Marketing Pilgrim

Analysing and Converting Paid Traffic

Andy Atkins-Krüger – WebCertain

In his session Andy looked at the range of ways both a PPC and organic SEO a campaign could be broken down to measure how effective each stage was performing. Aspects such as number of visits, pages views, dwell time and bounce rate were all seen as important elements to measure.

Andy also suggested that rather than take the traditional approach of looking to only improve the final stage of the shopping funnel (i.e. optimising the buy page) improving who gets onto the website in the first instance was equally important.

So to recap, whilst people typically look to the shopping cart for initial conversion improvement—Andy advocated starting at the other end of the chain and at keywords.

He outlined that ‘Better visitors arriving on a site with a proven conversion purchase will increase the conversion just as much OR MORE than the buy page’.

Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO—OgilvyOne Worldwide

Once again SMX London was held at the rather grand New Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden. Unlike the typical chilly days of last November Spring was in the air and to begin the conference Brian Fetherstonhaugh of OgilvyOne took to the stage in front of a packed conference hall to deliver his keynote.

Brian began with addressing the concept that search was the holy grail of marketing. And even more so in a time of recession—the industry itself was still growing at a rate of 10-20% a year! He then told attendees that whilst OgilvyOne had worked with some top brands including American Express, Sears, Ford, Shell, Barbie, Pond’s, Dove and more. But as Brian pointed out, David Ogilvy was kind of crazy! “He was an “interesting and nutty guy”.

Michael Stebbins—Market Motive

Whilst not technically a session I was fortunate enough to hear Michael Stebbins of Market Motive present a little mini-presentation in the Expo hall, which grabbed a lot of people’s attention. I was away from my laptop but managed to type up notes on my iPhone.

His presentation was titled: 15 stupid things you can do to your website:

1. Using lots of JavaScript menus so search engines can’t crawl your website properly.

2. Using stupid keywords—ones that are too competitive or no one is searching for. Michael suggested picking mid-range keywords and work your way up.

3. ‘No Crawl’ added to the robots.txt on the test site, but then accidentally copying that over to the live site when it goes live. This could include using the ‘disallow all’ command in the robots file of a test site and then unwittingly copying that robots.txt file over to the live website.

The ‘Ask the Link Builders’ session was a Q+A style panel at SMX West this year and consisted of Rae Hoffman, Debra Mastaler and Roger Monti.

Q: How do you keep link building white hat?

The general consensus was to stay away from things that go against Google’s terms of service. Debra Mastaler recommended going easy on reciprocal links, site wide paid links and not to be too obvious in what you are doing. Rae Hoffman advised the audience to avoid buying links especially from major networks and to keep anchor text in the inbound links natural. So varying the words used was a good idea.

If in any doubt about the link building activities Rae advised its always worth asking yourself “Is this something I’d be comfortable explaining to Google?” Roger Monti agreed with the others suggestions about staying away from obvious paid link networks—though he recommended that link builders should approach websites direct and do ‘behind the door’ deals.

The following is a special report from SMX West 2009.

Peter Linsley—Google

First up Peter Linsley of Google ran through some of the concepts behind Google images and also factors that may influence ranking of images on Google which included some of the following:

• Number of referring sites—so whether the image is used on more than one website is a key metric in Google’s ranking Algorithm.
• The text around the image and the kind of words contained is also a factor taken into account by Google.
• Also placement of image—and whether it is above the fold

Peter also suggested that other dynamic features were in play. For example can a user comment on the image via a comments box? Or whether the image could be rated somehow.

Kaushal Kurapati—Yahoo

A session on the legal aspects of search and domains was an interesting addition to this years’ agenda. Moderated by Sarah Bird and featuring a selection of legal experts, a range of topics relating to search and affiliate marketing were placed under scrutiny.

Travis Crabtree – Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C

First up was Travis Crabtree. Travis outlined the 2 key criteria that must exist for a case to exist in respect to ‘misuse of Trademarks’. Those two things were either a use in commerce must occur, or that there must be consumer confusion. However differences did exist between California courts and those of New York.

For California courts, using competitors’ tags is a use in commerce. An example given was that a search engine triggered a pop-up ad on the use of the word ‘Playboy’. The California court ruled it was a use in commerce. So trademarks are being protected even in the case of triggering pop-ups. However in New York different rulings are happening. In New York in one example the court ruled it was more like product placement.

The session on search marketing tactics served up a strong panel of speakers. As a result a range of interesting ideas were addressed from common sense optimization tips, to leveraging shopping feeds . . . and even Twitter.

Ethan Griffin – Groove Commerce

First up Ethan’s shared some ECommerce optimization tips with the audience, which included some of the following:

• Use the H1 tag
• Use unique product descriptions (don’t just copy and paste supplier info into the web pages)
• Pay attention to internal linking issues
• Don’t bury folders/directories so that pages appear too deep in the site
• Have the most important content at the top

In respect to SEO activities and links Ethan recommended that webmasters still submit to directories, consider creating separate blogs to drive traffic, use social media and leverage online PR.

Pete Olson – Amadesa

This session looked at ways to better liaise with web developers in the search marketing promotional cycle.

Nathan Buggia – Microsoft

Nathan went through some examples of internal optimisation that the Live team were faced with. One example was that Microsoft had a product that they knew by its full technical name – however online most people were searching for the abbreviated initials ‘Moss’. So whilst originally Microsoft were optimising for the internal long name, the customer base was actually searching for Moss. As a result people searching for ‘MOSS’ were going to affiliate type websites for MOSS and not to the official company pages. Once Microsoft realised what was happening they began to optimise their pages for the keywords users were searching for. The importance of understanding what users are looking for are key whether you’re an in-house SEO or working as part of an agency.