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Tips from Day 2 - Search Engine Strategies 2008 San Jose
August 20, 2008 by Erik Cunningham
On Tuesday, Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies 2008 in San Jose, I was able to mix things up a little bit. At the conference, I attended sessions related to PPC and web analytics. Between sessions, I had lunch with an old friend from college. In the evening I rounded out my day at the Google Dance.
All in all, it was a great day - very social and very educational. Here is a summary of my experiences.
Day 2 Agenda
Measuring Success - Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
11:00am - 12:15pm
Avinash Kaushik, an author, blogger, and analytics evangelist from Google, opened the morning’s session by describing Web 2.0’s effect on the creation, distribution and consumption of content on the internet. In the world of Web 1.0, publishers distributed their content to web users through controlled channels which made the consumption of that content easy to moderate and easy to track.
The emergence of RSS feeds and content syndication in Web 2.0 broke this model and took the control of content distribution and consumption out of publishers’ hands and put it into the hands of the web community. Avinash describes this transfer of power as, “different but better”.
In a Web 2.0 world, content monitoring and tracking have become far more difficult. Unique visitor and page load statistics no longer carry the same significance. Avinash recommends that publishers find new ways of measuring success. He uses tools such as Feedburner, Google Analytics and Technorati to monitor the results of his publishing efforts and focuses on data that reveals customer loyalty and subscriber base.
Sponsored Session: Omniture - 5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM
2:45pm - 3:45pm
Although sponsored, my second session of the day was high on content and surprisingly low on salesmanship. Kudos to Omniture for providing us with useful, non-proprietary search marketing information. Here are the five topics the presenters discussed:
- Direct navigation and one and two keyword searches are on the rise. Are these factors related?
- Small advertisers should focus their PPC campaign efforts on the top two or three search engines with the largest marketshare in their geographic area. Choosing good keywords and building relevant landing pages are a must!
- SEM doesn’t work for everything. Creating PPC campaigns for products with latent demand can be a waste of time. When marketing new technologies with descriptive words and acronyms that public is unfamiliar with, display and vertical advertising is a better strategy for success.
- Traffic from search engine “content network” PPC advertising is about 30% lower quality than normal PPC search traffic. Google and Yahoo! use it as an upsell, but it may not be in the best interest of the advertiser.
- Some of competitors’ search engine marketing activities are easily researched. Simple keyword searches can reveal what terms competitors are buying and following the paid links will show you their landing page strategies.
Measuring Success - Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers
4:00pm - 5:15pm
The last session of the day was a bit dry, but I did manage to pick up some pointers about search analytics.
In addition to the standard bounce rate, average time on site, and page views statistics present in most analytics packages, Michael Stebbins from Market Motive, recommended that you find a program or means to measure conversion rates, cost per visitor and revenue per visitor. The resulting data doesn’t have to be completely accurate, as long as it reveals “trends” related to PPC campaigns so you can identify which ad groups perform the best, and which perform the worst. Once you can determine this, you should cut the top 10% of your poor performing ads.
Brett Crosby from Google recommended that to best track and analyze your Adwords campaigns you should configure goals and funnels in Google Analytics, create custom dashboards to organize your data, and set up custom email reports that relate to the job functions at your organization.
Google Dance
7:00pm - 11:00pm
The Google Dance was great as always. Lots of food, free t-shirts and free drinks, and plenty of entertainment. Thanks again Google for being such a generous host!
That about wraps up Day 2 at SES 2008 San Jose. Two down, but two more on the way so stay tuned!
— SEO — Tags: google analytics, ppc, search engine strategies, search marketing, ses 2008, web 2.0
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