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Make Money Per Conversion, Not Click: Search Engine Strategies, NYC

By Kim (cre8pc)

It is day one for sessions at the NYC Search Engine Strategies Conference being held this week at the NY Hilton. There are over 5000 attendees, and believe me, every session I've sat in on has been overflowing with people. There is strong interest in Advanced topics, with a keen eye on what the future holds for the Search Marketing industry.

 I'm delighted to report that although I'm not there in any official capacity as a usability speaker, the relationship of user experience, persuasive design and conversions is inching its way into many sessions and conversations.

The following is are my takeaways from a talk called "Pay Per Conversation" from today's sessions.

Moderator: Jeff Rohrs, ExactTarget

Speakers: Jeffrey Eisenberg, FutureNow
Sandra Cheng, Product Mgr, Google

Jeffrey is standing in for his brother, Bryan Eisenberg, because his wife just went into labor. This room is filled to capacity. Unlike the first session I attended this morning (SEO: Where to Next?"), where it was overflowing and I had to sit on the floor, this time I'm firmly planted in the front row.

Jeffrey leads off the session by having us consider the typical PPC (Pay per click) term and reworking it to "pay per conversation". The reason for this is that we don't want to make money per click. We make money per conversion. He also pondered that rather than "SEO", we view it as "search experience optimization". As he says, "There is a signal by the searcher and if we hear it right, we can get them to take action." So let's look at his ideas on how we can listen and meet user/searcher expectations:

 1. Web Analytics consulting can show you were the disconnects are. These are where our user expectations are not met. Did they search on a phrase and your page appear but not meet what they expected? Your goal here is to study your data to discover traffic patterns and unmet needs.

 2. There were several references to what we now called "information scent". While there are many different definitions, essentially "scent" are cues to your visitors to keep them interested. They'll stick around when pages are relevant and click paths are goal driven. Links, for example, should contain content that will promise to take your users where they want or need to go. Where there is scent, there is momentum. Study your drop off data and note where they have lost the scent of what put them on the trail to your site. Information Scent creates motivation. The objective is to avoid losing so many users up front. Pay attention to the signals users are looking for.

 3. Keywords don't fail to convert. Rather, how pages are relevant to keyword searches makes the difference.

4. Personas. There are simple vs robust" personalities, logical vs emotional, quick vs deliberate, methodical vs spontaneous. User behavior absolutely is taken into consideration when determining design, content, and tasks. Eye tracking studies have proved different patterns of page usage can be traced to different types of personalities. Some people will find something quickly and then move on. Motivation is where users will focus. Geico appeals to an emotional need with the use of its lizard, who promises to save you hundreds of dollars. However, if you have sold the idea and then present your visitor with a technical and complicated form to fill out, you risk losing your visitor.

 5. (I loved this!) "Plan, improve, measure and plan again, over and over...." Conversions are a continuous improvement process. Align customers with business objectives and consider their behavior patterns. By studying patterns, this changes what you add and enhance on your web pages. Don't throw anything against the wall and see what sticks.

 6. There is a White Paper on creating personas on FutureNow. Their Twitter account is twitter@thegrok Jeffrey had a great set of slides to compliment his talk and also showed several case studies from some big brand companies, where something as simple as changing the content on a call to action button increased conversions. He illustrated the value of testing several pages to see what converted best.

Sandra was next. She's an excellent speaker. Very clear and easy to follow. She strongly emphasized the value of using Google Analytics in her presentation but any testing is fine. She showed how testing can help you figure out what works best for your users. Some highlights from her talk include:

1. Not everybody who comes to your site will do what you want them to do (but lets try to nab what we can).

2. Try to avoid bounces and abandonment by making sure the directions are clear.

3. The best way to understand what's confusing is to watch a friend use your web site. You know where everything is already. Where did they get stuck?

4. Get analytics to get data. You need an idea where people are going on your site and what happens when they get there. Reports will prompt you to ask the right questions about your traffic. Data shows where they come from. You will ask questions, get answers and make fixes, all with the help of your reports. Look at landing pages. Where do they enter your site? Google Analytics shows bounce rates. Do they land and leave before clicking anywhere? Bounce rates represents opportunity. What changes can you make to help them to stay? Look at funnel reports. These are goal paths and show Where they come in and out/ Page leaks (where users leave) are also opportunities to patch leaks.

5. Internal site search are great sources that show customer intent. People type into your site what they are looking for. This is how they tell you what they want. Study where they go when the search and also investigate where they left. Look at search terms and un-met needs. Perhaps the search results page is too confusing. or you don't carry the product they're looking for. You can get a great picture of customer intent with on-site search.

6. Test page or ad copy. Look at non-paid keywords and bounce rates and compare with paid keyword strategies.

7. Let visitors design your pages for you. Compare page content by making and testing 3 variations of the page. Google will track responses and show you the winning combination. Run mulit-variate testing. Test an image vs without an image near a call to action prompt. It is not rare for 20-50% conversions improvement by making small changes that appear in this kind of testing

8. Remember that "best practices" aren't always the best for YOUR site.

Win a Free Ticket to Online Media Boot Camp on April 9, 2009

By Li Evans

We announced Online Media Boot Camp, a unique & exclusive online marketing training conference going on here in the Philadelphia area. Now I have some good news!  We're giving away three free tickets!  You have your shot at winning 1 of them, just get someone to nominate you.  Here's the rules to how it works:

The three lucky ticket winners will be picked on March 20th!

1. Want a chance at winning a free ticket to the Online Media Boot Camp (a value of $349 before 3/16 & $449 after 3/16), you have to be nominated by someone else.
2. A person can be nominated in one of four ways: a blog post, a video, on Twitter, via an e-mail sent to OMBC (beth [at] onlinemediabootcamp [dot] com). All four must include: Who you are nominating and why. You must include a link to the Online Media Boot Camp (www.onlinemediabootcamp.com) in your post. If you tweet it, use the #OMBC hashtag.
3. If you nominate someone, you can buy a ticket for $349 after 3/16. A savings of $100! (Code: OMBCFTW)
4. If you are nominated for OMBC and you want to go to OMBC, you must do one of the following to accept the nomination: a blog post, a video, or send an e-mail to OMBC accepting the nomination (beth [at] onlinemediabootcamp [dot] com).You must state that you will cover all travel costs, that you will attend and why you deserve to win. You must include a link to the Online Media Boot Camp (www.onlinemediabootcamp.com) in your post. If you tweet it, use the #OMBC hashtag.
5. All posts, videos and e-mails of those nominated will be posted to the OMBC blog too.
6. The three winners will be selected by the OMBC speakers. Criteria includes: creativity, passion, honesty, statement of how online marketing/social media will help you as a business owner or marketer/communicator/etc. and any other items that you think make your case to win a free ticket.
7. If you are nominated for a free ticket, but don’t win, you can buy a ticket for $349 after 3/16. A savings of $100! (Code: OMBCFTW)
8. If you win a free ticket and have already purchased a ticket, we’ll refund your money. Or, if you are feeling generous, you could give your purchased ticket to a friend…

It’s that simple! Have questions? Contact Online Media Boot Camp on Twitter: @onlinemediabc or e-mail us at beth [at] onlinemediabootcamp [dot] com.

Beth also explains that if you aren't creative, we just won't be that into you! :)

The Pirate's Dilemma - SES London Keynote by Matt Mason

By Li Evans

Matt Mason, author of the Pirate's Dilemma spoke at the opening keynote of SES London. Prior to him speaking I got a chance to speak to him a little and I was really impressed with what a down to earth person Matt really is. That carried through to his presentation as well.

Matt started out by giving the audience some big picture overviews about Piracy by asking the audience how many of us knowingly pirate things and how many don't? Matt went on to point out it's not the piracy laws that we know that we break, but the ones we don't know we break every day. The audience seemed a little bewildered until Matt went on to point out that singing happy birthday in public, forwarding emails and photocopying books are all examples of piracy. If you calculated it all, 4.65 billion a year would be owed by each person for violating laws around piracy.

In the past, information use to flow in one direction but with the changes in society, technology and advancement with the internet, information is now flowing in a lot of directions and decentralization is happening. Piracy is having a great impact on businesses such as fashion, pharmaceuticals, and movies just to name of few industries, and its only just getting started. With the advent of the 3d printer and the fact that these printers are getting extraordinarily cheaper each year( a few years ago they were 21k, this year 1,800) as well as smaller and faster, piracy is becoming more and more a big issues companies face.

SES London 2009 - Link Building Basics

By SEOidiot

This session is in the fundamentals track so a lot of the content may not be suited to people at a more advanced level already

Moderator:
Kevin Newcomb, Managing Editor, Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
Peter van der Graaf, Advanced Search Specialist, Netsociety
Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
Jonathan Stewart, Head of Natural Search, iCrossing UK
Brian Turner, Offpage Optimisation Specialist, Propero Digital

Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link:

Links are the soul of the web, sites that have a lot of links rank well.
Before we can do that we need to understand where this all came from.
Back in the 50's with the launch of sputnik the world realised that they needed a network that would survive if nuclear war happened and this eventually lead to the creation of the internet. Once the amount of pages on the net increased the search engines became the way to find information.

Google started with the view of course that the links between these sites were citations as sites voted for each other.

Link Popularity

Link quantity - Number of links
Link quality - The authority that is passed through the link
Anchor text - The text used in inbound links
Anchor text is most effective when these links point at pages optimised for that term.
Link relevance - establishes where your site is in the neighbourhood of links.

Authority sites
Sites that rank well and have strong positions within their niche and have quality inbound links that support that.

Avoid when link building: -

Try to build slow and steady to avoid sending a signal to the engines that this isnt normal
Repetitive anchor text - try to avoid just using one term and link deeply into the site rather than just to the homepage.
Reciprocal links - dont get stuck just using reciprocals
Links in the content rather than the navigation as these can appear to be potentially paid or out of full context.
Links that nofollow or are affected by robots.txt wont help you with your link popularity
Make sure the pages you are trying to get links from are indexed as a guide that it should pass at least some value.

Jonathan Stewart of iCrossing UK:

Links - its all about quality

• Trust
• Dofollow
• Age of links
• Page Rank
• Content
• Anchor text
• Position
• Relevance

Tools for link analysis

• Google webmaster tools
• Yahoo site explorer
• SEO Elite
• Linkscape

How to get links

• Directories
• Had a tough time of late (Google have even removed it from their guidlines)

Dont use to focus on big money terms (Better used for long tail)
Make sure the directory has good editorial and that the page you want is indexed and has a cache in google

Link reconfiguration

• Approach webmasters already identified as linking to you and ask them to change the link to something more optimised or even add further links to additional content.
• Agencies - use the clients email address to ask and be personal (phone, manual email etc)
• Identify sites linking to a 404 page on your site and ask them to correct

Press Releases

• PR Web
• Response Source
• Source Wire
• 27-7 Press release

Embed links in the release
Google only takes the anchor text from the first link. So if three links in your release all point to the home page the first found is the one that google uses.

Creating great content

• For a recent toyota blog campaign they looked at the fact that the car was aimed at people who are looking for fuel efficiency
• They decided to do some hypermiling where they tested how efficient you could get the car to act.
• Flickr photos
• Twitter
• Blog posts
• Picked up and linked from some highly valuable sites.

Peter van der Graaf of Netsociety

Just sending mass emails isn't that effective
Stages of link building

• What do i have and where do i want links from (Inc competitor link analysis)
• Link bait creation
• Distribution
• Continue the relationship with people who link to you

Preparation

• How natural and full is my current link profile
• Do i have good links?
• Do I have links that could appear paid
• How does this appear in relation to your competition
• Which possible link partners would help bridge that gap?
• Can these possible link partners be grouped into possible approaches ?

Link Bait Creation

• You have to match the content that you create that match the approaches that you identified in the previous stage. Do some research on a topic and create content based on that research.
• Contribute to websites, content, providing tools, guest post, reward their visitors (discounts perhaps?)
  Linker rewards - reviews, testimonials, link trades (knowing the down sides of that now)
  Must see - shocking, funny, hot topics

Distribution

• Email, as personally as possible. The more personal the better the results.
• Take personal control of the most important targets to ensure the best chance of success.
• Distribute through sites that already have some authority. Press releases, social, news etc
  Spread virally
• Continue relations
• Link value keeps building up so don't lose them.
• Makes it easier for ongoing projects.

Brian Turner of Propero Digital

A lot of people misunderstand link building as they often look at links in isolation as a way to manipulate the results rather than making it part of the overall marketing process.

• Link buying is a good example of an area that if focussed on getting links can cause you problems.
• Google is developing newer methods than just links as signals. Human traffic values for example.
• Link building therefore has to be part of a wider communications strategy.
• By entering into conversations with people in your industry you are naturally inviting links
• The internet is a social web run by people for people so engaging in conversations is a natural way to invite links as part of that conversation.

Q & A

1 link building tactic that works right now

• Jonathan - Link reconfiguration
• Peter - Reduce branding - people are far more likely to respond without a prominant brand
• Brian - be newsworthy

SES London - Orion Panel - SEO Where to Next?

By SEOidiot

Moderator: Mike Grehan

Speakers:
Kevin Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair & CMO, WebVisible
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings Where does

Where does SEO go next?
Why do we do SEO - why don't we expect the engines to do that work and fix their crawler?

Jill Whalen - We have to do it. The problem is often the developers who don't understand what they have to do to make life easy for the engines.

Chris Sherman - SEO is as much PR as it is tweaking pages.

Rand Fishkin - Linkbuilding is its own art and science, great linkbuilding isn't always tied to great marketing. Good marketers who find technical and psycological ways to make people want to link.

Mike Grehan - If you think about great ways to attract people and make good content its better than trying to set yourselves some number based target. One great link can outway a volume of poor links. Is it about quantity or quality?

All- quality

Should we spend more time on quality?

Jill Whalen - Natural links are best, getting that extra edge is a real science

Rand Fishkin - When you do a lot of site analysis you sometimes find that it isn't always quality. Yes in the long term quality counts but when you see weaknesses in the algo its hard not to take advantage of that.

Mike Grehan - The weakness of the link based method is that unless you have a website you don't get to vote

Rand Fishkin - Web 2.0 has partly addresses that and now the public does get to vote

Mike Grehan - Usergenerated content is now 5 times that of traditional content.

Rand - I think we may underestimate google. Is a crawler going to be the best way to gather all the information in the world? When you look at things like twitter for example.

Mike Grehan - What are some of the new things we should be doing now?

Chris Sherman - If we are doing some of the quality things we should be OK.

Brett - We are coming into a new era where search engines aren't the defacto way to get information. Social media is starting to take some share of that task.

Kevin Ryan - Getting access to the data isn't the only factor, local 2.0 has become the integration of usergenerated content into the mix.

Rand Fishkin - When you look at what has changed, local is one area. The new sources cant be manipulated in the same ways.

Mike Grehan - On doing a search for bed and breakfast new york all the work that people had done on organic rankings and getting backlinks is wasted by the fact that google puts a list of local listings before the first result.

Rand Fishkin - You have to do different things to manipulate your chances in local, you have to be aware that if you simply sit back and let it happen naturally then you aren't influencing the results.

Jill Whalen - We should be helping make the internet better and helping the search engines give good results

Rand Fishkin - Blackhats aren't ruining the web, they are pushing the envelope. They are one of the drivers that make google improve their systems.

Mike Grehan - If we did just stick to googles guidelines that would be hard

Rand Fishkin - Yes it would be hard but even now by leveraging the new user generated content and thinking differently you can still.

Mike Grehan - Lets talk about social media, should we be recommending that people use that? Should it be part of the mix?

Jill Whalen - It creates traffic and people are using it in addition to google

Rand Fishkin - I don't know how we couldn't recommend that

Chris Sherman - Depends on your goals, if you use it for areas that don't work for social media you may get a backlash.

Mike Grehan - How do we get the new signals from user generated content into the algo? Rand Fishkin - The goal of many of sites now is to be the defacto answer to the query so you dont rely on google. bt - When google did their recent ajax test it stripped off the referring keyword and if implemented would cause us to rethink our optimization strategy.

Mike Grehan - If google changes overnight we don't get a warning that they will change.

Jill Whalen - Thats why concentrating on making the pages you create the best that they can be and have made good use of social media then it shouldn't matter if google changes its algo.

Mike Grehan - Video? is optimizing video the SEO's job

All - Yes

 Chris Sherman - We are going to see more technologies like speech to text conversion that will make our job easier.

Mike Grehan - Again we are all talking about new signals

Chris Sherman - Content is king and will continue to be, the technical aspect of SEO will change but content remains king

Jill Whalen - The IT department and the marketing departments of businesses need to come together. they need to understand that SEO is a function of both

Kevin Ryan - Other than googles dominance the involvement of google in government now is a concern.

Q & A

With the advent of so many new ways to get to the web without having to go through google (Think Tweetdeck for Twitter and other applications) how are our jobs going to change?

Brett - If you focus on the user then the engines will follow
Rand Fishkin - Perhaps thats a different job than the job of an SEO?

When you are looking at applications that access the sites directly thats perhaps not search. Is Google now finished as we move away from a link based eco system?

Chris Sherman - In the early days the method of viewing value through citation that was a good way to look at the web, there will be new ways going forward.

Rand Fishkin - Link analysis still has some life in it for coming years but citations can evolve beyond just links.

SES London - Measuring Success in a 2.0 world

By SEOidiot

Moderator: Mike Grehan

• Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
• Miles Bennett, Director, Targetstone Limited
• John Marshall, CTO, Market Motive
• Neil Mason, Director of Analytical Consulting, Foviance

What do we need to track? 
Many years ago clients merely asked that we needed to simply track hits

Richard Zwicky - 2.0 is how user want to interact with the web.  Measure the value delivered rather than simple numbers

Miles Bennett - Usability towards growing registrations rather than simple traffic metrics.

John Marshall - Becoming tougher to measure the success of the business rather than simply the website. So much of the interaction with business now happens off the website (think RSS feeds etc)

Neil Mason - Define what you mean by success - time needs to be taken to make the client understand what success means. Analytics simply show behaviour rather than determine success in the visitor achieving what they came to achieve.

How does the client determine what the KPI's are ?

Richard Zwicky - Clients do need to be lead through the process

John Marshall - Its getting harder for the client to grasp the fact that a lot of the value happens away from the website. Email marketing for example can be difficult as so many of the savvy younger web users use mediums like social networking

Mike Grehan - In 2.0 there are so many additional factors (think user generated content video etc)

Miles Bennett - Trends, peaks and troughs as a method to show where the risks and value are. It doesn't matter what the historic numbers are if they get problems off site on things like Youtube it can still affect the brand.

Mike Grehan - How important is it to measure things like tagging - del.icio.us twitter hashtags etc

Neil Mason - The toolkits are sparse in that area so its difficult. researching using the newer tools helps large customers to start to understand the value from multi channel behaviour.

John Marshall - The analytics traditional tend to now give a more 2 dimensional view but don't tell us much about the intention and experience of the user. Surveys are an important tool as is competitive information. KPI referrals from search is better with a view of share of search as it gives a far more meaningful metric.

Richard Zwicky - Professional analytics give so much more than the basic tools like google analytics etc - we fall into that as its easier when some of the professional tools give so much more. Its like a professional photographer using a high end SLR verses the ease of use of something like a camera phone.

 

Mike Grehan - So how do we add value to our clients?
People give value too often to the last click rather than the whole picture

Neil Mason - To do a job you need a variety of tools. Google Analytics - good strong basic analytics tool but as you ask more questions you start to need more tools. Got to get the data in one place as you need to be able to see all the data across the different technologies and therefore be unable to understand the total picture which then in turn informs what decisions you make.

John Marshall - Admission of complexity is a first step in understanding that we need to change. Tools like Hitwise and other competitive data isn't a replacement for analytics but provides an additional layer.

Mike Grehan - tools that are out there ?

Neil Mason - Hitwise as competitive analysis
John Marshall - Compete

Many of the newer tools are expensive as we have been lulled into a sense that analytics data is free whereas many of the new services rely on work that costs a great deal to assemble.

Mike Grehan - what are the important KPI's?

Miles Bennett - its hard to give a one size fits all as they need to align with the customers objectives

Neil Mason - You have to first define what the goals of the business are and these have to be clear and confident. what does good look like (what would the indicators be of success). Then looking at how you can measure that, perhaps for an investment company good may be determined by phone call enquiries. Many of these metrics point to outcomes that manifest themselves in actions offline.

Richard Zwicky - The site isn't an island in the business and so you need to understand how to listen to those customers

Q & A

Measuring success
If the client doesn't have a clear idea of the 'value' of each lead what can you do to counter that?

John Marshall - There are tools that can help attach the real search query into the lead generation tool. this then gives the sales people the opportunity to see the types of leads and it gives them a way to value those leads. Think - if the referral from search was 'cheap widgets' that gives the client a better idea of the value of that lead versus other terms.

How much time do you suggest businesses devote to measuring success?

Miles Bennett - Web analytics and data analysis is a full time role and people need to give it the resource to get the value

Richard Zwicky - If you define the goals then you can define the amount of time that you need to spend with the data to achieve those goals

Neil Mason - The more the pressure of the current climate bites the amount of time between adjustment cycles will mirror the faster pace of changes within the client.

Search Engine Strategies London!

By Li Evans

It's hard to believe that it's been a year already, since Mike Grehan of Acronym Media put together one of the best Search Engine Strategies events I've been to, but, the calendar doesn't lie, it's been a year.  Last year Mike had one heck of a program put together, new sessions, great speakers and some awesome keynotes.

This year looks to be no different, in fact it looks to be able to top last year in content that addresses the subjects that are relevant to what's going on in the industry now, globally.  Take for example the opening keynote, it's Matt Mason who's the author of The Pirate's Dilemma.  Now as some of you know I've got thing for pirate lore, so the title of that book immediately caught my attention when friend Whitney Hoffman of LD Podcast (great podcast for parents with children who have learning disabilities) first mentioned it to me, now the author is a keynote speaker at SES London - and no I don't expect him to dress as a pirate although and eye patch might be a cool touch. :)

What's cool about this book is that it touches on how the youth are really driving and changing trends and fads in the online world.  With these changes, its creating havoc in our worlds of marketing and business because none of these trends follow the old "norms" that companies have established.  Companies and marketers have to stop and rethink how they approach marketing online because of this, because "piracy" has become a new business model.

Beyond the keynote by Matt Mason, there's a great lineup of sessions.  Some popular ones are returning from last year's lineup, and then there are new ones like one of the panels I'm speaking on with Greg Jarboe and Shari Thurow - Online Video Update - The Next Wave.  There's even a Orion Panel discussing where SEO goes next, and look who's on the panel - Brett Tabke, Jill Whalen and Chris Sherman, just to name a few.

Beyond speaking on the Video panel, I'm also speaking on Social Media and moderating the Podcast/Vodcast panel and a Site Clinic.  That site clinic will have Matt Bailey and Dave Naylor on it, I think that clinic is going to be fun, since you never know what site is going to be reviewed and what the panelists will help with.

So if you haven't signed up yet or you're on the fence, what are you waiting for?  Especially in today's economic recession, you need to get ahead of the curve, SES London can help you do just that!

Online Marketing Training in Philly at Online Media Boot Camp

By Li Evans

With the way the economy is going these days,companies are downsizing and looking for ways to cross train staff members to handle more responsibilities with online marketing strategies.  Trouble is that just because your online marketer handles your PPC doesn't mean they totally understand how to handle your PR online.  You're blogger may be great at creating catchy blog posts but might not know how to integrate a complete social media strategy.  Your very competent SEO can get you rankings for keywords, but might not have the knack for building a community.  Where can you find the cross training to help your team get up to date on all these different areas of online marketing at a reasonable rate? Well that's the question we attempt to answer by creating a great online marketing training conference called Online Media Boot Camp!  For under $500 you can get some great cross training in Online PR, Blogging, Social Media and Community Building.

Exclusive Online Marketing Training

It's also a pretty exclusive training, limited to just 65 attendees.  That gives the attendees more face time with the online marketing training speakers who do this stuff every day and know the ins and outs.  So who are the speakers?  Well check out this out.

• Mack Collier who writes at his own blog, the Viral Garden (and others as well) will be doing training on building communities.
• Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions is going to be speaking on how you can sell online marketing and social media internally and get buy in from not just the higher ups but your whole company.
• Valeria Maltoni from the Conversation Agent is giving guidance on corporate and business blogging.  It's a lot different than just personal or hobby blogging and Valeria has got a lot to share.
• Beth Harte from The Harte of Marketing and SMG's most recent author edition is sharing her knowlege of Public Relations in a Web 2.0 world.
• Then there's me - Liana "Li" Evans - I kick the day off by giving attendees the basic fundamentals around social media and online marketing.

Now you're wondering where, when and how much really, right?  O.K., so here's the other important details.

• Where:  King of Prussia, PA - just north of downtown Philly, conveniently located off of the PA turnpike.
• When:  April 9th, 2009 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Cost:  Until Feb. 20th, 2009  just $349.00 (yes, that truly is under $500!)

So what is included?  Well the training of course, but breakfast, lunch with the speakers and snacks are included as well as a few "give mes" (swag) and free WiFi.  Not a bad deal for some excellent online marketing training, wouldn't you say?

What are you waiting for?  Sign up today, because after February 20th, 2009 the price goes up, and with only 65 slots available, they won't last long!

SMX Singapore Keynote II - Harrison Gervitz

By David Temple

16 year old business prodigy, Harrison Gevirtz of GevirtzMedia and LeaderClicks spoke about social media monetization for the keynote on the second day of the inaugural Search Marketing Expo in Singapore, SMX Singapore. LeaderClicks is a social advertising network, working with publishers and advertisers on Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and Hi5. Harrison's company specializes in monetizing social traffic with proprietary ad serving technology.

Social networks have been growing significantly over the past 5 years and he just read an article that social media has surpassed the adult industry. 4 of the top 10 sites in Singapore are social media sites. MySpace and Facebook are receiving most of the traffic as well as Friendster here in Asia.

The evolution of social media started with just targeting based what was on their web page. Now we're getting into a new technology, social graphing targeting. Using technology shapes relationships. We developed technology to determine influence among friends. For instance if someone has 500 friends on a FaceBook profile and interact once or twice a week, let's say that friend has around 500 - 1,000 interaction points.  But if someone has 200 friends and they interact on a daily basis they have a lot more interaction points. So they have more power over their friends. So it's quality over quantity.

eMetrics: A Morning in Google Analytics University

By Li Evans

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit - Day 1

This week SearchMarketingGurus is at eMetrics for a 2nd year.  This year, myself (Li Evans of Key Relevance) and Simon Heseltine will be bringing you all the great highlights of the sessions here at eMetrics being held at the Hilton High Mark here in Alexandria.  I'm actually excited to be here after all of the great things that Mike Grehan & Bryan Eisenberg have told me about this event.

This morning I arrived bright and early, set on finally sitting in on a Google University class.  It's running all day, and I'm stepping in for certain segments of it, while attending to normal "work" things. 

This Google Analytics session is being presented by Justin Cutroni of EpikOne and really opened my eyes on some major things I'm missing out on.  I love data, and you don't realize just how much data there is afforded to you by Google Analytics until you sit down with someone who can show you everything.  I'm a big fan of Avinash Kaushik (like no one didn't know that already) and have read his book, but still, there's something about sitting and having someone present it too you in this type of fashion that opens your eyes even more.

Here are some of my quick take aways: