SES returns to the San Jose Convention Center August 18-22, 2008

SES returns to the San Jose Convention Center August 18-22, 2008

When You Register:

Win a Mazda3!* Free drawing takes place Wednesday, August 20 in the Expo Hall. More » *model subject to change

Join us for our 10th Annual SES event this August in San Jose, California, home to the largest concentration of successful internet and high-tech companies in the world.

SES San Jose affords delegates the largest learning and networking opportunity of the year, as the 70+ sessions (80% of the sessions are new to the agenda) will cover everything that is search related and the numerous networking parties are back, including the famed Google Dance and Search Bash. Fellow marketers, webmasters, executive decision makers, including first timers and SES Alumni, will converge to learn how to maximize their business’s Search Engine Marketing (SEM) opportunities, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search advertising, in addition to staying informed of the latest industry, tools, and algorithm developments and solutions. This is the one event of the year you do not want to miss.

SEM Training  |  Conference Agenda  |  Sponsorship Opportunities  |  Sponsors/Exhibitors  |  Register Today »

Tuesday, Aug 19
Learn more »

Lee Siegel

Satya Nadella

Chip Heath

Jim Sterne

Matt Cutts

Kirsten Mangers

NEWS: Jarvis: The end of SEO?

Jarvis: The end of SEO?

from editorsweblog

As Google gets better at providing more personalized results, the importance of Search Engine Optimization seems to decline, according to new media guru Jeff Jarvis.

SEO and Googlejuice (how far a website ranks in the search) might have been as important as a company’s EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) in the past, but that may not be the case today.  

“What does that mean to brands? The world gets confusing once more. But I think it means that true relevance becomes more important than SEO tricks,” said Jarvis.

The relationships between brands and people may become more important than spending resources on optimizing the rankings of news stories.

“It also means that the more relationships you have with people — the more they talk about you and link to you and click on you — the better off you will be,” Jarvis said.

The end of SEO?

from BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis

Google is trying to get better and better at anticipating what we’re looking for whenever we search; that’s what Marissa Mayer has said. They have been making better use of geography, not just sensing our country and language but now asking us to say where we are so it can give us local results. Since last year, it has been using our search history, if we allow, to improve our searches. The universal search tries to freshen up results with news, multimedia, and more, and I sense that the algorithm is giving more weight to currency…

Comscore: Actually, We Were Right. And Google’s US Business Stinks

Henry Blodget | April 24, 2008 5:19 PM

Comscore (SCOR) has had it up to its eyeballs with being blamed for blowing Google’s quarter (GOOG). A week after a company blog post failed to quiet screams that inaccurate Google click data had cost investors millions, Comscore’s CEO Magid Abraham sends an even more strongly worded email to clients.

The bottom line?

• Our data was accurate. 
• Pundits and investors who are blaming us should look in the mirror and ask why they couldn’t even be bothered to distinguish between “US” and “Global.”
• The untold story of Google’s quarter is that Google’s US business stinks.

Dr. Magid Abraham, Comscore CEO:

When Google announced strong Q1 earnings last week, some financial and media analysts wrote thatcomScore’s reports of slowing growth in Google’s paid clicks missed the mark. That conclusion is patently false.

Unfortunately, many pundits attempted to draw conclusions about Google’s worldwiderevenue performance based on comScore’s domestic paid click data, resulting in an apples-to-oranges comparison. Had they used comScore‘s domestic paid click data to better understand Google‘s domestic revenue trends, they wouldn’t have missed an important U.S. story and they also likely would have avoided making the wrong call onGoogle’s worldwide business.

Following several historical quarters of strong sequential domestic revenue growth (including the seasonally equivalent Q1 2007), Google’s Q1 2008 revenue growth was essentially flat, which represented a significant change for Google’s domestic business. Such an important trend was also evident in comScore’s paid click data.

The chart below shows the directional association between comScore’s domestic paid click trends, as compared to Google’s domestic revenue trends.

 

[The chart can also be viewed at the following link:http://www.comscore.com/images/google_us.gif]

Of course, this is not a perfect correlation because the comScore data do not include the impact of changes in Google’s price per click and do not include paid clicks from partner sites like AOL, Ask, Washington Post, etc. nor paid clicks from the AdSense network. But the strong relationship of the two trends is undeniable.

There is of course a lesson to be learned here. To extrapolate a single data point across all aspects of a company’s business can lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions. 

Finally, to confirm the accuracy of the comScore paid click data, we previously published an apples-to-apples reconciliation on this blog. This analysis reconciles thecomScore data with metrics shown in Google’s Q1, 2008 financial report. In short,comScore got it right – both quantitatively and qualitatively. What was wrong were the conclusions that some people drew based on inherently flawed comparisons.

Dr. Magid Abraham

President and CEO

comScore, Inc.

Driving Site Traffic With Search Engine Optimization and Paid Advertising

Ed: Basics for marcom.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

SEO refers to modifying your Web pages to enhance your visibility in search engine results. If your business sells, say, left-handed widgets, your goal is to be listed near the top of the results if someone performs a search using the keywords “left-handed widgets.” Research shows that if your site isn’t within the top 30 search results, very few visitors will click through to your site.

How do you reach that coveted high rank in a search engine? You have to learn to think like the robots (also called spiders and crawlers) that search engines such asGoogle use to find and catalog Web pages. First, learn to describe your products and services at your Web site using words that your prospective customers would likely use in a search (most search engines understand words, not images).

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SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISING

If you don’t like waiting months for SEO benefits to kick in, I recommend advertising on search engines for fast results. The paid approach might bring increased traffic to your site within as little as 24 hours.

The most popular type of search engine advertising–and the easiest to set up–is the pay-per-click (PPC) text ad. You write short text ads that display next to the search results for specific terms or keywords that people enter in a search engine. You pay for each visitor who clicks on your ad and is then directed to your Web site…

The cost spans a wide range, from a few cents to several dollars per click, depending on how much a certain keyword is in demand among advertisers. You can set a daily or monthly maximum charge to ensure that you don’t outspend your budget.

Google paid click growth slowing – Advertising Shelf Space

Ed: In retail, footage of shelf space matters. Has online advertising become the same?

• Nov 2007, Google stopped using the text box as the click area. Net effect is huge drop in shelf space and more than 25% loss of clicks.
• Google continues to use the text box as the click area on affiliate search pages.
• Yahoo still uses the full box for top of page SEM ads.
• Yahoo extends the click area to the entire title area for skyscrapers.
• CPC click rates and CPM click-through-rates may be statistically un-differentiated when adjusted for square inch of clickable area.

Has advertising become a retail shelf space problem? Is the rest statistical noise? Are we measuring brownian motion?

View NEWS: Cookie Deletion Inflates User Metrics 

View NEWS: New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Display Advertising Click-Through 

View ANALYSIS: Internet Consolidation or Fragmentation?

View	ANALYSIS: Who Earns the Page View?

If the results of a study by SearchIgnite, a search advertising technology firm, prove representative of the broader search market, something unusual happened in search ads in the first quarter: Google lost share to Yahoo in the United States.

The report shows that spending by search advertisers on Yahoo grew a robust 57 percent while spending on Google grew only at about half that rate. That meant Google’s total share of search ad dollars declined slightly to 70.4 percent, while Yahoo’s rose to 24.2 percent. Microsoft’s declined slightly to 5.4 percent.

“It was unusual and unexpected,” said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite…

Google paid click growth slowing

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Google’s (GOOG) US paid-click growth in March was as bad as in
February–up only 2.7%–rounding out a violent deceleration in Q1, says
Comscore (per Mark Mahaney at Citi). In all of Q1, Google’s US paid
clicks rose only 2% year-over-year versus 25% in Q4 and 48% in Q3.

On the face of it this looks like bad news in stark contrast to the good news on 38% UK internet ad spend growth in 2007, but for a couple of reasons it isn’t as bad as it first seems.

The ‘this isn’t so bad after all’ argument notes that the number of searches continues to increase (33% year-on-year to March) and says the decline in clicks is due to Google’s ongoing efforts to improve lead quality for advertisers and the experience for searchers, which has resulted in a much lower search to paid click conversion rate. If this is right the quality of the clicks and hence the revenue per click will have increased – and Googles revenues will still be growing much faster than 2%. Analysts’ consensus is for 25% revenue growth. Results are out on Thursday, which will be interesting.

If this is true we should all be seeing our cost per click increase on adwords, but that will be offset by improved conversion rates. I will start asking my portfolio if that is the case.

I buy the argument that the growth in paid clicks is slowing because Google is trying to increase quality, but I don’t think that development will be totally offset by an increase in the cost per click. Rather, I think that up to now there has been a lot of rather pointless adwords activity which delivered little value to either advertiser or consumer, and that what we are seeing now is that activity tailing off. Partly down to Google, but also partly down to people getting smarter about how they use Adwords, particularly in the face of a recession.

Either way I hope Google’s results match up to analysts expectations. Otherwise I fear confidence in the internet sector will be badly hit, which is the last thing any of us needs.