Cool Marketing Thoughts

The Search & Measure event’s goal was to create awareness about the necessity of search engines and web analytics and also to inform about possible variations of tools to track and trace traffic. The audience for the lectures were on the one hand the future users, and on the other hand existing users within this market, mostly decision makers and marketeers so to speak.

Different varieties and types of search engines were demonstrated and discussed, and the focus was mainly on internet search and enterprise search. SEA & SEO were also part of the package and last but not least there was some talking about the measurement by aid of web analytics applications and how to implement these into existing content management systems and projects.

The problems of enterprise search within CMS systems is a hot topic. Managers are getting more demanding about including their product data (often managed by a CMS) into different search engines They also want to calculate the ROI of their marketing tools, e.g. by using web analysing systems.

Various topics:

• Legally following and using visitor’s trail information on your website?
  Leg’s dig into the legislation.
• Underestimating the power of search engines?
  Learn why only a few well-selected words can catapult your website into the highest ranking.
• Having enough of the fruitless campaigns?
  Analyse and learn from click-behaviour.
• Searching quickly for the right document?
  Enterprise search tools helps you find them.

First presentation was from Geert Somers of Lawfort, one of the leading law firms in Belgium. This presentation was all about legally tracking and tracing online and offline information. Main questions that were discussed here were: “what are you allowed to know from your visitors?”, and “how long can you keep this data?”

It’s every company’s dream to appear first in search engines results and to perfectly know everything about your visitors and store all the information in your own IT system so you can collect it or call upon this data whenever you need it. Reality however shows that your competitors have rights, your visitors have rights and even your employees have rights. To not violate these rights you must get consent, one way or the other.

The most interesting things I learned here were that you’re actually allowed to deny the access to your site if a visitor refuses to accept a cookie. You can’t use keywords that are directly linked to competitors (trademarked words) and you can’t read your employee’s emails.

As a company you always need to be aware to never violate the privacy laws that apply to the collection of personal user data. You also need to be careful not to violate fair trade practices and respect the intellectual property rights. The hardest thing to keep is know-how, because know-how isn’t tangible.

Other very important notes were about the processing of personal data.
You can only collect personal data for a specified and legitimate purpose, and there’s no possible legal way to use this data also for an incompatible secondary purpose.
You’re not allowed to collect data that isn’t relevant to the product or service you’re providing, and the collected data needs to be accurate and up-to-date. If the purpose for which you collected this data is fulfilled or terminated, you’re obliged to delete the data you stored. You always need to include an opt-out if the data you collected has ‘marketing’ purposes.

The next presentation was from SAS and was about “State of the art in marketing and web intelligence”. Speakers were Juan Quesada & Luc Colson. SAS claims to be the leader in business intelligence and analytics. The most interesting thing here was the predictive factor they included in their service. SAS uses advanced forecasting and data mining of customer behavior to address critical online business goals, like increasing conversion rates with predictive analytics like the automated analytical visitor segmentation. A nice thing you can do with that is quantifying the likelihood that an individual visitor will make a purchase, which takes you far beyond the classical ‘number of visits’ theme. The tool actually displays an list of visitors most likely to purchase.

Using SAS, a company can act procative instead of reactive, which also helps decision makers to make decisions more efficiently and with less risk. Amazon.com uses SAS, and it helps them increase the number of products bought by customers through an understanding what other products are bought together by peers in the same profile group and what other products these peers buy (from that same profile group) in what order and in which time frame.

This presentation was very much about how SAS can help you to convert more registered customers to active buyers, how to increase the number of repeat buyers, converted visits, items per order, the average order value per customer, the total spend per customer and the total orders per customer.

The SAS approach is a total (different) strategy, one that goes beyond “here’s what’s happening”. It helps you understand “what you can do about what’s happening”.

Next presentation was from WebTrends, the focus here was the shifting advertising model to ‘the online world’. That’s nothing new to me, and hopefully it made sense to some other people in the room. Like all the other companies, WebTrends too is a leader. WebTrends is the leader in enterprise-class web analytics and marketing performance management solutions for marketing professionals worldwide. That’s a mouthful to say they also offer services that can help you convert visitors into buyers.

Remarkable stats:

• 20% of all households in 2007 will have a PVR
• 25% of all teenagers have an iPod or MP3 player
• Consumers spend 34% of their media time online
• Online ad spend is just at 6% of all ad spending
• Over 625 million searches are conducted each day
• 65% of webshoppers use search engines to find the sites from which they make their purchase
• 67% of the searchers move on if they didn’t find what they were looking for after the 2nd page of listings
• 22,6% does this after the first page of listings
• Total revenue from organic search is $ 207 K
• Total revenue from paid search is $ 37 K
• Repeat buyers spend 50% to 85% more per order

WebTrends gave some insight in the understanding of both organic and paid search, and how to effectively measure search results. They also explained some things about segmentation and the importancy of it towards the results of sales. Segmentation is the key to increasing the lifetime value of your customers.

The best way to calculate conversion rate is to divide the number of conversion by the number of unique visitors, and not just by dividing the number of conversion by the sum of daily uniques, nor dividing the number of conversions by the amount of total visits. That’s an important lesson.

The next presentation was from Catherine Closset, Product Manager for MSN Search. I must say I probably expected too much of it, after having experienced the Microsoft Developer & IT Pro days last month. Catherine is a charming lady to talk to, but she didn’t tell anything new. The presentation she gave was about Windows Live, Live Search, AdCenter and Corporate Windows Desktop Search. Windows Live is wicked. We all know that. Perhaps it was a revelation to other marketeers in the audience, but I felt a bit weird listening to the basics of it. There was a little bit too much focus on ‘come surf to our site’ and too less on ‘this is what you can do, and how’, but like I said I was probably me.

What I truly liked, however, was the the Live Search and even more the Corporate Windows Desktop Search. These are the tools I like to play with nowadays. Especially the great ease of use with the advanced search tips Catherine showed off. Here are a few examples:

I remember David sent me a powerpoint: command to use: “from:david*.ppt” or “from:”David Crosby”

I had a conversation with Tom about a dog: command to use: “with:tom dog”

I sent it to Dave with ‘chat’ in the subject line: command to use: “to:dave from:myname subject:chat”

It was a picture somewhere in a vacation folder: command to use: “kind: picture vacation”

I like this. I really do. Like Catherine said a few dozen times: “Great”. ;)

So, after this presentation, lunch was served. First class food, really yummy and far too much. Just the way it’s meant to be. Here’s picture of the room we had dinner in:

San Marco Village, the name already reveals it, is a duplicate of the famous square in Venice (Italy). It’s actually quite a funny feeling to be sitting there, and the themed meeting rooms around the central square really create a festive and special atmosphere. It was both impressive and humorously bizarre.

After lunch, I skipped the presentation from Amplexor, also a leader but in Content Management solutions and specialised in consulting and implementation services. Amplexor helps its customers by proposing content management solutions to deal with the information overload they are faced with today.
I met a few people from These Days and we were stuck at Kenny Van Beeck’s booth from the emailgarage. Pretty interesting talks, good laughs, kind people. What more can you desire.

The next presentation was from Extenseo and was hosted by Elly Cools, she’s a senior e-traffic building consultant. Extenseo is since January 2006 a subsidiary of Belgacom Skynet, a Belgian ISP which will soon be totally amazed by the power of Clo. Clo used to work for Virgin, but she’s going to start at Skynet in three weeks. Welcome in the fast lane, Skynet. Anyway, back to Extenseo. First there was the usual blabla mandatory in the intro. ‘leading company’ yadayadayada. Let’s skip to some interesting parts of the presentation: Google has 46.2% of the market in the US, but it has 83.1% of the Belgian market. Search Engine marketing can be split up into two parts, namely search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA).

• Things that prevent your website from being indexed in the search engines:

  Flash, JavaScripted links, Frames, Dynamic sites with complex URLs, URLs containing session IDs, mandatory cookies to browse a site.Other major sources of problems: alias domain names, sites without external links.

• Things that make your site rank:

  Domain name, URL structure, Internal link structure, page title, metatags, visible text (body text), titles (H1 and H2 heading tags, html tags,…), paragraph tags, keyword density, prominence, placement, text & image comments and so on.

Next company I listened to: Websidestory. Speaker: Israel Martis, Sr. HBX Mayor Account Executive. Israel is an envagelist. He brings his story with a lot of entertaining warmth and is very passionate about his product. By far this was the best speaker I’ve listened to and a plus was that he didn’t actually sell his product. He promoted it as ‘how it could help the user’ without focusing too much on ‘we are’ and ‘we can’. His story was all about ‘you can’ and ‘you are’, which might be a detail, but it’s very relevant. I think Websidestory is the most reliable company in its segment. The way Israel promoted the Active Marketing Suite really caught me. If there’s one company I’ll ever rely on if I need to, it’s going to be this one.

“The fact that HBX Analytics and WebSideStory Search are completely hosted and integrated was a big plus for us. There are strong synergies between the two products that will help us better serve customers and increase sales. There are also obvious advantages of working with a single vendor and a single point of contact.” – Lillian Posner, Director of E-Commerce
Brooks Brothers

Israel showed off some demos about the tools they provide and it was pretty impressive. There was a real-time predictor that could help you estimate the result of some actions, these actions could be numerous. (adding more budget on this or that will increase/decrease total results by x) The tools have a very user-friendly interface and high usability. It all seems so easy to manage. Plus: HBX is the best thing you can get nowadays. Having that tool completely integrated is pure gold.

The last presentation of the day was Nedstat. Blahblah. Crooks I tell you. Criminals of the lowest kind. I can’t believe people still trust them. I know some folks who’ve had contracts with them for tens of thousands of Euros. None of them are with Nedstat now. They all left and lost loads of cash. Truckloads of cash. Nedstat doesn’t have any price/quality comparison with any other player in the same segment. They’re too expensive. They’re overrated. You’ll pay thousands of dollars and still don’t own any byte of data. Ripp-off, scammers, porn pop-under providers. This company is a sharade. If internet has a gutter, these guys would be king of it.

That concludes my day at Search & Measure. I’ve had a great time, I learned enough to keep me busy for a few days. I laughed a lot to keep me going for weeks. Thanks, Christian Daems from CMS Channel for putting this together. It was cool and solid. You did a great job and thanks for the entrance card. If there’s anything I can do to return the favor, just let me know. Also thanks to Miss BNOX for the lovely ride, the good laughs during the day and chill tunes afterwards.