Sydney’s Darling Harbour Chinese Gardens were the tranquil setting that greeted guests attending e-Channel seminar to industry search VIP’s Wednesday 12 November. What a great setting for a function, a few people who have lived in Sydney all their lives commented they had never been to the CBD gardens and were blown away. Massive gold fish, lizards sunning themselves & waterfalls greeted participants.

Guest speaker Caroline Rowe a Senior Lecturer for University of South Australia and Direct Marketing expert with 20 Years advertising and consulting experience gave away some of the secrets used by e-channel staff to build great SEM campaigns and Ads. The seminar lasted an hour and finished with an actual group Ad design session applying some of the newly learnt skills.

e-Channel spent 2 years constructing its search training methodology, called the 7 Elements of Search. The methodology is now a 65 page training manual that it now shares with its key clients.

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SMX Sydney was a great success well done Barry.  I went to all the way to San Jose last year to hear what our international comrades think about search and Barry has saved me a trip this year by bringing the best of the best to us here in Australia.

Some of the A list thought leaders that I got to discuss the future of search with were Danny Sullivan, Rand Fiskin, and Gord Hotchkiss.  I couldn’t get within 10 feet of these guys in San  Jose.

It was also very good to see a lot of very familiar Australian faces in the crowd.  My old mate Mark Armstrong from Google and I had a very constructive conversation about AdWord API Fees – I said they were a touch expensive to add and update ads and he accused me of melting down several adwords servers and causing the San Fran power grid to shut down when the adwords api was free. We came to a mutual agreement that the adwords api fee was a good way to make people like me develop smarter software and hopefully he will push my feedback up to the people that set the api quota system and make it cheaper to publish ads.

Apology

I would like to make a public apology to Stuart Bartram from Double Click for calling him a big tool in the middle of my SEM tool kit presentation.  What I meant to say was that there were many big companies in the market that “BUILD” SEM tools - instead I said, “there are many big tools in the market” while pointing to Stuart. – Sorry about that matey, it was a genuine slip.

Thank You

Thanks to Adam Lasnik for being so incredibly generous with his time and sharing so much webmaster tool wisdom.  The legendary Rand Fiskin  - thanks for sharing SMO/M insights.  Of course Danny Sullivan for his views on the future of Bid Management.

Last but by no way least thank you to the very lovely Ani Babaian for sharing the incredible Live Webmaster Center with the Aussies and for draging us to the ice bar.

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To those of you that missed SMX Sydney here are my two presentations

1. First session was managing ads that convert (will open in PPT) – always a difficult topic but one of my favourites none the less.
2. Second was SEM toolkit (PPT) where I discussed the importance of campaign management and how Dynamic Creative  solves the pressing problems that search enginine marketers face in a Quality Score world of SEM.

love to get your comments

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I was asked to talk about the major issues to consider when running a search engine marketing campaign on a budget. The theme for the Brisbane bootcamp was travel and travel is of course a competitive category. Of course it is possible to compete but there are no shortcuts.

You can download the presentation here

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I asked over 200 people I know in the internet marketing world (via my LinkedIn network) to tell me where they get their SEM and SEO news and here are the most popular responses after I striped away the serious spammers.

1. www.SearchEngineLand.com - An industry standard - Good info
2. www.bluehatseo.com - Borderline spam - a good read but spam nonetheless
3. www.searchenginewatch.com - Its been around from the beginning of search and still worth a read
4. www.SEObook.com - Lots of content - Good Glossary
5. www.SEOmoz.org - Half way between publishing and providing services - a good read at times
6. www.emarketer.com - Great in the broader Internet marketing world and Good on search
7. www.marketingvoices.com - Very professional and very informative
8. www.mediapost.com - More of a marketing site than search marketing but a good read
9. www.sphinn.com - A social media site made just for us

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I have battled with this question from the very first day I decided to scale up my business.

When I started e-channel in 1999 I was armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and an associate diploma in mechanical engineering. In the early days search engine marketing was source code and Meta tags, and as odd as my background sounds it suited search engine optimisation (SEO) nicely. When Overture (now YSM) launched paid search - the landscape began to shift. Suddenly my skills were not enough and I knew it. My technical skills were still suited to SEO but I had to learn to deal with ad budgets, copywriting and data analysis. I enrolled in a Masters of Marketing at the University of South Australia and that was the turning point for me and e-channel. I learnt about the science of marketing and was instantly able to apply it to search. When Google came along with AdWords and took Overtures model to a whole new level I was ready to handle the technical and marketing aspects of search. The only problem was that my unique combinations of skill sets were not easy to find - So when I went about employing people I found the task of finding search engine marketing talent quite a challenge. I soon realised that I needed great software engineers and great marketers in my team to deal with the increasingly complex needs of my customers.

I now have a great team of search engine marketers and engineers around me. Here are some of the things I look for when recruiting a new team member. (more…)

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Tags: SEO SEM Jobs, SEO SEM skill Shortage
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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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