SES Day One: "A Winter Wonderland"
March 1, 2005. New York, NY. The Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference and Expo at the Hilton in New York City has begun! Jupiter Media’s very popular “traveling road show” expects to draw its largest crowd ever, with well over 3000 attendees. With headliners such as keynote speaker Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo!, and many other leaders in the search engine industry gathered together by Danny Sullivan, it certainly promises to be an educational week. The conference focuses on three major topics: search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and industry research trends and tools.
I will be writing a daily recap of the sessions that I attended, offering our visitors a “view from the inside.” The first day’s sessions that I attended included a “Search Forecast and Outlook,” primarily focusing on paid search trends and future performance estimates, “Applying the Lessons of Search to Other Direct marketing Initiatives,” and finally “Search Algorithm Research and Developments.”
Niki Scevak of JupiterResearch was the moderator of the “Outlook” session, providing very valuable insight and information. According to Jupiter, “paid search will continue to grow faster than any other sector of online advertising, increasing from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009.” Scevak presented some compelling evidence to back up this assertion, discussing two key factors aiding the industry’s growth.
First, he mentioned that the use of broadband is at an all time high and will continue to grow. He tempered the statement by adding he feels that this will not help to increase the overall use of the Internet as drastically, suggesting that many Internet surfers are already “tenured,” and simply gaining the use of broadband does not qualify them as new users.
Secondly, statistics presented by Scevak pointed to a much larger trust in the relevance of search engine results. Up to 70% of searchers now feel that the majority of results returned are “relevant.” Also, he mentioned that the industry benefits from constant competition and the needs to improve and create new products, saying, “product development stimulates usage, which (in turn) stimulates advertising.”
Also discussed briefly were the results of a survey indicating that the primary goal of using SEM was not surprisingly to generate sales. 50% of respondents said “immediate online sales” were the main reason for SEM. 23% said they would be happy with “leads for future online sales,” and 11% claimed they would justify SEM with “leads for offline sales.” (JupiterResearch) The rest of the session described the growth of “Local Search” as well as some perceived problems with the lumping-in of contextual advertising with “standard” paid search.
Scevak theorized that the expectation level of many users of contextual advertising (such as Google AdWords’ “Content Match”) was unrealistic because the ad costs were based on the standard bid for the keyword in an exact match search. Since the exact match offers more of a “pull” marketing feel versus the “push” feel of a contextual ad, it naturally enjoys a greater conversion ratio, because exact match respondents were actually searching for the product when the link was presented to them. The answer to this problem is not “simply shutting Content match off,” as was discussed in a recent forum thread dedicated to this topic, but however for the portals to create a different (less expensive) price structure for contextual placements.
The session ended off with an interesting discussion of vertical engines popping up in some of the more “mature” industries using paid search, such as travel and retail. Dianne Clarkson, a travel analyst for JupiterResearch, spoke of one such “crop” of verticals dealing specifically with travel related searches. Included in her example were “META Travel Search Engines” such as Sidestep, Kayak, and Fair Chase. Scevak pointed out that many of these engines were using paid placement with “CPA,” or “cost-per-acquisition” (aka: cost-per-call), which allowed for easier justification of the marketing budget. “Advertisers are always willing to pay for certainty,” he reminded attendees.
I spent a lot of time talking about the first session since so many important topics were discussed. The rest of the first day’s recap will be a little briefer. Scevak also moderated “Applying the Lessons of Search to Other Direct Marketing Initiatives”. The main idea was that “search has trained marketers to focus more on research and making adjustments to campaigns such as landing page optimization, for example.” Since A/B testing of landing pages and ad content is becoming so common, it is easily transferable to other forms of marketing, such as trying different direct mailers or inserts from one advertising period to the next and measuring performance.
David Daniels and Gary Stein, bit of JupiterResearch also added some invaluable insight into the natural match between SEM and other direct marketing initiatives. David compared “sophisticated” versus “unsophisticated” marketers as being those that use metrics from prior campaigns and not just cost and industry analysis. A good example would be to use the information from past email campaigns and use that to re-target people that clicked on “calls to action.” Not surprisingly, there is a correlation between performance of future campaigns and such “sophistication.”
All three speakers emphasized the importance of behavioral marketing practices. It is important to measure such metrics as which other sites your visitors enjoy, in order to help suggest possible partners for linking or affiliation. The last important topic covered was an overview of a few popular methods of gaining leads on the Internet through permission-based emails. Such methods include the use of an “email append,” “co-registration” and “site registration tactics.” These are all term worth learning more about…so do a search!
The last session of the day was perhaps the most “advanced,” dealing with “Search Algorithm Research and Developments.” Naturally, no search engine is going to release any information about how it ranks sites. There are plenty of experts that can offer a pretty legitimate guess as to important factors, including myself. But we all would love to be a fly on the wall at Google, MSN, or Yahoo!
There was not much new here, with the exception of a recent “hot topic” related to this subject: Semantic Analysis. Without going to deep into detail about this subject, I will describe it as such: there is a theory floating around that particular keywords are not as important to search engines as in the past, since they are gaining the ability to find and index synonyms. This makes linked sites that do not use the same keywords (instead using a variety of synonyms) just as important for relevanace. I personally hope that this will be employed in the algorithm with more “weight,” since I believe this would be a step in the right direction.
Chris Boggs
See Day Two Recap.
