April 10, 2007 Archives

Next on today’s agenda is the super-packed Ads in A Quality Score World session. The panel is being moderated by Gord Hotchkiss with speakers Joshua Stylman (Reprise), Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), and Jonathan Mendez (OTTO Digital)

This morning’s session was pretty important because it reflects the change in search marketing we’ve been seeing over the past few years. As the speakers pointed out, your rankings in paid search are being less about how much you page and more about your ad’s perceived relevance. This morning’s panel was all about understanding the factors that go into the engines’ quality score algorithm in order to increase your ad’s perceive relevance and getting those high-positioned bids.

Up first is Joshua Stylman to explain this whole quality score thing and help the audience put it in context. (I must note, I apparently missed the “get here 30 minutes early” memo so I’m so far back I can’t even see Joshua. In fact, I’m not even in the same room as the one he’s speaking in. However, I’ve been assured he really is standing there so let’s hope this isn’t a really elaborate set up.)

Back to the session, Quality Score is a way for search engines to rank their ads based on a variety of factors. Google, MSN and Yahoo are all now using a quality score system instead of the bid-based system that was used when pay per click was just a baby.

When Google released its AdRank model circa 2005, it confused advertisers because Google didn’t tell them what the exact variables that went into the ranking system were. Thankfully, now that time has passed and we have a little more information.

Google uses historical data to determine whether or not a keyword is relevant to an ad, which in turn determines what you’ll have to pay to rank for that keyword. The up-side to this is that it produces a better user experience, more qualified leads and more revenue for the engines. The down-side is artificial CPC inflation, that the engines are able to define ad quality (which Google’s Nick Fox disagrees with) and that any change advertiser’s make can affect and reset their quality score (i.e. testing is penalized).

Joshua also argues whether abiding by Google’s quality laws really increases the relevancy of your ads. His argument is that perceived relevancy is very often different than what your customers would value as relevant. Joshua found that by molding his ads to fit Google’s perceived relevancy scale, it actually made his conversion rates decrease. What good is a lower CPC rate if you’re losing out on conversions?

None.

Search marketers need to continue to study landing pages to find out what works best for them. As Joshua says, it’s what puts the ‘M’ in search engine marketing. Rock on, Josh!

Another interesting tidbit noted by Joshua is that under Yahoo's Panama, branded terms have seen a 25 percent increase in CPC. He found that branded terms dropped 58 percent, while un-owned brands CPC increased 42 percent. It makes sense…almost. Naturally, if Guess is going after the term “Guess”, their cost will be less because the term is seen as very relevant to their ad/brand. However, that also means Macy’s will have to pay more because they’re “less relevant” than Guess. This seems almost like a penalty. If you’re looking for Guess jeans (by the way, the early 90’s called and they want their style back), is a Guess store more relevant to your needs than Macy’s? Not necessarily. It may even be more relevant if you’re on a budget.

Next up is Andrew Goodman

Andrew starts by outlining the three generations of paid search advertising.

1. GoTo.com/Overture: pure bid for placement model.
2. AdWords 2.0: Max Bid X CTR
3. AdWords 2.5: Quality Based bidding

Obviously, right now we’re living in the world of quality based bidding and Andrew goes on to explain the two different types of quality sores – one affects your minimum bid and the other affects your rank.

The latter is most relevant for new accounts. When you have a history CTR things will become more stable. In the beginning, the engines are trying to determine what your potential CTR will be, as well as your relevancy for the keywords as they related to the ad and your landing page.

However, if you’re evil, there is no sanctuary (muahaha!). If you’re participating in privacy intruding data collection without disclosure, creating nasty multiple accounts or doing other bad things that would make your mother smack you upside the head, your ads aren’t going to be positioned well, if they show up at all.

Jonathan Mendez is up next, and says contrary to what we just heard there are three quality scores. The two Andrew listed above, as well as a content quality score which takes landing page relevance into high consideration.

Why are the engines creating multiple quality scores? Because it improves the quality of the ads being produced (according to the engines).

Jonathan warns audience members about being too concerned with their score. Personally, I like Jonathan’s approach. If you concentrate your efforts on delivering relevancy through your keywords and your ad, your quality will improve and so will your results. It’s the same thing with search engine optimization. Instead of going crazy trying to identify every little factor the engines are looking for (that’s our job) concentrate on making your site a subject matter expert for users. The other stuff will follow.

Relevancy is about how well you fill the needs/intent/goal of the user. Understanding the way users are going about their goals is the first step in being relevant.

Paid search is built for relevance. It is a segmentation engine that uses channels, campaigns, AdGroups and keywords. Ads are the bridge or relevance between the query and the landing page. You want to create ads to get attention, generate interest, set expectations and persuade the user in some manner.

Make sure that your ad copy is relevant to your keywords, and that the keywords you’re using are targeting the same kind of user. Don’t mix buying and research keywords in the same ad.

To determine the relevancy of your ad you have to look at your conversion rate, not necessarily at your click through rate. Interesting to note, your ad description has a higher influence of conversion rate, not the title. If you can create an ad that stands out, you can create something that is valuable and relevant to users.

To create effect ads, advertisers must:

• Understand user intent with query
• Segment keywords based on intent
• Target ad based on segments
• Optimize CTR and CR
• Reinforce relevance on landing pages
• Message to needs of users (not your needs)
• And always be testing and optimizing!

Nick Fox (Google), Brian Boland (Microsoft) and Gulshan Verma (Yahoo) are here to represent the search engines and participate in Q&A and had some great things to say.

Nick states that contrary to popular belief quality score is not a black box. Today’s presentations captured the essence of what Google is trying to do with their quality algorithms. Don’t worry about quality score, just focus on relevance and everything else will follow.

Also, don’t be afraid to experiment. Though we’ve heard this can be dangerous, Nick says Google encourages advertisers to experiment and improve their keywords, copy, landing page copy, etc, especially if you feel like you’re being penalized by a lower quality score. If you experiment and find the results are bad, you can always revert back to the original and you won’t be penalized. There is nothing to lose.

Clearing up another myth, Nick assures readers that it’s the users who are defining quality. Click through rate is a great metric to see if users are demonstrating interest. Google is trying to capture the essence of what users are telling them about relevance and then incorporate that into the algorithm.

Microsoft’s Brian Boland announced that Microsoft is going to release a quality based ranking component in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

This article was written by Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay, Inc

Moderated by Jessie Stricchiola

Eduardo Llach from SearchRev. He will focus on the kinds of techniques to use with “early terms,” and john and Sharon will focus on tail terms and some pitfalls. Traditional criteria used for targeting: keywords, ad copy, landing page, and the search network. How to split up traffic based on additional criteria such as location, time of day, etc.

He discusses “multivariable targeting.” How to use these techniques to improve the performance of the campaigns. For example, “online dating.” How to split it up geographically and by demographic, as well as time of day and day of week. Also, they want to optimize the creative. What works better in NYC verus Denver or San Francisco?

Geo/metro targeting. This works using the IP address of the searcher. AOL does pose a problem for this since all seem to be in VA. Country mapping is very accurate, state mapping is now accurate to 50%, citty mapping is accurate to 30%. He shows a spreadsheet detailing some home security system targeting conducted in about 20 cities. They found that it worked to aggregate metro areas by, for example, top 10 metro areas at Google. When they study this, they can find information and determine similar CPC but much higher conversion rates, for example. In these cases, they can use the data to recommend an increase in bids in a certain area.

They also adjust the exposure by sometimes using the search engine only, or adding it’s “search network” to increase visibility. With syndication, they can then compare conversion rates across each of the sites. If not taking the time to do syndication targeting, he would recommend running branded terms across all networks, in the example he shows. Remember that better conversion rates do not automatically mean more orders. Even though Google may have a higher conversion rate, there may be more raw conversions on another engine, for example.

Conversion rates do vary across industry. For example, although normally abysmal results in the content network, they found that a non-branded search in the automotive vertical had a very high conversion rate in contextual placements. He recommends structuring a campaign that works by optimizing beyond the keyword level. This multivariable optimization allows for additional tweaks based on geo and other factors mentioned above.

Time of day and day of week. Focus on conversion rate here…when it is traditionally up, bid up, and when down, bid down. Showed an example of one campaign with much higher conversions on the weekends. This can be 78% more effective if you bid up and down each day. They have noticed widely variant numbers based on the industry. For time of day, they focus on morning versus afternoon. The idea is to measure against the overall conversion rate. They found that some mornings were better than others, and some afternoon on different days were better also. You can use Google and other engines to set rules based on increasing/decreasing bid based on this type of data analysis.

Creative optimization. Each kw and creative will perform differently. Showed one example with a wide variance in conversion rates based on the creatives.

John Kelly from Sure Hits. He will focus on managing tail phrases. They mostly manage clients in the financial services area. So what is a tail phrase? They describe it as any keyword which doesn’t get a lot of volume. Why care about these? Large aggregate volume. Clear intention = better conversion rates. Less competition = lower bids. (Editor note: in some cases, this may not be true, especially with the page relevancy algorithm which sometimes may jack up a minimum bid even if there are no others bidders)

When we analyze the potential target, we need to find out what they want. Then 1 Calculate the click value. 2. Reward word choices, and 3. Watch our for tail dangers. So, how to calculate the click value? [Probability of conversion X Value of conversion] Is small volume a big problem? What if one click every six months? How to estimate the quality and value of the conversion?

Shows an example of a search for “Columbus Ohio car insurance quote.” This includes two great clues: Geographic data and product information. How to deal with this information? A bad way would be to use buckets: States, cities, city and state, car insurance, quotes. The problem is when someone types in quotes, they are twice as likely to convert, so bucketing causes the loss of this type of information. The right way to do it, he feels, is to “tag” tail phrases. You should tag each phrases for the different identifiers, and then use the information to estimate what the probability of conversion is based on the number of tags it has and each of their own historic performance.

How to bring this all together? [probability X value = click value] So in some cases the longer tail will have a much larger value. So what about rewarding the choices made by the searcher? Respond to them with creatives in ad copy as well as on landing page. He found many pages in the PPC listings that did not present the proper information to reward the visitor for choosing their listing.

A couple quick dangers: brand phrases. Many brands are built around cities, for example, “Tampa Bay Mortgage” is a brand. If someone is looking for a Tampa Bay mortgage, are they seeking any mortgage provider or the branded one? Watch out also for “fake” tail phrases, such as “Washington auto insurance quote online.” Too many searches per day on a term like this may indicate that it is being used as a title of a paid link somewhere. Last danger is homonyms, such as “Mobile home loans.” Is this for Mobile, Alabama or for a mobile home?

Last speaker is Sharon Crost from Red Bricks Media. She will speak about avoiding the pitfalls of PPC, or “How to get more ROI by Dragging your tail.” She introduced a couple of examples, but unfortunately I have to leave for a meeting so I will not be able to cover the rest of her presentation.

This session is a one of the newer sessions from the ClickZ track that is going to get opinions from some top media buyers on what they expect to see this year, what they are buying, and where the trends going.

First up with Tessa Wegert from Enlighten. She says she will discuss the four major areas that are experiencing growth and changes such as Television, radio, and newspaper. Looking at media spending growth, in 2006 spending is on the rise. A lot of advertisers are looking at spending in local media because a lot of the effect translates down to local advertisers. The local community content fosters site user loyalty. Relevant regional content eliminates need for geo and contextual targeting. There is a lot of untapped inventory out there. Less competition for location site inventory means competitive rate. Local sites are more willing to create more inventory opportunities. On the local media search sites such as Google Maps, Google Coupons, etc.. you can create local business listing, local business ads. Great way to set your business apart from others. Google local business ads is basically Adwords but it appears in Google Maps.

When search and display used in tandem an advertiser's site pageviews up 68 percent. There are a lot of benefits doing a integrated campaign. You can expand audience reach, increase interaction, and increase sales. This nets a wider audience online, drive search traffic. She puts up an example of a integrated campaign. They are doing advertising on national sites like Better Homes and Gardens and the other part is Google paid search advertising.

She next talks about online video. One third of the US population over age 3 watch online video monthly. With video you can create a lot of cross media consistency. It helps with branding. She mentions a study, that fewer video ads needed to create brand awareness than other means. There are a longer banner recall as well from video ads. There are different types of video ads, such as PointRoll an ad type that accompanies the video player, clickable video which cites immediate action but may require unique video content, and long form video which is random ad placement reduces avoidance).

Tessa next goes into custom made media opportunities. She talks about Pandora an online radio station who has experimented with custom ads such as using custom variance, customer text ticker, and combined proven ad unit and custom art. Some of the more traditional publishers are even coming up with custom made media on there sites.

Second up is Robin Neifield and she starts immediately explaining the question better. She says she wants to know where they are spending the money on a wide variety of areas. Is the budget allocation across media predicted on specific goals and current media penetration. She says they look at the spending on a media model in a three tier system of potential customer, window shoppers, and active buyers. She is expecting spending to shift a little bit towards new types of media and testing. They want to expert with community sites, etc.. There are new networks out there that can present some good opportunities. People are spending more money online. Robin says they allocate some of their clients money for testing. She explains that the pressure to monetize increased media budgets, better analytic tools, and a stronger understanding of how to use the data will lead to: more conversion testing, better analytics, etc..

Behavioral targeting is now widely utilized. Mobile is finally moving forward. Search retargeting is a great new area to get into to. There are new targeting options (including video), and new networks. She next goes into mobile advertising. According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending in the US will reach nearly 4.8 million by 2011. From 2006-2007, mobile marketing spending is expected to double. The largest area of growth in 2007 will be through the development of WAP (the mobile internet) pages and supporting campaigns. WAP is the second highest mobile content used sources for mobile browsing. SMS can be difficult because you have such limited space to tell you story.

Click through rates can be substantially higher when combined with an integrated marketing campaign. Extension or complement to TV viewing is a practiced method. Repurposing TV spots for the space is an option, but creating web only video is a better option. Social media is another area. They find that the engaged audience is less likely to click off and complete an action. Blog advertising is not as good. Users are interested in a conversation and ads are harder to deliver effectively. In the end its about getting a story told in search, banners, e-mail, and affiliates.

Third is David Rittenhouse from neo@ogilvy and talks that they works with a lot of different companies but specialize in technology companies. He says that advertising media investment choices are driven by consumer and business priorities. There is a complex environment in which spend allocations are made by advertiser, region, country, campaign, message, medium, tactic, and media company. Challenge is digital media present mass of ever-changing ever emerging, ever under measured options. The next part to this, is that consumer media usage is flux and media \$ want to follow closely. Out of every $100 now it is ordinary to have 1/3 to ½ spent online. Overall media budgets are not growing at the same pace but at the expensed of traditional media like print and broadcast. Some clients are flipping models and putting digital media first. Interesting but understandable.

He feels that growth in digital does not always equal more of the same. On small scale tests over the past several years have yielded learning that are starting to drive scaling up and out. There is a lot going on in online video, microsites, podcasting, mobile, social media & blogs, content syndication, and video games. He says there is a real focus on asking ‘what else can I do?” He gives an example of streaming golf for specific holes for people who loved golf but only wanted to know what was happening at certain holes on the course.

One of the challenges he sees is the availability vs. recommend-ability. The challenge is planning and prioritizing in a systematic way that is based on consumers and advertisers needs. It’s a question of usage, quality, and relevance. One of the challenge is buying acrss a number of different currencies. He means impressions, click, circulation, streams, and all the other “C” words. The second challenging in this is the execution of being efficient when everything is always new. There is no surprise that Rich Media and Search leading the way. Ecosystem is most ready to deliver these with scale and there are few barriers.

David finally goes into search and how is matters in the media business. Search is the fastest growing part of the media business and of Neo’s operations. Increasingly the “way” in to many clients and most logical first dollar spent of digital budget. Search as a marketing application, beyond PPC is starting to realize potential with clients. There is a diagnostic services, natural search and analytics. Though there is some drag that should be dealt with expeditiously. He also mentions that specialization can also lead to isolation. He says he observed that some marketers only do search or this or that and they isolate themselves, when in reality we are all marketers and should work together on that.

Harry Gold is up last and talks about working with B2B companies specifically and how they like to track and measure. Traditional advertisers continue to migrate online. Richard media replaced search as the fastest growing form of online media driven by traditional advertisers. From a recent study 62% of respondents said it was where most of their growth was going into rich media. He says prices are going up! He says that rich accommodates a level of branding and rich media formats that search does not. How efficient are you when you are dealing with new mediums. He says they help clients experience with new forms of media. Ranking of ROI from types of media, search is down near the bottom. Good news about the internet is you can track everything, but the bad news about the internet is you can track everything. Lot of data and everything may not always work.

He is pessimistic and optimistic about search. Traditional advertisers are increasingly looking at online media and search as branding mediums and love multi platform deals. But they still love the metrics and the concepts of optimization and cancellation clauses. Performance and lead gen advertisers continue to buy farther down the conversion chain. Where did those quality leads come from? Look at lead sources and lead quality. What is the most they can afford to spend on a lead? What do those people paying $13 dollars a click know that you don’t They know the quality of the leads they are getting is very good. Its worth it. He explains that they are strong advocates for search so it is expected that it would grow for our clients.

He says this might be a strong statement but rented email is out. Email is always the lowest performing thing on the list. There are spam filters, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, the CPA is way to high. Newsletter sponsorships are great though.

On the performance lead based side. Advertisers are extremely focused on metrics. There is continued growth in search. Low CPM and PPC network buys. Premium buys combined with alternative placements and value ads. There is an increased usage of CPA buys, especially in education. What is happening is that is driving down the cost of the lead. There are overall budget increases. He ends that online is the biggest real time focus group there is. Offline has been in a way driving online. Optimization needs to be integrated and online will be driving offline.

Chris Sherman starts the session off by introducing Mobile Search as an ever-increasing build-up of new ideas that will soon catch up with earlier expectations of consumers. You can't optimise for mobile in the same way as you do for the web, although as few people have currently adopted it - you can get ahead of your competition.

Cindy Krum recommends optimising your existing site, rather than a new .mobi site. You need to make sure in mobile search that your pages are device independent, in order to broaden your user base. The industry is in its infancy with some niche mobile search engines still requiring manual submission. Search results for mobiles use a different dataset to web search, with its own crawlers and slightly different algorithm. Code Best Practices should be strictly adhered to; mobile browsers are less forgiving than traditional browsers, so sites should be W3C compliant (preferably XHTML). External CSS style sheets are a good idea as they limit the amount of code that needs to be downloaded and helps when scaling for different resolutions and screen sizes. CSS allows you to have a separate stylesheet for handheld devices as well as your original stylesheet. Cindy suggests showing different pages based on which mobile browsers are being used, although this is more likely for hiding features rather than your web copy. People won't learn your website's format so organise buttons consistently and logically. Text links should be used rather than images, which may not download and will increase page loading times. People prefer navigation below the content of a page, as they don't want to keep scrolling down on each page to find your information. This can be done via CSS styling (I try to do this anyway for websites as it pushes content to the top of the page and helps prevent duplicate content flagging). Anchors (links to sections within the same page) are no longer confined to the 90's; it means that people don’t have to keep scrolling on their device. Do not use frames or flash on your pages, as most mobile browsers don't support them and they just slow things down. Keep file names short so that URLs can be easily viewed and managed on small screens. Do not use pop-ups and use heading tags correctly. You can get mobile device emulators to check to see what your site looks like, such as Mobi Ready. Make sure that if you go to the trouble of optimising your site for mobile that you advertise your site as mobile compatible. Get links from mobile sites and directories; it helps with SEO and for people seeking mobile sites. Make phone numbers clickable, you can send a number directly to the mobile device by prefixing tel: to a phone number in a link (like when using mailto: for clickable email addresses).

Greg Markel from Infuse Media starts by mentioning Google's Voice Local Search service (currently in BETA lab for the US), which is easier and more convenient than searching using a stylus. There's no cost to get into these search results, your business simply needs to be in the main Google Local index. Mobile adoption is slower in the US than anticipated, with only 19% people using mobile search. Most of those people end up using mobile portals, often operated by their phone carrier. A good place to find industry data about Mobile Search is M:Metrics. Unlike the more precise search queries being used in web search, terms on mobile search are usually quite generic e.g. "movies". This is most likely a result of the time it takes to type queries on mobile devices. Brand terms are also very popular, as users don't want to have to type in the full URL. A majority of users don't scroll through results, putting a lot of pressure to rank positions 1-3 for your target terms. Google has recently released a new version of mobile search, which offers similar functionality as found in web search after signing into your Google account. Google Mobile has a good help section that explains a lot about mobile search and is a very good resource.

Rachel from iCrossing has spoken to her clients a lot about mobile search recently, 1.3 billion people around the world use a mobile device and is a market that should not be ignored. Mobile devices can't currently duplicate the same user experience as found when using a browser on your computer. This shouldn't be an issue as people using a mobile device are looking for different things such as contact details and snippets of content. A lot of people are still using WAP rather than mobile browsers, especially for news and sport results. People are starting to understand what’s available to them on the wireless web though, and many are migrating across. The average salary of mobile searchers is higher than the national average and age groups are starting to level out. Most mobile users are not just surfing aimlessly; they are actively looking for something, such as movie reviews, DVDs or services. Google now allows you to submit a separate XML sitemap for mobile. When visiting Google, users are not automatically sent to the mobile optimised result set, although this is expected to change soon. Many companies have also failed to acknowledge the need for mobile search optimisation - a search for McDonalds on Google Mobile for instance has a mobile-friendly BBC news page as the number one result.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by in the interest of speed.

Advertising in Social Media
Rebecca Leib – Moderator

Speakers
Bill Flitter – VP Marketing Pheedo, Inc
Marc Shiller, CEO & Founder, Electric Artists, Inc.
Nicole Bogas Gossip Blog Team Lead, Blog Ads
Chad Stoller – VP of Emergining Networks of Organic

Rebecca welcomes everyone to the ClickZ Track, Click Z is 10 years old
Explains about the Click Z track

Bill Flitter from Pheedo
Speaking about Ads in feeds. Pheedo does adverstising in feeds.
The old way of advertising - Broadcast Advertising – “We tell You” (publisher/broadcaster) – newspapers, TV, etc.
Now – there is social media
“We tell each other” Brands and people are participating in the marketing, but also still have passive readers
Meet all the people that see your ads (Types: “Not Interested”, “Needs More Information”, “Existing Happy Customer”, “Too Busy”, “Clicks Through”)
But most ads are only targeted towards the “Clicks Through” and avoid the “not interested”
But don’t the others have value – absolutely – immediate value, although the not interested has “longer value”

“Needs more Info” – suppose she could subscribe to the info, instantly read review, speak to a peer
“Too Busy” – forward the follow-up, bookmark
Happy Customer – become the customer evangelist, write a review, tag your ad for the world to see

Engaging all them, learn from one and each other.

Advertising for today’s audience - But does it work (Adverstising in RSS Feeds)?
Ford Case study – ford auto show web site
.4% CTR on content
20% conversion rate on subscriptions
.2% Email rate
133 interactions in 7 days (comments, tags, etc)
Overall 1.1% interaction rate

The “not interested guy” – came back read a product review by your happy customer, and came across a bookmark by the Too Busy, and bought your product.

Nicole Bogus from Blog Ads
First sold Sept. 2002, over 1300 leading indie blogs
All site accept flagship unit the Blogad
22 blog specialists and programmers
Target delivery into 40+ hives, gossip, politics, parenting, music, gay/lesbian, humor, pets, marketing, ports, religion, fashion, etc.

PerezHilton, Go Fug Yourself, PowerLine, 101 cookbooks, hot air, crazy aunt pearl – some of the top blogs

Before blogosphere communities – one to many
After the blogosphere – “swarms” – lots of link, information gets out quickly and more efficiently

Perez Hilton – tops E Online, US Magazine
DailyKos – tops the New Yorker and New Republic

What ads work –
Smart Ads: have multiple links, strong image, faux video, hand made feel, puzzle invites click
Bad Ads: no links, dull, text-heavy image Tell rather than show, feels designed, full story negates the reason to click

Engaging the blog reader
Rich Media is expensive, so the blog ads it’s a good alternative
Click in to watch a video
Click to add to netflix queue
Click to purchase song
Encourage of participation
Encourage conversation
Add reviews of movies
Banners designed around the Blog’s atmosphere
Content rather than hard-sell = more clicks

Mark Shiller
Talking about advertising in 2nd Life
Bringing brands into Social Media – hard to tell the difference between PR, Advertising and Marketing

Focus should be on experiences
People are more interested in being shown how something is made or created than they are in seeing the final results
To succeed in a “Connected world” good will must be in the DNA of everything you create
From sitting back to leaning forward – web 2.0 communications is less about watching and more about producing

2nd Life is great for
Creative prototype experimentation, brand re-invention, opportunity to foster more collaborative learning methods, PR Awareness, relevancy: allows a brand to sty in touch, e- commerce opportunities, new channel of customer interaction

Obstacles – no direct ROI, budgeting is tricky, maintenance and management of brand in 2nd life, slow to create interesting in world experiences, resolution and functionally to technology, time

Starwood Hotels – becomes the first company in history to launch a new hotel brand inside of a virtual world. Prior to opening to the public in 2008, Aloft Hotels offered in a sneak preview of the brand in world.

Starwood Hotels opening in 2nd life allowed Starwood to test-market the hotel’s design

They will be the first brand to leave 2nd life as well – the hotel will go out and land donated

iVillage Girls Night Out.
In December iVillage launched a series of new events inside 2nd life called Girls Night Out. This extended what iVillage already knows how to do “bring women together”. They held a fashion show with incredible results, had people waiting a few hors to it to start.

Student Travel Network
College area is now exploding in 2nd life. Works with the universities to help them understand 2nd life.

Pick a niche and go after it.

Social Networks – has become a legitimate web community and resource, however social networks can polarize people.

This covedrage was graciously provided by Liana “Li” Evans, who is the Search Marketing Manager at Commerce360 that oversees Natural Search, Social Media and WoMM. Li also is the owner, editor and writer of SearchMarketingGurus.com.

Note this is coverage provided by Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay, Inc. Thanks Lisa!

Zachary Rodgers (ClickZ Network) is moderating this morning’s Online Video

Advertising panel with speakers Ian Schafer (Deep Focus), Chad Stoller (Organic), Lars Bastholm (AKQA), and Steve Rosenblat (Dennis Digital)

You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but today’s ad campaigns have evolved past your traditional static online banner ad. I know, I miss them too, but they’re gone. With video penetration almost saturating the market, advertisers are looking to interactive video to grab a hold of customers and make the most impact. Utilizing video has become a cost-effective tool for marketers, but only when they’re up-to-speed on all the various formats, strategies, creatives and other considerations.

Zachary comments that two years ago online video was nothing more than a two minute clip with a 30 second ad attached to it. That was all consumers could get and all advertisers could buy. Boring.

Today we have Hillary Clinton videoblogging on MySpace, paid ads on YouTube with comments, online video being embedded on blogs, and magazine Web sites also using video advertising. The choices provide a lot of opportunities for marketers to do new things, but it can also create confusion. Media buyers don’t know if they are better off sticking to the traditional video spots on sites like MSNBC that have been tested or if they’re better off experimenting with the new types of online ad formats.

With all the confusion, the easiest thing for marketers to do is to roll their own content and build their own experiences.

First up is Chad Stoller. (Side note: Chad must be from the East Cost. He talks faster than my mother and almost as fast as Michael Gray. I can’t help but stare.)

Chad’s presentation focuses on an ad campaign Organic ran for Jeep.
Jeep has been an early adopter of Internet technology since 1995. Much like the Jeep brand, Jeep.com continues to innovate with interactive technologies. On March 15, 2007, they launched the Way Beyond Trail in conjunction with the launch of the new Jeep Patriot. (Warning: If you go to that site, you’re going to be humming the theme song all day, but I guess that’s the point.)

The Way Beyond Trail is a complete interactive experience for users with over an hour of video. Users are part of a 360 degree holistic, integrated and seamless marketing program. There are 44 different scenes incorporating personalized elements with only one correct ending. While navigating through the game (Is it a game? I guess it’s a game), users will find surprise, delight, zany character, and will see the Jeep vehicle presented in a non-traditional way. Chad has found in order to be effective the consumer’s experience must be completely transparent. Don’t preach about your product, demonstrate the “why buys” through the video. Have a lot of cargo room? Don’t say it; show how many sheep will fit inside that jeep.

Once your video is out, advertisers must study everything – time spent, bailouts, social and sharing, forums and conversation, pass along, personalization counts, hand raisers, exit surveys, etc.

A great presentation by Chad.

Next up is Ian Schafer focusing on the importance of creative and placement. Ian uses a few of his company’s past projects to show that the purpose of video is to reach people wherever they may be, not just at a brand-specific Web site. Sage words by Ian right there.

Ian’s first example focuses on the launch of the new season of Best of Show. It was decided that video would be used to fill a plot hole for the TV show.

In the video, the character played by Jeremy Piven is interviewing new staff members. [Ed. note: Jeremy Piven is actually in Entourage.] Once users enter the site, they are able to fill out a job application (also a great way for the company to get leads, user’s email addresses, demographic info, etc) and sit in for an interview with Piven’s character. The entire process is interactive and Piven will respond based on what users’ type into the answer box. The whole thing lasts about 10 minutes and at the end of the interview users will find out if they “got the job” or not. (Wait, you mean they don’t have to wait and stress for two weeks like I did? Unfair!)

Ian reports that the average user spent more than 8 minutes interacting with Jeremy. He also notes that if you want your video to be effective, keep your video on the short side. You never know how long a user will interact with your video and you want to make sure you’re able to get your message across.

To have the most impact, marketers should look to create advertising opportunities on the most popular sites on the Web before they become well known for their advertising opportunities.

Ian then wins my heart by bringing up Ze Frank (Huzzah! I hope every session has a Ze mention.) aka the most popular videoblogger on the Web (his words!). He brings up Ze to make that point that using video doesn’t always mean you have to create content; it’s also about establishing your brand through existing content. In the case with Ze, Ian’s company sponsored the last week of the show and the archives and in return got a verbal plug from everyone’s favorite videoblogger. Totally cool.

Ian’s company Deep Focus is currently developing a hybrid online/on-air interactive video production, as well as dynamically, contextually targeted Flash overlay video advertising. The latter may be the thing that ends the pre-roll.

Lessons learned from Ian:

• Don’t be intrusive with online ads
• Keep it short
• Keep it portable
• Make it good
• Make it relevant

And work with the content creators, dammit.

Up next is Steve Rosenblat.

Your first step in utilizing video is to know what the user is expecting to see, how they’re currently interacting with video and who you’re trying to reach.

4 Ways to use video:

• Original content
• Product placement
• Video integration
• Custom video

From here, Steve outlines a few of the campaign his company has been working on:

Icehouse Miller campaign: Steve’s company created an original video about a new robot Brewtron. And it must have worked. I, a female and not part of Icehouse’s demographic was not amused. However, panelist Chad, who is a young (hunky) male, was giggling through the entire video.

Mission accomplished for Icehouse.

To distribute the video Steve used viral sharing sites, community and social networking. You want to create a brand content piece and put it in the right place where users will pick it up and pass it on.

Old Spice: Create an association between Old Spice and the theme “experience”. To do this they created Lessons to Live By and took slips from movies like Talladega Nights (Steve shows a clip. Once again I am left looking around wondering if I missed the joke while Chad is giggling). At the end of the videos, a Maxim model went out and interviewed a bunch of men and asked them about their favorite badass. (Mine is Mikkel.) The video concluded with a “brought to you by Old Spice” message.

Moderated by Allan Dick, who will be throwing his awesome dinner tonight.

Cam Balzer from Performics will lead off. He says they have a new discipline called “benchmarketing.” Since search is such a public arena, you have to pay attention to what competitors are doing. How are others responding to the dynamics of the marketplace, thus the mix between search and benchmarking. Goes over the search funnel and benchmarking. First ask “how visible am I in search results?” How effectively am I reaching searchers, and lastly what is the cost/ROI.

You can first “benchmarket” against yourself. In above stages use the following metrics: impressions, clicks and CTR, leads and $$, in order to derive CPC, total cost, and ROI. Since search is so fundamentally competitive, but also benchmarket against competitors using the following metrics: Coverage, share of voice, share of wallet and overall cost and ROI. Will now walk through several benchmarketing examples for Performics clients.

One benchmark example he showed: Looking for paid visibility of select advertisers on a sample of 38 insurance terms. They use AdGooroo to load up keywords they want to track. They (AdGooroo) go to all engines in multiple countries and perform searches repeatedly in order to gain insight on visibility. Shows a chart with Avg reach on horizontal axis and coverage % on vertical access. Looking at a bucket this size gives a good overview of this vertical, and allows for analysis and predictions. Some questions that can be answered include: how visible am I? What kws are showing up? What are my competitors’ bid strategies? What level of coverage should I maintain on high volume/high cost keywords.

Then shows another visibility benchmark from Hitwise. He used the visibility benchmark of “share of visits.” Showed the top 15 sites that received traffic from the search for “iPod.” Apple accounted for 54% of total visits, but this isn’t as much as they maybe should be getting, since the Apple sites to well both in Paid and Organic rankings. So what more could they be trying to increase reach? Question to ask is what portion of visits are generated by particular keywords.

Next benchmark is the traffic benchmark. They use Hitwise again here that follows click data to determine the monthly percentage of traffic from search to selected home improvement sites. Questions here include how much traffic is coming from search versus my competitors. Bear in mind that this is both paid and Natural search blended together, and they cannot separate the two datasets. They like to combine this data with the market share data in order to gain more insight. Even though some seem to be found well in search, they may not get the level of visits that some competitors. Looking at this allows one to decide if they could be more aggressive in their SEM.

Natural versus paid traffic. According to ComScore qSearch data, the total traffic from paid and organic varies from 5% paid/95% Organic all the way up to 50/50 and more tilted towards paid. The average across all categories is about 89% of search traffic is organic. Car rental actually gets 54% of its traffic from paid search. This is very useful data on an aggregate/category level. Considerations include weighing the proportion of natural versus paid against the absolute volume.

They “take their thought leadership role in the industry very seriously.” In January of 2004 they started tracking an index of 50 of their clients. He then discusses the performance benchmark of cost. The chart he shows varies dramatically on an avg CPC level, and also indicates a strong seasonal relationship to the cost. Looks at other metrics as well. He notes that the Performics 50 can be found at Doubleclick.com.

Next is Mike Moran with IBM. One thing that they found with search marketing campaign benchmarking is that is was difficult to benchmark the competition since they have so many different products and competitors. They found that no matter how important IBM was, in 2001, Google didn’t really feel they were that big of a deal. Less than 1% of visitors came from SE’s. So they needed to really focus on their own benchmarking, which is what he will focus on today.

Conversion rate is a nice tool, but they do not want to optimize on that, instead you want to increase your traffic. The nicest thing is if you can do both. Many people don’t want to talk about what they are actually selling, instead focusing on their rankings. Each site must be trying to get someone to do something. At IBM, they want people to download the whitepaper. They have found that 2% of these will end up buying a 50K consulting package.

The first step in organic SEO is to be in the index. Which search engines are critical? This can vary by country. How many pages are in the index versus how many pages should be there. The hard part for some companies is figuring out how many pages they actually have. In a lot of cases, the exact number doesn’t matter, but that the trend shows increased traffic. The second step is to choose the right keywords. Ask what percentage of the traffic should be yours. Third step is to examine what the landing pages have on them. Want to look at conversions, since they will help you find out what needs to be done. If you have good rankings but no conversions, there are a couple of possible reasons. Your web site might not be the strongest, or maybe you are not focusing on the right people. This needs to be done week by week, month by month, keyword by keyword, landing page by landing page. Focus on constantly trying changes and experimentation to get you where you need to be.

There are some good tools to help with rankings, as well as some that perform Content audits. Focus on the analytics packages. The fourth step is figure out how to find links to the site. For any competitive keywords, this can be the difference. Use tools to find, “score” links. Tools can also manage link campaigns. Use the competitors backlink data to gain insight. Suppose you do not have time for all these tools? All-in-one tools that he likes for small businesses include soloseo (hosted) and WebCEO (software). It s nice to have one dashboard instead of having to reenter metrics into every different tool.

“I can’t look at each page individually.” Build tools. They built their own tool to analyze for missing or duplicate titles, for example, as well as other factors. They also broke it down per division, and used “management by embarrassment” to color-code the particular site areas that needed more help. Even though many managers didn’t really understand what was wrong, they wanted to move from a red code to a yellow and eventually to a nice green. These metrics can be updated and should be to include the current factors that matter most, and omit issues that have been handled already.

“None of this works for personalized search.” He has been looking at a tool recently called SEMlogic, which looks at the underlying factors across competitors, Analyzes which ones matter for your keywords, and allows for decision making. Now, IBM has 2M pages indexed in Google versus 10K. In 2001, 95% of pages had titles, now up to 99%. 2001: no top 10 rankings, now over 3000. Briefly promotes his and Bill Hunt’s book, “Search Engine Marketing.”

Martin Laetsch, SEMDirector. Will talk about what he has learned about benchmarking “with a small little company like Intel.” When he talked to marketers, they often came up with “fluffy” marketing terms like reach and frequency. This is not enough. With Intel, one problem was that it was a very siloed organizational structure, which made things difficult. When they started with Intel, 19% of keywords were duplicated in at least 2 campaigns. Pentium alone was in multiple SEM campaigns, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasteful spent.

Typical management challenges with information included: missing information, too much information, numerous sources, not valuable, difficult to get from other areas of the company. Yet competitor information is difficult to get. The use of reporting analytics for benchmarking is important. In order to get actionable information, comprehensive reports are required. The reporting and housing of this information needs to be scalable to other software. You should have consistent reporting, and know the audience for specific reports.

When dealing with thousands and tens of thousands of keywords, so many things to consider. Even as deep as the delicate balancing act between PR teams and sales. So: used a centralized organizational structure for all search program management. They set up best practices, then moved on to tactical SEO and SEM execution, followed by establishing the reporting and analytics software framework. Also, then line up search with other marketing efforts… The Intel Viiv press release resulted in 15,000% more Google searches! He ends up with two quotes: Andrew Lang “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than illuminations.” Sherlock Holmes: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data…”

What does this mean? Marketing is changing, and online is going to con tin ue to be a larger percentage of the overall mix. Measurement becomes that much more important. Must use solid data to make sensible decisions.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Moderated by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, as well as one of the conference organizers.

OK this is a monster post so bear with me.

Leading off with Amanda Wattlington of Searching For Profit. Provides five major reasons to Podcast. (thanks Amanda for giving me your slides prior to your presentation :) ) :
First, it creates direct communication channel with prospects and customers. Secondly, it extends reach through emotional connection with target market. Thirdly, it adds new media outlets to extend reach. Podcasts offer marketers audiences unavailable via regulated broadcast radio. Use short sponsorships to integrate advertising for broad-based content. Fourthly, it facilitates marketing communications with target audiences. Extend awareness of knowledge, expertise and approach. Forges relationships. Finally, it humanizes relations with the public. Provide the public with a more approachable means to relate to your organization.

Benefits: Engage consumers by creating a dialogue. Easily indexed by search engines.
Augments site content. Little-No Cost Media – Easily distributed (RSS). Humanizes organization. Extends reach of message. Choose topics selectively.

Challenges: Requires level of transparency. Measurability can be limited. Content is less formal with shorter turnaround than traditional communications. Less control and ownership. Requires on-going commitment and content development. Set editorial guidelines for content. Loss of control of distribution and use. Company vs. public information. She provides a list of things that are “podcast-worthy.” Includes educational content, news, oral history, commentary, tours, music, ads, and literature.

Before You Get Started: Decide if you are doing a one-off standalone podcast or a podshow. Don’t finalize the name of your show until you make sure the show name is not already in use. Podshow names are not as easy to check as domain names. Changing the name is difficult once you have an audience. Decide on Showname and episode name – Each will need its own Title and Description. Carefully write your Titles and Description for your show and episode. Develop a keyword list for the show and determine how you will brand it – by the host, the show name or (else). Write the audio tag information carefully in advance. Get album art ready – even for non-musical shows. Review iTunes categories to look for the right fit. Be prepared to edit the audio tags yourself for each episode – download a tag editor. Build your infrastructure in advance of creating the audio so that you can rapidly mount your show.

Describes podcasting as a four-step process: 1. Optimize ID3 Tags. 2. Create Web page. 3. create and validate feeds. 4. Submit and regularly monitor distribution. Step 1 is optimizing the sound (ID3 tags: ID3 = Metadata for MP3, 4,WMA, AAC or Ogg Vorbis audio files. ID3v1 = Appended to the end of the audio file. ID3v2 = Appended to the start of the audio file, highly flexible format. Maximum tag size is 256 megabytes and maximum frame size is 16 megabytes. 39 pre-defined frames including – copyright, content type, dates, and content information, and space for files such as pictures. Can also carry lyrics and complete transcriptions of text. Look up tables for locating information in the file. Comment frame is user-defined. ID3v2 editors abound – originally designed to assist users in cataloging and organizing music collections. All of the data in the ID3 tag is able to be parsed.

In addition, use: Title – Name of the show and date (mm/dd/yy) or an episode name. Album – Name of your podcast. Artist – Your name or the host. Year – The year podcast is released. Track – Episode number. Genre – Podcast or Other. Comments – URL, a transcript or abstract and who or how to contact for more information.

Optimize the File Name: Make sure that you use a unique name. Use a shortened name + date or episode number. For example: pdmktg032707.mp3 could be the name for a show called Podcast Marketing, first released on March 27, 2007. Or, pdmktg03.mp3 could be the file name for the third episode of the show. This is important for users and for directories.

Optimize Your Landing Pages: Use a separate landing page for audio content to limit possibility of broken links. Have a page for the podshow with links to it for the episodes. Provide information on the show’s schedule to attract subscribers and how to subscribe. Create a separate pages for each episode. Optimize the landing page for the show. Provide subscription information on every landing page. Include a player for those who want to listen online. Include with the player the length and size of each audio file. Include an abstract or a transcription of each episode. Use multiple feeds if you provide multiple formats. Optimize – SEO “scrub and rub” every page.

Amanda then suggest some services to create and validate feeds, including Webmaster Podcaster, Feed For All, Jitbit, Podifier, and FeedBurner. The list some places to submit, including FeedBurner, Podfeed.net, Singing Fish, iPoderX, podnova, Podcast Alley, and Yahoo! Podcasts and others.

5 Tactics to Promote Online Audio Beyond Search Engines: Use the power of the content – interviews and topical subjects draw listeners. Use PR and word-of-mouth techniques. Embed links to audio in online press releases distributed by newswires. Use marketing communications to drive listeners. Make URL/name memorable and easy to spell. Feature links on your website to boost awareness of your podcast. Blog about your content and link to audio.

Amanda then speaks briefly to monetizing, and gives examples of enablers such as FeedBurner, Podomatic, Podbridge, Podcastpickle.com, Podzinger and some others. Lastly, she gives 5 Secrets for SEO Success for Your Podcasts: Optimize the audio file. Build landing pages for your show AND Each episode. Build accurate, effective RSS files. Submit and promote broadly, and watch for changes.

Next: Daron Babin from WebmasterRadio.FM. Will talk about “Is it worth it?” Factors like production time, cost of production, equipment, encoding (can be a pain), analytics (who has come close?) and bandwidth. When listeners come, they want it to be nice and “clean,” otherwise they may not come back.

Speaks at length about the importance of minding bandwidth. “One rogue blogger” can send traffic off the charts. Users want to be entertained and engaged…don’t write about your dog being neutered (to the wrong audience). Keep the person’s attention is an even greater job. They are listening if you are compelling. They want to be both educated and entertained. Prepare for the growth. He recommends securing a sound or content delivery network. They currently use Akamai. Live streaming is an issue with them, but for delivering volume they are great. Latency doesn’t become an issue with these networks, people don‘t email saying its taking forever to download. Be prepared to pay a premium for these services…it is not cheap. Establish up front what it is going to cost. It will cost an ungodly sum of money if not properly negotiated at onset.

Also determine what kind of analytics will be provided. You can use some to “marry with log files” and get a very accurate picture what is going. This is very important because when you look to monetize podcasts, people are going to want to know this.

Transcribe everything! In optimizing audio files with spoken word, you can get great traction. In terms of optimizing ID3 files, like Amanda said can be a problem, he challenges you to “do it dynamically!” Remember that originality + passion = downloads. Be passionate and don’t pull punches. People want to hear the passion, this is what engages people and leads to downloads. Goes into some methodologies for optimizing. He urges that you look at how to write and employ text for media files. (he gets a laugh when he describes a “dark side” technique of employing content is particular fonts…)

If summaries are not thorough and you are not transcribing, you are doing yourself a disservice. Take the time, and the results will follow. He suggest checking with Amazon that has a product which helps with this. He isn’t sure of the name but it is fairly affordable ($10 for every 20 minutes or so) and it is a quick turnaround. Look at geo-targeting to deliver ads for the podcasts. There are whole new avenues of monetization coming in the realm of dynamic podcast delivery options.

Rick Klau, from FeedBurner. He is not here to pitch services, since most of their stuff is free. He will look at some stats into what is working and what isn’t.. Things to remember: not everyone uses iTunes. This fundamentally changes in how you look at your audience if you remember this. Metadata is essential for discovery. The subscription process sucks. Some people don’t even care about this. His wife refuses to do the RSS feed because she just “goes to the web site.” Laughs when he explains that this is funny because of his job and he can’t even get his wife to use the feeds to properly subscribe. (Funny I have the same problem – I can’t get my wife to blog about her passion for Children’s Ministries, so I can monetize that). Get your feeds out there. “Ping, ping, ping…”

In Q1 2007, over 100K podcast feeds managed. In aggregate, they are tracking more than 5M subscribers, up from 50K in Q1 2005. When he says this, the actual audience is likely to be over 10M, but this cannot be determined. The stats are important to understand. If larger audience is goal, then optimize for that. If targeting is goal then optimize for that.

He describes one particular feature called “uncommon uses.” The common ones are Tunes, etc. Increasingly, however, they are seeing access from domains that are only requesting one particular feed. This leads to the need to further analyze why this is happening, in order to gain greater insight into the needs of the audience. You have to understand the scope. This is almost secondary SEO, because you have to optimize to make sure that those audience have easy visibility.

Consumption is happening everywhere. He picked on podcast and listed literally 100’s of applications that are consuming the podcasts. For example Tevo just one place to make sure that you podcast is easily subscribable for the listeners. Directories are a very important driver of pod cast consumption as well. Many are in themselves “SEO honeypots.” They are static archives which are frequently updated. If not in directories, you are losing the potential visibility within the major search engines. They are likely to rank higher for your show name or category than you are, so make sure content is properly formatted and rich in description in order to be prominently listed.

Republishing is also critical (to the freshness factor, I am assuming). Making the content consumable in the way the audience wants is again critical. Just seeing a link to iTunes isn’t necessarily enough. He explained to (his son I think he said) about how you can actually engage iTunes for something other than 99 cent songs. He was amazed. Many people have never bothered to even find out what a podcast is. Do not assume that people understand what the podcast is. Do not assume that a link to iTunes will automatically translate to the visitor as being a way to download or subscribe to the podcast.

Step 1: create the feed. Format the page in something understandable. Talks about how different current browsers assuming they know how to present content better than the way it is archived. Suggests using Yahoo! Media RSS which provides the ability to present additional metadata. Using show notes: make the files look interesting! A small part of him dies every time he sees ugly show notes. Remember this gets indexed by search engines. Describes a friend who had a problem with “John Elway Dodge” and now owns that term with a six part podcast. (Chris Sherman mentioned after that John Elway had changed the name of his dealership, and this may have been why).

Remember to submit and “ping.” Submit to all services and directories available. Enable “PingShot” to ensure timely content updates. Remember this is a good way to use popularity. “Cool kids get cooler.” Directories love popularity contests.. Ensure “Auto Discovery” is enabled. This ensures that bots know where the feed lives. There is no limit to how many feeds you can advertise. He designs his to include all relevant feeds. By doing this, just like user agent subscriber-focused servers, you are enabling applications to no be in the position to consume the feeds.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com
In this session, the presentation were a combination online examples how all the paid search engines offer different tactical options in Geographic targeting, SEM Campaign best practices and the importance of Editorial Reviews and Trademark policies. The most interesting key points were that Bidding on Trademark terms in Google does affect the Quality Score as well as Yahoo Panama’s matchdriver which takes misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations and directs them to a primary term. Now, that we have a brief overview, I will now go the key talking points.

The session started off with Brad Geddes Dir. Of Search Locallaunch.com. He spent a lot of time focusing on the many different options on Geographic targeting in Google, Yahoo and MSN. He also walked the audience through the Google adwords target audience settings, as well as the details of Google offering Geo targeted campaigns in 200 different countries with Local targeting is 27 countries. He also went through some examples of Geo targeted ads, Radius Targeting, Multi-map options, Location Targeting Options where users can targets customers in an area whose shape you define. Ad Diagnostic tool. Ads show in different results based on where you live.

Brad then continued to talk about the geo targeting options that MSN and Yahoo offer where MSN supports 200 countries, Local targeting is 4 countries (US, Canada France & UK) and Yahoo Panama supports 23 countries, DMA and State Targeting. He also talked about blocked continents, map or text regions, zip code search, and the one of the most interesting points that each country has different editorial guidelines.

Kevin Lee, Exec. Chairman, Did-it.com
Next up to the podium was Kevin Lee and really nailed it on the head when he said Paid search is targeting humans, not clicks or impressions. He focused on that driving qualified search to interesting prospects is what matters. He walked the audience through the interfaces that the engines offer. Going though the different Matchtypes available on the engines and mentioning the importance of Yahoo’s extended broad match and MatchDriver which tries is figure out what the searcher is looking for. He also talked about
that MSN is experimenting with stemming and that MSN as well as Google prefer that you add plurals to the campaign separately.

Kevin also went into detail about why we need to use match types to determine search intent and to use exact match to maximize quality score. He mentioned best practices such as to mix and match the different match types to maximize SERP coverage; Encouraged users to utilize analytics to look for seasonal, weekly and daily trends track everything such as the time of day, day of the week, geographic, etc… He closed his presentation highlighting on that scale & efficiency of SEM campaigns equals a good strategy.

Mona Elesseily Internet Marketing Strategist, Page Zero Media
Next up to the podium was Mona Elesseily and she focused mainly on search engine editorial review process, as well as Trademark policies. Mona highlighted on the that even though Google MSN and Yahoo have automation in place to speed up the review process, Ads to do not just automatically go live on the engines without some sort of review She also focused on Yahoo in particular still continues to random sweep all accounts to catch editorial infringements and is still performing “case by case” manual reviews.
Mona then discussed the Trademark issue, She mentioned that grammatical errors, superlatives and use of the trademark name do trigger problems. In Google, a user can bid on trademark terms, however not in ads/Creatives and that some trademarks are placed on a “block list” for immediate notification. One of the most interesting points in the presentation what that even though users can bid on trademark terms, it is very likely that it will affect your quality score. In my opinion, this is welcome news for companies who are in bidding wars with their own affiliates, competitors and partners because it makes it has the potential to free up the real estate for the trademark search terms which are generally the most profitable for them.

Session Coverage Provided By: Greg Meyers from Commerce360, Inc.

The SERoundtable team (minus Barry and Tamar) is covering many of the sessions at SES today. Barry and Tamar will be here tomorrow. I wanted to point out if there is any particular session that the reader want covered, leave the suggestion in the comments here. We have quite a few people today covering sessions such as myself Ben Pfeiffer, Chris Boggs, Debra Mastaler, Greg Meyers, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, and Kim Krause Berg. If you happen to see anyone of us, be sure to say hello.

So far the conference is PACKED again this year. Many of the sessions are standing room only. I noticing a lot more big business and companies with new SEO positions represented this year. Additionally have already meet a lot of people from Europe visiting this conference. This has been an ongoing trend over the years as one would expect for more and more businesses to create positions and send those people to learn more about SEO. What a testament to what is going on in this industry. Despite the changes over the last year, the basics are still important as ever it seems in the SEO process. The press room is also quite packed. The internet is fast and consistent (thank goodness) so a thank you to Incisive for making sure we are setup here. If you have followed us for a several years now, you know that we have covered the accessibility to internet for press at these conferences.

Some Recommended SES Sessions Today:

11:00-12:30pm Podcast & Audio Optimization

11:00-12:30pm Ads in A Quality Score World

2:00-3:30pm In House: Building The Team

2:00-3:30pm In House: Advertising In Social Media

4:00-5:30pm Where Are Your Spending Your Clients Money?

4:00-5:30pm Advanced Paid Search Tactics

Welcome to SES NYC 2007! Chris Sherman moderating.

Got in a little late…Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst was speaking. Came to a slide titled “Video and viral are drinking buddies.” I wish I understood that analogy. ;) Anyway, Sherwood was stressing the point that linking works very well to help with SEO. He feels that video is driven by viral marketing, not search engine marketing. Now he will go into video strategies for different industries and applications.

Spread of video throughout the web is happening very fast…6-7 figure traffic per month. So: people have the idea of using video as a content provider. Everybody that produces content on this level has a stake in the game or could benefit from it. Right now…viral marketing is the primary mechanism, so how to leverage that for lasting value? There are bloggers to television networks. They decided to work with a “feeder strategy.” Made two groups of videos, one geared towards YouTube and others towards video SE’s. The goal is to get them back to the website, so that they can view the ads. If you post videos, it is not enough to just be famous on YouTube. This can be used as a foundation for other updated content, which turns into a cycle that keeps feeding users.

Caution: all-in-one video players can cause problems for search engines. Be mindful of how the video is implemented. Sometimes it is made “almost too sophisticated.” Avoid taking that road too quickly without considering possible after-effects. Pages that mix html content with the actual video players will function best. He shows a couple examples of pages with both html and video. The he goes into top ranking videos in standard search results. “Video search is reaching out to the so-called ‘real world’ of search engine marketing.” “Beyonce has a video from YouTube on page 2 of the regular results. CSI Miami on #1.

Video for pharmaceutical companies. Here we have a very different approach. Very regulated, conservative space. Has two approaches: one for onsite/brand portals. Offsite/off-brand veers towards curiosity and entertainment sites. These are dry topics, but video can add depth or dimension to the topics. It ads color/details/life to products. Things like patient interviews on a website, brings life. So far they have not achieved the strongest natural rankings in regular engines for this, but are getting some lift. He shows another example of a medical animation showing the creation of a cell or something, and how it garnered traffic because it was interesting.

Video for ecommerce: make it newsworthy. Showcase anticipated uses of products you sell. For example, if you sell power tools, use them to build a deck. Sell clothing? Use a runway show. Prepare for unanticipated uses of products. These can be very big. One person made an MP3 player out of an Altoids tin. This can be leveraged. Use teaser strategy and bring people to a branded page. Imagine the commercial value of having footage that no one else has, and making it work for your marketing. Brings up the Mentos/Diet Cole example. This was leveraged after by producing additional videos. Shows other videos that show up high. The rap video for Pepto Bismal, etc.

To wrap it up: video pages can be strong contenders in regular search results. Most of today’s videos search success stories are happy accidents. Product demos, testimonials, entertaining commercials – use anything that adds dimension to the products. But don’t fake it (or suffer from massive quantities of negative commentary). Execute your strategy with the right mix of video and text content.

Next is Eric Papczun from Performics. Will dive right into stats. 123 M Americans now consume video online. 7B videos served/month. 72% watch news videos online, 27% once a week. 76% of users are sharing videos. Driving the viral chain. Video consumption is moving from TV sites to video sites and eventually to search. So, will video kill the radio star? Seeing more and more people searching for video than things like music.. The top destinations. He shows share of traffic versus share of video streams. 43% YouTube traffic, but only 9% of video streams. MySpace leads the share of video streams at 20%, followed by Yahoo sites at 11% then YouTube.

The relative share of traffic: 68% Google Video, 21% Yahoo, 8% AOL. Traffic relative to Google.com: 2.20% Google video, 0.69% Yahoo! video. The reality is that most people are using traditional search engines to find videos, or going to a trusted provider like YouTube where they have relationship and a community there. (Last year, Blinkx was garnering lots of press, but they have less than 1% share of traffic.)

The roadblocks: Lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for producers to use. Search is too dependant on text from video’s corresponding we page. Flash video players. Ugly URL’s with lots of parameters. So he says that you should think like the Video searcher. Shows the example of searches for Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld), and how there is a short opportunity to get videos indexed. Shows the top video results at Google for Michael Richards, which are not good. (#1 is titled “the Death of Michael Richards’ career.” People are also searching for Kramer. Those sites that were smart and also optimized for that did a good job of gaining multiple share.

He also advocates surrounding video with html. Recommends keeping videos “off of the root.” Use a separate directory. Also suggests using video site maps, one sitemap linking off of regular sitemap. He advocates using the word video over and over again. The more times you can get it into META data and content, the more success you will have with regular searches. Not a lot has changed in terms of relation to traditional SEO. Link and anchor text are very important. But now file tagging and commenting Are becoming more important. (this makes sense since it is SE-legible content that surrounds the video). There is a whole collection of folks that “sit there and really do the work for you.” Now instead of watching the whole state of the union address, you can watch only the parts that pertain to you.

Shows some common video distribution tools like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Blinkx. Best practices: train editors to think like searchers. Encode for the right keywords – use them in filename. One video per URL (avoid Flash and pop up players). Suggest using tools to remove metadata that is just “noise” getting in the way. Add tagging./ Keep video files in same directory. Surround video w/relevant text. Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text. Create an optimized video sitemap. Upload videos to SEs. Add in-format metadata.

He feels there is a good opportunity to brand yourself in video. Grab real estate around the term video. Really wants you to focus on the keyword video. If you have a good potion in video, you will do well down the road. Paid search helps to capture current stories (like Kramer video” search. Shows and example of top paid listing titled “Kramer’s Racist Rant.” He feels that in Google, video search can be gamed by suing links and anchor text. He shows a chart with correlation between linking and rankings. Not perfectly scientific, but the evidence definitely points to the Goggle video ranking algo using these.

Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative. Talks about the fact that it is exiting to see all these people interested in video search (the large room is pretty full). Why is video search so important? Well, it is free, that helps. There is no cost per action or cost per click. More guys search for video than girls…that’s a surprise. Laughs. He will skip through some redundant content to leave more time for QA. You cannot rely on the big players for the highest view numbers. They often see numbers surprisingly high on the second tier engines.

AOL video search skews entertainment-based searches. They find that focusing only on YouTube is sometimes causing the miss of big surprises when it comes to traffic. More people search for video that news, love, and religion. Video is influencing regular search results. A search for Corvette Video” on Google.com does not return a single manufacturer site. Again, this is free. Many of the video search engines have great integrated viral/community tools. One ting that is hot with VSEO is similar to the commercial blogging enterprises. Tagging teams can help follow regular SEO and help to create artificial interest that leads to additional viral bang.

The list of video SE’s is growing exponentially, weekly. New engine every other day it seems. He shows a list with lots of them, and states that there are still tons left off of it. Goes into basic approaches to optimization and submission types. The uses the word “sexy” for the second time in his presentation which as usual makes me cringe. Shows some examples of encoders that can be programmed to be SEO-friendly. There are three main ways to get content into a video search engine (VSE). The first are crawler-based VSE’s. Another submission type is the upload-based like YouTube. A degree of keyword prominence seems to come into play with these. Keep usability in mind also…use the keywords but include a call to action in creative. The second are the ones where you upload a video. With many of the upload types, you will see requests for specific information: use them!

Third type of submission that is possible after crawl and upload is RSS. Yahoo! Is one of them. They would require and HTML RSS feed, pretty basic. Optimization tips for this include title, description and keyword, as usual. Include this within the RSS structure. If yopu are posting video on a website, make sure you link it from relevant html pages with associated keywords. Goes into some examples of how the process is still manual and somewhat labor intensive. At Infuse, they create a tool to semi-automate the process. This also tracks views. He announces that they will be creating a commercially available version of this tool sometime in the third or fourth quarter.

He does not see the landscape changing soon. Shows some case studies. A Non-profit sex education site for teens. Video and sex education types of keywords – figure this out, it is extremely competitive. They received over 250K video views in the course of two months with only optimization cost. When they talk to companies now, the first thing they ask is what are your video assets. Another case study shows over 1000 video views (brand impressions) per week as a result of their efforts. He echoes that secondary VSE’s can be important especially in some niches. He lists essentially the same best practices as the other speakers.

Before you upload videos, take advantage of the medium. Watermark the lower right hand corner in order to create brand reinforcement like CBSA does for example. Include a brand reinforcement in the first frame of the video. In last frame of video, include an audio or text based call to action. These are simple things that can add to overall marketing benefit. If you really want to be geeky, make sure that you are also optimizing your spoken word. Although voice-recognition is still growing, it is changing rapidly. Additionally, the ability to recognize characters is also improving, so include keywords in the video subtitles, if available. He gives one example of around the Superbowl, many people would use the word “commercial” in their searches. So they actually tagged their commercial with the word commercial, which worked great. Finishes with a list of helpful resources. Blinkx created a wiki for VSEO…can be very timely information.

Note: This is live coverage of SES NYC 2007. Please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors that slipped by n the interest of speed.

What matters when doing big SEO for big brands or big sites with thousands of products? This session will discuss the problems and solutions that marketers run into when faced with such large issues and the best way to handle them.

Jeffery Rohrs opens the session welcoming everyone to the session. It is a very packed and hot session with this the first session about doing SEO in house. Looks like it will be a very good session.

Bill Hunt the CEO of Global Strategies starts first to talk about SEO for big brands. He begins talking about Enterprise key focus areas for large companies and what has the most success. He recommends integrating SEO best practices into the organization at the right levels. Next, implement internal protocols to minimize unexpected problems. Third, integrate search into the web development and management workflow. Style guides and web rule books are important to help dictate search practices. Style guides tell developers where exactly pixels go and so on. These documents can be very detailed but also very important part of the SEO process. Bill will next discuss proving the concept and discussing any missed opportunity matrix will get management support.

So how do you change management? You need to centralize your efforts for success. He puts up a very useful chart of the ways to integrate all the various parts of a big brand into the search marketing initiates. He gives the example of the management team has never met the web team. They meet and exchange cards and chat up the meeting. They can been in the same building but never interact. He says that you need to get these various groups together. Press release team, TV, advertising all need to be part of the process. In a large organization you need to segment the program and look at the infrastructure of the organization. He says they usually hold a best practices session and invites everyone to come. They look at it a couple ways. One from the brand level, group level, and corporate level. What will appeal to these various groups.

Bill broke the process down and asks where is the organization today. He recommends to have executive do searches in Google to see where they are. Having standards work very well in organization because it gives them something to follow. After you have identified the problems and set standards you need to next implement the SEO program. Finally you need to attack the web analytics and reporting tool framework. Bill says that search is one of the easiest to measure in the organization.

He talks next about site wide algorithm compliance audit. Look at things of link popularity, contextual relevancy. What is happening? He recommend building a template for page level audits by putting these into an excel spreadsheet. Start with the basics and work to more advanced topics. He says working with the big three is a good place to start. These are things such as the title tag, headers, and content. The second part to his recommendation is to integrate SEO into your content supply chain. He provides an example of mapping out the clients content creation work flow. There are many ways to track the content through a wiki, blog, articles, etc.. His company also takes a look at style guides. Monitor the infrastructure is also important in order to look for problems that big arise. Pages ranking for words that don’t make sense is a good idea to look at. He recommends creating a page ranking score card and additionally identifying a missed opportunity matrix. He next puts up a document showing the success for certain keywords. He said they call the slide the no bullshit slide, because it highlights how the site is doing in the rankings.

One important ways to understand the cost of not ranking is to show missed opportunity for not ranking well. What does it cost in PPC when you don’t rank in the organic results.

Marshall Simmons from the New York Times starts saying they work with a lot of specific content and organization. He says there are a lot of challenges dealing with 11 million documents, such as looking at why an email registration wall might not be a good idea, also a paid subscription wall and dealing with journalists, editors and guides. The New York times has a company ego which makes it difficult to change different styles of writing and a lot of effort involved in changing the approach to content and SEO.

He next talks about About.com and the integration with the New York Times. About.com is very serious about search and says there will also be opportunity for growth in traffic. So how does About.com get results? They say organized, there is an on-site SEO program manager. They want to engage the team of marketing, technology, research, editorial, and even sales. The SEO are imbedded strategists. In charge of breaking down the areas that need to be analyzed. Small changes could generate major results, affecting vast majority of pages. He gives an example of moving the NYT registration wall back 5 pageviews. More making templates changes that affected entire sections. Cleaning up code is also important. Global search and replaces to remedy spam problems.

Marshall mentions that education is very a important part of the process. Everyone gets one sheet they can refer too. Do ongoing in-depth training sessions. Perform separate training session for technical staff, design, and editorial. Execute strategy and measure results on an ongoing basis. Funny, he says that metrics saves jobs! You have to track way is going on. You need to set baselines monthly, not weekly in order to no what is going on. If you are a publicly traded company these numbers are beneficial to report to investors and all those involved.

So what can big brands do today? Hire an in-house search specialist or SEO project manager. Establish an internal SEO team. Start looking at where you can make the most money. Use solutions like Omniture, WebTrends, Hitwise, etc.. Monitor spider visits, cozy up to IT and do some logfile analysis. Use those results to manage up. Think about metrics that make sense across the company.