December 3, 2007 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: December 3, 2007"

Co-moderated by Kevin Ryan and Kevin Heisler from SEW. Panelists include Mike Grehan from Searchvisible Ltd. (congrats Mike on the new company), Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media, Brad Goldberg from Microsoft Search Business Group, James Lamberti from Comscore, and Jim Muller the tech lead for Google Universal Search.

Mike Grehan briefly introduces some searches at Google to demonstrate the new Google Universal Search layout. He uses the term “Dove beauty workshop,” and describes how some of the results are especially desirable, and that someone would wish they could pay Google for it. The next example is “Bourne Ultimatum” which has “Google Promotion” paid ad and some other results including a “Get Showtimes” “One Box.”

Then Kevin Ryan airs the video of one of the latest ask.com commercials, and pulls up a slide from Comscore, which James presents. He starts off by describing the integrated search and how it is often dominated by engine owned content. From a consumer perspective, the value proposition is changing, but you have to be retrained on how to view the search engine result page. In terms of the data, the most exciting stat is the growth of search: in 2006 20B more queries were conducted than 2005, has grown by 35B queries since 2006.

Integrated search also will have more creative options for Search Engine marketing. The downside is that there will be more competition. 2005: 40% search engine results pages (SERPs) had at least one Google paid ad presentment. 2006: 70%, down to 50% in 2007. On another chart, Yahoo! has remained somewhat flat but the other engines are showing less ads in total, which are still generating more total clicks. Comscore will measure this space by “success rate.” Lastly he pulled up a slide which was down too quick for me to catch but showed the number of times that people actually clicked on a result of the first page. Google led the way with 79% and I did not catch the rest.

Mike talks about how search is changing and this could be a good thing. he compares the experience his kids get at Facebook from the now often-bashed “10 blue links,” and suggests that the Facebook users want more than this. (see this month’s Search Marketing Standard magazine and you will see my opinion on this subject -which I asked about during the QA and was not surprisingly shot down by both Jim and James since I suggest that people may actually grow frustrated by the new formats and yearn for the old school style "10 blue links." Mike Grehan actually approahced me after the panel and jokingly said that he knows a nice search engine in Eastern Europe which would love to have me help them with that interface).

Jim talks about some of the testing they have done, including watching the video right on the SERP, for example. MSN has a hard line policy that says they will not favor the content that comes from MSN. They will never veer toward a paid inclusion type insertion of results, even if it includes their own divisions. Google has always been very careful to carefully differentiate between ad and organic content. With these new results, they have to rework and make decisions as to where they appear. For example, the local results may appear somewhere, but they are clearly identified as being local specific content so that people understand what they are and why they are there.

So far, users really do seem to enjoy Universal Search, according to Jim. James reminds that there is not a lot of data yet, and the lack of data is somewhat relevant to the discussion. He feels that there will be a slow glacier like movement is due to the engines taking their time. Sometimes what you do is ahead of what the consumers are ready for. We have “trained” users for years to look for results in a typical manner, and changing things around requires time for people to get used to it.

Brad (MSN) talks about analyzing the user behavior on their results pages in order to determine what works and why. They want to make the experience better for everyone. Ryan asks if ask.com is moving the needle? James says that ask.com is remarkable because they haven’t lost ground. They have hung in there and are now bigger than AOL and the clear number 4. Ask 3D indicates that they have jumped in with both feet from the blended results side.

Ryan asks what the shelf life of SEO is given these improvements. Mike says that every time he writes “SEO is dead,” people want to drag him to the square and hang him. However, he advises consistently that you have to consider the idea that the ten blue links will go away, as people become more desirous of richer content. Jim agrees but reminds that most people still are not looking for or using this type of content. Mike says don’t stop optimizing now, but understands that the signals are telling us there is more to do on behalf of the clients beyond simple content optimization. James feels that the view through value of search is going to become even more important - it always was, he says, even though not many people talk about it.

Kevin Ryan asks the panel to “tell him something he doesn’t know.” Brad says that when we sit here 5-10 years from now, what we think of search will essentially be the same thing. It is all query-centric. However if you think of the biggest sites on the internet today, those are mostly sites about search like Amazon – searching for books. A lot of what happens will be centered on how the user experience evolves. Jim feels that the vertical search engines will be merged into Google and other search engines. There is a certain way we should be thinking about searchers: they are very busy. As much as they might like Google maps, they may want to only go to one place to find it – he feels that Universal Search has begun the shift towards blending verticals into one interface.

James says if you take travel, for example, there is no way that a search engine could ever provide the same experience as an Expedia or the like. As things become richer and richer, can you actually have one thing that satisfies everyone and is revolving around their actual intelligence.

Barbara Coll in the audience points out that with working with large corporations, when you have to try to optimize different types of content, this makes the job exponentially difficult for the Search marketer who now has to work with 17 different divisions of the client company, and educate each one about the optimization process and need. Mike echoes her sentiment and says that certainly adds time to the entire education process.

Again, this Orion style panel was very interesting – but difficult to blog since the content jumps around so much. You have to come to SES to really gain from a panel like this, I feel. I strongly encourage the panelists to please comment in order to clarify any incomplete thoughts.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Apologies to readers as I came in late due to a scintillating conversation I had with Gary Price over lunch that ran-over. Speaking is Jeff Pruitt from iCrossing who is also the current president of SEMPO and a great guy. He is talking about Cyber Monday. Record 733M, up 21 % versus last year. Number of online buyers was up 38%, and 60+% were using work computers.

So is money really being left online? There needs to be a buy-in on the part of the client – communication has to be effective. He describes a travel client and how they had to map out the individuals involved in touching the website or marketing, and how to understand the objectives of each working group. For example, if it is a bank and they have seven different working groups around the “.com,” in many cases they are not communicating internally. External communication is also important – you need to know what the traditional agencies are doing for the client and how the interactive side can be involved (preaching to the choir here I find this to be so important and so often not pushed). For example if a travel client is saying “go ski whistler” in ads but not creating content online to support it, they are losing money. Worse off is that some competitors could be capitalizing on their offline ads.

Understanding the customer’s language by doing market research (keyword research), you will find examples of how people search may differ from your regular marketing copy or perceived important kws. They also want to create multiple entry points that are focused towards specific relevant searches being conducted – this makes the web site more usable to the visitors. You also have to integrate the search programs. he shows an example of how the overall traffic level rises when search programs are integrated.

Talks about blogging and how it can be integrated into the communication process. Create blogs, post content, and interact with others that are using blogs to find out information about your niche. Then he briefly discusses social bookmaking which can help to further promote the content in a viral manner. The recommends using RSS feeds to help get the word out as well.

Video search is popular, and it’s free. 74% of Broadband users download or watch online video. He recommends the use of view tracking technology like that available with TubeMogul, which is a submission company that pushes out the content to multiple video platforms, and then provides a great back end from a reporting standpoint. Connecting with networks is another important area to focus on in order not to leave money online. He has a Palm case study but will skip over for now. He suggests that there are tools to find networks that are discussing your product or brand online. This is important because if you know where they are talking about you can engage them and hopefully turn them into evangelists.

Kevin Heisler is the moderator of this panel, and he will lead some discussion. It looks as if I missed Duncan White from Oneupweb’s presentation so Duncan if you are reading this please feel free to add your notes to the comments or contact me directly and I will update this coverage.

Questions included what is your favorite keyword research tool? Duncan likes the “Oneupweb process,” which is the use of a variety of tools combined with industry experience to dictate what the focus will be. The key, according to Jeff, is how you crunch the data. He recommends a MSN tool “Ad Sage” that he feels is “really cool.”

How much time should ecommerce sites spend on the various activities that were recommended. Jeff sticks with what Duncan was saying that the basics are not even being utilized the best. For example, many of the retail sites are not using clean information architecture (paraphrased).

How do you segregate B2C from B2B, as it seems like most of the data coming out for retail are B2C? Duncan feels you run into a lot of the same pitfalls along the lines of they want to tell you how to talk about the product in an exact fashion without allowing for thre way people actually search for it. Number one, start off with a plan of all the things you will be doing. Don’t just start a blog – make sure it will be effective and actually host it on your own site, for example. All the principles really do hold the same for B2C as B2B.

Someone asks about keyword density and its importance. Duncan says that this depends on the particular search. SEO isn’t just one page at a time, and you should place the content in multiple areas of the site. Someone else follows up with the difficulty in marrying SEO writing with marketing verbiage and asks how to get around this. Duncan feels that SEO copywriting is an art and a science. Look at the page and figure out how to break it up and find ways to get more occurrences in headers and links for example.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Vice President & Editor-In-Chief, The ClickZ Network

Speakers:
Bill Hanekamp, CEO, The Wall
Ed Kim, Chief Executive Office, Red Bricks Media
Fionn Downhill, CEO & President, Elixir Systems

Rebecca starts off talking about can you build the next chicken? She’s referring to the subservient chicken that Burger King did last year. This is what will be discussed in this session.

Bill Hanekamp

After you’ve optimized and done everything Google asks think about what works so well for Google. They deliver really relevant results. You need to think if your site is relevant for your keywords. Will the person care and will they want to tell others about your site.

You have 2 types of content - Your content and user generated content. Subservient Chicken and Elf Yourself is like catching lighting in a bottle. If you try and replicate it, it won’t be as successful.

Four things that make it Buzzworthy
* Entertaining
* Relevant – have to care about it as visitor
* Timely
* Exclusive

Content Visitors Provide
Engagement - Like miller and their manlaws site.
Referrals (and links) 3rd party sites like YouTube, dig

Nirvana by Dove is the perfect campaign for relevancy. Did a great job of user engagement.

Bill’s final question for the audience to think about was - With all your content does anyone care?

Ed Kim

* Identify and profile the users that we wish to enlist as our buzz agents
* Understand tools and mediums that the target audience is using
* Create content and conversations that they are interested in and feel is buzzworthy

Consumers place high value on 3rd party recommendations. Places that have no link back to the company itself. Consumers are going direct to their communities when looking for guidance and advice.

Key Takeaway
* Identify and influence the influencers

The Empowered User and His Tactics
* The Remarkable
* The Outrageous
* The Hilarious

Fionn Downhill

Free Viral Techniques
* RSS – (news pages, regularly updated content people may be interested in)
* Articles – (costs your time)
* White Papers - (costs your time)
* Adding links to social bookmarks
* Add “email this page to a friend” to your pages
* Social media groups and networking
* Find the influencers
* Prepare your strategy and test your first campaign

Additional Points

Subservient Chicken worked because they thought about their audience and went after them. Teenage boys who loved the rebellious chicken.

Objective isn’t I want a viral campaign, that’s a tactic.

Important to keep an eye on where people are coming from by using analytics.

Once you have content that is interesting to your target then repurpose it. Don’t think about the channels until you’ve done that.

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

Moderated by two of the SEW Kevins – Ryan and Heisler. Ryan does the introduction and welcomes everybody to balmy Chicago. Speakers will be Allan Chapell of Chapell and Associates; Jack Myers of jackmyers.com; Pauline Ores from IBM.

Kevin Ryan said he thought he would change it up a little, this being his first SES fully in-charge. They created a pop culture video mash about search…very funny South Park cut about MySpace pages, and some other good ones. (hopefully they will share this video mash at SEW blog soon). Ryan then points out the multiple references to Google maps as well as various search engines. So what is the missing piece of the equation when it comes to ensuring that your private information within various community sites remains private? Jack explains that many communities are moving towards self-policing and self regulating.

The panelists talked about both the recent Facebook issue with its “beacon” option which essentially broadcasts personal content) and the TJ Max privacy debacle. Pauline says that for every step that IBM takes they consider privacy, which is overseen by their chief privacy officer. According to Allan, the job of a chief privacy officer is to steward information as it goes into and out of the organization. Jack also feels that the consumers are increasingly choosing to become a part of the information network, to allow their information and personal choices to help marketers deliver relevant messages. He feels that more consumers are headed in this direction as opposed to proactively opting-out.

Allan feels that there are not enough tiers of permissions available from an opt-out perspective. He talks about differences in relationships and how they require different levels of permissions. The real choice is often an “either-or” and there needs to be more granularity. Kevin Ryan talks about how when you hire someone one of the first things that you do is look at MySpace and search engines for information. Are people responsible for their own behavior, especially if it is available on MySpace? (rhetorical)

The panelists then shift to discussion about receiving invites and how some people are inundated at Facebook for example with invitations to be friends or join groups. What happens when you don’t respond? People actually “feel dissed” as Jack puts it, that they were ignored. Ryan asks where do we see the sense of community going? Are people getting tired of the “man burning his own (private parts)?” The panel laughs and Jack sees “we never tire of that kind of thing.” Pauline feels that there will be a proliferation of more private Facebook-type communities.

Heisler asks that by definition isn’t everyone who takes part in Facebook and that kind of community sharing this information with the world? Allan feels that people should understand this and not post things to Facebook that they would not want everyone to see. he knows that when people search his name, they will find a variety of things, but that they should hopefully look at the totality of the information before making judgments. Jack says that because people are sharing so much about themselves. “Gaya,” “Club Penguin,” and “Webkinz” are great examples of kids communities which are teaching children to interact with other people in a completely different way. They are learning to respond based not just on thinking before they act, but also to think and act with their gut. The really young generations that are growing up in this world are learning a completely new method of interconnectivity and ways to express themselves. Yes there are predatory-type dangers, but it is more interesting to look at the positives and the way that people are growing.

Ryan talks about search habits and how if you look at them it can provide a “scary window” into their personality. At what point does the information need to become private? He refers to the issues that are coming up in the discussions with Google/Doubleclick and the worries associated with too much information acted on ain aggregate. Allan says that to the questions of when the Search engines need to increase privacy choices and permissions, we should also ask what the user needs to do. When you delete cookies and cache, you are also deleting the ability to receive relevant advertising. It is again incumbent on the industry to provide more options for the admittedly small number of people that want opt-out options. Again he feels that there needs to be a much more granular level permissions process.

Jack feels that it is up to the advertisers to reward people that choose to receive messaging with increasingly more relevant advertising. If the marketers are not providing relevance thanks to the people choosing not to opt-out or block cookies, they should be rewarded. Pauline feels that companies now have an opportunity to have a very different relationship, but it needs to be better and more contextual. Social media is a two way dialogue – not one way. Ryan asks if there is a Darwinian aspect to this that people that do not take advantage of this type of functionality will eventually be culled from the respective societies? Heisler asks how many would cancel their Facebook accounts if they started seeing more ads? No one raises their hands (large room full of people btw). Jack also reminds that a lot of the ads on Facebook are not seen as ads because they are fro Facebook groups or fan pages since people do not see this as an ad and instead a way to be more involved.

The audience is then polled as to how many are on LinkedIn and there are a lot more hands. The difference between LinkedIn and Facebook is that Facebook is more of a social community also being used for business purposes, but that LinkedIn is more of a business community with less social interaction and communication, according to Jack. Pauline says that she views LinkedIn as a Web 2.0 model of an address book. By giving Kevin control of his listing in my address book, this is better since they will maintain it themselves and make updates.

That’s it for this session, which I feel went very well for a prototype.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Darian Rodriquez Heyman, Executive Director, Craigslist Foundation
Ben Rattray, Founder & CEO, Change.org
Nan Dawkins, Founder, RedBoots Digital, Serengeti Communications

Darian Rodriquez Heyman

They take the name and spirit of Craiglist into the community sector via online and in person. They have a non-profit bootcamp. Work with over 150 partner organizations. Calling their new project “entry point” which is a redesign to their website that launches in January.

Traditionally it was about push but now it’s turning into push back. Its more than receiving information and pulling what I want but now it’s about giving back like youtube for example.

Ben Rattray

$220 billion given by individuals in 2006
$50 billion spent on fundraising
Can the internet change this?

The aim was to make it easier than ever to give
Donation portals
Nonprofit websites

But unrealized expectations
Only 3% of current giving is online

Why?

Donations are not like commerce
* People don’t go around looking to donate
* People need to be asked

Failed to address core problems
* Impersonal
* No idea about quality of organization
* No idea where money goes
* No sense of impact
* Not treated as valued member of community

Overcoming barriers to giving
* Peer-to-peer connections
* Personalized communication to donors (unique advantage in terms of having evangelists to communicate for them)
* Collective action & magnified impact
* Status of Web 2.0 Adoption
* Many organizations excited & dedicating resources
* Focused primarily on MySpace and Facebook
* The bottom line: budding interest, but not fully embraced

Future
* Deep Integration - Building communities around organizations

Most of the donors aren’t on the Myspace and Facebook’s but the problem is that it’s hard to build a discreet community on a single organization. Its important to find an in between where non-profits can brand, capture data, and directly communicate with their supporters through one space. Branding is very important in doing so (Flickr, Yelp etc..)

You need a sufficient amount of content and a large user-base in order to bring people back. That makes building your own social network tough. It's worse to build a social network for your brand that has little to no activity for your brand than to have none at all. Start out by using Facebook and sites that are already out there.

Nan Dawkins

Early Web 1.0 non profit sites just told people its all about me.

Nonprofits and web 1.5 got people more involved to take an action.

They are using social media channels to drive people to do the same things as before (donate, take action) so its still all about me as an organization telling you what to do.

People are now creating content and pushing causes with absolutely no affiliation or organization. Woman raised $2 million dollars off 1 YouTube video and blog (ironmatt.org)

When you have a social network that is based loosely around your cause they tend to work well but the narrower you get, the tougher it becomes.

In a web 2.0 world:

Companies no longer own their brands

NPO’s no longer own the cause
No longer control the message

.... Its really a partnership now

* You are no in control of the message
* The cause comes before the brand
* Focus on creating/facilitating evangelists (not just donors)
* Pay Attention: What interests them, what motivations them, what are they doing because they want to?
* Help Them

Can I use Web 2.0 for fundraising?

You can but you’re only focusing on the tip of the iceberg.

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

SES Chicago 2007 Day 1 Session 2: Meet the Web Analytics Players
Vendors from major web analytics services each covered different metrics challenges plus answered questions about measuring success and their tools in general.

Moderator: Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM:
The industry has grown extremely fast over the last few years and if you’re not using it [modern analytics] you’re far behind the curve. Whether online or off, analytics are used to determine where the customer comes from, their behavior within content, and associated conversion.

Speakers:
Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc.
The traditional SEM conversion path is about impressions, clicks, and conversion. Adding modern analytics to the mix evolves the path to: impression, click, site interactions with content with content, and conversion. He discussed newer metrics available with the advent of modern analytics software.

The universal metrics are bounce rate (who leaves after 1 page), time on the site per visitor, page view per click, “metrics, analytics, “success events, or “KPIs” mean the same things.

Conventional Retail metrics include orders, revenue, conversion rate (orders / clicks), cost per order (cost / orders).

Modern analytics afford additional metrics including. Average order value, visit yield, average retail, cart creations, cart conversion rate, cost per cart creation, checkouts, checkout conversion rage, cost per checkout, monthly unique visitors, average time on site, days since last visit, return visit frequency, advertising cluck rate, revenue per page, ad impressions, ad clickthroughs, and, subscriptions.

Lead generation metrics are generally used for technology or b2b sites and include leads initiated, total leads completed, lead conversion ratio, lead completion ratio, and cost per lead.

Financial vertical metrics include applications initiated, applications saved, applications completed, application value, and applications approved.
Thomas Grant, Director - Internet Marketing Solutions, Unica Corporation:
Marketing channels are evolving and are much more about an online/offline funnel than direct response to search. A huge amount of people convert offline.

Unica’s “Enterprise Marketing Management” approach uses software to deliver marketing process efficiencies, customer dialog precision, and accountability across all channels. The marketing system of record is a cycle: analyze, plan, design & product, execute, measure, and begin the process again.

Web analytics are a key component using KPI dashboards & reports, frictionless ad hoc analysis, granular, visitor level insight to drive profitable action.

Click fraud

Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics:
Version 2.0 was launched in May 2007. It’s focused on making analytics to people at all different levels. The new dashboard report, allows for custom configuration of critical data and automatically emailing reports.

Recent announcement: Internal site search, event tracking, outbound link tracking without tags, new optional GA JavaScript, urchin 6 software now in beta.

Internal site search is the ability to learn what people search for within you site once visitors arrive. Reports will include: who search/when, what were they searching for, what page did they initiate the search from.

Event tracking for rich internet applications will solve the problems of using Flash, Ajax, and other media types which don’t usually show up in analytics. This feature will create “virtual page views.” These types of objects, actions, and labels will provide more insight.

Outbound link tracking (tagless) will help users understand what the exit destinations are.
Google is creating a new JavaScript tag called ga.js which they are migrating to. It will be optional. Moving towards object oriented coding style. It’s faster, smaller source file and more readable for professional developers. It has auto-detection of server protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) which eliminates security-related issues. There’s faster download for non-secure pages. Most importantly, it’s the backbone for event tracking and outbound link tracking.

Urchin software version 6 from Google is in beta. The software will cost $2995 and will be free if you bought advanced support previously. You can apply what you paid for Urchin 5 towards version 6 and will be sold and supported through GAAC partners.
It is notable that, while the session was called meet “THE” analytics players, a number of major analytics vendors were not represented.

Marty Weintraub writes for aimClearBlog and is President of aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency specializing on organic / paid search along with social media marketing.

Moderated by Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ, who warmly welcomes the attendees and introduces the session’s only speaker.

Brian Eisenberg of Future Now Inc. Will present his views on redefining the customer. He talks about the Marketing (r)Evolution by showing a picture of three guys sitting on a couch receiving information through media., Now instead of being passive participants, you have people that are way more involved. He will talk about how the customers’ behaviors have evolved. He shows a slide of research that showed that 47% of people claim that “sleeping” is another thing that they do while watching TV. The economics of mass marketing works for those that accept that not everyone will see/listen to the ads. He shows a slide of a picture of someone asleep in front of a computer and talks about how this is unlikely.

He then shows the GoDaddy commercial from the 2006 super bowl and asks why they deliver people to a different model on the home page than the one they had used for two years straight in commercials. He thinks GoDaddy left money on the table by not including the model on their home page. This year he feels “they caught the pass,” because they included her on the home page.

Will now talk about the customers (FYI it is very hard to cover Brian because he speaks very fast and jumps around slides, so you will have to see him in person next time – no knock, his presentation is great but just fast). World of mouth has grown into the muscular beast, Interconnectivity, and now moves with lighting speed. The new definition is that we are all connected better than before and faster than before and we want to participate in the communication., You can no longer outrun consumers. Marketing redefined: we are moving away from mass marketing model and away from “push” more towards “pull” marketing. Consumers will only become more demanding.

he talks about “Waiting for your cat to bark” and what he was talking about in that book. He talks about the fact that a dog has a master, and a cat has a staff. Talks about Pavlov and how his work affected marketing. “Marketing, behaviorism., and bells.” If we can create triggers, or ring the bell in the customers’ minds, then they will salivate. This worked really well on dogs, but what would have happened if he used this on cats? Marketers have been treating their customer if they were dogs - ring the bell and they will come. Now that no longer works. The cats and search have changed the nature of this relationship. This fits in with the history of evolution of marketing and sales – every step in the evolution has done one thing: reduced the friction on the customer, but conversely this has made it harder for the marketer. The internet essentially provides a frictionless environment.

He talks about Seth Godin’s work and how he understands how things have changed. You cant use the old marketing “the meatballs” with new customers. Slide about “always be closing” from “Glen Gary Glenn Ross” (movie). How many would dare buying a car today without going online first? We can now walk into the dealer knowing more than the sales ;person. All of our BS meters have grown exponentially, and we can hear marketing speak from miles away. Naturally, marketers resist change. What have people done: attack of the blogs – they destroy brands and wreck lives (from Forbes 11/14/05).

As consumers, how often do you trust marketers? The landscape is that now consumers trust other consumers over marketers. 54% resist 56% avoid 69% block advertising. Yet we still want to buy. New customer definition #2: customers will control the conversation. This is about developing real relationships. He thinks it is related to the divorce rate in this country as well…people have forgotten about relationships. He talks about the customer journey that is the buying process. Now the evaluation stage involves so much more like customer reviews, etc.

The problem is that will all the attention to the online world for marketing, only 26% of people reports that they are satisfied with the online shopping experience. They did a large study of customer experience, and the average score was 43 out of 100. Issues: no enlarged images or fonts. No information about in stock, availability. Only 58% of online marketers correctly answered a customer email within 48 hours. remember that all this online experience influences offline experience as well. Brand differentiation – studies show that the best investment that a marketer can do is to invest in improving the customer experience. We are so concerned with the “:how many” that we forget about the “who?” Conversion rates are disappointing 3.2% in 2002 down to 2.4% in 2006.

You can’t create an experience for the who. You create the system your visitor must navigate. Customer only care about how they buy, not how you sell them. They need specific information and often it isn’t there. So what is relevance that the customers are looking for? He talks about Hypocrates and the breakdown of relevance. Competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic. Then goes into how they interact with content (Myers Briggs) Interactive – info gathering – decision making - lifestyle. All these different factors will determine how people want to gather information from you. You cannot simply give them a 250 word statement and expect them to buy.

Google explains relevance…a quote from Krishna Bharat of Google. Then talks about Jakob Nielsen he has been talking about the fact that users ignore the navigation area – either the content is on the page or they click the back button. Then a slide (probably #50 by now at least) about a Lincoln Study. Then a Jarrod Spool quote. Then the typical visitor patterns – I want, it’s not there (then they bounce). 2. “Pogo stick” they look through product pages and category pages and eventually give up and leave. Does your site stink? (in a good way) Does it give people the scent? Talks about a Geico ad and the experience that people can have with being asked for too much information too quick.

He shows a recent viral example at zafu.com… the Bra Scientist Video. Then he wonders why the home page didn’t capitalize on it. Everything matters online – user experience, SEO, etc, but if you have lipstick on a pig, it will still be a pig. Who si the father of modern usability? He then talks about Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization: Is it functional, is it accessible, is it usable, is it intuitive, is it persuasive? Each step is important. Persuasion Architecture: 1 Uncover deep motivations, 2. map the customer journey, 3.Predict and excel at key points, 4. execute even if it is wrong, 5. Master story telling to convey intent, 6. Define, measure, and test continually. he talks about a case study of overstock.com in which using a simple process made huge gains – changing one picture resulted in $25M.

Highlights of Brian’s comments during QA: Persuasion is hard work…it is a lot like sweat equity. Create a better experience of the customers, and people will come. Customers are expecting one-on-one conversation.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Welcome to the Search Engine Roundtable coverage of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2007. The crowd seems to be fairly large, with people trickling in and smooth lines in the registration booth. I am excited to get things cooking!

This first session will be moderated by Dana Todd of SiteLab International, who is also on the SEMPO Board of Directors. She welcomes everyone to SES Chicago, and announces some of the new formatting, including the Orion panels.

John du Pre Gaunt from eMarketer will kick the session off, with a slide deck titled “Mobile Search and Marketing Dollars.” He will be providing some information based on studies performed during July 2007. Briefly introduces eMarketer, and his mobile-defined role there. Talks about “the stakes.” This is a battle of the newest and possibly biggest digital interface that has become available since the World Wide Web. Nobody has “cracked the problem cold” circa 2007. We are still looking for the search category and/or specific mobile search needed to drive it into the mainstream. This is a process involving technical considerations combined with social engineering. There is a social environment where search is now integrated into people’s activities, but mobile search isn’t there yet – primarily he feels because there isn’t a main industry or category focused on it.

The three major industries so far are mobile telecom, web portals, and Yellow Pages/Directories charging into mobile search. With very few exceptions, the biggest web players and the biggest telecom players don’t like sharing with each other. It is hard to transfer search history and other collected data between the two, in order to better serve the searcher. The cliché that “mobile search is about answers instead of links” is not totally true. It is true that the consumer is more often on the cusp of making a decision or taking an action – the trick is how easy they can turn their search into a direct action.

The mobile search advertising objectives are typical: classic direct response content sales, local advertising, branding, etc. If you wrap them together, mobile is in fact a marketing interface. let’s start talking numbers. They feel there will be 900 million global mobile users worldwide by 2011, and shows a chart depicting the growth of mobile search revenues from 6.8m in 2006 to 2.3B by 2011. U.S. specific: by 2011 around 55M mobile search users (daily or several times a week) versus 64.8M total mobile internet users. The US revenues will grow to 700m into 2011. Kelsey Group predicts US mobile search revenues in 2011 at about 920M, which even though is 200m separate, this is statistically “close enough.”

There is a strong correlation with mobile internet use and mobile search. of the people using mobile internet, 75% will search, where those not using mobile internet regularly only 20% will use it to search. He then shows a iCrossing study result showing actual use numbers that I didn’t catch. Scale: planning for world wide smart phone shipments. You have to start planning now for during Christmas 2009 when a $99 Blackberry will be available that will be able to handle mobile html and has qwerty keyboard. In 2011, 324M units will be sold. Networks are also important. There is a correlation with mobile search use and higher speed networks. 3G versus non-3G subscribers indicate a much higher percentage of users on the 3G side.

Lastly, on the monetization aspect, initial consumer receptivity to seeing ads is there. People are willing to use systems that charge lower monthly subscription fees and include advertising. He shows a couple slides to illustrate his opinion that there will be some consolidation in this market over the next few years. Dana asks the crowd if they are taking mobile budget out of existing search budget versus other budgets like brand budget. Most say the search budget. John says that people are still often in experimental stage using “play money.” Some audience members echo this idea. Some industries are now in full blown use, like entertainment and food and beverage. They feel that travel is also starting to play a bigger role, having “more serious” mobile search campaigns.

Dana asks if we all still need to go ot and make WAP versions of our sites? John feels that WAP as a separate build over time will start to diminish towards something more html like. However, how WAP handles data is actually pretty good, so he feels there will still see a certain amount of WAP investment in another area of the stack. Dana follows up with is it important to buy up “.mobi” extensions? John feels this is still a growing area, but some people are starting to look into this.

About use: not many people are using mobile search yet for random things like being in a bar in Scotland and wanting to know who Henry the 8th’s 5th wife is. Most searches still involve local services etc, which is a problem since so many of the smaller local sites have not built m specific landing pages.

Jeff Torgeson, Idearc Media Corp. he starts about the difference between mobile local and mobile local search. he is coming from it from the mobile local space, and he kind of thinks of it as a feed like product. He talks about the players that do great things in mobile local, like Google, superpages.com, en pocket, admob, ad infuse, Idearc, third screen media, and Yahoo!. The mission for them is to make this an easy industry/marketing tactic for executives to understand. Others include Android and Moorestown, which is coming out from Intel in about 2009 with a new mobile ad platform. These two show that people are thinking differently about what will happen in this space in the future. If you start talking about having a WAP site and there is no proven money there, executives will not like this. We have to engage the small business owners to get on board, and then once they have success there will be a hockey stick effect and lots more larger companies joining in.

They are trying to figure out through their YP sites and superpages.com how to best move forward in this space. They are trying to solve the problems of landing on irrelevant or non content-rich pages, which lowers user experience (paraphrased). He hopes that people will start using more of an adaptive rendering type of system in order to display the proper content – we need to make some technology progress there.

They found that Mobile Local users are definitely transactional in nature, like John did. Types of things people search for: large retails chains (surprising considering you would think people would know where they are in their area), dine out/go out, home improvement, and traditional brand. They have been testing limiting the number of categories coming back to users. For example, a search for “coffee” will not return the bulk/wholesale coffee results, since it unlikely that m users are looking for that.

Shows a slide of a baby trying to grab a big jug of milk, captioned “want.” This describes how people are when they are on Mobile Local Search. If someone is looking for a service, and they have a GPS phone, and you can prove to them that they showed up at the doorstep, this would be a cool way to add value to the MS ad market. Need to be more forward thinking on the types of ads served.

They are focused on User Experience. Blackberry: keyword versus category searches are an example of the types of things they can analyze to improve UX – since most users on both Blackberry (around 55%) and iPhone (around 75%) use category searches. He doesn’t believe in the need to build out .mobi sites, etc, but feels that you should focus on the one site and provide better technology to sniff the browser.

Dana says she is sick to death of hearing “it’s great – go buy it.” Asks the audience what kind of traffic/results they have been getting? One audience member is not satisfied at all with the traffic. She asks from a “newby” perspective how to actually setup a mobile ad. Jeff says that the industry is very fragmented right now so it is difficult to learn how to do it. Not pushing YP, but that is a good way to approach the space John adds that if you are learning, you better have “funny money” because it may take some time to test to fruition. He thinks that we are in a similar stage to mobile search as regular search was in the mid-nineties. So, buy mobile space through YP or ad networks. “It truly is a ‘one check’ kind of deal right now.”

Dana had asked Yahoo! why there isn’t a single interface to deal with all these systems? She said their answer made her kind of mad, because they suggested that SEMs should be creating this. What are the emerging technologies for managing and tracking this stuff? Jeff encourages that advertisers should think about the differences in the space – it is presently more difficult to provide just one platform for all this since everything is still so fractured.

That will be all for now…catch the rest of the Q/A at the next SES. Note that the new SES format of having moderator-led discussion after the presentations and prior to audience questions went nicely, as Dana was able to handle this well.

***Note this is “live” unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist.

Moderator:
- Kevin Ryan – Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch.

Speakers:
- Motoko Hunt – Founder, Japanese Search Marketing Strategist, AJPR LLC
- T.R. Harrington – Director of Strategic Direction & Product Development, Darwin Marketing
- Erica Schmidt – Global Director of Search, iProspect

Motoko Hunt

Japanese Internet Market

87.5 million on Internet
68% penetration
50% Broadband mix

More access via mobile than pc. Word of mouth marketing is huge in Japan. They believe what they read on blogs so harness that but be careful as to any negative comments that may be posted about your company and react.

Social Networking and Gaming is huge on cell phones there. Students are doing all their online activity via cell phones.

Yahoo and Google allow you to get search results from all webpages or from Japanese pages only. (check boxes) No need for .jp domain when searching from those two sites.

Search Box is getting popular on all advertising including television. Ex. Ad tells you to go to a site and enter a keyword. (My thoughts are that because of the cell phone penetration that keyword marketing keyword use makes total sense and this is why its so big)

Language Issues
4 different sets of letters and characters
No spaces segmenting the words
Spelling variation for words

Translation Challenges
Not the best message for culture
Lose keyword density
Ad copies to long or short
Use less popular words

Different words, spelling, characters sets etc..
Select target keywords – create keywords list, translate english keywords

Shopping
Payment options – credit card, mobile, wire transfer, net banking, cash on delivery, pay at convenience stores, points (not coupons)

Budgets are growing rapidly and companies are bringing more services in-house





T.R. Harrington

Search inside China

Baidu is the market leader in China. Their share in search traffic has increased to 68%. Google has just 23%

Revenue Growth U.S. 234 Million in 07

Baidu shows paid search ads before the natural or organic results. For popular words you may not see natural results on page 1 or even page 2. Take that into account when dealing with China.

Baidu just released API but the platforms are much different. The china search engine market is very young. Their advertisers need a much more simple interface. There are much fewer options with their search engine marketing because of a lack of education on search engine marketing and internet marketing in general

Paid Search
- High click-thru rates (assumed; Baidu provides no CTR%)
- Faster CPC price increases (largest in the world) (Jan-May 70% in select industries)
- Relatively few optimization variables

Natural search
- Keyword selection methodology
- Traffic estimation tools in china unreliable (Google has even recommended not using their tool in China)

People in China are willing to open many windows at 1 time when running searches (ex of 8 or so windows). Searchers want something that’s very tangible.

Advertisers have very little experience with brand marketing so they aren’t ready to bring their SEM in house as opposed to Japan and Australia.

People are still primarily buying offline even though online commerce is growing. Limited data at this time on search. Portals in China do not give out impression data so they don’t sell CPM based on portals.



-------------------------------------------------------------

Erica Schmidt

Australia’s Uniqueness

2 years behind the US

2007 estimated 67% of population is online
Growth rate of broadband has been slower and less availability

Google 72% Yahoo 4%
Google 17% MSN 4%
Google has almost 97% share in Australia

Marketers are purely focused on paid search in Australia

72% of the clicks on Google are on the natural search results so SEO is very important in that market.

About 40% of spend online is dedicated to search because of such a huge amount of participation.

Important Things to Consider
Volume, Leverage video content by using YouTube (Video and Maps very new, Understand the market, Social is still new only about 10 to 12% penetration rate, Trust (concern about identity theft – build relationship with customer make them feel safe), Creating Time, Respect cultural distinctions between US and Australia, Don’t leave money on the table in terms of organic search engine optimization.

Because of broadband experience the shopping cart is very important because of lower connections speeds.

Since trust levels are lower many are using search as an offline mechanism for in store buying. Big opportunity is around Travel because of the amount of Travel that Australians do.

Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.

Scott Hendison (who I met at a variety of search conferences and will see at Pubcon -- hi!) blogged about MSN ignoring 301 redirects: a site he had that ranked #1 in MSN was completely gone. After investigation, he found that the 301 was being ignored:

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page.

Over at Sphinn, it's not a shock. Apparently MSN has been doing this for years. Yahoo and Google took awhile to sort out their redirects. The question is: does Microsoft know about it and do they intend to fix it?

Some suggest that they don't:

It's been a known fact that Microsoft prefers making new standards rather than follow it.

Well, what's the new standards for a permanently moved page?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Matt Cutts recently spoke with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and made a few interesting statements that elicited some interesting forum response.

First, WebmasterWorld members were particularly interested in this statement:

we did do a full PageRank update several weeks ago - there's less PageRank flowing around in some areas (e.g. search and SEO). Vanessa Fox's site dropped by one as well, and for her as well, it's just a case where less PageRank is flowing in some niches of the net. PageRank doesn't always monotonically increase.

The forum member asks if Google is being selective in key vertical markets.

Well, this is news. At first, we were all concerned about the attack on paid links since Google is clearly declaring war on paid links. The suspicion that more popular niches get negatively affected is a whole new ballgame.

So this could be related to a "balance of popularity" as one member puts it.

If some areas gain in overall link share, or entirely new segments are introduced (with some hype) they will be calculated into or even become (or come closer to be considered ) the new scale, the new meaning of PR 1, 5, 10.

Which means all the people who were saying that PageRank 4 is the new PageRank 5 were right.

Very interesting.

DigitalPoint Forums members (particularly Michael Vandemar) find another statement made by Matt of concern:

To say "page A shouldn't rank at this position because it has paid links" commits the logical fallacy that it's the paid links that cause page A to rank, as opposed to the other links to page A.

In other words, just because a site is buying links does not mean that it shouldn't rank well.

The discussion goes on to suggest that those who sell links are the only ones who will really be penalized from this, but not those who buy links. As another member puts it, Google is so dependent on backlinks that this is a "fear" tactic to prevent this.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

This weekend has been a landmark time in the SEO industry. To huge blog posts, with dozens of policy changes over the past couple of weeks, have been instrumental in what makes this weekend so significant. The official Google Webmaster Central blog has a post by Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye named Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank and Matt Cutts himself wrote his own post with extreme examples of paid links named Selling links that pass PageRank. Matt's blog has over 200 comments already, and the discussion throughout the SEO world is running rampant.

Here is a quick run down of some (not all) of the threads out in the space on this topic:

• Buying/selling links that pass PageRank from Google Groups
• Official Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank from Sphinn
• New Post from Matt Cutts on on Paid Links/Blog Posts... from DigitalPoint Forums
• Matt Cutts Expounds On Selling Links That Pass PageRank from Sphinn
• Matt Cutts & Maile Ohye on buying / selling links from Search Engine Watch Forums
• Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines from WebmasterWorld
• Offical Word From Google About Paid Links from Cre8asite Forums

I have read most of all of that conversation, and skimmed the rest. Overall, we learn a few things from it:

• Some are upset with the harsh, real-life example Matt Cutts used in his blog. Not all cases of paid links are that extreme. But to Matt's favor, Google has to worry about the extreme and non-extreme cases.
• Even in cases with Google, "editorial" posts by the Google Checkout Blog may be seen as paid in nature, is a matter of what is perceived. (this is important for later)
• Which may be why Google has removed the requirement to say you are guilty of something when you file a reconsideration request.
• Google is becoming more careful with how they link from their other properties. In fact, they redirected a bunch of static links through a robots.txt to block any PR passage.
• Google has now disallowed AdWords ads that mention selling PageRank. But I now see some new ads for those types of keywords.
• Google has hit hundreds of sites that sell text ads that can pass PageRank

The list goes on, but I feel those are the most discussed topics here.

As I wrote in my Theory: How Does Google Determine Which Sites Sell Links? it was us, SEOs and Webmasters who caused the drop in sites PageRank that sell links. But it goes much much further than that. If you look at much of what Google and Matt Cutts is saying, they admit to having a really tough time finding which links are paid and which are not. In fact, that is why Google has been so aggressive with encouraging SEOs and Webmasters to report paid links, without us, Google would not be able to fight paid links.

Google said they have no problem with banner ads or affiliate links. Matt said:

We've spent most of our time talking about paying money for text links or paid posts, because Google does a pretty good job of detecting and handling things like affiliate links or banner ads.

Since Google has a really hard time detecting paid links, they need manual intervention. That is where we came in and provided Google with all this data. Data they can use to press the big red button and data they can use to improve their paid link algorithms.

Do I blame Google. No way! They had to do this. It was smart. But for us to complain about this after we, ourselves, reported sites that were buying or selling links? We can't complain as an industry.

The bottom line is that Google has no choice but to do what they can to make sure their algorithms do not get manipulated. Google was lacking in one area - paid links - so they asked us for help - which we graciously provided.

The main issue is what is a bad paid link? Google cannot say, so now they must wipe out all paid links no matter of editorial conduct. But they can't. They can't wipe out Yahoo Directory links, they can't wipe out every paid link. So they have to pick and choose. That is where people get upset. Either all paid links get wiped out or none. The gray area of search has just expanded a whole lot with this, a whole lot.

Forum discussion at the following threads:

• Buying/selling links that pass PageRank from Google Groups
• Official Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank from Sphinn
• New Post from Matt Cutts on on Paid Links/Blog Posts... from DigitalPoint Forums
• Matt Cutts Expounds On Selling Links That Pass PageRank from Sphinn
• Matt Cutts & Maile Ohye on buying / selling links from Search Engine Watch Forums
• Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines from WebmasterWorld
• Offical Word From Google About Paid Links from Cre8asite Forums

I hope to have an even more comprehensive post at Search Engine Land within a couple hours, if possible.

A WebmasterWorld thread has dozens of reports from SEOs and Webmasters that Google has dropped the number of pages they indexed of their sites.

Here is one such report:

On all the searchees I look at a regular basis I am now seeing millions less results posted.

Some searches 10 million less some searches 2 million less and so on. It kinda looks like a certian percentange have been dumped from the database.

I am still able to go to the 900 result so this is the same just millions of results less.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster, believes it may just a display change. He explains, "just a change in how they get that total number to report." But he is not sure based on some of the differences he is seeing in Google today.

Marcia, legendary WebmasterWorld member, has her own thoughts:

I don't believe they're dumping any data at all. It's my belief (or best guess) that what we're seeing is because they're utilizing statistical query data and making use of partitioned indexing to maximize the efficiency and speed of returning query time results.

Yes, this is nothing new. An older WebmasterWorld thread from over a month ago reported the same issue. But then many reported Google returning the pages after a couple weeks. Now the issue seems to have come back?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I just reported about a Google Image update but it seems with that update, Google has removed a very important feature. Typically, if you click on an image in Google images, it will open that image in a framed window. Part of that framed window will contain a Google Search box at the top and the page the image came from in the bottom half.

What is now missing is the "Remove This Frame" link from Google Image search.

You can of course click on the "Below is the image in its original context on the page: URL here" option to take you directly to the image source. But the "remove this frame" link has been removed.

A WebmasterWorld is discussing this now and some are mentioning that Google is currently testing out new layout options for this feature. For me, I currently don't see the "remove this frame" text anywhere. However, some say it was "renamed and moved to the other side of the screen." Time will tell.

Forum discusison at WebmasterWorld.

Both DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld are reporting Google has updated the Google Image Search index and algorithm over the weekend.

Many people are noticing new images being found in the image search engine. Also some are noticing that Google is more particular about which images they are showing. The SafeSearch filtering tool, which allows you to define how safe you want your results, seems to have been fine tuned a bit also. The three options include:

• Moderate filtering excludes most explicit images from Google Image Search results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you’ll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
• Strict filtering applies SafeSearch filtering to all your search results (i.e., both image search and ordinary web search).
• No Filtering, as you’ve probably figured out, turns off SafeSearch filtering completely.

If someone turns this filter on, there are reports that many images are missing from the results that should not be missing. The suspicions are that if a site that isn't "family friendly" is linking to that image, Google will include it in the filtered results. Even if that image is family friendly and even if that image is on a site that is family friendly.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, tries to offer some type of explanation from Google on this:

Google wants to be extra careful with images (they've recently shown some embarrassing images quite prominently in "universl" search results)

But Tedster still believes this behavior is a bit out of the norm.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

It has been WebmasterWorld about a possible update that started rolling out on December 1st.

Some reported seeing an update and then said Yahoo seemed to have rolled it back. But now more are reporting seeing significant changes in the Yahoo Search results.

Of course those who are negatively impacted are the loudest:

Observing lots of changes in Yahoo

Rankings have started to disappear :(

We currently do not have a "weather report" from the Yahoo Search Blog announcing the update. But typically, we beat out Yahoo posting such news by a day or two.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.