Last week, I walked through an interaction with the search page step by step and looked cognitive engagement with the page. To understand the nature of branding on the search page, you first have to understand how we interact with brand messaging on the page.
Quick to Click
We left off last week as we picked up enough information scent on the page to encourage us to click on the listing. It’s important to understand that this is not a rigorous appraisal of relevance. The amount of deliberation is directly related to the amount of risk involved in a click through, determined by much time will we have to invest should we click through. The amount of time we invest in deliberation on the search page is telling. In most search interactions we’ve recorded in our lab, average time to first click is around 10 to 12 seconds, during which most people scan 4 to 5 listings. That amounts to 2 to 3 seconds per listing. Once the click through happens, deliberation is almost as limited on the landing page; 10 to 14 seconds is spent determining if information scent is sufficiently present to stick with the page. If not, we’re clicking the back button and heading back to the results page.
I tally up these times to make a point: we don’t spend a lot of time interacting with search messages. This is spot scanning at best, not a thorough assessment. We don’t read listings, we glance at words. When enough hits register to establish relevancy matches with the goal of our search, based on the words we used in the query and those that remain locked up in our prefrontal cortex, we click.
Fruit Foraging
Let’s go back to the foraging analogy, because it helps establish the mindset we’re dealing with. You’re looking for oranges and walk into a mall with 20 different storefronts opening off the main entrance. Each storefront has signage in front with a brief description of the items they carry. Most appear to offer oranges. However, you don’t want to spend the rest of your day going from store to store looking for the perfect bag of oranges. So, you’re going to use the clues you pick up on the store signs to pick your best bet. A produce store is a better match than a convenience store, which is a better match than a clothing store which for some reason says oranges on their sign (perhaps it’s the color of their Fall line). Your goal is to pick up the best oranges in the least amount of time. The process you would use to narrow your store selection is similar to the one you use every day with a search engine.
Now, let’s look at the part brand plays in this same analogy. You’re looking for oranges, but you’re using related concepts to help you narrow down your choice. A store that appears to offer a variety of fruits has stronger scent. A store that has a sale on oranges today might offer even stronger scent. And a store that offers Sunkist oranges might offer even stronger scent, if you happen to like the Sunkist brand.
Brand Connections, Not Emotions
That’s the role brand plays on the search results page. It’s a critical role, but it’s significantly different than the brand building role many are trying to carve out for search. Search doesn’t build brand, search connects people to brands at just the right time.
Brands work because they represent something. In fact, studies show that successful brands actually act as a proxy for reward in the brain. They fire the same dopamine producing neurons in the reward center that the actual product would, if you possessed it. The brain transfers the pleasure of the product to the brand, where it acts as a convenient label. If you have a favorable opinion of a brand and you see that brand in the search results, your working memory pulls that brand belief out of storage and brings it into focus in the prefrontal cortex.
But, as we learned, brands become powerful influencers if they’re tagged with the power of emotion. That’s classic brand building. As I’ve gone over at length in this series, there are a number of ways those brand beliefs can be built, including personal experience, the opinions of others and yes, even advertising. But I stand by my belief that emotional brand building doesn’t happen on the search page. The nature of the interaction simply isn’t conducive to it. This does nothing to negate the importance of brand on the search page, as I’ll talk about in future columns. In fact, the appearance of brand on the results page is critical. But an emotional brand bonding moment it’s not.
So, with my own company responsible for a number of search brand lift studies, am I refuting my own evidence? Not at all. It just requires a clearer definition of brand lift and a little knowledge of the ways we measure it. I’ll deal with both next week.
Two weeks ago, I talked about the concept of selective perception, how subconsciously we pick and choose what we pay attention to. Then, last week, I explained how engagement with search is significantly different than engagement with other types of advertising. These two concepts set the stage for what I want to do today. In this column, I want to lay out a step by step hypothetical walk through of our cognitive engagement with a search page.
Searching on Auto Pilot
First, I think it’s important to clear up a common misunderstanding. We don’t think our way through an entire search interaction. The brain only kicks into cognitive high gear (involving the cortex) when it absolutely needs to. When we’re engaged in a mental task, any mental task, our brain is constantly looking for cognitive shortcuts to lessen the workload required. Most of these short cuts involve limbic structures at the sub cortical level, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and nucleus accumbens. This is a good thing, as these structures have been honed through successful generations to simplify even the most complicated tasks. They’re the reason driving is much easier for you now than it was the first time you climbed behind the wheel. These structures and their efficiencies also play a vital role in our engagement with search.
So, to begin with, our mind identifies a need for information. Usually, this is a sub task that is part of a bigger goal. The goal is established in the prefrontal cortex and the neural train starts rolling towards it. We realize there’s a piece of information missing preventing us from getting closer to the goal and based on our past successful experiences, we determine that a search engine offers the shortest route to gain the information. This is the first of our processing efficiencies. We don’t deliberate long hours about the best place to turn. We make a quick, heuristic decision based on what’s worked in the past. The majority of this process is handled at the sub cortical level.
The Google Habit
Now we have the second subconscious decision. Although we have several options available for searching, the vast majority of us will turn to Google because we’ve developed a Google habit. Why spend precious cognitive resources considering our options when Google has generally proved successful in the past. Our cortex has barely begun to warm up at this point. The journey thus far has been on autopilot.
The prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory, first sparked to life with the realization of the goal and the identification of the sub task, locating the missing piece of information. Now, the cortical mind is engaged once again as we translate that sub task into an appropriate query. This involves matching the concept in our minds with the right linguistic label. Again, we’re not going to spend a log of cognitive effort on this, which is why query construction tends to start simply and become longer and more complex only if required. In this process, the label, the query we plugged into the search box, remains embedded in working memory.
Conditioned Scanning
At this point, the prefrontal cortex begins to idle down again. The next exercise is handled by the brain as a simple matching game. We have the label, or query in our mind. We scan the page in the path we’ve been conditioned to believe will lead to the best results. This is starting in the upper left, and then moving down the page in a F shaped scan pattern. All we want to do is find a match between the query in our prefrontal cortex and the results on the page.
Here the brain also conserves cognitive processing energy by breaking the page into chunks of 3 or 4 results. This is due to the channel capacity of our working memory and how many discrete chunks of information we can process in our prefrontal cortex at a time. We scan the results looking first for the query, usually in the title of the results. And it’s here where I believe a very important cognitive switch is thrown.
The “Pop Out” Effect
When we structure the query, we type it into a box. In the process, we remember the actual shape of the phrase. When we first scan results, we’re not reading words, we’re matching shapes. In cognitive psychology, this is called the “pop out” effect. We can recognize shapes much faster than we can read words. The shapes of our query literally “pop out” from the page as a first step towards matching relevance. The effect is enhanced by query (or hit) bolding. This matching game is done at the sub cortical level.
If the match is positive (shape = query) then our eye lingers long enough to start picking up the detail around the word. We’ve seen in multiple eye tracking studies that foveal focus (the center of the field of vision) tends to hit the query in the title, but peripheral vision begins to pick up words surrounding the title. In our original eye tracking study, we called this semantic mapping. In Pirolli’s book on Information Foraging, he referred to it as spreading activation. It’s after the “pop out” match that the prefrontal cortex again kicks into gear. As addition words are picked up, they are used to reinforce the original scent cue. Additional words from the result pull concepts into the prefrontal cortex (recognized URL, feature, supporting information, price, brand), which tend to engage different cortical regions as long term memory labels are paged and brought back into the working memory. If enough matches with the original mental construct of the information sought are registered, the link is clicked.
Next week, let’s look at the nature of this memory recall, including the elusive brand message.
SEO or SEM (PPC), organic vs. sponsored? Where should your online marketing budgets go? Well the answer is both. SEO and PPC can work very nicely together depending on where you are with your online marketing efforts. We came up with ten instances where SEO and PPC should be used together as an effective online marketing campaign.
Preparing for a Site Redesign - when planning a redesign and making sure that all of the SEO best practice are being put in place as you prepare to launch, you’ll want to bolster your online campaign with sponsored efforts as you transition your site from the old site to the new. Once the SEO efforts kick in post launch, you can reduce your PPC spend and focus your sponsored efforts elsewhere.
Preparing to Launch a Microsite - Microsites allow you to try out a more targeted online strategy. For quick traffic generation to your new microsite, you’ll want to utilize an well planned sponsored startegy. At the same time your SEO efforts can be geared towards a focus on long-tail, and less competitive keywords to drive additonal traffic to the microsite.
Launching a new Sub-Domain - Similar to launching a microsite, sponsored efforts can be used to direct traffic to the new sub-domain while an SEO strategy can be developed to obtain long term rankings for the sub-domain.
Launching a new Website - Anytime you launch a new website, you should have both an SEO and SEM strategy working together to help obtain traffic to your new web property. Initially your sponosred startegy might be the only means of driving traffic to your new site, until you can improve your visibility in the natural search results of the search engines.
Marketing Your Website on a Shoestring Budget - If you have a tight budget, you can focus efforts on SEO and compliment that with a smaller PPC strategy where you bid on phrases that are less expensive. You may want to focus your PPC spend for local search while you concentrate your SEO efforts for more genreal search engines rankings. As you develop content through SEO and on-page optimization the only cost you incur is time.
Company Mergers & Merging Web Properties - In the dynamic economic environment that we have experienced in recent years, it’s not uncommon to see companies merge. Quite often startups are bought out and you are left with multiple web properties at your disposal. This is another great example of when you should be using SEO and PPC simultaneously to educate your target audience of your recent merger or acquisition. You may want to phase the old company out, as a resul you may want to move some content from that companies website to your own. Developing an SEO transition strategy that is backed up by a solid PPC strategy can be an effective way to educate your existing consumers as well as any new prospects who may be looking for your solution.
Releasing a New Product Line - PPC can be used in conjunction with SEO to promote your new product or solution line. Chances are that your new product name will be easy to rank for orgnically, backing that up with some non-branded traffic from sponsored efforts and you can quickly acheive some additional branded and non-branded traffic that will convert on your site with the proper type of messaging and promotion.
Online Reputation Management Campaigns - Experienced some negative press? Use SEO and sponosred solutions to protect your brand in the online space. From an SEO point of view, you’ll want to ensure that any negative organic listings are pushed to page two of the search results page, by optimizing your site for blended search, and leveraging social networks to dominant the SERP landscape. Furthermore you will want to protect your branded via PPC efforts so that negative or "questionable" listings do not appear within the sponsored results.
Entering New Markets - If your company is large enough to go global or is entering new regional markets, you might want to use SEO and PPC to target these geographic demographics. Depending on your expansion, you might want to try a GEO-targeted sponsored campaign, backed up with content development for organic rankings in the natural search results of the search engines.
Plateauing Search Engine Traffic - Seen your website traffic start to plateau? Maybe you need to modify or add a sponsored strategy to your SEO strategy or vice versa. Revisit both your SEO and PPC efforts and get creative with some new messaging to drive more traffic to your site.
While many companies are doing SEM or are developing SEO strategies, there are still a number that are not leveraging SEO and PPC efforts together. If your company is experiencing any of the ten issues above, you may want to establish a co-existing SEO and SEM strategy to ensure that you effectively intercept your target audience and that you continue to drive qualified traffic to your site. Search engine optimization and sponsored search marketing efforts can work together to provide you with optimal results. The more effective you become with your online marketing efforts, the less spend it will take to drive more business. While it takes time and is subject to the changing nature of the Internet, realizing when to use SEO and PPC together can return tremendous results.
Jim Sterne’s depiction of the Customer Life Cycle Funnel - four distinct funnels based on successful or unsuccessful customer acquisition, persuasion and conversion - has been widely quoted and referenced since he first presented it in 2000. In the interview, Jim walks us through the four funnels, while also touching upon B2B vs. B2C, and social media marketing.
In a single day, you will be assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discrete bits of information. I’m writing this from a hotel room on the corner of 43rd and 8th in New York. Just a simple 3 block walk down 8th Avenue will present me with hundreds bits of information: signs, posters, flyers, labels, brochures. By the time I go to sleep this evening, I will be exposed to over 3000 advertising messages. Every second of our lives, we are immersed in a world of detail and distraction, all vying for our attention. Even the metaphors we use, such as “paying attention”, show that we consider attention a valuable commodity to be allocated wisely.
Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex
Couple this with the single mindedness of the prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory. There, we work on one task at a time. We are creatures driven by a constant stack of goals and objectives. We pull our big goals out, one and a time, often break it into sub goals and tasks, and then pursue these with the selective engagement of the prefrontal cortex. The more demanding the task, the more we have to shut out the deluge of detail screaming for our attention.
Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that continually scans our environment, subconsciously monitoring all this detail, and then moving it into our attentive focus if our sub cortical alarm system determines we should give it conscious attention. So, as we daydream our way through our lives, we don’t unconsciously plow through pedestrians as they step in front of us. We’re jolted into conscious awareness until the crisis is dealt with, working memory is called into emergency duty, and then, post crisis, we have to try to pick up the thread of what we were doing before. This example shows that working memory is not a multi-tasker. It’s impossible to continue to mentally balance your check book while you’re trying to avoid smashing into the skateboarding teen who just careened off the side walk. Only one task at a time, thank you.
You Looked, but did You See?
The power of our ability to focus and filter out extraneous detail is a constant source of amazement for me. We’ve done several engagement studies where we have captured physical interactions with an ad (tracked through an eye tracker) on a web page of several seconds in duration, then have participants swear there was no ad there. They looked at the ad, but their mind was somewhere else, quite literally. The extreme example of this can be found in an amusing experiment done by University of Illinois cognitive psychologist Daniel J. Simons and now enjoying viral fame through YouTube. Go ahead and check it out before you read any further if you haven’t already seen it. (Count the number of times the white team passes the ball)
This selective perception is the door through which we choose to let the world into our conscious (did you see the Gorilla in the video? If not, go back and try again). And its door that advertisers have been trying to pry through for the past 200 years at least. We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. The strategies behind this diversion have become increasingly sophisticated. Advertising can play to our primal cues. A sexy woman is almost always guaranteed to divert a man’s attention. Advertising can throw a road block in front of our conscious objectives, forcing us to pass through them. TV ads work this way, literally bringing our stream of thought to a screeching halt and promising to pick it up again “right after these messages”. The hope is that there is enough engagement momentum for us to keep focused on the 30 second blurb for some product guaranteed to get our floors/teeth/shirts whiter.
Advertising’s Attempted Break In
The point is, almost all advertising never enjoys the advantage of having working memory actively engaged in trying to understand its message. Every variation has to use subterfuge, emotion or sheer force to try to hammer its way into our consciousness. This need has lead to the industry searching for a metric that attempts to measure the degree to which our working memory is on the job. In the industry, we call it engagement. The ARF defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context." Really, engagement is better described as smashing through the selective perception filter.
In a recent study, ARF acknowledged the importance of emotion as a powerful way to sneak past the guardhouse and into working memory. Perhaps more importantly, the study shows the power of emotion to ensure memories make it from short term to long term memory: “Emotion underlies engagement which affects memory of experience, thinking about the experience, and subsequent behavior. Emotion is not a peripheral phenomenon but involves people completely. Emotions have motivational properties, to the extent that people seek to maximize the experience of positive emotions and to minimize the experience of negative emotions. Emotion is fundamental to engagement. Emotion directs attention to the causally significant aspects of the experience, serves to encode and classify the “unusual” (unexpected or novel) in memory, and promotes persisting rehearsal of the event-memory. In this way, thinking/feeling/memory articulates the experience to guide future behaviors.”
With this insight into the marketing mindset, honed by decades of hammering away at our prefrontal cortex, it’s little wonder why the marketing community has struggled with where search fits in the mix. Search plays by totally different neural rules. And that means its value as a branding tool also has to play by those same rules. I’ll look at that next week.
Word of mouth is powerful in marketing. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen how the opinions of others can cause us to change our own beliefs to match. We’ve also seen how the speed at which the word spreads is a function not only of the structure of the network itself, but also the value of the message and its impact on the people in the network, as well as how much they stand to gain (or lose) by spreading the word.
Influencers: Our Connection to Opinion?
In the world of marketing, one of the most cherished concepts has been the idea of an influencer or opinion leader, the super connected individual who acts as a hub in an information cascade, rapidly disseminating the idea to many. According to this theory, most of us (90%) play relatively passive roles in information cascades, meekly accepting the opinions of these influencers and following the herd. Katz and Lazarsfeld introduced the two step influencer model in the middle of the last century, showing how media first influences these influencers, or opinion leaders, who then act as a conduit and “infection agent” for the greater population.
It’s not the Influencer, it’s our willingness to be influenced
For the past 6 decades, marketers have allocated a lot of effort in reaching these influencers, assuming that once you capture the influencers, you capture the entire market. The assumption was that information cascades depended on these influential hubs. Malcolm Gladwell’s TheTipping Point brought the phenomenon to popular attention.
In the past few years, a number of researchers, including Duncan Watts from Columbia University, have questioned the impact of influencers on information cascades. They’ve created several network models which have shown that in most cases, ordinary individuals are all that’s required to trigger a word of mouth cascade. We are not merely sheep following the herd. We are all influencers in our own right, but only when we feel strongly about something. The necessary ingredient is not a hyper connected influencer or super trend setter, but rather a group of people willing to be influenced.
Passion by Word of Mouth
Which brings us to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. When promoting the film, Gibson knew the most receptive audience would be church goers. So he arranged for private screenings and the distribution of free tickets in churches throughout North America. We had Watts’ ideal model, a low variance network (similar levels of influence) that shared a vulnerability to influence, given the nature of the message. Word spread quickly before the launch of the movie (which also resulted in a firestorm of controversy), making The Passion of the Christ one of the most successful movies of 2004.
This example also leads us to a possible error in analysis in looking at information cascades that has perpetuated the “influencer” theory. It’s relatively easy, when looking in hindsight, to make the assumption that if a cascade happened; the individuals at the beginning of the cascade had to be unique in their ability to influence others. A proponent of the Influentials Theory could look at the example of The Passion of the Christ and say that it was the pastors and ministers of the selected screening churches that acted as the influencers, spreading the word to their congregations. But Watts’ theory offers an alternate explanation. The every day, commonly connected members of the audience were willing to be influenced, and once captured by the message, went and spread it within their other social groups. It was the willingness to be influenced that was the critical factor. To use the analogy provided by Watts in his paper, assuming some unique level of influence by the catalysts of a cascade is like assuming that the first trees to burn in a forest fire are somehow able to spread flames farther than other trees. Often, the fact that the tree was combustible in the first place is overlooked.
Starting a Brand Fire
So, when we talk about brand, what makes a tree ready to catch on fire? Here we have another important insight from Watts’ work. For too many marketers, the assumption is made that influencers are the critical component of success. Proctor and Gamble has made influencer marketing a corner stone of their strategy. But the fact is, if The Passion of the Christ was an unremarkable movie that audiences couldn’t have connected with, all the influencers in the world wouldn’t have caused the word to spread. It was a powerful message connecting with an audience primed to accept it.
Watts’ models show that the success of a cascade depends on the vulnerability to influence. If that is present, ordinary individuals can cause the word to spread as far and just as quick as hyper-connected influencers. And the vulnerability to be influenced, the “combustibility” of the audience, depends on many factors, perhaps the most important of which is the back story of the brand.
The Combustible iPhone
Look at what has been one of the most successful cascades of recent times; the Apple iPhone. The iPhone is a tremendously combustible product. It’s not the technology maven that’s causing the word to spread (although they do have influence. Watts is quick to point out that they have impact, but it may not as disproportionally large as everyone believes), it’s the person sitting next to you on the plane who says they love it. And we’re receptive to that message because we have that magic connection of brand (Apple makes cool products) and a remarkable product. We’re ready to be set on fire.
I’ve spent the last few columns detailing the aspects of word of mouth because they have a tremendous impact on brand and how we create our own brand beliefs. And it’s these brand beliefs that are triggered when we interact with search results. Next week, we return to more familiar territory and see how this interaction plays out.
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