Search Engine Roundtable

SEO Through Blogs & Feeds

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T15:22:03-05:00

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.

Ads in a Quality Score World

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T14:58:20-05:00

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.

Social Media Marketing: What is it and What is it Good For?

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T14:56:55-05:00

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.

Getting Vertical Search Right

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T14:55:48-05:00

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

- 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

Domain Quality, Length, and Memorability Matter

Tamar Weinberg — 2008-08-20T09:49:57-05:00

Daniel Scocco has written a really great blog post at Daily Blog Tips of the importance of domain names--that length and quality do matter. After looking at the Alexa top 250 sites (and the "last 250 sites on the front page of Digg," he concludes that good domain names are vital in the long term success of the site:

All other things being equal (e.g., marketing budget, content quality, design, affiliation with larger websites and so on), a website with a good domain name will always outperform a competitor with a bad or average domain name.

The blog post is a great read, and is especially helpful on a personal note to convince a few people I know that their domain names of choice have been less than ideal.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google Enhances "404 Not Found" Experience, Creates Broken Page Experience Instead

Tamar Weinberg — 2008-08-20T09:30:17-05:00

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about new widgets that Google has created that allow you to "embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL."

At Search Engine Land, Barry illustrates how this works:

For example, I set up a page at the Search Engine Roundtable at seroundtable.com/advertize.html, notice I spelled advertise, with a "Z." Google automatically notices that I have a page at advertise.html, and offers that as an option for people to visit. Here is a screen capture:

However, if you're using a Windows computer, it seems, that advertize.html page doesn't work at all and brings up a blank page instead if you're using Internet Explorer or Firefox. (It does, however, work in Safari for Windows and apparently Opera too.)

I'm not sure if that's a coding issue or what, but I'm assuming that wasn't intentional. (Two different users have already reported this issue, and I've been able to reproduce it. Thanks, Tom!)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Tony explains the issue is due to the page not actually returning a 404 response. So it is my error and this should work fine.

Google AdWords Hides Low Volume Keywords

Tamar Weinberg — 2008-08-20T09:11:33-05:00

At Search Engine Watch, member abbotsys notices that the Quality Score for low volume keywords is good -- but if you look closely at the keyword analysis, the ad isn't even running!

According to Google, those ads are not showing because nobody is searching for them:

Ad Showing - No The keyword phrase you've entered has a low search volume and isn't showing any of your ads. If more users start searching for your keyword, your ad will begin to show. You don't need to do anything

Should Google be doing this? Forum member Gooner151078 says that "In my mind, you as an advertiser have the right to have your advert showing against any term, regardless of the volume." (But one can argue, then, that an ad with a low quality score should still be showing up!)

However, others understand (and have encountered) this issue. One says that matching terms for that keyword should be added (surrounded by quotes or brackets) and that you should keep in mind to utilize long tail keywords to create more opportunities for your advertisements to show up.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebPosition Gold To Release Fix For Ranking Report Issues Soon

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T08:33:35-05:00

I am tracking the large WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of WebPosition Gold no longer working on Google's search pages. It seems like WebPosition Gold is releasing an update today, that will address the issue that is preventing the scraping of the Google results, which stops the tool from building Google ranking reports.

WebPosition Gold employee, Scott, said in message number 3726633, yesterday:

I have an update going out today which should improve things for WP users...

That clearly implies that they have reworked the program to properly pick up the Google search result pages and document rankings again.

Member, pageoneresults, feels this fix won't last too long. He feels Google will counter WebPosition Gold's update with a slight change themselves, which may cripple the software from documenting your Google rankings.

Clearly, Google is not happy with people using these tools. But it doesn't seem to be the top concern for Google at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SES San Jose Roundtable Live Coverage Day Two Recap

rustybrick — 2008-08-20T07:44:29-05:00

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.

Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

rustybrick — 2008-08-19T20:37:34-05:00

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.

Search Advertising 101

rustybrick — 2008-08-19T20:36:25-05:00

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

Advanced B2B Marketing

Tamar Weinberg — 2008-08-19T20:04:33-05:00

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