Online Marketing Blog

Editor’s Note: I am excited to introduce the next in our series of guest articles from IBM Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran.

The credentials list on Mike is a mile long including 20+ years experience in search technology, co-author of the best selling book “Search Engine Marketing Inc” as well as his recent book, “Do It Wrong Quickly“, 4 patents on search and retrieval technology, a sought after speaker at SES, DMA and AMA events and a great blogger with Biznology. Even though he’s one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, Mike stole some free time on a plane to write this post on the difficulties of search marketing for readers of Online Marketing Blog.

Editor’s Note: The next in our series of guest posts from SEM professionals comes from Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo. Marketo is a client of TopRank Online Marketing and provides B2B marketing automation software in the form of pay per click management, landing page optimization and integration with salesforce.com.

With Jon’s B2B software marketing expertise, excellent work both on his blog Modern B2B Marketing and as a contributor on Search Engine Land, I asked if he could write up a guide for search marketers that would provide actionable advice for readers on the topic of landing pages.

Perhaps the largest difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) pay-per-click is that the post-click goal for most B2B marketers is to capture a lead, not make a sale. This means that B2B companies must focus on converting clicks into leads as much as they focus on getting clicks in the first place.

A trap I fell into early in my career as an SEM specialist was to ensure clients we would do our best to drive all the traffic we could to their site. Looking back, I’m glad I learned the obvious error of this statement before becoming involved in a client’s burgeoning PPC campaign.

The session “Creating Compelling Ads”, moderated by Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath had at its core the powerfully obvious notion (in hindsight) that driving all traffic to your site is not only a fool’s mission, but in the realm of PPC, a costly mistake.

Generating qualified traffic for a campaign shaped the presentations provided by the esteemed panel of:

• Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media
• Brad Geddes of LocalLaunch.com

In 1981 when legendary Minneapolis agency Fallon first opened their doors, a full page ad was run in the Star Tribune, Minneapolis’ primary daily, alerting the local business denizens that a new ad agency was promising to help them outsmart the competition, rather than outspend them. The concept of quality score as it relates to PPC ads always reminds me of this anecdote from the traditional ad world.

Quality score, as covered by Danny Sullivan and his esteemed panel at the session “Ads In A Quality Score World” is the bold idea that an ad’s success should be dependent on whether it produces content relevant to that which it promotes. In other words, a firm should not have to outspend its competition to be successful if it’s simply bright enough to ensure their ad speaks directly to its target’s expectations.

Yahoo Panama is on the upgrade path today with several new features to help advertisers streamline account management:

Move/copy keywords: You can now move and copy keywords from one ad group to another without doing the copy/paste/delete thing. On the Ad Group page under the “Campaigns” tab, you’ll now see a “Move” button which will allow you to move or copy keywords from one ad group to another ad group.” Note that there is still a 1000 keyword limit per ad group.

Streamline keyword selector tool: Yahoo now provides an estimate of the monthly searches on each keyword suggested. This provides more detailed information on the traffic that this keyword may be able to generate. As before, you can select the keywords you wish to add by clicking the box next to the suggestions and clicking “Add Keywords.”

Earlier today Yahoo Search Marketing announced they will now provide free, open access to the “Panama” search marketing application program interfaces (APIs) through the launch of the Commercial API Program. Commercial clients (big agencies) will also be offered optional fee-based, value-added services that come in three flavors: basic, advanced and elite.

Yahoo’s been busy today, because this evening I got the heads up Y!SM is rolling out quality based pricing across it’s paid search and contextual advertising networks.

Here’s the lowdown on quality based pricing from Yahoo:

“Essentially, it assesses the quality of a publisher’s traffic based upon the publisher’s ability to deliver more interested, high-value potential customers to Yahoo!’s advertisers. A few of the factors considered by quality-based pricing include publisher conversion rates, traffic source and implementation type. Depending on the quality of a given publisher’s traffic, the cost of an advertiser’s click can be automatically discounted by a certain percentage.”

Day two of the Search Insider Summit was full of great presentations and commentary, so be sure to read the frequently updated MediaPost Raw blog.

Since many of the attendees of the Summit are the kinds of companies, marketers and agencies that employ various types of marketing channels, both on and offline, the opportunity to present examples and case studies of integration with search was ideal.

Some of the high level takeaways from this session include the importance for company marketers to set expectations when enegaging in an integrated campaign as well as the importance of coordination. Larger agencies that are capable of managing multi channel programs including search may have an easier time than a situation where a company uses multiple agencies to manage their various marketing programs.

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

Due to the Australia distraction we skipped last week’s update of the search marketing blogs list. We’re still holding a few blogs in queue to accumulate more content for those that might be wondering. Thanks to Amie Krone for helping out this week!

• SLI Systems – Dr. Shaun Ryan comments on the search industry from a site search vendor’s perspective.

• Michael Visser – The Australian blogger.

• Metaverse Business Blog – A blog about Second Life marketing.

• Web Analytic Matt – Simple solutions for a complex world from Matt Hopkins.

• The Online Marketing Guy – In-house SEM advice from a co-chair at SEMPO.

• FishSEO – Scott Fish keeps you up-to-date on the latest SEO news and techniques.

• Search Marketing Sage – Janet Driscoll Miller offers advice on SEO and PPC.

By now the High Rankings SEM Seminar team has infiltrated our city of melting snow and is preparing for the all-out assault on SEO, PPC, Analytics and more for the benefit of the local marketers wise enough or fortunate enough to attend.

The fun begins around 7:45 am or so for registrations at the Crown Plaza downtown Minneapolis and the ball gets rolling around 8:30. It looks to be a very good sized group. Actually, it’s an ideal size – small enough to be able to interact with all the other attendees and speakers over two days and large enough for a variety of interactions, comments and feedback.

I’m looking forward to it and hope to see you there. More details about the seminar here for any last minute attendees.

Threaded email discussion lists are a bit old school communications in contrast to the rise in popularity of blogs and RSS. However, there are several of these channels that serve as a sort of digital watering hole for some of the most experienced search marketers who dispel invaluable insights.

For large segments of the internet community, email remains a preferred discussion tool. The platforms most often used for such lists these days seem to be Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.

One of the best known and now out of commission lists was the I-Search Discussion List, which I’ve written about before. In fact, there are remnants of the I-Search list in at least three of the discussion lists in this week’s poll, which hopes to both find out what lists OMB readers prefer as well as draw attention to some great sources of search marketing information.

One of the things that often happens with people in the search marketing industry is that after being in the business for a while and attaining a certain level of expertise, it becomes easy to take for granted that not everyone in marketing and business is consuming and digesting as much information. References to strategies and certain tactics do not have the same meaning, because of the dependencies on previous knowledge.

This happens with SEO or search engine optimization pretty easily. Chasing after the next “silver bullet”, whether it’s SEO and PR, social media, social networking or personalized search, can distract marketers from what’s important. The search marketing industry is one that can be counted on to change on a regular basis. Strategies, tactics and best practices will emerge as new channels of distribution evolve and consumer search behaviors change. Just look at the shift from offline news consumption and traditional media to online as an example.