David Raab Article Archive

Mercado Software Mercado CSN
by David M. Raab
DM News
September, 2006

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Say “search engine”, and most people think of Internet search sites like Google and Yahoo! But search includes other tasks, such as analyzing document archives, finding customers in a database, and identifying products in a catalog. All draw on similar statistical and language-based techniques for identifying relationships among texts. The really important differences are in the applications which make those techniques usable for a particular purpose.

Mercado CSN (Mercado Software, 888-376-1400, www.mercado.com) searches for products on an ecommerce Web site. It extends beyond returning search results to provide extensive control over what visitors actually see, based on rules defined by site merchandisers. Mercado lacks major portions of ecommerce functionality, including page design, content management, and order processing, so it is not intended as a complete ecommerce platform. Yet, by controlling much of what appears on the screen, it can have a major impact on site results.

The foundation of a Mercado installation is an index file with information about the items to be searched. Mercado can import item information or use its own UniClass technology to extract, standardize and classify item attributes. Like other language-based text engines, UniClass relies on thesauri, taxonomies, and semantic analysis to help interpret the inputs. Mercado provides reference bases for different subject areas, such as automotive, consumer electronics and food. Users can edit or extend these to better fit their particular data.

The index file contains links to the content that will be displayed on the Web page. The content itself is stored and managed outside of Mercado. The index can also include attributes from sources other than product descriptions, such as inventory levels or profit margins from an accounting system. An index file is typically updated in a regular batch process.

Once the relevant information is available in an index, Mercado can use it in many ways. One is to extract lists of categories and present these for users to browse. Another is to accept search words and return a list of results based on exact matches, partial matches, synonyms, value ranges, related terms, and other connections identified through linguistic and category-based methods. The results are ranked using a relevancy score based on several elements. Users can adjust the element weights as needed.

The list of results is transformed by user-defined rules before anything actually shows up on a Web page. Mercado divides each page into several zones and can display different information in each. For example, there can be zones for actual search results, related products, recommendations, best sellers, banner ads, and relevant documents. Each rule specifies which zone it applies to, when it is triggered, and what actions to take. Triggers can be based on search inputs such as particular key word, on the contents of the search results such as a particular category or attribute, or on the nature of the results such as the number of items found. Rules can also be limited to particular customer segments, based on customer identifiers imported from the Web site along with the search input. Mercado can also randomly assign customers to segments for A/B tests. In addition, rules can be limited to a particular department within a Web site, allowing merchandisers for different areas to operate independently.

Rule actions may redirect the user to a different page, such as customer service; generate a banner ad; or modify the result list by adding, excluding or re-ranking its contents. Users define groups of items to change through the same search interface that site visitors see, working in an image of the actual site. This helps to ensure the rule generates the desired results, while avoiding the need to train merchandisers on a special group-building interface. These group definitions only exist within a given rule, however, so groups that apply in multiple cases would best be converted into product attributes.

For organizations where managers must approve changes before they take effect, Mercado can generate an email to notify managers when a proposed new rule is ready and let the managers simulate the rule’s results before putting it into production. This simulation also presents a view of the actual Web site, with an option to select which customer segment is being simulated. Rules can automatically activate and deactivate during specified date and time-of-day ranges.

Management approvals, department-level rule creation, and automatic activation are particularly important to administrators at large, complex organizations. Mercado has additional technical features to support large sites, such as the ability to consolidate searches across multiple data types and servers.

Deployment of Mercado takes a fair amount of technical effort, ranging from three to five weeks at a small site to twenty or more for a major company. Some of the work is modifying the underlying site to generate Web Services requests that send information about each search or browse query to Mercado. The vendor provides a sample application to help users do this. But most of the time is spent revamping the Web site to take advantage of Mercado’s capabilities. This requires adding the different types of page zones and populating these with the XML outputs that Mercado generates in response to each request.

Mercado also produces a range of reports. Most focus on visitor behavior, such as lists of the most common search terms, browse selections, search and browse sequences, frequently viewed items, and query trends. Others are more aimed at helping to administer the system and identify areas for improvement, such as lists of requests that returned few or low-relevance results, most-used business rules, and load statistics. Users can also write custom reports.

Versions of Mercado are available for large consumer retailers, smaller retailers, and business-to-business marketers. The software can be purchased to run in-house under a traditional one-time license fee or can be hosted by Mercado. Pricing for the hosted version starts at around $3,400 per month and is based on query volume. Mercado was founded in 1997 and its software has been purchased by about 70 brands, many of which use it for multiple projects.

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David M. Raab is a Principal at Raab Associates Inc., a consultancy specializing in marketing technology and analytics. He can be reached at draab@raabassociates.com.

Paid Search Bid Management Systems
by David M. Raab
DM News
August, 2006

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One of my more sarcastic associates often responds “this Internet thing – it’s gonna be big” when I describe some interesting piece of Web-related software. Although the joke has long since worn thin, his underlying point remains valid: the Internet is too important to ignore, even though many companies still haven’t adjusted to it. (At least, I think that’s his point. He may just like being sarcastic.)

But taking full advantage of the Internet is not easy. There’s a Web site to build; search engine optimization, paid search and Web advertising to drive traffic; site analysis to understand what happens once people arrive; and email campaigns for prospecting and customer relationships. Since most companies have already developed an initial Web presence, the question is not where to begin, but what to do next.

One likely candidate is paid search: those little clickable ads that appear next to Google or Yahoo! search results. Marketers bid for those ads by specifying how much they will pay per response (“click”) from people who have searched for particular words and phrases.

Paid search is deceptively simple: you decide what an inquiry from a particular keyword is worth and you bid on it. But once you start managing more than a handful of terms, things get complicated. Because other people are usually bidding for the same words, you must continuously adjust your own bids to meet your volume goals without overpaying. In addition, measuring the value of each click requires tying the clicks to actual sales or other site behaviors. Of course, value and bids are related: you don’t want to bid more than the leads are worth.

Software to manage pay per click advertising falls into two broad categories. One set of products handles the mechanics of bidding for keywords across multiple search engines. These include Dynamic BidMaximizer (www.apexpacific.com), Roffers Engineering BidRank (www.bidrank.com), Atlas Search BidManager (www.atlasonepoint.com), Direct Response Technologies Inc. KeywordMax (www.keywordmax.com) and SearchMarketingTools PPCBidTracker (www.searchmarketingtools.com). All provide a central console to set up keywords, manage bids, and review results across multiple search engines. They automatically adjust bid amounts and offer Web site analytics services (at extra cost) to measure the value of the resulting leads. Costs can be as low as $200 per month to manage 10,000 keywords. (Nearly all vendors in this market charge on monthly or annual fees, even if the software actually runs on the clients’ own system. This entitles customers to receive updated software as the search vendors make changes to their own systems.)

The other class of products, including SearchIgnite AdConsole (www.searchignite.com for an agency version or www.adconsole.com for smaller, self-managed advertisers), Searchforce (www.searchforce.com) and Efficient Frontier (www.efrontier.com) move beyond managing individual keywords to optimize bids across an entire keyword portfolio. This involves using statistical algorithms that predict the performance of different bids for different keywords and comes up with a set of target bids that, taken together, best meet the advertisers’ business goals. Pricing on these products is harder to come by but can exceed $2,000 per month for the same 10,000 keywords.

Both groups of products integrate directly with the bidding systems of the paid search vendors. Marketers first set up accounts with each vendor and load a list of keywords and phrases with upper and lower bids. They then set up corresponding accounts in the bid management system, download the keywords, and add supplemental information—most importantly, a target ranking such as first, second or third in the list of ads on the search engine site. After that, the bid management system runs on a user-specified schedule, automatically downloading fresh results and competitive bids from each search engine account, adjusting the bids to get closer to the target ranks, and uploading the new bids. Products vary, but users can generally choose among different bidding goals such as maintaining a specific rank, making the most cost-effective bid within a range of ranks, out-bidding competitors, or barely under-bidding competitors so they spend as much as possible. Users can also often define alternative bids to apply during days and times when less attractive visitors are likely to be active.

Additional options are available to users who track the behavior on their Web sites. Most bid management systems can either import results from third-party Web analysis tools or from their own Web analysis services. These services all require users to tag their Web pages with scripts that send information about visitor sources and behaviors to a central server. The bid management system uses this data to adjust bids to reach target sales to advertising ratios or similar goals. Some of the Web analysis services only measure ad results, while others approach the capabilities of a dedicated Web analytics package. Pricing for one million page views varies from $400 to $1,000 per month, with higher rates for lower volumes and lower rates for larger amounts.

The basic bid management systems manage each keyword separately for each account with each search vendor. Even reports are usually organized on an account basis, so seeing the performance of a single keyword across multiple accounts takes some work. Further complicating matters, some vendors still run one system for Yahoo!/Overture keywords and another system for Google and everyone else. The systems generally do let users assign a group of keywords to a campaign within an account and to set total spending limits per campaign. But this still allows serious misallocations of resources, since the efficient campaigns will stop when they run out of money while less efficient campaigns continue to spend.

The advanced bid management systems avoid this by first estimating the performance of each keyword on each site at each bid price, and then creating a package of recommended bids that produces the desired results as efficiently as possible. The optimization may target total volume, average cost, return on investment, or other goals. This is a much more complicated task than keyword-level management but probably worth the extra expense for marketers spending large amounts of money on many different keywords.

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David M. Raab is a Principal at Raab Associates Inc., a consultancy specializing in marketing technology and analytics. He can be reached at draab@raabassociates.com.

Design Logic, Inc. LogoYes
Greek Attic Ltd Moonfruit SiteMaker
by David M. Raab
DM News
July, 2006

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I own an electric drill, but that doesn’t make me a dentist. Yet owning a computer has made many people into graphic and Web designers. This has certainly saved them time and money compared with hiring someone else. But the results can be as painful as a do-it-yourself root canal.

Design software built for professionals is really no help. Ambitious amateurs often lack the technical skills to use professional software and the aesthetic sense to use it well. Fortunately, there are systems developed specifically to help untrained users do a good job on design projects. These combine easy-to-learn interfaces with features to help users to make reasonable choices. Many are provided as Web-based services, allowing the quicker implementation and lower costs than software on the user’s own machine.

LogoYes (Design Logic Inc., 800-940-5646, www.logoyes.com) is focused on one task: creating business logos. Users specify a company image (high-tech, experienced, or creative) and an industry. The system then offers a variety of symbols that it deems appropriate. If none of the symbols appeal, users can see additional choices. After selecting a symbol, users enter their company name and an optional tagline, choose among system-selected typefaces for each, and arrange these with the symbol to form the logo. The whole process can be completed in a few minutes and everything to this point is free. Users can then pay $99 to receive EPS and JPEG files of their logo, ready for printing and online displays. Paying users can also save two versions for online review and make revisions before creating the final output.

The key to all this is the quality of LogoYes’s recommendations. The company says it has a total of 20,000 symbols, all designed especially for logo use. These are arranged by topic as well as industry and image, so each combination of choices brings up different options. This approach does narrow the number of choices to something manageable. Recommended typefaces also vary with the image type, although there are many fewer choices.

The final quality of the results will still depend on the design sense of the user and is somewhat constrained by the one symbol, one name, one tagline format. For example, I could not create a logo for “high chair heaven” that replaced both h’s with chairs. Then again, that was probably a bad idea. So LogoYes may do its users a favor by limiting the complexity of their creations.

Moonfruit SiteMaker (Greek Attic Ltd, www.moonfruit.com) lies at the other extreme of help-you-do-it-yourself software, letting users build complete, sophisticated Web sites. Many other products share this ambition, of which I have personally tried just a handful. So, although I liked Moonfruit better than the others, I can’t authoritatively say it’s the best choice available.

What I can say is that Moonfruit was remarkably easy to use given the power it provides. I was able to set up a test Web site and add some fairly impressive features working almost wholly by intuition, with just an occasional peek at the online help. Such accessibility is critical for do-it-yourself tools, whose users are unlikely to have the time or patience to work through even a simple tutorial. Moonfruit users start by picking site design templates, which automatically generate the pages for the new site. Users than replace the default contents with the text and images they actually want. It took a bit of trial and error to figure out the SiteMaker buttons: does Edit, Pages, Insert or Design add something to a page? But the answers made sense once I discovered them, so the right choices quickly became automatic. It’s worth noting that Moonfruit’s file upload function, which has been balky in several programs I’ve tested, worked particularly smoothly. The system even automatically stores smaller versions of large graphics files, to speed performance.

Each Moonfruit page is essentially a canvas that holds objects, similar to a Powerpoint slide. Users add, select, move, resize and delete objects at will. Once an object is selected, a small window opens up with tabs to set properties such as colors and fonts. Different types of objects have different properties, but since the appropriate tabs appear automatically, users don’t have to remember much about the details. There’s no HTML or JavaScript or anything remotely technical. Where Web page design is concerned, this is about as easy as it gets.

Moonfruit objects include text and images, of course. More impressively, there are objects for searchable lists such as products or members, member sign-up and log-in, bulletin boards, online chat, downloadable picture galleries, polls, email forms, MP3 jukeboxes and Ask Jeeves search. Hundreds of specialized objects can further enhance pages with buttons, clip art, graphic elements, text effects, animations, site counters, clocks, and games. Connections to PayPal widgets offer single-product ordering and multi-product shopping carts.

Nearly every object can be assigned a link, which could point to another page within the Moonfruit site, an external Web page, an email form, a file to be downloaded, a PayPal widget, or the member log-in function. Different words within a text object can be given different links. Members can be assigned to groups with rights to see particular pages and perform functions such as list updates. Outbound email can be sent to all members or specified groups.

Moonfruit definitely has its limits. Serious marketers will miss site personalization (although groups provide some capabilities), ecommerce beyond PayPal, in-site search, and reporting on visitor behavior. More sophisticated users may be concerned that pages are Macromedia Flash files, not HTML, meaning they cannot be edited or enhanced outside of the system. Nor can a site built on Moonfruit be transferred elsewhere.

But people needing simple information site with a few key capabilities, including lists, member registrations, and emails, will find Moonfruit a viable alternative to hiring a Web developer. At under $200 per year for the most extensive package, including Web hosting, price is no object. Moonfruit was launched in 2000 and says more than 750,000 sites have been built with its tools.

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David M. Raab is a Principal at Raab Associates Inc., a consultancy specializing in marketing technology and analytics. He can be reached at draab@raabassociates.com.