David Dalka attends and reports business events and conferences to discover the future of business where technology, organizations and customer exeperience meet. Also serves as emcee, moderator and motivational business keynote speaker.
Search Engine Marketing, SEM
Kevin Delaney wrote a Wall Street Journal article today that rips on Yahoo! for the way it is handling the conversion to customers.
This flies in the face of all the articles and public opinion I’ve witnessed in person and online. I’m starting to think the Wall Street Journal is a bit guilty of bashing Yahoo! while letting the issues of another certain search engine slide completely. This is unfortunate.
Jennifer Slegg offers a post with excellent insight into the issues.
Has anyone done the A/B testing that Jennifer suggested? I’d be interested in the results and to see if that was a driver of this move.
On October 9th, I wrote this about Kathy Sierra’s “Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees”.
It’s a great post and it relates to a lot of problems in the business world in terms of having innovative customer service. Let’s hope her post prompted some people to realize that operating in this manner is a mistake.
Congrats!
AI Gateway, a development stage search portal and ad network with a truly unique value added technology, was accepted into a major university incubator today. Founder Joe Holcomb put significant work into this effort and gave me a shout to let me know that this goal has been reached.
AI Gateway is currently seeking angel funding and or an aggressive venture capital participant willing to fund a predevelopment concept based on a unique business plan that starts to generate revenue quickly upon completion of a beta product.
John Slade speaks to an overflow crowd…
Says “Thank You!” to existing customers
Thanks people who have been early adopters
Web Publishers – everyone is a publisher in some way, even if they don’t think they are.
Consumer Context – Keep it in perspective
The Four Questions:
– How do I reach my desired audience?
– How can I effectively engage them?
– What mix of tactics should I use?
– How do I know its working?
Today’s offer model is a linear model, moves to multiple ad targets & calls to actions
Tip: Always get your keywords in your titles and descriptions.
Build calls to action: It’s a framework to continue
New Tools:
– Dynamic Account Structure
– Ad Testing
– Fast Ad Activation – building more automation and integrity checks into the process.
– Enhanced Geo-targeting
– Alerts – proactive keyword alerts to start shortly
– Share of Clicks and Forecasting
– Quality Index
Rank is determined by its bid and expected performance. Relevance is critical to preventing “ad blindness”
Five Reasons Marketers Should Be Exited:
– Improved user experience: intuitive, speed
– Faster impact and rewards for advertisers that optimize
– Focus efforts on what matters most to the marketer’s business
– Gives marketers the power create, test, and analyze campaigns like never before
– Leverage creative (missed the rest of the slide)
John stressed that one needs to be cognizant of thinking in new ways to get full advantage of the features of the new system.
Graham Harris…gives demonstration. Shows the automated keyword generator. This shows a huge change in magnitude that allows effective campaigns to be created by almost anyone.
Patrizio Spagnoletto speaks…
Upgrading Approach and Schedule:
– U.S. advertiser upgrades have begun
– Advertisers may chooser to upgrade post holidays
– Invitations will continue in stages to U.S. advertisers over the next several months
What to Expect
– Frequent Update
– Cheat sheet
Please look at the tutorials, customer solutions 1-866-YAHOO-98
It’s important to Yahoo! to make this house your home. We are successful when you are successful.
Question/Answer: Minimum bid for the US market is still $.10.
Question/Answer: Bulk submit is available.
International markets will occur sometime in 2007. John Slade said customer feedback was being sought on the best way to roll out.
How do you calculate relevance in a new ad? Dozens of factors drive us to a relevance to an ad, many of these come from Yahoo! search technologists. As data is available, this is factored in as well.
All in all, Yahoo! is demonstrating some positive attributes during this large conversion of platforms. These include a customer focus and taking the time to make a professional and transparent system migration that I believe will serve as a model in how to make a professional and non-disruptive migration. Stock analysts should look at the long term of what is occurring here.
Gary Stein, ammomarketing.com
Why Social Media?
Three Wrong Reasons
Two Right Ones
(plus one bonus concepts)
– Obvious and Wrong Reason #1: That’s Where the People Are
– Minority of consumers read blogs, blog, podcast, have a Second Life avatar, etc.
– Most businesspeople are not tuned into Web 2.0
– Obvious and Wrong Reason #2: Consumers are in Control
– Nuthin’ new about consumer control
– Media owners have a right to their rights
– Obvious and Wrong Reason #3: The Mainstream Media is Kaput
– The best blog barely touches the reach of established players
– Blogs have big frequency, low reach
– Real Reason: The Channel is Unfair
– Private labels clog p the shelves
– Big box stores dictate rules
– Brands forced into direct ads and coupons
– Real Reason: Manufacturers Set the Ad Agenda
– Manufacturers drive branding
– The relationship mandate is Critical
– Manufactures need consumers to walk into the channel want their product and only their product
“Consumers are won when you meet them as equals”
– Consumer reviews are the silver bullet to ecommerce.
Bonus Concept: Brand Want Media, Agencies Want Brands
– 2007 Trend – owning the channel
– These are built on Web 2.0 principles
– Not real hit on media, since they will need traffic, as well as development of new channels (see Yahoo’s New Brand Universes)
Henry Copeland, CEO, Blogads
Asks for hand raising to prove Gary wrong.
Where publishers once ruled walled gardens, dictating news cycles and headlines…
Influentials now trade news and views in real-time swarms…
The best ads fit into blogs’ hyper-linked, news and views-rich conversations…bottom-up voices…
Subtle tweaks, does your ad make the reader want to ask questions.
We as marketers need to infiltrated the cocktail party. Put interesting creative in there.
(note to self – download Henry’s example slides)
Bill Flitter, Pheedo
RSS to power marketing programs
(Extremely long case study – had a feel of a client push so I won’t capture it)
Social media campaigns have a gradual decline and longer tail due to residual traffic from search engines.
Marc Schiller, Electric Artists
Second Life concepts to be explained
What have changed since the bubble burst in 200?
1 in 8 couples married last year met online (McKinsey)
Today, the most successful companies connect their customers together
“Our goal with second life is to make it better than real life” Linden Lats, CEO and founder
1.6 million residents
Medan age is 33
50/50 male/female
3,000 entrepreneurs making $20,000 a year
Estimated $100 Million of transactions (2006)
People are making their living in Second Life
Content owners maintain ownership of their IP
Aloft Hotel – useful in both prototyping and branding
Scion, MLB are launching now…
Provides ten rules for success in second life (should have left up slide longer)
Great thought provoking session with some points of view one degree away.
Tag: SESChicago2006
How do you do better in a quality score world?
Joshua Stylman, Reprise Media
– Quality score is determined by a number of factors
– Google Adwords = CPC x CTR (more relevant copy)
– Why make these changes – control over #1 position
– 2005 – Black Box – CPC, CTR, Landing Page, Ad Copy, others that aren’t transparent
– CTR not a good proxy for relevance, irrelevant landing pages, etc.
– Example of dramatic lowering of CPC once ad had a quality score
– Unintended impacts – artificial CPC inflation, Engine define “quality”, changes affect quality score
– Death of bid management, not really.
– How do you solve for an equation that you don’t understand
Andrew Goodman, Zero Page Media
– Two quality scores – one affects minimum bid, the other affects ad rank
– “Other relevancy factors” – tightness of relationship keyword – ad – landing page
– Relevant ads, ad keyword are critical
– How it works – see the public guidelines, human codes used to train algorithm
– Principles for ad quality raters are derived from user feedback on a large scale
– Adbots crawls landing pages looking for ”markers” a formula will determine score
– QS Ad Rank – CTR still key
– You can fix some of these issues – Advertiser (A sports training facility) using separate page to test response on different domain
– Don’t be foolish
– Cheesy Landing Pages + Deceptive Offers – “There is No Sanctuary”
– Try country variance
Jonathan Mendez, Otto Digital
– Strategic services arm of Offermatica
– What is relevance? Contextual relevance.
– Segmentation + Targeting = Relevance
– Engagment
– Ad needs to be relevant to the keyword and the landing page
– Geotargeting – important to news growth
Brian Boland, Microsoft
– Was there for the question and answer session – Google was invited to the panel but declined to participate
SESChicago2006