Search News: SMX East – Search Marketing Happiness is a Warm Churro
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 6, 2008 | Share This
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The Javits Center is a cruel place at 8:30 AM – especially when Search Marketing Expo East is sharing the cavernous steel and glass girdered barn on the far, far west side of Manhattan with a few other shows. I’m not sure that I had enough coffee in me yet to properly express my horror at being asked “Are you here for the kid expo?” “Christ, no!” is apparently not the standard response.
Happily I did find my way into the SMX side of the hall after picking up the requisite backpack full of swag to slip into a comfy chair for the opening panel: “Search Integration: Are We There Yet?” James Lamberti of ComScore quipped that he wanted to prep a powerpoint slide with a giant “No” on it.
It was a good panel with a satisfying flow from speaker to speaker moderated with verve by Sara Holoubek.
Robert Murray of iProspect started things off by talking about offline media’s influence on online searches. His soccer happy intro was a perfect set-up for ComScore’s Lamberti who busted open some mad data on measuring the “full value” of search. Lamberti advocated strongly for the idea of search as a vehicle for reaching consumers beyond the typical PPC (pay-per-click) measurement.
This was echoed by Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg, who talked extensively about enterprise level paid search and the exciting challenges that exist when planning a search campaign for a major brand like Microsoft.
One of the interesting insights that Pete brought up was the high level of offline and search marketing campaign integration which allowed Reprise to buy highly specific long tail keywords based on the first set of ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. In addition to the expected terms, keywords targeted to the TV ads like “shoe circus,” “conquistador” and “warm churro” were ready to deploy before they aired.
MTV Networks Don Steel fought bravely through what sounded like a nasty cold to agree with Pete and demonstrate MTV’s similar integration of on and offline marketing methods. He also gets to see “South Park” episodes before the rest of us to determine their similar keyword strategy – pretty cool.
An underlying theme was the importance of conveying to clients the importance of those less measurable parts of search. It’s easy to fall back on the great metrics PPC provides but there is more going on than just click-throughs. A search ad can also function as a much more effective billboard – bringing a sharp targeted message to an engaged audience that may still click through to an organic result. The choice to click on an organic link (hopefully yours on a well-optimized site) can very well be influenced by your paid search ad. So could the choice to visit a website in another session online or even plunk down some cash at a physical site – all without clicking on that initial search ad.
These actions can be hard to measure but they aren’t impossibly so. As search shoulders a greater burden of marketer’s total campaigns we need to educate clients about the results that aren’t so easy to see right away but can have an important effect on their ROI.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Conferences & Events, Media Convergence, Microsoft, Reprise Media, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Keyword Generation, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: News |