Tim Reis, head of mobile and social solutions for Google, broke out the mobile playbook for marketers Monday in a keynote at MediaPost’s OMMA Mobile event. The mobile strategy guide, which Google unveiled last month online, revolves around five questions that companies should ask themselves in approaching the medium: *How does mobile change the value proposition? *How does mobile impact digital destinations? *Is the organization adapting to mobile? *How should your marketing adapt to mobile? *How can you connect with your tablet audience? On the first question, Reis explained that marketers have to define their value proposition by figuring out what customers want to do with their business in mobile and delivering those services. As an example, he highlighted a Hotels.com TV spot showing a man using the site to book a room while in the act of skydiving. It vividly illustrates Hotel.com’s core proposition: the ability to book rooms quickly and easily. Reis also pointed to various factoids that underscore how mobile is well-suited to local marketing efforts. For instance, 95% of smartphone users have searched for local info and 90% of those people have acted on the search results they got. Google’s own data shows that about a third of all searches have local intent. Smartphones have also ushered in the era of “price transparency,’ where 45% are using their devices in-store to search for product information; about the same proportion compare prices. Google estimates that almost four in 10 shoppers who leave without making a purchase are influenced by their smartphone usage. All the information at a mobile shopper’s fingertips makes it crucial for retailers to respond by providing strong in-store service and offering unique products or bundles of products that make apples-to-apples price comparisons difficult. Retailers should also embrace mobile themselves by offering things like free Wi-Fi, equipping sales staff with mobile devices, and using QR codes to provide product information. When it comes to the mobile destination, the bottom line is creating a mobile-optimized site. Although almost 60% of mobile users say they will not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, the majority of sites still don’t have a mobile-tailored presence. “Do not neglect your mobile Web site,” said Reis -- pointing out that while apps may be sexy, their shelf life can be short. To create a sense of accountability for mobile within an organization, Google says that companies should appoint a “mobile champion” to create a mobile task force with people from different departments. More broadly, companies should look at how customers use mobile through focus groups and surveys, set aside budget, talk to agency partners and brainstorm internally. In adapting marketing to mobile, Reis keyed on mobile search. Google has seen mobile searches grow fivefold in the last two years, with 30% of all restaurant searches and 25% of movie searches now conducted on mobile devices. To help develop a mobile search strategy, Reis suggested that executives take five minutes to search for your brand in mobile as a consumer would. Then follow up with your agency about the results. He also emphasized the ad opportunity in mobile emerging from growing amount of usage in popular apps and sites. For instance, mobile users collectively spent the equivalent of 570 years daily playing “Angry Birds” and watched 600 million videos on YouTube. At the same time, only 1% of ad budgets are going to mobile. (The IAB estimated $1.6 billion, or about 5% of the $31 billion in 2011 U.S. Internet ad spending, went to mobile.) Reis also advised marketers to treat tablets -- which he called “the lovechild of the laptop computer and the phone” -- as a separate market within mobile. He noted that in two years, more than 200 million tablets will be sold globally, making it a sizeable audience in its own right. In addition, nearly three-quarters of tablet owners are using them to buy things on a weekly basis. With that in mind, brands should create campaigns and content geared specifically to tablets. Kraft, for instance, designed its Fork & Spoon app for the iPad, providing more in-depth content and games compared to its popular iFood Assistant app for smartphones. Since tablets are mostly used at home, campaigns can feature stronger calls to action, like “Shop now from your tablet.” Because of the larger screen size, tablets also lend themselves well to rich media advertising and video. Such efforts can also dovetail with so-called two-screen viewing in the living room as people access content on tablets that is related to what they are watching on TV.
Big data is everywhere. It’s become a fashionable topic du jour, and in an industry like search engine marketing, where data is everything, that trend holds especially true. One of my favorite quotes on the importance of data to the future of business is from Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, “Datarati are companies that have the edge in consumer data insight... Data is ubiquitous and cheap, analytical ability is scarce... The sexiest job in the next ten years will be statistician.” Though I’m no statistician, per se, I have found myself on dozens of occasions attempting to explain my line of work to friends and family. It’s easy for the lay observer to glance at a search results page, eyeball the text ads and dismiss them as simplistic. “Oh, those little ads on the page? That’s you?” has become a common type of response. Yes, that is me (and several thousand others like me), vying for attention, clicks and conversions among the more than 12 billion searches performed each month across major search engines. “Those little ads” are driven by an incredibly complex algorithm that determines which advertiser’s ad is shown based on relevance, historical performance, keyword bid, geographic targets, time of day/day of week -- all of which is calculated in 1/100th of a second. Though marketing smarts are still prerequisites to success, competing in the “little ads” industry has become a decidedly data-driven endeavor. Winning in paid search today means having a complete understanding of the data returned by search campaigns. One of the best opportunities for search marketers to produce outstanding results versus the competitive set, is through a methodical analysis of keyword versus query data. That analysis is called search query mining. Last spring I authored a column, “The Call for Smarter Search Analytics," where I identified search query mining as crucial for SEMs. In that piece I noted, “Query mining is the process of identifying raw queries which were mapped to keywords within the search auction, and then extracting long tail derivatives and negative keywords to be explicitly introduced across the programs to enhance overall performance. This is an essential tactic for advertisers who rely on broad match keyword portfolios or are launching new programs. Think of query mining as a way to help eliminate the unqualified noise, while enhancing the keyword portfolio with more precise phrase and exact match keyword targets.” In the time since that column was published, I’ve performed a sweep of query mining solutions available to advertisers today. There’s the default Google AdWords’ offering, which allows an export of raw user queries and the keywords and match types they were paired with. ClickEquations (which has recently been acquired by Acquisio) also has a very slick Keyword Zoom feature that allows some small-scale query mining natively within its UI. But the solution I have become most enamored with is QueryMiner, a Web-based tool that can easily analyze several hundred thousand rows of data in a matter of minutes. I connected recently with QueryMiner founder Chad Summerhill to get his take on the importance of search query mining and vision for how SEMs will utilize technologies like his. (Disclaimer: I do NOT have any personal or professional involvement in QueryMiner.)RD: Why did you decide to create QueryMiner? CS: Because search query mining at scale is extremely hard. It’s difficult to recognize patterns with the naked eye, or even [Microsoft] Excel, for that matter. When you have more than a screen’s worth of data, identifying patterns is impossible. RD: What is the value of using a solution like QueryMiner, and how does the software work, specifically? CS: QueryMiner promises to expose hard-to-find keywords and patterns among long-tail search queries. First and foremost, it surfaces problems with AdWords campaigns. The advertiser then has three options – either write better ads, produce better landing pages, or add the query as a campaign-level negative keyword. As far as product functionality, QueryMiner utilizes on-site conversions as a proxy for value. We unearth queries that are worthy of investigation based on their performance versus the campaign’s mean average; and that performance is determined by on-site conversion data. RD: Is QueryMiner focused on long-tail or campaign-level negative keyword identification? CS: Both really, though our solution really shines in identifying campaign-level negatives. We will soon be releasing a new “keyword expansion” module which will allow our users to leverage the tool to build out keyword-thin campaigns. Keyword expansion will additionally identify themes across user queries that can be used as proof points for new advertising copy… the applications for this data are really limitless, in our opinion. CS: Google’s opinion of relevance and our opinion of relevance are seriously different. A lot of irrelevant search queries get paired to broad match type keywords. Without sound strategies and the right tools, advertisers will waste a high percentage of spend on unqualified traffic. There’s no reason why any advertiser should be without query mining technology. We offer free analyses to demonstrate how much wasted spend exists, even across the tightest-managed campaigns.