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Creative Management, Search Engine Bootcamp
I presented Creative Management at search engine bootcamp on Thursday the 26th of November.
For those of you that could make the event you can download the powerpoint presentation here
Any questions please leave a comment and I will answer as soon as I can.
Longtail Marketing
After working in Tourism for 17 years on major marketing campaigns I thought I was reasonably IT savvy but having recently joined e-channel I realise, knowing what I know now, my advertising strategies would be very different today, especially in terms of any online media strategies.
Much of the non IT marketing world would think you were from another planet if you started talking the IT lingo.
Some marketers in tourism for example might think longtail is a new budget airline entering the Australian market or a new species of Wallaby!
If you’re a marketing executive and haven’t heard of the longtail or terms like Spider, SOAP, DELTA and PageRank, then chances are your competitors that do will be attacking your market share. It may be that you are not as knowledgeable in online marketing as you think you are?
Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) companies are revolutionising advertising with campaigns able to respond to customer reaction almost instantly. Online advertising is a relatively new world rapidly evolving, more and more companies, that get online media, are spending a larger portion of their advertising dollars on SEM. Online advertising is also one of the most affordable and measurable components of a media campaign, but some are still shy to engage it. Much of this resistance is due to a lack of knowledge and perhaps the sectors inability to communicate the product benefits simply. Those companies that have embraced it are reaping the rewards and keeping it quiet.
As one of Australia’s leading SEM & SEO providers we find time and again that people think they have this area covered but most don’t. This advertising sector is evolving, for the better, so quickly that efficiencies dreamed about a year ago are now achievable. One of our challenges is educating business people about the power of online advertising, once you explain the product and demonstrate the results, it sells itself!
If you’re a CEO or a marketing decision maker and your website is vital to your business, or you spend more than $5,000 a month on advertising and your online marketing is an after-thought you’re leaving the door open to competitors.
Find out if you should be advertising in the longtail and discover why on-line advertising is expanding faster than any other form of advertising globally.
If you want to know more about SEM or the longtail contact us at e-channel.
Links and Social Media SES san Jose 07
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.
Ad and landing page testing SES San Jose 07 Review
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.
Benchmarking an SEM Campaign SES San Jose 07 Review
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.
Ads in a Quality Score World SES San Jose 07 - Review
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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About the Authors
The world does not need another search engine marketing blog to tell us when Matt Cutts has a haircut or to regurgitate news that has just been posted on searchengineland.com. We will attempt to provide genuine commentary and opinion on how we see search today and where it is going in the future. I am the CEO of e-channel and my team and I will cover SEO and paid search and try to explore the marketing aspects of search rather than the technical. Please post your comments freely.
Frank Grasso, CEO