Cyber Monday

I thought it was fitting that I post a message about Cyber Monday, which is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. People typically shop offline during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and once they get back to the office on the Monday after Thanksgiving, they start placing their online orders. Paid search marketing is a smart and cost effective way to reach a targeted audience. You will get people looking for your product at the time they are asking for it. Many retailers have special Cyber Monday promotions, which you can usually find when you come to their website. Even if you are not currently buying keywords, online search is a great way to see what the competition is up to. You can search for items that you want to rank for and see who the top results are on both the paid and the organic side. More importantly, pay attention to the landing page. Does it make you want to shop there? How can this information help you to compete more effectively? Think about this as you prepare your 2009 online marketing strategy.

Social Status Seminar

Yesterday morning I participated on a panel at the first Social Status Seminar presented by PR firm Trevelino Keller. I represented Search Discovery, and other panelists included The Content Factor, dNeero, Luckyfish, and Vitrue. The goal of the seminar was to educate the audience about the different forms of social media and to provide a roadmap on how to get started. Social media is not a one-time marketing gimmick, but rather an ongoing relationship with your customers. Therefore, if you choose to get involved, you need to make sure that you have a resource to manage it on an ongoing basis. From Search Discovery's perspective, we can help clients optimize their content for the search engines and drive traffic to the page via paid search. Clients can measure the impact of their social media presence through analytics tools, including Google Analytics, which is a free tool. It's free to start your own Facebook page, so it's worth a try. At the very least, you'll get some key learnings about your target audience.

eM8 Atlanta

On Wednesday I moderated the Search Marketing Panel at eM8, the eMarketing Association's conference in Atlanta.  Joining me on the panel were Lee Blankenship and Brian Ussery from Search Discovery, Lindsay Blankenship from Razorfish, and Jonathan Nelson from Primedia. The audience included e-marketing managers from around the country. My lead question to the panel was about how advertisers should treat search marketing in the current economy. The answer was that search becomes even more important in a slower economy. People become more price sensitive in a recession and shop around. Therefore, marketers must maintain relevancy and awareness through paid and organic results. Measuring the impact of search traffic is also important and requires strong analytics and reporting capabilities. Thanks to Kevin Lee for inviting me to moderate the panel.

Analytics

You're only as good as what you can measure, especially if you're a search marketing agency trying to prove ROI to your client. There are a number of high end Analytics solutions in the marketplace including Omniture. On the SEO side, it's important to be able to know exactly where you stand today, how your users behave on your website, and what changes to make next. Unlike SEM, SEO requires a significant investment of time and money, and it can take several months to see an impact. That said, hope is not a strategy, and you need to adapt in order to drive incremental traffic to your site. The best free offering is Google Analytics. Google gives this information away with the hope that you will spend money on AdWords to drive traffic to your site. Paid search works, and the more you can measure, the better off both of you will be. Implementing analytics software is not a simple process, and it has created a big market for analytics consulting. It is important to do this job right, because if your analytics is wrong, you're making decisions off of bad data. A good place to start learning is the Google Analytics Blog.

Search and Toolbars

HP and Microsoft announced a deal today to install the Microsoft Live Search toolbar on all 2009 PCs sold in the U.S. and Canada. In my previous role at Comcast, I launched the Comcast Toolbar, a browser based tool that includes a search box. People like to search where it's convenient, whether that is on their home page, from a toolbar, or in the built-in search box in IE7, Firefox, or Safari. Toolbars often have useful built-in features like links to e-mail, anti-spyware, and weather. Essentially the search engines give away toolbars in exchange for the future stream of search revenue. Many casual Internet users do not even know what toolbar they have installed or that it's even a separate downloadable application, but it makes a major difference to the search engines, for whom each point of market share is worth millions of dollars. It's also a good place for search engines to test new features to a portion of their audience without affecting the search experience for the general audience. Prior to working at Comcast, I was a big fan of the Yahoo! Toolbar, which includes anti-spyware, server-based bookmarks, and customizable buttons. Today it's hard not to have a toolbar, since they are often bundled with other downloadable applications like Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't have one on your PC, I recommend downloading one and testing it out. Here are links to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's toolbars.

Google Travel

BusinessWeek is reporting that Google will be expanding its travel offering through enhancements to Google Maps. Travel search is an interesting vertical because there are a lot of ways to search for the same information. In addition, when searching to book travel, there can be significant price differences between sites, and of course, prices change on a regular basis. My personal favorite is Kayak.com, a travel search engine that searches multiple sites at once. For full disclosure, Comcast, my former employer, uses Kayak as its online travel partner. What differentiates Kayak from the online travel agents like Orbitz and Expedia is that you can book your travel through the travel provider's own website, many of which guarantee the lowest available rate. It is surprising that despite all of the advances online, there are still challenges to booking travel. It will be interesting to see if Google gets into the travel search space. So far, they have avoided this vertical, which BusinessWeek points out is a $90 billion+ global ad and sales market. My guess is that whatever they develop will offer more advertising opportunities, which is their core business.

Meet Benjamin Rudolph

Hello, Blogosphere! My name is Benjamin Rudolph, and this is my first post on the blog that bears my name. I plan to discuss search marketing-related issues. I am an Interactive Media Buyer at Search Discovery, an interactive ad agency based in Atlanta that specializes in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Prior to joining Search Discovery, I spent four years at Comcast, most recently managing their search partnership with Google. My goal is to keep this blog up to date, commenting on the latest search news and providing analysis. If you'd like to meet me in person, I will be speaking at the FASTforward Summit in Boston on June 19th. I'll be discussing Site Search Strategies for Search Engine Optimization. I appreciate your readership in advance, and I look forward to making this a useful source of news, commentary, and information.