One reason market research gets a bad name is because of bad research.

I'm reading a book "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This", by Luke Sullivan, a big-agency copywriter, and a disciple of William Bernbach. From the start he rants about marketing being more art than science, and about research killing good ideas. It was Bernbach who famously said:

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

When you look at what exactly Sullivan complains about - and he complains in detail - what he is complaining about is BAD research. Meaning research based on methodologies that don't work, or are improperly applied or misused.

Like focus groups.

It's as though someone complained that all vehicles are bad, because some of them are of poor quality.

I think what is going on here is marketers who don't know research don't distinguish between one form of research and another.

Let's stamp out bad research.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:52 AM | Permalink

We've now completed moving all remaining websites onto our dedicated servers, and it shows in the uptimes.

Our average up-time for our premium hosting website clients, for August was 99.997%, or an average of only 1 minute outage for the entire month.

No website experienced more than 25 minutes downtime total. No website has had ANY downtime since we completed the moves.

You're welcome.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:59 AM | Permalink

One problem that applies across a wide range of marketing design work is:

How will this actually look?

Some examples:

1. Print design depends on the quality of the print job. Your beautiful black and white photo can suddenly develop a sickly greenish cast.

2. Print ads appear in a context. How will it look against the backdrop of the other ads or copy on that page or in that periodical? Will your ad disappear because it looks like all the rest?

3. How a web page looks depends heavily on the monitor on which it is being viewed.
4. Signage and packaging aren't going to look the same lit by sunlight as by indoor fluorescents.

This is not a new problem - marketers have been struggling with this for ages, as this photo from 1955 illustrates.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:42 AM | Permalink

Search is down 16% from a year ago.

Now isn't THAT interesting?

There's lots of speculation on why that is. My own guess, it's a combination of factors:

1. People have less time for aimless wandering around the Net.
2. People have found sites that work for a lot of things, and have them bookmarked.
3. Google has gotten smarter so people are taking fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
4. People have gotten smarter in their searches so take fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
5. Alternatives to search are rising (such as mobile apps).

I've put them in order of what I think are the biggest to smallest factor.

In any case, pat yourself on the back, if your website is getting found as much or more through searches as it was a year ago.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:42 AM | Permalink

Google has been making changes.

More and more, they are tending to show a wider variety of results.

It's all about ensuring they hit what you are looking for - even when your search may mean several things.

If you are searching for "mister" are you looking for a male person, or for a device for spraying little droplets of water?

If you search for plumber, are you looking for a plumber in your local area (probably), or maybe you just want to know more about the profession?

Are you looking for a web page, video or images? Information? A site where you can buy something online?

One way Google has dealt with this: It has been a firm rule for about a year, they will not serve up more than two pages from the same website.

That way there are eight other chances (not counting Places and Sponsored listings) to hit a home run with the searcher.

You see this where the second listing is indented slightly indicating it is another page from the same domain. Usually one is the home page.

Now Google has announced another tweak. Under certain circumstances, they will again show more than two pages for a domain.

For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:

Note that in the example given, they still show only 7 results from the amnh.org website. This puts three other listings on the first page of results. Google still hedges their bets.

Smart. Very smart.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 07:16 AM | Permalink

There are three things on a web page, all of which can go by the name "title."

They are about the three most important elements of a web page.

Most CMS (Content Management Systems) use the same content (and name) for all three.

And yet, and yet, they are NOT the same thing and you don't necessarily want them to be identical.

1. Page Title. This is the line of copy at the VERY top of the screen (above the browser menu / tool bars and everything). It is determined by the "title tag" code. It is the single most important thing Google looks at to determine what your page is about. And Google usually picks it up for the first line of your listing on a search results page.

Because of its location, most people aren't aware of the page title on their screen. So Google can downgrade or even ignore the page title if it doesn't match the other content of the page.

2. Page Name. This is the URL (address) of the page, such as "marketing.html." Again, search engines consider this an important clue to what the page is about. So page names like "page37.php" are not going to buy you any rankings. Also you can lose people with completely unfriendly page names like "z132503577.asp" - page names should say what they are, and they should be as short as is realistic. Use a "-" or an "_" to separate words, for example, "tampa-marketing.html/"

3. Heading or Headline. The first, large copy in the main content of the page, could also be called its title, just as it would if were a scientific paper or perhaps newspaper article.

Again, it is a big clue to Google what the page is about. Oh yes, and to the visitors.

Let's call it the headline and make it say something. "Welcome" not only doesn't buy you any search engine rankings. It doesn't give the notoriously skittish website visitor any reason to stick around.

We have shot a website up from obscurity to excellent search rankings just by editing the home page title tag.
Like I said, three of the MOST important things on a page. So worth paying attention to.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:39 AM | Permalink

For the last two days it's looked like Bing started powering Yahoo Search, and, what-do-you-know. We were right.

Officially announced yesterday.

(Link is to a good article about the change and what it means, on Search Engine Watch.)

"MicroHoo" = Microsoft + Yahoo, and yes it is a bit derogatory. The combined market share is now somewhere around 25% of all U.S. search, compared to pushing 70% for Google. Will this change make them a viable challenger? No.

But one big change will be not having to run Bing and Yahoo click ad campaigns separately (starting probably in about a month). Possibly, it will drive Ask and the other miscellaneous search engines even further down into the weeds.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:29 AM | Permalink

Most advertising is classified by Ad Agencies as for branding purposes, or to create a response.

More and more though, ads are expected to do both.

Time-Life infomercials get people to call up and order their music CD collections. They also get people to know the brand Time-Life as a source for really good themed music collections.

A lot of advertising is what is called "TOMA" = Top of Mind Awareness. But not exclusively so. In short, some people will have an immediate need for what you are selling. Most people will not, but through repetition will come to remember you so that when they DO have a need, they call you or go into your store or buy your product.

Notice the difference. Some things (CD music collections) are not need based. No one NEEDS one of these. Whereas some people NEED their teeth fixed. Or a new car.

You do get some pure Direct Response advertising, where there is no effort whatsoever (nor any reason) to create a brand awareness. That is rare.

And you get some pure Branding advertising, but that is mostly baloney. If you aren't trying to sell something, why are you advertising?

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:53 AM | Permalink

The description meta tag remains one of the most important "behind-the-scenes" aspects of a website.

A website visitor doesn't see it when he views a page. For that reason, Google gives it little importance in determining search engine rankings.

However, when a description tag is present on a page, Google will normally use it for the "snippet" of your listing - the two lines that follow the title line - on a search engine results page.

Your page title usually becomes the lead line - call it the headline - of your listing. It either grabs someone's attention and resonates or it doesn't.

Think of the snippet then as the body of an ad. THIS is your opportunity to tell the searcher who you are and what you do.

And it is almost completely under your control.

If you aren't paying attention to this, you are missing a hugely important aspect of your Internet marketing.

If you hire an SEO company and they don't test and edit description meta tags, well then, they are skipping a factor that could easily double or triple the amount of traffic to your site.

No exaggeration.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 06:27 AM | Permalink

I know I dump on Big Agency marketing all the time. It's not that they do a worse job than a lot of small marketing companies. It's that most of what they turn out is crap, and there's no excuse for it.

At the same time, they do produce brilliant work. Current reading is "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This", by Luke Sullivan, a copywriter at one of the Bigs. He has a lot of good things to say about the creative process.

This - harnessing creativity - is the toughest part of the marketing game, because you can't bottle it.

The difficulties are legendary. "Writer's block" immortalizes the idea, but it applies to all the arts.

Ultimately, it's the artist closeted alone with his soul, pleading for an Idea.

Any successful marketing company, to be successful, has to find a way to make this process work.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 07:32 AM | Permalink