proactive by sorting through your campaign data to look for patterns around the best conversions. Typically you'll notice different conversion behavior in different seasons, on different days of the week, at different times of day, in different geographic areas, and if you're running a campaign on MSN, by different demographics.

To adjust for different seasons, allocate extra money for your peak season and spread your remaining funds evenly throughout the rest of the year. As for time of day, Google and MSN let you automatically boost bids by day part, but this is another area where a sophisticated third-party technology can come in handy.

With Google and Yahoo! you can create a geo-targeted campaign, while with MSN you can boost your bids automatically on searches that occur in your preferred locations. If you're running a national campaign in Google or Yahoo! and notice that certain keywords perform better in certain areas, you should create campaigns targeted to those areas with higher keyword bids. The engines will show only the most relevant ad, not both.

As you slog through your data, you may find other odd conversion behaviors. Perhaps users of one ISP convert better than those of another ISP, or a certain engine converts better than the others. Again, be prepared to shift your budget around these segmentation parameters. The perfectly segmented campaign will have you in the top position in front of your best searchers and at lower positions the rest of the time.

On a broader level, be prepared not only to shift your search funds around but also to shift your marketing budget among the multiple channels. If your search campaign is performing better than your direct mail campaign, for instance, you shouldn't wait until the next year's media plan to reallocate your budget. In the new advertising age, you need a fluid budget that you can move across channels and a system that manages your budget within these channels.

Mark Simon is vice president of industry relations at Did-it, a New York-based search engine marketing and auctioned media management agency.

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Broadband and e-commerce go hand in hand.

Nearly two-thirds of Internet users in France ages 11 and over said they had purchased something online, according to a Q1 2008 survey by Médiamétrie. That was up from the six out of 10 respondents who said they were online buyers in the previous year's study.

In comparison, eMarketer estimates that nearly 68% of Internet users in the US ages 14 and older will buy something online this year.

Need data for presentations? eMarketer subscribers can download charts instantly — over 50,000 choices. Learn About an eMarketer Subscription

Why are the numbers so close for the two countries? For one thing, broadband is closely associated with online purchasing. eMarketer estimates that 58.2% of households in France will have broadband by the end of 2008, compared with 62.7% for the US.

Online buyer demographics are similar in both countries as well. The main difference is that in France, male Internet users are more likely to be online buyers than females. In the US, online buying is nearly equal by gender.

E-commerce in the US remains the province of young and affluent consumers, according to a February 2008 online shopping report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Individuals ages 50 and older accounted for only 29% of adult online buyers, and affluent Internet users were more likely to be online buyers than were users from lower-income households.

To learn how online merchants in the US will fare this year, read eMarketer's US Retail E-Commerce: Slower But Still Steady Growth report.

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