Our coverage of the December search marketing conferences is now complete. We have extensive coverage, in raw-live format from SES Chicago and PubCon Vegas. Both conferences were a huge hit and lots of fun and learning took place.

Again, a huge thank you to our contributors and writers including Carolyn Shelby, Dave Rohrer, Chris Boggs, Justin Davy, Marty Weintraub, Avi Wilensky and Tamar Weinberg. Your hard work does not go unappreciated by the SEM community and industry - we all thank you.

We covered 28 sessions from PubCon and 24 sessions from SES. Here is a recap of the sessions we covered by conference:

PubCon Vegas 2007 Search Conference Coverage Recap:

1. Keynote Conversation with Craig Newmark
2. SEO 101 - The Timeless and Classic Hits
3. PPC 101 – Beginner to Intermediate Level
4. Monetizing Social Media Traffic
5. Reputation Monitoring and Management
6. Social Marketing 101
7. Link Building Campaigns and Strategies
8. Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies
9. Optimizing Your Site for Contextual Ads
10. Content Creation - Cranking it Out
11. Link Buying
12. Domain Names and Trademarks - Legal Issues
13. Effective Domaining Strategies
14. Web Hosting Industry Overview
15. SEO Design and Organic Site Structure
16. SEO and the Big Search
17. Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDF's, and Blog SEO
18. Brand Management
19. Keynote with Matt Cutts
20. Responsible Web Design
21. Effective Action Based Copywriting
22. CSS and HTML Coding Today
23. Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization
24. Search and Blogging Reporters Forum
25. Competitive Intelligence
26. International and European Site Optimization
27. Organic Keyword Research and Selection
28. Tools of the Trade

SES Chicago 2007 Search Conference Coverage Recap:

1. Search Around the World - Part One: Asia/Pacific & Australia
2. Mobile Search Battle Royal
3. Redefining the Customer
4. Meet the Web Analytics Players
5. The Human Equation: Giving Back Internet Style
6. Orion Panel – Search, Privacy, and the Community in the Digital Age
7. Igniting Viral Campaigns
8. There’s Still Money on the Table!
9. Orion Panel - Universal, Blended, and Vertical Search
10. The Transformation of Local in a Search Driven World
11. Retailer Track: Shopping Search Tactics
12. Are Paid Links Evil?
13. Maximum Conversion in Retail: Raising the Bar
14. Actionable Social Media
15. Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search
16. Case Study: Moving from Paper to Online
17. Managing Automated PPC Bid Management
18. Your Marketing Program in Context
19. Calling All Clicks: PayPerCall and You
20. PPC Advertising on Influential Blogs and Social Media
21. Last Minute Holiday Search Tactics
22. Just for Fun Track: So You Want to Be a Search Marketer?
23. Fun With Dynamic Websites
24. Dealing with Difficult Clients

Our top five stories across both conferences by pageviews are:

• Monetizing Social Media Traffic from PubCon Vegas written by Tamar Weinberg
• Link Buying from PubCon Vegas written by Tamar Weinberg
• SEO 101 - The Timeless and Classic Hits from PubCon Vegas written by Avi Wilensky
• Shopping Search Tactics from SES Chicago written by Marty Weintraub
• Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies from PubCon Vegas written by Dave Rohrer

That wraps up our coverage. See you all in February, for our next major conference coverage event!

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs, who states this this will hopefully be an Oprah-like therapy session (laughs).

First speaker is Michael Murray from Fathom SEO. Difficult clients - they want solutions to their problems and assurance. He suggests to avoid problems in the first place by framing expectations and conveying a consistent message. They use as many possible methods to amplify the points they are trying to cover. Being attentive to regular calls and conferences, even if the client is less-so. Keep thorough notes on clients. The requirements: signed agreements with specific terms – commitment time period specific, control methodologies in place, and collaboration channels are clearly identified. For example, they have to have full and immediate access to analytics in order to participate in the measurements.

Objections: what is the problem? What caused the problems? What are the possible solutions? What is the best solution? They ask these questions internally prior to the meeting/phone calls with the client in order to be well prepared. Handling concerns – be proactive about direct communications – no voice mail messages, etc. It is better to know we’re going to respond and then call within one business day. The more people we bring into meetings, the more they know we are dedicating a lot of resources towards solving their problems. A “show of force” like this can go a long way in making the client content. Be consistent and rapid in the communication.

Jeff asks the panelists about the idea of managing expectations. What are good ways to do this once the process has begun? Simon states that the initial thing as Michael said is the full requirements gathering clearly states the expectations. Kendall thinks it is a progression. Yes the first thing is a thorough scope. Typically, unless the person is already a friend, you have to get to know each other. As you do get to know each other, you have plenty of opportunities to more clearly define and continually revisit the expectations of the projects as well as the quality expected and the level of service desired. Michael insists on 6 weekly calls form the get-go, in order to get them in the habit of meeting with them. The first six calls really tell the client how serious they are. They are adamant about scheduling that immediately. Simon adds that you are maybe regularly dealing with someone in the middle level of management and used to managing to their expectations, and then discover a new level of expectations in a meeting with the C Suite.

Next up is Simon Heseltine from Red Boots Consulting. he will talk about the six types of difficult clients: 1. The “I want it yesterday client.” 2. “The Denier.” These people do not implement recommendations, and yet are taking times to second guess everything. They are sometimes only partially implementing. 3. The “sneak attacker / Invisible man.” They disappear for some time and then all of a sudden contact you and turn into the I want it yesterday client. 4. “The scope creeper.” Before you know it the one site audit turns into 3 site audits and a white paper on Bolivian dental services. 5. “The spy” they are trying to train their in-house staff when they are working with you. This is fine if it is a formal training situation, but at some point they may dump you. 6. The lack of internal process client. He describes a situation where IT teams sometimes simply copy stuff onto other pages, etc, making it difficult to understand strange changes manifesting themselves in the analytics. This leads to the discovery of recommendations that were either improperly implemented or reused erroneously.

Be proactive in dealing with difficult clients. Set expectations up front – use the contact for scope issues. Provide regular updates on a mutually agreed schedule. Identify the issues ASAP and then resolve them. If all else fails, you can fire them. You are in the business sot make money and to help clients. If you have someone that is an absolute pain, then you have to possible reevaluate the need for the relationship. He then announces that Red Boots will be rebranding in January as Serengeti.

Jeff asks about the differences in communications styles based on generations or other differences in demographics between the client’s makeup and the internal team make up (paraphrased). Kendall suggests asking up front to see how they like to operate/communicate, and fit into that. Jeff wonders if that should be documented specifically, and Kendall doesn’t necessarily do this every time. They do not want the client to think they are being so diligent about writing every single thing down and referencing it formally in email etc…this is not their style.

Kendall Allen from Incognito Digital. (She has no PowerPoint) They are a small agency and they want to focus on deep relationships with a few clients. Some of the things they think about from a positive front. They help clients with branding and conversions, which can be challenging since it is a dual metrics campaign. They are focused on developing long term engagements and long term planning, so they want to be in that process with the client along the way. It can be challenging with some of the types of clients that Simon talked about.

It is a constant progression/journey, not a one time event of setting expectations up front. They are focused on helping their clients with preparing reports to present internally. Then there is the component of good and bad ideas…some times the client’s ideas need to be carefully re-crafted. The idea of building a relationship with clients that would last even over multiple agencies is something she considers. If you think of that possibility instead of short term, you will likely have a better relationship.

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

It's extremely important for IT and Marketing to work together.  Kiss and make up!!!  IT guys do more than play quake.

First begin your research project by looking at:

• URL Structure How many variables are in that url?
• Search Engine Indices
• Current Rankings You have a list of phrases that you want to show up better on?  You need to look at historical numbers as well as current and future changes.
• Spider Activity How often are the spiders getting down to your 3^rd, 4^th or 5^th level content?
• Determine Target Terms What keyword phrases do you want to show up for?  You would want to rank for your highest converting keywords.
• Overcome technology, resource and/or
• Index, Optimize political challenges
• Monitor Improvements

Homepage titles really do matter.  What keyword phrases are really important to your site? 

Category page titles are important as well but its not enough.  Be sure to use an <h1> tag that reflects your title tag with your important keyword.  Use on page copy in a paragraph that is keyword rich.

If you've done all of this and your still not ranking what's wrong?  Many times your competitor has the particular keyword in the domain or domain name.  In this case make sure your important items or keywords are featured on your homepage.

Basic Optimization Principles

• Page titles
• Headings
• Navigational Text
• Content
• Metadata
• URLs
• Anchor text
• Links

Universal search- is it affecting your organic placement more off-site factors for competitive keyword phrases

Select keyword phrase improvements in Google, but takes longer to achieve top positions

Consider optimizing a Yahoo data feed

Robots.txt

Be sure to use robots.txt file Can you exclude files that would be considered duplicate?  The robots.txt is like a welcome mat at your house.  People are still going to come into your house if you don't have one.  Its like this with search engines, they'll still come in but your telling them where they can and cannot go.  Be careful when building out your robots.txt file, 1 “/” and you can disallow your entire site from the search engines.  You must educate yourself about the robots.txt file.  Google webmaster central can help with this.

Redirects

When doing any kind of redirecting it's recommended to use a 301.  It's not good to do this on the root level though.  Most of the time people link to the homepage of a site because it's the easiest thing to do, but what your telling the search engines when setting up a root level 301 is that none of my content is here but its somewhere else.

Architecture

Don't use javascript in your navigation unless you want to loose the search engines. 

Duplicate content

Everypage on your website should have its own address like your physical house that you live in.  you don't share 20 homes.  With duplicate content you basically have 20 mailboxes for one home.  You need to think about which “home” or page is the important page.  An example of who's doing this wrong is www.brookstone.com and the product level page (Maxell Batter, 9-Volt)  this page can be accessed almost 20 different ways through this one website.

Canonicalization

You can start with http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com  If so you have 2 websites with the same content that can be accessed two different ways.  How are you linking from your home button?  Are you doing something like this http://www.domain.com/index.html?  Now you've just created a 3^rd way.  You need to use a 301 and choose 1 way to link to your homepage.  When linking from your navigation be sure that you are consistent as well.

“Legacy” Spam

Does your site still have “invisible” text links from years ago?  If your doing this, you will be caught and your ranking will slip as well as the pages being indexed.

Be sure to take advantage of Google Webmaster Central and the offerings from the other search engines as well.  Fix your architectural problems instead of just trying to Band-Aid with a sitemap.

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

Ready to start your search marketing career?  This panel looked at ways fledgling SEMs can educate themselves to get started in this exciting profession. The session was moderated by: Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Dave Davies, CEO, BeanstalkThings to do: Get a great lawyer and accountant, stick to your strengths, pick your strongest skill and be excellent. Take care during growth and only hire what you need, not what you want. Watch your stats and keep researching your market position.

Things NOT to do: Don't be over optimistic you won't rank for "SEO-Your-City" in 2-3 months (sorry). Try not to do everything you are not an expert at SEO, and design and everything else. Hire friends. If they own part of the company, you're not hiring them. Don't rest on your laurels, they will get you crushed. ENJOY your business. If you don't then it's not truly success.

David Wallace, CEO and Founder, SearchRankToday we have many ways to learn about search marketing: Free Resources -SEOmoz's "Beginner's Guide To SEO, "multiple blogs and forums, eBooks -SEOBook.com, Small Business Guide to Search Marketing, Online Courses -SEMPO, Search Engine College, Bruce Clay, Conferences and Seminars -SES, PubCon, SMX. However, in David' opinion, nothing replaces a "hands on" experience one obtains when doing SEM for their own site(s).

Establish a website.  Choose your niche (Something that interests you but not highly competitive), something that may help establish your business. Secure a Domain Name If new, you then have the hurdle of "establishing" the domain, Old domain is better but can require some work and money to obtain, Establish Web Site. Three options -Design it yourself, hire a designer or use automated solution.
Applying a Search Marketing StrategyConduct keyword research. This lays the foundation for your search marketing effort. Techniques Involve applying what you have learned to date which should at least be basic SEO and link building techniques. Set up Paid Search Campaign (if applicable). Track Progress. Analyze visibility, traffic, even conversions where applicable. Most of all learn from successes and mistakes.

Network with others.  Whether working for an agency or establishing your own SEM firm, it is important to network not only with partners but other search marketers. Develop business partnerships traditional ad agencies, web design firms, etc. Network online with search marketers forums, blogs, social media, etc…  Network in "real life" with everyone. This can include this conference for example but even things like local business organizations or trade shows.

Brand yourself as an expert: There are many search marketers, there are few that really standout. Write informative articles. Participate in forums. Participate in social media. Start an informative blog.  Words of caution: Don't spam forums and/or blog comments. Don't steal other's content or sales copy. Don't come off as a know-it-all. Don't promise what you can't deliver. No matter what color hat you wear, don't be unethical in your business practices.

Nicole St. Martin, Search Marketing Analyst, HotGigs/Jobs2webSearch marketing is a great field to get into. It requires No College Degree, employment terms are extremely flexible, salaries are lucrative, skills are portable & global. Skills like patience and passion and problems solving are very important.
Learn search marketing from SEOMOZ, High Rankings.com, TopRank, SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SMX, SearchEngineStrategies, and Search Marketing Standard.

David Hoffman, Search Smart MarketingFive Rules for Dating My Client: Partnering with Agencies, Web Developers, PR Firms and others:Rule #1: Sign a "PreNup, "including Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreements which should protect both parties. It will put the agency's mind at ease. You live under their roof and under their rules.

Rule #2: Don't Disrespect the Family meet deadline and live up to their standards. Establish guidelines for client contact.

Rule #3: Earn Their Trust. Exceed expectations. Provide education; lunchtime seminars, pertinent articles. Don't "nickel & dime."

Rule #4: Be Discreet About Dating Others. Working with multiple agencies can become dicey. Avoid client conflicts. Be wary of exclusivity.

Rule #5: Keep Everyone Happy. Make sure it's worth their while. Make sure it's worth your while

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

Marty Weintraub writes for aimClearBlog, published by aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency specializing in organic & paid search as well as social media marketing (SMM) and blogging.

Moderated by Kevin Ryan, the conference’s organizer. He welcomes people and provides a brief introduction to the topic. He discusses that search is great since you do not have to have the campaign “in the can” months in advance. He cites the Aquadots story and how they are being recalled, and that many ads on Black Friday still featured the product in their creative since they could not remove it in time.

First up will be Matt Naeger from Impaqt. What did you learn from last year? It is important to understand this and is a good starting point for holiday planning. He feels you should actually be looking at last year every day. You should know exactly what percentage of your online sales occurred in December. He suggests following traffic and revenue by hour and day not week and month. Think “Cyber Everyday” – the biggest thing he has learned from Cyber Monday is that it is a starting point to the season. Typically there are 5 or 6 higher volume days than Cyber Monday (he did not mention which). He recommends that you learn from your competition, since they are smart too. Also, you should manage to your market, not your budget. Don’t worry about the budget, instead understand where the market is and react accordingly.

Pay attention! Keep your search in step with other marketing vehicles. Be persistent with your creative…don’t put it up today and take it down tomorrow. Many people get nervous too quickly. Don’t forget about organic – you will see these results sometimes change on a daily basis, and should react accordingly with paid search tactics. Build supporting messages and be prepared to launch at any time. Submit creative pieces early to get them approved, and then store them in the campaign ready to go right away. Test creative by time of day, especially with high volume terms. Differ the creative based on the audience that is likely more prominent during the particular time of the day, such as the “happy home makers,” for example.

Ongoing campaign refinement is important – don’t buy what you can’t sell and don’t sell what you can’t deliver. He suggests promoting delivery times by product. Use creative that states the typical delivery times, not just “last ship date.” Focus on products based on volume and margin. He recommends buying generic keywords on low position – he has seen a lot of benefits from a lower position for terms such as “gift for…” Lastly, learn from your customer – start looking at the actual full phrases that the customers search for instead of relying only on the broad match keyword.

Next up is Kevin Lee from Did It, and also a member of and past Chairman of the SEMPO Board of Directors. There has been significant growth in online holiday shopping year over year. Are you getting your fair share? Consider asking for some additional “slush fund” money to let you take advantage of opportunities. Conversion rates change sometimes on a fairly large basis during the holidays, so consider this in your planning. Don’t make decisions based on old inaccurate data. Monitor shopping cart sizes, lag times (reductions may be occurring) and the offline purchase behavior. Perhaps you have a ton of data which will support your request for additional budget.

He also feels it is better to pre-load campaign creative to be able to turn it on when you want, but that you should also create new campaigns and ads during the high opportunity seasons. He suggests using a cloned campaign instead of the main campaign for this. Offer shipping deals, promotional couponing, etc. Are you monitoring buzz indicators? Use Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz index, and your own top seller information. Knowing what is hot sooner lets you follow the trends more closely, and take advantage of the opportunity to make changes. Watch your competition spending – are your competitors or suppliers spending heavily both online and off? can you piggy back off their spending? There may be a halo effect around particular buzz. Search is often not spontaneous – people don’t typically wake up and say I need a new cell phone,” for example.

Some tactics to consider include home page takeovers, viral marketing, TV, and bug banner buys. It is never too late to execute new tricks for the holidays. Kevin also stressed the importance of using “free shipping” type verbiage, but recommends even using “free FedEx” in order to take the ambiguity away from some people that will wonder if they still have enough time to get it delivered.

Bill Tancer from Hitwise was supposed to be here, but got caught at the airport due to weather. Bill sent data to Kevin Ryan including the research that shows a 37% growth since last year. He suggests being culturally sensitive as well. There is a big timeline difference between Hanukah and Christmas, for example. People “go nuts” for gift cards, so he recommends keeping active in promoting these even after Christmas. Remember to take ads down after the holidays – this may seem obvious, but it happens often. Kwanza ads during June? This is a waste of time and money.

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

Speakers:

• Todd Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO, Buzzlogic
• Jay Sears, SVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc.
• Jason Weisberger, COO, Federated Media

Blog Statistics

• 65 million Americans read blogs
• 60% of those readers access blogs to explicitly get an opinion
• 65% of online “power shoppers” say they always read consumer generated reviews and spend more than 10 minutes engaging with UGC before they buy.
• 3.5 billion brand-related conversations per day

Who is directing traffic and attention to a particular post?

Who is the influencer linking out to for information?

What do these linking patterns tell me about consumer behavior?

Super engaged audiences are now going to targeted content via social media.  So if an iPhone is being blasted in a conversation about how it doesn’t work with corporate email then blackberry would find it valuable to advertise on that page.

There’s been a lot of media fragmentation over the past few years, with page views in the top 3 portals declining while total internet growth in page views is up 21%.

With that being said, media spend is lopsided with over 50% of media spend going to those big destination sites.

Scale vs. Control includes the need of a common denominator to bring scale.  Other important factors are demographics, behavior and targeting based on “social nets”

Control can mean a lot of things:

• Pricing & reliable volume projections
• Content adjacency (what type of content is my ad going to run against)
• Brand Association (if you have any brand based considerations you want to be in a brand safe environment)

Contextual is not search

• Readers are not searching for you
• More like banner or print advertising
• Blog readers are in research phase, not buying phase

Never run content while running on the search network at the same time.  It should be a separate campaign.

Algorithms look at the keywords and the ad copy and then picks a theme for that category in one of 594 themes.  No more than 30-50 keywords per ad group.  The lesser the better.

More on the structure of content campaigns

Match types are irrelevant (except negative)

Individual keyword bids are irrelevant

Negative keywords are necessary

Ad Copy Differences

Ads need to stand out

Yell, don’t whisper (your not punished for low quality scores like with search network)

Be more competitive – e.g. free shipping

Test, test, test

Ad Position Differences

Magic positions for search are 1-3

Magic positions for content are 1-4 since avg. pub runs ads with 4 spots

Watch Google placement performance reports.  It shows which sites your ads have appeared on as well as the metrics that you’re used to seeing in your keyword reports.

Sample Strategy

1. Setup separate content campaign
2. Run performance report
3. Use site exclusion to eliminate poorly performing sites
4. Move top-performers to a CPC placement targeted campaign
5. Rinse & repeat

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

Speakers:

• Marc Barach, Chief Marketing Officer, Ingenio, Inc.
• Dan Hight, Director of eCommerce Sales – Agency Division, Superpages.com

Pay Per Call is paid calls from search.

• Calls: A performance based advertising service and network that drives calls instead of clicks.
• Cost-per-action: Advertisers only pay for tangible results
• Bidding: An auction based marketplace where advertisers compete for top placement
• Targeted: A service that allows advertiser to target ads to specific categories and geographic locations
• Accessible: a marketing vehicle available to any advertiser whether they have a site or not
• Intuitive: A service that requires no change in customer behavior
• Disruptive – A revenue source beyond traditional media
• Multi-channel

Ad network includes: Internet Search, Internet Yellow Pages, Mobile Search, Directory Assistance, Text Messaging, and Podcasting

How it works: Toll free number redirects to actual customer number.  Consumer simply picks up the phone and calls. (This isn’t click to call)

Top 10 Categories for Online Directory Searches

1. Cable & Satellite
2. Internet Service Providers
3. Mortgage Refinancing
4. Credit Repair
5. Travel Agents
6. Substance Abuse Treatment
7. Auto Insurance
8. Cosmetic Surgery
9. Timeshares
10. Cruises

Why Pay Per Call works for Mobile

• Delivers timely relevant content to mobile customers.
• It’s intuitive
• It’s easy to advertisers to get started
• It makes sense for portals and publishers

Top 5 Search Categories for Mobile

• Food and Dining
• Arts & Entertainment
• Travel
• Shopping
• Family and community

This session echoed a common theme that consumers are searching online but primarily buying offline.  (3% buying online and 97% buying offline)

Cost Per Call factors include CTR, Bid Prices, Call Duration, & Repeat calls from the same number.

Advertisers can prefund their account on a one time or reoccurring basis or for larger advertisers they can sign up for invoicing. 

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

Speakers:

• John Squire, SVP, Product Strategy, General Manager, Search Services, Coremetrics
• Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Mediasmith
• Isabel Sopoglian, VP of Search Marketing, Cars.com

John

Think about your marketing in terms of how we get the right visitors and what the right pages are to land on.  Also how do we get the right measurement to validate our decisions? 

Think about where you should invest your marketing dollars.  Over 50% of customers interact with more than 1 ad when making a conversion.  A little less than 50% click on one thing and then take some sort of action.  When you look at the data though nearly 25% are touching more than 30 channels over a 25 day time period before making a conversion.  Its important to look at all the influencers all the way through the sales process instead of just looking at the final conversion and believing that that was what made the sale.  Multi-touch increases a marketers decisions whether to eliminate an investment, invest in more 3^rd parties linkages, or bid up a particular keyword.

• Use attribution reporting across all sessions to gain an accurate picture of the paid search terms
• Identify critical groups of low cost per click keywords that precipitate sales

Bob

 

Search works with all the other branding activity that you do.  When Napster did a Super Bowl spot, search activity went up. 

Whether it’s an email or banner ad, it’s important to watch the click trail leading up to the last click.

There are instances where you try to be so efficient like just running search that you’ve eliminated all of your volume.

Isabel

 

What counts as a conversion on your site.  (sale, signup, traffic)

What is the value of that assigned conversion.  Are you tracking on keyword level?

Internal Key Factors to Conversion

Keywords, Ad copy, Landing Page, Conversion Path, Negative Keywords, URL Blocking

External Key Factors to Conversion

Traffic quality, click fraud, behavior of searchers, algorithmic changes, SERP changes, search engine testing

Example: Impressions up almost 300 percent for particular ad on Yahoo.  This decreased CTR’s.  They called Yahoo and Yahoo said they had been running “tests” Sometimes results are out of your hands.

Important to track

• Ability to track on keyword level
• By search engine
• Match type
• Ad copy
• Landing page version

Simple Strategies to Convert

• Only select keywords that are relevant to product
• Extensive negative keywords
• Use appropriate keyword match types
• Don’t mislead searchers with your ad copy
• Optimize your landing page and lead path to convert

Advanced Strategy to Convert

• Detect international clicks and demand search engines to block source or refund money
• Block non-performing domains
• Score traffic quality by source and implement into your bidding
• Check traffic for click fraud and provide search engine w/proof

Judge carefully when just looking at pure conversion data! The higher the quantity of traffic, the more statistically relevant becomes the results for your conversion. Once they were able to get more traffic from the Yahoo network they expect the conversion percentages for Google and Yahoo to even out!

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

Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch moderated the panel.

Managing PPC without automation is becoming impossible to do by hand. Tools at different price points are becoming more prevalent and require serious expertise. This SES session discussed using API bid management applications to increase ROI and gain a competitive advantage.

Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO, Acronym MediaEduardo Llach kicked off the discussion of automated bid management. “Automated bid management is outdated” and is just one of many functionalities search marketers need to run campaigns. “Campaign management” is what it’s really about.

First decide what you actually need. Do you need a solution for campaign syndication? Optimization? Reporting? Customer insight? Regardless, can you trust automated systems to make good decisions? Data-driven automation is not a substitute for granular web analytics. He recommends Omniture because it has strong web analytics integrated with bid management.

Pretty looks can be misleading but flexibility trumps good interface design. DoubleClick has the ugliest interface but the most powerful solution. Will automation actually save you money? Don’t forget keyword research, copy testing, user and user experience.

A good rule of thumb is to automate what you already know. He suggests optimizing campaigns by hand and then turn what you know works over to the machines.

Drive your friendly technology vendors mad by understanding the system and pushing it to the limit. Do not hire statisticians. Campaign automation needs smart search marketers because automated tools don’t ask deep questions, YOU should. Finally, campaign tracking is not a substitute for full web analytics. You need sophisticated, granular, and real-time technology to track user behavior.

David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
At first Clix was skeptical of automated tools. Even after they became convinced, their interest was further piqued by the “campaign management’ features of API tools. Clix asks, “How complex are your bidding requirements” and chooses tools based on needs.

Are they simple or complex? If simple, just use Google. More complex applications require dealing with variables like multiple publishers, tracking conversions and revenue, episodic flight based programs, inventory linkage, and keywords that are competitive.

Google offers free (of course) Google Conversion Optimizer for campaigns > 300 conversion / month, you can specify maximum cost per acquisition, and Google manages the bid price. It automatically manages your bid to manage a cost per action business rule. TIP: if you don’t meet the criteria by generating enough conversion, Google recommends that you “game” the system by placing the code on a non-conversion page.

Google has data that third party vendor do not have including geographic location, publisher site conversion history (content campaigns) day/time, and “other factors.” You get to campaign optimizer by “edit campaign settings.”

CMO and Founder, SearchRev discussed advanced techniques for paid search. He recommended putting together complex campaigns and then turning them over to tools to manage the campaigns.

What is common about all rules based tools are that the use one bid per keyword. SearchRev believes in multi-variable targeting + syndication, for instance separate bidding for the same word in different geo-graphic locations, times of day, and platforms. “How is the keyword doing in New York on Monday morning on Google as opposed to MSN in Massachusetts at 6PM in the afternoon on Friday?”

Track the results for each day, focus on the conversion rate and CPO, and bid according to conversion rate and CPO. In Google you can do accomplish day-parting right in the standard interface.

***Note this is "live" unedited blog coverage of SES Chicago 2007. Some typos, grammatical errors, or incomplete thoughts may exist. You can find Marty Weintraub at aimClearBlog, published by aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency focused on organic & paid search along with social media marketing.

How ThomasNet reinvented itself after 100 years

A little history

ThomasNet was a print directory company who turned into a giant online marketing force.  They connect industrial buyers and suppliers. They’ve been online since 1995; 100% focus on industrial marketplace.  They cover a wide array of areas and Linda assures us that the lessons they’ve learned will benefit all of us.

There are new authority sites popping up like Travelocity, Amazon’s and Expedia. 

Years ago there were only a few options in terms of television; they were NBC, ABC, and CBS.  This shook things up and made the marketplace competitive.  Linda compares this to sites like Travelocity, Amazon’s and Expedia’s that are focused on categories which compete with the Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

To be a destination site, you need to be a trusted authority.  They moved their directory from print to online but it’s more than that.  You need to reinvent yourself and listen to your buyers.

Staying true to core business adjectives

They stuck to what they had done best and that was bringing together buyers and sellers.  They didn’t just build a web component for the heck of it.  The important thing is to understand your buyers and users and this will help you to build relevant results and how to fill that need. 

Buyer Centricity

Building and improving products & services

Measure everything

Promote and marketing

Continually improve w/ testing

 

Questions to Consider

1. Where do they currently look for products/services?
2. What information is important to them when sourcing?
3. What level of detail are they looking for?
4. What frustrates them?

Older vs. Newer Methods

Direct Mail vs. On-site/online and email surveys

Focus groups vs. Online Focus groups

In-person surveys (one-on-one) vs. Webcast Surveys

Key benefit: rapid proto-typing – faster to market

9 out of 10 buyers start with the Internet to source products and services.  Their buyers were going online faster than the suppliers were putting their products online.  Less than 5% of their 20,000 clients were performing e-commerce actions on the site.

Situation -> Opportunity

Spending more time sourcing online -> Increase speed & efficiency of site

Sourcing online is not easy when looking for complex information -> Provide more company information in relevant categories

They reinvented themselves but developing products/services that enable suppliers to help buyers display information and easily navigate.

The website now has to serve the purpose of answering questions and asking questions back just like what a typical sales person would have done if talking to the buyer in person.  Your site has to have the ability to do that.

Situation -> Opportunity

Knowing key places buyers’ source online -> Educate suppliers on where buyers go first – reps, workshops, etc.

Website falls short of detailed specs and navigation -> Help supplier build websites, catalogs and CAD drawings that buyers want.

Proving ROI – understanding metrics -> Produce tool to help suppliers identify conversions actions and measure activity.

Constantly think about what user action you would want to take place.  (phone call, email)

Additional growth areas….

They post about 100 new product articles on a daily basis (many of these are press releases on new products).

Available via RSS feeds

Daily, weekly, monthly product alerts

Bi-weekly blog

Bi-weekly industry newsletter

Expand internationally, site translation

What they offer

Website Design & Development

Online Catalog Tools

Online CAD Drawings

Website Tracking

Measure Everything

1. Quantitative user online surveys
2. Traditional and online user focus groups
3. Web analytics

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

Speakers:

• Jeremy Kreitler, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Maps
• Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
• Jim Schoonmaker, CEO, Everyscape
• Ziya Genceren, LiveSearch Maps Product Manager, Microsoft
• Gary Price, Director of Online Information Resources, Ask.com

 

Gary Price – (This presentation was taken directly from a url provided at the conference)

 

Defining local is key

• Local is more than maps and business listings 
• Local is not always where you live, drive, "hang out"
• In fact, local is potentially more important other places, away from home turf
• Think about "local" and Chicago for those attending the conference

 

Will they be used by the masses or are we in a "geek only" mindset

• Is the user able to get more (better, more specific answer)
• User friendly
• Value proposition (will they save the user time, effort, aggravation) 

 

A Historical Perspective 

• TerraFly (More than six years old)
• Pages Jaunes (Street-Level Imagery of Cities in Spain and France)
• SuperTours (360 Tours of Several Areas including Las Vegas Strip)

 

What We're Up to at Ask.com

• Ask Mobile GPS (with Sprint)
• Lifestyle application combining Evite, CitySearch, Directions (spoken directions), etc. 
• Search geo-location

 

Ask Maps

• Walking and driving directions
• Aerial imagery
• Drag and move with dynamic recalculation
• Highlight new locations to map with simple one-click--no typing necessary

 

Ask Mobile

• No downloads necessary with all features
• Maps with visual cues
• Driving AND walking directions
• Satellite imagery 

 

AskCity

• Local search, buy tickets, movie info, reviews, restaurant reservations
• "Search inside" or "search along" a specific area with map mark-up features, save and share
• Neighborhood other sugggestions suggestions often listed in left rail

 

Ziya Genceren

 

When many think about local search they think of YellowPages but that’s a very limited way of thinking.  You should define local search as any query that involves location or geographic property.  For example what is the name of the Fountain across the street from the Chicago Hilton.

 

Local search has basically 2 touch points to mapping.  A map is a canvas and a rich mapping platform is important.  It can be done on the fly or in a custom way.  An advanced mapping platform allows the users to get much more information out of you like what Microsoft has done with 3d mapping.  He also gave us an example of how he brought up the fountain from across the street here at the Chicago Hilton and how that was the fountain that was used in the tv show “Married with Children” Microsoft has the ability to go out and pull geo information from the web which is then tied back to the photo.

 

Ian White

 

To API or to not API?

 

Ajax, tiles, rendering factory.  Their then cached and made available on demand.

 

How free is free though?  Free API’s virtually have no cost like with Google and its free up to 15,000 geocodes per day.  With paid solutions however you get additional functionality that is baked in as well.

 

Service-based businesses

No (meaningful) business address: cellphone + automobile – I come to you (nanny, plumber etc)

 

Defining multiple service area

Multiple ‘offices’

‘We serve Colorado’

A cold ware service-based business search

How to deescalate from MAD

 

For local search Ian says that IP targeting sucks.  For national targeting it works pretty accurately.

 

Jeremy Kreitler

 

Online maps are a central part of how users search today.  Over 60% of the internet audience is performing local specific queries.  41% of local searches are within a user’s home location.  Maps have a 88% reach on the internet in the US 3^rd after search and email.

 

Maps offer a geographic and visual way to organize different information.  It allows you to organize information from across the web into a visual format.  Local searches are growing as a portion of overall web searches.  Local is extending beyond business lookup including social media, local news and more.

 

Jim Schoonmaker

 

Map platform lack benefits to advertisers

 

Many features to the user experience

Street Imagery

Satellite Imagery

Directions

Maps

 

And Adwords do not meet their needs.  While the new search environment may suit some of the needs its not meeting the advertisers needs, particularly the smaller ones.

 

Now small businesses want people to be the interiors of their stores, restaurants, museums, dentists etc with Everyscape offers.

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

Moderated by Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink, who introduces the topic and panelists. She asks how many are actually using social media tools, and a fair amount of the nicely filled room raises their hands.

First speaker is Todd Parsons from BuzzLogic. BuzzLogic is an on-demand platform for social media marketing. They help identify influencers leading conversations on certain topics, and can also engage them. Blogging is hardly dead…65 Million Americans read blogs. Of them 60% are going to a blog explicitly to get an opinion. 65% of “online power shopper” always read user generated content (UGC) like reviews and spend an average of 10 minutes engaging with the UGC before they buy. 3.5 billion brand-related conversations are occurring per day. He gives an example of the linking behavior and dialogue that was fueled online by people talking about the recent news that the Toyota Prius could not pass the state of Georgia emissions testing.

Linking “gets a bit of a bad rap these days.” He feels this is wrong. He distinguishes between editorial and acquired links. Acquired links are engineered by marketers to gain search engine exposure. Editorial links are the organic result of producing great content, but harder to control. These types of links are rooted in trust. He states that search engines are getting much smarter at sniffing out manipulation. He talks about SE’s targeting bloggers associated with Pay per Post and devaluing their outbound links.

Social media tools (voting, comments, reviews, rankings) make it easier to foster SEO through authentic means., New technologies make is possible to locate important linking hubs. He was going to go into another case study but ran out of time.

Next up is Adam Lavelle from iCrossing. he says he has 5 minutes and 35 slides so bear with him. He goes through some illustrative slides that show how we are social animals that create connections. Content is the fuel that we sue to connect to each other. We have great devices to capture content, incredible software to shape it, and more ways to share and distribute it than ever before. What makes it social is out personal networks. LinkedIn, buddy lists, contact lists in Outlook, etc.

What does this mean for clients? Within three years 70% of the content online will be UGC. He quotes Clive Thompson who claims that Google is a reputation management system rather than a search engine. He shows the search “using post it notes” and how UCG has come to the top. Listen and be useful – this is all you need to do. Many opportunities exist to leverage social media ( a cool slide depicting these).

He shows a tool that they developed at iCrossing which maps links and sites that talk about 3M. This is a map that shows a clear ownership of the conversation about 3M by the actual brand. But if you look at the buzz/links/weight of the content around Post-It notes, 3M does not own that. Shows examples of other sites that are really dominating the talk about that brand, and ironically YouTube is near the top since so many people with time on their hands have uploaded videos of post-it note art. He then goes over another case study about Symantec, which indicates success in tracking this kind of information. He actually got through all 35 slides in 5 minutes!

Next up is Jennifer Laycock, from Search Engine Guide. She will be getting more specific and give examples from one social networking platform – Flickr. “Flickr – Say it with a Picture.” Why use it?> What you need to ask is why it will impact positively. She shows an example of some plain text content and how it get’s more interesting through the addition of a picture. Walt Disney said that pictures are the universally most understood medium. (something like that). She then shows a Yahoo! image search with a ton of Flickr results in the top page.

Another benefit of Flickr is the community. these people are very engaged since they actually add pictures to the site instead of just engaging in conversation. Shows a group example “Edible Gardening” and leads to the link at the bottom “Discuss.” She shows a person that came to the specific topical forum to get information.. Two ways to “play:” one is that you can be the person that has the knowledge to appear as an expert, but you can also encourage brand evangelists to speak. Another benefit of Flickr is links, both direct and indirect. She shows an example of the profile “Bento Yum” and how she drives traffic to the Bento Yum blog from there . Use the 80/20 rule, and don’t always use the site to build links.

Recommends that if you are going to use Flickr in this manner, you should learn about: tagging and adding notes, finding and joining communities, geo-tagging images, subs cribbing to RSS feeds, using Flickr widgets, creative Commons Licenses. these are all ways to get on other people’s radars.

Tamera Kremer from Wildfire Strategic Marketing. She will discuss Del.icio.us and how to leverage it. Del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking tools out there, and you can use it to share as well as vote on topics’ popularity (folksonomy). The ability to tag the articles: can be tagged as an individually relevant, or group them by “wishlist.” you can browse other users tags by keyword, and you can share your links with other users in your network. What really gets interesting and gets to the whole folksonomy is that you can add comments/descriptions.

She goes through a brief case study for a B2B client. It did not take off right away…was slow growth. The problem was that many people didn’t understand how to use it effectively, so they developed a “quick start guide” for the client’s employees, who would be helping with creating content to support this tactic. once developed, the participation increased tenfold. They learned that you have to limit the number of keywords, which made the tag cloud grow too large, this caused them to develop their own set of keywords for AIMS Canada. You cannot always have every member of the organization keep up with the latest stories and information around a particular subject, and Del.icio.us helps to keep this kind of information combined in one area.

last speaker is Steven Marder from Eurekster, who will introduce the product “Swicki.” He discusses the trends in the space, leading from Search and Media 1.0 to Social Media and Search 2.0 (algo + humans (publishers and users). Social media is about participation, and an opportunity to allow your users to build your brand for you. Looking at acquiring or retaining users through the online channel, you have to consider how to leverage what you already have. This is about providing a tool or application, for example, to help build interest. (I hope to get a copy of his deck and include it in a follow up, since he has lots of interesting content but due to time limitations has to speed through them)

A Swicki (Social Media Widget) can be about anything related to the site and brand. The syndication opportunity is dramatic, and this further reinforces the brand and provides something useful. He shows a couple screenshot of select client example3s. over 100k of the Swickis have been built to date, and the other feature (custom search portals) have been created by over 25000 people. Anne Kennedy tells the audience that one of the best things about Swicki is that is absolutely free, and “it can make you money even.”

Anne asks the panel what the biggest issues they see with this area. Jennifer says that one problem is people that go into this with a plan to market, and this won’t work. If you are going to get involved, you have to determine how long the project will last and what the goals are. Tamera agrees and says that people have become pretty adept at quickly picking out the spammers. The problem is when you have sucky product and are not being authentic or useful, according to Adam. You have to make it fit into your framework…there is a lot to do behind the scenes and not just “going out and posting ona forum.” Todd concurs, saying that the investment of time required is significant for it to work well, if proper prior planning is performed. He stresses the importance of the authenticity as well. Steven adds that you can be overly strategic in the communications, but at the base it is respect for the customer. Anne says it is like Aretha said :r.e.s.p.e.c.t. (laughs).

“Hugg” is a site like Digg but focused on “green” stuff (environmental causes) that Jennifer shows as an example of a relevant community.

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

Speakers:
* Jennifer Doss, E-Commerce Marketing Manager, Lids.com
* Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready
* James Beriker, President, Efficient Frontier
* Chris Leggatt, Senior Account Executive, Moniker


Jennifer Doss

Lids.com is real-time they sell hats from colleges and other sports teams.

Goals
* Triple monthly revenue at max CPA of $7
* Boost sites sear visibility on keyword hats
* Double revenue #’s from natural search

Challenges
* Over 10,00 pages and 20,000 sku’s
* Pages not optimized for indexing
* Not enough copy
* Keywords not properly targeted
* Content not targeting visitors
* No sitemap

Paid Tactics
* Manual management replaced
* Expand participation in other search programs
* Optimized paid search ad copy
* Increased keywords from 500 to 13,000 terms
* Revised monthly PPC budget (spent more in Nov & Dec based on season. About 30% of sales done that time of year)

Organic Tactics
* Dynamically generated optimization tags (code auto populated meta tags)
* Blog strategy targeting specific keyword phrases (sports and specific teams)
* Dynamic Google Sitemap file

Paid Campaign Results
* CPA decreased by 50%
* Monthly conversion increased 1,294%
* Monthly revenue increased 1,244%

Organic Campaign Results
* Achieved #1 ranking in Google
* and two others that I wasn’t fast enough to catch J

Jamie Smith

3c’s for success
* Conversion drivers (credibility security value)
* Conversion inspiration
* Nearly Customers – 1st Tier Closest to converting. Address these customers to have an immediate impact
* Non Customers – Came to site and didn’t add item to cart etc..
* New Customers

The 3 C’s for SEM Success
Develop a VISIBILITY strategy based on your target market, goals and objectives
* Creative
* Continuity
* Conversion

Visibility (Broadest View) In PPC Visibility=Impressions

How do you measure your success?
* Creative - Highest possible CTR
* Continuity - Lowest possible bounce rate
* Conversion - Maximum possible ROAS

If over 20% call to order…. Call Analytics?

Watch Path Analysis

* Navigation, Usability and Site Design
* Robust Site Search
* Complete Shipping

Chris Leggatt

What makes a good domain?
* Natural generic brand
* Easy to remember
* Clear, concise and descriptive
* Industry segment
* Visually pleasing
* Existing type in traffic

70% of internet users use direct navigation up 53% from 4 years ago
Direct navigation currently on track to surpass $1.2B this year
Direct navigation comprises 8-10% of us and us
More than 43% direct navigation traffic is willing to purchase product

Think about generic domain names being an expenditure. Are there other domains that can accomplish same results. Are there related domains whose acquisition would increase current traffic? How much am I spending for search adv. Vs how much would it cost to just buy the source?

On the other hand
Ex of Asthma.com
It’s an $11b dollar industry – 60% going to prescription drugs. Now 1 company controls that. So is it valuable enough for your company to own that domain?

Movie companies are converting better from film merchandise through direct navigation.

James Beriker

Most categories are growing and people are willing to spend more online. Consumers are also willing to pay for premium services like premium delivery etc.

Retail spend doubled year over year. Google search spend grow 134%

Google most effective at driving conversions for retailers
Spend preferences show MSN has higher conversion rates relative to yahoo

Conversion Best Practices
* Quality Score: User experience (conversion funnel) & Account Structure
* Higher quality score – more clicks @ lower cpc – more conversions – more revenue at lower CPA/higher ROI
* User experience determined by 3 things that must be congruent (search query, ad copy, landing page)

Search queries must be relevant
* Make sure title and description is relevant to that keyword and then make sure your landing page actually offers that

Account Structure Rules
* Organize Campaigns by product type
* Create ad groups based by product
* Inventory-based advertising (if your ad groups are organized by product, you can easily pause a group for out of stock product

Promotions
* Offers increase click-through rate in ad copy
* Offers only increase conversional rate. Is message is reinforced on landing page?
* Align print and online campaigns

Landing Pages
* Motivation
* Value proposition (clarity of value proposition)
* Friction (are u setting up resistance or clutter on your page)
* Incentive (counteracts friction)
* Anxiety (are there reasons on page not to buy)

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

Google is on a rampage to devalue sites who engage in link buying and selling. Do paid links ruin the integrity of search engine results? Are they evil? From the conference description: “Search engines, especially Google, say don't do 'em. But some search marketers say paid links work. Are paid links subverting search quality? Or are they simply a fact of life, here to stay?”

Moderator: Chris Boggs, Manager, Search Engine Optimization, eMergent Marketing/BRULANT, Inc.
[Chris provided background information for SEO newbies: Inbound linking is the method by which search engines judge the importance of any given pages. SEOs use “unnatural methods” including buying valuable links. Chris also explained “NoFollow” which means that you don’t actively endorse the page you’re linking to.]

Speakers:
William Leake, Founder and CEO, Apogee Search
This topic has flared up quite a bit over the last 72 hours and over the last few months. It’s important to disclose to clients whether or not linking strategies, which may include paid links, are high risk. Do paid links work? They do. Google’s attempts to discount paid links have had moderate success at best.

New link discounting practices only lead to new types of link building. For example, eco-system-wise, we’re seeing that directory links don’t have less value than they did previously, but paid blog posting is becoming more pervasive. While paid links are effective, they are just one component of a successful SEO campaign.

In hypercompetitive spaces (like mortgage, insurance, and dept consolidation), paid links are a necessity to survive. Compare that to negative political ads that are also necessary. Competitive forces have more influence on marketers than Google preferences. I.E. ROI is more important than a Google blessing for most advertisers. Balanced SEO campaigns are the best. Paid links should never be the only strategy. You need a well rounded approach.

Advertising without disclosure is a deceptive practice and the FTC has spoken out against it. All paid links are not necessarily deceptive. Google does not determine ethics for the industry and Internet. Yes, there are likely cases where search result quality is subverted but the impact is not significant. Overall, Google still provides high quality listings.

Sage Lewis
All link campaigns must start with content which is the “horse.” Sage says not to put the cart before the horse. The cart is the links and the horse is the content. In order to develop a link campaign you must have some appeal for liking sites. “What’s in it for the users?” Link worthy sites are hard to come by. They require time and dedication.

Here are some value propositions for building organic links from great content: Integrate the community into your corporate events. Promote the good work you are doing in your community. Help your audience succeed. When you build a site that has value, is worthwhile, then building links becomes easier.

Brian Boland, Director-adCenter, Microsoft Corporation
Search engines see paid links as a technical problem which MS is “not throwing in the towel on like some other engines” The average search takes over 11 minutes to find appropriate results and paid links are an algorithm problem which can be solved. He discussed how easy it is for search engines to dissemble the linking universe for any site and that MS will solve the “technical issue” of paid links.

Their goal is to “100% protect user experiences.” The statements surrounding the “ethics” of paid linking are fascinated and should not be couched in terms like “good and evil.” MS cares ab out quality. Users who have a lousy experience try another engine. There is no cost to switch engines.

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

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

This session offered research and methodology for ecommerce and merchant sites “can and should” be included in shopping search engines. The Moderator was Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch.

Speakers:
Heather Dougherty, Analyst, Hitwise
The holiday season started well ahead of the traditional trends this year. The patterns have changed in that growth this year has been far more significant than the last few years with traffic steadily increasing since May-which is really early. The growth will continue for the next couple of weeks.

The surge is sending traffic to a wide array of retailers and product categories including house and garden, appliances and electronics, apparel, computers, sports and fitness, toys and hobbies, video and games, and health and beauty.

For shopping comparison engines, the audience is aging with significant growth in users 55, an increase of 56% over last year. Use of comparison engines for the age groups 18-24, 25-34, and 35-44 have decreased as customers migrate to search.

The breadth of search terms driving traffic to the engines is declining. That’s the weekly number of unique search terms driving traffic to the comparison shopping category over last year. More visitors are conducting exploratory product-specific research. 27% for branded products, 24% were for generic products, and 23% were looking for shopping tools. 11% were looking for a specific retailer.

Comparison shopping engine brands themselves and generic products are the most common search terms. Top search terms by volume are Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, and Bizrate. Ninendo Wii was the only branded product in the top 20 search terms. Target and JC Penny were the only retailers in the top 20 search terms.

The holiday season continues to start earlier each year so it is critical for retailers to make sure that their feeds to comparison shopping engines are accurate and dated well ahead of time. Searches are becoming more specific and that must be taken into account with feed detail.

Brian A. Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines
DFO (Data feed optimization) = intelligently manipulating your data feed to achieve a desired marketing goal. You’re in control. Shopping feeds are incredibly dynamic, help with SEO/PPC, and the algorithms are simpler to figure out than SEO.

Engine setup means getting your products listed on the shopping engines and is the first step in data feed optimization. Without a proper feed, many products or an entire feed may be rejected. Remember that each shopping engine has a unique data feed specification.

Are all your SKUs listed? Did you include all the optional info? Did you send the right information? Did you send a unique data feed to each shopping engine? Uniqueness, attribute headers, HML/JS, image links/product links, no commas in the URL string for images, no “$” sign, correct FTP info, mapping, etc…are important attributes.

Qualitative: Once a data feed is up and running you’ll immediately look at the numbers and want to cut your listings. Before you do that you need to understand why your listings are not performing well. Run tests to see if the quality of the data is good enough to achieve desired results.

Watch categorization, titles/descriptions, and product attribute comprehensiveness. Add as much information as possible, use the optional attribute fields, do not spam or make things up, always include whatever unique IDs you have. If manufacture is not listed on shopping engine, tell them to add it. Google base custom attributes for specialized products can make a huge difference.

Quantitative: Determine profitability of the channel of individual engines and individual SKUs. Do not just cut SKUs from your product fee “MasterCard”, not “master care” - be careful.

Get to work! If you invest time and resources into the channel it can work.

Scot Wingo, President and CEO, Channel Advisor Corporation spelled out a list of serious conversion analytic formulas.

How do you impact CSE ROI? At the data feed level, measure each product’s ROI, nuke those that don’t convert, keep those that do. SKU level bidding which is not available on all engines is a useful tool. ETR = sales/cost of sales and sales = clicks * CR*AOV.

ROAS = (AOV*CR / CPC
CPC-“floored”, but you can bid up
AOV – use price filtering to impact
CR – the biggest variable you can impact
CSE level – make sure the data feed is optimized
Site level – entire industries available to help with CR

Price, website optimization, on site search, up-sell, cross-sell, rich images, reviews, etc…are all helpful.

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

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

The Transformation of Local in a Search Driven World

Moderator:

* Michael Boland, Analyst, The Kelsey Group

Speakers:

* Bob Armour, Chief Marketing Officer, ShopLocal
* Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow
* Manish Patel, CEO, Where2GetIt
* Richard Rosen, CEO, FastCall411

Richard Rosen

FastCall411 started off talking about how they connect consumers with local service providers faster, easier and more reliably than any other search platform.

Consumer Expectation / Current Market Reality

* Of 250,000.000+ calls per month, 2 out of 3 sent to merchants who are not “available”
* 87% of consumers say availability is an important factor when hiring a local vendor
* 10,000,000 merchants are not relevant to the customer
* Proximity is the wrong approach to local search. Meta data is poor

Local search is frustrating for the customer; an effective business model hasn’t been materialized

* Bad base data (old listings, no relevant, poor meta data)
* Not enough user generated content “reviews”
* Difficult prospecting and selling local merchants
* Poor match of “leads with needs”
* Poor concentration of lead volume to individual merchants

Identify “availability” as part of a completely new approach to local search

Connect consumers to relevant available local merchants

Think outside the “web”

Manish Patel

Consumers want choice

* Where 2 buy
* When to buy
* How they buy
* They want basic questions answered
* Where is the nearest?
* Where is it available?
* How do I get there?
* What is the price?

Consumers have adopted search but other very relevant mediums still exist

* Search engines
* Retailer websites
* Manufacturer websites
* Vertical directions
* Comparison shopping engines
* Social media

Getting found = retailer website

Most visited section on their clients websites

Consumers are much more savvy

Filtering functionality

Move ready to buy customers from the product page to where to buy

Answer questions like:

* Where is the product sold?
* What price?
* Is it in stock?
* Can I buy from you directly?

Getting found using search

* Organic
* Vertical
* Paid Search

Get found in emerging media

Even Adidas has a MySpace page

Consumers are in control and you have to be found everywhere whether selling a product or service

Nearly 80% of online searches follow up offine via in sotre visit or phone cal. Of these 66% go on to make a purchase

Engage with Relevant information

If your are selling a product or service today

* Add Local Content to your Website
* Add Mobile Extensions
* Add Registrations

Scott Dunlap

Example – Mobile Targeting

* Shoppers see signs for service on mall directories
* Opt-in by texting “NEARBY”
* Retailers can target nearby customers in real-time
* Limit 2 ads per hour
* Service shuts itself off after 90 min

Mobile can extend existing media

* Can be used to extend in-mall advertising
* Shoppers choose preferred retailer
* From emotion to action
* Make existing media more measurable

Ex: Text “ng1” to NEARBY to find the nearest store that carries this “widget”

If you have buy online pickup in store option, it quickly becomes about half of your online sales

If you put the ability to get a mobile receipt about 35-45% of online sales will use that

Bob Armour

ShopLocal helps advertisers drive in-store sales using the web

Driver #1

The Internet is being used more as a research tool than a buying too

92% of shoppers use internet to do product research but 95% of retail sales happenin store

Driver #2

The web’s influence on offline sales will continue to grow to almost half of all retail sales by 2011 (over $1 trillion)

Driver #3

Advertising spend will follow consumers media time

On advertiser’s sites:

- Smart Circular (The web version of what you get on your Sunday paper)

- 53% of shoppers visit store within 1 week; 95% within the month

- 267 milion page views on Black Friday 2007, up 84% over last year

All across the internet:

- smart media (Local promotions in rich media)

- “close the loop” test: CPG retailer + Large publisher + consumer tracking panel – test produced 2x planned lift. Results were “too good”

- Interaction time: 17 seconds vs 10.7 seconds for standard rich media

On ShopLocal.com:

- 56% of shoppers bought the items they saw on the site in a store

- Over ½ of purchasers would not have bought if they didn’t see the ad online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Hanekamp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Kim

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

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

Key Takeaway
* Identify and influence the influencers

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

Fionn Downhill

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

Additional Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darian Rodriquez Heyman

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

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

Ben Rattray

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

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

But unrealized expectations
Only 3% of current giving is online

Why?

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

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

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

Future
* Deep Integration - Building communities around organizations

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

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

Nan Dawkins

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

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

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

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

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

In a web 2.0 world:

Companies no longer own their brands

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

.... Its really a partnership now

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

Can I use Web 2.0 for fundraising?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click fraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Motoko Hunt

Japanese Internet Market

87.5 million on Internet
68% penetration
50% Broadband mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





T.R. Harrington

Search inside China

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

Revenue Growth U.S. 234 Million in 07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Erica Schmidt

Australia’s Uniqueness

2 years behind the US

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

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

Marketers are purely focused on paid search in Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the first time in our history of conference coverage where we are going to attempt to provide coverage of two different search marketing conferences that are overlapping on the same week. If you did not know, Search Engine Strategies Chicago is the same week as WebmasterWorld's PubCon. And yes, we will be covering both in great depth - thanks to our wonderful volunteers.

First let's thank our volunteers, who include Carolyn Shelby, Dave Rohrer, Chris Boggs, Justin Davy, Marty Weintraub, and Steve Krull. (Oh, and I, Tamar Weinberg, am writing too) ;)

Now here are the schedules:

Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2007

Monday, December 3
9:00-10:00AM: Search Around the World - Part One: Asia/Pacific & Australia (Justin)
9:00-10:00AM: Mobile Search Battle Royal (Chris)
10:15-11:15AM: The Human Equation: Giving Back Internet Style (Justin)
10:15-11:15AM: Meet the Web Analytics Players (Marty)
10:15-11:15AM: Redefining the Customer (Chris)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Orion Panel: Search, Privacy and Community in the Digital Age (Chris)
1:30-2:30PM: There's Still Money on the Table! (Chris)
1:30-2:30PM: Igniting Viral Campaigns (Justin)
2:45-3:45PM: Orion Panel: Universal, Blended and Vertical Search (Chris)

Tuesday, December 4
9:00-9:45AM:Keynote Presentation: Seth Godin (Chris)
10:15-11:15AM Shopping Search Tactics (Marty)
10:15-11:15AM Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price of One (Steve)
10:15-11:15AM: The Transformation of Local in a Search Driven World (Justin)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Landing Page Testing Overview (Steve)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Big Site, Big Search (Justin)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Are Paid Links Evil? (Marty)
2:00-3:00PM: Actionable Social Media (Chris)
2:00-3:00PM Maximum Conversion in Retail: Raising the Bar (Justin)
2:00-3:00PM Sitemaps: Oversold, Misused or On The Money? (Steve)
3:30-4:30PM: How to Build Investment Interest in Your SEO/SEM Company (Steve)
3:30-4:30PM: Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search (Justin)

Wednesday, December 5
9:00-9:45AM: Keynote Presentation: David S. Isenberg "Neutral Net" Topic (Marty)
10:15-11:15AM: Podcast & Audio Search (Chris)
10:15-11:15AM: Managing Automated PPC Bid Management (Marty)
10:15-11:15AM: Case Study: Moving from Paper to Online (Justin)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Your Marketing Program in Context (Justin)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Managing PPC for Multiple Clients (Steve)
2:00-3:00PM: Calling All Clicks: PayPerCall and You (Justin)
2:00-3:00PM: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines (Steve)
2:00-3:00PM: Retail Case Studies (Marty)
3:30-4:30PM: Last Minute Holiday Search Tactics (Chris)
3:30-4:30PM: PPC Advertising on Influential Blogs and Social Media (Justin)
3:30-4:30PM: SEM Pricing Models (Steve)

Thursday, December 6
9:00-10:00AM: So You Want to Be a Search Marketer? (Marty)
10:15-11:15AM: Landing Page Optimization Clinic (Steve / tentative)
10:15-11:15AM: Search Marketers on Click Fraud (Justin)
11:30AM-12:30PM: Dealing With Difficult Clients (Chris / tentative)

WebmasterWorld PubCon Vegas 2007

Tuesday, December 4
9:00-10:00 AM Keynote by Craig Newmark (Tamar)
10:00-11:30 AM Social Marketing 101 - The Playing Field (Dave)
11:35AM-12:50PM Monetizing Social Media Traffic (Tamar)
11:35AM-12:50PM Optimizing Your Site for Contextual Ads (Dave)
1:30-2:45PM Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization (Tamar)
1:30-2:45PM Link Building Campaigns and Strategies (Dave)
2:45-4:00PM Content Creation - Cranking it Out (Tamar)
2:45-4:00PM Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies (Dave)
4:00-5:30PM Link Buying (Tamar)

Wednesday, December 5
9:00-10:00AM Keynote by Richard Rosenblatt (Dave)
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Domain Names and Trademarks - Legal Issues (Dave)
11:35AM-12:50PM Interactive Site Reviews - Focus - Social Media (Tamar is speaking!)
11:35AM-12:50PM Effective Domaining Strategies (Dave)
1:30-2:45PM SEO and Big Search (Tamar)
1:30-2:45PM Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDF's, and Blog SEO (Dave)

Thursday, December 6
9:00-10:00AM Keynote with Matt Cutts (Tamar)
10:15-11:30AM Effective Action Based Copywriting (Tamar)
10:15-11:30AM Brand Management (Carolyn)
10:15-11:30AM CSS and HTML Coding Today - (Dave)
11:35AM-12:50PM Search and Blogging Reporters Forum (Tamar)
11:35AM-12:50PM International and European Site Optimization (Dave)
11:35AM-12:50PM Responsible Web Design (Carolyn)
1:30-2:45PM Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization (Carolyn)
2:45-4:00PM Competitive Intelligence (Carolyn)
4:00-5:30PM Tools of the Trade (Tamar)
4:00-5:30PM Organic Keyword Research and Selection (Carolyn)

Again, a big thank you to our volunteers! These schedules may change, but we'll do our best to stick with them.