Jed Nahum of MSN Ad Center spoke about the unique capabilities of MSN AdCenter; AdCenter will eventually be the platform that will run all MSN Advertising and is expected to come out of beta during this Summer.

Audience: converting better (MSN and AOL) using this technology - we also think the quality of audience is desirable at MSN.

Fun with Audience Intelligence

New York Yankees vs the Boston Red Sox - (you need AdCenter to search) - there are more woman and Young men looking for Red Sox on MSN compared to the Yankees.

There was more I’d like to have written down here but my laptop was just booting up and I did to get a chance to write it all down.  I’m wondering if my audience study of Tattoo’s was seen by Jed?  It’s on this blog  - just search on Tattoos.

Achieving Search Marketing Success - Michael Levine - Yahoo!

 Continued explosive growth of Internet users and the increasing fragmentation of the audience and as people drop off from TV they are available often, on the Internet.

Yahoo home page, alone, gets 73% of the traffic off the Internet and Yahoo! Search Marketing reaches 92% of active search users.

The New Marketing Funnel World:

Consumers don’t care where they will be consuming media - but it’s important how you intersect that audience.  Demand creation when they advertise on the Yahoo home page - and unifying search to capture all the demand created by that advertising.  What we’re really trying to do trying to do.  

We did a test with Harris Direct on Yahoo - quite dramatic and people who saw the display on Yahoo created 91% more activity on the Harris Direct site.   Search is the most common way people are finding out new information on websites - search, without a doubt, absolutely dominating.

What role does search play in the buying process - improving the search campaigns.

• think about the long tail - leveraging the things you got to sell
• a/b testing and multi variable testing
• partnership with optimost, etc - testing out the conversion funnel

Federick Vallaeys - Google AdWords

• pick right keywords
• pick righ ads
• right network

AdRank changes - combination of max CPC + Quality Score.

• have many adgroups
• have multiple creative in each adgroup
• take full advantage of different match type
• broad match (all relevent keywords)
• negative keywords (mask out variations that you don’t like)
• phase match (excludes all expanded keywords)
• exact match (control exactly how your ad is shown - but it’s tougher because you have to come up with each term you want to show up for).

New AdWords tool released in the last month

You can show your ads on Google and on contextual networks - and now you don’t even have to show on the regular search results.  Site targeting has also been set up.

• show on site x, y, z (show range of daily pageviews)
• list topics that are relevent
• demographics your trying to reach

In each case, you get a list of sites to advertise on.   

Google Analytics can be used to with measuring  traffic and conversions.  New features in AdWords reporting to help find specific information on.