The Smartest Bidder Will Win

At the search engine marketing session, Did-it.com's Kevin Lee hit me with a pile of new information about paid search marketing and left me wanting more.

Smart marketing is key, he said. "This is an auction market place, and the strongest, smartest marketer is going to win in the end. The guy who figures out how to afford to pay the highest price is going to win."

So the key is not just finding cost-effective clicks, but making sure they convert... and then making sure you know how profitable those customers are in the long run.

Patient Approach Boosts Consumer Data Results

The key driver of success in consumer data collection is long-term thinking, says Paul Buta, COO of Optas, a company that provides the plumbing for other business's consumer data harvesting. Unfortunately, Buta said, the typical tenure of a brand manager is 18 months, and he needs results in the next three months, so it is very difficult to get staff to think about lifetime value of a consumer relationship. Employees rush to get information, and develop shallow, opportunistic relationships with consumers.

This is true at every company Optas deals with including those in the health, financial services, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods industries, he said.

Give coupons to get data, and you'll learn about consumers who are opportunistic and unlikely to generate profits in the long-run. Gather data slowly and patiently over a period of years and you'll learn far more and from consumers who are valuable to the company, he said.

Buta offered a number of insights into how to cultivate a healthy long term relationship with consumers. Some of it is obvious, but bears repeating. Be honest. Be transparent. Ensure security of data.

Media Mix Modeling 'Nonsense,' Says Panelist

Even though "media mix modeling" was the title of our session, Erwin Ephron dominated the session with arguments that intelligent mixing isn't happening. TV-think still dominates the way advertisers and agencies understand online audiences, so any pretense of intelligent mixing is bogus, he said.

Television is a reach/continuity model, he said. Agencies are combining
television dayparts to reach all viewers. When you don't know much, as is the case with television, it is important to reach everyone. But with more targetted media like the Internet, reach is less of any issue, Ephron said.

Search Engine Marketing Extravaganza

I went to two and a half sessions on search engine marketing today, and at last got some real nitty gritty information. After this post, I need to re-write my site.

The first session, Buying Your Way Into Search: Paid Listings, with a panel all smartly dressed in black, had some interesting case studies, but no real meat.

The second, Organic Search Engine Optimization: Natural Search Listings was paydirt. All the good stuff is below.

The half was lunch, very graciously provided by Did-It and featuring nothing earth-shattering in the speeches. So I'm here to blog you the good stuff.

Search Engine Basics

This was pretty much the Kevin Lee show. He's the CEO of did-it.com. The panelists each got to introduce themselves briefly, and then Lee went into his presentation without pausing for breath. Someone who came up to talk to the panelists afterward joked to them, "Next time, don't talk so much."

Get Lee's Power Point on the ad-tech site and you'll have the session. Don't get me wrong, he has excellent points:

- it's not always best to have first position: sometimes second or third is actually more effective (nobody said why).

- buy very specific regional keywords if you are a national brand.

- be sure to buy model numbers and product names that you sell within a larger store or site. Some people type in a model number.

- If you have 1,200 words that each get 40 searches a month, you could have a killer campaign for a lower budget than if you buy only top terms.

- include two, three, four and even five-word phrases because 35 percent of people search that way.

- create phrases in the form of a question.

- include synonyms and substitutes.

- include several permutations of words and phrases.