Search Engine Strategies 2008 San Jose Archives

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

• Searching For Jobs in Search: Starting and Advancing Your Career in the Industry
• Search Advertising Tools
• Organic Listings Forum
• The Best Kept Secrets to Search
• How to Choose a Search Vendor
• Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know
• Fast, Free and Easy Tools to Get You Going
• Special Kelsey Group Presentation: The 3G iPhone: Local Search Demos
• Special Kelsey Group Presentation: Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search
• Effective Contextual Search Management
• How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done

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

This panel of experts will discuss the qualities they look for in candidates, as well as strategies for career advancement in the search industry. The discussion will include:

• How have the criteria for a strong candidate evolved over the years? Are the sources that were relied on in the past different than they are today?


• How can you break into the search industry as a marketer who doesn't have direct experience with the medium?


• Can specific training jumpstart the experience necessary to enter into the search industry? What particular types of training are recommended?


• How important is training and continuing education to career advancement? What are other recommendations for career advancement?

Moderator:

Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Katie Donovan, Business Development Manager, SEMPO Institute

Ken Clark, EVP & Co-founder, Onward Search

Search Jobs: Demand is High. Look at SEMPO Job Board. Salaries are still fairly high as well.

Hiring Criteria/Skills

KC: companies are focused on what is your experience within the industry or segment they operate in as opposed to just are you a good search marketer. They want proven success in that niche.

KD: Need people skills.

FW: Someone that is going to be outgoing. Need to have certain level of confidence.

KD is finding that training sales people in SEO helps, they have the people skills and can help understand what problems the customer is having.

Audience member: better to have someone with narrow and deep skills, or wide but shallow skills. Need to look at size of company. Job seekers need to look at where they find a place they might like and what matches their skill sets and what their area of comfort.

Amazon person in audience: looking for horsepower, analytics skills and creative ability. They ask lots and lots of questions to help determine if the candidate has these skills.

FW commented to audience member that it is great to have someone that has both the marketing knowledge and the IT knowledge and can sit in the middle. KC: Don’t think there’s a perfect background to be a search marketer.

For new people, is training a good thing? KD said previous training is a good thing, SEMPO and one other are only ones with certification programs, some employers do give everyone training when they come in. Ways to prove what you can do: take a charity and do things for them. SEM Cares. KC: feels training/course does give an advantage. Be able to demonstrate something to the employer that shows you have initiative, even if it is a small project.

Breaking In/Finding Jobs

SEMPO has an RFP section, often has people with small budgets, but you might be able to get experience from them. Look at Craigslist and other online places to find small things to build up portfolio. Come to conferences like this to network with people. Affiliate marketing might be another way to prove what you can do, but may be difficult. KC: take active part in managing your reputation online. Recruiters do their research. Make sure you’re on LinkedIn.

Don’t have to write about SEO on a blog. FW wants to see your passion for something, write about what you know and what you’re interested in. DT asks panel how to do lateral transfers. How do you keep your advancement going after you’ve gone past the entry level? KC: There is an executive trail. He doesn’t have numbers to quote, but there is job creation in those higher levels.

Training

Online Training, Certifications (online courses, search engines). It’s a nice to have, but not a must have. Not like on IT side where you need to have an MCSE to get a job. Probably a couple of years to figure out which certifications will be in the highly desired. They are more beneficial for someone just getting into the field.

Advancing Your Career

FW: Become more known in the space. Get a moderator job on one of the forums. KC: ask yourself where you want to be in five years. Do I want to be a generalist or specialist? Agency or inhouse? Manager or individual contributor?

KD: just because you know you’ve done well, others may not realize. You do have to let people know about your accomplishments.

Thanks to Keri for this!

In order to get a leg up on the competition, successful Search Engine Marketers need to be armed with the latest tools of the trade. Join us as we explore a range of popular search engine advertising tools along with some important features you should be aware of. Whether you are looking for a free basic tool that will help you get started or a more advanced paid offering, our panel of experts will provide you with the insight and experience to zero in on the right solution.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Yoav Izhar-Prato, Co-founder & CEO, Kenshoo LTD
Neeraj Kochhar, VP/Director of Search, SMG Search
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
David S. Kidder, Co-Founder & CEO, Clickable

First up is Yoav from Kenshoo.

Keeping all the ingredients in place and correlation between them is the key factor. Must implement "quality management".

What is quality management? Understanding page content, behavior, and how conversions take place.

Under consumer behavior - takes 4-5 clicks on average for conversion to take place. Most of the systems in place today attribute the conversion to the last keyword used. You need to look at the whole path to the conversion. You need to be able to assign weights to first click, last click - weights needs to be allocated properly.

Another aspect is super structuring. Doesn't matter how many engines using, need one campaign management center. Use your structure across all campaigns.

Bid optimization - algorithmic and rule based. Believes in a combination of both.

Major aspect is path to conversion. Lots of keywords can contribute to the conversion. Again, assigning weights to them is critical.

Next up is Neeraj from SMG.

What is a holistic approach? Search in the context of broader cross channel communications. Looking at TV, and other channels collectively is key.

Talent - need search professionals with marketing mindsets that understand consumer behavior, ROAS, engagement and technology.

Innovation - we think of search as web based. Expanding beyond that to mobile. Agnostic to a particular device. Understand the motivation for mobile search. Understand the motivation for Google to present text results or image results.

Technology - generation efficiencies.

Methodology and approach - life cycle of a search campaign.

First piece is to understand consumers. Google Trends is a good tool for this. What other queries are consumers using? What are consumers thinking about your business? Mine search query data. Look at seasonality.

Connect - how to take the insights and build messaging, how do you target people? What mode are people in?

Measurement - key component - otherwise throwing dollars away.

Beauty of search is speed. Can do all this fairly quickly. All this happens in real time and in a dynamic way. Don't need to invest millions. Can invest small.

Holistic approach - two key components - paid and natural. With SEO there are no guarantees, but need to get all the work done. With paid search you can bid on keywords you can't rank for naturally. Want to maximize coverage on page 1. Drop off rate from Page 1 to 2 is 85%-88%. Page 1 is the true opportunity. Need to be there. Need to craft the right balance between SEO and paid.

Starts with KW list. Look at volume. Map keywords with content. Where do you need to supplement or get support from paid? Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, and other tools are great.

Must understand if search is always a meaningful platform. Can it help you if you are in the deodorant business?

Must look at entire cycle - the funnel. How are people moving on from keyword to keyword through the funnel and what do they do to prior to converting?

Finally, competitive analysis. What are you up against? What is the likelihood you will succeed?
What's your strategy relative to the competition? Always keep a holistic approach in mind.

Need a way to centrally manage all your keywords. How do you generate scale? May be running campaigns on 3 - 10 engines. Need to consolidate. Need to look at all the variables.

Measuring beyond the click. Are consumers completing the actions you want them to complete? Are they driving sales?

If doing something on TV, or radio, it's important to have search support.

That's all.

Last up is Thomas Bindl. Topic - "Tools that make SEM life easier".

Gives live demos of the following keyword tools:

Google Sets (great for generating keywords)
Digital Point keyword suggestion tool (Gives free access to WordTracker)
SEO Book keyword tool
Google Trends
Refine Labs keyword tool (pulls data from Google and shows competition and volume)
Spyfu
Keycompete

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Pose questions to our panel of experts about free "organic" listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools, and techniques. There's no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Jerry West, Founder, Web Marketing Now
Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search

It's the next to last session of four days at SES and it's a forum session with no set agenda, so this is a bit incomplete. My apologies in advance.

Singular vs. plural search phrases. How do they treat them different? Verma talks about search engines doing query rewriting. Buggia – sometimes will combine word into what they think is root word, sometimes they keep them separate. D'Souza also said that it shouldn't matter. Where it might be different is how much weight each term gets – should a stem get more weight? That's where you might get some variation, but not as vast as questioner found.

Variability of results among the engines. Missed explanation as to differences here. Each engine does have a different type of audience, they have different types of behaviors when they search.

Think about ranking about which types of pages to show for what pages. Indexing is what pages to index, but without any context. Try to figure out which pages are going to answers questions.

Question about searches / pages from different countries. Vanessa said it was good to set targeting for country in Webmaster Tools. There will be filtering in SERPs.

D'Souza Mentioned duplicating filtering at indexing level.

Grehan said ideal would be to have servers/host in country of target.

Buggia said top level domain is biggest clue. Having directory structure for each language does help

Vanessa: use meta language tag.

Title/keyword phrase combinations. Example of four words phrase, any subset of this would have a match, as would stems. Stuffing title tag less important than quality of content on site.

Displaying results on search engines. SERPs not showing meta descrptions. Meta descriptions are good to create a snippet when they can't easily find the text in the page (but have a lot of inlinks that talk about it).

Inbound links. Asks about page rank toolbar. Grehan says it's green fairy dust. D'Souza says it's not integers, much finer granularity.

Buggia all sites use page rank-type thing as initial base value, but so many more things go into ranking. Think of a search engine as a reputation engine.

Top five things you would focus on? You've got to be kidding if you're going to get a straight answer out of this panel for that.

Content.
Audience. Have a specific audience and people who want your content.
Internal linking
Do a site: search in Google using phrase in question, then adjust linking structure. Look at how other sites are doing this, make sure you also look natural in what you're doing with incoming anchor text links, etc.

Grehan asked what panel thought about PR sculpting.
Look at your problems, start fixing those first. Make sure you understand value to the business of things like page rank sculpting – how do you know that's what you should work on, vs. other things that would be better to work on.

Gerhan asked how important is an H tag. Diff't pieces of text on the page are rated differently. Other more important things though about content. Rainy day thing you may want to take care of, but again other stuff should fix at.

Be sure to use webmaster tools for each engine. You can get info from engines about problems they have, crawling info, and give them clues about what is going on.

Provided by Keri.

Secrets of paid and organic search? Sure, they're out there. Join us for a no-holds-barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks, and secrets. While there's no replacement for old-fashioned hard work, getting the inside scoop and shortcuts to search success never hurt.

Moderator:
· Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce

Speakers:
· Katee Crawford, Online & E-mail Marketing Specialist, California Chamber of Commerce
· Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
· Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Q&A Panelist:
· Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

Dana: I am so psyched about this panel. We are going to take about red hat – revenge SEO!

First up is Katee Crawford, with her is Jamie Smith, they work hand in hand so Jamie may pop in with some comments. Please welcome Katee Crawford to the stage.

Katee: I am going to be speaking to you about what we do at the California Chamber of Commerce. We are NOT tourism, everyone thinks we are. We are large business advocates and we also provide affordable and easy to use services. We provide labor law compliance info, books and software. For marketing we use PPC campaigns and started SEO as well. We do catalogs, direct mails and email campaigns – about 30 in the past year.

I am going to give you some tips in how to improve your ROI.

Educate your SEM company on all your marketing materials and products.
Joint efforts produce better results so work together.
Rethink the norm: Integrate marketing with promotional offers.
The "I deserve it" tactic works. We gave away free Starbucks cards.
Track often and evaluate honestly.

Jamie: PPC Insider Tips:

- Don't change your bid more than once every couple of days – when you run the reports, it skews your conclusions when you change your bids, and it defeats the purpose of testing
- Test special characters in your ad creative, such as TM
- Exact match all combinations of exact matched terms
- Test no spaces between words in a multiple word phrase
- Test placing phone number in ad – we found that local numbers vs. 800 numbers improve the call in rate
- Test placing .com at the end of some keywords.

Katee: We are looking forward to 2009 to improve our marketing plan. Thank you!

Eric Enge: I have 5 quick tips for you.

Syndicating content is a great way to get links, lots of websites are starved for quality content, so it solves the problem for them, and you in turn can get links with good anchor text. The bad part is that when you do syndicate content, the engines see duplicate content, and they will almost always recognize the original author – but not always.

But the solution is simple. Take the article, get a writer to work with it, and give it a spin – and you might get a different result.

Local Search: Search engine challenge: obtaining accurate data. So they use many sources, such as yellow page sites, syndicators such as LocalEze and local news sites.

Give them the data directly. All 3 major search engines give you a way to give them authenticated data directly. Give them accurate data.

Google Local: They will allow you to submit locations individually or by feed. The feed is useful for large numbers of locations. Individual submissions are verified by Google.

More on KML – "Keyhole Markup Language" – language for geographical annotation. Search engines find the location of your KML using your sitemap file.

It's good to be listed in many places. It increases the data accuracy problem. Invest the time and effort to get this data right. Services help with this but cost money.

In summary: Quality data drives rankings!!!

Getting free links from Google Webmaster Tools:

- If you don't have an account, get one!
- Add to your .htaccess file a 301 redirect from the incorrect to the right one.
- Look for malformed URLs.
- Look for the Not Found Report in the Web Crawl Errors section.

Make sure you find lost links! Sometimes sites list URLs but don't like them. Media especially is bad at this. If you can discover these situations and ask people to fix them it would be very good.

MSN Search Funnels – shows what the users intent was when they do a search term, what they search on next. You can go the other way, and see also what they search on before. You can also use search funnels to isolate problems on your website.

Dana: Next up is Richard Zwicky,

Richard: I work at Enquisite. If you don't know what we do, look it up. I will share with you today some basics about what you should know and then go a little deeper.

If you don't know this, you are missing a huge opportunity: only 1.8% of traffic comes from page 2 of the search results. Everything else comes from page 1. So spend a little of time on the pages that are on page 2 and you will increase your traffic.

Build out what the customers are actually trying to get from your site. Don't just focus on getting the traffic, but what do to with that traffic.

Links are probably the most relevant, non-page factor you can build into your SEO. You need to understand what's coming to your own site and what's coming to your competition. Also, identify sites that are citing you but not linking to you.

MSN has some great linking tools. Use linkfromdomains:www.yoursite.com.

Regional links – they matter. Think of links geographically.

Learn, learn and learn some more. There is no magic. You're competitors are probably lazier than you are. Take an active interest in continuing education.

So – when to consider going black? I have found that anyone doing SEO properly knows how black hat works, so they don't cross the line and do anything bad.

What do you do? Someone is slandering you or your business. They do it anonymously so you don't know who it is. So if you want to get rid of a bad site, do it at your own risk. Be very careful. I don't do this, but I know how to do it. Here are the steps.

Go buy a domain. Don't touch your own. Don't use your own name! Get a UPS mailbox near your opponent's address.
Go buy another domain. Don't use your own name! Put your opponent's address on your site.
Go buy another domain name with your opponents address. Go to the post office and pay for a mail redirect to your mailbox!!
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Do it again, host your sites all over the place. Never use your name.
Make sure none of your sites link to each other.
Start optimizing these sites and get good links. Link out to the same sites as your opponent. Get yourself in the same neighborhood as far as the search engines are concerned.
Link to your opponent, ask them for a link. Get indexed. Do some SEO work.
Start showing up in the SERPs.
Add more content, however you can. Reprint PR from within the industry.
Have a bunch of orphaned pages in your sitemap.
Submit the site map.
Now go out and start messing with all of these sites. Do everything bad you can think of. Go copy your opponent's content! Do it as fast as possible as soon as the content is posted and submit it as fast as possible!
Start messing up. Start copying their sitemap into your own. Remember, you look like them according to your registration info. You kind of look them as a website. It's confusing to the engines.
Keep doing more black hat and work really hard to get your site banned.
Just after you have pulled every stunt you can, and you know these sites are going to get banned, redirect to your opponent!!!!!!!!!!
[This gets a lot of laughs]

Now your opponent will get thrown out. Everything you have done looks like them and now everything bad will happen to them. But of course they bashed your site in the first place so they deserve it. Now all of what they did is going to get looked at. And if they happened to do something wrong along the way, now they are facing review. And if they get resubmitted, and they mess up in the future, the threshold for error is really low.

So what have you done? You have forced the competition to clean up their act!!!!!!!!!

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Marketers face a bewildering number of options in selecting their search marketing campaign tools and vendors, and making a decision will only become more difficult as the variety of players in the industry grows. Likewise, instead of just settling for the usual functionality, features, and pricing, search marketers are clamoring for more integrated tools and innovative solutions when they survey the various vendors. Join us for an enlightening discussion as industry veterans share insight into matching the best product offering to your company's individual search goals.
Moderator:
Jonathan Allen, Search Marketing Specialist, VNUnet.com
Speakers:
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, DoubleClick Performics
Jeannie Moran, eCommerce Marketing Director, AutoNation

Eric from Doubleclick starts off.

Has an agency point of view. Will talk about natural and paid, and will give guidelines what to look for in a PPC provider. Also, guidelines for finding someone to bring pieces together.

8 Things to consider for hiring an SEO firm:

1- An understanding of your business, goals, and has a plan around that. Stay away from anything that feels canned, templated, or prepackaged. Need customization.

2- Alignment - someone with experience in your vertical. Need someone with expertise, or partners that have the expertise. Always question and test expertise and background.

3- Consider what your buying. Basically hiring a consultant when hiring an SEO or PPC firm. Looking for a partner to work with you in an integrated fashion. Look for someone with expertise in consulting. Find someone who is a taskmasker - will push you forward. Need to get recommendations implemented. Want someone who is pushy to get tasks and goals accomplished.

4- Equipped - Want to find a whole team that represents you. Folks that specialize in copy, keyword research, technical side - when you have that team - you get the best of both worlds. Good account management at the front end. Find a vendor that is balanced. Balance between technology and expertise is the sweet spot. Be wary of folks who tell you they have everything you need, but don't. Just like interviewing - ask for examples of work, tools they use and how they use them, and how they will help you move towards your goals.

5- Sound methodologies - SEO done right is an art and science. Need a good process, one that doesn't limit creativity. Find one methodology that is specific to SEO - like keyword methodology. Ask questions about it.

6- Leaders - you need an advocate for your goals. Having someone with the skills to understand how to talk to technologists, marketers, to digest this is important. Passion is very important. Need someone who can preach the benefits of SEO. Be careful that if they have these skills, they have the expertise to back it up. Good vision + good tool sets.

7- Education is vital. Good consultants share information. Need someone who is open about their knowledge in a simple manner. Someone who can speak in layman's terms and technically.

8- Trustworthiness. Hiring a partner, so honesty is so important. If you feel oversold or fabricated, try to trip up with questions. Get referrals. Find out the work they've done. Just like on a job interview - if you probe and ask the right questions, you will get to the right story. At the end of the day, you have to trust your gut. Have to feel good about it. Don't hire because someone is down the street. Need to find someone who matches your culture and can communicate well.

Choosing a paid search vendor:

Outsourcing is done for efficiency. Consider three things.

1- Are you going to get an account manager that will do everything? A generalist? Or will you get a specialist. Bid management is huge. Need someone with the skills.

2- Technology - need integrated API's with the engines. Frequency of reporting is close to real time. Want to know about tool sets. How do they do bid management? How do they structure campaigns?

3- Methodology - Ask what the typical launch time frame is? What goes into a launch? What is the process? Need to be as clear and organized as possible. Need consistent delivery on promises. Dig deep and ask tough questions.

How can we bring these together? There is a massive trend of clients looking for holistic search management. Old model was to find best in breed in SEO and PPC. If not working together - not thinking of it as one - leaving opportunity on the table. Need someone who an test rankings and ROI on both the SEO and PPC side.

Next up is Jeannie from AutoNation, Inc. AutoNation is the largest auto dealer group in the county.

Will present the opposite view - from the client side. What they look for. Goal is to share specifics of what worked for them.

The auto industry has been hit hard recently. There's a huge focus on where dollars are being spent.

Setting the stage. Has hired several vendors, and fired several. Can't settle.

Hiring a vendor is a partner. Going into a relationship.

5 Rules:
#1- Sign a prenup. A mutual NDA. Puts both parties at ease.
#2- Don't disrespect the family. Need to be aligned.
#3- Build trust. Set reasonable expectations. It's a two way street. Client has to build trust with agency. Need to trust what vendor is sharing. Lots of ways data can be manipulated.
#4- Be honest about dating others. Working with multiple partners can be tricky. They use multiple vendors, but they know what each other is doing.
#5- Keep everyone happy. Make sure it's worth the vendors time and your time.

Groundwork for Success.
Educate yourself in what you are buying. Need to be able to ask the right questions. Some players will guarantee positions. Must filter between pros and amateurs.

Purchasing considerations - never meet with the sales team only. Meet with someone who will be accountable with what will be done in proposal.

Make sure technology is compatible with applications already in use.

Confirm capabilities; Does the tool work on tier 1 and tier 2 engines?

Get all promises in writing.

Negotiate a trial period. A test pilot. Only do things that way now.

Always ask about hidden costs. How do you know what to ask for?

Technology is very important. Ensure that applications for tracking and reporting is not being duplicated or inflating.

Check if product works with foreign languages.

Verify API status to ensure that fees are included in contract, not additional.

Make sure you understand methodology for measurement.

Support - need a strong team. An available contact.

SEO Vendor Considerations:

1) Strong keyword research strategy. How will they determine KW's you will show up for?
2) Strong copywriting and link building.
3) Optimization plan for organic pages.
4) Measure organic conversion and ROI.
5) Proven results. Ask about failure, success, and referrals.

Paid Search Vendor Considerations:

1) PPC programs in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2) Web traffic measurement tools to measure your precise ROI.
3) A/B testing of PPC ads and landing pages to identify the most effective campaigns.
4) Account managers that are Google Adwords Certified and Yahoo Ambassadors.

Social Media Vendor Considerations:

1) What channels are you currently active in for clients? (Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon)
2) Give examples of how channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort.
3) Proven results, failures, success, and referrals.

Key Takeaways:

1) Educate yourself to ask the right questions!
2) Invest time to find the right partner!
3) Agree and document billing model!
4) Start small - test vendor on small scale!
5) Monitor, measure, and optimize!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

In 2008, U.S. paid search advertisement revenue is expected to reach 15.52 billion. This represents a 31.9% increase over 2007. Despite this tremendous growth, uncertainty in recent court developments may discourage search engine marketers from purchasing keywords that are trademarked by others for fear of being found liable for trademark infringement. The presentation will include a discussion of the state of the law as well as legal ways to use another's trademark to enhance your visibility on the web.

Moderator:
· Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
· Mark J. Rosenberg, Esq., Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.
· April Wurster, Attorney, Baker & McKenzie
· Eric Goldman, Assistant Professor & Director of the High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law

Jeffrey Rohs introduces all the panelists.

Eric: Normally I have a strong biased opinion that I am going to try to keep in check. My goal is to outline a bit of trademark law in keyword advertising.

Trademark infringement is a popular topic. There are 4 elements of a claim in court:

1. Ownership of valid trademark.
2. Priority
3. Use in commerce in connection with the sale of goods services. There words come out of a statute. If the advertiser buys the trademark as a keyword but doesn't use the keyword in the ad copy, there's a huge split in opinion on whether or not this infringes on a trademark. We also have a geographic split – in New York it appears to be no, in the rest of the country it appears to be yes.
4. Likelihood of consumer confusion. A couple of courts say that if there is a purchase of a keyword without the keyword in the ad copy, it does not confuse the consumers. Another court says that consumers will always be confused and the plaintiff should always win. So we don't really have judges with consistent opinions. If consumers are confused, there are a variety of defenses; referencing the trademarked owner. In the Tiffany vs. Ebay case, Ebay was buying advertising on Tiffany trademarked products, and was excused because the use was nominative – "Ebay is a great place to buy tiffany products".

Some other regulations:

- State anti-keyword law: Utah spyware control act and a law in Alaska against popups. Neither of these statutes are dormant though.
- There was a frontal assault on keyword advertising in Utah, that was designed to ban keyword advertising, an assault on our entire industry. Utah screwed up a second time and they repealed the law.

Search engine trademark policies: the gist is that Yahoo and MSN have banned certain types of keyword ad buys based on the trademarks. As you know Google allows bidding on trademarked keywords, but does not allow reference of the trademark in the ad copy. This may be more helpful.

I am not a big fan of the trademarked policies. The cost of litigating is so expensive.

Jeffrey: Next up is April Wurster, a practicing attorney in the arena.

April: Good morning. I will talk to you about how a trademark owner can protect their rights.

First you want to know who is using your trademark, monitor your trademarks. There are some companies out there that do this. They are relatively inexpensive; they range from $200 – $500.

The second thing you can do when you find out if someone is using your trademark is send them a cease and desist letter. But talk to your attorney about this because it can get complicated. If it's strongly worded, the accused infringer can file a lawsuit against you and they then become the plaintiff. So be careful.

You can also file lawsuits, which we will talk more about later, and you can also address trademark concerns without going to court.

Google trademark complaint procedures:

US, UK, Ireland and Canada: won't investigate in keywords, but only in ad text.
Outside the US, UK, Ireland and Canada: will investigate usage in both keywords and ad text.

Google's complaint procedure is very easy, you can fill out an online form. Yahoo has the opposite procedure; they don't allow users to bid on trademarked keywords. Ebay has a complaint procedure, it's called the VeRO program (Verified rights owner) and they can and will kick people out. You just fill out a form, it's easy, you don't need an attorney.

So what if the self-help programs don't work for you? You might need to file a law suit. When an attorney looks at your case, there are a lot of different factors, but they will look at the type of trademark you have – common law, state registration, or federal. Common law trademarks are free and extremely limited – so you get what you pay for. They don't get any of the presumptions you get with federal regulations, like validity. State registration is a good alternative, very cheap, about $70, compared to federal which is $325, and you can get it fairly quickly. But they are limited geographically to the state where you register.

If you are really motivated to protect your property rights you should be seeking federal registration. Some advantages:

1 – you get nationwide notice of rights
2 – you can get increased damages
3 – if you use your trademark exclusively for 5 years,, it can become incontestable, meaning that certain challenges against your mark are taken away from the defendant.

How to use your mark so you don't abandon or misuse:

- Always use proprietary notices: "this TM is registered"
- Distinguish your mark in print perhaps use it in all caps, or use it with the first letter as the capital (though don't use it is a proper noun because then it becomes generic. For example, Escalator lost trademark rights because they used it as a noun, and now an escalator is the generic word for "moving stairs"). Also don't use it as a verb, like Xerox, you should use it as an adjective, like Xerox copier.
- Never change your mark. So if you update or modernize your mark, be cautious of the trademark implications.

Thank you.

Jeffrey: Next is Mark Rosenberg

Mark: Bad news: marketers can use your trademark. There are limits though on how they can use it. My goal today is to give you those limits.

Trademark use is prohibited if it causes confusion. But there are ways you can use it. The issue of what is and isn't likely to cause confusion - just ask yourself the question, why am I using someone else's trademark?

- To identify a genuine product or service.
- To let users know you are offering a product or service.
- To make a comparison between your product and another, for example, you are marketing a generic version of a product.
- There is no other readily identifiable way of identifying the trademarked product or service.

Infringement:

- To get a search engine listing when your website was nothing to do with the trademarked product.
- To get a more prominent organic listing when your website has nothing to do with the trademarked product.
- To get more traffic to your site.
- To divert a competitor's traffic to your site.

If you have the right answer to why am I using this trademark, here are some permitted uses:

- When your website sells the genuine trademarked product
- In a meta tag when the website sells the genuine product
- In a meta tag when the website sells the generic version of the trademarked product

Limits on use:

You can say, "We have the best prices on Rolex watches", or "Our burgers are better than McDonalds", or, "We sell the generic version of Lipitor".

You can't use the trademark more than necessary (Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra), or in a more prominent form than necessary (We sell VIAGRA). You can not overly exclaim a trademark (We are not Orbitz, We are not Orbitz, We are not Orbitz). You can't use a trademarked logo instead of the word and you can't falsely claim sponsorship.

Domain names: It's usually a bad idea to use a trademark in a domain name. Don't do it.

A new use is when a marketer writes about a product or service, and this comes up in the search listings results, when it has nothing to do with the site. The articles are usually written to drive traffic to the site. I have not seen any case law, but it will get the person in trouble.

Jeffrey: Thanks Mark, thanks guys, this has been a great overview. Now we'll open it up to Q&A.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

This session will focus on free and low-cost tools that can help beginners get started with their search and online marketing campaigns. The speakers will all reveal their favorite "tools on a budget." This session is geared for beginners to help them to understand the areas they need to tackle first and which tools are available to help them increase rankings and drive sales, so they can afford to move to higher-level tools that require subscriptions or hefty investments.

Moderator:
Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide

Speakers:
Matt McGee, Director of Strategic Search, KeyRelevance
Scott Allen, CEO, Hybrid6 Studios
Joe Abraham, VP of Marketing, SageRock

Matt McGee
Don’t let the tools make the decisions for you, but use the tools to get information so you can make the decisions.

SEO Tools: Firefox and Friends

• SEO for Firefox http://tools.seobook.com for Google and Yahoo, it gives you lots of information under each listing in the SERP. Gives you page rank, age of domain, inlinks, where it has listings, etc.
• Search Status http://www.quirk.zib/searchstatus/ Provides some of the same data as SEO for Firefox. Instead of providing it in the SERPs, provides as you’re looking at an individual page.
• SEO Quake Lot of people use it, but Matt doesn’t like how it slows down the browser.

Keyword Research

• Keyword Discovery. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. Shows search frequency of queries. URL is to free version.
• SEO Book Tool http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/. Tons of information here.

Backlink tools

• Site Explorer. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ One of the best backlink tools if you don’t verify the site with the search engines, Google doesn’t give nearly comprehensive results for sites.
• Link Diagnosis http://linkdiagnosis.com/ Gives backlinks, anchor text, if it’s nofollow, lots of other data, repackages from Yahoo.

Link Building Tools

• Hub Finder http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder gives top ranking sites for the keyword, then gives sites that link to these sites.
• Traffic Marks http://www.trafficmarks.com/.

PPC Tools

• Local Keyword List http://5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php provide zip code, radius, and keywords. Looks up zip code database, concatenates list of keywords with city locations.

Domain Tools

• Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com/ Whois record, title, meta description, internal and outbound links, dmoz listing, etc. etc. etc.

Spider Tools

• SEO Browser http://www.seo-browser.com/. Gives additional info about links, page load times, etc.

Scott Allen

Competitive Research
Compete.com

• Free tools let you compare traffic with competitors and get limited keyword data
• Premium tools provide detailed data on what keywords are driving traffic to specific competitors.
• Even though best data isn’t free, good site to have on your radar.

Google Trends for websites

• Similar to some of compete’s tools, but less in-depth
• Shows info about other sites’ traffic
• Regions visitors are from
• Other sites visited
• Keywords that other sites’ visitors have search for
• Can be used to
• Derive who competitors are
• See some top keywords driving traffic to competitor sites
• Drill down and analyzer further

Spyfu

• Excellent PPC data for competitors
• Find data by domain or keyword
• Find out what competitors are spending on PPC and see ad data
• Find out what keywords they rank for and are bidding on
• Ability to drill down and download data for further analysis
• SpyFu UKI recently launched

Google Insights for Search

• Google provides data specifically for marketers based on what people are searching for
• Decipher trends
• Locate appropriate regional markets
• Determine best messaging/phrases based on search data. Helps you determine what types of messages will be best received.
• Find competitors in your market

Competitious

• Store data about competition
• Create matrix to compare competitor features / attributes
• Pulls in RSS feeds
• Pulls in search results
• Clip and save anything that looks interesting from search or blog feeds

Wordpress as an SEO tool
Note: refers to Wordpress on your own domain, not the wordpress.com.

• Popular blog platform
• Well suited for SEO, even right out of the box. Modifications can help make it even better.
• Many plugins available to expand functionality
• Can be used by beginners/experts
• Free: download at wordpress.org
• Installs in minutes

Wordpress SEO benefits

• Helps user create basic optimized content even with little SEO knowledge
• Once setup all you have to do is write (for best results 2-5 times a week)
• Building links and awareness (ping)
• Social Media Marketing plugins and friendly content

Recommended settings

• Search engine friendly URL’s
• Settings -> permalinks -> month and name (or something more friendly than numbers)
• Indexable by search engines
• Settings -> privacy -> blog visibility “I would like my blog to be visible
• Communication with other blogs
• Settings -> discussions (look for way to ping)

Plugins: Caveats. Some plugins may not work with different version of WordPress. For security/integrity only download from author’s site or wordpress.org.

Where to find wordpress plugins. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Type exact name into search box (of plugins listed in this presentation

All in One SEO Pack

• On-page (Content) SEO benefits
• Optimizes Title Tags (still important to write keyword rich yet natural headlines)
• Prevents many duplicate content issues
• Generated meta description tags automatically

Internal Linking Important to improve internal linking throughout blog.
Wordpress related posts

Pagination Most blog platforms are weak in this area and requires a plugin to fix (both navigation and ranking issue). Adds page numbers.
WP-PageNavi

Social Media makes it easier for site visitors to submit your content to social media sites or vote for your content
Sociable

RSS Feed. Feeds are published but rarely optimized with out-of-the-box blog software
RSS footer: easily add copyright notice and other stuff.

Caching: Traffic spikes can cause server to buckle under the load (dig, etc.). Don’t want site down long time for both users and search engines
WP Super Cache

Joe Abraham

Google Keyword Suggestion

• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Now gives you approximate search volume!
• Search by specific term
• Let Google Suggest terms by URL
• Shows approximately how competitive the term is.
• See what Google thinks our site is about, see what it thinks other (competitor) sites are about.

WordTracker

• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• Up to 100 phrases
• Each term with an approximate search count

Keyword Discovery

• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
• Up to 100 free terms with estimated search volumes

Microsoft adCenterLabs

• http://adlab.msn.com/
• Free Demographics Tools! Comes from when people are logged into Microsoft products.
• Input a URL or a List of Phrases; Get Predicted Demographics Back!
• Demographics Prediction Tool. Gives you an idea of who is visiting that website, gender, age range.
• Keyword Forecast Tool

XML Sitemaps

• SitemapDoc.com (up to 500 pages)
• XML-Sitemaps.com
• Google Webmaster Central

What’s an XML Sitemap?

• An XML file that lists all of the pages on your site that you want indexed
• Lists relative importance of pages
• Allows engines an easy way to find pages
• Does not guarantee inclusion. NOT an excuse to use bad code, just because a page is in the site map doesn’t mean it will be included in the index.
• Google, Yahoo and MSN all support this protocol

Google Webmaster Central

• Directly submit your XML sitemap to Google
• Once verified, gain access to some Google Data on your site
• Content Analysis
• Top Search Queries
• Web Crawl Statistics
• Can be added to iGoogle
• Has great way to check robots.txt file. You can put in a URL and see if it would be excluded.

Usability
Crazy Egg is a Heat Mapping Tools

• Visual Stats program
• Creates different visual overlays of site with statistics. Gives some different information than Google Analytics heatmap
• Creates heat maps. Use of color indicates activity

By the time SES San Jose rolls around, we will have seen a torrent of application development for the 3G iPhone. Mobile local search will finally get its due, with built-in GPS functionality, combined with a feature set and price point that are mainstream-friendly. This session will get a first-hand look at how companies in the local search space are making good use of the iPhone's open development standards. Whether the search is for a restaurant, a flat screen television, or a crescent wrench, we'll see the applications that will lead the way for the next generation of local search on the mobile device.
Moderator:

* Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group

Speakers:

* Ethan Lowry, Co-founder, UrbanSpoon
* Scott Dunlap, CEO, NearbyNow
* Ryan Sarver, Director of Consumer Products, Skyhook Wireless
* Siva V. Kumar, Founder & CEO, TheFind.com
* Sonia McFarland, Head of Business Development, Yelp

Mobile local search is becoming more mainstream with new smarter phones like the iPhones. Third party application development is a great initiative moving forward in local mobile search.

First up is Ryan Sarver from Skyhook.

Skyhook is a behind the scenes product. GPS has been around on phones, but not used for location based apps till recently. Skyhook does Wi-fi based positioning. Instead of satellites for reference, uses 56,000,000 Wi-fi access points to identify location. Needs density to work - urban and indoor areas. Uses triangulation.

Consumer ready location - can return location much faster than GPS. Works indoors, and in cell phone dead spots.

Shows video of Steve Jobs plugging the product!

Looked at the apps in the store, and identified which Apps using GPS. Huge amount of apps using location, even AP news to serve local news.

Next up is Ethan from Urban Spoon.

Helps people find restaurants using the mobile phone. Pulls together reviews from critics, bloggers, etc. Wondered how could use search engines to create a business without spending a dime on marketing. On the web, Google and others are the natural gateway to find info on the web. Different story on the phone. Challenge to get traffic on phone without spending much money. Along comes the iPhone with location awareness.

The app store looks like the net looked years ago. Only a few thousand apps. Small pool. Can get noticed easier. Wanted to make something that would be fun and practical and toy like. The problem set to solve was indecision where to eat. The idea was to create a magic 8 ball to find a restaurant. The publicity has been great thus far, and over 500,000 downloads. A quick demo - first identifies location. Shake the phone and spins a slot machine that suggests a restaurant. Can tailor experience by price, cuisine, location. Keep shaking it to find a restaurant you like, and then shows you more info such as reviews, phone number, map, address, email to friend, and tweet. Not truly random, skewed based on popularity of restaurant. Also a social element to see what your friends like.

Scott from NearByNow is up next.

Nearbynow takes product data from stores across the US and geolocates them. Has a concierge service that will have someone call the store to locate the product. Developed two iPhone apps around this. One is a shopping mall map application. Common among iPhone users is to take photos of products in malls and get feedback from friends. iPhone users are in a higher income bracket, are more fashion forward, and more likely to buy products at full price. Business model is driving leads to stores.

With the new app, you can take a photo of friends trying items on, store displays, etc. and can send to a contact group with a message. When taking the photo, it identifies the store using the location based feature. Retailers get excited when see what people are photographing in their stores. Lots of photos of people asking interesting questions such as "is this girl cute", "should I ask him out". Works on other phones besides iPhones. Other features include locating products in other stores, and similar products based on tags.

Siva from TheFind.com is up next.

TheFind.com is a search engine. What they do is shopping search that comprises local and online products. They have a crawler that only looks at shopping sites. Crawl them very deeply, and there are 500,000 approximately. Index has roughly 250 million products. Also crawls the address location of the stores. Map the products with the store locations. Can search for "ugg boots" in Cupertino, etc. You can use the site as a Yellow pages or check inventory from Krillion and Nearbynow's concierge service.

Application for iPhone is still being approved, not out yet. First thing the app does is take the location of the phone. Then maps all the stores around you. Then can conduct a search. The map changes and shows store icons that carry the product. Also has comparison price feature built in, where you can cross reference eBay and other retailers.

Sonia from Yelp is up last.

Yelp is a local content community network site, as well as review site. 3.5 million reviews.
Restaurants are 1/3 of content. Boutiques, cafes, spas, and other types of business are the bulk.

Demos the iPhone app. Searches "coffee wifi". Shows results sorted by distance. Get photo of the business, and status if still open. Can browse reviews. User activity is a big part of who to trust when reading reviews. Alternatively, you can use maps to browse local businesses. Can filter search results by distance, price, etc. Next she queries "hair salon San Francisco". Shows us filtering by neighborhood feature.

That's all.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

What percentage of online searches are local? If you consider searches that end up having some influence on local buying activity, the opportunity is put into perspective. But there are still large gaps between the point of search and the point of purchase. How are online mapping, shopping engines, and directories starting to fill these gaps with user-generated content, video, or inventory data that funnel searchers towards local businesses? And how can marketers utilize these tools to get local searchers to pick up the phone, schedule appointments, or show up at their stores?
Moderator:
Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group
Speakers:
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
Peter Hutto, VP, Business Development & Sales, Local.com
Joel Toledano, Co-founder & CEO, Krillion
Steve Espinosa, CEO, eLocal Listing, LLC
Meredith Papp, Product Marketing Manager, Google

Local is a huge market opportunity with lots of challenges. Very fragmented, and lots of different companies emerging and improving the space.

Peter Hutto is first up to speak.

Strategy for Local.com is aggregation. Pulling content, functionality, and advertising from different places.

Most of the big players are all in the space - trying the same combination of strategies.

Engagement: Ratings and reviews. The big thing now is video, lead by Citysearch, 24 months ago. Every big player has a video initiative right now.

Technology: All the major directories, yellow pages, etc. are changing algorithms to cater to a local model.

Data initiatives - lots of local neighborhood info.

Functionality - mapping, shopping.

Google - most of us get our traffic from Google, so it's important to play the game figuring out the organic and paid side .

Core challenges - it's a fragmented and messy market. Huge market opportunity, but no single face.

A look at players in the space.

Oodle- doing a great job at classifieds.
Krillian- local big box retailers with product availability.
Nearbynow- covers the mall vertical.
Stepup- store inventory and promotion for small businesses.
Kriyari- customize online malls for major retailers.
Shopping.com- traditional portal.

Ian White is up next.

Comes from the printed map space. Where he started.

What percentage of queries are local? 80% of dollars are spent near the home. Up to 40% of queries are local - maybe. Data is a bit out dated. Came from an AOL study. Roughly 5% of search terms have the city or state. 2% of queries leverage neighborhood boundaries. .05% search terms use ZIP codes.

An early example of user generated content was a bunch of printed documents by two law students name the Zagats in the late 70's (of Zagat.com). Didn't do the work themselves. Packaged others reviews. Not something new, but good example.

Original local search - the Yellow Pages. Factoid - Why are they yellow? Because they ran out of white paper. 1857 was the first directory for local merchants.

Local search to do list - 1) take lessons from past 2) Get the data right (insights, spatial, and inventory) 3) Long tail geo modified keywords.

Geotargetting currently sucks. Bid on long tail geo modified keywords. Allows to target in a more granular way.

Thank you!

Joel from Krillion is up next.

Krillion does real time location based product search. Different from online search and online purchasing to the extent that they are completed in physical stores near the consumers. Work with manufacturers, retailers, publishers, and search engines. Reach the consumer who is researching online, and will go out to buy the products. Cover the major big box retailers. Over 1 billion SKUs! Has 85% US market share across the different categories.

Key is that consumers research online and buy offline. 95%+ of all commerce transacted is in a physical store. 72% of the research is done online.

Where are consumers researching? Manufacturer's sites. Retailer sites, search, and shopping engines. Go to a variety of sources so need to spread information everywhere.

Several years ago, this data did not exist. Krillion powers "in stock" availability for sites. Constant updates of inventory and prices. Real time in store product available. Key to lead gen and driving real time sales is real time data.

A case study: Panasonic - power the "where to buy" feature. Used to be a consumer dead end - just could research data. Now they can show you where to get the products and allow online purchases - with in store pickup. Great for mom and pop stores without websites. CTR's of over 70% have been shown. Quite significant for retailers.

25% of the time, products are out of stock or not located near the consumer. Last month, rolled out a product which now recommends related products that may be in stock. No more consumer dead ends.

Distribution network - launching with 2 major search engines soon. Powers a new iPhone app with all their data called "The Find".

Steve Espinosa is up next.

Local listings should stand out in rankings. Goal is to get lots of 5 star reviews.

Merchant verification - showed a 1.8x increase in calls for a client with a merchant verification icon.

You want to scan and analyze the Google and Yahoo! result sets. Often you will see local portals in the top 10 results. Instead of trying to outrank, take advantage of this and optimize on the local portals and engines.

Link to your local listing from your website. Use anchor text with a good key phrase. Google is more likely to rank a source like Yahoo! Local rather than your website if your site is new and has little to no links.

Video - SEO, conversions, and citations. Likes to create small commercials for customers.
When creating video for clients, create a new page on your site. Surround it with the same description or tags you would submit to Youtube. Standard optimization of the page. Send links to your Youtube videos. Will see videos get included in universal search. Video optimization is still in its infancy. Can take advantage of this.

Enquiro has a study showing that companies received 2.2x more attention on the results page if the company had Adwords and organic results on the same page. Their research shows that 3.34x more likely if there is a video on the page.

Web references - Local listings are not usually linked to. Rely on scanning the web, and see how many times the business is mentioned on the web, and that's counted as web reference. Videos can be attributed as web references if you do proper linking.

Research your competitors and look at their web references. Go there to create web references. The source of the citation matters. "Amount" of web citations does not guarantee rankings.

Bonus tip - free phone tracking by Google. Create an audio campaign - go through the process - right at the end there is a "call reporting" link - where you can generate up to 20 unique phone numbers. Can use the call tracking feature without charge now, it's a hole in the system. Don't need to complete the ad creation process to take advantage of list.

Next up is Meredith from Google.

Meredith works in the traditional media products division. Will share stories of advertisers who saw great results using print, TV, and audio through the Google network.

We know it's important to be found in search. But if you limit focus to just search, you are missing opportunity. Customers are not yet looking for you in many cases.

Within the Adwords console, you can place ads via these mediums, and can manage them within a single interface.

Case study: Blue Nile - a diamond retailer. Wanted to target 6 strategic markets. Ran print ads using Google. Used unique URL and unique offer. In markets where they ran print, revenue increased by 29%. They also tried a new ad format - the consumer response tag. When ran ads with this tag, revenue and engagement increased 6.5x.

Can target by demographic, geography, section of paper, days, time, etc.

Case study: Golf Now - sells unsold Tee times. Expanded into new areas in the US. Wanted to increase presence in a few markets. Ran print campaigns in relevant sections, as well as audio. Huge spike in sales by accessing print and audio in adwords account allowed efficient targeting within one interface and tracking it.

1700 different channels across the US, partnered with Clear Channel. Can target by state, market, format, zip code, and demographics. Audio ads offer event triggers - for example weather based products. Can create ads and have them played given the weather condition.

Case Study - the Hanley Center Drug Rehab Center. Goal was to reach new potential enrollers beyond local market. Ran national TV campaign using Google TV ads. Used day parts, and also targeted specific shows. Measured brochure requests. Saw a 40% increase. After the TV campaigns, identified what specific markets were most receptive, and able to up the ad buys in those markets.

Can access up to 96 cable networks in the US. Most excited part is collecting anonymous data from set top boxes, and share that data with us. Not only tell us impressions, but can also get data on second by second basis. What percentage of audience watched the ad till the end.

Google Analytics can also measure TV and Audio. Analytics will be able to measure Print campaigns very soon.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying contextual ads offered by major networks and effective tactics for managing paid search in the contextual advertising arena. You'll hear from publishers delivering ads and those who manage contextual campaigns.

Moderator:

Gregg Stewart, SVP, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
Speakers:

David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
Cynthia Tillo, Senior Product Manager of Advertising Services, Adobe Systems
Jennifer Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com

Gregg Stewart: First up we have David Szetela, he's SEW's expert in content advertising.

David: Thanks Gregg. I write a column called profitable PPC that hopes to teach you everything about PPC. The contextual column I write is based on a lot of research and interviews at the bar with a lot of Google and Yahoo people. The available click inventory in the content network is growing at a much faster pace than in search. There is a lot less competition in the content network so if you are faced with rising click costs in search you should definitely switch to content advertising.

So the subtitle of this presentation is "content network doesn't really suck as much as people think it does". So why do content advertisers lose money?

1. The ads appear on irrelevant pages and they get bad clicks (low conversions rates). But my theory is that people will click on anything regardless of relevancy. So they get clicks, but no conversions.

2. The ads don't distract attention from site content – people are not looking for your ad so the ads need to distract attention from the content.

3. By default when you create a Google Adwords campaign, search and content are blended (shows image of Adwords campaign settings set up screen). Always uncheck the content network box for search campaigns and vice versa.

Contextual is not like search. People viewing your ad are not looking for what you are selling, kind of like a print ad. So the first job of every ad is to distract attention away from the content to your message.

Keyword differences: Keywords in content ad groups are treated very differently than in search - keywords are not discrete entities. You should not use more than 30-50 keywords. In most case your keywords for content should be different than for search. Match types are irrelevant (except negative). Individual keyword bids are irrelevant.

The most important keyword difference: if properly used, the keywords in the content ad group should describe the kinds of pages where you want your ads to appear. Keyword lists should equal the words that appear most frequently on such pages.

Ad copy differences: ads need to stand out – distract. Feel free to yell, use exclamation points (only 1 per ad of course) – you can afford to be a little bit obnoxious. Also, be a little bit more competitive. When people see a content ad, they are not in the sales process yet, so you need to lead people to the sales funnel and not assume they are in the sales process.

And of course you should test, test, test.

Ad position differences: magic positions for search are 1-3, for content 1-4. Below position 5, your impressions will drop off dramatically.

Quality score differences: CTR is the only determinate of quality score, which suggests an opposite bidding strategy – most people think to start bids low. But you should start high, buy the CTR, get the quality score love juice and then diminish the bids over time.

Always set up separate content campaigns.

Google reporting is essential. Regularly run the report and exclude the ads that are performing poorly.

That's all I have, this is a subset of what I wrote in my columns, you should check out my posts in SEW. I also have a weekly radio show called PPC Rock Stars you should check out. Thank you!

Gregg: Thank you David. What would you say are best practices?

David: A big bold message with a clear call to action works well. GIF or flash animation work well to deliver the message more than words. In text ads, go out on a limb and make strong claims about your product or service, make declarative statements and say crazy things.

Gregg: Thank you David. Next up is Cynthia from Adobe Systems.

Cynthia: Basically what I wanted to talk about today is an exciting new channel for you to advertise – PDF documents. Is it so far-fetched that someday the government might monetize the highly-trafficked 1040EZ tax form with advertising? Probably not.

So when Adobe was thinking about the advertising industry and how we can add value to the space, we thought about how to reach a highly targeted audience. There are over 256 million PDFs floating out there. This is a great way to reach an audience.

A service we launched in beta about 8, 9 months ago is ads for PDF, and we partnered with Yahoo. As you can see from the slide, we display the ads in a separate panel on the right. It's contextual. From the Adobe standpoint, we have developed some technology understanding what PDFs are about. A page can be anywhere from 1 to 1,000 pages (e-books) So our technology is able to analyze this and we can get some great ad relevance.

These ads are dynamically matched ads, like every time you visit a web site page. That means that all your targeting options can still be applied to the PDF content itself. With this new service, you can maintain these ads from person to person so you can still reach your target audience.

We are also letting publishers embed placeholders as well into PDFs – integrate ad content but make it look and feel like a magazine.

A few examples from a publisher and an advertiser perspective:

- Newsletters. We have one publisher that puts at a monthly PDF newsletter.

- Digital versions of a magazine or newsletter.

- E-books. Traditional publishers are figuring out how to get their content online, so they are making e-book versions in PDF because it's more practical than "next", "next" links in html. Also, people are expecting content for free.

- Digests and compilations.

A top use we have seen success in is archives. Some publishers are sitting on a hundred years of content that they are trying to move online. You might think, what types of ads would be served out to people reading 100-year old content? Memorabilia, perhaps.

Thanks.

Gregg: Any design implications on PDF sites with advertising?

Cynthia: not design, but we have been seeing high CTR rates – by the time people take the trouble to download a PDF they are highly engaged. And also, there are not a lot of distractions like in traditional websites.

Gregg: Next up is Jen Slegg.

Jen: I will walk you through tips and techniques from a publisher perspective.

You have to think about what you want to monetize, explore your options.

When you shouldn't monetize contextual advertising:

- If you are business site selling products, why do you want people to click on ads, you will be sending them to competitors instead.

- If you are an accountant, you don't want ads of do it yourself tax software, you want the people to be your clients.

- Any site with content against Adsense policies, like gambling.

Are you leaving money on the table?

Some people don't realize that if they put some thought into testing, they can do better. So think – why did you chose the Adsense network, there are tons of other programs. Why did you put the ad where you did, why did you choose the color scheme that you did? Did you consider the user experience? When people get too focused on making money they inconvenience the user.

What is your priority– for the users or for monetization? It's hard to achieve the balance, in the long term you should be prioritizing the user experience so you get repeat visitors.

Beyond Adsense:

- Image ads/graphical ads

- Video ads

- Affiliate ads

- Cost per action

- Cost per thousand

- Adsense for search/mobile/feed

- Other contextual companies

Don't just focus on Adsense. Consider the options because Adsense might not be the best choice for you. You need to test and try out your different options.

Some things you should consider:

- placement

- proximity – wrapping text around the ad unit – it could perform well

- size selection

- ad unit colors and borders, can have a huge effect

- borders

- keywords

- URL filters

- geo-targeting – consider how the traffic from different countries can affect your bottom line

Ad units that earn people the most money:

336 x 280

300 x 250

Are you filtering out your revenue? Be aware that your ad blocking filter list will cost you revenue. You really only want to filter out your competitors, ads that are grossly mistargeted or ads that are inappropriate.

Ad heaviness turns off users: don't have 3 identical image ads in 3 or 4 places on the same page. Don't make user scroll down 3 times to get to your content. And don't make the visitor feel that they are only there to click your ads.

Don't select ads just because they pay more CPA – carefully select cost per action ads. Must be targeted.

Some takeaways:

-always do A/B testing

-experiment with different placement, sizes, styles, colors, etc.

-consider the impact of being too ad heavy

-look beyond traditional Adsense text ads and experiment with other formats

Thank you.

Gregg: Thanks Jen, are publishers relying too heavily on one source of revenue?

Jen: everyone things Adsense is the best choice, but what if the account gets banned, or the traffic drops, it could have a major impact, so always have a backup, especially if 99% of your income comes from one source.

Audience Q&A.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Are you in charge of marketing the website, yet have to deal with unfamiliar IT issues? How do you handle a mean IT department? Do you want to improve your relationship with your IT staff? This session provides clear advice and translates the geek-speak into real-life examples. Learn specific steps to analyze your website for potential search engine road blocks such as duplicate content penalties, canonicalization, circular navigation, and other technical horrors. We'll help you identify potential problems and provide clear advice on how to approach your IT department with your request and an olive branch of peace.

Moderator:
Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Chris "Silver" Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts
Greg Boser, Three Dog Media
Sage Lewis, SageRock.com
Matt Bailey started. He started in IT, would deal with marketers wanting IT stuff, then went into marketing and had to go to IT to have them do things.

Robots.txt
Think of robots.txt as a welcome mat for the search engines. Welcomes the bots, but also says here is crap in our index that we don’t want you to look at.

Example of very basic robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /test

Do NOT just say Disallow: / as it will exclude all content.

Redirects

• Change or URL
• Change of index page
• 301 (permanent)
• 302 (temporary)

WebBug is a good software tool that lets you know if there is a redirect for a site. Redirects within a site is OK, but need to examine how they work on your home page (sorry, didn’t get exact explanation of this).

Inconsistent linking. Gives example of rookstone.com that has inconsistent URLs, multiple URLs for home page.

Duplicate Content. Shows Brookstone again with multiple URLs for same battery. Think of duplicate content as having 4,000 mailboxes in front of your house. You need to figure out which mailbox is getting the mail. Which mailbox is Google going to think is the right mailbox?

Crappy URLs. Long URLs are not user friendly, especially ones with a lot of numerical parameters instead of shorter with words in URL.

Favicon. Get a favicon, gets you more opportunity to brand.
Short. vs. long. Words in URL also help.

Diluted Content
Putting everything on one page, gives example of 200 gadgets on one page, not focusing on good categories.

Unclear Instructions
Need to give marketing information to user. Site may be technically fine, but not good for marketing, unclear to users.

404 pages
Marketing and IT both need to work on good 404 pages. Marketing needs to give users a friendly message.

Don’t point fingers, before you blame IT make sure that it’s not a marketing problem. Gives example of marketing complaining about no sales, blaming IT, but marketing had never gone and tried to buy a product from their site.

Chris Silver Smith

Getting in touch with your geek side

1. Check for problems: SEO health diagnostics
2. How are we today? Ongoing analytics
3. Watching recurring issues
4. befriend IT colleagues
5. Get company to Prioritize SEO
6. Still can’t win?

Check for problems: SEO health diagnostics
Get Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox (and a couple of other browsers).
View your site like a search engine spider would. Web Developer Toolbar lets you disable things like javascript, CSS, images, etc. Shows Coca Cola website without images, etc. sees very little information and especially keywords about Coca Cola.

User Agent Switcher: signals site that you are googlebot, slurp, etc. See what site looks like to googlebot.

Example of bad redirection: Coca-Cola. He shows javascript or meta-refreshes being used instead of server-side redirect. Need to use server-side redirect. Check the header, should return 301 if redirected, not a 200.

How are we today? Ongoing analytics

• Check daily referred visits for each of the search engines. If you get a huge drop from search engines, especially zero, work with IT and try to figure out what had happened.
• Track conversions from SEO traffic vs. other sources
• Track bot requests over time. Need to look at log files, Google analytics doesn’t help because it only looks at java script.

CMS Hell (recurring issues)
Recurring CMS/Legacy Issues? Check and re-check SEO factors – titles, metas, H1s, etc. Don’t assume once fixed, always fixed.

Befriend your IT Colleagues

• Befriend and collaborate with IT
• Give credit to IT where/when credit is due
• Understand that improvements can be handled iteratively, be satisfied with baby steps towards goals – all progress is worthwhile
• Follow standard IT process for prioritizing/scheduling SEO changes

Get company to recognize SEO

• Make business case for why SEO is needed. Look at news about money left on tables, competitors’ successes to help convince the rest of the company why SEO is necessary.
• Equally important to success are user experience, usability, legal requirements, branding, etc.
• Take every opportunity to educate others about SEO.
• Once worth of SEO is recognize, it can be prioritized along with other projects, and IT can take it seriously get needed work scheduled.

Still can’t win?

• Go to another IT department.
• Legacy system/hellish CMS? Build Parallel
• Use a proxy system – GravityStream.com

Q&A and comments from panelists.

Greg Boser requires IT to be a part of things. Marketers don’t have terms to explain to IT what it is that they want done. Take presentation to IT, show what they want done, and why they want it done. If IT is not on board, he won’t even take project.

Panelists suggest reading some basic books on website programming so you can speak to the IT  department with their language, to some degree. You don’t need to learn the language in-depth, but useful to learn the basics.

Have lots of employees go home and try to buy something on your own website (with dummy credit card), and take screenshots of any problems. Often users will not tell you about problems, this is a great way to get that information complete with screenshots.

Coverage provided by Keri.

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

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

Black Hat/White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO
Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
4:15p - 5:30p

Speakers:
Jill Whalen, HighRankings.com
Bruce Clay, BruceClay.com
Dave Naylor, Bronco.co.uk
Todd Friesen, "on sabbatical"
Greg Boser, 3 Dog Media

Moderator: Matt Bailey

(Town hall style debate. The initials preceding the comment indicate who is speaking.)

MB: Apparently, no one wants to be labeled, so let's start out by defining what "black hat" and "white hat". So let's start out by having Bruce and Jill define black hat and then let Greg and Todd define white hat.

BC: I think that black hat vs white hat are labels defined and applied by the search engines moreso than by the people in Search. The white hats tend to play in the middle of the acceptable area, the gray hats play near the edge of what is acceptable, and the people who are truly black hat are the people who consistently play in the truly unacceptable area. I think that if the only person you're hurting is yourself, you can be black hat all you want; however, people who do pain to their paying clients -- those are truly evil people.

JW: Black hat techniques are those methods that seek to decieve the search engines. There is spam and there are also "tricks" to make the engines believe your site is more releveant than it really is, or relevant to keywords that it's actually not. Those "tricks" are definitely black hat.

TF: White hat people are those who print out and laminate the Google Webmaster Guidelines, hang them on their wall and worship them every night.

GB: White hat is a euphemism for "SEOs with no game"

DN: I don't think I've ever seen a white hat site rank really really well in truly competitive verticals.

MB: It's come up a couple of times that black hat techniques can get you in trouble, so we know there is risk there. However, is there any risk associated with white hat techniques?

JW: White hat is making your site the best it can be, so really that's it, there's no risk with having the best site you can have.

BC: The way I look at it, if you're sitting at your laptop working on your website and Matt Cutts walks up behind you and your first inclination is to close your laptop -- quickly -- then you're probably not playing by the rules. I think that if you're doing things that are defendable in the face of inquiry and with the best of intentions, you can call yourself white hat.

TF: Look at cloaking, is it good? Is it evil? No, it's agnostic. It's a neutral technology that can be used properly or improperly.

GB: The crowd I run in, let's face it, we do some stuff that is "pushing the envelope" for our own personal sites and we look at it as R&D that sometimes pays us lots of money. Those learning experiences help us be better SEOs in general.

JW: Let's face it, there are white hats and black hats and then there are just plain old incompetent SEOs.

GB: There are a lot of people in this industry who just aren't qualified to do the work. They take jobs they don't have the experience or knowledge to handle properly and make promises they can't keep. Then they're in a position where they end up doing things they shouldn't to make good on their unrealistic promises.

DN: You know what's a big problem, it's when yer working yer nuts off on a site and then you find out that yer not the only SEO who's working on the site, and you start looking at it, and someone's been buying links in an uncontrolled fashion and thinking it's not leaving a footprint, when it's really leaving a big footprint. Most of the big mistakes come from someone within the organization who makes a decision to "help" and they don't really know what they're doing and they're doing more harm than good.

BC: People are looking at things like "should I invest the time building my site, making it expert, and building it into an authority site" or "should I just spend the money to buy 10,000 links and save all that time working on developing my site". If you

JW: I'd like to say something about "rules". You don't need to read the Google rules, because it's common sense. What's within the lines and outside of the lines is all known. We're all adults and you know what's right and what's wrong.

TF: I absolutely disagree that is common sense. If it were common sense, we wouldn't have an industry that's growing as fast as it is.

GB: Bruce is saying 3.5 years out versus 30 days out... I mean first of all I don't see buying links as bad or evil. The approach we talk with clients is this... if the client comes to me and I tell them it's going to take 3 years to get them to the top, that's just unacceptable, so we split the difference. We're always working with them to build a quality site so that when Google can actually accurately track and nuke the "bad guys" we will be the sole standing survivor, but until then we're simultaneously using "quicker" methods to stay competitive to not only start realizing gains sooner, but to also get the client on board to start incorporating *all* of the SEO recommendations.

MB: So is black hat SEO appropriate for every site?

DN: No! There are verticals that do not need it. I mean if you're in for the long haul and your industry isn't full of people that are buying links and stuff then you can go and be white hat all you want.

Audience Question: If you build a widget and it links back to you but it's on people's Facebook pages (behind their logins) do those links count?

Panel: No!

DN: I'd make a Wordpress plugin or widget and that would be great, but Facebook, no.

[Random questions...]

BC: I don't think buying links is essentially evil. It's commerce.

TF: The goal of buying links is essentially link acquisition. Buying links just jumpstarts the process.

MB: In other words, Todd, you're advocating "marketing".

JW: Yeah, go hire a traditional PR firm.

BC: I don't think a major, established brand should ever black hat.

GB: Yeah, you know, BMW did it and it totally burned them... for less than 48 hours. I disagree. I even wrote a blog post about it and said that big brands totally should spam search engines because they don't suffer any repercussions like little people do. Look at BMW specifically, no one ever went into a BMW dealer and said "You're cloaking! I'm going to go get a Mercedes!"

Matt Cutts: Ok, I just want to add a little disclaimer. I know the sites we take out, and not everyone outside of Google always knows who we take out. We don't always make announcements. We absolutely take action on big sites, we just don't always call them out.

GB: What about Forbes?

Matt Cutts: You'll notice they no longer have pre-sell pages. There's not always a need to call people out and pick on them. I think the question is, do you want to take that risk?

GB: Here's the deal, the BMW work was so amateur. They did it sloppy and they got caught.

DN: I know Google is holding back some companies in the UK that ought to be topping the SERPs for link buying and it's all hush hush.

Audience Question: So if we don't buy links, what DO we do?

DN: Content (obviously, I mean I don't want to say Content is King because that's so cliche at this point)

JW: There's public relations, there's social...

GB: Yeah but even with social if you don't pay someone to get it going on Digg it gets no traction anyway, so in the end it's all paid.

JW: and also, just because Google says it's evil doesn't mean it really is "evil".

Live blogged by Carolyn Shelby, co-host of SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.fm

From Facebook to MySpace, Twitter to FeedBurner, social software and feeds are reshaping the world we live in and streamlining our online experience. Networking sites like Facebook and social messaging utilities like Twitter bring the human element to the foreground by enabling people to communicate and exchange information with everyone and anyone they trust. Likewise, feeds leverage the social graph by enabling instant distribution of content for publishers, while permitting consumers to easily aggregate and keep track of all their favorite websites and blogs. Join us for a lively discussion as our panel of experts debate the various dimensions of community-driven social applications and the future of how information and messages get shared.
Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
Speakers:
Andy Beal, Consultant, Blogger & Author, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
David Snyder, Search Specialist, JRDunn.com
Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek

Andy Beal is up first.

Presentation - "Avoid Being a Twit on Twitter"

Taking a perspective of a marketer for this presentation.

First get your name right. Nicknames are mostly for teens. If you sign up for Twitter, use your real name to brand yourself. Important if people instantly recognize you.

If you are not ready for Twitter yet, register anyway to avoid getting your brand or name hijacked. Difficult to get it back. Do it with all social media sites.

Twitter pages can get juiced up nicely. Andy's page has a PR5. Profiles rank nicely for names.

Break the monotony by creating your own background to stand out. Pimp your profile. If nothing else, change your colors. Check out www.twitterbacks.com to download templates and customize your own background.

The basics:

Learn the commands.

@andybeal - directs a message to a specific user. Public - everyone sees it.

d andybeal - sends a direct message that is private. One on one.

#olympics - hash marks tag comments.

Favorites - doesn't use it much, but there is a star to click on to favorite the tweet.

Can delete the updates, but don't assume they will be deleted everywhere.

Definitely change the setting so that you can see replies from anyone - even if not following. Change the default. Helps connect with people.

Don't use protection! Can protect your updates with a privacy setting. Recommends not using it. Harder to promote yourself. Don't use it unless you use it for a small group or internal purposes.

Learn the "pidgin". You only get 140 characters. Reason is SMS text messages are limited to that. Learn to shorten words. If you use SMS you know LOL and BRB.

Tweet = to send a message.

Tweeple or Tweeps = friends, nicer word than "twits"

Followers = subscribers

ReTweet = when someone resends a tweet that someone else said.

Check out the Twictionary for more.

Don't follow everyone! Will be hard to keep up. Don't wan't to be labeled a spammer. Follow friends, employees, customers, press, or anyone that will bring value to network. Don't just follow everyone.

Check out tinyurl.com/twitmarketers to find a good group of marketers to find if you need a good starting point.

Twitter is a big cocktail party. It's dynamic. Keeps moving. Don't send Twitter spam to people you don't know.

Have conversations with people with large networks. Helps build up your network.

Don't always expect a reply. Might not be at your computer, or the message might fall to deaf ears. Will only be able to send private messages to people that are following you.

Start sharing valuable information like breaking news such as an earthquake, Google update. Live-tweet events and conferences.

80% social, 20% business - mix up your messages. Don't just be self promoting.

Cross promote carefully! Use www.twitterfeed.com to combine with your blog to post your blog post on Twitter.

If you get heavy with promoting your business, set up your business profile.

Tools of the trade. Don't have to use the web only. Twirl, Twitterific, desktop apps, iPhone apps, etc.

Reputation management / monitoring with Twitter. Don't get pulled into negative conversations.

http://search.twitter.com (formerly summize) , tweetbeep.com. Query your name, products, competition. Can subscribe to alerts via RSS feeds.

Go to www.tinyurl.com/SESTwitter to add Twitter tips.

Follow Andy at www.twitter.com/andybeal. Buy his book "Radically Transparent", which is the first book on reputation management.

And finally, MC Hammer is a Twitter user! If he can use it, you can!

Note: Kevin asks to be followed @KevinMRyan

Next up is Neil Patel from ACS.

Facebook is a lot more than just photos of Neil in socks. It's a place to interact with friends. Best way to explain it is try it.

Who uses it? Most people are White - 73% - 14% black - 6% Asian - 6% other.

Over 30% make over $100k annually.

43% have never attended college.

Why should you care about Facebook?

Over 90 million people on it. Can connect with others - friends, industry people. Build relationships. Great for branding. Spread a message to the masses.

Connecting with others - Neil lives in the OC. LA is really close. Wanted to connect with other SEO's. Searched for SEO's, and found groups to meet up with. Takes the online world to the offline world. Transpires into real world.

Great for birthday reminders.

Great for branding. Shows photo of him getting kissed by Chris Hooley. "Says" he didn't enjoy it ;-)

Great for uploading photos of SES and connecting with others.

Good for sharing information. On Facebook there are feeds similar to Twitter - updates. Also can use applications.

The "Facebook Effect" - one company tied their application to Facebook and it drives 100,000,000 pages views a month.

Visit Quicksprout.com for more.

Next up is Dave Snyder.

Follow him @davesnyder. He will follow you back, and reply to you.

Thanks Tamar for helping with his presentation on Friendfeed.

What is Friendfeed? A social aggregator that consolidates the updates from social networking sites. It's an RSS feed on steroids. Puts the data into one space.

What can you do with Friendfeed? Create content streams. Create imaginary friends to represent blogs, etc.

Track topics of interest. Search topics of interest from friends RSS feeds. Makes this a powerful online reputation management tool.

You can interact with your network's information. If a friend uploads a Youtube video, can see it all in the stream. Puts the social web into one place. Makes the dilemma of social media - the disconnect, go away. This allows a real time engagement with users.

Monitor your reputation. Establish a network, RSS monitoring, Mobile reputation management, social media profile for SERPs, building brand advocates.

Allows you to monitor who is monitoring you.

Third party tools - lose alot by not using them. Twirl is a great tool. More tools on the presentation slides.

Mashup video, photos, and other content into your stream, allowing instant engagement with content. Mashups are the future of the web, as we can see with Universal search.

Check out Dave's website at SearchandSocial.com or buy him a drink!

Follow Kevin @kevinmryan
Follow Andy @andybeal
Follow Neil @neilpatel
Follow Brian @bmorrissey

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp. Follow me on Twitter @aviw

When your catalog has 200 million products, grows at $3M per week, and contains content created by users, how do you optimize it?
· Capture the long tail by balancing a user-contributed folksonomy with a site taxonomy that works for both searchers and search engines.
· Provide tools for users to SEO their own content and use the power of community to edit the retail site.
· Measure traffic, model SEO revenue, and track performance across multiple variables.
With user-generated content, you are reaching customers who are ready to buy and customers who are participating in a community. Learn how to maximize SEO returns by developing an SEO strategy that satisfies both markets at all phases of the buying cycle and scales to huge sites.

Moderator:
· Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
· Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CTO, CafePress
· Benu Aggarwal, Founder & President, Milestone Internet Marketing
· Kurt Krake, Search Advisor, Bazaarvoice

Rebecca: Welcome our first speaker Mehdi.

Mehdi: I run the online operations at CaféPress. We are a 100% user generated content businesses. Users upload their designs and sell them to the community. If you want us to sell it we can sell it for you, and if you want to sell it to your own community you can set that up. We have 6.5 million active users, get about 2,000 new shops every day, our catalog of available product is close to 200 million, and every day our users create an average of 45,000 products.

So how do we manage our SEO?

It's a challenge for us because we are dealing with so many different products. A third of our traffic today is search engines, so Google hits us about 5 times a day.

When the incoming content comes from the consumer, we allow that to become a custom taxonomy within out site, by product line. We have to find a balance between conversions and how deeply we want to categorize things.

At our site, we are still growing at 30% on traffic which is incredible.

Every shopkeeper is tagging their products so they get found, and we deal with a lot of spam issues that we need to control.

When you search for a term and you have 4 million products, how do you put the most relevant designs on top? So we balance between how recently something is designed, how well it sells, and many other factors.

When you get to a PDP (product detail page), there's a balance between showing you what you searched for, vs. showing you our catalog.

Our business is part shopkeeper - someone wants to sell Go Green t-shirts, hats, etc. so we give them the tools to set up their shop, and this page probably shows up pretty high.

How do you manage all this with millions of searches coming in? The metrics becomes important. What are the vital signs you look at to see if you are succeeding? We look at where the traffic is coming from and where it ends up. We look at the top 100 keywords that drive traffic as well as a group of terms driving traffic. A/B testing is something we also do to increase our conversions.

Thank you.

Rebecca: Next up is Benu Aggarwal.

Benu: My firm focuses on the lodging industry and we face this issue all the time.

Why are customer reviews so important? How are they impacting organic listings? How do you incentivize your customers to post reviews?

Some stats: 1,200 consumers shop online at least 4 times per year spending $500 or more annually.

78% of customers spend more than 10 minutes reading reviews. Which reviews are they reading and where? Why Trip Advisor became one of the largest site in the industry – the credibility was so much more when reviews were posted on third party sites.

How do reviews help you in conversion? It increases credibility!

The impact of reviews is very significant, but just as significant is how they are presented.

Trip Advisor gives very easy access to different topics such as room service, etc. We have developed a tool in-house that allows users to post very easily.

So what are the things that are important to remember? Good reviews will help, as a site owner, to understand the preferences of the customer.

Make sure your reviews are above the fold on the page. Make product reviews attractive, ask customers to add videos and photos. Incentivize your customers – chance to win, free drink, etc.

How should you categorize your website properly so that when they land on it they know you have proper architecture? Make sure it's categorized properly. If you are on a product page, the user needs to know they are landing on a product page.

Check if site is designed for higher conversion: add contact info, maps, search box.

Focus on the product pages. If they are not available, don't take users to the home page, take them to another similar product page!

Programming best practices:

- Make sure you are doing re-writes
- Multiple entry points
- Use java script but make sure the download time is minimum
- Optimize your titles, meta data
- CSS for layouts and drop downs
- Server-side database caching techniques
- Provide videos, great way to gain reviews

Thank you.

Rebecca: Next is Kurt Krake from Bazaarvoice.

Kurt: I am a search strategy consultant for Bazaarvoice. We're going to focus on how product reviews really enhance product websites.

We did a study based on 21 retail brands (that you know) and we checked out different product sets from home supplies and sporting goods. We were looking at what the reviews did to the natural search traffic. There's a high correlation between searching and reading product reviews. We also know that purchases use search to use research.

What would a term look like towards the head for Bazaarvoice – maybe "jewelry research" and for the long tail, maybe "best men's watches". As we go down the list of the long tail, we get better quality keyword searches.

Graphical example of how a long tail keyword shows up in Google Trends graph. So the deeper you go, the more highly relevant.

So Bazzarvoice employs a segmented strategy for ratings & reviews. We use product-focused pages, and then reviews-focused page. We optimize around title tags and meta descriptions. The body of the page is user generated content and so the page is optimized purely for reviews. The great thing is that when people search using the keyword "review", it will take you to a page like that.

Type in a product into Google, then type in that product with the word review, and see what the results look like.

With Bazaarvoice, the average query is 3.5 - 4 words, vs. Google's 2.5 average.

Product search frequently contains product names; not laptop but Dell laptop. The research also showed a noticeable increase in conversions from referrals from the review page than the products page.

Thank you!

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

How can you best tap into long tail terms? Are there targeting techniques you're overlooking? This session examines these and other techniques to help you get more out of paid search.

Moderator:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Speakers:
Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd

Christine starts out with her presentation
Landing Page Faux Paux: 10 Mistakes That Can Cost You Sales

Technical Headaches
Broken Page Elements

• Are all page elements working properly?
• Broken forms
• Database-driven dynamic elements. Is it slow? Does customer leave because it looks broken?

Customer Contact Loops Broken

• Can the customer contact continue?
• Missing phone number
• VOIP phone number reliability
• Form submissions working?
• Form-2-mail – is anyone reading the mail?
• Slow servers can cause customers to assume things are broken, and the competition is only a click away.

Entropy
Things that can break when you’re not looking

• Check for things that break over time
• Rendering issues may cause site to render incorrectly in different browsers
• Rendering is typically tested rigorously when launched, but not when amended
• Broken links on landing pages can also lower customer confidence

Ad page existence often doesn’t get tested thoroughly after minor site updates

• Since landing pages are often not a part of the main navigation, they can incorrectly get removed (404 error) or placed behind a login
• Mass rewrite rules have unanticipated consequences for landing pages.

Site redesign/relaunch doesn’t include the ad pages

• Site gets republished to server without the landing pages.

Communication Confusion The landing pages doesn’t include the user’s keywords

• Keyword resonance
• Reinforcing the keyword used by the customer adds confidence
• Improves CTR
• Improves stickiness
• Improves landing page quality score

• Lack of keyword resonance will lead to poor CTR performance and wasted PPC spend when the customer bounces immediately out of the site.
• The landing page doesn’t reflect the ad message
• Watch out for inconsistent messaging
• The landing page appeal should reflect the ad copy
• Choose your appeal (cost, experience, availability, etc.) an d reinfore appeal on landing page
• The landing page is not persuasive

Analytics matters Failure to include/maintain conversion tracking code

• PPC conversion tracking allows better management of PPC accounts
• Make sure conversion code for all PPC campaigns are included
• Check conversion code to make sure it’s still there
• Failure to maintain analytics instrumentation
• Using analytics is key to measuring PPC performance
• Identify conversion funnel issues
• Track ROI
• Analytics code often missing or poorly maintained on landing pages

 

Matt Van Wagner

Negative Keywords: The strong force behind PPC Campaigns

Why you need negative keywords
Save money

• Reduces unproductive clicks charges
• Reduce ad impressions, improve quality score and lowers CPCs

Improves campaign performance

• Improves conversion
• Improves user experience

How to use negative keywords
Boxing Out eliminates costly clicks. You want to make sure that words you don’t want don’t get shown – your campaign becomes invisible to “bad words” in searches.

Boxing In – use negative keywords in broad and phrase match if you have that keyword in exact match. You can pay less because it is a longer-tail phrase. Example of Wood Ceiling, Wood Ceiling Panels, and Faux Wood Ceiling Panels. You want to use Faux as a negative keyword in the first two groups so that you drive traffic to the third ad group.

Google:
There are three negative match types

• Negative broad
• Negative phrase
• Negative exact

Negative broad works differently than you may expect (no stems, plurals, and other stuff I missed)
No limitations on number of negatives
Apply at campaign/ad group levels
Important for content campaigns
Tip! Don’t forget the (-) sign when editing online, you don’t need it in the offline editor. Can lead to confusion

I have incomplete notes for Yahoo and Microsoft – use at your own risk, and look at the network for the correct information.

Yahoo
“excluded” keywords
For advanced match only
missed rest

Microsoft
Has interesting implementation
Negative is sort of like broad match, but not quite – need to add plurals, misspellings
Maximum 1022 characters (1k total)

Cascading negatives (missed explanation)

Evaluating Negatives

• Keyword Discovery for negatives– similar to positive keywords
• What is the real volume?
• What is the real impact against your keywords?
• Be selective about negatives
• Contain your impulse to add randomly
• Implement in batches, measure impact
• Document your negatives
• Why did you choose it?
• What impact did you expect to have?
• If it didn’t have an impact, try others.
• Focus on high payoff words
• Even 100 keywords are a lot to manage
• Create a hierarchy of importance

Best practices

• Add negatives conservatively
• Be selective
• Think portability

 

Thomas Bindl
Mastering Google AdWords

Analyzing log files
Log files are good for SEO and paid search
You can get the following information:

• Keyword searched
• Rough position
• Country
• Language
• Exact date and time
• Geolocation

He explains a log file and how to analyze it.

Using dynamic parameters

• {keyword}       which keyword triggered the click
• {ifContent:Content}      Content Network
• {ifSearch:Search}         Search (network)
• {creative}         Which AdText triggered the click
• {placement}     Which website triggered the click (only for site targeted campaigns)

Shows example of a landing page URL.

Measuring broad match

• Don’t measure what you wanted, measure what you got
• Add {keyword} to every landing page URL
• Compare value of {keyword} and “q=” referrer
• Assign tracking values to {keyword}+”q=”referrer

Example: books -> buy cheap books.

Going from broad to exact

• Analyze results of bought vs. delivered
• Positive ROI goes into phrase match
• Negative ROI goes into negative keywords
• Positive ROI goes into exact match
• Negative ROI goes into negative keywords
• Profit margin goes up

 

Andy Atkins-Krüger spoke about international paid search advertising, but I was not able to see the slides well and take good notes.

Moderator: Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

Use comscore Conversational media category
- dont forget that the numbers are panel based

Let google do it for us
- Trends down to the site are now available

CMO’s will end up being WEB analyts or havint them nearby, high on the organizational food chain.

Bake in analytics to all marketing campaigns by auditing them, changing the campaigns before anything else is done. Right now, Social media has no

se place in most organizations

- whenever you sit down in a campaign, sit down and think about if this is something you can measure.

Web 2.0 is about empowering users. Its not the technology, its about letting people have a voice and communicate with each other.

Measure conversations - it can be done and this panel shows some examples of where we succeed.

Tools like Radian6 and others can measure certain things.

WAA is working on stadards for social media and the beginning drafts will be available this fall.

—————————————–

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Social Media Measurement

*warns that he is going to go quickly*

Expanding social media universe
- 45% of adult interenet users have created content online
- 1.2 million blog posts per day

Designing Social Media
- Phase 1 - listen
- Phase 2 - engage
- Phase 3 - measure/optimize

First know what you want to know
- how are people feeling about our brand
- who is influential

Reports: Voices

Reports: Product attribute tag clouds

Limitations of Automation
- a pure machine based solution cant pick up sarcasm
- technology is a long way away, you will need human intervention

How to use it?
- Extension of Customer Service
- some companies are mining data on a daily basis. They are looking for venues that they can firefight and avoid dell hell type issues
- its a mix of PR, CS, and marketing all at once
- Search results
- *shows chart that has social venues ranking well for big keywords*
- Engagement
- built blog strategy based on 6 months of listening
- positive sentiment increased 15%

Where does this all go?
- Trending
- disparity of capabilities in social media monitoring and analysis will fall
- are all metrics really part of the same elephant

Start to look at how these things work together: sales, traffic, brand trackiing, conversation mining, conversion tracking

—————————————————–

Breanna Wigle, CRM Manager, Military Advantage & Todd Parsons, Co-founder & CPO, BuzzLogic.com

Social philosophy
- profiles and communities
- discussion boards

Have found that social media traffic converts 6% than non social.

Strategy: isolate the influencers and reach passionate readers of military defense news and information
Campaign goal: increase product awareness to (new) influencers and their (audiences) convert visitors into rss and newsletter subcribers
Challenge - finding influencers and advertising to their audiences manually is daunting, given the fragemented nature - there were 1000s of sites

and all in the long tail. They wanted to know the top areas to spend their time.
Step 1. Uncover conversations - started looking at same keywords they used on the site. They then went out and found sites that were about those

keywords. Other site targeting: same terms, different outcome. Networks in google adsense were forums, photosharing sites and reference information.

In the data, they found active conversations that linked out to other locations.

Step 2. Rank the influencers. How often do they blog on a topic? what is their reach? They targeted the influencers.

Campaign overview
- creative was compelling, informative and had a clear call to action

They ran on a cross section of 250 blogs which included influencers and sites linking into the conversation

Results: 86% higher CTR campain compared to historical average for targeted banner campaigns. Direct conversions: 5.32% lift from pre to during. The

goals included newsletter and rss subscriptions. 90% of visits were new to the site. Users from the campaign stayed on the site 6.25% longer.

Key observations and learnings:
- active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences. Highly targeted display ads can perform in this environment.
- influencers and their network relationships
- this can get you closer to a search like intent
- the nature of conversation can impact ad performance

They say there is a ton of inventory. The problem is that there arent a ton of quality ad networks that work with blogs.

Q. price wise - how does it compare to yahoo/google?
A. blog content is less expensive, but what they do is go after the influencers

——————————————————–

Edmund Wong, Vice President, Strategy, iCrossing

Case study - tech forum engagement

Problem: unhappy customers were online talking about how unhappy they were
solution: worked with client to identify, monitor, and develop an engagement strategy. The goal was to be helpful and not market.
outcome: negative sentiment is decreasing. Alot of traffic was going to the postings where they were reaching out. Program learnings and

recommendations are being shared with the entire organization. Management, Development, and their knowledge base are all being updated.

Measuring and reporting
- Monitoring metrics
- tonality of user postings
- site traffic for the forum sites
- Engagement metrics
- direct metrics: number of company postings, number of converstaions engaged
- indirect: page views of postings, number of links posted to clients website, amount of traffic from the links

track links posted and clicks received by site - they are using Omniture data and combining (by hand) a count of which links are creating

visits.

Categorize and analyze discussion topics
- non technical (they dont engage) or technical topics(they do engage)
- decide when and where not to engage

Example: forum users were complaining about confusion about being over charged for customer support
- one path took you to a free self help, another took you to a fee based.
- Solution: they created a landing page that explained the two

Key takeaways:
- there is no one killer metric
- track anything possible
- its not just about the numbers
- its all relative (focus on benchmarking)
- view monitoring social media as a social intelligence program involving the worlds largest focus group

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

How many keywords do you need in your paid search account? What keywords are your customers searching for? How do customers find products after they reach your site? How to target the right terms in your paid and organic search marketing, and where these keywords should be used.
Moderator:

* Cory Treffiletti, President, Managing Partner, Catalyst:SF

Speakers:

* Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings
* Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
* Frederick Vallaeys, Google AdWords Evangelist, Google
* Jorie Waterman, Lead Program Manager, adCenter Keyword Research Platform
* Jason Dorn, Senior Director, Network Quality Team, Yahoo! Inc.

Christine Churchill takes the floor.

Will be talking about keyword research. The idea is to have better ways to talk to customers who will be buying and create relationships with. Biggest mistake is when people become myopic and use words that are internal jargon or in house terms while not thinking about what the customer might be using.

Why do it if keyword research takes a lot of time and commitment?

Search engines are text based. Sure they can read other formats, but text is key. Keyword research is the fundamental step in search marketing. It also helps us correct mistakes. Back when Christine was at Net Mechanic, made a big mistake and had a site rank for the wrong terms. Terms the customers couldn't even spend! Started looking at the traffic to help make proper keyword research decisions.

Another reason to do research is to increase conversions. Increase conversions by speaking the customer's language.

Develop list of relevant terms to target in SEO, PPC, Blogs, Videos, Social Media, and offline documentation.

Competitive intelligence - insight on competition helps you identify key opportunities.

Keywords and usability. Helps give ideas for site design and navigation. Very overlooked part of the process.

Favorite reason to do the KW research is to discover new opportunities. If you have a content site, the more KW opportunities - the more chance you have for a sale, donation, or conversion.

The long tail - Based on frequency graph. Coined by Chris Anderson who wrote a book about it. What you find with this graph is that the popular keywords are in the front of the graph, and then reduce to infinity. It's a way for small sites, and sites such as Amazon or itunes to capture lots of unique traffic. Tail phrases are very descriptive queries that people use to search. It's been reported that 20% - 25% of queries are new to Google. People are using unique phrases all the time.

Brainstorming and building a keyword list- Goal is to cast your net widely and generate a broad list. Don't have someone negative in the room to ruin the creativity of group.

Another overlooked opportunity is to look at keywords within the company. Look within press releases or current site copy. But be careful of insider jargon. Product reviews, company reviews are great resources.

Log files - catch 22 situation. You need to be found first. But may give you a core phrase to give you insight for others. Google Webmaster tools and other similar tools are great too.

Site search box - Terms thrown into internal site search database.

Competitors - good place to get ideas.

Learn the lingo of the customer. So important. Customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, blogs, forums, discussion groups are great resources.

Keyword research tools - lists many different products out there - see lecture slides for entire list. Wordtracker, Trellian, Spyfu, Nichebot, Hitwise, Trends, etc.

In sum - the success of your campaign goes back to your keywords. Takes time and is an ongoing activity. Requires continuously looking at your lists. Use a variety of sources.

Thanks!

Frederick Vallaeys of Adwords takes the mic.

Adwords evangelist for Google. Talks about tips and tools to grow your business with keywords.

The agenda:
-Best practices for keywords
-Keyword tools at Google
-Business intelligence tools

The long tail phenomenon is real and advertisers are aggressive. Shows a graph of two studies that were done. Strong correlation between long tail keywords and conversions. 2-3-4 keyword phrases is the sweet spot.

How many keywords do you need? Different for everyone. If have thousands of products - thousands of keywords. How do you structure this? Use ad groups. Recommends 10-50 keywords per ad group. Helps you break words into themes and match ad text. Mistake is having one keyword or ad creative per group. People think its more trackable, but not the case. Also a mistake is to duplicate the keywords with multiple match types. The reality is that is not the best strategy.

Finding words - use the Adwords keyword tool. Don't need an account to use it. You can put in terms, and it will generate similar terms. Gives up to 150 keyword refinements. Now has keyword volume data! Audience claps. Was a big request and finally implemented it. The other option in this tool is "keyword broadening". For example, "wireless router" will produce the suggestion for "linksys router". Great for finding negative keywords. Another option is to use the landing page URL to find keywords. Suggests new ad groups. Should use the search query performance reports. Tells you which queries people did when they saw your ad. Say you bough the term "anniversary flowers" and the ad is coming up on "anniversary gifts". Can help make a decision if you want that term or not.

Discovering new opportunities - Say you are watching the Olympics and you sell sports memorabilia. You see that Michael Phelps and Kobe Bryant are related terms. But in the last week, there was a huge spike for Michael Phelps. It's real time data that happens every day and lets you capitalize on potential seasonality and regional trends. Shows which month has highest volume. If you have a back to school campaign, you can use this data very effectively. If you look at the reports, you can see the differences amongst different regions. Can use different keywords in different regions to address what the market needs.

A new tool called Google Insights for search was recently introduced. It's a version of Trends built for advertisers. Plug in "north face backpack". Shows Canada is demanding this product and great place to unload them. Shows up-and- coming queries. Shows lots of interesting buying trends. Uses the term "breakout" which means a major spike in query volume.

Jorie Waterman from MSN is up.

Adcenter keyword research tool for Excel 2007 is what she will be talking about. This tool is great not just for Adcenter but for all SEM efforts. Jorie is a real keyword junkie. She loves keywords.

Why is keyword data important? It's a real gauge of user intent, a lense into your audience and a great way to help improve ROAS and expand reach. Highly recommends looking at different tools and comparing information.

The MS Excel add-in. There will be a version for 2003 coming soon. You can use it for up to 20k keyword per day, per account. A great way to be creative about keyword research. Delivering absolute numbers on exact match queries. Not showing unique users, but how many times has a term been searched. Fully committed to transparency.

Where does the data come from? Keyword services platform. 3rd party developers can tap into it. Comes from MSN, Adcenter, and the web itself. Can see monthly traffic, buzz, monetization data, and by vertical, extract keywords from URL - tremendous amount there.

Shows the demo live. There's a tab for "Ad Intelligence". Type in a URL in cell A1. Click Keyword Extraction. Extracts keywords. Great tool for competitive research!

Can see up to 100 keywords per URL! Another way to expand keywords is with "Keyword Suggestion". Returns data very rapidly within Excel and gives lots of long tail terms. Can easily create thousands of terms. Uses "travel" for example, and gets thousands of keywords. How do you prioritize terms? You can click on "Monthly Traffic" to forecast, and see how words are affected by seasonality. Great for budgeting. This data comes from exact match vs. paid so more representative.

Because it's in Excel, you can rapidly total things, sort, etc. You can also type in similar terms, and there is a great way to get concrete info to help which terms to prioritize. Couch vs. Sofa. Helps decide which gets more volume. Monetization data shows paid search info for specific keyword. Can look at data from last 30 days from specific position, or by match type. Puts data in a pivot table. Shows average CTR, CPC's for data range.

Encourages us to play with the tool and dig in! (Sorry, there is no Mac version yet!)

Next, we have Jason Dorn from Yahoo!

Talks about pitfalls to avoid.

Where to begin? The answer is - your business - your website. Content on your site. You know about your business to dig in and extract meaningful information.

A case study of a credit card merchant who bid on "loan", "credit card", "new car", "restaurant". Too broad. Audience laughs.

Keyword research tools - these can be great but can't tell you relative value of keyword to your business. Tools show search volume, and that's seductive. But with high exposure is high cost, and can also be over broad and more difficult to convert. It's important to match your budget with what you bid on. Shows an example of plugging in "Mac" and getting both computers and cosmetics. Important to review the generated terms.

Use internal search query logs is very attractive but also presents pitfall. Example of an auto dealer who imported everything from his logs into his PPC campaign. The term "discount" got in there. Maybe not the best term to bid on. A travel advertiser did the same thing and bid on "Italian history". Context is key. Might be a traveler, but most likely a research query - non commercial term. An electronics dealer plugged in "wwii" - World War II instead of Wii! And there was a lawyer who had the term "atomic bomb" in his list!

Collect all the right keywords but can still fail because of a poor ad group structure. Ad group structure is the foundation for success. Once you find the right keywords, structure them tightly so you can craft compelling creatives.

Lastly - chronology is important. Bid first on what you know you should bid on. Also, keyword de-selection is important. If something is not working - remove it. When content changes on a site - update your keyword inventory. Make sure you drive people to the best and most relevant landing page because people expect that nowadays. Don't pay for clicks to send people to the wrong landing page.

You can always check out help.yahoo.com/ss for tutorials, tips, and webinars.

Finally, we have Jill Whalen of High Rankings.

Switching gears. Keyword research is the cornerstone of a good SEM campaign. Jill specializes in organic, but can apply these strategies to paid.

Where do you put those phrases when you have these terms? Put them in title tags if nowhere else. Anchor text, alt tags, headlines, body text copy, and meta descriptions.

Home pages and main category pages - that's where you want to describe the site in general. Great to put your competitive broad phrases from your research. Homepages are great for competitive terms because get more PR. Don't just stick your keywords in the top where it doesn't make sense for people.

Product level pages are great for very specific phrases. Put good headlines and make sure that the anchor text uses the product name in the text.

Websites are not brochures! Assume visitors knows nothing about you! Many websites Jill reviews make the mistake of assuming all visitors know about you. SEO and paid is about getting people who don't know you. Make sure users know they are at the right place! Even just a sentence or two.

Good content - what is that? Don't need to always create special pages for SEO or PPC. Speak to your target audience. Solve their problems. Answer questions. Provide information.

Content that is king is written for users first, while also keeping engines in mind. It's a balance. It's about writing for both.

Don't fake real content. Don't write about the history of door stops. Fix your site. Don't use doorway pages that aren't part of your site. Still amazed people are using them.

Write clearly and descriptively for target audience.

How to be descriptive? Don't use words like "our product" or "our solution". Describe it. What is your solution? Avoid generic words, but don't stuff words.

Edit current text and replace with appropriate phrases. Sometimes you might have words in your existing copy, such as "restaurant" - can become "Martha's vineyard restaurant" or "Martha's vineyard cafe" or "where to eat in Martha's vineyard". Don't have to guess right keywords any more.

Have enough copy to support the phrases. No maximum amount of word per page. How many you need to say whatever you are trying to say.

Use plurals, past tenses, and -ings. Don't rely on "stemming". Better writing uses different forms of words. Don't be afraid of using variations.

Sometimes words have different forms or spellings. "websites" or "web sites", "email or e-mail". Be consistent though. Google is now smarter at detecting these discrepancies.

Writing really does matter!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

More and more site owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results? This session looks at the issues and explores solutions.

Moderator:
· Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Speakers:
· Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch Expert & President & CEO, VIZION Interactive
· Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
· Benu Aggarwal, Founder & President, Milestone Internet Marketing

Amanda: First up is Mark Jackson.

Mark: First we will jump in to what we are going to cover today.

-why do search engines care about duplicate content
-identifying duplicate content on your site
-correcting duplicate content
-copycats

So why do search engines care?

Removing duplicate content allows search engines to provide variety for users. It brings up the issue of spammers, creating millions of useless pages as well as the ability to identify authority and ownership.

So how do you identify it? Google takes an automated approach to finding it and look at identifiers to tip them off, such as similar or identical URLs and title tags.

How do you find it? Do a site:domain URL search; look at pages indexed across the search engines and see if there is a large disparity between Yahoo and Google. You can also just copy a phrase on your site and do a search! Same thing with blogs.

Here's an example (screenshot) and you can see there are 9,380 copies of my article on SEW. But since SEW is showing up first, it shows they own it, were the original publisher. You can run the same search on copyscape.com.

Finding duplicate content on your own site: look for mirror web sties…how many domains do you own? Look for similar title tags, similar meta description tags, similar meta descriptions. Look for pages that are light on indexable content, i.e. ecommerce site with short descriptions tend to have duplicate content.

Look for print versions of an article or page, "email to a friend" pages. Canonicalization issues. Session IDs (multiple URLs for the same content).

If it's a domain name, redirect with 301 permanent redirect.

If someone is copying your content, first determine if it's hurting you. Are you getting the credit/link? Look at the cache date to see if it was indexed first. Determine if it is worth your time to get the content removed.

Preventative measures: have your content copyrighted. If you hire someone to write content, make sure their content is unique.

Lazy content: By industry and by geographic region. The same content just replacing all the city names.

When content is close, what do you do? Title tags, focus on first paragraph of copy.

Bottom Line: Duplicate content can hurt you. Remove, redirect, no-index. Deal with copycats efficiently and effectively. Don't be lazy.

Amanda: How many of you are in ecommerce? That's a really unfortunate place. This poses a fascination challenge. Next up is Mikkel who will deal with such issues.

Mikkel: there are unlimited ways you can create duplicate content!

1. Multiple domains – choose one brand domain. You can buy multiple, but implement a 301 re-direct.
2. Sub-domains – make sure you can only access the content through one of these domains.
3. Test-domains – always password protect so they don't get indexed.
4. Issues with www. Vs. no www. – most engines seem to be able to handle common use of both. But if not a solution is to redirect one-to-one.
5. Server load balancing – it confuses the engines, don't do it.
6. Secure and unsecure pages: http vs. https: engines often mess up with this, links do not seem to benefit both. Solution is to use full URLs on navigation links if you have both pages. Also, redirect one-to-one.
7. Session IDs – a way of storing information rather than using a cookie. The problem with that is the engines cannot handle this and every time come back, they assign a new identifier. So dump all sessions into a cookie.
8. Permalink Structure – especially if you blog using Wordpress, you can set the way you want the way you want the URL structure to appear. There is a good plugin – Canonical URL.
9. Forum issues: different threads can be part of different URLs. When you can rate a thread that will add more parameters to the URLs, now you have 2 separate pages with the same content. So do a redirect.
10. Sort order parameters: it will index the content several different times. So redirect everything to one version of the page.
11. Breadcrumb navigation – problem for shopping sites. You can end up in a situation where you get to the same product in a few different categories, and because the breadcrumb nav is replicated in the architecture, you can have the same content on two different pages.

Amanda: I work with a lot of clients that have serious content issues. You think you've solved one layer but then you find another way it's leaking through to the engines. So there are several ways for duplicate content to occur. Our third speaker will be Benu Aggarwal.

Benu: I took 3 problems that most of the businesses face:

1. Multiple domains, identical homepage, different URLs for the same content:

You can solve it in 2 ways: you can use Google webmaster to identify the primary URL, or you can do a redirect.

Multiply entry points for the same content. You can solve this easily by adding more re-write scripts.

2. Syndicating content – authenticating ownership of content.

Make sure you have easy access to edit meta-data and images. Use tools to check content, especially if you are getting massive amounts of content.

3. Website done in multiple languages.

Make sure meta data is absolutely unique in country specific sites, don't just copy and paste all the same meta tags.

Best practices to avoid duplicate content problems:

- Disallow folders in robots.txt file that have same version of site in different format for exp print friendly sites
- User preferred domain setup in IIS or webmaster tools. Work on redirects.
- Always use the same link to link to any page on your site.
- Syndicate carefully.
- Authenticate your content, use unique snippet content per page.
- Check and double check your rewrites. Mange your URLs.
- Avoid publishing stubs.
- Use top level domains to handle language specific content.

Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages. Learn also how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.

Moderator:
· Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
· Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
· Jeff Quipp, President & CEO, Search Engine People
· PJ Fusco, Natural Search Director, Netconcepts
· Jody Farmer, VP, Strategic Marketing, CreditCards.com


Kevin Ryan: I see some new faces here and also some very old faces. This is a session that many years ago a guy names Mike Gray decided that links were going to be the next generation. Many of the people on this panel are experts on the topic. So I would like to thank Mike Gray for this and let him take it from there.

Mike: Thank you. What we used to do back in the Alta Vista days was keyword stuffing. And it got to the point that when you have thousands of keywords on a page, how do you know which is going to be the most authoritative? So back in 1998 a computer scientist John Kleinberg did a search for Alta Vista and was stunned that it didn't come up in the results! He realized after doing research that it's not what is in your page but rather what it is that other people say about you. And then the guys over at Google took that, and developed Page Rank, and that's when link building became very important.

And with that, let me introduce PJ Fusco.

PJ: I'm with Net Concepts with offices in Madison Wisconsin and New Zealand. I used to be the in-house SEO for Jupiter Media. And now I have the gig for writing for ClickZ. Today we are going to talk about the strategies of link building.

Quick tour of link popularity – true popularity comes from acts of kindness, which can correlate to "you attract more flies with honey".

What is link building? It's an activity – an ongoing activity (not set and forget) of increasing high-quality inbound links to a document. Not web page, but a document. And obviously it's all about relevancy.

There are 3 things you should have in mind when starting a campaign:

Set some goals – increased search-referred traffic always assumes that more is better than less – and with links, it's more about quality than quantity.
Improve your search engine visibility for targeted terms – assumes your stuff should rank better than other people's stuff.
Improve relevancy signals to the search engines – presumes your stuff is relevant for specific search queries.
Getting started – this looks like a monumental task – so we will walk through some free webmaster tools and understand that PR is not the only thing that matters. We will also look at free and not-free link analysis tools. The caveat of course is that tools are tools, you have to be smarter than the tools, know where the data comes from. Webmaster toolsets have come a long way in the past few years and months. Yahoo Site Explorer is still one of the best free ways for scoping out backlinks to your site and to competitors sites. Google, with its webmaster tool, has recently expanded on what they are showing. MSN, relatively new – we used to be able to count on them until advanced queries were blocked. Now they have a filter option, and the results are limited, but we can expect to see some expansion on this soon.

Other basic free tools - and there are many:

- Robots.txt
- SEO for Firefox – goes way beyond back link analysis, had a lot of other features
- Marketleap popularity checker – good for determining which competitor links you want to raid

Net Concepts is a player because we developed a plugin for Wordpress so we are getting links just from that.

If you are a more visual person use the more visual tools. Quintura and Kartoo are good visual search engines, and of course Google Visual Search.

Hubfinder is a good free link analysis tool.

There are a series of subscription-based tools: Advanced Link Manager is great for anchor text insight and backlink diversity data. iBusiness Promoter is another one.

Time Investment: Is it worth it? Absolutely.

Kevin: Jody is up next.

Jody Farmer: I work for a company that relies heavily on SEO – CreditCards.com. We are the leading online site for credit card seekers. We are earnest SEOs, not looking for shortcuts. We have also some international domains as well. We've done a good job of high rankings for pretty competitive keywords.

Link building is a tricky business because you need the cooperation of a third party.

6 Tenets of Linking Theory: Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Anchor Text, Steady Pace, Link Deeply.

Now that's all theory – let's talk about PRACTICE.

Link building is a basic marketing discipline. It requires specialists with expert knowledge and understanding and a special skill set. Would you let your event planner buy your media? I think in practice there are 4 Ps of link building: Practice, Purpose & persuasion, personnel, patience & persistence.

1. In terms of Planning, there are 6 distinct phases to go through:

- Keyword selection and URL designation.
- Set baselines and goals – SERPS rankings? New links/week?
- ID target opportunities – who competes on those keywords. Where are their links from and how did they earn them?
- Think about your bargain – what do you have to offer (not money and not reciprocation)
- Evolve some campaigns to run simultaneously. Got a strategy for .gov? Directories? .edu? Blog comments? Social media?
- Outreach – the hardest part. If you build it they will NOT come – force discipline around how many emails will be sent per week, how many directory submissions will occur etc)

2. Purpose & persuasion: Give your targets a reason to link – i.e. link bait. For some targets, likle directories, your simple existence or scale will be enough of a reason. But more likely, you'll need content or tools. Also, find the links you didn't ask for and fix them, reach out to the webmaster regarding anchor text.

3. Personnel: this to me is the most important thing – dedicate researchers to link building. They should be persistent, detailed and goal oriented.

4. Patience & persistence: there are so many shortcuts available. Avoid the temptation to build too many links to quickly, build sporadically, focus on one keyword, and be cautious of paid links.

Kevin: Jeff is up next.

Jeff Quip: Today I will talk about myths and mistakes on link building. At some point there has to be some guidelines.

Myth #1 - PR matters. There are 2 types: the kind that Google knows about and hides, and then toolbar page rank. Real PR is viewed only by Google. In Google, a page with a PR 3 is ranking #1 for ranges…think about that. If it really mattered, it would be a PR 8 or 9. So don't take it at its face value.

Myth #2 – reciprocal linking is dead. It's not! It's a natural pattern when used in moderation. It should be a component of your linking strategy.

Myth #3 – PR sculpting is not the best use of your time (forcing links to more important pages and away from the less important pages, like contact us). PR sculpting uses no follow. Set up your linking structure properly when you set up your site, and don't really worry about it after.

Myth #4 – More links is better. In reality, it's about quality not quantity. Think in terms of trust and authority.

Mistake #1 – Not using text links. Text links hold 10 times the value of image links.

Mistake #2 – Link farms – free for alls. It was a creative strategy at the time but ended many years ago. The engines figured it out pretty quickly and started to penalize. That could lead to bad search engine karma. If it seems to easy, it is. You will be punished.

Mistake #3 – Links to the homepage only. Make sure you build links to content internally. If you have too many thinks to the main page and none to the internal pages, it shows as unnatural and can raise a red flag.

Mistake #4 – Using 302 redirects – use 301 redirects instead, which are permanent, and it transfers the link power to the recipient page.

Mistake #5 – No follows - Google is trying to enforce the use of no follows.

Mistake #6 – No valuable content on the site. The more content you have, the more opportunity you have for natural links.

Mistake #7 – Not socializing content. Socializing content creates media opportunities.

Mistake #8 – Buying links. Be very very careful. If you have to buy links, make sure you know what you are doing, and buy them embedded in relative content on a site.

Here is a tip: Submit your blog posts to social media sites. But the content must be good otherwise it's considered spam.

Kevin: Thanks Jeff. Google developed the toolbar about 5, 6 years ago. I came across a page that was PR 0 and this page has Catherine Zeta Jones in her underwear. Could be the most important page I have ever seen. That's a 10! (gets laughs).

Michael Gray: I like to make things simply. Everything you need to know about link building you learned in high school! If the cool kids say something nice about you it's much more important than if the AV squad likes you. And if the principal says you a smart, it's better than if the janitor thinks you are smart.

So it all comes back down to quality and authority.

Keep your core focus to where your website is.

A good place to start is directories. You should have a well rounded link profile. Directories are one of the core link building exercises you should engage in. Such as BOTW, Yahoo, Business.com. Whatever your niche is, find that directory. And look at the stats to see if it's worth it. Look at what page you will be in, you want to be closer to the top of the page rather than the bottom. And see if the page in that sector is ranking. And check to see if it's in the index! If it hasn't been spidered in a while, it's not worth it.

Look at popular and frequently visited sites in your sector. Look at who they are writing about and linking to and why. Create content that these sites are looking for, what will make them happy.

Look at the backlinks of everyone who is ranking. Those are the kinds of sites you should try to get links from. Look at trade organizations as well.

Local groups, local government resources are great as well for links.

You want to have a well-rounded technique. Use article syndication sparingly. Use it to identify people are looking for content and filter for quality. Create unique content specifically for the website. Trickle out content slowly over time instead of dumping it all at once.

Publish full posts!!!!!! And put links in your posts, whoever scrapes you will copy those links. There is a Wordpress Plugin called RSS footer which you should use, it adds links to the bottom of your posts.

Rotate your keywords every three-four months.

Look for guest blogging opportunities, blog carnival opportunities.

Link building and viral content – it works. It will give you links from places you will never get on your own. Go after niche sites not just the big sites. It is easier to get noticed. And don't go after Digg 20 times in one week, go after different sites to become more well-rounded.

Satellite and remote content – content sites like Squidoo and Google Knol. Image sites like Flickr. You Tube, Meta Café. Put your links at the bottom.

Spread your efforts around.

The currency of the link economy is attention. Don't obsess about Page Rank. It's more myth, an illusion. Trusted links are worth much more than anything else. Get deep links, just links to the homepage is not enough. And try to get 10 quality links a month rather than 1,000 random links.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Searcher Behavior Research Update

How do searchers interact with search engines? New research is constantly coming out revealing how searchers act. This session explores the latest studies and findings to provide tips and tactics for search marketers to consider.

Moderator:
Bill Muller, Chief Marketing Officer, iProspect

Speakers:
John Marshall, CTO, Market Motive  jmarshall@marketmotive.com
Pavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft
Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
Bill Barnes, Co-founder & EVP, Enquiro Search

John Marshall speaks on DIY Search Behaviour Analysis.

It’s difficult to get good data on behavior on people searching on the web. You can get data about what happens on your website, but you also want data about what happens outside of your website.

How does this impact you on Monday Morning?
Looking at keywords in Google Analytics provides a good place to start. The problem with this is that it is a very narrow view of what is happening on the web. You get data about what people searched on, but you only see the results that ended in that person coming to your website. You don’t see when you showed up in SERPs but people didn’t click on you. You want to know broad intent of people, not just those who came to your site.

How can we really see the intent? Having a site search on your page gives you lots of good data. It gives you a better view of the user’s intent, conversion rate information, and more. People don’t often use this data because it is free and is ignored. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean the data is bad. People use Hitwise data because they paid a lot for it, and the organization wants to make sure they get their money’s worth out of the data.

A lot of his time is spent fixing things that go wrong with data collection.

Things that go wrong

• Mixed case. By default, GA does not convert all site search queries to same case. You need to convert the search keyword into all lower case so you can have valid data, rather than having same query replicated in several results and makes it difficult to evaluate the data.
• Multiple results pages. Need to make sure that your “no results” page has tracking on it.
• Usual JavaScript breakage
• Injected terms. Common mistake is to make query for “digital cameras”, then give that query URL to affiliate marketers. You have that included in your site search results when people did not actually type that query into site search. You need to filter this out (he did not explain how).

Next is Pavan Lee

“Power of Three” – Cross Channel Ad Effectiveness on search display and content ads.

Background
Search listings have a branding value.

• Exposure to search listings has a positive impact on branding
• People exposed to search listings are more likely to visits store than before

Paid search listings have a strong branding impact than organic search listing

• Exposure to paid search listing consistently demonstrated strong impact on key branding metrics
• People exposed to paid search listing also reported a more positive shirt on brand favorability than those exposed to organic listings.

In-lab study with Enquiro Research, included eye-tracking in a lab, then surveyed with questions.

Key findings
Strongest impact was when both content and paid used.

Lift in Ad Recall

Search Index 100

• + Content 121
• + Display 130
• + Content & display

Life in Brand Recall
Search Index 100

• +content 115
• +display 117
• +content and display 127

Lift in Purchase Intent
Search Index 100

• + content 113
• + display 113
• + content and display 127

Relative Visation and Gazing
Single channel
Display + 7.4%
Content + 5.3%
Search + 9.9%

Multiple channel
Search + display +10.8%
Search + content +7.3%
Search + content + display + 11.3%

Take away:

“Power of Three” = Synergistic Branding Impact. Good correlation between search lift and multiple display types in Microsoft search. I missed her exact wording here.

 

Thinking Beyond the Search Results Page
Larry Cornett

Beyond the SRP

• Search is just one point in time. Lots of activities that happen before and after this point. They’re doing a task. You need to understand what their task is.

Types of Research at Yahoo!

• Search editorials
• Bucket testing
• Metrics and analysis
• Search science
• Focus groups and surveys
• Eye-tracking research – gives a lot of answers that users cannot always verbalize.
• Ethnographic field studies
• Usability lab studies.

How users experience search

• Starting context
• Quick scanning (spend very little time on page)
• Information scent (ex. keyword bolding)
• Matching intent
• Quick decisions
• Looking for answers
• Feeling safe

Crafting Searches
How to help people complete their query, get at what is in their head. People don’t know how to enter query, not sure what to do to start. The predictive search is so people don’t have to work so hard to get information from search engine. It’s not just a problem of being in an artificial environment in the lab, they saw this in the field visits too.

From “to do” to “done”
How to get them to their goal, get them to the answer. He talks about Search Monkey. Owner can tell what is most important about their site. Gives more information than would just be in a text link.

What does this mean for you?
Before the SRP

• Starting context – how is the user going to ask for this in the search engine? What do they want?
• The “real task”

On the SRP

• Intent and information scent
• SearchMonkey!

After the SRP

• Fulfilling expectations
• Being their “answer”

 

Bill Barnes

Both search marketing and research company. Research born out of search marketing, which gives insight into research. Obsessions with wanting to know why is why they started research

Why

• Why is the first listing seen as so important
• Why do we scan in groups of three or four?
• What branding is important

Another picture of heat maps and the golden triangle!

How important is the area of greatest promise? They played around with top sponsored listing, ad copy, did a/b test – one good text that was targeted to the search, one generic text. Everything else on the page was the same.

A good ad vs. bad ad influenced user’s answer about if they would use the search engine again.

Why do we scan in groups of three or four? It has to deal with the way the brain works.

A 16% point increase in brand association when brand is in top sponsored and top organic results. There were lots of graphs here that I couldn’t replicate, but they can be found at this presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/studentlamarketing/enquiro-white-paper-the-brand-lift-of-search/

Yes, do buy branded terms!

• Brand fixations occurred in the URL and title of the listing, not in the description.
• Place your brand in the title, URL, and as close to the start of the description as possible in your sponsored and organic listings
• Subjects with established affinity for the brand spent 25% less time on the top sponsored listing, jumping down to the organic listings 73% faster than the non-affinity group
• Sponsored listings appear to have a great opportunity to lift brand affinity among new customers, write and target them as such.

Key findings

• Understanding intent is key
• Top sponsored and top organic combined give the greatest brand lift
• Be aware of who else and what else is on the SERP
• Play with the enemy
• Missed the rest of the key findings, my apologies.

Liveblogged by Keri Morgret

Kendall Allen, Former Managing Director, Incognito Digital, Digital Marketing and Convergence Media Consultant

The advancement of integrated media

- silo days of search and social media
- integration vs. synchornization
- cooler yet, really integrated digital

Search and Social Media - the early years
- do you remember the ancestors of what we now call social media?
- listservs and user groups
- message boards, chat rooms, auditoriums

- Later more robust chat, file sharing, emergence of social media centers

Integration vs Synchronization
- marketers began to tlak the talk of integration more often
- bigger agencies bred online difisions
- not necessarily smooth, perhaps an unnatural act
- represented a move toward a more integrated….
- paid search emerges

The playground for integration: digital
- with platforms beyond pure online advancing, digital means more today
- tiered markeitng and media plans that deploy digital to hit branding as well as performances objectives and metrics
- the onset of web 2.0 aptitueds, the advance of rich media technology

Social Media coming of age
- community building is no longer disticnt from a good marketing plan, but part of it.
- consumer-centric speak has moved from talking to walking
- the state of tools availalbe is at an alltime high
- the blogosphere is showing up in integrated media plans
- smart marketers are develiping well knit cross platform or integrated social media initiatives with optimization in mind

Integration Illistration - big brand goes for it
- kellogg’s offline advertising included tv spots, pring tads, and pushed you to search on yahoo
- searches on “special K” increased 754% from the year before
- 1500 people joined the community in the first 2 weeks

sCRM -
- polls, surveys, other engagements
- example: Reach Social

Social Spark
- is a social marketing network that connects advertisiers and bloggers through an oline advertising marketplace

—————————————

Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance

Social media’s rise

Why do you want to use it??
- Links are by products
- Wisdom of the crowds
- sharing and conversion - free advertising and WOM
- it gives your consumers a voice

Who is in your target audience?
- you need to know your audience prior to jumping in.
- what do they do? what do they like to do?

Types
-Social news
- social sharing
- social networking
- social bookmarketing
- everything else

Dell’s blogging and social collaboration
- *talks about Dell Hell and exploding batteries*
- Ideastorm -> where products are picked by the people

Houlihans and Communities
- they found out via their community that they shouldnt have taken the fajitas off the menu

Del Monte
- Dogster -> snausages

Loblaws ratings and reviews
- filmed them winning a BBQ contest
- they found out that people hated the bottle but loved the sauce
- the packaging was fixed

Dont let this happen to you?
- Sony psp
- Walmart fake blogging

What social media isnt:
- dont let interns do it
- something you just jump into

What social media is:
- its difficult
- its time consuming
- is not the same for everyone
- complement to seo and ppc

—————————————

David Snyder, Search Specialist, JRDunn.com

77% of all searches are branded

Social Networks - some due to varying factors (internal linking structure, domain trust) can be indredibly useful in your serp battles.

When you create your profiles for your company in twitter, myspace and other networks, they can become heavily weighted, especially for branded

terms if you add them to the same link neighbourhood as your currently ranking site

Optimize your profiles - create a lot of content
- talks about TNT and their NBA Live as examples

Go out and engage -

Images - The Flickr model
- flickr profiles are indexed and searched. the profiles and photostreams also pass link equity.

SMO tips for image sites and images
- set the username of r the account in connection with your business or product
- you will want to tkae care when naming your images, creating descriptions, and tagging them. Utilize your keyword researcher

Video - the Youtube model
- be the first one in your market to create video
- make sure you optimize your video and feeds

Case study - Barack Obama
- #6 is his myspace
- #8 is youtube video
- #9 is youtube channel

What else does this do for you?
- selling SMO to your CEO
- manage your online preutation
- improve long conversion funnel sales

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you're missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Chris Boggs, Search Engine Watch Expert & Manager, SEO, Brulant, Inc.
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Daron Babin, CEO, Webmaster Radio

First up is Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit.

Blogs, SEO, and marketing. Blogs should not be just part of an SEO play. They are a real part of the marketing program.
They create alternative keyword media. Not just the ones you are chasing, but an opportunity to find new keywords. Allows you to extend the reach of your web communication - its marketing and SEO. Building a community deepens SEO relations. Build business or brand - connect with consumers particularly with products that address a particular issue. Any kind of marketer can enjoy the benefits of Blogs.

Lets get tactical! Things you need to think about "before" you launch. Will it be an official blog? Or a personal blog? Will it sit on a subdomain on the company's website, or sit on its own and take on a new life. The look and feel - will it before personal, or company branded? Will it be a multi-blogger platform or a lone blogger platform? Amanda is very pro multi-person blogs.

Will it sit on Wordpress, Movable Type, or open source Drupal type platform? Arguments on behalf of each.

The optimization process - four key steps:

1- Customize and optimize the CMS
2- Customize and optimize the RSS feeds
3- Conduct and apply keyword / tag research
4- Socialize the blog and create a community

Shows a large slide that will be available to download which keynotes main points.
- Tweaking CSS
- Title tag optimization
- Permalinks that show real titles, not the text "permalink"
- Use a robots.txt
- Use favicons,
- Sitemaps
- Widgets - "don't fidget with too many widgets but plan for blidgets". Widgets break - don't slow your blog! "Blidgets" - stands for "blog widgets" - can be helpful and useful.
- Validate, tweak, and stay put.

Use the blog plugins! Every blog CMS has plugins for every activity - sitemaps, 301 redirecting, etc. Then - optimize the feeds. Will there be enough content to populate feed? Don't want reader to unsubscribe. Amanda likes full text feeds. Increase items in feed from default 10 to 20 if the blog has frequent posts. Decide how to handle multimedia - if you have audio or video. Manage feeds with Feedburner (personal recommendation).

Tips:
1- Optimize the RSS feed - use keywords in feed in title tag, less than 100 characters.
2- Most readers display feeds alphabetically - helps to be an A or B.
3- Write description as if for a directory
4- Use full paths on links and unique URLs
5- Provide email updates

Process for content production.
1- Write post
2- Review keyword research list
3- include a keyword in the headline
4- Review the body of the post

Make socialization easy for people with buttons. Cross link your blog and website aggressively. Notify other bloggers via comments and emails. Join the blog community.

Keeping the mojo going!
-Develop a mindset that this is a long term, continuous effort.
-Build a battle plan to maintain quality of blog.
-Use analytics to guide editorial choices.
-Post original material often.
-Weed out comment spam.
-Keep blog fresh.
-Build blidgets for social media to drive traffic back to blog.

In summary:
-Use software as a powerful marketing tool.
-Leverage the assets by customizes the templates and feeds. Get the most out of it.
-Socialize it.
-Build content based on keyword list for SEO benefits.
-Plan to keep the mojo going.

Email Amanda for lecture slides.

Next up is Lee Odden from the Top Rank Blog.

Will show us a few case studies. Started a blog in 2003 - Top Rank Blog. Wasn't big until 2007. The growth was outstanding.

According to Technorati, 100,000,000+ blogs have less than 20 in bound links. 400,000 blogs have more than 20,000 links. The top 2,500 bloggers have > 1000 links. Illustrates that its not a monumental task to get to the top.

Blogs on their own do well as a marketing tool. When optimize and socialize, and link out to other blogs - software will see this via trackback or linkback. Will often elicit a response. Optimize content that's great and relevant that you promoted.

Blog Case Study 1: A senior citizens housing developer. Strategy was to create a communication channel to target a market that's less formal than on the corporate website. Tactically - upgraded the blog, optimized it according to Amanda's advice, and reached out to other bloggers in the space. Within a few months, became a top source of traffic to site: rankings went up, visitors increases. Very nominal effort with very tangible results.

Blog Case Study 2: A book and game retailer. Wanted to generate sales. Many are passionate about games and brain teasers. Wanted to create a place for people to play games. Tactic - created an SEO'd blog, created communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Stumbleupon. Mined Twitter data to find out what people are talking about and to friend people. Result - great top 3 rankings for target keywords. Did a social promotion for an old style carnival game. Created a Flash version and promoted in social media. Many wrote about this game and create a big spike. Then was another spike as a latent effect. People started searching for the game. Traffic, pageviews, quintupled. Now the blog sell ads in addition to products.

Blog Case Study 3: Top Rank Online Marketing Blog. Strategy - increase thought leadership - cover news, and generate leads.
Tactic - create unique content on a regular schedule via interviews, agency insights, etc. What happened over time? Became the #31 blog on Technorati. But the he good stuff was the media coverage. In 2008 - as a result of visibility - many top journalists and book publishers contacted Lee. That visibility was priceless. Couldn't have paid for this. Lost mojo in July and traffic slowed down. Got 26k visits from search in that month over 12k keywords - shows the long tail distribution. Result - Rank in top 10 on Google for "online marketing" and "blog optimization". Most important is the many advertising inquiries and business inquiries, as well as press inquiries, that continuously pour in.

Key take aways: Goals drive content. Automate SEO as much as possible. Socialize. Measure. Refine and repeat. Make sure you focus on end objectives.

Email Lee Odden at lee@toprankblog.com.

Next up is the amazingly awesome Chris Boggs, who also is contributing live conference coverage for the SERountable.com.

One thing to touch upon is to make a fundamental decision where to host the blog - probably the best practice is to host on your own domain - in general, with some exception.

We're going to talk if a blog will work for your industry.

Some tips: Keep links live from the start. Fix any broken links. Choose words that belong in text.

Chris shows us a content rich "Destin Florida Real Estate" blog. Shows the top 10 results for the term "Destin Florida Real Estate" and that particular blog does not rank. The top 30 has few blogs on the SERPs for that result in there. Key take away is not to count on blog - particularly in industry where rankings are not dominated by the blogs such as this one. It's a nice compliment for link generation and to build authority, but for this example would recommend content within the main site vs. the blog.

Moving on - looking at an old Yahoo! blog that links to SEW with a dead link. Who's at fault? Was it Yahoo! or SEW for not redirecting? Many would thing it's SEW's fault - but falls both ways. How do you ensure a link will stay alive? Pay strict attention and take time to identify best links. Look at Yahoo! news. Picked a random topic of Scientology. Went to an older result. Yahoo! news did not archive the old post. Asked PR-Web if press releases stay forever on the site. They said yes. Hopefully the site will house the copy of the press releases. The reason we focus on PR is because typically they are problematic compared to links from static content.

How to keep blog links live? Try for the brand site if linking to press releases. Keep track of links - loves Xenu Link Slueth and w3.org/checklink. Fix your broken links - don't be lazy or sloppy. Be proactive - tell bloggers their links are broken and consider redirecting pages you remove from site that may have inbound links.

Lastly - since Chris writes alot on search, his name is semantically associated with search. His name appears on a lot of spammy sites. Should probably study this even if you are a pure white hat.

Crackpot Theory #317 - people use Chris's name to spam. A great forum post on SEW about it by Dr. Garcia. See the lecture slides for the link to it.

Finally, check out Chris's column every Friday called Crossfire on SEW with Frank the Tank Watson.

Next up is Daron Babin, our gracious host for Search Bash tonight.

Approaches this topic from a different angle. Hates blogs, the technology around it, hates open source. Has to trust what others know. When started in the mid nighties, was black hat all the way. They are testing this all day, and kicking butt. Take a risk - build something on your own - build it - test it.

Will give examples of how WMR uses feeds. Has a new site with 122 top level categories which every feed needs to be optimized. Has a customize CMS that is organically supercharged. When publishes a page, goes to the website and writes it to the sitemap.xml and robots.txt. Try to control how the engines ingest content off the feeds as well as spider bait and link bait off the homepage.

Be careful what you put in print, because it may rank. Term "rock stars" ranks top 10 in Google because RSS feeds are highly optimize on the "SEO Rock Stars" show. They are Feedburner whores at WMR! Write content in Feedburner fields very carefully.

Another hidden secret - MeFeedia.com. Drives more traffic to WMR than Yahoo!

Shows slides where WMR kicks ass on the SERPs for many high quality terms. Many top 10 rankings for ultra competitive terms. Rate of growth of 2k - 3k traffic driving new terms per month because of feeds.

Article promotions- another way to syndicate content through feeds. Very important how articles are written and inserted into the feed. A bit about automation. Years back we said - automation would kill SEO. Today, we build automation to make it idiot proof. Anyone that can fill out a form field to optimize content.

Feed analytics - best way to do this is via Feedburner. When shoving lots of content through feeds, need to measure effectiveness. With typical web stat packages today its difficult.

Use the auto-discovery tag which is very important. Engines are looking for this tag and will help improve TrustRank inside site over time. Doesn't happen overnight.

Curve ball about doing things on one domain - if you have a huge media database. The WMR article site is 5x the size and it's just text. Imagine passing the PR through those two databases. Cross pollinate between the two. Very powerful.

That's all, thanks everyone!

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

More and more, ranking well in paid search listings is less about how much you pay and more about the "quality" of your ad campaign. But what goes into making up your quality score? In this panel, we'll take a closer look at quality factors and give tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.

Moderator:
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
Speakers:
Brad Geddes, Founder, bgTheory.com
Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch Expert & President/CEO, Symetri Internet Marketing
Kendall Allen, Former Managing Director, Incognito Digital, Digital Marketing and Convergence Media Consultant
Misty Locke, President & Co-founder, Range Online Media


Dana Todd: How many of you out there are advanced advertisers, meaning you've been doing PPC for three years or more? How many of you have been doing it less than two years? So, the panelists will first go over the basics and then we will get more and more granular, and provide some tips for you all to take away.

First up is Ron.

Ron Jones: What is a Quality Score? The old model is kind of a bid to position situation. Quality score essentially is a dynamic value assigned to each keyword, and is the basis for defining quality and relevancy of your ad. So the higher your quality score, the lower your minimum bid and the higher your ad placement.

Google rolled out Quality Score in 2005, and they revised the algorithm in 2007 to incorporate landing page relevance, and then later on allowed their users to see it. Yahoo Panama launched in 2007.

A key thing is that we believe that delivering more relevant ads would create more value for users. If search engines can deliver more relevance that makes them look good and then you look good.

So Quality Score a way to bring more relevant situations.

Where to find the Quality Score? You need to drill down to the ad groups and specifically shows each of the keywords, you need to click on "customize columns" and then quality score. So it gives you a feeling of how good or poor your keywords are. In Yahoo, you can see it right away, you don't need to turn it on or off.

Historical click through rate for each keyword affects your Quality Score, the relevance of the ads and the quality of landing page. Also your account history, history of all click through rates and ads in your account. Of course there are factors as well that won't be revealed to us.

Relevance and landing page are the key things.

Case study: we had a client come to us, they were managing their own campaign and they currently had an average minimum bid of 40 cents, and 5 ad groups, and each ad group had 100 keywords. It turned out that 72% of their keywords had poor Quality Scores.

So the first thing we did was come in and create more, smaller, more relevant ad groups. Then we developed more relevant ad copy for each group. Then we optimized the landing page using Google's web optimizer. And we tested to see what was and was not working. So some results: the average minimum CPC went down to about 8 cents, click through rates went up about 11%, conversions went up from 2.6% to 4.2% within 2 weeks, the quality score for over 50% of the keywords went from poor to great. And then after a month, anything that still had a poor rating, we just deleted them altogether.

So the key thing is you need to test and keep an eye on quality score. Many people miss out on this.

Hot tip: You probably should allocate about 10%-15% of your budget specifically to testing. You will learn what's working and what's not working.

Dana: Brad is up next. Brad has been working up to the minute to get some insight directly from Google on this. You will now get as close to Google level knowledge as possible today. Welcome Brad.

Brad Geddes: I will talk specifically about Google. Their Quality Score permeates everything in the account about what it affects. Your bids. Your position. Your placement targeting. Ad rank.

So we will walk through how the Quality Score factors affect everything.

Why is Quality Score important? It affects your ad rank, where your ad appears.
Ad rank = keyword Quality Score x maximum CPC.

So often you don't want to change your bids, you want to see if you can raise your Quality Score rather than your bids.

First Google determines your minimum bid. The minimum you can pay to have your ad shown. And if your bid is higher than the minimum then you can show on search, but if its lower you can't show up in search but you can show up in content network.

Minimum bid is determined by:

- Historical click through rate on Google.com – not on the content network
- Relevance of keywords
- Landing page (goes into the min bid calculation)
- Other factors

Don't get caught up in other factors.

So viewing minimum bids: you can see them right away. Take your minimum bids and export them into Excel so you can see them more clearly.

Quality Score factors chart: look at particular factors as a reference when you start diagnosing issues.

The higher your minimum bid, maybe you have a landing page problem. Start playing with them and see what's working. Go into your Adwords accounts to see more information. Load time of your landing page and other factors.

Account organization is the number 1 factor to get a good jump in quality score. The more granular the campaigns, the more relevant everything will be.

Dana: Kendall Allen is next, she is currently a consultant for Convergence Media.

Kendal Allen: I put together a review of history and some considerations from my perspective that comes from my background. For me, it's interesting to look at the progress in the conversations since the 1990s when I started out here.

The progressive conversation on relevancy:

With the onset of Quality Score, relevancy is much more scientific if you want to approach it properly. The conversation has been going on for quite a while. I am going to focus specifically on the landing page and the collaboration that needs to occur to get this right.

Relevancy: what it used to mean, you had this bucket of keywords and you had the same titles and descriptions for everything on your list. Maybe you categorized them in Excel, started to map keywords, either way it used to be extremely manual. Then, the tools started to get better, standards started to raise, and relevancy became increasingly part of the conversation when it came to do quality search marketing.

We got more aggressive on bidding strategy, handling text ad methods, titles and descriptions, keyword landing page, and getting more serious about what we wanted the consumer to do.

Landing page: we have always been delivering this to deliver on consumer demand. Where you land on the page is one thing but now there are many more things to look at. You want to look at the account history, content and layout, usability and navigation and load time.

If Quality Score is well handled, it will force the tightening of relevancy to occur earlier on. We want to deliver on relevancy.

Guidance: when it comes to content, content rich strategies in search have always been wise. Use tags when necessary and be descriptive.

Usability: it should be useful, relevant, and deliver.

Navigation: direct connection to what is sought. Make it clear how to get there. Ease of passage.

Transparency: make sure the nature of your business is crystal clear.

Load time: this can be smooth with the right kind of collaboration. Minimize the number of redirects and come up with creative workarounds of slow servers.

So in sum, if you are serious about relevancy, you need to take Quality Score seriously. It does I believe represent an opportunity to hang your interests on. As you go about making site modifications and dealing with all the other factors, understand what the threshold is and what your efforts should be. Know that your efforts are going to be re-evaluated by the engines over time, and will get better and better.

Dana Todd: last but not least is Misty Locke who will give you some great tips.

Misty: we are an SEM and we focus on paid, SEO and feeds. Emphasize digital assets.

Quality Score takes search back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. Providing the user direct access to finding the content they want at the time they want it.

5 basic steps:

-keywords
-organization & structure
-match type
-creatives
-landing pages

Keyword building: most people bucket them and go off on the long tail. You should have several different groups and categories of brands. It will really improve your quality score. They are not necessarily tail terms, they are product specific. Don't chase every keyword, chase the right keyword. If you can build out your campaign you can really lower your CPC – if your keyword is profitable, make it more profitable.

Structure: don't build thousands of useless keywords. Be organized when you put this together. Yahoo limits you to 10,000 ad groups. If you have not reached that limit you are not working hard enough!

Match types. Every keyword you run should be on every single match type. Every keyword should be running on exact. When you break it out, you will start to see a decline in your phrase match spend. Put in your negatives.

Creatives: go down to the specifics where you are not even using Dynamic Keyword Insertion any more. Be so specific. We use color type, size, etc in every creative that we do. Let the user find the exact creative that they are looking for. It will increase your Quality Score and lower your CPC.

Landing pages: In MSN and Yahoo, your ad could/will be disapproved if you do not have great landing pages. Everything in your landing pages should be in your ad copy and everything in your ad copy should be in your landing pages.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it's Web 2.0, and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.
Moderator:

• Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board & Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, IBM Corporation

Speakers:

• Erik Qualman, Search Engine Watch Expert & Global VP, EF Education
• Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras
• Vanina Delobelle, PhD., Global Product Director, Monster Worldwide

Vanina Delobelle is up first. She works with social media and user generated content at Monster.

What are Social Media?

• Virtual Universes (Second Life, World of Warcraft)
• Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, Xing)
• Blogs and Livecasts (Blogger, Justin.tv, seesmic, etc.)
• Forums (Phorum, phpBB)
• Microblogging (Pownce, Twitter
• Diggs
• Multimedia Sharing (YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare)

A user centric approach

• Social Networks
• Blogs
• Forums
• Microblogging
• Diggs
• Multimedia sharing

The use of Social Media

• Connect with people. Reach the people where they are in the way they are used to.
• Keep brand positioning. Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.
• Generate more traffic
• Enlarge the targeted segment. Different type of people use different types of media.
• Increase the use experience
• Plus leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get better brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products, get more sales.

The requirements for Social Media

• Global means local. Because we deal with communities we need to be close to them. The communities are still local, if you want to go global, you need to be where they are an in their language.
• Resources. Community managers need to get more focus.
• Consistency. The effort should start and last. Be sure to keep users with your community.
• Content. The content should get more focus and be relevant.

Towards a (global) user centric platform. This is what Monster has done for social media.

• 2007
• Blog (US)
• Twitter (US)
• 2008
• Forums (EU, CAN)
• Twitter (CAN, UK)
• Others (UK)
• 2009
• Forums (Turkey, Russia…) Others (EU)
• …and many more Social Media to be integrated all across the site.

Screenshots of the search engines’ golden triangles. Golden triangles are now dominated by social media.

Create user centric products.

• People share, comment, communicate, rank…the product belongs to users. Give the users what they want.
• An example: Monster UK
• YouTube: 250,000 views
• Facebook: 990 fans
• Created one month ago. Bebo, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, hi5, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, Pownce, Slideshare, Tumblr, Twitter, Xanga.
• Increased page views by 24% in nine months on content.monster.co.uk.

Next is Erik Qualman.

He’s with EF Education and gives an overview of their company. He states you don’t want to be “that company” that’s two years behind social media. His company was “that company”, and he gives examples of what they have done and what they learned.

They did a Facebook application, but required people to give their information to add the application. A user complained, the company didn’t listen, so the user went and started Where I’ve Been, which was quite successful. He gave example of TripAdvisor and Cities I’ve Visited. You don’t need to have a totally unique application, showed how both are successful. But you can’t take the same traditional type of marketing to social media. Don’t require people to fill out forms for example.

 “Field of nightmares” – they built it (social app), but nobody came. Usually best to leverage existing community rather than trying to build your own in many cases. They did learn from their mistakes, and launched a social media product that actually was successful.

They started thinking about what it was that only their company could provide to the customer base. “Find who’s on your tour” Facebook application was a way for students to see who else was on their foreign country tour (many of the student tours of foreign countries are run through his company). Part of it was to be helpful to student, but part of it was also bragging to friends about where they were.

• Where should I start? (Facebook, Myspace, etc.)
• When should I start? Today! Don’t try to be perfect before your launch. Slap beta on it, figure out what people like, get out bugs, do this for a month or two, then learn from mistakes and make marketing push.
• Can search engines crawl social media/networks?
• Does Facebook PPC work? It depends. In his case, better to not put filters on. Don’t treat it like direct response. Build your community on Facebook initially.
• What’s the easiest way for my company to use Twitter?
• What else is exciting?

Brent Csutoras
How you can use social media to benefit you in conjunction with or independently of your search marketing campaign.

Social media is really broad – Twitter, IM, Facebook, etc. He’s found the most viable part of social media is to increase your visibility, ranking, links to your site, etc.

Important factors are Domain Age, On Page Factors, links. Links are harder to get these days, especially with problems with paid links. Social media can really help you here with links, traffic, visibility, and branding.

How it works: create content on a section on your site, find specific communities that will react well to your topic (don’t put your political content on a dog site), engage the people in these communities. People with blogs are looking for content and look at these communities. If you get your content on these sites, you get lots of exposure. People write about you, link to you, even talk to you outside of the web (TV, newspaper). You’re getting two types of links – community links (profiles showing what individuals voted on), and sites like Wired and others that write about you. The second type usually has better visitors, and you get long-term influx of links (weeks/months).

Case study of two campaigns that were simply images that they found and pushed out to the social media sites, especially Digg. Got over 8,000 quality inbound links (over 30 PR8 inbound links), would cost a lot of money to have bought these types of links.

Social Media Tips

• Have a site that is social media friendly. Don’t plug advertising and marketing stuff. A week or so after you’re successful, then you can put advertising back on.
• Pick communities you relate to. Research these communities, see what communities are appropriate.
• Check what worked before. Do more research, see what was successful for others in your field.
• Create high quality content.
• Understand how to submit and push social campaigns.
• Understand what to do with success.
• Be social! Treat it like a real life social event.

Q&A Time

How do you deal with the time management aspect of social media? How do you not waste time? Social is not one of those things you can just spend a small time on. If you don’t have much time, focus on smaller things like bookmarking and bookmarking items that are high quality that others might pick up in social media. Another way to deal with limited time is to pick just one social media site that you want to participate in.

What about reputation management? You don’t have a choice, it’s going to happen. You need to participate. If there is something negative, address it, comment on it, then bring it back to your platform and your site. In a couple of months, they’ll often delete the original negative press. Offer people products, that often helps, or give them a phone call. Sometimes it’s not necessary to respond if it’s just one small mention, see if you can get a couple of down vote the comment.

Where do you see social media going in the next two or three years? Many panelists responded. You need to be going the extra mile, give people more power with what they can do on your site. Go beyond just social media, but integrate it into your marketing mix in general. TripAdvisor for example might look at where people have visited via their Facebook app, then use that data.

Coverage provided by Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs.

Philip James, CEO, Snooth, Inc.

What changed? Web got big
- search engines index small portion
- poor results for focused searches
- endless tweaking of search terms

- need for specialized search
- videos, jobs, medical data, blogs, etc

Its easy when you are a niche
- smaller = high relevancy
- balance specialization vs market size
- dominate your space
- room for 1 to 3 players each

Getting the word out
- From a search engine
- SEO - if you have content
- SEM - if you have a fast conversion cycle

OR

- SMM - depending on the business

How scalable are these?

Delivering better search
- new content search - blogs, images, bideos
- canned search - dog friendly employers
- parametric search - more like DB queries (example: weather.com or kayak.com or searches that you select a price or some range)
- semantic search - implied meaning
- filters and relevant post search tools

Killer combo: parametric/semantic
- no need to disco er intent, its already clear
- parametrics and semantics in action

*showed financials of what you will need eCPM and page views and went over it*

———————————————————————–

Paul Forster, CEO, Indeed

vertical search charactersistics
- specialized data
- hidden web
- structured or semi-structured
- time sensitive
- comprehensive search

Examples?
- travel - kayak.com
- jobs - indeed.com
- shopping - become.com

Why does this matter to marketers?
- are you looking for people with specialized intent?
- focused audiences (ex. search indeed for search engine marketing jobs and search from SF… you know their location and intent)
- Google is bad at it
- spectacular growth (shows a growth chart where vertical search engines are way above other sites)

How do you market there?
- organic inclusion (can you provide a feed?)
- optimize your feeds (check to be sure its complete and correct)
- accuracy
- reliability
- dedupe
- paid inclusion
- emails, subscriptions and more
- kayak has ppc and sponsoring

Questions to ask?
- what audience am i trying to reach?
- what kind of vertical search sites to use?
- does a prospective site get enough traffic?
- how significant is their partner network?
- is free organic inclusion on offer?
- have I optimized my feeds?
- what ad products does the site offer?
- how can I track results and ROI

———————————————————————–

Jonathan Dingman, VP of Marketing, Digitally Imported Inc.

Vertical Search

How do you stand out? Be unique.
Content is king - with a lyrics site you are going to have the same content. What you need to do is make yourself unique.

Can you keep up?
- fast moving results
- staying on top of SEO
- SEO? links
- SEO? Keywords
- SEO? Stay relevant

Whats the bottom line?

- be unique
- bring visitors back to your site
- be memorable
- be unique

———————————————————————–
Q. Why should I choose vertical search over just trying to optimize for Google/MSN/Yahoo?
A. Traffic is growing very fast on Vertical search engines. *said a stat about the growth but missed it*

————–

Live blogged by Dave Rohrer

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

• Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
• Global Search for the B2B SEM
• Shopping Search Tactics
• 7 Proven Ways to get Your Website on Page 1 Organically & then Convert
• 5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM
• What's new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?
• Advanced B2B Marketing
• Search Advertising 101
• Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

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

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

First up is Craig Danuloff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up is Brian Cosgrove of Avenue A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Dougherty from Hitwise is up next.

Using CI to identify and maximize SEM Opportunities.

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

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

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

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

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

Next up is Michael Stebbins of Market Motive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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

Introduction by:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

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

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

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

If you love data, you’ll love PPC.

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

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

How do you buy search?

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

Understanding Hybrid Auctions

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

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

Pre-flight checklist for building campaign.

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

Setting base values and goals

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

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

Finding Keywords

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

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

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

Building the ads

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

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

Schedule

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

Budgeting

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

Managing Bids

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

PPC and SEO are complementary.

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

PPC allows you more control over messaging

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

Process creates sustainable advantage

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

Use systems-level thinking

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

Track performance, Make adjustments

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

Set good goals and work towards them.

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

Google/MSN keyword match types.

• Broad
• Phrase
• Exact
• Negative

Yahoo Keyword Match types

• Standard Match
• Advanced Match

Broad match

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

Phrase Matches

• Exact query order

Exact Matches

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

Yahoo
Standard Match

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

Advanced Matches:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content sites

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

Search:

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

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

Example of ad designed to draw clicks:

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

Ads designed to filter clicks

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

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

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

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

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

Coverage provided by Keri

Patricia Hursh, President & Founder, SmartSearch Marketing

10 Tips for b2b

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

8. offer multiple action options

9. simplify registration forms

10. turn web inquiries into sales leads

Buying Cycle

- shows forester chart

Advertis in the ail

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

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

Non Branded Terms

Use adcopy to prequal clickers

- address your specific target audience

- pre qual clickers

Align ad copy with search query

- align ad copy with search query

- modify copy across buying cycle

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

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

Microsite

- typically between 3-10 pages

- focused on a solution or client type

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

Test page elements - landingpage testing

- they run a/b or multivariate constantly on microsites

- Items to test

- page layout

- action triggers

- images

- registration form placement

- names and descriptions of downloadable assets

- registration form fields

track & improve results

- shows a chart of 60 days

Secondary actions

- allow for more than just one action

Registration forms

- showed some examples of good and bad registration forms

————————————

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

How to deal with an enterprise salesforce:

A -B - C

- ratings for leads

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

Priority order of trust
- free trial
- demo

Sales reps go into the CRM and cherry pick.

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

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

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

Review sales success meaures
- close rate
- time to close

- average selling price

- quarterly quota

Feedback look into search buys and site optimization

Challenge

- low end priced products

- high end enterprise products

- who gets more of the attention?

- upsell

- final revenue numbers

- company goals

- quality of store experience

————————————

Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing

Wrong metrics = wrong decsisions

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

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

You need to watch profit, not CPL.

*shows a slide of the Advertising Ecosystem*

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

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

the most profitable for the company.

Phone Call Tracking

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

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

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

————–

Live blogged by Daver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop looking at visits, look at goals and conversions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What’s new with Google Website Optimizer

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

Why is testing becoming mainstream

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

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

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

New Resources

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

Go to google.com/WebsiteOptimizer for lots of resources

Many more new industry partnerships.

For those who want the VIP Treatment
Authorized Consultants

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

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

New Product Updates:

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

Improved reports.

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

The New Bill of Rights
We have a right to:

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

Designing your test

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

Three things to do this week

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

Live blogging provided by Keri.

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

Moderator:

· Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture

Speaker:

· David Rodnitzky, VP, Strategy, PPCAdBuying.com

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

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

· Vinny Lingham, CEO, Synthasite

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

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

- the assumption that the long tail is eternal

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

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

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

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

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

Any questions on this data so far?

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

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

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

Chris Zaharias: Next up is Vinny Lingham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provided by Avi from Promedia Corp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So first up is Aaron.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple URLs are also very important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few tips:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing

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

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

China

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

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

Japan

Yahoo Japan is leading Japan with 64% market share

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

Seasonality

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

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

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

voice”

Google - Mexico
80/20 Spanish to English ads

Yahoo - Mexico
100/0 - All listings are Spanish

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

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

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

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

—————————————————————–

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Didit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Site-side conversion rate

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

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

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

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

——————————————–

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

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

- Communication > Localization > Objectives

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

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

Program Management - Process

Search Triggers
- TV spot, Radio spot, Display

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus on Engagement Success:
- white papers
- web casts

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

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

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

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

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

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

————–

Live blogged by Daver

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

Moderator:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to measure what is a conversation?

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

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

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

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

Contributor: Keri Morgret

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

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

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

Gary Stein, Director of Strategy, Ammo Marketing

Starts with an actual story - about snow tires in Alaska and Nordstrom.

Brand
- statement of belief
- communicated
- managed
- developed
- stakeholders
- ability to recall
- needs to be managed

Story
- chain of events
- shared
- lived
- experienced
- characters
- ability to retell
- needs to be given

In the netowkrs that matter, The Story is the critical unit of communication.

People dont pass along brand messages, they pass along stories.

The Story is the Most Powerful Form of Communication

Stories shape behavior - he gives an example about a bank teller.

Business is being shaped by the stories being told. Advertising research that 30 second ads that tell a story are more

memerable then simple brand messages.

5 stories that can be told:

1. Origin - where did you/your brand come from
2. Purpose - tells us why you are a business
3. Vision - similar to origin but is where are we going
4. Education - Starbucks educated people about traditions of coffee
5. Ethics - when someone walks the walks of what they are doing
6. Connection - reaching out and talking to the customer

Review, Evaluate, Build, Deploy

Benefit-Statement Searches - people are searching for an answer to their problem.

——————————————————————————–

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.

Find your brand story - figure out what is being said and what you want it to be. You have to monitor online convos and

know what is being said.

*shows a slide of the “PC vs Mac guys”

*shows a slide of Kleenex’s campaign “let it out”

*shows Dove “pro-aging”

Nichols Concrete Cutting - doing the impossible
- through testimonials were able to get their story

FLOR - sustainable, beautiful homes

Tell an Authentic Story
- insincerity or fake stories will backfire (shows an image of Walmart)

Hone the Story
- get the story down to simple, repeatable, and memorable

Listen for the story
- employees, customers, suppliers

Connect your brand to the story
- all creative must be tied to the story

Amplify the story online
- can do this by optimized press releases with images
- shows a chart about universal search (study by Jupiter )

Audio
- you need more and more digital assets
- Whirlpool - has a sponsored audio show

Video
- Rec’s that you look at Intercontinental and what they did with Video

Articles
- write educational articles, give good info, tips

Blogs & other websites

Syndicate the story
- RSS your content takes on a life of its own

Consitency
- how you look, what you say, and more important, what you do.
- product performance and service is the final word
- needs to be true

Leave something to the imagination

Let the story spread

If you really hone your story, figure it out, let other people tell the story for you - that is when story telling will do

wonders for your marketing.

——————————————————————————————

Larry Lawfer, Founder/President, YourStorys.com

Its all about entertain (some), create community, engage, pull in (its not push out).

The images you put with your words are very important.

Stories need to be authentic and real.

People are looking for something. Search people are not telling the story well enough.

*shows a Timberland print ad - the people are naked (…dont ask )

engage, Inform, Retrain, Create Communit, Grow
- the basic rule is to be real
- be authentic
- invite involvement
- listen, respond, repeat

Listening is essential. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? (shows a video with Mitt Romney,

Cam Neely, Denis Leary, and others)

Do you want to know more? *shows another video*

The Julie Fund *example* as an example:

What I know?
- interviews are a process
- research, develop questions
- gather more information
- prepare, aware, define
- LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN
- follow through with what you just heard
- what havent I asked, Listen?
- stay on schedule, confident in knowing what you need

////Funny how he says the Flip phone is nice but not professional, yet everyone else has said that its a great item to get

started with - Observation by Dave////

Engage, Inform, entertain… create community
- authetic is essential
- real is invaluable
- scripted and practiced devalues your result
- people are visually sophisticated, make your content the best it can be
- develop a library of content. Be strategic

Pulling the numbers
- its all about the results
*he pulled the slide down - drat!!!*

Know what you want. Know what you are getting. Be prepared for better
*shows a video*

Set the goal before you start.

Real, Authentic, Inform Engage, Share
*shows another video of a guy enjoying his interview*

Q&A

Q: What is the most effective story?
A: Vision. With a flood of products, the vision story can stand out the most right now.

Q: Benifits of a product, asked about data trends for these type of searches
A: No hard stats, and not sure that anyone is measuring it. Its more of a feeling and a trend he is seeing based on talking with agencys.

Contributed by DaveR.

The value of search as a true enterprise platform has been touted for years, yet few organizations have seriously embraced the opportunity. This session will provide an overview of enterprise search fundamentals and explore the enterprise search marketplace in depth. Current enterprise search tools, design issues, and real-world examples of effective enterprise search implementations will be discussed. Whether your organization has a well-established Intranet or an Intranet that has just been launched, you'll walk away from this session with a better understanding for the principles of a well-designed enterprise search solution.

Moderator:

• Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch Expert & President & CEO, VIZION Interactive

Speakers:

• Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing, Vivisimo
• Bill French, CTO, MyST Technology Partners
• Andy Feit, SVP of Marketing, Mark Logic
• Avi Rappoport, Editor, SearchTools.com

Avi Rappoport

Scope:

• Public-facing web site search
  • online stores
  • informational
  • hybrids
• Intranet Search
  • Departmental
  • Extranets for partners
  • Research (narrow and deep)
  • Enterprise (wide and shallow)

Finding content

• Robot crawlers
  • follow links
  • discover servers
  • same problems as webwide search robots
• java, javascript, flash navigation links
• unlinked content
• redirects, infinite loops

• Direct data source access
• databases, CMS, document stores, data silos
• web services, REST, and other APIs
• Updates can trigger re-index
• Avoid extra page content, navigation.

Un-optimized content

• No title tag or duplicate titles
• Invalid HTML
• Modification dates unreliable
• Non-HTML files
  • no file properties or duplicate properties
  • huge file sizes
  • multiple versions of the same file

Dealing with short queries

• Average 1-3 words in a query
  • often ambiguous
  • multi-word queries are usually phrases
• Smart query processing
  • Auto-complete for popular terms
  • Expand queries (synonyms, acronyms)
  • Match with Best Bets
  • Offer spelling suggestions (hard to do well).

Retrieval and relevance

• Expanded queries find more match files
• Relevance and perception
• Complex algorithms rarely help. Users don’t care how many results there are, they usually just look at the first page. Even treating searches as AND or OR have similar results, best if you put the results with all words in phrase at top, however.
• Page-rank not applicable
• Most links are navigational, not meaningful
• Simple term frequency ranking works
• Heuristics: position and phrase matching
• Personalization – small bang for big bucks. Might be useful in specific situations, but not usually.

No to Spam, yes to Metadata

• Your own content is (mostly) reliable
• Metadata adds value
  • search and show author
  • several more, missed them.

Search Analytics

• Search Traffic
• Top queries
  • navigation
  • topical
  • trends over time
• No-match queries
  • add text, metadata, new content
  • improve no-matches page.

Enterprise search tips

• Basic SEO is smart
• Users rarely type long queries
• Giving them what they really want is hard
• Metadata can change the dynamic
• Search analytics rock
• This is more librarianship than marketing – expose your content rather than drive people to something.

www.searchtools.com consult8@searchtools.com

Bill French.

Enterprise search: definition?
Finding information…

• inside the enterprise?
• for employees?
• for partners?
• for clients?

His definition is Search Solutions that help to Achieve the Objectives of the Enterprise.

Observations:
Employees may (or may not) know what the yare looking for, or even know that they should be looking. One study said that workers may spend up to two hours a day searching.

Ideal Operational Efficiency
Information magically finds you in a context where it has the greatest value. Think less about the search function, and more about the software applications that employees are using. Those are the key moments where you can provide the greatest productivity to the user.

Findability: Three Key Observations

1. Value directly proportional findability. If something cannot be found, it has no value.
2. Findability is directly proportional to focus.
3. Focus is dependent on two elements: the message and the presentation architecture.

Bill disagreed with Avi, and feels that you can’t always trust the internal metadata. Employees do want to be heard, they write things and want them to be found, and even the internal system can be gamed.

Andy Feit
Enterprise Search: Approaches to Choosing and Using Your Own Search Engine.
Three views: Knowledge Management, “Google for your intranet”, Application Centric.

Knowledge management is a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows and how it knows it (source: wikipedia). Can drive tremendous value, but not without the investment and commitment.

Cheap and Cheerful: If KM is so challenging, what options are out there? “Google for your intranet”

• Could literally be Google, but there are plenty of other options for basic spidered search.
• Generally works well when underlying content publishing process is in place. Problem can be if you have multiple versions of a document, and people finding wrong version.
• Downside: like web search, it puts the onus on the user to do the work.
  • Worse because web relevancy models are not present.

Learning from the web…

• Going vertical, or these days “micro-vertical”
• Leverage focused content, engaged audience, and common goals
• Often combined with Web 2.0-style interfaces:
• User Generated Content
• Tagging, Rankings, Comments, etc.

In the enterprise, silos are not always bad. We call “vertical role- and task-aware”. You searches can actually be quite relevant because it is specifically in your area of interest.

Examples of good silos and specific results.

• Consulting -> Statements of Work Builder
• Heathcare -> Patient Post-op Instructions. Instead of generic post-op instructions, take the existing content in your network (patient records) and making it specific for the user (patient). Would know exactly what procedures were done and have specific information for patient.
• Market Research -> Dynamic Publishing
• Legal Departments…
• Marketing Teams…
• Sales…

He showed screenshots of several specific vertical search applications.

Rebecca Thompson
“Using Search to Jump Start Collaboration”

Enterprise search today: screenshot of existing enterprise search for a company. Documents are organized by sources, such as Sharepoint, Documentum, intranet, etc. Another search type option is clusters and facets.

Enterprise search can be a hard sell to executives. You can present case that employees use a lot of time searching, but executives ask if people will be more productive with the time that they don’t search, or would they just mess around online. Missed good example of how to convince executives here. A compelling argument is employees can make use of existing internal knowledge. How do you deal with people that retire or leave? What happens to the data on the laptop after the person leaves? A lot of knowledge is now gone.

The Collaboration Starting Point. The natural starting point for collaboration is search. Why?

• Search can access all content and data
• Unlike standalone social tools, social search is bootstrapped by the data
• Everyone in an organization can use search
• It is simple and intuitive
• Corporations have been struggling for years to organize data across departments and repositories – let users help!

Social Search in the Enterprise:

• Social Tagging: voting. Users can actually do this to help clean up data.
• Social Tagging: rating. You can either just show rating that user gave so others can see how useful it was, or you can put it in the backend too so that it can be used to increase relevancy of results.
• Social Tagging: keywords. Users can tag documents with keywords. This can help by adding information that is not in the document itself. Can be freeform or from dropdown.
• Social Tagging: annotations. Users can enrich search results by annotating existing results with their own thoughts and commentary. Almost like a mini blog post, or looks like comments on items in Friend Feed.
• Social Bookmarking: Virtual Folders. Represented as a folder in the interface, but like a tag on the backend of the system.

Quickly went through at TV Network News Division search engine results.

Social Search

• allows enterprises to tap into and make use of human knowledge within their organization
• provides the opportunity to go beyond finding information to enriching it
• reveals valuable insights into the collaborative intelligence of the organization.

Contributor: Keri Morgret

According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year. This makes optimizing video for YouTube one of the biggest opportunities in the fast-changing and complex world of search. This session will look at how video search engine optimization (VSEO) has become the most important new use of search engine optimization today.
Moderator:
Joseph Morin, Partner, Boost Search Marketing & CEO, Storybids, Inc.
Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixsy Corporation
Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development & Management, eLocal Listing, LLC
Matthew Scheybeler, CTO, blinkx
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
Greg Jarboe: Anyone heard of Youtube? Audience laughs.

We were playing with this weird thing a few years ago and then Google acquired it. Youtube accounts for over 98% of all videos viewed at Google sites. The game has changed. A lot of us keep optimizing and optimizing and hope with enough optimization good things will happen. One needs to understand Youtube as a couple things. It's a search engine. But it's primary power and addiction and force of dominance is as a video sharing site. The right strategies to get your videos found - means you need to optimize, but also need a sharing strategy. That's the real secret to ranking in Youtube.

A few case studies: A B2C site. A company called STACK media got 140,104 views on 137 videos. Spikes are wonderful, but want videos take off on a sustained basis.

The Allen Iverson training video had 36,885 views as of August 8th, 2008. His training video is getting a consistent growing uplift. The shocking truth is that 13% of views came from Search! That;s where the optimization kicked in. 75% came from somewhere else. In this case, they came from related videos. People don't watch "a" video, they watch batches. They are addictive. They came from other Allen Iverson videos - they came and saw more. This is "related video optimization".

Another case study: Worked with SES to optimize over 130 videos - London, NY, etc. Got 26,2411 views. Healthy in a B2B category. Let's look at an individual video. We see a spike at the time of SES NY. Then # of visits went crazy again in the summer. What happened here? Where did the views come from? In this case 7.4% from search. Great! But 71% came from embedded in players and on blogs. Is that search? No. But it's views. And it helps get integrated in universal search.

The related video phenomenon - people watch related videos in a session. And if they embed it in a blog, even better. Create a widget. Allows a package of videos to be taken onto a site. Can tailor the widget so that your videos come up first on your site. Cross fertilization effect. It's video sharing, and that's the secret.

Next up is Chase Norlin:

The web is becoming increasingly visual. It's a challenge to index everything. Getting in video search engines is big. Provides free traffic, exposure of brand and content, or ad revenue.

Pure Video is a large video search site, and a lot of people want to know how to rank high in this engine. How do you show up in top 3? Need to add rich metadata. Push out RSS/MRSS and update frequently. Format that video search engines like. Video search crawling in general is not automated. Also, contact the videos earch engines! Email them to get into the crawler queue. Will get regularly crawled.

Got a site? Run private label video search on it! Powerful for creating traffic and ad revenue and unique content. Customize the search to your audience.

That's all! Thanks.

Stephen Espinosa is up.

How do you get ranked in universal search, and how to convert it?

Who knows that Yahoo has universal search too with video?

Create your videos - take into account the length. No one wants to sit and watch a 3-4 minute video on a search page.
Have a call to action. Calls are more important than clicks. Make it ready for TV. Put a twist on it to make it viral.

Make sure video is in SWF format. Don't use Active X controls.

Use Google Video sitemaps and available variables. Make sure all your videos are fed to Google via the sitemap.

SEO: Build a page for every video you produce. Optimize the page with the tags, content, keywords, file name. Use a constant video description that is keyword rich across all sites.

Use analytics to test how long people are staying on the page. If a video is 6 minutes, and people are staying for 42 seconds - you have a problem.
Use A/B variant testing to determine which videos gain the best response and where to place links to your video page from your homepage.

Utilize thumbnails. Show your call to action - phone number. Can tell Google which thumbnail to display. Make sure to tell your video producer to put the call to action at the 1/4 mark, 1/2 mark and 3/4 mark.

Google TV. Very affordable to create highly targeted TV spots that you can coordinate with video launches.

Video & Local. Sponsored and local listings are 2.2x likely to get the click. Add the video and you are 3.3x more likely to get the traffic.

Next up is Matthew from Blix.

Tips: Submit video to Blix and they will do the hard work for you.

A list to do for Google and Yahoo video:

1) Provide a well place message
2) Have a page with lots of text
3) Descriptive file names
4) Sitemaps - submit to different engines
5) Make sure the URL is descriptive

Don't:
1) Don't tag spam. Will get penalized in Blix.
2) Don't require a special flash player

Real his white paper on video SEO.

Gregory of Infuse is up next.

Doing video search since 2001. Has #1 result for "video optimization" on Google.

People forget how effective video can be for reputation management. Can own the SERPs using video optimization. Sharing / community is key to maximizing the bang.

Also, theres mobile benefit. Can opt into a mobile version of the channel in Youtube. Great for demos.

Case study: "Corvette" search on Google - GM does not have a video but someone else does. Missed opportunity by GM.

Put the video on your site as a best practice, but these days people focus on upload approaches as well as RSS and MRSS feeds.

If you are concerned about putting own video on your own site, and want to rank as well as possible, focus on the metadata and everything that surrounds the video. The video search engines read and use that to rank.

We believe video optimization is any technique - paid, viral, social - anything to achieve marketing goals with videos. People get fixated on he keywords when uploading. They are important. Focus on the truncation aspect. The most important keyword or brand should be at the beginning of the sentence. Can rank very successfully for moderate and non competitive phrases just with keywords, but no longer the only piece of the puzzle. To illustrate this - a video with less views can rank higher because of the social aspect. Especially in a competitive vertical. Google is opening up in new ways - the Google keyword tool - now revealing queries. Youtube is becoming more transparent too. More stuff rolling out. You will not rank well on Youtube for competitive videos on keywords alone. Need to stimulate it.

Tips:
1) Have no financial interest - make it a good advice piece.
2) One title, description, etc. syndicating to many engines.
3) On the Youtube homepage, it will tell you what's popular. Query your keyword. It will show you vital information and what keywords are most popular.
4) Type a keyword related to one of your terms, and sort by views. Study those videos. Look at the content, tags, and community aspects such as comments and links.
5) AOL has a page that shows you popular videos from video search engines.
6) Find related videos, and come up with a clever video response to that video. Add a URL in the description of the video to your website.
7) Any type of text, or call to action. If you have a series of videos - keep them in your walled garden - there is a free feature in Youtube to do so.
8) Add a branding experience. Add a URL in every single frame with a call to action.

Get familiar with the Youtube partner program. If you are content owner, can get rev share. No cost way to increase your video optimization, because Youtube will help promote it.

A new feature: The screening room. They are desperate for content. Can get 6 figures worth of advertising value if you get featured there.

Allow comments within your channel. If you don't, hard to rank well in hypercompetive verticals.

Talk about your video in social sites, press releases. Can embed videos in press releases. Check out sites like Socialmarker.com, Stumbleupon for using social to promote videos.

Paid search - a new feature rolling out - can buy keywords in Youtube via PPC - only available to agencies right now.

Can use Adwords - through content and site match - to place video ads. Very cost effective. Tremendous value.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Is Google your main search engine? Do you realize that there are many other tools that will help you find specific information — sometimes better than Google? Most people are unaware that there are more than just the "big three" of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The list includes Bit Torrent search engines, image search engines, artificial intelligence systems, clustering engines, recommendation search engines, metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. Most of these niche search engines have very fun, interesting features, and you'll discover all sorts of relevant information you might have otherwise missed using the more general, big box-type search engines.

Moderator:

• Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media
Speakers:
• Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch Expert & President, SageRock.com
• Jay Sears, EVP, Strategic Products & Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc. / ADSDAQ Exchange
• Jonathan Ewert, Vice President and General Manager, LookSmart
• Dustin Kwan, Senior Product Manager, Ask Sponsored Listings
• Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Andrew Goodman, SEW Expert: remember back in 1995 when there were 9 or 10 competitive search engines…we’ve sort of gotten away from that. It seems like today there is a lot of energy in the space, it’s a complex picture that needs simplifying. So we have some experts here to talk about the subject.

Sage Lewis: Good afternoon. I happen to be one of the proud experts at SEW, you can see my bi-weekly column there. Today this session is brought to you by my family vacation! I was at my in-laws in Upstate NY, and here is the media we had on our vacation! Movies, laptops, stereos! The point is, there is more media to buy than ever! But – there is not more media budget. And – more options mean more risk. I am coming to you as a buyer of media here so I am going to share with you some of my experiences in buying media on search engines, I will show you some of the things we have done and find success in.

1. Paying bloggers to post: there are many places you can do this, Pay Per Post, and also experimenting with a company called Review Me, but Social Spark is another one. We’ve had good and bad experiences. The good experience is we used them to create buzz for a contest – and we won this. The bad experience is when we used this for a B2B site, to get users to fill out a survey, and it was unsuccessful, too targeted. If you have a large audience you are trying to reach, using these networks can be very effective, but not if your market is more targeted.
2. Ask.com is good cheap traffic where we get a lot of conversions. Ask has been very successful for us.
3. Superpages.com is great for a local or regional campaign, can be very successful, we have seen a lot of conversions. The traffic is qualified.
4. Facebook can allow us to target based on demographics. You can buy ads to promote a variety of things on Facebook. The process allows you to demographically target – and Facebook has over 24 million members. I highly recommend this.
5. We like Quigo because you can target very specific newspapers and magazine. Quigo is PPC – and you can target very specific places, great if you are doing regional campaigns. This might be something that you would find interesting.

Here is a campaign from one client (slide). It shows a variety of advertising networks. I have highlighted when one medium beat our overall average. I wanted to show you specifically that the bottom line of this is cost per conversion, which the average was $50.90, and the CPC average was $0.90. And Yahoo and MSN, in this particular case, was above our average! But, Superpages and LookSmart were below and converted quite well.

Tip #1 - Buy alternative advertising through referrals. If you are in a marketing network group, ask around, see what you might find.
Tip #2 - Be absolutely clear about your goals and time frame – know what you are going to get out of this.
Tip #3 - Allocate 10%-25% of your online budget to testing. And know that it’s testing, and it’s not going to convert, but if you don’t test, you might miss out.

Jay Sears, EVP of Context Web: I talk about 3 things today:
1) Why search is not advertising.
2) Why some very large companies have spent over $10 billion over the past 15 months for display.
3) Trends we are watching and you should watch.

Search is not advertising. It’s demand fulfillment. It’s order taking. Content is more about demand generation. There is only so much search. About 5% of the time you spend online is searching. The other 95% is looking at content. There is 50 times the amount of inventory and opportunity with content-based ads. Because content advertising has been lumped in with search (largely because of Google), it is largely misunderstood.

Targeting content vs. search. This is applicable to Google content network. When you are targeting content you want to go wide, it’s implicit interest, you want to generate that demand. Versus search, where someone has told the search box that they are interested in something.

Think about categories. Keywords can appear out of context. Go wide and gear your ad towards the right category. People make the mistake in using very specific keyword to target content. If there is a page about baseball, about the Red Sox vs Yankees, don’t run an ad about the Red Sox because you will piss off half the people. But if your ad is about memorabilia or tickets, you will get a different response.

The next battle ground is display advertising. Google’s organic growth rate, though still growing by leaps and bounds, is slowing down. So they have to innovative on the display side, so they bought You Tube and Double Click. Another issue people are trying to solve for marketers, that unlike the search market which is highly concentrated to Google, display is highly fragmented. You have a million publishers that carry advertising. Social applications and other sources allow us to avoid homepages and go straight to deep pages. So how can we re-aggregate those opportunities to reach customers?

You have branded sites now building mini ad networks, and ad networks themselves now specializing. Dream up any topic – and you will find an ad network especially for that industry.

The growth on a lot of the portal destination sites are down over the past few years, so this is why they are creating these platforms.

There are 120,000 blogs creating every day. So how many calls would you have to make a minute to reach all those guys! So you can see why these platforms are all getting created.

So some of the things we are doing about it –
Marketers want scale and control, making the long-tail addressable (Google has the only effective strategy making the long tail addressable, they have over a million publishers on their network), content is a high value common denominator, solutions for big and small sellers.

We catered our business to the large agencies, and recently created a self-publishing product for smaller companies.

I just want to leave you with some trends:
-the display/content advertising is the next battleground.
-innovations in self service publishing will happen more and more.
-other portals are figuring out ways to make the content/display market friendly for all of us.

And if you are a buyer, you might start to become a seller, and vice versa, and eventually we are all going to become media traders!

Jonathan Ewert, LookSmart: I sure hope search is advertising Jay!

Thank you for having me, this is an exciting time in search advertising. We have a lot of unknowns, and alternatives are certainly needed in the marketplace.

All markets follow a cycle and change over time. Years ago there was nothing called internet search and obviously no search networks. Infoseek was out of inventory, so we needed to start a network to get more inventory from other publishers; in those days it was all display ads and not text ads. Today there are a series of new and established search engines, and a whole host of networks.

What’s happening? Fewer search engine choices will drive higher prices, which creates the need for search advertising networks. Search networks may or may not have a search advertising network. When these networks interoperate with each other, it’s more cost effective and will offer the potential of a great return.

At this point Google is a natural monopoly. Are they too smart for their own good?

Search advertising networks are text-based with traffic that exists in other places than in search engines. It’s a big business and growing pretty quickly. It’s going the reverse of search engines which essentially has only 3 biggies. There are more places, and more budgets, in search advertising. Online overtook TV spending in the UK last week and it’s on track to happen in the U.S. As we talk to advertisers, here are some of the things they ask us:

1. Make sure it’s easy for us to buy and optimize through an API. I spend a lot of time optimizing my own buys, don’t make me do that with your network.
2. Answer the phone – be responsive with actual human beings.
3. Offer plenty of targeting options beyond local.
4. Offer a lot of reach at a low price.

Be careful, if you bid to low you might not get access to premium networks, if you bid too high, your economics are upset.

LookSmart leverages and licenses its AdCenter platform to advertisers and publishers as an essential complement to major search engines.

Dustin Kwan, Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL): Some topics I will cover: Why advertise beyond the Big 3? How can you improve your performance in targeting with Ask?

Ask is the fourth largest search engine. Why advertise out of the Big 3? Really with Ask, you can extend your reach to those not on Google, Yahoo and MSN. A percentage who use Ask don’t use the others! You can get a pretty big performance boost if you can combine another, without harming your ROI. You will see much lower CPCs and CPA’s on ASL. We spend a lot of time on the performance of the network.

We have very specific tools that are available for you to help improve your campaign performance to help expand your keywords and clicks and improve the granularity of your performance. The top 3 underutilized tours include dynamic insertion codes, keyword prospecting reports, run of category targeting.

Dynamic Insertion Codes are similar to DKI, but you can add additional information, like Ad ID and feed source, and other metrics to help optimize your ad. You can add codes for more granular tracking. All campaigns can benefit from these codes. You want to optimize your traffic sources based on feed insertions, and use the codes in conjunction with Analytics tracking.

Keyword Prospecting Reports will give you a list of keywords that are currently undersold or have low bids compared to past click and CPA performance. With this you can find high-volume keywords with low competition and low prices. You can also test out some new keywords at lower bid rates.

One size does not fit all with search networks. You may find words that didn’t work on Yahoo or Google, but might work with us.

The last tool is Run of Category Targeting. We have 38 categories that are targetable. It will expand your reach. Compete with exact and broad match ads. You do not want to use it for highly targeted campaigns. The great thing is that it has a 5 cent minimum bid, and actually does get around reserve prices!

So with the Ask network, you will increase your reach and we do have low-priced, quality clicks. And make sure you use useful tools wisely to add to your campaign performance.

Mary Berk, Microsoft: Why are we up here? So while we are one of the Big 3, we are clearly on the smaller size. You can think of us as the biggest of the small guys.

So quick overview, I will share with you how we think about our platform. The more we can encourage you to experiment with our engine, the better it is for us, but it is also better for you.

We are really looking at optimizing the needs of our users, our advertisers, and our publishers. The goal is to find the optimal mix of meeting all of their needs.

We work first to show high-quality ads to our users. When our user is engaged, we have further reach. The further our reach goes, the more our advertisers and publishers are engaged. It’s a constant balancing game.

Google is a class act. Most of us up here think we have something to offer by way of diversity. So why does Google get all the attention? If advertisers want a one-stop shop, they will go to the place that has the most users. And they don’t want to spend time optimizing their campaign for a search engine that doesn’t reach that much traffic. But – traffic isn’t everything, quality counts.

Microsoft AdCenter/Live Search:
-Led overall conversion rates among search engines
-Drove 17% of purchase and 15% of dollars based on 9% of the traffic, showing efficiency in driving conversions and dollars
-Special strength areas include mass merchants and many others.

If you are really trying to get the biggest return on investment try different things. As you experiment you will overall improve your campaigns. So look to other engines to discover varying cost per acquisitions, different traffic and audience types (and quality levels), different publisher types.

So checkout Microsoft, we have different publishing and advertising products. Anyone who runs a search campaign can easily transfer that to content-based networks. We have some state of the art free tools (that could even be applicable to Google campaigns). We have an Excel plugin for keywords which is great. We have AdCenter Analytics – we will tell you about your audience if you install our code. We also have AdCenter Desktop to allow you to manage your campaigns while offline, and then you can upload them when you get online. Thank you!

Post contributed by Sheara Wilensky of PromediaCorp.

Where does search really fit within a marketer's total digital advertising effort? Big businesses and small businesses alike struggle with how to allocate search marketing, and other online advertising or marketing efforts. This Orion panel will evaluate strategic thought processes and then grind down to tactical execution with thought leaders from the search engine marketing, advertising agency, and advertiser perspectives. We will explore how search can be "carved out" from an overall budget and how it will lead the white whale of online marketing — a truly holistic marketing strategy.

Moderators:
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Robert Murray, President, iProspect
Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Resolution Media, an Omnicom Media Group Company
Steven Kaufman, SVP, Media Director, Digitas
Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Strategist, Discover Financial Services

Kevin Ryan welcomes us. Announces winners of the SES awards. Yahoo! takes the win for most relevant search results. Chuckles from the audience. Looksmart wins best ad platform.

Why does search get credit for everything is the big question tackling today. Constantly gets asked this question, and we still don't have an answer.

KR: What are the key take aways to gain from this session? What are the best plans for executing holistic strategies. Lots of crap about agency integration - digital arm working with search - clients feel dissatisfied with this model. And at the end of the day - brand integration and where the money's coming from. From a MarketingSherpa - it's amazing to me how little measurement is occurring.

Panel: The bright part for us search marketers that its grown 200% in two years.

An integrated brand campaign - such as with one of our clients - Discover - we the focus is integrating search in our online branding campaign. Our strategy is to tie it with TV to maximize our mileage from the campaign. If someone watches a TV spot and goes to the web, and has brand recall. We also use ad copy and landing pages and microsites revolving around the TV spot. That is another way search is integrated.

KR: Poll of marketers - how many are integrating search with marketing. Less than half admitted to integrating search with marketing. Where the money comes from - a hypothetical scenario - Budweiser campaign had a $16 million budget that went $16 million over budget. What's going in that case.

Panel: It varies by brand, client. Google is aggressive now about pushing Youtube - putting the creatives and building a channel around it to drive more impressions. The brand clients are becoming more and more savvy, recognizing that the creatives need to live online.

KR: So where is the money coming from? Are you borrowing from Google to pay Google?

Panel: It varies. On the digital side, we need to make sure we have enough money. Broad based TV branding campaigns, if there's an online component - search is a part of it.

One thing to clarify when hunting the money trail. It's different when talking about paid vs. organic. On the natural side, the budget is usually not from the ad side - usually from IT, or something else such as web development.

KR: What do you attribute the changes to? Overall awareness?

The efficiency has driven this more than anything. The returns effective campaigns generate. More exposure of what search can do for the overall budget.

Everyone is starting to realize online is a better channel, more cost efficient, measurable. Having these internal champions for search. Also, conferences like this are a good example - more people are engaging in search marketing.

KR: A lot of people are interested in where the money comes from how it comes together - show us the consensus. Where does it start?

Panel: Where does it start... We've long known that search is truly accountable and comes down to measurement. We can track what's happening.

CPCs are going up and not down. Increased competition. It's getting harder to yield the same dollar for every dollar spend.

There's the acquisition side, and the brand side. Clients are pretty good at forecasting - and it's a finite world. There's frustration on how to scale this great channel. The engines need to do a better job at selling a branded search product. A recent study by Google showed the value of being on the page - but the problem is that we are being charged on a CPC basis on and not a CPM basis.

Search is being used to justify traditional media budget. We're looking at query volume against TV schedule and looking for spikes. TV lacks that measurably that search has. Google is trying to change things, but the scale is not there yet. We're using search data to make decisions about TV advertising.

KR: Search engines need to do a better job at showing how it can be used as a branding tool. What do you mean?

Panel: If you search Yahoo! for "Special K". They have a branded image with info on "Special K". So they do a good job there. Google is not going to do this but other engines are . It's not just about your listing, but multiple links and logos and dropping brand equity here.

It's nice to get the logo in there if you can make a deal with the engine, but Yahoo just recently showed quantifiable lifts among brand recall and likelihood to purchase just by exposure and not clicks. They need to do a better job at merchandising that little text ad. In a recent study, 40% of people polled assume that the top results are the top brands. So there is that brand equity. The challenge is how do I buy it? They need to sell us a branding search package.

KR: Poll. How was lunch? Audience chuckles. We're working on it. Anyway, the numbers are going up. Click costs, is there a number increase? What do you tell the clients? How do you ask for more dollars?

Panel : We forecast and have to be prepared to adjust budget over time. Have to set range parameters. As you yield through, make adjustments. The most advance marketers budget the best.

KR: Correct me if I'm wrong, budgets are category specific for both natural and paid - different proportions than something that is directly transactional like package goods?

Panel: It really depends on where you product is in a category lifespan.

KR: Do you buy that its really happening in mass - the holistic model?

Panel : An example - a study showed that the baby boomer demographic is much more likely to buy online - and do business online when exposed to the message offline.

Part of the migration to digital marketing is that its not like traditional where you set the budget at the beginning of the year. It has to be made flexible - and ability to move money around as you need to.

KR: Is it ongoing, once a year?

Always advise clients to set separate budgets aside for landing page testing, and other abilities. TV is still a good way to build a brand, and it's often a challenge to move money away into search, but for the most part we have a budget, track, and see if we need more.

KR: What about resources. Hanging out in NY with the agency community, seeing that the traditional agencies are fat, obese - with staff, and more staff. Then move to interactive department with 5-7 people managing the money that 200 people do in traditional. A recent agency laid off 200 people and no one noticed. Are traditional agencies becoming more leaner because they have to be and are you getting more because of it?

Panel: If you look at reports coming into '09, traditional media is being scrutinized much more than digital. Clients are asking for more for less. Times are tight. They want more and don't want to cut ad spend, so it's all those pieces together.

It's harder to spend $1,000,000 on search than on TV. The profit margins are a lot higher on TV. The fat is being trimmed, but it's more streamlined. Some large agencies have merged the traditional and digital groups and the plans are more holistic.

KR: Have they really come together, or they just saying that?

Were not done yet. The last 5 years have had leaps and bounds. Progress not perfection. Getting there.

KR: Traditional people think they are better than us and it pisses me off. I never saw the parody. Are you guys seeing it now.

Panel : Clients want more and more. They need the money to be more justified. We show clients how TV fuels search.

AK: Does that mean when we see sites being built we can expect them to be optimized and crawler friendly?

Panel: Much more today than ever before. Now SEO is making a come back with CPC going up. It can be a more upfront investment for a longer term yield.

KR: Comscore reports yesterday that organic search is up 20% year over year. Its a proven trend. The frequency of clicking is increasing. Is that causing a renewed interest in SEO?

A big part of the driver is the increasing costs of all of the media is driving the interest in search. 6-7/10 people click on the organic results. If you look at search as more blended, the results are more positive.

KR: What are some key take aways - three tips for sound budgeting and holistic planning?

Panel: Recognize the outcome your hoping to achieve. Some terms will drive immediate action. Others will drive awareness. Measure everything you're doing. Definitely understand the difference between demand capture and acquisition and hold them to different standards. Don't forget to build a test budget. Need to see whats effective change. Be nimble and flexible and fluid with budgets. Larger organizations need to think like small business and tear down the walls, and have everything fluid across channels. Must be nimble.

Moderator: Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, SES & Search Engine Watch

Speakers:

Amit Kumar, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Nagaraju Bandaru, Co-Founder & CTO, BooRah
Erik Collier, VP, Product Management, Ask.com
Tim McGuiness, VP of Search, hakia.com
Scott Prevost, General Manager & Director of Product, Powerset

First Speaker: Amit Kumar

My job today is to convince you that semantic search is coming closer and closer to reality and that you can participate, and I'm planning on exploring the following:

• What does semantic search mean (to us)?
• Potential user experiences?
• Let's build it together!

What does it mean (to us)? (Understand underlying structured data)
When the web started, most of the content was written by hand. Research papers, personal experiences, etc. Over the last 5 years or so, most of the content (70%+) is coming from structured databases. Search engines and other companies have recognized that getting to and understanding the structured data is of key importance. Once you have access to that data, helping users understand that data is the next step. Help the users get from “to do” to “done”. These are the guiding principles for Yahoo in terms of semantic search.

Potential User Experiences
(Amit provides a list of ten sample search queries and then shows samples of Yahoo’s semantic search results – the results include images, supplemental links below the images, suggestions for further clarifying the query, constraining the query to specific sources, etc.)

Local results show maps, yelp reviews, store hours, phone, etc. right in the search results.

For the search query util.list, the results show not only relevant results, but it breaks down the results by version of software (cshel: Cool!)

All of these results are live today. Some of the things are on by default, including blog results, LinkedIn results, Yelp, etc. It’s providing real value to the users.

Yahoo wants your data. Expose your structured data. Use microformats, RDP markup (preferred). Use datafeeds (based on open RDFa format). Build SearchMonkey applications. In return for going through the trouble to exposure your data, Yahoo is seeing +15% increase in clicks for participating sites.

Nagaraju Bandaru, Co-founder & CTO, BooRah

BooRah is a local search company that uses natural language processing to extract intention and affinity from user reviews and blogs from across the Internet. BooRah generates that structured data that helps make the semantic search experience richer.

Ultimately, semantic search is about leveraging information to make the content on the semantic search results more relevant.

Google is continue to use “smart indexing”, keywords/attributes, and behind the scenes semantics. Yahoo is using a more open approach, and is using content markup, open search and integrates vertical data feeds to enhance their results.

The companies that are trying to understand the content (more so than just the keywords) are companies like Hakia, Aggregate Knowledge, and BooRah use natural language search, discovery and recommendation, and sentiment analysis.

Does search behavior ultimately change the user experience? Bandaru thinks so. When people start searching for “Where can I find the best fois gras in San Francisco?” and then start getting results that they like and can use, they’ll start doing those types of searches more frequently.

This doesn’t negate standard SEO best practices because that is still information that the search engines need, and there are still users who do searches “old school”.

Bandaru’s company specializes in sentiment extraction to enhance search. Sentiment extraction summarizes “gobs” of content – like category specific scores, normalizes different data sources, and then rolls it up into an easy search and sort. They also look at inferred meta data, which leverages existing content like reviews, blogs and message boards. All of this increases relevance and content. It helps filter out keyword spam and also provides more context for location aware mobile applications.

Third Speaker: Erik Collier

We believe that the true semantic web is quite a ways away. You will start to see it when you find that you don’t have to rephrase your query to get the results you want. Right now, that’s not the case. The burden is on the user to think the way the engine wants them to think. If the meaning of the query is the same, you should get the same results no matter how you phrase your question. The semantic web will understand your intent and give you the answer based on your intent, not based on the exact arrangement of your keywords.

To see examples of how query phrasing and word selection affects the outcome of results, search Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, Powerset and Hakia with the following queries and note the differences in the results:

What is the population size of Japan?
What is the population of Japan?

Ask is currently using structured content feeds containing all listings for a 2 wk period. They apply logic based on the actual question (queries for specific actors/titles/etc), and then based on specific words in the search. They then apply user data like location based on IP.

Kevin Ryan asks Eric Collier: So tell me… we’ve been spending years teaching people to search using caveman speak. How are we going to change the minds of people to get them to switch from the caveman speak to real language search terms?

Erik Collier responds: We’re going to start using a club and hitting them over the head. No really, because Ask.com’s history is using natural language, we feel like we have a leg up on that because we’ve always encouraged our users to ask “real questions”. We are trying to encourage them by phrasing the suggested query refinements in natural language as well.

Kartal Guner, Chief architect, Hakia.com

Semantic technology embodies cognitive knowledge and operates on concept relations. It paves the way to text-menaing-representation and conversational aptitude. Challenges:

• Know-how
• Time constraints/sclability

Current web search suffers from the limitations of statistical methods operating on keywords:

• Dependence on link referrals, behavior tracking, corpus selection, etc.
• Long tail phenomena
• May be vulnerable to external manipulation (miserable failure)

Semantic Search Operations at Hakia:

• Generalization-Specialization
• Parallelization (equivalent meanings)
• Question type detection and relevance – we’ve broken the standards in about 50 different types.
• Categorization
• Compression
• Content characterization (Qdexing)
• Disambiguation (applies to all of the above)

All of these capabilities allow search forms of higher refinement and human interactivity – conversational search (the user asks questions, the search engine asks questions back to help further refine the query).

Their goals are to provide higher relevance for searchers, the freedom to search in natural language and a new search experience – going beyond 10 blue links, coherent text, focused sentence and referenced links.

For advertisers, there’s a higher relevance and better targeting. For SEOs, the goal is to allow them to focus on content rather than keywords.

Scott Prevost, Powerset, General Manager and Director of Product

What we’ve heard from most of the speakers is that semantic search is about structured data, and really most of the data on the web today is still unstructured. So Powerset provides structure to that content.

Keyword techniques involve shallow representations of document meaning and user intent. Powerset believes that better relevance can be achieved through improved models of the meaning of documents and queries.

Their “Vision for Search” is two pronged, the first is improving search relevance by applying deep natural language processing to extract semantic features from text and encode them in the index, they also extract semantic features from the queries themselves and then retrieving and ranking documents based on the semantic keywords and other features. The second prong is to improve the user experience.

The semantic impact on relevance is improving recall through word and phrase variations (synonyms, hypernyms and anaphors) and improving precision through linguistic structure and content.

The impact on the user experience includes allowing more natural and flexible querying – regardless of whether you’re searching using keywords, topics, phrases, full questions. Powerset also highlights the relevant part of the results for the user.

Live blogging provided by Cshel.

Moderator: Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:

Dhana Pawar, Co-Founder & VP Products, Yojo Mobile
Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.
Brian Wool, VP of Content Distribution, Localeze

The "one web" premise of the iPhone generation of connected devices offers a strak contrast to the former mobile standard, in which webmasters create separate a '.mobi' site, specifically targeted for mobile users.

First Speaker: Donna Pawar

.Mobi is an alternative domain name extension, like .com, .net or .org and was intended to be used exclusively for websites catering to mobile devices. Having a special domain extension exclusively for mobile devices is not really needed anymore given today’s next generation devices like the iPhone and sophisticated browsers like Skyfire which features built-in Flash and Safari.

Some stats about mobile web browsing:

84.8% of the iPhone users and 58.2% of total smart phone users access news and information from the hand-held device.
58.6% of iPhone users and 37% of smart phone users visited a search engine on their phones.
30.9% of iPhone users have tuned into mobile TV or a video clip from their phone.
74.1% of iPhone users and 27.9% of smart phone users listen to music on their mobile devices (Source: mMetrics)
Nielsen mobile recently proclaimed that the mobile internet had reached “critical mass” w/ more than 40 million users today.
Case Study: MizPee

MizPee.com is a cell phone and web based service which helps you find the nearest clean toilet based on the address you enter. MizPee uses the same URL regardless of whether you come in from a web browser or a mobile browser.

Using a simple servlet (3 lines of Java code) and optimizing the mobile pages for the smaller devices, they direct visitors to the right “version” of the site based on the type of device they came in on… but users still only had to remember the same URL.

Carolyn’s note: Because consumers are so programmed to think “.com” in regards to anything internet related, it eases the burden on the marketing budget to retrain consumers to remember a different gTLD.

How did they SEO MizPee.com? MizPee.com was search engine optimized through “normal” SEO best practices.

Think like a spider.
Use a “normal” gTLD.
Use Title Tags
They provide search engines with a guide to your on page content
They need to be 63 characters or less.
Use Alt Tags
Other ways to promote your mobile site:

Widgets so users can share with friends
Run contests and polls
Advertise and Linking -- Establish beneficial partnerships with other sites
Second Speaker: Cindy Krum -- "4 Mobile Site Architecture Options"

Why should you care about mobile search engine results?

Mobile is important.
Mass mobile convergence in terms of apps, functionality. Phones are expected to do much more than just place/take calls.
It’s the most personal marketing medium ever. It knows where you are, who you talk to, what you look for, etc.
There are more interactive marketing possibilities.
It’s on you at all times.
Mobile is Different

Mobile bots – they evaluate your site based on how it will look on a mobile device.
Algorithms
Smaller screen
Simplified reading
More sophisticated searchers – mobile searchers use much longer search phrases because they’re trying to be more specific and get exactly the info they want on the first try.
Immediate intent
Why Now?

Real mobile web browsing (iPhone) – ppl turn over their cell phones every 2 years, so the number of people gaining access to the better web experience on their phones is increasing quickly.

Flat rate Data Pricing
Faster download speeds
More processing power
US Adoption has hit critical mass* (Nielson)
Why is .mobi less than ideal?

Bad for SEO (Mobile and Traditional)
Splits traffic, you have to duplicate effort.
Splits links
Splits Index size
Doesn’t benefit from history
Risks Duplicate content
Confusing for Users
There's no preferrence for it in Mobile search engines
No unique assets or features
Best Practices

Use basic/usual SEO Best Practices
Blended Search Best Practices
Local Search Best Practices – mobile search tries harder to anticipate what the user is looking for… acts more like a portal. Local search is more heavily emphasized.
Mobile search engine submission
Do mobile research
Understand predicative text – if you understand what words phones will suggest based on the first couple characters users enter… optimize for those words because ppl are lazy
Transcoding Analysis – google.com/gwt/n
Emultation and Testing – test your site on a variety of emulators and also test it on real handsets since sometimes things are lost in the emulation.
Traditional + mobile analytics – sometimes java isnt’ executed so you’d be missing capturing traffic information that relates specifically to mobile browsers.
Adhere to accessibility standards
Use external CSS
4 Architecture Options

1. Do nothing – if you site renders “well enough” and are ppl using yoru site when they’re mobile anyway?

Evaluate your web site. Does it look okay transcoded? Does it look okay without transcoding? Does it look good on a true browsing phone? On a mobile browsing phone? If the answer to those questions is "Yes" or "Looks good enough", then you don't have to do anything at all.

The advantages of doing nothing? It’s easy, cheap and you can say you're mobile compatible and appear "forward thinking".

Are there disadvantages to doing nothing? Transcoding only works when people get to your site via search, so if you're relying 100% on transcoding, you might have some users who aren't able to fully enjoy browsing your site on their handheld devices. Plus, urls get modified when transcoded, so bookmarking the pages is hard for the user to do easily, plus your site gets no credit for inbound links that reference the transcoded links because they route through the search engine (so ultimately the engine gets the credit for the link, not your site.). And finally, the mobile user experience is hard to control

If that's all okay with you, then go ahead and do nothing.

2. Mobile Only Pages (tiny pages for tiny screens)

Set up a subdomain just for mobile – something like m.domain.com; wap.domain.com, etc. and then duplicate your existing site on the subdomain, but tweaked specifically for the smaller format of handheld devices.

Advantages to this method? Just update your existing code. Adjust the level of content so it’s easier to read on small screens/on the go.

Disadvantages? Your traditional homepage still has to work on mobile, so it's not 100% the answer to the problem. Also, it’s an extra click from the homepage to get to the mobile exclusive content. This method also means that you have to duplicate all of your efforts -- anything you do on the "main" site you also have to do on the mobile site.

3. Mobile and Traditional Hybrid Places – Multiple CSS for ‘screen’ vs ‘handheld’

This method lets you have the exact same content but just provide different rendering instructions to the browser based on the type of device. By providing a "handheld" version of your stylesheet, you can rearrange the divs and structure the content to render in a format better suited for the narrow format of smaller screens.

Advantages? Just add new stylesheet, use the same content. No risk of duplicate content. The CSS only has to download once. Can be device specific.

Disadvantages? Not 100% reliable. Some phones won’t pull the right stylesheet (like the iPhone) and if you’re not already using CSS it’s a pain to implement.

4. Dynamic Mobile Pages

If you have a lot of money and a great coder/programmer, you can have your mobile content generated from a database on the fly based on the exact type of device (make/model/OS) that the user is on.

Advantages? Device specific experience, good for SEO if ModRewrite is used, DB is cheap or free, and you get greater insight about your users.

Disadvantages? You constantly have to update your database when new software is released or new makes/models of devices are introduced, otherwise you risk missing someone. This option is also difficult to implement and can be cost prohibitive for many businesses.

Speaker 3: Brian Wool

There are 225 million mobile subscribers, but there are only 191 million Computer/desktop internet users. With the continuing improvement of web browsing on handheld devices, it is possible that there will soon be more people searching the web via handheld devices than on traditional computers.

Primary uses for Mobile Internet

Email
Weather
IM
Maps/Driving Directions
News
Local Search
Sports
Quick facts about Small and Medium-sized Businesses

90% of business are small business and the majority of advertising dollars across most channels come from this segment.
90% of the $15B print YP adverstising comes from the SMB segment.
About 50% of SMBs have a website.
Less than 0.01% of SMBs have invested in a .mobi website.
It’s the App, it’s not the Web Site

60 million iPhone Apps have been downloaded.
The local search providers have all made iPhone apps, so users are using the apps and not going out to actual websites.
Mobile search is much more verticalized than traditional search, so the value of the Local Apps is in their ability to deliver very specific, targeted content to the end users.
Points to remember from this session:

Cindy Krum: The trend we’re seeing is that the SE users use on their “real” computer is the one they tend to use on their mobile devices. So in general, when you’re optimizing for your traffic, it’s fairly safe to assume that if the majority of your visitors are finding you on Google, then that will translate to mobile.

Brian Wool: The reason I mentioned Google a lot is primarily because the Google Maps iPhone app comes pre-installed on the iPhone, so ever iPhone users has access to it.

Cindy Krum: Do keep an eye on the other SEs because they’re entering into carrier specific agreements to be featured/pre-installed on devices.

Rebecca Lieb: Mobile likes small, dumb, ugly pages.

Brian Wool: Mobile search makes the most sense for restaurants, places that sell things, etc. Stores that would benefit from being able to reach users when the user is actually looking for a product or service *right then* -- tow trucks, restaurants, physical/brick-n-mortar stores, etc.

Live blogging provided by Cshel.

In a world dominated by behemoths like bud.tv, MySpace, and YouTube, how do mid-sized and smaller companies break through to generate online destinations that create buzz, encourage word of mouth and establish relationships with potential buyers? This session unveils the secrets of Web 2.0 techniques and technologies that enable companies to stand out and be talked about.
Moderator:
Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media
Speakers:
Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
Fionn Downhill, CEO & President, Elixir Interactive
Justilien Gaspard, Search Engine Watch Expert & Search Marketing Consultant, Justilien.com
Chris Winfield, President, 10e20, LLC

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Andrew Goodman polls how many are first timers. A good number of hands are raised.
Economics of marketing work a lot better when people are talking about you. Lots of tactics and issues to considered.

Chris Winfield of 10e20, takes the floor.

Polls if people like polls. Lots of laughs. Curious about this.

What is viral marketing and social media? What types of things work, and what typically goes viral.

Viral marketing: The spread of information quickly. At it's essence, word of mouth marketing online. Supercharged. The web allows things to move quickly.

What is social media? In short - a giant conversation online. So many different avenues, networks - places for people to talk online.

Who has a company blog, who has a personal blog? Makes a few jokes, lots of laughs.

Blogs and microblogs: check out Technorati directory. Blogs are highly consumable. Easy for people to read and they get it. People are used to it. Good place to put message. Allows comments, discussion, linking. On the other side, you want bloggers to link to you and talk about your stuff. You have to look at it from both ways.

Social networking: Ask most people - they will say Facebook and Myspace. Just one component. These are the big ones. There are more niche ones - like myartspace.com which is for artists that share a common interests. Look and see beyond the big ones - look at the ones in your niche - the ones you should build a presence on.

Online video: More than uploading and telling friends. A place where people can comment and respond. A quick way to spread message. A good video like Chris Crocker spread easily. Youtube makes it easy for people to link directly.

Forums and groups: Often most overlooked. Forums are most powerful for him. Strong and passionate communities. One key take away regarding forums is a site called Bigboards.com which ranks forum sizes. The biggest ones are niche - Paintball, Volkswagens, Bodybuilding. Look at the forums in your niche and build a presence. Get involved. Talk to people. Look at logs of a viral campaign to see the forum activity.

Social news and bookmarking: The big guys are Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. More than just bookmarking. It's about allowing people to see what your interested in. With Digg there is a large barrier to entry because its competitive. In any niche, there's a social news site for you.

If your content gets to the top of Mount Digg, it will result in millions of viewers. The traffic is good. But most important is how it influences other sites. Bloggers need Digg and social network to find content and information. Gets popular and people bookmark it, IM, email it. Reporters also use these sites to find content. It's a way to get people who know nothing about you to find out about your company.
Lots of eyeballs and info spread.

What is good content that goes viral?
Lists - Lists work. Shows 10 commandments which started the trend :).
How To's - People love how to's. "how to tip like a gentlemen", etc.
Surveys - "top 25 geek colleges". Don't have to interview thousands of people to get this content.
Comprehensive - Something that's comprehensive, that will be a strong resource - that a .gov will want to link to.
Strong opinions - It can backfire - if it's controversial it can go viral bot not in the best way.
Best of lists - People love best ofs. Best of the Beatles. They love it.
Calculators, tools, anything that helps people do something better. Great ways to get people excited about your stuff.
Video: Must be interesting and makes people go "wow". Will it blend is the classic example of a boring product made interesting in a video.
Widgets - great for people to put things on their site and builds links.
Quizzes, badges - makes people put them on their site or pages, and spreads.
Ending tips:
Have clear goals and objectives. Lots of people come to Chris asking to do something on Facebook - but why? What's the goal?
Promote great content. Don't do something half ass. Do something great - take extra time.
Contribute to communities. Find the right communities that make sense to you. Build relationships on these sites. Give back. Make the sites work better.

Next up is Justillien Gaspard.

Today's topic will be igniting viral marketing with people of influences. The PR folks, the customers, etc.

Important to define objectives. Most viral campaigns aren't massive. Just like real viruses. They can be small but have an impact. The goal might be to brand or promote a product launch.

People of influence are experts, journalists, or top bloggers - these people have the power to promote. People tend to support things from people they trust. Most news organizations recycle news. Take advantage of this.

The approach - You can launch and then contact these people of influence. Develop relationship ahead of time, this way they are more likely to help you. Lets say you want to target a specific blogger. Send them leads, tips, content - then down the road, bring them on board for consulting. They will be more likely to respond vs. a random email.

Cartoonists - you can hire a college student, outsource.

Bloggers - have you blogger come up with something creative or hire a guest blogger with a following - give a financial incentive. It will cost you but may be well worth it. If you have a startup it can put you on the map. Can get their followers to follow you. Not just A list bloggers. Every industry has their own.

Contests - can have them regularly, and promote them internally. Or can recruit judges of influence.

Interviews - make it easy as possible on the interviewer. Get a list of contacts to spread it. Really want to find out who they know to promote them.

Research - if you are small on a tight budget - chambers of commerce, local mayors office, college group.

Find brand advocates - forums, blogs, social media, own customer list, sales newsletters, blogs - create relationships. Get them behind your brand. Give them incentive. Discounts, upgrades, etc.

Recruiting influencers can be difficult. Approach from a sales point of view. Get past the gate keeper. Attend conferences is a great way to establish face to face. Better than cold calling.

Want to target a blogger? Buy advertising space. Easier to get them on the phone.

Hire consultants! Experts, bloggers, journalists, forum owners. Can use their names for media publicity.

Utilize customers to spread campaign. Look at emails, invoices, press releases. Talk to sales reps.

Brick and mortar - do cross promotions. Find points of contact.

Many other ways to spread the buzz - individualized. Sponsorships, PPC, PR agencies, releases, newspaper ads, even fliers in a local market!

In sum, find people of influence before launch, engage customers, promote the buzz.

Check out Justillien's column on Search Engine Watch.

Next up is Fionn Downhill from Elixir Interactive from Scottsdale.

Shares some stats. A survey from Nielson shows that recommendations from consumers are most powerful. On the web, this translates into thousands of people.

Case study - Starbucks announced closure of stores. Stock price dipped. At the same time there was a huge spike in the blogosphere regarding Starbucks.

More stats. 7/10 Americans use the net for news. If your in that space, you have a huge opportunity. 97% of journalists go online to find stories on the web. 79% find stories on the news wires.

Budget - how many people have a viral marketing budget? Not too many. This is a definite issue.

Myth - Web 2.0 and viral marketing costs a fortune. Her success writing a white paper got an interview in the Washington Post and Computer Weekly. Took time and approach, but not much cost involved.

Basic elements - free is really good. Like a white paper. Give away expertise.

Make it easy for your content to spread and share.

Make sure it scales easily from small to large. Don't crash your server! Use Youtube to host your content if need be.

Social media takes advantage of common motivations and behaviors. People are generally social.

Utilize existing communication networks like the news wires such as PR Web. Can put news or podcast or video on there. Take advantage of these resources.

The key is great quality content! There many different strategies. Great tip is adding an RSS feed.

To blog or not to blog? Need a strategy. Who is going to say it? How often? Need a plan. Don't start a "me too" blog.

Basic techniques: Forward to friend, bookmark features, etc. "Addthis.com" is a great tool to enable sharing.

Youtube - Setup your own branded channel - create simple videos that are fun and quirky. Tell your clients and friends. Optimize your channel. Link from your website. Get a Flip Video Camera!

Tubemogul is a free service that distributes your videos across the major channels. Can check the stats and pull reports.

Measuring success - links - we know are gold for organic rankings. Has a client called Tennis Channel. Are in top 10 for Tennis, all from the links from viral videos.

Make sure you have plan to create the right connections.

Thank you!

Jennifer Laycock is up next from Search Engine Guide

How to create ideas that spread. How do you do this yourself? The big challenge is coming up with the ideas. We can look at what's worked, but many successes don't tie back to your business. There are different ways to approach this. The Coke and Mentos case doesn't get you to consume more of those products.

3 Rules:
1) Thou shall know thy customer - find out what customers are looking for.
2) Thou shall be remarkable - about doing something different from what you've done before. Zappos is great at this. A campaign called "I heart Zappos". They are committed to customer service. Zappos had helped an ill customer by sending the post office to pick up the return, as well as sending a florist with a get well message. Went viral.
3) Thou shall try, try, again - most efforts don't take off. Every try improves your chances.

Brainstorming the ideas:

Need to ask - what do customers love about you? In Jeniffer's case, small businesses like her because she has a small business. What do customers not like about you? Whats your biggest challenge? Address a problem like customer service.

What sparks online conversation? Must be part of the conversation - important to be in the forums and social networks.

Can you do something outrageous like the Coke and Mentos and Will It Blend? Gets the marketing message across. Can you do something funny? Funny sells. Scary also tends to go viral.

Tie into holidays or events like the Olympics. Technorati has a cool chart that shows blog activity, with spikes. Great see what getting people to talk to put the news spin.

Can you get the mostest of something? Biggest this, etc.

What do you want people to say about your company? Can you get people to address this?

Create or embrace controversy? Can be dangerous.

Underdog stories.

Look at your analytics. See what sends people to your site. Not just traffic but engagement. How long are they spending on the site.

What motivates customers? Price? Service?

Look at capabilities. Look at your budgets and limitations. Can you create and edit videos? Can you create and edit Flash games? Can you create and edit widgets? Do you have a skilled writer? Do you have a skilled researcher? Humorist? Do you have an email list or can you buy one? Can you partner with a non-profit?

Understanding campaign costs. If something is free, must know ROI is sustainable. Starbucks got in trouble by cancelling a free offer that went out of control. A competitor took advantage of that. Know your break even points.

Can you do this in house, or do you need to outsource this? Bring all this together to know your starting point.

Make it easy for people to spread content. Establish relationships. Need to be involved in the community. That is key. You lose that credibility of the pitch if you've never been heard of before.

Before pitching - aim for at least half of these:
1) Read at least 5 posts on their site.
2) Comment on one or two existing posts.
3) Write at least two sentences that are unique to the person pitching. Needs to be personal.
4) Have at least one other person read the email before you sending it.
5) Contact the blogger to share feedback before the pitch.
6) Keep track of which sites you pitch. Can get tough to manage a big campaign.

Must do's before pitching:
1) Make sure your pitch addresses the person by NAME. Simple but few do it.
2) Make sure you have the right email address. Don't send to webmaster@domain.com unless you are looking for the right email.
3) No mass emails! People will know.
4) Be transparent. Let them know who you work for.
5) Spell check your message.
6) Familiarize yourself with their readers. Read the comments.
7) Ask yourself in all honesty if the pitch is really relevant to readers.
8) Check to see if they have a policy about accepting pitches.
9) If you pitch multiple writers at the site, let them know in the text of the email.

You can email Jeniffer for the tips list in PDF format.

That is all. Thank you.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Non-Profits & Socially-Responsible Companies With Global Interests in a 2.0 World

The Web has changed how we do everything, including giving back to our fellow man. What does the nonprofit world look like in the Web 2.0 world? Technology has grown by leaps and bounds since the dawn of the Internet as a communication vehicle. It has changed the ways we give back and communicate with our constituents, and new platforms support entire communities. Learn from experts about the latest developments in community and technology for the non-profit sector.

Moderator:
Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek

Speakers:
Jamie Welsh, Founder & CEO, 10% Solution
Xavier Helgesen, Co-founder, Better World Books
? from Better World Books

Better World Books (BWB) is the first speaker. From their website: Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than two million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.

They started selling books via multiple sites, and now have their own website as well. They want to create a brand where people can vote with their dollars, support literacy with their purchase, and support the environment, as they use carbon-neutral shipping. Their proceeds go to support literacy. They have a group on Facebook, they sell excess books for libraries and help them raise money.

Jamie Welsh from 10% Solution is up next. They help companies become more socially responsible.
We 2.0 = Total transparency = Putting your money where your mouth is before you open it. They help organizations figure out how to effectively work in a 2.0 world. 2.0 has changed a lot of things and the way things are done, and their company wants to help people to use them in the proper way.

What not to do. She first talks about “greenwashing” and “givingwashing”. Companies need to use transparency and truth. Givingwashing example of someone donating $25,000 to Katrina victims, then spending $100,000 making sure everyone knew about the donation. You need to make sure that your external message matches up with what your company actually does internally.

What to do?

Figure out who. Who is going to make a difference? Who can help? Break down silos, make sure it isn’t just a couple of people doing something, but organized for whole company.

You can bring in an outside company such as hers, or other companies (missed company names here). The companies can help you get your social responsibility set up.

Do a test drive. Don’t just do a Facebook app, but check with outside people and inside people, see if it will be something you actually use.

Look at the tools available, such as Flickr, Facebook, etc. (missed rest).

Fifth step: stand back, and get ready for feedback. It is a two way channel. You need to be ready for the feedback, it isn’t just a one-way communication.

Q&A

How hard is it to sell companies on the “why”? How do you make the case with the current economy? She has found little impact due to the recession with the organizations they work with. She suggests looking at latest issue of Fast Company, as there’s a good article about Clorox and Sierra Club and their environmental campaign. People are understanding that even though we’re in a recession, they still need to get involved with this, that this is the direction that everyone is going.

To BWB: how do you mange being a company yet still have a focus on the non-profit aspect of things? Missed all of answer, but need to keep

Jamie:Gen y is coming in and asking about social responsibility. In an interview, you need to be able to answer to job candidate that yes, you are socially responsible, and be able to show it. Again, transparency is a key.

What are the three things that holds most companies back from embracing this? Amount of work involved, amount of work involved, and amount of work involved. The companies do manage to overcome hurdles once they do decide to do this. You need to convince the companies of why they will love it once this is done. They may be reluctant to start, but are grateful by the end of things.

Xavier: It really helps to have a cause that makes sense. With the books, it made a lot of sense to support literacy, as opposed to something like the Humane Society. For Google, with the majority of their money coming from ads, it make sense to give away some of their ads (via the Google Grants program) for non-profits.

It is easier to be socially responsible today than it was twenty years ago. Companies are now being recognized for this, consumers are taking social responsibility into account in their purchases, and employees when they select an employer.

Jamie: You need to look at what’s the best fit for your company. Get a plan for what you’re doing, don’t just choose an idea that you can throw money at. Need to be part of the business plans, how to incorporate it into a sustainable business and branding. There may be hard parts in the evolution of how things work, especially between big and small organizations. Example of small organic farmers and companies like Costco selling organic products under their own name.

How do your differentiate yourself when everyone is saying they’re socially responsible? Better World Books has partnered with another company to make sure they do this. Rewrote bylaws to make sure that they are accountable to their mission and not just shareholder value.

Today things are being blended. It’s not just 100% pure donations to a non-profit, or 100% for-profit. How do you be both socially responsible and make a profit? There is at least one fund that helps support this type of company that gives a social return as well as economic return. It can be hard to measure the social benefit of what you are doing. Carbon offsets are one thing that is easier to quantify and measure. Jamie also talks about benchmarks and the ROI that you can attribute to your social good. This is a challenge right now in this space.

Jamie suggested looking at REI. They’re a non-profit, yet look like a “real company.”

Question for BWB: Audience member bought a book for four dollars with free shipping, she asked how the company could make money. Those books are low margin, but orders usually have multiple books and larger dollar amounts for orders.

Another audience member asked how to compete with places like Amazon that are huge and have lots of marketing budget. BWB can get to smaller markets that are not as viable for Amazon, such as shipping English books to Germany at a low cost.

Live coverage of this session is provided by Keri Morgret. Please excuse any typos and grammar errors on our live coverage notes.

For marketers to become successful in their SEM efforts, PPC can no longer stand for "Pay Per Click" — it must stand for "Pay Per Conversation." Many marketers agree that the current state of the economy is having an impact on their marketing plans. That's why every dollar and click matters. Every click is a potential customer trying to engage you; will you continue the dialog or have them bounce off your landing page just moments after they arrive? What you want to do is engage and persuade your visitors to keep taking the next click, all the way through the purchase funnel. To achieve that, you must demonstrate the value of your products and services in all your marketing, especially when sales are decreasing. You do that by planning content to improve relevance and test continuously until you have the best conversation. This session will show you how to identify missed conversations and what you can do to improve them and your PPC ROI.

Introduction by:
• Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink
Speakers:
• Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder, Future Now Inc.
• Brett Crosby, Group Manager, Google

Bryan: Pay per conversation, how did we come up with that…

When you think about search engine strategies, you think of PPC and organic. I don’t think PPC should stand for pay per click, it should stand for pay per conversation. The purpose is not the clicks, but rather the goal is to turn them into business. We are also going to change SEO to searcher experience optimization, rather than search engine optimization so the searcher has the best experience leading them to convert.

What matters in terms of getting the sales is communication. The biggest challenge is that 53% of people’s budgets are focused on just driving traffic – not doing anything except for getting people to the site.

There is a huge discrepancy of driving traffic vs. analytics, testing, etc. the budgets are almost none, so people are not getting the returns they are expecting. Think about your typical customer. I think of them as toddlers with money. What do toddlers always ask…why? Your customer does not have as much patience. We are going to address the issue of why conversations are failing. It’s because users don’t have confidence. So getting through trust is a big thing. The second thing is relevance. People will look for something very distinct – if we don’t give it to them the second they want it, they leave the site.

10% of traffic drops off after the first click to your site. OK, that’s untargeted. But 55% drop off after the second click! Something is wrong – the user got distracted, lost confidence, lost relevance, lost the scent. This has not changed since the early to mid 1990’s! So we must focus on scent. Jakob Nielsen has said that people are so goal oriented that they ignore everything except what they are looking for – so that’s what costs you money.

Example: “pink roses” – the first site landing page shows red roses! So the searcher leaves. The second and third ones – also no pink roses! So I finally go to the fourth ad – and there are finally pink roses. So the first 3 out of 4 failed. People are missing the basic point of conversions. They are missing the landing pages. 67% of customers leave your site because the site does not provide enough information. Two-thirds! It’s because we are not continuing the conversation, and just burning the money.

Marketing is about understanding people’s needs. So we must re-think the conversation, the path of conversion. Different people come in with different needs. Our job is to figure out what needs to be in that conversation in the moment they come to you. Start thinking about optimization in a conversion point of view.

Brett will shed some more light now. Brett is one of the founders of Urchin, and will walk you through what you will need to be looking at to improve relevance and find opportunities.

Brett Crosby, Google: It all sounds easy with Analytics, but where do you start? Everyone should always be testing. But you need to start with the idea of a scent, and grow from there. Let’s take a look.

Focus on the high traffic areas with big revenue potentials: landing pages, site overall, internal site search pages, and leaky funnels.

How do you know if the page is actually broken, or the keywords?

I want to start with my own metaphor: Here is a map of San Jose. We just hired you to minimize traffic accidents in San Jose. What will you do first? Look for: where is most of the traffic? Where are the most accidents occurring? Do we have wrong or no street signs? Seasonality issues like rain or snow? Timing: a convention going on at the convention center?

It also helps to know your website. Maybe you want to watch a friend click on your ad and navigate through your site.

I know from experience that when you start going into the reports, the data is overwhelming. We redesigned Analytics about a year and a half ago to make viewing the data easier. We want the new interface to prompt you to ask questions about your data.

(Analytics screenshot) Look across the top at the traffic over time for the date range you’ve selected. Do you know what bounce rate is? It’s when people leave right after coming to your website. Below that, we tell you geographically where people come from, and then virtually where people come from. On the left side nav, we start with the visitors, the content, the goals, then the e-commerce. Understanding that mental model and applying it can really help.

The most relevant part of our reports is in the content section. Any one of those sections will have great data for you to look at. Number of entrances and landing pages, bounces and bounce rate. Bounce rates are a big opportunity.

Next is funnel reports, one of my favorites, do you know about this? People can enter through the center or side of funnels and you want to look at where people are leaving the funnels, the leaky pages. It is valuable to know something about your site. Where people are exiting is a great place to start.

Then I will take a look at site overlays, where people are clicking, converting, buying. It’s very useful. Just looking at this you can come up with some great ideas. Maybe switch placements of products on the page. It will give you some ideas.

Internal site search: basically, if you have a search box on your website, are people using search within your website? We have a whole section of reports on site search. Where did visitors start their searches and which page did visitors find?

Back to the question: how do you know if it’s the ad or the page?

We have Analytics pages on landing page optimizations: shows keywords and entrances. You select “non-paid” keywords, and take a look at the bounce rates. Now let’s take a look to see if the page is the problem. Select “paid” keywords, and it tells you 0% bounce rate! So that means it’s not the ad copy that needs rewriting, it’s the page that needs attention.

One practical tip: I’ve worked in small and big companies; sometimes in a small company you can go to the main point of the website. But in a big company you sometimes need some consensus building: I believe in something but need my boss to believe in it. So start small, focus on improving one area of the site.

Bryan is going to speak now, if you have any questions come by our booth.

Bryan: So how does testing work? It’s super simple. Now that you have these reports, what do you do? I am a big fan of Google Analytics – because it’s free – and you get great stuff from it, and maybe you decide to pay for a product later on. Anyway, the basic concept is, let’s take all the traffic coming in to your page and split it among the different sections of the page. Take a script at the top of the page, track at the bottom of the page, and track your goal page.

Every single hyperlink out there is a contract between you and your visitor. Different people might type in the same keyword but have a different intent. Web analytics measures these things. Some people will get rid of the keyword, say the keyword didn’t convert. But it’s not the keyword – you need to understand the intent behind that keyword.

Take a look at big retailers and how they are selling digital cameras – by brand, megapixels, features. They have been selling cameras the same way for many years. What about by shuttle refresh rate? What people are actually frustrated about with the camera? No one mentions that a specific model is the fastest, takes 5 pictures in 5 seconds!

There is a great plugin for Firefox that pulls the reviews – but nowhere in the ad copy does it talk about I the topics that people are mentioning in their reviews! If this is what matters, why aren’t retailers putting it up front!!!!

How people gather information and how they make decisions: this is what it’s important in marketing. Take a look at these ads (projector), which is more logical/methodical and which is more emotional. People act differently with your content! Some look straight at the image and leave. Others look at the content. You don’t need to be an expert in personality types to understand this. Jakob Nielsen says there are 4 types of eye tracking when people come to your site. Spontaneous, humanistic, methodological, competitive (people coming in quickly and leaving quickly if they don’t see what they want). So, now that you know that different people act differently, how can use it to optimize your page?

Start simple. The analytics says that 90% of people who came to this page bounced. Let’s look at the personality types and think about what they would want to see on the page. You need to appeal to them. Every day that hole is not fixed in your site cost you money. Go through every page and make sure the pages appeal to all personality types.

Also look at reviews and see what people saying about the product: the way it looks and feels (emotional) vs. the functionality and practicality (methodological) and you can adjust the product copy accordingly. Use their voice to give back to them. Use the voice of customers and integrate into product descriptions.

Using product images – also applies to videos, not everyone will respond to videos – 24% of photos in a study did not allow the customer to enlarge a product image, and 65% did not offer multiple views of a product! That will have an impact on the consumer.

Some sites focus on the glitz and glamour, that they miss the basics.

Let’s talk about credibility issues: some examples – who are you? People care about the “About Us” page, it will establish some of the confidence. Contact information – have it! Put the contact info in various places, it will inspire more confidence and legitimateness. Does your site look professional? Even if you are not a design person, you can tell. Other examples of breaking confidence: small font type in gray! Be conscious of these things.

What can you add in to build confidence? Point of action assurances: We value your privacy. How long it will take for a customer service rep to contact someone who fills out a form. Return policies, guarantees. Make sure it’s all there for the consumer.

Other points: 59% of sites in a study did not provide shipping costs early in the check out process and 35% have a checkout process with more than 4 steps! 41% do not provide assurance points in the checkout process. Many sites do not offer in stock availability. Make sure you offer estimated delivery date, etc.

Others credibility points to add to your site: certifications, awards, other review sites that look your site.

Testimonials can also be very effective, but also can have no impact on you. Look at different styles and see what works best for you.

What kind of financial impact can this have on you? You can double your sales just by adding policies.

Contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Search marketing is the largest online ad format. Paid search not only accounts for nearly 45% of the global online ad spend, but it is also one of the fastest growing online ad formats. The panel will focus on the broad trends in search marketing, such as growth drivers, core search vs. vertical search, search spending and CPC trends in general and by verticals, search penetration in the U.S. vs. international, search adoption by brand advertisers, and search vs. other online ad formats.

Moderator:
• Sandeep Aggarwal, Senior Internet Research Analyst, Collins-Stewart
Speakers:
• Heather Dougherty, Research Director Hitwise
• Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Didit
• Sean Walsh, VP, Online Marketing, LuxuryLink.com
• Jaideep Singh, CEO & Co-Founder, Spock.com
___________

Sandeep: We are the first panel in SES, the topic you will hopefully find very interesting. I am an internet analyst with Collins Stewart. I used to do strategy planning for Microsoft and Schwab.

Why is this topic important? Some industry data. This advertising industry is around $700 billion, and internet is a $45 million industry. We think it will grow over 5 times faster than advertising over the next few years.

In order to determine trends in search marketing we have some great panelists. After they introduce themselves they will chat and then take questions.

Sean Walsh will be first.

Sean: Thank you Sandeep. I am the VP of online marketing for luxurylink.com, essentially an online luxury travel marketplace. You can consider it to be a combination of Priceline and Ebay for luxury travel. I have run some large and small paid search campaigns, and have been involved in product strategy and web development for many years before that. I originally started in aerospace engineering and found my way here. I’d like to spend a few minutes to take you far afield from what you will be hearing over the next few days.

Over the past few years the shift from offline to online advertising has fueled many businesses. There are a few countertrends though that may be cause for concern – the health of the American economy and the American consumer. Here are some data points. I encourage you to point out what could be some of the holes in my argument, ask questions and please approach me after the session.
A few data points on the travel industry, pulled from Google Insights, a relatively new tool. It’s one data point, but indicative of what’s been happening. This is the trend of the search query for “vacation” over the past few years. We are down now, there is certainly a decline. That is happening in the context of the indication of some of the vacancies in hotels, Phoenix and Nashville and Chicago have some of the highest vacancies. Some cities are benefiting from the weakness of the U.S. dollar such as New York and Las Vegas; but U.S. hotels are struggling though overall right now and have hard times ahead. That comes amid a great increase in the investment in hotels around the U.S. If you look at the trend line you can see that hotel investment, over the last few years, has doubled. Why has it increased so much when residential real estate has been dropping? Commercial projects take longer so it will take a while to see the downtrend.

It makes me wonder how anyone can consider “inflation contained”