Marketing Pilgrim

A midnight marketing news snack to tide you over til morning:

• Yet another reason why you should consider using product reviews: Peer reviews help to increase consumers’ brand trust.
• LonelyGirl15 Part Deux: KateModern. The Bebo-based online video serial is from the same people that did LonelyGirl last year, but this time they’re not keeping us in suspense about whether or not it’s real. But, as Red Herring put it, they are “creating a richly drawn world where real and fake become difficult to decipher.”
The New York Times catches up, but Pownce is so yesterday.

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Who knew display ads might actually be useful? A new study from Yahoo and comScore finds that online display ads produced 11% lift in dollars spent in in-store conversions. Search ads yielded a 26% lift in dollars spent.

Most impressive, however, was the result from a combination of search and online display ads: a 83% lift in dollars spent in later in-store conversion. The combination also increased incremental in-store revenue 90% (as opposed to 43% with search-only ads and 15% with display-only).

Display ads were also found to increase page views 37%—comparable to search ads’ effect (46%). Together? 68%.

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I wonder if Ask’s parent company is regretting spending the big bucks on Crispin, Bogusky + Porter yet—increased advertising costs for Ask.com was one of the many factors cited in contributing to poor results in this year’s Q2, as reported today.

Overall, InterActiveCorp’s revenue rose 5.6% over last year’s Q2, to $1.51 billion (after adjusting for “special items and one-time gains,” as Reuters put it). Their net profit nearly doubled to $95.97 million, up from $53.8 million last year. However, this growth only represents a one-cent increase in earnings per share over last year’s (and falls one cent short of analyst’s expectations).

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The Federal Communications Commission has made its decision on the ground-rules for winning the 700MHZ wireless spectrum. Remember, Google upped the ante by making a bid provided the FCC agreed to:

• Open applications: consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
• Open devices: consumers should be able to utilize their handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
• Open services: third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
• Open networks: third parties (like Internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee?s wireless network

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Wow, it’s the last day of July already! Ok, you’d better read this news item quick as they’ll turn into mice at midnight tonight.

• WebTrends releases a new version of their Marketing Lab web analytics product.
• Mark Evans suggests that the music industry no longer needs fear peer-to-peer networks. It’s social networks that are sharing illegal music.
• Not only are more of us using social networks, we’re spending more time on them that ever before.

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So, is Google really interested in winning the bid for the FCC’s upcoming 700mhz wireless spectrum auction, or is it just a big bluff?

You can never really tell with Google. Maybe they’re interested in owning the frequency so they can continue their quest to dominate every aspect of our connected-lives. Then again, maybe they’re just using this as leverage. Here’s a ZDNet statement that caught my eye…

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Search Engine Land takes a close look at Yahoo’s new Yahoo Search Assist tool. Unlike normal search suggestion tools, Search Assist predicts when you might need a little help with your search and then shows up.

As Danny Sullivan explains…

Ever had one of those moments when you start to type in a query, enter a word and then pause because you’re not quite sure what other words to add to it? Search Assist senses this. It notes that you’ve paused, takes that as a sign you need help and magically makes suggestions appear below the search box. Cool!

In addition, you don’t just get suggestions that contain some of the letters you initially type. Search Assist goes beyond the original word to suggest related topics.

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It seems Microsoft’s not quite sure whether they do truly wish to give away Microsoft Works 9.0 for free or not. First reports suggested that Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Search & Advertising Platform Group, told Mary Jo Foley that an ad-supported version of Microsoft’s stripped down version of Office would be available soon.

Nadella added that Works will be just “the first of the ad-funded software we are going to do.” When I asked for other examples of products might decide to make free and ad-funded, he mentioned Office Accounting Express - a product which is currently available as both a free download and as a component of certain Office Live paid subscriptions. He also said software downloads/shareware was another category ripe with products that could be free and ad-funded.

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Inside AdWords has announced the launch of Google AdWords new ad performance tool - Campaign Optimizer.

The new tool is designed to look for weaknesses in your campaign and suggest ways to boost performance.

Here’s where you can run it…

How does it work?

…first, the tool analyzes your campaign to see what settings have or haven’t worked well for you recently — this process typically takes a minute or less. Next, it generates a customized proposal of ideas for your campaign aimed at improving your performance. Finally, you’ll be able to review each proposed change and apply the ones you like directly to your campaign.

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Today iCrossing, possibly the largest SEM firm, announced its acquisition of web development firm Proxicom. The acquisition came on the heels of an announcement last week by iCrossing that it had received $62 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and three venture capital firms. This acquisition is just the latest in a string of purchases by iCrossing this year and last, including: ewGate Internet, a paid-search firm in San Francisco; Spannerworks, a search and social-media agency in the United Kingdom; and Sharp Analytics, a marketing technology firm in Salt Lake City.

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MarketingExperiments.com has just published a new research brief that discusses how the relevance of the ad displayed impacts the click through rate and conversion rate.

In two case studies, Marketing Experiments showed important the ad text is to both the click through rate and conversion rate. In one study that tested ads for Encyclopedia Brittannica, ad titles that contained both “Encylopedia” and “Brittannica” converted 2.5 times better than ad titles that contained only “Brittannica. ” It is important to understand that 90% of the tested traffic saw the ads after searching for a phrase that contained both terms.

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