[ Music ] >> Lesson 5 The Consumer Brand Relationship. We're going to take a little time and look at channels that brands use to reach consumers, and then why those channels are important and importantly the metrics that can be used to gauge the success of those channels in analytics. What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about each channel, and discuss how each of them have a role in creating relationships; a very unique role in creating the brand/consumer relationship. We'll talk about how brands use search to be relevant to consumer needs. We'll talk about how they use display advertising to intersect consumers along a web journey. We'll talk about video and how that is used to engage with consumers, and then finally, how social is a very important tool in connecting with consumers at very key moments. So those are the four-- here are the four channels that we'll be talking about- search, display, video, and social. These are digital ways for brands to reach and connect with consumers and vice versa through content, sharing of discussion, and other means. They're very vital ways for brands to reach consumers, and as a result very important to us and with analytics; it's very important to know why a brand would use a particular channel. What kind of data is available to me in that channel as an analyst, and then importantly, what metrics I should be using to gauge that success. So let's start with search, just a little bit about search. And before we get-- you go too deep into it; you need to talk about these two concepts: SEO and SEM, search engine optimization and search engine management; very different for brands and they mean a great deal of different things for them. Search engine management if we start there is all about brands investing in paid search to reach consumers. That is the green out here if you look on the slide; that's the stuff at the top and along this backside. All of that is placed by brands through investments in paid advertising, and for that reason we call that search engine management. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is all this stuff that's organic results that come in here in the red. These are results that are triggered by generally secret formulas held by the different search engines. Relevance is always an important thing making sure that it is indeed what the consumer is looking for will be boost your results up. As well as just popularity is another thing that would drive the results. There is nothing in search engine optimization that brands can pay to get moved up that list; it's basically as I said organic results, and it's just based on the content that you've got that consumers are searching for. So both of the ways that SEM or SEO they differ very much in the output, right, but at the end of the day the result or the objective for a brand is still very similar. You basically want to be where a consumer is when they are searching for something. When they are telling you I am looking for this; I have this need. InquireO in 2007 put out a study that tracked why it was so important for brands to be at the top of that return list. What you're looking at is just a simply Google search page and then what they've done is they've outlined where consumer's eyes fell on the page, so the darker the redder that area there in the center means that consumers were looking at that page and looking very intently. And the vast majority of consumers are looking at the first couple of results and then making a decision and going on. There are studies that say that consumers expect the best brands to be at the top of that list, whether that's an organic result or the result of some kind of paid search engine management advertising. But suffice to say that the objective of a brand is to be relevant to consumers when they're in that search, and then also to return high on that list so that they are the ones chosen. Other sites have said that that first return link is clicked on ten times more than anything towards the bottom of the page, and almost never will a consumer scroll what's called below the fold. So to results that don't show up immediately into that first list, so getting to the top of that search result very important for brands, and a key objective of search. So how would we measure against that objective? What measures would we use? So there's a couple of them. Click-Through Rate is a very important metric in that is basically looking at the percent of consumers who saw my search link or my display ad; whatever it is that thing that I want them to click on and then clicked on it. So in this case, it's the percent of consumers who saw my search ad or organic result and then clicked on it, what percent did that. Another important metric is the Macro Conversion Rate. Because you've got consumers who are clicking on a link, and you are sending them someplace, which could be right to a buy now page, could be just something along the path to a buy now page, but you know pretty well where they are sending them. It becomes very easy or much easier to figure out what percent enter into my buy process, and then ultimately what percent actually make a purchase. So the macro conversion rate is tracking just that. It's tracking how many customers came to my site, and then how many of them actually made a purchase. How many of them did I convert to a customer of mine. Another metric that is important is the cost per acquisition. Because you've got such good data through search on who is making the action to click on a link and come to my site, and you're getting very clear data on that number of consumers, and you also then know how much you are spending if you're investing in a paid search ad. It becomes a pretty easy calculation to figure out how much those conversions, these customers that I turned into customers of mine, how much they cost me, and then figuring out a rate of just taking that investment, dividing by the number of people that you converted and getting a cost per acquisition.
