Are you a recent college graduate and looking to break into digital advertising media working with Google, Facebook and Twitter? Keep reading, because we have the opportunity for you!

We are Thrivepoint™. We do real-time digital media buying and creative optimization. We buy and optimize advertising media & produce and optimize advertising creative — to drive continual improvement throughout our clients’ advertising campaigns.

We manage and optimize millions of individual advertising auctions every day to secure the advertising placements that reach the right audience and deliver on the campaign objective.

We are seeking exceptional candidates for the Optimization Specialist position focused on real-time advertising media and optimization in search, social media and display advertising.

Considered candidates will have:

• Undergraduate degree focused on quantitative studies such as economics, mathematics or statistics.
• Demonstrated experience leading teams to accomplish defined objectives.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Excel and other similar applications.
• An MBA is not required, but would be a plus.
• Experience with the following would be a plus: SEM, Google, Adwords, Facebook, advertising exchanges, demand side platforms, adservers, site analytics, bid management.

To be considered: Please submit your resume, cover letter and compensation requirements via email.

On May 17th, Google Adwords is adding three privacy requirements to their existing AdWords landing page and website policies that cover disclosure and usage of personal information. The purpose of these policies is to ensure a safer web browsing experience for users of Google.

New Policy

For all sites that request payment, financial, or personal information from visitors, the following will be required from the landing page and sites in order to continue advertising on Adwords.

Clear, accessible disclosure before visitors submit any personal information
How you plan on using the personal information you solicit must be easily accessible before site visitors submit any personal information.

Option to discontinue direct communications
In the same description including the disclosures, websites will be required to describe how people can opt out of future emails, phone calls, or other direct communications.

SSL when collecting payment and certain financial and personal information
AdWords policy will now require all advertisers to use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) when collecting payments and certain financial and personal information (like bank account and social security numbers).

Definition of Personal Information

Advertisers who collect any of the following personal information must provide a clear, accessible explanation of how the information might be used, as well as a simple, effective way to opt out of future direct communications:

• Full name
• Email address
• Mailing address
• Phone number
• Birth date
• National identity, pension, social security, tax ID, health care, or driver’s license number
• Mother’s maiden name

In addition, AdWords policy will require the following information to be transmitted securely over an SSL (https:) connection:

• Credit and debit card numbers
• Bank and investment account numbers
• Checking account numbers
• Wire transfer numbers
• National identity, pension, social security, tax ID, health care, or driver’s license number

Actions

To ensure uninterrupted Adwords campaigns, marketers should review the following aspects of their websites to ensure that the websites are in compliance with these policies.

• Review the website’s privacy policy to ensure that disclosures are included.
• Ensure that the privacy policy is easily accessible by users before they submit any personal information – especially on pages requesting financial or personal information.
• Ensure that the website uses SSL in any instances where financial information or payments are requested.

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss how we can help your business.

© 2011. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Google launched an update in the US to their search algorithm last week and the natural question is… how will my site’s traffic and rankings be affected? First, let’s dive into what Google said when they released the update:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

This all seems straight-forward so long as your site is considered “high quality” and not deemed “low quality” or “just not very useful.” Of course, how would you know that?

The Search Engine’s Challenge

It is always useful to start out with a reminder of how search engines work and what they are trying to accomplish.

The search engine’s ultimate goal is to answer a query on the first try. The typical user query in a search engine is between two to three words. The search engine is then expected to answer the question correctly. If the user needs to refine their search because their question was not answered, it is considered a bad user experience. The goal is to provide that correct answer on the first results page the user sees.

The resulting challenge for the search engine is three-fold:

• the user provides the search engines very little information (have you ever tried to answer a two-word question?)
• there are hundreds of billions (N00,000,000,000+) of web pages available to answer that question
• search engines need to process the question and return 10 accurate results in 0.05 to 0.010 seconds

When you consider the complexity, it is amazing that it works so often, right?

Two Key Factors Influencing Results

Whether your web pages rank or not depends on thousands (maybe more) of calculations that the search engine’s algorithms make to process all of the information it has gleaned from spidering the web. To simplify, we can categorize these calculations into two general categories – Relevancy and Authority.

For the most part, users are focused on how relevant the information provided is compared with their original intent. But users also want web pages that are trusted sources of information. In this way, users tend to blend relevancy and authority into one bucket. In other words, a response needs to be both on topic and from a trusted source in order to be deemed relevant from a user perspective.

However, the search engine does not work that way. Relevancy and Authority may be considered independently. The algorithm might score a page as relevant, but not authoritative. And it might score a page as authoritative, but not relevant.

In general, the search engines strive to present the most relevant and authoritative pages to the users. However, relevancy tends to trump authority in instances where both do not exist.

And this gets to the crux of the whole issue here. Google had an algorithm for determing authority. It did not match how users defined authority. Some business learned how to exploit that algorithm and the resulting user experience was impacted negatively. And now, Google is attempting to correct that discrepancy by right-aligning their algorithms definition of authority. It is a natural evolution.

Website authority and domain strength more important than ever

What this update has done is joined the Relevancy requirement a lot more closely to Authority. Both have existed as metrics for the past 10 years, but now it appears that authority is playing an even more important role in ranking. And what is authority? A lot of it comes back to domain strength (and in some ways the original PageRank concept that launched Google):

• Unique, unduplicated content
• Age of site
• Relevancy of inbound links
• Authority of inbound linking sites
• And the last one is purpose. Why does your site exist? Does it serve a unique purpose? Or is it similar to (or the same as) hundreds of other sites out there? This is probably the most important of all with regards to authority.

To get back to the goal of the search engine, they have one shot to answer the question correctly. To improve their accuracy, they are somewhat limiting the pool of potential answers by filtering out sites with less authority. This leads to more relevant answers for the users and helps the search engine achieve its goal.

For those marketers who have focused on building out sites with SEO best practices and businesses with unique selling propositions, there should be limited impact to your business. Google is trying to filter out the noise so that sites like yours can be found more easily. For those sites that have strayed, implementation of SEO best practices and clear articulation of a unique selling proposition will help get you back on track.

And if you’re not sure where you stand? Dig into your site analytics tool and look at pre/post traffic levels from organic search. The best way to know how your business is going to be affected will be measuring the data on an ongoing basis and learning what the traffic patterns are on your site.

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss how we can help your business.

© 2011. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Adweek published an op-ed by Bill Wise earlier today entitled, “Will IBM Crush Madison Avenue?”.

The op-ed makes a very strong case for the coming of analytically driven marketing. We completely agree that results-based analysis should and will be a key-driver in decision making for advertising, marketing and product development. And the boon in analytics and automation will assist in making that a continuing reality. But we think the conclusion that IBM, and other IT companies, will ‘crush’ advertising agencies, is incorrect. Here’s why:

Advertising exists to sell products and services.

Applications exists to simplify, automate and improve the administration of tasks.

The two are different. It is perplexing that people continually state that marketing tools and analytics will eliminate the need for advertising professionals. Advertising is not simply about data. Advertising is about the ideas, emotions, needs and wants that drive a consumer’s purchase decisions. Tools, data and analytics will help advertising professionals make smarter decisions (and it will even assist in the decisioning), but the core foundation can not be replaced; businesses will still need to decide:

1. Who is their customer
2. What do you they to sell them
3. How do they want to sell it

Why would advertising professionals not continue to do that type of work with the added benefit of better tools and analytics from the likes of IBM and Adobe? Think of it this way:

Did Quickbooks ‘crush’ accountants? or did it make accountants more productive?

Did Salesforce.com ‘crush’ sales people? or did it make sales people more productive?

Did Microsoft Office ‘crush’ office workers? or did it make office works more productive?

In each case, the applications enhanced and improved the ability of professionals to do their job better. And honestly, our point of view is that this is what is happening — IBM is making applications for marketers. Adobe is making applications for marketers. Accenture is making applications for marketers. And ad agencies are going to be as likely to embrace these toolsets as anyone. In fact, they already are embracing them at increasing rates. The thousands of new agencies that have sprung up in the past ten years are the earliest of adopters and will continue to be so because they know it is good business, good service, and good marketing to do so.

[Hat tip to @citizencaen for starting this conversation last week]

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

To much fanfare, Google launched a significant change to how people will use search now and in the future:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

Google Instant is brilliant, but we think they may have mis-typed that last sentence (key technical insights notwithstanding!). We think what they meant to say was that now you can need only type one keyword to easily scan multiple search results pages. This increases speed and accuracy of searching and drives a much better searching experience for consumers. Instead of typing a query. Clicking search. Getting results. Typing the next query. Repeating. The user simply starts a query and then seamlessly scrolls through several different results pages.

Here is an example of a query for barack obama. With Google Instant, you only need type in barack obama and then you scroll through several results for things like biography, quotes… er, birth certificate.

And this is ultimately how user search behavior will change. Users will type one idea into the search box and then scroll through several different SERPs (search engine results pages) to fine tune their search.

So how does Google Instant affect search marketing?

Questions abound: Will this kill SEO? Will this drive more traffic through more expensive paid search terms?

Our take: This is fantastic for consumers and good for marketers.

Why? Because instead of users settling for one and two word queries, they will use Google Instant’s auto-suggest feature to expand their queries to three and four words. This drives better, faster, more accurate results for users and if you’ve looked at campaign performance by query length, you’ve probably seen better campaign performance from more specific terms. At the very least, you will be able to better discern if the searcher is really a target customer or not and whether you want allocate budget to reach that searcher.

Take a search for vans; If someone types in vans, Google is encouraging them to expand their search to something more specific. As a marketer this is good because that searcher will likely self-identify by choosing the suggested keywords for shoes, concert tickets or vehicles. That’s saves marketers from inadvertently buying clicks from non-qualified searchers.

What about the long tail? We expect that more one- word queries will turn into two-, three- and four- word queries as people use the auto-suggest feature more. And we expect that five+ word queries will probably turn into more three- and four- word queries. We’re not sure if this makes the head bigger, the tail shorter or what you want to call it. Just expect more demand to be aggregated on two to four word queries in both paid search and SEO.

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

A debate about conversion attribution analysis started several years ago when SEM programs started gaining a very large portion of enterprise marketing budgets. In essence, it goes like this: Should the keyword that delivered a conversion get the sole credit for the conversion, or should the other channels, such as display ads, which reached the consumer first get some or all of the credit?

Here is our answer: Why not give both their full due?

Hear us out. The problem in this debate is that it is not apples to apples. Some marketing channels are good for closing deals. Some marketing channels are good for making introductions to consumers. Some are good at both. The best marketing programs not only acknowledge this, they embrace this reality.

The key piece missing has been the quantifiable proof… which brings us back to conversion attribution analysis. In order to quantify the role that different marketing channels play, here is how we recommend you implement click attribution analysis:

• Evaluate buys for both conversions and introductions
• For conversion metrics, use last click attribution and measure CPA or ROI or whatever your conversion metric typically would be.
• For introduction metrics, use first click attribution and measure lifetime value as the metric
• Optimize your marketing based on maximizing introductions and maximizing conversions

The goal of this approach is to maximize your growth opportunity while you optimize your conversion opportunity. If you use this model, you will identify the best channels for introductions to consumers and you will know how best to convert them too!

Read more viewpoints from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

When people talk about “social media” marketing, what do they really mean? What is a “social strategy”? How do you get started? How do you measure success? These are some of the the daily discussions we see that usually revolve around how marketers can get more “fans” or make marketing more “viral”. But these questions are questions about distribution, which is an advertising-centric way to think about it.

In advertising, distribution drives content. On the other hand, in social media marketing, content drives distribution – that is, you have to have something important or interesting to “say” in order for someone to be interested enough to engage and pass it along. It is the content strategy that delivers distribution opportunities, audience cultivation and, ultimately, how a social media campaign may play out.

So how do you develop content that provides distribution? Here are four ways to break down social media marketing into specific content and distribution tactics.

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If you live in California, Arizona or any number of states in the Southwest, this will come as no surprise to you: more money is spent annually in the US on salsa than on ketchup.

Salsa surpassed ketchup in dollar-volume sales in 1991 and was worth $931 Mil in 2008 (that’s more than 379 million jars!). Now, part of that may be because Salsa doesn’t last as long as ketchup. But hey, that’s not salsa’s problem.

Salsa first gained notoriety in the 1970s due to increased interest in Southwestern foods, healthier foods and higher tortilla chip sales (you gotta dip all those chips in something). Nowadays, you’ll find many varieties of salsas. Pace introduced 5 new varieties in 2008 alone.

If you read our recent post about BBQ sauce, you’ll remember a problem that small producers have: shelf space. The big guys run the show for salsa much in the same way they do for BBQ sauces. Continue Reading »

There are two kinds of BBQ sauce: The biggest. And the best.

The former can be determined pretty easily. Walk into any supermarket, convenience store or corner market and it will be what’s readily available. Sometimes it will be the only thing available. In case you need to know, it’s Kraft, closely followed by Heinz BBQ sauce. In their defense, they were also the first to market back in the late 40s and early 50s.

The latter is much more subjective. And regional for that matter. Your favorite barbecue sauce may only be available in your favorite BBQ restaurant. Or it might only be distributed within a 30-mile range of where it is made.
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Boosting Your Sales and Distribution Through Online Marketing

When people think of online marketing, they usually think one of three things: e-commerce, B2B lead generation or flashy ads from Fortune 500 companies. But, if you sell a consumer packaged good (CPG) at retail stores – the bricks and mortar kind – online marketing could be your secret weapon to grow your sales and distribution.

You’ve probably heard of email marketing, SEO and social. But simply engaging in these tactics will not necessarily deliver results. The key to success is having a strategy that can engage and activate your customer base – both existing and potential customers.

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