MetaMuse

Improving Google Hints to use Behavioral Targeting Keywords

Mike Dierken at Others Online just wrote an interesting post about the ability to mashup "Google hints" with behavioral targeting keywords. "Google hints" is an invite-only feature of Google AdSense.

Basically, the feature works by setting an undocumented AdSense variable called google_hints to a comma separated list of keywords. AdSense then considers the list of keywords to select appropriate ads.

For those of you able to use Google hints, there's a simple way to populate the google_hints param with better targeted keywords. I won't go into details, but think of the keywords as a recommendation based on all the pages that user has been to on your site, filtered/biased by affinity score and commercial value.

What is Twitter?

"Web 2.0" is so much about the movement of our collective attention being streamed to the Web -- what we care about, what we're thinking about, our opinions, what we're doing, writing, shopping for, planning on, worrying about, etc. It's the implicit and explicit sharing of behavior and information.

Twitter fits into this movement. I'm a light user (and apparently also a famous Twitterer). But I really like  CommonCraft's Twitter in Plain English video below.

By the way, you can find me on twitter at http://twitter.com/kickstand.

Social Media Research

Great stuff on social media usage, activities, trends, numbers, etc.

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Increasing Social Network Ad Revenues

Ever since I heard about the MySpace HyperTargeting program last December, I've been looking for information about how it's been performing.

The theory, which we're proving to Others Online partners and which HyperTargeting is testing, is that ads in social network situations are better targeted not by the context of the page you're on, but on the content you write within your own profile/pages.

Looks like they're reporting 300% increase in clicks in initial tests.

UPDATE: Found a little more information on how MySpace HyperTargeting works and how they're charging. Looks like they are segmenting users into proprietary categories based on the information in their profiles, then selling those categories on a CPM basis at a 50% premium.

Affinity vs. Engagement in Advertising

Others Online has been working on some interesting reports for our partners to summarize in aggregate form what their users care about. As a matter of labeling, we've discussed the term "affinity" vs "engagement". The latter has been thrown around the online advertising space quite a bit recently, so I did some poking around the Web to get a better feel for how it's being used. Usually, going with some convention in labeling in more advantageous, rather than creating your own definitions (which markets get annoyed with IMO).

Stumbled upon an interesting and intelligent blog post on How the New Engagement Metrics Can Impact Advertising Decisions. In it, "engagement" was defined as the nature of visitors’ relationship with a site and how that is expressed in the full range of user interaction, involvement and connection. Kevin then went on to describe categories of engagement that effectively describe the kinds of engagement illuminating and differentiating Web sites for advertisers: loyalty, recency, click depth, interactivity, duration, and subscription. I should also point out that Kevin's work leveraged the work of Eric Peterson. Kevin then wrote:

How  can publishers collaborate with advertisers to yield actionable intelligence?

“We’ve developed Web technology to the point where we have an astounding wealth of data about audiences. Publishers can tell us what content audiences are consuming and the share of content downloads among competing advertisers. All this has been great. But what does it all mean? How can we turn that information into something we can act on?”

Brandon Starkoff, Vice President/Global Director at Starcom Worldwide

Starkoff’s point is critical to the whole point of seeking to establish a definition and a set of metrics for engagement. What does it matter if, as far as media companies are concerned, it doesn’t produce better insights into what will make advertisers successful with even the most “engaged” audiences? The kind of audience knowledge Starkoff says he is seeking is “predictive intelligence-advice on what kinds of advertising will work with a particular audience or audience segment.”

Advertisers right now think about engagement as a way to distinguish sites from each other.

It was in the last sentence that I realized what I felt was wrong with their line of thinking. It's not that advertisers need to distinguish sites from each other, but rather people from each other. Engagement is a term being applied as an attribute of a site, not a person. That's just wrong IMO. That's online advertising 1.0, not 2.0. As long as the industry continues to think in terms of targeting sites and not people, there will only be small incremental improvements to online advertising performance.

Affinity is a term which we feel best describes attributes of people, and what we actually care about. Since Others Online is all about targeting people and not sites/pages (based on our understanding of what they care about), that's clearly the label we need to use.

Interesting News from TechCrunch

While I haven't been posting very much in the last two weeks, I have been clipping some interesting news I've seen come through the TechCrunch RSS feed, all related to online advertising. Since I don't have the time for individual posts, I'll just summarize in bullets below (as if I'm some sorta TC fanboy):

• Looks like Technorati might be shifting its strategy to that of a blog advertising network? Yeah yeah, so vertical ad networks are in vogue currently but that's not why I think this is a good idea for Technorati. They have access to some *very* important behaviors and direct mappings of individuals to intentions, sentiments, interests, etc.  If they harnessed this behavior warehouse, could result in a ton of value to the company. I doubt that's what they're doing though.
• Jeez, I thought it was just me! But it turns out that click-through rates (CTR) on Google AdSense units are down across the board, primarily as a result of redefining the clickable region from the entire box to just the text link. By reducing the number of errant clicks, Google improves the conversion rate and CPA for their AdWords customers. This is necessary as AdSense continues down the slope of advertising effectiveness and forces marketers to rethink display advertising.
• Two estimates put the US online advertising market for 2007 at over $21B. See more of how this breaks out to search, display, etc. and my thoughts on social media ad spend.
• Is the glass half-empty or half-full? While TC reports that half of all clicks are worthless, I'd prefer to think that half of all clicks are valuable. But here's the thing, very few people I know actually click on ads (or admit to it) and therefore the fact that anyone does boggles their mind! It's hard not to take an ego-centric view of the online ad world -- but the fact is that the online advertising market is growing, the measurements and targeting are improving, and none of this would be happening in a failing market.

Attention Data and User Value

I believe most people on the Web are lazy, and would prefer services to read their minds instead of requiring them to expend more effort. I'm talking about most uses of the Web. This is why social bookmarking and tagging in general isn't mainstream -- at some point, the explicit effort gets to be too much work. That's why I believe so strongly in the power of the Implicit Web, and using Attention Data as the backbone of Web services (in addition to explicit user preferences/indications).

I just read a post from Marshall at R/WW on different things you can do to "fall in love with tagging again" -- in general providing good ideas for how to tag content for improved productivity/efficiency/communication. He starts off saying that he stopped using social bookmarking services last year because of the cost/benefit (cost being the effort required). Ok Marshall, I'm with you so far. His 5 useful ways to use tagging weren't very interesting to me, though I can see how it would be for some content junkies.

His "reason 5 1/2" I thought was weak though. In it, Marshall discusses the future where we'll be able to influence our attention profiles through tagging. I can't disagree with that, but I thought his example was thoroughly uninspiring. Marshall is very smart and tuned in, so I suspect he just lobbed the example out there instead of applying much thought to it. So I thought I would provide some examples ...

Ok first of all, tagging is inherently an explicit action -- an extra step -- and therefore (in my mind) just one small way to influence your attention profile. I believe your existing actions, such as reading content, searching the Web, publishing, shopping, etc. represent a much more powerful way, since it's more thorough and doesn't require any incremental user effort.

So let's assume we can leverage explicit and implicit user behavior within an attention profile. And let's also assume we have many many attention profiles and an infrastructure/ecosystem in place. Here are a few more examples of user benefits, which I think are more compelling that the "African photoblogging" example Marshall gave:

• Connections to people -- what if I was able to connect with people who were most relevant to the Google search I just did, or the camera I'm looking at? From within an "attention warehouse", one could even introduce you to someone who owns that camera, ALSO uses it primarily for outdoor adventure photography, and whose blog displays many pictures.
• Connections to content -- what if you could connect with the content being viewed and/or published by groups of people who indicate the same level of attention in certain areas? You could view the Web through a filtered lens of those with an attention affinity to "Barack Obama, Seattle, readwriteweb.com", and even do keyword searches of content viewed/published within that congregation. There are many jewels in the long tail, often hidden due to lack of popularity -- viewing the Web through the eyes of the many instead the eyes of the few improves discovery.
• Attention metrics -- do you ever wonder what your readers are paying most attention to these days? Do they care about Dick Clark? What % of them show an affinity to UK Premiership Football? Understanding what people care about gives you a much different view of the world, and helps break up all the echo chambers.

I believe 2008 will be the year of Attention Data, and user benefits therefrom. Just as the content Web is comprised of HTML links, I think we'll finally see the emergence of the "people Web", comprised of similarities and matches between attention profiles.

Social Network Overlap

In this height of Facebook mania, we've all seen or heard the opinion that Facebook is eating LinkedIn's or Myspace's lunch. I've seen some reports from Compete and Read/Write Web in the last couple weeks that imply (to me anyway) that they are each simply expanding the social network market rather than abruptedly taking market share from each other.

There is very good data on the demographic breakdown of the users, particularly in the R/WW post.

From the R/WW post:

• 62% of Facebook users also use MySpace, but only 15% of MySpace users also use Facebook.
• Only 5% of Facebook users also use LinkedIn, but 16% of LinkedIn users are on Facebook.

Slightly different numbers from the Compete post, which has a great matrix:

• 64% of Facebook users also use MySpace, but only 20% of MySpace users also use Facebook.
• Only 2% of Facebook users also use LinkedIn, but 42% of LinkedIn users are on Facebook.

To me Facebook is not a professional network, it's personal. LinkedIn is all professional.

Person-to-person Targeted Advertising

Ok, so I've got this company that will hopefully disrupt the world of advertising a little -- creating the concept of person-to-person targeted advertising. There are more people creating content on the Web today than businesses, and many more individuals looking for Web site traffic than Google advertisers.

Anyway, we're just getting started and haven't made any real noise, but my man Mike recently informed me that we're at almost 500K targeted "introductions" per week now. Our engagement rate on our widget is about 4%, and 40% of people who view a user profile go to that user's blog.

Cool, but not nearly good enough. We're working on it ...

How Many Web Pages do People Visit Per Day?

Or alternatively asked:

How many Web pages are viewed per person per day? How many Web pages (unique URL's) do Web users surf to each day? Same question really.

Back in my previous company, we had data that showed an average Internet user browsed to 120 pages per day. Today I learned from someone I trust, who certainly has access to this type of data, that it's increased as I expected. Per him:

Our data indicates that the average broadband US internet user surfs to 138.1 pages per day.  For dialup, the number is 136.4.

Why is this interesting to me? It relates to the opportunity to monetize a toolbar vs a Web site.