This Week in Relevance

Welcome to TWIR week 7. This week our never ending hunt for all things relevance leads us to examine the increasingly prominent role Data is playing across the web. Data is becoming more and more central to everything, not just marketing and measurement, but content development, navigation, personalization, etc. Here’s hoping TWIR week 7 will help you look at boring ‘ol data in a new and exciting light.

The Ad Campaign as Data Asset
We loved this Clickz article by @andrew_goodman which asserts that a paid search campaign can be a data asset which enables marketers to reap much greater dividends than using it strictly as a customer acquisition source. Search campaigns are “response engines” to quote Andrew, and as such, within a few short weeks marketers can get a great understanding about how consumers respond to offers of different types, at different times during the week, in different areas of the country, etc. The article also brings us a fantastic quote by Seth Godin when discussing clothing company Zara: “Zara is an information business that happens to sell clothes.” Here’s hoping that more marketers embrace this approach!

Data as Marketing Content
Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec, writes an interesting article on his blog, Chief Marketing Technologist, around emerging capabilities enabling marketers to publish data to the outside world. This starts with search engines with technologies like Rich Snippets and Search Monkey but ultimately extends out across the Web, where there are thousands of data APIs available for organizations to create amazing content. In fact, even the stodgy world of newspaper publishing is getting on board. As of this year, The New York Times is offering its data in RDF these days, which should make for some pretty incredible mash-ups and improved content experiences on the web. Now we can really figure out which was the best Yankee team in history…

Twitter Knows What You’d Like to Read
From Search Engine Land, Twitter has launched a new feature to suggest followers for you based on your interests and current list of followers. Twitter is using its massive data resources to get in on the personalization act and drive more engagement from its already passionate user base. To us, Twitter is looking more and more like a utility to enable content and information discovery across the Web and beyond. Lookout Google…

When Online Truly Drives Offline
From the early days of the Web, shopping comparison engines were central in helping users navigate the murky and often polluted waters of online retail, to discover products and deals. Over the last few years, some of those sites have struggled a bit and new tools for online product discovery emerged, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Gilt.

Per a Search Engine Watch piece this week, it seems the next battlefield for shopping engines maybe offline, yes offline. With the vast majority of commerce still conducted in store, it does seem like a natural next step to enable in-store shopping comparison through the use of data and intent – it will be interesting to see who jumps out to a lead here. We know that if we had a dollar for every time I couldn’t find what I was looking for at the supermarket….you get the idea.

Bringing It Down a Notch
While we are talking about mash-ups, we thought we’d leave you with a fun, somewhat disturbing, and visually stimulating infographic on American’s consumption patterns.

While we are floored by the actual data in the piece, what is more interesting to us, as @chiefmartec mentioned in his piece referenced above, is how boring old data is getting very exciting again, especially as companies such as Factual and Freebase are enabling marketers and publishers alike to create engaging content to excite users. Just try not to think about this too much when you head out for lunch today.

Advanced or Needs Sophistication? You make the call.
In Josh Dreller’s recent piece on advanced PPC copywriting techniques, he calls out Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as a commonly used technique for scaling great copy across a search marketing campaign. In fairness, Josh calls out potential pitfalls of this approach, but we feel that marketers can actually get into quite a bit of trouble when leveraging this approach too broadly as the below example shows – hate to kick a wounded animal when its down, but for the query “oil spill disaster” we see this ad:

Oil Spill Disaster
Stay Updated On BP’s Gulf of Mexico
Response Efforts. Learn More.
www.BP.com/GulfOfMexicoResponse

Clearly BP’s strategy to influence the flow of information surrounding the spill is a sound one, but they’d probably prefer not to echo the public’s sentiment that it truly is a “disaster.” This is just one of many DKI pitfalls – we’ll explore more in later issues.

UPDATE:

BP has now changed their ad on the term “Oil Spill Disaster” to a static Title — great move on their part, starting to understand the potential pitfalls of using DKI.

Location, Location, Location
Wired offered a piece this week on the growing momentum behind Zip+4 targeting online, which would add an incredibly powerful tool into marketers’ arsenals. However, as the amount of data available explodes, the tools and technology required to accurately message to and engage these audiences grows as well. We like the sound of that challenge!

Search Meet Social, Social Meet Search
For years we have heard the somewhat trite but always buzz-worthy phrase, “social drives search.” Finally, with the launch of the “Like” button, Facebook may actually be unlocking the true underpinnings of that phrase. The folks at Business Insider take an in depth look at Facebook’s social search aspirations, and while it is still very early, there are definitely some promising (and relevant) results driven not by crawling algorithms, but social ones.

Relevance Doesn’t Just Matter When You’re Paying
Search Engine Land published some great tips on how to use PPC Copy and relevance scores to drive SEO copy (Page Titles and Meta Descriptions). A simple reminder that relevance should drive every marketing copy decision that we make, not just the ones where there is a monetary penalty for not doing so. We also love the test and learn approach!

Start Thinking About Longer Queries
A new study from ad network Chitika provides some interesting insight into query length and its effect on SEO volume and conversion rate. We all know that query strings are getting longer as users get more sophisticated in their searching, but this study ties actual value towards optimizing meta content towards longer queries. Additionally, in the context of the above story, search engine marketers should be using results like these to help drive their campaign content.