WebmasterWorld PubConference VI - Day 1, 2:30 PM (EST)

[Garrett]

Hello from Orlando, Florida! It’s windy here but it’s a nice change from the snowy streets of New York :-)

I just attended the first few sessions from WebmasterWorld’s Publishers Conference VI and everything’s going really well so far. The sessions are running smoothly and the speakers have shared a lot of relevant information.

The crowd is enormous. They were only expecting around 300 attendees but that number has grown to about 550 --- not too shabby, eh? ;-)

The atmosphere is much different than that of the DMA/AIM net.marketing conference. For one thing, the people here are generally much younger; most of the attendees here are probably in their early thirties, whereas at DMA the average age group was probably closer to the mid-forties. Another thing I found to be interesting is this audience is predominantly male, whereas the DMA audience had a pretty equal gender ratio.

It’s always great to see diversity and I am thrilled with the level of internationality at this event. People have flown from literally all over the world, every country and continent you could think of (well, except Antarctica, of course!) to join us at this conference.

I’ve also had the great pleasure of meeting and having lunch with WebProWorld member Steven Glover (http://www.webproworld.com/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=3139), who will be helping us bring you live reports, exclusive interviews, and other information from this conference – so HUGE THANKS to Steven for that! :-)

Nothing has really blown my mind so far but I have collected a lot of very relevant information, which I’ll be sharing with you shortly – so keep an eye on WebProWorld for updates!

[Garrett]

85% of Search Terms Untapped? Some people have accused this conference of being too commercial; so far, I disagree. The Pay-Per-Click session earlier this morning might have had an advertisement flavor but there was also a lot of useful information to be obtained. The big site architecture seemed quite useful.

During this morning’s Pay-Per-Click Bid and Spend Maximization session, Overture’s Dan Boberg said, "Thirty-five to forty percent of all searches are commercial searches and eighty to eighty-five percent of these search terms are untapped,” meaning people aren't optimizing for those search terms.

Steven and I both thought that was a little extreme. I doubt whether the statement is necessarily true and Steven would like to see the research behind the statement.

What do you think?

Anybody Using Broadmatch? I interviewed a man from Finland named Risto Poutiainen, owner of http://www.hakukone.info. Risto, who is very concerned about search engine optimization, is not a big fan of Broadmatch. With Broadmatch, he says you get much much less relevant visitors your site because your ads get buried beneath and get included with irrelevant ads.

Steven thinks it's interesting to turn on bc you can watch what phrases you are getting searched for then break them up and turn them into paid keywords. So Steven says it can be useful for experimentation while Risto advises against using Broadmatch altogether.

So, does anybody out there use Broadmatch? If so, would you mind sharing your two cents? (Or three cents or one-and-a-half cents… or however much you can contribute… ;-)

[WebMetro]

BroadMatch in Overture can work for some keywords and some campaigns.
One example of when broadmatch can work very well is when you want to target a local area. For example, if you want the keyword "new york accounting", it would be good to turn on broadmatch for this word. It is true that you could just add "new york accounting firm", "new york accounting cpa", ect., to your Overture account. But you could also be missing out on dozens of other searches.

We recently turned on broadmatch for a school that targets a local area, even though we have hundreds of words in Overture, and leverage every niche term, we were still able to lower the overall CPC because of broadmatch. If you find the broadmatch traffic not as good, but still decent, then you can still lower your CPC for broadmatch searches and see if your ROI goes up.

Broadmatch can be very helpful if leveraged correctly.

[Steven Glover]

OK Garret tommorow I bring my laptop, your breaking all the good news. Hehe