Category: CEO

Customer Acquisition Costs

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Here’s a real challenge – what makes up the true acquisition cost for a customer in a user-generated content site?  And what constitutes a ‘customer’?  Since revenue on sites like ours is driven by advertising and affiliate product purchases a ‘customer’ can be either a registered user (who can contribute content) or a visitor (who just looks at the content).

Customer Acquisition cost is made up of 5 major contributors in a business like ours – Pay Per Click advertising (Google, Yahoo), Banner Advertising, SEO Optimization, Viral Marketing Campaigns, and community management (headcount driven).  But these costs can drive both registered users and visitors.   Here are the relevant metrics from my view:

1) Cost per Registered User – monthly aggregate marketing spend/# of registered users

2) Cost per Visitor – monthly aggregate marketing spend/# of Unique Visitors

3) Cost per Action for Pay Per Click advertising

4) Cost per Action for Banner and Viral Marketing

These are interesting metrics to track and trend, but they beg some real questions.  How do we define an ACTIVE registered user vs. just a registered user?  Does it matter?  How do you factor in the value of items added as compared to number of registered users?  Is one user that adds 200 unique/interesting items (which positively affects SEO and visits) more valuable than a user that adds 2 items (or none, but blogs)?   Is there a way to segment registered users in a way to spend more efficiently to get the high value registered users?  Is that a smarter spend than just driving activities to get visitors who may drive more purchases and ad views/actions?

If you think about this question, it has important ramifications for most web 2.0 companies.  I’d be interested in understanding how others approach this question.

Web 2.0 challenges traditional marketing approaches

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The traditional four P’s of marketing championed by Phil Kotler of Kellogg have been a cornerstone for many years. Product, Pricing, Placement, Promotion. At least TWO and maybe three of the P’s are much more difficult to manage given the changes driven by the internet and specifically Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.

Pricing is not as straightforward and direct as it is for traditional bricks and mortar (and even web 1.0) businesses. There are multiple levels to get to the paying customer. The revenue is much more indirect than in any other business. For example, if a web 2.0 site is dependent on advertising revenue how do you control the ‘P – Price’? Yes, once you get to a certain size you can demand higher CPA or CPC rates, but you are still dependent on generating traffic to show the ads and even then your ability to drive the conversion rates necessary to recognize the revenue is semi-passive at best. And this is AFTER you have reached a traffic level where you can even set a price at all. Is this truly ‘Pricing’ in the traditional sense? Instead of focusing on the traditional levers of COGS (cost of goods sold), Gross Margin targets, and variable sales and marketing costs the web 2.0 marketeer has to focus on traffic, eCPC (effective CPC) rates, Click through rates, and ad priorities. And where the site actually generates direct revenue (such as subscriptions or premium features) there are additional metrics and drivers that the marketeer needs to focus on that are far outside the realm of traditional marketing.

Placement also has a very different meaning in the web 2.0 world. There is no shelf space (relatively) with the exception of search engine rankings and banner advertising locations. Banner ad locations also present a challenging difference. Does Banner Ad location represent Placement or Promotion? A/B testing is so critical in web 2.0 marketing! Unlike traditional advertising A/B testing where the marketing professional is testing both creative and media in the web 2.0 world the marketeer is testing location (placement) on page, media, specific site results, and creative. All of this with very questionable and inconsistent metrics between different sites and tools.

So, what does this mean? In my mind we’re beginning to see a new paradigm develop. Marketing will be much more dependent on analysis of metrics such as click through rates, exit rates, and time on site. Rather than being able to run focus groups to find out what customers ‘want’ the web 2.0 marketeer is going to have to be able to do in-depth statistical analysis to understand how the customer ‘want’ is translated into actions and web development.

Deepak Jain, the Dean of Kellogg’s School of Management, has a Masters in Mathematics and Statistics and is a top professor of marketing. I had a class with him early on and he spoke about the increasing integration of math and statistics into the marketing process. I didn’t get it at the time because I was in a traditional business. Now I do. He’s right and it’s moving faster than even he suggested.

Are others finding similar things? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. We’re beginning to look for more quant-friendly marketing interns here. Are you? Mail me at daltounian@itaggit.com.

Sharing the craziness….

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Alright, it’s time that I jump in and try this blogging thing out. Friends have told me that my life is just crazy enough to be partially interesting. I’m going to try to update this on a daily basis but since I’m not much of a creature of habit we’ll see how it goes….

A little background. I have a wonderful wife and three great kids. I have to say ‘kids’ carefully because my oldest daughter is 19 years old and away at college.

I am the CEO of a small startup in Austin, Texas called iTaggit. It’s a web-based service company which provides cataloging and asset management tools to people. I’m also a minority owner of the Austin Wranglers, an Arena Football League team and am the acting CMO for the team.

On top of that, I’m one of the founders of a Tablet PC company, Motion Computing and while I’m no longer active in the day to day operations, I am still a board member.

Finally, I’m just finishing up my Executive MBA at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois. I’ve been flying between Chicago and Austin every two weeks for the past two school years. Graduating in June.

Each of these activities gives me lots of interesting stuff to write about (at least to me). I’m tired from just writing what I do! Tomorrow I’ll pick a topic and start writing.