Moderated by Rebecca Lieb, ClickZ Network. Smaller room…almost full. This session has 4 marketers from major agencies that will present case studies of campaigns related to search, but that search is by no means the whole or central component of the campaigns.
Tessa Weggert - Enlighten
“Blogs, viral marketing, and their effect on search.” Starts by talking about different types of popular blogs. Corporate Blogs: IE: GM’s “Fastlane,” Boing’s “Randy’s Journal.” Products blogs: Stoneyfield Farms, KongisKing.net. Product Blog Tours: Castrol’s blog gives the opportunity to Castrol users to ask abut particular product usage. Blog Book tours: “Readerville.” Corporate blogs: Best known for establishing a dialogue between corporations and their consumers. Improves corporate image. Product Blogs: increase product awareness. Boost product and brand affinity. Product blog tours: initiate dialogue between companies and consumers. Book tours: allows interaction between writers and readers. Blog influences on search marketing: frequent updates and relevant content can help to boost rankings, and can result in ongoing search presence due to be updated often.
Stenyfield Farms Blog has frequent content updates, which lead to multiple search listings and the proximity effect. Many times Google will list company blogs very highly for brand related searches. This can help to lead to greater brand affinity and eventually sales.
Viral marketing: Key principles to success: 1. offer free service with some sort of value to Internet users. 2. Create unique applications or variation on popular themes. 3. Incorporate humor, if consistent with brand. 4. Remain timely, tap into existing cultural dialogues. Make it easy to spread around. Potential benefits: Increased awareness of a company. Showcase services and creativity, etc. Like blogs, viral marketing helps build links. Quotes Jennifer Laycock in saying that “the best way to build links is to stop requesting them and start earning them.” Gave a quick case study on how Enlightnen used a holiday card on a subdomain, which resulted in 50,000 unique visitors to card landing page from 12/7 to 12/31. They got coverage in Detroit Free Press, Ann Arbor News, and others news sources. They estimate it was a 5-7 times ROI (not sure what she meant by this). Resulted in over ten “serious” business leads. Was indexed within days on 16 SE’s…primarily they feel due to link popularity. Corporate site page views were up 300%. Corporate traffic showed high propensity towards highest value site pages.
Hollis Thomases – Web Ad.vantage
Where search starts, where advertising ends, and how it gets gray. The old days: no text ads in search, only display ads. GoTo which became Overture and was bought out by Yahoo, and of course Google, bought search advertising into mainstream. Can you use popular keywords effectively in display advertising? The answer Web Ad.vatange found was yes, the use of the keyword within an image ad led to greater Click-through rates.
Internet Yellow Pages including Verizon superpages.com do offer options with displays, combining a graphic with an image and other pertinent information. Also uses click-to-call button, which allows people to capitalize on searchers without even having a website. What can you do that are not search but support search? Re-targeting launched by PPC. Advertising.com’s “Lead Back” allows for them to be served additional ads in the future (tracked by cookies) via purchased display ads on other websites. Behavioral – use keywords to trigger behavioral targeting. Nice affinity audiences can be identified when you analyze long-tail terms that are very popular, and then use them within display ads on relevant sites. (showed an example of the term “Mustang check” being popular, and then the display ad purchased on a car-enthusiast website). RSS advertising- automatically through Yahoo or Google contextual versions, but keywords can be bought though networks like Pheedo, Feedster, Yahoo RSS ads. Have seen very high CTR from display ads served in this manner.
Hybrid search/non-search. “Inoventiv” (that is correct spelling) provides a “search & Display ads” system that allows for real time search within the display ads. Integration, consideration & Best practices suggestions: 1. Character restriction in search not equal to additional space allowed within sponsor pages. Lead time for new keywords: in search, this can take time. You can hedge IMP-based ad spend to test responses to offers in search before display. Offer exclusive special offers for non-search. Lastly: don’t be afraid to use search to test what works and carry that over to display/banner search campaigns.
Can display ads impact search? For branding, display impressions have to be very high and visible.
Jinenne Sutherland – Organic, Inc. Goes though a short history of the use of the Internet. Talks about how people share information. Her notebook is filled with little asterisks that say “check this out.” This leads to bookmarking sites, more visits, etc. Use other Peoples’ Picks found by word of mouth, blogs, email, and vertical directories. This kind of sharing is “creating a new ‘bottoms-up’ or organic approach to navigating the Internet.” How do social epidemics get created, and how do I harness that as an advertiser?
This means hard work for advertisers. Campaign complexity has increased exponentially as we seek to exploit the organic nature of the Internet. Try to align yourself with ways that people share this information.. use original content, viral distribution, RSS, Comprehensive search, time-based promotions, blogs, etc.
Case study: “Meet the Mudds” created to help launch the Jeep Commander. The fictional family is made up of active, well adjusted people that they want to promote the Jeep brand lifestyle. They integrated the following into this campaign: Stared with a “buzz phase” using Webisodes about the Mudds, a virtual geo-caching scavenger hunt, comprehensive search, Online ads, a character blog, viral and DTV distribution, online “fake PR” with interviews of the Mudds, etc…They launched a series of videos that showed the adventures of the Mudds, so people could follow their adventures, pick up clues online or through their cell phone (based on a partnership with Cingular). Some of the results: press in the Wall Street Journal. Great success with signups and people interacting with this. Found that when they did a search for “the Mudds,” good sites had picked up the idea and sent links to the Mudds site, including the popular craveonline.com.
Mark Stephens – AvenueA/Razorfish “Online Media Interaction Analysis” What is the relationship between Search and Web Media? Are marketers missing something by optimizing each campaign separately instead of together? What are alternatives to managing each media within its own silos. Finding the “Sweet spot” of Custom Attribution by analyzing customer experience management and other factors. Using 3rd party ad serving to support this (sorry was going too fast so I missed this slide). Shows numbers showing media overlap (once again too fast to blog, but very interesting. I asked him after the session to please forward this info and I will update when I get it).
Branded vs. unbranded search conversion lift. The impact of web media was greater for unbranded conversions than for branded search conversions. Then speaks about “the Optimization trap,” based on incorrectly attributed conversions…very important to connect the two and make them work together. What about “conversion attribution?” Most ROI versions only look at the last click, but what other media may have influenced this conversions? Not a one-size-fits-all scenario, each particular client needs their own algorithm.
This is part of the Search Engine Roundtable Blog coverage of the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo 2006. For other SES topics covered, please visit the Roundtable SES NYC 2006 category archives.
SES NYC Tag: sesny2006
