SMX Sydney 2008 - Rand Fishkin’s Favourite Heath Ledger Movie & Much More.

It’s official! In an impromptu tribute to Heath Ledger, Rand Fishkin declares “…I like the gay cowboy movie” while Danny Sullivan prefers of "A Knights Tail”!

…Me? Sorry Rand, I’m with Danny on this one…

In all seriousness though, SMX Sydney was a fantastic event and big congratulations must go to Barry Smyth of Search Strategies and the crew at Third Door Media for bringing 'SMX down under' and more importantly, to all the speakers - yeah you know who you are - for making it such a success!

I went into the two day event with one fairly straightforward goal. I wanted to walk away from Luna Park having felt that I’d learnt something truly valuable.

Thankfully I did!

In 2007 at Search Summit, I got a true sense of the passion and drive behind the attendees from across the Australian Search Marketing community. It was amazing to see so many like minded people in one place all intent on building their knowledge and improving their skills. The audience was not disappointed.

Jumping forward a year, what would SMX Sydney deliver? How much can things change in 12 months? …As we all know in this industry the fact is that anything and everything can change over the course of a year - nothing is sacred...

Search Marketing is evolving, so jump on people it’s going to be one heck of a ride.

My Top 8 SMX Sydney Moments.

1. Danny’s Keynote on Search 3.0, 4.0, etc – Mate, I love the passion! It was like DailySearchCast, only in the flesh!

2. Gord Hotchkiss – Enquiro - Your points on Human Hardware, behaviour etc, just blew me away – Inspirational.

3. Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz - Every time he opened his mouth – Hilarious

4. Ciaran Norris – Alltogether Digital - I want your Job?! Great run down of the viral marketing, Social Media space, and the work you’ve been lucky enough to be involved with.

5. Mike Motherwell – WMS Consulting - Funny, funny, man.

6. Rand’s Tie on Day two…

7. The speaker heckling via text message to the front.

8. Krispy Kreme Donuts from the Sensis Booth.

9. And last but not least, the FlightCentre Cloaking discovery… tsk, tsk, but what a forum in which to get caught!


There has been some great blow by blow coverage of SMX Sydney over the past week, most notable from Rand at SEOmoz, and also some solid work from local Aussie Blogger Neerav Bhatt.

Enjoy, and make sure you’re at SMX Sydney 2009. No excuses, If you’re in search, you need to be there because you can never know too much, and you can always learn more.

Paid Search (PPC) Tip: Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Paid Search (PPC) Tip of the Day: Thursday December 20th

When using Dynamic Keyword Insertion in your Google Paid Search Ads, it is important to understand that the keyword that appears dynamically in the Ad Text is the one matched from in 'your' ad group, and not that which the user actually searched for.

Example:

Title: {KeyWord:Cheap Home Loans}

Ad Group Keywords: (broad match)

home loans cheap
home loan cheap
loans cheap

User searches for: 'cheap home loans sydney'

Title Appears: Home Loans Cheap as this was the keyword in your Ad Group.

Be sure to keep this in mind as you build out your keywords and ad groups using dynamic insertion.

Paid Search (PPC) Tip: Google AdWords: Ad Preview Tool

PPC Tip of the Day: Wednesday December 19th: Ad Preview Tool

While this may seem second nature to many, make sure that any time you're testing your Google AdWords Ads, do so via the AdWords Ad Preview Tool.


Why? Well for one, you can easily test you keywords and ads against multiple targeting settings: Google Domain, Language, Country, state or region, and even specific coordinates, but more importantly you're not negatively influencing the quality and relevancy of your ads during the testing process.

Essentially, if you've viewing your, or your clients, ads directly via Google.com, then every impression you generate and every 'click' that's not received, lowers your CTR and there's naturally a flow on effect.

On high volume 'head terms' sure you may have next to no impact at all, but think of the tail terms, those that only get a handful of impressions an hour or a day. Every 'false' impression you generate is going to lower the CTR and potential Quality Score of that particular keyword.

Certainly something to think about as we all strive to maximize the quality of our campaigns.

Top Real Estate Sites In New Zealand June 2007

Figures just released by Nielsen//NetRatings New Zealand show Trade Me Property maintains clear market domination in the region with more than double the Unique Browsers of the nearest rival - realestate.co.nz.

For NZ House Prices visit WhatPriceMyHouse.co.nz

Web 2.0 killed the Ad Impression Star!

“…video killed the radio star… video killed the radio star…”

Ok, in all seriousness, enough of the late 70’s, early 80's pop… now imagine a time a few years from now… a time when technologies like AJAX, ‘communities’, the mobile web, social media etc. are just common place on the internet, a time when personalisation, collaboration, and contribution is simply what we all do online…. Now pull yourself back to today and ponder this – What does this mean for an online advertising industry that lives and dies by the ‘impression’?

In the not to distant future, the ‘Ad impression’, ‘page view’ or ‘page impression’ will simply be a meaningless measure on many sites. Users will no longer have to load a page to refresh their content. Content will update ‘in-page’, and be dependent on the particular action of the user. The poor impression counter will not move an inch.

In a climate where the CPM rate is still common place - a cost to the advertiser per thousand ad impressions, I sense a few revenue concerns for the many publishers out there today who do live and die by the number of impressions served to their advertisers. The industry must evolve…

OK, Ok I hear you, this is easy you say, ‘…we as the publisher will just implement a counter that refreshes the ad each time user interacts with our in-page content and keep charging a CPM because that’s the BEST solution…’

…are alarm bells ringing for anyone else?

The online measurement game is awash with re-hashed methodologies for measuring a ‘new’ technology. Take the traditional TV ratings panel methodology for example. Along came a medium where transparency was required around audience number in order to ascertain who had the best offering for an advertisers’ spend. So a ratings system was designed that would sample a select few to statistically represent the viewing habits of the masses. This is fine, perfectly acceptable from a data integrity perspective. It was fine because we had a finite number of channels for which this measurement methodology need be applied.

Enter the internet… These very same companies (and hundreds more) think it’s now perfectly acceptable to apply the same base methodology online. Wrong my friends, misguided and backward. In a world of infinite channels (the internet) the traditional ‘people-meter’ based sample approach simply does not cut it. Some companies are getting closer to the solution via large scale network based activity monitoring, but the fact still remains that the industry is still basing much of it’s research data on a methodology that was designed for a finite medium, and not the infinite medium of today.

Ok, rant over… but now enter web 2.0 and technologies that will make it even harder to measure online audience engagement with content. We can again re-hash archaic methodologies to find a best fit adaptation of an old technique to suit a new technical platform… but this is not a solution, is a deception... Ok rant over for real this time… back to the ‘Ad Impression’.

So ‘Ad Impressions’- an online publishers best friend because they bring in the dollars – what of them in the age to come? As the web evolves and an ‘impression’ does loose it’s value as an advertising currency, we can repeat the measurement mistakes of old (see above!), or, a better option, the online advertising industry evolves and hones in on what really matters to the advertiser… define what it is that truly represent value and return on investment for an advertiser and go from there…. It’s certainly not going to be a counter that increments every time a user interacts with an AJAX powered content feed or updates the content in their personalised home page widget.

As we move more and more into the second age of the internet, what matters most is the fact that people are viewing the content… people are eyeballing the ads as they traverse the internet. This media consumption need not be tied to a pseudo impression counter, what’s needed is a measure of how long the user interacts with content. How sticky is the site?

Maybe the solution is something I call it ‘Eye Ball Minutes’, but call it what you like, quite simply, it’s the amount of time users’ spend on a site. I.e. time spent interacting with a site. Tie this in with a ‘unique visitor’ count, and a ‘visit frequency’ count, and you then have a recipe for time spent interacting with site content. Unique Visitors x Frequency x Average Session Duration. What better way to gauge the effectiveness of advertising in an online world that’s evolving?

So yeah, Web 2.0 may just kill the Ad Impression star, but we need not re-use an old methodology to attempt to prove value to an advertiser. As an industry we just have to think on our feet and challenge ourselves to continually come up with new ways to measure success.

Top 6 Tips for Optimizing Ads on the Google Content Network.

Steps to Improving your campaign performance on the Google Content Network.

1. Ensure your ad groups are themed – This is even more important on the content sites as the Google AdWords systems need to easily identify what your ads are targeting.

2. Experiment with separating out Content Bids in AdWords – You may find that increasing or decreasing standard bids improves performance. Eg. High volume, low conversion ads on the content network may be improved through implementing a lower CPC.

3. Remember your Audience – Content Ads are contextually targeted, not keyword targeted. Ensure you ad copy is descriptive and clear with a strong call to action.

4. Exclude sites that are not performing – Makes sense. If you identify sites that are not performing, or you do not want you Brand associated with, then exclude these sites.

5. Implement Conversion tracking – This goes without saying, and does not merely apply to the content network. If you truly want to gauge effectiveness of your advertising and have key success events to track, then implement either Google’s Conversion tracking or another tool from a 3^rd party vendor.

6. Analyze the data! – There are many analytics packages available today, and everyone should be using something to assist in their ongoing campaign and website optimization. If you’re not measuring your site audience, and you’re not tracking visitor sources, then this should be a priority. Google Analytics is a great start.

Google Webmaster Central: Robots.txt does not make files invisible to Google

Some interesting comments from Google Webmaster Central at last week's Search Summit held in Sydney Australia.

It occurred during some questions surrounding what will and will not be indexed, and specifically, whether Google indexes CSS content. etc. A common myth is that the robots.txt file will hide anything that you wish not to be seen (for whatever reason), but be warned, if the content hidden does, in the eyes of the googlebot, impact on what is displayed to the user, ie CSS styles, then this content can still be spidered and looked over, it simply will not be displayed in the index.

So again, be warned if you're trying to do anything sneaky...