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Chris Raniere is the President and CEO of Revcube. He brings over 15 years of executive management, operational and business development experience to Revcube. A true entrepreneur, Chris has founded a string of successful companies and been a pioneer in the online marketing industry.

Prior to Revcube, Chris co-founded and served as COO for Fathom Online, an early leader in search marketing. Prior to that, he co-founded and served as VP of Business Development for GlobalStreams. As a VP at Ask Jeeves, Inc., Chris launched the Text Ad Network which utilized an open market concept for online advertising purchase within keyword markets. As part of the executive management team at his original start-up, Cybernautics, Chris was integral in the sale of the organization to USWeb. Educated at Vanderbilt University and the London School of Economics, Chris holds degrees in both Engineering and Economics.

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Revcube CEO Puts Campaigns On The Right Track

Written on
July 10th 2007
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by Chris Raniere  |
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hispeed1.jpgThough it is making great strides every day, today’s online marketing world is plagued with challenges. Fraught with sluggish manual processes and a lack of automated tools to help marketers be more strategic, it’s an industry that’s still feeling some growing pains, beginning with tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns in an integrated fashion and ending with effectively using data for future planning.

There are many offerings out there to help with deciphering and optimizing different pieces of the puzzle, but which do you choose? How many aspects of your campaign do you want to, or can you afford to, track? Can you afford not to track any of the pieces? And once you receive tracked data about your campaign, then what? The almighty spreadsheet becomes both a friend and an enemy.

The first online marketing challenge I’m closer to than I’d like to admit is spreadsheet hell. It starts with analyzing and understanding the data thrown at you in many forms from your online campaign, then moves to strategizing against the analytics and recent online activity and finally to creating a new online marketing plan based on your findings. At this point, however, it’s weeks, if not months, later and the plan may no longer seem relevant to your current online marketing data.

The truth is the findings are not worthless, and you can use them for the next campaign. However, to properly do so you need to find ways to optimize not just at the end of the cycle but throughout the entire campaign cycle. What this means is not optimizing search bids separately from display ad buys, separately from email blast, separately from landing page but together in an integrated manner, as a complete media mix.

To accomplish this you must have a very skilled (and probably expensive!) team of marketers and multiple agencies/technology tools (or one expensive one) to manage the execution of this new strategy. But at least you’re lowering your opportunity costs and everything’s peachy, right? Wrong. At this point, you have to start all over and every time you go through this cycle it’s costing more and more, as well as burning out good marketers (and probably you).

The process does not work because there’s too much room for error, too many data collection and adjustment points, too little time for an effective strategic program and the strategies are often stale once they’re implemented. However, what does deem to work and can lead to more conversions — as well as a more satisfying role as a marketer — is integrating various online marketing programs by automatically optimizing within and across them, from engagement to conversion.

Integrating your marketing programs means taking your email program, paid search, banner ads and landing pages and using a platform where success and failures from paid search are used to influence banners placements and email copy; where banner success and failure influence paid search and email the same with learning from an email blast and everything is tied directly to the landing page and conversion funnel such that the conversion is what drives placement and landing page decisions in real-time… the dream we all have had since “they” promised it back in the 90s.

Automating the optimization and management of your marketing campaigns leads to maximum efficiency and a minimum of mind-numbing tactical work. The process requires ever-evolving optimization algorithms and a robust layer of business intelligence. The algorithms work in concert to determine optimal media placement and budget while at the same time delivering the optimal response to an ad for the specific segment of prospect responding to a specific ad placement.

Here are three keys for identifying the right automation platform:

*Size is important. If you are only converting a few customers per day you can be very effective in manual mode.

*Be sure at some level you connect all media placements with landing page optimization and if possible to life-time-value data. Landing page optimization is not a stand alone offering in the world of acquisition.

*Make sure the system does actually take action not just spit out a report. If a system can tell you which banner is under performing or which combination of elements on a landing page return a negative ROI it should be able to shut them off without your input.

And here are my best practices for online marketing:

*Placement to conversion should be on one platform, meaning that for every placement such as paid search the campaign consist of integrated decisions on keywords, text ads, landing pages and conversions. Don’t separate bid management and landing page optimization.

*Develop expected value calculations for every placement and use them in determining daily if not hourly CPC, CPM or CPA rates.

*Auto generate and optimize landing pages taking into consideration both creative and environmental attributes and never take creative executions out of rotation.
Paid search cannot be 100 percent automated. It is part art and needs the human touch. It’s marketing, after all.

One day, online marketers will rightfully take a seat at the strategic C-level table in much the same way IT folks became CIOs and key advisors to CEOs. For that to happen, they must get out of the tactical weeds of spreadsheet analysis and manual processes and into the world of automation. That’s when the dream becomes real!



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Posted by Kelly OShea | 5:14 pm on July 10, 2007.

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