Twitter: Real Search Engine: 19 Billion queries per month.

Twitter Ads: “Promoted Tweets”. Expand program through 3rd parties. 75% of traffic is via API’s. UberMedia…currently tussling with Twitter.

Facebook: Pages, apps, ads, polls…analytics via Facebook Insights.

Real time search: Is displacing traditional results. Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real time algos.

Mobile: Mobile advertising is the new point of sale. 25% of Facebook users are on mobile.

Google dominates mobile web ads. IDC: More mobile devices sold in 2011 than PC’s. Apple: 60% of touchscreen market. Most mobile campaigns are ad-hoc and lack the focus of traditional campaigns.

Consider optimizing part of your site for mobile.

Location-based social networking is hot (Foursquare, Gowalla). Geofencing detects location & can place ads on devices.

Video: YouTube is now the second largest search engine by traffic. Video will be 70% of mobile data traffic by 2014. Need to embed metadata, create relevant titles & filenames, appropriate on page optimization, lots of descriptive text where video is embedded & include URL’s in the video to encourage viral linking.

Takeaways: Search marketing continues to grow importance…more opportunities than ever for clever SEM’s, we haven’t begun the upslope curve of hockey stick groth in this industry.

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The post Conversion Optimization Session appeared first on SEMpdx.

Summary:
Learn what your competitors are doing to drive their online businesses, how to emulate their successes, and exploit their weaknesses.

The post Competitive Intelligence Session appeared first on SEMpdx.

Rosetta and SEMPO President

Getting Stuff Done – How to Increase Implementation Rates and Grow ROI in 2011

Implementation = Success

+ Greater rate of implementation yields greater successes (as defined by stated goals).

+ Measurement methods must be trusted and backed up, strategy requires full understanding of goals, delay of implementation yields diminishing returns, not refreshing strategy can be costly.

+ Need to be nimble!

+ Performance is best measured over time for large scale strategy and more rapidly for granular changes.

Establishing Connections

+ Networking never ends, especially in complex organizations.

+ Small business has an advantage over large orgs due to centrality of leadership and consistent oversight of most tasks

+ Knowing someones and sharing the same goals with them increases implementation rates

+ Truly integrated marketing requires consistency across all channels

+ The state of many current organizations – although things are getting better, many orgs still have fragmented communities and lack harmony between marketing campaigns

Training for Executives and Teams

+ Training is NOT one size fits all

+ Business owners shouldn’t be involved in the granular tactics but they should understand the importance of these activities

+ Establish the key elements required to run on all cylinders

+ Empower influencers to become decision makers for the granular tactics and learn the most important ways to measure success

+ Influence reporting dashboards

+ Establish ongoing training opportunities for all levels – executive track (goals and KPIs), content track (ad copy, press releases, keyword research, managing social media accounts), promotion track (leveraging PR, display retargeting, leveraging social media for PR, monitoring tools & strategies).

Utilizing Customer Intelligence

+ Leverage all target market research used to develop offline marketing and website

+ Use the demographics, psychological profiles and segementation/personas in developing and testing search

+ Use PPC to test for organic and display and mix/match A/B with multivariate efforts

+ Leverage internal search and bounce rate by page/keyword entrance

+ Use surveys and monitor reviews/social sentiment

+ Finding the “hidden keyword” is key throughout the funnel – for example people needing “personal loans” may more likely be searching on “home improvement loans” vs. a generic query such as “personal loans”

Leveraging the Environment

+ Know your SERP!

+ Most keywords will yield different styles of universal search results, which vary greatly when environmental changes occur

+ Understanding both the SERP and the autocomplete (formerly “Google Suggest”) for primary brand and non branded keywords

+ Protect your turf using Local, PPC, News and DAO

+ The other environment: Performance Management (tie implementation to responsible sources, all the way up the ladder)

+ Digital asset optimization – a must for most industries and paid search opportunities exist as well.

Acting on Analytics

+ Use your data, don’t let it use you

+ Don’t be driven by rash judgments based on incomplete data BUT don’t be afraid to test with smaller samples

+ Never expect analytics systems to match up closely

+ Don’t over trust competitive intelligence tools, but don’t ignore the RELATIVE differences they report

+ Test and test again, using all your marketing vehicles

Wrap Up

+ The book of laws is always unique to each business

+ Acceptable level of implementation only occurs when team work together towards a common goal and within a reasonable time frame

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Today’s major search networks are constantly introducing new relevancy requirements and technical features, which means that you have to stay ahead of the curve. This advanced session features insight into the latest PPC strategies for Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter, and others.

Joanna Lord: Google… You So Silly
+ Disclaimer – skipping the basics
+ Things have changed, so many new features and tests rolling out and being added to AdWords platform
+ What is Google investing time into? Ad formats, display network, remarketing/audiences, opportunities tab, automated bidding

Ad Formats
+ Now have longer headlines – make into format of a sentence to expand. This drops the barrier between paid and organic as these appear more like organic listings.
+ Enhancements to sitelinks – taking best performing sitelinks and showing more often
+ Display URL changes – to all lower case
+ Product ads (listing and product extensions). Google is testing ways to increase CTR for us by giving us more options to utilize.

Display Network
+ Simplifying (bye bye default bids)
+ New contextual targeting tool (amazing) – first time Google actually saying it’s thematic. Beneficial for SEO as well.
+ Display campaign optimizer (limited) – relatively hands off
+ Updated display ad builder
+ Updated display resources

Remarketing
+ Target people that have visited your site and show them related ads other sites on Google Display Network (GDN)
+ Strengthen brand recognition, increase conversions by keeping your brand/services in mind

Opportunities Tab
+ First page CPC notifications
+ Advertiser goals (increase spend? decrease costs?)
+ Ideas and increased export options – most of your competitors aren’t using this yet and take advantage
+ Analyze competition – be aware of categorization
+ Purpose? Stop management paralysis, keep expanding without help of 3rd party tools, data dumps for research purposes

Automated Bidding
+ Change budgets, increase/decrease bids, create rules for ad groups, ads, etc automatically
+ When to use: transitioning managers, during holidays, for promos, optimize for performance, when you get sick of starting at PPC, when your client doesn’t have time

Bonus Round
+ Local PPC – local extensions, local extensions with multiple locations, promoted places/Google Boost. WATCH FOR: Google Voucher/Offers (Groupon anyone? Users can download coupons)
+ Mobile – mobile ads forever ago, set ads to just serve to mobile, manage AdWords campaigns on your mobile, preview what your ads look like on mobile, click to call phone extensions (location and phone), keyword tool enhancements just for mobile.

General Things We Are Seeing and What it Means:
+ Customization, campaign set up tools (set your campaigns up right from the start), Improved targeting, more customer support (auditing, consultation, etc)

When we say advertising on AdWords in 2011 we mean:
Contextual targeting, beyond the initial search intention, lower barrier to entry, automated management, more pressure on us (attribute everything). This will change format options, pricing models and our metrics. Social search advertising? Expect it. AdWords right now has about 70% share on spend, it will go down as Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads and others gain more traction.

Questions for Joanna:
+ Attributing conversions through remarketing? SEOmoz uses Retargeter and they do a great job at that. In terms of remarketing messages be sure to hit them with different types of messaging.
+ Thoughts on modified broad match? Seen great success with companies that weren’t taking of exact and phrase in the past. For those that were, helpful for refinement.
+ Have you noticed any trends in mobile search? Numbers in ad text seem to catch eyes, not adjectives. Higher engagement and CTR but less conversions at this point.

Dan Sundgren – Are You Missing the Golden Ticket?
+ NOTE: Mary O’Brien was supposed to be speaking however she got snowed in and could not make it. Dan is presenting Mary’s material. This presentation is focused on adCenter opportunities.

Why You Should be Using Bing
+ 2nd largest share of search market
+ Growing market share, great value and returns are phenomenal (take advantage in early stages)
+ CPAs are lower with the alliance, however volume is lower (many seeing a 20-30% decline due to heavy filter on algorithms for quality vs. quantity)
+ Why is CPA better? Less competition. Geotargeting. Demographic targeting.

How to get results
Upload Google campaigns, stay out of content and some of the noisier places in the beginning, test networks in separate campaigns.

Demographic Targeting
+ Bid more for age groups or day part / geo target

Network Bidding
+ Monitor bids by network, set up campaigns correctly, utilize negative keywords

Match Types
+ Match types are slightly different in Google vs. Bing and constantly retooling. Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI)

Tools You Can Use: adCenter Desktop (like AdWords Editor), Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plugin, Ad preview tool, import campaigns from AdWords, shopping feed

Key Findings: Bing is gaining ground, most advertisers are seeing higher conversion rates and lower CPCs but volume isn’t there yet. ROAS better for Bing, CPC higher on Google, Reporting better on Google, Editorial tools and UI better on Google.

Tactical Tips
+ Match types on adCenter – if you pause phrase match you are also pausing broad and exact.
+ Budgets in adCenter – two settings: divide across the month or spend until depleted – recommended spend until depleted if performing well.
+ Do Google GAP analysis to see where you are missing opportunities in adCenter
+ Separate campaigns
+ Device targeting – look at these and decide what battle you want to pick
+ Track conversions with simple code snippet
+ Site exclusions – can exclude only about 500 domains but it’s a good start.
+ Get API access if you can – not yet available to public, no fee
+ SearchAlliance.com – info on merger

Questions for Dan:
+ What kind of volume drop have you seen? From maybe 100 clicks to 70 clicks for same keyword after merger.
+ Are they planning to make the desktop tool on a mac? Who knows. Assuming at some point. Consider a 3rd party management tool like Clickable.
+ Best practice to delete keywords with many impressions and no clicks – consider these as “dead weight” and can certainly impact quality score

The post Advanced PPC appeared first on SEMpdx.

Search isn’t just “ten blue links.” This session is all about how to maximize your video, image, news, products and local results. Read on to learn how you can apply tips to do this.
The session started with John.

What is universal search?

Known as “blended search” or “search 3.0,” it means incorporating results from non-web sources (like videos and images) into the regular web search results.

He gave a history of the SERP (search engine result page). We first saw a page with only ten web results. Then we started seeing some videos and some shopping results. Now, we’re seeing images, shopping results, videos, etc. One of the newest developments is real-time results in the SERP.

Why universal search?

Greater SERP real estate. It’s also great for online reputation management as you can acquire more of the real estate by having different kinds of content on the SERP. You can leverage your unique content in a way that you couldn’t before and it helps take users directly to where they want to go. Ultimately, universal search is better for users, websites and search engines.

The clickthrough rate for universal search is higher on blended results than just the regular results. The most click vertical in universal search – images.

Image optimization

File names – match the name of the file to the content. You should also allow robots.txt access and include keywords in the caption for the image if you have one. Optimizing surrounding text for the image is also a good target – this is the second-best way search engines can know what your image is about (aside from file name, alt tag text or caption).

If you’re using Flickr, make sure your photostream is public. Also make sure you complete each tag field and describe them in a full fashion. Important: decide on copyright and creative common licenses. Embed these photos into your web site, blog, etc.

Optimize your images and you can see anywhere from a 5 – 10% increase in image referral traffic.

Video optimization

Have a separate page for each video. Choose an interesting thumbnail, as it can be the difference between a click and a non-click. You need contextual content too: transcriptions, tags, titles, comments, translations, etc. Also – perform your usual SEO on the video page (i.e. optimize title tag, meta description tag, headlines, body copy, internal linking, etc.). Make sure the file name makes sense and includes any keywords that the video is actually about.

If you have your own video player, consider the URL structure, the branding elements, a clear call to action, a comprehensive set of sharing tools and give users an embed code with hard coded links to use on their own websites.

Submit your videos with a video sitemap.xml file. This can help get your videos indexed as well as showing up in the “video” section of a blended SERP.

Where you should optimize on YouTube:

• Video title
• Video description. Start your description with a link.
• Video tags.
• Category – make sure you have your video in the correct category.

Other YouTube tips

Do not exceed three minutes of video. Build playlists by topic to help viewers easily view related content of yours. Watermark your video with your brand. Put a call to action at the end of the video (such as “find more videos on our site”). Talk about and link to your videos on social bookmarking and tagging sites.

Look to uploading your videos to other websites such as Vimeo and Daily Motion. Use TubeMogul.com to distribute your videos across multiple video portals.

Video responses is a way to try to get more traffic to your videos.

Product Optimization

Submit your product feed to Google Merchant Center. Doing this helps get your product data in blended results. Try to fill out every product field; the more information you give Google Products, the better chance you have at ranking for a variety of different keywords. You should look to update your data feed 3 times a week. Include keywords in your product titles.

Blog Posts

55% more website visitors to websites that have blogs. Also – websites that have blogs get, on average, 97% more links than websites that do not.

You can use WordPress.com but know that all of the links that would be going to your blog would actually be going to the WordPress.com. There is a service to that will allow you to “mask” the URL of the blog for it to appear to be part of your website. But best case scenario – you should install WordPress on your own server.

Use Google Insights to see when people are searching for a topic you’re writing about. For example: people look for celebrity news on the weekends more so than during the week.

News

You should look to produce press releases on a fairly frequent basis. Look at Google Hot Trends to see what people are searching for and “frame” your PR towards that, if applicable. Obviously, don’t optimize your press release about the NCAA tourney if your news has nothing to do about it. Use Google News suggest to see what hot topics are currently being searched for. Note: this list is different than the regular Google search suggest!

Mike was the second speaker. His deck was titled “Review Management: where social and rank meet.”

Where does Google get reviews? The local search ecosystem is a bit confusing and complicated, to say the least.

Reviews & Google Ranking

Google likes to know that your business is breathing and alive. That’s why they look towards reviews as a part of their ranking algorithm. 70% of users will look at reviews and take them a face value. 24% of all American adults have reviewed a business online.

“There are two types of businesses out there: ones that have received negative reviews and those that haven’t quite yet received negative reviews.”

Reviews are now front and center on SERPs with local search queries – “you can run but you can’t hide.”

Case study – a small jewelry store.

Not much time & confidence in search marketing. Mike kept on nagging her about trying to get people to review her business. Months later, she’s getting more business and even getting notes from people saying they came to her store because of the reviews that had been written. Validation confirmed!

Reviews engage the business’s customer in the conversation. The good news about this for the business owner? Little to no work involved!

Avoid bad reviews. Treat your customers right… but now, treat your customers even “righter.” You’re going to get some bad customers – give them an outlet for them to contact you. Be the first point of contact and not the last one; this could keep the problem between the dissatisfied individual and you instead of having that dissatisfied customer write a review on Yelp or Google Places.

Business Considerations in asking for reviews

• Integrate into business process. Just ask!
• Go for reviews on a diversity of review sites. Ask for reviews on more than just Yelp or Google Places.
• Leverage each review. These can act as testimonials?
• Plan for negative reviews – they will happen. Own up to the issue. Describe how future customers will not have this issue. Of course, offer to fix the issue. Realize that it’s not that you’re targeting the customer here: you’re primarily responding so the prospects can see that you took responsibility for the negative review and that you’re trying to fix it.
• Make sure to make an ethical decision with your reviews. There’s nothing worse than a scorned customer who might even write how fishy your reviews seem!

Easy customer considerations

Have business cards customers can grab (or put them in their bags as they purchase something) with a vanity URL that will redirect to a page on your site that gives the customer places to click on review sites to review you. Also look to sending up a follow email address (if you get their email address) making sure they’re happy with their purchase and then links to review sites. Also look to use QR codes right by your entrance / exit of your business so people can easily leave a review.

Choice

Make it easy for customers to write reviews. Citysearch has Facebook login that makes it super easy. Lots of people still have Yahoo email addresses, so use Yahoo Local if that’s what your audience might use. Look to also use Yelp, Google Local or even vertical review sites.

Monitoring tools

List of tools to use to monitor reviews:

• GetListed.org
• MyReviewsPage.com
• Postling.com
• Google Alerts

The post Universal Search Marketing Strategies and Tactics Session appeared first on SEMpdx.

Summary: What are some proven techniques for winning new business? What are the large agencies doing for streamlining client reporting, scaling their efforts, and finding & retaining net talent? How can you establish credibility with clients and peers in this growing industry? The speakers on this panel will show you!

How would you start out today?
Ian: Find a tiny niche — local, mobile, etc.  Old-fashioned networking.  If you want to make a living, approach other agencies and be willing to contract for overflow.
Todd: Get your name out there in the community & the industry.

Client horror stories…what are the red flags?

• Don’t work with anyone out of South Florida.
• “I just want to pick your brain.”
• The person who can’t tell you what their company is/does.
• Any sign that one particular group has a stranglehold over the site/company.
• Nightmare stories about the last agency…you’re probably next on the firing line.
• Beware of squishy goals (particularly in relation to performance-based pricing) & lack of balance.

The cost of retaining people…is it an unavoidable cost of business, or do you think if you do the right things, people should stay.
Ian:  Make sure the only people leaving are the ones getting deals that they can’t (and you wouldn’t yourself) refuse.
Todd: People go looking for new jobs for a reason, they don’t just fall into their laps.

Terminology….used to be ad agencies, what do you prefer now?
Todd: A Performance Marketing Agency.  Internet Marketing Agency is still accurate.
Ian: Full-service Interactive Agency

The post Building Your Search Agency appeared first on SEMpdx.

The post Implementing Your Search Marketing Strategy Session appeared first on SEMpdx.

Allison Hartsoe from Semphonic

Measurement Framework
+ Passing data into web analytics tool requires configuration, doesn’t always give data you need by default.
+ In order to create measurement framework, need the full picture
+ For retail sites usually not a problem because most carts are relatively optimized and metrics are straightforward
+ Use proxies for success for softer conversions such as time on page – relevant for media, government, etc
+ Total value of pages viewed a good proxy for success OR a measure of engagement such as time on site
+ Measure to lifetime value – not just looking at visits, need to understand what visitors are doing over time
+ Tracking to lifetime value can be very difficult – can take a very LARGE set of data or look at sales cycle to look for key metrics that signal conversion behavior. This is essentially creating a segment.
+ Once segmented, understand and test to see how early users will eventually convert
+ Branded Search –> directed product research; Non branded search –> Early stage research

Coding for Measurement
+ To effectively use the analytics tool you need to ensure key variables are getting passed from your search program. This may take the form of a campaign code (such as utm parameters for Google Analytics). Can deconstruct traffic source, campaign name, keyword, etc.
+ In Omniture you can upload a decoder to translate query parameters
+ Omniture: pull the s campaign variable by the GetQueryParam plugin. Set tracking code id in admin.
+ AdWords Inside Google Analytics – ensure accounts are linked; recommends Tatvic GA Excel plug in that allows you to automate advanced query requests and populate charts.
+ Integrated report data – aggregating data from various sources and calculating metrics for a more comprehensive view of campaign performance and tracking lifetime value.
+ Key SEM capabilities – for broad match consider tracking actual in addition to the keyword that converted, for ad networks track content match source, for long tail – collapse search terms and group them (branded vs. non branded for example).
+ Site behavioral reports – ability to path over time at the event level (x visitors entered on PPC search and Y entered on visitor searched); Over time report (behavior of PPC visitors during a particular time period in a subsequent time period)
+ Types of Analysis – SEM traffic, Organic vs Paid, Traffic by Engine, Traffic Trends
+ Traffic by Search Engine example – understanding organic effect on PPC. When you look at source by engine it shows that certain engines are underrepresented. What is the identification of the SEO problem by engine? Do we need to better optimize better for Bing?
+ Analyze by Channel – organic cannibalization example: shut down PPC altogether (dark period) to assess organic traffic and PPC traffic cannibalization. Are you overspending on certain PPC terms?
+ Analyzing Quality – engagement example: different qualification rates for the visit (submitted lead form vs. download whitepaper). Reviewing drop off rate to optimize performance of campaign.

Things to Remember:
+ Make sure you are optimizing to the RIGHT metrics
+ Carry through as much info as possible through proper configuration
+ Range of analytics prospects to ensure success

Questions:
+ Campaign stacking and how to easily set up – set up as custom evar to allow to track event; insert easy separator to stack and be able to separate out. Be careful how long campaign names are, usually limit is 5 or less.
+ How long would you turn off PPC for “dark period”? Minimum of 2 weeks however possible to do less for clients that have a TON of traffic. Need enough volume for a reasonable measure.
+ When do you see Google Analytics not being adequate and you have to use Omniture for example? GA is an amazing tool however it falls apart in terms of sampling. Omniture and Webtrends have a limit in tables of about 500k. For Google, their sample is about 50k per table however it is boosted when running AdWords. The other area is the fact that you can’t aggregate data the way that you can with Omniture. Although they have custom variables, it’s usually not sufficient considering the amount of custom information often needed to integration. In short – data sampling and robust conversion tracking.

Conrad Saam from Avvo

+ Coming from in house perspective vs. agency
+ Ranking Report Rant: personalization, local, query variations (ranking reports for one targeted keywords can result in missed opportunity for great keywords that are ranking and driving traffic), the long tail (ranking reports don’t capture)
+ Think about your ranking reporting structure: 1. ubercompetitive keywords and online reputation management – track rankings, 2. Head terms – measure traffic, 3. long tail – think about traffic, # keywords, # of entry pages and # of indexed pages

KPI Questions
+ How much SEO traffic do i have? MUST separate branded from non branded traffic. Direct traffic and branded usually perform quite similarly.
+ Is my site what I think it is about? Not necessarily – check Google Webmaster Tools for most common keywords, is there a disconnect from what you expected?
+ Is my site authoritative? There are tons of metrics to help determine and track (SEOmoz is great but so many numbers – consider choosing just a couple and stay consistent); look at log files and track number of pages crawled.
+ How does my site’s authority stack up to competitors? Your site’s data alone with no comparison doesn’t mean much. Look at the total number of links and number of domains linking (diversity).
+ A data warning: many link counting tools report inconsistently which ends up comparing apples to organges data. Graph % of links and % of domains over time which is great but sometimes data is skewed, however no good solution so far.
+ Am I a good link builder? Calculate % of links that go to home page. If you have really valuable content more links should be deeper within the site.
+ Was that a valuable link? Look at the traffic it generates. Basic but true.
+ Have I lost some links? In GWT, are links going to 404 pages? Check these and fix!
+ How spammy is my link profile? Look at the difference between your mozRank and mozTrust – if big discrepancy then maybe a problem.
+ Should I give up on this keyword?
+ Do I Nail the Long Tail? Track the NUMBER of keywords and landing pages driving traffic. Also track how many pages are being indexed. Search engines may be crawling but not necessarily indexed – this represents the possibility of wasted crawl budget.
+ Does my site look fat in these jeans? Site performance in GWT as one of ranking factors, also YSlow is an amazing tool for this.
Will prospective partners take my call? Using PageRank to determine authority of your site doesn’t mean much however everyone takes a cursory look at this metric so it does matter on some level.

Audience Questions:
+ Are there any commonly overlooked methods to increase your site’s authority? Think about your PR agency as your best link building friend. Finding ways to marry PR with link building can be surprisingly effective.
+ Why do you have to separate branded data when many product sales are based on that? Because behavior is extremely different (friends vs. strangers) and they will not convert the same.
+ How did KPIs change over time? Yahoo Site Explorer was garbage – too much data fluctuation. For a long time obsessed with ranking reports until realized correlation between ranking reports had nothing to do with traffic and engagement.
+ Pages crawled vs. pages indexed, how did you get pages indexed? Work on authority and link building, realized that certain template pages weren’t providing that much value – worked to increase content and value of those pages to get them indexed.

The post Advanced Analytics appeared first on SEMpdx.

Mobile marketing is arguably the future of marketing. This beginner level session hit on why mobile marketing is something to get into now along with a discussion on strategies and tactics on this fast growing segment.
First up was Greg from Sterling Market Intelligence / Screenwerk. Greg says the mobile web is the future, however, you need to think about it holistically and think of it as one of the approaches for your marketing strategy.

He presented “the big numbers” of the mobile market. And the numbers are staggering. Basically, it’s a segment you really shouldn’t ignore.

His presentation was fairly quick hits full of lots of data. I’ll highlight the important data.

Theoretically, in 2015, there will be more mobile web users than desktop web users. Fun fact: 35% of Yelp’s queries are coming from mobile.

More smartphones were sold than PCs in Q4 2010.

Text messaging, often not really thought about, is an important channel for some industries for using tactics such as opt-in mobile marketing.

Apps vs. Browser

Most people will not search for your site directly on smartphone. Recommend building a mobile-optimized HTML5 site; this way, your site can work across varying platforms.

If you are building an app, there needs to be some thought about it. It’s getting cheaper to get apps, some DIY platforms, etc. They promote engagement but it’s a small segment of the market.

People are much more engaged with apps in terms of minute of use than browsers.

A mobile user’s needs is much more immediate and focused in many more instances than PC users. These users want to take an immediate action.

Microsoft says 53% of mobile search has a local intent.

After a local-mobile lookup, 61% called and 59% visited business.

79% of smartphone owners use phones while shopping; 74% have made purchase as a result.

Top general content categories:

• 40% – news / current events
• 27% weather

Top local-mobile search categories:

1. Restaurants / bars
2. Banks and ATM locations
3. Hotels / motels
4. Gas stations
5. Mobile phone stores / services

Google says that mobile “doesn’t see” cannibalization of desktop searches. They will be complimentary to one another.

Will Facebook become largest network?

• 200 million active (daily) mobile users.
• Top iPhone app / connect for mobile / single sign on.
• Places / deals (which is like Foursquare).

Very well could become it.

Mobile marketing and advertising

Reach vs engagement – SMS is to reach as apps is to engagement. Mobile web is right inbetween the two.

Mobile ad options:

• Display
• Search (includes pay-to-call). Google pretty much “owns” click-to-call and it can work really well.
• SMS opt-in
• QR codes. “Going to be more and more common.”
• Video / rich media
• Coupons

Composition of mobile ad revenues: 56% search / 44% display.

Google owns 95%+ of mobile search market. Essentially zero shift for months and months.

One in seven search queries on Google is coming from a mobile search.

Consumers are leading the mobile market while a majority of the brands and marketers are falling behind.

Reid was the second speaker. His presentation was titled “Mobile State of the Industry, Click-to-Call and Tablets”.

Mobile-optimized sites

Is your site ready for mobile? Most likely, it is not. Don’t feel bad – most websites aren’t. Reid looked at the top 100 companies to see if they had a mobile-optimized site.

• Retails and CPG – pretty much all of them had no mobile-optimized site.
• Finance and insurance – most did have a mobile-optimized site. This was to be expected.
• Services, manufacturing and entertainment – most did not have an optimized mobile site.
• Tech, telecom and auto – most did not have mobile-optimized sites. Two out of the big three big carriers did not have a mobile website. Apple did not as well.

Thoughts on how to structure an optimized-mobile site

Lead with search – browsing on a mobile device can be painful; let users search to quickly find what they need.
Promote your app – if you have an app, tell mobile users about it.

Bonus: mobile-optimized sites load much more quickly.

State of the industry

27x gap between mobile and desktop clicks. This seems bad… but last year, it was 90x and the year before ~200x. Desktop had a bigger clickthrough rate on brand keywords than mobile by close to double. Conversion rates are higher for desktop compared to mobile (~9% to ~4%). Mobile conversion rate improves with a mobile-optimized site. Time of day usage – mobile searches happen more towards the middle/end of the day whereas the desktop is more about the beginning/middle.

Click to call

Click to call is great because you can have your number in your display ad in a mobile Google search results. It’s super easy to set-up and able to track at different levels as well. You can also run it on a desktop campaign and Reid recommends doing it for desktop search. He sees much longer call duration on desktop than mobile. Tips:

• Route numbers to different inbound numbers to help your call center track performance more granularly.
• Daypart to call center hours.
• Consider testing yp.com; they will provide inbound phone number

iPad

It’s a third-type of device. The SERP, CPCs and conversion rates are different on the iPad. And iPad impressions have been growing so it’s definitely something to look to target. iPad users tend to search in the morning and at night. On the weekends, iPad doesn’t see nearly the fall-off that desktop and mobile users see.

The post Mobile Marketing Strategies & Tactics Session appeared first on SEMpdx.