feed hat blog

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google Inc.
Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media & Chief Strategy Officer, iProspect, Range Online Media / iProspect
David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

Hi everyone! It’s the final day of the SMX West conference and I’m leaving it all here. Blog ’til you drop, baby! There’s a good-sized crowd for today’s keynote, a roundtable convo between some heavy hitters of search.

Chris welcomes everyone. When they’ve done panels like this in the past, he’s usually saying Google, Google, Google. But in the past year we’ve seen more radical change than he’s observed in the last 15 years since he’s covered the search engines. It’s really exciting, and that’s why they’ve assembled this stellar panel.

Last year this time we were in the early stages of an economic meltdown and everyone was uncertain about how the recovery would take place and what it meant for a new industry like search marketing. So does search still have a bright future?

Dave: As a search marketer, it allowed him to show their stuff and gave them a reason to shift strategies. In his experience they were able to support business goals in a shifting landscape through search marketing. Also, he’s seen a shift back to SEO and not just in paid.

Misty: Some businesses as a whole saw pain points, but e-commerce areas performed well. In some areas, e-commerce business grew when they weren’t expecting it to. Some record-breaking months and quarters were seen thanks to search. Both customer acquisition and customer loyalty were both affected positively.

Chris: The Super Bowl is the big spend event for TV advertiser. We’ve seen several advertisers pull out of it this year. Is that a shift online?

Vanessa: With Pepsi, they decided to shift their money to social media. But what struck her when watching Super Bowl ads was that many large brands were just starting to recognize search was important. It seemed better than last year, but slowly edging up and there’s still a lot of work left for large brands.

Chris: In terms of branding, there seems to be an argument that branding and search don’t mix. Do you believe that?

Avinash: What’s great about search is that relevancy and accountability are there. Branding was a great metaphor for wanting to do something without understanding the outcome. But in search, the case is that you can use it effectively for many desired outcomes. When people say, “I want to run a branding campaign,” his first question is what do you want out of it? A one time thing, a long-term relationship, and so on. Search is an effective way to show relevance for many goals.

Chris: It seems there’s finally a good number two in Microsoft and Yahoo!

Dave: It’s a huge project and a lot of resources are being put in the partnership. The proof will be in the pudding as advertisers start to migrate. When things like this happen, he’s usually the one being the guinea pig.

Chris: There was a lot of animosity early on in the media around the partnership.

Dave: Yahoo! search and engineer resources will move to Microsoft but a lot remains to be seen. Everyone on this project understands that this is a must-work project so he thinks they’ll figure out a way to make this happen.

Chris: What’s the reaction of clients across the spectrum?

Misty: They’re excited, not only clients but also the search managers at her agency. It allows her to shift strategy, so instead of 70/20/10 it’ll be 60/40. The opportunity is big around reach and the additional volume this will bring. One question will be will Microsoft still bring us some of the highest conversion rates once Yahoo! comes in. Bing Cashback has been a big opportunity for her clients.

Avinash: Competition is a good thing. It gets people to innovate and do better and not get stale. The way each engine works and the kind of people that use each engine is very different. You should have a strategy for SEO for each engine, a portfolio strategy because you will find more customers and find your dollars more effectively.

Vanessa: She’s waiting to see how the partnership shakes out. She doesn’t know how Searchmonkey and BOSS will work when Yahoo! doesn’t have its own index. Yahoo! did have a play for innovation and for startups, so she’s reserving judgment until the partnership settles in.

Chris: Google has a culture of being open and yet opaque. With Caffeine we’ve heard it’s on one data center. What impact is the Caffeine update going to have on SEO? And is Google going to continue in it’s sprit of tools and openness?

Vanessa: Once she looked at all the changes by Google in the last year, normally she tells people not to think much about SEO besides the foundation, but now it’s really important because there have been so many changes to Google search. With Caffeine, she doesn’t think it will have an SEO impact, because there’s no rankings change, other than indirectly, for instance being able to crawl a site quickly.

Avinash: If every Googler woke up and decided they would answer questions from webmasters, he doesn’t think we’d ever be able to answer all the questions. One part of the tool strategy is trying to help people at scale and give you the transparency and info you need to make better decisions. Also, the tool strategy is to help you make better decisions with search better. He’s been “orgasmic” about the amount of data Google has made available, like Insights for Search, geo and trends organic search data all there.

Chris: There’s a little confusion of who’s doing what regarding Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Dave: Yahoo!’s committed to search, and one way is on the sales side. They’ll be managing both display and search for their network, and maintain the high-touch with big customers. A lot of smaller and self-service customers will be managed on the Microsoft side. With the platform, he thinks the goal is to make the adCenter platform the platform of choice for both Bing and Yahoo!

The question is what can we do given the data and assets we have to serve ads better for the consumer. Buying behavioral and demographic targets, there are teams focused on creating better ad products and technologies for consumers and advertisers.

Chris: People say we’re seeing social media replacing search for interactions online. What can search marketers do, not just to be social, but to anticipate what’s going to happen in the next 12 or 18 months?

Vanessa: Someone was interviewing her and said that search is old news, so why are trying to get people to optimize for search? People aren’t done searching. She doesn’t think there’s an either or thing for search and social.

Misty: She thinks social elevates the opportunity for search marketing, breaking down the boundaries between marketing departments. If she’s looking at a marketing campaign, search is being given the responsibility to drive campaigns. Lift campaigns, branding campaigns, and so on, marketers have that ability at their fingertips through social and real-time info to drive search volume.

Dave: He’s always said, sit tight, the rest of the marketing community is coming your way, search marketers. Search engines are pulling social into search, which is great. All the discipline and accountability that search has grown up with is going to be a huge advantage for companies.

Avinash: The media loves “or” stories even though we’re in an “and” world. There’s no either or, and that brings me back to my point about having a search marketing portfolio and that each channel is used for what it’s good at. You wouldn’t want to use the shouting from TV ads within a social media campaign. If you execute each strategy optimally, the bottom line impact you’ll have is much broader than you’d have imagined.

Chris: If you’re going all of sudden from mass market messaging to individual touch, how do you manage that info overload? And will we see siloing, with search absorbed in a silo of an organization?

Avinash: We put on the wrong lens when we say, “How do we make advertising more relevant?” Instead, what we do today is try to influence people, and one emerging way to influence people is to have these conversations. What is sure is shouting at people is going away. He believes the single greatest reason for Google’s success is relevance. Marketers have to accept that the way we influence people is changing, because marketers don’t decide what works, the customers do. With question two, he doesn’t see search going into a silo, because it’s used for a broad spectrum of goals.

Dave: If you look at social media managed in an organization, you see it’s the first channel that’s delivered on the promise of customer engagement. Q: Who should own social media in an organization? A: Well, who owns the paper in an organization?
That puts it succinctly. Social is breaking down the barriers because it has to be implemented across an organization.

Vanessa: With data, if all the areas of marketing can share the data there’s going to be much more understanding and it benefits them all.

Chris: What happens when unethical marketers get a hold of all that data?

Avinash: If you look at the sides of the Egyptian tombs, there are spam comments in that. Spam will continue to be a problem for a very long time. The best advertising channels can do is do what they can to suppress it and to provide incentives to doing things the right way.

Misty: There will always be spam. The trick for ethical marketers is overdoing our efforts for authenticity Consumers can sniff it out and sometimes be judged too harshly.

Dave: There’s the potential to do unethical things as well as criminal things. There’s not enough awareness and understanding of advertising mediums by the public and by the government. The risk of regulation is that there’s a big lack of understanding and it’s scary to think what regulation can do to marketing. Legislators aren’t up to speed on technologies like these.

Chris: Let’s shift to global. What’s the opportunity for search marketers? And with regulation, how do you work with restrictions and censorship of certain countries? Opportunity or keep watching?

Vanessa: You should always understand your audience. It’s not enough to just localize your content. Understanding the culture and government, you’ll see audiences are very different. I think the government stuff is a whole other issue, but start by understanding the audience.

Avinash: Search marketers outside the U.S. tend to be sophisticated marketers, though there is still a reliance on shout channels. But they’re getting up to speed fast and there’s an opportunity to come up with something very creative in the global market.

Chris: Outside the U.S. we see a big mobile internet population. Is mobile here?

Dave: It’s here but it may not be what we thought it would be. We’ve seen 20 percent smartphone penetration hit, and that could be a sign of big things.

Avinash: On vacation he was looking for something to do with the family and he picked up his Nexus phone and did a voice search. Six seconds later he had driving directions from where he was. In that six seconds the query went to the Google servers, translated the text, found what he was looking for and delivered him an answer. All that is search. It made him think that he has to rethink his search strategy for that kind of a use case, and he doesn’t think people are thinking of that as search. It’s not just a WAP version of a Web page.

Misty: When a client comes to them and says they want to optimize for mobile, she starts by asking lots of questions about the usability of a site. After that, then the client can think of advertising.

Vanessa: The ubiquity of mobile opens up the door for new search opportunities. Users don’t even know if they’re searching when they do things like Urbanspoon or Google Goggles. Most of the world has never had a smartphone before the iPhone, the first time smartphone had a mass audience. Mobile is here.

Keynote – The State Of The Search Union was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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Keynote – The State Of The Search Union

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Brian Boland, Manager, Direct Response Solutions, Facebook
Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor Inc.
Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing, Performics
Will Scott, President, Search Influence

Facebook’s Brian is starting the session. He’s going to give an overview of how Facebook ads work. About half the audience is using Facebook ads now.

Mission: Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Product vision: identity, connections and sharing

Facebook scale: Rapid growth, the top daily reach of any site, including Google and Yahoo, they’re number one in the time spent on a site.

Direct response: Standard ads

1. Standard ad
2. Standard with social
3. Event
4. Fan

Facebook Ads and Search

1. Users are at a different point in the sales funnel. Comparing a Facebook ad to a search ad and you see they’re very different. Facebook has a broader swath of users. Facebook ads will have an impact at the highest level of the funnel, demand generation, as well as the end with demand fulfillment.

2. Targeting is based on user interests, not keywords: take advantage of interests and connections. You can specify targeting for age/gender/location, authentic interests (not “keywords”, they’re changing that next week).

3. The ad environment and ad units themselves are very different.

Optimizing Facebook ads is between an art and a science. There are demographics reports that provide information about users viewing and clicking on ads. There are responder profile reports which tell you common characteristics of the users clicking on your ads.

Try it out. For new accounts or accounts created in the last 90 days, $50 coupon to test and learn with Facebook Ads. Limit 150 uses. Code: SMX50

Next Michael will talk about performance based advertising on Facebook and some applications that are being used to optimize Facebook advertising.

Performance Based Advertising

Facebook social ads are text and image based ads that appear in the right-hand rail of Facebook user’s profile pages

Bought on a CPC or CPM basis

Trigger by demographic

Benefits:

Increase brand exposure

Drive acquisitions/sales

Generate fans

Capabilities:

CPC auction-based media to target audiences on social networking sites and manage campaigns to optimal CPA, click or impression goals

They learned that Facebook is a fertile and welcoming promotional environment, with the right offers.

Case Study: Threadless

Facebook Application Development

Moxie Interactive developed an app for driving movie sales. It fetches movies or gifts your friends may like based on their profile interests. Select your Facebook friend in the “fetch” box. Users could add it to their profile. Users could share their fetch result with their network.

Benefits of a Facebook connection with your consumer:

Post ad for product 27%

Link to ad for product 37%

Purchase product 44%

Talk about product & recommend product, combined 46%

Will is next. He works with local businesses, almost all small businesses with small budgets. He’s going to compare search and Facebook ads with small budgets. He’s generally finding the same level of success on Facebook at a third of the price of the major search engines.

Display ads are earlier in the cycle. You can talk to them before users know they have a need.

Facebook Demographics

Facebook is like the third-largest country, or it rivals it in size. It’s also the third of the population with money to spend (they have computers, after all).

They’ve seen a huge savings on a cost per lead basis with Facebook. The advantages of Facebook are a lower CPC that traditional PPC, there’s great demographic targeting, and you get magazine-like editorial ads. Keyword filters allow tremendous targeting opportunities.

You can target fans of affinity groups. For instance, show ads of high-vanity product to fans of Victoria’s Secret. You can also show ads to fans of your competitor.

Facebook Advertising Benefits Summary:

• Lower cost per click
• Lower cost per conversion
• Less saturated ad inventory
• Demographic filtering
• Competitive targeting
• Customer is earlier in buying cycle

Addie takes the podium next. She loves Facebook ads:

• In January her ads were served to 57 million unique users an average of 56 times for total impressions of 3.2 billion.

• User data is accurate for the most part
• Targeting is awesome
• It’s not Google, Yahoo! or MSN and she likes competitiveness in the marketplace

Who’s Advertising on Facebook now?

• Data collectors
• Aspirational products
• Local advertisers
• At night, it’s a dating site
• Brand advertisers
• Everyday needs
• Facebook game apps

Finding Your Audience

It’s not search — it’s demand creation:

• Know your demo – gender, age
• Understand their interests – interest, education, occupation, keywords
• If they are dating and who they like to date – relationship status and interested in
• Know where they live – geo and language
• Get to know their friends – app, fan page

Testing is awesome:

• Image tests
• Headline tests
• Body text tests
• Three-factor ANOVA
• User experience testing
• Geo testing
• The list goes on!

They did a test of 6 ads for the same thing, same text, different images.

From here you can do a headline test. They saw up to 120 percent difference in unique CTR, 101 percent difference in conversion rate.

Challenges: Constantly evolving marketplace

• Changing ad policies
• New entrants
• Ad fatigue
• Audience saturation
• User behavior

How to Win:

• Get to know who you want to target
• Continually test and get better
• Get granular
• Use all the reporting Facebook gives you
• Be creative
• Stay fresh, try new things

Fears: Her mom is on Facebook. Facebook might not be that cool anymore. But she hopes it lasts because it’s a great platform and it’s getting better every day.

Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers

Today’s episode of SEM Synergy features tech news of the week, tips for brainstorming new content ideas, and an incredibly insightful sit down with accomplished Internet marketer Bryan Eisenberg.

Bryan talked about a couple of his passions on the program today, conversion optimization and copywriting, though he frequently lends his expertise elsewhere, such as in the pages of his NYT best-selling books, at conferences, and in interviews, like the one below:

In this interview, Bryan asks a question:

50 years ago let’s say you had an extra million bucks, and you had the opportunity to invest in one of two companies: GM or Toyota. Who would you have invested in 50 years ago?

Now, I love this question because from the position we’re standing in today, we know which answer is the most profitable. And yet, at the same time, we know that if we had been in that hypothetical situation, we would have made the wrong choice.

We wouldn’t have made the wrong decision due to a lack of consideration, but when it came to GM 50 years ago, all signs pointed to yes. So Bryan asks the next logical question:

What happened, what changed fundamentally? Well, it used to be that you could survive with marketing and innovation, but times have certainly changed.

Have they ever! In the last 10 years alone, the rate of progress has skyrocketed, which means either exciting or scary times for business. It’s exciting on the one hand because of the understanding that the bar may be higher but the reward is greater. On the other hand, there’s a glaring realization that if you screw it up now, everyone will be able to see the egg on your face.

So what is it that worked for Toyota so well? Bryan tells us:

But what really works so well for them, more importantly, is that after the war Edward Deming came over to them, taught them about total quality management, and taught them about the concept of kaizen, right, continuous improvement. And that’s been the fundamental thing. They didn’t worry about innovations, because innovations they can grab from other people and improve upon those.

The need for continuous improvement is magnified in today’s fast-paced world. Not only must a business keep pace with the change, but they must also continue to improve their offerings to suit the evolving needs of the consumer. And there’s really only one place to start this effort — Web analytics.

In Bruce’s annual preview of the SEO industry in the year to come, he predicts that 2010 will be the year of Web analytics. With personalization of search results and increasingly tight competition online, tracking behavior and measuring conversions will be undeniable needs as time goes on.

Don’t allow your business to be blindsided by this emerging reality. Track, test and measure for your greatest opportunity for success. Thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for illustrating the concept so beautifully, and for being our guest on the podcast today!

SEO Story Time with Bryan Eisenberg — SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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SEO Story Time with Bryan Eisenberg — SEM Synergy Extras

Happy Friday, friends! Hungry for a recap?

The week’s big news was that social search entered the mainstream. Bing, and subsequently Google, announced social search integration into their respective search engines. Bing partnered with Twitter and Facebook to serve status updates and tweets in search results, and the social search service is now up and running. Quick aside: Bing’s parent Microsoft also released the Windows 7 operating system this week.

Meanwhile Google, in a move that smacks of thunder theft, has said that its social search will launch in Labs in a few weeks. (Not content to just slap Microsoft, Google co-founder Sergey Brin managed to smack Yahoo! this week as well.)

For more on the social search features and how they may affect SEO, check out Marc Elison’s exploration of the subject on the Bruce Clay Australasia blog. [Hallo down under! --Paula]

Ice cream = Happiness

The social networks themselves also celebrated accomplishments this week as Twitter reached its five-billionth tweet and Facebook data was used to create a Gross National Happiness Index based on the sentiment expressed in users’ status updates.

In other social news, Facebook elaborated on its leaked and as-of-yet-unreleased home page design, and Twitter use is being blacklisted by some segments of Hollywood.

Now, living in L.A. you see lots of weird things. But have you ever seen a group of people break into song in the middle of a grocery story? Improve Everywhere, the infamous group of improv artists that spreads smiles in the New York City area, pulled off this very feat, with all the gape-mouthed glory you’d expect if life turned musical before your eyes.

Rumors that Google is entering the music game were all but confirmed by leaked screenshots of a new service where Google allows users to stream music through the search engine and purchase songs through iTunes and Amazon.

However, the search engine did announce new features for Google Analytics and an API for Website Optimizer. The company’s newly approved patent for “trustrank” also piqued interest in the search community.

Communities are really the lifeblood of the online world, and posted comments are like a vital sign. Outspoken Media has posted seven illnesses of a comment-less blog, and more importantly, their cures. If you should be taking advice on building blog engagement from anyone, it’s clearly The Lisa. I know I do.

Study of e-mail user demographics by RapLeaf

The findings of a RapLeaf study of 120,000 e-mail users will be revealed in a multi-part series on the consumer data company’s blog. The first part, available now, breaks down the users of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! e-mails by age and gender. The study shows that there are more male than female users of Hotmail, more female than male users of Gmail, and email users age 46 and up prefer AOL.

E-mailing and text messaging, according to a study by The Participatory Marketing Network and the Lubin School of Business’ Interactive and Direct Marketing Lab at Pace University, are the last activities that Gen Y would be willing to part with. Gen Y, those babes of the Baby Boomers, would give up the phone, TV, social networks and basically the whole rest of the Web before letting anyone pry e-mails and texts out of their hipster hands.

SEO vlogger Neal Rodriguez published his interviews with Bruce and me from SMX East earlier this month. Bruce talks about the coming new-and-improved SEOToolSet suite of diagnostic tools for Internet marketers. Neal and I talk about BCI’s liveblog coverage and my favorite learning moments at SMX East 2009. And just in case it’s not clear, the name’s Nussey, Virginia Nussey. (Cue secret agent theme music.)

Things I learned from Boing Boing this week:

• The Blue Brain computer is a project aimed at reverse engineering the human brain.
• Chili peppers can keep you warm if you tuck them in your sock or glove.
• In David vs. Goliath match-ups, eagles hunt reindeer.
• Nokia is suing Apple for stealing its iPhone technology.
• Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile? It’s all in your mind…

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Friday Recap - Social Chokehold Edition

One of Bruce’s maxims just took on a life of its own thanks to Twitter. Former Bruce Clay, Inc. blogger (and forever BCI fave) Lisa Barone wrote (in response to a comment about strawberry beer, oddly enough):

It’s a succinct and colorful portrait of the true aspirations of SEO. In an industry sometimes called into question because of snakeoil salesmen, the saying goes a long way in explaining how ethical and comprehensive search engine optimization works through a deep transformation of a site.

Claims of superficial edits (All you need are a few keywords in your Title tag!) and overnight ranking schemes (Rank #1 in two weeks! Make your lump sum, upfront payment out to…) still reel in victims. The illustration of foundational improvement is an important one. And flying pigs and eagles — as Lisa said, it’s sticky, a real crowd pleaser.

But a few Internet marketers had suggestions for what their proverbial pig/eagle hybrid might look like.

1. Up first, the skeptic:

I think most white hat SEOs are hoping to do more than this. Isn’t this proposal like the first half of the saying — the putting wings on a pig part? True site improvement seems to be sidelined in this point of view — even if just for comic effect.

2. There’s also the pass-it-off-as-an-eagle approach:

With all the value attributed to links and link anchor text, it’s possible to get strong rankings without modifying site content, Meta data or architecture. Google’s done a lot to decrease the power of Google bombs, but a link-focused approach to SEO is very popular. However, I think we can recognize that neither the site owner or the consumer will benefit from this too-narrow approach.

3. Much more often Internet marketers end up taking a baby-steps approach:

It can be difficult to get a potential client to commit to a campaign that would fully optimize a site. A lack of understanding, buy-in or budget leads to SEOs trying to stretch their shoe-string resources. At that point, it can be a struggle to do even the most fundamental SEO tasks.

Most search engine optimizers are hoping to make a real difference with their campaigns, in line with Bruce’s original saying. And if that’s not an option due to restrictions like limited resources or client cooperation, sometimes we have to live with a pin-the-tail-on-the-pig or a pig in eagle’s clothing.

But remember what the highest goal of SEO is.

It’s about making a site better from the inside out. Not putting lipstick on the pig, as with bachelor #1. Or dressing the pig up in the emperor’s new clothes, like bachelor #2 wants to do. If all else fails, we can take bachelor #3’s approach and improve the site as much as we can with the resources and knowledge at our disposal. [Ian's approach is something of a Charlotte's Web approach. Not making the site a new creature but polishing up what's there as best you can. --Susan]

If the choice is yours to make, create a site that’s good for search engines and good for users. Because, in the end, that will be what’s good for the health of the business.

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Eagle SEO

Our moderator is Jeff Ferguson, SES Advisory Board & Senior Director, Online Marketing, Local.com. Our speakers are:

• Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
• James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft
• Aiko Yoshikawa, Sr. Product Manager, Convergence, Yahoo! Advertising Products Group
• Leigh McMillan, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Marchex Call Analytics
• Niraj Shah, Product Manager, Marin Software

Jeff welcomes the crowd after a nice outdoor lunch. He congratulates us for making it to these last-day sessions. Word. Jeff can remember a time when the biggest metric was hits. Then it was click-through rates. It finally got to a point where you could determine revenue — what a revelation! That was information you couldn’t get from other channels. As programs became more complex, the realization occurred that credit might be attributed to other channels.

The question became, how do you determine attribution? The first man in and the last man in is probably too simple. And what if you’ve got more than one thing to do on your site? All of these things need to be assigned to the right place, lest you cut something that’s not working. That’s the heart of the matter that will be discussed today.

Thomas Bindl

Tom is up first. He’s going to focus on real data for better decisions. Even if you’re able to see the full ROI and channels involved, it’s still hard to believe all the data. In general, cookies get lost. How many days does a third-party cookie survive? After 30 days there is a loss of 21 percent of cookie tracking data. That was determined by setting cookies to users they could identify later, over three sites, covering different topics in different countries. That’s a lot of data that’s going to be wrong.

High AOV may result in less accurate tracking. AOV in travel industry increases over time. The data must be tracked from the first interest to the conversion. A possible customer journey might involve multiple channels that impact the conversion. Display, search and affiliate can all factor in. A quarter of all tracking data is wrong. 25.3 percent of conversions need 2+ clicks.

Attribution management: Why the last click shouldn’t get all the credit

• Try to understand cross-channel effects.
• The brand works better with generic terms.
• Define a value for all clicks that lead to a conversion.
• The longer the sales cycle, the more important attribution management is.
• In doubt credit the last click the most, but not everything.

Even the best technology needs help. There are ways to increase tracking accuracy:

• Store click IDs on your site and return on conversion
• Pass on order/client ID with every conversion
• Local shared objects (Flash cookies — often too slow for redirects)
• Ask your users for channel of origin
• Unique coupon codes

Online and offline rely on each other. How can you actually measure offline conversions?

• Coupon codes are often only generated online, but you can do it vice versa as well. A coupon code given in the store that buys accessories online will be connected to their original purchase.
• Discount IDs in ads and landing pages together with phone numbers. Google is about to start a feature called Life Ads that lets you put in a different number for every keyword. You can identify what people are searching for and what keywords are causing the last step conversion.
• Check against prior behavior. A lot of people always take the same path to a site.
• Ask for original/influential channels. Ask the consumer — it actually works!

Jeff asks the panel if putting all consumers in one funnel is a detrimental way of doing business. Tom says that a lot of companies are putting money in channels and not paying attention to what’s happening. But with the technology to actually measure the results is foolish. You get more efficiency to all online marketing channels.

Niraj Shah

Niraj is next.

What are multiple conversion events?

• Visitor actions that indicate engagement
• May be directly revenue generating
• Maybe a sign of interest, future revenue
  • Examples: store locator, sign up for newsletter, offline conversions (click to call), cross sells on thank you page, stages of a sales funnel (application submitted, approved application > registration)

Why use multiple conversion events?

Reporting

• Track conversion events across paid search program.
• Analytics and reporting deliver insight to every level.
  • Which keywords drive new users vs. existing users?
  • Which creative phrases drive store locator but not checkouts
  • Which ad groups have high abandonment rate?

Bidding

• Assign value to conversion events separately.
  • Give credit to keywords driving quality visits
  • Tune bid setting to meet ever changing business goals
  • Examples: month-end blitz to sign up new customers
  • Monetization for cross sells changes
  • Financial markets necessitate shift to affluent clients (vs. mainstream clients)

Reactivity

• When lag from click/revenue event is long (like 30 days)
• Option 1: Wait for latent revenue to trickle in and update bids accordingly
  • Problem: bidding is reacting to changes 30 days late
• Option 2: Monetize intermediate events that have less lag.
  • Advantage: bidding reacts to changes immediately.

How to choose multiple conversion events

• Match conversions events with business metrics and goals.
• Attribute values to events for bidding.
  • Enables SEM program to easily adapt to business goals
  • Examples:
    • Cross sells, offline conversions, ensure keywords get credit
• New vs. existing customers
  • Value new customers based on life time value: 2x initial order
  • Value existing customers at 1/2 of order size
• High end vs. mainstream customers
  • Value high-end customers at 100% of captured revenue
  • Value mainstream customers at 75% of captured revenue

Conversion events aren’t always revenue events:

• Stages of a longer sales cycle
  • Choose proxy value for intermediate stages
  • Regularly review proxy value vs. actual revenues and adjust
• Store locator, newsletter sign up
  • Correlate with offline and future conversations
• Qualify visits
  • Useful for conversations with no explicit link online

Leigh McMillan

Leigh is up next. She’s going to look at leveraging call tracking and analytics — the under utilized advertising intelligence. She asks how many people are with an agency. A few hands go up. How many use call tracking or are familiar with it? About 25 percent raise their hand.

Call tracking is analytics for calls rather than clicks or Web site activity. She’ll refer to it as call analytics. On average calls convert at ten times the rate of clicks. People get to talk through the service or there’s an urgent need.

Overall there’s 23 billion plus estimated calls driven from performance advertising and listings in the U.S. (search, print, yellow pages). That’s a robust source of data. Before, business had no cost-effective way to measure these calls — and the business that results from the calls. What campaign, what time of day, what keyword drove the highest value.

Now, a plethora of call data is available. It can be tracked by source, ad, campaign, keyword, time of day and call duration. With call duration, a baseline of calls helps you analyze and separate sales vs. service calls. Repeat calls, hang ups, missed calls, geo-location, recordings and caller info can also be collected.

Value Proposition of Call Analytics

• Prove ROI
• Capture offline conversions
• Gain advertising intelligence
• Improve sales staff performance

Call analytics measures the action most important to local and service-based businesses. One client saw that three times more conversions were counted because 66 percent of conversions were over the phone.

Who should use call analytics? Any service-based or local business and the agencies that work with them. Not only does the agency get credit but it also acts as intelligence to act on in the future.

• Home services
• Professional services
• Automotive
• Real estate
• Education
• Dining
• Finance
• Insurance
• Business service

How it works:

1. Provision the tracking number.
2. Place the number in an ad, site, landing page, etc. Any marketing where there’s a phone number.
3. Leverage the data to optimize campaigns.

Best practices:

1. Use local numbers whenever possible.
2. Use dynamic number replacement (the site and landing pages based on source can each have a different number through JavaScript).
3. Test and track what you really need.
4. Call-optimize your landing pages.
5. Listen to call recordings.

Evaluating call analytics providers:

• System uptime and infrastructure
• Ease of implementation
• Number of processes available
• [... I missed the rest!]

James Colborn

James will be our next presenter. He’ll look at the normal understanding of search and ROI and how you might also want to think about it, along with possible testing scenarios. How many people in the audience are buying search, display, content and image ads — a good number raised their hands for each one.

How do we think about search ROI today?

Consumer search > Click > Action = Desired ROI

At that action point, we’ve looked at multiple sources for getting the desired ROI. Interestingly, a lot of marketers stop their thinking process at the click. A lot of us also stop at the action point. But he’s going to focus on the first step. What actually prompted them to search for you in the first place?

How should we think about ROI?

Online advertising is accountable and measurable and provides some control. But the downfall is getting to the point of juggling a thousand plates on sticks at the same time. That’s where analytics and understanding come in. How many steps did it take to get to a conversion?

Is it worth trying to spend the right time trying to find the right mix?

Possible testing scenarios:

• Reality is that it’s far easier to do this with technology. But…
• If you don’t control a display budget, content/image ads are available
• Test medias together. You have the last-click data at hand
• Design campaigns to prompt cross-media connection
• Build a control campaign and test against it with multiple campaigns

Aiko Yoshikawa

Aiko will wrap up the presentations with her look at Yahoo! Conversions & Assist reports. Last click may not tell the full story. How do you value attribution across different marketing campaigns? There have been a lot of studies about display and search working best together. Yahoo’s Sponsored Search reports provide into the full story. Conversions = “last click”: prior to conversions. Assists = metric which gives credit to ads beyond the last clicked ads.

What are assists? They’re marketing activities that lead to conversions. Yahoo tracks up to 45 days before the conversion. Assists aid decision making. In the past, a campaign might be discontinued because it’s relatively high CPA. But high assists number would suggest manufacturer should maintain budget for campaign. The assumption was that there was causation involved, not just correlation. This kind of data is available to all Panama advertisers.

See the original post here:
The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion

When SES rolls around next week, how many people in attendance will not own a smartphone? Enough to count on two hands? The mobile revolution has been a long time coming. But don’t be surprised if you feel a breeze in the room during Keeping it Local: The Convergence of Phones & Local Search. That’s just the mobile era whizzing past, slamming the door shut and announcing it’s here to stay.

Michael Boland

Michael Boland is the senior analyst for The Kelsey Group, an independent research and business strategy organization that examines the local and digital media space. Michael’s a speaker and moderator of several SES sessions focused on the intersection of local and mobile marketing, and is no stranger to the Bruce Clay blog.

Last year Mike shared his thoughts on the state of local search and small businesses. This time around, mobile search, mobile applications and the effect of the economy take the stage.

1. You’ll be speaking during The Convergence of Phones & Local Search panel. A look at the session description seems to suggest that mobile search has finally reached critical mass in the U.S.: “These folks aren’t looking for web sites - they’re looking for physical locations. This is Local Search finally working!” Would you agree?

We’re getting closer but there is still a long way to go. The mobile products are in place, based on better device standards that have entered the market, and an opening up to third party innovation (mobile apps). So the consumer facing models are somewhat in place, but that’s only half of what I consider to be a successful scenario in mobile search.

In order to monetize these mobile search products, we’ll need more advertiser interest. That will eventually follow but right now it isn’t happening fast enough, due to lots of factors, including the economy. It’s kind of ironic that we’ve seen so much evolution on the product and user adoption side, and then the economy tanks - making advertiser interest slow down considerably.

Since mobile is viewed by many advertisers as “experimental” it’s often the first thing to be cut from ad budgets. On the bright side this is having the opposite effect on some advertisers out there who are being forced by recession to reevaluate their ad spends and demand more measurability and concrete ROI. This has accelerated a shift from traditional media ad spending to more measurable media like search and mobile.

But we’ll see even greater advertiser demand as we emerge from recession. Like other forms of media, advertiser demand will start with larger brands or agencies and then reach adoption at the local SMB levels. With mobile marketing that hasn’t happened yet, so that’s another reason why I think we’re not quite there yet. There are 23 million small businesses out there and that’s where the true mobile local opportunity will lie.

2. The Kelsey Group is known for its independent research in the fields of mobile and local marketing. Mobile and local marketing are often tied together because local search is often conducted on a mobile Web device, as a user is out and about and looking for something. But what about mobile apps? Should search or app development be the priority as mobile Web usage continues to grow?

This is an interesting area. Stepping back to a historical perspective, the online (desktop) web has moved away from heavy desktop software towards more browser based products and content that resides in the cloud. This is behind what many define as Web 2.0 - (although that term has been stretched out).

But in the past few years of mobile, we’ve moved in an opposite direction - towards apps that reside at the client level. To answer your question, I believe we’ll see a reversal of this trend and we’ll move closer to the aforementioned online trend of more browser based products - call it mobile web 2.0.

This will be driven by more capable web browsers that can perform the functionality that was previously reserved for native apps. The most recent example is the introduction of the iPhone V3.0 software which came with a more functional version of the Safari web browser. This includes a lot of self contained functionality like pulling in a user’s location and launching maps from within the browser. More evolutions like this across the industry, which utilize the emerging HTML 5 standard, will signal a move towards more innovation on the mobile web.

In other words - less apps and more mobile websites, a.k.a web apps. Google has already announced on a few occasions that this is the direction it is moving. Most of the products it’s launched on the iPhone so far have been web apps rather than native apps, including Gmail, GTalk, and Latitude. We’ll see much more of this to come.

3. Earlier this year The Kelsey Group predicted local mobile ad revenue is set to grow over the next few years. From your comments in this article, it sounds like most of this revenue is coming from an online ad format that’s been ported over to a smaller screen, with display advertising being a good example of this. You explain that there’s also experimentation happening with mobile ad formats, like game apps, but that these strategies often don’t account for how people use their mobile devices. Could you give these misguided marketers some tips?

What I think I remember saying is that most of the money being spent on mobile marketing so far is national brand advertisers or agencies. And what they’re doing is mostly porting over their online strategies to a smaller screen. This mostly involves display ads in both branding and direct response formats.

This is okay and is what I would expect them to do at this point. But eventually we’re going to require ad formats that better utilize the unique capabilities of the mobile form factor. Because it is location aware, and because it’s portable (i.e. in your pocket when you go to the store), there will be lots of room for other content and ad delivery that more effectively drives conversions. This could involve more cost per action ad models such as mobile coupons, promotions or “reserve item” functionality.

We’re already starting to see product models develop around these principles. TheFind is a great mobile app that pulls in data from point of sale inventory systems and tells users after they search for a product, who carries it, how many are on the shelf, and for how much. Another favorite is ShopSavvy, a Google Android app that lets you scan bar codes at the point of purchase to find out more about products, pricing, reviews and who else carries it. This is a powerful scenario, and different ways to monetize this and drive conversions at the local level will follow.

4. You’ll also be moderating Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps. In your research, do you see any trends that you expect to grow in the future? Are users showing a preference to informational, entertaining or other kinds of apps?

Lots of the most popular apps so far are more entertainment than they are utility. Gaming is a big category among mobile apps. But it’s getting harder and harder to rise above all the noise in Apple’s app store, given more than 60,000 apps. Many apps see very little usage, and there are only so many apps you can have. Technically you can have 148 on the iPhone but the amount you will use on a daily basis will barely fill up one screen.

I think we’ll see a lot of application developers migrate to other platforms where there is still some semblance of “virgin territory”. This includes Palm’s application store, Blackberry and Android. Android is in fact, where I’m placing a lot of bets. It’s proven to be robust, flexible and not to mention free.

Many OEM’s are beginning to power more devices with Android including HTC, Samsung and Motorola. This will take share from Windows Mobile which has faltered on coming out with its next generation operating system (6.5) which will replace 6.1 and be able to complete with the functionality of the iPhone, Android and Palms WebOS.

5. According to research by The Kelsey Group, Europe, and Western Europe specifically, are witnessing the biggest boom when it comes to mobile search adoption. What can U.S. marketers learn from the European market that might help draw users here in the States?

Yes, that’s our recent Western European mobile forecast which examines mobile search and display ad revenues in the region from 2008 to 2013. During this period, mobile search ad revenues will grow from 39 million euros to 2.3 billion euros, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 125.4 percent. Mobile display ad revenues will grow from 14 million euros to 1.1 billion euros, a 138.3 percent CAGR.

But the fastest growing area of the forecast will be mobile local search ad revenues. This is the local slice of the aforementioned search ad revenues, defined by ads that drive conversions to geographically specific areas or store locations. Ad revenues in this category will grow from 18 million euros to 1.4 billion euros, a 139.3 percent CAGR. This growth will be driven by local search volume increases and rates associated with locally targeted ads.

To answer your question, Western Europe leads the U.S. in each of these areas, mainly due to the region’s greater number of mobile handsets — currently 499 million, compared with 266 million in the United States. Smartphones will also drive mobile advertising, growing from 43 million to 149 million. This is a 28 percent CAGR, compared with overall handset CAGR of 2.8 percent.

Much of the ad revenue growth in the forecast in fact derives from expected smartphone penetration and mobile Web consumption. As mobile Web use continues to gain share among mobile subscribers, ad inventory will grow with it. This will combine with a growing demand for mobile marketing as advertisers shift spend from traditional media to more targeted and measurable mobile advertising. We’ll see a similar dynamic occur in the U.S. market over the next 5 years.

6. While you’re at the show, are there any sessions you plan to attend? Where can people meet up with you while in San Jose?

Definitely. I’ll also be speaking at the Local Search Summit run by Local Search News. It’s essentially an offshoot of SES which attendees can go to. Think of it like a separate mobile and local track. That’s on the 13th at the San Jose Marriot. I’ll also be going to some of the other main SES sessions on online video and social media, which are topics I’m very interested in. Anyone can get in touch with me to meet by following me or sending me a direct message on Twitter @thekelseygroup.

Thanks, Mike. These sessions are a sure win for small business owners and marketers working in the local and mobile space. Viva la smartphone! SES is going to be awesome!

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Six Questions with Michael Boland