The first speaker, Aaron Goldman, uses Microsoft AdLabs Audience Predictor tool that I have written about quite a lot over the years.  Also, using Search for Competitive Intelligence using AdGuru (he uses the new AdGuru free tool), is something the speaker regularly does.  Also, refining your USP using Twitter to do real time search and see what other people are thinking about around a subject (ie: childcare services).   Also, using related keywords, using Quantcast, Comscore, you can come up with more ideas for services.   Using Google Insights for Search to look for Geography where keywords play stronger is useful.   In addition, using Microsoft’s AdLabs Commercial Intent tool shows a site could and should match the commercial intent of a keyword phrase.   Tweak non-search advertising creative using Yahoo Buzz!   Look for other places people go when they visiting your site.  Also, measure performance of offline ads – when a commercial airs look how the keyword traffic performs on your site (where the ad would generate traffic).   Finally, using Search to predict elections – using Google Insights.

Pier 1 Case Study –  have 1000+ stores and 1.2 billion of annual sales – 4%-6% is spent of that sales goes back to marketing (part offline/part online) and the goal was to increase sales across all store locations and spend marketing dollars more efficiently.  The goal was to prove that Search drives Offline Sales – while, normally, Search is used to generate online sales.  Ha!

The test for Pier 1 was to use Applied Predictive Technologies (a 3rd party) and used test and control stores to do this process along 52 test markets and 93 control markets.  The client did share their sales data – and this test was labor intensive since it looked at just 59 markets and happened over 5 weeks.

We did see some pretty significant results with a lift of 2% in the test markets vs. the control markets and some stores had a 5% lift in sales – and this happened last October, when the economy was tanking.  Also the ROI was 300%.

Alax from BlueKai – How does Search and Search Data apply to Online Marketing.  We know Search works because people spend 5% of their total time online yet a much larger share of sales are coming from Search than the time we spend online.  However, Click Through Rates perform 3 to 4 times better and convert 10 times better than untargeted search ads.  There’s a lot more money being spent on Behavioral Marketing (4x more than 2006) – what has changed?   Now you can apply Search Data to the online channel in real time.  Now, people are going to verticals and searching and Behavioral networks are capturing the behaviors of those searches and using it to retarget ads.  In addition, Ad Market Liquidity and Scale has improved, allowing more focused results – you needed a gigantic data set to begin with so you could filter down and still have someone left to display ads to.  While data analysis is very expensive to do – free open sourced tools like Hadoop has allowed it to get much cheaper – and we’re not at an inflection point where what is possible now is vastly more than even a year ago.

What’s next, Real Time Shopping data, including demographics and spend power, lifestyle and attitudinal data can be captured via search data of a website (and you can go buy those “searchers”).  Real Time bidding for users has accelerated and Search Engine Optimization companies are getting into a space – it’s a second level bidding system and agencies are functioning as system integrators.

Eli Goodman – Search Evangelist at Comscore –  Search is at the epicenter of a lot of go on in business – he has some small case studies  and tidbits.  Search is involved in early and LATE parts of the purchase funnel.  He suggests to lump searches together by some basic ideas (ie: if your looking at the Health Industry, lump Search Queries by Symptoms).  Also segment by “How” – the idea that a certain percent of searches are really “questions”.

He also looks for searches on “iPhones” and which sites get the traffic from that – Online Searches that focus on Questions and Answers can serve as Focus Groups to give you ideas and insight for your marketing.

What is the Brand Lift from being exposed to search vary and he suggests looking at Search Cross Visitation (using Comscore, of course – since you can not easily do it on almost anything else).

Everyone knows that search can be an effective platform for driving online traffic, leads and sales. But most people don’t realize that search can be leveraged in many ways beyond just the SEM channel. From using search to drive offline sales to mining search data for insights to build audience profiles, search has application to a wide range of marketing techniques. In this session, we’ll share actionable ways to unlock the power of search across all channels and hear case studies from folks in the trenches.

I looked at WordStream’s  keyword tool last week but waited till it was formally announced before writing about it.  According to Wordstream, their keyword tool compares favorably to Google’s and WordTracker:

I almost have to wonder why anyone bothers with WordTracker anymore – I’m not sure that paid keyword tools are really worth it – esp with so many free tools, including an excellent one by SEOBook (though it might be packed with too much information).

But in another way, using different keyword tools leads to different ways you’d want to use them, ending up with different results, overall.

I did a search on Netbooks (I just bought 2 netbooks, today)

What I like the most about Wordstream’s keyword tool is the related keyword sections on the right – I started with “Netbooks” by itself, but the volume of that keyword must be low, since no suggested words were present – then I added “laptop” and got several – I can use the related keywords to build out a better keyword list than I can get from WordTracker, alone, and perhaps, from Google’s Keyword Tool – which is more focused on sales.

In the interest of being transparent – I am doing some freelance work with WordStream – though this review of WordStream’s keyword tool is not part of that work.   What I’d like to see WordStream do – is make this keyword tool a widget – and let people embed it whereever they want.

The WordStream Keyword Tool is also a nice way for WordStream to do lead generation – you can get the entire list of keywords on any query by giving them your email address – and WordStream has a guide to show you what to do with the information you get out of their new free tool.

If anything, WordStream’s new Keyword Tool is another free resource you can use to write better copy for your website.  Using WordStream’s new Keyword Tool as a guide – here’s an example of how I’d write a little review for my new netbooks -

I bought two new Acer Notebooks today, both Eee PC 1101HA Seashell (though my are black) with 11 hours of battery life (though I ‘m not sure that’s true – since it depends on which of the 3 battery types came with the laptops – 3 cell, 6 cell, etc).

While at Best Buy, today, I was looking at the Samsung netbook which was a little more expensive, but didn’t as far as I could tell, seem to have any better features – and it was about 70 dollars more than Acer Netbooks I decided to buy.  True, the MSI Wind netbooks with 2GB of Ram built in, might seem, a better deal than the Acer Netbooks that  I bought and had to add an extra GB of ram to; the reviews on MSI Wind netbooks in technical forums suggests a netbook will outperform many laptops that are more than 2 years old.

One more nifty feature of WordStream’s Keyword tool is the ability to easily remove words from the keyword results.

All you have to do is hover over a keyword in a phrase and delete any term you don’t want to be part of your results.

I could definitely see myself myself WordStream’s new Keyword  tool for SEO Analysis and copy writing.

How far we’ve come in Search over the last 6 or 7 years – there was a time where using certain url parameters (back in 2002-2004) got your site in the Google doghouse because Google’s crawlers would think, then, each url was part of a session, and since crawlers don’t login to sites, it would ignore those urls.

Today, people don’t have to worry as much about that happening, as Google just announced an enhancement to Google Webmaster Tools that Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore according to Search Engine Journal:

A new feature has appeared in the Site Configuration Settings Sections of Google Webmaster Tools. The setting, called Parameter Handling, enables site owners to specify up to 15 parameters that Google should ignore when crawling and indexing the site.

Google lists the parameters they’ve found in the URLs on your site, and indicates whether or not they think they those parameters are extraneous (with a suggested “Ignore” or “Don’t ignore”. You can confirm or reject those suggestions and can add parameters that aren’t listed.

So what does this mean for site owners?

The primary value of the feature is to improve the canonicalization of a site in Google’s index due to duplicate content. Canonicalization issues occur when multiple URLs load the same content. This scenario can be problematic for a number of reasons (for instance, it can skew analytics data) but from a search perspective, canonicalization issues can cause:

In a way, duplicate content, is often created by the same pages that are tagged for different purposes.  For example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18regulate.html?hp

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18regulate.html?ref=business

are the same url, the hp parameter refers to traffic that discovers this page on the homepage while the latter link indicates the page was opened from the business section – the search engines might pick up both urls, as separate pages – but they’re really not – so Google’s new utility, in this case, would allow the site owner (NY Times, in this case) to tell Google to ignore “hp” and “ref” parameters which eliminates the duplication.

Another thought was about Adobe purchasing Omniture yesterday for 1.8 Billion Dollars – according to Read/WriteWeb:

“…Th he acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe’s quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

Omniture is a top dog in analytics. But even though it competes with just about everyone, including Google, in the measurement market, some industry analysts have pointed out that it’s really run out of new ideas. In trying to explain the acquisition during an earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen asserted that buying Omniture was meeting customer needs.”

A number of people, including Eric T. Peterson, thinks making Flash trackable is not that big a deal-not enough of an excuse for this merger -

“…Similarly, I don’t see this acquisition as creating anything new regarding measurement being embedded into rich media applications. Thanks, perhaps ironically, to Macromedia (owned by Adobe) we have been embedding tracking codes into Flash, Flex, Silverlight, AJAX, etc. for years … and while the integration is botched as often as not, I don’t see how adding a “Click here to Omniture-ize” button into Dreamweaver and Adobe’s RIA development suite will solve that problem.”

Actually, that’s one way I can see a lot of money coming out of this deal – Adobe-Omniture could create that button – and develop Omniture Site Catalyst as the premier solution to gather information on Flash, etc – and then create a toolkit for everyone else (all the other analytics vendors) but charge then for access and use – that could create a lot of revenue.

Let’s face it – if it were that easy track Flash with a “button” – most analytics platforms would have had it already, but it’s not.   Maybe Adobe didn’t make it easy to develop solutions – now it will, but, maybe, you’ll have to pay to get access – and …. who in their right mind, would not pay?   After all, these days half of the pages on many sites are running Flash – or some similar type of Rich Media – that isn’t easy to track – and easily botched up in tracking, when it’s attempted – … why not just “charge” people to turn Flash Tracking on ……. End of Story -  who, in their right might would refuse?  All the headaches this will solve, or attempt to solve.

So, from that perspective, the Adobe acquisition of Omniture makes sense – even if it has something very disquieting about it – the nature of Web Analytics is changing – and vendors are rapidly vanishing, being bought up, one by one – what’s next for Coremetrics and WebTrends?      Hey, maybe Sears will buy WebTrends and maybe Coremetrics will be bought by IBM – just a guess – might be totally off (since Coremetrics bought IBM Surfaid a few years back – in a way, things would have come back full circle).

With the analytics vendors being “absorbed” into other businesses (for example, Omniture bought by Adobe – Document preparation, Flash players, etc – essentially – presentation software) – what’s next?

Also, on the Social Media front, I noted that Jive Software and Radian6 entered into a partnership, announced this week, to power part of Jive, with Radian6′s listening platform.   I never worked with Jive -and was largely unaware of them – Jive seems to be a platform for a large enterprise company to work with Intranets:

…. Broadly Share Those Learns – Relevant tweets, blog posts, comments on a traditional news outlet website, or trend reports can be pulled directly into a team community with designated places for specific topics and focus areas (such as competitors, industries, or product lines). This information can either be pulled in from pre-set dashboards, directly from the web, or from the company’s own community—and published to an Observation Wall specific to that market or topic. That wall effectively becomes the central point of collaboration where others in the organization can add their comments, thoughts, and opinions.

One thing I have noticed – and Radian6 has attempted to address  it, is how it’s neccessary to have “Listening Systems” in place to understand spikes in traffic coming to your site.  In many cases, Referral logs are unable to capture, by their nature, the richness in conversations that go on, around a brand or website, on the web.

Radian6′s solution (see my post on Radian6’s Web Analytics and Salesforce.com Intergration) goes halfway towards a solution by allowing the export of a site referral log into Radian6 – which will match up pages of your site, and buzz that results in a visit to your site – but not all the buzz about your site – stuff being said about your business – leads to a visit – therefore, won’t be co-related – so while this solution by Radian6 is excellent – it could go further.

Another story that caught my eye about Social Media is the300  Jewish bloggers who are  geting advice on combating the Iranian threat at a Jerusalem convention

Aimed at tackling challenges faced by Jewish bloggers both here and in the Diaspora, over 300 bloggers attended the Second International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem at Beit Avi Chai on Sunday evening.

Jewish bloggers who off their offerings at Sunday’s gathering at Beit Avi Chai n Jerusalem.
Photo: Sasson Tiram

Although the convention attempted to help bloggers discover how to best make use of the Internet for promoting their cause, Tova Serkin of JGooders warned that “social media are not the ‘magic bullet,” and explained that while the Internet is indeed “the future,” it remains merely a tool that needs to be harnessed.

The conference, titled “Uniting the Jewish Community through Social Media,” included eight workshops followed by two panel discussions aimed at advancing Jewish, Zionist and charitable causes.

Can 300 bloggers who agree on the same thing change perceptions of a nation?  Perhaps – if you get get 300 people to fully agree, and they all blog …..  well, I’ll let you complete the sentence.    I don’t agree with the sentiment – don’t want to see any more wars – but I do think if you can get a small group of people to totally be on the same page – and really focus – you can amplify that energy.