2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Keynote Interview: Tim Mayer

Tim Mayer will be giving the morning keynote at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I started my career as a professional trademark searcher believe it or not. I actually was not crazy about that first job but when the commercial Internet came along in the mid 90s my passion started in search building crawlers indexing web content and domain name databases. In 1998 I saw Eric Brewer speak at the Infonortics conference and after that talk I knew I wanted to work for a web search engine and eventually run my own commercial web search engine. After graduate school I applied to Inktomi, Eric Brewer’s search engine which powered the portals of MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Hotbot, and was hired as a product manager. I was at Inktomi for 2 years before being hired away by a Norwegian search engine called FAST/AllTheWeb which I was General Manager of for a year before the web search division was acquired by Overture along with the AltaVista. I was at Overture for six months before being acquired again by Yahoo joining my Inktomi colleagues again from earlier in my career. Six months later we launched a new search engine at Yahoo displacing Google. During my time at Yahoo I ran search product, search business (monetization and distribution), the Yahoo.com front page news desk and editorial teams, the commerce properties (Shopping, Local, Personals, Travel, Local, Autos, Tech and Real Estate) and my final role was a cross company project to boost Yahoo’s declining market share in search. Since Yahoo I have worked for both B2B and B2C companies leading marketing and am currently at Trueffect, which is an ad server that has a very unique and patented way to target and measure display ads more effectively. I focus on content marketing at the core and then multi-channel B2B marketing around that. I am high level but still am a doer too and can often be seen in AdWords, analytics, Facebook advertising amongst other things.

2) What are first party cookies and why should we care about them?
Typically many ads have traditionally been served through what is known as third party cookies. These are tracking mechanisms that act as tracking devices and are served by third party advertising companies (such as DoubleClick) and data tracking vendors (such as Epsilon). There have been many privacy concerns over these types of third party tracking mechanisms and as a result many browsers and phones do not accept them and many security programs delete these cookies on a regular basis.

First-Party cookies, on the other hand, are served by the brand along with the brands content that a user is interacting with and must be served, written or read from that brand’s domain. These cookies are typically the ones used by products such as Gmail and Facebook to ensure that logins are persistent. Browsers and security programs allow these cookies because there is a relationship between the brand that is serving the cookies as well as the fact that it would be a he usability issue to have to log in to Facebook and Gmail every time the service is accessed. Since the First-Party cookies tend to stick around for longer they have huge advantages in recognizing users and serving targeted ads as well as providing a stable base on top of which measurement algorithms can work to provide much more accurate ad measurement. As you may have heard, the Holy Grail is to get to a user centric way to target ads rather than an entirely cookie based one.

3) What is a business losing by not venturing outside the Google ecosystem for tracking, retargeting & analytics?
Google and Facebook are creating “walled gardens” around their advertising. They are not allowing others to track and measure the ads within these walled gardens. We have seen Google recently disallowing the use of tracking pixels within Google Display Network, which is another step in not providing full visibility into the performance of a brand’s ads. Having Google serve and measure its own ads is the equivalent to a student grading his own homework assignments.

Many in advertising are saying that a company’s data is its second most valuable asset after its employees. Data ownership has become very strategic and letting your proprietary customer data outside of your company’s firewall is putting that data at risk for leakage to other companies and potentially your competitors. In the worst-case scenario, your customers and prospects potentially could be the bull’s eye of your competitor’s retargeting efforts.

4) How can a business successfully isolate each paid marketing initiative for purposes of measurement?
Traditionally marketers with a grounding in search have used what is called “last-click attribution” to measure marketing success. This technique gives 100% of the credit to the last click that led to the conversion. This is a simple but accurate technique but has the drawback of limiting the volume and efficiency of your purchase funnel.

These days, users are interacting with ads and a brand across many channels (social, display, SEO, PPC, email etc.) and many devices (PC, Phone, tablet etc.) and the customer journey is a lot more complex and multi touch than it used to be. More and more marketers are moving to more sophisticated attribution models that give varying degrees of credit to all the touch points with a prospect or customer. Often times the brand introduction and the last touch or click are given the majority of the weighting/credit with touch points in between receiving minimal weighting. We must make the transition to more sophisticated attribution models so we can grow the top of the funnel to get more volume in the funnel, such as branded searches, as well as efficiency in the funnel, such as increased click through rate on organic and paid search results.

5) What’s the level of opportunity in non-Google Display and how can a business comfortably test the waters?
Display is all about finding quality inventory that attracts an audience that is relevant to your business. For search people the easiest way to test display is to start in retargeting which has very similar metrics to search such as click through as well as being lower funnel. You can target all people that have visited your web site and serve them different copy and creative based on the activity the user displayed on the site. In addition you can create audience using email addresses to target customers or prospects on the web. Google Display has a bunch of inventory but you would be missing out as stopping just there.

An advertising driver that is often underestimated is that of timeliness. Facebook and other social inventory is very valuable as users access their social network very frequently and often times right after their shopping behavior takes place.

To really take your business to the next level it is optimal to go beyond just retargeting and implement a full funnel display strategy, which will optimize display across all stages of the funnel to optimize for conversion across channels. Using your own customer data, be it your site’s behavioral data or your CRM data can improve performance to a great degree.

6) How will paid search management evolve over the next few years?
The main issues I see with paid search at this time are:
1) There are too many similar channels offering paid advertising be it AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Twitter. There has got to be an easier way to generate ads: copy and creative that all seem to require different character lengths and creative
2) Paid search is still almost entirely based on the professed intent of the user through the current query and to some extent previous queries and web pages and sites clicked on. We should be able to know whom we are serving the search ads to and alter the bid or creative.
3) The web used to be more “pull” than “push”. Search was dominant but now people are open to being pushed relevant information.

As a result I see an opportunity for paid search management to be eclipsed by larger ad management system that can implement and measure the customer journey across many channels and devices. Search can become more people based so customers, prospects and former customers can get differing ads or no ads at all.