I am rolling a couple of sessions into one here because there was a lot of repetition between the two sessions. It was refreshing to see that these activities are being performed on sem campaigns. Its high time that these subjects feature in a search engine strategies conference over bid management. These guys were all saying and doing the right stuff in my opinion. A/B split testing on ads and then moving to multivariate testing of the elements within an ad. The same approach was applied to landing pages. The biggest difference I see between our American comrades and Australian search experts such as yours truly is that the traffic volumes that they are able to work with. In the US you are able to get a representative data sample in a much shorter time frame which means that they are able to test more rapidly than we are. Some of the stats quoted in the case studies were iffy. One lady claimed a 25% conversion rate on one of her landing pages. Those stats are meaningless unless they are analysed in full context. What was the conversion event? If it was a free software download, that’s believable but if was a financial transaction that would be impressive. All in all these sessions were ok to watched but they lacked the juicy substance I was expecting to find.The biggest issue wit testing in my experience is the practicality of it all. Ads to a degree are easy to test because as a search engine marketer I can control all the elements. Landing pages on the other hand have many stakeholders, marketing departments, brand managers and web designers are usually in control of landing pages and the search marketer usually has little say over what the landing page looks like. Hats off to those search marketing agencies out there that have really managed to influence change over internal management teams.All in all I am pleased that the search engine marketing world has moved on from bid management and looking into the marketing message. This is great for the industry. Please keep it up SES.

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Don’t buy links but bait them in Dig that’s ok. The Matt Cutts attacks were getting boring the paid links debate is boring I am over it but clearly thousands of SEO’s are still up for the fight. I have been doing this stuff since 99 and its always been the same story. Find an easy way to get links and the search engines will find a way to neutralise them. The social media optimisation link baiting methods are dangerous in my opinion and if they truly are endorsed by Google they are hypocritical. I must say that I did not exactly hear a google representative say that link baiting is ok they just peep towing the same old line “write great content and people will link”. Links are hard to achieve naturally and that why there is such a big weighting place on them in the ranking algorithms. I think that social media optimisation has much more appeal to it than just a link baiting tactic. Watch this space because social media optimisation (or social media marketing) is only going to get bigger and bigger. There is no denying the popularity of myspace, youtube, dig, technorati and there is no sign of it slowing down.

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Wow I found this segment to be a real worry. The speakers were all great. Hats off to them they clearly all knew their trade. The reason I found it to be a worry was that they were still talking about ad-ranking and other technical aspects of benchmarking. This is not a dig at the speakers, they were great presenters and very articulate during question time. I guess I was expecting to hear a little more about marketing metrics rather than ad ranking. Once again I would like to stress that I am not attacking the speakers here it they were presenting what most people in the room wanted to hear. I did feel as though they were all holding back a little but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I suppose I was expecting the American market to me more advanced then Australia because it is so much bigger and what this session showed me was that it’s not that advanced at all.

As an industry we have tagged “cost per customer acquisition (CPA)” as the Holy Grail of search but it is not what we focus on when benchmarking. I have never spoken to a dot com marketing director or CEO who doesn’t want to increase market share or at least grow in line with their market but when it comes to benchmarking search we are more interested in where our ad or organic listing ranks. I have heard Chris Sherman ask the question many times at conferences “what happens when big brands start spending real advertising dollars in search?” and no one has really dared to answer. I agree with Chris that big brands will come into search in a big way and when that happens most existing advertisers are going to have to find new ways to benchmark. I predict that words like reach and frequency are going to be a lot more popular then ad rank and CPA. How we benchmark search and measure return on investment today is not robust enough to cope with what lies ahead. This is a topic of great interest to me and an area that I intend to research further. Any comments will be appreciated.

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I am going to check out what is promised to be the search engine event that is not to be missed. I hope that our American friends will address some of the pressing issues in search today. Here is what I am hoping to explore while I’m there.

Bid Management Vs. Campaign management

I think that not enough thought and attention is being placed on the creative aspects of search. Most service providers and advertisers are still hung up on bid management and not paying anywhere near enough attention on optimising conversion through campaign management. Yes it is important to manage your bids so I’m not saying you should stop. What we also need to consider is the role that keyword, creative and landing page management plays. I have been a fan of targeting longtail keywords since 1999. In those days all we did was SEO but in our pursuit of algorithms we built a landing page with customised meta tags for each keyword we targeted - and we got sensational results. Yes there was less competition in those days but the strong focus on relevance paid dividends in the form of conversions. Paid search came in a few years later and it seemed that everything that SEO taught us was immediately forgotten. I believe that paid search needs to go back to grass roots and optimise each keyword, ad and landing page just like we did in the days of SEO. Google clearly agree because relevance is a big aspect of quality score . The major advantage we have with paid search over SEO is that we can create many more landing pages without having to worry about spamming and that we can test and change ads and landing pages rapidly in comparison to SEO. I have staked my livelihood on this belief by spending much of my companies R&D effort in addressing this issue so I am hoping to find some comrades in San Jose that agree with me so that we can explore this important issue much further.

ROI

Guilty as charged! I used to speak at conferences and seminars saying that search engine marketing is an inbound form of direct marketing and that we should calculate ROI based on short term profit. In a way that was true back then there was very little competition and the bidding wars had only just begun. The reality nowadays is that almost any keyword has competition and there always seems to be someone willing to pay more than you would like to pay. Happy days for GoogleJ - Why didn’t I buy sharesL. You can’t boycott Google adwords that is not a real option. Any dot com that has pulled their ads for a period of time will tell you that it has an impact on sales; but for some keywords, competition is so ferocious that even a perfectly optimised ad can consume the profit made in a single purchase occasion by the ever rising CPC. It is clear to me that we need to start looking at longer term ROI models that incorporate life time customer value. You wouldn’t book a TV ad and expect to make your money back the next day so why is it expected that paid search ads should deliver immediate results? I will say that it is possible to achieve immediate profit by targeting the longtail and bidding for 6^th to 10^th position - the problem with that strategy is that you acquire less customers than your competitors and when your CEO is pounding the desk with her fist (or his) saying “what’s happened to my market share” - You can say “at least our cost per acquisition (CPA) targets were met” and hope you don’t get fired. I am as sorry as the rest of the early SEM experts should be for spreading the word that CPA was the perfect ROI model for search but its now time to add a little more marketing science to the equation. So either we start calling all of our competitors and politely ask them to stop advertising in Google or re-examine our ROI models. Once again I am hoping that my American friends have lots to say about this.

So for the next week I will hang my South Australian SEM hat and change my name to Hank and hope to blend in the crowd at the San Jose SES to see what insight I can bring back home from the States. Show me the way in San Jose!

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Behavioural targeting has been on the cards for many years with sites like Amazon and eBay you know when Amazon sends you emails suggesting books you may be interested in. This kind of targeting does have its sceptics; although I am personally not offended, it does have its drawbacks. They use past purchase data to predict what you may want to buy in the future. The problem is of course that if you purchased an Elvis Presley CD for your twice removed great uncle’s Jack’s 75^th birthday it doesn’t mean that you want to buy the whole Elvis collection.

Search engines are taking behavioral targeting to a whole new level. They use cookies to record search details of a user and tracks them through their web journey for the purpose of serving them relevant ads. The idea is that a consumer reveals a great deal about their purchase intent in their search query and therefore allows an advertiser to retarget them while they are browsing at a later date. Say for instance that I go on Yahoo search to search for “Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits” and then sometime in the next 14 days go to Yahoo Music; it will attempt to serve me a display ad that is relevant to my previous Elvis search. Companies like AlmondNet facilitate the data collection and partner with search engines and publishers to track searchers and feed that data to the publishers ad servers. This also ties in very nicely with search personalisation that is being introduced by all the major search engines. Although post search advertising is still in its infancy it really does open up some great opportunities to convert customers beyond the search engine, particularly seeing that the ever rising cost per click and competition is eroding immediate return on investment. How search marketers embrace post search targeting remains to be seen but there is no doubt that it will play a bigger part in future SEM strategies.

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It was refreshing to see that Quality Score is being embraced by all the major search engines. We seem to have gone full circle in search marketing. In 1999 we used to create incredibly granular search engine optimisation campaigns. A page for each keyword and unique meta tags for each page and that’s where we are again with Quality Score. Basically SEO best practice increases quality score. The difference of course is that if you overdo it in SEO it can flag a spam alert. While the main Quality Score Measurement is still landing page relevance is now factored into the mix. (warning, I am about to give ourselves a plug)This is of course great news for e-channel. We have put years into the development of Dynamic Creative to address this issue and will continue to do so. We have already commercialised the software and have a competed case study which shows the benefits of optimising Quality Score in a large paid search campaign. (end of plug).

I think that Quality Score enhancements will only increase user experience because it forces that advertiser to produce relevant advertising. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, Google said in her keynote session that they don’t differentiate between organic results and paid search results. Relevance will always be the primary goal for Google and its safe to assume that Yahoo and MSN agree. Now that universal search is gaining ground it will be interesting to see if and when Google introduce image ads into AdWords and how Quality Score will apply to an image ad. I am also curious to see how personalisation and Quality Score work together in the future and if a searcher past search behaviour is thrown into the mix. One thing is for sure. Quality Score is here to stay.

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