Adwords - the ginger tail. A story of micro-targeting success!

We had 2 kittens that we needed to sell. I was about to place an add on our local newspaper site (not free for kittens, by the way!), when I thought, "Hang on, what would I do if I was looking for kittens online?" Well, I'd use Google. And I'd put in "kittens" plus my local town / area, as I don't want to be travelling miles to go and see them.

So I thought, why not use Adwords.

It took me about 5 minutes to set up a landing page using my photosoftware (http://www.barnesgraham.com/toms_stuff/kittens/kittens.html) and another 5 minutes to add a Campaign to Adwords. The keywords all contained "kittens" and I tried 3 alternative strands - Bristol (nearest city), Thornbury (nearest town) and Ginger (for a more generic term to give the experiment a bit of balance).

The stats came out very much as you would expect them to, with the most targeted terms (Thornbury) performing the best in terms of CTR and the more general terms (ginger) generating the most traffic and also by far the most cost.

Keyword	Current Bid Max CPC	Clicks	Impr.	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. Pos
[kittens thornbury]	£0.10	2	4	50.00%	£0.03	£0.06	3.8
kittens thornbury	£0.10	3	10	30.00%	£0.03	£0.09	3.7
[kittens bristol]	£0.10	8	45	17.77%	£0.07	£0.52	2.8
ginger kittens	£0.10	39	969	4.02%	£0.08	£2.97	3.2
[ginger kittens]	£0.10	10	323	3.09%	£0.06	£0.63	2.6
kittens bristol	£0.10	6	211	2.84%	£0.08	£0.50	3.6
[ginger kitten]	£0.10	1	71	1.40%	£0.04	£0.04	4.3
ginger kitten	£0.10	1	153	0.65%	£0.09	£0.09	3.5
kitten bristol	£0.10	0	20	0.00%	-	-	3.0
[kitten bristol]	£0.10	0	2	0.00%	-	-	3.0
[bristol kitten]	£0.10	0	1	0.00%	-	-	4.0
[kitten thornbury]	£0.10	0	1	0.00%	-	-	2.0
kitten thornbury	£0.10	0	0	-	-	-	-
[bristol kittens]	£0.10	0	0	-	-	-	-

I got 6 calls and an email, unfortunately I don't know which terms converted to calls. (Ironically it was the good old ad in the shop window that actually sold the kittens before the responses started to come it; a bit like the Premium phone scandal, I must confess to continuing with the campaign after they were sold to get some more stats.)

One interesting point is that almost everyone looked for "kittens" as opposed to "kitten", even though the people I spoke to seemed to be after only one!

The ginger tail experiment was a great success and is one I'll try again next time I have something to sell.

Email overtakes print - why is that surprising?

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has released figures in its Email Benchmarking Report showing email marketing has overtaken direct mail in terms of volume. The report reveals that the average volume of emails rose by 50% in the last quarter. This increase underlines email marketing’s continued effectiveness due its ability to react swiftly to market opportunities and its short production cycle.

Personally the only reason that I find this is surprising is that it hasn't happened sooner.

If you make a direct comparison between the costs of direct mail and email, email is the winner by a country mile. With delivery costs of between 1 and 5p and no print costs, email has a clear and massive benefit. Other advantages are the ability to track response rates right through to purchase, the ease with which you can personalise your message and the immediacy of the medium (you could have an email launched hours after deciding to run it).

So there must be a perceived downside. Reach is one element, email is not universal so you can't target everyone. Risk of being seen as a Spammer is another.

But how significant are those issues. Certainly email is not universal, but take up is very high, and rises as you target more affluent customers. Here are some stats to consider: over 20million UK residents use the Internet every day; 90% of consumers now access the Internet using Broadband; 75% now shop online spending an average of £1,600 and 10% of retail spend is now online.

Spam is a problem that you need to recognise and manage. If you follow best practice you will minimise the risk of being perceived as a spammer and maximise the effectiveness of your communications. (And to switch the argument round, how many people are annoyed by junk mail and bin it without regard?)

The fact that this tipping point has been reached before is down to the fact that the marketing world, like the world at large, is risk averse. They would rather run with the tried and tested, than try something new. Marketers will know all about adoption curves, innovators to laggards. Well the message from the DMAs report is clear. Email marketing has reached its tipping point. It cannot be ignored any longer, even by the laggards.