Industrial Strength Search Marketing (SEM, SEO)

I’m back to obsessing about attribution models and how they do and don’t get adopted by marketing organizations in big companies. I’ve spoken with folks who have had success in this regard – they are few and far between – and most of the success stories are from companies that are inherently data driven, where the math behind attribution plays a central role in their businesses. Think credit cards, financial services, insurance, etc.

As well, I’ve spoken with some of the providers – ad servers who do custom work around this stuff for large customers, and of course pure play attribution companies, and talked about some of the common challenges they all face in big orgs. Turns out the biggest challenges are not technical, they’re organizational.

The central theme here is the inherent tension between models that are sound (mathematically) and those that can be easily understood. As this plays out and evolves, stakeholders are less willing to buy into these attribution models and that’s where the process falls apart. More detail in my Search Engine Land column published today.

I’ve been remiss in posting to this blog some of my latest attempts at contributing to the search world. In the past I would post my column content here after it had published on search engine land, plus give folks a little color. The good editors over at SEL reminded me that this was in violation of my signed agreement with them, so I stopped. So, instead, I guess it makes sense to point folks back to search engine land where you can read my stuff if you’d like (the SEO in me just died a little — sigh).

My last post, which came out two days ago, told the story of recent SEO success at Yahoo!  Anyone who works at a large company can appreciate even a small dose of SEO success. This column looks at a few factors that together created a tipping point (thanks, Malcom) for SEO at Yahoo! in some of our largest and most visited sites. Turns out that is you have executive support and you’re able to work SEO requirements into the development process, then simply by creating clean URLs and eliminating duplicate content, you can double your SEO traffic! Who knew?