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I found this an interesting presentation and if you are involved in website creation or search engine optimization it is worth the read.

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.

Look, I’m typically an optimistic guy. You could even say I’m optimistic to a fault. But unfortunately, I’m finding it very difficult to remain optimistic in the current economy.

Let me be very clear, I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t even have an MBA. However, I think I get a few simple economic principles and this
is one of my fundamental beliefs: strong economies cannot have a weak currency, a massive deficit, and a national debt with so many zeros they won’t fit on a billboard.

I don’t buy the arguments made in favor of the current level of deficit spending. Adding $1.8 trillion in one year to our national debt for the sake of kickstarting the economy makes no sense to me. What do we mean when we say, “The stimulus is necessary so the economy will start growing again?” Are we doing that so we can get back to our bad habits of buying homes we cannot afford and cars we don’t need? Why do we believe that our economy should start growing ASAP, regardless of the cost? A country with a big economy but a massive deficit and huge debt is very much like a big company with a lot of revenues but no profits and carrying a large debt load…kind of like GM. And by now we know what happened to GM.

So, the question is: will our economy become bankrupt? Why not? Countries have gone bankrupt and it appears they will continue to do so. This country is not immune to the economic dynamics that have forced other, albeit smaller, national economies into a state of bankruptcy.

We have a very large economy but, by the same token, our fundamental economic problems are very large, too. My concern is that we are in a recession and, rather than fixing the fundamental problems in our system, we are flooding the economy with money. Of course this will create short-term growth. In fact, I expect 2010 to be a decent growth year. However my belief is that this growth period will be short-lived, and our deficit spending combined with the size of our national debt will drag us down into yet another deep recession. If that happens, we will be in serious trouble. There will be no bailout.

You can compare our current situation to an individual who is hungry and is given a candy bar full of sugar to eat vs. a reasonable portion of food with protein and vegetables. Clearly, you will feel good for a short period of time, but your hunger will quickly return. In a similar way,  I’m afraid that within three years we will return to a very difficult economic environment, one which could turn into a long and sustained depression.

I think, as a country, we need to re-calibrate our approach to economic good health and re-examine our values when it comes to how, both as a government and as individuals, we choose to spend money. How should we measure our success as a country? Economic productivity and GNP per capita are just part of many important measures.

I, for one, am very concerned about the path we are on. It’s scary!

Eternal optimist and entrepreneur,

Payam Zamani

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”

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

Mythbusting PPC Urban Legends

Speakers

• Scott Brinker, President & CTO ion Interactive
• Frederick Vallaeys, Adwords Evangelist, Google – his presentation can be found on SiliconVallaeys.com
• Reid Hoffman – iProspect

Myth #1 – A landing page is a single landing page

• More likely than not, a landing page is actually a path pulling the consumer along
• Second step of the landing page is to further clarify the visitor’s intent or ease them into a process
• Car insurance companies have done a great job optimizing the first page of the landing page with zip code only

Myth #2 – Flash on landing pages is evil

• Loading delays, lengthy animations, expensive to build
• Flash is universally supported
• Google can now index text in Flash and can dramatically increase usability (similar in concept to Ajax development)
• Flash has been shown to produce higher conversion rates, better branding, creative differentiation

Myth #3 – Multivariate testing (MVT) is better than A/B testing

• MVT isn’t better than A/B testing–each has pros on cons
• A/B requires less traffic, fewer variations, apples-and-orange tests, no risk of bad combinations, easier to set up
• MVT – requires more traffic, test far more variations, great for ad copy, great for variations in website (fixed structure)
• Landing pages are the one chance to break out of the box (i.e. easier to change than your website)
• Test small and test often
• Capture people’s attention visually and pull them along

Myth #4 – Google Content Network has no value

• 5% of time online is spent doing searches, 95% of time online is spent doing something else
• 4 websites get 55% of display inventory, but only 25% of time spent online
• As an advertiser, it is hard to find niche to advertise in
• 20% of conversions from advertisers come from the content network
• CPA vs. Search was -2% over search
• Best practices
  • Separate campaigns for search and content
  • Use Enhanced Online campaigns combining placements and keywords
  • Placement target sites that convert well
  • Manage bids per placement
  • Exclude placements that don’t convert

Myth #5 – I should lower my bids to avoid top position ads (too many junk clicks)

• Google analytics has a position report showing how each ad slot has performed
• Review conversion rate, bounce rate–according to Google it converts well (side note: that hasn’t been Reply!’s experience)
• CTR drops as position decreases, which can negatively affect quality score

Myth #6 – Broad match is useless

• Users can’t spell
• Query length is getting longer (the number of 3+ word queries is growing), meaning exact match is getting more difficult
• Broad match – 33% of conversions
• Expanded broad match (new form of broad match) represents most of those conversions
• Broad Match -> Expanded Broad Match -> Phrase Match -> Exact Match
• If you are using broad match, it is critical that you narrowly target specific ad creative
• Run search query reports on a regular basis and trim non-converting spend
• Bidding on broad match – Google recommends that you separate your broad and exact match

Myth #7 – Can I juice my quality score by bidding higher

• Google normalizes position CTR (i.e. position 1 has a high expected CTR)

Myth #8 – Myth IP addresses can reliably locate you

• US Geo-Target works well for all businesses, when done right
• Works great for small local businesses in concept, but AOL and large proxy servers screw up the IP blocks
• Either the engines ignore large proxy servers (AOL, MSN, Yahoo), or there are back-office deals for better IP intelligence
• If your ISP or company’s hosting facility is located far away from your physical location
• The bottom line – the smaller the geography you target, the more junk traffic you get out of search… Bad for search, but good for Reply!

Myth #9 – Geographic regions behave differently

• Revenue-per-click varies dramatically from state to state
• State or City Targeting won’t work – Reid recommends that you blend cities and states to get the best traffic (ie. New Jersey + New Your City)
• Google allows geo-targeting down to 10-20 miles (shows how accurate they can be)
• MSN – no zip code targeting
• Yahoo can do zip code targeting – just launched, and the volume from MSN/Yahoo is very small
• Geo-targeting – once you remove AOL, MSN/Yahoo produces very small results
• Geo-targeting outside the U.S. is very immature

Myth #10 – Campaigns can be optimized at the individual local level

• Reid recommends that you add together small cities to increase volume of impressions – yes, it will introduce junk clicks, but will increase volume to make it viable
• Old-school geo-targeting – use geo-modified keyword terms, such as “dallas autobody shop” or “phoenix tanning salon”

Q&A

• Is long tail dead on Google? – if keywords have a low search volume, Google used to suspend them, but they are “slowly bringing them back” – long tail keywords are slowly coming back, but don’t expect a lot of volume
• Does one keyword/ad group produce better CTR? Google recommends under 25 keywords per ad group
• Landing page optimization is critical for increasing “maximum potential rate”

I am attending the SMX Advanced tradeshow and wanted to provide some semi-live updates from the show.

Notes from the panel on “Keyword Research Artistry”

Speakers

• Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
• Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI Services
• Taylor Pratt, Search Marketing Specialist, nFusion

Site Search

• Need to add site search to any site for which you want help with keyword research from UGC
• Tie-in site search into Google analytics
• Easy way to show all keywords being used on the site

Keyword Trend Tools

• Google
  • Google Trends – provides view into the mind of the surfer
  • Google Insights tool – provides keywords with regional interest, plus a section for top searches and rising searches

Searches

• Google Hot Trends – enter any date and it will show you hot topics for that date
• Google Search Options – appears on the left side of Google, allows you to explore search topics, and shows you related searches
• WonderWheel
• Yahoo Buzz – up and coming events with rising popularity
• Facebook lexicon – tool to follow trends in words in Facebook walls
• Twitter Keyword Tools – poor right now but many tools are coming. It is important to monitor brand and keywords on social

Media Sites

• Twitscoop (trending on topics in real-time)
• Twitvolume – allows head-to-head comparisons
• SiteVolume – visually tracks how often word appears in social media sites (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, etc.)
• Twitbeep – like Google, alters for Twitter, updates hourly, sends you email
• Twhirl – allows you to track and monitor keywords
• Wikipedia tools
• Wikirank – shows popular trends on Wikipedia with trending topics
• Wikipedia article statistics
• VisWiki
• EyePlorer
• How to beat affiliate marketing’s large CPCs
• Longtail research technique
• Find UGC sites with deep content and just read them
• SEOmoz’s TermExtractor Tool
• Hidden market for keywords: Compete.com & SpyFu.com
• Have robot extract sidebars and anchor tags
• How to select keywords for expansion
• Search volume – how much traffic is there?
• Relevance – is your site relevant for the keywords?
• Competition – can you realistically get to position 1-3?
• Raven SEO Tools
• Google Suggest
• SEOBook Keyword List Generator

On to the next session.

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