Biznology Blog: April 2007

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April 30, 2007

Should We Still Worry About Click Fraud?

I find that most search marketers don't know what to make of click fraud. They've heard the stories, but they have no idea whether it's happening to them. It's human nature to put risks out of our minds when we don't know how to respond to them. Is that a safe way to deal with click fraud?

If you're one of those with your head in the sand, start by understanding what you're missing. Click fraud probably occurs more than you think—some estimates have placed click fraud at 20% of all paid search clicks. Click fraud is being contested in court. And click fraud has been the subject of scary insider stories that would give any search marketer pause.

I started thinking about click fraud again, when Forensics found a 14% click fraud rate in a recent study. But as that Search Engine Land article correctly points out, that 14% rate is the total fraud rate—not the amount that a search marketer pays. Search engines aggressively identify occurrences of click fraud and do not charge search marketers for those suspicious clicks. In fact, some reports say that click fraud's cost to search marketers is around 2%.

So what does this all mean to search marketers?

I recommend thinking of click fraud as a cost of doing business, much like shrinkage in a retail store. Few retailers go out of business because of shoplifting, and click fraud is unlikely to doom your paid search campaigns. Focus on your return on investment, such as Lifetime Value calculations. If your campaigns are providing a sufficient return on investment, then don't worry about whether a small part of your investment was actually wasted on click fraud.

It's rare, but sometime ignoring a problem really can be OK.

Posted by mikemoran at 7:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 27, 2007

Google Takes Another Step to Personalized Search

Google has announced a new capability, Web history, that is another step towards far deeper use of personalization techniques in search results. God Hotchkiss has an excellent interview with the Googlers behind personalized search. So, why is this important to search marketers?

If you think that personalized search is just a more interesting development in making search results more relevant to searchers, think again. Personalized search results will shake the foundations of the search marketing industry.

First, personalization means that Google and other search engines know more about the searcher. Microsoft already offers search marketers the ability to pay a premium for clicks from searchers fitting certain demographic characteristics. There's no reason to expect this premium pricing to stop at demographics. Would you pay more for searchers with a history of searching for similar terms? How about searchers that have been to your competitor's Web site in the last three days? You'll probably get a chance to decide soon.

But the biggest changes are in store for organic search marketing. As I've written before, personalization dooms traditional rank checking. In a world where no one ranks #1 for a keyword every time, search marketers will be forced to confront the basics of appealing to target segments. You can think of today's organic search world as offering only one market segmentation method—keywords. In the new world, each keyword segment can be divided into many more segments based on demographics, firmographics, search history, Web history, and just about anything else that searchers will allow us to know about them.

To be prepared, search marketers must start thinking about segmentation the same way that other marketers do. The king, search rankings, is dead. Long live segmentation!

Posted by mikemoran at 11:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 26, 2007

Are Your Affiliates Siphoning Your Paid Search Customers?

Angie McCloskey makes a strong case in MediaPost's Performance Insider on how "Affiliates Are Pilfering Your Brand" by grabbing branded search terms and then charging the merchant for the trouble. She points out that if your brand is what caused people to search, then by restricting your affiliates so that they can't bid on those branded keywords you'd reap all the benefits of customers coming directly to you. Instead of paying affiliate fees for searchers using branded terms, you'd pay nothing to make the same sales. Although this sounds like common sense, I think it's wrong.

Certainly Angie has a point. If you've spent years building your brand, why would you want to cut affiliate marketers in on the sale when your customers search for branded keywords?

Some merchants running affiliate programs have heeded Angie's advice and changed their affiliate agreements so that their affiliates are not allowed to bid on certain branded terms. Unbranded category keywords are fine, and it makes sense to credit the affiliate with driving sales from those terms, but these merchants are making branded terms off-limits to affiliates. Studies by MarketingSherpa indicate that this practice is on the rise, with twice as many merchants blocking branded search terms since early 2005.

I think that's short-sighted.

As I wrote a year ago in my column in Revenue Magazine, "Unfortunately, no matter what a merchant does to block its affiliates from buying branded keywords, competitors can't always be blocked, because the merchant has no control over them. The merchant can buy just one ad per branded keyword, but the search engines always show several ads on each result screen. Although the merchant might have the top paid spot, who has the rest of the spots?

"Before that merchant began blocking its affiliates, the bulk of those other ads were likely from its affiliates. Searchers who clicked on those affiliate ads (and bought) were still buying from the merchant, even if the merchant had to shell out higher fees than if the searchers had purchased without coming through an affiliate.

"But Randy Antin, search marketing manager of Travelocity, notes that when his company restricted its affiliates from bidding on branded keywords, 'the spaces in the bidding were soon replaced by our competitors' affiliates.' Searchers clicking anything other than Travelocity's single ad might end up buying from a competitor. Yahoo has recently changed its policy to block competitors from using trademarks, but it remains to be seen if other search engines will follow suit."

To me, it's a shelf space issue. Every search has a set of results, and anything you can do to crowd out the competition is a good thing. I'd rather have higher cost of sales with a lot higher sales than lower my cost of sales while losing revenue to the competition. You can read my entire column, "The Search Tug of War," but I warn you that the Web site has mangled the text a bit from the original print version.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 25, 2007

Do Search Marketers Need Another Ad Vendor?

I'm constantly asked which search engines a rookie paid search advertiser should work with. Obviously, everyone should take part in Google AdWords, because Google covers half or more of all searches. Most marketers should also look at Yahoo!, which handles about one-quarter of all searches—their Panama platform has made them an even more interesting choice for ad spending. But what about Microsoft? Or ask.com? Or MIVA? Every search marketer has a limited amount of time to spend managing campaigns, so what would cause you to look at them?

Big search marketers probably have the volume to look at many paid placement vendors, but smaller companies must be more careful. Let's look at several search vendors and see what you get out of them besides a bit more traffic:

• Microsoft. The big carrot here is personalization. Search marketers can pay a premium to get customers in certain demographics (such as age or gender)—if that results in more qualified visitors for your site, then it might be worth the extra work to manage a Microsoft campaign.


• Ask. The newest program has one of the best sweeteners. If you spend $5,000 a month with them, Ask provides free search marketing consulting to improve copy, click rates, and other return on investment factors. You might find that what you learn from this free consulting could be applied to ads you run on other search engines, boosting your entire campaign.


• MIVA. MIVA has traditionally had a stronger presence in Europe than elsewhere, so you may consider them more strongly in certain country markets. In addition, MIVA has an interesting inline advertising option, so some advertisers may find that they benefit from a different presentation than the average contextual ad.

You'll find no end of options for the search marketer with time on your hands—except there aren't any such search marketers. We're all busy and we must pick our spots to decide what's worth our time. After you've focused on Google and Yahoo!, however, maybe these thoughts can provide you some guidance as to whether to spend your time on one more paid placement vendor.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 24, 2007

Is Organic Search Marketing Too Much Work?

I read Tom Foremski's post, "Is search broken?" over a month ago, and I responded at the time by comparing the work you do for search with other ways of getting attention. But I keep thinking about the question Tom asked, and I think I have a better answer today than I did back then.

At the time, I mentioned that any kind of marketing requires some kind of work, which is true, but I think what's needed is for us to think about what the best comparison is to a kind of marketing we know. After some thought, I think the best analogy is to public relations.

Organic search is seductive because it seems free. It doesn't require forking over your credit card to Google the way paid search does, but it does take work. PR is similar. It's not advertising, but it does take work on your part to get any attention.

A strong publicity campaign, just like a strong organic search campaign, starts with a good story. You need a story that people are interested in. In organic search, your content is your biggest weapon. If you deliver content that is relevant to what people are interested in (uses the words they use, for example), then you'll succeed. If you have an especially good story, people will link to it (which draws traffic by itself but also improves your search rankings).

Publicity requires more than a story, however. If all you do is write a story, no one finds out about it. You need to issue it as a press release. You need to call up the media outlets. You need to sell your story to the media so that they decide to give it more attention. Over time, you learn more and more what will appeal to the media—that's how you get coverage of your story.

Organic search is no different. If all you do is slap together a Web page, no one may find it. You need to use the words people use in search, you need to think about how to make your page appeal to the search engines—just as you do with publicity.

Now, I am sure there are folks out there that say to themselves, "Why is public relations so much work?" They'd prefer to come up with their story and have the newspapers run it. But that's not how the world works. And you can spend your whole life lamenting how much work it is, or you can just make a decision to do the work. (Or make a decision not to do it.)

Search is the same. If all you do is write the story, it might work. But if you take the time to think about what you're doing, and try as hard to appeal to the search engines as your PR person works the media, you'll do better. Understand, you don't swing in totally the opposite direction either, where you obsess about the search engine and forget about your real audience (just as you don't try to please media folks but have no real story their audience wants to read).

To me, any business that has a Web site ought to spend some time understanding organic search marketing. Yes, it's work, but it's less work than most other forms of marketing and it really pays off. Think of it as public relations for your Web site.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 23, 2007

Perfection is Dead

I've spoken ad nauseum about how we have to stop obsessing about carefully, slowly, deciding the exact right way to do our marketing. It's comforting to believe that you have it right, but it's an unattainable dream—you never have it right. I like to say you should "do it wrong quickly," and it was gratifying to see Web metrics expert Avinash Kaushik blog about this same subject as an excerpt from his upcoming book.

Avinash is right on when he says that perfection is dead. He talks about how there are no perfect metrics, which I've talked about previously, also. I think that some metrics experts are hung up on perfect measurements and we've tried to be more precise at the expense of unifying metrics so that people understand how to make decisions from them.

But I think perfection is dead in an even bigger way. Our relentless pursuit of the perfect Web page, the perfect call to action, or the perfect e-mail campaign is totally misguided. When we launch any marketing campaign, any Web redesign, or any kind of marketing message, that's not the end. It's the beginning.

That's when we start measuring what is happening, not to prove ourselves right, but to find out how wrong we are. If you have convinced everyone that this is the perfect campaign, you almost can't find out how it worked. You need to gather metrics only to prove that it really was perfect. You can't honestly see what is wrong so you can fix it.

Instead, you must look at the first day of your campaign as the real start. You must test who is responding and how they are respnding—is it better or worse than you expected? Now is the time to roll out Plan B and Plan C to vary what you are doing to see if you can increase response. This is the real secret of interactive marketing—instead of seeking perfection, keep doing something different so it works better and better.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2007

Do We Want to Measure Time Spent?

Andy Beal and Bryan Eisenberg are both asking good questions about the new "time spent" metrics that Neilsen/Netratings is introducing. Andy wants to know how time spent is calculated (good question) while Bryan assumes that it is time spent in the browser and asks more good questions. Are we missing the boat on metrics here?

I think so.

"Time spent' is an attempt to treat Web viewing the same as TV viewing, but I think that's misguided. We don't measure the time spent watching TV shows because it is a good measurement, but rather because it is all we have. We're far better off modeling Web metrics around a direct marketing approach that counts the number of impressions made by a message, along with the number of times the reader selected that message and eventually converted.

I talked about this in a Biznology newsletter a few months back, and I still think it's the right way to think about measurement. The problem with measurements is that we use different ones for every tactic, instead of unifying online marketing metrics so that everyone understands them. Using the direct marketing approach makes our marketing a lot more measurable than trying to equate "time spent" into some kind of business value that CEOs understand. "Time spent" is just marketers talking to other marketers. We need to do better.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 19, 2007

Search Marketing for Direct Marketers

Yesterday, I presented to the Direct Marketing Association at their B2B Marketing Conference on the subject of Return on Search Marketing Investment. I love talking to direct marketers, because they understand how to market on the Web, but they don’t know they do. When I show them how to take what they know and apply it to this new online world, watching the light bulbs go on is very gratifying.

Direct marketers frequently don’t know how much they know. They already understand the idea of measuring the response to every marketing tactic, how to experiment, and how to test. They get the concept of changing copy and images to increase response rates. They know how to sell without salespeople.

That’s what selling on the Web is all about.

Instead of being threatened by the Web, direct marketers should look at interactive marketing as the biggest direct marketing opportunity to ever come down the pike. If direct marketers are willing to learn the new ways of the Web, they’ll find they already know 80% of what’s required to become successful Web marketers.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 18, 2007

What Customers Want, When They Want It

I've talked in the past about the Three Rs of Internet Marketing—being real, relevant, and responsive. They apply to real-world marketing, too, which was brought home to me early this morning as I schlepped toward my hotel room at 3 am after a long evening of two delayed plane flights. What would be relevant to me at this point?

Right. A bed.

When I entered the room, however, I could not find a bed. It actually wasn't a room—it was a suite. There was a kitchen, a dining room, a living room—it was really impressive—but no bed. Could there be another room? In my addled state, it took a few minutes to find the handle on the wall that pulled down the big bed. And I had to move chairs and a heavy cofee table that had one of those heavy unattached tops to make room for the bed.

Oh, and I cared about one other thing. I wanted Internet access so I could send an e-mail to my wife telling her that I had arrived OK. Calling at 3 am is not cool, so I tend to use e-mail in that situation.

So I had to find the Internet connection. There was no desk in the room, but I finally found the wire hanging out of a wall near a little table in the corner. I fired up my laptop and was presented two choices of what kind of Internet access I wanted—I didn't really understand the difference between them, so I chose the cheaper one. I had to fill out a long registration form and finally got access.

Except it didn't work. I got the dreaded "Page not found" for everything I tried. So, I looked for the phone number for technical support, wondering if there would be anyone there at 3 am. I comforted myself by thinking, "Hey, if they are in India, it's the middle of the day."

But the phone number was out of service. I ended up digging a phone cable out of my bag and sending the e-mail using my modem.

And it started me wondering about the way we do marketing. All the nice stuff, the dining room table and the couches and the kitchen were all wasted on me because they weren't relevant to my experience of staying in a hotel for a few hours. The two things I really wanted were more painful than they had to be. All the money they spent was wasted on me and I ended up a bit frustrated about my stay.

To the hotel's credit, the next day they were genuinely concerned, cheerfully credited my account, and noted the problem I had. I fully expect them to follow up and fix it. So they passed the real and responsive tests. But more and more, it might make sense for us to focus on what we think people expect. I didn't need a suite. I called the hotel and told them I'd be late and they knew I was checking out the next morning. They might have made sure the bed was down.

Even offline, being relevant is critical to a happy customer.

Posted by mikemoran at 5:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 17, 2007

Free Site Search Just Got Better

I was excited back in December when we announced IBM OmniFind Yahoo! edition, a free search engine that handles up to half a million documents and is extremely simple to install and operate. It got great reviews, but any successful product means that there's more to do. We announced a new release yesterday, which my colleague Sean Johnson explains in the product blog—touching on even more customizability and better language support. It's tricky to add features to a simple product without having it become more complicated, but I hope you'll agree that we pulled it off.

Posted by mikemoran at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

Why marketers should care about the Google-DoubleClick deal

For those of you who turn off your computers on the weekend, you should know that Google announced Friday that it spent over $3 billion to acquire DoubleClick, of banner ad network fame. You can read from other people what this means from Google's point of view—I don't think that is very important to marketers. So what is important about this to marketers?

To me, it marks the end of the stark lines between banner ads and contextual ads and search ads. Savvy marketers have always tried to use each type of ad to their advantage. Whether it's Google's acquisition or any other partnership between banner ad networks and search advertising networks, the effect is the same. Advertisers will increasingly have choices of dealing with a single way to choose between any of these advertising forms, and those ads will be placed on both search engines and publisher Web sites.

This increasing integration of ad networks will also greatly simplify measuring the results of advertising. Today, banner ad networks count impressions and clicks but it can take some technical feats of strength to tie those metrics into your Web metrics program, so that you can tell if those banner ads drove any sales. Integrated networks will tend to make the measurements simpler.

So Google's acquisition of Doubleclick, in and of itself, is interesting, but the real thing for marketers to pay attention to is the trend of integration of advertising networks. Marketers should expect to have more choices for advertisements, with more flexibility and automation in administering their campaigns, and with better metrics to prove return on investment.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 13, 2007

Search Marketing for Marketing Executives

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with a few dozen marketers from the New Jersey Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) in Morristown (NJ) this morning. (My slides on Step by Step Search Marketing can be downloaded, if you are interested.) It's always good to talk to marketers about search marketing, but I always like the time after the speech, when people come up and ask questions or provide me with further insight.

Today was no exception. I have been talking for years about the importance of applying direct marketing techniques to Internet marketing (and to search marketing in particular), and I think I always assumed that folks with direct marketing skills were being snapped up by savvy interactive marketing firms.

Sad to say, my experience today leads me to believe that online marketers are missing the boat.

I spoke to several direct marketers this morning who are looking for new positions. It looks like the cost of direct mail and catalogs might be starting to shrink the investment in traditional direct marketing, which I expected, but what I did not expect is that these experienced direct marketers might have trouble moving over to the new online world.

If I ran a digital marketing company, I would jump at the chance to hire direct marketers to run my Internet marketing. I am always hearing people complain about how expensive these skilled online marketers are, and how tough it is to find them. A smart interactive marketer would hire a few direct mail veterans and train them in a couple of months and have a much lower-priced crew of very loyal Web marketers.

Direct marketers understand in their bones what Internet marketing is about—response. And they understand the idea of measuring everything. And experimenting and testing until you get the best conversion possible. They just need to be shown how to translate all that experience into the online world.

I don't know why no one is doing this. If you never thought of it before, now you've lost that excuse.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

Tags Are Not the Answer for Search?

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch has been quoted by Tom Foremski as saying that the widespread social search phenomenon is misguided, because tags don't work. I guess that I am getting old, because I have less and less patience for such black-and-white approaches. Of course tags are not the answer. Nothing is the answer.

Search relevance is not about having one thing that works or doesn't work. If it was, we wouldn't call it "ranking"—we'd call it "sorting." The secret sauce of relevance ranking algorithms rely on dozens or even hundreds of factors. Doing content analysis alone doesn't cut it. Nor links. Nor tags. Nothing works, if you just look at that one factor.

Because I am older than dirt, I remember the debates back in the 1980s about what was the right way to find information: search or hypertext. What do you think that answer was?

Now Mike Lynch is a very smart guy and he knows this very well. He is trying to make the point that tags don't replace all the rest of this stuff, I hope. And that if we did a better job of semantic analysis, that maybe we wouldn't need tagging.

But I think that is too black-and-white. It's clear that tags are helpful for non-text content, such as videos and images. Just as some tags are inaccurate by mistake and some are inaccurate intentionally (spam), the same problems occur with content and with links today. Just as some good content does not get tagged, so it is true that good content doesn't get linked today. In other words, whatever people complain about with tagging applies to everything else in the secret sauce, too.

No, tags are not the answer. They are not magic. They are part of the secret sauce just like everything else. Perhaps someday we won't need to do any work to get the right content to appear, but I don't think that day is all that close. Until then, we should keep an open mind about using as many possible ingredients in the secret sauce as possible, rather than marking things as "working" or "not working."

Posted by mikemoran at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

In-House Search Marketing Session at SES

For several years, I did the in-house search marketing tracks at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, but I asked Danny Sullivan to give me different session this year, on organic search benchmarking, which I posted on yesterday. I still wanted to sit in on the in-house session, however, because my co-author, Bill Hunt, and Marshall Simmonds of the New York Times always do a terrific job. I took some notes for those of you unable to make it.

Bill and Marshall presented before the audience got a chance to ask questions of them, and of Tanya Vaughan of Hewlett-Packard, and Brendan Hart of National Geographic.

Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, a search consulting firm, was up first. Bill urged listeners to focus prove the concept of SEO by using the missed opportunity matrix (which we discuss in our book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc.). The missed opportunity matrix takes the targeted keywords, along with the number of searches for each one, and projects what percentage of that volume should be coming to your site if you were getting your fair share. That's the traffic to expect after you conduct your organic search campaign. By using conversion rate and the monetary value of each transaction (online or offline), you can place a cash value on every missed conversion—that's what your campaign can return to your firm. Bill noted that especially "if you are a top brand, you should get a large share of what you're missing" in that matrix.

Bill also recommended that larger companies centralize for success. "There are hundreds of people but you need to isolate the ones that matter the most. I notice that the people in corporate marketing have never met the Web team. Get all these people together. Re-purpose your ads into video. Optimize your press releases. Get everyone together. Do a trip report after this conference. In a large organization you must segment the program—corporate level programs, group level, and brand level. At IBM, we held a meeting on search marketing—six years ago we would get three people, but now we max out the conference line.

Bill advised companies who sell multiple products within the same product category to "do your research at the group level—do all of shampoo at one time" but to "do keywords and optimization page-by-page" at the brand level.

Whenever he begins a search marketing consultation, Bill's team conducts a full site audit and shares it with the key members of the client's team. Bill advises, "Sit your exec down and do searches and let him see your competitors outrank you." Bill also told attendees to "Focus on standards and best practices—it can take a while, but once it is done it has a huge impact. Don't chase the algorithm—by the time you get it implemented the search engines have moved on."

Next was Marshall Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist at the New York Times and CEO of Defense Search strategies. Marshall described how hard it can be to get top newspaper writers to change their writing styles, but it's critical to help a newspaper to optimize its search marketing. Marshall came to the New York Times in the about.com acquisition, and he explained that no matter how long you work on organic search—six years and counting at about.com—there's always more you can do. He got a 49% increase in about.com's search traffic last year, despite how well they were doing going into the year.

With Marshall's clients, he feels its important to set up search evangelists at each firm, such as the Boston Globe, TV Guide, and the New York Times. The evangelist's job is 80% communication and 20% SEO. Marshall says, "We have to pick a person from each department who is responsible for disseminating information and is accountable for results."

Marshall advises to work incrementally—take what you can get. "We made a small change that doubled traffic in one department—the only one that would listen to us—and we then used that to show the rest." He's a big advocate of small changes, such as using checklists, "Perform separate training sessions with separate checklists for technical staff, design, editorial—one page to print out. If you can get the IT people to update your content management system so that pages are not published until certain fields are filled, that's a clear win. It's hard to do when you are in a big company but over time it has a big effect."

Marshall warned against over-reliance on consultants, saying, "Hire someone to train your in-house team. When the consultant leaves, you have an SEO department and infrastructure in place."

Several interesting questions came up during the Q&A session:

How have you gotten IT to buy in?

Tanya: "It boils down to going after the same objective. I've been denied a lot of IT requests but a lot of them that I think is more important they have come around but it takes time to understand why they are resisting. I would love to use subdomains but I do understand their resistance."

Marshall: "Put together your wish list and get into that queue. What do I want now and what do I want a year from now? With one of our customers we know we will do nothing but clean up messes. Once, the IT department decided to put meta refreshes across the site and we had to clean it up. Some IT departments will do whatever you want because they know that it works. It's a matter of triage. Get it all in front of them and give lots and lots of credit that IT made it happen when credit is due."

Is there frustration in putting together justification for SEO as opposed to traditional media buys?

Bill: "The number one thing I heard at SES Munich is that they aren't doing search because their agencies are not telling them to do search. If my trusted advisor is not telling me to do it, then why should I do it? It takes a rogue exec who trusts the data he sees to go outside the comfort zone. Search is not driven by any crazy variables like how many people are watching a TV show. We know roughly how large the opportunity is and we can use our metrics to see what actually happened. That makes marketing accountable. Because other forms of marketing are not accountable, search scares marketing people because if this brings in 20% of my leads on 1% of my budget how do I explain how I am wasting the rest of my budget?"

Do you specific tools to predict your results?

Marshall: "The golden triangle was a fantastic report but it causes people to say that if you are not in the top three, you won't get any traffic. If you can get from page two to page one, [I say] mission accomplished. We aim for top ten placement. If we're number ten vs. number two, there is a difference, but it is our goal to get on the first page. Yahoo! said number ten is the new number one because people scroll to the bottom of the page to get away from the ads. You might be optimizing for a keyword no one uses. Are we digging in the right place? Or is this a term we want to build up ourselves?"

Bill: "We took the Missed Opportunity Matrix and made our changes and got to number two and no one was clicking through. The problem was that if you look at the context of the searches, in this case, it was hotels in a specific location. Their description said they are the premiere resort in that city. 85% were looking for a cheap or discount qualifier—it did not match the searcher's intent. They got a ranking for a second property for a cheap room to watch a NASCAR race—then the traffic started flowing. We've taken variations and segmented them—in Orlando it's branded—they know where they want to stay. In Phoenix it's all about resort and golf. How does our description compare to our competition? Brand affinity will take you to some point, but you must look at searcher intent."

Tanya: "I question the accuracy of all the tools. When you see there are 500 searches for the most obscure words you've ever seen, then you question it. If I decide I want to optimize for laptop or notebook computers I can look at which one gets more. I don't know that I should assume it really gets two million a month because none of them are fully accurate."

Marshall: "You have to use multiple tools to look at Overture and Hitwise, WordTracker, your log files. You can't rely on just one. That should be one of the jobs of an SEO specialist. Google said that 50% of Google's searches are unique every day. Those tools don't report that 50% that Google is talking about."

Brendan: "We thought we should associate National Geographic with animals. We looked at all animal searches, but did we want to publish content on all animals? We looked at Hitwise and our log files and did a competitive analysis to see which terms are driving traffic—here is a core set of animals that we will start publishing for. Are we presenting this animal correctly for the copy we are using?"

What portion of your SEO recommendation is about creating more content rather than optimizing what you already have?

Tanya: "We have some high level pages with great link popularity that has no content—I have been pushing for more content on those pages. No one is searching for 'adaptive enterprise' so I have been encouraging content on existing pages that already are ranking well."

Bill: "A lot of companies are creating microsites to avoid the bureaucracy. They are reaping the benefits but they can't tell anybody because it will get stripped down because they are not following the corporate standards. In all my years of working at IBM, one of my proudest days saw a marketing manager reviewing a new set of brand pages and saying 'These are far from search friendly.' The mid-tier guys are pushing back and creating microsites. I am also seeing that when I am in front of C-levels: 'Why don't we think about these words when we name products and use the right words in our copy?' Now they mandate looking at the content at the point of creation. Anyplace that a copywriter touches content, someone must sign off that it is SEO certified. Those companies see that the mountains of content they are creating are so valuable that they must do it right up front."

Should a company bring everything in house and lose that unique perspective from a consultant?

Brendan: "I would say bring it in house. If you can scale the business then you have the core skill set. If you can build executive trust in the internal team, then go for it."

Tanya: "My approach is the hybrid approach. Any company of any size needs an internal expert in SEO but there are a lot of agencies that pop up and say they are experts, but I see the value in having a consultant or agency that keeps abreast of everything going on in the search industry. So much is happening so fast that it can help to hear about things that worked with their other clients."

Marshall: "I am a fan of in-house too. I now consult with companies to help them bring it in house. At TV Guide there are qualified people there. We are just there to validate. Don't be afraid to go outside because management and IT needs to hear it from someone else."

Marshall and Bill always do a great job on this session and Tanya and Brendan added interesting insights also.

Posted by mikemoran at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

Organic Search Benchmarking

I was really taken aback today when I presented at Search Engine Strategies today in New York. I remember the first one I attended back in 2001 in Boston—there were about 300 people there, I recall. Today there were 300 people at my breakout session, on what I thought was an obscure topic (although one close to my heart): Organic Search Benchmarking. I also met Sherwood Straneri, who was the first search marketing consultant that I ever hired for IBM, so it really caused me to think back. I had a great time today meeting lots of old friends and got lots of great questions in my session. I've posted the slides here for all those interested in Organic Search Benchmarking.

UPDATE: Lisa Barone has a good writeup on what Cam Balzer, Martin Latsch, and I said in the Search Benchmarking session, for those of you unable to attend.

UPDATE: Search Engine Roundtable weighs in.

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April 9, 2007

Online Market Research

Everyone knows about SurveyMonkey and Web analytics programs, but I heard about something new (at least to me) last week—online market research. I attended an AMA Webcast on Community Marketing on March 29 where one of the topics was how to attract online customer panels that provide high quality market research.

I've seen lots of focus groups before, but the market research is shallow—customers sit there for a couple of hours and react to some product concepts. I've also used customer panels, where you meet regularly with the same group of customers over a period of time, but getting the customers together is very expensive.

Online customer panels seems like a great new way to get some of the benefits of focus groups and customer panels without a lot of the drawbacks. Panels can be long-term, so you can get very deep research. Customers can interact with each other, as in a focus group. It costs very little, compared to other methods.

Del Monte Foods operates the “I love my dog” site to gain deeper consumer understanding and to generate new ideas. Customers can register to participate and must sign in to get access to the site. Del Monte tries out their own ideas on the panel, but also solicits customer ideas for new products or improvements to existing products. They also conduct research on unmet needs and how customers care for their pets.

One question is whether competitors might register, pretending to be a pet owner, and get access to the market research that Del Monte is paying for. Gala Amoroso, Del Monte’s Senior Market Research Manager says, “Competitors can lurk, but they give themselves away with too many questions.” She also noted that sometimes Del Monte takes valuable conversations offline to keep insights private.

Regardless of any problems, this seems like something worth checking into for some marketers. Some agencies already have online panels that they can provide access to, but it looks like large companies, such as Del Monte, are growing their own. Everything else is going online, so why not market research?

Posted by mikemoran at 3:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 6, 2007

Search Marketing Podcast

Thanks to Jeff Parks who recently interviewed me on search marketing. Jeff asked good questions for people who want to get an overview in search marketing—the differences between organic and paid search, how both of them actually work, the contrast in search marketing issues for big and small companies, and more. We also covered a few advanced topics such as eye tracking research, doorway page spam, and the bow-tie theory of Web linking. I really enjoyed the interview with Jeff and I hope that you will also—it's only half an hour but I talk fast, so it has a lot of information packed in.

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April 5, 2007

Free Multivariate Testing

I've written before about multivariate testing, an emerging technique for rigorous analysis of just what persuades customers to convert. But some companies have been stopped in the past by the cost of licensing a multivariate testing tool. Yesterday, Google Website Optimizer, a multivariate testing tool, emerged from a restricted beta test and can be used by any Google AdWords advertiser for free.

Now, understand, the tool is free, but multivariate testing still costs you time and effort that you'd be spending on other things. You must take the time to develop multiple versions of your content and you must load up the page with some JavaScript and run and monitor the experiment. You can check out Google's multivariate testing instructions to gauge the effort required.

The effort is worth it. At last October's Emetrics Summit, Regis Hadiaris, the Director of Web Marketing for Quicken Loans, said that the use of multivariate testing has increased revenue 30 percent per year every year. ReallyGreatRate's case study is also persuasive. You ought to be testing variations to improve your site anyway—multivariate testing is just a better way to do it.

Just as when Google began offering a free Web traffic metrics service, Google Analytics, some folks have questioned whether marketers should allow Google access to this highly-valuable marketing information. Andrew Goodman, in particular, has written persuasively about this "fox in the hen house" situation where a company you buy advertising with knows how much you sell and what it is about your site that sells it.

For small businesses, "free" is more important than data privacy, but larger marketers might be better off using Optimost or another licensed multivariate tool that protects the privacy of their testing data, just as they might use CoreMetrics or another fee-based analytics tool to protect traffic and conversion data.

Regardless of the data sharing issues, your company ought to be using multivariate testing to optimize your customer conversions. And if the cost of a licensed tool seemed too formidable before, now you have no excuse. Google Website Optimizer makes that free.

Posted by mikemoran at 8:33 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 4, 2007

Profiting from Impulsiveness

Impulse purchases are rising because Web sites become more convenient each year, because customers grow more confident in Web purchasing, and because product delivery keeps improving. Pure online businesses, such as music downloads where delivery is immediate, inspire the most impulsive purchases. Think about how online trading has rocked the securities industry in the past ten years. Time was, buying or selling stock was a big decision, one not made very often. Advice was frequently sought from a stock broker, a financial advisor, or even friends and family. Buying or selling an investment usually received careful consideration.

What happened when investments could be bought and sold online? Everything changed. First, there was huge competition over the lowest fees charged for each sale and over the simplest customer experience, and the trustworthiness of the electronic broker. But that was only the beginning. Completely new needs began to emerge. Brokers began to compete on the information available—real-time quotes, investment analysis, and portfolio management tools. And then day traders emerged—the ultimate impulse purchasers in the electronic brokerage business. They are highly sought-after customers because the churn in their accounts brings in large fees. They are the high rollers of the brokerage business.

This kind of change is underway in music today, as brick-and-mortar retailers that first came under attack from CDNow and other Web retailers now also fear Apple iTunes, the music download store. Digital commerce and digital delivery inexorably result in more impulse purchases at lower prices. Where someone formerly thought a bit before trooping to the store to buy a $15 CD, now they think nothing of downloading a single song for 99¢. You can see the same shift underway for books, and can imagine it affecting many other industries as the years go by.

What does this shift to more impulsive purchases mean for Web marketing? First off, it means more of your business shifts to the Web, but it means much more than that. Impulse purchasers want different things. A day trader is not looking for the same brokerage features as a conservative investor. People buying CDs are more likely to choose by artist and by album, while folks downloading tunes for their iPods are choosing a song. As your business moves from offline to online commerce to pure online, you might see similar shifts in customer needs that drive your Web marketing strategy.

Posted by mikemoran at 8:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 3, 2007

Listening Advice from a Blogger

Ryan Saghir is a force in the satellite radio industry. With a quarter million visitors to his Orbitcast blog each month, his words influence satellite radio customers and industry decision makers alike. He's the perfect person to advise marketers on how to listen to bloggers who write about their company and their industry.

Ryan says that “Both XM and Sirius [the two leading North American satellite radio companies] do a good job of treating me like press,” but he offered advice for marketers in other industries as to how to treat bloggers who write about them.

“Companies have the wrong impression of bloggers,” Ryan believes, because they treat bloggers as some kind of second-tier journalists. Ryan says “the press is taught to be an unbiased source trying to read between the lines and interpret something [in a] negative [way]. They’re trying to create buzz and sell papers.”

Bloggers are different, Ryan asserts. “Bloggers are usually not trying to make money. Bloggers are fans of the product and of what the company does. We love the product more than anyone else does and we foster an environment where other fans can rally around.”

Clearly not all bloggers are cast in Ryan’s mold, but many industries have bloggers just like him. As he says, “Satellite radio is what I am passionate about and what I evangelize.” A little nurturing makes that passion a huge positive for XM and Sirius.

Ryan also advises marketers to use the blogosphere as an early warning system: “PR people I’ve spoken to have noticed that there’s a reaction in the media after I’ve written something.” If you have powerful bloggers in your industry, addressing the issues they raise may ameliorate later coverage in the mainstream media.

Ryan believes that marketers have a huge opportunity to win over bloggers. “If they speak like human beings (without the corporate-speak) they’d be amazed at the response they’d get from bloggers. Bloggers are on your side.”

Posted by mikemoran at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 2, 2007

April Fools!

I've preached before about the necessity of being real and responsive in your marketing, which includes owning up to your own screw-ups, but it's not easy. So here's one of mine—we botched up our newsletter mailing lists. April Fools! Well, no, we really did mess up the lists by inadvertently subscribing everyone on my Biznology newsletter mailing list to my wife's Diet Survivors FeedBlitz subscription. No one's e-mail address was ever made public, but I still feel bad about dumping unwanted e-mail in my subscriber's inboxes. If you want to read all the details of what happened, they are after the break, but suffice it to say that you can click the link at the bottom of the unwanted e-mail to unsubscribe. And we're sorry this happened.

My kids get a kick out of April Fools Day but my wife Linda and I don't really notice it too much. But this year, we were the April Fools.

Some of you may know that my wife and I publish three e-mail newsletters each month. Linda writes Diet Survivors—advice on intuitive eating for weight control without dieting. She started it after writing the book How to Survive Your Diet and has loyal readers that wait for her newsletter each month.

I publish my Biznology newsletter, which you probably know, and we jointly publish a Life Planners newsletter to assist families in setting up care instructions for their disabled children. (Some of you may know that the oldest of our four children is 14-year-old David, who has Down Syndrome.)

We've published all three of these newsletters for years without incident, but yesterday was an April Fools Day to remember. Linda pressed the button at 6:45 am to send out the first newsletter—Diet Survivors—through the list server provided by our Web hosting company. Everything looked just fine. Until we started receiving e-mails from subscribers telling us that they were getting multiple copies of the newsletter. Not just two or three, but 10 or 12!

That's when the unsubscribes started coming in—some of the folks were angry, as you might expect. (A few reacted with good humor, one saying that Linda's newsletter is so good that it might make sense to read it all ten times.) We called Wyenet, our hosting company, and hung on the phone while they tried to figure out what was wrong. They tried several things before they finally stopped the mailings. We then sent an apology e-mail to the same mailing list to let people know what happened.

Except Wyenet hadn't fixed it.

Some folks reported getting the apology notice, but many did not. Lots of folks got dozens of empty messages instead of the apology. (April Fools!) We got back on the phone with Wyenet and they escalated the ticket to an emergency and their system administrators started working on it. That sounded good, except that they told us that once the system administrators start working on the problem, that we can no longer call them to report any new symptoms or get any status—everything has to be done by e-mail.

So, as we noticed changes in the symptoms of spewing e-mail, we dutifully sent e-mails to the Wyenet system administrators with no reply. At this point, frustrated with our inability to tell the Diet Survivor subscribers what was happening, and concerned that we were annoying folks no end with this e-mail avalanche, we decided to accelerate a project we'd been toying with for a while. Linda was planning to move her mailing list over to FeedBlitz so that she'd have just one mailing list for both her blog and her newsletter—we decided this would be the perfect day to do that.

So, she extracted the mailing list from our backup copy and uploaded it to FeedBlitz. But there was one problem. She inadvertently extracted the Biznology mailing list! My wife is an extremely careful person and nothing like this had ever happened to her. She was very upset, because now she had sent Diet Survivors' e-mails to all the wrong folks. Suddenly, we were the April Fools.

We quickly went to the FeedBlitz site to delete all the erroneously added subscribers, but ran into a problem. No matter what we did, we could only display a couple of hundred of the thousands of addresses. We deleted all that we could, but most of them are not shown in the FeedBlitz list management screen.

Mortified, we e-mailed FeedBlitz to find out how to fix the error. It was a Sunday (April Fools!) so we still haven't heard back yet. We haven't heard back from Wyenet either, so we have been afraid to send out the Life Planners and Biznology e-mail newsletters. We didn't want to make a bad problem even worse.

So, if you received a notice that you are now subscribed to the Diet Survivors newsletter, just click on the link at the bottom of the e-mail you received from FeedBlitz to remove yourself. We would like to be able to remove everyone from the list ourselves, but we can't be sure there is any way to do that—we're waiting to hear from FeedBlitz.

I'd appreciate it if you did not report us to the FeedBlitz abuse address, because it was a mistake and we are trying to fix it. We already have told FeedBlitz what we did.

So, although we wish that this was just a big April Fools joke, it wasn't. We're sorry for the e-mail snafus that we caused, and those caused by the Web host that we picked. I'll try to get e-mails out for the Life Planners and Biznology newsletter as soon as it seems safe. Thanks so much for your patience with us.

UPDATE: FeedBlitz has graciously removed all of the Biznology e-mail addresses we mistakenly populated into the Diet Survivors mailing list. Thanks again for your patience with us. We have been incredibly impressed with FeedBlitz, who has provided excellent support, even though we don't pay them anything. I am about to attempt to ship my Biznology newsletter, hoping that Wyenet has corrected its problems and I won't need to make any more updates to this post.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Do It Wrong Quickly Culture

How do you remake your organizational culture to "do it wrong quickly"? You know that you need to change to a more adaptive, experimental approach, but how do you pull it off? Hear from marketing leaders in several companies that have already walked down that road in this month's Biznology newsletter A Do It Wrong Quickly Culture.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack