CogBlog

Are you in Excel Hell? If your search campaign has gone beyond your ability to analyze with a spreadsheet, you may have an ultra-complex campaign on your hands according to Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International. Bill's long-time client IBM exemplifies the ultra-complex campaign with many unique business units, a complex product mix, hundreds of thousands of targeted phrases, and multiple responsible owners within the organization.

Bill Hunt was joined Roger Barnette of SearchIgnite, and Peter Morse of ECNext in a panel moderated by Daron Babin of WebMasterRadio.fm.

Roger Barnette of SearchIgnite described the growth in the number of pay-per-click engines, the increase in competition, growth of search budgets, and large and growing keyword lists as pressures on managers of complex campaigns. You will need some technology help to manage a campaign like this, and SearchIgnite provides such a tool.

Peter Morse described their recent experience taking the newly launched Manta.com from launch to top 10 business destination in one quarter using a massive paid inclusion program. Manta.com offers an enormous volume of very narrowly targeted business documents and articles. Rather than even attempt to build a keyword list comprehensive enough to match this volume of content, ECNext decided paid inclusion would help them reach their niche audiences more effectively. Their program through Yahoo's paid inclusion system has ultimately grown to a multi-million URL campaign.

Essentially the lessons the panel shared boiled down to a list of best-practices for any search campaign: measure and test your keywords, organize your phrases into manageable buckets, try to segment your phrases by relation to brand or search intent--is it a buy word or a learn word, and make sure the whole organization has at least a fundamental understanding of the role of search.