Customer Experience Is More Important Than Advertising.

Saw the infographic below and thought I would share...  Customer Experience Is More Important Than Advertising.   

·       Only 4% of customers trust advertising…

·       40% of people began purchasing from a competitive brand because of its reputation for great customer service

·       55% are willing to recommend a company due to outstanding service,  more so than product or price

·       85% would pay up to 25% more to ensure a superior customer experience

Top Reasons Why Customers Switch Brands

·       Interaction with a rude employee

·       Unexpected charge or fee

·       Poor quality of product or service

·       79% of customers told others about their bad experience

A full 85% of customers who had a bad customer service experience wanted to warn others about doing business with the company. 66% of customers wanted to discourage others from doing business with the company. 55% of customers wanted to vent their anger. But only 24% of customers actually tried to contact the company to get the issue resolved.

 

Study: 51% of U.S. web traffic fraudulent

Dive Brief: 

· Solve Media, a company that places ads in captchas, has reported that 51% of all U.S. web traffic was fraudulent in Q3. 

· That figure is an 8% increase from Q2 and the first time fraudulent traffic has hit more than 50%, according to Solve’s Quarterly Bot Traffic Market Advisory.

· Solve Media also reported an uptick in fraudulent traffic on mobile, going from 22% in Q2 to 27% in Q3.

Willie Sutton summed it the current fraudulent web traffic problem best.  50 years ago.  "Why do you rob banks?"  "Because that is where the money is..."   

I suppose that sentiment sums up a certain percentage of society.  However I am especially disappointed because digital fraud has made me line of work a little harder.  While the system is not fool proof, TV advertising, by and large, is “as advertised”.  On network TV you buy an ad on one of the four networks, receive a schedule and can flip the channel and see you ad running “as advertised”.

With digital marketing products like targeted display, it is a little more complicated.   You place your buy through a network or exchange and it is possible that your ad will run on one of hundreds of web sites, with no “schedule” that lets you know to tune in at 10:08 and see your ad.

You rely on a report that your vendor (agency, ad network, exchange) provides that shows X number of impressions ran, Y number of clicks, etc.

This is where transparency comes in.  To be fully transparent, this report would also include site/URL level reporting. 

Your behavioral network reported 100,000 impressions.

32,405 impressions ran on AAAA.com with 32 clicks

21,207 impressions ran on BBBB.com with 73 clicks, etc.

But many networks are not transparent.  They choose to only provide summary level detail, not site level.  This is where the Willie Sutton’s of the digital world play.   If you cannot access the URL where your ad runs, how do you know the site and the traffic is legitimate? 

Ad networks include sites on their list based on a variety of factors, like number of unique visitors, page views, demographics, etc. 

With today’s technology, it is easy enough to build a web site with little or no content, but with multiple ad placements, and then program a bot to pound away visiting the web site and driving up metrics and clicks.  There is little to no human traffic, it is all fabricated.  But you can run a report that documents 100,000 page views, 29,212 unique visitors, etc.

Some responsibility lies at the feet of the individuals running the networks.  Shouldn’t they vet each and every web site prior to adding them to the network?  That sounds good, but there are 644 million web sites operating today (and growing). 

Most vetting today is done by algorithms, not humans.  So while human intervention would help, it will not solve the problem.  (And for some, there is a disincentive to discover this truth.  If you are selling a 0.89% CTR, do you really want to know?)

The most powerful tool we have to ferret out these dummy sites and networks is sunlight.

Full discloser brings all the secrets out into the daylight for all to see.  There will still be sites that attempt to game the system, but the more access you, the advertiser, have to this list of sites, the better you can decide on whether or not the individual site is right for your campaign.

Many networks are offering full discloser and are being rewarded by the additional revenue advertisers are channeling their way.  The digital ecosystem is moving in the direction of full disclosure, but we (the marketers and advertisers) need to expedite the process by only placing our advertising dollars with the networks that report our campaigns in full sunlight.

“Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself.”

            -- Joel Hawes

Pixalate Cracking Down On Click Fraud, Bot Traffic and Ad Viewability

“It doesn’t do any good to sit up and take notice if all you do is keep on sitting.”

As we all know, the mobile revolution has arrived.  For the previous three months in a row, the mobile traffic to KSAT properties exceeds the traffic generated on the “mother ship” – the desktop version of KSAT.com.  Life has changed and we embrace it.  “It doesn’t do any good to sit up and take notice if all you do is keep on sitting.”

It is no longer a case of whether or not your web site should support mobile devices.  Mobile support is what the consumer expects. 

The most compelling reason to focus on mobile is that consumers are moving their digital engagement away from desktops and onto mobile devices – Smartphones and Tablets.  Fourth Quarter 2011 was a watershed moment – it was the first quarter that mobile devices outsold desktop/laptops.  “Total worldwide PC sales fell 14 percent to 76.3 million units in the first quarter, IDC said on Wednesday, exceeding its forecast of a 7.7 percent drop. It was the fourth consecutive quarter of year-on-year declines…”   

33%Of Paid-Search Clicks Coming From Mobile Devices

·       “U.S. advertisers have already spent nearly 50% more on paid-search ads in 2013 compared with the previous year, with click-through rates rising 14.1%.”

·       Consumer behavior drove brand marketers and retailers to make search marketing investments early in the season -- in particular, the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. By getting a jump on the holidays, brands managed to connect with those consumers starting their shopping earlier, due to the reduced number of post-Cyber Monday shopping days this year. So far among Kenshoo clients, the 2013 shopping season generated record-high online revenue for U. S. paid-search retailers with a 30 7% YoY increase compared with 2012. 

Reaching the Mobile Holiday Shopper

Consumers are so increasingly connected that some argue we never actually go shopping -- we are always shopping. Consider the following:

• 44% of all email opens currently occur on mobile devices
• More than 1 billion smartphones were in consumers' pockets at the beginning of 2013
• 4 out of 5 minutes on a smartphone are spent engaging with an app
• 1 in 3 minutes spent online is now spent on devices other than PCs. Marketers must have both, a mobile app and a mobile Web site, or they run the risk of alienating their customer base
• Smartphone ownership tipped the scales to comprise 58% of all mobile phones in the U.S. in 2012 and is expected to reach 83% of all mobile ownership by 2017
• 62% of marketers will increase their budgets for mobile in 2013

Here is a link to download the eMarketer 2014 Snapshot of Digital Media Usage.  Some of the highlights:

·       Growth in Facebook usage has slowed to a crawl, with a 3% increase expected for 2014.

·       Mobile is hot.  Double digit growth against all social media sites.

·       98.2% if smartphone users are mobile internet users.

·       Video consumption continues to grow on mobile devices.

·       51.8% of tablet users will buy online this year.

Peter Townshend of The Who said it best in Going Mobile.

“I'm goin' home
And when I wanna go home
I'm goin' mobile”

He was only 42 years ahead of his time… 

How the Mobile Category is Affecting Holiday Shopping

One of the most frequent questions I receive, especially this time of year, revolves around how the mobile category is affecting holiday shopping.  Here are links to three articles that may provide a little clarity! 

Why You're More Likely To Buy Something When Shopping On Your iPad

·       People tend to increase the value of an item the moment they take ownership of it. Psychologists call this the "endowment effect."

·       One recent study found that people who touched an item felt an increased sense of ownership toward it. A follow-up study found that simply imagining touching an object produced the same possessive feeling.

·       In the iPad condition, the endowment effect thrived. On average, test participants using the tablet wanted to sell their item for significantly more than those using the laptop (roughly $213 to $154). Pressing a finger against a digital image on a fake website in a laboratory--that's all it took to make people feel like they owned an item, and to value it more as a result.

People window-shop on their iPhones, but actually buy things on their iPads

·        Americans spent $3 billion shopping online on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and a quarter of those sales were made with smartphones and tablets, according to Adobe….

·       The trend really applies more specifically to Apple’s iPhones, which drove $126 million in sales, and iPads, which were responsible for $417 million…

·        Adobe said that online shopping on Black Friday peaked between 11am and noon ET, with $150 million in sales that hour…

HolidayWrap: Mobile Jumps in Visits, Order Size & Sales

·       While mobile traffic from Thanksgiving through Sunday accounted for much (41%) of all online traffic, it increased more than a third (35%) from the same period last year, based on the IBM data.

·       Survey Analytics found that while many (62%) of Black Friday shoppers did their shopping online, a third (33%) shopped on mobile phones.

·       Smartphone…  visits increased 69%, page views increased 103%, average order size increased 16% and mobile sales increased 258%.

 

 

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought."
Buddha

 

The Future of Digital: 2013

Fellow Marketers of Digital Excellence

A link to a great presentation from Business Insider below.  A few highlights.

·       "New Media" dwarfs "Old Media" in market value.

·       The most important trend is multiple devices and screens.

·       PCs are now the small share of connected devices.

·       And PC vendors are getting smoked.

·       60% of online devices are now smartphones or tablets.

·       Screen fragmentation creates opportunities.

·       Mobile is the only media that is growing.

·       20% of Internet traffic is mobile.

·       38 million US Facebook users visit only on mobile.

·       Mobile drives all of Facebook's revenue growth.

·       250 million tablets will be shipped in 2013.

·       60% of all new computing devices run Android.

·       Apple has a big edge in eCommerce traffic.

·       There’s only one thing you need to remember about media – “Attention is monetizable”.

·       Money follows eyeballs.

·       Eyeballs are moving to digital, especially mobile.

·       And the money is following.

·       Digital now accounts for ¼ of total ad spend.

·       43% of ad revenue at 20 biggest companies is digital.

·       Digital spending is now bigger than TV.

·       Google is now bigger than all newspapers and magazines combined.

·       Print revenue has fallen off a cliff.

·       TV may be next.

 The Future of Digital: 2013  

 If you are interested, I have this PowerPoint presentation, but the file is very large – 30mg.  I will be happy to send you an electronic copy via the mail… 

A/B Testing Helps With More Than Web Design

Digital Marketers

Working in the winter wonderland… 

Inspired by the book A/BTesting: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers, here is a link to a great article - 71Things to A/B Test.  Both are from Optimizely, a company that specializes in providing tools for digital marketers to enable A/B testing of digital products and campaigns. 

 

I was working with a client recently who asked me how often I would change the creative for an online campaign.  The beauty of living in today’s digital age is that you don’t have to “change creative”.  Ad servers give you the option of launching multiple creatives across a single campaign at the same time.  Then let the consumers tell you which one resonates best with them. 

 

So you are buying 500,000 impressions for your client.  Why not start out with four different creative ideas and allocate 125,000 impressions per creative?  Within a fairly short period of time – say two weeks – you will be able to see which ad is driving the desired consumer behavior.  You then optimize your campaign by moving the impressions from the underperforming creative over to the creative(s) that are working best.

 

The beauty of the digital universe is that it is designed for change.  Almost instantaneous results are at our fingertips.  And “It doesn’t do any good to sit up and take notice if all you do is keep on sitting.”  

Some of my favorite ideas in this article:

·       Test multiple Calls To Action on a landing page against a page with one CTA.

·       Test different headline text. Try variations that are straightforward against ones that are abstract, goofy, or creative.

·       Test different types of images on your landing page. People versus product is a good place to start.

·       Test the order of menu items in your site navigation.

·       Everybody loves free stuff. Try a special offer, discount, or promotion to increase sign-ups

·       Test the headlines on your paid campaigns to see which ones get the most clicks.

·       Change the size and placement of social icons to see what compels users to share more often.

·       Test length and copy of your email subject lines.

There are a lot of great ideas in this article.  There are even more in the book.  If you would like a copy of A/BTesting: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers, send me an email I will send you a copy.

Enjoy!