During SES New York, aimClear will be giving away 3 iPod nanos®. The only KPIs are fun and friendship . Ya’ know, one is sliver and the other’s gold. There’s no obligation, (absolutely no data-mining). Each iPod Is Engraved With “#SESNY Search Engine Strategies 2010.

Entering is super easy and there will be three big chances to win, one each day of SES NY. The only catch: you must be a badge-carrying Search Engine Strategies New York 2010 attendee holding a Platinum, Speaker, Press or Exposition pass. Enter now! Here’s How You Play!

Deeply rooted in the same keyword research that advises SEM, nestles the discussion of classic query types and user intent. This conversation has bubbled under the online marketing industry for nearly a decade,  continuously evolving in both sophistication and scope.  The reason is obvious. Leveraging search terms common to consumers is only half the battle-  now more than ever it is crucial to understand nodes of user intent before you shove transactional content at merely walk-by traffic.

While this fascinating conversation can be traced back nearly a decade, the concept really gained traction in 2006 with the boom of social media and a new emphasis on the human behind the keywords. Now we’re talking about ascribing intent to “social segments.” This dialog has proven so important to our daily demographic research that we think revisiting the history of thought-leadership on-topic is in order. Each post below is a worthy read that helps lay groundwork to this fascinating aspect of our semantic craft. We hope you enjoy this walking tour.

25 Classic Query Intent Posts From The Vault
December 18 2006
Why Do People Google Google? Understanding User Data to Measure Searcher Intent
Search Engine Land | Bill Slawski

May 28, 2007
User Intent and Characteristics of Search Queries
SEO by the Sea | Bill Slawski

October 30, 2007
Search Engines and User Query Intent
Search Engine Watch | Eric Enge

February 1, 2008
Two Approaches To Determining Intent: The Wisdom Of Crowds And Personal Values
Search Engine Land | Gord Hotchkiss

February 27, 2008
Create Landing Pages Based on Keyword Intent
CDF Networks | Chad Frederiksen

March 10, 2008
Keyword Intent: Tidy Campaigns Avoid the ‘Dump and Chase’
Search Engine Land | Andrew Goodman

July 17, 2008
Google On User Intent in Search Queries
Search Engine Watch | Nathania Johnson

May 4, 2009
PPC-Man Drowning… Too… Many… Keywords…
Search Engine Land | Andrew Goodman

March 23, 2009
Understanding Your Customers’ Language
Clickz | Mike Grehan

May 27, 2009
The Search Taxonomy: Getting Inside the Mind of the Searcher
SEO Book | Peter Da Vanzo

June 17, 2009
PPC Segmentation: 4 Tips To Better Target Customers
Search Engine Land | Michelle Stern

August 28, 2009
Commercial Intent & Web Search Behaviors
Search Engine Land | Shari Thurow

August 31, 2009
New Research On AdWords Broad-Session-Based Match Type Results
Search Engine Journal | Brian Carter

September 29, 2009
Keyword Commercial Intent – Choosing Keywords That Convert
SEO Wizz | Tim Grice

September 30, 2009
Where to Kickoff Your Keyword Research
Outspoken Media | Rhea Drysdale

November 16, 2009
Leverage AdWords Impression Share Data to Improve Your PPC Performance
Clix Marketing | David Szetela

November 24, 2009
SES Berlin: Google and Microsoft looking for user intent
SearchCowboys | Bas van den Beld

December 7, 2009
Customer Insights via Search Engine Tools from SES Chicago ‘09
Search Engine Roundtable | Chris Boggs & Marty Weintraub

December 14, 2009
How Search Engines might Divine the Intent behind Regional Queries vs. Global Queries
SEO by the Sea |Bill Slawski

March 2, 2010
Mining Subtle Query Intent for PPC Conversion
aimClear | Lauren Litwinka

March 3, 2010
Trends, Zombiebait & Sideways Keyword Research
aimClear | Matt Peterson

March 9, 2010
Targeting Multiple Keywords vs. Singular Keyword Focus
SEOmoz | Rand Fishkin

February 12, 2010
Understanding Content Relevance in Relation to Keyword Intent
KOMARKETING ASSOCIATES | Derek Edmond

And last but not least…

March 25, 2010 (upcoming)
The Evolution of Search: End Users Signal the Way
SES NY Keynote | Yusuf Mehdi

Though this little gem hasn’t taken place yet, we look forward to learning more about Bing’s take on query types and user intent when aimClear attends Search Engine Strategies in New York City a week from today. You might say we’re a little excited for the trip. You might say that.

photo credit: huangjiahui

If you were in the standing-room only crowd for the SEMpdx SearchFest 2010 keynote on March 9, I don’t have to tell you it started off with a bang. And a Bing. If you weren’t there, put it on your docket for next year. Now. In its fifth year, Portland’s SearchFest was all grown up.

Expanded to include three simultaneous tracks, “rock star” search marketers from around the country, and a spiffier venue (the classic Governor Hotel), SearchFest was an impressive event. The content was top-notch and the day was well-organized. But what really struck me was the diversity of the crowd. Many of the attendees were not SEO pros (or planning to be). This was a clear indication SearchFest had expanded beyond a wonky SEO shop talk event into a conference any marketer can learn from.

I think a pivotal part of that expansion happened because SearchFest added a social media track this year and split search marketing tracks into SEO and PPC. In fact, it was interesting that at a conference dedicated to search, the social media track was scheduled in the largest ballroom. This was a reflection, no doubt, of the gold rush social media represents to search marketers and traditional marketers alike.

Of course, having multiple tracks to choose from just confounded me because I always want to see everything. I had to settle for running up and down the stairs to catch a few gems in each category.

Bing Gropes at the Future
Keynote speaker, Stefan Weitz, Director at Bing Search, surprised me. I expected a state-of-the-industry talk with a lot of spin about what makes Bing better. We got that. With a Caprica twist. (I hope you’re watching that show on Hulu.)

Weitz talked a lot about where technology and communications in general are headed, with an emphasis on whiz-bang features yet to come. He seemed especially smitten with augmented reality and geo-local stuff. I have to confess, his enthusiasm was contagious, even if he didn’t always draw a straight line to show how those things would intersect with search. For example, he talked about how the next generation of mapping (helped along by geo-local apps and user-generated video uploads) may include images inside of buildings as well as outside (what we’re used to with maps by that other big search engine).

While Weitz was talking about this, I was just thinking about that guy who got caught having an affair because his car was parked in front of his mistress’ house on Google maps. Urban legend or not, will that guy have to worry about personal photos appearing on a Bing “map” inside a restaurant, too? It seems there may be no rest for the wicked in the brave new Big Brother… er… ah… Bing world.

No vision of search would be complete without a discussion of the semantic Web, and Weitz touched on that, too. “This is the year of the semantic Web,” he stated. Then added a caveat: “But semantic is the most overused and misunderstood word.” He said Bing aims to understand what human beings are asking for instead of making humans understand how to work with search engines. He also noted that Bing would “broker” across several sources to present people with what they want.

Throwing down the gauntlet for best analogy of the day, Weitz compared the text Web to acid washed jeans. “It worked, but it’s not that great anymore. No question it will remain a huge force, but we have an opportunity to think differently about the Web and that forces us as marketers into a whole new business of optimization. All these things will change the way we think about optimizing a page for a client or building a site.”

“Prepare yourself,” he added. “Think of search as a groper of a collection of objects, and an attempt to re-associate all those disconnected items in the Web back together.”

And you thought I was kidding about the groping.

Attention SEOs: Let Copywriters do Their Thing
The first session of the day in the SEO track was “Content.” Stoney DeGeyter of Pole Position Marketing in Canton, Ohio and  Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks in Portland presented their ideas about what makes for good website copy. I have to confess, ten minutes into this preso I thought it should have been titled “Content: For Newbies.” But I feel that way at some point in every conference I attend. They should all offer beginning and advanced tracks, but don’t get me started on that!

DeGeyter emphasized how SEOs and writers can work together. “You don’t want SEOs writing content,” he said. “Not to say they shouldn’t be involved. They should be doing keyword research and guiding writers, but let writers do their magic and work in keywords where it makes sense.”

“Ignore old-school nonsense,” he added. “Don’t worry about keyword density. We’re not counting keywords. Just write for your audience. You need to make sure you’re not just moving keywords around for search engines. Visitors come first.”

DeGeyter stressed the importance of understanding the conversion process when writing for the Web. “Every page should lead your visitor to the next course of action. What do you want someone to do with this information? What’s their next step? Put that in the content. Give them the call to action they need.”

Lloyd-Martin was on the same page, reiterating many of the same points and digging into the process of how writers can figure out everything they need to know about their target audiences, principally (though not solely) through keyword research.

She offered a handy list of things to plan for when writing for the Web:

1. WHO does the writing? New SEO copywriters need training.
2. WHAT pages need to be rewritten? Create an editorial calendar.
3. WHERE does the budget and time come from? Good writing costs time and money.
4. WHY don’t you look at other opportunities for optimization? Consider Twitter, blogs, etc.
5. WHEN are you uploading new pages and making changes? Set deadlines.
6. HOW will you know if it works? Leverage conversion testing.

Facebook: “People are there to have a good time.”
The Facebook panel in the social media track featured tips and tricks from Will Scott of Search Influence in New Orleans and a great case study on Facebook fan page growth from Ilana Rabinowitz of Lion Brand Yarn based out of New Jersey.

Scott talked about ways to build your fan base on Facebook. He recommended getting your employees to suggest the page to all their friends: “Get your team involved. Buy their love if you have to.” He does this via internal contests. He also advised to “reach out to your current fans by any means necessary– email, blog, etc.”

“Facebook ads are the bomb!” he enthused. “They have a lower cost-per-click than traditional pay-per-click advertising.” He stressed that Facebook is immediate, measurable, and it amplifies other media. “We’ve found a very high amount of traffic to our site comes from Facebook, while some of the traffic from other referring sites has gone down.”

Scott’s presentation was chock-a-block full of great ideas – too many to detail here. Perhaps the most interesting was this claim: “From an SEO plus social perspective, Facebook is the killer app.”

Rabinowitz talked about how Lion Brand Yarn went from zero to 100k+ followers on Facebook and how they manage their internal resources to engage with fans. “I’m a big advocate of testing dayparts in almost anything,” she said. “There are a number of tools that allow you to automate posting. Test this over a three-week period over different times of day and different days of the week. Historically, we know with email campaigns you want to send something out at 10:00 am on Tuesday, but Facebook activity often happens after hours. If you can engage people after their kids are settled in, you might be able to get their attention.”

A great anecdotal gem from Rabinowitz (that I agree with): “We noticed our Facebook fans hate Twitter, but Twitter fans don’t mind Facebook.”

PPC for Social Media: Unprecedented Opportunities for Highly Targeted Campaigns
Luther Lowe of Yelp in San Francisco 
and aimClear founder and President Marty Weintraub provided very different perspectives on pay-per-click advertising in the PPC track. Lowe gave a big picture overview of what Yelp is and how it came to be, just touching briefly on its ad products, which aren’t exactly ads. They are actually “sponsored results”- listings that appear at the top of a list after a query. Kind of like Google Adwords meets Citysearch.

Lowe’s key points:
1. Yelp is transactional social media – nobody searches for a plumber just for fun.

2. Most successful businesses on Yelp focus on providing great customer service, not soliciting reviews. The word of mouth will take care of itself.

3. You can figure out how it all works by using Yelp’s free business tools.

An interesting note: apparently Yelp users won’t see all reviews for every business because of Yelp’s review algorithm, which can be perplexing to businesses. “It’s our heart as well as our Achilles heel,” Lowe explained. “The algorithm drives businesses crazy, but we accept that. It turns out consumers want filtering.”

Marty (seems silly to call him by his last name) gave us a high-speed, granular analysis of the opportunities with Facebook advertising. His rapid-fire, off-the-hook presentation style had the usual effect: people talked about it all day.

What I tweeted in the moment pretty much sums it up:

Tools & Competitive Intelligence – spying made easy
The panel on competitive intelligence in the social media track included Neil Patel of ACS in Seattle, Jordan Kasteler of Search and Social in Salt Lake City, and
 Brian Carter of Fuel Interactive in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Here are a few of the highlights.

Carter:

• Online data can be overwhelming, so the best way to start is with questions. What do you need to know?
• Watch for slip-ups by employees of competitors (on social media sites) that may reveal tactics or limitations.
• Don’t spend too much time focusing on competitors– that just makes you a follower. Pay more attention to customers.

Patel:

• Instead of paying for research, you can find out what people want on Twitter.
• Google trends can help you determine what you should be going after if you want to leverage the social web– but you must act quickly because trends change fast.
• Tweetmeme can help you figure out what’s going to be popular before it actually happens.

Kasteler:

• Ways to monitor include: buzz/trends, blogs/RSS feeds, email alerts, social conversation, forums/message boards, and social sharing.
• If you need to monitor tens of thousands of mentions a day on the cheap, take a sample of comments, figure out what words are most common and create a variety of standard queries.

Some of the juiciest tidbits came during the Q&A when the panelists starting discussing how to build fans on Facebook. I think these tips fall under the grey hat category, so I’ll skip attributions:

• Facebook Blaster Pro will help you collect IDs of people.
• You can pay someone to create a tool that will spider a competitor’s fan page, then you can create multiple accounts to connect with those people.
• Create a fan page with your name on it so all your friends will connect there, then change the page to something else later.

Big Take-aways from Searchfest
Marketers from other disciplines have finally decided that they can learn a few things from search marketers, particularly as it relates to playing in social media spaces. PR pros, web designers, eCommerce specialists, channel marketers and more showed up to get insights from those on the front lines of driving Web site traffic and conversions.

Now is the time to master the ever-changing intricacies of Facebook. That includes B2B marketers! Multiple panels examined this dynamic concept: Facebook offers unprecedented opportunities to create the most targeted ad campaigns ever and it’s a great place to build community as well. I would have liked a little discussion of the dark side of Facebook, i.e., their crappy customer service, the fact that fan pages can disappear without warning, and most importantly, you never own your content on Facebook. But it’s the nature of conferences to present the giddy upside.

For real-time comments about SearchFest on Twitter, you can read (and download) the archive I created at Twapperkeeper.com/SearchFest.

To see SearchFest 2010 in pictures, check out Matt McGee’s photostream on Flickr.

credit: Matt McGee

Search Engine Strategies New York is an annual conclave of rare depth and importance.  In search marketing, channels evolve at blazing speed and staying relevant is an intense and ongoing process.  As part of our commitment to stay cutting-edge-current, aimClear team members hit the road for about 80 days of training each year. SES New York is on the shortest-list of must-attend seminars we would simply never miss. Here’s why:

5000 Marketers On A Mission
As robust as social media connections can be, there is absolutely no substitute for in-person networking. It’s not an exaggeration to say that aimClear’s SES participation has been a key building block to our knowledge and growth.  The assortment of industry peers, new friends, human resources, agencies, vendors, speakers & bloggers is stunning.

I’m always astonished to find so many kindred professionals so willing to share, prognosticate, network and party.  We’d never miss Search Engine Strategies New York, if only for the opportunity to feel part of such a close-knit and powerful community.  Look around the room. These are among the most plugged-in and gracious Internet marketers on earth. I’ve made life-long friends, partners & clients at SES.

Critically Important Topics
Really, it’s a matter of survival. A commitment to attend Search Engine Strategies New York is  assurance that your search marketing team will stay relevant. The content is cutting edge. Whatever your bag, you can fill it with goodies here. Dive into best-in-class training to move your SEO, PPC, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social PPC, video, strategy, tools and tactics to the next level.

We’d never miss SES New York because there are so few places to find such deep training, all under one tent. Search industry players tend to hold major announcements for release at SES New York.  In 2008 Google verified that personal search had, in fact, been dialed-in. Attending SES means being part of the industry news cycle, rather observing from afar.

Seriously Relevant Tracks
Each day features themed sessions segmented into “tracks,” this year’s SES Tracks are: Search Fundamentals, Beyond the Crawlers, Search Analytics, The State of Search, Search on the Edge, Search Fundamentals, News & Advertising, Business Track, Geek Speak, OMS Track, Search & Social, Hybrid, Advanced Issues, Geek Track & Clinics. Obviously it would be mistake to miss SES New York. There are very few places in the entire world to find this specialized a concentration of topical matter.

aimClear is Speaking!
I’ll have the pleasure of speaking on the Advanced Keyword Research panel.  Moderated by Jon Myers, SES Advisory Board & Head of Search/Associate Director, Mediavest, my fellow speakers are Yigal Elnekave, Senior Product Manager, Search Advertising Strategy, Microsoft Advertising, Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance, Marcus Tandler, CEO, Creativity in Action.

This session is going to be a burner folks, packed with advanced concepts for building targeted keyword lists whilst providing a basket of practical tools and techniques. We look forward to seeing you at 4:15 -5:15 of Thursday March 25^th.

Awesome Speakers List
The SES New York speaker’s list is a veritable who’s-who in search marketing.  It’s rare to see such a glittering gathering of thought leaders, vendors, up-and-comers and representative of the engines themselves.

What’s most striking is how incredible approachable the speakers are.  Somehow they always seem to find time to chat it up with attendees. Meet your favorite practitioners, bloggers and thought-leaders in person.

New York Hilton Venue
The New York Hilton is one of the coolest hotels in the world. Smack-dab in the middle of Mid-Town Manhattan, it’s only steps to Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, Broadway, Central Park, killer shopping and (of course) the best selection of eateries anywhere in the world.

The grand ballrooms, striking concourses and ornate decorations whisper memories of America’s opulent renaissance.  This hotel is my personal favorite conference location in the world.

Next Gen’ Keynotes
The keynotes promise to be extraordinary David Meerman ScottAuthor, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas… Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google. Yusuf Mehdi Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business, Bing. I’m particularly excited about seeing Avninash speak. His approach to analytics is nearly Zen for those in the know. Don’t miss this chance to see him debut in his first SES NY Keynote.

The City of New York
Never miss a chance to hang out in NYC!  To walk the streets and look around is to discover America’s architectural roots.  The people are an amazing rainbow, a melting pot of what world was and has become.

The restaurant options are stunning, including always-vital China Town & Little Italy fare, Korean, Afghan, South American, Cuban, Kosher and just about every other ethnic permutation imaginable.  Museums, attractions, theater, and music…from neighborhood to neighborhood, the opportunity to experience NYC is always golden.

See You There!
There are many excellent reasons to attend SES New York and we never miss it.  Gather all the information your team needs in one sitting and make life-long associations.  Keep current on rapidly changing trends and tools to keep the team relevant. Partake in New York City’s splendor. We look forward to seeing you there.

Google is planning to test ultra-high speed broadband networks and is considering Duluth as a trial location, among others across the country.

Google Fiber, so you’re considering a move to Duluth…? Join the club. In 1982 I first came to visit. Then after a decade-long love affair with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) to the North, I finally made it here in 95’ and never left. Our office to this day is in famed Canal Park. Many of us here have similar stories of falling in love with Duluth and moving here.

Google, over the coming days, we’ll be sharing aspects of our community and why aimClear, an internationally known search marketing agency & many other tech’ companies, thrive here.  57% of aimClear’s employees were either born in the Duluth/Superior area and/or are a product of University of Minnesota, Duluth or University if Wisconsin, Superior.  Today’s Part 1 shares some background, pictures from our friend Dennis O’Hara & a free music download of one of my songs-deeply inspired by Lake Superior.

I was but in my early 20’s when I first discovered this unique region. So much about Duluth, Minnesota was utterly compelling to me. Having grown up in Boston, summered on Nantucket, frequented trails in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Duluth was like coming home without having ever been. Dude, I could not believe it was Minnesota!

A Vast Inland Sea
Lake Superior is AWESOME.  I was no stranger to the sea’s spectacular grandeur or intense weather for that matter.

Not to worry… the Souls are hardy here, born of Northern European Immigrants. The ore that powered America’s industrial revolution was sent by train from the great Mesabi Range, loaded onto boats in Duluth Harbor and sent to Detroit. Now, taconite pellets have been replaced by high tech’ and tourism.

Duluth is a perfectly placed digital port of call.

Duluth is a world-class pristine wilderness port-city gateway. For generation’s ships of many shapes, sizes and purposes crossed under our great areal lift bridge.  From the Saint Lawrence Seaway Greek, Turkish, Italian and vessels from the farthest waters make their way here.  Google Fiber, it’s awesome here in Duluth.

Now Here’s the Song
Portage to Heaven | Seafarer’s Way .mp3
I recorded this song with some friends in my living room-of-the-day, in a house dug out of the dunes on Park Point, the largest freshwater sandbar in the world. Lake Superior was placid, as the sun set across the rolling dunes on Lake Superior.  Anchored ships on the horizon kissed the sun’s final reflections goodnight.

I was thinking about the mystical nature of Duluth, this gateway to the Boundary Waters & and canoeing “up north” with my sweet daughters. It was late summer 1998. We hope you enjoy my song,  Portage to Heaven.

Duluth Pictures: Dennis O’hara NortherImages.com, Copyright, used by permission.

Canoe Picture: Sylvie Weintraub

Music: “Portage to Heaven,” Marty Weintraub

Dear Marketer-folk: You’re missing serious demographic opportunities. The dual income gay & lesbian household, the force-of–nature purchasing power of latino consumers, teens, tweens & African Americans. You’ve probably read the NYT articles or some Adage infographics on these demographics, but if  these recent advertising efforts are any indication, the boat = still missed.

Paid Search Bullseye was the first time an SMX panel focused around staying relevant  & being true when targeting to users in gay, lesbian, youth & ethnic communities.  Understand that everyone is a consumer and that all marketers should strive to dial in the correct awareness, sensitivity and tact with our marketing messages and techniques to these emerging demographic segments.

* Panelist Introduction *

Graham Mudd - I run search and media practice for Comscore.  I work with search engines, agencies and marketers to help them refine their marketing programs and understand their audience better. I thought this was an interesting panel because this was directly in Comscore’s wheelhouse.

Bill Carter – I’m a partner at a youth culture marketing agency based in New York called Fuse. We were created in 1995 which sort of makes use dinosaur in this space. We work most closely with Mountain Dew and Pepsi. The reason I thought this panel was a great idea, was that I’m especially interested in the use of those offline traditional tactics and where they meet up in the digital space with SEO.

Thomas Roth – I founded community marketing in 1992, which makes me pre-dinosaur. We’ve been working with a variety of clients on gay and lesbian market research since that time. When we started, very few people had been focusing on the LGBT community. We’ve done work with New York life, Wells Fargo, Gallo wine,  and the US census. These are companies and entities interested in fine tuning their approach. The more fine tuned your approach can be, the better your ROI.

Bobby Jones – I’m the VP of Alloy Access. Alloy Access is primarily focused on urban multicultural consumer and better understanding theses multicultural and urban groups. We spend a great deal of time on qualitative research, leveraging for brands, and the last piece is digital. We’re excited to be in here helping you all in leveraging digital platforms in search to reach multicultural consumers.

Speaking first is Graham Mudd of Comscore.

The Economic Environment and It’s Impact on E-Commerce
We’ve seen dramatic growth rates for e-commerce in the past 10 years, except in 2009 we saw a first ever decline. Most of the weakness came from the travel sector, which of course, is discretionary budget. First quarter this year is looking fairly good however.

One of the biggest growth categories they’ve observed are jewelry and watches, this was formerly all offline in the past, so the growth is largely a function of moving transactions previously offline to online. Consumer electronics and computer software were up as well.

The big declines were in toys and hobbies, followed by flowers, greeting, & misc gifts as well as apparel.

How big are the demographic groups we’re talking about?
Youth internet users ages 2-11  make up 10% while youths ages 12-17 make up13% of users. So 23% of all users are under the age of 18. These users tend to be heavily engaged with mobile internet. Also there’s an obvious daypart issue, where usage spikes right after they got done with school.

Black & Hispanic internet users each represent around 11% of all internet users. Hispanic growth rates on marketing rapidly outpace any other internet group.

Inside the Hispanic population, you have to understand that not all users are the same in language preference. Over 1/2 of all these users prefer English language, less than a quarter would characterize as Spanish primary, another 30% consider themselves bi-lingual.

What types of content resonate with these audiences?
2-11 year olds consume 1000% more content on kids site than the average internet users. There’s also a serious propensity towards gaming information as well as entertainment. Teens think of the web largely as an entertainment medium, for the most part, they are thinking of the internet as primary and the television as secondary.

Hispanic internet users are focused on two categories – everything entertainment as well as travel, attributed to the fact that they seek to maintain ties to family members in other countries.

With Black internet users Comscore has seen a real propensity towards career development and training. Black internet users are 60% more likely than the average internet user to visit training and information sites as well . The African American internet population tends to skew a bit older overall.

Creative Strategies and Findings for Retailers
Comscore has found four principle techniques for successful creative and messaging.

Quantify the Benefits – Vague statements like ” lower prices” don’t resonate as well as a number, $19.99 etc.

Multiple executions make a big difference – Take advantage of frequency by showing  a number of message & ordering these in a meaningful way makes  a big different.

Emotional content catches attention – The degree that you use rich media makes a big difference.

Make the brand prominent – The brand is a powerful thing, don’t sell yourself short. If you’re brand is resonating, make it front and center.

Up next is Bill Carter of Fuse

Why does the Youth Culture Matter?
There are 82 million teens and young adults in this country, 90% are online, and 75% use social media regularly. They hold a purchasing power of over 200 billion a year with nearly 1/2 of them  making online purchases. 1 in every 3 dollars spent are influenced by someone under the age of 18.

Fuse started working for Gatorade almost 2 years ago, when they decided they needed to become less involved in stick and ball sports and more into action sports. They set out to have their offline tactics amplified online around specific events and promotions. Gatorade developed sponsorships with all of the Transworld (those super-thick skateboarding mags on the floor in your buddies basement) web properties and the social media component coupled with all of these added to their success.

Speaking next was Thomas Roth

LGBT Research Methodology
They developed a  survey panel of over 50,000 LGBT consumers from around the world. This represents “out”  LGBT media consumers who regularly use the internet.

Get beyond the concept of the gay market
There’s not a  “gay and lesbian market,” there are so many diverse markets inside of this. Lesbians in Portland Oregon are more likely to own a Prius than any any other gay & lesbian group in the country, as one example.

Some General Gay & Lesbian Internet Stats

• Gay men on average use  the internet for non-work leisure time for 14/hrs a week, while Lesbians are on 11/hours a week

• 66% of gay men & lesbians log into Facebook once a month.

• 39% of gay men responded to ads on LGBT blogs.

• 51% visit mainstream internet daily, and about 91% are checking their emails all day long.

Key Industries and Leaders for GLBT
Tourism travel and hotels are leading the charge, starting all the way back in 1992 with American Airlines. Consumer electronics and appliances follow after. Banking and financial recognize these demographics as extremely important because many in the LGBT community are identified as DINCs (Double Income, No Children). This may be shifting with increased adoptions & US legislation.

Search and internet marketing for LGBT should be part of a comprehensive plan. Approaching the LGBT community from a wide variety of angles will lead to the best results. Their are display ad opportunities in LGBT media.

Inreach before Outreach
Inreach is surprisingly not in the dictionary. It would be defined as: to lay a good foundation within your company and your own best practices before you do  an outreach. If your company is just slapping a rainbow on an ad when they don’t  have good hiring practices, and they discriminate against LGBT person in their own company, have the potential to fail/have a PR disaster.

Case Study: Sweden Tourism
Sweden created a  special landing page that is gay and lesbian oriented. In Travelocity – there is GayTravelocity.com that mirrors the overall website but focuses on dedicated LGBT content. All of your marketing approaches should point people to your LGBT landing page. This is one of the first things you do to maximize your results.

Visit Sweden also developed a gay and lesbian facebook page, they also are on twitter and organize special events; this is prime example of a holistic, authentic and comprehensive approach.

They didn’t just slap a rainbow on it their previous tourism message, Sweden actually has gay marriage and progressive policy, things that make their organization congruent with their marketing message.

Speaking next was Bobby Jones from Alloy Access

Case study on Hennessy Artistry -
This is a global music property from the Hennessy brand. Alloy was tasked with working with the property to make it more relevant with their demographic – 25-34 African American and Hispanic males

Mobile Program Strategy
Alloy started to engage the Hennessy audience on their mobile phone at the point of inspiration.  Leverage this to drive awareness and buzz around the property;  a two way dialog around the brand and consumer that provides value for the consumer.  Next, they set out to build a community around this engagement.

They always like to go back to the consumer to know what they can build around. This is what they knew about their audience beforehand.

1. Very connected to their technology and eachother, always want to be in the know and connected to things and people important to them

2. Insatiable need for new content, they always want to have access with whatever is available at the time.

3. Very much values social currency, what they know versus what other social networks know.

4. Convergence – they want to do all of these things wherever and whenever they want.

Know Where the Consumer Are, Know Where They Are Going and Meet Them There
You want to be leveraging existing outlets, communities & other hangouts where users go to interact. One outlet was a number of urban radio stations. From this they developed an interactive mobile music widget that encompassed all of this. They also leveraged point of sale – whenever users went to buy a bottle of Hennessy in store, they made sure that their widget logo was prominently displayed for reinforcement.

The end result was an integrated approach where this widget provided features  like direct to mobile download & access to all of the contests. Users were also able to post/embed this widget to other online properties.

The programming was hugely successful in the short period of 8 weeks with over 1.1. million combined engagements, opt-ins, widget embeds downloads and click throughs.

* Question & Answer Session *

Misty Locke – I found it interesting that each of you spoke about the segmentation and how to market to each of your consumer demographics, when I start thinking, it doesn’t seem that hard. But then why is is that so little budget is siphoned off to each these targeted demographic areas.  Everyone talks about wanting to segment, what is the hold up? Is it volume , is it a fear of doing something wrong?

Bobby – I think it’s two things. One is that there seems to be this constant desire to create efficiency among media marketing dollars and that quest for efficiency creates inefficiency. You end up talking to everyone on a topical level instead of a meaningful one. As brand starts to understand the cultural and lifestyle nuances that influence purchases, they’ll be better equipped to communicate. The second thing is you need to truly understand your consumer, and the  subtle distinction between them. There’s always going to options for dealing with inefficiencies.

Bill – I agree with all of that, one thing I’ve observed is that  Fortune 500 companies have an unbelievable fear of alienating anyone. With Harley Davidson, the average Harley consumer is 55 years old, that goes up by a year every year. In ten years they’re not going ot have that base. When they came to us they said “we want to reach men in their early twenties,  we have this product we want to put out there.” When we went for them with messaging that would be really relevant to men in their early 20’s, they said” No no no, men in their 50’s aren’t going to like that.” Well, of course. The fear of alienating a core customer is the number one reason that appropriated budget fails.

Graham – Just to add to that, what’s been discussed is exactly right. Larger brands operate at scale “How can I find the most efficient way to reach the most users and have the most impact. It used to be the case that you didn’t have much choice, but everyone watched and consumed in the same way, that’s not true anymore. Marketers really need to think about that way they talk to consumers in much the same way.

Thomas – One size fits all doesn’t really fit under the umbrella of LGBT anymore. We’ve found that LGBT Latinos want to be spoken to differently. Talk about fear, LGBT certainly has faced those issues. With American Airlines and Wells Fargo, they have not had this issue, they’ve embraced the communities. Wells Fargo has gotten tremendous ROI on their LGBT approach. You can’t just be all things to all people. Same thing with gay and lesbian market – it may be small changes you make, but you need to get it right.

Misty- As this session has gone on, I started getting overwhelmed with, “Am I going to have to always segment hispanics & teens & LGBT & african americans?” Are we going to get segmented to where it’s not efficiency,  are we missing the point?

Thomas – You really do need to segment, are younger lesbians your market, are southeast US lesbians your market?

Misty – If  I’m marketing to a teens or youths, should I consider it breaking it down even further with different users, segmenting with keywords we purchase?

Bobby – It starts with the research, the younger African American consumer girls are less about ethnic identify, but I see myself as a teen, as a skater, as a boarder.  Even within that, it’s about understanding what those interests and passions play in making those purchases. Is it worth it to get to that level of detail? When you also understand that a particular segment plays, you should be able to already have the insights to dial it up for that particular group, or consider that they also may be influential to other groups. (Matt note -Awesome idea to ponder)

Question-  Most of your examples apply to national campaigns, with our large but non-national company, when we geotarget, we carry so few impressions. How can we geotarget to these segments effectively?

Bill – One of portion of the Gatorade strategy is to have a host of brand ambassadors, we have 150. They may be a manager at  a local skatepark, these are mostly at a local level. We ask them to do a number of things online that are at their disposal, with their own social media. They’ve been very successful because they keep it very localized. The brand ambassador that’s a skatepark manager in San Jose is successful because he stays local and the kids there do follow him on twitter and friend him on facebook. Even for a brand like Gatorade – if you add up all the brand ambassador activity, the localized approaches do have a lot of impact

Bobby – If you look at the hispanic community, they overindex in terms of household purchases. Hispanics from a search standpoint look for information at every phase of the process, what’s the best, what’s the best deals, what do other people think about it. You have a consumer group that is looking for information that’s relevant in their community to make decisions at a very local level. You can have a very powerful effort that’s targeted to regional and local communities that can add a lot of impact when aggregated across locations.

Question – Do you have any suggestions on search specific strategies when targeting communities?

Bill- I’ll take a quick stab at this with Gatorade, think about how long skateboarding has been around, how many brands are involved, then you have Gatorade coming in late to the game, already a crowded field. You hava a few choices to make. You can develop a strategy using a lot of money, fighting it out over time. Look, even if you win the numbers game, you’re not going to win the authenticity game, the kids are going to see you bought your way in. Take a more subtle approach to develop relationships with pro skaters and pro snowboarder, search on specific snowboard sponsors names – you’re going to start see the brand come to life.

Graham – Authenticity matters & content is really key. To say that it’s going to be as easy as my broad landing page coupled with all of my audience keywords will drive volume, not the case. You need to develop content that resonates well with moms or hispanics. Also understand that a brand may not fit with a demographic. If there’s really no way that a LGBT consumer thinks differently about laundry detergent, you maybe shouldn’t target them differently.

Thomas – But marketshare is everything.  If you can be the first to market laundry detergent to LGBT, buy that marketshare. AmericanAairlines was the first do this and they’re unshakeable with that market.

Question- What % of internet users are LGBT

Graham – This is not something we ask when panelists join Comscore , but it’s something between 4-10% of the internet population in general, but because of their affluency, they tend to overindex.

Question – How does economic and educational activity affect the way people connect?

Graham – I can take a first swing at it at least,  internet usage correlates fairly well with fluency, it does take discretionary spending to subscribe to an ISP. Youth internet users are definitely users of mobile and shared computers, so IP targeting is not as effective.

Bobby- The digital divide is closing between consumers of different affluency. Multiculturalausers will go wherever they need to go to get online and check their social networks, in terms of available tools, whether it be schools, libraries or mobile phones.  Lower income communities have less convient resources, but their resourcesfullness closes that gap.

photo credit: *Micky

<FACEPALM> In the past we’ve attended major industry conference-shindigs as one big live-blogging family. But dude, the aimClear team is expanding. Our 2010 conference agenda and travels to and fro might damn near pull us apart at the seams if we all went. In this quarter alone some of us will be returning from SXSW while others ship off to SES NY, some will fly back from the 140 Character Conference as Marty jet-sets to Sydney to speak at SMX… You get the picture.

Instead of falling prey to exhaustion-induced spontaneous combustion, we decided to send out a few members at a time to cull coverage from different conferences. Why, at this very moment our own Matt Peterson is covering the final day of sessions at SMX West 2010 in sunny Santa Clara, California. Meanwhile, back in Duluth- aimClear (like so many others) is living vicariously through tweets featuring the #SMX hashtag. All this hashtag monitoring really got us thinking: which conference tweets were useful and which… not so much.

As per usual, there are those who know how to successfully leverage Twitter for valuable session coverage and  those who casually tweet unrelated stuff which dilutes the tweet stream.

Since the folks at home can’t exactly tune out the noise when monitoring an all-encompassing conference hashtag, we decided to put together this DO and DON’T “suggestion list” for those in the field.   We mean no offense to any attendee mentioned here. We love your tweets, too. Everybody is beautiful in their own way.  This post speaks to what served our needs as we consumed the conference from afar and nothing else.

DON’T turn into a twelve year old girl at a Britney Spears concert:

DON’T actually answer the question, “What are you doing?”:

DON’T tell us you’re in a session and then leave us hanging:

Oy. Now, onto the goods. These folk take the time to tweet and retweet coverage that’s actually of value to the stuck-at-home search marketer. They serve as successful contributions to the stream of SMX tweets.

DO tweet session details (i.e.: Who spoke? Was it good?) to accompany links to coverage
@Echwa | Damien Anderson
@pcmguy | Larry Bruce

DO tweet a gem from the session along with a link to the coverage:
@portentint | Ian Lurie

DO tweet links to places where we can get a collection of your conference coverage:
@BruceClayInc | Bruce Clay, Inc.
@bbille | Brian Bille

DO tweet breaking news!
@KevinPike | Kevin Pike

DO tweet tips and tidbits even if you’re without a link to coverage:
@lookadoo | Dana Lookadoo
@ProminentPlcmnt |Prominent Placement
@ravenpratt | Taylor Pratt

DO recommend valuable sessions for us to check out (before, during or after):
@balibones | Everett
@Jeff_Martin | Jeff Martin

DO directly quote the top dogs even especially if it’s vulgarly hilarious:
@jordankasteler | Jordan Kasteler

And let us not dismiss the less conventional but still useful alternative ways to employ a conference hashtag.

DO wish well to those in the trenches:
@SusanEsparza | Susan Esparza

DO bring us along after hours (so long as it’s PG-13):
@jillwhalen | Jill Whalen
@lookadoo | Dana Lookadoo

Well, even if it’s not 100% PG-13:
@sheigh | Sheigh

DO use it as a geo-locating device to reach out for help:
@graywolf | Michael Gray

DO share on-going jokes about screaming CEOs with the rest of the class:
@jtyost2 | Justin Yost

In a perfect world, we’d all be right there with Steve Ballmer as he wowed the crowd with the volume of his voice. Instead, we have to hope those fortunate enough to be at an event like SMX West will treat the hashtag with reverence… or, at least, a sense of humor that actually, well, makes  sense.

Peter Norvig

SMX West Day 2 kicked off with a keynote from the genial Mr. Norvig, while Search Engine Land’s Chris Sherman & Danny Sullivan picked his behemoth brain. The keynote was split into two parts, first a laundry list of notable Google Research accomplishments, followed by a Q & A session with Danny & Chris.

21 Projects from Google Research in 15 Minutes

#1 Person Finder – After the Chile earthquake , Google built an app engine application where you can hook up with people you know in Chile and find out if they are okay. Was developed in a short amount of time.

#2 Google Power Meter – Plug in a device into your house and find out how much power you use each day. In some cases, after installing the meter, users starting cutting down on consumption by 25%.

3. Earth Engine – An app that works as an overlay with Google Earth data, displays with deforestation data for instance, tons of potential.

4. Trikes and Snowmobiles – Google is taking Google Streetview where no car has gone before. They had a snowmobile pulling steetview data at the Olympics, apparently.

5. User Photos In Google Streetview

6. Image Swirl – Google’s image reconnection software – do a search query,  get images and they are then  put together in piles of images that look similar (Matt note – this one can get tricky)

7.  Web Scale Image Annotation – Google has taken a set of images and the queries that triggered them and then matched them up across several languages, more like an inter-lingual translation model.

8. Image Rotation Captcha – Google is currently looking at ways to make captcha’s easier, like showing a picture that’s rotated and your task is to rotate it correctly.

9. Google Goggles – This is an application that runs on a phone with a camera, when you take a picture with a camera in San Francisco-  the application it will tell you it’s the Golden Gate Bridge ( if it’s actually in the picture).

10. Discontinuous Video Screen Carving – This is sort of like squishing pictures down to a smaller aspect ratio in Photoshop, but for video. You can take 1 frame in a video and you can squish it together, and track that from 1 frame to the next

11. Sharing Cluster Data -  A high level view of data on all jobs running in Google’s cluster – how much memory the jobs took, how much time, wow, useful.

12. App Inventor for Android – An introductory program development environment currently being used in some highschool and college dev classes. Really, it’s a  visual programming language for Android where you can snap blocks together and build working applications.

13. Speech Recognition on Phones – Enough said.

14. Punctuation & Capitalization in transcribed speech – Now they’ve built a language model that gets periods, commas and quotes right in transcribed speech.

15. A Translating phone – Google has talked about this possibility & though they’re not there yet  they’ve got the two pieces – machine translation and voice recognition,  just have to put them together.

16. Low Resource MT(Machine Translation) For Yiddish – There’s not a lot of written text in yiddish – 98% is actually hebrew, google was able to do Yiddish translation by falling back on other languages that share similar attributes

17. Sound Understanding – Go to Youtube, search for something that sounds like a rooster and they’ll give you that. They produce a sonogram for each video & then couple that with their image processing features.

18. Google Squared – This is essentially Google building a database of attributes by scraping off pages

19. Clustering- A project for clustering of words within a context. If you type in the Whistler – clusters around the painting, the city in Canada, the bird. Really awesome.

20. Attribution Extraction – For example, this project can recognize a cluster for basic foods, then find & sort  attributes  in documents -  pounds, cup, kinds, bowls &  in queries – nutritional value, health benefits, glycemic index etc.

21. Browser size – showing percentages of what people can view on your page compared to browser size.

In conclusion, Peter proffers this quote

” You can observe a lot just by watching” – Yogi Berra

*Question & Answer with Peter Norvig*

Chris Sherman – Can you give us a broad overview of how you approach research project?

Peter – Anyone can go out and start a project on their own. People are open and when you get an accumulation of enough people saying something is interesting,  then they start developing. One thing that makes it easier is the infrastructure we’ve built that makes it easier for people to have experiments.

We’re not looking at a powerpoint slide, it’s a demo. Sure it’s not finished,  it has some ragged edges, but it’s a demo. At Google, they already want to build the tool, so when you start experimenting, you’re immediately running it all over the web. One thing unique to Google is that we run production services out of research. Once we have something that we think is pretty good in research, we don’t roll it over to engineering, we keep the same team and run it out of research.

Chris – Any of the things you showed us today has a practical application. How do you decide the balance of where you focus your efforts?

Peter - I think we’re  always pushing hard to create something useful.

Danny Sullivan – What do you think are some of the biggest things to come out of the 20% time (Matt note – Google encourages its employees and engineers to spend 20% of their time on other projects that interest them)

Peter – One story is, Paul Buccheit did both GMail and Adsense in his 20% time because he was frustrated that it was easier to search the web than it was his own email.  Then he said, “Well how are we going to pay for this, maybe show ads on the side, and then they said why not on the SERPs too?”  He doesn’t think that was 20% time, but as soon as he had the idea, it transferred over to 100% time.

Chris – How much are Larry and Sergey hands on, today?

Peter – They’re very hands on. They see themselves as having two goals.  One is the long range direction of where the company is heading. Two, they’re trying to evaluate as many projects as they can. They’re just as involved as ever, to them they’re life hasn’t changed. To the rest of us, it has because the interval that they can get around to any one project is a lot longer.

Chris – You have research facilities all over the world, are they segmented by region or project?

Peter -Certainly you want to have experts in the local language and culture & that ranges from the mundane – getting all the translations right to novel types of search product. There’s also the aspect of “we need more engineers, and we can’t hire them all in one place.”

Chris – Google has moved very quickly to incorporate realtime and social search, but you don’t have the same signals with that type of stuff, it seems like that would be a big challenge to come up with the relevant signals without endangering your core search product?

Peter – One thing I think is still overhyped is Pagerank. People think you do this computation on the web graph and order all pages by that. That computation is important, but it’s just one of many things. We never felt that it was such a big factor, it’s got a catchy name, but we’ve always looked at all available data. The fact that there aren’t legacy links (in realtime and social), we don’t think of that much different. What enables that is the infrastructures we’ve built that makes it possible to do real time. Look, when I started, the index was once a month.

Danny – It’s interesting when you talk about Pagerank. Is it time for someone to put together a catchier name for Google Rank?

Peter – I think that’s right, there’s confusion that there’s this one component called Pagerank, but that also, all of the algorithm is somehow based on Pagerank.

Chris – With the Caffeine structure update, how much does your group put into that?  Also, we hear that Caffeine is is in place by now but also some conflicting data saying it isn’t.

Peter – We have one data center, testing very well, & we’ll be rolling out further. Specifically, who in my group is working on that?  It turns out, that system programming stuff is not done typically in research.

Danny – Back to the ideas of signals and rankings,  do you have some that you can share that people might not realize? People understand link aspect, but like with local search,  you’re take local citations etc, what can you share with us?

Peter – In a lot of cases, you can think of it as saying we are manufacturing links that way, we can recognize this as a business or something else. I showed some of the recognition of objects and they’re attributes (idea #20). With Google books, when you’re scanning books, they don’t have hyperlinks, but they do have bibliographies, so we build links that way. I know that this community is interested in finding just the right keywords & synonyms, but also know we’re trying to help to do that as well.

Chris – Is there a division between your focus on the core search vs advertising vs other products?

Peter – There’s certainly a fundamental distinction that this side of the house is given this side of the page – this other group is given this side of the page. You can’t have your editorial team mixing with your advertising team, the teams are working separately to try to keep those distinct.

Chris – IS there more work put into ads vs something else?

Peter – I don’t know if there is in terms of total numbers. T think there are different types of challenges, but we do think of those two as being the real core, then the periphery is other products like Gmail.

Danny – Are we getting to the point where having the index of objects?

Peter- I think we’re starting to get there, where we had the objects in there and their attributes. Google Squared is one example were you can see companies, and then their executives and revenues, but I think we are moving in that direction. That’s driven by a lot of factors. People want better answers, to do more with them and we want to support these types of queries, like  “Show me these companies and rank them by revenue.”

Chris – You have a background in AI, 20 years ago speech recognition was called improbable. What kinds of things are you seeing as problems that will take a while to crack.

Peter – Vision is the big problem, speech recognition and translation. The vision problem for still images and video images is challenging both for computation issues – so much more data involved in a video. Then also it’s just messier, trying to parse these pictures up into objects. Words are very nice, you can differentiate much easier

Danny – Got any solutions for email, I think people would like to have something to process email to deal with all that stuff they have on their plate.

Peter – I had an intern working on the project because that really bugs me. (Matt note – this is a joke, go ahead, you can laugh) Watch out for future stuff we’ll have that we’re still playing with. The other thing, is email really the right tool? Maybe just slashing that all down and starting all over will help. If the new model is wave or buzz or twitter? I don’t know what the right answer is, sometimes starting over is the next step.

Chris – Your teams, are they using wave internally?

Peter – Some certainly are, people are trying to figure it out where it works best. When you start something new you have these choices – do i make a google wave, do a make a gdoc, do a make a google site? I think we’re going to have to see some consolidation, you don’t make the choice with technology, you make the choice with content.

Danny – We do have all these differnt tools and more and more information, and let’s not forget video. Who’s winning, the new information blowing in or the ability to keep up?

Peter – We’ll, we’re managing the ability to search through it very well. wW’ll need more help in really finding the best things. I subscribe to an email mailing list, but what I’d really like to subsrcibe to is “What email in this mailing list have been read by 70% of the users.” More ways of describing what’s useful and what’s not.

Chris – Sergey talked about embedding a chip in your head to search google, anyone working on that?

Peter – Not yet, Jim Reese is gone so no more brain surgeons.

Danny – If you want to grow up and be a search engineer, how do you go about insuring people are ready to work at google?

Peter – Ties with the academic industry. In other industries, you get trained in school and you get a job pretty quickly. People that come to google often say “Wow, everything i knew is wrong.”

Chris – Do you move people in around in google? Microsoft is very well built for moving people from project to project.

Peter – We encourage that, we like to keep our projects short so you can finish one and move up or move on. I think I found more often than not, you finish a 3 month project and you say “wow so many ideas came up from that, I want to work heer for my next 3 month project.”

Danny – What do you see as next in search, are we going to have dramatic changes finally?

Peter – I don’t know, I think you see the search results page becoming more interesting and varied, not just a list of 10 links now. I think you’ll see the result page look more like a newspaper page. That’s one aspect. Mobile is also driving things hard, you’ve got such a small screen, that will require more of a partnership to make it work. I think we’re going to have to learn a lot more about what your personal context is.

Some people think keyword research consists of going to the Google Keyword tool, typing in four of their industry phrases & then just grabbing the keywords with the highest volume. But some people are ultra DumbPants month-punchers & need additional research guidance in order to find the highly targeted keyword permutations, relevant stemming topics & true opportunities for their brand/product/designer puppy-couch site. Where should a  DumbPants month-puncher search marketer begin look for these keyword opportunities?

Starting things off on Tuesday afternoon’s SMX West 2010 Keyword Research: Beyond The Ordinary panel was Christine Churchill, of Key Relevance.

Christine asked how many of us run a blog or newsletter. As a big advocate for the editorial calendar, Christine’s newsletter team used to identify topics and stories they’d run over the course of a year- leveraging it mainly for advertising.

The opportunity therein was to associate this calendar in tandem with seasonality of keywords trends. If you know a keyword’s trend is cyclical, you can use a keyword calendar as a proactive planning measure. Groundhog’s Day, Washington’s birthday (the only holiday I personally celebrate), events of this nature- Christine recommends listing these early in the month and generating videos and articles as much as several months ahead of time. Taking a proactive approach to these efforts gives you an appreciable jump-start on ranking your content during a time that correlates with the keyword peak.

In-house, Christine’s team uses Excel to plan their keyword goals and organize by different months/seasons/ events/trend phrases. From there, they develop separate keyword lists for the most optimal terms.

Trending Tools
Christine employs any and all of the following: Google Hot Trends Google Trends, Google Insights, Yahoo Buzz, Google Analytics, Site Search, Google Keyword Tool.

A lot of people ask Christine how to get associated trend data in the Google Keyword Tool. By default, the Keyword Tool doesn’t offer very much information. But if you go to the keyword drop down, select “Show All” and compare volume month by month for the keyword phrase, you can get a bigger picture.

With Google Trends you can compare similar keywords such as “swimsuits” and “bathing suits.” There are obvious trends here. Christine recommends working at the lower volume times of the year so that you can position yourself to be out front well before the trend spikes again.

With Google Hot Trends, you can query in specific dates. Check out trending topics from different times last year… will they be hot again?

Google Real-Time Search takes the terms showing up in hot trends and actually embeds them as a chart. Consider trend data from the tsunami on Saturday. This concept is similar for Twitter trending topics.

Yahoo Buzz provides a little pull-down menu that lets you compare different time periods to see what’s hot.

Who benefits from this?
Anyone publishing online. This type of data gives all of your departments keyword ideas. There’s a lot of traffic out there on seasonal and event-related phrases. It will seriously blow your mind. Funnily enough, this traffic and data are all to often overlooked. Consider making seasonal traffic evergreen (like the tree!). Think ahead, plan ahead and have content waiting in the wings to get out there right when you need it.

Next up was Taylor Pratt, Product Marketing Manager at Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Keyword Research Brain Dump
Taylor wanted to give us a brain dump of all the out of the ordinary keyword tactics he uses. We had to be careful because brain dumps are notorious for attracting zombies.

Analytics Insight
A lot of Taylor’s techniques pair with Google Analytics.

• Abuse Custom Reports- set two dimensions, set your keyword, then set a subdimension with the timeframe you want that report for. At the top, set a metric so you can look at things that are negative, bounce rate, exists, goal completions, pageviews, etc… your goal is to go outside the obvious.

• Match keywords with landing pages – at the beginning of a campaign, you already have traffic pointing to specific pages. Are the keywords you are targeting sending traffic to the right pages? Are they converting? Setup is easy. On the sidebar of Analytics, go to Traffic Sources -> Keywords -> Landing Pages . This will generate a list of all landing pages associated with your site- all you have to do is filter out your branding pages. This will also show which pages amass which keyword data.

End Keyword Bias
We all have a keyword we want to win, but it’s important to try to maintain objectivity. One way to do this is to export all your keyword data, then black out each keyword- this will force you to only look at metrics and prove value in an unbiased way.

PPC Testing For Clicks
Set up your traditional PPc testing campaign. Do you keyword testing normally, but run it through AdWords and set your results to display broad match that direct.

PPC Testing For No Clicks
Some keyword tools out there are all just estimates. Try using exact match and phrase match- at the end of your campaign, export this data in a report to get a better idea of impression data.

User Testing
Hopefully you’re testing your site to make sure it’s user-friendly. If not, you should seriously take advantage of this. Ask your users, “Can you describe what this page is selling? How would you describe it to your friend?” Pay attention to the keywords they repeat a number of times.

Facebook Ad Testing
Set up an ad as normal and segment. You don’t have to run the ad, just use the demographic tool to get a handle on how many people it can reach.

Twitter Search
You can use this basic search feature to compare speed of volume for a given keyword.

Interview Key Stakeholders
Consider sending a questionnaire to customer service reps and secretaries to gather what words they’re using to describe your products and services.

Google Adwords Tool
Select URL targeting- plug in the unpersonalized Google SERP for your keywords- this will provide a scan of the top ten results and recommend words to target. Do this also for Wikipedia pages, Amazon product pages, eBay pages… even directory listings in multiple categories.

Stoney deGeyter, President of Pole Position Marketing took the stage after Taylor.

Stoney began by tackling how to organize keywords into highly targeted, customer focused campaigns.

When you do keyword research, he pointed out, there are things you are trying to discover about your audience

• Who is the target audience?
• What are they interested in?
• What needs of their can you meet?

Not All Keywords You Get are Equal
You need to learn to sort through your keyword lists. Sure, you have your single keyword of high volume, but they’re not necessarily targeted. Rarely do they even turn out to be worth your while.

• Multiwords - less search volume but the ROI starts to show improvement.

• Phrase variations - allow you to create a various keyword lists from just a few keywords.

• Localized keywords - take your broad words and add your localizations and geoqualifier references.

• Convertibility - will this keyword convert for you or not, independent of volume.

• Search Volume – note this most frequently, but don’t let it be the only factor you consider.

• Informational queries – if you’re selling, disregard these most of the time, although they might be good food for blogs. The first time someone searches for something is usually not that last time they search- as they learn, they type in more refined queries, more specific searches.

• Core terms – look through your site and identify the two or three words that best describe what each page is about. Eliminate obvious things (your page is about sports bags,  but just “bag” won’t help you). Take your core terms  and start mapping the, out through the site. Have a plan before optimization… take every core term into consideration, and ask yourself, “Which keyword best fits each individual page?” From there, start mapping relevancy.

Qualifiers and Variations
Take your core term “beauty supply” and start adding your qualifiers to it – “store,” “discount,” plurals, “natural…” usually there are 75-100 qualifiers to append to you core term.

Quality
As you’re building this list, consider the intents and desires surrounding the phrase. Consider trends, seasonal and future. Also look at ROI- fill in areas where other people aren’t, places without competition. There is often a good ROI to get out of this.

Organize for Performance
Look at what’s achievable – don’t go after the most difficult keywords. Figure out what will give you the quicketst result, and figure out what will be the most profitable.

Four Prioritizations

1. Search Volume – we all tend to look at this, but again, it shouldn’t be the only factor you consider
2. Target Audience - not every keyword that looks good is your best bet
3. Profit Margin – consider this on a keyword by keyword level
4. Meet Demand – if you’re going after the keyword that’s optimized, yet you find you can’t meet the demand, truly consider how good of an investment it is for you

Segmenting Keywords
Start looking at keywords by theme: Is this a research keyword?  Is this shopping? Informational? Or are people ready to buy?

Don’t forget group-related qualifiers – vintage and exotic go together, discount and cheap go together.

Next up was Alex Coen, Senior Marketing Manager at Click Equations.

Alex admitted that he doesn’t belong on this panel… to prove it, he spent the next 10 minutes convincing us to stop doing keyword research and instead, focus on PPC and search query mining.

3 Critical Goals of Keyword Research

1. Volume – find the words with the greatest value.
2. Competition - find a balance between high volume and something that’s realistic from a budget side- PPC or man hours, SEO, etc.
3. Intent - find out what questions you want to answer, uncover goal of the person who is doing the search. Alex loves intent because it’s what makes you money at the end of the day.

Common Sources of Keyword Research Data
Keyword Tracker buys access to databases from metacrawler and dogpile. Tools like WordStream buy data from ISP. The weakness is that there is no cost or conversion. Google AdWords Keyword Tool doesn’t give you any conversion data either. None of these tools tell you whether or not it’s worth your time to go after any given keywords.

What is a search query?
When someone searches for “buy web analytics 2.0″ they have a specific goal in mind. Your job is to figure out which questions you want to answer, and then how much you’re willing to pay to deliver that answer.

Where are the search queries?
You can find this in information in Google Report section under Search Query Performance. Bing and MSN let you do this. For Yahoo, you have to call your rep.

3 High ROI Ways to Use Search Queries

1) Build Out Negatives. Find the biggest leaks, gather all the keywords on broad match and sort by number of unique queries. If there are a high number of matches, chances are, they are not as valuable to you. Create a report of all search queries that haven’t generated a click or an assist and do that over a specific time period. Once you have those words, go into your tool and add them as negatives. This a great way to cut costs quickly.

2) Improve Alignment Between Keywords, Queries & Text Ads. Let’s say you are a marketing manager at a Porsche- you have the word Porsche on broad match and this attracts a lot of different searches. If you just use that on broad match,you can’t possible write a text ads that appeals to all the unique needs of searchers. Instead, use the search query data to build out separate ad groups and separate text ads to appeal to a variety of needs. Use this data to improve how you target people in your ads. This data also helps you identify obviously bad ad groupings.

3) Convert winners to exact match. Promote is a better term. If you’re using all three match types, Google will generally prioritize exact match, which beats phrase match as well as broad match.

Bonus Tips

• Microsoft Ad Intelligence - there is an Excel plugin that lets you get more data and synonyms. Don’t use campaign association or similarity but do use the “contains” option on the winners list to get more similar word ideas.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool - use the tool to obtain synonyms and their estimated average CPC (though this is often so fictional it should be on the Bestseller’s List).

Wrapping things up was Cady Condyles, Director of Marketing with the Rimm Kaufman Group.

Product Specific Keyword Techniques
Use a product feed to create all permutations of manufacture, category, product, color, size, material, SKU model numbers, category IDs (pay special attentions to numbers with spaces or dashes- also be sure to include all common misspellings and synonyms for products names).

When building out for your product feed, monitor new product additions for expanded keyword opportunity. Then use stock status and invetory to make bid adjustments. If you know you have more common vs. uncommon sizes (for example, shoes in size 7, 8, 9  sell much faster than size 5 shoes) incorporate this when bidding. If you know you’re selling 10 products in a given week and you only have five left, start slowing down the bid.

For out of stock and back-ordered items, set a threshold and remove or lower bids for these products. With good site suggestions, these terms might still convert. These keywords yield low traffic, but say you have the next model or something comparable, someone might be just as willing to convert.

Common Mistakes for Hot New Product on Your Site

• Relying on automated lists or lists that are too large to use- robots and spiders don’t think about keywords the same ways that people do.

• Putting long tail and product specific keywords on exact match- these keywords are already so specific that limiting exact match will make it more difficult to bid appropriately.

• Deleting keywords for products that are out of stock- if you do have good site suggestion or comparable products, it might be worth it to keep the terms.

• Using competitor term lists – it’s rare that you sell every single product that your competitors sells. Make sure the keywords are appropriate for your product selection.

photo credit KiraZombie

There’s an old adage – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, unless you are carefully able to fix it in ways that helps all parties who use it & also it will make you more money, then you should think about trying to fix it, so good luck with this. Google essentially took this approach when they began testing new Adwords ad formats last year.

While  opportunity with these new formats is apparent and massive, information is limited, compared to the abundance of tutorials & tools available for classic ads. What the heck are these new ad formats, how do I get them, & how do I use them to make mad guap? Welcome to Not Your Father’s Adwords, the first afternoon session on the SMX West advanced track.

Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster moderated, bringing up first Nicholas Fox, Director of Product Management and Ad Quality at Google. Nicholas’s team is responsible for rankings, quality score and all the other “little details” involving text ads on Google SERPs.

Nicholas noted that Google ads have not changed very much… format still composed of a blue link, finite amount of text,  and green URL. Meanwhile, consider the search results on Google-  there’s an explosion of the variety of content, video results, news results. A.k.a.: blended or universal search.

Google has noted that universal search formats are quite effective- working well for users. Google’s course of action now is to keep employing the tried and true philosophy of “the right information to the right user at the right time” and to apply this to the expanding Google ad format.

Ad Sitelinks
The theory on sitelinks goes like this: if you’ve got the right website to answer a query, the best thing you can do is help the user get to the right page in that website. This has been a feature in the SERPs for a while, but Google has just recently started testing this concept within the ad platform over the last 6 months.

The first two lines of the ad are typical ad format, but below the ad are four deep links that go further inside the site. Additional opportunity exists with the “deal of the day” link, for example. Nicholas notes that there’s been amazing creativty with this format. On Black Friday, retailers ran sitelinks with a heavy focus on the holiday deals inside of the site. The results Nicholas has seen have exceeded any other  tests  in ad formats… namely, a 30-40% increase in CTR on average when advertisers adopt this.

Product Advertising
A significant number of people come to Google ready, willing and eager to buy products. Typically, ads don’t go far enough when it comes to delivering content for users regarding specifics of products.

In this example, six different HP products are featured along with their specific item name, product type and retail price. Think of these sponsored ads like a storefront on Google… just like window shopping past an HP store in the mall. This type of ad is created by associating your Google merchant center feed with your Adwords account. The ads are still CPC-based and keyword targeted.

Another demo, “hp all in one,”  is a product listing ad on the right side of the SERPs. These ads are automatically targeted to merchant center account as opposed to keyword-based, and are CPA-based.  These ads are also grouped-based on the product, so they’re served up with multiple vendors from which a user can buy the same product.

Local Advertising
Local is accrues a large portion of geo-targeted queries on Google, as you can imagine. Advertiser budgets, correspondingly, are also local. Google sees two types of advertisers in this space: local businesses (like plumbers, chiropractors etc.) and large, national chains (like Starbucks). Looking for a dentist in San Francisco?

Though the typical local map box still appears, the top ad also features a link that says “Show map…” where you immediately get the location of the dentist on the map, a phone number and a larger map view right within the ad.

Looking to buy a phone? Type in “AT& T store” and you’ll see a display map with various locations of AT&T stores. As you move the map around, it automatically updates with new AT&T store locations.

Comparison Ads
Nicholas noted that these are the  most radically different advertising format from the other advertising types we all know and love. Type in “Mortgages” and the top result allows you to compare mortgage rates.

You can also click a button that allows you to refinance and compare rates. Nicholas pointed out that all user-specified attributes on the left of the comparison are targetable and biddable by the advertiser (in this case, the lender).

Nicholas expects Google to tinker with new things over time, as 2010 will be the year for experimentation. He encourages us to try with them.

Speaking next was Clix Marketing’s David Szetela.

David set out to describe how agencies and advertisers can best put these new ad types into practice.

If you think about Google’s mission to present relevant information, and you use relevant information to mean not just the page, but the conversion action, then what Google’s doing is moving users closer to the conversion action. This cuts down on time and space between the search query and fulfillment of the action. This is good!

Szetela on Sitelinks
David pointed out that while the main consensus is that sitelinks are the least exciting new ad format opportunity, he happens to finds them the most exciting of all. His team jumped all over this discovery, adding both additional persuasive language and well as sales discounts. They saw up to a 60% increase in CTR.

Currently, Google lets you specify up to 10 sitelinks for display. However, only four are displayed in the sitelinks ad at any given time. You obtain these when your ad naturally earns/deserves the #1 position of the page, i.e.: the top of the left hand column. This isn’t just based on brand terms- it’s any ad/keyword combination that deserves a #1 position. If you translate this into  CTR and quality score, keep doing what you’re doing and strive to maximize these factors. Don’t exclude conversions/conversion rates, but for the sake of attaining a top position, your goal should be to obtain exceptional rates and scores, along with a double digit CTR, at least.

(These ads will appear automatically in your campaigns if you are qualified. Check out your campaign settings, then the Networks Devices and Extensions, and you if you’re qualified, you’ll see an “ad extensions” option. Open that- you will see boxes for your “10 Link Text and Destination URLs.” In David’s experience, only the first four have been displayed.)

Szetela on Product Extensions
Product Extensions are really a matter of  submitting a product feed via Google Merchant Center (formerly Google Base). This process is actually quite easy-  just an XML feed you export for your product. You don’t have to do your entire product feed right off the bat, either.

When your submitted product feed is approved by the Google Merchant Center, you should see an option for Google Product Extension Ads under Networks Devices and Extensions. This is  prime real estate for persuasive pictures, text and links.

Szetela on Product Listings
These are different than the other new ad types because of the ability to display images links and prices, and also because the clicks are free (except for the ones that spur conversion), which David thinks is fantastic.

To use this, you must either be part of the Google affiliate network or another affiliate program.

Tracking New Ad Formats
The good news: for product extensions, you’ll have way more data than you’ll ever need. Data points like “how many times the plus box is expanded vs. how many times it’s not.” Just awesome.

The bad news:  with sitelinks, there’s no intrinsic tracking in Google reporting. However, there’s an easy solution through Google Analytics by tagging each sitelink with a different goal setting.

For some lead-gen companies, expect to see the ability for users to submit their information right within the ad itself. David expects this type of ad a lot more across more search engines and also within the content network- never having to  lead to the site itself. There’s a lot of potential power here, seeing as you don’t have to interrupt the flow of what the user is doing on the page itself.

Matt Van Wagner: David, let’s say you got all these great pictures and sitelinks, and someone spends all their time here instead of your site… does a ten dollar long-term customer now become a one-dollar one time customer?

David: My intuition says that if I’m getting more people converting closer to the search action, I will get more people converting- period. I always assume people doing searches have Adult Deficit Disorder.

Speaking last was Cory Nielsen, Performance Marketing Evangelist at Mercent Corporation.

Retail Focused Ad Formats
Cory pointed out that 25% of users doing a product search actually start on Google shopping. The bummer part of the product listing ads are that the platform is still in beta, so only a limited number of people are using it. Still, it is very exciting.

When he does a keyword search on his favorite shoe (the Brooks Beast, FYI), the brand wasn’t even included within the first 20 organic results. However, their ad claimed the top spot on the first SERP.

What should I know about these new ad types?
Sure, they are easy to launch- but these new ads can definitely be a mess. One issue: you’re only sending one feed through Google Merchant Ad Center, which goes out to three different ad networks:

• the affiliate network
• AdWords
• Product searches

Be aware that if you’re the person editing and/or optimizing the shopping product feed, you’re affecting the affiliate marketing team as well as the paid search marketing team.

Performance Attribution
Concerning product listing ads, it’s best to use the Google affiliate network to track performance. The network also supports unique product URLs and tracking variables. However, when it comes to product extensions,  the cost is tracked to AdWords. Depending on how you’re setup, your sales are going to be tracked to Google Product Search rather than through your AdWords campaign.

Product Listing Ads Overview
In general, Corey has seen low CPCs, but lower conversion rates with PLAs.  Ultimately, return on ad spend has been very favorable. Now, PLAs account for 11% of all shopping feed marketing revenue.

You might ask, “Won’t this affect the revenue generated from Google Product Search, which is free?”

Corey says, the nice thing is that it’s not really affecting anything adversely. His team saw a 30%-50% YoY increase in revenue from Google Product Search.

The best reason to do this is it will help lead to your control of your brand in the SERP. If you do a search for UGG boots, Zappos has 20% of the on-page real estate.

SERPs domination tips:

• When it comes to product listing ads, you have the the ability to set category level commission in GAN … as more merchants join, it’s going to get more and more competitive.
• For product extensions, you have the ability to send your feed and have Google pick your products for display. But your goal should be to suggest the keywords for product listing. Adding keywords can increase CTR by 1.7 times.
• For GPS onebox, remember that about 80% of Google Product Search traffic comes from that Google onebox… do what you can to get your products listed there.

So essentially, Google is awesome for helping the consumer and marketers. It’s going to get messy, but investing in the platform is totally worth it.