Search Engine Marketing 101

Slide 1: Search Marketing General Overview May, 2008 Mike Goos Product Marketing Consultant http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegoos © copyright, 2008, All Rights Reserved.

Slide 2: Marketing and Search • Marketing is bringing the right products or services to the right group of people at the right time • Search is finding content on the internet that you are interested in – Internet content: web pages (blogs), products, videos, news, maps, pictures/images – Internet application: a tool that depends on internet protocols (IP) to function • #2 most used application of the internet (Email is #1)

Slide 3: What is Search Marketing? • Enabling prospects to discover specific internet content (sites/brands/offers/products/applications) • Leverage ubiquity/popularity of search engines and consumer behavior • How are sites and related content discovered? – Domain name guessing (especially with strong brands) – Display ads static or animated banners/video ads – Email campaigns – Social Media (digg, stumble upon, delicio.us, wikipedia) – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search Engine Marketing (SEM) • Tracking/analytics tools for all of the above to accurately measure performance

Slide 4: SEO • Search Engine Optimization • Makes web sites and landing pages easier to find using search engines without buying keywords or paying for placement in directories. – Search engines use crawlers that are looking for certain things • HTML tags added per page (beyond <META> ) • Actual text (customer-facing) per page is important • Accurate site map • Number of links to your site that exists on other domains is crucial – Goal: Make it easy for the crawlers to index your web pages • Rationale – No need to pay for keywords or directory placement but not assured of rank from day to day – Search toolbar browser plug-ins are widely available and have been heavily adopted – Default settings of new browsers (such as Firefox 2 (3 beta) and IE 7) have search fields as the primary interaction – Searching is an ingrained web user behavior – Consumers will stick to page 1 of N results

Slide 5: A new browser – default launch Primary interaction

Slide 6: Sites with good SEO appear above the fold on the SERP Title Description URL

Slide 7: SEM • Search Engine Marketing - Pay to get placement in prime positions on the search engine results page (SERP) or on relevant web pages of any site • Products offered – Pay Per Click (PPC) • Buy keywords per each Search Engine’s bidding mechanism (e.g., Google adwords) • These keywords mapped to your title, description and associated destination URL • Appear in “sponsor areas” – you pay more to be ranked higher in the list – Contextual • Similar to targeted ad banners, but scans the editorial of each web page first • Also PPC but ads do not appear on SERP (e.g., Google adsense) – Shopping Feeds (e.g., Amazon, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping) • Pay to feed SKUs via XML catalogs of ecommerce or shopping comparison sites – Paid Inclusion (PI) • Pay to get placement in the directories that are frequently scanned for the creation of search indexes • Yahoo specializes in this – Local/International • Learns zip code from previous cookie of any web app – Pay Per Call (e.g., Who’s Calling, Ingenio) • Unique 800 # appears on the page; if it is called, the advertiser pays • Example of offline conversion

Slide 8: PPC and Sponsor Area Example

Slide 9: SEM and the Search Engines • Google – Adwords/Adsense is 44% of the PPC market • Yahoo Search Marketing – Sponsored Search/Publisher Network/ContentMatch is 28% (formerly, Overture) • Microsoft adCenter released Sept, 2006 – optimal for live.com • AOL – AOL.com is 60% of the company’s R+D (since 2004). Massive investment in ‘directional media’. – Google ‘bought’ 5% of AOL in early 2006 to safeguard their ad inventory • Ask (part of IAC, a Barry Diller company) bought them in 2005 and has plans for growing PPC services • Niche engines that are growing but rely on network partners for distribution – Miva (formerly, FindWhat) – Business.com – Industry Brains (especially contextual) – Kontera (especially contextual)

Slide 10: Landing Page Optimization • Once user clicks on SERP, then what? • Need great page design for first landing page with a clear call to action to increase chance of final conversion – Fill out a web form – Call a 800# – Download software or a coupon – Buy a product or service • A/B/Multivariate testing takes out the guesswork of landing page effectiveness – People enter search terms and they are pre-navigated to the landing page – A, B, C testing is constantly happening – Creative is optimized based on click thru results – Offermatica (acquired by Omniture 9/07)

Slide 11: Performance Tracking • All Destination URLs have tracking strings • Subsequent links on landing pages, etc also have tracking strings • Third party Search marketing tracking services – DoubleClick DART Search (owned by Google) – Atlas Search (owned by Microsoft-aQuantive) – MediaPlex Mojo AdServer (owned by ValueClick) • Web analytics vendors (e.g., Google Analytics, Omniture/Visual Sciences, Coremetrics) provide these services as well • Learn impressions, click thrus and conversions per keyword per Search Engine (SE) • Compare conversions among several SEs or per product from the same SE (PPC against contextual for example) • Reports generated every day

Slide 12: Social Media • Easy to add buttons to pages of your site for visitors to submit to social media sites – Digg – Stumble Upon (owned by eBay) – delicio.us (owned by Yahoo) • Post comments to blogs that are relevant to your industry/market – frequency is key • Take advantage of top 10 web destinations – Submit your information into Wikipedia since it is free to become a contributor – Register your events with Facebook and Craigslist.org – Create a MySpace and/or Facebook profile for your organization or the leader of the company

Slide 13: Video Search • Reactive: Crawlers look for video files with sufficient metadata • Proactive: Multimedia RSS feeds (XML) accepted by video aggregators and search engines • Google, AOL, Ask and Yahoo have video tabs – highly visible • Video specific aggregators: YouTube, Crackle, AOL-Truveo, Heavy, MySpace Video - have a loyal following • Overlays, pre- or post-roll video ads can appear during the playing of the video