Online Marketing Blog

Moderated by Simon Heseltine, Senior Marketing Manager for AOL with panelists including: Eli Goodman from comScore, Justin Merickel of Efficient Frontier and Doug McMillen from Microsoft Advertising.

First up is Justin Merickel from Efficient Frontier, which runs about $180m in PPC through their platform. Justin talked about two main trends:

The changing SERP. Data comes front and center to the results page
Justin shows a SERP page for “bottled water” where the top PPC ads display images of bottled water. Not sure of it’s impact. However, if you’re not leveraging Google features (like images in PPC or local listings) you’re missing out on significant visibility.

Advertisers need to think about how to get their products and services into the new multimedia search results page.

Charlene Li is co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and gave the keynote on day 3 of SES San Jose.  She spoke on the intersection of search and social and discussed how to prepare for the future of search.  Read on for the highlights of her presentation:

How far have we come since 2001?  In just 8 years, we’ve gone from simple text links in search results to pictures, video and a rich user experience.

Imagine what will happen going forward into the future.  The engines are only going to keep innovating – and one of the trends is the integration of social and real-time into search results.

Chris Boggs is moderating a local MIMA event, aka “Salon”, with reps from Google (Kevin Willer) and Microsoft (Saleel Sathe) tomorrow night and asked if I would join since the Ask.com rep had to bow out. It’s called “The Future of Search: A Holistic View” and should be pretty interesting. As a guy who’s involved with every organization and publication in the search marketing industry you could possibly think of, Chris is a very sharp fellow and I’m sure he’ll keep the engines on their toes.

The event promotion rightly emphasized the search engines’ participation on the panel and since I’m being added the night before the event happens, no one will expect to see me there. I hope the Ask.com fans are not too disappointed. I’ll just have to say I’m there to channel Gary Price since he’s been so good about providing us the latest and greatest Ask.com developments.