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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Is Your Ad Experience Good Enough For Your Customers?
00:23:58
Daniel and Ciaran explore the importance of taking a good look at the experience your customers have of your brand or organisation when they experience your advertising online. What is it like to be on the receiving end of your brand advertising...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com.
- [00:13]
B
Hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:18]
C
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
- [00:19]
B
And today, Daniel, we're asking how good are your customers advertising experience? What's it really like to be on the receiving end of your brand's adverts?
- [00:29]
C
I think this is hugely important. The ad industry has been one that has suffered massively because of the low quality of ads that we've experienced and the misuse of some of the technology that's been available. There have been some solutions that I don't think are solutions. So we'll talk about those and then I'm going to have a big rant about something at the end as well and I'm going to try and manage that rant.
- [00:51]
B
We're building up to that. Building up to that, exactly. Can I just remind you, Daniel, our family friendly rating is still good. We within itunes, I should control my.
- [00:58]
C
Language or add some extensive bleeping to the whole thing recording as well. So let's just start off and put this in context. Advertising and banner ads have been used previously as a brute force way of shoving things down your throat and just showing you ads until you kind of felt into submission.
- [01:14]
B
The whole display ad side of things has been very much like that since I think since sort of the dot com boom, stroke bust era. Actually it never really changed that much.
- [01:25]
C
No, it didn't. And then retargeting came in which is supposed to alleviate the problem, which is okay, you've been on my website, therefore I'm going to show you content that's related ads that are related to what you've already shown an interest in, therefore that will be more useful. However.
- [01:38]
B
Well, it just got overused a bit, didn't it really? So, you know, we've all been there. You visit a website and you look at a pair of shoes and then everywhere you go you see these wretched shoes, they're there in front of you.
- [01:49]
C
I'm waiting for an analogy. Come on.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, so. Well, this is a favorite analogy of mine. So I always like to think of digital marketing space and this is a game you can do with your own brands. Think of it like a physical store. And I think when misapplied in the wrong way, I'm not against retargeting. I think it can be effective. But if you're not careful, you run the risk of doing this, which would be a customer enters into your store and your shopkeeper says, can I Interest you in our special offer. And you say, no, thank you, I'm just browsing. And then you wander down the street and go into a different shop and that same shopkeeper follows you in and says, but can I interest you in this special offer? And it's like, no. And that would clearly be wrong. You would never do that in the high street.
- [02:31]
C
It would be weird.
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B
It would be weird. Maybe we should try it just for fun. Just for fun. If anybody. No, let's not go there. Don't try this. Don't try this. I don't think it would be a good thing. It's just not appropriate. And yet online, using digital tactics, people do it all the time, think it's perfectly okay. And actually, I think there's a. Well, you only need to look at the backlash that people have had and how actually anybody you talk to, particularly within the senior teams of your own boards actually will despise. And hey, oh, I really don't like that. I've never work for a big brand where they've kind of really said no. It's amazing. I think it's the best thing ever.
- [03:06]
C
But there are basic tools like frequency capping. If you've seen an ad x number of types stop showing to or sequencing rather than just showing you the same product again and again show you a sequence of different ads that maybe tell you about product features. So the technology is there, but we're just misusing it to some extent as well.
- [03:21]
B
It is. And it still comes down to people not asking, well, how is this customer experience? What's it actually like to be on the receiving end of this thing that that we're doing to our customers and actually if it's not good, take stock of that and make it better. There's a real opportunity there too.
- [03:37]
C
My favorite one of these was a polar bear Christmas light. So very oddly, I was doing some work for a brand and on their website they had a delightful polar bear Christmas light. This is December, so I clicked on it and then everywhere I went, including Facebook, other websites, they showed me this polar bear Christmas light. But I was basically being stalked by this polar bear everywhere I went. And it got ridiculous. It was literally I was seeing it 10, 15 times a day. Come January, I was still seeing this polar bear Christmas light. So it just really was a waste of their budget as well. So thinking about actually how much is annoying people when's appropriate show things, could they have shown me otherwise maybe I would have bought a reindeer Christmas light. But they needed to work out what it was Interested in. Now this moves me on to some other technology. I have a real bugbear at the moment where big brands are being bamboozled by agencies sometimes where they will say, well, we're doing some targeting with your ads, but we're doing some really smart targeting and we've got this Programmatic team.
- [04:34]
B
Algorithmic.
- [04:35]
C
Yeah, they're doing programmatic targeting and. Oh, that sounds good. What are they doing? Well, I don't know.
- [04:40]
B
Very clever.
- [04:40]
C
Yeah, very clever. There's some big brain people in our programmatic team doing this stuff and they can't tell you what they're actually doing.
- [04:46]
B
They do normally at this point whip out a few very complex looking slides.
- [04:49]
C
Exactly.
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B
That have been designed to look remarkably simple but yet are still complex.
- [04:54]
C
So what I'd say is that programmatic in itself can be a massive solution. So it can do things like real time bidding. So real time bidding says, actually instead of showing mad a thousand times and hoping to hit the right people, I'm going to show my ad once, but I only want to show it to someone that is in the north of England, that's on an iPhone, that has recently shown an interest in credit cards and I'm willing to pay 30 pence for that person. And then the system goes, right, we've got one. And then if you're bidding the highest, your ad is shown to that person. Perfectly great. One example, use of programmatic and there's lots of other much more clever uses than that. But the problem is it's being used as a bit of a cover up in some cases for doing clever targeting. And then people can't explain what they're actually doing. And my advice is if it can't be explained to you how the targeting is being done, either your agency just thinks you're stupid and they don't want to bother explaining to you because you just wouldn't understand. Or they don't really know and someone probably does, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're doing something that clever. So again, it's one of those technologies that's being used as a bit of an excuse. So really get to understand what is the customer experience, what have they done, what are they going to do that's going to make them experience this ad and how is it relevant to their experience.
- [06:02]
B
Another thing I think is really important you look at with these systems is to see who gets what when stuff happens and how are they being incentivized. So if the structure of the campaign is very much done on, you know, getting volume away Then you know, be wary of that and really dig into who's getting what, where and when within that whole supply chain.
- [06:23]
C
Now one of the solutions to this was and kind of is supposed to be the iab, the Internet Advertising Bureau or the industry body for online advertising is their self regulatory initiative. And what this is is you go and look at a behaviorally targeted ad, you may in many cases, little top right hand corner, tiny, tiny. You'll see a little kind of logo in blue which looks like the kind of IAB logo a little. And you can click on that and it will tell you how they are targeting ads at you and why they're targeting ads at you. And you can change your options, you can say, no, I don't want these, and so on as well. The problem I think is that most people don't know what that symbol means, let alone do they click on it. And actually I think the biggest problem is the advertising networks have not really embraced this fully. And even though they're using it, when you click on it, it's mind bendingly complicated to change your settings. So they're kind of discouraging you. Not all of them, some are doing brilliantly, like one click, I can get rid of this or I can change it. But many of them are making you go through three, four clicks to actually change your settings and it's not particularly helpful. So iab, good for you starting it. I think it should be enforced slightly better and I think more people need to be educated about what it actually is.
- [07:28]
B
But the sentiment's in the right place, making it a bit more transparent and less complicated. They've just not quite got the good solution.
- [07:35]
C
No, I think then I think IAB are doing a good job in doing that. I think the reality is though, they don't want industry regulation, they want to regulate themselves as any industry does, because otherwise it could cause some problems. So worth taking a look at if you haven't looked at it, it's IAB search and they've got local websites in pretty much every market and there's some good examples of what they're trying to do.
- [07:53]
B
So one of the areas of discussion I find really fascinating is the furore, Daniel, over ad blocking software. And there are two sides of thoughts to this. Consumers tend to love it and embrace it because it stops advertisers spoiling their online experience. And let's face it, at times the Internet can get so heavily ad driven. Certainly sites that you land on can be so heavily populated with ads that actually you just can't get to the content and particularly thinking of some of the more gross examples like the clickbait where there is like 15 things you have to know about Paris Hilton and each one's on a separate page, but you have to click through and there's like millions of adverts you gotta get through. And actually sometimes you struggle to see the actual content. For actually, I think it's interesting because actually the consumer has reacted because advertisers didn't do anything about this and the problem was getting so bad they took matters into their own hands and started adopting these ad blockers in large numbers and still do, as a lot of people I know still use them and value them. The for all is over. The fact that this advertising pays for a lot of this content and actually without it, or a little bit stumps, kind of a bit of a chicken and an egg situation.
- [09:06]
C
It's interesting. So globally the stats are 11% of us use an ad blocker. Okay. However, specific audiences use it to a greater, much greater extent. If I speak to my students at Imperial College, so I lecture at Imperial College and in London and we have 200 students in the master's program, all of whom are 21 years old pretty much. So they've come out of doing like an undergraduate, they've gone into a postgraduate thing and they're 85% international. So they're a really good test bed for what do 21 year olds generally? Smart bunch, obviously, very kind of tech savvy. 70% of them use ad blockers. So if you want to get to this audience, they are a tough audience to get to through ads and it is a reaction to poor quality advertising. If ads were showing more value, then actually we wouldn't bother doing this. So ad blockers are a challenge, but the problem is many, many websites are paid for by the advertising. And if you don't allow the advertising to roll through that website, you are not going to pay for the website. The website will just go, the content will disappear. So we need to be realistic about this commercial relationship of how content is being paid for. One of the things that I think has always been missing, and we're going to come back to this point in a moment, is micropayments. And no one's quite cracked this yet. If you could go to a website and it could say you can read this article for one penny or one cent, a lot of people go, yeah, fine, that's no problem. And I could just build up on my account and I could just pay things then a Lot of us would do that and it would pay for the content without the need for advertising. But it's kind of missing as a mechanism. Putting one penny through a credit card isn't very appealing to credit card processors. It's going to cost the company more than that in the fees to do it and all those kind of things as well. So because of that, there's a bit of a problem in the market and we need to work out the way around this. And that moves us on into some of the things that Google is starting to do as well.
- [10:52]
B
There's certain things about Google that I've always loved and one of the things, do you know what, When I first discovered it, I hated it. But actually, as you work with their system, you begin to love it. And that's the AdWord quality score, which is a really important metric. So for those of you that don't know, Google kind of score every ad with a quality score and you can see it within your AdWords interface. And actually overall your, your whole website has a score as well. And basically it's a sort of a measure of the intent of you as an advertiser, matching up the needs of the people you want to reach. So to get a really good ad quality score, what you need to do is to pick some really appropriate keywords that are definitely going to be the sort of thing the people you want to reach are going to be searching for. And you need to include those keywords ideally within the headline of the advert. And obviously the advert itself needs to be about that subject. And then going one step further, the page on your website that you take them through to needs to have that same synergy with those original keywords search. And if you do those things, you get a really good ad quality score and as a result you actually pay less per click and have your advert shown more often than in a lot of, lot of cases you could be paying less than your competitors do because, you know, overall your whole campaigns, all of your ads kind of sit within a really good ad quality score of normally when managing accounts normally look at good score between 7 and 10. So it's measured on a 10 point scale, 10 being kind of superb and 0 being, you know, really not very good at all. Try better. So that's Ad quality score and that's a great feature of Google AdWords. I think it's one of the key things that's really made sure that they're both meeting the needs of the consumer, the searcher and businesses. And it's trying to bring about a win win situation. However, that's not always been the case for Google's display advertising product. And as we've talked already, display advertising has been one of those really problematical areas. But we've seen some really interesting move by Google which we've noticed over the last two to three months, kind of starting early summer where actually Google really seemed to be picking up and championing the whole customer advert experience across the board. And there are a number of things that they've bought out that have done that. So just to kind of highlight a few of these, they've introduced some new reports into Google Search Console, formerly Webmaster Tools. Daniel, do you just want to say a little bit about that?
- [13:24]
C
So what these will do is analyze your website, if you have ads on your website and try and work out is that giving a good experience to the visitors the website and it's trying to look at the relevance of those ads both in terms of content but in terms of the physical experience, how much space the page they take. Are they kind of getting in your face a little bit too much? Are they very kind of pop up all those kind of things? So it tries to give you a kind of quality analysis of how relevant ads are on your website. And I've also been told because what Google is starting to do, there's something if you have a lot of pop ups and those kind of things in your website and ads that do those kinds of things, they're actually going to be punishing the website from an SEO point of view. So it's very important for people to make sure that actually they don't have a poor user experience because actually it could damage your SEO rankings if you've got ads on your website as well. And they could be internal ads by the way as well. So it doesn't need to be banners from somewhere else necessarily.
- [14:12]
B
I think it's really telling that they've put these reports into Google Web Console because that is sending a very clear message. I think that there's a connection between those things, the connection between SEO, that's the main tool they give you for monitoring your performance within the search engines. I think that's a really quite bold moves. Like if you've got adverts on your website, you need to make sure they're, they're good and not annoying people.
- [14:34]
C
Absolutely. So that moves us on to some other things that Google, I mean one thing I've seen is really interesting, they're relying a lot more on machine learning. They're learning more about what people are interested in. And they have come out and said, look, it's not just about keyword targeting anymore, but actually it's about intent. And we're coming up with more and more groupings around intent and interests based on artificial intelligence and understanding what people are really interested in to try and make ad placement more relevant as well. So they're over the next year going to be adding a lot more features in terms of ad placement and trying to target your ads in smarter ways as well.
- [15:05]
B
So as well as putting these reports into Google Search console, they've also bought out some new ad formats in the Google Display network that are designed to be a lot less annoying. So great. So not only are they kind of guiding you to have better adverts on your site, they're also bringing out new adverts, formats that are known through testing to be less annoying.
- [15:26]
C
Are you trying to say lots of positive things about Google because you're now about to say lots of negative things about them? Because I'm going to rant about the next thing.
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B
No, I'm just trying to set the scene because if you do a search within the news feeds and stuff, you're going to find articles to all of these things and there's one more thing that they've brought about which is kind of improved filtering for advertisers. So there's been, I suppose over the last year really it's been a real for all within the press about, you know, brands advertising on various Google properties. Not just Google, actually, other display networks as well and their ads being shown in inappropriate places. And it's one of the real challenges with Programmatic. You know, it's great that I can reach, you know, X million websites with my ads, but unless you've really got your finger on the pulse, it's a full time job staying on track of who's using adverts and how, you know, how do you manage that at scale. And what the Google Display network has is a number of categories and they've recently taken steps to really refine and improve these categories to give a lot more control over where your adverts might be. So I think all of these are positive steps in the right direction that show that Google actually have a real interest in the overall customer ad experience. And I think certainly if Google are doing it, you should too. But not because Google are doing it because actually it's good for your customers and what's good for them is generally good for most businesses.
- [16:47]
C
Yeah, I think the problem with things like retargeting is why have we carried on doing it for so long if it's irritating people? Because the numbers tell us to. Because basically if you go through and say, well, we did the retargeting and we got an extra 2% uplift in sales, you go, brilliant. Well, it sold for 2% more stuff. We should do it. What it doesn't take into account is how many people did you irritate, how many negative touch points have you had with your brand, how many people are so sick of your brand they will swear never to buy anything from you again.
- [17:09]
B
It also won't tell you how many of those really core customers have you hacked off and those call customers between them. And when I've worked for some brands, as little as 2 or 3% of your entire audience could be bringing in 80, 90% of your revenue. And actually, when you're just going on simple metrics like ad click through and conversion rate doesn't tell you that, it doesn't tell you the damage it can be doing. And actually a lot of these things don't have sophisticated enough targeting to really tune into your CRM and dig into that kind of level of data. So you just won't know, but you'll just find that things haven't been so good lately. Absolutely right.
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C
Rant alert.
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B
Yeah. Okay, so the last feature that I want to bring in is one. It's not out for a bit, Daniel. And actually the results and what it'll actually be are a little bit sketchy at the moment. But they're planning on launching this in 2018. It's had quite a lot of coverage within the online press, and that is add filtering if you like. It's kind of like what people are saying is Google are adding ad blocking into Google Chrome, their web browser.
- [18:16]
C
Let me just clarify this.
- [18:18]
B
Yeah.
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C
A company that makes 97% of its revenue by selling ads is going to build an ad blocker into their browser. But that ad blocker will allow their ads through, as I'm interpreting it, because they are not annoying. Because they built new rules. So they're not annoying. But other people's ads might be seen as noise. They might block those.
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B
Okay, so that's my interpretation. I get that. So to be fair to Google, they're not billing it as an ad blocker, they're billing it.
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C
They wouldn't, would they?
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B
No, no, they wouldn't. But they are billing it as an ad. Ad filtering. So basically, if you don't want to receive annoying ads, you can filter those out. I'm guessing the system will choose what's annoying and what's not, but it's probably learning kind of machine learning code and see what works and what doesn't. And I guess it's just, do you know what, if you're a big advertising display network, you've got to start the ball rolling somehow. How do you break the impasse?
- [19:17]
C
I think that it's fair that actually ad blockers the moment punish everyone and actually there might be some great ads out there and we need some mechanism to filter those. I'm not sure that the world's largest seller of online ads is best placed to be the decider on what the best ads are.
- [19:36]
B
So I'm going to challenge you on this. And it's not because I've got a hell bent needs to protect Google. I'm sure they can do it. So but you know, everybody knows that the searcher is king and that's one of Google's adages. And actually I think they're taking some quite brave steps to try and re establish that at the moment there's this impasse of ad blockers and consumers being upset and advertisers being upset. And actually this is a step in the right direction. And the other thing I think is that we don't yet know exactly what form this will take, but I think it's another move and in the space that they're in, actually your very incredulity at the whole thing suggests how brave a move it is. And I still go back to some of the true things that have always been driven through to me by the whole Google PR engine and the messaging which is the searcher is king. And actually I think they understand that actually it's not about the advertisers or the ads. The people ultimately paying for all this are at the beginning of the food chain and that's the searches themselves. So taking steps to actually improve that is great. But you know what, we should all wake up and smell the coffee and get on board with how good is our ad experience for our customers because ultimately that's what they're kind of looking to try and move the goalpost a little bit, I think to help try and find.
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C
I think the danger is it's kind of slight saying, well, I'm a company that happens to have a browser and I won't name the previous company this and I have an operating system and I'm going to put that browser as the only operating system because I think that will give the user the best experience and they got themselves into quite a lot of trouble for doing that. Now I'm not suggesting it's the same thing. I'm legally disclaiming this. Now this is an opinion. I'm not comparing the two things directly, but I just think it's slightly dangerous when the biggest seller of something is setting the rules for how you filter that particular thing. I understand why. I understand we don't know the full details yet and so on as well, but I find it slightly challenging and I think we just need to monitor it. And I think you're absolutely right. They are actually they have and always have tried to make steps in the right direction of improving the user experience first at the expense of a lot of ad sales in a lot of cases as well. So that is a fair point.
- [21:45]
B
Look at them taking the move to reduce the number of ads on the page of any given search, which made.
- [21:50]
C
It more competitive and therefore more expensive for all advertisers. But actually overall and changing the button on it. That said, add to the same color as the link so you couldn't differentiate between them.
- [22:00]
B
But there was a lot of win win in there. I think overall it's gotten a bit better. Certainly mobile searches have improved I think because you get less clutter.
- [22:08]
C
You do, but at the same time it's pushed the organic search results down the page and you can't deal with the difference between paid and organic search results.
- [22:15]
B
After this recording you and I outside, it's going to be handbags at 50 paces.
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C
I think it is. I think that's. I am in agreeance that actually in agreement that they are doing lots of good things. I'm also highly cynical of it and I think that's rightfully so as well. I think we've got to keep an eye on it. They are a profit driven company like any other is as well. Well, they do lots of cool stuff and without them we wouldn't have an awful lot of stuff we've got. So let's not get that wrong as well. So interesting to look out for. We don't even know what's gonna happen. None of this might even happen yet anyway. So let's keep an eye on it and see what occurs as well. By the way, one of the best places to monitor this, the Google Webmasters blog is brilliant and actually they publish all the latest stuff they're up to in there as well. So it's a really good place to keep an eye on those kind of things as well. So we will keep you up to date on what's happening with it.
- [22:58]
B
And if you're interested in finding out more on these changes, we have quite an in depth article coming out this week, so watch out for that as well.
- [23:06]
C
So thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your opinions as normal. And that's it from the Digital Marketing Podcast for now.
- [23:18]
A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.
- [23:49]
B
Sam.