Wow, what an event this has turned out to be! It's so cool because everybody here is so into their industry and so intelligent, it's a pleasure just talking to them. Getting to know people in the industry who are really trying to understand what's happening in the search engine world at the moment is exciting.
Here are some tips from the Balancing Organic and Paid Listings forum:
Advice from Stacy Williams. Stacy Williams, president of Prominent Placement, Inc., says, "If you are buying Adwords and your selling point is the cost of your product, people will compare prices and are more likely to buy from the third place they click because they see your price is comparable or better than the others." What she means is that people will click through and compare prices. People don't always want a whole lot of clicks. If that's the case, you should definitely go with paid advertisements versus organic, as you'll have more control.
It'll come back to haunt you. Andrew Wetzler, president of
http://www.MoreVisibility.com, offered another interesting tidbit. Andrew spoke with a Google representative who told him that with Google Adwords, your clickthrough stays with you. In other words, Google remembers it, and you could even be penalized in the future for your past clickthrough rates. It's sort of like a GPA type of thing. Historically, Google pays attention.
The Baseball Analogy. Andrew also used this great baseball analogy when referring to earch engines: "Search engines are an advanced form of direct marketing and as a general rule you should aim for singles and doubles, not home runs." He believes we should watch for re-emergence of the Yahoo! Directory, as it will become more important in the near future.
The Higher, the Better. Bryan Kujawski of 360i says 1 in every 20 people go to the second page on search results pages, but only 1 in every 100 people go deeper than that. This just backs up what we already knew -- that it's very important to be ranked high on search engine results pages.
Vivian Marx, director of online strategy at
http://spiegel.com, told me she came to this session because wants to learn whether she needs to start doing search engine optimization in house or externally. She'd like to know the basics so either way she can get more from the company she works with or from the people she hires. Sounds like a good enough reason to me!
I think that's about it for this update. The next session is starting soon. I'll be sure to bring you another live report!
Clicks Count! - Day 2, 5:00 PM (EST)
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