The correct place for manufacturer information is on the GS1 database, right next to the barcode. GS1 does a great job of providing a global standard to uniquely identify products, but the reality is that the richness of this information, and ease of access to it is extremely limited.
The incentives of product manufacturers is to sell as much product as possible, and there is overwhelming amounts of evidence to suggest that more information help conversion. Yet, when a manufacturer goes to do this there are a multitude of channels that they need to do it – many of which are competing with each other and benefit from making it harder for the other guy to have access to this information. All the while, the manufacturer and the consumer lose because of middle men.
The obvious solution to this is to have an API to access the GS1 database – I envisaged a product wiki in the absence of any progress from GS1. It seems we have a better database of uniquely identified people accessible to all developers through Facebook Connect, than we do of products.
A massive amount of services would benefit from this, including Lasoo and all its competitors, but the real winners would be manufacturers and consumers.
There seems to be a common trend in marketing (and probably throughout a lot of business sectors) that people seem to be adamant that they can have their cake and eat it. That is, having two things that are mutually incompatible.
Here are a few examples I have come across -
1. Paying for an advertising medium with a specific pricing metric/ model and then measuring its performance against another. For example - paying for ad space on Google on a CPM basis then measuring its performance on a CPC basis, or a CPA basis. While it is acceptable to work out how valuable it was across a variety of metrics makes sense, assessing performance on anything but the bar you were paying them to jump over isn’t.
2. Paying for an advertising medium with accountability, transparency and measurability and rather than expecting to pay more for the accountability - expecting to pay less because it is easier to accurately attribute value to the medium and disregarding the lack of transparency in other mediums.
3. Buying marketing communication and expecting that you are buying sales - ie the difference between paying for ad space and paying for a salesman.
4. Using the term SEO to mean “Free SEM“and expecting that manipulating your organic ranking in Google is as easy as managing a SEM campaign, only that it refers better traffic, and it is free.
All of these are examples of people looking at the world and ignoring the realities of the balancing forces that make the market work. The main point I want to focus on here is point 4, because I have heard a few people talk about running SEO campaigns. The problem with this mentality is that you simply can’t run an SEO “campaign”, at least not effectively. You need to have an SEO “strategy”. Having an SEO campaign is like saying “I need to have a logistics campaign for Christmas” when what you really need is an ongoing logistics strategy that is continually refined making supply chain management all the more efficient.
SEO is essentially split into 2 parts, on site and off site. On site is just building the right architecture and signage for your website so that all of your information can be easily accessed by humans and crawlers. The easier this signage is to understand, the better you will rank for it over time. Off site is another ball game, and for simplicity, I’ll just say largely out of your control - just add value and people will link to you. Being listed in authoritative directories in your field is probably the best off site thing you can do. Following that, participate in relevant social communities.
SEM however, is your almost guaranteed (paid) fast track to search front page bliss, and if you have decent landing pages, then the amount of these that you have is the only limit for your search term breadth. For SEO, you really have to target much more niche keywords as you don’t have the opportunity to take hold of the dominant traffic driving keywords, unless you have a really clever strategy or you are prepared to put in a lot of hard work.
Changing process of things you already do is usually the best approach to SEO - that is why they call it an “Optimisation”, rather than a “Campaign”.
One example of this(or even try here) is that I have noticed that the offers that stay on Lasoo for longer periods of time, seem to get better traction in Google organic results - despite Google’s hunger for dynamic content, the historical information it can build for longer term URL’s add to Google’s understanding of a page’s relevance. It also allows social communities, and other websites to build links into the page, thus increasing the page rank.
This shouldn’t be the main driver in how you sell things (Product pages achieve a similar kind of result) however, people love offers, and they love linking to them, so having some long term deals might be a good move on specific loss leading items. So if you are an online cake eater, this is just some food for thought….mmmm…. thought.
Why are offer impressions a better metric than a catalogue page view?
Offer Impressions are a better metric than a catalogue page view for many reasons that can best be appreciated when looking at the short history of the web. Initially, the metric that was used as common currency for doing apples to apples comparisons of web real estate was the “hit” – the number of client requests to a web server. This was quickly outdated as pages became more sophisticated and “hits” were being registered when every asynchronous element refreshed (widgets etc), tracking servers were called and a myriad of other activities resulting in “hits” took place.
Then, to replace this came the Page View metric. Marketers decided to disregard how many “hits” there were since it was no longer one page = one “hit” and it was more valid to see how many page views there were. However, this metric soon became outdated as well when AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) became the standard for usability in the Web 2.0 world. Now, more than half of a page’s content could change without a new “Page View” ever being registered since the URL remained the same.
So, the impression was born to be the apples to apples comparison metric for marketers. Regardless of what all of the information on a page was doing, how many servers where “talking” to produce a complete page of information, the one thing that would remain constant and relevant to marketers across all mediums was – how many times did my offer appear in front on the eyeballs of a consumer.
Catalogue Page view’s suffer the same drawbacks as page views with regard to performing accurate analysis for a marketers spend – despite being the common currency in the analogue world where “offer impression” granularity is hard to come by since offers per page vary from page to page. However, ad space inside catalogues is still sold at the offer level, indicating that more granular metric is the more relevant one to marketers.
We can track catalogue page views, yet, if this is all that is looked at, then the offer impressions that appear in search, and not on a catalogue page view is never counted, despite this being the more relevant and targeted advertisement. Some may think you could just measure both and report this, but now you are dividing what would otherwise be a consistent metric, making it harder to understand and do accurate analysis on. What is the point of looking at a report that may say
100 Catalogue Page Views
13 Search Listings
813 Offer Impressions
Rather than
813 Offer Impressions
13 Search listings
Where catalogue pages are evident inside the more granular metric?
The result of this approach is that when comparing to other media and you are looking at
Print: Circulation
Print: Readership
Print/ catalogues: Distribution
Viewership: TV
Listenership: Radio
Visits: Web
You have one universal metric to apply to your ROI calculations.
NB: This will become much more important when we look forward to a more convergent Internet as described here by Kevin Kelly.
Part 2. Using a universal metric when calculating ROI? The offer Impression
Reducing offline media to a universal metric – the offer impression, is fairly intuitive, but has some intricacies in finding the correct estimates for certain variables.
Offer Impressions = (Circulation x (wastage factor)) x (probability of reaching ad page depth) x Offers per page
Offer Impressions = (Readership x (wastage factor)) x (probability of reaching ad page depth) x Offers per page
Offer Impressions = (Distribution x (wastage factor)) x (offer impressions per person)
Offer Impressions = (Viewership x (wastage factor)) x (offer impressions in TVC)
Offer Impressions = (Listenership x (wastage factor)) x (offers in radio commercial)
Offer Impressions = Offer Impressions
Now you have an apples to apples metric to begin calculating ROI (In fact, you could even work out offer impressions per unique visitor – however, this is a different yardstick compared to the other media that are largely absent of any tracking).
The next thing required is to establish the quality of an offer impression in each medium with respect to sales. This is the responsibility of the marketer, not the ad network. The job of the ad network is to generate the highest quality offer impressions in the greatest quantity possible for the lowest possible price.
The general formula then for establishing media effectiveness would look something like
Media Effectiveness = Sales per offer impression = Sales / Offer Impressions
I.e. Sales = Offer Impressions x Media Effectiveness
This can now be ascertained per media channel.
ROI = Sales/ Dollars Invested
Hence, your ROI can be predicted and measured by
ROI = (Media Effectiveness x Offer Impressions)/ Dollars Invested
Now, to get a relevant statistic for this you really need to run a control set of offers, probably simultaneously across different media that is unique to each state – eg Radio in Melbourne, Search in NSW, TV in Queensland, and then assess what the performance was in each medium so that you can ascertain what the Media Effectiveness was for each channel. If you have eCommerce enabled, you can get an idea of the effectiveness of online channels by seeing the quality of different traffic streams on online sales. However, this totally ignores web to store conversion which research has indicated counts for up to 95% of online traffic on the eCommerce enabled sites.
