What I Saw at Ad:Tech that Might Help Your Company's Future

On April 25, 2007, I spent an entire day visiting the hundreds of exhibitors at Ad:Tech San Francisco. I was looking for new angles, new products, new ideas that are priced for small to medium businesses, you my subscribers. Of course, "small" can cover a big range in business sizes -- and companies with "cheap" prices don't rent the pricey booths at Ad:Tech.

I saw many media agencies and pay for performance ad networks. But I particularly was interested in:

• Site Search from WebSiteStory
• WebSideStory Express Search, formerly from Atomz
• Customized homepages from PersonalWeb
• StrongMail and Lyris ListManager e-mail solutions
• HotBanana hosted content management system
• LivePerson Pro and LivePerson Contact Center for live customer support on your website
• Advertising through custom-written articles from AdFusion
• Video and animation for a website from Rovion MovingMedia and SitePal, respectively
• Wyndstrom Social Network Suite to build a social networking site
• Webloyalty.com with an approach to online loyalty programs.

My observations are detailed in the rest of the article.

Media Agencies

I saw scores of firms and agencies that offer clients help with SEO, media buying, especially paid search advertising. Each was looking for new clients to sign up. Some of these companies claim to be able to do almost anything -- so long as you fit their model and pricing structure. On that day, the main differentiator seemed to be the tchotchkes* they were offering. Ah, yes.....

Pay for Performance Ad Networks

The next big category of exhibitors was ad networks that work on a pay-per-performance basis. These often label themselves as affiliate marketing. While they do supply tools for affiliates, they mainly provide a network of sites on which your ads appear. The difference between these and traditional affiliate programs is a matter commitment on the part of the affiliate -- that is, the publisher sites. Instead of a true pre-selling approach, most ad networks are simply a matter of placing various prepackaged ads on existing content and hoping for a connection. The publishers get paid typically on a pay per action basis, though there are many pay per click networks out there, as well as a combination of the two. If you're an advertiser, here's a way to purchase advertising on a pay for performance basis. If you can find ad networks that partner with particular sites your industry, this could be helpful. If not, well....

Site Search

I'm personally convinced that one of the keys to effective e-commerce for stores with hundreds and thousands of products is effective site search. The problem with site search is that you can't predict what keywords your site visitor will enter to search for one of your products. For example, if you have a product you call "Blue Widget Standard" and your visitor searches for "Blue Widgie" (a nickname) or "Bule Wigdet" (a misspelling), they won't find it and will go elsewhere. An effective site search program allows you to customize search for each product with alternate names and misspellings, some of which you can find in your traffic logs. For online stores, such an effective system can make a huge difference in overall conversion rate.

When I attend the Internet Retailer Conference this coming June, there'll be lots of search vendors. But at Ad:Tech I saw only WebSideStory. WebSideStory, an enterprise level analytics company, offers a stand-alone search tool (http://www.websidestory.com/products/hosted-site-search/search/overview.html?lid=//Products//Search) that helps companies improve site search, beginning at about $20,000 per year.

A poor man's solution is their free WebSideStory Express Search (http://www.websidestory.com/products/hosted-site-search/express-search/overview.html?lid=//Products//Express+Search), formerly offered by Atomz, which was acquired by WebSideStory. Express Search is free and can be used on sites up to 2,500 webpages, but shows some third-party text ads with the search results. It won't solve serious e-commerce search needs, but could help you if you're putting a search feature on an information-type site.

Frankly, I don't know of any inexpensive solution to this serious e-commerce search problem, though ShopSite (www.shopsite.com) told me last week that their Pro version offers a way to include other keywords, synonyms, and misspellings for each product in the store. At least that's a start.

Providing Personalized Pages for Visitors and Clients

PersonalWeb (www.personalweb.com) from Claria helps you offer a personalized, customized homepage on your site to encourage your best customers to come back. You can try out a free version that give you an idea what the private-label versions can do for a company website. PersonalWeb collects data on your customers' interests based on their searches and browsings, and then offers related content -- updated constantly to reflect new interests. These customized homepages can offer benefits to consumers (who get customized content based on their interests), publishers (who build loyalty and may receive advertising income), and advertisers (who get targeted, specific segments of consumers to whom they can show their wares). I'm not too interested for my own sites, but some of my readers might be.

E-Mail Marketing Services

A number of excellent e-mail services were present, including Lyris, EmailLabs, Topica, IntelliContact, and others. Two services in particular interested me at the show:

StrongMail (www.strongmail.com) is not a hosted service, but provides the hardware and software for an in-house e-mail server, with a basic cost of about $10,000 to $15,000 for the software and computer to run it, then 18% to 22% support fees annually. Qualities that differentiate StrongMail from other e-mail software programs that run on a client's site are StrongMail's constant updates, consulting, and deliverability monitoring. For example, they assess about eight different factors that provide prime deliverability to the top two dozen US Internet Service Providers, including throttles that send e-mail to them at a prime rate -- not too fast. When these factors change, your application is updated with new software that allows you to keep deliverability optimized but still use an in-house server. Medium businesses may be interested.

Lyris ListManager (www.lyris.com) has been around for a decade, but is constantly improving. I used it to send Web Marketing Today for several years. The Pro and Enterprise versions provide a powerful solution that can feed back information into the database detailing customer click-throughs as well as that customer's subsequent activity on your website. This allows you an easy way of segmenting your list based on customer behavior -- a key to getting better results with e-mail campaigns from your house list. Lyris is available as both a hosted service and software that you can license to use on your own site.

Content Management Systems

If you have a site that needs constant work to keep up and involves several people in the content maintenance process, you probably need a content management system. For several years I've used Article Manager (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/articlemanager.htm) from interactivetools.com and have been quite happy with it. They've now come out with version 2.1 that uses a MySQL database backend. The sale price is currently a one-time $349 (normally $500). The application is written in Perl and provides some of the best telephone and forum customer service I've seen. This is a low-end price for this kind of product.

While interactivetools.com wasn't at Ad:Tech, HotBanana was. HotBanana (www.hotbanana.com) is a hosted content management system starting at $329 per month for up to five users, ideal for small to medium business, if not Mom and Pop sites. It provides not only content management, but lots of tools that can be used with a website. Instead of being forced to obtain separate applications for each of the tools you need, HotBanana includes in a single application such tools as: e-mail list management (for small lists), event management, CRM integration, landing pages with A/B testing, web forms to get information from your customers, RSS feeds, SEO tools, and analytics, as well as campaign and performance optimization. The first generation of content management systems was notoriously unfriendly to search engine spiders. But HotBanana is built with SEO in mind. In addition to the monthly cost is a $500 set-up fee and the costs of template design -- which could run thousands of dollars to implement a design across the entire site.

Live Chat for Customer Contact

When customers get their questions answered quickly and satisfactorily, the conversion rate on a site goes up substantially. There are several low-cost live chat software programs out there, but perhaps the best known -- and recognized as one of the best of breed -- is a hosted application, LivePerson. Essentially it involves a box or button on every page of your site that invites a customer to ask a question using a chat-program that opens up when clicked on. When no one is available to staff the chat, an "out of the office" message is shown.

LivePerson Pro (www.liveperson.com), designed for small businesses, provides chat only and is available for $99 per seat per month. If you have two people available to staff your site, then you'd need two seats. Their software, which has now gone through a number of generations, improving each time, enables you to monitor visitors on your site in real time. You can see where a visitor has already been so you can interact intelligently with the customer. Geo-targeting allows you to tell where the visitor is from geographically. The program includes an alert system that will call you to the computer when someone wants to chat. You can store canned responses to answer common questions. If you need a tool to increase sales in your already profitable store, LivePerson could be it for as little as $3 per day.

LivePerson Contact Center costs $150 per seat per month and adds several features to basic chat -- e-mail, VoIP telephone, and a knowledge base, plus analytics. A "call me" button opens a screen in which your visitor can gives his phone number. Then he receive an immediate call from your staff member using VoIP technology to keep the price down. Pretty slick. If you have the right kind of business or store, this live customer support system could pay for itself rather quickly in increased sales and happier customers.

Advertising through Customer-Written Articles

One of the most convincing kinds of media is an article written about a product or service, since it can explore various aspects at greater depth and -- when done right -- doesn't seem like a hard-sell, in-your-face pitch. A low-cost approach is to write articles containing links to your site and distribute them through free article sites.

However, not all small businesses have the writing talent or the distribution network to make this work effectively. Enter AdFusion (www.adfusion.com). AdFusion provides in-context advertising through custom written content that appears on a network of publisher sites. Each article is SEO-friendly and written just for you, containing links back to your website and landing pages. There is no cost for writing the articles. AdFusion makes its money by charging $1.50 and up per click for each click-through from the articles. AdFusion shares this revenue with publishers to compensate them for hosting the articles on their sites, thus providing a strong distribution network. The result is traffic from highly targeted visitors who have already experienced a pre-sell for your products and services, making them more inclined to make a purchase.

Video Messages Designed to Engage Your Visitors

Visitors come and go so quickly! How do you engage them so they stay long enough to see what you're offering? One approach is to use video overlays on your webpages using videos of real people (yourself, perhaps) who tell enough of your story to get visitors interested. Rovion MovingMedia (www.rovion.com) provides the technology to stream video through your site. This isn't video in a rectangular screen. It's video that seems to be unencumbered by video player software. To understand what I'm flailing around trying to describe, go to www.rovion.com and watch the bottom right of the webpage.

I've successfully experimented with OddCast's SitePal on my site and found that it engages people so they stay on the site longer. I'm convinced that Rovion's solution can achieve the same objective with the classiness of video.

Social Networking Advertising and Solutions

A number of vendors at Ad:Tech were offering various kinds of advertising and promotion to social networking sites that allow advertisers to reach a young online demographic. If you're marketing to a young audience, you need to learn how to do this.

I was interested by companies that offered to set up online socializing centers on your company or organization website. Of course, only companies with a current following and substantial traffic stand to profit here, but a social network on your website could be a big loyalty program to bring people back again and again to your site -- and become a profit center on its own. One company at Ad:Tech that offered such services was Wyndstorm Social Network Suite (www.wyndsorm.com). It's not inexpensive, but offers a multitude of features that your audience takes for granted in a social networking experience.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs, such as frequent flier miles, are one way to get customers to return. One of the better known online programs is Webloyalty.com (www.webloyalty.com). Here's how it works: After completing a purchase on your site, your customer sees a offer from Webloyalty as a thank you -- $10 off their next purchase at your site and 30 days free access to a membership site that offers various discounts. Some e-commerce sites earn an extra $.50 to $2.00 per transaction from membership fees to the membership site as well as a significant slice of repeat transactions on their own site. I haven't studied this in depth, but it may be worth exploring as a way to build loyalty among your customers.

There you have it. This hasn't been a comprehensive review of each of the hundreds of vendors at Ad:Tech -- many worthy of your time -- but my selection this year of vendors that may help you move your business forward.

*Tchotchke (originally from Yiddish tshatshke (trinket) ultimately from a Slavic word for "toys" — Polish: cacka, Russian: цацки) are trinkets, small toys, knickknacks, baubles, or kitsch. The term has a connotation of worthlessness or disposability, as well as tackiness. For example, an overly ostentatious piece of jewelry, valuable or not, might be referred to as a tchotchke (Wikipedia).