New venture outsourcing blog

A very interesting insight from Brian McAndrews, a Microsoft SVP in charge of advertising and publishing, used to run aQuantive until Microsoft acquired them.  He says that search is getting paid too much to deliver people to websites as the final stage of the advertising process.

This is part of an effort by his team to give advertisers a fuller picture of how all of their advertising is contributing to web visits & sales.  This concept is being named “conversion attribution” by McAndrews & his team.  Frank Watson at searchenginewatch.com made a good point that this sounds great until you realize that every activity on the web has to be recorded in cookies to get this to work.

Here is a 15 page presentation where McAndrews makes his case for conversion attribution in slightly more detail.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it.  I bet that if you do the math on how often and when people see various ads you will find out that search ads are less important than most people think they are today.  However, the bad news for advertisers, is that this probably just means they’re not paying enough for the other forms of advertising.  I seriously doubt search is anywhere close to maxed out on the revenue they’re receiving from each search.

However, search is normally a part of the last leg of the buying process - which is always the hardest part.  Closing the sale generally earns an outsized share in the offline world.  Why should we expect things to be so different online?  I think McAndrews is on to something, but maybe not as much as he’d like.

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Earlier this evening I gave a talk to a group of bright, young, aspiring, entreprenuers - all part of the UCSD business plan competition.  I was asked to cover the fundamentals of entrepreneurship in about an hour!  Happy to support their impressive efforts, I agreed to take on the most difficult talk I’ve ever given (a two years of a full time MBA isn’t be enough to cover this topic).  Here are some of the highlights:

-work with capable partners

-build an excellent, interdisciplinary team

-get started now

-thoroughly analyze your competition

-get started

-be able to talk about your ideas but don’t give away the secret sauce

-be passionate about your technology and the way you’re making meaning in the world

-get going

-cool technology and good business aren’t always related

-know your customers

-make some progress on what you’re proposing

-focus groups, surveys, or online analysis can work wonders

-make use of advisors, mentors, and professionals

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Shawn Purtell at ROI Revolution has a great thread on combining google analytics and google website optimization.  This is a really important step as we don’t consider hte website optimizer to be powerful enough for most people on it’s own.  Additionally, he updated his tip in June by showing how you can read the data within the new google analytics interface. It’s great that Shawn is keeping this thread current - but I’ve got one minor point of clarification. I don’t think the integration is exactly the same.  Using the new analytics I would highly recommend people not exclude their “combination” URL parameter using the exclude list within the google analytics campaign setup.  Otherwise the different combinations won’t appear in the reports.One good option now is to leave it as a visible parameter, which is totally reasonable.  The down side is that you’ll be splitting all of your traffic to your pages over these various combinations so historical comparisons will be harder.

The other option is to store the parameter as a “user defined variable” within the google analytics results.  Unfortunately, you only get one.  Shawn has cautioned, appropriately, that he likes to us his user defined variable for other things - so be sure you don’t need it if you use this option.

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Our firm does comprehensive online marketing and web sales acceleration for small businesses. Our approach is unique in a number of ways, but chiefly in that we use very advanced statistical methodology and that we focus on very clear business goals (increasing online revenue, selling more product, increasing the number of newsletter readers, etc). I thought it would be useful to share some questions we receive about this work:

How is this different than SEO/PPC/what XYZ is offering?

Search Engine Optimization is one piece of a good online strategy. After all, what good is a high Google page rank if it doesn’t lead to more sales or your profitable growth?

Why do you run experiments on my site?

Because your site is (hopefully) unique. Your customers, what they are looking for, and what they respond to are worth knowing. Inventure believes very strongly that running quick, efficient experiments provides evidence of what your visitors and customers do. Smart designers and developers (including our own) can only speculate on what will work to improve your results based on experience. Real insight into your web business enables real improvements and, most of all, real results!

Is this a short- or long-term effort?

Both. Inventure aims for both short term and long term results. In the short term you should see an increase in web traffic from your paid advertising campaigns, as time passes you’ll spend less on this and see more visitors arrive from all over the internet! Of course, all of this happens in parallel with a series of experiments and improvements on your website. The end result is more qualified visitors, more sales, and a more profitable website.

Do your services pay for themselves?

Yes. Business fundamentals apply on the web as well - a good products or services will attract and retain customers. By outsourcing your marketing efforts you can unleash your website and set new sales records!

There is some more information here.

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