SMX - Opening Session

Opening Session started at 9 AM in the Edinburgh Room of the New Connought Room Hotel. Chris Sherman, host of the event started the session:

• 9.02: Chris Sherman opening the day; Online Marketing is a new era, new tools enable us search marketers to manage our job much more effectively.

• 9.03: Zhaohui Tang: Microsoft adcenter programmer Keyword related technologies and campaign optimizers. Today talks about future of keyword technology. Microsoft is going to offer new API to connect to platform.

• 9.06: Excel presentation; Ad Intelligence ad-on on the ASP platform, Website autos.msn.com > Keyword Extraction Tool, querying keywords for the website and gives a confidence rate for the keyword. With this you can optimize your keyword list and extend it. API provides a keyword expansion - live.

• 9.08: demonstration of keyword suggestion of the keyword “car” - shows relevant keywords live within excel.

• 9.09: show monthly traffic of the given keywords. It will show you the past 24 months and 3 months forecast of a give keyword. it can predict the keywords searches for the next months. Live demonstration of elections with the keywords Barack Obama and John McCain. Shows the monhtly traffic of the both. Obama is in front in terms of searches, over a year period. “You can find out who will win today the election”

• 9.11: 3 days latency of keywords, they try to bring it down to 1 day. It will show you the DAILY overview of keyword searches. The API can also give you the geographic location of the keywords for any given keyword. for example: “sports cars” #1 London, 478 Impression; #2 Boise, 111 Impressions

• 9.12: You can also find out the demographic of the keyword. sports cars Male 58,97%; Female 41,03% of searches also gives you the age of the searcher.

• 9.13: Another API option is the monetization of the keywords. It will give you a chart of possible Fields (keyword, clicks, impressions, position, ctr,cpc, match type, date range) it will return the number of a given keyword. You can narrow it down within Excel to any give date or date range. It will tell you which type it is ie. exact, phrase or broad match

• 9.16: powerpoint presentation - product classifications you enter “Thinkpad x60″ will show you predicted category “Computing”

• 9.18: Microsoft will create ad text automatically for you based on your website (example autos.msn.com)

• 9.20: Nathan Buggia (Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager); how many people have been in search marketing for longer than 2 yrs? > 40%, how many longer than 4 yrs? > 15% “those are the experts”

• 9.21: Webmaster Center - “everyone is invited to sign up”, one year ago they launched webmaster center, worked a long time with publishers to find out how to support them.

• 9.22: microsoft to deliver more structured data to the publisher. Building up a portfolio for SaaS (as Ad Text).

• 9.23: microsoft to give you raw data what they found about your website that could be better. they use similar techniques as yahoo and google to verify your website. they support up to 125 accounts.

• 9.25: technical issues: they take a look of their index and made a list of most common erros, they have 5 issues. File not Found, Blocked by REP (robots exclusion protocol), Long Dynamic URL, Unsopported Content-Type, Malware Infected, they will show results below with the pages that have issues. Take this list as an audit and solve this issues.

• 9.26: the give you filters to narrow down on subdomains or folders.
• –VIDEO-TO-COME– Malware outgoing links

• 9.30: you are able to enter keywords in the tool and they find the pages on your site which are ranked the highest for the given keyword. you can find out if the right page is on tope by the page scroe. you can optimize by that number the conversion rate. Page scroe is the Microsoft version of Google PageRank.

• 9.32: Micorsoft will also show if you are blocked or not (spammers). will show if you whether or not you are flagged as spam, if msn thinks you are violating their rules. you can review their guidelines and it will give you a form, where you can ask for reevaluation of your website.

• 9.33: Webmaster Wishlist:
  1. Data about customers needs 25%,
  2. Improve placement / traffic from search 22%,
  3. information to help with SEO 9%,
  4. Tools to enhance website (analytics, site search) 16%,
  5. Roi data about my SEM efforts 19%,
  6. data about my competition 13%

• 9.34: Microsoft will not talk about their roadmap, but they make decisions based on this list.

Q&A

• 9.35: Relevance is the number 1 investment at Microsoft. they have a huge gain in relevance already.

• 9.38: Microsoft is looking for something more than just Cost Per Click. They experience i.e. now on Cost per Action.

• 9.40: Tang: want to offer more data to the people who want to advertise. They want to open their platform to other people.

• 9.43: Chris: Pro: Microsoft - unlike Google - gives more transparency. He thinks it is a risk for Microsoft, but it is a good risk and the right decission.

• 9.44: Tang: there is a gap, we know which features are missing and we have also innovation. We have a lot of innovative people at microsoft. Paid search model is changing every day, you can’t just copy your competitors, you have to think of the future.

• 9.45: Nathan: microsoft has a long history of partner. MSN to go through partner and find out which data they need. Angst to hurt the ego-system by asking, worst case you have to go back. Main goal: make publishers become most successful

• 9.46: Chris: You have a little bit more freedom. How do you know when yo go too far?

• 9.47: Nathan: we are not too far, we haven’t hit the boundaries yet

• 9.47: Chris: A lot of people want to try a multiple country campaign, any suggestions that can help? multinational campaign

• 9.47: Tang: they are about to release a UK version (he will give a UK private beta). They started with US market and they are going corss-country

• 9.48: Nathan: multinational campaign is very important. There are also cultural “borders”. If you have an article in english, people all over the world can understand it worldwide. there are a lot of pockets in US that speak french also in the United States. Point: the geographic region does not tell you what your customer speaks! there are hard parts that they still have to find out

• 9.50: Chris: Mobile. We keep on hearing mobile is almost here.

• 9.50: Nathan: How many people have done mobile search today? 30%; A mobile version of website is necessary but not possible, full-featured mobile browser are getting built. we are not yet there.

• 9.51: Chris: A best practical tip, gold nugget tip

• 9.51: Tang: Use Adcenter Excel Tool *laughs* Dig inside data! AdCenter is a free tool with great resources if you use the data for other search engines

• 9.53: Nathan: best piece of advices: build something people want. Find a unique niche and build something good. Build good stuff and we will find it. The only metric that matters is your shopping metric. Figure out YOUR critical metric and build everything else around that.

• 9.55: Chris: we are going through an economical problem right now. Business is slowing down. Are we seeing a slow-down or a pause?

• 9.55: Tang: we don’t see a chop on CPC, or on search. This is performance based marketing and we are lucky in this industry.

• 9.56: Nathan: agrees on Tang. Search is the first measurable (ROI,..) marketing technique. We don’t have drops in organic or paid search.

• 9.56: Chris: where are we in 5 years from now, what are we talking then about?

• 9.57: Tang: Most offline media spending going to move online. our platforms will be more and more connected. the media places will be auction based, everything will be more transparent, more data available. The tools can talk to different platforms - interconnected. No one can really predict the future.