SES San Jose 2007 Day 1

Posted on | August 20, 2007 | No Comments

Even though I didn’t land in San Jose until 12:45, I was able to catch two sessions at Day 1 of SES San Jose 2007. The first one focused on “Personalization, User Data, & Search.” It was a panel discussion featuring Jonathan Mendez (OTTO Digital), Richard Zwicky (Enquiste), Dave Davies (Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning), and Gordan Hotchkiss (Enqurio Search Solutions).

There were a couple of take-aways for me including:

  • Personalization changes the way people read search. The eye tracking reports show that the introduction of personalization shifts focus to the organic listings as well as gives more prominence to the 3, 4, and 5 positions on the page.
  • Personal rank is the level of importance that may be given to an individual in the world of Google. Much like sites today want links from sites with high Page Rank, tomorrow you will want links from users with high Personal Rank.
  • Time to return to search engine includes time spent on sites after visiting the first site. If you can help visitors to your site find the right site for what they were looking for, this will improve the time top return to search engine.
  • Personalized content based on parameters provided by search engines can help improve time to return to site as well as conversions and other key metrics that will improve many key metrics of the internet marketing campaign.
  • Google recommended building widgets and they are trying to provide results for the “Zero Word Query” with iGoogle.
  • Yahoo is more focused on Social Data. Become an expert on de.licio.us, Yahoo! Answers, or Digg so you can develop a unique expertise and produce fresh and relevant content.

The second session I was able to attend was “Advanced Paid Search” and it included presentations from Jon Kelly (SureHits.com), Eduardo Liach (SearchRev), Matt Van Wagner (Find Me Faster), and Michael Sack (IdeaMarc).

This session seemed to focus more on execution and had several new pointers for paid search campaigns including:

  • Day Parting : Bid up on good days and times of day. Figure out your average conversion and the conversion for each specific day. On good days, bid up and on days below average..bid down. Also, if a business has natural capacity issues such as being open from 9-5, bid accordingly.
  • Geo Targeting: Find the top 10 metropolitan areas and build a new geo-targeted ad focused specifically on these top 10 metropolitan areas.
  • Content Network: Generic keywords at low cost per clicks seem to do better on content network when comparing cost per conversion.
  • Dynamic Keyword Insertion – The DKI keyword phrase is not the keyword typed by the user, it is the keyword in your adgroup campaign.
  • In general, state based campaigns perform better than city based keyword campaigns.
Category: Research Engine

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