Advantages and disadvantages of paid search marketing

The Advantages and disadvantages of paid search marketing PPC

 

Paid search listings, or sponsored links, are very important to achieve visibility in search engines when an organisation is in a competitive market, given the competition to appear on the first page of the natural listing for target keyphrases.

As a result, many companies with an established paid search programme may generate more visits from paid search than SEO, although this wouldn’t be true for companies that are class leaders in SEO.

Advantages of paid search marketing

The main benefit of paid search marketing are:

● The advertiser is not paying for the ad to be displayed. As we explained at the start of wastage is much lower with paid search compared to traditional advertising. Cost is only incurred when an ad is clicked on and a visitor is directed to the advertiser’s website.Hence it’s a cost-per-click (CPC) model! However, there are increasingly options for paid search marketing using other techniques – Google also offers CPM (site targeting) and CPA (pay-per-action) options on the Google Display Network (GDN),where contextual ads are displayed on third-party sites relevant to the content on a page.

● PPC advertising is highly targeted. The relevant ad with a link to a destination web page is only displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase, so there is limited wastage compared to other media. YouTube users can also be targeted through Google’s ‘promoted video’ PPC option. Users responding to a particular keyphrase or reading related content have high intent or interest and so tend to be good quality leads.

● Good accountability. With the right tracking system, the ROI for individual keywords can be calculated.

● Predictable. Traffic, rankings and results are generally stable and predictable in comparison with SEO.

● Technically simpler than SEO. Position is based on combination of bid amount and quality score. Whereas SEO requires long-term, technically complex work on page optimisation, site re-structuring and link building.

● Remarketing. Google offers retargeting through cookies placed on the searchers computer to display ads on the content network after someone has clicked on a paid search ad or visited a specific page on a site as a reminder to act.These can be effective in boosting the conversion rate to lead or sale.

● Speed. PPC listings get posted quickly, usually in a few days (following editor review). SEO results can take weeks or months to be achieved. More over, when a website is revised for SEO, rankings will initially drop while the site is re-indexed by the search engines.

● Branding. Tests have shown that there is a branding effect with PPC, even if users do not click on the ad. This can be useful for the launch of products or major campaigns.

Disadvantages of paid search marketing

The main disadvantages of paid search marketing are:

● Competitive and expensive. Since pay-per-click has become popular, some companies may get involved in bidding wars that drive bids up to an unacceptable level. Some phrases such as ‘life insurance’ can exceed £10 per click.

● Inappropriate. For companies with a lower budget or a narrower range of products on which to generate lifetime value, it might not be cost-effective to compete.

● Requires specialist knowledge. PPC requires a knowledge of configuration, bidding options and of the reporting facilities of different ad networks. Internal staff can be trained, but they will need to keep up-to-date with changes to the paid search services.

● Time consuming. To manage a PPC account can require daily or even hourly checks on the bidding in order to stay competitive. This can amount to a lot of time. The tools and best practice varies frequently, so keeping up-to-date is difficult.

● Irrelevant. Sponsored listings are only part of the search engine marketing mix. Many search users do not click on these because they don’t trust advertisers, although these are mainly people involved in marketing! Best practice in planning and managing paid search marketing With PPC, as for any other media, media buyers carefully evaluate the advertising costs in relation to the initial purchase value or lifetime value they feel they will achieve from the average customer. As well as considering the cost-per-click (CPC), you need to think about the conversion rate when the visitor arrives at your site. Clearly, an ad could be effective in generating click-throughs or traffic, but not achieve the outcome required on the website such as generating a lead or online sale. This could be because there is a poor incentive call-to-action or the profile of the visitors is simply wrong. One implication of this is that it will often be more cost-effective if targeted microsites or landing pages are created specifically for certain keyphrases to convert users to making an enquiry or sale. These can be part of the site structure, so clicking on a ‘car insurance’ ad will take the visitor through to the car insurance page on a site rather than a home page.

shows how cost-per-click can differ between different generic (e.g. ‘car insurance’) and specific (e.g ‘women’s car insurance’) keywords, as well as the impact of different conversion rates on the overall CPA. The cost of PPC search in competitive categories and why companies will strive to maximise their quality score to help reduce costs. 

The cost per customer acquisition (CPA) can be calculated as follows:

Cost per acquisition = one hundred over cost–per–click conversion rate % times cost per click. Given the range in costs, two types of strategy can be pursued in PPC search engine advertising.

If budget permits, a premium strategy can be followed to compete with the major competitors who are bidding the highest amounts on popular keywords. Such a strategy is based on being able to achieve an acceptable conversion rate once the customers are driven through to the website. A lower-cost strategy involves bidding on lower-cost, less popular phrases. These will generate less traffic, so it will be necessary to devise a lot of these phrases to match the traffic from premium keywords.

How Paid search marketing works

 How Paid search marketing works

Although SEO has proved a popular form of digital marketing, paid search marketing is still of great relevance since it gives much more control on the appearance in the listings subject to the amount bid and the relevance of the ad. 

Each of the main search engines has its own paid advertising programme:

● Google Adwords (www.google.com/adwords);

● Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! adCenter (http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com).

What is paid search marketing? We explained the principles of paid search marketing or sponsored links in the introduction to the section on search engine marketing. 

Although we said that the main model for paying for sponsored listings in the search engines is pay-per-click marketing, we have called this section paid search marketing since there are, increasingly, other options for payment on what is known as the content network.

Paid search content network

Paid listings are also available through the display network of the search engines such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Content Match. These contextual ads are automatically displayed according to the page content. 

They can be paid for on a CPC, CPM or CPM (pay-per-action) basis and include not only text ads but also options for graphical display ads or video ads. Google generates around a third of its revenue from the content network, so there is a significant amount of expenditure on the network.

Trusted feeds

Trusted feeds or paid for inclusion is no longer significant to search advertising. However, we include reference to them since a similar approach is used by retailers to include their prod-ucts in Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs), where product information such as pricing and images are uploaded to Google’s servers for display in Google AdWords and within Google Shopping (see documentation for Google Merchant Blog for the latest techniques).

What controls position in paid search?

In early pay-per-click programs, the relative ranking of sponsored listings was simply based on the highest bidded cost-per-click (CPCs) for each keyword phrase. So it was a pure auction arrangement with the cost-per-click dependent on the balance of the extent of competition in the marketplace against the revenue or profit that can be generated dependent on conversion rates to sale and retention.

The inflated CPCs at the time of writing in different product sectors show how competitive Google AdWords is. Since only a small proportion of visitors to a site clicking from the ad will convert, it is difficult to generate a positive return-on-investment for these generic terms.

Contrary to what many web users may believe, today it is not necessarily the company which is prepared to pay the most per click that will get top spot. The search engines also take the relative click-through rates of the ads dependent on their position (lower positions naturally have lower click-through rates) into account when ranking the sponsored links, so ads which do not appear relevant, because fewer people are clicking on them, will drop down or may even disappear off the listing. The analysis of CTR to determine position is part of the quality score, a concept originally developed by Google but now integrated as part of the Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! search networks.

Google quality score

Understanding quality score is the key to successful paid search marketing. You should consider its implications when you structure the account and write copy or review performance with an agency.

Google developed the quality score because it understood that delivering relevance through the sponsored links was essential to its user’s experience, and the company’s profits.

The AdWords system works best for everybody; advertisers, users, publishers and Google too when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible we call this idea ‘relevance’.

We measure relevance in a simple way: 

Typically, the higher an ad’s quality score, the more relevant it is for the keywords to which it is tied. When your ads are highly relevant, they tend to earn more clicks, move higher in Ad Rank and bring you the most success.

A summary formula for the Google quality score is:

Quality score = (keyword’s click-through rate, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance, speed and other methods of assessing relevance) So, higher click-through rates achieved through better targeted creative copy are rewarded, as is relevance of the landing page (Google now sends out AdBots-Google to check them out). 

More relevant ads are also rewarded through ad text relevance, which is an assessment of the match of headline and description to the search term. 

Finally, the keyword relevance 

is the match of the triggering keyword to the search term entered. If you have ever wondered why the number of paid ads above the natural listings varies from none to three, then it’s down to the quality score you can only get the coveted positions for keywords which have a sufficiently high quality score you can’t ‘buy your way to the top’ as many think.

 

Advantages and disadvantages of SEO

Advantages of SEO 

The main benefits of SEO are:

● Significant traffic driver. showed that search marketing can attract a significant proportion of visitors to the site if companies are successful in implementing it.

● Highly targeted. Visitors are searching for particular products or services so will often have a high intent to purchase they are qualified visitors.

● Potentially low-cost visitors. There are no media costs for ad display or click-through. Costs arise solely from the optimisation process where agencies are paid to improve positions in the search results.

● Dynamic. The search engine robots will crawl the home page of popular sites daily, so new content is included relatively quickly for the most popular pages of a site (less so for deep links).

Disadvantages of SEO

Despite the targeted reach and low cost of SEO, it is not straightforward as these disadvantages indicate:

● Lack of predictability. Compared with other media SEO is very unreliable in terms of the return on investment it is difficult to predict results for a given investment and is highly competitive.

 ● Time for results to be implemented. The results from SEO may take months to be achieved, especially for new sites.

● Complexity and dynamic nature. The search engines take hundreds of factors into account, yet the relative weightings are not published, so there is not a direct correlation between marketing action and results ‘it is more of an art than a science’. Furthermore, the ranking factors change through time.

● Ongoing investment. Investment needed to continue to develop new content and generate new links.

● Poor for developing awareness in comparison with other media channels. 

Searchers already have to be familiar with a brand or service to find it. However, it offers the opportunity for less well-known brands to ‘punch above their weight’ and to develop awareness following click-through. For these reasons, investment in paid search may also be worthwhile.

Best practice in planning and managing SEO

In this section we will review six of the main approaches used to improve the results from SEO covering different search engine ranking factors. We describe these in some detail since is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing techniques, so it’s important to understand that SEO is a technical discipline and that the techniques used change through time.

For this reason SEO is often outsourced to a specialist SEO agency, although some companies believe they can gain an edge through having an internal specialist who understands the company’s customers and markets well. You will see that some of the on-page optimisation techniques recommended in this section are relatively straightforward and it is important to control brand and proposition messages. 

Content editors and reviewers within a company therefore need to be trained to understand these factors and incorporate them into their copywriting

1 Search engine submission

While some unscrupulous search marketing companies offered to register companies in the ‘Top 1000 search engines’, in reality registering in the top 5–10 search engines of each country an organisation operates in will probably account for more than 95 per cent of the potential visitors. Most existing companies and even startups will be automatically included in the search index since the search engine robots will follow links from other sites that link to them and do not require submission services. 

Google allegedly places new sites 

in a review status sometimes referred to as the Google sandbox effect. However, Google search engineers deny the existence of this and explain it is a natural artefact produced by new sites having limited links, history and so reputation. Either way, it is important to remember this constraint when creating startup companies or separate unlined microsites for a campaign since you may have to rely on paid search to gain SERPS visibility.

2 Index inclusion

Although a search engine robot may visit the home page of a site, it will not necessarily crawl all pages or assign them equal weight in terms of page rank or relevance. So when auditing sites as part of an SEO initiative, SEO agencies will check how many pages are included within the search engine index for different search engines. This is known as index inclusion

Among the potential reasons for not gaining complete index inclusion are:

● Technical reasons why the search robots do not crawl all the pages, such as the use of SEO-unfriendly content management system with complex URLs.

● Pages identified as webspam or of less importance or considered to be duplicate content which are then contained in what used to be known as the supplemental index in Google which don’t rank so highly. In these cases it is sometimes best to use a specific ‘canonical’ meta tag which tells the search engine which the primary page is. If you are a multinational company with different content sites for different countries, then it is challenging to deliver the relevant content for local audiences with use of regional domains tending to work best.

Companies can check the index inclusion through:

● Reviewing web analytics data which will show the frequency with which the main search robots crawl a site.

● Using web analytics referrer information to find out which search engines a site’s visitors originate from, and the most popular pages.

● Checking the number of pages that have been successfully indexed on a site. For example, in Google the search https://secretfocustips.blogspot.com/ lists all the pages of Dave’s site indexed by Google and gives the total number in the top-right of the SERPs.

● Using Google Webmaster Tools, a free service that site owners can register with which shows pages indexed and potential webspam problems such as a penalty.

What is SEO? How to improve your search Ranking on Google search engine

 What is SEO? 

How to improve your search 

Ranking on Google search engine 

Improving positions in the natural listings is dependent on marketers understanding the process whereby search engines compile an index by sending out spiders or robots to crawl around sites that are registered with that search engine.

The technology harnessed to create the natural listings involves these main processes:

1 Crawling. The purpose of the crawl is to identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have changed. Crawling is performed by robots (bots) that are also known as spiders. These access web pages and retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis and indexing.

Although the terms ‘bot’ and ‘spider’ give the impression of something physical visiting a site, the bots are simply software processes running on a search engine’s server which request pages, follow the links contained on that page and create a series of page references with associated URLs. This is a recursive process, so each link followed will find additional links which then need to be crawled.

2 Indexing. An index is created to enable the search engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing the query typed by the searcher. Rather than searching each page for a query phrase, a search engine ‘inverts’ the index to produce a lookup table of documents containing particular words.

The index information consists of phases stored within a document and also other information characterising a page such as the document’s title, meta description, Page Rank, trust or authority, spam rating, etc.

For the keywords in the document, additional attributes will be stored such as semantic markup (<h1>, <h2> headings denoted within HTML), occurrence in link anchor text, proximity, frequency or density and position in document, etc.

The words contained in link anchor text ‘pointing’ to a page are particularly important in determining search rankings.

3 Ranking or scoring. The indexing process has produced a lookup of all the pages that contain particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms of relevance. 

Ranking of the document to assess the most relevant set of documents to return in the SERPs occurs in real time for the search query entered. First, relevant documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the index at a particular data centre, then a rank in the SERPs for each document will be computed based on parsing many ranking factors, of which we highlight the main ones in later sections.

4 Query request and results serving. The familiar search engine interface accepts the searcher’s query. The user’s location is assessed through their IP address and the query is then passed to a relevant data centre for processing. Ranking then occurs in real time for a particular query to return a sorted list of relevant documents and these are displayed on the search results page.

Search engine ranking factors

Google has stated that it uses more than 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithms.These include positive ranking factors that help boost position and negative factors or filters which are used to remove search engine spam (also known as webspam) from the index where SEO companies have used unethical approaches such as automatically creating links to mislead the Google algorithms.

The importance of ranking factors are much disputed by SEOs since with so many factors it is difficult to isolate their impact to prove a correlation, or more important a causative relationship between.

The interested should read the balanced article bdiscussing the The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors. In this coverage we will summarise the current thinking based on Dave Chaffey’s more than 15 years of experience as an SEO consultant and publisher.

At a top level, the two most important factors for good ranking positions in all the main search engines are:

● Matching between web page copy and the key phrases searched. The main factors to optimise on are ‘keyword density’, keyword formatting, keywords in anchor text and the document meta-data including page title tags. The SEO process to improve results in this area is known as on-page optimisation. We will cover some of details of best practice for this process in a topic later in this section.

● Links into the page (inbound or backlinks). Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for this page. So pages and sites with more external links from other sites will be ranked more highly. The quality of the link is also important, so if links are from a site with a good reputation and relevant context Search engine ranking factorsGoogle has stated that it uses more than 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithms. 

These include positive ranking factors that help boost position and negative factors or filters which are used to remove search engine spam (also known as webspam) from the index where SEO companies have used unethical approaches such as automatically creating links to mislead the Google algorithms.

The importance of ranking factors 

are much disputed by SEOs since with so many factors it is difficult to isolate their impact to prove a correlation, or more important a causative relationship between. The interested should read the balanced article by  discussing the The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors. In this coverage we will summarise the current thinking based on Dave Chaffey’s more than 15 years of experience as an SEO consultant and publisher. 

At a top level, the two most important factors for good ranking positions in all the main search engines are:

● Matching between web page copy and the key phrases searched. The main factors to optimise on are ‘keyword density’, keyword formatting, keywords in anchor text and the document meta-data including page title tags.

 

The SEO process to improve results in this area is known as on-page optimisation. We will cover some of details of best practice for this process in a topic later in this section.

● Links into the page (inbound or backlinks). Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for this page. So pages and sites with more external links from other sites will be ranked more highly. The quality of the link is also important, so if links are from a site with a good reputation and relevant context.

Phase 1

Determine relevant documents set.Rank in order of relevance Search query string User searches Query/Rank processes SERPs

Phase 2

Extract document titles and snippets. Return as SERPs Crawl control Crawlers Inverted Document and index servers link history Crawl/Index processes The WWW web pages and documents/media Inverted index servers.

Level of investment in digital assets

 Level of investment in digital assets

The digital assets are the creative that support a campaign such as that they include:

● display ad or affiliate marketing creative such as banners and skyscrapers;

● microsites;

● email templates;

● video, audio and other interactive media such as Flash animations, games or screensavers which form a microsite.

As with traditional media, there is a tension between spend on the advertising creative and the media space purchased to run the executions. There is a danger that if spend on media is too high, then the quality of the execution and the volume of digital assets produced will be too low.

Integration into overall media schedule or plan

In common with other communications media, digital media are most effective when they are deployed as part of an integrated marketing communications approach. 

Describe integrated marketing communications as: 

The concept under which a company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent message about the organisation and its products.

The characteristics of integrated marketing communications have been summarised by Pickton and Broderick s the 4Cs of: 

1.Coherence – different communications are logically connected.

2.Consistency – multiple messages support and reinforce, and are not contradictory. 

3.Continuity – communications are connected and consistent through time.

5.Complementary – synergistic, or the sum of the parts is greater than the whole! The 4Cs also act as guidelines for how communications should be integrated. 

Further guidelines on integrated marketing communications from Pickton and Broderick that can be usefully applied to digital marketing are the following. 

● Integrated communications planning is based on clearly identified marketing communications objectives (see later section). 

● Digital marketing should involve management of all forms of contact , which includes management of both outbound communications, such as banner advertising or direct email, and inbound communications such as email enquiries. 

● Internet marketing should utilise a range of promotional tools . These are the digital media channels. 

● A range of media should be used to communicate consistent messages about opportunities for customers to interact with a brand online. Marketing managers need to consider the most effective mix of online and offline media channels to encourage interactions and drive traffic to their online presence. 

● The communications plan should involve careful selection of the most effective promotional and media mix.

Additionally, we can say that integrated marketing communications should be used to support customers through the entire buying process, across different media.

Planning integrated marketing communications 

The Account Planning Group ( www.apg.org.uk ), in its definition of media planning, high lights the importance of the role of media planning when they say that the planner:

 Needs to understand the customer and the brand to unearth a key insight for the communication/solution Relevance.

As media channels have mushroomed and communication channels have multiplied, it has become increasingly important for communication to cut through the cynicism and connect with its audience Distinctiveness. The planner can provide the edge needed to ensure the solution reaches out through the clutter to its intended audience Targeted reach.

Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

It is seldom the case that a customer will go straight to a site and purchase, or that they will perform a single search and then purchase. Instead, they will commonly perform multiple searches and will be referred to the ultimate purchase site by different types. This consumer behaviour is indicated by This shows that someone looking to purchase a car may be referred to a site several times via different digital communications channels.

A common approach to attributing the influence of different online media a customer consumes before purchase has been the last-click method of digital media channel attribution introduced well by Lee. Gives an example of using a social media marketing tool to assess effectiveness on a last click basis.

 It shows that when a business shares content across different social networks they can review how many clicks and conversion to leads are generated. In this example, Facebook is most effective by volume.

However, Lee explains that this can give a misleading picture of which marketing channels are effective

In an analysis of visitors to an airline site for non-brand terms and PPC for brand terms are more significant when looking at the contribution of all sources. Referring to you can see this has the benefit that we don’t credit multiple affiliates with sale for affiliate marketing only Affiliate 2 is credited with the sale, a process known as digital media deduplication. But it has the disadvantage that it simplifies the reality of previous influence or digital media ‘assists’ and previous referrals influenced by other customer touchpoints on other sites are ignored, such as the natural search or display ad.

So, for the most accurate interpretation of the contribution of different media, the online marketer needs to use tagging and analysis tools to try to build the best picture of which channels are influencing sales and then weight the media accordingly. For example, a more sophisticated approach is to weight the responsibility for sale across several different referrers according to a model so just considering the affiliates, Affiliate 1 might be credited with 30 per cent of the sales value and Affiliate 2 with 70 per cent, for example.

This approach is useful since it indicates the value of display advertising a common phenomenon is the halo effect where display ads indirectly influence sales by creating awareness and stimulating sale at a later point in time.These are sometimes known as ‘viewthrough’ or post-impression effects.

These allocation approaches won’t be possible if agencies are using different tracking tools and reporting separately on different media channels for example, the ad agency reports on display advertising, the search agency on pay-per-click, the affiliate manager on affiliate sales.

Instead it is important to use a unified tracking system which typically uses common tags across all media channels. Common unified tracking solutions that consider all media are available from the likes of Atlas, Doubleclick Dart and some of the larger media agencies.

Further sophistication of tracking will be worthwhile for companies investing millions in digital media in order to understand the customer journey and the contribution of media. 

A useful analysis to perform is in the formThis anonymised example shows the importance of display ads, for example, and how different channels support each other.

It can then be worthwhile understanding the role of individual channels better, and in particular paid search. Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of terms. The repeated use of different types of search terms for a single customer (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here). 

The two columns on the right show how it is unrealistic to attribute the sale to the last search since the influence of the assists isn’t shown.

Achieving and measuring repeat visits is worthwhile since, according to on average, purchase intent sees a double digit increase after someone has been to a site more than once. For some promotional techniques, tagging of links on third-party sites will not be practical.

These will be grouped together as unattributed referrers. For word-of-mouth referrals, we have to estimate the amount of spend for these customers through traditional market research techniques such as questionnaires or asking at point of sale.

The use of tagging enables much better insights on the effectiveness of promotional techniques than is possible in traditional media, but due to its complexity it requires a large investment in staff time and tracking software to achieve it. It is also very dependent on cookie deletion rates. To see how a budget can be created for a digital campaign.

Selecting the right mix of digital media communications tools

 Selecting the right mix of digital media communications tools

When selecting the mix of digital media for a campaign or longer-term investments, marketers will determine the most appropriate mix based on their knowledge built up through experience of previous campaigns and taking input from their advisers such as experienced colleagues or agency partners.Mecri and Hafa 2022 have suggested that many online marketing failures have resulted from poor control of media spending. 

The communications mix should be optimised to minimise the cost of acquisition. If an online intermediary has a cost acquisition of £100 per customer while it is gaining an average commission on each sale of £5 then. Cleary , the company will not be profitable unless it can achieve a large number of repeat orders from the customer. Suggested that e-commerce sites should focus on narrow segments that have demonstrated their attraction to a business model. 

They believe that promotion techniques such as affiliate deals with narrowly targeted sites and email campaigns targeted at segments grouped by purchase histories and demographic traits are 10–15 times. more likely than banner ads on generic portals to attract prospects who click through to purchase.

Alternatively, pay-per-click ads on Google may have a higher success rate

 When this experience isn’t there, which is often the case with new digital media opportunities, it is important to do a more structured evaluation including factors such as the ability of each medium to influence perceptions, drive a response, the cost of response and the quality of response are respondents more likely to convert to the ultimate action such as sale? What is their likely lifetime value?

For example, some digital media channels such as affiliates are more likely to attract customers with a lower lifetime value who are more likely to switch suppliers. Media planning services and buying agency Zed Media has produced a useful summary of how a media mix might typically vary according to budget. 

The  blog shows that for a direct response campaign with limited budget, investment in controllable, targeted media which typically have a lower cost-per-acquisition such as affiliates and paid search should be the main focus. If more budget is available, it may not be possible to buy further keywords or there may be benefits from generating awareness of the offering through more display advertising.

• Cost effective and volume channels priority

• PPC search 60%

• Affiliates 30%

• Display 10%

• Test 2–4 weeks

• Affiliates maxed out, more networks

• PPC search 40%

• Affiliates 20%

• Display 40%

• 12 months

• Display more viable networks

• PPC search 50%

• Affiliates 30%

• Display 20%

• Up to 3 months

• More money available for display

• PPC search 50%

• Affiliates 25%

• Display 25%

• 6–8 months £100k £250k £500k

With a brand campaign where the focus is on generating awareness, the recommendations of Zed Media are reversed where they recommend that, even at lower budgets, more invest-ment should be made in display advertising.

Deciding on the optimal expenditure on different communication techniques will be an iterative approach since past results should be analysed and adjusted accordingly.

 Marketers can analyse the proportion of the promotional budget that is spent on different channels and then compare this with the contribution from purchasing customers who originated using the original channel. 

This type of analysis, reported by Hoffman and Novak (2000) and requires two different types of marketing research.

First, tagging of customers can be used. Here, we monitor, using specifically coded URLs or cookies, the numbers of customers who are referred to a website through different online techniques such as search ads, affiliate or banner ads, and then track the money they spend on purchases.

 Digital marketing  gives more details of how the Google Analytics system is used.

Budgeting and selecting the digital media

Budgeting and selecting the digital media

Traditional approaches such as those  can be used to set overall communications budgets. For example: 

● Affordable method – the communications budget is set after subtracting fixed and variable costs from anticipated revenues. 

● Percentage-of-sales methods – the communications budget is set as a percentage of forecast sales revenues. 

● Competitive parity methods – expenditure is based on estimates of competitor expenditure. 

For example, e-marketing spend is typically 10–15 per cent of the marketing budget. 

● Objective and task method – this is a logical approach where budget is built up from all the tasks required to achieve the objectives in the communications plan. This is a bottom-up approach that is often based on a model of the effectiveness of different digital media channels based on the measures of campaign effectiveness described in the objective setting section at the start of this blogger.

Complete to understand how these models are created

Digital marketing campaign plans require three important decisions to be made about investment for the online promotion or the online communications mix. These are: 

1 Level of investment in digital media as opposed to traditional media. 

2 Mix of investment in digital media channels or e-communications tools. 

3 Level of investment in digital assets. 

1 Level of investment in digital media 

Techniques in comparison to offline promotion a balance must be struck between online and offline communications techniques based on the strengths and weaknesses of the different media options. A useful framework for considering the media characteristics which influence decisions on which to invest in has been developed by Mecri and Eric (2022).

Offline media are often superior in generating attention, stimulating attention and gaining credibility. Online media tend to be better at engagement due to personalisation, interaction and support of word-of-mouth. The offer can also often be fulfilled online for products that can be bought online. However, there are limits to the number of people that can be reached through online media (a limit to number searching on particular terms) and the cost is not necessarily always lower in competitive markets.

Focus on content marketing

We introduced the growing role of content marketing within digital marketing communications. 

We believe that content marketing should be at the heart of digital marketing for all types of brands, because content fuels all the main digital marketing channels we use to communicate with our audiences.
Search, social media, conversion rate optimisation and email marketing all require content which helps a brand increase its visibility, engage its audience and drives leads and sales. Within a campaign, content is vital as the method of engaging the audience and generating demand, whether this is educational content as part of a business-to-business campaign or video content as part of a consumer campaign.

The only case where the role of content is diminished is where the main campaign offer is a price cut, discount or sale.

Given the importance of content marketing, many businesses now look to develop a content marketing strategy as part of their digital marketing tactics. As with all strategies, this will involve review of the current approach, setting specific objectives and developing strategies to create and share content.

To review how content can best support digital marketing, Dave Chaffey developed the Content Marketing Matrix with Dan Bosomworth of Smart Insights.

The activity explains how this can be used to identify the right content types. outlines typical options that companies have during a campaign, quarterly or annually.

Which do you think would be the best option for an established company as compared to a dot-com ‘pureplay’ company? It seems that in both cases, offline promotion investment often exceeds that for online promotion investment. However, some pure plays do invest the majority of their budget in paid search and affiliate marketing, although they are likely to find there are limits to growth that this will impose. There are also increases to buying digital media, as suggested which need to be considered. 

For existing companies, traditional media such as print are used to advertise the sites, while print and TV will also be widely used by dot-com companies to drive traffic to their sites.

Econometric modelling

Econometrics or econometric modelling is an established approach to understanding the contribution of different media in influencing consumers and ultimately generating sales and profit.

It can also be used in a predictive way to plan for future campaigns. It is increasingly used in integrated campaigns to assess the appropriate media for further explanation. One of its main benefits is its ability to separate the effects of a range of influences such as offline or online media usage or other variables such as price or promotions used and to quantify these individual effects.

A simple example might be for the sales of a drinks brand:

Sales = 100 + 2.5 × own TVRs (television ratings)– 1.4 × own price + 1.6 × competitor price + 1.0 × distribution – 0.8 × temperature– 1.2 × competitor TVRs

These relationships are typically identified using multiple linear regression models where a single dependent variable (typically sales) is a function of one or more explanatory or independent variables such as price, temperature, level of promotion.

Econometric models are developed from historic time-series data which record fluctuations dependent on different variables including seasonal variables, but most importantly, variations in media spend levels and the mix of media. In econometrics, sales fluctuations are expressed in terms of the factors causing them.

Customer insight for digital marketing campaigns

Customer insight for digital marketing campaigns

There is a wealth of customer insight information available for digital marketing campaigns, but it varies by sector. So it is important during the briefing or pre-planning stage to list all the possible information sources and then evaluate which are worth while, since some are free and some are paid syndicated research. 

We have introduced many of the techniques such as persona and customer scenario analysis, and also some of the information sources Research tools for assessing digital markets.

Examples of the types of customer insight related to online competitor and audience behaviour that might be accessed at this stage in the campaign from third-party syndicated research sources include:

● Site audience reach and composition. What is the breakdown of audiences by age, gender or socio-economic group on different sites? This data is available from online audience panel providers such as Nielsen Netrating, Comscore and Mecri.

● Online buying behaviour and preferences. For example, from the Forrester Internet User Monitor or TGI.net. In the UK, TGI.net gives information on typical product preferences for a particular site for example, the percentage of the audience whose last holiday was a city break. Additional surveys can be conducted via publisher sites.

● Customer media consumption. The usage of different offline and online media for different target demographics can be accessed from sources such as Mecri.

● Customer search behaviour. The proportion of different phrases and their importance can be used to inform messaging.

● Competitor campaign activity. The activity of current advertising campaigns and previous seasonal campaigns. For example, in the UK, this is available from Thomson Intermedia.

● Competitor performance. This will give information on the audience size (reach) and composition of competitor sites and services like Hitwise can show which marketing techniques such as search engine marketing or affiliate marketing are successful in driving visitors to a competitor since referring sites and search terms can be accessed. Wertime and Fenwick (2008) suggest a similar technique to persona development for campaigns which they describe as a ‘participant print’. 

The main elements of the participant print are: 

● General profile . This is basic demographic and psychographic information about customers. It may also include insight from previous online campaigns and activities such as search keywords and propensity to respond for different demographic groups ( response rates). 

● Digital profile . Digital usage habits the authors say this includes the usage of different digital media channels, types of sites used and digital platforms they use. 

1.– Content consumption preferences this includes favoured sources of information related to the product category from portals specific to the product, comparison sites and specialist blogs. 

2.– Content creation profile . This reviews the propensity of the group to participate online. For example, in contests where they upload photos or ringtones, blogs or forums they comment on including neutral sites and competitor sites. 

● Individual profiles . This is information about existing prospects and customers including profile information from customer databases, content preferences from web analytics and qualitative research with customers about their needs, wants and how they prefer to use digital channels. An example of the type of in-depth research available is the IPA Touchpoints survey which covers both surveyed usage of websites and other media, and opinions including why they use particular media.

Hafa (2022) describes the purpose of this he says the aim is to enable campaign planners to identify relevant target markets (demographic groups, attitudinal groups, activity groups, and so on) and fully understand them in terms of:

● how they spend their day (shopping, work, travelling); 

● who they spend it with (friends, family, work colleagues); 

● what they believe in (views and opinions on life, brands, media, advertising); 

● what is important to them (time spent on activities, family values); 

● how, when, where and why they consume particular media. 

Further information on marketplace analysis, including links to the main data sources for digital campaign insights.

Online response mechanism

Online response mechanism 

The required response mechanisms should be specified in the digital campaign plan and the number of responses from each model. Suggests the typical options of out comes to online campaign media. 

From the creative shown using media such as a display ad, pay-per-click ad or rented email newsletter, there are five main options.

1 Home page

In the majority of cases, investment in online media will be wasted if visitors are driven from the media site to the home page of the destination website. Typically it is appealing to many audiences and offering too much choice it won’t effectively reinforce the message of the online creative or convert to further action.

2 Microsite/landing page

A focussed landing page or specially created microsite can more effectively convert visitors to the action to help gain a return on the online campaign investment. Shows an example of a landing page giving a range of response mechanisms, although offline is omitted.

A URL strategy is used to make the page easy to label in offline creative. This specifies how different types of content on a site will be placed in different folders or directories of a website (this can also help with search engine optimisation). For example, if you visit the BBC site (www.bbc.co.uk), look at how the web address details vary as you move from one section to another such as News or Sport.

An individual destination page on a website may be labelled, for example, www.company.com/products/insurance/car-insurance.

A further example is where site owners have to make a decision how to refer to content in different countries, either in the form:

http://<country-name>.<company-name>.com or the more common http://www <companyname.com>.com/<country-name> Campaign URLs or CURLs are less widely used today, the idea being that they will be more memorable than the standard company address and blend in with the campaign concept.

For example, an insurer used the CURL www.quotemehappy.com, which represents memorable elements of the campaign. Also memorable is www.subservientchicken.com a viral hit from ten years ago for Burger King and reinvigorated for 2015 under the hashtag #ChickenRedemption.

3 Personal (chat or call-back)

In this case the creative or landing page encourages campaign respondents to ‘talk’ directly with a human operator. It is usually referred to as a call-back service and integrates web and phone. Buttons or hyperlinks encourage a call-back from a telephone operator or an online chat.

The advantage of this approach is that it engages the customer more and will typically lead to a higher conversion-to-sale rate since the customer’s questions and objection are more likely to be answered and the personal engagement is more likely to encourage a favourable impression.

4 Offline: phone, post or store

Because part of a campaign is run online does not mean that offline responses should be excluded.

Offline response mechanisms should not be discarded unless the cost of managing them cannot be justified, which is rarely the case.

Offline response goals for multichannel integration

We also need to include the right response mechanism for the offline media element of the campaigns such as TV ads, print ads or direct-mail pieces.

The permission-based web response model is one that is frequently used today in direct marketing (Chapter 6). For example, this process could start with a direct mail drop or offline advert. The website is used as the direct response mechanism, hence ‘web response’. Ideally, this approach will use targeting of different segments.

For example, a Netherlands bank devised a campaign targeting six different segments based on age and income. The initial letter was delivered by post and contained a PIN (personal identification number) which had to be typed inwhen the customer visited the site.

The PIN had the dual benefit that it could be used to track responses to the campaign, while at the same time personalising the message to the consumer. When the PIN was typed in, a ‘personal page’ was delivered for the customer with an offer that was appropriate to their particular circumstances.

Examples of digital campaign measures

Examples of digital campaign measures

An interactive marketing communications plan should have five main types of goals included:

1 Audience or traffic building goals

These define targets for using online site promotion and offline site promotion to drive quality visitors or traffic to a website or other social presence which convert to the outcomes required (sales, lead, newsletter sign-up, social interaction) at an acceptable cost.

Examples of SMART traffic building objectives which can be expressed as visits or sales:

● Achieve 100,000 unique visitors or 200,000 visitor sessions within one year.

● Deliver 20,000 online sales at an average order value of £50 and a cost-per-acquisition of £10.

● Convert 30 per cent of existing customer base to active use (at least once every 90 days) of online service.

● Achieve 10 per cent ‘share of searches’ within a market.

2 Conversion or interaction goals

Use onsite communications to deliver an effective message to the visitor which helps influence perceptions or achieves a required marketing outcome. 

The message delivered on-site will be based on traditional marketing communications objectives for a company’s products or services. 

For example:

● encourage trial (for example, achieve 10 per cent conversion of new unique visitors to registration or downloads of a music service such as iTunes or Spotify)

● build in-house permission-based list (increase email database by 10,000 during year through data capture activities.

● encourage engagement with content (conversion of 20 per cent of new unique visitors to product information area).

● persuade customer to purchase (conversion of 5 per cent of unique new visitors);

● encourage further purchases (conversion of 30 per cent of first-time buyers to repeat purchasers within a six-month period). To estimate a realistic number of conversions, we recommend creating conversion-based models like that  Take, for example, the objectives of a campaign for a B2B services company such as a consultancy company, where the ultimate objective is to achieve 1000 new clients using the website in combination with traditional media to convert leads to action. To achieve this level of new business, the marketer will need to make assumptions about the level of conversion that is needed at each stage of converting prospects to customers. This gives a core objective of 1000 new clients and different critical success factors based on the different conversion rates.

If there are no products available for sale online, such as a luxury car manufacturer or a high-value B2B service offering white paper downloads, then it is less clear how to calculate ROI.

To get the most from campaigns which don’t result in sales online and optimise their effectiveness, it is useful to put a value or points score on different outcomes for example in the case of the car manufacturer, values could be assigned to brochure requests (5 points or £20), demonstration drive requests (20 points or £100) or simply visits to the site involving reviewing product features information (1 point or £1). This approach is known as value event scoring.

Through knowing the average percentage of online brochure requests or demo drive requests that convert to sales, and the average order value for customers referred from the website, then the value of these on-site outcomes can be estimated. This is only an estimate, but it can help inform campaign optimisation, by showing which referring sites, creative or PPC keywords and pages visited on the site are most likely to generate desirable outcomes. Gives an example of different types of events for a photo sharing site.

3 Third-party site reach and branding goals

Reach, influence and engage with prospective customers on third-party sites such as online news and magazines sites, portals and social networks.

● Reach a targeted audience of 500,000 during the campaign.

● Create awareness of a product or favourability towards a brand (measured through brand research of brand awareness, brand favourability or purchase intent through using an online brand-tracking service such as Dynamic Logic, www.dynamiclogic.com).

4 Multichannel marketing goals

Integrate all communications methods to help achieve marketing objectives by supporting mixed-mode buying.

Examples of mixed-mode buying objectives:

● Achieve 20 per cent of sales achieved in the call centre as a result of website visits.

● Achieve 20 per cent of online sales in response to offline adverts.

● Increase average amount spent in store for every active site visitor from £3 to £4.

● Reduce contact-centre phone enquiries by 15 per cent by providing online customer services.

5 Longer-term brand engagement goals

One of the biggest challenges of online marketing, indeed marketing through any channel, is to sustain long-term interactions leading to additional sales. These are measured through lifetime value, loyalty and customer interactions.

Customer engagement communication shows the importance of capturing and maintaining up-to-date customer details such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

The characteristics of digital media

 

The characteristics of digital media 

By understanding the key interactive communications characteristics enabled through digtal media we can exploit these media while guarding against their weaknesses.

In this section, we will describe eight key changes in the media characteristics between traditional and digital media. They provide an alternative framework that is useful for evaluating the differences between traditional media and new media. 

1 From push to pull 

 Traditional media such as print, TV and radio are push media one way streets where information is mainly unidirectional, from company to customer, unless direct response elements are built in. In contrast, many digital marketing activities like content, search and social media marketing involve pull media and inbound marketing . Among marketing professionals this powerful new approach to marketing is now commonly known as inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is powerful since advertising wastage is reduced. It involves applying content and search marketing to target prospects with a defined need they are proactive and self selecting.

But this is a weakness since marketers may have less control than in traditional communications where the message is pushed out to a defined audience and can help generate awareness and demand. Advocates of inbound marketing argue that content, social media and search marketing do have a role to play in generating demand. The implications are that stimuli to encourage online interactions are still important through online or traditional ads, direct mail, physical reminders or encouraging word-of-mouth. 

 Push from email marketing remains important and is part of the inbound or permission marketing approach :

It should be an aim of websites and social media presences to capture customers’ email addresses in order that opt-in email can be used to push relevant and timely messages to customers. 

2 From monologue to dialogue to trialogue

Creating a dialogue through interactivity is the next important feature of the web and digital media which provide the opportunity for two-way interaction with the customer.
This is a key distinguishing feature of the medium according to Peters (1998), and Deighton (1996) proclaimed the interactive benefits of the Internet as a means of developing long-term relationships with customers through what would later be defined as permission marketing by Godin (1999).

Walmsley (2007) believes that the main impact of digital media has not been to find new ways to connect brands to consumers as originally anticipated, but in connecting those consumers to each other. In the age of trialogue; brands need to reinterpret themselves as facilitators. Walmsley believes this trialogue will influence every aspect of marketing, from product design through to product recommendation. An example where product design is influenced is Threadless.com, the online T-shirt store, which only carries designs its users have uploaded, and manufactures only those that get a critical mass.

3 From one-to-many to one-to-some and one-to-one

Traditional push communications are one-to-many, from one company to many customers, often the same message to different segments and often poorly targeted. With digital media ‘one-to-some’ reaching a niche or micro-segment becomes more practical e-marketers can afford to tailor and target their message to different segments through providing different site content or email for different audiences through mass customisation and personalisation.

illustrates the opportunities for mass customisation as interaction occurs between an organisation (O) communicating a message (M) to customers (C) for a single step flow of communication. It is apparent that for traditional mass marketing in (a) a single message

Hoffman and Novak (1997) believed that this change was significant enough to represent a new model for marketing, or a new ‘marketing paradigm. They suggest that the facilities of the Internet, including the web, represent a computer-mediated environment in which the interactions are not between the sender and receiver of informationbut with the medium itself. Their vision of the future is now apparent in the popularity of social networks, blogs and specialist communities.

consumers can interact with the medium, firms can provide content to the medium, and in the most radical departure from traditional marketing environments, consumers can provide commercially-orientated content to the media.

4 From one-to-many to many-to-many communications

Digital media also enable many-to-many communications. Hoffman and Novak (1996) noted
that new media are many-to-many media. Here customers can interact with other customers via a website, in independent communities or on their personal websites and blogs. We will see in the section on online PR that the implications of many-to-many communications.

loss of control of communications requiring monitoring of information sources, but it opens more opportunities to reach out to influencers to expand reach.

5 From lean back to lean forward

Digital media are also intense media they are interactive, lean-forward media where the customer wants to be in control and wants to experience flow and responsiveness to their needs. First impressions and devices to encourage the visitor to interact are important. If the visitor to your site does not find what they are looking for immediately, whether through poor design or slow speed, they will move on, probably never to return.

6 The medium changes the nature of standard marketing 

communications tools such as advertising In addition to offering the opportunity for one-to-one marketing, the Internet can be, and widely still is, used for one-to-many advertising.

The website or social media site can be considered as similar in function to an advertisement (since it can inform, persuade and remind customers about the offering, although it is not paid for in the same way as a traditional advertisement. (1996) consider a website as a mix between advertising and direct selling since it can also be used to engage the visitor in a dialogue.

Constraints on advertising in traditional mass media, such as paying for time or space, become less important. The wastage in traditional advertising where ads are either ignored or are not relevant for an audience is reduced in online marketing and search marketing in particular. In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, display of ads can be controlled according to user need based on what searchers are looking.

Multichannel communications preferences

 Multichannel communications preferences

Reports on research where 1000 UK consumers aged 18+ were surveyed to identify the role and importance of customer services and communications for online businesses. Despite the growing popularity of email as a communication tool, 53 per cent of those interviewed still prefer to communicate with businesses over the telephone, particularly for service enquiries, compared with 48 per cent for email and 16 per cent for traditional mail. However, when asked about their experiences, three out of ten UK consumers stated they found it difficult to locate contact details on websites.

Surprisingly, 53 per cent of consumers consider three minutes waiting time a satisfactory period to speak with an agent over the telephone.

Consumers particularly disliked ringing a contact centre only to be met with a computerised answering service.

Notes, replacing a skilled operator with an automated service might save money in the short term however, in the long term companies risk losing brand advocacy and sales. 

Additionally, customers believe 24 hours is a respectable amount of time to wait for a response when contacting a business via email.

He concludes:

Overall the research shows that in this era of multi-communication, consumers are no longer allied to any particular mode of communication. They will select the most convenient or appropriate channel even if the retailer trades solely online. As a result, brands need to provide their contact centre agents with the tools to seamlessly combine different communication channels such as telephone, email, v-mail, web chat and SMS to communicate with the consumer and meet their expectations of service.

Agents also need to have real-time access to all past interactions with a customer

This should include text transcriptions of conversations and emails, scanned copies of letters received and despatched, as well as call recordings, comments and outcomes ensuring that the agent is fully briefed on the existing relationship that the customer has with the brand.

Importantly, this information can be further used to tailor all future contact with the customer, delivering greater levels of customer satisfaction.

By employing the customers preferred channel of communication, which has been identified using the data from real conversations with individuals, it is possible to meet customer expectations, and as a result maximise retention and brand advocacy.

A further assurance concern of e-commerce websites is the privacy and security of customer information. 

Company that adheres to the UK Internet Shopping

Is Safe (ISIS) (www.imrg.org/isis) or TRUSTe principles (www.truste.org) will provide better assurance than one that does not. For security, ‘hacker safe’ accreditation is available from Scan Alert (www.scanalert.com) which is owned by McAfee security products.

This involves automated daily scans to test site security. Chaffey and Smith (2012) suggest that the following actions can be used to achieve assurance in an e-commerce site:

● provide clear and effective privacy statements;

● follow privacy and consumer protection guidelines in all local markets;

● make security of customer data a priority;

● use independent certification bodies;

● emphasise the excellence of service quality in all communications.

Empathy

Although it might be considered that empathy requires personal human contact, it can still be achieved, to an extent, through email and web communications.

Provision of personalisation facilities is also an indication of the empathy provided by the website, but more research is needed as to customers’ perception of the value of web pages that are dynamically created to meet a customer’s information needs.

It can be suggested that for managers wishing to apply a framework such as SERVQUAL.

In an e-commerce context there are three stages appropriate to managing the process:

1 Understanding expectations. Customer expectations for the e-commerce environment in a particular market sector must be understood.

The SERVQUAL framework can be used with market research and benchmarking of other sites to understand requirements such as responsiveness and empathy. Scenarios can also be used to identify customer expectations of using services on a site.

2 Setting and communicating the service promise. Once expectations are understood, marketing communications can be used to inform the customers of the level of service.

This can be achieved through customer service guarantees or promises. It is betteto under-promise than over-promise. A book retailer who delivers a book in two days when three days were promised will earn the customer’s loyalty better than the retailer who promises one day but delivers in two! The enlightened company may also explain what it will do if it doesn’t meet its promises will the customer be recompensed? The service promise must also be communicated internally and combined with training to ensure that the service is delivered.

3 Delivering the service promise. 

Finally, commitments must be delivered through on-site service, support from employees and physical fulfilment. Otherwise, online credibility is destroyed and a customer may never return.

Site promotion or traffic building

 Site promotion or traffic building

Promotion of a site in order to boost visitors is a significant topic that is part of the strategy of developing a website. It will follow the initial development of a site and is described in blog detail  Particularly important issues that must be considered during the course of site design are search engine optimisation and the experience delivered on landing pages where the visitor arrives not on the home page, but deeper within the site. 

Service quality

Delivering service quality in e-commerce can be assessed through reviewing existing marketing frameworks for determining levels of service quality. Those most frequently used are based on the concept of a ‘service quality gap’ that exists between the customer’s expected level of service (from previous experience and word-of-mouth communication) and their perception of the actual level of service delivery.
We can apply the elements of service quality on which Parasuraman et al . (1985) suggest that consumers judge companies. Note that there has been heated dispute about the validity of this SERVQUAL instrument framework in determining service quality see, for example, Cronin and Taylor (1992). Despite this it is still instructive to apply these dimensions of service quality to customer service on the web. 

● tangibles – the physical appearance of facilities and communications;

● reliability – the ability to perform the service dependably and accurately;

● responsiveness – a willingness to help customers and provide prompt service;

● assurance – the knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence;

● empathy – providing caring, individualised attention. As well as applying these academic frameworks, organisations can use benchmarking services such as Foresee (www.foreseeresults.com) based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index methodology which assess satisfaction scores based on the gap between expectations and actual service. It should also be remembered that the level of service selected by an online transactional service is based on the relationship between the costs to serve, the value of the product and the likelihood of the channel to increase conversion. the typical situation for a bank. Typically costs to serve increase to the top-right of the diagram, as does the capability to convert through a more extended dialogue and the value generated from sale.
The figure shows a general pattern, but the options are often not mutually exclusive for example, phone contact may be available for all levels, but emphasised for the most complex products.

We introduced some of these methods of delivering service

1 Straight-through processing. Transaction typically occurs without intervention from staff for a relatively simple product such as a savings account.

2 Call-backs. The customer has the option to specify the bank call if there is anything they are unclear on.

3 Live chat. Online discussion between service representative and the client. This may be invoked proactively if analysis suggests the customer is having difficulty in deciding.

4 Co-browsing. Sharing of screen to walk through application process.

5 Phone. Typically this has the highest cost, but often the highest conversion rate.

Two of the most significant frameworks for assessing online service quality are:

● WEBQUAL (Loiacono et al., 2000, 2007) which considers 14 dimensions. It has been criticised for relating too much to functional design issues rather than service issues. 

Consider other limitations which could include rating of content or products, trust Typical product:

Savings

ypical product

Travel insurance

Typical product

Car insurance

Typical product

Mortgage or loan

Product complexity

Customer value.

Mobile design considerations and techniques

 Mobile design considerations and techniques

 

we explained that it’s important to research the level of adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. I css For many site types such as social networks and news sites, the proportion of mobile users has been well above 50 per cent for several years.

At the time of writing this edition, many retail sites now see more than half of their traffic from mobile and this will naturally increase. So designing websites such that they are effective across desktop and mobile devices is now a key consideration for all businesses.

 The challenge of the many options for mobile site design has been nicely summarised by ex-eBay designer Luke Wroblewski, as shown in Digital marketing.

We will now review five common options for mobile site development identified by Thurner and Chaffey (2013):

A Simple mobile site (different content).

B Screen-scrape (same content).

C Responsive Design (same content, different mobile styling).

D HTML5 site (same content, different mobile styling).

E Adaptive design (potentially different content, different styling on different mobile devices).

These are not mutually exclusive so an HTML5 site can typically offer adaptive and responsive design too

Mobile site design option A.

Simple mobile siteThe quickest method of creating a mobile site is to create a completely separate mobile site on a domain http://m.company.com which has a different design, build, hosting and content.

This option may be appropriate for very small businesses looking for a simple mobile site which they don’t update frequently, but we would advise this not a viable long-term option for most companies for these reasons:

● Updates to content have to be duplicated across each site.

● Different tools and resources often needed to manage each site.

● Future updates to styling have to be duplicated too.

● May not give a consistent brand experience for users.

Mobile site design option B. 

Screen-scrape Although it’s not an option we can recommend as best practice, it’s worth noting that a number of high-profile retail brands like ASOS and John Lewis opted for a temporary ‘screen-scrape’ approach, which involves dropping existing web content into a basic mobile.

Site template without opting for back-end integration. The advantage of the screen-scrape approach is that it presents a quick route to market, and avoids potential conflict between PC web and mobile web developers.

Think through the widespread disadvantages of screen-scraping when compared with the fully integrated approach, which provides the better long-term solution.

● The screen-scrape option incurs additional time and cost to manage the site, as changes to the back-end CMS will need to be updated manually on the mobile site, rather than benefiting from automatic updates.

● A review of ‘screen-scrape’ sites reveals an alarming degree of standardisation across the sites, which lack the differentiation brands demand across their PC websites.

Mobile site design option C. 

Responsive design Today’s multiple-device-using consumers need content in the right format in real time, which presents challenges as the form factor and operating system varies across most of their devices.

Enter Responsive Design, which automates the overlay of contextually relevant content matching the profiles of mobile users allowing you to access social media feeds, loyalty offers and other data feeds triggered by your preferences to maximise engagement and to optimise sales conversion.

First introduced as a concept in 2010, Responsive Design is the principle web developers deploy to design website styling that changes the display layout to suit users of a range of mobile devices using modern web development methods like CSS3 and image scaling.

Blocks of content are moved and rescaled based on screen resolution

Responsive Design is an increasingly popular approach to building mobile sites since it enables a single version of the site and content to be maintained which adapts for different resolutions. 

Mobile site design option D. HTML5

HTML5 blurs the line between sites and apps, and challenges the prominence and cash flow of the appstore hosts. Companies operating in the main sectors who were enthusiastic adopters of mobile, such as retail, packaged goods, travel, financial services, publishing, are turning to HTML5 ‘web apps’ in order to build once and target all mobile platforms at once.

This is more cost-effective and less labour-intensive than building different native apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

HTML5 web apps allow developers and publishers to circumnavigate the 30 per cent commission charged by Apple and Google on app download costs and a further 30 per cent on products and subscriptions sold in app.

Both costs can be eliminated with HTML5-based sites. From the technical perspective, HTML5 apps have some problems that native apps do not.

HTML5 apps are typically slower than native apps and it is more costly to support a range of apps. FT.com still uses native apps for Android and Windows platforms.

Of course, the other big benefit for publishers, not mentioned here, is that they can take a bigger share of subscription revenues.

The app was launched in June 2011 in response to Apple’s introduction of new rules governing subscription-based iOS apps Apple is looking for a 30 per cent cut of subscription revenues for people signing up from its native app and keeping access to those subscribers.

Development and testing of content

 

Development and testing of content

 It is not practical to provide details of the methods of developing content since marketers do not need an in depth understanding of development technologies as they will use specialists for this. What marketers do have to know is the aspects of customer experience that can be affected by the tools and development methodologies used. Then, when selecting suppliers, they can ask questions so that the type of constraints on the customer experience described are accounted for. They can also test to make sure the systems have been built successfully.

Selecting the right content management system (CMS)

Is important to provide a good user experience and is also important for an efficient method of publishing content since the facility can be made available to people through out the company. Today there are two main forms of CMS, both of which are delivered as web services which can be accessed through a web browser. Enterprise CMSs can be used for large, complex sites (and other corporate documents); as well as the standard page creation and editing facilities these offer version control and review of documents through workflow systems which notify reviewers when new documents are ready for editing.

CMS for smaller companies traditionally lack workflow or multi-author facilities, but offer many of the other features to create content. However blogging platforms such as WordPress and Moveable Type are increasingly used by smaller businesses for managing their entire site since they have enterprise features.

Criteria for selecting a content management system 

A professional content management system should provide these facilities: 

● Easy authoring system . Editing of new and existing documents should be possible through a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) facility similar to a word processor which makes it easy to embed images and supports a range of markups necessary for SEO.

● Search engine robot crawling . The content must be stored and linked such that it can be indexed by search engine crawlers to add it to their index. Sometimes URL rewriting. To a search-engine-friendly format without many parameters is required.

The Google Webmaster pages describe the requirements: www.google.com/webmasters.

● Search-engine-optimisation-friendly markup. Some bespoke content management systems created by design agencies do not enable easy editing of the key fields, such as <title>, <h1> and <meta name = ‘description’ content = ‘page description’>.

● Different page templates. The design and maintenance of content structure (sub components, templates, etc.), web page structure and website structure. It should be possible to create different layouts and designs for different site sections or categories of pages.

● Link management. The maintenance of internal and external links through content change and the elimination of dead links.

● Input and syndication. The loading (spidering) of externally originating content and the aggregation and dissemination of content from a variety of sources.

● Versioning. The crucial task of controlling which edition of a page, page element or the whole site is published. Typically this will be the most recent, but previous editions should be archived and it should be possible to roll back to a previous version.

● Security and access control. Different permissions can be assigned to different roles of users and some content may only be available through log-in details. In these cases, the CMS maintains a list of users.

● Use of plug-ins and widgets. Mashups are possible through embedding widgets such as links to social networks or third-party applications.

But a content management system may not readily support embedding within the main content or sidebars.

● Publication workflow. Content destined for a website needs to pass through a publication process to move it from the management environment to the live delivery environment. The process may involve tasks such as editorial authorisation and the construction of composite documents in real time (personalisation and selective dissemination).

● Tracking and monitoring. Providing logs and statistical analysis of use to provide performance measures, tune the content according to demand and protect against misuse. It should also be possible to rapidly add tags to the page templates for web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

● Navigation and visualisation. Providing an intuitive, clear and attractive representation of the nature and location of content using colour, texture, 3D rendering or even virtual reality. It should be possible to make changes to the navigation and containers holding content within the page template.

● Flexibility to test new approaches. It should be possible to test alternative designs and messaging using techniques such as AB and multivariate testing. Testing the experience marketing managers responsible for websites need to have a basic awareness of website development and testing. We have already discussed the importance of usability testing with typical users of the system.

In brief, other necessary testing steps include:

● test that the content displays correctly on different types and versions of web browsers;

● test plug-ins;

● test all interactive facilities and integration with company databases;

● test spelling and grammar;

● test adherence to corporate image standards;

● test to ensure all internal and links to external sites are valid. Testing often occurs on a separate test web server (or directory) or test environment, with access to the test or prototype version being restricted to the development team. When complete, the website is released or published to the main web server or live environment.

Post-launch, ongoing improvements to site effectiveness can be made through review of the web analytics and testing of different page layouts, messaging and offers using the AB. 

For online retail site owners, merchandising is a crucial activity, in the same way it is for physical retail store owners. In both cases, the aims are similar to maximise sales potential for each store visitor. Online, this means presenting relevant products and promotions to site visitors which should help boost key measures of site performance such as conversion rate and average order value. You will see that many of these approaches are related to the concept of findability.

Some of the most common approaches used are: 

● Expanding navigation through synonyms . Through using a range of terms which may apply to the same product, the product may become easier to find if a site visitor is searching using a particular expression. 

● Applying faceted navigation or search approaches . Search results pages are important in online merchandising since conversion rates will be higher if relevant products and offers are at the top of the list. Faceted navigation enables website users to ‘drill-down’ to easily select a relevant product by selecting different product. 

● Featuring the bestselling products prominently . Featuring strongest product lines prominently is a common approach, with retailers showing ‘Top 10’ or ‘Top 20’ products.

● Use of bundling . The classic retail approach of buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) is commonly applied online through showcasing complementary products. For example, Amazon discounts two related books it offers. Related products are also shown on the product page or in checkout, although care has to be taken here since this can reduce conversion rates.