Jinkies! Friday already?! Feels like just yesterday I was living the SEO good life at SES San Jose.

Bruce and me at the IM Charity Party. Photo by Dana Lookadoo.

There are some resources helping me relive the magic. At WebmasterRadio.fm you can download all three keynotes from the SES. And Yo Yo SEO founder, Dana Lookadoo, has posted awesome albums of pictures taken at the show and after parties. I think I’ll nab one of those pics. Zoink! —->

If you didn’t get a chance to go to San Jose because you were in, oh I dunno, Australia, there’s another great educational opportunity coming your way. Throughout October a one-day SEO training program will tour Australia led by Bruce Clay Australasia. Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney are the stops, so BC’s SEO training will be available to all interested throughout the continent.

Twitter has announced that a retweeting system is in the works for the microblogging site. And a new site, bingtweets.com, is Microsoft’s experiment with a hybrid social media search engine. Topics trending on Twitter, Twitter/Bing search, and keyword-related tweets are some of the features on the site.

Bing’s technology is also behind some cool new apps. Bing Maps is powering Ancestry.com’s location feature for the family tree generator.

And Real Live Search is a search engine that uses a Bing API to provide search results as the user types. Basically, every letter added to the search box will result in different results being listed on the page. For SEOs this can come in handy when comparing results for slightly different queries — the difference between singular and plural, for example. [Now if only Bing's results were better. --Susan]

In the Googleverse, AdSense will soon be rolling out enhanced contextual targeting. Be sure to click through to the gallery of worst contextual ads ever. Eesh. YouTube, meanwhile, has landed another big media content partner, Time Warner.

While we’re on the subject of online video, I haven’t been able to get this song out of my head all week:

Yes, I’ll date her avatar. Geeks are hot.

Uh, where was I? How about smart phones? Responding to controversy following Apple’s removal of Google Voice applications from the iTunes store, some iPhone owners have turned to fire arms and flames to express their disapproval at Apple’s decision to pull the apps. Ever wonder what five bullet holes in an iPhone looks like?

If you don’t plan to strap explosives to your iPhone anytime soon, you may enjoy this list of iPhone apps for SEOs and site owners. Then again, maybe you’re more of a BlackBerry person. If you’re not sure, here’s a quiz that might help you decide if RIM or Apple is best for you.

Whatever your smart phone preference, I bet I can guess your carnivore preference. Does bacon top you list of favorite meats? Endless Simmer’s 101 ways to use bacon is one tantalizing adventure into the world of bacon. There are recipes for bacon toffee, bacon marshmallows and bacon fudge, because in America we like to take liberties with our pork fat. Mm mmm!

MarketingSherpa charts email performance since 2001

There’s a new report on trends in email marketing performance since 2001. Efficiency seems to have dropped from a peak in 2002 to a low point in 2008 and is on the rebound this year. Emails that don’t follow best practices are hurting the worst.

Maybe these marketers aren’t playing to their strong suits. If you subscribe to astrology (or just enjoy reading horoscopes once in a while) Search Engine People has a fun take on SEO astrology, complete with that eerie feeling of being too spot on.

Earlier this week I wrote about the concept of the SEO development life cycle, and usability expert Craig Tomlin pointed out to me via Twitter that usability wasn’t mentioned. Luckily, Craig’s all over it and has posted an overview of usability testing.

In social media advice, Ian Lurie shared his tips on how to ask a blogger for a review. His four points are exactly what I’m looking for when I get requests. Take note! Also, a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com shows that almost half of employers are using social media sites to screen job candidates.

Things I learned from Boing Boing this week:

• As Susan put it, the annual “don’t you feel old?” list is back! [The answer is yes, I really do. --Susan]
• Every single fish tested in American rivers and streams has been found to be contaminated with mercury.
• Fiji Water isn’t just hard on the pocketbook. It might actually support a brutal military regime.
• Gallery of sculpted sandwiches. ‘Nuf said.

Friday Recap: Relive the Magic Edition was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

After averaging around the neighborhood of four posts a day during SES San Jose, you were starting to jones for more from the Bruce Clay blog, weren’t you? In between the liveblogger marathon and writing up this post you’re reading now, the Bruce Clay media team has been busy crafting this month’s SEOToolSet Newsletter.

It’s a cause for celebration here at the BCI office because the edition hitting mailboxes now is the 70th volume of the newsletter! To commemorate this exciting landmark, we invite you to join us (and my friend the party tortoise) for the latest edition in a long tradition of illuminating SEM news reporting (if I do say so myself).

But what, you ask, is this month’s newsletter about? Take a peak with me!

Feature: What You Need to Know from SES San Jose

Last week wrapped up Search Engine Strategies. If you couldn’t make it, or you just a refresher, we’ve pulled together all the things that you need to know from SES San Jose. The overall theme of the conference was summarized neatly by Greg Jarboe in his panel. To be successful online, SEOs need to focus on something more fundamental than the technology du jour. They have to focus on the people using the technology.

Back to Basics: Holiday PPC Campaign Planning

Gift giving and round-the-clock Frank Sinatra tunes are still off on the horizon, but there’s no time left to put off holiday PPC campaign planning. Winter holidays themselves only last a few days, but preparing and managing a seasonal SEM campaign takes much longer — as long as six months or more! Read on for an in-depth exploration of the goals and tactics that can help guide an effective search engine marketing holiday-planning strategy.

Hot Topics: Google Gets a Boost with Caffeine

The search world got a jolt when last week Google launched a preview of its “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.” Search speed, indexing speed, index size, the number of results returned, and accuracy of results are targeted for improvement through Google Caffeine. Currently available through a developer preview, Google Caffeine is accepting feedback from users.

The above descriptions are a mere teaser of the information found in the two articles and monthly news roundup. And there’s more action-packed info where that came from. Be sure to check out the SEOToolSet Newsletter, and if you like what you see, subscribe to have it delivered to your mailbox each month. We think you’ll be glad you did.

Our SEO Newsletter Turns 70! was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Where was Virginia for the last week? Why up in San Jose, of course, at Search Engine Strategies. She covered 14 sessions over three days and still found time to record a radio show live for WebmasterRadio. Give her a hand, folks.

Tuesday, August 11

9:00 am	Opening Keynote: Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody
10:30 am	How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community
11:45 am	In the Now: Conversational & Real Time Marketing (Social Media & Video Strategies Forum)
1:45 pm	Turn Brain Science into Bucks: Incorporating Persuasive Messaging into Your Content Strategy
3:00 pm	SEO Tools of the Trade: What’s in YOUR Toolbox?
4:30 pm	Performance Pricing Models: What Every CMO Must Know!

Wednesday, August 12

9:00 am	Credit Crunch: The Death of Last Click Attribution and its Impact on Paid Search Advertising
12:00 pm	Live broadcast of SEMSynergy with Mark Knowles and Wendy Roe of Pixelsilk.
1:00 pm	Afternoon Keynote: Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google
2:30 pm	Four Paths to Success in a Tough Travel Economy
4:00 pm	Social Media: White Hat vs. Black Hat

Thursday, August 13

9:00 am	Morning Keynote: How to Prepare for the Future of Search, Charlene Li, Co-Author, Groundswell, Founder, Altimeter Group
10:30 am	Electronic Contacts and the Long Arm of the Law
12:45 pm	The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion
2:15 pm	Advanced SEO Roundtable: What is it Really? And Where is it Going?

Complete SES San Jose Liveblogging Coverage was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

The advanced SEO roundtable — undoubtedly one of the most packed sessions of the show. People are lining the walls for this one. Should be awesome! Our moderator is Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO of Enquisite. Our distinguished speakers are:

• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
• Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair
• Todd Friesen, VP Search, Position Technologies
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Matthew Bailey, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen, Mike Grehan, Bruce Clay and Richard Zwicky

Why can big organizations get away with more than little ones?

Mike: User expectations is what it comes down to. A user expects a company like BMW to come up for their search for German automobiles. When they were penalized, they were back fast because of that user expectation.

Matt: He had a good business for a while in cleaning sites up that had been pulled because it was usually caused by amateur mistakes.

Bruce: How many in the audience had a site get pulled? [About five hands go up.] How many knew they were doing something wrong when they did it? [A few raise their hand. Mike calls them naughty!]

When a search engine penalizes a site, is it ever motivated by the engine’s desire to preserve their image?

Todd F: Again, it’s about user expectation. It’s not as much about Google’s brand. It’s what a user wants to find in search results, because if they don’t find it in Google, they’ll go to another engine.

Bruce: There was a session in which Matt Cutts indicated that there are sometimes a large section of an account that will be dropped, and maybe not the whole thing. Part of the penalty that Google can apply is partial blocking of a site.

Todd F: If you’re a really big brand, it may be worth the links to get banned. BMW was getting a lot of links at the time as the story was covered. And when the site came back, they had the positive effect of linking.

Matt: It’s ironic BMW got busted for what they were doing considering they didn’t have to do it in the first place. They were a strong brand.

Can you please discuss buying links? When I buy a press release in PR Web, I’m pretty much buying links.

Todd M: If you buy direct links, only do a small number. Approach it as a partnership, form a relationship. And of course optimize the link.

Mike: At the end of the day, who’s Google to tell you what link you can put on your site? But if you’re thinking of why you need to buy links, maybe there’s a reason you can’t get a natural link. Ask why you built the site in the first place.

Todd: If you’re going to buy links, get professional help on that. You can do it, you just gotta do it right. You have to keep it ant a low percentage. You want to hide it or blend it in.

Bruce: If you’re a local business, get local links. Build in obsolescence in your link program so they rotate through.

How do you manage pages that fall in and out of the index on a daily basis? How do you group keywords into an actionable reporting function?

Matt: Rely heavily on analytics, which he believes is what advanced SEO comes down to. Rather than where am I for this term, ask where you are in the family of the term. And then sub-segment that out. What are the most consistent segments of that word? It’s much more useful to look at slices rather than in aggregate.

Todd F: The total number of unique search queries is obviously very high. That’s a ridiculous number of keywords to manage. So they focused on the front end, the top 1000 that actually drive 99% of the revenue. Also take into account on-site search because if they got to that landing page, that wasn’t what they were looking for.

Should we make a policy for getting links back from charitable donations?

Todd: Don’t make it a policy — that’s kind of… sleazy. But if you ask, nine out of ten times they’ll do it.

What about purchasing links on high-quality sites that don’t actually relate?

Mike: Cross-promotions, sponsorships, joint ventures — links come as a byproduct of doing great business.

Todd F: Google can discount links at the link level. So a lot of what you see as blatant paid linking, probably isn’t’ working anyway.

Matt: If you look at the best link building companies, they’re doing business and adding value. Value propositions through marketing is what it ultimately comes down to.

Mike: Backlink checkers only tell you what’s happening right now.

Todd M: You can stretch relevancy in a lot of ways, but it has to be targeted at a page level. The stretches should happen deeper in the site.

Todd F: If you do start getting links on a viral article or video, be careful of the fact you’re going to dilute your site theme. Stretching relevancy is fine, but be careful how far you stretch it because you don’t want to dilute the topic of the site.

If you combine Bing and Yahoo!’s best algorithms, will it matter? What is the effect of the partnership on SEO?

Mike: I think it’s great. Why do SEOs talk about the next Google killer? The difference is a huge change in Bing’s results once they get access to Yahoo!’s historical data. You’re going to see much more relevant results.

Todd F: If Bing results just went over to Yahoo!, that’d be a disaster. Bing is a mess. But it would be nice to dust off our old tools from 2002 because those would start working again. Also, he hopes to see paid inclusion stay around.

Matt: Search is going to become more of an experience, and that could be good competition.

Mike: It’s the end of an era. Crawling the Web as far as search is concerned has reached its limits. That’s why he talks about new signals. Everyone’s looking to get data in real time. It gives Microsoft that one step up in hanging on to the current phase of search.

Todd M: Again, analytics is what advanced SEO is about. But the difference between Bing and Yahoo! is a different kind of user than Google. Ecommerce sites convert better. 200 visitors from Yahoo/Bing could be better than 2,000 from Google. The volume might not be high, but when Windows 7 comes out, he predicts more people will be using the engine because it’s the default.

Bruce: Traffic will likely go up if relevancy goes up. Yahoo! has a lot of technology. They bought a lot of algorithm heavy weights. They have a better algorithm than Bing. Combine the algorithms with the Yahoo! data, and you could end up with a power player.

Todd F: He honestly sees the Bing algorithm go “boop!”

Is there any benefit from reciprocal links?

Todd F: It’s heavily discounted.

Mike: If you’re linking all your sites together, what’s the value?

What about search suggest? How can we get there?

Matt: There are a lot of angry, bitter suggestions. The question is raised, how often is something searched on to show up in search suggest. By typing in “how 2″ you’ll find things like “how 2 buy drugs.” If you look for “how does one” you’ll find “how does one split an atom.” It’s an insight into the searcher mind.

Does siloing still matter? What about siloing in pyramid form?

Bruce: Theme-aligned content structure. It’s not about nofollow. It’s about keeping content from bleeding across all parts of the site. It’s about lining up content to the way people search. He’s been doing the practice for six years, with minimal nofollow usage. The use of nofollow was brought up when Matt Cutts commented about nofollow for PR sculpting. But he believes the nofollow issue is not exactly understood and probably doesn’t work the way people think it works.

Mike: Nofollow is bunk. The three engines came together for this protocol. But why have it there if you don’t want it followed.

Todd F: The conspiracy theory over nofollow is that search engines will know what sites are being SEO’d based on the occurrence of nofollow. But to back up to siloing, he looks it as proper architecture for your Web site. Keep it focused all the way through.

I’m spending a ton of time and money creating unique content and distributing it across a network. How can I do this without duplicate penalties?

Todd F: Google’s really good at detecting duplicate content. Where you can, try rewriting, re-titling, and so on, but at some point there’s a diminishing return. You have to pick with publication is going to take the lead at certain times.

Matt: Rely on local properties to localize the content. It’s a tough model, and he’s seeing a huge rethinking of strategy in the publishing industry.

Bruce: If it’s duplicate, one will be filtered, and if it’s syndicated by a higher authority site, they could rank instead of the original creator. There are also instances where there are words dynamically replaced. That’s more considered spam.

Mike: There has to be some kind of white listing. He asked someone at an engine if duplicate filtering was on all the time. Every university has this manual on their site, so does that mean every university is going to be filtered? There’s got to be analysis on when it should be filtered and when not.

Todd M: It’s hard to argue against duplication consolidation when you consider site quality scoring — if there is such a thing. Even the publishing industry will need to consider this.

The best analytics tracking package is blank.

Todd F: His favorite is Core Metrics. Omniture is a beast to set up. Google is free. Enquisite has a free trial period. Look at what you need to do and what package will meet those needs.

Mike: He agrees with Todd. A hammer to crack a nut might be too much technology for you.

What do you recommend when a term gets localized and ten spots pop up at the top of the results?

Everyone: First get into the local results if you can.

Todd F: Localization is getting so broad now. Local results show up for queries that don’t even have a city name now. And you can’t use a P.O. box. There are places that are re-mailers that will forward your mail to wherever.

Mike: Get a paid listing.

Todd M: You can do re-mailing for your top offices and locations. Include those office addresses on your contact page. You won’t be across the board anymore.

What are your thoughts on Caffeine?

Todd F: Everything he’s checked on it is relatively at the same position as it was before. It’s less an algo shift as it is an infrastructure shift.

Bruce: Some of the spammier sites have dropped.

Mike: The end user expects the freshest results. Crawling the Web has always been about lateral results. So the intention is to speed up the process within the HTTP protocol we’re working with.

Todd M: When there are significant changes, it can take up to six months to find out how it will affect the search industry.

We’ve invested heavily in PR and the links have done nothing for our rankings.

Mike: You probably won’t. The notion of a press release isn’t to get the links. You want the guy at the Wall Street Journal to write about your press release and get one big link.

Todd F: Be judicious with the topics of your press release.

Matt: Are your targets those newspapers that after 30 days the article is in archive and then it’s behind a registration wall? Target publications with longer lasting links.

I thought login pages were a good place to use nofollow, but Matt Cutts told me take them all off. And my observation has been that Google hasn’t taken all their nofollows off. What’s going on?

Todd F: He’s seeing that nofollow is just evaporating PageRank, not consolidating it. He doesn’t see a reason to use it

Mike: He never gave nofollow a second thought — never bothered with it. Use robots.txt if there’s something you don’t want in the index.

Do you still think all press is good press?

Todd F: Yeah, even bad press gets links. But it depends on what the business goals are. If you can avoid bad news, avoid it. There are sites out there like RipOffReport that can take control of your SERPs.

What are the most obvious questions that customers don’t ask when engaging an SEO program that they should be aware of and plan for?

Matt: There’s still a focus on rankings and not business model and revenue. That’s an old mentality and it’s not necessarily the case.

Todd F: Clients don’t understand the space. If you ask, “who are your competitors for your shoe store?” they say Nike, Adidas, etc. But really it’s Zappos. They can’t get their head around who their online competition is. The other big issue is that they want certain major traffic keywords, when those words don’t convert.

Bruce: They often don’t know what their key performance indicators are. A lot of people have been flying blind and don’t have a sense of how to measure the success of an SEO program.

Matt: There’s no concept of what it takes to compete in certain spaces. The days of the little guy competing against the big guy are long gone in many verticals.

Mike: And look at the whole marketing strategy of competitors — not just online. If a competitor is spending money on TV ads and other channels too, then are you prepared to do the same?

Advanced SEO Roundtable: What Is It Really? And Where Is It Going? was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Our moderator is Jeff Ferguson, SES Advisory Board & Senior Director, Online Marketing, Local.com. Our speakers are:

• Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
• James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft
• Aiko Yoshikawa, Sr. Product Manager, Convergence, Yahoo! Advertising Products Group
• Leigh McMillan, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Marchex Call Analytics
• Niraj Shah, Product Manager, Marin Software

Jeff welcomes the crowd after a nice outdoor lunch. He congratulates us for making it to these last-day sessions. Word. Jeff can remember a time when the biggest metric was hits. Then it was click-through rates. It finally got to a point where you could determine revenue — what a revelation! That was information you couldn’t get from other channels. As programs became more complex, the realization occurred that credit might be attributed to other channels.

The question became, how do you determine attribution? The first man in and the last man in is probably too simple. And what if you’ve got more than one thing to do on your site? All of these things need to be assigned to the right place, lest you cut something that’s not working. That’s the heart of the matter that will be discussed today.

Thomas Bindl

Tom is up first. He’s going to focus on real data for better decisions. Even if you’re able to see the full ROI and channels involved, it’s still hard to believe all the data. In general, cookies get lost. How many days does a third-party cookie survive? After 30 days there is a loss of 21 percent of cookie tracking data. That was determined by setting cookies to users they could identify later, over three sites, covering different topics in different countries. That’s a lot of data that’s going to be wrong.

High AOV may result in less accurate tracking. AOV in travel industry increases over time. The data must be tracked from the first interest to the conversion. A possible customer journey might involve multiple channels that impact the conversion. Display, search and affiliate can all factor in. A quarter of all tracking data is wrong. 25.3 percent of conversions need 2+ clicks.

Attribution management: Why the last click shouldn’t get all the credit

• Try to understand cross-channel effects.
• The brand works better with generic terms.
• Define a value for all clicks that lead to a conversion.
• The longer the sales cycle, the more important attribution management is.
• In doubt credit the last click the most, but not everything.

Even the best technology needs help. There are ways to increase tracking accuracy:

• Store click IDs on your site and return on conversion
• Pass on order/client ID with every conversion
• Local shared objects (Flash cookies — often too slow for redirects)
• Ask your users for channel of origin
• Unique coupon codes

Online and offline rely on each other. How can you actually measure offline conversions?

• Coupon codes are often only generated online, but you can do it vice versa as well. A coupon code given in the store that buys accessories online will be connected to their original purchase.
• Discount IDs in ads and landing pages together with phone numbers.
• Check against prior behavior. A lot of people always take the same path to a site.
• Ask for original/influential channels. Ask the consumer — it actually works!

Jeff asks the panel if putting all consumers in one funnel is a detrimental way of doing business. Tom says that a lot of companies are putting money in channels and not paying attention to what’s happening. But with the technology to actually measure the results is foolish. You get more efficiency to all online marketing channels.

Niraj Shah

Niraj is next.

What are multiple conversion events?

• Visitor actions that indicate engagement
• May be directly revenue generating
• Maybe a sign of interest, future revenue
  • Examples: store locator, sign up for newsletter, offline conversions (click to call), cross sells on thank you page, stages of a sales funnel (application submitted, approved application > registration)

Why use multiple conversion events?

Reporting

• Track conversion events across paid search program.
• Analytics and reporting deliver insight to every level.
  • Which keywords drive new users vs. existing users?
  • Which creative phrases drive store locator but not checkouts
  • Which ad groups have high abandonment rate?

Bidding

• Assign value to conversion events separately.
  • Give credit to keywords driving quality visits
  • Tune bid setting to meet ever changing business goals
  • Examples: month-end blitz to sign up new customers
  • Monetization for cross sells changes
  • Financial markets necessitate shift to affluent clients (vs. mainstream clients)

Reactivity

• When lag from click/revenue event is long (like 30 days)
• Option 1: Wait for latent revenue to trickle in and update bids accordingly
  • Problem: bidding is reacting to changes 30 days late
• Option 2: Monetize intermediate events that have less lag.
  • Advantage: bidding reacts to changes immediately.

How to choose multiple conversion events

• Match conversions events with business metrics and goals.
• Attribute values to events for bidding.
  • Enables SEM program to easily adapt to business goals
  • Examples:
    • Cross sells, offline conversions, ensure keywords get credit
• New vs. existing customers
  • Value new customers based on life time value: 2x initial order
  • Value existing customers at 1/2 of order size
• High end vs. mainstream customers
  • Value high-end customers at 100% of captured revenue
  • Value mainstream customers at 75% of captured revenue

Conversion events aren’t always revenue events:

• Stages of a longer sales cycle
  • Choose proxy value for intermediate stages
  • Regularly review proxy value vs. actual revenues and adjust
• Store locator, newsletter sign up
  • Correlate with offline and future conversations
• Qualify visits
  • Useful for conversations with no explicit link online

Leigh McMillan

Leigh is up next. She’s going to look at leveraging call tracking and analytics — the under utilized advertising intelligence. She asks how many people are with an agency. A few hands go up. How many use call tracking or are familiar with it? About 25 percent raise their hand.

Call tracking is analytics for calls rather than clicks or Web site activity. She’ll refer to it as call analytics. On average calls convert at ten times the rate of clicks. People get to talk through the service or there’s an urgent need.

Overall there’s 23 billion plus estimated calls driven from performance advertising and listings in the U.S. (search, print, yellow pages). That’s a robust source of data. Before, business had no cost-effective way to measure these calls — and the business that results from the calls. What campaign, what time of day, what keyword drove the highest value.

Now, a plethora of call data is available. It can be tracked by source, ad, campaign, keyword, time of day and call duration. With call duration, a baseline of calls helps you analyze and separate sales vs. service calls. Repeat calls, hang ups, missed calls, geo-location, recordings and caller info can also be collected.

Value Proposition of Call Analytics

• Prove ROI
• Capture offline conversions
• Gain advertising intelligence
• Improve sales staff performance

Call analytics measures the action most important to local and service-based businesses. One client saw that three times more conversions were counted because 66 percent of conversions were over the phone.

Who should use call analytics? Any service-based or local business and the agencies that work with them. Not only does the agency get credit but it also acts as intelligence to act on in the future.

• Home services
• Professional services
• Automotive
• Real estate
• Education
• Dining
• Finance
• Insurance
• Business service

How it works:

1. Provision the tracking number.
2. Place the number in an ad, site, landing page, etc. Any marketing where there’s a phone number.
3. Leverage the data to optimize campaigns.

Best practices:

1. Use local numbers whenever possible.
2. Use dynamic number replacement (the site and landing pages based on source can each have a different number through JavaScript).
3. Test and track what you really need.
4. Call-optimize your landing pages.
5. Listen to call recordings.

Evaluating call analytics providers:

• System uptime and infrastructure
• Ease of implementation
• Number of processes available
• [... I missed the rest!]

James Colborn

James will be our next presenter. He’ll look at the normal understanding of search and ROI and how you might also want to think about it, along with possible testing scenarios. How many people in the audience are buying search, display, content and image ads — a good number raised their hands for each one.

How do we think about search ROI today?

Consumer search > Click > Action = Desired ROI

At that action point, we’ve looked at multiple sources for getting the desired ROI. Interestingly, a lot of marketers stop their thinking process at the click. A lot of us also stop at the action point. But he’s going to focus on the first step. What actually prompted them to search for you in the first place?

How should we think about ROI?

Online advertising is accountable and measurable and provides some control. But the downfall is getting to the point of juggling a thousand plates on sticks at the same time. That’s where analytics and understanding come in. How many steps did it take to get to a conversion?

Is it worth trying to spend the right time trying to find the right mix?

Possible testing scenarios:

• Reality is that it’s far easier to do this with technology. But…
• If you don’t control a display budget, content/image ads are available
• Test medias together. You have the last-click data at hand
• Design campaigns to prompt cross-media connection
• Build a control campaign and test against it with multiple campaigns

Aiko Yoshikawa

Aiko will wrap up the presentations with her look at Yahoo! Conversions & Assist reports. Last click may not tell the full story. How do you value attribution across different marketing campaigns? There have been a lot of studies about display and search working best together. Yahoo’s Sponsored Search reports provide into the full story. Conversions = “last click”: prior to conversions. Assists = metric which gives credit to ads beyond the last clicked ads.

What are assists? They’re marketing activities that lead to conversions. Yahoo tracks up to 45 days before the conversion. Assists aid decision making. In the past, a campaign might be discontinued because it’s relatively high CPA. But high assists number would suggest manufacturer should maintain budget for campaign. The assumption was that there was causation involved, not just correlation. This kind of data is available to all Panama advertisers.

The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Our moderator is Anne F. Kennedy, SES Advisory Board, Founding Partner and CMO, Joblr.com and Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink. Our speakers are Robert Friedman, Partner, Kelley Drye & Warren, and Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.

Anne says our speakers will put up legal jargon definitions in the presentation slides. Robert is up first. He’s going to talk about personal jurisdiction. Lawyers talk about different kinds of jurisdiction. Personal jurisdiction refers to the state in which an individual or business can be sued. A person or company cannot be sued in a particular jurisdiction if the court does not have personal jurisdiction over that person or company. There are special considerations in the electronic space.

Caveat 1: This is an area of law that’s developed since the country was formed. Therefore this is going to be a broad overview with the goal of giving you the understanding for your business.

Caveat 2: The goal is to do business and make money, so they’re not saying don’t do business. But there are risks to consider. You may decide the reward outweighs the risk.

Most states have statutes that allow a person or company outside its borders to be sued in that state. Find out what your state law is and what jurisdiction another state has over someone in another state. For example, in NY, the Long Arm Statute grants personal jurisdiction over a person or company doing business in NY or transacting business in NY and the lawsuit arises from that contact.

If you transact enough business in the state, it might be fair to have jurisdiction in that state. You also consider the due process — would the person reasonably expect to be sued in that location?

Our forefathers never considered the way business is done today. The system was created based on state borders. That invisible line acts as a barrier for jurisprudence. But with Internet commerce, the goal is knock down all the borders. Commerce is quick and widespread. So how have the courts that have grown with these laws deal with the new borderless commerce? The answer: not very well.

Web Site Jurisdiction

Chloe v. Queen Bee of Beverly Hills: Six weeks ago a court in one state considered a case that revolved around a single transaction in the state by a company outside the state. The finding was uh oh, we don’t have a way with dealing with this — we have to examine it deeper.

Companies and individuals that use interactive Web sites to do business in certain states and with residents of certain states may be sued in that state.

Key facts with a Web site jurisdiction case:

• Revenue generation
• Active vs. passive distinction
• Solicitation or targeting of a state’s residence

The Zippo Sliding Scale has been adopted by courts:

On one side of the interactivity scale is passive information. On the other side is the active site that is selling product and generating revenue. In the middle is some degree of interactivity but no sales are being made. This includes registration, blogging, free items, file sharing.

Even the most passive Web sites have some interactivity. Even tech-slow law firm sites are becoming interactive with blogs and comments and posts.

Here are some cases that illustrate Web site jurisdiction.

Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC v. CAVS USA, Inc.: Jurisdiction was found based on online orders to over 100 Tennessee customers and just 2.5 percent of products sold there. The court exercised jurisdiction.

New Angle Pet Products v. MacWillie’s Golf Products: $32.97 was spent in a state to buy a product in another state over the Internet. This was enough for jurisdiction.

Square D Company v. Scott Electric Company: This case was based on less than one percent of sales. There are quite a few others that fall in the same group. Even just a quarter of a percent (.25%) was enough in one case.

Societe des Bains de Mer v. MGM Mirage: Sales weren’t even considered. A sales drop-down menu was enough to get jurisdiction because it meant people in that state could buy from the site.

The ninth circuit of California — the highest federal court before the Supreme Court — just made a radical and controversial decision. There were two competing law sites. One site had a completely plagiarized page touting their elder law practice. The Web designer had lifted it from another client. The fact that the plagiarized firm was doing law in CA was enough to give the state jurisdiction.

Meta Tags and SEO

While Meta tags are interesting from a legal standpoint, they have less relevance to business today. Optimization has more relevance. Keyword advertising isn’t bringing as many legal cases because the plaintiff has to prove consumer confusion. Morris Material and Handling case can be looked at for an example of this case

Personal Jurisdiction in the Clouds

This is the next frontier in the business and legal side for libel, trademark, etc. The courts are grappling with how to deal with these issues.

Capitol Records, LLC v. Video Egg, Inc.: No jurisdiction based on the sheer availability of infringing products on the site. The site didn’t actually generate revenue. But the court found jurisdiction based on substantial ad sales to NY companies. A factual record showed that VideoEgg promoted the NY user base to advertisers. So despite the fact there was no revenue generation from the downloads, the ad revenue was enough.

Contrast that with a case in NY where Royalty Network sued Dish End. The court didn’t issue jurisdiction because while Dish End has big NY advertisers, there was no evidence they had promoted their NY user base to advertisers. This is a good indicator of how courts will consider jurisdiction.

IO Group, Inc. v. LaPerna: No jurisdiction where there were no sales in CA. Uploading files onto CA server and allowing one CA business to advertise on a site was not found to be enough for jurisdiction. The server location and the one advertiser was not enough of a basis for jurisdiction.

Forward Food LLC v. Next Proteins, Inc.: Jurisdiction found based on a single visit to NY, uploading of due diligence documents to a virtual data room for review in NY, and several emails sent to NY.

Chang v. Virgin Mobile USA: A phone company downloaded a Flickr user’s photo and used it on their ads. A court in Texas, where the Flickr server was located, did not find personal jurisdiction. A server isn’t enough. There needs to be some kind of targeting or proof that the company wanted to business there. With more targeted marketing happening, this could provide an easier basis for establishing jurisdiction based on audience targeting.

Mark will now talk about how to protect yourself with the court’s past decisions in mind. He asks, “Why should we care?” You may be considered to be doing business in states you never thought you were doing business in. You may need to comply with another state’s laws. Jurisdiction determines where you can get sued. You may be required to collect sales tax for customers located in other states.

State Registration Requirements

You may need to register or license your business in other states. Insurance, financial products and counseling, and real estate transactions — even if an advertiser for such businesses — you may need to register or license in the state.

You may need to register the product that you’re offering. If you don’t there could be significant penalties.

Comply with state laws:

• Disclosure requirements of disclaimers
• Product or service may be prohibited
• Age limitations
• Sales restricted to in-state sellers
• Tax issues

Where can you be sued?

• Any place personal jurisdiction exists
• Not just where you or the plaintiff reside
• Where your cease and desist letter is received

Where you get sued matters:

• Cost and convenience issues
• Laws vary from state to state — this often determines who wins or loses
• Court rules and docket speeds — each courthouse, and even each judge, can have a different speed or process

Collecting Sales Tax

New York and Rhode Island required that a sale that was affected in any way through someone in that state — for instance, if an affiliate led to the sale and resides in that state — pay that state’s sales tax. There are steps you can take to avoid doing business in a certain state.

Option 1: Nothing

This is a viable option if:

• Passive site
• Purely local site
• Don’t deal with regulated products or services
• Don’t have affiliates
• Don’t care

Odds are you’re probably safe if one or more of these apply.

Option 2: Avoid a particular state

Don’t offer product or service to residents of that state. Make it clear on your site, and really mean it. If the site blocks them (for instance, if the state isn’t in the sales drop down), the phone sales team needs to know to look for sales from these states as well.

Option 3: Choose where you want to be sued

This can be as simple as including terms in your Terms and Conditions. It’s called a forum selection clause. Something like: “Any claim sought shall be adjudicated in any state or federal court in King County, Washington, and you consent to exclusive jurisdiction and venue in such court.”

Option 4: Choose what law applies

This is approached with a choice of law clause: “By visiting Amazon.com, you agree that the laws of the state of Washington, without regard to principles of conflict of laws, will govern these Conditions of Use and any dispute of any sort that might arise between you and Amazon.”

Keep in mind that a state attorney general can still bring a case against a company with choice of law and choice of selection clauses. The clauses don’t apply to state attorney generals, just consumers.

Option 5: Stay out of court

Have an arbitration clause. This is often a quicker, cheaper way of resolving a dispute compared to litigation in court.

Terms and Conditions

It’s a best practice to make users affirmatively agree to the terms and conditions before the sale. A court will consider if there was a real agreement. Did the consumer look at the terms and agree to them. Checking the box is almost ironclad.

Affiliate Sales Tax

Avoid affiliates in states with sales tax requirements. But you may not want to cut out states like CA and NY because you’re ruling out a number of affiliates. Mark thinks that more and more states will adopt affiliate sales tax.

Cease and Desist Letters

Before you send it, think twice. You’re opening yourself up to being sued in that state. File a complaint first and then hold off on serving. Having a first-filed litigation could give you the upper hand if the person brings an action against you. Your filing will go through first.

Electronic Contacts and the Long Arm of the Law was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Oh, the final day of a rocking conference. The flamenco music has just faded out and Liana Evans is now on the stage. She says that every time she hears our speaker talk she always has awesome takeaways. Li’s speaking of Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell and founder of Altimeter Group. Charlene steps up to the podium.

Think of how far search has come in the last 10 years. Search results are much richer today. Imagine how much more things will evolve. She shows a screenshot of Bing and highlights the left-hand table of contents. Search is much more sophisticated than before.

The Groundswell is where social technologies enable people to get what they need from each other. You can watch videos, listen to audio, connect on Facebook, check what people are saying in real time. In search, the Groundswell has had an effect, and she points to United Breaks Guitars as an example.

After a year of fighting with an airline, a man got fed up and put a video up that told his story. If you do a search for United today, the music video is the fourth result. United doesn’t own their brand as a keyword anymore. Social is out there and it’s being picked up, including by search engines.

People must be at the center of your search strategy — not keywords. So how do you do that? Look at content meaning and advertising through the lens of people. If you think of relevancy as where content meaning, advertiser intent and user intent come together.

Content Meaning

Search engines today can’t make much sense of social sites. Partly because there’s a registration wall and partly because it’s not link based. Take a look at Starbucks’s Facebook fan page. They have 3.7 million fans. Starbucks recently posted on their wall about their Red Foundation pledge campaign. This post had more than 600 comments and more than 7,000 “likes”. And these likes and comments don’t only stay on this page — they’re shared with those users’ friends.

The Facebook search feature lets you know what other people in your network have said about things. And there’s no capability for search engines to tap into this.

The real-time Web presents new challenges for search engines. What’s the value of retweets, replies and short URLs? If you search for the same word in Twitter Search and in Google, the sense you’ll get of the conversation will be totally different

User Intent

Social networks will be like air. It will be all around you, at your fingertips, not just on your desktop computer. User intent becomes clearer with geographic, time and social context. Now you can use your smart phone to search nearby, search on route, search by time of day, find places with friends’ reviews or even friends nearby. How does that change the parameters of what search actually requires. User intent becomes more than the words, it becomes the context.

What if you could read reviews from people you know? If there’s a way to filter by friend reviews first, or friend reviews from only foodies if you’re looking at restaurants. Check out what Earthwatch is doing with trip reviews shared between friends.

There are new ways of targeting marketing:

• Demographic
• Geographic
• Psychographic
• Behavioral
• Social-graphic

What could you do if you could understand user intent better? Media6 identifies who is closest to you — your network neighbor. The idea is that friends have something in common. Friends, more than anything, is the most reliable indicator of interests.

Media6 maps network neighbors based on visits to profile sites via browser cookies (no PII involved). If Jane buys shoes on NineWest, NineWest ads may be shown to Lisa’s friends, without identifying or involving Jane. The key is tapping into the social graphics, creating profiles, which advertisers can use to target.

If you do a Google search, the ads don’t take into account who you are. What if the CPC/CPM could be augmented by social data like:

• Influence
• Number of friends
• Influence among friends
• Number of influential friends

This information can inform the advertiser how valuable a person is to you as an influencer.

How will social CRM work with search?

So how does a business prepare?

1. Focus on the people not the keywords.

It’s about the long-term relationships. Let that inform your interactions with your audience. Focus on relationships, not technologies. What kind of relationship do you want? Do they look transactional, occasional, impersonal and short-term? Or passionate, constant, intimate and loyal?

Goals define your strategy. The first goal should be to learn. This happens through listening to customers first. Then engage them in a dialog, help and support them, and/or innovate with them.

Learn with monitoring tools. Search for free with Twitter and Delicious to see how people are describing and using a product. A paid tool is Radian6, which gives you all kinds of information about product/brand mentions. You’ll see where the conversations are taking place and who is influential in the conversation. Along with listening, encourage feedback.

The Engagement Pyramid

The first level is the watchers. The level after is sharing, and that actually involves engagement. Then come commenters. These people actually create content through their shared opinion. Next is producers — people who create content for a specific audience.

Charlene is a blogger and she has a very clear idea about who her audience is. She’s not going to share a post with them about her family vacation, but they will care about her thoughts on technology. At the top of the pyramid is curators. These people can’t function without the permission of the rest of the community.

So where should a business be? The top? Nope! Pay attention to the bottom of the pyramid. You need to start from the beginning where you’ll draw the movement. Think of where sharing and commenting can be integrated in you site — where they’ll make the most sense and where they’ll be the most utilized. When the right tools are available, anyone can be a marketer on behalf of the company in the future.

This scares companies. But the time of fear is past. You have to find the people in your organization who can speak on your behalf and give them the right tools and training. Look at Dell’s Twitter account. It’s not push marketing — it’s dialog and conversation and customer support.

Or look at the @comcastcares account. Someone doesn’t even have to contact Comcast. A mention of a bad experience elicits the company proactively reaching out. More innovation can be seen in Starbucks’s automatic ordering via swipe card idea. Starbucks has been thinking of how to make it work for the last year. They weren’t able to make the idea happen, so they posted that the technology is an issue and explained their decision making process. That gives customers validation.

2. Get your backend data in order.

• Single sign-on and identity record.
• Integrate off-site behavior and data.
• Know influence of key people.

Integrate social into your site. Facebook Connect is an easy way to do this. People will bring their social network into the site. LinkedIn also has this ability. Think of where your audience connects with their friends.

Prepare to tap into “chain of intent”. If you search for “family vacation” and then “cruise” and then “family vacation again” — the third search will show ads that account for cruises. How good is your ability to analyze this information on the fly and return information based on that?

3. Be ready to give up control.

The biggest barrier companies have in adopting these technologies is not wanting to give up control. How many of your personal relationships do you control? You don’t. You build up trust over time. And if you think of what control you’re giving up, you realize control is a fallacy.

Summary

• Social networks will be like air. Your social network will go everywhere with a user.
• People must be at the center of your search strategy — not keywords.
• Deepen relationships with social technologies.
• Be ready to give up control — you have no choice.

For slides, send an email to slides@altimetergroup.com
Find her on Twitter @charleneli and read her blog at blog.altimetergroup.com.

How to Prepare for the Future of Search: Keynote with Charlene Li was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Someone clever has set the stage for the black hat/white panel with some smooth jazz tunes over the speakers. I expect the panel will tackle this potentially controversial topic like the cool cats they are. Our moderator is Dave Evans, VP, Digital Voodoo. Our speakers are:

• Beth Harte, Community Manager , MarketingProfs
• Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
• Dave Snyder, Co-Founder, Search & Social
• Chris Bennett, President & Founder, 97th Floor

For clarity’s sake, when I say “Dave” I’m talking about panelist Dave Snyder. I’ll refer to our moderator by his full name.

On SEM Synergy last week, the hosts asked what’s considered black hat in the social media space. Prepare to find out.

Dave Evans welcomes the audience and gives us some background. This session is part of the ClickZ/Online Marketing Summit track and as such it goes beyond search. He hopes to enter the larger conversation of how social media plays into search and into business as a whole. Social media is becoming a huge factor in decision making. People are looking for ratings and reviews and it’s affecting the purchase process.

Plus, user generated content plays a role in search as well. So let’s look at how these things are used. He’s going to start with spam. There’s a notion of a war in the digital technology realm. Outrageous spam like the green card lottery in April 1994 is unfairly coloring the conversation. The real questions are focused on how to please the customer. Anything disingenuous or which deteriorates trust will work against your efforts.

There’s a new marketing cycle that’s based on the ideas of what a consumer says a bout a product has a greater affect than it did 15 years ago. There’s also an issue of trust. Basic trust with regard to marketing itself is at risk. Let’s look at some examples.

Paid reviews and the following apology is just dumb. Look at the case of the College Prowler. Profiles were set up under the guise of being a student. The brand was damaged when it was found out it wasn’t true.

If you look at Dell, who’s using Twitter as a pure commercial outreach channel, compare it to other channels like TV or email. In TV or email, ads are given to you as an interruption. But on Twitter, it’s purely opt in. Someone can just unfollow Dell and their experience is back to ideal. The full disclosure, transparency and opt-out measure makes for a great marketing channel.

Wal-Mart made a faux pas when they wrote an RV blog and pretended it was an independent writer. But now they’re smarter. They’re using Twitter the right way.

The questions:

What defines black hat?
What defines white hat?
It’s all about results right?
Who’s making the rules?
How’s the conversation impacted?
How does disclosure factor into this?
What about social media and SEO relationship?

Lee says that the intention of being black hat is to get better results faster. But the consequence is having to manage risk. He sees white hat as a silly distinction — it’s marketing and there are rules (again, who’s making the rules?) and that has to be factored in as you decide what tactics to use.

Dave says there’s no white hat/black hat. Black hat was a term used in SEO to define spamming. Unlike search where there’s a guideline set in front of you, the community guides the social ethics. Wal-Marting across America is not black hat, it’s stupid. It’s really important to understand how to utilize each platform. Each community has its own guidelines. There’s spam, then there’s automation, then there’s conversation. It’s different shades of gray. Look at how the community for each platform reacts to different marketing tactics.

Beth says the community isn’t just customers. It’s stakeholders, analysts, etc. Again, it’s not what’s right or wrong, but it’s what works for everyone involved. Chris says there’s a TOS for every platform. And like Dave said, you have to identify the communities’ preferences.

Dave Evans asks Dave Snyder to expand on the social ethics comment. Dave says that the biggest cross-over between search and social is link building. You’ll find a lot of poor content being submitted by some companies. You’ll all see really great content being submitted by companies. Polluting the platform means the effort won’t succeed. If it’s no good, there’s no way around the fact the community will reject it. Chris says social media isn’t the ends, it’s the means to traffic, community building and followers. It helps get your brand out there and get links. And people that just submit articles and press releases to Digg aren’t going to see any positive results.

Lee is interested in seeing how the tactics have changed in the last year. There were some short term gains early on, but it was hard to sustain. The sustainable model revolves around quality content. And he sees the difference between white hat/ black hat as stupid/smart.

Beth has an issue with ghost blogging and ghost tweeting. They don’t know enough about your company. Some products and services are very complex, and an agency will never know enough about the product to produce content that’s compelling to the community. And if you approach it as just putting in the buzzwords, the community will sense the BS.

Chris asks if that mean no agency can work for SMO? He understands the point, but he says he knows how to take a company and give it the social media twist so that it will resonate with the community. So who writes the piece? Beth says the company should. Chris says, “Then why hire an agency?” Dave Evans says he gets the concern of a client that they don’t have the time for social media marketing. How willing is the brand to give up to control not only to customers, but also to an agency on their behalf.

Beth says that when an agency takes on content creation for social media, the tactical effort is going to suffer. Agencies can fall into a trap if they write as someone else. If that someone else is ever asked about what they meant in that piece, the fact they didn’t actually write it becomes obvious.

Dave says that Twitter has to be very transparent. He looks at his relationship with clients as a bullhorn, allowing them to communicate appropriately. He sees his role as teaching people how to use the platforms to communicate. Also remember that social media isn’t only about communication. It’s also about information sharing. It’s not 100% conversation. If you took comments away from YouTube, it would still be there because it offers information sharing. Of course, each platform is different and you can’t leverage it unless you know it.

Dave Evans says that there’s new work and new opportunities for organizations. And somehow, someone has to talk on behalf of the brand with real technical knowledge.

We have four agencies represented on the panel, with an agency approach to social media marketing. That’s clouding the conversation about black vs. white. It’s quick for you to dismiss stuff that doesn’t work as not best practice. But there’s really a lot of stuff out there polluting the platform.

Dave says there’s definitely spam on social media. He has a lot of outrage over the actual platform because they provide all the tools to spam. As a social media user you get mad at the guy who sends you DMs about making $1 million dollars. But we don’t get mad at Twitter for their API that makes it easy for this spam to occur.

Lee asks, are you going to get mad at the telephone for interrupting your dinner? Dave says he does. He says the platform is as accountable as the user.

Dave Evans asks about the Burger King Facebook app that had people de-friend people. The app was shut down quickly because apps can’t let people know when they’re being de-friended. It doesn’t help the development of the community. Is that an issue?

Dave says you’ll get a reaction from the platform when you take away they’re ability to make money.

Beth and Chris seem to be at odds on the agency role in PR 2.0. How does a company help foster and create a PR rep for their brand?

Beth says the biggest problem is not knowing what different employees’ strengths are. Don’t put employees out there who aren’t social and don’t have a personality. If you don’t have a brand that someone wants to engage with, don’t get involved in social media.

Lee has a brick-and-mortar client who’s got a blog. People applying for jobs are actually tested on their writing ability. They’ve gotten tons of great content on the employees who contribute to the blog.

Chris says that he doesn’t disagree with Beth’s point about ghost writing for a client. But he would review it and make sure it communicates in the right way to the community.

What about automation with social media? I’ve been using automation on my personal Twitter account for a year and haven’t had any problems. I think my followers and I have an engaging relationship.

Dave says if you’re doing that with clients you better be aware it could cause your account to be banned. Sure you’re doing it on your personal account, but you’d never do it on your company account. It comes back to risk management.

When are we going to get rid of black hat, white hat terminology?

Chris says SEO doesn’t own the term. It came from programmers. Lee asks if there are any communities that are good at policing itself. Craigslist, Wikipedia and Reddit are mentioned as platforms with communities that organically police themselves. Lee thought years ago that communities would police themselves but today he’s not seeing that as much as he thought they would.

Should large media and news companies be submitting their own work to bookmarking sites?

Dave says it’s a good way to get banned. Chris says that even if it’s Digg worthy, it’s better that the company focus on ways to create great content. Focus on spending time figuring out ways to make stuff the community likes. Dave Evans says that publishers voting for their own stuff looks funny. Chris suggests that if your company model relies on it, find someone in your company who is truly involved in the social media site and has real relationships in the community.

What if you have employees are directly engaging with your customer through social media?

Dave says a company needs to consider what they’ll do if that employee leaves. He doesn’t have an answer and is waiting to see how it plays out. Lee says that there’s a lot of equity and brand that leaves when the employee leaves.

Name a brand that was damaged by a social media faux pas. It’s never happened. Nobody cares.

Lee says it’s less about customers than it is about industry analysts. Beth says you can just push messages, but it comes down to how effective it is. Dave says it comes down to building effective campaigns that get results for clients. Chris says if you want to catch a terrorist you hire Jack Bauer. If you want a successful online marketing campaign, it might get messy, but Jack Bauer’s going to get the job done.

Social Media: White Hat vs. Black Hat was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

We’re in the vertical & B2B track for this one. Our moderator is Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search. Our speaker line up is:

• Benu Aggarwal, Founder & President, Milestone Internet Marketing
• Michelle Stern, Client Services Director, iProspect
• Roger Wong, Product Manager, Bing Travel
• Carrie Hill, Director of Search Strategies & SearchEnigineWatch Expert, Blizzard Internet Marketing

Benu Aggarwal, Milestone Internet Marketing

Benu steps up first. She’s going to focus on the organic path. For a comprehensive e-marketing plan, start with market and customer analysis. Then think about the product and incorporate that in your marketing strategy. But before you start doing research, think about geo-targets, lines of business, USPs, niche travel words and attractions. Make a table with these headings as columns and you’ll have a table for focusing your plan.

If you have a travel package, be sure you’re including unique and valuable offers.

Site conversion factors:

• Offer exceptional value packages
• Lowest rates guaranteed
• Customer reviews
• Maps and directions
• Blog featuring local info
• Ad promotion on social media networks
• Search engine friendly two-minute video
• Offer trackable time-sensitive coupons
• Phone number, address on ever page
• Photo gallery
• Flat site architecture
• Reservation menu
• Crawlable community maps
• Printable ebrochures

Visitors are coming to your travel site because they want to find things to do, see photos, book reservations and get offers.

You should have an organic promotion strategy. First things first: own your local listing! Upload your profile, add pictures and videos. Also make sure your info on Internet Yellow Pages are correct. Then contact your local chamber of commerce. Add attractions to Wikipedia. The links aren’t followed by the traffic will come.

Ultimately, your goal is to rank high for your name and for relevant keyword phrases. Why your name? There are going to be travel sites that rank for your name. With an enhanced listing, with a map or a blog, they will get to know you.

If you have a duplicate local listing, combine them so you don’t nullify both because of the duplicate.

Final tips:

• Create comprehensive marketing plan
• Identify long tail keyword phrases and bundle it up
• Add conversion facts to your site
• Add coupons, time sensitive value added offers
• Track online and offline conversions such as calls, coupons
• Focus on enhancing and verifying local profiles, validating feeds
• Get links from authoritative local site in that area
• Identify relevant niche markets and create strategies to convert those
• Make sure key Internet Yellow Pages have accurate information

Michelle Stern, iProspect

Michelle is up next. She asks the audience to raise your hand if you have a rotary phone in your home. No one raises their hand. That’s because it doesn’t meet our needs. There’s a need for search marketing campaigns to evolve as well. But how to do that in a down economy? Let’s look at a case study. WTH is one of the nation’s largest leisure travel company, partnering with companies like Orbitz and Expedia.

This happened last December — the economy’s big dive and an important time for WTH. With the economic turmoil, conversions in December and January decreased. But people were still searching. They planned to improve conversions by looking at the 4 highest traffic terms in the campaign. They looked at search volume year-over-year. Three were steady but one, “cheap cruise”, had really spiked. This was insight into the consumer mindset. You may not want to negatively impact the brand by emphasizing cheap travel, but you may be able to mitigate any damage by balancing it with customer reviews and service.

They realized that not all travelers are created equal. They recognized four profiles and decided to test copy for each profile groups around the keyword. In tests they saw the new copy had a decreased cost per click and a higher conversion rate. Conversions increased 16 percent year over year for top ad groups.

Lessons learned:

• Integrate with other channels. Search is an opportunity to get a real-time pulse of consumers.
• Speak in the customers language, not yours. They will listen! It sounds basic, but it’s so often not applied.
• Create promotions and a sense of urgency. Give them a reason to buy now, creating promotions that set you apart from your competition. Capture contact information so you can remarket those who don’t convert at a later point.

Carrie Hill, Blizzard Internet Marketing

Carrie’s next and will focus on social media, touching on mobile and local marketing as well. She’s going to look at dealing with shrinking budgets, especially in the not-so-accountable social media space. But what happens if you ignore social media? You’re leaving opportunities for competitors and won’t know what’s being said about you or your industry.

How do you find out who your audience is? Use demographic keyword tools. Watch the bloggers that cover your area by searching your key terms In blog search. And look at your referral traffic. You can always ask as well.

Getting involved isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about being where the conversations are, which vary depending on who you are and what fits your client. Track the conversation with URL shorteners that track clicks. Correlate tweet and FB updates with spikes in site traffic (use this to sell the C suite). Alerts are useful, too.

What’s the ROI?

• Brand recognition
• Track revenue from social networks with Google Analytics event tracking
• Happy guests that talk about their experience
• What is the return on ignoring?

Facebook tips:

Be genuine, personable and always professional.
Set up a fan page and promote it on your Web site.
Don’t only post links and promotional material. Share videos, images and stories and answer questions.

Twitter tips:

• Grab attention with deals
• Offer exclusive deals and codes
• Answer questions
• Promote your presence on your site
• Don’t auto DM followers
• Don’t post a link in every single update — it looks contrived

Integrating your approach:

• Use a client to help you. She likes Hootsuite with Ping.FM
• Post to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all at once
• Schedule tweets for future posting
• Save keywords searches
• Track link clicks
• Integrate in your staff’s email signature
• Don’t forget to tell the visitor where they can find you in social media

And finally, here are a couple mobile and local tips:

[David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors --Susan]

Roger is here to give us practical tips for Bing Travel. Online travel continues to grow. Most travelers still plan to take trips in the current economy. And many travel companies are reacting well to the environment. Information reported in June 2009 from PhoCusWright Inc. shows that boomers are being hit more than other generations. This means that marketers can target the user groups that aren’t as heavily affected by the recession.

Roger Wong, Bing Travel

Test ad copy optimized to target younger travelers expected to spend more on travel and are less impacted than boomers. Go beyond looking at just keywords to better understand what motivates different segments of the population to travel and what features/messages matter to them and tailor campaigns to target those users more effectively.
Expect future systems to incorporate more advanced segmentation.

Travel metasearch Web sites, travel guide web sites and social networking web sites are standing out as three typically used shopping travel sites. Some major SEM engines also provide text ad syndication to many travel sites. Ask your account manager where your ad could show up and find out what keywords these partners use to request ads.

Search behavior and the long tail is another area to pay attention to. They looked at travel research overall and found an increased sophistication in the way searchers look for travel info. There’s been a huge growth in the long-tail of car rental searches. They’ve taken advantage of these trends in Bing by building out pages that refine things like hotel info.

As for staycations, there’s evidence that people are taking shorter trips and staying closer to home. They’re helping travel clients build out local attractions and targets. One adCenter client increased hotel and vacation packages traffic significantly by targeting local attractions such as museums, national parks and tourist attractions.

Four Paths to Success in a Tough Travel Economy was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

For some background, Nicholas Fox is the business product management director for Google AdWords. According to his speaker bio, he “is responsible for the development and improvement of the algorithms that determine the display, ranking, and pricing of AdWords ads on Google and its partners. Nicholas also leads product management for AdWords bidding features, which enable advertisers to maximize their ad performance and simplify their bid management.” [Editor's note: There was a lot of scathing commentary about this keynote on Twitter but the information presented is better than I expected.--Susan]

Nicholas Fox, Google

What will this Google insider have in store for us this afternoon? Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board, introduces Nicholas as the guy in charge of “the other algorithm.” He’ll be talking about the future of search advertising. And with that, Nick takes the stage.

We all know what AdWords offers today. But the future is evolving. So let’s look back a bit and see where we came from. Google could have been all about banner ads, but they decided it didn’t work in the UI. Eventually they settled on the text ad model. Now they run an auction for ads — more than a billion auctions a day. This was pretty unimaginable when Google was first created.

There are couple things about search ads that are groundbreaking. First is the focus on relevance to the user. More importantly, it’s not about an editorial team figuring out which ads are good and bad, but the decision is made by the user through click-through rates. The idea that click-through is a signal was very novel when it was first introduced.

The second big change is that the advertising is measureable and accountable. Advertisers were able to test different creatives through the dynamic system. They can also target ads to different locations and times of day.

The AdWords system isn’t just a success for Google. It’s also a success for advertisers and users. He thanks all the advertisers in the audience for their contributions to the system.

The Internet is exploding. There are 100 billion pages on the Web, 500 billion images and 20 hours of video uploaded every minute — and all these numbers are growing. Publishing has gone mainstream through blogs, tweets, Flickr. And knowledge has become collective. Wikipedia has 100 million hours of human thought invested in it.

Search advertising has evolved through improvements in bidding tools, better targeting of queries, a more streamlined UI. His team, the AdWords quality team, has made breakthroughs. Machine learning algorithms can predict what the click rate might be for an ad that’s never run before. There are hundreds of experiments going on all the time. And AdWords is trying to be more transparent about this information. The bid simulator is giving advertisers an unprecedented insight into the traffic they’re receiving.

Keywords, text ads and CPC are the holy trinity of search ads. They’ve served us well, but in the future they intend to think about how and if these three things are should be applied. The innovations will come from all over the place.

There’s an old adage. If a story is called a Civil War, it’s because the old guard wins. If it’s called a revolution, the new group prevailed. They want to see a revolution because everyone will win with improvements.

Going Beyond Keywords

The keyword targeting business is like a game. A user searches for a product and an advertiser has to guess what they’ll be searching for. From his vantage point he says advertisers are predicting pretty well. The Oxford English Dictionary has half a million worlds. Their ad database has about 30 million keywords. Every day 20 percent of the queries we receive are ones they haven’t seen in at least 90 days.

Users are becoming more creative in their queries, which makes it hard for advertisers to catch up. So what if it was turned around. A business tells Google what they do and then Google matches the site to the keywords. Or what if Google crawled your site and then created ads and figured out what to present them for.

They’re also trying approaches that contain no keywords. They want to get better at matching keywords to advertisers. Once they figure out the right match for a company and a keyword, what will the ad be?

Right now the ad format is fixed with a blue text link and a green URL. But the one-size-fits-all approach may not work in every case. Driving directions and user reviews, for instance, may be a good fit for a query. There’s a lot of experimentation happening around this. They also want to figure out how to keep the ads unobtrusive, which is what Google users like about Google ads. They want to make sure ads are useful.

Leads, Schmeads

With the right info on the right ad with the right query, a user will click. So is a marketer done at that point? Of course not. Clicks aren’t what counts. Marketing is about delivering sales and customers and return on investment. What if you didn’t have to pay for clicks that didn’t convert? Cost per acquisition is new to search, and Conversion Optimizer is working in that direction.

There’s lots of innovation and experimentation going on, and you need a lot of ideas to have one good one. The reality will depend on what makes sense for marketers. He welcomes input. Q&A is about to open here. There’s also a forum that we can visit to give feedback. By participating in betas, the benefit is that an advertiser can get an early start on the new tools and developments.

Q&A

How do you referee the difference between two advertisers going after the same “piece of meat”?

They try to be as objective as they can be. With conversion optimizer, they use their systems to predict which clicks are likely to get clicks and convert. A conversion rate comes together with the bid price in order to make the decision of what ad shows up.

Is Wave going to present PPC opportunities?

He doesn’t know. He hasn’t looked at it in detail. The Wave team will decide if advertising makes sense in the context. But the plans aren’t in place yet.

What’s the future of image recognition in search?

There’s a similar images feature in image search. And for advertising it’s being worked on. It’s a difficult computer science problem to solve.

How do you differentiate between similar quality score and similar bids?

If it’s the same advertiser, they show exact match ads before phrase or raw match ads. If it’s among different advertisers, they look at who has the highest combination of bid and quality.

What have been some of the biggest search ad UI mistakes?

They would have like to have innovated with Universal search differently and explore ad formats for Universal search. Ads haven’t really kept up with the types of features advertisers would like to have.

Can you share the largest volumes for mobile search?

A fair amount of volume of geographic queries are coming from Japan and the U.S. — the more developed mobile markets. In terms of vertical queries, they see a lot in product queries and porn.

What could take the place of keywords in ads?

In the case of a plumber, the ad might be about the services offered and where the plumber operates. A retailer could present their product catalog. There’s currently a step the advertiser needs to make between what they’re selling and what keywords they’re targeting. They want to remove that step as much as possible.

Why’s there a difference between the clicks reported between Google Analytics and AdWords?

They’re trying to reconcile that difference because it should be the same. It has something to do with the way Analytics filters out spam and how AdWords deals with things like cookies.

Is there any plan to integrate Analytics and AdWords so advertisers don’t have to go back and forth?

In general, they sympathize with that pain point but he can’t comment on when that might happen.

When will CPA in Conversion Optimizer be as regulated and set in terms as the CPC in AdWords?

It comes down to whether they have an accurate prediction of conversion rate. They’ve improved this over the years and are continuing to work on it.

SES San Jose Keynote with Nicholas Fox was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.