Pay Per Action - A strange departure for Google

Google has this week announced the trialling in the USA of a Cost Per Action system to take the Adwords model further than the highly successful Pay Per Click Online advertising model. The original announcement is visible at Google Pay Per Action.

The reason I find this strange is that core to what Google does is to assess the quality of site's content in terms of keyword searches and positioning within the search index. Pay per click has been a revolutionary digital marketing media in terms of creating a model that enables online marketing professionals to pre-qualify prospects by search phrase and then by advert copy before any money is paid to the media owner. When Google then bought Urchin software and offered Google Analytics free of charge to Adwords customers it inevitably accelerated the growth of Pay per Click as an advertising media.
However the level of conversion that pre-qualified website traffic offers is based on a multitude of factors that Google the media owner, can not control:
-Faith in the brand
-Online customer experience - ease of navigation
-Financial value of the purchase / time cost of interaction
-Level of purchase contemplation / lifespan of the product
-Perceptions of product quality
-Perceptions of the level of transaction security
-Management of expectations of service offering / communications plan

Obviously the list above changes based on what the digital marketing aims are but I find it a little disconcerting that Google would attempt to create a technical solution that simplifies or even negates all of the human psychology that goes into online purchase decisions or sign up to an online brand engagement.
A clash of technology versus digital communications expertise perhaps?

Ebay strengthen Web 2.0 marketing position

Having just come back from a long weekend away, I logged on to ebay to see a few significant customer experience and web 2.0 realted updates. It appears that some usability testing has made them increase the prominence of the core call to actions - 'Place bid' and 'Watch this item'. I could speculate that ebay have analysed the volume of bids placed from items that were previously being watched and then had 'auction ending' reminder emails sent to the watchers and found that an increased number of bids are placed on heavily watched icons.

Perhaps more likely is that they have undergone a full customer experience review. This is likely to be a response to having undertaken usability testing research which has shown that new ebay users who are not familiar with all of the functionality that ebay offers, are unclear as to the simplest customer journey and some people may now be bewildered by the depth of ebay's functionality when arriving on the site for the first time.

Ebay have also further increased their position as one of the core definers of what Web 2.0 is really all about. They have increased the sophistication of the feedback process so that buyers can rate the accuracy of product descriptions, delivery speed, packaging and quality of customer communication. This usage of technology to create greater transparency of transaction history and to encourage greater levels of seller customer service is what underpins ebay's position as a leading commercially successful web 2.0 case study. If you are interested in understanding more about how the metrics of the Web 2.0 era could affect your brand or would like to discuss a customer experience review the please contact digital Aim.

SEO agencies breath a sigh of relief

Last week Google has announced that following new legislation it will now 'anonymise' all of the search engine queries / search engine keywords that it holds on file for any Google users who have a G-mail account or a login for any of other Google services, such as personalised search. It remains to be seen as to whether this will bring an end to Google personalised search or whether they will be able to adapt anonymity to this. While uptake of personalised search is relatively low, it does pose a significant threat to the search engine optimisation industry who report positioning of clients within search engine indexes for searches under a given target keyword. The full story is available at Netimperative's site.
For more information about deciding where search engine marketing should fit into your marketing strategy then get in touch.

What defines customer experience?

“Clients buy design within a given deliver medium (in this case web) but the direction and mapping of the communication journey defines the creative destination, the customer experience and the results that follow.” - Scott Howard

Short blog I grant you - but in writing a proposal I wanted to capture this thought as ultimately I think this sums up why many websites that are well designed, technically well scoped fail to achieve their objectives in making people take action in the most interactive media the world has ever seen. When this changes Digital Aim will have to find something else to do. For now however we are keeping very busy indeed.