Under Armour Used Real-Time Data, Display Ads to Drive Holiday Sales

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BY MAX BLAU

Under Armour has become a sports apparel giant over much of the past two decades. The Baltimore-based company, which has sponsored some of the world’s biggest athletes, including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper, has tapped into data — and display media — to promote winter sales leading up to Christmas.

Jason LaRose, Under Armour’s new senior vice president of ecommerce, wanted to generate excitement for its product lines by creating “highly relevant and engaging” holiday advertisements that reached far beyond UnderArmour.com.

Days before Black Friday, Under Armour launched an 18-day promotion for itsfull holiday gift guide using Google’s lightbox ad format — a type of unit that expands into a full-page takeover ad — to attract interest in the brand.

Web users have been greeted by a 250-by-300 pixel promotion [click to see the ad in action] with several apparel items and the tagline, "roll over to get armoured." Once web users hovered a mouse over the ad for two seconds, Under Armour’s holiday expanded into a full-page gift guide that included discounts, top 10 picks for men, women and kids, and links to purchase sportswear.

LaRose wanted Under Armour's winter campaign to reach both general fitness consumers and sports enthusiasts between the ages of 18 to 34. To do so, the apparel manufacturer's staff relied upon Google’s display network — using interest, category and keyword targeting to find its desired audience. According to the senior vice presidents, the company also leveraged ruled-based targeting tactics to raise the promotion’s chances for success.

"The campaign has been phenomenal to-date," LaRose says.

"The campaign has been phenomenal to-date," LaRose says. "In addition to substantially increasing awareness for [Under Armour]’s holiday offerings, we've engaged with consumers at a high rate and driven targeted site traffic. This campaign has been an essential add-on to our holiday marketing portfolio."

That improvement has largely happened through key changes based on consumer data collected during the campaign. LaRose, who thinks creating relevant promotions that resonate with consumers can be a major challenge, overcame those obstacles after analyzing the information at hand.

"The biggest tweaks [came] within the hands-on optimizations that we've made within our user targets," he says. "We've dynamically swapped out interest and keyword targets to ensure we're driving efficient traffic volume while also achieving scale."

Not only did Under Armour’s banner promotions help the company reach the right consumers, it also led to improvements with their larger social media efforts. LaRose's team used data amassed from the online promotion to refine messaging sent out to more than 2,600,000 Facebook fans and nearly 270,000 Twitter followers.

"We've also been able to tweak our content in social media based on targets and in-unit engagements to scale relevancy," LaRose says.

Image: Google/Under Armour

That approach has proven successful. Under Armour’s team realized that men's and kid's apparel had garnered the most activity during the holiday ad's initial rollout. Based the campaign's early analytics, LaRose tailored the company's social posts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to feature more products from those respective sportswear lines. Under Armour's staff also used metrics to help inform what items of clothing would specifically be promoted in those messages.

LaRose says the promotion's ad-unit engagement rate has more than doubled since it launched. He credits his team's data-based decisions for connecting Under Armour's potential customers with the brand.

“We were able to provide a useful service by bringing our product to the consumer in an elevated fashion,” he says. Though the company is mum on precise sales numbers for Black Friday, its stock price has steadily risenthroughout the holiday period (and 2013, in general), suggesting the brand's marketing tactics are paying off.

Image: Flickr/paulrabil

http://mashable.com/2013/12/14/under-armour-black-friday-metrics/#!

The 'New SEO' is Plain Old Marketing

Jennifer Van Iderstyne, December 6, 20130 Comments

•SEO Evolution: Sell, Discover, Deliver & Report on Highly Converting Keywords by Krista LaRiviere, gShift Labs

The latest trend in SEO seems to be change. Changes in the way Google evaluates signals, changes in the way brands are treated, changes in the way we all have to approach what optimization actually means in a new landscape.

The uncertainty of it all can turn any of us into some SEO version of Dr. Doofenshmirtz trying to take on a Google-shaped Platypus. Now, it’s not because we’re a bunch of inept fake-Germans with questionable accents. We’re smart, if maybe a little inevitably clueless about how to attain the ultimate victory over our foes. To arm ourselves we only have indicators, guides, and best practices but we don’t have silver bullets or a giant optimiz-inator to help us take over the world.

A Shifting Market

Search engines have always been a business. Their function is to help us navigate the vastness of the internet to find precisely what we are after. The fact that being at the top of the list could make someone a whole lot of money just presented an impetus to game the system. We focused on the quick wins and easy scores, because if you knew the right moves it was quick and relatively easy to play in the big 10. And then Google would make it rain.

It used to be amazing how frequently you’d see a whole first page of search results for a really popular product like sneakers, or jewelry that wouldn’t even include names you’d see at the mall. A lot of the established brands took their time embracing online marketing while small businesses sprung up and flourished on little more than SEO. But that time is over, and looking for anything now that is “quick” or “easy” is an exercise in both futility and frustration.

More Parts to the Equation

To quote my boss, links used to be the “800 pound gorilla in the room” when it came to rankings. Now, links may still be a sizable primate, but they’re not all that matters. There was, and in some cases still is a sort of perception that links are a magical elixir that the right one, in the right place, with the right anchor text means total rankings domination. But in any equation, both an augend and an addend are needed to make a sum. That means it has to be links plus other efforts to get a result. And honestly, it’s not even as simple as an addition problem.

This past year (and arguably for several years leading up to this) we’re dealing with problems that look a lot more like the kinds of complex algebraic equations that convinced me math was just evil by nature. Links matter. Technical SEO still matters (yes even though certain short cuts may be shut down, SEO is still alive and kicking), authorship is coming into play; in-depth articles have gotten their own schema. Then there are Social signals that can't be counted out, user data like CTR, return visitors aka customer loyalty, pogo sticking, and of course, his highness, king content that all factor in.

There may have been a time when links could push you forward in spite of these other factors. But the new math isn't; old links plus more links equals winning. There are more constants, more variables, the occasional exponent, some parentheses, and no scientific calculators to make it all easier. We have to do it the hard way.

Old School Marketing is the New Online Marketing

Sometimes moving forward means going all the way back to the beginning. For a time there was a real distinction between SEO and online marketing. SEO focused heavily on technical proficiency, but it also became an umbrella term for every trick, tactic and strategy for getting higher rankings. Even if the tricks are dying out the, technical aspects like speed, structure and optimized hierarchy still matter. That doesn't mean the definition of SEO is shrinking, just the opposite actually, its expanding, and quickly.

With the changes we've seen, I'd posit that brand power and recognition are very much a part of SEO, but they are also the foundation of marketing online and off. Even before the internet, if you wanted to sell your stuff, people had to know who you were.

So there came marketing, advertising, Madison Avenue, Don Drapers, and culture-changing sayings like “Where's the beef?” or “I'm not going to pay a lot for this Muffler.” They had to be creative and innovative. Then came Google and suddenly there was this whole other way of getting customers that didn't require creative ingenuity. All it took was taking advantage of the latest loophole before it got shut down. So the quest for that beautiful bounty of inbound buyers turned into a really ugly dog fight. But the need for more traditional marketing didn’t die.

Remember word of mouth? Well, that's social media now. Billboards still exist on the information superhighway, but they are 2-inch jpegs instead of 50-foot signs. Fliers come into your inbox instead of a mailbox. Coupons get Tweeted instead of clipped. Tried and true, real marketing practices are still applicable online and sure, they take longer and don’t always affect your rankings, but they can grow your business and really, isn’t that the point anyway?

Bring on the Mad Men!

A part of the new world of SEO is as basic as going to our marketing roots. There’s no way that building relationships through networks is going to bring you more search engine traffic as quickly as 200 directory links did three years ago. Expecting the same results from the old techniques or new ones is only going to lead to a lot of giving up on things that “seem” like they aren’t working. We need to change our expectations. We have to stop thinking about search engines as something we can still manipulate to avoid more traditional forms of marketing. The only difference is the way we leverage those techniques from a technical standpoint to bring the maximum benefit.

Today’s SEO isn’t about finding a way around the arduous task of brand building; it’s about mastering it.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2317491/The-New-SEO-is-Plain-Old-Marketing?wt.mc_ev=click&WT.tsrc=Email

How do Engineers use Facebook

Engineers Don’t Use Facebook

Wed, 12/04/2013 - 9:46am

Chris Fox, Managing Editor

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After a recent journey through part of Southern California, I had the opportunity to meet several design engineers, industry reps, and company owners. One of these meetings afforded me the chance to sit down with a family that owns and operates QuickSilver Controls. The president, Donald Labriola II, was in the room, albeit working on designing a new component, while the meeting ensued with his wife and marketing director, Diane Labriola.

The meeting ran like any typical visit, we discussed what’s new at PD&D, what we’re doing differently, our numbers, and our delightful, yet opinionated audience – until I mentioned social media.

As with any publishing company, we have expanded our social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (I’m still holding out on Google+), but we often find it difficult to reach new readers in an engineering audience via these outlets. I jokingly made a comment about how tech-savvy engineers are, or rather should be, but questioned why they don’t want to tackle something as simple as Facebook.

It was at that moment that Mr. Labriola looked up from the computer and chimed into our conversation. Let’s just say that he provided a new understanding of the situation.

I’m paraphrasing, but Mr. Labriola said that when successful engineers reveal themselves on Facebook (and other social media outlets) they run the risk of being bombarded by likes, friend requests, and awkward digital conversations. From his experience, Mr. Labriola found himself over-stimulated, not by videos, terrible memes, and the occasional pictures of food, but rather by young engineers looking for college paper answers, recommendations, and even jobs.

Through my shock at the quiet engineer/president in the corner (who had been working in CAD, with little interest in marketing, until that moment), I quickly realized his point. As much as Facebook and LinkedIn are tools to connect to friends and media, they are also incredibly powerful engines for job searching and collaboration.

This brings up a challenging point, since social media (specifically, Facebook) seems to have waning policies on privacy: where is the line? These resources have the potential to be incredibly valuable for collaboration and connection among engineers and other great minds across multiple disciplines, but it also exposes valuable information to job-hungry, and potentially trolling, graduates, hobbyists, and aspiring inventors.

Truth is, the job market is not the same as it used to be, and companies (big or small) don’t have traditional hiring practices. Who can blame young engineers for using the tools at their disposal? At the same time, should successful industry veterans feel compelled to avoid social media to save their inboxes from piles of friend requests and half-cocked job inquiries?

This also skirts an interesting problem that I have heard quietly resonating through the engineering workforce: underqualified young engineers. But, that is a subject for another blog.

http://www.pddnet.com/blogs/2013/12/engineers-don%E2%80%99t-use-facebook

What are your thoughts on how engineers, young and old, use social media? Do you avoid Facebook to escape the clamoring noise of those looking for help? Have you used social media to advance your career? Comment below or email chris.fox@advantagemedia.com. 

And be sure to check out PD&D’s Facebook page.

Matt Cutts on Linking Guidelines: How Many Links on a Page?

Jennifer Slegg, December 3, 20136 Comments

•SEO Evolution: Sell, Discover, Deliver & Report on Highly Converting Keywords by Krista LaRiviere, gShift Labs

There has been a rule of thumb for many years that you shouldn’t have more than 100 links per page. While the webmaster guidelines have changed to state that link should be keeping to a “reasonable number,” many webmasters still keep to the 100 links per page as a precaution. Matt Cutts is tackling the subject in his last webmaster help video.

How Many Links Should We Have on a Page? 

First, Matt shares some background about why the whole 100 links per page rule started and how Googlebot actually did interact with that maximum number of links per page.

“It used to be the case that Googlebot and our indexing system would truncate at 100 or 101k and anything beyond that wouldn’t even get indexed. And what we did is we said, ‘Okay, if the page is 101k or 100k, it’s reasonable to expect roughly one link per kilobyte and therefore something like 100 links per page.’ So that was in our technical guidelines and we said this is what we recommend, and a lot of people assumed that if they had 102 links or something like that, that we would view it as spam and take action. But that was just kind of a rough guideline.”

However, these guidelines were put in place 10 years ago; obviously the web has changed significantly, as well as the kind of content on sites and how it is presented. Fortunately, Google has also changed with it in terms of how Googlebot interacts with websites and any amount of content it indexes.

“The web changes, it evolves; in particular, webpages that have gotten a lot bigger, there’s more rich media and so it’s not all that uncommon to have aggregators or various things that might have a lot more links. So we removed that guideline and we basically now say keep it to a reasonable number, which I think is pretty good guidance. There may be a limit on the file size that we have now, but it’s much larger -- at the same time the number of links we can process on the page is much higher.”

Matt also cautions webmasters against diluting their PageRank by having so many links on the page. If you want your PageRank to flow to the ones you link to, PageRank gets divided by the number of links you have on the page, so the fewer the pages, the higher the PageRank that those linked pages will gain. However, if flowing PageRank or lack thereof isn’t a concern, just follow the reasonable link number guideline, rather than trying to cut back as many links as possible.

“When you have PageRank, the amount of PageRank that flows through the outlinks is divided by the number of total outlinks. So if you have 100 links, you will divide your PageRank by 100; if you have 1000 links you will divide that PageRank by 1000. So if you have a huge amount of links, the amount of PageRank flowing out on each individual link can become very, very small.”

The thing to consider is the fact that having a huge amount of a links can still be considered spammy, even if there isn’t a hard set rule on how many links that might be. Instead, Google looks at it from a user experience perspective, and if have the links present could be spam, such as paragraphs upon paragraphs of nothing but links.

“The other thing is that it can start to annoy users, or start to look spammy if you have tons and tons and tons of links. So we are willing to take action on the web spam side if we see so many links that looks really, really spammy. But if you compare our old guideline with 100 links and you look at what the web looks like now, it is quite common to have two or three or 400 links on the page, as long as the page is long, it has value add, there are substantial amounts of substance and real stuff on that page.”

Overall, as long as you’re presenting your content with links in a user-friendly way and your content adds value to the web, you don’t need to worry about restricting yourself to the hundred links per page.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2316757/Matt-Cutts-on-Linking-Guidelines-How-Many-Links-on-a-Page?wt.mc_ev=click&WT.tsrc=Email

See the full video:

Social Media Doesn’t Drive Sales… But That’s Not the Point

November 25, 2013 

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The point is that social media is a teeny tiny reflection of what happens in day-to-day life. In Jonah Berger's Contagious, he makes the salient point that only 7% of word of mouth happens online (other studies say 5%). I'm not sure if all of that even belongs to social media channels, either. I'd guess a bunch of it happens over email and private chat.

There are hundreds of ways that your customer will find you (or not find you) online and offline. However, when it comes to spreading a message, word of mouth has always been the most effective way of marketing messages spreading. But these messages become ineffective when they aren't authentic. The most salient point here is:

You cannot force word of mouth.

It doesn't matter the media or the amount you spend on it – some stuff just doesn't spread. And though marketing impressions make a brand awareness difference – whether it's a billboard or a paid tweet – it's never guaranteed to work.

So I'm continually bowled over when I hear people complain about how their social media marketing doesn't work. Usually a few questions helps me realize what's really going on:

What's really going on here is that companies think that paying for marketing is some sort of silver bullet. It's not. It never was and it never will be. Hell, some Super Bowl ads go unnoticed – and that audience is one of the biggest captive audiences in the universe!

You are probably asking yourself, "Okay then, why would anybody in their right mind pay for marketing?"

Good question. I sometimes wonder myself because not everyone is ready for it... and sometimes they are too late for it.

But why pay for marketing when the results aren't guaranteed? Because, like I said before, there are hundreds of ways your future customers will find you (or not find you) and it's better to be findable than not. And good marketing means that you will be more findable AND have more credibility (if the branding is done right) when people do find you. And all of that helps with what you want: sales.

There are all sorts of wonderful things built into social media marketing that you won't have built into traditional one-way channels. There are:

1. analytics: you can't really tell who paid attention to that television ad, but you cantell who watched your YouTube ad all the way through, and who liked it, and who shared it, etc etc. The data available on how people interact with your content is AMAZING.
2. feedback: it's right there in the comments. It's also there on Twitter. Oh, and you can find out what people are saying on Reddit and on their blogs and in forums and... well, that is invaluable. Read it. Report it back to your team. Improve your product with it. Respond to it with thanks. Hell, you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this feedback from focus groups each year and here it is for you for free. Completely raw.
3. relationships: you aren't going to strike up a conversation through the TV or radio. But that two-way conversation is built into social media platforms. It's really awesome. You can find out so much about your customers and start to really build a bond.

What really baffles me is the demands that brands make of social media marketing when they pay a fraction of the price to use it. They'll hire interns and junior staff to run it, they'll lowball agencies and consultants ("I pay you what for a couple of FB posts?! I can get my kid to do that!"), they get impatient and want instant results without being willing to invest the thought needed or take risks, they'll tack on a social media strategy (which has no strategy) to a made-for-television and magazine ad campaign thinking that it's yet another direct marketing channel (which is a limited medium, too).

All of this and the brands ask for stellar results. They look past the amazing insights and feedback and potential for relationships that no other traditional marketing medium every had and they say, "Meh. Social media doesn't work for me."

And completely miss the point.

You want to know the ROI of social media?

Number one. It's the ability to listen. It's priceless. Not with some damned tool that measures sentiment or finds influencers, either. Really listen.

Number two. Serendipity. It's opening yourself up to constant and amazing opportunities to participate and by participating, you will find numerous opportunities to lead the conversation and make a great impression. Oreo's dunk in the dark tweet is a great example of this. They are doing a really great job of being a relevant brand again by seizing opportunities like that. Do they do it every single day? Nope. But when they do, they nail it.

Number three. Community instead of customers. The difference is incredible. If you have patience and build a community instead of just a customer database, you will have finally tapped into that magical word of mouth network you wanted to buy a few months ago. But this time, it's real and authentic and it spreads.

So PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF DOG stop thinking of social media as a direct marketing tool or some sort of silver bullet that will drive sales through the roof. Stop reading those case studies where Facebook... no, Pinterest... no, Polyvore... no, Snapchat... drove millions of dollars in sales from a viral campaign.

That's not the point.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131125033630-3154163-social-media-doesn-t-drive-sales-but-that-s-not-the-point?trk=mta-lnk