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The Changing Landscape of Advertising

July 16, 2017 Advertising Questions

By now, we’re all very familiar with how the Internet has changed almost every aspect of life as we know it. But as advertisers, you may not realize just how quickly online users are changing their habits. Within just a few short years, desktop search became secondary to mobile search, voice queries are becoming the preferred search method over typed search, and streaming services are making standard cable obsolete.

Mary Meeker produces something called the Internet Trends Report every year for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In this 350-page behemoth of a report, she looks at the online world regarding trends, online advertising, games, media, the cloud and a lot more. But there are some great takeaways from her report that are worth bringing up.

Down the Tube

As of 2017, Internet ad spend will take over television ad spend. What? Yes, you read that correctly. With almost 3.4 billion internet users as of 2016, much of the world has access to the internet in some form or another. Compare this with only 1.4 billion homes worldwide having at least one television set, and it soon becomes obvious that marketing to consumers where they are (online) is not going to be through traditional advertising. The chart below shows that internet advertising expenditures will reach $200 billion dollars in 2017. Notice the level of increase in just the past 5 years. Meanwhile, television ad spend has been going up, but at not nearly the rate. This reflects advertisers increased understanding that there has been a fundamental shift in how people get their information.

The Big Players

To no one’s surprise, the biggest players in the field of online advertising are Google and Facebook. But Meeker’s Report shows just how incredibly dominant these two are. As of 2016, the two companies owned 85% of the online advertising market. And this trend appears to be growing, with Google up 20% Y/Y and Facebook up a whopping 62%. Compare this with the rest of the field’s increase of 9% and it’s easy to see what the near future holds for online advertising dollars.

Another key slide in Meeker’s report was her chart showing how these online advertising dollars are spent. In 2016 for the first time, Mobile advertising spend outpaced desktop spend.

Again, this is not surprising, given the increasing amounts of time that people are spending online. In 2016, adults in the U.S. spent an average of 5.6 hours PER DAY online. But what’s even more astounding is that they spent 3.1 of those hours using their mobile phone.

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?

Meeker’s report points out that for traditional media, the percent of ad spend roughly equals the percent of media consumption (i.e. television consumption was 38% of total media, and of total media spend across all channels, television’s share was 38%.) But this is not the case for mobile. As of 2016, mobile consumption equaled 28% of total media, whereas its ad spend was only 21% of total. This means that there is a $16 billion-dollar opportunity to be had, as the amount of mobile advertising catches up with the amount of time spent on phones. The data shows that there is a giant opportunity for nimble companies to beat their competitors to the punch by reaching customers via mobile.

The report also shows that the future of online advertising will continue to be done through social channels. In addition to Google and Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram (owned by Facebook,) is seeing higher ad spend.

Advertisers can’t look at online advertising anymore with disdain and incredulity. If they want to reach their customers, they are going to have to jump in with both feet. Raven Marketing in Portland, Oregon can help businesses stay on trend and use their advertising dollars efficiently by creating a marketing mix that incorporates media that customers are using most.

Is Your Business Set Up to Rank Well on Google?

June 20, 2017 Advertising Questions

The most recent version of the Moz Local Ranking Factors came out a few weeks ago. For local businesses trying to gain a foothold in search engine rankings, this offers incredible insight as to what you should be focusing on.

But let’s back up a little and remind ourselves why we want to rank higher in search. Ranking higher, especially on the first page, brings in more clicks, which can lead to more sales. According to Moz, 71% of searches did not go past the first page before the searcher clicked on a link. Pages two and three got only 6%. Furthermore, the top three organic listings on a search results page accounted for roughly 61% of the total clicks, with the next 3 positions, numbers 4, 5 & 6, totaling 18%, while positions 7-10 accounted for just 11.6%.

Obviously, it’s important to rank for keyword phrases that get searched more than others, but that’s a discussion for another time. We’re here to talk about what factors lead to your site and pages to getting ranked above your competitors. And that leads us to the report. Moz ranks factors in order of how much they contribute to your site’s overall ranking. This year’s rankings have changed somewhat from two years ago—the last time this report came out.

Number 1 Factor: Google My Business Signals

Google My Business (GMB) is Google’s free tool that allows businesses to manage their Google presence. When you search for a business on Google, information including category, phone number, address, reviews, and more are pulled from the business’ Google My Business page to be shown in the results. This information allows Google to determine where your business is in relation to where the searcher is. So, proximity is a key factor. It also allows them to determine what type of business you have–another important factor. While GMB is still the number one factor in local rank, it has gone down from 22% to 19% in the two years since the study was last done.

Number 2 Factor: Link Signals

Links (aka backlinks) are just what you think they are: links from other pages “back” to yours. But not just any link adds value. To be valuable, links must come from high domain authority sites. Domain Authority, another term coined by Moz, is a predictor of how well a site will rank on a search engine. The precursor to this was PageRank, developed by Larry Page of Google, which was a more simplified measurement of links and link equity. As you can see in, link signals are now quite valued, making up 17.3% of total factors involved in where your website ranks.

Number 3 Factor: On-Page Signals

On-Page Signals have everything to do with what’s on your site. The first on-page signal is the presence of something called the NAP, which stands for Name, Address, Phone. It’s important to have this information on every page of your site, preferably in the same spot. The second signal is whether you have keywords related to the search in your page titles, header tags, page urls, and meta data.

Number 4 Factor: Citation Signals

Simply put, a citation is any mention of your business and address on the internet. You’ll typically find these on internet directories such as the Yellow Pages, Whitepages, Yelp, and other places. These will normally have your name, address and phone number (NAP), possibly your web address, and a description of your business. There are some key citations that are very important. We call these data aggregators, of which there are four main ones—Express Update, Neustar/Localeze, Acxiom, and Factual. Getting listed on these is paramount. But getting your business listed on as many high domain authority directories as possible is also smart, as citation volume feeds into this signal. One last determinant is the consistency of your listings. Your business must have the same NAP across all these aggregators and directories to get the most value.

Number 5 Factor: Review Signals

Finally, a signal that is easy to understand. We all know what reviews are. You may have gotten a few reviews here and there, some good and some bad. But reviews are very important to ranking well. A few of the important factors inside this signal include the volume of reviews your site or product page has gotten, their “velocity” or how frequently they are posted, and their diversity, meaning reviews on a variety of different sites, like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and more. Review signals increased 21.53% in importance between 2015 and 2017.

Number 6 Factor: Behavioral Signals

One of the biggest changes from the last survey to today is the increased emphasis on behavioral signals. These include your site’s click-through rate (the number of times your site link came up in the search results divided by the number of actual clicks to your site), as well as mobile clicks to call and check-ins. While this signal accounts for only 10% of the total ranking factors, it’s up by 18% since the last report.

Number 7 Factor: Personalization

Personalization means that the search engines, including Google are increasingly delivering search results that are compiled based on the searcher—what country, city and neighbrhood they live in (determined by the searcher’s IP address), the searcher’s search history, and their click-through history. Google’s goal is to deliver increasingly personalized results based on these parameters. There isn’t much a company can do to affect this, other than making sure their NAP (Name, Address, Phone) appears consistently throughout their site and on other sites.

Number 8 Factor: Social Signals

With all the talk of social media, one would think this factor would be at the top of this. While it’s only at #8, it’s still important. Just having a Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or other social media page isn’t enough. The amount of engagement with visitors these pages get is also factored in. By engagement we’re talking about comments, shares, and likes. The amount of engagement isn’t a direct ranking factor, but rather a pointer. To quote Searchmetrics 2016 Rebooting Ranking Factors White Paper, “The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high…”

Conclusion

As the search engines (read: Google and all others), continue to evolve their algorithm for determining rank, it’s important to pay attention to the latest data out there and focus your energy on the factors that will move the needle.

If you feel like you don’t have the bandwidth or the knowhow to implement these suggestions, you may want to consider hiring a SEO professional like Raven Marketing. We have a track record of boosting our client’s rankings and can work with you to get your company to the top of the search engines.

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Do Young People Still Watch Television?

May 17, 2017 Advertising Questions

The rise of the internet a couple of decades ago was seen as a major challenge for the TV and electronic media industry. Even rudimentary video sharing websites managed to gain a strong foothold in the everyday lives of users. However, it wasn’t until YouTube was born that the TV industry really began to feel the pinch. YouTube and other forms of social media – like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine – promised a whole new world of content created by the users, for the users. Looking back at our viewing habits today, it doesn’t appear that that model has exactly worked as intended. Sure, there has been a shift in TV viewing styles and demographics, but the good old television remains a firmly anchored staple of the modern American home. As a matter of fact, nearly all American households – 98 percent to be precise – own at least one television.

Demographics of TV Viewers

Recently, marketing research firm Nielsen released data based on six years-worth of extensive research into the TV viewing habits of American people. Here are some of the key findings of the research:

Young People Still Watch TV

The report found that millennials between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four still watch a weekly average of more than fifteen hours’ worth of TV – that translated to over two hours every single day. In fact, in the past three years, this is the second smallest decline noticed in the number of TV viewers among eighteen to twenty-four year olds.

Generation X Still Loves its TV

Generation X, comprised of people between the ages of thirty-five and forty-nine watches around thirty-one hours of TV per week, or more than four hours per day.

The Adult Demographic Stays Strong:

Adults above the age of fifty are still the largest viewers of TV, with an average viewing time ranging from six to eight hours per day.

Half of All Americans Use Online Subscription Services:

The research also found that nearly half of all Americans now have online subscriptions to services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon prime in their homes.

Mobile is the Next Big Thing:

Americans love their tablets and mobile phones, spending between thirty minutes and two hours on these devices each day. This marks an increase of over 60 percent in just a couple of years.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that TV watching habits are changing steadily, but there is no need for alarm yet. All audience groups still continue to watch TV, and for adults, this habit is gradually increasing over time. This translates to people having more purchasing power still relying on TV for entertainment and information. On the other hand, while younger individuals are switching to other methods of catching their favorite seasons and movies, they still spend a significant amount of time each day watching traditional TV. With that in mind, TV continues its long-standing legacy as the premium method of choice for advertising, even today. To learn more about how you can advertise to young people in the Portland market, contact Raven Marketing at 503-954-1473.

Automobile Dealers: Do You Know Where Your Sales Come From?

April 26, 2017 Advertising Questions

Since the beginning of the automobile era, car dealers have been advertising to their customers using the same basic methods. Whether it’s newspaper advertising, tv or radio ads, or billboards, the goal was to cast as wide a net as possible and hope that you lured in enough people to make money month over month. Then came the digital age and the internet. This presented an interesting challenge to auto dealers in terms of where to advertise. Many dealers started using Google Adwords and Facebook ads to augment their existing advertising and hopefully reach more customers. They used built-in filters to target customers within a certain radius of their dealership. Some went even further, identifying advanced customer demographics such as age or gender. But they still didn’t have a clue as to who ultimately walked through the door or why they decided to come in.

Let’s Get Mike!

That’s where the name Mike Annable comes in. Mike spent the better part of 20 years in the internet marketing business. After working for a dealer group in Florida as ecommerce director, he quickly saw the need for a business to manage auto dealers’ SEO and paid search.

So, Mike founded Showroom Logic to do just that. Within a few years, Showroom Logic was handling this work for over 1000 dealers across the country. As the business grew, Mike realized he had a problem, and it had a name, “Marketing Attribution.”

In the process of a buying decision, a customer experiences several “touchpoints” or interactions with various media, whether it be seeing an ad on TV or radio, seeing an ad in a magazine, or using comparison shopping sites on the web. Attribution is the science of giving credit to or assigning dollars from a sale to each of the marketing touchpoints that a customer was exposed to prior to their purchase. Mike had difficulty doing this, because he just didn’t know what all the touchpoints his customers had hit on the way to their purchase.

A Better Mousetrap

That’s when Mike decided to develop a software tool called ROI Detective that could do the heavy lifting of identifying how customers ultimately came to the dealership. ROI Detective is a unique software that allows dealer salespeople to survey their customers. They are asked questions regarding which websites they visited prior to visiting the dealer, what their first method contact with the dealer was, and other questions. The great thing about this tool is that it’s done post-sale so there’s no pressure to answer one way or the other. The dealer gets true data from actual customers, which they then aggregate with data from other customers to develop a comprehensive attribution picture. Armed with this information, dealers can fine tune their marketing mix and spend based on evidence and facts, rather than presumptive ideas of how customers were acquired.

The company, founded in 2015, has been growing rapidly and refining their software, which is now in the hands of a handful of dealers in the Florida area. Mike’s goal is to get dealers across the country using the software to gain real, actionable data on the customer makeup.

Is TV Advertising Too Expensive?

April 1, 2017 Advertising Questions

When planning their advertising and media budgets for the year, many companies completely ignore television advertising. Why? Because they think it will blow their budgets, leaving them nothing left to spend on other channels. But are these companies missing an opportunity? The answer is most likely yes.

Fine Tune your Focus

The big misconception in television advertising is the thought that companies need to run their ads during peak viewership times to be successful. The key, says Laura Gonzales of Raven Marketing, a Portland-area advertising agency specializing in television advertising, is to zero in on specific programs with the right audience demographics, rather than trying to get in front of the most people. By focusing on viewers that are a good fit with your business, you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

“Companies think they have to advertise during the highest rated shows. This couldn’t be farther from the truth,” says Gonzales. “While we don’t completely disregard ratings, we really focus in on the other factors—the age, ethnicity, and socio-economics of the viewers, as well the subject matter of the show. We find the right program that fits with client’s customer base, and run their ads during this period.”

Repeat After Me

Gonzales went on to say that another key is repetition. She said that the best successes occur when a client runs their ads on a regular basis over a three-month period.

Seasonality & Timing

Other factors that contribute to the success of your television ad are things like the season and even the day of the week. If you’ve got a product or service that lends itself to a particular season, be sure to advertise during that time. If you sell products that are typically shopped for on weekends, such as furniture or cars, make sure that is when your ads are running.

Other Budget-Stretching Ideas

For businesses that need to stretch their advertising dollar, looking for discounts of any kind can be invaluable. By using these tools, you might be able save even more.

Pre-Pay for Your Ads

Television stations are much like other businesses in that they like to be paid ahead of time for the service they provide. When you pay upfront for your ad slots, you tend to get better service and fewer preemptions.

Agree to Longer Ad Schedule

Stations and cable companies offer the best deals on packages that run 10 to13 weeks. Once you’ve decided on the program or programs that you want your ad to run during, committing to a campaign of this length helps the station manage their inventory and in the process, lower the buy rates for each slot.

Remnants & Auctions

Stations often have advertising slots that they are unable to sell. In the industry, this is called remnant or remainder advertising. By setting aside a small part of the advertising budget for this “fire-sale” type of advertising, you may be able to get a much-reduced rate for shows that fit your advertising profile.

Advertising auctions can also be a place to get a bargain on ad slots. The important factors to note here are that you must pay upfront without knowing what time slots you’ll get. While you wouldn’t want to base your entire ad plan on auctions, it can be an effective addition to your planned spend.

Conclusion

By letting go of the notion that television advertising costs too much, you may find that it may just be the advertising channel that drives the best ROI for you or your client. To learn how to advertise effectively yet efficiently to people in Portland, contact Raven Marketing at 503-954-1473.

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