Search Engine Strategies 2004 San Jose Archives

Ok, I am still in the SES mode. Tomorrow I should be back 100%. Over at HighRankings there is a thread that discusses the postings of photos from the conference. HighRankings has given people the ability to upload their images.

You can view them at SES San Jose 2004 Photos. Keep checking it out, people are uploading as we speak.

Amanda Watlington was up first. Why should SEMs should look at blogs? 4.12 million hosted blogs, 10.3 million hosted blogs estimated by end of year. 2.72 million are currently semi-abandoned. 51.5% created by teens, 56% created by women and 44% by men (Perseus 2004 Survey). 69.3% og blogs readers are 25-50 years old, 40% have households incomes > 90k, 79.7% like blogs because they provide news they can't get elsewhere. Blogs get nice traffic. She then showed some theoretical benefits of blogs. Blogs and linking are all about related linking strategies. Spiders like blogs because, (1) fresh content, (2) keyword rich, (3) themed, (4)lots of links and (5)spider friendly templates. She shows Seth Godin's blog which is framed and is bad for engines. Use keywords in your blog (example adverblog.com). She then brought up ABAKUS blog, said you should add more categories. She then brings up the JupiterSearch blog as a thought leadership blog, jupiter has links to the main site (she recommends this of course). When should you syndicate your blog? Commit to blogging before electing to syndicate, it is easy technology to use.

Scott Rafer from Feedster is up now, he started Feedster about a year ago. He says syndicate everything, its a main stream media. He says the whole Web is changing, XML joining HTML as volume web-pulishing format. He said Google hates blogs, they took off all the feeds. That is why Feedster came about, to build a blog search engines. SEM differs vastly between the two. XML is machine readable, not human readable, versus HTML is both human and computer readable. They provide a very precise turn around. Once you do your search, you add it to an RSS reader, what to expect soon are ads in RSS readers.

Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo was up next, one of the blog kings. He is here to talk about what Yahoo is doing with RSS and search. RSS is changing the ways information is bring bought in, its structured data (no h1 tags here needed), a new ecology (all the different styles of linking), there is a lot of link spam (comment spam), and there are lots of integration opportunities here. My Yahoo and Yahoo Search are integrated. He showed an example of search on new york times, with a link to "add to my yahoo." He showed you how it works in My Yahoo!.

Mark Fletcher from bloglines was next up. Bloglines allows searching, subscribe, publishing and sharing rss information. He goes over these functions in more detail but stuff you can find out by trying out bloglines.com.

Chris Tolles from Topix.net helped create ODP and now Topix.net. They are largest producer of non blog rss information (over 7,000 sources). What feeds seem to be to him is a better way to do content management for an individual. NY Times have machine readable content. For Topix, they can aggregate information. He says what is different about Topix is categorization.

Q & A:

Q: How do you combat submission spam?
A: Blog/RSS feeds are opt in, you ask for it. Topix only allows non-blogs.

Q: When, where, how are we going to get ads in feeds?
A: Feedster said they are putting out themed ads.

Q: How is RSS being used for product feeds specifically?
A: Jeremy said he wants to see anything he routinely visits as RSS so he can add it to his reader.

Q: Jason from KeywordsRanking asked the panel their thoughts on how companies handle lawsuits for employees who blog?
A: The companies make sure the bloggers have non-disclosure guidelines. He says you see that bigger bloggers are starting to take on journalistic approaches over time.

Taking the simple, basic session and discussing the advanced parts. Danny introduced Andy Beal.

Andy Beal said he will talk about 10 minutes on advanced topics. Andy does some company bio stuff, etc. He started off with inside the searchers mind. We (as owners) focus on the solution rather then the needs of the searcher. Search on "one hour photo" not "on site processing". The higher the cost of the product or service the more searches a potential customer conducts before making a decision. If you can position your products based on the searcher's problem rather then on your own idea of the solution, you can convert better. There are four different stages of an online buyer and he will discuss this in more detail later.

The Buying Cycle: (1) The awareness stage; provide info pages to educate, target phrases in the "i need" format, built trust with the searcher, and 8.7% of potential customers use search for this phrase. (2) The research stage; offer comparisons, target competitors search terms, and 68.3% of potential customers use search for this phrase. (3) Decision phase; write your product reviews/articles, license content from review sites, list customer testimonials, target search terms that aid in the decision process, and 42.6% of people use search for this phase. (4) Buying phase; focus on model numbers, make sure the product page content matches those phrases, add buzzwords "free shipping", and 28.2% of potential customers use search for this phrase.

Low Cost Products have fewer searches, less need for multiple search terms, and lower the costs the higher the likelihood of an online conversion. There are fewer instances for research types (comparison reviews) for these low cost keywords.

High cost products have increased number of searches per day, target all the phases of the buying process, and anticipate where the conversions will take place.

The number of keywords searched from July 2004:
2 word phrases reduced 2.5% since 01/04
3 word phrases increased 1.22%
He gave more detail but ran out of time, couldn't write all the information from the slide down.

Dan Thies starts off saying he is from Texas, and he is working on the accent part. He will talk about "keyword mining" and VERY briefly discusses his company. He talks about prioritysubmit.com. Semi automated keyword discovery, what if you can automate the keyword discovery phases, quicker and cheaper. He discussed how he used to do it, get search results, spider top ranked sites and analyzes the keywords from those pages using (ranks.nl). Dan talked about some of Orion's posts and he discovered the EF Ratio, which is the the ratio of results form an exact phrase search and a final all search. You can easily identify what is a language phrase versus non language. He gave some easy to understand examples. This allows Dan to sort out what phrases are real and not real. Term frequency; common words vs. uncommon words. It is helpful in sorting 1 - 2 word search terms. Adding relevance involves the "c-index", co-occurrence; term 1 appears with term 2 in a document. This kind of bridges which terms are relevant semantically allowed. So Dan built/building a tool named STAT (for now) where you can input a keyword, queries google, fetches cached page, extract's candidate search terms, and sorts by c-index and ef ratios and term frequencies and then gives you search terms to add to a project. Can't wait to see it! Should be available for free in a week or so, check out seoresearchlabs.com and sign up for his newsletter. This is going to really revolutionize this keyword business (WordTracker on steroids.)

Bill Tancer from Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service. I saw their demo in NY, very expensive but powerful tools. Traffic interception; find your closest competitor, identify what search terms are driving traffic to their site, identify which search engines are driving traffic to your competitors, and use this data as a base point to launch your search campaign. He came up with a case study for a site. He typed in backpacks and found ebags, analyzed ebags traffic with this tool. It showed you everything. GAP analysis; identify additional competitors, perform a gap analysis; what keywords are driving traffic to my competitors? He pulled his own data showing the number of words per search query in the shopping and classified category; cool stuff. He was able to show the distribution of number of keywords entered into search engines based on very specific categories (like automotive, etc.). With this data you can determine if you should target 1 word phrases or 2, or 3 or both. This program also has a search term phrases. You can understand the psychographics profile's of your searchers per industry (again, very cool).

James Lamberti from comScore qSearch is going to talk about his tool. They use passive tracking of actual consumer search activities. Its an opt in panel, they know exactly what they are doing through a proxy. The tool track everything the people are doing online. Step 1: Share of voice reporting, what are the keywords my competitors are buying? Step 2: Source of search traffic by term, what keywords are driving traffic to my competitor sites? Step 3: Source of conversion by term, what keywords are driving direct sales? Step 4: Sizing the market; detailed keyword reporting. Step 5: Profiling the consumer. They can look at the offline impact, latent impact and branding impact. A "reverse conversion" analysis, buy-cycle/research cycle, and custom studies as required.

Trellian was next to talk about http://www.PrioritySumbit.com/, a last minute presentation. They have collected searches from 37 different engines, and have about 9 billion records right now. Just type in your term, and it will come up with the top searches that incorporate those keywords. In addition, it shows you an historical graph of search for a specific keyword over the past 12 or so months. You can also type in a URL and it can extract the keywords from the entire page.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Haven't been to one of these sessions in about a year so I decided to check it out again. These sessions are always filled, I think that is why its on the last day (if it was my conference, I would put it on the last day). That is also why I am here, because people want to hear about this session but you normally won't find any 'experts' in this room (besides for the people on the panel - hope I don't insult anyone). Danny Sullivan is moderating this session. Most of the people are first time SES attendees in the room.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves is up first to present. He starts off about the number of properties they own, which they purchased over the year. This seems to be their way of saying we are different. They are the number 5 overall search engine out there. He then gives an overview of how search engines work, I'll spare the readers here that part of the presentation (you already know how spiders dig around and eat up all your bandwidth). He then gets into their "subject specific popularity" and "communities." Check out the Ask Jeeves and Teoma forum for my post on this, if your interested. He goes into the problems with crawling the Internet... He then gives up secret sauce on how to rank well; (1) content of page, (2) meta tags, and (3) links. :) He said use a date stamp as to when the site was updated, this helps users and the bot.

Jen Fitzpatrick from Google was next up, she is the director of engineering. She starts off with PageRank and explains it in a theoretical sense. She then talks about text analysis and then how the crawlers work. First looking at news, then fresh content and then the rest of the Web. Then she goes over the Webmaster guidelines, the Google's do's and don'ts. Do make sites content relevant, do submit to directories, do let others link to you, and read google.com/webmasters/. Don't cloak, don't send automated queries to Google, dont hide text and links and don't do other things... She discusses the 301 redirect, using the HTTP If-Modified-Since header: respond 304 Not Modified. and use the robot.txt file. She then gets into AdWords and AdSense a bit. She then adds the Google Search appliance, its a combined hardware and software solution that is meant for corporate America (I thought that product wasn't doing to well). She then talks very briefly about the other Google products; gmail, toolbar, etc. She says Google is very active with Webmasters, i.e. GoogleGuy.

Ken Moss from MSN Search, first time on this panel. He says he is very excited to be here. He brings up a live MSN search page (search.msn.com). He did a search on search engine strategies conference, and he said these results are not MSNBot, they are provided by Inktomi. So why are they developing a new engine? He said because there is a lot of innovation still left in this technology, and in 2 years the industry will be very different. He also showed how ads differ now on the search site, compared to before. He did a search on flowers and it came up with good results but the third result had those >> that Google disallows but Inktomi allows for. He told you to go to snadbox.msn.com, and then skips down to the MSN Search Technology Preview. He does a search on search engine strategies again and you see a ton of duplicate results from the same site (he doesn't say that of course), he says please provide feedback so we can improve it. They want as much feedback as possible, that is how they will achieve. They have a feedback link at the top of the page, they have a little bar next to each result so you can give feedback on the specific result, and you can also email them at msnbot@microsoft.com. This site will be taken down August 8th and then come back later improved. So provide feedback soon please.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! Search was up next, nice guy - we chatted a bit in the speaker room. They took their search technologies that they purchased and made their own. They power half of all us web searches. Yahoo! has 260+million users. They want to discover all the content on the Web, 99% of the index is free crawled, the other 1% is PFI. Yahoo! has grown significantly, focusing on freshness and volume. They look at freshness in two ways, updated content and new pages. They have CAP. They have a crawl-delay which can tell the bots to not crawl until x seconds. What if I unsubscribe from PFI, and I dropped? If you were in before, then you will be in after - as long as they can get to you through a natural crawl. Yahoo has a RSS support, they recommend adding your RSS feed to My Yahoo!. They support ATOM in My Yahoo! but the bots do not support it.

Q & A:
Q: Font sizes and CSS???
A: Google doesn't look at CSS files right now. Yahoo doesn't either. Other engines dido it.

Q: Anyone using click data from ISPs to rank sites?
A: Google said we don't comment on the rankings algorithms. Google does not purchase ISP data for who clicks on what sites. MSN said privacy is a big concern with them but they do have an opt in data analysis. Yahoo and Ask does the same thing.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman looks at his watch, looks up at the audience, looks back at his watch. The room is basically empty, could the Overture party last night have kept everyone sleeping this morning? Anyway, its 9am here and the show has to get started.

Chris introduced the speakers. Doug Cutting the senior engineer from Excite, Steve Kirsch the founder of InfoSeek, Louis Monier the primary 'instigator' of AltaVista. He then threw up that gimmick where someone typed out the Google homepage on a type writer and wrote it was up in 1960, by fury.com. He said its hard to know the exact dates of the new technologies. Steve Kirsh made an announcement on July 18, 1994 saying that InfoSeek is using Python. Steve said in his post that he is giving out 5,000 FREE accounts. So then Steve began speaking.

The original concept of InfoSeek came from a computer library (on a disk). He used it daily and then decided to make it available to more people at a lower price. He wanted to make this available at a very aggressive price for these 150 periodicals. He worked out a deal where he can give this away to 5,000 people for free. Then beyond that would be $10 per month for this information. They then added as an additional resource such as a Web index. Kind of moved from there. He wrote excite in Python, he likes Python (most people don't),

In September 27, 1995, there was a post to toutell.com on the announcement of Excite.com. They said its a free Web search with 1.3 million web pages. He clarified he was not an original founder, he came on a few months after this date. He said the original founders were roommates in college. He said that they were looking to work together so they decided to go into this text search software. They brought a crawler and demoed it off one PC to a VC. The VC pointed them in the direction of Web search. Excite did both Web search and Web directory. Excite is arguably the first portal. Doug started in January 1996. Then soon after AltaVista was started up, which launched with 16 million Web pages indexed and it was fast! So one of the VPs at Excite said, lets crawl 50 million. 4 - 5 months they relaunched with 50 indexed pages. They were the largest search engine for a period of time and soon were surpassed by many others. It was a good time.

AltaVista posted on December 15th 1995. This was the internet's first "super spider". Talked about the volume covered and the speed of the search. The one thing that really never came through from the press was that there was no support. AV was about 6 people, locked inside a dying software company. Louis convinced his company to invest (in one server) to let them do this and get good PR. He said AV is a story against all odds. He said how the company was like, "Digital planned this big thing out", when in fact it was Louis's idea one day. Louis's wife designed the logo, etc. He said AV never had any business development. Yahoo came to AV and AV didn't know what to do. He said it was a great technical rush but a business disaster.

Chris then asked them to touch on some of the new pioneering features they came up with.

Doug from Excite started off by saying they didn't necessarily invent them but made them popular. They said they used "discrimination analysis" or a big thesaurus. Like, words you would add to a query to refine the search. It was very popular and then it was not used later on. They also had a feature named "channelized search", basically if yo u typed in San Francisco baseball and it knew there was only one team. It would show you the score of the game in process, and a link to the site. It had maps, etc. A lot like what everyone is trying to do today. It died out at Excite but is now popular.

Steve from InfoSeek said they were one of the first to put up banner ads on search results pages. They were the first to come up with the CPM model (he believes). They had enhanced relevance because they looked at the links to your Web pages, much like Google today (poor man's google). One of the firs to have phrase search and then soon added a syntax (+, -, etc). The last innovation he is proud of is AltraSeek, which was a corporate search tool. Steve had a ton of opposition with this in his company, but he did it anyway. AltraSeek was sold to Inktomi and you can still find this feature in some companies.

Louis from AV said people wanted to make AV into a portal. Every attempt to make AV a portal was a disaster. He seems really ticked off about AV's business division (which makes a ton of sense to me). On the search side he feels pretty good, it was all about speed, simple GUI - you can see these blueprints at Google today. Universal access, he spent a week trying to work out a bug with a very small browser (used by 0.00023% of the Internet population). he made sure it worked on every single browser. He used to joke that AV would work on a washing machine. The languages worked well across some countries. He then went to a unicode index (Russian, Chinese, etc). He said the business took us down again. An other really good thing was the babelfish translation service. (I personally loved this service and I use it today when reading some non US SEM forums). AV launched something that was once called "Life Topics" that was a super techie thing, it was cluster your results a major refinement search. He said, when he left AV, they unplugged it.

Chris then asks them to look into the future and touch on what you feel are miss opportunities for their company. Chris read off an article where he said InfoSeek missed the opp to buy Yahoo! for 20 million because he felt it was over valued. Also he turned down eBay as well.

Larry Page came to Steve from InfoSeek, asking them if they want to license PageRank. So did Doug and Louis claimed he was impressed with PageRank but didn't have the power to sign the check. They all believe that was a big mistake. 1997 Google was asking to license it, then in 1998 -99 they had their own site and began taking on all the users. Doug said that there was little innovation since 1998.

Steve really regrets not just focusing on search. He said he was the only one pushing the search size index. The business people said that people don't want so much, they just want the top pages. The management and VCs wanted to move it to a portal. He gets credit for turning down Larry, and help inventing Google.

Louis said he missed the Google opportunity as well, but he had no power to do anything. His own personal regret, a few days after they launched AV, Excite called him. He turned down a job opportunity at InfoSeek, where he could of had purchased two jets. AV missed the aspect of link popularity to improve the relevancy of the Web. AV used it to map the Web in size but not to improve relevancy.

Doug adds that Google also innovated the ability to search on one word queries. Everyone else had the default operator was OR. But Google used AND as the default (which was simple but genius). Focusing on precision and recall was also an area where Excite did not focus on.

Louis said Google built a system that scales very easily, the hardware at Google is very impressive. He bets Google can double its index with no problem, because of their hardware architecture. Doug adds that he was talking to Larry Page, and Doug told Larry that Google has an excellent brand but the search quality will not always be best. Larry said that people do not use Google because of its brand but because of its operations. He said just like with Coke, Coke's brand is because of its operations. Louis said Google does their stuff on the cheapest possible platform they can.

Chris then gets into valuation and they all start laughing at the dollar signs. Chris asks if we are going through an other bubble or???

Doug said he wont comment and won't speculate on the market.
Steve said the difference here is that Google has real revenue and real profits. The other companies did not have this.
Louis agrees with Steve but he is not buying any stock.
Doug adds he feels that the IPO is a bad thing for Google and they were smart to push it off so far.

Chris then asked them to look into the future.

Doug started talking about his Nutch, an open source Google. People find it useful to build and search niche search engines. He said its hard to know where it will go. Its open source, good enough quality and major commercial search engines will use. That is predicated on that search technology is becoming a commodity and is not getting much better.

Steve doesn't like to predict in the future, but if an other Stamford student comes to him, he will listen.

Louis said search is not sticky. Google is now adding elements to keep people there (gmail, photos, etc.).

Great session!!!

Q & A:

Q: Mike Grehan asks what they think of PageRank, Teoma's (HITS) answer and when did you realize spam is an issue?
A: Doug said spam was thought of as search quality, improve the quality. You can also build spam filters as well. Google probably does both. He feels PageRank is overrated.
Steve said PageRank is underrated, if it wasnt really that important then why is Google where they are? The fundamental difference was PageRank. If you don't have the precision that Google has, then none of that matters. Steve doesn't know much about Teoma.
Louis said pure PageRank is a joke, Google clearly uses a mix of things. Teoma he feels is a good idea, looking at subjects but it will be great to see it bigger, faster, personalized, etc. Louis said spam in Av was a nightmare. He said one day they turned something on where you can add pages to the index in real time. Louis was so excited because the Web index will increase. He didn't think for a second about spam. One guy wrote a script to pound spam into the index and break the system. AV tried everything and they never had a good answer. They tried using a duplicate content filter and keyword frequency. He said he feels for Google.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Jeffery Rohrs from Optiem discusses how this is going to work. This will not be a true "moot court" argument, not arguing a specific fact pattern, rather they will debate the general issues that are popular, and this is for non lawyers and lawyers. The people on the panel are "role playing" and does not mean they believe in what they are saying, they can be playing devils advocate. Scott Schwartz will be making the case for the trademark owners. Deborah Wilcox will be making the case for the search engines. Danny Sullivan, Barry Felder (playboy vs. netscape case), Eric Goldman (epinions counsel) will be on the board. Jeff will be the moderator.

He briefly describes trademark and what is it. A word, name, symbol, color, scent or sound used in commerce to distinguish good or services. Stronger marks might get stronger protection. Arbitrary marks like Google, Pepsi, RustyBrick all get stronger protection then would a generic word. Trademark law protects against "confusion" and "dilution." I did a review on this at the NY conference, do a search on trademark at this site and you can read more about the legalese of trademark and search. To see Google's current trademark policy visit google.com/tm_complaint.html, it says that in the US you can not have trademarks in the copy of the ad but you can bid on it (outside US it differs). Overture has a policy as well, trademarks can be used for several fair use reasons, read their policy (URL too long to type). And here we go.

Scott Schwartz begins represents the case for the trademark owners. TM owners spend enormous amounts of money establishing, promoting them. Search engines make a lot of money selling them. He then showed some obvious examples of trademark issues on tangible items. So why is this ok on Google? You type in "Klennex" in Google, and the sponsored results have non-Klennex company pages. TMs being sold in paid search is causing consumer confusion and having a negative effect on TM owners. Do a search for elmopalooza, you see an ad to sing up your kids for talent agencies. Search on dunkin Donuts, in the sponsored links you see franchise opportunities.com available to click on, are they part of dunkin Donuts? I am confused, and that is the test for trademark confusion.

Barry Feldman jumped in and asked Scott a question: He asked if he put up a brand named "new sauce" and put it in the same isle as ragu, would that violate TM? Scott said absolutely not, because on search, someone is searching on "ragu" not on "sauce".
Eric Goldman asked for the difference between online and offline, in terms of not being able to visually see the package.
After more probing by Barry and Danny, Scott said that the language used by search engines "Sponsored" it kind of means that dunkin Donuts is sponsoring these results.
Then as he began to conclude with this concept, Eric asks an other question by asking about the elmopalooza case, the sole case is to ride the elmo brand to find new talented kids.

Scott says its the SEs responsibility, and they need to change things. They profit from it and they bare the responsibility for it. They need to change the visibility of these ads, call them "paid" and not "sponsored". They should alert the trademark owners when their trademarks are being purchased. Advertisers must say they are not infringing, advertisers need to provide accurate contact information, and require buyers to indemnify search engines.

Deborah is representing the search engines, she starts off saying where is the trademark problem, where is the confusion? (1) There must be some kind of use of the trademarks. Use in the legal sense, you must have some type of branding going on. The search engines are using the trademarks to brand their engines nor are the advertisers using it to boost their brand of their brands. (2) Where is the confusion? TM law is meant to protect the consumers, it is not misleading the consumer's purchase decision. If there is no confusion then where it the problem. Sponsored links do not confuse the user, they are clearly separated on in Google, Overture and Yahoo. This is in compliance with what the FTC requires. (3) The searcher's objective is not know when they search. The searcher might not be looking for the "official site". They might want to learn about reviews, competition, and more. So I might type in a product name to look for reviews.

About 5 minutes of questions by the board were thrown in to Deborah, all which were handled well. Hard to cover this because there is very little structure to the presentation, it was meant to be in this fashion. But it was a great presentation.

Now they each have five minutes of rebuttal.

Scott said search engines are literally nickel and dimeing the trademark owners to death (people clapped). He shows more example of confusion. He said he would like to see the search results on a different page. That made everyone laugh.

Deborah offers her rebuttal, she says that this is not illegal. People always use others brands to boost their own brands legally. Is Network Solutions held accountable when someone buys your trademark name? No but the person who buys it is.

The board walks out for 10 minutes to discuss, we can ask for councils questions.

The board now comes back in and they each speak.

Barry Feldman is up first. He said a balance approach is appropriate. Was there confusion? There are things the SEs can do to help make sure this does not happen. The visuals are important to help reduce the confusion.

Danny said that he dislikes that people can buy other people's brands but its not illegal. He would like to see the sponsored listing label to change to "paid advertisement." In the end, the beef is with the advertisers not the search engines.

Eric Goldman said we need to separate our emotional response and the legal response. He agrees that the beef is with the advertisers. Plus there needs to be confusion with the ad, plus the landing page.

That is all. We had some Q & A but most were like, look at my example.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman moderated.

David Weinrot from BizRate sees shopping search as a specialized vertical in search. One of the highlights of shopping search is the product level comparison. He began going through screen shots of bizrate's shopping search engine. In the past 15th months online consumer behavior has shifted 17% to shopping search sites. BizRate attracts 20 million unique users per month and direct that traffic to merchants. He says its basically risk free, no set up fees, etc. The business services site has listing, bidding and other tools. They have a customer rating system (which is very popular out there).

Rob Solomon from Yahoo! Shopping was next up. He started with a quiz to give away hats. He said apparel and home and garden products are 60% of search. His point, people are now using this for that. He asked a few more questions and flung out a few hats. Search is the foundation for shopping. Uniquely combines search and compare functionality. Focused on ensuring search results are highly relevant and comprehensive. Search on mp3 player, you will see you can narrow it down by attribute, they are improving on this today. He said comparison shopping is a "killer app." They have a program named "product submit" to help you manage your feed. High quality product images, include data about products, product names and description, updated info, total price are all very important areas to rank well on Yahoo! Shopping.

Sean Behr from Shopping.com will try to point out things shopping does differently and how to succeed with shopping.com. Shopping.com is the largest online comparison shopping services, and the 4th largest online retail destination, 20 million uniques per month, and more then 6,000 merchants. They originally started out as dealtime.com and focused on tech related products, not they are wide spread and sell mostly apparel and home & garden like the others. The sort area is defaulted to "trust" which is ratings by customers. Price is important but ratings are more important. Smart Buy gets about 3x more visibility. An other tool they have is the CDI (customer demand index) found at shopping.com/cdi/. Merchant ratings are hard to get, there is traditionally a negative bias (which is logical). Merchants with a 4.0+ rating have a 34% higher conversion rate then others. Trusted Stores have a 49% higher and a smart buy has a 110% higher conversion rate figure. Take advantage of all the product listing features, use the shopping surveys to boost ratings, partner with SEM firms and watch the cdi to see what is hot.

Marissa Mayer from Google was up next to talk about Froogle. History was how she started, in 2002, people were querying on product related items but Google wasn't providing what they needed (they wanted to buy). They decided to develop Froogle. Froogle is Free - that got some claps. Process: Merchant -> Feed via FTP -> Froogle Results Page. Another way to get into Froogle, they also use the Google index to find products for sale and they call these "fall-through" results. Feed results always appear before the fall-through results. Feeds are very easy to set up, they have a great merchant center, and you can update the information at any time. Free advertising is infinite ROI. Features can sort by price, filter price, search by category as well and the price and picture are visible in search (unlike Google.com). They want more feedback, feel free to respond.

Last up was Mark Bradley from NextTag, which is the second largest shopping site (shopping.com is the largest). NextTag focuses on selection, ROI, volume, and efficiency. 50% is tech product, the rest go to other industries. He didn't want to repeat what most the others said, they are very similar to the others. He said they give a marketing message to place in his engine that help with CTR and conversion. They also show a "price history" chart, which shows how the price decreases or increases over time and they have a price alert feature (like stocks). Its very easy to list products; (1) send feed or (2) automatic crawl.

When I buy, I go to Google do my search on sku or product name, click on the ads of the shopping search engines and then look for the lowest costs with shipping. Loyalty for me is not there amongst which engine I choose. But I think I buy more from Shopping.com, they have more merchants, which normally means lower prices merchants.

Q & A:

Q: Nacho got the first question and he asked about how does he handle selling the same exact product but in different size, or different colors, etc?
A: BizRate recommends that the SKU values be unique among the product sizes and colors. So each product would require a different sku. NextTag recommends you see what others are doing. Yahoo! tries to allow you to include a "sales rank" and if you say this product is more popular then it would rank higher. Shopping.com said you don't want to have a person click on each listed size, so see which one you prefer to list. Froogle lists one and has a link to more.

Q: How do you recommend new sites to rank well based on customer reviews?
A: Shopping.com recommends using the survey option and in 2 to 3 weeks you can rank well. Yahoo says everyone has the opportunity to be rated well, but they are coming up with a grace period factor being implemented.

Q: What is your biggest business challenge in the coming years?
A: BizRate said providing attributes for every category. Yahoo said differentiation is the biggest challenge, personalization is a big focus for Yahoo and then scale. NextTag's biggest challenge is higher people but seriously he said there is a 20% overlap between these engines (besides Google). Froogle's biggest challenge is taking the feedback and improving.

Q: Pricing is very competitive, do you allow special pricing?
A: NextTag said no, you have to have the same price on nexttag and on the site, but its hard to monitor.

Q: How do people buy, price or brand or reviews?
A: NextTag said 50% buy based on merchant brand and 50% buy based on lowest price. BizRate provided this information earlier. Shopping.com said price is a huge factor, its their secondary sort. Froogle sees a lot of interest in price as well.

Q: Do web search algorithms overlap with shopping algorithm search?
A: Google said no but they do include the top three Froogle results in Google. Yahoo said something interesting, he said Inktomi is powering Yahoo! Search (he must of not meant that). Missed the other part, because this shocked me.

Forum Coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman welcomes everyone to this panel and describes it as more hands on, how do we make money with what we are doing.

Chris Bowler from itraffic (Agency.com) and he will provide a case study of a client named "Barrie Pace". Barrie Pace sells upscale women's clothing online. Sold 15.8 million in apparel online in 2003. itraffic does customer email marketing, search engine advertising, online advertising/direct marketing and shopping search engines. Why go into shopping search engines? Because people are going to shopping search engines in buy mode, and those engines have a much higher reach then barriepace.com. In 2003 they partnered with five engines. Pricing models differ between the engines, there are three types. (1) Commission based (i.e. Amazon, Altura), (2) Referral Fees (AOL Shopping, Shopping.com), (3) No Charge Inclusion (Froogle). They all have in common that you need to feed your data to the engines, typically flat files, either daily or weekly, and each engine has their own templates.

Shopping.com is the easiest to set up in his opinion (I agree), it has a simple CPC model, they also provide adverting to increase visibility on top of your product feed. Amazon is the most difficult to set up, but it has the largest reach - so its worth setting up. Its complex because of the commissions and all transactions are done at Amazon, returns are a bit complicated as well and there is a monthly fee. You have to review 29 documents to review and submit back, could take up to 4 months. They need merchant profile, merchant help pages, storefront layout, images and content, shipping tables, and tax rules and tax codes. Then you need to set up the Amazon Product feed. Then you need to download orders for fulfillment on a daily basis. You need to provide back the order shipping info for the customer and then you need someone to handle returns/adjustments. AOL is much like shopping.com, the CPC is a bit higher and there is an annual fee. Altura/Catalog City is similar to Amaazon, commission based pricing and fixed set up fee and they will distribute catalogs to their users. They also syndicate to Yahoo shopping. Froogle is free, small but free.

There are click rates of 3 - 5% because they are searching for Barrie Pace. Conversion rates are between .4 - 4%, the lower number is because Barrie Pace is an unfamiliar site to them. ROI is $6, for every dollar they spend, they get back $6.

Tips: (1) Aggressively monitor your listings, (2) Track results at the product level, (3) Take advantage of operational and customer service emails, (4) shopping sites will buy your brand keywords in search - beware and (5) monitor and respond to customer feedback.

Misty Locke from Range Online will talk about Yahoo and MSN. MSN and Yahoo! Shopping are search. MSN versus Yahoo: MSN gets 4 stars and Yahoo gets 1.5 stars. If you type in "bestbuy" you will see Yahoo brings up nothing from bestbuy.com, MSN doesn't sell besybuy. She then types in JP Penny in Yahoo and JC Penny shoes came up, in MSN the store comes up, with featured offerings and information on the store. Then she types in "soccer" in MSN shopping, it breaks down results by category (movies, books, sports, etc.), Yahoo doesn't do this. She then goes to Yahoo and types in "airfare chicago" but the results are not relevant, with MSN they send her back to the normal search page and bring up Orbitz as a top result. Why didn't they bring them to Expedia (MSN owned) and TraveloCity (Yahoo partner)?

She then typed in "laptop" in MSN, they have a nice page layout. The featured products on the bottom are based on CPC prices. Dell is in the top three listings, they spend the most. Then type in "director chairs", MSN breaks out categories, she clicks on "kitchen and furniture" and Pier 1 is listed every where. Target is paying more but Pier 1 is higher because the results are more relevant. Yahoo, doesn't come close (try "sheets" in Yahoo versus MSN). She doesn't really know what makes product a come before product b, she gets different answers from different people in Yahoo. Yahoo is changing, but its coming way of optimization (optimize your Yahoo feeds). She feels Yahoo is working on it and they are making changes, she upgraded them to 2 stars.

Laura Thieme from BizResearch was next up. Two retail case studies, one with a 2.6% conversion and one with a .4% conversion rate. In 2003 he brought in Christmas 2003 741 orders from shopping.com. Then in 2004 they got about 214 from shopping, 81 from yahoo and froogle 21. Yahoo dropped, she believes because of Overture's sponsored ads. They dropped out of Yahoo because of this drop. Conversion rates were displayed, and shopping.com consistently had good conversion rates. Shopping.com had the best ROI compared to Froogle and Yahoo! (including developer time).

Retailer # 2 didnt do as well, bizrate performed better then shopping.com. Bizrate requires manufacturers id and shopping.com does not require. Froogle was the best conversions, but overall this had a poor ROI. Why is it not performing? Sometimes you need to go through the experience to figure it out. She showed screen shots of her travels. She basically says there can be a ton of reasons...

Q & A:

Q: How do you optimize against the affiliates in the shopping.com arena?
A: You can prohibit your affiliate from cannibalizing your sales.

Q: What affect do product reviews have on clicks and sales?
A: Reviews help ranking and help conversions. Its a combo of relevancy and reviews.

Q: Can you send traffic to category or gallery pages?
A: I don't think so, but you can technically map your results to any page. But why not optimize your product pages to say, here are more products from this category.

Q: Are there tools to manage Amazon feeds?
A: Amazon has tool for "gold merchants" but they are very expensive. Nothing really for the mid to low range merchants. Its best to build your own tool for this, its easy enough.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Danny said these panelists are all very brave since he just gave them the questions 10 minutes ago.

Jerry Campbell from AOL said that we are all trying to solve the same problems, but they have different ways of solving these problems. AOL search fits within its subscription base via Google results (the web search) and, on top of that, AOL takes their content (Time Warner) to bring out the search. If you search on pumpkin recipe you will get recipes pulled from Time Warner's food channel. AOL delivers a great "content experience."

Jeff Weiner from Yahoo! said Yahoo! wants to understand the intent of each user when searching. Search is to provide the means to the end, but they want to also provide the "end." They feel the most important thing is personalization. They also have a huge register base. They now own their own proprietary search technology which gives them a lot of flexibility. They are also able to integrate their content from their partners. He began to give a live demo from Yahoo.com. His first search was "san jose traffic", "san jose airport", "american 123", "new york city weather", "new york hotels". These are examples of how Yahoo uses content within the search. A hidden shortcut is "shopping!", if you add an ! after the name of the Yahoo section, you will be taken to that property. So we went over to the shopping section of Yahoo and you type in "camera." Yesterday Yahoo! announced Yahoo! Local at http://local.yahoo.com/. Search for "restaurants" and you can then narrow it down from there. I did this last night, but I used SmartView - which is neat. He then moved over to SmartView.

Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves decided to use his presentation, Danny (i think) asked them not to. Ask says "one size" does not fit all. They have 8 brands, each brand provides a different experience. He started talking about how the industry is growing... He believes we are just at the beginning of understanding searchers. In one year they jumped from the 32nd ranked property to the 7th. They have a 25% domestic reach compared to 10% last year. In the future they will continue to innovate. Improve relevancy, leverage the Teoma technology, further differentiate Ask's distinct search experience, and expand local strategy. He then showed a demo on typing in "weather in san jose" and it shows you the weather right there, with more options, right in the search - he said we should try it on our phones now.

Christopher Payne from MSN Search, he said he is the new kids on the block. He feels the end user is going to win in the coming years. Some of you know my thoughts on this, back to coverage... Microsoft is undergoing a transition, they have been in the search space since 1998. They outsourced the technology until now, and now they are investing in building their own technology. In the next 12 months they hope to release these technologies. They will giving you the ability to not only search the Web but also their desktop (email, files, etc.). He feels this desktop search will be the major area of search in the next few years. They announced changes to their live site in July, they made decreased the weight of the pages (much faster now), they pulled the ads and labeled them more clearly, eliminated their paid inclusion (because customers want separation between paid and natural). They just announced their recent "newsbot" at sandbox.msn.com in the US. It is based on their search technology, its MSN's first personalization example. "Implicit personalization", they look at what your reading and then serve up more of that type of news, this will be transparent to you. This "implicit personalization" will migrate over to Web search. The last thing he would like to talk about is the tech preview, he said its the beginning. Its not great, its there to provide feedback in order to develop a road map to build a better search provided by MSN.

Google is not here, because of the IPO, I am sure they will be here next time. Danny will talk for Google (people laughed).

Questions Now:
Question: How do you bring in the searcher from other properties?
Answers:
MSN said by providing a better technology, people will switch.
AOL said by providing the most relevant result right away, by providing an emotional experience that 'wows' people, sample people and get it right each and every time. Search evolved from providing results to helping navigate the content on the Web.
Yahoo said a way to provide search always, maybe a toolbar. How do you get them to download it? They provide an anti-spy bot in their toolbar. Search is completely stateless, we don't know them, no relation, etc. He said as we get to know the user better, we can get them to stay.
Ask said we look at the world that every person in this room is unique. He asked how many people in the room ate an egg in the last month? Then said he bets some of you had it scrambled, some had it easy over, etc. You need to customize it for each users needs. Not a "one-size fits all."

Question: What is the next big vertical for your engines?
Answers:
AOL said they break it down into revenue and user experience. People looking for values with product, looking to make a transaction. Value added content will be a focus for improving your vertical experience.
Yahoo said where is user demand, he said local is about 20% of all queries. How can they differentiate this content and then value creation (monetize and product quality). Going forward you can start to see travel, music (lyrics, downloads), and careers.
Ask said its based on the search, local is huge (he said about 10% on his site). See more of reviews, opinions, local markets, and more. Its about combining structured and unstructured data. Also desktop search.
MSN's next vertical is search :). News, desktop search are other verticals.

Question: Do you view SEMs as the enemy or what?
Answers:
Ask said they see SEMs as a very valuable aspect of their Web search experience. He likes the fact that people optimize, not spam, but optimize - as long as they are doing it for the right reasons.
Yahoo said that bad irrelevant results are the enemy not SEMs.
AOL said advertising equals content. SEMs are the best thing that happened to the industry.
MSN thinks our interests should be aligned in the long run. If we degrade results with spam, then it hurts our industry and our assets.

Question: What is your best search feature is?
Answer:
AOL said that the best feature that people don't know that AOL has is search (people laughed). His favorite feature is that everything is locked inside the AOL client.
ASK said that its not a feature, people don't look for features. He said its the unfeature, "smart search" - give them the result right away.
Yahoo said he has a shortcuts page, and brought it up. They try making it easier for people to find these features. His favorite features include; he searched on "Florence" and he showed off the "also try" refine your search option. He loves the anti-spy feature as well.
MSN said his feature is "lookout" which helps you search your outlook email. It will change the way you use email.

Question: What will continue to grow search revenue?
Answers:
MSN said the number one thing they can do is increase the supply, get more people to search.
Yahoo said the same thing.
ASK said people are seeing a complete shift in the advertising landscape, we are getting better at measuring that. As we do that more, its becoming a better experience and more and more people will enter. Advertising is a $300 billion industry, and search is a tiny fraction of that.
AOL, traffic needs to increase and he agrees with the others. He also adds that we have one answer (web search), how do we give more answers in other ways?

Question: Google is going public, what impact will Google going public have on you?
Answers:
MSN said they don't think about it much. He said it won't affect the industry to much.
ASK said they are excited about it because it brings the industry more credibility.
Yahoo! wishes them well and welcomes to the club.
AOL said it brings a focus to the industry, AOL likes seeing good friends succeed.

Question: What surprises you the most about searchers?
Answers:
MSN said the search diversity about what people are looking for. There is so much more potential to answer a searchers questions better.
ASK said searchers are unique, the same keyword search done by person A can have a different meaning if searched for by person B.
Yahoo said the number of people who use the search box instead of typing in the company name into the browser URL box. I said before, I was at a client and he wanted to go to the Google homepage, so he searched on "google.com" at Google.com. :)
AOL said emotion is what they look at.

Question: If you had to describe your search engine as a person, how would you do it?
AOL is Cal Ripkin, AOL always shows up and always delivers.
Yahoo, did you see the movie "Good Will Hunting" and he said we are incredibly smart.
ASK said we are at your service to meet your needs, he said we are "data" from star trek, we know everything you might need.
MSN said instead of coming up a name, he said he will describe the attribute; passion and innovation.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Of course I decided to pull out my Apple PowerBook at the Google Dance to write on this excellent event. The sun has set and you see these neon green, pink and green objects moving through the crowd of people. I can't get over how nice it is to see SEMs and the SEs together, let alone at the Google Plex.

People I had time to chat with:
- Matt Cutt from Google (rumored to be the GoogleGuy, but he would not provide a confirmation).
- Kevin Lee (did-it.com, we talked SEMPO scandal)
- Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld, talked SEMPO, forums and the WMW Pub Conference)
- Bruce Clay (he thought I moved or pruned his post at SEW forums on the honestseo.com site, I did not)
- Danny Sullivan (we talked SEMPO and forum)
- Elisabeth (we talked forum)
- Nacho (we talked a bunch, fun and good guy)
- Jim from WeBuildPages (talked a lot as well)
- Joseph Morien (sew forums), David Wallace (sew forums), EGOL (seo chat forum), SEO Guy (seo chat forum)

So what did I get from my conversations with Kevin Lee, Brett Tabke and Danny Sullivan on SEMPO. It seems like most of the board want to stay out of "industry standards" but Danny is pushing SEMPO to get involved. In addition, Kevin strongly believes that Google and the engines should set the standards, not the SEOs. He then said that he is happy he is out of the SEO industry.

I had some forum lurkers and posters stop me to say hello. No one yet checked me into a wall, like I requested in my blog post earlier, but there are a couple more days left in the conference. I'll be posting pictures at my blog (seroundtable.com) because for some reason I am having problems posting images here (I know how to, believe me - I spend a ton of time in forums).

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Want more? Visit the pictures section of the Google Dance 2004 here.

Continue reading "Google Dance 2004"

Chris Sherman starts off by saying that there is life outside of Google and Overture. He says that this panel will focus on the opportunities outside of Google and Overture

Peter Hershberg from RepriseMedia was up first, he is here to talk about the other types of engines. Paid listings distribution across the Web is covered by Google (53%) and Overture (45%). So the other 2% is about 2 million searches and the prices on Google and Overture keep climbing. The inventory of search ads is shrinking. So we have Tier II Search (FindWhat, Enhance, LookSmart, Kanoodle, Search 123) and Verticals (Business.com, Industry Crains, TravelZooo, Gamblling.com) and the Shopping Engines (Shopping.com, bizrate and pricegrabber).

The value of working with the alternative PPC engines are:
- More volume
- Lower minimum CPCs (as low as a penny) a good way to test
- Less competition
- Hands-on customer service (Tier I can not handle the customer service requests but Tier II's can)

You need to be cautious of the following areas with Tier IIs:
- Distribution can be poor quality
- Relevancy can be sub-par
- Search behavior might differ from Tier I to Tier II
- Lack of tools compared with Tier Is
- Fraudulent clicks (he went into a lot of detail on this, but I covered click fraud in this mornings session).

Chris Churchill from Fathom Online was next up. He asked who is concerned about the rising price of clicks on the Internet. Pretty much everyone rose their hands, not me, I am typing. Two Ways to Increase ROI (1) better buying and (2) increasing conversions. He briefly discusses the "power of conversion rates" with a 'what if scenario' slide. This session is about "better buying", and he complied data from the first half of 2004, 218 campaigns and 6.8 million clicks. They divided up the universe into tier I and tier II. He broke down conversion rates by Tier. He left out the names of which Tiers were and were not converting. The conversions ranged from 2.92% from a tier II, then a 1.98% from a II, and 1.58% from a II, then two tier Is at 1.37% and 1.12%. He also broke the tiers down based on conversions by industry. For some reason the financial industry performed better on a tier II then on a tier I. If Tier I's have 98% reach, why would Fathom have 18% volume from Tier IIs? Because Fathom leverages both, unlike many SEM companies.

Frank Watson from FXCM stood up without slides. He spends about $200,000 and $150,000 on Google and Overture respectively. He said that is all that is available, so he looks elsewhere. You should utilize the Tier IIs before your competitors do. Use analytics, use verticals, use international engines and test. Short presentation but he made his point - work hard.

Next up was Dan Ballister from FindWhat.com. He describes who is FindWhat.com is. They get 1.5 M clicks/day from 300+ affiliate sites, Espotting in 9 countries, premium private label partners such as lycos and verizon, and they offer merchant services such as miva drive traffic. Advertisers work with FindWhat because they reach a "different footprint," reach ROI goals through efficient bidding and two tiered customer support level. They see the space becoming more and more vertical, cross border marketing (i.e. espotting, mitsui, miva), fully monetizing every paid click (online, on phone, and on premise). They are encouraging you enter a phone number for you to track the on phone "pay per call".

Damien Smith from LookSmart didn't bring a presentation as well (not sure why). Can I reach my volume targets and my requested ROI? He says that is the important question. LookSmart wants to be able to help you by focusing on three things (1) quality traffic (traffic quality is not good enough in the industry today, they are working harder on it now) (2) prices low (3) robust tools. He gave out his personal number so you can speak directly with him if you not happy with LookSmart's services.

Q & A:

Q: Someone why do people participate or conduct clicl fraud?
A: :)

Q: What is the ideal time to test a campaign on these Tier IIs?
A: FindWhat asks for 90 days, Peter said he agrees but tailors it on the clients needs, Frank adds that there are many variables to take into consideration.

Q: How will FindWhat manage the Pay Per Call campaign?
A: FindWhat said there will be a separate area to manage Pay Per Call. Reporting will include pay per call with an 800# and not a hyperlink.

Q: Does LookSmart have plans to do pay per call?
A: They haven't looked at it yet, but its possible.

Q: Dana Todd asked Damian if he can go more into how CTR has an impact on listings?
A: Damian said its relatively similar to Google, just think of it at CTR x CPC.

No more questions for the panel...So we are just waiting for more questions. I am going to leave and post this. Off to the Google Dance in a couple of hours.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Chris Sherman introduces the session with a quick summary and welcomes Massimo Burgio from Ad Maiora.

Massimo starts speaking in some foreign language, to make a point (which I expect he will get to). European market consists of 25 countries, where there are 20 official EC languages. Europe is an active and major portion of the internet population. Search queries with european languages are 1/3 of all searches. Searches per search engine users are the highest in the UK. Europe is a very complicated market. In Europe there are some major local search properties; such as Virgilio, Wanadoo, T-Online, Terra Network, Spray and more. If you are doing SEM in Europe, you must look at the local engines. The UK is the most active market in terms of SEM/SEO services, search adverting spending is 33% (average is 10%), rising stars in the European area are Poland and Scandinavian countries. IAB/EIAA, Jupiter, and SEMPO are all very active in Europe. Many independent search events are also taking place (funny, there was a typo on the slide but that is ok, its a European session, not US session). He did not want to get into the technical side.

He then gives us a little case study on Wyndham hotels. The target countries include; Italy, France, Germany, Spain. But the .com Web site was only in English. PPC networks such as Google, Overture and Espotting were used. They saw that only traffic was coming from Google. The ad editors' specs change over time and are not the same from country to country. So they began building specific ads and landing pages for each specific country. They are in the process of building vertical micro site for his country. He collected some nice data on what types of locations people from Europe (broken down by country) would like to travel to.

Bill Hunt from IBM was next up. He manages IBM's worldwide strategy for search. IBM has 83 localized language versions of its site representing 31 countries. He has developed a clear management system for SEM, this way they make sure to apply the same things in every market (just fined tuned for each market). Common problems with international SEM include; (1) all the problems faced in the US in English, (2) Not thinking like the consumer in the market, (3) Poor quality translations typically not optimized, (4) Lack of centralized approach, vision and support, (5) Lack of resources - people and money, (6) faulty or no keyword research in local language, (7) multiple simultaneous campaigns - partners & affiliates, and (8) poor or inefficient navigation to and from country sites.

The Global SEM process:
Market Research -> E-commerce Strategy -> Strategy -> Conduct keyword Research -> Localization -> Optimization -> Measure

Barrier # 1: Local market search engines restrict pages to those with local languages or local top level domain, 90% of Europeans use the local languages version of the search engines.

The US centric Google.com brings up IBM as the first result for "ibm thinkpad", the second tab they picked (i think german language) brought up the wrong german page, the third tab was german located pages only which requires you to have a site that lives in germany or the domain suffix must be .de.

Removing Location & Language Barriers:
- Use correct meta language tags (html lang="de") and (meta http-equiv="Content...)
- Use local domains (i.e. .de, .fr, .co.uk), they can be hosted in the US and at least a few pages on the local market domain

Barrier # 2: Getting crawled is a major problem. Example, pop up or pull down country/office maps are not being crawled. Restrictive JavaScript language detects pushes hurt as well.

Barrier # 3: Cheap translation is just that...cheap. Translators are not good optimizers (mostly). Many translators do not use the internet often. Few translators don't understand keyword research. Translation tools typically kill current optimization efforts. And None of the major localization firms currently use keyword research as part of their glossary development or translation process.

Barrier # 4: Keyword variations and mapping.

Harrison Magun from eONmedia was up first and will be focusing on PPC in Europe. Why do Americans go to Europe? (1) Drink Beer, (2) Take Pictures, (3) To Be with other Americans who like to take pictures and drink beer. :) But really: (1) increase distribution, (2) competitive advantages, (3) first mover opps, (4) leverage foreign exchange and regional pricing advantages. Two main goals to increase sales and profits.

190 Million US internet users versus about 170 European internet users. Market growth in Europe is much higher then in the US.

What kinds of companies should market in Europe? (1) Downloadable applications do not require shipping, (2) Hotel and air, (3) Fragrance and Beauty, (4) Media, and (5) B2B/Wholesale. Who should not? (1) Restricted products, (2) Consumer electronics, (3) Automotive, (4) Online/Offline education, (5) Leads for US based services (credit cards, mortgages, etc.).

Linguistic and regional elements are huge. (1) Make sure the ads are relevant, (2) the landing pages as well, (3) translation site (merchandising and pricing, fulfillment and CRM), (4) Competitive strength and weakness versus regional.

Effective AdWords listings from a foreign company in the US, "russian souvenirs" brought up "Russian Unique Doll" with the description on a Russian Doll Bottle Holder. Brought up a funny product which had nothing to do with the search, (or did it?). Effective site for the US work the same way, he brought up a very funny example of a European company's language into English.

Q & A:

They had special Q & A people on the panel: (1) Peter Celeste from Overture and he is into launching new markets, to work with the current markets to help accelerate revenue, and they have a new team to help US based companies go Europe. (2) Tor Crockatt from Espotting was on the panel to help the SEMs get to Europe by helping you localize your marketing efforts. And (3) Derek Preston from Marago the European search engine.

Q: How do you work around having multiple languages on a single page?
A: Bill responded they have a rule that they do not put more then one languages. But the search engines do put weight to the dominate language on the page and the tag. A problem IBM has is with support content in China where the customers do not want translated support content because they are not 100% confident in the accuracy, so ranking those pages are hard.

Q: Question is to Peter from Overture, he was wondering how many US companies are going Europe.
A: Peter said many are. Bill adds that many large companies are moving in that direction. Sessions like these keep getting larger and larger.

Q: How is it best to manage content?
A: IBM uses 14 different CMSs in its organization. Depends on the organization side and needs...

Q: Do you have keyword research tools for this industry?
A: Espotting has a few tools that allow you to do this over multiple networks on the languages. IBM said there isn't any tool that does it, they use Overture, Espotting, WordTracker and other tools and do their best. Espotting added that the UK had the most "comparative searches" but Germany and Scandinavia has more "product specific searches".

Q: What if you don't have the resources to do this?
A: Well, if you don't do it and your competitors are then you can not compete. People normally won't transact from a site they don't understand, its scary.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Andrew Goodman moderated this session. He introduced Jessie Stricchiola from AlchemistMedia. The room is pretty pretty much filled up, I think I attended this session in NY and it was not as filled (maybe it was the clinic). CPC Ads are Not All Alike she said. If one thing is for sure, everyone is talking about how search ads are very different then contextual ads. You can not control/select/analyze contextual ad distribution, cost, etc. You can do certain things to optimize your campaigns by testing ad copy with contextual only (like Andrew discusses in yesterday's morning session). Moving forward we should tell the CPC companies to provide more separation between search and contextual, ability to view this data, and we need more data on the users and patterns.

Jessie tells us about the "bracket trick", which she told the audience in NY. (1) {KeyWord:Long Beach} = All words with initial caps (2) {Keyword:Long beach} = First word capitalized (3) {keyword:long beach} = All words in lower case. This allows you to dynamically put the keyword the searcher used in the engine in the title of your ad with these brackets "{keyword}'.

To keep your CTR high, turn off ads at times where the CTRs are low. Day parts tracking help with this. She says "test, test test..." your elements (call to actions, text, graphics, forms, links, navigation), characteristics (positioning, color scheme, form usability, and word content). Test and fine tune. She mentioned this tool named optimost.com which is a 3rd part dynamic landing page optimization service (sounds very interesting).

Misty Locke from Range Online Media is up now. How does the ad meet the conversion? She talks about her 6 key reminders. (1) Who are you targeting? Know your audience. (2) Conversions can vary depending on keyword and landing pages AND on CPC engine. (3) Landing pages should directly correlate to keyword and placement. (4) Remember the convenience of the online shopper. (5) Take a deep breath - use the 2 to 3 click rule, don't make the user to click too much. (6) Think conversion not traffic when selecting search terms for interior or product pages.

Determine most relevant search terms, consider the product inventory (how much you have in stock), which products have the highest profit margin? Then identify your biggest competitors, what are they ranking for? are they buying on those words? Where are those landing pages? And what sets you apart from them. She then goes over some basics which you all know, since your reading this. :)

Pier 1 Case Study:
High CTR but low conversion rates, which was not great. They wanted to increase conversions, and ROI. They improved user experience (landing pages), detailed more keywords and targeted only the pier 1 shopper. She wrote creative that was targeting the Pier 1 customer only. The CTR was about 20%, which was excellent. They then added more 'feeling' to the ad, the CTR increased about 10% (to 30%), but where they buying? Problem was that the customer didn't know how to navigate from the home page to the product. So they took them directly to the product or category pages. Site conversions increased 4 - 6 %. Keyword conversions increased from .37% to 1.79%

Lee Mills from BeyondClicks is up next. He said include keyword in ad creative always. You also want to include the keyword in the ad landing page and a strong call to action (offer free stuff if you have to). One of his clients is anonymizer. The landing page must have multiple call to actions, multiple ways to buy (top and bottom of the page). He said its also good to put price in your ads (if you are a low cost provider). They are more likely to buy if they know the cost. He stresses, like the other speakers, test continuously!

They did some A/B testing on landing pages. B2B example: Page A had a 3% conversion rate. So they made Page B which was simplified, and its conversion rate was 18%. That is huge! B2C example: Page A had a 3.2% conversion, they made a longer page with multiple offers on Page B and the conversion rate was 9.6%. He said if you have scrolling pages, then put an additional offer (call to action) at the bottom of the page. Do not use pages that do not allow for navigation to your other pages, I see this often with landing pages - he says it doesn't work (causes lack of credibility).

Q & A:

Q: With the "bracket trick", now people are using 3 to 4 keyword searches, how much longer will this trick work?
A: Jessie said it works well in some cases and not in all cases. Ideally, any CPC source that allows this, you can bet they will expand it. With Google, they only allow 6 keywords - so its a product fault. But sometimes you should break them down into static ads.

Q: How do you work with companies to change their navigation?
A: Start slowly and show how it works.

The same guy made a comment about how nice it was to see a female panelists. The panelists liked that, thought it was funny.

Q: My clients are dumb, they want to my "town real estate" keywords but he said they don't convert.
A: Test different styles of ads; personal ads versus corporate like ads. "Meet Mrs. Real Estate Agent" versus "Meet Company Real Estate". The individual, personal ads seem to do better, because its like a word of mouth referral. Do what you can to capture that lead, maybe a white paper, maybe something else. Then after you get the lead, have your sales people jump on them.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Jessie Stricchiola starts off with a brief history of how she got into click-fraud. She had her tech team build a program to monitor click-fraud. Then identified two of the client's competitors who were clicking on the ads. The average costs were $1,500 per day! The company that was doing this fraud was ironically a law firm that worked on Internet fraud. Then GoTo.com (2002) gave the client a refund.

Fraudulent clicks come from:
- Competitors clicks; often manually, sometimes via automated 'hitbots'.
- CPC affiliate clicks; often via 'hitbots' and is generated by PPC partners from various locations. Its hard to detect these things and the CPC engines are also working on identifying and blocking it.
- Impression Fraud is an other concern. One of the criteria of ranking well in Google AdWords is your CTR. The higher the impressions but the lower the clicks, this can ultimately lead for your ad to be removed.

Auditing Click Fraud:
- Set up tracking URLs
- Data you need to collect is the URL request and the Visitor behavior data (after the click). She mentions three Web analytics tools (Urchin, WebTrends, ClickTracks) and Bid Management (did it, atlasone and keywordmax).
- Configure your reports to store as much information as possible (ip, os, browser, keywords, source, etc.)
- Then you do analysis of these reports by compiling click data per keyword and per cpc engine.
> average daily clicks
> average page views per click
> average conversion rate per keyword per click
> PPC network partner sources (international referrers)
> hourly click trends, etc.
- What are click fraud indicators
> abnormal spikes
> abnormal clicks increases plus atypical visitor behavior
> more than one competitor dropping out of contention
> non converting cpc network partners
- Presenting the Information to your CPC Engine
> be thorough
> document your analysis
> record all data
> take screen shots

She said Google is not as helpful as Overture when it comes to this stuff.

- Action Items
> contact your competitors if possible, see if they are experiencing the same issue.
> contact your cpc account representative
> continue to monitor your click activity

She adds that she feels one day they will be able to sue people and take them to court for click-fraud.

Lori Weiman from KeywordMax is giving a case study as I type. She started off describing how click fraud happens. They might click on your ad manually, or use a bot with a way to mask their IP. Then you have the stupid click-frauders that just click without masking IP. The affiliates are the smartest click-frauders, they mask IP, break the referral url and break your own tracking URLs.

How do you catch it? Use a tracking system that captures IP addresses, use a tracking system that captures the referrers. Audit your bills and what for click spikes, also watch for clicks from irrelevant geographic regions.

Case Study A:
Client A notices an ongoing spending increase of $30,000 per month on Tier 1 engines. It was detected by receiving threatening email from a disgruntled ex-employee, using keywordmax they saw 0% increase in conversions. The fraudster went to jail! This client had to ask for refunds, and it took a lot of time. The CPCs should have been more helpful.

Case Study B:
Client B had an affiliate fraud problem. He notices click spikes of 5x coming form a tier 2 engine, it was tracked and reported. The CPC engine refunded the money and they booted that affiliate. CPCs need preventive measures in place to stop this from happening in the future.

How to file a complaint?
- 60 days to file a complaint in writing
- Very thorough documentation and proof (keywords, date ranges, etc.)
- You will need to follow up with emails and phone calls.

What can the engines do to be more proactive:
- Detailed billing just like your phone bill. We want an itemized click bill.
- Set up Fraud Departments to handle this
- Communication and Willingness to work with customers

Danielle Leitch from MoreVisibility was up next.

Case # 1:
She saw normal traffic based on her Web analytics but when she looked at the AdWords report reported 5x more. She noticed a huge increase in clicks from the same keyword phrase, will a zero conversion rate. She basically had the same thing to say as the other two speakers (but she made a point to say that she never spoke with the other two speakers before today).

Case # 2:
Overture reported a 10x increase in overall clicks on a single day. Since there are no daily limits set, it could be very costly. Red flags were raised all over the place based on traffic, conversions, clicks and more. They looked at the server logs and found a pattern, they also looked at tracking URLs. She called Overture and reported the information to Overture. 1 week later she got her refund, which was good. They reviewed the previous weeks as well and credited for previous history as well.

Remember if you do get a refund, you must adjust your reports accordingly. Update your Web analytics and report data.

Q & A:

Q: Why are there no search engines on the panel?
A: The search engines declined to join.

Q: Do you think if you did not report this click fraud to the engines, you would have received a refund?
A: No. Jessie said Overture has done a lot to increase the comprehensiveness of the analytics and increased the support staff to support this. They can't disclose what they are doing because if they do, the spammers can work around it. She still says they should disclose it to the advertisers. If you are getting a refund, you should know exactly what you are being refunded for (which keyword, times, etc.), Lori adds. Danielle does not fault the engines, she said its up to us to report it to the engines. But Jessie does fault the engines. She points out the overture reps in the room.

Q: How do you contact the click fraudster? What is the best way to do it?
A: You must have evidence. If you do, then contact them.

Q: What percentage of overall traffic is click-fraud?
A: Jessie said its nearly impossible to figure that out because click-fraud is dollar, niche and keyword specific. She said there are probably verticals that don't have this problem, some keywords are hit more then others. She said "within competitive keyword phrases ($2 - $3+ per click), based on her opinion, about 10 - 20% are fraudulent.

Q: Did you ever make a case where you reported fraud and not get a refund?
A: Yes, and the CPCs were right in the case that they were not fraudulent. Sometimes there are partial or no refunds based on looking deeper in the details.

Q: Do CPC engines block IPs?
A: They handed the mic to Overture to answer the question. They sometimes do it but they rarely block IPs, they write filters to increase their fraud algorithms.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

Danny Sullivan begins to say that his past keynotes were all about telling the audience who owns who and which engine powers which search. But ironically he quickly goes over the "who powers who" diagram.

SEM Threats:
- Contextual Pollution;
Results only come up for a keyword search I desire. This works differently then viewing ads on a Web page based on browse mode versus "quest mode." Danny said "contextual ads" are not "search". Just because an ad is CPC-based doesn't make it search. Lumping the two together pollutes the data. Are you a performance marketer or a search marketer? Its important to separate these two types of marketing tactics out. One is search and one is contextual. Just because the search engines are providing this technology, doesn't mean they should be looked as - as one.
- Agency Money / Branding Buck;
There is branding value here based on the GoTo's 2001 study and IAB's study in 2004. He says the pie of a company's marketing budget isn't bigger, but you need to get a larger piece of that pie. The search companies are providing support for this primarily on the PPC (ad side). But SEM is not only ads its also SEO, which is Public Relations. The support on the SEO side is an issue, other then PFI, there is no support.

SEO Lives:
- SEO should have died
- Google has kept SEO alive and revived it (he notes a thread at WMW that discusses how 3 bots revived SEO.
- You can sell ads but people want the PR (SEO) too

He then goes into a case study, a funny example of his 3 and 5 year old boys. His children call flash lights "flash torches" because Danny is American (flash light) and his wife is English (torches). So his kids are not hitting either market with the name "flash torch". So they can buy ads but they get nothing on the SEO side.

What is Needed for SEO Support:
Danny basically pulled the info from an SEW thread (t=197);
- Algorithm shift warning
- More authoritative info
- Express Spam Report
- Public spam reporting and checking
- Paid support program
- Search query stats
- Complete crawls
- Partnership in attitude on both ad and free side
- Commissions? Protection from direct sales? Certification?

What's the incentive for search engines to do this?
- Helping to win the ad spend but can't be ad-only shop
- It's not exactly like newspapers. You do need PR support and can do it without violating the church/state divide.

SEM Reputation Problem?
To get more support, we need to deal with the reputation problem in our industry (reference the SEW thread in the forums). He also quotes the marketing guru, Seth's blog entry. He pleads that SEO is not a black art. He discusses the SEO contest and how link bombing worked. The customers when shopping for an SEM firm are afraid. Fast Company releases an article about the Google Dance 2003 with the title "Shmoozing with the Enemy."

He goes through some spam examples on the Web, with tons of links at the footers of pages. The search example was "san jose radio flyer" in Google. Then he did the same search in Ask Jeeves. The text is not hidden, but pages are filled with text that mean nothing to the searcher.

He says there are good SEM firms and good stories.

What do customers want?
- Traffic that converts (not just top rankings), check references
- Not to be scammed (maybe someone should start a public forum telling people about these companies)
- Not to be banned

Solution:
- Code of Conduct? "I will do nothing to harm search engine relevancy" but this is all very subjective.
- Enforcement/Review
> seopros.org
> seoconsultants.com
> any standards are open to debate

One thing Danny thinks will help is if the search engines themsevles get involved.
- We need something, not sure what.
- Search engine involvement in proactive way would greatly help (goes both ways)
- Will it lock some out? Some people will be locked out but they will have to deal with it. Its not just a white hat versus black hat. He said there is a lot of gray in the industry, because its a very complicated area. I wonder if the audience understood "White versus Black"

He now gives the audience a peep talk about all we have done. SES will be giving out marketing awards in the future to reward us.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.