CogBlog

Honestly that title almost sounds like complete nonsense. But, it is not.

Google announced that they are scrapping the Froogle Merchant Center, and that all submissions to its comparison shopping engine, Froogle, will be handled through the Google Base interface. What's more, you can now make submissions to the service in RSS, or Atom formats.

Thursday Google is expected to release their new payments service, Gbuy, which I'm sure will tie into Google Base as well.

Just a follow-up to my previous post.

After checking the 22 unique ip addresses from today's onslaught, it appears Korea is leading the charge. 14 of the 22 ips were from that country. Here's how it broke down:

Korea: 14
China: 4
Jordan: 2
Thailand: 1
USA: 1

A while ago we made a simple little spam-bot blacklisting tool. It checks form submissions from our sites for people trying to exploit them by injecting MIME mail headers. If it detects this, it will block the submission, record their IP address, block any further access from that address, and send us an email.

Many sites have no protection from this kind of exploitation. Their mail servers inadvertently send out hundreds of spam messages without them ever knowing. This then can cause big ISPs like Earthlink, to block their mail server--hurting deliverability of their legitimate messages.

It seems like the spam comes in waves. Today was particularly active. Here's what my inbox looks like from just a portion of our spamblocker alert messages:

Recently we were analyzing the lead activity on a client site by day and hour. I threw together this heatmap to illustrate. Interesting isn't it:



You can definitely see this is a B2B customer. Weekends are relatively quiet.

Those that stuck around for today's keynote were treated to a fascinating glimpse in to the real world of business and life in China. James McGregor, who has spent over twenty years as a journalist (Wall Street Journal China Bureau Chief) and businessperson there, reminded me what a pleasure it is to listen to a true expert.

In his recent book "One Billion Customers : Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China" McGregor relates the stories of his experiences and over 300 interviews with Chinese from all walks of life. The title of his book was taken from a book written in 1937 by Carl Crow called "400 Million Customers" about Crow's experience starting the first western ad agency in Shanghai.

According to McGregor, there is a lot we can learn about China and it's culture by understanding it's pre-communist history. "China is all about business--I think of it as the worlds largest startup". There is a tradition and culture of commerce there that is much more fundamental to Chinese life than most westerners appreciate.

The phrase used to wish someone a happy new year in China translates to "congratulations on getting rich". "Does that sound like a population that is ready for communism?" asks McGregor. But, while he views the emergence of communism as an "accident of history" it would be wrong to think his view of Chinese government is completely negative or in any way without nuance. "The communist party is probably the best run corporation in China." He describes the party as (like many US corporations) very democratic at the top, and completely autocratic at the bottom.

What about the censorship issues in China that we see so much about in US media? According to McGregor the government is trying to walk the line between full control, and the necessity for a certain amount of informational freedom. All media in China is answerable to the Communist Propaganda Department but the boundaries are constantly being pushed. And, the Internet is playing a big role in pushing those boundaries. For US companies he says "they need to follow the laws of China" it is their country and they establish the rules.

But, he mentioned Google as a company that is doing things the right way. They comply with the Chinese censorship rules, but actually label missing content in a search results page with something akin to a "due to government regulations, certain results not shown". Foreign companies should insist that the government follow it's own rules. If you are asked to censor, get it in writing. "Yahoo caved too quickly" he says.

When asked about China's environmental problems, McGregor agreed that the country is in very bad shape, "But, they know it". To paraphrase, he said that China has gone through over 100 years of equivalent US history, in just the past 20. The standard of living has improved dramatically in that country. They are driven to achieve prosperity, they will, and with it will come environmental improvements.

Should we be scared of China in the USA? No, says McGregor. They will be consumed with their own internal problems [like their environment] for a long time. "My opinion is that we should be afraid of America. We need to figure out what we are doing here."

If you have any interest in China, it's culture, it's growth, and it's increasing importance in the world, I would highly recommend you check out the podcast of this presentation on the AdTech site. The final comment from of the session came from an audience member born in Shanghai, and raised in Hong Kong. "Many speakers go to China once and come back to speak about it, your presentation was much more accurate."

I can't speak to the accuracy, but I will thank AdTech for rewarding us last-day die-hards with an excellent keynote.

Real quotes overheard at AdTech this week:

"That guy was really just speaking a lot of technobabble.
But, I speak technobabble."

"Look for me in the lobby. I'll be the one in the gray suit."

Good luck with that.

"He's a great guy. I love that guy...what's his name again?"

And my personal favorite said while pointing at the corporate brochure:

"...but it says here we did this for this customer."
"Yeah, we lied."

Earlier today I heard someone talking about this AdDrive party tonight at The Mezzanine. They called it Fight Night: Melee at the Mezzanine. The conversation went something like this:

Isn't that place some kind of actual boxing place?

Yeah, I think so. But I'm sure they are just making it into some kind of club/lounge thing for tonight.

Yeah, they wouldn't actually have people fighting.

Yes, they would. And did.

A group of AdTech attendees I would swear I've not seen before had made their way to 444 Jesse street to witness a real brawl up close. The loud music and drinks were the same as any AdTech party, but the high levels of testosterone, the clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke, and the two big guys duking it out in a ring were something new.

A few people I met today were incensed by the "girls gone wild" party. "It's a total insult to women." I'm pretty sure I know how they'd feel about the g-string clad ring card girls of Melee at the Mezzanine.


(click for the video)

As a marketer who's agency works with relatively small technology companies, I found some inspiration in the BtoB Search Marketing Best Practices panel this afternoon. It seems the big guys share the same challenges as the little ones, with the additional test of very large-scale programs, and organizational complexities to manage. Of course, they have the advantage of tremendous resources, and established brand recognition, but my impression is that the playing field is pretty even all things considered.

John Tapping, Director of the BtoB Technology Vertical at Google moderated a panel for this session that included Crispin Sheridan, Director of Online Marketing at SAP, Martin Laetsch, Manager of Worldwide Search at Intel, and Dema Zlotin, President of SEM agency Silicon Space.

A few of the issues highlighted by the panel included:

• internal organization


• measurement and metrics


• channel conflict


• day to day management of campaigns


• expansion into global markets


• integration with offline marketing efforts


• the balance of paid and natural search

Crispin Sheridan related SAP's experience in adding search to their mix of traditional media. At first "we tired to treat this [search media] like traditional media with each individual business unit managing their own program". But, before long they discovered they were competing with themselves in many areas. Three years ago, they consolidated their search marketing and now use a single agency to help with implementation and execution.

Intel is unusual because their search campaign is completely focused on brand awareness rather than direct response said Laetsh. Currently they spend between 3 and 4 percent of their total media budget on search, with about 10 percent of the total online. They also learned the same lesson on centralizing their search buy through a single responsible party in the organization. "We found there were 9 different groups bidding on the term pentium". Now he says "all sponsored search goes through me". Interesting. And they let this guy fly? was my first thought. My second thought was that it must be nice to be in a business that generates so much cash that it can spend it promoting Maria Carey commercials in the hopes it will ultimately result in a sale at Dell.

None of the panelists had strongly endorsed third party verticals as a source of quality traffic. Zlotin's group had found a large disparity between the traffic reported by the smaller verticals, and the numbers reported by their own analytics tools. This fits with our own experience as well. Almost any traffic source will see some drop off, but a sudden change in the portion tracked by your in-house tools is a should be shared with your partner, and may be cause for a refund.

Several sites the panel did highlight as positive traffic sources were Industry Brains, Business.com, Vibrant Media, and IT.com. Other than these (and I assume a few others) they stick to the majors.

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.

What's next after email marketing? Isn't RSS going to free us from all those problems with email like deliverability issues, and steadily dropping open rates?

Not so fast says Barry Stamos, Senior Director of Strategy at Responsys. Email is still one of the best tools available for making and maintaining a connection to your customers. "Email [today] is sort of like website development was 4 to 5 years ago" says Stamos. "Each one is a chance to make or break your relationship". Stamos recently came to Responsys via the acquisition of INBOX Marketing where they guaranteed an increase in email marketing sucess rates by 50%. "We never had to refund any client campaign".

When the CEO of StubHub first charged Madden with re-vamping their email marketing program she thought "isn't our program pretty good already?". But, after digging into StubHub's email communications, it turns out there was plenty of room for improvement. She started with the welcome message. It was their first opportunity to sell the benefits and features of StubHub, but was only a very basic welcome to StubHub message. After their changes, they saw a 43% increase in open rates, a 130% increase in clicks, and an 1196% increase in conversions.

At Philosophy, Stayer wanted to grow the size of their opt-in email database and improve revenues produced from their in-house list marketing. With the help of Responsys, they implemented a customer acquisition, conversion, retention and segmentation program. Their program now boasts a cost-per-acquisition rate of just $0.47, and a 2006 purchase conversion rate of 16%.

So, what were some of the tips that helped Stayer and Madden achieve such great results? Here are a few of their suggestions:

• Use a short subject line, with a strong offer.


• Test whether using your company name as the first item in the subject. It can boost rates significantly, but Stamos warned this may not always be the case


• Your average user will only spend 5-7 seconds looking at your message, so have a clear, engaging, offer in a prominent headline


• Use a subhead that refers to your headline offer


• Make sure you have a hero shot as a clear visual starting point.


• Put a caption on your hero shot. People are trained to look for and read captions to images


• Use text links and buttons as return points to your site. Some will respond to one, but not the other.


• Be sure you have a strong landing page. There is a symbiotic relationship between the email and the landing page

When asked by an audience member what they should do if they are just starting an email program, Stamos responded with these suggestions:

• If you are a commerce site, you absolutely should implement an email cart rescue message. "This is the single best thing you can do to improve conversion rates--it can save 20-30% of lost carts".


• Create an email preferences center. Rather than just unsubscribing users who are unhappy, give them options like a lower message frequency. This will help reduce unsubscribe rates.


• Pick a good email delivery partner, and use an email delivery audit service like Pivitol Veracity to boost delivery rates.


• Add a quick sign-up form on every campaign landing page--this alone can improve your conversion rates by 30%

One final tip: "Treat every customer like they are a princess." Every message is your opportunity to improve your relationship with your customer.

I'm sure just about any site owner can see something in this list they could improve.

Here are a few links to documents referred to during the session:

- Marketing Sherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide (requires purchase)

- The JupiterResearch study The ROI of E-Mail Relevance available with registration at Responsys.

- Barry Stamos' article on iMedia Connection: 10 Quick Wins for Email Marketing

Immediately after having a little fun with MSN for their banner placement, I headed over to the W Hotel for the MSN customer appreciation get together. Apparently word was out that free drinks could be had at the W, because it was quite the popular spot. Brody, our MSN contact, graciously fixed me up with a Vodka Tonic, despite my banner posting - all news is good news right? By the way, you won't find MSN on the exhibit floor this year, but I'm sure they'll make a showing after AdCenter is out of Beta.

Last year I gave the prize for best strategic banner placement to Ominture. They had a banner stretched across the escalator chute every attendee had to funnel through to reach the sessions and exhibit hall.

This year we may need to give a new prize to MSN for "strangest message sent by banner placement".

I mean this is a high traffic area though right? Don't forget to stop for a shoe shine on your way out.

Barbara Coll, founder and CEO of WebMama, and Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc tackled the topic of Organic SEO. Both are bonafide experts in the field. Barbara Coll has been a Search Engine Optimization practitioner for years, and was the founding president of SEMPO. Bruce Clay is well-known from his Search Engine Relationship Chart, and boasts SEO clients like Edmunds, and MTV.

This session was full of hands-on practical advice to ensure your site will perform well in natural search. Of course, everyone would love to appear on top of natural search rankings, and if you follow their tips it can happen for you too. Or at least maybe it will help.

Here are a few of their suggestions (I warn you, these are very "practical". That means boring if you are not into this topic):

Regarding your site's source code:

• The title tag is the most important item in each page from a search perspective, so you should be sure that it is descriptive. From my own experience, I know this one change alone can make a big difference. Barbara suggested that you check Google to see how many pages are indexed by Google. To do this search for "site:www.yourdomain.com". If you see a lot of pages with the same title, you need to do something about it.


• Use Alt tags for images on your site. It will be required by disability laws in the United States soon and it helps from a search perspective.


• Use meta-Keyword, and meta-Description tags. These have gone out of vogue, but both speakers agreed that you should still include them.


• Keep your code clean. Remotely link CSS and JavaScript files in separate files

Regarding Keyword Selection:

• It is important to structure your site in a way that identifies you as an expert on a particular topic. Bruce's example here was that if your site is all about white marbles you may pretty easily be seen as an expert about white marbles, but if you speak about red, green, blue and yellow marbles too, you may not even be seen as an expert in marbles. So your themes and the words you use to describe your themes is important.


• Make sure you understand how search engines match synonyms of your phrases. You can see what phrases Google treats as synonyms by adding a tilde in front of your search phrase. For example, by searching for "Search Engine ~Optimization" you'll see that Google treats "submission" and "placement" as synonyms for "optimization".
• 
  

Both speakers also agreed that every site should use a site map. This means the XML feed versions for Google and an actual plain-text version for users. Also, they suggested using the Yahoo Site Explorer tool to see whether you've been indexed.

That's it. Do those things and you'll be number one in no time. And, if you're not, please send your "comments" to Barbara or Bruce. Tell them Steve Hall sent you.

After coming out of the keynote by Mark Kvamme I was stoked. Ten years of excitement and bliss are coming our way. I was so excited that I even thanked Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer for the great session. They look kind of alike ok? Though the fact that the "speaker" was standing alone with Steve Hall might have clued me in...

So, now that Mark/Geoff had buit up the excitement level, I was off to hear Bambi Francisco grill some "thought leaders" on the future of search. Panelists included Kevin Ryan, Managing partner of Kinetic Results, Dana Todd of SiteLab (and current President of SEMPO - Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing, and Fredrick Markini of iProspect.

Sounded like a great session.

But it turns out that the future is not well defined. Maybe my hopes were too high, but the session seemed to me to contain a few too many random musings about the future of search, and very few clear ideas. Maybe it had something to do with the panel itself. The representatives, though I'm sure they do a fine job with things like reacting to change, or plotting a reasonable course for their customers, seemed to me are really more well-connected users of marketing tools than oracles for the future of search.

Bambi Francisco started things off by sharing a bit of data on the number of new search-related VC investments there have been lately. Back in '99 (most conversations inevitably reference the earlier "boom") there were 32 search related start-ups, but last year there were 47, and 82 in the last two years. Many of these are related to vertical search tools--search for music, blogs, friends, and just about anything else under the sun.

Frederick Markini pointed out that many of the most popular online applications like iTunes are really just specialized forms of search. So, maybe we need to broaden our definition of search in the future. John Batelle expects the vast majority of these new startup to ultimately fail, but those that survive will re-define our understanding of search. He thinks there will be an inevitable jump to the use of actual natural language (spoken) as an interface to search. That is an interesting idea.

Dana Todd feels that people are generally just too lazy to try other sites, so most of these vertical sites will have a hard time attracting an audience. She pointed out that most of these sites still rely on the major engines to actually generate their initial traffic.

It was interesting that Mark Kvamme mentioned this in his keynote. He said the average user only regularly visits 7 sites. And, that companies they invest in must have already been "discovered" by the online community. "Great sites are discovered, not promoted".

From there the session sort of descended into a discussion of "what is personalization". "I mean, I change from day to day". A few panelists began having their own conversation. Audience wasn't invited, but I'm sure it was interesting.

Bambi wrapped up with the question -- what are bloggers going to be called in the future? Panelists looked into the crystal ball and brought out "boring," "clutter," and "authors".

The final message from all of this? Something big is happening.

Maybe what this session needed is some good ol'facts and figures - Geoff Ramsey style. Or was it Mark Kvamme?