Industrial Strength Search Marketing (SEM, SEO)

This one was a lay-up of sorts. One the one hand I was, as usual, searching for a suitable topic for my column. Not sure why I agonize like that every month, but I do. At the same time I was completely blown away by the social momentum of the ’25 Random things’ tagging going on on Facebook. And as you might imagine, just like I don’t do New Years’ Resolutions,  I also don’t do chain letters, and let’s face it – 25 Random Things is a chain letter – a Web 2.0 tell-you-everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-your-friends chain letter, but a chain letter nonetheless. So in the spirit of things I don’t do, this is what I did…

If you spend any time on Facebook you’ve no doubt been tagged by the ’25 random things’ game that’s been plaguing the social mediasphere. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you either don’t use Facebook or you live in a cave, or both. By the time you read this you will likely know more random things about more people than you ever wanted to. So while I’m not posting 25 random things about myself on my facebook wall, I will take this little corner of the internet to post 25 random things about Search Marketing (and a couple about me). Please send your 25 random things to 25 of your closest friends. You’ve been tagged.

1. When I got into the business in 1999, it wasn’t called search marketing. People just called it ‘that search engine thing’. One early customer called it ‘serendipity’. Seriously.
2. I started out running paid inclusion campaigns for e-tailers. It was fun, and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we made money for our clients, so they either didn’t care or didn’t notice.
3. I worked for an SEM agency but we didn’t know we were an SEM agency (see #1)
4. I’m left-handed
5. The name of my first business contact at Inktomi was Tomi.
6. Paid inclusion used to drive more volume than pay-for-placement
7. I bought paid search ads from Google on a CPM basis in 2003.
8. I forget what eight is for.
9. I had a boss at an SEM Agency who said to me, and I quote, “I feel this company is ready to take off. And if anybody gets in my way I’ll rip teir fucking throats out”. He wasn’t my boss for very long.
10. I used to buy Looksmart for all my clients. Once they lost MSN distribution, I stopped.
11. I once had a client who asked me to do some regression analysis to project what a paid search program would look like if we bid every keyword to position 2. I told him I did some ‘back of the envelope regression analysis’ and it would increase his cost by 50%. He was OK with that.
12. SEM is an ad buy. SEO is religion.
13. At my last agency job, where we had big-brand customers, clients were primarily interested in running SEM campaigns that were well-integrated into their broader online and offline marketing programs. They were much less interested in running SEM campaigns that were well optimized.
14. My favorite thing about paid search is its flexibility. This year we’re optimizing to profit instead of revenue. Just like that.
15. When I first came to Yahoo!, the first thing I did was audit all the SEM business going on across the company. When I presented my findings to management, I highlighted the SEM programs that posed the greatest risk to the company. Three weeks later I was directly responsible for those very SEM campaigns.
16. These days you need to find a way to value your SEO traffic, otherwise you risk losing all of your resources.
17. It’s time to stop doing SEO audits to fix what’s broken, and to focus on buiilding SEO-friendly web assets
18. David E Roth, not David Lee Roth
19. In 2008 I standardized SEM processes across our company. This involved 4 different functional groups and a dozen properties and it took me 9 months to build the necessary content and sell it aross the organization. It was worth it.
20. Last quarter in annual planning I did no less than 14 versions of plan across 12 properties.
21. Yesterday I bought the keyword ‘zombie zombie zombie’. I lost money.
22. Watching the Superbowl, it was interesting to see companies make a more conscious effort to support thier ad buys with their web assets.
23. This year, Coca-Cola finally got their Superbowl search strategy figured out, and I can no longer use them as fodder for my presentations at industry events. I guess I’ll have to find a new target.
24. I don’t think too many people are searching for ‘open happiness’, but I did and I was pleasantly surprised to see the link to Coke’s MyCokeRewards site to go view their Suberbowl ads.
25. Sammy Hagar sucks.

This entry was posted on February 11, 2009 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.