Turning Advertisers off with visual Vomit

Posted on by Billy Tucker

As a user, Facebook is frustrating, and as an advertiser, it’s downright useless.

Humans are skilled at ignoring the visual vomit around them, and these are skills that have been perfected over many years of increasingly desperate advertising techniques – from the subliminal to the ridiculous.

Stealing 5 minutes to get critical updates on the latest cat meme is what Facebook is all about, and monetising that experience has mostly been limited to targeted advertising (selling your personal details to advertisers so that they can craft ads most likely to drive a response). But with just $10 of annual revenues from each of its 600m or so engaged users Facebook has a long way to go to satisfy its many Shareholders’ many expectations!

The real challenge for Facebook though is that economically it’s still a One Trick Pony with 8 out of every 10 dollars of revenue coming from advertising. So how does Facebook outgrow the rebounding economy in order to drive up shareholder returns?

I think they have three pillars of advertising growth ahead of them, each of which will likely trade off user experience for advertiser revenue:

More advertising inventory – as the rate of subscriber growth slows more inventory is required to avoid an overall slide in the supply of advertising space – meaning more of the Facebook page will be dedicated to paid media resulting in a poorer user experience

More personal advertising – Facebook will give as much data as it can to advertisers to make the advertising product more effective – meaning Facebook will go even further to leverage their users’ personal data

More interruptive advertising – as consumers get better at ignoring the Advertising Vomit, Facebook will push its products to become more interruptive, meaning you have to wait for them to finish or actively “push” them out of the way. A poorer experience but one that is likely to yield more clicks for the advertiser.

And yet, the real challenge here for Facebook is that it just isn’t a great place to advertise for most businesses. It’s neither a great Brand advertising platform, nor is it a great Performance advertising platform – and in this analytically informed world of Marketing, the investment required to evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising platform is lower than ever before – meaning most big advertising dollars have already come and gone.

Spreets goes Hybrid in a desperate move that might just work.

Posted on by Billy Tucker

Spreets recently announced their plan to include offers from competitors alongside their own, making spreets.com.au the first major player to launch a hybrid Group Buying/Super Affiliate offering in the Australian market.

I imagine the evolution of their model went something like this:

Early 2010: Spreets is formed and is among the very early entrants into the Australian marketplace, their model closely echoes the fast growing US originator, GroupOn.

Middle 2010: Spreets finds early success with a single deal each day, deals are sold at 40-50% revenue share to Spreets and consumers are excited about the new model, each offer sells many hundreds of vouchers, competition is light and shareholders are happy!

Late 2010: A number of new entrants intensify competition, including well-funded overseas players GroupOn and LivingSocial, local Catch group player Scoopon and of course Cudo who brought TV advertising to bear for the first time. Spreets immediately lose marketshare to these new upstarts, unsettling shareholders and peaking the interest of Yahoo!7, the natural rival of Cudo shareholder ninemsn. A second “side deal” is now commonplace on Group Buying sites, providing an alternative to the main offer of the day. Revenue shares of 35% are also now common as competition intensifies and daily deals businesses battle to win the best merchants.

Early 2011: Spreets is bought by Yahoo!7 for just over 22m, an incredible outcome for the Spreets’ co-founders and investors. Interestingly, a higher purchase price was touted ($40m) as the new owners congratulate themselves at having managed to jump on the fastest of bandwagons (myspace anyone?). The model has evolved to include 5 or more daily offers, vacation offers and longer running offers. Revenue shares of 30% are common.

Late 2011: Some 80 competitors exist in the market and Spreets market-share has flattened to 12-14%, products offers become frequent often at under 15% revenue share for the Group Buying business, customer discontent is at an all-time high due to shoddy product suppliers failing to deliver and 20+ daily offers are now common resembling a deal marketplace and requiring an increasingly large and expensive sales force to meet that demand.

2012: 2012 was make or break for many group buying businesses with a large percentage falling away in the second half of the year. Average revenue shares of 25% are typical and with 50+ daily offers on each of the larger group buying sites the average voucher sales per offer has declined significantly making it hard to fund the sales force required to meet the demands of a deal marketplace.

December 2012: Spreets calls it quits on the Group Buying model deciding to give the Hybrid model a go instead.

For many, the economics of a deal marketplace don’t stack up, which seems to be the case for Spreets. Meeting the demands of a marketplace without the overhead of a large sales force is possible though if competitor deals are surfaced alongside those deals originated in-house as a Hybrid affiliate/group buying business. Doing so can be profitable too, Affiliates are commonly paid 10% of gross revenue when a new customer is introduced, or almost half of the revenue retained by the group buying company, which is a good bounty given no sales effort, customer support or refunds and no exposure to shoddy merchants!

Assuming their Group Buying competitors sign up to having their offers surfaced on Spreets.com.au deal choice on the site will grow and no doubt customers will thank them for it. But what is the long term outlook for this Hybrid model?

Spreets customers will be absorbed by the competition over time, Spreets will already be losing 4-8% of Subscribers each month though natural churn and may not have the funds to replace them so a customer exodus to the competition will hurt greatly. The more successful the Hybrid model is at generating Affiliate fees the more quickly the exodus will occur and unless they can make their marketplace a great destination through the curation of compelling deal content and email targeting/personalisation they won’t come back either.

Alternatively this may be Spreets way of simply “milking the asset” until they close the doors on the business given this model will lead very quickly to some much needed profits, given their original investment it would be nice to see some return!

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Is your business suffering a Group Buying Hangover?

Posted on by Billy Tucker

Group Buying helped good businesses access revenues that had previously eluded them, improving utilisation, buoying their P&L and promising a sustainable new revenue stream from this exciting new consumer channel.

But now that the sector has waned and desperate Group Buying businesses have become fixated on stack ‘em high sell ‘em low product chuff – those once buoyed businesses are left feeling a little queasy.

Just one of the problems they face stems from prepayment, one of the headline benefits touted by most group buying companies (including me).

Although quick access to cash is manna from heaven for most business owners, prepayment has left behind a tequila-like side effect.

The problem is this. A top priority for all online businesses should be around Funnel Conversion, i.e. the ability for the business to convert leads into dollars, however in a world of prepayment, conversion becomes somewhat unimportant. In fact, if breakage (unused vouchers) is a profitable exercise for the merchant, higher conversion may actually mean lower short term profits.

Now that Group Buying is providing an ever declining proportion of revenues, many online businesses that signed up to breakeven or lossmaking campaigns in order to grow their subscriber base, now find they are unable to monetize that base due to poor site performance, especially in the area of conversion.

Faced with lower than expected revenues, these companies often head back to Group Buying to find that like-for-like offers work only half as well as they did before. Now the business is in a pickle, the drug is half as effective, risk its brand by doing twice as much? Surely you know your drug dealer is never your friend?

The key is to get the fundamentals of your businesses working right before looking to Group Buying or any type of Marketing for that matter. Ensure that the purchase funnel is converting 60% or more of the people who hit “Buy Now”, that your Subscription Channel is effective, and your email strategy is delivering appropriate Open, Click and Purchase rates.

When cloaked by the shiny veneer of Group Buying dollars your site performance will look a whole lot better than it really is. Time to sober up, shake off that hangover and see if your bedfellow looks as good as you remember.

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