B2B media companies share best Web practices

Yesterday's annual online digital media event held by American Business Media was extremely worthwhile, as usual. Attended by some 150 B2B digital media executives--a show of hands revealed this was a first-time ABM event for about a third--the event, themed "Online revenue strategies" focused on the business, not technical, aspects of B2B digital media initiatives.

I won't summarize the highlights here, as the usual suspects at Media Business and Folio: will no doubt do a better job of that than me. But I do want to dash off some thoughts about what struck me, in no particular order.

1. Taxonomy, taxonomy, taxonomy. The more ways we organize and arrange our content based on how our users think, the easier it is for them to find what they're looking for, and the easier it is for us to serve relevant ads. This can only be done by tagging each article with a specific taxonomy.

My gut feel is that many if not most B2B Web site publishers have been tagging for years, but the ones who haven't (like us!) should take this crucial step. Drawback: Editors hate taggging articles. Tip I picked up from the event: Write a style guide for the editors for how to tag articles so it becomes more of a painless process. By the way, I think editors should write two headlines for each article...one for print, one for Web, designed to entice users to click. That should be covered in the style guide, too.

2. Unstructured or social or open taxonomies could potentially replace structured, top-down taxonomies. In response to a question about taxonomy maintenance, one of the panelists raised the intriguing possibility of social using unstructured social tagging, a la del.ici.ous or Flick'r, to let users tag the content based on how they actually think, rather than how editors are guessinghow users might think. In some markets where everyone (readers, suppliers, editors, etc.) generally agrees on what the taxonomy should be, this is not as important. But I suspect there are many markets--our own (packaging) is an excellent example--that seem to simply make it hard for any two people to agree on a similar taxonomy. Social tagging would be a great answer to this, if users took the time to tag such content. (Which, admittedly, they probably wouldn't do for news content.) But it's an interesting idea.

3. RSS has profound implications, but it's still way early--or is it? An internal straw poll (with only 16 responses yet...far from scientific) conducted on our own Web site, Packworld.com, revealed that NO respondents currently used RSS news aggregators to consume business information, though 40% claimed they'd be interested if we were to offer RSS feeds. The rest said they'd stick with e-mail regardless. Other research cited by eMarketer's Geoff Ramsey led to similar conclusions.

That said, Thomas Industrial Network's Paul Gerbino said his site, Produt News Network, is into RSS in a big way. With 51 RSS feeds offered (one for each product category), the site derives 10% of its pageviews from RSS traffic. The interesting part--most of that 10% is from news aggregator software. Meaning those "visitors" read the content in their news aggregator software, not on Gerbino's Web site. (Yes, there were text ads packaged into the feeds.) You'd expect 10% from an IT site. But Product News Network is pretty middle-of-the-road manufacturing subject matter--sludge pumps and flush'o'meters, to quote Gerbino.

4. Web casts are maturing as a lead-generation tool--if done right. Disclaimer: I've always hated the idea of Webcasts for three reasons: First, they are an artificial construct whose fixed schedule in time flies in the face of one of the greatest things about the Internet: time-shifting. The Internet was supposed to allow users to access content when they want to, not at a fixed time and date specified the publisher or broadcaster. Second, they require relentless promotion for what is essentially a one-time event. Such promotion could be more efficiently used to entice users to sign up to an ongoing opt-in relationship such as for an e-mail newsletter. Third, a big chunk of pre-registered attendees never actually show up because darn it, they've already got something going on Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m.

And yet, many B2B media companies have had a lot of success with Webcasts, which are at heart, lead generators. At the ABM event, Pennwell's Tom Cintorino gave some great rules-of-the-road advice on putting on a successful Webcast.

Then, the breakthrough--the notion of the on-demand, Tivo-style Webcast. Though not new, it was the first time I'd heard about it. Makes all the sense of the world. At yesterday's conference, Accela claimed credit as the first Webcast vendor to shift to an on-demand model vs. a live event. They cited stats showing users prefer on-demand vs. live 8 to 1. I believe it. One of Accela's customers is IDG's Network World, whose Andrea D'Amato presented at yesterday's event. She said that the on-demand nature of Accela's webcasts are easier to promote, and result in higher quality with lower risk. Registration isn't required until you've already seen a bit of the program, which results in 33% greater registration, she said. Since all programs are pre-produced, you can edit out the gaffes. And finally, Webcasts are typically on the shorter side--30 to 45 minutes--which makes sense, given users don't want to commit to a ton of time. (D'Amato said the average viewer spent about 19 min.)

You could run an on-demand Webcast for six months, creating an entirely new kind of ad package, vs. an artificial one-time event. That means a hook on the Web site that can continue to produce leads for a given advertiser month after month. Hmm. Network World even closes business on a guarantee of a minimum number of leads generated. Guaranteed leads? Demonstrable ROI? What advertiser can resist? Sounds a lot better than banner ads.

5. Behavioral targeting is heating up. Alec Dann, SVP, Internet Publishing, of PostNewsweek, showed how his two sites, GCN.com and WashingtonTechnology.com, uses Accipiter's behavioral targeting software to increase ad relevance. The idea is that if someone visits, say, the homeland security section of the GCN site x times in y weeks, they're cookied with a tag that identifies them as interested in that topic. Then they're served with homeland-security ads no matter which section of the site they visit. The ads follow them around, in effect. Dann confirms that clickthrough rates are indeed higher for behaviorally targeted ads, resulting in his ability to charge higher CPM's. Accipiter also presented at the event, and impressed me with what seemed to be robost ad management technology. You can even target ads based on registration data for registered users.

6. The best Web analytics software continues to be daunting. About a year ago, my company switched to WebSideStory's Hitbox, now HBX. I was told by the sales guy it would take about a week or so to set up. I spent the next 4 months of my life trying to get my developer to configure it properly, and to this day, it still doesn't do what I wanted. Don't get me wrong...it's excellent software. Too excellent. It requires you to basically hire a consultant to configure it properly. Plus every time I log in, they've advanced to the next version, and it seems like the menus change.

I thought I was just an idiot until I saw Maggie Dallatana's presentation. Her company, ALM, selected HBX after an extensive vendor selection process. She also had a similar experience to mine with HBX, though to be fair, she's still working through some bugs and discrepancies related to the initial roll-out of the software. Again, it's very powerful software, but unless it's set up properly, it can be a huge time sink, as I found out the hard way. Nevertheless, help is on the way. There are now consultants who specialize in helping you to set up such software, like Andrew Edwards' Technology Leaders. Edwards also co-founded the newly launched Web Analytics Association, which is attempting to bring some order to this chaotic corner of the Web.

7. People delete their cookies--really! Okay, remember a couple of weeks ago when a Jupiter Research study revealed that a startling 40% of Internet users delete their cookies once a month? A lot of people, myself included, were highly skeptical. Are most users are that adept at personal technology? Yesterday, a presenter asked the audience for a show of hands for those who deleted cookies at least once a month. Damned if about 40% of the audience didn't raise their hands. Freaked me out. Must have freaked out others since an indignant chorus of "Why?" went up from the other 60%. Yet no one answered. Still shows that cookies are much misunderstood. More alarmingly, the presenter (I can't remember who it was) also said that new spyware cleaning software--including software from Microsoft (not sure if it's the browser itself)--defaults to clearing out cookies regularly. This has profound repercussions for a B2B Web site's ability to recognize a registered user, among a host of other bad things.

8. Performance-based advertising is continuing to outpace traditional online display advertising. Paid search, a main form of performance advertising, continues to grow. A stat yesterday showed that paid search consists of 40% of online ad spending--and that number is rising. Since most B2B site publishers lack enough search inventory to effectively sell performance ads, I suspect 99% of paid search dollars are going to Google and its competitors. That's why as B2B site publishers, we need to embrace behavioral targeting and other techniques to make ads relevant wherever possible. Network World's performance-based guarantee for their Webcasts are another good example of where the market's headed. I remember Mitch Rouda once saying that Hanley-Wood's eBuild site also offers a similar guarantee.

There was much more at the event than what I've indicated above. These are just a few points that struck me. A huge thanks to 1) staff at American Business Media for putting on a first-rate event, 2) Ed Padin of Padin & Estabrook, who did a lot of the footwork to make sure the event came off without a hitch, 3) Tom Cintorino, VP/Digital Media, Pennwell, and Chair of ABM's Digital Media Council, who gracefully guided the event to its conclusion, and 4) fellow members of the DMC who did all the hard work to line up speakers and sponsors.

Online ad endgame: Relevancy or bust

Dave Winer's advertising-in-the-age-of-Podcasts manifesto makes some interesting points:

• We're seeking out info all the time, so why not deliver ads as the info we're seeking (paid search, contextual ads, etc.)?
• Ads (info) forced on you when you don't want them are bad. (TV, radio, etc.)
• Create commercial info that's informative, respectful and entertaining.

What Dave's basically saying is that non-relevant ads have no place in the modern online advertising environment. Users tune'em out. (Which is why some ads are getting bigger, more intrusive, more in-your-face--a losing battle.)

Online ads not only must become content, they have to be good content (a rant I've made before). That in and of itself is too much of a leap for most marketers and agencies. Yet it's not sufficient to produce results.

As Dave Winer reminds us, the ad must be relevant. Sure, we trigger relevant ads by keyword searches, but that's a no-brainer. What about searches that turn up NO relevant ads? Or what about good old-fashioned article pages that aren't searches at all?

Unlike Google, search results only make up a minor portion of a typical B2B Web site. We lack the volumes to support a pay-per-click model or a search-only ad model. (For 8 years I've explained to our advertisers that 95% of their ad impressions are on pages OTHER than search for their product category. But against the noise of Google, that message never quite gets through.)

In this ruthless ROI-oriented ad world, ads, like people, must perform. And those that don't will be dropped, much to B2B publishers' peril. I live my days fretting over whether my advertisers' ads are good enough (getting there), and whether I'm making them relevant (could be doing a much better job).

As Web site operators, we need to start moving away from displaying random ads. In a perfect world, there should really be no such thing as an ad rotation. By using a combination of site registration data, behavioral targeting (last few screens this guy clicked was X, so on the next few screens, let's show ads for X) and contextual targeting (even via something as basic as a common taxonomy used to tag both articles and ads), every single pageview--regardless of whether it's a search or article view--should be an opportunity to serve an ad that fits the visitor like a glove. This may not be possible in consumer marketing, but jeepers, should be easier to achieve in B2B. And darn it, if we don't know whether the ad is relevant, maybe we should stop displaying it in the interest of focusing more attention when we do display an ad.

Users would love it, and so would advertisers. But to make that happen, we need help from the users. Wouldn't it be great if users, upon visiting a B2B site for the first time, were told, Hey, we have two versions of this Web site...the "clean" version where the only ads we show are relevant to your needs, industry, buying cycle, etc., or the typical in-your-face version in which we shove vast quantities of ads down your gullet whether you want'em or not?

To make that happen, users would need to check a couple of boxes indicating interests. The form would have to be really simple. If we could pull that off, would the lure of relevant-only advertising be enough for users to take the plunge? And would we as B2B site operators retain enough impression opportunities to sustain a viable business model by severely restricting the display advertising this way? Perhaps too utopian, but we should be heading in that direction.

Lead generation: Combination of tactics

Brian Carroll's blog on B2B lead generation has this map of all the different tactics a marketer must use in order to generate leads for the complex sale (click image to expand).



As publishers, we're certainly doing our part to try to help our advertisers generate leads.

But after looking at this map, I'm struck with two thoughts:

• it's unfair for advertisers to hang the lack of leads on publishers when there are clearly so many other levers that marketers must work in order to generate leads.
• Print branding is a such crucial part of the lead generation strategy. It occupies a mere branch on this rather big tree in the diagram above, but if they've never heard of you, it makes it that much harder for the rest of the lead generation marketing machinery to work right.

Email vs. RSS for B2B marketing

An interesting case for RSS vs. e-mail marketing. No question, it's the future. Question is, when will enough of our readers use RSS?

More Eyetrack results: Print vs. online heads; more evidence for text ads; keep decks short

More interesting findings from the Eyetrack III study, which tracked eye movements of users on newspaper Web sites:

1. Headlines written for print don't automatically (and in my experience, rarely) translate to the Web: Participants' eyes tended to fix more often and longer on the first word or two of headline links. Developer Adrian Holovaty, quoted in this roundup of experts' comments on the Eyetrack III study by Jay Small, says:

"Here's yet another good reason news sites shouldn't be sucking in headlines automatically from the print product," he said. "Site maintainers should take the time to craft Web-specific headlines -- if only for homepage stories. And publishing systems should allow multiple headlines for a single story, based on the story's context."

Then, further down on the page:

A headline on the Web serves as a call to action, in a different way from print. Heads written to fit print layouts may or may not succeed as Web enticements to click through. When in doubt, rewrite -- and if you do, consider putting the "power words" in front unless it's too awkward.

2. From that same experts' roundup, more proof that text ads trump graphical ads:

[Usability expert Jakob Nielsen:] "Other ad types have registered higher click-through rates in the first few months after they were introduced only to suffer declining performance in later periods," Nielsen said. "Since text ads have been doing well for more than three years now, I now think that they have survived past the novelty stage and that they may be here to stay."

[New media industry researcher Rusty Coats] said text ads work best in the proper context. "Text ads rock on pages where users are already in a 'reading' mode," Coats said. "It's just an extension of their reading experience, whereas blinking tiles are not."

3. In the findings on whether to use blurbs with heads, the conclusion was that blurbs increases reading time and causes users to spend more time throughout the page (where blurbs exist). But it doesn't increase clickthrough vs. headlines only. It just redistributes clickthrough. Further, readers do NOT read the entire blurb. Editors who tend to write lengthy decks (which are repurposed as blurbs) should do well to remember this:

If you're going to use blurbs, remember that the first few words may matter most. Our findings indicate that very few people go to the trouble of reading all of even short blurbs. Most people don't invest much time in deciding whether or not to click through to an article, so keep head/blurb combos succinct.

4. Smaller headlines integrated with blurb text resulted in participants scrolling further down the page.

5. Some interesting comparisons of home pages designed to fit a single screen vs. a traditional longer home page that requires scrolling. Shorter home pages drive users deeper into sites by clicking navigation, whereas traditional longer pages encourage sampling of stories just on the home page.

Eyetrack studies: Text ads prevail

This eyetrack study should be required reading for any content site publisher or designer. I've excerpted the part about advertising, but you really should read the whole thing.

Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen. We noticed that when an ad was separated from editorial matter by either white space or a rule, the ad received fewer fixations than when there was no such barrier. Ads close to top-of-the-page headlines did well. A banner ad above the homepage flag didn't draw as many fixations as an ad that was below the flag and above editorial content.

Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. On our test pages, text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average.

Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen. Small ads on the right side of homepages typically were seen by only one-third of our testers; the rest never once cast an eye on them. On article pages, "half-page" ads were the most intensely viewed by our test subjects. Yet, they were only seen 38 percent of the time; most people never looked at them. Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text. "Skyscraper" ads (thin verticals running in the left or right column) came in third place.

Also, the study has a whole section on what works best for online advertising and one takeaway is that "ads that blend into look and feel of the page--especially text--draw more eyes."

Ad serving and site design: A contarian view

I came across this post mentioning a contrarian view of Web site design and ad serving for newspaper sites. Designer Alan Jacobson is working on a client's site that features no ads on the home page and only one ad per page on interior pages. And the ads are "the biggest ads you've ever seen on interior pages."

This is risky from a traditional ad serving standpoint where a publisher needs to maximize impression opportunities by cramming as many ads on a page as the traffic will bear. Yet it's a courageous stand from both a usability and common sense standpoint. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen postulated as early as 1997 that non-targeted advertising doesn't work on the Web because using the Internet is a goal-directed activity, and the act of clicking on an ad inteferes with the goal at hand. (Two notable exceptions--search ads, which are highly relevant to the user's information-seeking goal, and classified advertising, which users view as content. Hence the meteoric rise of Google and paid search, as well as auction/classified sites like eBay.)

Against this philosophical backdrop, two things can mitigate an ad's chances of being seen or clicked. First, ALL publishers need to reduce information overload by serving fewer ads per page. Better to have one ad that gets noticed than three or six or nine that are tuned out. (Graphical banner advertising is a lost cause online. People inherently tune out anything that oozes, flashes, moves or blinks. On our own sites, text ads outperform graphical ads by as much as three-to-one. Jakob Nielsen explains why this is.)

By the way, Jacobson feels home pages should be reduced to fit on one screen without scrolling or zooming. I think that's a great idea, but a bit too idealistic for a content site which can generate additional interior traffic by adding more links than can fit on a page without scrolling or zooming. Indeed, Eyetrack studies have proven that the number of headlines viewed increases with the number of headlines available (click here and scroll to bottom). That said, our experience launching Summit's digital magazines indicates that users are very much attracted to the idea of seeing all the content on one screen with no scrolling or zooming. Still, most content site home pages could stand to shrink a bit from their current length, which are so lengthy they induce choice paralysis, where users click hardly anything at all.

Second, on B2B media Web sites, the ad must work hard to be as good or better than the editorial content the ad sits next to. Content is what gets clicked online, not advertising. The more the ad seems like good content (offers for white papers are a good example), even if it's from an advertiser, the more likely a user will click.

But this means forcing advertisers to change the way the produce online text ads, which are often thrown together at the last minute with zero forethought. This is what we're struggling with currently at Summit. If advertisers are pushing us for better results from their ads on our site, we must push them to become better marketers. And that ain't easy.

How people view search results

From permission marketing guru Seth Godin comes this fascinating heat map of how people look at search results. (By the way--I think most search results pages on B2B media sites are terrible. B2B media sites publish content according to very defined taxonomies, yet such taxonomies are completely missing from search results. This is something I'm struggling with now as we redesign Packworld.com yet again.)

Note scant attention is given to where ads normally are (on right-hand side). If users are tuning out the ads, can someone please tell me why are we putting them there? And we wonder why clickthrough rates are declining . . .





Podcasting for B2B publishers?

I recently discovered podcasting. (Yes, I feel old.) I downloaded ipodder, loaded it up with some sample feeds, listened to a few podcasts, then promptly deleted all the feeds I had signed up for. Most of what I listened too wasn't very good, and I agree with others who say the growth of the medium will really take off when it's easy to find cream-of-the-crop podcasts, especially for B2B publishing.

However, there are a couple of interesting angles on podcasting for B2B publishers:

1. Really, really, really high-quality interviews. Sort of the Terry Gross/NPR model. An example is IT Conversations. So instead of an editor droning on and on reading his copy into a microphone, we get the editor conducting provocative interviews with thought leaders in the industry. Which they do all day long anyway. Hel-lo? Is that a natural for podcasting or what?

2. Meanwhile, from across the pond, I came across this interesting idea for a sort of audio newsclipping service:

We put together a monitoring package, scanning a variety of aggregated news sources - PubSub, Google Alerts and so on. Based on criteria that the client supplies - “this week I need to know about X” - we scan the feeds and grab anything that seems likely.

Then we quickly scan what comes up - and using our skill and judgment - select the items that we judge to be the most interesting. We narrate a summary of each item (in our finest BBC English accent) as an MP3 file. They’re short podcasts, no more than 3 or 4 minutes each. And there’s maybe a half-dozen at a time.

Their client, who travels quite a bit, simply grabs his ipod and throws it in a suitcase, loaded up with short, relevant clips of good content. This has profound implications for publications whose audiences tend to travel. It's essentially a form of "push" audio publishing. Not sure what the ad angle is yet.

What a wonderful way of pushing out good quality content for readers to consume on those cross-country plane flights.

Trade magazines vs. blogs

Will blogs replace trade magazines? It's probably not a fair comparison (or at least it didn't hold up in this blog-only news diet).

I do know this...trade magazine editors need to embrace blogging. What's a blogger if not a trusted , plugged-in persona disseminating information in a narrowly defined area? Isn't that what our editors are supposed to be?

Indeed, the best bloggers seem to have become exponentially more efficient at finding and disseminating highly relevant information quickly and briefly. By contrast, trade magazine editors have traditionally disseminated information slowly and at great length (at least on monthly pubs). Editors are cruising for a disconnect here on the information highway.

Here's a more measured view of the magazine vs blog debate.