Vinny Lingham’s Blog

This post was unpublished, from my trip to Boston in 2006 - I think I lost the connection and it just saved to my Blogger account previously - only remembered it was there today.  This was a great post - so enjoy (if only with a pinch of salt) :

Ziv Dascala takes the Podium for this session with his presentation. This was a very good session. Ziv is from Oron Online. I’m not going to bother with the others guys here, this was the pick. What makes an online market a highly competitive one?

1. Follow the money: (High volume demand) x (high margin per sale + cross & up sales opportunities) = large profits

2. Many vendors compete for the same customer

3. Vendors offering are commodities

4. Surfers are searching for information before the “buying” activity Understand the REAL value of a customer

• It is not just the sales amount!
• Know the profit margin per sale
• Figure out the profit in the cross and up sales
• Understand the customer lifetie value
• Understand the potential customer lead value opportunities

Know EXACTLY what the maximum amount companies are willing to pay

1. Bid to be 1st in the top 5 most important terms of the industry

2. Send the traffic directly to the best known branded vendor site

3. Figure out the conversion ratio

The affiliates pre-dance

1. Close special deals with all the vendors
2. Avoid deals with income spread over a long period
3. Prepare a HUGE list of related keywords to grab
4. Prepare a MASSIVE amount of content on the subject
5. Use PPC campaigns to understand the most effective landing pages

The Dance

1. Target huge list of related keyword with different domain names, pages and content
2. Constantly issue press releases
3. Spread free articles with reference to your sites
4. Discuss your offering in online public and private forums and blogs
5. Buy traffic from other affiliates, offer more than what they get from the vendor
6. Buy other affiliate and informational sites on the subject
7. Let the vendors competet between themselves on improving your special deals

The post dance

1. Charles Darwin: Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest
2. Your target is to control most of the SERPs (directly or indirectly) and push your special vendors deals
3. Vendors visibility on the SETPs becomes much more dependable upon your traffic
4. Payouts from the vendor increases all the time, since you keep the vendors compete visibility on your controlled online properties
5. You keep doing the ROI calculation constantly, it all comes to how much do you get paid for each visitor to your site !

Shift of Powers

1. Intially : You were working as a marketing arm for the vendor
2. Mid term : You and the vendor are working hand in hand to get more clients and split the revenues
3. Finally: The vendor is working for you as an oprational sales and fulfillment on a “cost”+ basis.

Self introductions:

Jed Nahum - Product Manager for MSN Adcenter
Michael Levine - Director Strategic Channel - Overture
Frederick Vallaeys - Product Specialist Google
Chrysi Philalithes - VP, Global Marketing & Communications - Miva

Jed takes the podium for MSN:

MSN adCenter Update:

Fall ‘05
Live in France & Singapore
US pilot began (invitation only)

Feb ‘06 - US Pilot 2nd phase begins
Feb 18th : New UI
Increasing rotation away from Overture
April 19: New Release

Early Summer ‘06 - US Launch

Audience Intelligence Drives ROI (and here, I think MSN Excels!! Pun intended!)

Learn About Your Customers -> Connect via Rich Targeting -> Refine Your Campaign

Jed discusses a quick case study about “Bleach” on which the product was mistaken for an Anime charactor, called Bleach.

Some of the functionality he discusses shows huge promise for the future of search.
By breaking down the demographic to it’s target demographic - we can increase the effective value per click.

Your Goal: ROI

According to Sacerdote & Co., the first adCenter customer satisfaction survey reveals MSN traffic is converting equally if not better than Google 80% of the time. This is backed up by WebSideStory.

Fun with Audience Intelligence

Here he shows some nice slides about how much younger women and older man search for the red sox, as opposed to an even distribution.

Wrap Up:

Learn More :

MSN Blog
WebmasterWorld
adCenter Blog

Next up is Michael Levine from Overture.

Achieving Search Marketing Success

He queries the room to get an idea of the demographics.

Agenda

• The online Opportunity and Yahoo!
• The Power of Search Marketing
• Making Yahoo! Search work for you

Internet usage continues to grow, users expected to double by 2010. He’s now showing lots of graphs - nothing bloggable but very interesting. Media is allowing you to choose your target audience.

Frederick Vallaeys takes the podium next with a presentation from Google. He’s moving fast, so I have to type very quickly, and he’s using slides.

Optimize : Keywords

How we rank ads

Ad Rank = Max CPC x Quality Scrore

How to improve rank in paid listings:

Group Related keyword and create relevant ad texts
Use 2-3 creatives per Ad Group
Use Match types to your advantage

• Broad Match is our default keyword type and wwe will try to show your ad for closely related queries
• Phrase Match ensures the word order is matched and that we do not match related words
• Exact Match gives you the most control but also takes the mostwork from you

Fred discusses some of the basic Google distribution channels and new Audience optimisation tools - where data is taken from ComScore, as well as Google Analytics.

Chrysi takes the podium now.

In 1975 consumers were bombarded with 512 marketing messages per day, that has grown to over 3000 in today’s modern world.

Consumers are now dividing their attention between multiple touchpoints, media, magazines, online, friends, etc.

Miva, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Ad programmes are different.

-Revise Keyword selection and creative accordingly

Advertise in mutiple markets
-Never translate!
-Understand cultural Nuances eg:
UK: Price Conscious
DE: Product Conscious

She moves onto a case study, and there is alot of quick slide flushing. I’m done now! Long blog!

The guys on the panel are:

Yaron Galai -
Will Johnson -
Shuman Ghosemajumder -
Jay Sears - ContextWeb
Doug Perlson - Kanoodle

This forum turned out to be a big sales pitch from most of the guys.

Doug Kicks off…

Kanoodle offers sponsored links on some of the Web’s Best Sites (he puts up a nice picture of all the partners).

BrightAds - Monetization for Publishers

1. First sponsored links provider to map by “Topic,” not keywords
2. Utilizes combination of editorial mapping, behavioural data and page scan technology to provide greater relevancy than page scan alone.
3. Ensures highest editorial relevance, which means more clicks and more revenue.
4. Competitive Revenue-Per-Click (RPC): Average RPC in BrightAds network is over 0.70 cents

Flexibility

• Can be listed on the same pages and within the same website as other networks
• Allow you to choose the format that works best, including cookies and pops
• We don’t tell you how to run your business

BrightAds Cookies

• First of its kind program that allows publishers to generate revenue when web surfers click on Kanoodle’s sponsored links - even when they aren’t on the publisher’s Web site!
• Non-competitive with ther programs
• No creative interference

The 3 R’s

• More Revenue
• Multiple products mean you can generate more revenue from your pages
• Always Relevant
• Using a unique topic based approach, the right ads are matched to your content. Targeting by keyword and context alone has its limitations
• True Relationship
• Kanoodle is a true partner with people to talk to and work directly with you

What sites work best with Kanoodle?

• Niche sites within certain key verticals
• Areas like Finance, Health, Computing, Travel and Automotive monetize well with Kanoodle
• Broad sites that span many topics
• Kandoodle’s 15,000 topic taxonomy has ability to get as general or as granular as your site

What’s next? Building a better program…

• BrightAds CPM
• Sites over 100k pageviews can contact us about our beta CPM program
• Approved on a case by case basis
• Expanded Behavioural Program

Jay Sears from ContextWeb takes the floor:

Jay shows some slides from eMarketer on the growth of Contextual Ad Spending.

Since 2001, ContextAd is the only true Real-Time marketplace for buying and selling ads using patent pending contextual targeting technology.

• Content from 50 of the top 200 comScore sites
• Large pool of advertisers

The ContextWeb Difference

Monetize Dynamic content with Real-time indexing
Increase page yield with categorization and keywords
Maximize eCPM and monetization

Important distinction is that they use real time indexing, not spidering to detect the relevant ads for the content.

He is moving to fast, I can’t keep up! He is now doing a demo on their software.

Next up is Shuman from Google.

He speaks about the Internet Ecosystem and speaks about the virtuous cycle, where Users, interact with Publisher and Advertisers and vice versa.

How does Google help you meet your objectives?

Create content, monetize content and deepen engagement.

Adsense for Content: Better Ad Monetization

• Uses combination of contextual-targeting and site-targeting to deliver the best ad for a page.
• Uses click-feedback to deliver high performing ads
• Large, comprehensive base of advertisers
• Maximizes revenue by displaying relevant ads
• Broadly used by publishers in virtually all business categories

Contextual Targeting: Intelligent Ad Selection

1. AdSense technology understands the content of each page and dynamically matches ads to it - maximizing ad relevance and performance
2. Link Structure Analysis of the web

Now he starts moving to fast, so I’m going to just add commentary from my perspective.

Keyword & Site Targeting ads compete for placement based upon highest yield.

I can’t cover the rest of this session because my battery is dying! Sorry guys, I’ll post a link to someone else’s blog on this sessions - I see a few bloggers in the room.

This morning’s sessions is “Meet the Super Bloggers of Search”, featuring Matt Cutts from Google, Robert Scoble from MSN/Microsoft & Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo. Brett Tabke from WMW is moderating.

Matt led the Google session yesterday, and he comes across as a really nice, down to earth guy.

Matt just took a swipe at Paul Gardi’s comment a few years ago to him, saying that PageRank is old technology - roar from the audience.

So the question is : “Where is blogging heading?”

The group census is that blogging is like a Genie, once it’s left the bottle - once you’ve had a taste of it, you won’t go back. So blogging is here to stay, obviously.

I’m going to paraphrase the comments from the panel here, so I’ll write this blog in the first person, although I’m taking what they’re saying and writing it down.

One of the things about blogging is that it tends to target smaller niche communities. Alot more people are going to be blogging, and a good source of traffic.

Blogging has changed the way people have communicated life within the company. Employees are alot more vocal on what happens within the company.

Sometimes it’s not worth bring up a public topic, when you know the person responsible for an issue. You can burn bridges if you’re not careful.

Another good laugh was the fact that when you leave a session, you read 4-5 different accounts of the same session - which leads to alot of PR nightmares. Journalists are looking at Technorati all day long, looking for a great new story.

Jeremy Zawodny also says that he found that ruffling feathers through his blog will get him better contacts internally anyways. Given that Yahoo is such a large corporate (10,000 people), it’s obviously difficult to locate the right person.

He also says that sometimes it’s difficult (red tape) to get something published on the company’s official search blog, so his blog is used as a quick outlet to market.

Blogger etiquette within companies is crucial to prevent employees from

I just asked Matt why he doesn’t use blogspot - he said that he can’t use categories, etc.
The funny thing is that none of these guys use their companiy’s blogging services.

More questions:

What keeps you guys going? Red Bull
What’s your motivation for blogging? Tapping into a whole world of people that talk about interesting things.

The guys go off on a tangent, rambling about how people who read their blog, interact with them afterward.

Someone was interviewing for a job at Google, and he mentioned Matt’s blog and mentioned that the guy interviewing used to make useful comments on his blog from time to time.

Roundup: Meet the bloggers - they want to meet you! Go introduce yourself!

Obviously, being on the panel, I didn’t manage to blog this, but I did find a nice post which covered the session pretty well on WebMetricsGuru.