Marketing in the Age of Google, by Vanessa Fox, Review by Rachel Vassaur

This book provides a great overview for understanding different tools to implement an online business strategy. Vanessa Fox includes a thorough discussion of online search-related topics to help you implement your strategy, expounding upon search data, search methods, search personas, search engines, search strategy, search engine optimization development, social media, and the future of the web as it pertains to online search. She looks at online strategy from the perspective of asking the question: What do you want to accomplish with your business, and how can you create an online presence in congruence with you business strategy? From her point of view, an online strategy should not be very different than a regular business strategy because the internet is just another outlet for marketing – like radio commercials, tv commercials, or mailers. For instance, an online strategy would not be something like, “Get involved in social media,” but could be, “Use a company facebook page to encourage customer feedback and understand the needs of the customer.”

Even though she keeps reminding the customer to focus on content of sites and how they affect customer satisfaction, which I see as the broad view of marketing, she gives some technical advice too. She weaves the conceptual and technical together by referencing specific tools you can use in order to understand what the customer wants. The most mentioned tactic would be tracking the details of the traffic on your website. If you know where people are clicking, when they are abandoning, what ad they are responding to before arriving, etc, you can understand how to direct your website’s look and feel to your users’ habits.

Another plus in this book is that she assumes your online vocabulary is minmal and explains the meanings of common terminology used by developers in order for you to a.) be able to communicate with your developers and b.) get a full picture of how the web and search work. This basic technical understanding often keeps higher ups from asking the impossible from their developers. It also saves them time by focusing their efforts in the right places. For instance, since 63% of search-related purchases occur offline, a company might not need to offer online purchasing if it has numerous storefronts (Fox 10). However, Fox notes that there is a growing need for businesses to at least have an online presence because of how many people search and view inventories before going to the store (i.e. furniture sales).

The largest percentage of this book is simply statistics about internet use that have been found in various studies. Most of the studies are not the writer’s, which gives her information more credibility. She references a large handful of well-known experts and studies to offer incites into what you should focus on when you’re tweaking or creating a website. For instance, 85% of clicks on search are organic search (9), but people tend to trust a site if it appears in both (Fox 12). So what does this mean? Basically, don’t spend all your budget on paid advertising, but don’t neglect it all together either. These kinds of results in the book will save you hours of time trying to pull together different studies for yourself.

Overall, Fox really has a traditional view on marketing, considering her background with such a huge internet-based company (Google), because she defines online marketing the same way Geoffrey Miller, author of Spent, does. Fox, via the words of Miller, defines marketing as, “a systematic attempt to fullfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy” (Fox 30). He continues, saying that a “company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince them to buy what they company happens to make... Marketing is not just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the most dominant force in human culture” (Fox 30).

In the end if you’re looking for a beginner’s book on e-commerce, focusing on marketing, you should read this book. Google is like the entry way to the web, and it can also serve as the entry way to your understanding of the web. Fox will flood you with quotations, statistics, and study results, but she focuses these numbers and facts around one idea: marketing online is the same as marketing offline – know your customer.

Here's my youtube of a mini-presentation of this book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtvtNGeimEA