+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: August 19, 2008"

Learn how content from your e-commerce or merchant site can - and should! - be included in shopping search engines.

Moderator:
* Brian A. Smith, Analyst, ComparisonEngines
Speakers:
* Aaron Shear, Partner, Boost Search Marketing
* Brian Mark, CTO, Toolbarn.com
* Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping
* Paul Dillon, Director, Director Commercial Search, Live Search

Brian Smith: We have some great panelists, we are missing one so I am stepping in at the end.

So, I want to set the framework for these guys and give you a sense of the landscape out there. Shopping engines are great for ecommerce, 16 million passed through during the holiday season. Online sales grew 17%-20% year over year. Shopping engines increased 20%-50% year over year for the 2007 holiday season. All major search engines are promoting their own shopping engines.

Here's a search I did for Timberland Work Boots - you can see Google promoting shopping in their product search results which is a great place to be, and it's free for merchants so you want to be in there. Here's a Yahoo search - you can see where there results are, some of the results bring you to Yahoo shopping and there are other merchants as well. You can see on the PPC listings that NextTag, BixRate, PriceScan are in there.

Really quickly, a data feed is just how you get on the shopping engines. It's a big list of your products with all the attributes, and the different engines have different required and optional attributes for you to submit.

So, with that said, here is our agenda for this session. Aaron will talk about what you can learn from the shopping engines. Brian Mark is going to give us what retailers like and don't like on the engines; Greg from Yahoo Shopping is going to talk about their features, and then I am going to tie everything together at the end with some tips.

So first up is Aaron.

Aaron Shear: Lots of merchants here in the audience, how many are getting at least 50% traffic from natural search? If you are not you should be ashamed of yourself, it's pretty easy. Many sites out there, whether you are Amazon or a small merchant, tend to have a fairly difficult navigation and really heavily on internal search to get around the site. But Google is looking at the navigational path and user experience. So how shopping engines works - a merchant submits a feed, an engine tries to classify it, they may go the extra step and provide custom descriptions, and they will aggregate your description with others out there to get a great page to rank well.

Many engines will try to give you multiple navigation paths - an easy way to get to the same product from multiple paths. This is very important and a lot of sites do a great job of organizing this content.

If you look at the taxonomy of a shopping engine - they copy data and steal data - merchants should be doing the same thing! ShopWiki is putting in a lot of great content on products and relying on users in the community to do a lot of the work.

Many sites use session IDs making it difficult to crawl content. Shopping engines have the benefit of organizing the content - and taking the credit for it. So look at what they are doing to allow the content to be successful in their areas.

BizRate has a review system - they will collect the data and store it in their systems and get a lot of SEO credit. You can do this yourselves. Shopping engines are getting a lot of benefit from the content you could be asking for from your own client.

Site performance: Shopping engines are typically much faster than ecommerce sites. They spend a lot of money making sure the sites are fast and open. Search engines put a lot of precedence on their ability to handle multiple search engines and threads at the same time.

Simple URLs are also very important.

Brian Mark: Hi, I am CTO of ToolBarn.com. Shopping engines are great at SEO and PPC. They are taking care of the marketing for you. The conversion rates from a shopping engine are great because visitors are already interested in the product. The customers are already looking. If you are not there, your competitors are. This is also a safety net approach. We went through a redesign, and used 301s, and a lot of our content was not indexed. But we had the shopping engines, so the effect was not as dramatic, we still had some sales.

Get included: Create a text or XML file, and do them to the spec provided. And transfer your data feeds regularly. If you need help getting this done, don't be ashamed to look for a partner to help you. You really only need to do one data feed, and not one for every company out there.

Time is money, if you are looking at this year's holiday season, you want to give yourself plenty of time so you don't miss out on a lot of potential sales. Start with the super value - Google. Look where your competitors are. Could be a good place to start - if everyone's there, could be a lot of traffic there, there is a reason they are all there.

Evaluate your ROI goals and start conservative. Then fine tune from there. Obviously you need to set up tracking. Be careful of some of the ROI trackers though because they can be monitored. Take advantage of CPA instead of CPC, it's less management and easy to justify.

When you are tracking, make sure you know all of the domains that are sending you traffic. You can put on tracking parameters.

Watch for partners. A lot of engines have API's so products are showing up on different sites and sub-domains.

Shopping engines will help build brand awareness. Searches for your site name could be influenced. Set a cookie tracking session. Make sure you track.

This is not a set and forget, just like SEO you need to work on it, don't just set up a feed and be done. You need to see what products are selling and how. Why might someone be landing on your product and leaving…pricing? The image is not good? Is it the product info? Shipping policy? Seller ratings are also very important, if you don't have one it could impact your conversions.

You definitely want to track how the shopping engines are doing vs. your overall conversion rate. When you use them carefully they can be really successful. We get about 20% of our new customers from shopping engines.

The better shopping engines do, the better you will do. They are not going away. You want to work on getting the most out of each customer, and shopping engines are helpful. Often shopping engines lead to repeat customers coming directly back to your site.

Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo Shopping: Yahoo Shopping is a comparison shopping engine, we spend a lot of time focusing on our site to make a better user experience, and have been rewarded with tremendous growth. We have 250 million monthly page views and 100 million products, so we have a massive reach across the internet. We focus quite a bit on our actual site, but our merchants that participate in Yahoo Product Submit really get their products out there.

It's an easy process to get into Yahoo Product Submit. You can open up a Yahoo store, then open and fund a product submit account and we will take your products, so you don't need to worry about uploading a feed. If you already have a platform enabled, you can use our feed upload and your products will appear on Yahoo Shopping. You are charged on a CPC basis.

A few tips:

1. Feed your feed. Ensure you are providing relevant, comprehensive, fresh data. Favor factual information over marketing language in product descriptions (i.e. "brown leather jacket" instead of "stylish leather jacket"). Make sure you include all the specs in your descriptions. It will drive your CTR.

2. Focus on your merchant rating. At Yahoo shopping we use three factors to determine your rankings: relevance, merchant ranking, and bid. So there are ways to go about improving merchant ratings. Don't do bait and switch, we get a lot of complaints about that, and that tends to result in much lower ratings. Also don't try to aggressive up-sell, saying you can't buy x without y. Read the reviews your customers are leaving about you and try to tend to the issues.

3. Participate in category level bidding. If you bid higher, you will get more traffic. Improve your product prominence.

Product Submit: Category Building - we have a lot of options for you to go deeper into your product description.

Your current bid is not always going to be your current cost. We only charge you one penny above your closest competitor.

Reporting for Product Submit: shows the number of products in each category and the average costs.

Just to recap, comparison shopping engines are very large. It's important to play in the space for maximum reach. We can send you a ton of traffic but where the value comes from is giving your customer a great experience. Focus on the basics of good customer service, fast shipping, and it will help increase ROI as well.

Brian Smith: Top 10 ways to die a quick death on shopping engines:

1. Not tracking properly. Track and test and track and test.
2. Not reading the specs, assuming they are correct. Put time into it.
3. Assuming your data feed is up and running. Go and check. Be careful about this.
4. Not including unique IDs (MPN, UPC, ISBN). You might not show up on a skewed list of products.
5. Bidding (like you do in PPC campaigns) - be careful. Sometimes you are bidding on a product or category, it's not keyword bidding. We see people throw tons of money away.
6. Going ga-ga over ad-ons - little things like logos can really increase your costs - it's an easy sell for the shopping engines so be cognizant. Rather than spending the extra 10 cents on a logo, spend 10 cents to increase your bid to get better placement.
7. Don't assume that submitting all products to all engines will work. Think before you send out the feed. If you make $1 on product and that's what the bid cost is - it doesn't make sense. And all engines have different types of traffic so pay attention.
8. Categorization: You must categorize on shopping engines. Some do, some don't. If they don't require it, you should do it anyway because otherwise you might end up in the miscellaneous section. And a lot of times the uncategorized products will end up at the bottom of search results.
9. Engine level quantitative data feed optimization (DFO) - see what engines are and are not working. And if it's not working, why? Look at the data you are submitting.
10. The biggest mistake we see is the "submit and forget" mentality. Think about actively improving your results.

Session coverage contributed by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing

1. Which engines
2. how importatn is translation
3. regional search trends
4. ease of PPC campaign set-up
5. common constraints

*shows some graphs of # of searches and market share of different engines*

China

Baidu’s market share in China is 75% or so.

http://margridgeconsulting.com/reports/2007_china_search_engine_report/ - interesting 2007 China report

Japan

Yahoo Japan is leading Japan with 64% market share

There is a difference of preference that varies by type of search.

Seasonality

*shows France chart* Charts show difference of seasonal changes for searches in different countries

How important is translation?
- search engine requirements
- target audience language skill
- searchers’ preferences
- acceptable methods

Go beyond translation - think localization
- utilize translation memory tools
- work with native speakers currently living in the country
- capaialize on local dialect, neacular, cultural references, current events, and regional word preferences. Use a “local

voice”

Google - Mexico
80/20 Spanish to English ads

Yahoo - Mexico
100/0 - All listings are Spanish

Estimating PPC Campaign Budgets
- easier to do in the US with Google, much more difficult in other countries

Setting up a Campaign
- Yahoo international is very different
- only invoices you on local currency
- min bids are different
- min deposits
- often times, ads and websites must be 100% in native language (i.e. Japan)

Google setup
- single adwords interface
- can charge you in local or US currency
- estimating credit terms apply

Investigate regional advertising constraints
- local presence required
- min IO’s
- min bids
- sales tax
*lists more but took slide down

—————————————————————–

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Didit

International search challenges
- hedge for currency fluctuations
- budget by country or region
- cross border ROI calculations can be challenging

Vendor Selection Issues
- localize or centralize
- single multinational vendor network or local hotshot?
- centralized reporting for optimal decisioning

B2B Challenges
- no single decision maker
- offline conversions
- long lead time and lagged conversions
- keywords are often not b2b specific
- huge range in lead quality
- huge range in LTV of a closed deal

How do you deal with b2b metric uncertainy?
- visits to the contact us pages
- lead forms
- immediate orders
- site stickiness

Predict if kw is b2b or not?
- search engine syndication settings
- daypart
- day of week
- geopgraphy (at the DMN, or more granular level)
- IP address and ISP (not targetable in search)

*shows a daypart and day of week conversion rate chart*

Geographic Segmentation
1. Clicks are worth different amounts
2. *wow, he took that down fast*

Site-side conversion rate

Higher predicted lead score
- does one audience segment have higher lead quality indicators
- if Bremen (germany) visitors are better quality leads than the country average, you can afford to bid more for the

segment vs overall country.
- again, higher bids in a segment may get you additional volume due to a position……

Higher Lifetime Value
- do certain geogrpahies deliver better LTV?
- whats your 90-10 or 80-20 rule look like?

What are your segmentation levers?
- day of week
- demogrpahics
- network click source (content vs search)
- time of day (dayparting)
Should all regions use the same metrics?
- different success mentrics
- more touchpoints may be needed
- competitve landscape might be different country to country

——————————————–

Jeffrey Pruitt, President, SEMPO and Vice president, corporate sponsorships, iCrossing

- 60% of b2b marketers are to up their spending
- 3.5 billion in 2007, will double to 8 billion in the next 4 years

- Communication > Localization > Objectives

*quickly goes over each, was too fast for me*

B2B Trends
- Mobile - 84% of mobile searchers expect a dedicated mobile site
- Display -
- Social - B2B marketers continue to explore Social
- Web Dev -

Program Management - Process

Search Triggers
- TV spot, Radio spot, Display

*again , he is just to fast for me to get it all down*

Client Example - Coke
- managing 9 PPC campaigns in 2 countries
- for SEO, managing 18 countries and some 200+ sites
- *shows global account team chart*

SEO Regional Management
- IC US TEam (USA, Canada) - start with one team and then grow

Localization Criteria
- in house - in country clients
- localization company relationship

Know your space
- Google dominates US and Europe
- Shows big players from other areas (Baidu, Meta, Naver, Rndex)

Example - Fortune 500 client
- globalization and governance of SEM campaigns
- multiple regions/countries/languages
- 7 search engines, 23 countries, 11 languges, 150 campaigns per engine (800+ total)

Challenges
- optimiced communication flow based on the client’s organizational structure
- translation of global marketing goals and objectives and marriage between them and the local market needs
- centralized campaign execution and optimization

Focus on Engagement Success:
- white papers
- web casts

Q:How do you vet or decide who to partner with when going oversees? What resources are out there?
A:Start with SEMPO list. Use the same criteria that you would use when hiring someone locally. Know what your strenghts

and weaknesses are and know what you are looking for in a Vendor. Look for testimonials from the past.

Take a look at the countries you want to get into. China example… if you are going to partner and not buy, you need to

go there and meet them face to face to build the connection. Due your homework.

Make sure you are using the resources you already have. Work to establish relationships with the local office.

Q:What toolkit can you give to an office (in another country) to get them started thinking on what you want?
A: You need to have the strategic talk with them to understand why they still look at page views and not lead gen.

————–

Live blogged by Daver

How do you know if you've been successful with search engines and your website in general? You can check your "rank" at search engines for particular keywords, analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your website, or make the ultimate jump and "close the loop" by measuring sales conversions and ROI. This panel explores both classic and cutting-edge techniques to measure success, what statistics you should really care about, ways to be more strategically focused, and how to drive increased revenue for your business.

Moderator:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite

Speakers:
Jim Sterne, Target Marketing & Chairman, Web Analytics Association
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google
Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

The session starts with Avinash. His presentation will focus is "Why is '2.0' such a challenge?"

He says you need to alter your mindset, otherwise it is not going to work. The fundamental models of content creation, distribution, and consumption have changed. Content aggregators, user generated content, bloggers, etc. are ways that the model has changed and are what makes it difficult to measure.

He presents us with three ideas to help us deal with this new world.

1. Multiplicity. Think in a multiple ways. Use Analytics, but also feed measurement, Technorati, etc. It's like building a house – you can't use just one tool to build a house. You need to use many different tools to get a grasp of how to build a house, or how to measure what is happening.

2. Unique Measures. You can measure all kinds of things, but are they relevant? For Avinash, the RSS feed is what matters to him. He wants to measure growth in the number of people that have given him permission to push content to him, rather than just number of visitors to his site. The actual day's visits are less important than the growth change over time. You need measurements that are unique to that channel. Think of unique measures, not just old measures that may not be as relevant

3. Unique data collection. Gmail is only one page load, Ajax, videos. How do you measure success? Fake page views have been used, but there are things you can add to the html to measure things. You don't need to pollute the data to measure success.

He sums up by "Get on the train, or get run over."

Jim Sterne is next. He shows how much data is out there and we can measure all kinds of things. We have so much data coming out of our ears.

Web metrics grows up. Evolution went from reporting to benchmarking to analysis to dynamic promotions to hearts and minds.

Search metrics grows up. The evolution of search metrics went from ranking to traffic to analysis to dynamic bidding to predictive buying.

A hitch in measuring this is the economy. There's not as much spending, we're being asked to cut down on costs, which makes it harder to measure things. You need to use the metrics to get better results. I missed some of what he said, my apologies if it's out of context.

Matt Bailey on segmentation. Analytics According to Captain Kirk. Captain Kirk is an analytics genius and pioneer. He talks about green alien women were the key to staying alive on the show.

The huge theme with Matt's presentation is context. Everything needs to be in context. Get away from pages of charts in reporting. You need to instead start with questions, look at complex relationships to make sense of things. Start building context.

Back to Star Trek. Shows stats about total deaths over five years, but no context. Red shirts die more, but need to know more. Keep segmenting for more context, so you can understand what factors are contributing to deaths (aka conversion rates). Look at what you can do to change things. Get alien women! By looking at these segments, we can understand what is increasing or decreasing conversion rate, can make decisions about what to do with this context.

People are not cows. We don't go through a website like a herd. Totally different stories for different people and segments. Conversion rates for one group of people versus another may not be comparable. Again, context is everything. You need to tell a story, it's the only way to compare and contrast what is happening on the site. Get a full time analyst, it makes a huge difference when someone can understand the analytics and make recommendation, it's a huge ROI for the company.

Marshall Sponder. Only has one slide. It's great to not have a scripted presentation, but means that I have missed some more items.. He's taken charge of the social media committee in the Web Analytics Association, now the biggest committee. Started drafting standards, will release later this year. Found search doesn't drive traffic to social networks, but it's things like Digg and Reddit instead.

Traffic to a lot of social networks comes from social media, they don't come from search. One reason is moderators aren't there in social networks to monitor content, add keywords, etc. Makes it hard for search engines to know what page is about.

How to measure what is a conversation?

Social media traffic is more directed than search traffic. Traffic to blogs, especially one he studied in particular, half of a traffic was from social media. That traffic is most directed. Monster and Military.com will release a study tomorrow about how they used social influencers to benefit the Military.com site.

Web Analytics Association has gone out and tried to find out what companies actually need to measure.

You can get people to a site, but you need something for them to do when they get to the site. We can drive people to a site, but need to figure out how to handle them. Analytics can help you with what to measure and what they are doing.

Web analytics in search and social media are similar, but different in one main way. Search is part of marketing, but social media isn't part of anything, not clear where it belongs in the company structure.

Contributor: Keri Morgret

CNET reports that software maker GraphOn has filed suit against Google for violating its patents in a multitude of Google products, including Google's Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube.

Is GraphOn in the right here? Forum members are not satisfied. Here are some reactions:

...in most news stories I hear about, it seems like patent holders are a pack of pedantic, nipple-twisting sharks who deserveth not a place in society.

[Patents are] more often a nuisance applied by bottom feeders that normally wouldn't be able to make money in the real world. They just sit around and think of obvious applications and file them and then kick back and wait for your patent to be granted and then sue everyone for creating those obvious applications.

Looking closely at the patents suggests no real patent infringement. One forum member who reviewed a patent says "The first patent describes every remotely user-content driven site ever. I have a sneaking suspicion here that everyone on this forum could be sued successfully if this holds up."

(But of course, GraphOn has sued the moneymaker. As incrediBILL says, "Grab a lawyer and join in the gold rush!")

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Maps Guide Tom at Google Groups reported to business owners that issues with phone verification have been fixed.

Forum members are not convinced. It seems that issues are still persisting. Business owners who are trying to validate their business are receiving call-backs from Google but there is no voice on the other end and the phone seems "deaf to the keytones."

Even SMS seems to be impacted.

For now, I guess, there's no solution to the problem. We will update this thread if there is a a fix.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

If you are a Google AdSense publisher and make a lot of money off of those AdSense ads, you may have noticed a dip in your earnings as a result of the Beijing Olympics. Google AdSense publishers report that their traffic, and subsequently, number of clicks, was lower than normal once the Olympics began.

But could the Olympics really be the reason for the drop? It's possible that a lot of people are just vacationing right now. It is, after all, August, and school is starting soon, so time is running out for those possible family vacations.

The solution? Think of a niche that is August-specific, suggests forum member netmeg.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Yahoo announced that they opened up Yahoo Buzz to the whole web. When Yahoo launched Yahoo Buzz, it was only open to less than 500 or so publishers, for users to use. Now, Yahoo has opened it to any web page on the internet, allowing any of their users to submit and buzz up any content on the web. You can read more of the news at Techmeme.

To submit content, go to http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit/. To add Yahoo Buzz buttons to your own content, go to http://publisher.buzz.yahoo.com/about.

We have been a Yahoo Buzz publisher for a while, so you have been able to see the Yahoo Buzz buttons on the bottom of our posts for a while now.

A WebmasterWorld thread does point out that it is "Restricted to US only." But other than that, there is not much discussion around this Digg-like service.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am 99.999% sure this is a new user interface for Yahoo Search. In the past, Yahoo never ever indented search results. In fact, in the past I thought they did do indenting and then stopped, but Yahoo told me that they have "never grouped results."

Many search results, including a search for search engine roundtable return grouped results now. Here is a picture:

This is 99.999% new behavior from Yahoo Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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

• More Customers, Fewer Costs: Why Marketing to the "Long Tail" Makes Sense
• Universal Search
• Search Industry Update
• Pay Per Conversation
• Non-Profits & Socially-Responsible Companies
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Mobile SEO: Death of the '.mobi'
• Semantic Search : How will it change out lives?
• Orion Keynote Panel - How Much Search is Enough?
• Everything but Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options
• Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
• Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine
• Storyteller Marketing: How the Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing

Gary Stein, Director of Strategy, Ammo Marketing

Starts with an actual story - about snow tires in Alaska and Nordstrom.

Brand
- statement of belief
- communicated
- managed
- developed
- stakeholders
- ability to recall
- needs to be managed

Story
- chain of events
- shared
- lived
- experienced
- characters
- ability to retell
- needs to be given

In the netowkrs that matter, The Story is the critical unit of communication.

People dont pass along brand messages, they pass along stories.

The Story is the Most Powerful Form of Communication

Stories shape behavior - he gives an example about a bank teller.

Business is being shaped by the stories being told. Advertising research that 30 second ads that tell a story are more

memerable then simple brand messages.

5 stories that can be told:

1. Origin - where did you/your brand come from
2. Purpose - tells us why you are a business
3. Vision - similar to origin but is where are we going
4. Education - Starbucks educated people about traditions of coffee
5. Ethics - when someone walks the walks of what they are doing
6. Connection - reaching out and talking to the customer

Review, Evaluate, Build, Deploy

Benefit-Statement Searches - people are searching for an answer to their problem.

——————————————————————————–

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.

Find your brand story - figure out what is being said and what you want it to be. You have to monitor online convos and

know what is being said.

*shows a slide of the “PC vs Mac guys”

*shows a slide of Kleenex’s campaign “let it out”

*shows Dove “pro-aging”

Nichols Concrete Cutting - doing the impossible
- through testimonials were able to get their story

FLOR - sustainable, beautiful homes

Tell an Authentic Story
- insincerity or fake stories will backfire (shows an image of Walmart)

Hone the Story
- get the story down to simple, repeatable, and memorable

Listen for the story
- employees, customers, suppliers

Connect your brand to the story
- all creative must be tied to the story

Amplify the story online
- can do this by optimized press releases with images
- shows a chart about universal search (study by Jupiter )

Audio
- you need more and more digital assets
- Whirlpool - has a sponsored audio show

Video
- Rec’s that you look at Intercontinental and what they did with Video

Articles
- write educational articles, give good info, tips

Blogs & other websites

Syndicate the story
- RSS your content takes on a life of its own

Consitency
- how you look, what you say, and more important, what you do.
- product performance and service is the final word
- needs to be true

Leave something to the imagination

Let the story spread

If you really hone your story, figure it out, let other people tell the story for you - that is when story telling will do

wonders for your marketing.

——————————————————————————————

Larry Lawfer, Founder/President, YourStorys.com

Its all about entertain (some), create community, engage, pull in (its not push out).

The images you put with your words are very important.

Stories need to be authentic and real.

People are looking for something. Search people are not telling the story well enough.

*shows a Timberland print ad - the people are naked (…dont ask )

engage, Inform, Retrain, Create Communit, Grow
- the basic rule is to be real
- be authentic
- invite involvement
- listen, respond, repeat

Listening is essential. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? (shows a video with Mitt Romney,

Cam Neely, Denis Leary, and others)

Do you want to know more? *shows another video*

The Julie Fund *example* as an example:

What I know?
- interviews are a process
- research, develop questions
- gather more information
- prepare, aware, define
- LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN
- follow through with what you just heard
- what havent I asked, Listen?
- stay on schedule, confident in knowing what you need

////Funny how he says the Flip phone is nice but not professional, yet everyone else has said that its a great item to get

started with - Observation by Dave////

Engage, Inform, entertain… create community
- authetic is essential
- real is invaluable
- scripted and practiced devalues your result
- people are visually sophisticated, make your content the best it can be
- develop a library of content. Be strategic

Pulling the numbers
- its all about the results
*he pulled the slide down - drat!!!*

Know what you want. Know what you are getting. Be prepared for better
*shows a video*

Set the goal before you start.

Real, Authentic, Inform Engage, Share
*shows another video of a guy enjoying his interview*

Q&A

Q: What is the most effective story?
A: Vision. With a flood of products, the vision story can stand out the most right now.

Q: Benifits of a product, asked about data trends for these type of searches
A: No hard stats, and not sure that anyone is measuring it. Its more of a feeling and a trend he is seeing based on talking with agencys.

Contributed by DaveR.

The value of search as a true enterprise platform has been touted for years, yet few organizations have seriously embraced the opportunity. This session will provide an overview of enterprise search fundamentals and explore the enterprise search marketplace in depth. Current enterprise search tools, design issues, and real-world examples of effective enterprise search implementations will be discussed. Whether your organization has a well-established Intranet or an Intranet that has just been launched, you'll walk away from this session with a better understanding for the principles of a well-designed enterprise search solution.

Moderator:

• Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch Expert & President & CEO, VIZION Interactive

Speakers:

• Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing, Vivisimo
• Bill French, CTO, MyST Technology Partners
• Andy Feit, SVP of Marketing, Mark Logic
• Avi Rappoport, Editor, SearchTools.com

Avi Rappoport

Scope:

• Public-facing web site search
  • online stores
  • informational
  • hybrids
• Intranet Search
  • Departmental
  • Extranets for partners
  • Research (narrow and deep)
  • Enterprise (wide and shallow)

Finding content

• Robot crawlers
  • follow links
  • discover servers
  • same problems as webwide search robots
• java, javascript, flash navigation links
• unlinked content
• redirects, infinite loops

• Direct data source access
• databases, CMS, document stores, data silos
• web services, REST, and other APIs
• Updates can trigger re-index
• Avoid extra page content, navigation.

Un-optimized content

• No title tag or duplicate titles
• Invalid HTML
• Modification dates unreliable
• Non-HTML files
  • no file properties or duplicate properties
  • huge file sizes
  • multiple versions of the same file

Dealing with short queries

• Average 1-3 words in a query
  • often ambiguous
  • multi-word queries are usually phrases
• Smart query processing
  • Auto-complete for popular terms
  • Expand queries (synonyms, acronyms)
  • Match with Best Bets
  • Offer spelling suggestions (hard to do well).

Retrieval and relevance

• Expanded queries find more match files
• Relevance and perception
• Complex algorithms rarely help. Users don’t care how many results there are, they usually just look at the first page. Even treating searches as AND or OR have similar results, best if you put the results with all words in phrase at top, however.
• Page-rank not applicable
• Most links are navigational, not meaningful
• Simple term frequency ranking works
• Heuristics: position and phrase matching
• Personalization – small bang for big bucks. Might be useful in specific situations, but not usually.

No to Spam, yes to Metadata

• Your own content is (mostly) reliable
• Metadata adds value
  • search and show author
  • several more, missed them.

Search Analytics

• Search Traffic
• Top queries
  • navigation
  • topical
  • trends over time
• No-match queries
  • add text, metadata, new content
  • improve no-matches page.

Enterprise search tips

• Basic SEO is smart
• Users rarely type long queries
• Giving them what they really want is hard
• Metadata can change the dynamic
• Search analytics rock
• This is more librarianship than marketing – expose your content rather than drive people to something.

www.searchtools.com consult8@searchtools.com

Bill French.

Enterprise search: definition?
Finding information…

• inside the enterprise?
• for employees?
• for partners?
• for clients?

His definition is Search Solutions that help to Achieve the Objectives of the Enterprise.

Observations:
Employees may (or may not) know what the yare looking for, or even know that they should be looking. One study said that workers may spend up to two hours a day searching.

Ideal Operational Efficiency
Information magically finds you in a context where it has the greatest value. Think less about the search function, and more about the software applications that employees are using. Those are the key moments where you can provide the greatest productivity to the user.

Findability: Three Key Observations

1. Value directly proportional findability. If something cannot be found, it has no value.
2. Findability is directly proportional to focus.
3. Focus is dependent on two elements: the message and the presentation architecture.

Bill disagreed with Avi, and feels that you can’t always trust the internal metadata. Employees do want to be heard, they write things and want them to be found, and even the internal system can be gamed.

Andy Feit
Enterprise Search: Approaches to Choosing and Using Your Own Search Engine.
Three views: Knowledge Management, “Google for your intranet”, Application Centric.

Knowledge management is a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows and how it knows it (source: wikipedia). Can drive tremendous value, but not without the investment and commitment.

Cheap and Cheerful: If KM is so challenging, what options are out there? “Google for your intranet”

• Could literally be Google, but there are plenty of other options for basic spidered search.
• Generally works well when underlying content publishing process is in place. Problem can be if you have multiple versions of a document, and people finding wrong version.
• Downside: like web search, it puts the onus on the user to do the work.
  • Worse because web relevancy models are not present.

Learning from the web…

• Going vertical, or these days “micro-vertical”
• Leverage focused content, engaged audience, and common goals
• Often combined with Web 2.0-style interfaces:
• User Generated Content
• Tagging, Rankings, Comments, etc.

In the enterprise, silos are not always bad. We call “vertical role- and task-aware”. You searches can actually be quite relevant because it is specifically in your area of interest.

Examples of good silos and specific results.

• Consulting -> Statements of Work Builder
• Heathcare -> Patient Post-op Instructions. Instead of generic post-op instructions, take the existing content in your network (patient records) and making it specific for the user (patient). Would know exactly what procedures were done and have specific information for patient.
• Market Research -> Dynamic Publishing
• Legal Departments…
• Marketing Teams…
• Sales…

He showed screenshots of several specific vertical search applications.

Rebecca Thompson
“Using Search to Jump Start Collaboration”

Enterprise search today: screenshot of existing enterprise search for a company. Documents are organized by sources, such as Sharepoint, Documentum, intranet, etc. Another search type option is clusters and facets.

Enterprise search can be a hard sell to executives. You can present case that employees use a lot of time searching, but executives ask if people will be more productive with the time that they don’t search, or would they just mess around online. Missed good example of how to convince executives here. A compelling argument is employees can make use of existing internal knowledge. How do you deal with people that retire or leave? What happens to the data on the laptop after the person leaves? A lot of knowledge is now gone.

The Collaboration Starting Point. The natural starting point for collaboration is search. Why?

• Search can access all content and data
• Unlike standalone social tools, social search is bootstrapped by the data
• Everyone in an organization can use search
• It is simple and intuitive
• Corporations have been struggling for years to organize data across departments and repositories – let users help!

Social Search in the Enterprise:

• Social Tagging: voting. Users can actually do this to help clean up data.
• Social Tagging: rating. You can either just show rating that user gave so others can see how useful it was, or you can put it in the backend too so that it can be used to increase relevancy of results.
• Social Tagging: keywords. Users can tag documents with keywords. This can help by adding information that is not in the document itself. Can be freeform or from dropdown.
• Social Tagging: annotations. Users can enrich search results by annotating existing results with their own thoughts and commentary. Almost like a mini blog post, or looks like comments on items in Friend Feed.
• Social Bookmarking: Virtual Folders. Represented as a folder in the interface, but like a tag on the backend of the system.

Quickly went through at TV Network News Division search engine results.

Social Search

• allows enterprises to tap into and make use of human knowledge within their organization
• provides the opportunity to go beyond finding information to enriching it
• reveals valuable insights into the collaborative intelligence of the organization.

Contributor: Keri Morgret

According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year. This makes optimizing video for YouTube one of the biggest opportunities in the fast-changing and complex world of search. This session will look at how video search engine optimization (VSEO) has become the most important new use of search engine optimization today.
Moderator:
Joseph Morin, Partner, Boost Search Marketing & CEO, Storybids, Inc.
Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixsy Corporation
Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development & Management, eLocal Listing, LLC
Matthew Scheybeler, CTO, blinkx
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
Greg Jarboe: Anyone heard of Youtube? Audience laughs.

We were playing with this weird thing a few years ago and then Google acquired it. Youtube accounts for over 98% of all videos viewed at Google sites. The game has changed. A lot of us keep optimizing and optimizing and hope with enough optimization good things will happen. One needs to understand Youtube as a couple things. It's a search engine. But it's primary power and addiction and force of dominance is as a video sharing site. The right strategies to get your videos found - means you need to optimize, but also need a sharing strategy. That's the real secret to ranking in Youtube.

A few case studies: A B2C site. A company called STACK media got 140,104 views on 137 videos. Spikes are wonderful, but want videos take off on a sustained basis.

The Allen Iverson training video had 36,885 views as of August 8th, 2008. His training video is getting a consistent growing uplift. The shocking truth is that 13% of views came from Search! That;s where the optimization kicked in. 75% came from somewhere else. In this case, they came from related videos. People don't watch "a" video, they watch batches. They are addictive. They came from other Allen Iverson videos - they came and saw more. This is "related video optimization".

Another case study: Worked with SES to optimize over 130 videos - London, NY, etc. Got 26,2411 views. Healthy in a B2B category. Let's look at an individual video. We see a spike at the time of SES NY. Then # of visits went crazy again in the summer. What happened here? Where did the views come from? In this case 7.4% from search. Great! But 71% came from embedded in players and on blogs. Is that search? No. But it's views. And it helps get integrated in universal search.

The related video phenomenon - people watch related videos in a session. And if they embed it in a blog, even better. Create a widget. Allows a package of videos to be taken onto a site. Can tailor the widget so that your videos come up first on your site. Cross fertilization effect. It's video sharing, and that's the secret.

Next up is Chase Norlin:

The web is becoming increasingly visual. It's a challenge to index everything. Getting in video search engines is big. Provides free traffic, exposure of brand and content, or ad revenue.

Pure Video is a large video search site, and a lot of people want to know how to rank high in this engine. How do you show up in top 3? Need to add rich metadata. Push out RSS/MRSS and update frequently. Format that video search engines like. Video search crawling in general is not automated. Also, contact the videos earch engines! Email them to get into the crawler queue. Will get regularly crawled.

Got a site? Run private label video search on it! Powerful for creating traffic and ad revenue and unique content. Customize the search to your audience.

That's all! Thanks.

Stephen Espinosa is up.

How do you get ranked in universal search, and how to convert it?

Who knows that Yahoo has universal search too with video?

Create your videos - take into account the length. No one wants to sit and watch a 3-4 minute video on a search page.
Have a call to action. Calls are more important than clicks. Make it ready for TV. Put a twist on it to make it viral.

Make sure video is in SWF format. Don't use Active X controls.

Use Google Video sitemaps and available variables. Make sure all your videos are fed to Google via the sitemap.

SEO: Build a page for every video you produce. Optimize the page with the tags, content, keywords, file name. Use a constant video description that is keyword rich across all sites.

Use analytics to test how long people are staying on the page. If a video is 6 minutes, and people are staying for 42 seconds - you have a problem.
Use A/B variant testing to determine which videos gain the best response and where to place links to your video page from your homepage.

Utilize thumbnails. Show your call to action - phone number. Can tell Google which thumbnail to display. Make sure to tell your video producer to put the call to action at the 1/4 mark, 1/2 mark and 3/4 mark.

Google TV. Very affordable to create highly targeted TV spots that you can coordinate with video launches.

Video & Local. Sponsored and local listings are 2.2x likely to get the click. Add the video and you are 3.3x more likely to get the traffic.

Next up is Matthew from Blix.

Tips: Submit video to Blix and they will do the hard work for you.

A list to do for Google and Yahoo video:

1) Provide a well place message
2) Have a page with lots of text
3) Descriptive file names
4) Sitemaps - submit to different engines
5) Make sure the URL is descriptive

Don't:
1) Don't tag spam. Will get penalized in Blix.
2) Don't require a special flash player

Real his white paper on video SEO.

Gregory of Infuse is up next.

Doing video search since 2001. Has #1 result for "video optimization" on Google.

People forget how effective video can be for reputation management. Can own the SERPs using video optimization. Sharing / community is key to maximizing the bang.

Also, theres mobile benefit. Can opt into a mobile version of the channel in Youtube. Great for demos.

Case study: "Corvette" search on Google - GM does not have a video but someone else does. Missed opportunity by GM.

Put the video on your site as a best practice, but these days people focus on upload approaches as well as RSS and MRSS feeds.

If you are concerned about putting own video on your own site, and want to rank as well as possible, focus on the metadata and everything that surrounds the video. The video search engines read and use that to rank.

We believe video optimization is any technique - paid, viral, social - anything to achieve marketing goals with videos. People get fixated on he keywords when uploading. They are important. Focus on the truncation aspect. The most important keyword or brand should be at the beginning of the sentence. Can rank very successfully for moderate and non competitive phrases just with keywords, but no longer the only piece of the puzzle. To illustrate this - a video with less views can rank higher because of the social aspect. Especially in a competitive vertical. Google is opening up in new ways - the Google keyword tool - now revealing queries. Youtube is becoming more transparent too. More stuff rolling out. You will not rank well on Youtube for competitive videos on keywords alone. Need to stimulate it.

Tips:
1) Have no financial interest - make it a good advice piece.
2) One title, description, etc. syndicating to many engines.
3) On the Youtube homepage, it will tell you what's popular. Query your keyword. It will show you vital information and what keywords are most popular.
4) Type a keyword related to one of your terms, and sort by views. Study those videos. Look at the content, tags, and community aspects such as comments and links.
5) AOL has a page that shows you popular videos from video search engines.
6) Find related videos, and come up with a clever video response to that video. Add a URL in the description of the video to your website.
7) Any type of text, or call to action. If you have a series of videos - keep them in your walled garden - there is a free feature in Youtube to do so.
8) Add a branding experience. Add a URL in every single frame with a call to action.

Get familiar with the Youtube partner program. If you are content owner, can get rev share. No cost way to increase your video optimization, because Youtube will help promote it.

A new feature: The screening room. They are desperate for content. Can get 6 figures worth of advertising value if you get featured there.

Allow comments within your channel. If you don't, hard to rank well in hypercompetive verticals.

Talk about your video in social sites, press releases. Can embed videos in press releases. Check out sites like Socialmarker.com, Stumbleupon for using social to promote videos.

Paid search - a new feature rolling out - can buy keywords in Youtube via PPC - only available to agencies right now.

Can use Adwords - through content and site match - to place video ads. Very cost effective. Tremendous value.

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Is Google your main search engine? Do you realize that there are many other tools that will help you find specific information — sometimes better than Google? Most people are unaware that there are more than just the "big three" of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The list includes Bit Torrent search engines, image search engines, artificial intelligence systems, clustering engines, recommendation search engines, metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. Most of these niche search engines have very fun, interesting features, and you'll discover all sorts of relevant information you might have otherwise missed using the more general, big box-type search engines.

Moderator:

• Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media
Speakers:
• Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch Expert & President, SageRock.com
• Jay Sears, EVP, Strategic Products & Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc. / ADSDAQ Exchange
• Jonathan Ewert, Vice President and General Manager, LookSmart
• Dustin Kwan, Senior Product Manager, Ask Sponsored Listings
• Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Andrew Goodman, SEW Expert: remember back in 1995 when there were 9 or 10 competitive search engines…we’ve sort of gotten away from that. It seems like today there is a lot of energy in the space, it’s a complex picture that needs simplifying. So we have some experts here to talk about the subject.

Sage Lewis: Good afternoon. I happen to be one of the proud experts at SEW, you can see my bi-weekly column there. Today this session is brought to you by my family vacation! I was at my in-laws in Upstate NY, and here is the media we had on our vacation! Movies, laptops, stereos! The point is, there is more media to buy than ever! But – there is not more media budget. And – more options mean more risk. I am coming to you as a buyer of media here so I am going to share with you some of my experiences in buying media on search engines, I will show you some of the things we have done and find success in.

1. Paying bloggers to post: there are many places you can do this, Pay Per Post, and also experimenting with a company called Review Me, but Social Spark is another one. We’ve had good and bad experiences. The good experience is we used them to create buzz for a contest – and we won this. The bad experience is when we used this for a B2B site, to get users to fill out a survey, and it was unsuccessful, too targeted. If you have a large audience you are trying to reach, using these networks can be very effective, but not if your market is more targeted.
2. Ask.com is good cheap traffic where we get a lot of conversions. Ask has been very successful for us.
3. Superpages.com is great for a local or regional campaign, can be very successful, we have seen a lot of conversions. The traffic is qualified.
4. Facebook can allow us to target based on demographics. You can buy ads to promote a variety of things on Facebook. The process allows you to demographically target – and Facebook has over 24 million members. I highly recommend this.
5. We like Quigo because you can target very specific newspapers and magazine. Quigo is PPC – and you can target very specific places, great if you are doing regional campaigns. This might be something that you would find interesting.

Here is a campaign from one client (slide). It shows a variety of advertising networks. I have highlighted when one medium beat our overall average. I wanted to show you specifically that the bottom line of this is cost per conversion, which the average was $50.90, and the CPC average was $0.90. And Yahoo and MSN, in this particular case, was above our average! But, Superpages and LookSmart were below and converted quite well.

Tip #1 - Buy alternative advertising through referrals. If you are in a marketing network group, ask around, see what you might find.
Tip #2 - Be absolutely clear about your goals and time frame – know what you are going to get out of this.
Tip #3 - Allocate 10%-25% of your online budget to testing. And know that it’s testing, and it’s not going to convert, but if you don’t test, you might miss out.

Jay Sears, EVP of Context Web: I talk about 3 things today:
1) Why search is not advertising.
2) Why some very large companies have spent over $10 billion over the past 15 months for display.
3) Trends we are watching and you should watch.

Search is not advertising. It’s demand fulfillment. It’s order taking. Content is more about demand generation. There is only so much search. About 5% of the time you spend online is searching. The other 95% is looking at content. There is 50 times the amount of inventory and opportunity with content-based ads. Because content advertising has been lumped in with search (largely because of Google), it is largely misunderstood.

Targeting content vs. search. This is applicable to Google content network. When you are targeting content you want to go wide, it’s implicit interest, you want to generate that demand. Versus search, where someone has told the search box that they are interested in something.

Think about categories. Keywords can appear out of context. Go wide and gear your ad towards the right category. People make the mistake in using very specific keyword to target content. If there is a page about baseball, about the Red Sox vs Yankees, don’t run an ad about the Red Sox because you will piss off half the people. But if your ad is about memorabilia or tickets, you will get a different response.

The next battle ground is display advertising. Google’s organic growth rate, though still growing by leaps and bounds, is slowing down. So they have to innovative on the display side, so they bought You Tube and Double Click. Another issue people are trying to solve for marketers, that unlike the search market which is highly concentrated to Google, display is highly fragmented. You have a million publishers that carry advertising. Social applications and other sources allow us to avoid homepages and go straight to deep pages. So how can we re-aggregate those opportunities to reach customers?

You have branded sites now building mini ad networks, and ad networks themselves now specializing. Dream up any topic – and you will find an ad network especially for that industry.

The growth on a lot of the portal destination sites are down over the past few years, so this is why they are creating these platforms.

There are 120,000 blogs creating every day. So how many calls would you have to make a minute to reach all those guys! So you can see why these platforms are all getting created.

So some of the things we are doing about it –
Marketers want scale and control, making the long-tail addressable (Google has the only effective strategy making the long tail addressable, they have over a million publishers on their network), content is a high value common denominator, solutions for big and small sellers.

We catered our business to the large agencies, and recently created a self-publishing product for smaller companies.

I just want to leave you with some trends:
-the display/content advertising is the next battleground.
-innovations in self service publishing will happen more and more.
-other portals are figuring out ways to make the content/display market friendly for all of us.

And if you are a buyer, you might start to become a seller, and vice versa, and eventually we are all going to become media traders!

Jonathan Ewert, LookSmart: I sure hope search is advertising Jay!

Thank you for having me, this is an exciting time in search advertising. We have a lot of unknowns, and alternatives are certainly needed in the marketplace.

All markets follow a cycle and change over time. Years ago there was nothing called internet search and obviously no search networks. Infoseek was out of inventory, so we needed to start a network to get more inventory from other publishers; in those days it was all display ads and not text ads. Today there are a series of new and established search engines, and a whole host of networks.

What’s happening? Fewer search engine choices will drive higher prices, which creates the need for search advertising networks. Search networks may or may not have a search advertising network. When these networks interoperate with each other, it’s more cost effective and will offer the potential of a great return.

At this point Google is a natural monopoly. Are they too smart for their own good?

Search advertising networks are text-based with traffic that exists in other places than in search engines. It’s a big business and growing pretty quickly. It’s going the reverse of search engines which essentially has only 3 biggies. There are more places, and more budgets, in search advertising. Online overtook TV spending in the UK last week and it’s on track to happen in the U.S. As we talk to advertisers, here are some of the things they ask us:

1. Make sure it’s easy for us to buy and optimize through an API. I spend a lot of time optimizing my own buys, don’t make me do that with your network.
2. Answer the phone – be responsive with actual human beings.
3. Offer plenty of targeting options beyond local.
4. Offer a lot of reach at a low price.

Be careful, if you bid to low you might not get access to premium networks, if you bid too high, your economics are upset.

LookSmart leverages and licenses its AdCenter platform to advertisers and publishers as an essential complement to major search engines.

Dustin Kwan, Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL): Some topics I will cover: Why advertise beyond the Big 3? How can you improve your performance in targeting with Ask?

Ask is the fourth largest search engine. Why advertise out of the Big 3? Really with Ask, you can extend your reach to those not on Google, Yahoo and MSN. A percentage who use Ask don’t use the others! You can get a pretty big performance boost if you can combine another, without harming your ROI. You will see much lower CPCs and CPA’s on ASL. We spend a lot of time on the performance of the network.

We have very specific tools that are available for you to help improve your campaign performance to help expand your keywords and clicks and improve the granularity of your performance. The top 3 underutilized tours include dynamic insertion codes, keyword prospecting reports, run of category targeting.

Dynamic Insertion Codes are similar to DKI, but you can add additional information, like Ad ID and feed source, and other metrics to help optimize your ad. You can add codes for more granular tracking. All campaigns can benefit from these codes. You want to optimize your traffic sources based on feed insertions, and use the codes in conjunction with Analytics tracking.

Keyword Prospecting Reports will give you a list of keywords that are currently undersold or have low bids compared to past click and CPA performance. With this you can find high-volume keywords with low competition and low prices. You can also test out some new keywords at lower bid rates.

One size does not fit all with search networks. You may find words that didn’t work on Yahoo or Google, but might work with us.

The last tool is Run of Category Targeting. We have 38 categories that are targetable. It will expand your reach. Compete with exact and broad match ads. You do not want to use it for highly targeted campaigns. The great thing is that it has a 5 cent minimum bid, and actually does get around reserve prices!

So with the Ask network, you will increase your reach and we do have low-priced, quality clicks. And make sure you use useful tools wisely to add to your campaign performance.

Mary Berk, Microsoft: Why are we up here? So while we are one of the Big 3, we are clearly on the smaller size. You can think of us as the biggest of the small guys.

So quick overview, I will share with you how we think about our platform. The more we can encourage you to experiment with our engine, the better it is for us, but it is also better for you.

We are really looking at optimizing the needs of our users, our advertisers, and our publishers. The goal is to find the optimal mix of meeting all of their needs.

We work first to show high-quality ads to our users. When our user is engaged, we have further reach. The further our reach goes, the more our advertisers and publishers are engaged. It’s a constant balancing game.

Google is a class act. Most of us up here think we have something to offer by way of diversity. So why does Google get all the attention? If advertisers want a one-stop shop, they will go to the place that has the most users. And they don’t want to spend time optimizing their campaign for a search engine that doesn’t reach that much traffic. But – traffic isn’t everything, quality counts.

Microsoft AdCenter/Live Search:
-Led overall conversion rates among search engines
-Drove 17% of purchase and 15% of dollars based on 9% of the traffic, showing efficiency in driving conversions and dollars
-Special strength areas include mass merchants and many others.

If you are really trying to get the biggest return on investment try different things. As you experiment you will overall improve your campaigns. So look to other engines to discover varying cost per acquisitions, different traffic and audience types (and quality levels), different publisher types.

So checkout Microsoft, we have different publishing and advertising products. Anyone who runs a search campaign can easily transfer that to content-based networks. We have some state of the art free tools (that could even be applicable to Google campaigns). We have an Excel plugin for keywords which is great. We have AdCenter Analytics – we will tell you about your audience if you install our code. We also have AdCenter Desktop to allow you to manage your campaigns while offline, and then you can upload them when you get online. Thank you!

Post contributed by Sheara Wilensky of PromediaCorp.

Where does search really fit within a marketer's total digital advertising effort? Big businesses and small businesses alike struggle with how to allocate search marketing, and other online advertising or marketing efforts. This Orion panel will evaluate strategic thought processes and then grind down to tactical execution with thought leaders from the search engine marketing, advertising agency, and advertiser perspectives. We will explore how search can be "carved out" from an overall budget and how it will lead the white whale of online marketing — a truly holistic marketing strategy.

Moderators:
Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch
Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Robert Murray, President, iProspect
Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Resolution Media, an Omnicom Media Group Company
Steven Kaufman, SVP, Media Director, Digitas
Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Strategist, Discover Financial Services

Kevin Ryan welcomes us. Announces winners of the SES awards. Yahoo! takes the win for most relevant search results. Chuckles from the audience. Looksmart wins best ad platform.

Why does search get credit for everything is the big question tackling today. Constantly gets asked this question, and we still don't have an answer.

KR: What are the key take aways to gain from this session? What are the best plans for executing holistic strategies. Lots of crap about agency integration - digital arm working with search - clients feel dissatisfied with this model. And at the end of the day - brand integration and where the money's coming from. From a MarketingSherpa - it's amazing to me how little measurement is occurring.

Panel: The bright part for us search marketers that its grown 200% in two years.

An integrated brand campaign - such as with one of our clients - Discover - we the focus is integrating search in our online branding campaign. Our strategy is to tie it with TV to maximize our mileage from the campaign. If someone watches a TV spot and goes to the web, and has brand recall. We also use ad copy and landing pages and microsites revolving around the TV spot. That is another way search is integrated.

KR: Poll of marketers - how many are integrating search with marketing. Less than half admitted to integrating search with marketing. Where the money comes from - a hypothetical scenario - Budweiser campaign had a $16 million budget that went $16 million over budget. What's going in that case.

Panel: It varies by brand, client. Google is aggressive now about pushing Youtube - putting the creatives and building a channel around it to drive more impressions. The brand clients are becoming more and more savvy, recognizing that the creatives need to live online.

KR: So where is the money coming from? Are you borrowing from Google to pay Google?

Panel: It varies. On the digital side, we need to make sure we have enough money. Broad based TV branding campaigns, if there's an online component - search is a part of it.

One thing to clarify when hunting the money trail. It's different when talking about paid vs. organic. On the natural side, the budget is usually not from the ad side - usually from IT, or something else such as web development.

KR: What do you attribute the changes to? Overall awareness?

The efficiency has driven this more than anything. The returns effective campaigns generate. More exposure of what search can do for the overall budget.

Everyone is starting to realize online is a better channel, more cost efficient, measurable. Having these internal champions for search. Also, conferences like this are a good example - more people are engaging in search marketing.

KR: A lot of people are interested in where the money comes from how it comes together - show us the consensus. Where does it start?

Panel: Where does it start... We've long known that search is truly accountable and comes down to measurement. We can track what's happening.

CPCs are going up and not down. Increased competition. It's getting harder to yield the same dollar for every dollar spend.

There's the acquisition side, and the brand side. Clients are pretty good at forecasting - and it's a finite world. There's frustration on how to scale this great channel. The engines need to do a better job at selling a branded search product. A recent study by Google showed the value of being on the page - but the problem is that we are being charged on a CPC basis on and not a CPM basis.

Search is being used to justify traditional media budget. We're looking at query volume against TV schedule and looking for spikes. TV lacks that measurably that search has. Google is trying to change things, but the scale is not there yet. We're using search data to make decisions about TV advertising.

KR: Search engines need to do a better job at showing how it can be used as a branding tool. What do you mean?

Panel: If you search Yahoo! for "Special K". They have a branded image with info on "Special K". So they do a good job there. Google is not going to do this but other engines are . It's not just about your listing, but multiple links and logos and dropping brand equity here.

It's nice to get the logo in there if you can make a deal with the engine, but Yahoo just recently showed quantifiable lifts among brand recall and likelihood to purchase just by exposure and not clicks. They need to do a better job at merchandising that little text ad. In a recent study, 40% of people polled assume that the top results are the top brands. So there is that brand equity. The challenge is how do I buy it? They need to sell us a branding search package.

KR: Poll. How was lunch? Audience chuckles. We're working on it. Anyway, the numbers are going up. Click costs, is there a number increase? What do you tell the clients? How do you ask for more dollars?

Panel : We forecast and have to be prepared to adjust budget over time. Have to set range parameters. As you yield through, make adjustments. The most advance marketers budget the best.

KR: Correct me if I'm wrong, budgets are category specific for both natural and paid - different proportions than something that is directly transactional like package goods?

Panel: It really depends on where you product is in a category lifespan.

KR: Do you buy that its really happening in mass - the holistic model?

Panel : An example - a study showed that the baby boomer demographic is much more likely to buy online - and do business online when exposed to the message offline.

Part of the migration to digital marketing is that its not like traditional where you set the budget at the beginning of the year. It has to be made flexible - and ability to move money around as you need to.

KR: Is it ongoing, once a year?

Always advise clients to set separate budgets aside for landing page testing, and other abilities. TV is still a good way to build a brand, and it's often a challenge to move money away into search, but for the most part we have a budget, track, and see if we need more.

KR: What about resources. Hanging out in NY with the agency community, seeing that the traditional agencies are fat, obese - with staff, and more staff. Then move to interactive department with 5-7 people managing the money that 200 people do in traditional. A recent agency laid off 200 people and no one noticed. Are traditional agencies becoming more leaner because they have to be and are you getting more because of it?

Panel: If you look at reports coming into '09, traditional media is being scrutinized much more than digital. Clients are asking for more for less. Times are tight. They want more and don't want to cut ad spend, so it's all those pieces together.

It's harder to spend $1,000,000 on search than on TV. The profit margins are a lot higher on TV. The fat is being trimmed, but it's more streamlined. Some large agencies have merged the traditional and digital groups and the plans are more holistic.

KR: Have they really come together, or they just saying that?

Were not done yet. The last 5 years have had leaps and bounds. Progress not perfection. Getting there.

KR: Traditional people think they are better than us and it pisses me off. I never saw the parody. Are you guys seeing it now.

Panel : Clients want more and more. They need the money to be more justified. We show clients how TV fuels search.

AK: Does that mean when we see sites being built we can expect them to be optimized and crawler friendly?

Panel: Much more today than ever before. Now SEO is making a come back with CPC going up. It can be a more upfront investment for a longer term yield.

KR: Comscore reports yesterday that organic search is up 20% year over year. Its a proven trend. The frequency of clicking is increasing. Is that causing a renewed interest in SEO?

A big part of the driver is the increasing costs of all of the media is driving the interest in search. 6-7/10 people click on the organic results. If you look at search as more blended, the results are more positive.

KR: What are some key take aways - three tips for sound budgeting and holistic planning?

Panel: Recognize the outcome your hoping to achieve. Some terms will drive immediate action. Others will drive awareness. Measure everything you're doing. Definitely understand the difference between demand capture and acquisition and hold them to different standards. Don't forget to build a test budget. Need to see whats effective change. Be nimble and flexible and fluid with budgets. Larger organizations need to think like small business and tear down the walls, and have everything fluid across channels. Must be nimble.