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Nov

19

Reply! Sees Gold in Vegas, Baby!

Posted by Reply! Public Relations
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Luck, be a lady next February! (That’s when Reply! will head to Las Vegas for LeadsCon as a Gold Sponsor.)

LeadsCon happens February 23-24, 2010 at The Mirage. Serving as “the pioneering conference and expo dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation industry,” LeadsCon brings together the top brass from the online customer acquisition space.

Come visit us at LeadsCon, where we’ll show you why the Reply.com Marketplace is more precise and profitable than search engines and ad networks. Learn how to acquire more ready-to-purchase customers using Reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks™ program. Also, see how the Reply.com Leads program can help you control lead price, quality, and volume—all while optimizing results.

If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with Reply.com at LeadsCon, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.

Nov

10

Reply! CEO to speak at Fifth Annual Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit

Posted by Reply! Public Relations
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Reply.com Founder and CEO Payam Zamani will participate in a panel discussion at the Fifth Annual Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in Menlo Park, California. The session is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel. NetQuote CEO Paul Ford and Oodle CEO Craig Donato will also participate in this panel discussion.

Oct

21

Reply! CEO to speak at Houlihan Lokey Tech Conference

Posted by Reply! Public Relations
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Reply.com Founder and CEO Payam Zamani will be a featured speaker at the Houlihan Lokey 5th Annual Technology Conference, a premier conference featuring a select group of high-performing, privately-held technology companies. The conference takes place October 21, 2009, at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, CA.

According to the Houlihan Lokey website, “This year’s conference will showcase more than 20 technology companies, whose executives will share insight into their business, markets, strategies and future. Year after year, this event attracts more than 400 senior-level executives from numerous public and private technology companies, private equity investors, venture capitalists and capital providers.”

Oct

8

Interesting Tradeshows

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Here is a list of interesting online marketing, search and ad exchange tradeshows for the next several months.

October

November

December

January 2010

February

March

April

May

June

Want to list your event? Please send an email to affiliate@reply.com

Aug

16

Reply! Takes Manhattan – Visit Us At LeadsCon

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Reply! News, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Ever since the “Mad Men” of the early 1960s ruled Madison Avenue, New York City has been the hub of all advertising. Reply! heads to The Big Apple to make a pitch for our ROI-boosting Internet advertising expertise as a Gold Sponsor of LeadsCon East 2009. Look out, Sterling Cooper!

LeadsCon East happens August 17-18 at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. Serving as a “the pioneering conference and expo dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation industry,” LeadsCon brings together the top brass from the the online customer acquisition space.

Come visit us at LeadsCon East, booth #203, where we’ll show you why the Reply.com Marketplace is more precise and profitable than search engines and ad networks. Learn how to acquire more ready-to-purchase customers using Reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks™ program. Also, see how the Reply.com Leads program can help you control lead price, quality, and volume—all while optimizing results.

If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with Reply.com at LeadsCon, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.

Aug

14

The Lack of Innovation in Local Advertising Products

Posted by Tom Young, Manager, Director, Online Marketing & Product
Filed Under Click Marketplace, Lead Quality, Online Marketing, Research, Search, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

While attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lack of innovation in online marketing products geared towards local advertisers. Buying local display inventory is next to impossible, and buying local traffic from search engines is sloppy and inefficient. Creating local SEO pages is helpful, but is still very difficult to do in a scalable and sustainable manner. I believe the future of online marketing is in delivering geo-targeted advertising products that level the playing field for marketers with budgets of all sizes. I’m still stunned I didn’t see a single vendor focusing on geo-targeted consumer acquisition for new product launches (besides Reply!).

What really confuses me is the direction in which the major search engines are going. They’ve placed their focus on allowing consumers to find local products and services, but there’s a significant lag in allowing advertisers to profitably acquire consumers who are conducting localized searches. Why is it so hard to find consumers who are searching for specific products or services in specific geographies? Solving this problem will not only help local advertisers, it will provide more value to consumers who want to find and compare local products and services.

I consider myself to be somewhat of an online marketing expert. I manage a marketing team and a large corporate advertising budget; we’re profitable and we find creative ways to grow revenue and profits each month. I say this to set up my next point, not to gloat. My father is an attorney, and I manage his website and small advertising budget in my free time. I’m failing when it comes to delivering local prospects at a reasonable cost. This isn’t because I’m an unsophisticated marketer; this is because the major search engines are failing local advertisers. The major search engines can’t deliver significant traffic in the areas I want and they make changing geo-targets a painful process.The inflated cost for going local is disturbingly high. Simply put, online marketing is geared towards national advertisers. Local advertisers are at a severe disadvantage.

Large ad budgets understandably influence product changes and innovation for companies offering online marketing solutions, but we’ve reached a point where advertisers with small budgets need to be heard. Their needs should be driving innovation. The next wave of growth in online marketing needs to come from providing valuable products to local advertisers. This growth will help shift $10 billion in ad spend from offline to online services. I would be willing to grow my father’s ad budget if I could find a way to do so profitably, but this just isn’t the case. This means the major search engines are leaving my (and millions of others’) unspent ad budget on the table. It also means the door is open for an innovative product to sweep through this virtually untapped market.

To learn how Reply! is solving the problems with local online advertising, you can read any of the following posts:

Tom Young
Director, Online Marketing & Product
Reply! Inc.

Aug

10

Learn More About Reply!’s Marketplace at SES

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Reply! News, Tradeshows | 2 Comments 

Reply.com is an exhibitor at the Search Engine Strategies 2009 Conference and Expo (aka SES), a premier global conference featuring the industry’s top Search experts. SES takes place August 10-14, 2009, at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.

Come visit us at Booth #223, where we will spotlight Reply.com’s leading online marketplace for targeted advertising. We’ll show you why the Reply.com Marketplace is more precise and profitable than search engines and ad networks. Learn how to acquire more ready-to-purchase customers using Reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks™ program. Also see how the Reply.com Leads program can help you control lead price, quality, and volume, while optimizing results. See our conference web page for more information.

If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with Reply.com at SES, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.

Jun

23

LeadsCon East Update & Special Discount

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Lead Generation, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

Reply.com is a gold sponsor of LeadsCon, the premier tradeshow on performance marketing and lead generation.  LeadsCon East will be held in New York City at the Marriott Marquis Times Square, August 17 – 18, 2009.

View the Full Conference Program and full Speaker List.

  • If you are interested in setting up a meeting with Reply! in advance of the show, please email us at BizDev@Reply.com.

LeadsCon East Discount

As a Reply.com reader, you are eligible for a discounted registration rate of $295 to attend the event, that is a a $300 savings off the onsite price.  You can ONLY get this special price through this link and you cannot access it from the LeadsCon website.

*Discount rate good on new registrations only. Credits or refunds cannot be issued on previous registrations.  Discount rate good through August 1, 2009, prevailing rate applies after that.

Interesting sessions happening at LeadsCon East 2009:

  • Reply’s CEO, Payam Zamani will be speaking on the “Ad Exchanges – The Future of Online Media Buying?” panel.

Ad Exchanges offer the promise greater controls and new revenue opportunities, no longer novelties but serious contenders in the fight for dollars online. Their rise has as many supporters as detractors with substantive questions remaining regarding their role both now and in the future. Listen as the experts elaborate on their take and answer tough questions about an emerging technology.

  • Other Sessions
    • Role of Institutional Capital in Shaping Internet Advertising
    • Achieving Breakthrough Results
    • Brand and Performance – Getting the Best of Both Worlds
    • The Rise of Direct Response and Per Inquiry Advertising
    • Display 2.0 – Bridging The Performance Divide Between Display And Search
    • Stories from the Front Line
    • Improving The Conversion Funnel
  • You can also check out the LinkedIn Event Group.

Jun

3

SMX Advanced – Day 2 – Amazing PPC Tactics

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Tradeshows, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Amazing PPC Tactics

Speakers:

  • Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, Course Advisor, Inc.
  • Ryan Lash, Founder & VP Search, YMarketing, LLC
  • Dan Shoa, Founder & SEM Specialist, Five Mill, Inc.
  • Dan Thies, CEO, Stompernet

Dan Thies

  • Time
    • some hours of the day are more profitable
    • Some days of the week are, too
    • He uses Google analytics to see conversion rate by hour
    • Conversion rate * average order = revenue per visit
    • Campaign 1 – best times
    • Campaign 2 – night owl
    • Different ad creatives and bids may work on different parts of the day/week
    • He normally ends up with weekday and weekend copy winners
    • He says the old belief that the sweet spot is positions 5 through 8 isn’t accurate, based on eye-tracking analysis
    • He always tests at the top position to get ad copy to work. If it works, you win huge.
  • Match Types
    • If you can’t make a profit on exact match with 10 keywords and tight ad copy – good luck with Broad match
    • He recommends Phrase + negatives = a strong winner
    • He almost never uses Broad match as he finds too much waste
    • Ad copy testing – make 10 copies of an ad and then only change 1 and you get a 10% sample to limit financial exposure. – Great idea.
    • MSN Ad Center labs OCI Tool – useful to understand if a query is commercial in nature
    • Video on his core lessons – seofaststart.com/link/adwords
    • Ad Creative + Landing Page

Ryan Lash

  • How to build a semi-automatic bid managment system
    • Web browser (Firefox)
    • Spreadsheet
    • AdWords Editor
  • Calculate Ideal CPCs for CPA Campaign
    • Ideal CPC = (Ideal cost/clicks)
    • CPC sweet spot close to 50% net margin
    • What are the minimum number of clicks you need before taking action
      • Calculation: (1/Non-branded conversion rate)
    • CPC Floor/Ceiling
      • Min: $0.01
      • Max CPA & Avg Conversion Rate
      • Example: CPA $50, Conv Rte 2%, Max CPC = $1

Addie Conner

  • Yahoo Min CPC – many accounts have been hit and had their keywords removed
    • Quality score in Yahoo mainly lives at the adgroup level
    • Ask Yahoo to create a new account (unlink your accounts) and min CPCs will disappear
  • Gaining competitive insight
    • Google data is saved in their system
    • It is a great way to peer into competitive metrics
    • Example: keyword “bounty hunter”
    • Capture exact ad and click to get destination URL
    • Upload via an adwords editor into a new Google account
    • QS and first page min CPC should transfer
    • You can get click-to-bid and bid-to-position model of your competitor
  • Dominate the page (i.e. double-serving)
    • Engines realize that a single company may wish to run multiple sites to micro-target different business segments and optimize user experience
    • General rule is < 80% overlap between sites
    • You can get targeted URLs and tightly coupled landing page experience
  • Launch Keywords With High Quality Score
    • What really matters: Initial CTR, Bid, Account Structure?
      • Initial CTR matters – you need to overbid for 2 weeks. Higher initial CTR = higher lifetime value quality score.
      • Do you need to start at a high bid? Yes. Once a keyword falls off in position it is harder to recover the quality. She recommends that you start high to collect max data from Google for ROI and optimization.
    • Launch best practices and account structure
      • Ad groups have their own quality score
      • She tested generic grouping, semantic grouping, and performance grouping
      • The result: semantic grouping mattered and reduced CPCs with higher quality score
      • Start out with an inflated bid
      • Run aggressive ad copy – once established QS – change
      • Start with high-quality, high-traffic keywords
      • Once those keywords have achieved desired level, you can add other keywords
    • Relaunch
      • Keep everything the same for good quality score keywords
      • All bad – change something – display URL that can reset QS
      • If you fail, start a new account

Dan Shoa

  • Write a headline
    • Keyword:Buy Blue Widget = all caps
    • Yahoo Quick Keyword Creation
      • Quality Index is at the ad group level
      • benefit from highly-targeted keywords
      • There is no “broad match”
      • Polarized sunglasses example and re-enter on the right “select keywords” and repeat
      • Analyze keywords CTR performance in an ad group–pay attention to position. Pause all low CTR keywords.
      • Duplicate ad group
      • Delete keywords not in other group (i.e. the CTR for top group should increase and for the lower group will increase some)
      • Net result – you will get more traffic and cheaper
    • Yahoo Dynamic Keyword Insertion
      • DKI will increase quality index because Yahoo gives credit for its use
    • Google Ad Competition
      • 1 ad group with 10 keywords and 2 ads
      • Some keywords perform better for one ad or the other
      • Make sure bids are targeting your success metrics
      • Duplicate ad group and run one ad in each
      • Turn on all ad groups
      • Re-bid to current metrics of success
      • Google will do the work and bid the winner higher and eventually a winner will appear
    • Google – The Delima
      • If someone is in position 1 in Google and has been there for awhile and you have the exact same ad copy in position #2, you get hurt
      • Solution: create a second ad with a different headline
      • edit campaign settings to optimize ads
      • Need to maximize the “normalized CTR of your position”

Jun

3

SMX Advanced – Day 2 – Conducting An SEO Audit

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows | 1 Comment 

Conducting An SEO Audit To Troubleshoot Problems & Tune-Up Performance

Speakers

  • Adam Audette, Founder, Audette Media
  • Derrick Wheeler, Sr. SEO Architect, Microsoft
  • Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Lad

Metrics to track

  • Search engine activity
  • User activity
    • Useful to track with webmaster tools for tracking indexing to measure if you have a problem
    • Keep a short list of high-value keywords and mid-size list for tail terms and track monthly
    • Need to measure key business metrics to see how SEO is doing over time
  • Site audits are extremely intensive and are normally outsourced to get external feedback
  • Issues: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

Framework for SEO audits

  • Domains/URLs/subdomains/filenames
  • Sections & categories – how they related to interior pages and navigation
  • Pages – product pages and interrelation
  • Media – are alt tags implemented, etc

Off-page

  • Backlinks (quantity, quality)
  • Social media signals twitter, digg, etc.
  • Cache dates, indexed pages
  • Toolbar PageRank
  • Marketleap has a tool for historical indexed pages

Big 4 factors

  • URLs
  • Site Architecture & Navigation
  • Product-level pages (tendency for duplicate content)
  • Site Latency

Key Deliverables

  • Summarize
  • Keep it Prioritized with High, Medium, Low
  • Keep it Actionable (Problem, Impact, Solution)
  • Build in Follow-up and Roadmap of What’s Next
  • Sizzle Matters – make the presentation pretty

Tools

  • IIS.net/extensions/seotoolkit Seo toolkit (no download needed) – just launched from Microsoft today (Site optimization, error identification)
  • Google site:domain.name – good for product pages
  • Lynxlet – looks at a site the way that a search engine does
  • SEO-browser.com – links on the web (same as above)
  • Charles – latency/debugging application (useful for landing page evaluation)
  • Firebug & whyslow give you recommendations on how to fix latency
  • Web developer toolbar shows you links on a page
  • Wave toolbar – structure of a page (can show outline and see how it is semantically structured)
  • SeoBook toolbar – comparison feature (green button) gives you main SEO metrics and can export to CSV
  • Linkscape – SEO backlink competitive research, good for 302s and 301
  • Wget-S good to see a very long redirect chain
  • Audettemedia.com/blog/seo-diagnostics-tool – parse log files (unix-based)
  • SEMRush – ranking of a site & good organic keyword report
  • Janeandrobot.com – lots of resources

Problems

  • Toolbar pagerank drops, number of indexed pages drops, indexing ratio change
  • Get the data
  • Top ten queries that bring in search traffic use – Rankchecker.com to get a report of pagerank
  • Crawl issue: run a script across log files to categorize how engines are crawling the site
  • Googlebot activity in last 90 days – need to evaluate data from Google
  • Crawl problems: flash, css images for links, ajax

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