SES Latino 2007: Miami SEM Campaign and Project Management Monday, 1:45-3:15p -- Landscape and Tactics Track
Moderator: Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group Speakers: Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM Alexi Huntley, Anthropologist/Marketing Director, Naturegate Paul D. Saffery, Managing Director, SilverDisc Chile
Nacho Hernandez
When you're dealing with the Latin America markets, it adds a several steps to the process of managing your SEM and Online Marketing campaigns. These speakers will be sharing their experiences and best practices for handling both your US and Latin America campaigns.
First Speaker: Paul D. Saffery
Account setup challenge --
Feasibility analysis -- Is there enough search volume? When I go to fish in a river, I want to know how many fish are in the river? -- How much ad competition is there?
Decide which site pages to target. Make sure: -- You don't exclude any pages from your page universe (use a site map or create one by crawling your site). -- Targeted pages are "near" the conversion page (not too many clicks to conversion -- one or two clicks at most). -- Targeted pages are fresh. -- Targeted pages are usable (download fast, uncluttered, make sure the ad is in the same language as the landing page).
Create keywords and ad copy for chosen pages: -- Maximise consistency between target page content and keywords/ads. -- Tag conversion pages. Both you and bid tools will need to measure your success. -- Add referrer codes to destination URLs.
Put ad groups into campaigns. Keep in mind: -- Shared daily budget management. -- Shared targeted networks (search/content/both) -- Shared targeted languages. -- Shared geo-targets -- Channel restrictions. For exmaple, max number of allowed campaigns, groups, keywords. All for future account growth!
Establish mapping between website pages and account....
Bid Management
- Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Identify which areas of your account have a high impact on your overall KPIs (Pareto Law typically holds), and prioritise management of those areas.
- If you are using a bidding tool, make sure you choose one flexible enough to allow you to set and tweak your KPIs.
- Keep advertising channel API usage costs in mind. Make sure your bid management software takes API usage costs into account.
Ongoing Account Tuning
Necessary when: -- New pages are added to the website and we need to market them. -- Pages currently being marketed are removed from the website. -- Pages currently being marketed change their content (price, product availability, special offer, etc) -- Signs of change in competition. Watch avg position, volume of impressions, click-through rates (CTR).
We need to monitor website changes. Options: -- Wait for client to inform us. -- Compare consecutive feeds that contain the structure and key content of the website you need to market or... -- Crawl the site and compare the new crawl to the old crawl.
Summary: The CM Cycle
(Graph -- see slides)
Speaker Two: Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre
Paid Search
MercadoLibre's Online Makerting is defined by 6 channels: Portals, Affiliate, Paid Search, Direct, Onsite, Product.
-- Paid Search marketing strategy: Increase qualified traffic generation to boost registrations and transactional volume.
-- Keyword Generation: What are qualified users looking for? ---- Use internal data, (queries, listings, common errors) ---- Use external data (trends, news, events, new products, seasonal items, localization) ---- Validate the KWs (check against policies, remove duplicates)
After defining KWs...
-- Trafficking Process ---- Targeting: Localization Language ---- Match Type: Keyword AdGroup ---- Creativity: Price Point, KW insertion generics ---- Landing Page: Home Page, Categories, Listings, Searches, Guides, Products, Promotions ---- Bid Management: Position Target, ROI Target, CPC Target
-- Bid Management Portfolio ---- Keywords and Campaigns ------ Position Target: Branding and Strategic KWs ------ ROI Target: Marketplace 90% of KWs, ROI based on Internal Metrics ------ CPC Target: Classified categories, Increase Traffic
Third part of process is Optimization...
-- Optimization: If we can measure it, we can fix it ---- For each KW, check if objective is achieved. (Nice flow chart on slide -- cshel) ---- If objective is achieved, derive additional KWs... if not, remove from list.
Organic Search
Just make sure that your site is user friendly and crawlable. -- Put yourself in the user's shoes... all your user's shoes -- Be natural... don't force your content for rankings. Think of the users.
Speaker Three: Alexi Huntley
History: Nature Air starts an e-marketing strategy in 2004 with New Media.
Goals: Redesign their website and optimize their website for keywords related to Costa Rica and the airline business, after the research they found a great audience looking for Costa Rica destinations. Also, make more $$$$.
Naturegate was established in 1990. The site was designed by an agency strictly for look and feel, no seo at all. Then in May 07, we implemented a booking engine and added it to the homepage. We also added some room for banners to help monetize the site. 25% of our market is local (Costa Rica).
This is something to be aware of... when the net you're casting into the ocean, you need to make sure your targeting is dead on. The size of your net in comparison to the whole ocean is very small and you need to pull in fish every time you cast your net.
When we relaunched out site, we focused on SEO/SEM. Our campaign involved 3 different sites and began in July 06.
Our team included three participants: -- NatureAir's inhouse staff -- New Media (Costa Rica) a team of Internet Marketing Analysts specialized in the development of the marketing strategies and Internet solutions. -- SEO-PR (US) 40 years of combined experience managing PR for tech companies and PR for web companies.
Our team used web conferencing to manage new content development that balanced search engine optimization needs and cultural reqs and discuss next steps.
Our team also used ranking and traffic reports to review progress.
All 3 of the strategic decisions we made required our team to focus -- we considered paid listings, but focused on organic -- we have a network of sites, we focused on 3 of them -- we identified 450 potential search terms, we focused on half of them
It's okay to fail, but fail soon and fail cheap.
Our SEO campaign tripled #1 rankings and doubled top 10 rankings over the last year.
-- In my experience, you need to quickly kill the naysayers. On the SE side, we (the marketing people) need this kind of information and slides to quiet the naysayers who can kill our projects (and our spends).
Visits to NatureAir are up 147% year over year to 8,313 per month.
Business impact of SEO campaign and project management.
Working together, our team has: -- Maintained the quality of our sites Increased #1 rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN from 12 to 39 and increased their top 10 rankings from under 100 to over 210 in just nine months. -- Increased traffic to the sites to record levels. -- Maintained look and feel of our local market, while maintaining the North American marketing aspects.
Where do we go from here? -- W/ high organic listings on the current 3, we're free to move on to the rest of our properties.
Fourth Speaker: Frank Watson
How many people are doing in house marketing? (not many) How many are looking to build an in house team? (even fewer) Wow. Mostly agency people then? This should go quickly then as I wanted to talk about how to build a team. :)
Many businesses believe they don't need to go outside of the American market because there's a school of thought that that is where all the money is. However, there is still a significant amount of money in those other markets and you can be very, very successful there.
How many people here look at their analytics everyday? (very few hands -- I raised my hand though) Wow. (sad sigh).
When you're branching out into new languages, there's more to translation. Yes, you can reach out; however, you have to be able to understand the replies... what comes back.
When you're developing your team, picking the right people is as important as picking the right keywords. If you find people with the linguistics, and you're strong in the mechanics, you can train the others and you complement each other.
The Team: -- Knowledge of Organics -- PPC Expertise -- Copywriting Skills -- Solid Web Designing -- Advanced Analytics Experience -- Some Programming Knowledge -- Five Senses
Knowledge of Organics: -- On Page Elements -- Off Page Elements
Have a basic understanding of these concepts so you can interview properly.
PPC Expertise: -- KW Selection -- AB Testing -- ROI Measurement -- Engine Rules -- Large and Small Engines
Especially in the Latin American market, your team needs to know which engines are performing and who has what market share in your specific market/locale.
Copywriting Skills: -- Headline Writing (journalism background good idea) -- Press Releases -- Website Content -- Email Campaigns -- Nuances of Language
Solid Web Designing: -- Linguistic Differences -- Eyeball Tracking -- Cultural Colors (Look at a site from Japan.. it looks like a teenage girl's bedroom... all pinks and blues)
Advanced Analytics Knowledge: -- Tracking -- Conversion -- Dynamic Changes -- Language and Geographic Stats
Some Programming Knowledge: -- Javascript -- Stylesheets -- CMS functionality -- CRM functionality
Know enough to be able to communicate effectively with vendors and other departments.
The Five Senses: -- Sense of Humor -- Sense of Comraderie -- Sense of Purpose -- Sense of Dedication -- Common Sense
++ The skills can be combined into a team as small as two, but as the project grows, so should the team.
++ Reward Creativity
++ Constant Training
Have fun, if you have any questions, I'll be in the bar later.
Questions and Answers
Q: What is the relationship between SEM and PR? How do you use the PR companies for SEM?
AH: Very good question. We do use PR extensively, more of a traditional model. We have our local market which represents 25% of our business, then Europe and North America. Unfortunately, we have not yet linked out press releases to our sites or the blogs and what not to our sites, and we're in the process of implementing that right now. I hope that answers your question.
Q: How do you utilize the press for SEM?
FW: Don't think of it purely in terms of traffic. There's offline branding, and there's online inbound links, awareness and some click-throughs.
Q; News indexes pretty well. Is the press release focused more for brand awareness or for indexing?
FW: It's all together. You can't isolate them. Most "real" news won't have lots of links, but there are instances where a properly optimized press release can get you some really well placed stories and generate a lot of traffic.
Q: With the lack of credit card usage in Latin America, how do you do transactions?
FW: The problem with credit cards, and that's a very valid issue not only in Latin America but also in China. The number of debit cards in South America is increasing and you can use those just like credit cards. We had the same problem in the United States, and as the number of types of "electronic money" increases, so does your potential customer base. There are prepaid debit cards and bank cards now, you can get them from the grocery store.
MG: MercadoLibre has an escrow service similar to the one EBay used to have years ago.
Q: You were mentioning consumer confidence levels. Can you tell us more about the consumer confidence in Latin America in terms of using credit cards.
MG: Most credit card purchases in Latin America are for large, special purchases. The users are becoming more sophisticated, and as they become more comfortable with the credit cards, they begin to make more and more purchases with them.
AH: For an airline that is a low cost carrier, our main sales channel is our website, and the main method of purchase is the credit card. Originally, our marketing copy was more playful... european. However, when you're in the Latin American market, playful doesn't encourage people to use their credit cards to pay for airline tickets. We had to go for more corporate, bank styled copy to instill trust with the users.
