On another more general note, I’m renaming this blog from “Vinny Lingham’s Search & Affiliate Marketing Blog” to “Vinny Lingham’s Blog”. This blog has become very generalized as I have focused on most things Internet, Business & Personal, and not just “Search & Affiliate Marketing”. This won’t affect any feed subscriptions.

Chris Sherman introduces the panel:

Jonty Kelt – Managing Director of UK and Europe – Performics
Bob Ivins – Managing Direct – ComScore
Elizabeth Van Couvering – London School of Economics
Graham Hansell – Head of Search Strategy – SiteLynx

Graham & Elizabeth Co-Present their presentation on “Search in the Zone”:

Intro:

• Search is not a very significant amount of user’s online activity
• Somewhere between 1.5% & 15% of online activity goes to Search.
• 15% of people don’t use search engines at all

The Web is different for everyone

In a 3 year study of nearly 600 representative Web users with 192,000 websites visited only 66.8% of websites were visited by only one person.

She presents a chart detailing:

Home Zone: Where people spend most of their time (Yahoo, Google, Intranet, etc) in routine behavioral patterns.
Neighborhood Zone: Sites users are familiar with and use occasionally, but know hot to get there. This is your known part of the web.
Unknown Zone: This is everything else that you are not aware of.

The user experience is focused on the known zones. When you’re on a routine session in the home zone, 1 in ten times, you might use a search engine to follow it up. The neighborhood zone is often accessed by bookmarks, memory etc, in 66% of the time, but the other 34% of the time, it’s characterized by the use of search. However, the Unknown Zone is accessed 74% of them time, via search.

The Home & Neighborhood zone represents up to 80% of the user online activity, but only about 10% of the sites that will be accessed.

Search is a “choke point” of the web. The top websites are very accessible and well known, but the rest of the web is only accessible 50% of the time, by search engines – the rest is branding, links, etc.

Getting your site in the zone:

• Transactional sites need to be high up in Search
• Being both listed high up & in a wide variety of searches in important
• In the research phase of Discovery it can be important to have “positive reviews” listed higher than your site
• Publishers need to get into the Home of Neighbourhood
Graham emphasizes the use of RSS feeds to allow you to drag your content into the Home Zone of the user and get the user to go directly to you and recognizing the brand.

Bob takes the podium next.

“More Searchers Searching More”

ComScore conducts passive tracking of actual consumer search activity.

According to Bob, there are 700 million people online, but that number is underestimated. Those people are spending :

95% on Portals & 87% on Search

By doing a little math, according to Bob – there are 33 Billion Searches per month.

He does a nice little comparison of Search to Email as the “Killer App”. Search now appears to be exceeding Mail for the position of the “Kille App”.

Does Search development differ by market? Europeans are more likely to use search then Americans with only 86% usage, compared to over 90% as the average for Europe. Europeans are more active users of searches as well (higher search per user ratio).

Google has a might higher market dominance in Europe as well. 40% of US search queries are not monetized in the US. 76% of Google’s queries are outside the US, but only 42% of their revenue.

Key Findings:

Europeans are more likely to search
Europeans are more active searches
Pages viewed per searchquery are flat to down
Monetization gaps exist
1. Keyword Coverage (US v Europe)
2. % Searches v % of Revenue

Jonty is up next:

Search Behaviour Research Update

Doubleclick is the online advertising technology leader

Search: Bigger, Stronger, Tougher

Increase in Broadband Access
Increase in Women Online
Increase in Searching
Greater Audience Access leads to more searches which lead to more chances to reach your target audience (especially relevant for small businesses who aren’t online.

Search Channels are Widening:

Searchers are…

More Sophisticated
• 41% of users who continue their search when they can’t find satisfactory results on the first page do one of two things – change search terms or change search engines (compared to 28% 4 years ago)

More Determined
Entering Lengthier Queries
Search Engine Loyal
Brand Led

Therefore Marketers need to target both simple keywords and lengthier keyword rich phrases, rank high for your desired search terms to ensure you’re not missing out on highly qualified traffic.

UK Search Engine Use:

Multiple Use

Limited Knowledg of Search Terms/Keywords

Ok – he’s going to fast, I’m not going to continue this! It was an interesting session.

My key take-away is that search differs Country by Country and you have to understand the market in order to market and that’s why it’s called Marketing!

Danny’s view are that we all united by search. We’re all different people and we wear black hats, white hats, organic, paid or a mixture of them, including a growing number of in-house search engine marketers.

“Who Loves Ya Baby?”

Anecdotally, search of all types are in demand and recent articles talked about the difficulty in hiring good search people. It’s not just the search engines that are fighting for talent. Swearch was born in the depths of the ad downturn, so today’s not a bubble. Search is now a fundamental advertising medium, just like TV, Radio, Print & Outdoors. Search marketing has demand filling and reverse broadcasting, and will change, evolve, move to new devices, but it’s not going away.

“Communities & Community”

We all have our hangouts:

1. Mailing Lists: I-Search, SEM 2.0, etc
2. Conferences: SES, PubCon, Ad:Tech
3. Forums: WebmasterWorld, Digital Point, SEW Forums
4. Blogs: SE Roundtable, SEO Book, Threadwatch
5. Organizations: SEMPO, SMA, Dallas

We have also been growing across our cliques (e.g. when Ian Turner went missing).
Cross community effort was instant. SEMPO, SMA, other efforts at uniting for a common good.

“Community Rewards”

Weather reports are getting more regular
Nofollow tags – Love it or hate it, we got more control over our pages – further indexing control to come?
Google Sitemaps
Yahoo Site Explorer
Google Sitemaps Stats!
Google Base

“Love It, But Want More”

Blogging community can monitor all their new links in Google Blog Search, but why can’t the longer established search marketing community get more important web search info. Maybe further indexing control to come.

Yahoo Site Explorer gives some but needs to give much, much more.

Time to go past URL feeds and into content feeds for all, esp. with rogue spider issue.
Ad reps as friends, not foes.

“Outsiders Recognize Community”

The focus is not only on the search engines so much, anymore. Search Marketers are getting into the spotlight and it’s without them being some unusual sub-species.

“But reputation problems remains…”

Despite gains, many people will still see us as the used car salespeople of the web.
There are two challenges: scummy companies and trespassing content

Scummy companies, the law will sort out, and trespassing content, we can help with..

“It’s the right thing not to do”

If not because it’s just wrong to respass, consider the consequences.

“Foot Soldiers / Fuel”

I’ve spoken before of search marketers as the foot soldies that have built search. More to the point, you’re what fuels the search engines. The drive to success they are all having.

http://www.frappr.com/seos

Be Pumped up, 2006 should be exciting as ever.

Please pick a day for Search Marketing Day and next time, let’s see a search marketer win the apprentice.

“It’s not about the keywords you want to be found on, it’s about what users use to find you.”

Keyword Popularity Suggestion Tools

Adwords Sandbox
Overture Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker
Nichebot
KeywordDiscovery

Keywords indicate where consumers are in the buying process.

Problem Recognition – Information Search – Select Alternatives – Decision – Purchase

Three types of Search Behavior:

Navigation – Knows what you want – goes to the site.

Informational – Want to know something

Transactional – Intends on performing a transaction.

Getting inside the searcher’s head

Understand the “why” behind the search and you can better target how to respond

Research vs Purchase
Stage in the buying process
Personal – Gender/Age
Psychological – Fear, uncertainty and doubt sells
Knowledge-based filtering
Adjust ad copy and landing page to reflect knowledge or service

To compete, you need Search Term Parity

You need to see how active the competitors are within the same marketing environment. Are they doing PPC? How much are the bids? How optimized are the sites? What’s their linkage situation? Anchor text?

Competitve Intelligence Tools

HitWise or qSearch

AdGooroo – Tells who is advertising on keyword phrases and how well they are doing. Very interesting tool!

Keyword Analyzer

Test Keywords Performance Early

Use PPC to test candidate KW’s before creating landing pages. This gives quantitative feedback on the KW performance.

Summary

Evaluate keywords from different angles
-Relevancy
-Conversion
-Volume

Next up is Lori Weimann from KeywordMax:

Methods Covered:

1. Mining Referring URLs : Organic & PPC

What you need:

A. Conversion Tracking Tool
B. Reporting that displays conversion rate broken down by keyword
C. For paid listings, make sure to capture BOTH the actual keyword bid upon & the referring URL

Mining Organic Search: The Easy Way is to create a report from your web logs.

Mining PPC Searc:

A. Run an analytics report
B. Find the converting words
C. Find the referring URLs
D. Mine the referring url for the query string

2. Word Building with Excel

Use concatenate to build keyword lists

3. Keyword Research Tools Best Features

A. Use what’s free
B. Important Data
i. Estimated # of searches
ii. Number of competitors/bidders
iii. CPC for position #1
C. Find Gems – words with lower number of competitors and low CPC.

4. Using Analytics: Case Study

Case Study : Gravity 180

Gravity180 provides event photography services – aka “Photo Marketing”
The keyword itself drove a lot of traffic and no business? Why not?

The referring URL’s explained why it didn’t work – they were receiving clicks on “Photos of Marketing” etc.

Tactics changed from broad match to exact match.

Good presentation Lori – now for Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems.

How to get the data out?

Manually examining logs
Write a script
Search tools
Analytics tools

Small case study – Ian Blackford of DesignConcious.com

Email script to collect search terms of www.hifix.co.uk. Quickly had thousands. Found that one manufacturer had dominated. Also found that people can’t spell.

Why use your site search for Keyword Research?

It is the language of your customers
They are continuously updated
You should be looking at them anyway to improve your site search and expand your offerings. You need to think of site context.

Site search is a fantastic source of keyword research, according to Shaun Ryan.

James Lamberti from ComScore networks takes the podium.

Today’s challenges according to Lamberti are:

Discovering the people behind the keywords – the users.
Integrating search marketing with other media
More, better competitive and market intelligence
comScore Technology

Passive tracking of actual consumer search activity.
They have a panel of about 2 million members of online consumers who have agreed to be continuously and passively observed.

They are able to track actual search data, at a click level to a link on a page level, based on the opt in granted by the consumer.

Search Marketing Today

Tools to evaluate words and volume
Performance at my site
Best Practices and consultation

A significant knowledge gap exists:

How many people am I reaching? How often?
Who are they?
How do I integrate search with other ad strategies
What are the trends?

Based on these needs, comScore have developed their software, qSearch. James goes onto to displaying some charts and results relating to the keyword iPod and he analyzes the market demand and supply for that keyword term.

I finally made it Chicago – and it’s snowing! It’s really beautiful, but freezing cold. I’ll be blogging the sessions that I attend at Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2005. Here’s my blog for the first session:

Dealing with Contextual & Other Non-Search Ads

Moderator: Andrew Goodman

Speakers:

Brad Byrd, NewGate
Barry Chu, Yahoo! Search Marketing
Andrew Goodman, Page Zero Media Inc.
Peter Hershberg, Reprise Media
Hillary Hoover Keller, Google, Inc.

The session kicked off with a presentation from Peter Hershberg – here are some notes from his slides:

What is contextual advertising? Peter shows an example of a contextual advert from Google (if you look at the top of this page, you will see a lone advert, powered by Google, which should be contextual to this page).

Benefits for Networks:

Contextual advertising allows networks like Google to access more users than their existing search programs will offer.

Benefits for Publishers:

Ability to monetize their pageviews by showing relevant advertising

Benefits for Advertisers:

Greater reach & more branding opportunities.

Contextual advertising in the past was sold as Search, which was an initially flawed model, piloted largely by Google. In the past, and up until recently, engines made the following errors, de facto:

Campaigns were linked to Search in the system
One bid price for both contextual and search – even though there are different conversion rates.
One single creative message targeting both search & contextual advertising, did not allow advertisers to differentiate and split the demographic.
There was no differentiation in tracking results.
You could not be selective within the contextual network.

As Peter put it, “a lot of heavy lifting” was required by the advertiser to make the contextual work. From his views, Google abused their dominant position and not make the changes to enable smart advertiser to use content. I agree with him on this point, and he had some nice slides relating to what advertisers asked for and what Google delivered, for example differentiated pricing, was fulfilled (and poorly) by Smart Pricing.

In 2005, Yahoo made their move into the space and Google countered by delivering on some of the requests made.

Evolution of the channel (what is currently available):

Place separate bids per AdGroup
Track separate at an AdGroup level
Choose sites you’ll run on and advertisers can now buy Adwords directly from sites in the network.
Pay a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and build you own custom network.

Peter believes strongly that Yahoo has been the main catalyst for these changes and the sleeping giant, MSN, is going to raise the bar to advertisers.

What’s next for contextual?

Better targeting (in particular, MSN), for demographics & behavioral targeting.
Better specialization – the engines are beginning to recognize the fact that contextual & search are decidedly different.
Improved Distribution – RSS, Podcasting, Videocasting, Google Print, etc.

That was Peter Hershberg’s piece. The next presenter is Andrew Goodman.

Contextual Advertising Update

Andrew did a brief overview of contextual, similar to Peter.
He suggests that you break your keywords down into very precise groups for contextual traffic. Andrew also shows the keyword tail of search, where there are very few keywords in a category with 2/3 terms in the phrase, but a lot more traffic on 5-6 keyword phrases, due to the variations.

Andrew also shows some stats from one of his campaigns, and the numbers do not look great. Contentextual accounts for 16.5% of clicks, 6.2% of spend but only 4.4% of their revenue – not great stats.

He also mentioned that Google drops the site targeting minimum bid – but again, not a great strategy to pay CPM, in my opinion.

Who’s better of targeting, computers or humans?

The most successful content matching programs are doing so not because you choose where to place ads, but because a computer does.

To be successful:

Be granular, precise, and bid separately
Use site exclude features where available
Be proactive on suspected click fraud
Bow out if you need direct response, consider graphical ads for better targeting.

Next up is Brad Byrd with Optimisation Strategies for Google Adwords Contextual adverts.

1. Overview of How AdSense Works
a. Google matching process is about matching themes with adverts
b. The goal is construct an ad group with an inherent theme

2. The Basics of Campaign Creation
a. Separate Content and Search Campaigns
b. You can opt-in or opt-out of content distribution during campaign setup, or by editing your campaign-level setting
c. Don’t just duplicate your search campaigns as poor contextual campaigns bundle diverse keywords into a single AdGroup.
d. While duplicating your search campaigns as content campaigns may be easiest, it’s not ideal.
e. Create smaller AdGroups around consistent themes.
i. Build smaller AdGroups, with keywords grouped by similar concepts
ii. Ensure thematic consistency between keywords and the ad copy.
f. Track your Content Campaigns uniquely
i. Use different tracking URLs for each keyword, distinct from URLs used for the same keywords in you “search” campaigns
ii. Define a unique tracking URL as the “default” URL for your content AdGroups – don’t share it with other groups or ads.
g. Use “Fast Track” (aka “ValueTrack”) tags for all your URLs, to learn more about your traffic:
i. {ifsearch:x}{ifcontent:y}; identify search/content clicks
ii. {creative}:identify which creative was used
iii. {placement}:identify which website generated the click
3. A few words about Google Reporting
a. AdGroup reports do not report on content clickthroughs by individual keywords, in either the campaign management interface or the reporting section; aggregates only.
b. AdSense does however send clickthroughs to a specific URL
c. The URL report does NOT report sending traffic to these URLs. Instead, traffic is reported against the default URL assigned to the AdGroup.
4. Bid Management Basics
a. Per keyword CPC prices are only a reflection of search related price distribution
b. Default bids are just that: default. Set content bids if you plan on having both Search & Content bids together – then default bids will apply to search, and content bids will apply to content.
c. To simplify content campaigns, manage bids at the AdGroup level.
5. Campaign Refinement and Optimization
a. Don’t use dynamic keyword insertion
b. Use the site exclusion tool to improve ROI and targeting.
c. It works on a domain, sub-domain, or directories only – not specific pages. Use your internal reporting, and the {placement} tag, to identify sites and evaluate conversion metrics.

A good session and Barry Chu from Yahoo! Marketing now takes over with a very brief overview from Yahoo.

Yahoo’s approach is around quality distribution, coupled with advanced algorithms, and editorial oversight. Yahoo also offers Ads in RSS, and are testing this out with some Beta publishers, such as Search Engine Roundtable.

Hillary Hoover Keller from Google now takes the floor.

She starts off with the Consumer’s Decision & Purchase Cycle. The growth of Search since 2000 is no longer a secret. Search is incredibly effective at the instant consumers that are ready to buy. The growth of contextual is driven by marketers’ needs and desires to the target consumers who are still in the research phase of the buy cycle. She emphasizes Google’s reach of 80% of users.

Smart Pricing – Performance Update

This slide uses 3rd party data from Atlas, which contradicts what Peter said earlier (and I still agree with Peter). I wish I had my camera, but alas, I can’t show you the slide – maybe I can get a copy of it later.

Site Targeting:

Target by affinities – Reach your target audience by only showing your ad on the specific sites they care about.

Flexible Bidding Options & Dynamic Pricing (finally) – CPM bidding and automatic discounting.

Content Bidding

Content Campaigns – AdWords ads that will only run on the content network.

Content Bidding Controls – The new controls that are available for the interface.

Ok – that’s it for this session – I’m going to put my laptop down so that I can give them some hard questions!!

November 30th – Johannesburg
December 1st, 2nd & 3rd – London
December 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th & 7th – Chicago, attending Search Engine Strategies
December 7th & 8th – San Francisco/San Jose (Silicon Valley)
December 9th – London
December 10th – Cape Town!!!!

I’ll be attending the sessions, so stay tuned for up-to-the-minute reports of what’s happening at the conference.

The trip to London was pretty easy – quick overnight flight on SAA.

On a slightly different note:

Companies that retail numerous products often have an XML product feed that they distribute to partners. We use these feeds to produce websites such as ThatShoe. The problem we as marketers face is that the companies which produce the feeds, do not necessarily have the inhouse skills to do so. The result is poor quality product feeds that lead to poor user experience, and ultimately, a negative brand experience. We believe strongly in the vertical search market, however, the limitations are simply that the merchants in the vertical do not always understand what their users are searching for.

Don’t get me wrong, some merchants are fantastic about providing better feeds with more information, but others couldn’t care – they have their feed built, and that’s that. No maintenance, no adjustment, no enhancement.

I think that eventually the people who deploy product feeds will have to start answering to their superiors as to why their existing and potential customers have had negative brand experiences as it relates to their product catalogs.

With content syndication playing a greater role in online marketing – don’t you think that the content that merchants distribute needs to be at a high level of quality?