August 19, 2008 Archives

Many companies find it difficult to use web analytics for more than reporting and ad hoc investigations. By defining requirements, roles, tasks, and benchmarks, an efficient process replaces one-off requests. This session covers practical workflows that you can quickly implement to see improved, consistent returns from your data. This sets a platform for experience-based learning that helps a company to set standards, anticipate a build-cycle or campaign refresh, and prioritize search marketing efforts.
Moderator:
Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert & Manager, SEO, Brulant, Inc., recently acquired by Rosetta
Speakers:
Craig Danuloff, Founder & President, Commerce360, Inc.
Brian Cosgrove, Site-Side Analytics Engineer, AvenueA / Razorfish
Heather Dougherty, Analyst, Hitwise
Michael Stebbins, CEO & Founder, Market Motive
Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics, Google

First up is Craig Danuloff.

Roadblocks and challenges are the topic we'll be discussing. Lots of challenges in paid search, based on data, organization, bad habits.

Three factors of evil - what your up against - when digging into analytics.

1- Invisible info - data we want that's not there. Lots of pieces that we can't quite get to.
2- Deception - things are not what they seem to be.
3- Unlimited powers and resources.

Invisibility - most important is the full spectrum of what's going on in search process. The start and the end of what your measuring is missing. The queries that match the text ads are vital. This info is not as available as it should be. Want to know every query paid for and that's difficult.

Profitability is also difficult to measure. Done on an ROI basis non on ROAS basis. In order to do that must enter margin information. Sometimes hard to come by. Lots of times positive ROAS does not correlate with positive ROI. Want to enter margin for each good enter, and take that against true cost to make decision.

Deception: Can you trust what you see? Lots of keywords, and campaigns - what comes back in reports are averages - rollups. If you haven't carefully constructed grouping - without looking inside. Brand terms vs. non brand terms are a great example. Need to segregate.

Accuracy: It would be nice to know if the sample is statistically significant - tools don't take this into account.

Unlimited power and resources - massive amount of data and a time frame that's ever rolling. Really need to watch where you put energy and effort. The tool set does not give you direction on where to make decisions. Also, always making lots of changes with keywords, creatives, bids. Competitors are doing things. Often make changes without recording them. Tool sets don't provide this today. We need to watch our tests, otherwise we are just guessing day after day. Sometimes need to be disciplined and not make 50 changes a day.

What can you do to deal with these issues? To deal with missing information - demand to get the info on the query and ROI. Adwords for example does not tell us which keywords were connect to queries. Omniture has a tool that helps with this. ROI and margins - same thing. All a matter of awareness. Understand that averages and aggregates must be segregated into homogeneous piles in some level - so that they are meaningful. Low performers, high performers need to be segregated. The rollup must be a narrow component of info to be useful.

Lastly - better math we can apply. Take the data and put it into Excel. Make records of changes. When you go back and see which change was positive.

One tiny tip is to organize keywords in groups with exact match, phrase match, and broad match separately.

Next up is Brian Cosgrove of Avenue A.

Started out as an inhouse SEO and has an engineering background.

First topic is implementation. Poll: How many are running paid and organic. Almost everyone. Who has a base feed? A local feed? Videos? All these things are on the same page and any analytics package will record this as organic if not configured properly. It's going to bucket them together. Need to know ahead of time to make sure that the system can separate that stuff out. Especially things like paid inclusion.

Filtering: Many do not take into account that a lot of internal traffic comes in for many reasons. Important to filter. Look at reports and look for things you don't understand. Very useful for SEO campaigns. To get good statistics, need to take action on your site.

Data driven organization - people within an organization will request different reports. Many are not using this to drive business decisions. Comes down to roles. Analysts are good at deciphering the data. Come up with insights to feed to developers, PR teams, specialists (PPC/SEO) and lots of other individuals in the organization. One role is missing - the operations person. The project manager. Someone needs to have the foresight to get developers together, content writers, and line it up ahead of time with a concrete list of recommendations to act upon.

Case study: A company changed their site every six weeks. Spent first four weeks going through data. Next two weeks were dedicated to handing off the business requirements to hand off to other team members. When that's handed off, the project manager takes over. The analyst switches gears and move into another mode - maybe landing paid optimization or other areas not addressed. The analyst is putting together action lists all the time.

A few specific reports you should look into- landing pages for organic search. Looking at those pages is extremely important. How landing pages relate to keywords is fundamental in paid and organic. Often the page that ranks well for the word is not the best landing page. Sometimes you get lots of traffic to pages that are not bringing people to their objectives.

Conclusion:
-Implement platform correctly
-Identify actions you can take
-Coordinate with other resources
-Separate the analysis cycles
-Staff people to manage changes

Heather Dougherty from Hitwise is up next.

Using CI to identify and maximize SEM Opportunities.

Identify and maximize SEM Opportunities. Identify trends. Shows slide of a retail brand. Shows Christmas and "back to school" patterns. Be able to plan ahead for trends instead of reacting.

Look at the breakdown between paid and organic within specific industries. Learn competitiveness and pricing. These ratios help you get a benchmark of whats going on. Knowing what competitor is doing is critical. Look at which search engines are sending traffic to competitors. Learn about their strategies. Look at ratio of paid vs. organic traffic. Identify branded terms and volume of traffic that comes from them.

Compare where people are searching to where they are clicking. Look for lower cost keywords. Improve keyword list efficiency. Prices are going up. Identify who is doing well in sponsored listings and learn from their copy. Look at how competitors are getting organic traffic. Is it the content? Maybe you can partner with competitors for ad buys, licensing, etc.

Determine user intent. Purchase or news? When looking at intent, can learn about what users are thinking about their brand. Case study: American Airlines. What are people typing in addition to the keyword? There was a major spike when all the planes were grounded. Queries showed that some searchers suspecting there was a conspiracy, and this was vital for reputation management.

Integrate search findings across the organization. Search is not just about SEO and PPC. Take advantage of findings to identify other marketing opportunities such as affiliate partners.

Next up is Michael Stebbins of Market Motive.

Will share own process for web analytics and how they shape paid campaigns.

What's in your data? Bounce rate, average time on site, and pageviews are good foundations for measuring basic interest. But make sure you are collecting conversion rate, cost of visitor, and revenue per visitor. Crucial. Cost per visitor is more difficult to measure. If revenue comes from off the site, its no excuse not to measure it. Need to put the data in analyics, even though it will never be accurate.

The Grim Reaper Approach: Tactical question - which 10% of my ads are not performing? Possible answers: Campaigns with low engagement, low ROI, low conversion need to be cut. People often cling to ads hoping they will perform. Better to create new ads. Can sort by ROI and eliminate candidates for deletion.

Check commercial intent tool at adlab.msn.com. Put in 2 terms and tells what the likelihood is for purchase. Adwords keyword tool is great too. Now shows search volume. Check forecast and demographics. Read Bryan Eisenberg on how to tune message to the user.

Placement - Google Ad Planner- free. Tool tells us sites that have the traffic we are looking for. Next you test. Create 3 copy of your ad. Don't want to cut a performing ad in half. A neat trick. Set ads to perform evenly.

Takeaways - Collect, Question, Cut, Create, Place, and Test.

View slides at http://www.marketivemotive.com/ses

Next is Brett Crosby from Google Analytics, formerly of Urchin.

Plugs the new book - "Always Be Testing" by Bryan Eisenberg.

More and more businesses and people within companies are demanding reports and analytics. The back end guys found themselves all of the sudden pumping reports. With GA, analytics jumped into the mainstream. The audience changed. No longer a small group within the company, but the entire company. Launched a new interface to put the data in context. As you use the tool, you get smarter. There is still data for the pros, but also for everyone. Allows people to get feet wet and just touch the surface.

Formalizing the process - getting the right data to the right people. Set up goals and funnels (for both ecommerce and non-ecommerce). Many people he encounters do not set up goals. Build customized dashboards, and customize email reports for different job functions (webmasters, executives, SEOs).

Goals and funnels - set up in the admin interface under "edit settings". Even without ecommerce, can set the goal value. Say a lead is worth $1,000 - plug that data in. Define the funnel steps. Can tell us goal value per visit. With ecommerce, the data is really rich. .

Custom dashboards - every report has an icon to add it to dashboard. Get the most important metrics in your face.

Custom email reports - get the data out to the guys that need it. Can run schedules. Customized data to the right people at the right time. Do this for each major role, and everyone is happy.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Paid placement is a form of search advertising that provides a top ranking in return for payment. Every major search engine offers a paid placement program. Learn what's available in this session that is especially geared toward beginners, with details on programs from major providers and advice on how to succeed.

Introduction by:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

We started with Dana Todd, who is the chair of SEMPO.

First advice was to take the time to look at the help and training from all of the search engines, and reach each engine’s blog regularly for updates. SEMPO.org also has free webinars.

If you love data, you’ll love PPC.

• The most successful pc managers are highly analytical.
• Microsoft Excel is your friend. You can have expensive tools, but it does a lot for you.
• Linear progression:
• Start small
• Test, measure, adjust, test it again
• Expand on your successes

Dana shows screenshots of several search engines and vertical/specialty search, and outlines which areas are paid and which are organic. Feeds, mobile, white paper, and lots more have opportunities for PPC.

How do you buy search?

• Flat cost-per-click
• Yahoo search submit (Paid Inclusion)
• Directory programs, white paper networks, etc.

Understanding Hybrid Auctions

• Blind Auction – you can’t see other max bids
• Ad rank is determined by a number of factors
• What you want to pay per click
• Competitive landscape
• Quality score
• Value of the ad space

What is quality score? It’s the keyword’s Click Through Rate + relevance of your ad text + historical keyword performance + other features.

Pre-flight checklist for building campaign.

• Good tracking software. At least install Google Analytics. You’ll need two pieces of code, from both Google Analytics and from Google AdWords. Might take some time to get this set up.
• KPIs
• Set Values
• Establish baselines
• Strategy (goals)
• Money
• Rules

Setting base values and goals

• Conversion: can mean many different things
• Absolutely required homework
• What are your target goals?
• What are the actions you value?
• What dollar values can you set? You can even do something like value an email lead at 41 cents, as that’s the cost it saved you on a stamp.
• It’s OK to guess. Use your gut if you’re not sure. You can always modify your assumptions.

She skips a conversion funnel, figures that we’ll get it in all of the other sessions here.

Finding Keywords

• Where?
• Your site, competitors, trade literature, vertical sites, lots of other stuff.
• Brand names are typically best performers if you have a known brand. You can control the message this way, much better than in organic SEO. You’re taking up more real estate on the page.
• Find “negative keywords” during this phrase as well. Use lots of negative words to filter out random impressions which hurt your quality score. Start with “free” “cheap” and “naked”. Look in your referral logs to see what is bogus traffic.
• How many?
• If you have a low budget, don’t spread yourself too thinly across a zillion “tail terms”. Start with just a few and get them good, then expand from there.
• 80/20 rule. 20% of your keywords will drive 80% of your traffic (and budget!).

http://adlab.microsoft.com shows upstream and downstream of visitors. If someone typed in Compaq, shows if people then next searched dell computer or Compaq computer.

Google’s keyword tool. It’s a lot of fun, and can save you a lot of time and effort. Set your match type first, as the default match type is broad.

Building the ads

• Because CTR affects your position, do NOT get lazy. Don’t use one ad for everything. You do need to put the effort into writing your ad, you want quality score to be good.
• Use keyword in title and/or description. Users follow scent trail.
• Must pass editorial review.
• Choose appropriate landing page URLs (usually NOT home page), though sometimes home page can be best. You might want to do an A/B test.
• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• A little complicated to explain here, so check out the tutorials on each site. Usage is different between engines.

Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. Make sure that the ad text and the landing page all talk about what the person is searching for.

Schedule

• Don’t just set it and forget it.
• Map out a calendar in terms of:
• Campaign rollout
• Reporting/analysis
• Testing period(s)
• Other promotions (offline, online – trade shows, etc., like editorial calendar)
• Budget changes (e.g. overspend on Google during kickoff)
• Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging
• Dayparting – time of day, days of week. If you are only open during the week, you may not want to advertise on the weekends.
• Overlay any expected seasonality
• Schedule quarterly “housecleaning”.

Budgeting

• Daily budgeting technology isn’t perfect, so engines usually under-deliver or over-deliver. Set it for a little more than you want to spend, so the engines don’t under-deliver. Do look at your spend.
• Put your high-traffic or high-dollar words in their own campaign with their own budget
• Start out with a bang so you can lock in a high CTR which will help your quality score – then pull back
• Google has different ways to manage budgets:
• Conversion Optimizer (average CPA)
• Budget optimizer (most clicks for a defined budget)
• Preferred cost bidding (set average CPC preferred)
• Manual bidding (you control it.)

Managing Bids

• Bid management software helps
• Popular tools: search engines’ tools, Atlas, Keyword BidMax, Omniture, SearchRev, Performics, Clickable, Adapt
• Note: “bidding rules” don’t work well on hybrid auctions
• Low volume keywords won’t have much data to optimize automatically against ROI or other projected values
• People are still required!
• Paying too much? Improve your CTR and landing page
• Delete low performing keywords, or pause/isolate them so they don’t bring down overall campaign. Don’t have pity, get rid of them if they don’t help you.

Final thoughts

• Don’t be afraid to start small and grow your success
• Build a risk portfolio for yourself – set aside some budget for experiments and branding. Be creative, try some things, see what you can figure out.
• Reinvest a portion of “profits” back into the budget.
• Leverage the engines for knowledge, but don’t believe everything they tell you. Changes occur, ad reps aren’t always talking to the engineers, etc.
• Provide enough resources to support the campaign.
• Strive for integrated strategy across all media.
  

Matt Van Wagner is up next.
PPC is really process-oriented. You’ll keep getting better as time goes on. He starts off by showing an ad for Bebop Baby Shop. Their only goal was to get people to go into the store. They did a bunch of ad impressions, got some qualified visitors, and it cost $185. Their sales were three months ahead of projects. They refined their ad to just a specific geography to make it more relevant.

Another reason he loves PPC is so many things are measurable. Investment, revenue, percentage of ad spend to revenue.

PPC and SEO are complementary.

• Get going quickly
• Discover what words convert
• Reduces risk of major ago changes
• Predictable, dependable flow of traffic

PPC allows you more control over messaging

• You control messaging through ad text
• You determine what pages ad visitors land on first.

Process creates sustainable advantage

• It’s not just about keywords, ands, bids, and “secretes”

Use systems-level thinking

• Align PPC campaign, goals with larger company goals.
• Increase s ales, not just clicks

Track performance, Make adjustments

• Be methodical, measure and test everything you can
• Don’t react too quickly, but don’t get analysis-paralysis. Do write a note as to why you are doing what you are doing.

Set good goals and work towards them.

He showed graphic of the structure of a PPC account. I won’t replicate here, as you can find it on the help pages for PPC vendors.

Google/MSN keyword match types.

• Broad
• Phrase
• Exact
• Negative

Yahoo Keyword Match types

• Standard Match
• Advanced Match

Broad match

• Queries in any word order
• Likely plurals
• Likely equivalents including misspellings

Phrase Matches

• Exact query order

Exact Matches

• Only if query matches keyword exactly. The keywords will be the exact search only.

Yahoo
Standard Match

• Exact query order
• Common misspellings
• Singular or plural forms
• Words in your ad, even if they are not in your keyword list. Warning!

Advanced Matches:

• Queries in any order
• Common misspellings
• Singular or plural forms
• Words in ad text or website. Warning!

Use broad/advanced match to generate traffic and discover new terms

• Stick to two and three word terms
• Use one word keywords only very rarely if at all
• Watch conversion rates and web logs

Use phrase and exact match to hone in on important high-traffic terms
Use negative match to reduce ad impressions on non-productive searches.
Negative match keywords

• Prevent ads from showing on non-productive searches
• Subtle differences across PPC networks
• Improves CTR, quality scores, and reduces costs.
• Good to exclude type of traffic you don’t want. If you want to sell wool capes, think of a negative of costume, so someone looking for a Halloween costume doesn’t see your ad.

Click-Through Rate = Clicks divided by Ad Impressions
Reduce unproductive ad impressions, improve CTR

Gives a case example where looking at logs and adding in negative words helped reduce ad spend.

Where do your ads show?
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

• A user types n a query
• They are actively seeking answers

Content sites

• User doesn’t type in query
• Users encounter ads while doing something else. Reading a newspaper online is one example. It’s interrupt advertising.

Search:

• More directly relevant visitors
• More control on placement
• Content ads
• Less control over where ads are placed
• Can be “spikey”, which could be good or bad
• Traditionally where more click spam lives

Tip: look at your spend of content versus search. Reduce content it is higher than search.

Example of ad designed to draw clicks:

• Make the ad relevant to the keyword.
• Ad includes keyword
• Good, strong offer
• Local campaign gives you a fifth line (Google only).

Ads designed to filter clicks

• Ambiguous keywords like “home care” need ads that clearly identify purpose – is this for lawn services, or senior care?
• Impacts quality score, unfortunately.

Get a variety of ad styles, have a contest in the office, or look at the SERPs and see the types of styles.

• First person story
• Trusted authority, uses quotes
• Price Appeal
• Convenience – toll free number
• Get information
• We’re different from “them”

When looking at ad performance, look at conversion rate. One can have higher CTR, but doesn’t convert.

Please forget everything you just learned about ad rank. Please remember only that ad rank exists.

Coverage provided by Keri

Patricia Hursh, President & Founder, SmartSearch Marketing

10 Tips for b2b

1. reach prospects early in the buying cycle
2. advertise in “the tail”
3. include non banded keywords
4. pre qualify clickers
5. focus and align ad copy
6. creave very specific landing pages and microsites
7. test pages continuously

8. offer multiple action options

9. simplify registration forms

10. turn web inquiries into sales leads

Buying Cycle

- shows forester chart

Advertis in the ail

- example is software: the tail would go to software…. enterprise software… erp enterprise software and so on

- conversions happen in the tail (shows a chart) 3-4 word phrases was the winner

Non Branded Terms

Use adcopy to prequal clickers

- address your specific target audience

- pre qual clickers

Align ad copy with search query

- align ad copy with search query

- modify copy across buying cycle

laptop computer -> laptop information -> laptop user reviews -> ibm laptop models -> ibm thinkpad t61

- for this example, change each ad - DONT use the same ad *she shows some examples*

Microsite

- typically between 3-10 pages

- focused on a solution or client type

- it eliminates the political stuff that comes with changing a coprorate website

Test page elements - landingpage testing

- they run a/b or multivariate constantly on microsites

- Items to test

- page layout

- action triggers

- images

- registration form placement

- names and descriptions of downloadable assets

- registration form fields

track & improve results

- shows a chart of 60 days

Secondary actions

- allow for more than just one action

Registration forms

- showed some examples of good and bad registration forms

————————————

Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.

How to deal with an enterprise salesforce:

A -B - C

- ratings for leads

- how full is the pipeline, and whats the % close rate

Priority order of trust
- free trial
- demo

Sales reps go into the CRM and cherry pick.

Search needs to drive potential customers thruogh high priority, high trust lead generation channels

- How?
- optimize for more than home page and product category pages
- point paid search clicks at aggressive lead generation pages
- and….

Make Search an A lead
- force it into the A lead bucket if it is a high converting paid search word
- ignore other rules for bucketing
- cant treat all search traffic the same
- educate the reps by showing them the paid search numbers
- check to see what the reps are following up on when search leads come in

Review sales success meaures
- close rate
- time to close

- average selling price

- quarterly quota

Feedback look into search buys and site optimization

Challenge

- low end priced products

- high end enterprise products

- who gets more of the attention?

- upsell

- final revenue numbers

- company goals

- quality of store experience

————————————

Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing

Wrong metrics = wrong decsisions

*shows example* and says that CPL isnt what marketers should use

*shows chart with profit, sale price, product name, leads/sale, CPA and CPL*

You need to watch profit, not CPL.

*shows a slide of the Advertising Ecosystem*

Purchase path - watch the buying cycle. Being able to see this will help you see the full cycle and what keywords help.

Life Time Value - what is the real value of a conversion? You need to connect the dots from orders to ads/keywords to help you know what really is

the most profitable for the company.

Phone Call Tracking

The Last Click Fallacy
- Problem recongiition -> information search -> evaluation of alternatives -> purchase decisions -> purchase

*shows 3 slides of the Purchase path attribution) - dont give all the credit to one ad/search, decide how far to go back.

We need to take the Wisdom of the Crowds line of thinking (its a book)

————–

Live blogged by Daver

Google continues to innovate around bringing power, flexibility, and accessibility to web analytics and web content testing. Join us for the latest news about Google's free web analytics and multivariate testing products: Google Analytics and Website Optimizer. Learn straightforward, data-driven techniques to enrich your website and increase your ROI. Come early to grab a seat. This is an event you won't want to miss!

Speakers:
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Analytics Evangelist, Google
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

Avinash starts by telling us bounce rate is a good indication of how much you potentially suck. Use it as a first step to find out what you should be potentially fixing. Many of the measures in Google Analytics will let you see bounce rate. You can see which referral sources are sending you traffic that bounces, which landing pages bounce most, etc. If you don’t do anything else when you go home, look at your bounce rate. You don’t control your home page, the search engine does. If you have 10,000 pages on your site, you have 10,000 home pages.

Avinash goes over sources to traffic to his blog, how many keywords, etc. Most analytics today are data pukers. He shows a screen of very very very tiny type with the 9,500 keywords. It’s a data puke that tells you nothing.

If you don’t rank high for your brand time, it reflects your incompetence. The brand names are generally the head. The long tail is a lot more generic keywords, and “virgin” keywords. I’m just starting to look for something, you’re the first site I see, convince me how wonderful you are. Search term example of best car insurance California.

How do you get beyond data puking to actually get useful information?

Two problems, two solutions. Head and Long Tail are two different two different problems, and have two different solutions.

Head: Obsess efficiently. Keyword position report is good for this.

Stop looking at visits, look at goals and conversions.

There’s a button for who sent me unusual traffic. Keywords that have sent you 20% more and 20% less traffic over the last seven days are listed. You can look to see what the trends/changes are. These keywords won’t show up in top ten, but can still be helpful. This report can tell you things like what new keywords to bid on. These reports can show trends before you see them at the top of the results.

Most marketers make the mistake of thinking of version in very basic terms. Don’t just look at one goal, but your website is solving for many different reasons.

Even though Avinash doesn’t sell anything from his blog, he does have three goals for his blogs. He spent a lot of time thinking about these goals. The pages are All Posts, About, and Speaking Engagements. Quantify your goals. You need to take into account more than just the profit of a hard good, but there are other monetary benefits that you need to take into account, will help show the value that these goals bring.

Visitor Loyalty measures. Visitor recency, depth of visit, length of visit.

You need to define how you measure success. It’s not just page views, or just the money made solely from a sale.

There are many add-ons for Google analytics. Outside people write Greasemonkey scripts that do lots of fantastic things.

Google Docs data:  http://bit.ly/gadocs
Show raw numbers instead of just percents for goals:  http://bit.ly/gagoals
Open report in a new tab: http://bit.ly/gatabs
What has changed report (things that aren’t easy to generally find):  http://bit.ly/gaiceberg.

 

What’s new with Google Website Optimizer

• Momentum
• Resources
• Partners
• Product Updates
• Case Studies

Why is testing becoming mainstream

• Advertisers are focused on ROI and CPA, especially with economic climate we are in.
• Leading agencies are offering landing page testing services
• ~10x the resources available vs. last year

It’s all about after the click. Nobody takes impressions to the bank.

• Visitors have lots of choices – their expectations are as high as ever.
• Best practice landing page designs are the minimum ante.
• In today’s economy, CPA and ROI are king. The CFO is just as interested in your effort as the CMO.

New Resources

• Google Trifecta Webinar
• Landing Page Optimization  and Always Be Testing books have been published.
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Website Optimizer Support Plans
• Website Optimizer Tutorial Videos

Go to google.com/WebsiteOptimizer for lots of resources

Many more new industry partnerships.

For those who want the VIP Treatment
Authorized Consultants

• Outsource everything
• Help with tags and tech
• Help with design
• Analysis

Woops! Missed some stuff here about how organizations can quality to be an authorized consultant, and what benefits they receive from being an authorized consultant.

New Product Updates:

The most requested feature is pruning. You can stop sending traffic to unlikely winners.

Improved reports.

• Color coded confidence intervals
• Color coded conversion rates
• Winner’s box
• Offline Validation for A/B tests.

The New Bill of Rights
We have a right to:

• Convert as many of our visitors as possible
• Challenger the HiPPO’s with science highest paid person in org.
• Landing pages that don’t suck
• Grow sales without growing ad spend
• Free testing technology for all our traffic on all our web pages.

Designing your test

• Basic
• Does it look legit?
• Is it intelligible with partial attention?
• Is it simple to convert?
• Advanced
• Is it compelling?
• Does it handle top objections easily?

Three things to do this week

• Evaluate top PPC landing page
• Set up A/B test
• Make it fun (they have internal contests to see who can get the best results).

Live blogging provided by Keri.

Finding keywords, trying different ad copy, testing landing pages, bid managing – blah blah blah. You already know what managing SEM is about. But if you crave the new SEM tactic, the unknown search story, the changing market dynamics of SEM that few understand and even fewer talk about, come to this session, where Omniture and an SEM "dream team" panel will push the conference envelope and make you — yes, even you— all-stars: better, more knowledgeable, and aware of what's really going on in search.

Moderator:

· Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture

Speaker:

· David Rodnitzky, VP, Strategy, PPCAdBuying.com

· Terry Whalen, SEM & Internet Marketing Expert, Founder, TDW Consulting

· Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Best Practices Group, Omniture

· Vinny Lingham, CEO, Synthasite

Chris Zaharias: I work for Omniture, our goal here is to tell you things that you might not otherwise have heard, stuff that does not get covered at the show. I did not know much about Omniture until I joined about 6 months ago; we are the leader in web analytics and headquartered out of Utah. We have about 500 SEM customers.

I will introduce the panelists and then speak a bit myself. Here are the topics:

- the assumption that the long tail is eternal

- the notion that there are 1001 things to do in SEM

- the assumption that SEM is always the right channel – where it is and isn't the right channel

- fine line between search engines and what they try to sell

- is search is really opaque or are there methods to make things more transparent

The first point is the assumption that the long-tail keeps growing, that finding more keywords is the critical activity (shows some data from HitWise showing percentage of total search volume for the top 2000 search queries). The reality is that search is becoming more navigational. The growth in brand and trademark queries shows that search is become less "search" and more a method of direct navigation. That's why revenues for the search engines are going more towards trademarked and navigation terms.

Any questions on this data so far?

David: Google is not encouraging people to buy the multi-token keywords, and encouraging to use broad match for the tail keywords. Search engines are reducing the efficacy of buying long-tail keywords.

Terry Whalen: People have gotten the point that you don't need to do super advanced queries to get the results.

Chirs Knoch: From my perspective I have seen quality scores declining because there are too many keywords in too many ad groups. I have done tons of campaigns with the long-tail and it's been a couple of years since I have seen a great return on that effort.

Chris Zaharias: Next up is Vinny Lingham.

Vinny (spoke really fast): When you are managing a $200,000 campaign and you spend 40 hours optimizing you can decrease costs by (1%)$2,000 = $50/hour. You can achieve greater scale as there are more gaps in bigger campaign than a smaller campaign – due to market fundamentals (all your competitors bid on the same head words, but not tail).

Smaller advertisers should focus on fewer engines, starting with largest market shares for their geographic areas. Expand once you reach saturation.
Theory is only valid for long tail campaigns (5,000+ keywords) – most effective with +1m keywords.

Should run multiple search engines for head words (top 100 usually).

Running big campaigns is great but when you have bad landing pages it will default to bad quality score. We have done tests where everything was right and you get good traffic and good volume. Keep your campaign focused on relevance, good ad copy and good landing pages. What users really want is relevancy. Keep that in mind and you will be fine.

Dave: I see a lot of people who are not tracking at the keyword level – if you are not tracking you have no idea where you should be spending your time. It's very difficult to know which keywords to adjust.

So, I think that SEM is obviously very hot and big corporations get a lot of pressure about spending more on SEM etc. but what I have found is that SEM in its traditional marketing does not always work. For many B2B products today, for people that have such a new product that there are no searches for, content network ads work really well. For example, a DVR, maybe 10 years ago people would not know to search for one, but to see it on a banner ad would be a different story, it raises awareness. So with new products, start looking at some other options. Also, I am really a search marketer not a banner ad guy, so my assumption was that the bigger the ad the better the performance, but it's not the case, the one that converts best for my clients is a square box!

Chris Zaharias: one of the campaigns I admired was by Honda, they were trying to get people to buy their car, but they had a lot of new models that no one was aware of. So what they did was they brainstormed who are their target demographics – and thought about what are those people searching for and interested in – types of animals, hobbies, etc, and did a campaign that revolved brand building around other topics and really increased brand awareness. It had to do with engagement of demographics, there was no demand, but they built up demand based on non-automotive search terms.

Chris Knoch: A common assumption I work on is that content is not as effective as paid search. What will you get out of it? The results are not the same. We've looked at the quality of content traffic. So you've got these engines that make it easy for you to opt in to these other programs, and they mix your costs, but it messes up your reporting. To Chris' point, there has been analysis done all over the place. Looking at Yahoo, over half is not good quality. On Google's network, a good 90% of traffic is considered to be less than great quality traffic. Search is like "permission" marketing, it doesn't interrupt you. That's very different than content, so you see the vast difference in the quality of traffic. But this stuff has so much momentum that they suck you in.

I recommend creating separate accounts altogether for content network campaigns. Don't let the engines up-sell you on that.

One of the most un-utilized ways to improve your broad match keywords is using negative match.

Terry Whalen: So there is the idea that a lot of things in SEM are opaque, we don't know algorithms and what makes up quality score. The point of this topic is not that you can go ad seek out transparency in terms of reports, but what I mean is more seeing the forest for the trees. What I am talking about is in terms of positioning and SEM, if you are a smaller company or a newer company, there is a lot of competitive intelligence you can gain from looking at your competition. You can use screen scrapers (Spyfoo), we can look at landing pages of competitors etc. This is a simple thing that a lot of companies don't seem to be doing this, but when I bring it up they are receptive to it but don't necessarily do it. If there are certain competitors that you know are large and buying the top keywords, most like they are doing a good job so there are probably some things you can learn about what that are doing. I think a lot of folks don't think about that.

Chris: Through any types of Analytics you should look at all the steps. The micro-conversions, what steps, say, people are taking to complete a purchase.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Learn the seven proven ways to get your website on page one organically and how to dramatically increase your conversion once you get there. Join Internet marketing guru Shawn Moore as he explains the secrets that he has discovered over his 11 years in the industry. Have your website generate comments like this: "Since we re-wrote our website in 2006, our sales have continued to grow at an alarming rate. Our lead count was up by 137% on the same period last year. Our contract signings grew by 608% and our conversion rate increased 40% on the same period last year."

Speakers:
Shawn Moore, President & CEO, ThinkProfits.com
Note: This is a sponsored session.

During this session, you will learn the powerful strategies to give you an edge, and learn the seven ways it worked for Thinkprofits over the past 12 years, for hundreds of websites. Disclaimer: These tactics are by no means the only ways to achieve these results, and just represent the strategies used by Thinkprofits.

Google's business model: We're starting with the basics. Business is generated from keyword sales from Google and buying positioning. Explains the difference between paid and organic results. Rankings are based on quality of content, links, and overall development of the project.

Page one results are priceless. 91.63% of AOL users clicked on the first result page. Based on AOL's results - and shows page one is priceless.
4.49% clicked to the second results page. 2.19% clicked to the third page. Almost half of people click on the first position on the SERPs. This came from an SES market trends report from last year.

Shows case studies of clientele dominating position 1 on page 1. People assume you are the reference if you hold that position. The branding opportunity is quite remarkable. People not knowing who you are or your brand think you are the "player". Will only continue to go that way.

Everyone has heard that content is king. It's really all about the text, video, images in a keyword rich environment.

Tip 1: Get good copy to support the keyword research. If it's an appliance part - find images and text to support it. Video too.

Tip 2: Navigation and architecture. Ability to choose structure that the engines can index. Be careful of certain types of Javascript and other non-indexable navigation.

Tip 3: Blogs. Another form of content. Pictures, text, images served in a slightly different manner. It's a strategy. Don't need to use all these strategies to dominate, but in a competitive arena, you need to deploy more and more to compete.

Tip 4: Quality and keyword rich inbound links. Utilize keywords in link text - avoid using your company name. Helpful resources at Google Webmaster Central, and on the Thinkprofits website. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool to measure inbound links. Bottom line is you want links from other websites to your own.

Tip 5: The database you install is important. Make sure the engines can index the content in your database. Well worth the investment to get the right database in place.

Tip 6: Electronic press releases. So much we can do with PR to get sites on Google often within 24 hours.

Tip 7: Domain name strategy. We find many people are missing out on this. When the opportunity arises to purchase a keyword rich domain, although not always possible, if the opportunity is there - set it as primary domain. Get extra points for that. In a case study, LuxuryYachtCharters.com helped rank. Register your domain for a long term, because it may show give you more points. Another idea is to register your keyword rich domain, and forward it to your primary site. Also assist in getting more traffic by address bar navigators.

Strategy deployment and competition. Check your competition and have more content rich pages than them. Assume you have the same amount of content and same amount of links. Will be a head to head race. Improve your navigation and architecture to get the edge.

Assume we all have healthy marketing budgets to allocate towards these strategies. What do we do? We allocate a % towards each strategy. Because we know it works, and have demonstrated this. That's what the bigger firms do. Implement as many strategies within that budget. Choose the ones based on looking at your competition. Not hard to find out the strategies they've deployed already. If you do good research, don't need to deploy all these strategies. Implement as many as you can afford and make sure you have conversion processes.

A bit about conversion. Create a measurable goal for each page. Lots of pages have great filler and content, but don't compel readers to take action. Capture an email, lead, sale, etc. Have a clear call to action at the end of the page to get to the next step. Put an 800 number on there. As simple as a link that advances the process. Don't make users search for the call to action.

When collecting personal info, make people feel secure about it. Get a security certificate. Some laws require it. Make the contact page have multiple mechanisms of communication. Opportunity to increase conversion rate.

Your ideal SEO team:
Designer
Web Developer
Content Writer
Marketing Manager
Wiz Technical Manager
Expert SEO Specialist
Expert Strategist that's done it more than once
All of these members must interact efficiently. Need the right people. Can find them here at SES. It's definitely a challenge.

Download the PPT presentation @ http://www.thinkprofits.com/page1-seo-strategy.html

Provided by Avi from Promedia Corp.

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: August 19, 2008"

Learn how content from your e-commerce or merchant site can - and should! - be included in shopping search engines.

Moderator:
* Brian A. Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines
Speakers:
* Aaron Shear, Partner, Boost Search Marketing
* Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com
* Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping
* Paul Dillon, Director, Director Commercial Search, Live Search

Brian Smith: We have some great panelists, we are missing one so I am stepping in at the end.

So, I want to set the framework for these guys and give you a sense of the landscape out there. Shopping engines are great for ecommerce, 16 million passed through during the holiday season. Online sales grew 17%-20% year over year. Shopping engines increased 20%-50% year over year for the 2007 holiday season. All major search engines are promoting their own shopping engines.

Here's a search I did for Timberland Work Boots - you can see Google promoting shopping in their product search results which is a great place to be, and it's free for merchants so you want to be in there. Here's a Yahoo search - you can see where there results are, some of the results bring you to Yahoo shopping and there are other merchants as well. You can see on the PPC listings that NextTag, BixRate, PriceScan are in there.

Really quickly, a data feed is just how you get on the shopping engines. It's a big list of your products with all the attributes, and the different engines have different required and optional attributes for you to submit.

So, with that said, here is our agenda for this session. Aaron will talk about what you can learn from the shopping engines. Brian Mark is going to give us what retailers like and don't like on the engines; Greg from Yahoo Shopping is going to talk about their features, and then I am going to tie everything together at the end with some tips.

So first up is Aaron.

Aaron Shear: Lots of merchants here in the audience, how many are getting at least 50% traffic from natural search? If you are not you should be ashamed of yourself, it's pretty easy. Many sites out there, whether you are Amazon or a small merchant, tend to have a fairly difficult navigation and really heavily on internal search to get around the site. But Google is looking at the navigational path and user experience. So how shopping engines works - a merchant submits a feed, an engine tries to classify it, they may go the extra step and provide custom descriptions, and they will aggregate your description with others out there to get a great page to rank well.

Many engines will try to give you multiple navigation paths - an easy way to get to the same product from multiple paths. This is very important and a lot of sites do a great job of organizing this content.

If you look at the taxonomy of a shopping engine - they copy data and steal data - merchants should be doing the same thing! ShopWiki is putting in a lot of great content on products and relying on users in the community to do a lot of the work.

Many sites use session IDs making it difficult to crawl content. Shopping engines have the benefit of organizing the content - and taking the credit for it. So look at what they are doing to allow the content to be successful in their areas.

BizRate has a review system - they will collect the data and store it in their systems and get a lot of SEO credit. You can do this yourselves. Shopping engines are getting a lot of benefit from the content you could be asking for from your own client.

Site performance: Shopping engines are typically much faster than ecommerce sites. They spend a lot of money making sure the sites are fast and open. Search engines put a lot of precedence on their ability to handle multiple search engines and threads at the same time.

Simple URLs are also very important.

Brian Mark: Hi, I am CTO of ToolBarn.com. Shopping engines are great at SEO and PPC. They are taking care of the marketing for you. The conversion rates from a shopping engine are great because visitors are already interested in the product. The customers are already looking. If you are not there, your competitors are. This is also a safety net approach. We went through a redesign, and used 301s, and a lot of our content was not indexed. But we had the shopping engines, so the effect was not as dramatic, we still had some sales.

Get included: Create a text or XML file, and do them to the spec provided. And transfer your data feeds regularly. If you need help getting this done, don't be ashamed to look for a partner to help you. You really only need to do one data feed, and not one for every company out there.

Time is money, if you are looking at this year's holiday season, you want to give yourself plenty of time so you don't miss out on a lot of potential sales. Start with the super value - Google. Look where your competitors are. Could be a good place to start - if everyone's there, could be a lot of traffic there, there is a reason they are all there.

Evaluate your ROI goals and start conservative. Then fine tune from there. Obviously you need to set up tracking. Be careful of some of the ROI trackers though because they can be monitored. Take advantage of CPA instead of CPC, it's less management and easy to justify.

When you are tracking, make sure you know all of the domains that are sending you traffic. You can put on tracking parameters.

Watch for partners. A lot of engines have API's so products are showing up on different sites and sub-domains.

Shopping engines will help build brand awareness. Searches for your site name could be influenced. Set a cookie tracking session. Make sure you track.

This is not a set and forget, just like SEO you need to work on it, don't just set up a feed and be done. You need to see what products are selling and how. Why might someone be landing on your product and leaving…pricing? The image is not good? Is it the product info? Shipping policy? Seller ratings are also very important, if you don't have one it could impact your conversions.

You definitely want to track how the shopping engines are doing vs. your overall conversion rate. When you use them carefully they can be really successful. We get about 20% of our new customers from shopping engines.

The better shopping engines do, the better you will do. They are not going away. You want to work on getting the most out of each customer, and shopping engines are helpful. Often shopping engines lead to repeat customers coming directly back to your site.

Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo Shopping: Yahoo Shopping is a comparison shopping engine, we spend a lot of time focusing on our site to make a better user experience, and have been rewarded with tremendous growth. We have 250 million monthly page views and 100 million products, so we have a massive reach across the internet. We focus quite a bit on our actual site, but our merchants that participate in Yahoo Product Submit really get their products out there.

It's an easy process to get into Yahoo Product Submit. You can open up a Yahoo store, then open and fund a product submit account and we will take your products, so you don't need to worry about uploading a feed. If you already have a platform enabled, you can use our feed upload and your products will appear on Yahoo Shopping. You are charged on a CPC basis.

A few tips:

1. Feed your feed. Ensure you are providing relevant, comprehensive, fresh data. Favor factual information over marketing language in product descriptions (i.e. "brown leather jacket" instead of "stylish leather jacket"). Make sure you include all the specs in your descriptions. It will drive your CTR.

2. Focus on your merchant rating. At Yahoo shopping we use three factors to determine your rankings: relevance, merchant ranking, and bid. So there are ways to go about improving merchant ratings. Don't do bait and switch, we get a lot of complaints about that, and that tends to result in much lower ratings. Also don't try to aggressive up-sell, saying you can't buy x without y. Read the reviews your customers are leaving about you and try to tend to the issues.

3. Participate in category level bidding. If you bid higher, you will get more traffic. Improve your product prominence.

Product Submit: Category Building - we have a lot of options for you to go deeper into your product description.

Your current bid is not always going to be your current cost. We only charge you one penny above your closest competitor.

Reporting for Product Submit: shows the number of products in each category and the average costs.

Just to recap, comparison shopping engines are very large. It's important to play in the space for maximum reach. We can send you a ton of traffic but where the value comes from is giving your customer a great experience. Focus on the basics of good customer service, fast shipping, and it will help increase ROI as well.

Brian Smith: Top 10 ways to die a quick death on shopping engines:

1. Not tracking properly. Track and test and track and test.
2. Not reading the specs, assuming they are correct. Put time into it.
3. Assuming your data feed is up and running. Go and check. Be careful about this.
4. Not including unique IDs (MPN, UPC, ISBN). You might not show up on a skewed list of products.
5. Bidding (like you do in PPC campaigns) - be careful. Sometimes you are bidding on a product or category, it's not keyword bidding. We see people throw tons of money away.
6. Going ga-ga over ad-ons - little things like logos can really increase your costs - it's an easy sell for the shopping engines so be cognizant. Rather than spending the extra 10 cents on a logo, spend 10 cents to increase your bid to get better placement.
7. Don't assume that submitting all products to all engines will work. Think before you send out the feed. If you make $1 on product and that's what the bid cost is - it doesn't make sense. And all engines have different types of traffic so pay attention.
8. Categorization: You must categorize on shopping engines. Some do, some don't. If they don't require it, you should do it anyway because otherwise you might end up in the miscellaneous section. And a lot of times the uncategorized products will end up at the bottom of search results.
9. Engine level quantitative data feed optimization (DFO) - see what engines are and are not working. And if it's not working, why? Look at the data you are submitting.
10. The biggest mistake we see is the "submit and forget" mentality. Think about actively improving your results.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing

1. Which engines
2. how importatn is translation
3. regional search trends
4. ease of PPC campaign set-up
5. common constraints

*shows some graphs of # of searches and market share of different engines*

China

Baidu’s market share in China is 75% or so.

http://margridgeconsulting.com/reports/2007_china_search_engine_report/ - interesting 2007 China report

Japan

Yahoo Japan is leading Japan with 64% market share

There is a difference of preference that varies by type of search.

Seasonality

*shows France chart* Charts show difference of seasonal changes for searches in different countries

How important is translation?
- search engine requirements
- target audience language skill
- searchers’ preferences
- acceptable methods

Go beyond translation - think localization
- utilize translation memory tools
- work with native speakers currently living in the country
- capaialize on local dialect, neacular, cultural references, current events, and regional word preferences. Use a “local

voice”

Google - Mexico
80/20 Spanish to English ads

Yahoo - Mexico
100/0 - All listings are Spanish

Estimating PPC Campaign Budgets
- easier to do in the US with Google, much more difficult in other countries

Setting up a Campaign
- Yahoo international is very different
- only invoices you on local currency
- min bids are different
- min deposits
- often times, ads and websites must be 100% in native language (i.e. Japan)

Google setup
- single adwords interface
- can charge you in local or US currency
- estimating credit terms apply

Investigate regional advertising constraints
- local presence required
- min IO’s
- min bids
- sales tax
*lists more but took slide down

—————————————————————–

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Didit

International search challenges
- hedge for currency fluctuations
- budget by country or region
- cross border ROI calculations can be challenging

Vendor Selection Issues
- localize or centralize
- single multinational vendor network or local hotshot?
- centralized reporting for optimal decisioning

B2B Challenges
- no single decision maker
- offline conversions
- long lead time and lagged conversions
- keywords are often not b2b specific
- huge range in lead quality
- huge range in LTV of a closed deal

How do you deal with b2b metric uncertainy?
- visits to the contact us pages
- lead forms
- immediate orders
- site stickiness

Predict if kw is b2b or not?
- search engine syndication settings
- daypart
- day of week
- geopgraphy (at the DMN, or more granular level)
- IP address and ISP (not targetable in search)

*shows a daypart and day of week conversion rate chart*

Geographic Segmentation
1. Clicks are worth different amounts
2. *wow, he took that down fast*

Site-side conversion rate

Higher predicted lead score
- does one audience segment have higher lead quality indicators
- if Bremen (germany) visitors are better quality leads than the country average, you can afford to bid more for the

segment vs overall country.
- again, higher bids in a segment may get you additional volume due to a position……

Higher Lifetime Value
- do certain geogrpahies deliver better LTV?
- whats your 90-10 or 80-20 rule look like?

What are your segmentation levers?
- day of week
- demogrpahics
- network click source (content vs search)
- time of day (dayparting)
Should all regions use the same metrics?
- different success mentrics
- more touchpoints may be needed
- competitve landscape might be different country to country

——————————————–

Jeffrey Pruitt, President, SEMPO and Vice president, corporate sponsorships, iCrossing

- 60% of b2b marketers are to up their spending
- 3.5 billion in 2007, will double to 8 billion in the next 4 years

- Communication > Localization > Objectives

*quickly goes over each, was too fast for me*

B2B Trends
- Mobile - 84% of mobile searchers expect a dedicated mobile site
- Display -
- Social - B2B marketers continue to explore Social
- Web Dev -

Program Management - Process

Search Triggers
- TV spot, Radio spot, Display

*again , he is just to fast for me to get it all down*

Client Example - Coke
- managing 9 PPC campaigns in 2 countries
- for SEO, managing 18 countries and some 200+ sites
- *shows global account team chart*

SEO Regional Management
- IC US TEam (USA, Canada) - start with one team and then grow

Localization Criteria
- in house - in country clients
- localization company relationship

Know your space
- Google dominates US and Europe
- Shows big players from other areas (Baidu, Meta, Naver, Rndex)

Example - Fortune 500 client
- globalization and governance of SEM campaigns
- multiple regions/countries/languages
- 7 search engines, 23 countries, 11 languges, 150 campaigns per engine (800+ total)

Challenges
- optimiced communication flow based on the client’s organizational structure
- translation of global marketing goals and objectives and marriage between them and the local market needs
- centralized campaign execution and optimization

Focus on Engagement Success:
- white papers
- web casts

Q:How do you vet or decide who to partner with when going oversees? What resources are out there?
A:Start with SEMPO list. Use the same criteria that you would use when hiring someone locally. Know what your strenghts

and weaknesses are and know what you are looking for in a Vendor. Look for testimonials from the past.

Take a look at the countries you want to get into. China example… if you are going to partner and not buy, you need to

go there and meet them face to face to build the connection. Due your homework.

Make sure you are using the resources you already have. Work to establish relationships with the local office.

Q:What toolkit can you give to an office (in another country) to get them started thinking on what you want?
A: You need to have the strategic talk with them to understand why they still look at page views and not lead gen.

————–

Live blogged by Daver

How do you know if you've been successful with search engines and your website in general? You can check your "rank" at search engines for particular keywords, analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your website, or make the ultimate jump and "close the loop" by measuring sales conversions and ROI. This panel explores both classic and cutting-edge techniques to measure success, what statistics you should really care about, ways to be more strategically focused, and how to drive increased revenue for your business.

Moderator:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Speakers:
Jim Sterne, Target Marketing & Chairman, Web Analytics Association
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google
Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

The session starts with Avinash. His presentation will focus is "Why is '2.0' such a challenge?"

He says you need to alter your mindset, otherwise it is not going to work. The fundamental models of content creation, distribution, and consumption have changed. Content aggregators, user generated content, bloggers, etc. are ways that the model has changed and are what makes it difficult to measure.

He presents us with three ideas to help us deal with this new world.

1. Multiplicity. Think in a multiple ways. Use Analytics, but also feed measurement, Technorati, etc. It's like building a house – you can't use just one tool to build a house. You need to use many different tools to get a grasp of how to build a house, or how to measure what is happening.

2. Unique Measures. You can measure all kinds of things, but are they relevant? For Avinash, the RSS feed is what matters to him. He wants to measure growth in the number of people that have given him permission to push content to him, rather than just number of visitors to his site. The actual day's visits are less important than the growth change over time. You need measurements that are unique to that channel. Think of unique measures, not just old measures that may not be as relevant

3. Unique data collection. Gmail is only one page load, Ajax, videos. How do you measure success? Fake page views have been used, but there are things you can add to the html to measure things. You don't need to pollute the data to measure success.

He sums up by "Get on the train, or get run over."

Jim Sterne is next. He shows how much data is out there and we can measure all kinds of things. We have so much data coming out of our ears.

Web metrics grows up. Evolution went from reporting to benchmarking to analysis to dynamic promotions to hearts and minds.

Search metrics grows up. The evolution of search metrics went from ranking to traffic to analysis to dynamic bidding to predictive buying.

A hitch in measuring this is the economy. There's not as much spending, we're being asked to cut down on costs, which makes it harder to measure things. You need to use the metrics to get better results. I missed some of what he said, my apologies if it's out of context.

Matt Bailey on segmentation. Analytics According to Captain Kirk. Captain Kirk is an analytics genius and pioneer. He talks about green alien women were the key to staying alive on the show.

The huge theme with Matt's presentation is context. Everything needs to be in context. Get away from pages of charts in reporting. You need to instead start with questions, look at complex relationships to make sense of things. Start building context.

Back to Star Trek. Shows stats about total deaths over five years, but no context. Red shirts die more, but need to know more. Keep segmenting for more context, so you can understand what factors are contributing to deaths (aka conversion rates). Look at what you can do to change things. Get alien women! By looking at these segments, we can understand what is increasing or decreasing conversion rate, can make decisions about what to do with this context.

People are not cows. We don't go through a website like a herd. Totally different stories for different people and segments. Conversion rates for one group of people versus another may not be comparable. Again, context is everything. You need to tell a story, it's the only way to compare and contrast what is happening on the site. Get a full time analyst, it makes a huge difference when someone can understand the analytics and make recommendation, it's a huge ROI for the company.

Marshall Sponder. Only has one slide. It's great to not have a scripted presentation, but means that I have missed some more items.. He's taken charge of the social media committee in the Web Analytics Association, now the biggest committee. Started drafting standards, will release later this year. Found search doesn't drive traffic to social networks, but it's things like Digg and Reddit instead.

Traffic to a lot of social networks comes from social media, they don't come from search. One reason is moderators aren't there in social networks to monitor content, add keywords, etc. Makes it hard for search engines to know what page is about.

How to measure what is a conversation?

Social media traffic is more directed than search traffic. Traffic to blogs, especially one he studied in particular, half of a traffic was from social media. That traffic is most directed. Monster and Military.com will release a study tomorrow about how they used social influencers to benefit the Military.com site.

Web Analytics Association has gone out and tried to find out what companies actually need to measure.

You can get people to a site, but you need something for them to do when they get to the site. We can drive people to a site, but need to figure out how to handle them. Analytics can help you with what to measure and what they are doing.

Web analytics in search and social media are similar, but different in one main way. Search is part of marketing, but social media isn't part of anything, not clear where it belongs in the company structure.

Contributor: Keri Morgret

CNET reports that software maker GraphOn has filed suit against Google for violating its patents in a multitude of Google products, including Google's Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube.

Is GraphOn in the right here? Forum members are not satisfied. Here are some reactions:

...in most news stories I hear about, it seems like patent holders are a pack of pedantic, nipple-twisting sharks who deserveth not a place in society.

[Patents are] more often a nuisance applied by bottom feeders that normally wouldn't be able to make money in the real world. They just sit around and think of obvious applications and file them and then kick back and wait for your patent to be granted and then sue everyone for creating those obvious applications.

Looking closely at the patents suggests no real patent infringement. One forum member who reviewed a patent says "The first patent describes every remotely user-content driven site ever. I have a sneaking suspicion here that everyone on this forum could be sued successfully if this holds up."

(But of course, GraphOn has sued the moneymaker. As incrediBILL says, "Grab a lawyer and join in the gold rush!")

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Maps Guide Tom at Google Groups reported to business owners that issues with phone verification have been fixed.

Forum members are not convinced. It seems that issues are still persisting. Business owners who are trying to validate their business are receiving call-backs from Google but there is no voice on the other end and the phone seems "deaf to the keytones."

Even SMS seems to be impacted.

For now, I guess, there's no solution to the problem. We will update this thread if there is a a fix.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

If you are a Google AdSense publisher and make a lot of money off of those AdSense ads, you may have noticed a dip in your earnings as a result of the Beijing Olympics. Google AdSense publishers report that their traffic, and subsequently, number of clicks, was lower than normal once the Olympics began.

But could the Olympics really be the reason for the drop? It's possible that a lot of people are just vacationing right now. It is, after all, August, and school is starting soon, so time is running out for those possible family vacations.

The solution? Think of a niche that is August-specific, suggests forum member netmeg.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Yahoo announced that they opened up Yahoo Buzz to the whole web. When Yahoo launched Yahoo Buzz, it was only open to less than 500 or so publishers, for users to use. Now, Yahoo has opened it to any web page on the internet, allowing any of their users to submit and buzz up any content on the web. You can read more of the news at Techmeme.

To submit content, go to http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit/. To add Yahoo Buzz buttons to your own content, go to http://publisher.buzz.yahoo.com/about.

We have been a Yahoo Buzz publisher for a while, so you have been able to see the Yahoo Buzz buttons on the bottom of our posts for a while now.

A WebmasterWorld thread does point out that it is "Restricted to US only." But other than that, there is not much discussion around this Digg-like service.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am 99.999% sure this is a new user interface for Yahoo Search. In the past, Yahoo never ever indented search results. In fact, in the past I thought they did do indenting and then stopped, but Yahoo told me that they have "never grouped results."

Many search results, including a search for search engine roundtable return grouped results now. Here is a picture:

This is 99.999% new behavior from Yahoo Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is the concise version of the live blogging coverage our volunteers put together at SES San Jose yesterday:

• More Customers, Fewer Costs: Why Marketing to the "Long Tail" Makes Sense
• Universal Search
• Search Industry Update
• Pay Per Conversation
• Non-Profits & Socially-Responsible Companies
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Mobile SEO: Death of the '.mobi'
• Semantic Search : How will it change out lives?
• Orion Keynote Panel - How Much Search is Enough?
• Everything but Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options
• Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
• Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine
• Storyteller Marketing: How the Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing

Again, a big thank you to our volunteer live bloggers, breaking their fingers on their keyboards. Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs, Sheara Wilensky & Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp, Carolyn Shelby aka Cshel, Chris Boggs of Brulant, and Dave Rohrer.