The Search Engine Race. After the Buying Search Engine Advertising session, there was a crowd of people waiting to interview the gentlemen from Google and Overture. I noticed that very few people were really paying any attention to Dave Roth, Director of Media Strategy at
eonMedia, LLC. Google and Overture both send representatives to this guy's company to train their employees to serve clients better by learning to write better copy for search engines. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to interview him.
Question: Dave, have you learned anything that is surprising or breaking news?
Dave: Look for search consolidation. There's going to be a three course race between Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Also keep in mind that Microsoft just hired the former Overture CTO. ... I'm noticing a trend that people are getting more involved with analytics now that they're spending money on their search terms. It's also very expensive to manage search engine data. That needs to be something people keep in mind as they start their campaings. You're getting the data, now do something with it. People need to manage and make decisions based on that data. You either outsource it or you do something with it.
CPA versus CPC. I also interviewed an Indian gentleman named Ram Srinivasan. Ram is president of
http://www.fireclick.com, a web analytics company. Fireclick has about thirty employees, with customers including GAP and Old Navy.
Q: Why did you come to this session, Ram?
Ram: To study problems others are having in this huge field. One of the things I'm looking for is new products I can provide.
One thing Ram looked at was the fact that Google and Overture have both been skirting CPA. "They need to provide better CPA versus providing CPC," he says, "because CPA provides more value to searchers."
He was extremely amazed by the number of small agencies that manage their own keywords on Adwords and Overture. Another thing he noticed is the increasing cost of managing keywords, and he is looking to provide a solution to this in the future.
Second Opinion Effect. Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of
SEO-PR, gave an incredible speech during the Balancing Organic and Paid Listings session. I look forward to interviewing him later. In his speech, Greg said, "You can triple your click-through rate if you're in the top listings and in ads." He calls this the second opinion effect.
Media providers. Greg looks at search engines as media providers (or sources of content) as opposed to search engines and believes that's the direction search engines be moving towards in the future. That's interesting, because Greg says that in magazines right now there's a split between 53% editorial content and 47% advertising.
Do you think search engines will start to move in this direction?
Engines as Media Providers - Day 2, 4:00 PM (EST)
Linear Mode
