Search Engine Marketing Blog by SearchRev

SearchRev at SES San Jose 2008

SearchRev at SES San Jose 2008

Come and see us at SES San Jose Tuesday, August 19th and Wednesday, August 20th at booth number 314. See Full Conference Schedule

SearchRev and Yahoo! Co-Presenting at SES San Jose

SearchRev will be speaking at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose, Thursday, August 21st, 11.30am – 12.30pm Eduardo Llach, Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder, SearchRev and David Roth, Director of Search Marketing, Yahoo!, will present ‘Creating a Cohesive Search Strategy Across Multiple Business Units’ , going into specific detail on how SEM campaigns can be cost-effective and deliver the highest ROI. Presentation topics include: How Yahoo! defines, measures, and manages online marketing success across a variety of online business models. Strategies for defining and leveraging life-time value metrics to drive standardization and results across a broad scope of marketing challenges Search strategies and campaign optimization techniques brands like Yahoo! use to meet their online marketing objectives. Find out more »

Eduardo Llach, Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder, SearchRev

David Roth, Director of Search Marketing, Yahoo!

(Un)Cuil Backlash?

By Michael Estrin

On the web, good news travels fast, but disaster spreads at the speed of light. See which brands belly-flopped this week, and how MySpace nipped a potential catastrophe in the bud.

News of a search startup aiming to take down Google is something of a regular occurrence, but when Cuil (pronounced "cool") exited beta this week, the company managed to dominate mainstream and industry headlines for about a day. That was the good news. The bad news was that the product itself took a beating from a lot of web watchers.

With thousands of media outlets covering Cuil, the search engine was probably a victim of its own hype. In fact, the site even crashed soon after it went public. How 1999!

But much of the backlash is undeserved, according to SearchRev CMO Eduardo F. Llach, who says he liked the results he got from his test searches. But a happy user may not equal a Google killer, Llach says, pointing out that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo has managed to come close to toppling Google.

That was an observation shared by John Battelle, who literally wrote the book on search. Earlier this week, he told iMedia that "the complete failure of any other company to gain significant share against Google" was the most significant thing to happen since he published "The Search."

So, what should Cuil do now? Focus on the quality of their results, says Seth Dotterer of Conductor, a search consulting firm.

"Cuil came out of the gate with an index of more than 120 billion pages -- a number equivalent to more than half of the stars in our galaxy," Dotterer explains. "It's a daunting number -- and great technical achievement -- but it's not a game changer for your typical searcher. Instead, they need to focus much more on the quality of their results, both from a relevancy and freshness perspective. This is the only way to win users' attention and ultimately their loyalty."   

As for the hype surrounding Cuil's debut, TechCrunch published a cheeky post -- "How to Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch" -- slamming the company for failing to live up to the promise of being dubbed a Google killer.

Original Article

Hear us at Ad:Tech Chicago, Wednesday August 6th

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Scott Linzer
Director, Search Marketing, AKQA
		Scott Linzer is the Director of Search Marketing at AKQA in San Francisco and brings more than 13 years of online marketing experience. He comes to AKQA from McCann Worldgroup where he served as the Director of Search Marketing for responsible for the global search efforts for Microsoft. Before this, he was the Director of Media at iCrossing in Scottsdale, Arizona. Clients he has worked on include Coca-Cola, Verizon Wireless, Symantec, American Airlines, General Motors, American Express and Disney. Scott is a native of Phoenix, Arizona and now lives in Marin County, California with his wife, Melissa, and yellow lab, Guinness. He is a graduate from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts with a BA in International Relations and Quantitative Economics. Scott just recently finished his MBA.
		Scott Linzer will be speaking at:
		Tactical Search: Local and Mobile Wednesday, August 06, 2008 02:15 PM -03:15 PM One of the original promises of the Internet was geographically relevant and targeted content for all. Local marketing strategies are effective and have widespread application, yet many marketers have yet to gain a solid understanding of the marketplace. In this session, we provide an update on the local and mobile landscapes today and what you can expect to see in the future. You will also get practical advice on best practices for reaching out to consumers using local marketing tactics with Internet and mobile platforms.
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Cuil Live

By Eric Auchard Mon Jul 28, 1:18 AM ET

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) - A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service at http://www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

"Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user," Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google -- namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

"The time may be right for a challenger," Sullivan says, but adds quickly: "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you."

Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc's massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia's Brambles Ltd

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay Inc's search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

"They do have the talent that is used to building large, industrial-strength search engines," Sullivan says of Cuil.

Cuil clusters the results of each Web search performed on the service into groups of related Web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organizing features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.

User privacy is another appeal of its approach, Cuil says. Because the service focuses on the content of the pages rather than click history, the company has no need to store users' personal information or their search histories, it says.

"We are all about pattern analysis," Patterson says. "We go over the corpus (Web pages) 12 times before we even index it."

DOES SIZE MATTER, ONCE AGAIN?

Cuil has indexed a whopping 120 billion Web pages, three times more than what they say Google now indexes, Patterson said, adding the company has spent just $5 million,

Google itself preemptively responded to Cuil's arrival with a blog post on Friday boasting of the growing scale of its own Web search operations.

Sullivan said he puts no stock in either company's boasts about the size of their indexes, since it has only an indirect effect on the ultimate success Web surfers have in searching. And Cuil's privacy virtues are exaggerated, he adds.

Founded in late 2006, the Menlo Park, California-based Cuil has raised $33 million in two separate rounds: The first, for $8 million from Greylock and Tugboat Ventures, and the second for $25 million by Madrone Capital Partners.

Initially, Cuil is optimized for American English. Later this year, the company plans to enable Cuil users to perform searches in major European languages, Patterson said. Eventually, Cuil plans to make money by running ads alongside search results, she said, but provided no further details.

Cuil is one of a number of start-ups that are looking to introduce new technology that can change the competitive dynamics of the Web search market that Google dominates.

Earlier in July, Microsoft bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based search start-up that enables consumers to use semantic techniques -- conversational phrasing instead of keywords -- to search the Web.

(Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Original Article

The G Word

Interesting article about Fortune Magazine's Brainstorm Tech Conference by Cnet.

Posted by Charles Cooper Post a comment

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--What if you organized a conference panel about digital advertising and nobody mentioned Google?

Yeah, duh.

Well, Fortune magazine almost accomplished that feat. During a session at its Brainstorm Tech conference devoted to the state of advertising in a softening economy, the three participants--Tom Bedecarre of AKQA, Lynda Clarizio of AOL, and Microsoft's Brian McAndrews--managed to get through three-fourths of their discussion without uttering the "G word."

Thankfully, one of Fortune's own, the ever-excellent David Kirkpatrick, asked from his seat in the audience whether anyone believed Google's current dominance in online advertising will continue or even might get extended to other forms of advertising.

I didn't expect either Clarizio or McAndrews to take the bait and they didn't disappoint.

"At the end of the day, this industry will be a scale game," Clarizio said. "I think the industry will be well served by competition and competition from several players.

McAndrews acknowledged that Google had "clearly created a great mousetrap with search" but pointed out that digital search, as important as it has become, does not define the entirety of the advertising market. "If you look across all their assets, we're much stronger in the display space," he said, adding that newcomers will face challenges.

The bigger surprise was a comment from Bedecarre to the effect that Google's new challenge is to reach out to marketers. He suggested that the company's most pressing future struggle would be to convince digital advertisers that there's real value clicking past the home page to the increasingly lengthy list of features and products it offers.

"They're having a real struggle trying to engage advertisers with everything after their home page."

Considering the shape of the U.S. economy, that's probably the kind of struggle most companies in the digital advertising business would happily settle for. Especially in these times.

McAndrews offered a tempered view of the digital ad landscape. He said the economic slowdown in this country has had the expected impact on advertising and forced adjustments in expectations. "To pretend that it has had no impact would be wrong," he said.

One topic that's getting a lot of attention here is the potential for digital advertising in social media. That still remains a work in progress, largely because of the reluctance of advertising to jump into a segment they still don't fully understand. Indeed, Clarizio noted the "very large opportunity" presented by social media, but allowed that several advertisers remain uncomfortable about advertising in social media.

Bedecarre echoed that opinion, pointing out that advertisers haven't caught up to the viral popularity of social networks with choice demographic groups. The problem is the uncertainty and potential loss of control associated with putting up an ad on a social network, he said. "They're uneasy...I'm very bullish about where it's going. But the people who spend the really big bucks have to get used to letting go."

Search Is On Target

By Ellen Kehoane

Originally posted on DMNews.com

Original Article

Before restructuring and partly deregulating its electricity mar­ket in 2002, Texas offered con­sumers limited options in choosing their retail electric provider, due to local monopolies. After deregulation, marketers needed to step up their efforts, thanks to increased compe­tition from a variety of electricity service providers and newly savvy comparison shoppers.

Reliant Energy, a Houston-based company that provides energy services to about 1.8 million customers in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic states, began to look for new ways to woo customers after deregulation. “Consumers [now had] a choice of what electric company they wanted to buy electricity from,” says Sicily Dickenson, Reliant's direc­tor of online marketing.

An additional challenge was that Reliant is limited to servicing certain areas within the Lone Star State. “Essentially, each electric company gets ZIP codes it can service,” explains Ashwini Karandikar, VP of client services for Range Online Media, a search and interactive marketing firm that has worked with Reliant since 2006. The offers that companies can provide in each area may be differ due to state regulations, she adds.

A deeper level of targeting

In order to ensure that it markets strictly to those customers residing in Reliant-serviced ZIP codes, the company now uses geo-targeted search engine marketing to acquire new customers — as well as to retain existing ones.

Geo-targeted search is practiced by serving pay-per-click ads to users based on their location (usually deter­mined by IP address), or if users include the name of a targeted loca­tion within their search request.

Companies wanting to adapt ad copy for different geographical areas – to better appeal to a given locale's consumers – can benefit from geo-tar­geted search, says Reid Spice, director of paid search strategy at iCrossing, “because you can structure your ad copy to speak to the local market. That can improve your click-through rates and conversion rates.”

Companies with bricks-and-mortar retail locations also use geo-targeted search to help coordinate promotions within certain regional areas.

“Geo-targeted campaigns can provide one level deeper of target­ing,” agrees Rob Murray, president of iProspect. The only challenge is that search engines cannot always uniquely identify someone by their IP address. “That's just a limitation to think about — it's not a reason to not do it,” he emphasizes.

The downside, however, is that you're taking your target and slicing it down to a fraction of what it would be nationwide, Spice points out. Geo-targeted campaigns also don't gener­ate a lot of data. “If you're doing any sort of testing, it takes much longer to get the statistics,” he says.

Still, more search marketers are using geo-targeting to reach the right consumers at the right time. “We use geo-targeting more now than we did in the past, and the ways in which we use [it] have become much more sophisticated,” Spice says.

For companies like Reliant, which are limited to servicing specific areas, geo-targeting clearly makes sense. Movers, for example, are one of the biggest target audiences for Reli­ant, according to Dickenson. “We know there are a handful of things that really put people into a shop­ping mode — one of them is they're going to move,” She explains. So the company runs pay-per-click ads for users who search for key terms like “moving to Houston,” or “real estate agent,” within a specific ZIP code.

Rather than going to Reliant'shome page, these customers are directed to the company's newly launched Move Center microsite at www.reliant.com/movecenter.  

“The site has [more than] 150 pages of content, focusing on where you are in the moving cycle,” Dickenson says, as well as a downloadable “move reminder” widget, and e-cards users can send to their friends and family to let them know their new address.

The microsite content has also improved Reliant's organic search rankings for moving-related key­words. Dickenson says, “Not only are we buying those terms, but we're seeing ourselves come up more often in natural [search].”

Reliant also has landing pages tai­lored towards prospective and exist­ing customers. For example, Range helped Reliant create a place for its customers to visit where they can download energy and savings tips.

People often change electricity pro­viders during the summer, as electric bills rise. Reliant uses various offers in its advertising to attract those con­cerned about cost, says Dickenson.

Over the last six months, Reliant has begun honing its search results. “We've seen our new enrollments on the Web site increase by 72%, and our conversion rate has gone up 60%,” says Dickenson.

Search aligned with other channels

She ascribes this increase not only to search, but to display advertising and such offline marketing channels as direct mail, TV, radio, billboards and outbound telemarketing. The key is checking that all messaging and campaigns are aligned.

“One of the only ways to get [search volume] to increase exponentially [is] to also run display,” she says.

Each time that the company has its messaging and campaigns aligned — including its offline channels — there's a huge lift, she adds.

Because search is Reliant's lowest-cost channel of acquisition, the com­pany wants to grow search volume as much as it can, Dickenson says. When compared to a direct mail campaign that can run about $250 per acquisition, the typical cost per acquisition for a search campaign is about $30 to $35, she says. “Search is our lowest-cost channel,” she says.

Working with Range has allowed Reliant to both try new things and optimize efforts already in place. She reiterates that geo-targeting allowed Reliant to target service areas and address the needs of prospects.

“What we've seen this year is an unbelievable incremental increase [in revenue],” Dickenson says of the campaign's results.

Sage Advice for a Search Engine Marketer

From Today's Media Post Search Insider

by Aaron Goldman

In A Converging Media World, What's A Search Marketer To Do?

FOR SOMEONE WHO PRIDES HIMSELF on keeping up with all the hot buzzwords, I'm awful cautious when I use one -- especially in the headline of a column -- lest my point-of-view get dismissed as bandwagoning.

In thinking about what's happening in the media world today, many an overhyped adjective comes to mind -- consumer-controlled, integrated, and plain ole digital -- but, at the end of the day, "converging" seems to best capture the essence of it (not to mention it's a catch-all -- aka cop-out).

See You at the Crossroads

There's no question that the pervasiveness of the digital platform is changing the face of media as people take control of their consumption, leaving marketers, agencies and publishers scrambling to integrate their assets. The result is a convergence of channels -- my favorite is "digital print" as exemplified by the Amazon Kindle -- and a convergence of marketing tactics - e.g., blogs as PR tools and social networks as guerilla word-of-mouth vehicles.

Of course, at the crossroads of all this convergence lies search. Search helps consumers access the glut of content that's now delivered digitally. And search helps marketers connect with those consumers at the most relevant moment with the most relevant message.

But it's becoming harder and harder to separate search from the rest of the media landscape. There's content networks, in-text advertising, search retargeting -- and the list goes on and on and gets blurrier and blurrier.  Convergence indeed.

Meanwhile, on the agency side, you have search firms branching out into creative, Web development, social media, auction media, etc. And you have traditional media agencies, Web dev shops, creative boutiques and their mothers creating search practices. Would you like a side of convergence with that?

Back to media publisher/aggregators. You have Google buying DoubleClick to get into display -- while at the same time pressing ahead with TV, radio, and print platforms. You have folks like Spot Runner branching out from TV to search. And, once again, you have rumors of a Microhoo deal. Do you, Yahoo, take Microsoft to be your convergent bride?

As I pointed out in my last column, the only part of the ecosystem that doesn't seem to be converging all that quickly is the org structure at large corporations. You still have ecommerce separate from marketing separate from PR, yadda yadda. Slowly but surely, we're seeing key stakeholders unite and, while today there aren't many Fortune 5's that have truly integrated teams, there are plenty with active cross-functional initiatives.

On The Verge

It's inevitable that these silos will come tumbling down and, when they do, everyone with a stake in search marketing better be ready. Because no CMO is going to settle for a search-only solution. Nor should they.

So what can search marketers -- both in-house and at agencies -- do to prepare for this outcome?

Here's a quick list:

1.      Go fly a kite. Seriously. Step away from the spreadsheet. Go to the beach. Hoist a kite. Take note how it goes wherever the wind takes it. And remember, in the fluid marketing world of tomorrow, the key to success will be agility.

 2.      Learn what CPM means. It won't be long before search, like most media, is bought and sold on a CPM basis. The only question is whether the driver will be a desire to quantify and capture all those "non-clicks" or whether it will be platforms like Microsoft's AdCenter -- that allow marketers to overlay keyword-targeting with other behavioral and contextual selects -- finally delivering meaningful scale (read: buying Yahoo).

3.      Take some marketing classes. It's called search marketing for a reason. If you came into the space without a marketing background, you'll need to brush up on your 4 Ps if you want to contribute to the conversation or even just keep your seat at the table.

 4.      Learn how to communicate. If your idea of communication is telling someone what keywords are working best, what copy test you just ran, or what bid optimizations you made, you've got another thing coming. And that thing is a pink slip. Figure out how to translate search-speak into the CMO's vernacular. Talk about insights gleamed from proactive consumer behavior. Talk about creative messaging that will resonate with a target audience. Talk about supply, demand, and point of diminishing returns.

5.      Integrate your data. Share your search data with everyone and anyone. Mash it up against TV weight to see the impact of GRPs on search volume. Roll it up with display (or enable exposure-to-conversion tracking) to assess various consumer touchpoints. Tie front-end search data and any subsequent site registrations to offline sales. Attach search queries to customer profiles to enable more targeted CRM efforts. Position yourself (through search) as the glue that connects disparate data sources and enables robust analytics and modeling.

6.      Educate. Demystify search. For so long, we've tried to overcomplicate things in an effort to justify our existence. Break search marketing down into bite-size morsels that even the CMO can understand. Deliver a Search 101 to the offline media team or the PR folks. And then ask that they return the favor and bring you up to speed on their area of expertise.

Apocalypse Not

Fear not, search marketers. An integrated media world does not have to leave you high and dry. To make sure you're not up convergence creek without a paddle, follow the steps I've outlined here and, before you know it, you'll be saying, "I love the smell of convergence in the morning. It smells like... victory."

Original Article

SearchRev Blog Team
www.searchrev.com

SEM is Fun + You Can Market Stuff! (and it can help you spell)

This is an awesome, creative use of SEM  from those hipster mavens over at Converse.

Here's how it works:

"Converse Spelling Bee" (www.conversespellingbee.com), combines a contest with paid search advertising. The site asks visitors to type "ludicrous" into their search boxes. Doing so correctly brings up a search ad atop Google with copy reading "Ludicrous is correct" and a link to whatareacodeisroundtwo.com, where the game continues. After five rounds, the user is taken to aspellingbeewinnerisyou.com.

Try it!

www.thisistheindexpage.com,

Original Article

Bowled Over by SearchRev Technology!

From the extremely comprehensive blog, SearchEngineLand.com (bookmark it now, along with ours ;) a look at what makes our technology award winning:

Demo of the week: SearchRev

By Josh Dreller

I can hear some of you groaning: another SEM Bid Management tool, right? Wrong. I did a demo last week with SearchRev's Jim Vetter and was bowled over by some of the unique approaches I saw with this tool. One of the more interesting methodologies is the way the tool offers features not available on the engines by creating seamless workarounds on the backend. For example, SearchRev lets you set different bids and rules for keywords based on individual geographic areas, departs, and even match types. Basically, you choose your options and SearchRev builds whatever new campaigns/ad groups are needed for all of those combinations.

The rep showed me a screenshot of the tool in action. So, you could choose different bids for the same keyword in Houston, Florida, and Boston, and the tool would create a new campaigns/ad groups for that keyword that is geotargetd to those three areas. For AdWords, you can even split bids between Google Search, Google Search Network, and Google Content and manage them side by side. This workaround obviously creates many, many campaign combinations in the engines. With an engine max limit on campaigns, SearchRev manages multiple accounts on the same engine to create the seamless frontend single account. Jim said some of his clients require 15 or more Google AdWords account to hold all of these campaigns. I did the quick math, 50 campaign max on AdWords so that's more than 750 campaigns for a single account! Ha!

I was shown some case study results of conversion rates going up and CPCs going down, and I didn't question any of the numbers. If there's one thing I've learned in search is that the more granular control you have, the more opportunities to optimize you have, which leads to better results. Just imagine... by setting a bid on a keyword at the national level, you may be in first position in St. Louis, 5th in New York, and 3rd in Orlando. That's not efficient. As well, which creative works better for those markets...or different day parts...or on Google Search vs. the entire Google Search Network? SearchRev manages all of that for you.

You can check out their website for more info or request a webinar to see the tool for yourself.

Original Article

The SearchRev Blog Team
www.searchrev.com