It’s amazing how, even as I walk the halls of Search Engine Strategies San Francisco, all the buzz is about social media.

“How much is it worth for a user to become a fan of ours on Facebook, or to follow us in Twitter? “

“How much revenue is social media really bringing in?”

“How should I think about hiring or putting resources against our social media marketing efforts?”

These are the questions marketers and managers alike are asking, both at SES and in companies like Yahoo!, Inc. In large companies in particular, where every incremental resource has to be justified by a business case, the lack of knowledge about the true value of social media can make it very challenging to get a program off the ground. (I’ve written in the past about how big brands should organize around social media) But before we throw in the proverbial towel on resourcing social media marketing (SMM) efforts, let’s take a step back and remember where we were less than a decade ago with search marketing.

The Way-Back Machine

When we started optimizing websites for search in the nineties, there was hardly anything in existence that resembled web analytics. For the most part we couldn’t quantify how we were benefitting from SEO, but intuitively we knew that traffic from search engines was good, so more of it must be better. Now, of course, the tracking of paid and organic search traffic, and the attribution of that traffic to conversion events, is not only well understood, but in fact it’s fueling a multibillion-dollar industry. So in order lay the foundation for a solid SMM campaign, let’s rip a page out of the book on search marketing and find something measurable to serve as a starting point.

Valuation, Valuation, Valuation

First of all, and you’re probably tired of hearing me go on and on about it, valuation will serve as the cornerstone to your SMM foundation in the same way that it helps search marketers secure and maintain their budgets and their jobs. But valuation in social media is fundamentally more challenging than in search, because the bulk of the value is generated outside the friendly confines of your website. I was talking to Brent Csutoras about this yesterday. Brent happens to know more about SMM than just about anyone. If you have a chance to sit down with him or any of the other BlueGlass guys (and gals) I highly recommend it. They’re a fun bunch of really sharp, forward-thinking folks.

In our conversation, Brent acknowledged that tracking SMM is tricky business. To cite a couple of obvious examples, only about a third of all tweets come from twitter.com, which makes the vast majority of tweets much more challenging to track. As well, while the bulk of facebook activity comes through the news feed, you can’t put traditional tracking code on your news feed page, so it’s a real chore to try and understand exactly what’s happening on facebook. The result of this conundrum is that, if your goal is to quantify the value of your SMM campaigns, you should start with something small that you can track and quantify, and that drives some sort of measurable value. Look for something bigger than a click, smaller than a conversion, to make your goals attainable yet significant. From there, your best bet will be to extrapolate the effect onto a larger scale.

Content Is King

Here’s an example. Think about promoting content on your site. Video, text, whatever you either have or can develop with some ease. Pick one item. Only one. Make sure that you have the content on a page where you can invite others to ‘like’ or share with all the popular social network badges right there around the content module. Heck, you might even try to make sure that the page where your content is hosted is search engine friendly (social helps SEO – I’m just sayin’). Then, either with an agency or on your own (if you know me you also know that I’m going to recommend you use an agency), promote the hell out of the content via SMM, and use tracking URLs wherever you can. On your facebook page, link to the content. Tweet about it. Promote it to bloggers. Here’s where an agency can really help, as they’ll know the best places to promote your content based on your goals. Use bit.ly URLs that re-direct to your analytics server to cookie the users if you can.

Wait For It

Then, you should be able to see the effects of SMM over time. If you’re promoting video, measure the number of times people play the video or the average time spent engaging with the video unit. If it’s a white paper, measure the number of downloads. If it’s normal web content, measure time spent or subsequent activity on your network. Anything that leads to quantifiable value is fair game here.

Now, you’re able to go back to your SVP and show him or her the value of SMM in some measurable fashion. The good news is that SMM is a little like SEO or SEM, in that once your executives get a taste of social, they’ll want more. And more, and more…

If you have an extra hour in your very busy workday day, don’t spend it fine tuning your site for algo search, or optimizing your SEM campaigns for efficiency, ROI, or profitability. Spend it building out and executing on your social media strategy. I know, shocking advice coming from an old search jockey like me, but I mean it. Seriously, how much cash are you really going to squeeze out of your already-optimized site or SEM program compared to the huge opportunities in front of you in social media?

Let me take a half-step back. First of all, I just finished a monster piece on the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance detailing the upcoming transitions for advertisers and publishers, and I’m admittedly a teensy bit weary from the experience. Not complaining, mind you, it was a great opportunity and hopefully a decent column, it’s just left me with a bit of a search hangover, if you will. Secondly, while I was making the final edits to the Alliance piece, I was attending BlueGlass LA in Marina Del Rey. Chris, Dave, Brent and the rest of the gang did a bang-up job and we ended up in an intimate setting with an all-star cast of talent and an incredibly savvy and engaged audience. What struck me at the conference was not only that search marketing had clearly established itself in the mainstream of digital marketing, but also that the tactics around SEM and SEO had somehow suddenly become mind-numbingly complex and sophisticated. Don’t get me wrong, I could sit and talk all afternoon with Kris Roadruck about how to legitimately bootstrap link authority through strategic content in a competitive SEO space (and nearly did). And, I was proud as the proverbial peacock when at the conference I presented my favorite graph that shows positive statistical synergy between paid and organic search. However, it occurred to me as I nibbled on a chocolate-covered macaroon at lunch on Tuesday, that at some point in the last several years, likely when I was busy building infrastructure to support automated keyword bidding algorithms, we not only reached the point of diminishing returns, we shot past it a warp speed and kept right on going into outer space.

Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that anyone ignore paid search or SEO. I’m still search marketing’s number one fan, and I’ll be the first to chastise any marketer for leaving search out of the mix (if Melanie Mitchell doesn’t beat me to it). But what became so abundantly clear to me as I polished off that last bite of macaroon was that there is so much ‘white space’ in social media compared to search marketing, that the real challenge in a resource constrained world is to understand when you’ve optimized your search efforts to the point that the next hour of your work life would be better spent on something else.

Social media is today what search marketing was ten years ago when I started. It’s completely wide open. BlueGlass is a prime example of how search marketers and social media-types are teaming up to exploit the enormous opportunities that arise when the lines between search and social begin to blur. I’m not going to go into great detail about social media tactics, and I’m not (yet) going to pretend I’m an expert at it. There are plenty of folks who are dropping massive amounts of free social media knowledge on us. What I’m suggesting is you spend just a little (more) time researching, communicating, and trying a few new things in social. Dip your toes in the social media pool and see how the water feels. If you don’t, pretty soon you’ll be lagging behind the curve, just like all the search marketing nay-sayers of the last decade.

With the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance in full swing, the accompanying transitions of both paid and organic search are imminent. As such, search publishers and search marketers alike have some work to do. I’m going to walk you through this as best I can from the perspective of a large advertiser within Yahoo!. I will endeavor to provide tips and information that will enable both large and small advertisers, publishers, and webmasters to navigate the process smoothly. I’ll progress from the simplest of issues to the more complex, starting with a guide to resources.

First, The Links

The best thing I can do for you is to first point you to the various public repositories of information as published by Yahoo! and Microsoft. First and foremost, Yahoo! has set up a Transition Center to guide small- and large-size advertisers, publishers, and technology partners to provide useful information. New items keep popping up here, so make sure to come back more often as the transition gets closer.  For example, Yahoo! just added a page on upcoming editorial guidelines.  There is also more general, press-oriented information available at www.SearchAlliance.com.  In similar style with a bit more detail is the YSM Blog. I’m also going to make reference to Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center, both of which SEOs and webmasters should be getting to know if they haven’t already.

Timelines

Yahoo! has shared that we’re going to begin live testing of both organic and paid listings (showing search listings from the Microsoft platform on Yahoo! Search) this month. Barry Schwartz posted here on July 16 noting the email sent to advertisers. The idea as I understand it is to test the integration points for both organic and paid results, and if all goes well we could see a transition of organic (“algo”) listings in the August/September timeframe, with the paid transition right on its heels. The goal is to migrate all paid advertisers to adCenter by October 15. The key here is quality. Yahoo! and Microsoft have been very clear that only if we can ensure a high-quality experience for users, advertisers and publishers will we hold to this timeline.

Publishers and Domain Match

The publisher story is fairly straightforward. Yahoo! is trying to set the transition up so that it’s seamless for publishers. Publishers of paid listings will ideally make the same calls for ads, which will be translated and returned with adCenter results, and likewise publishers of organic listings will make their same calls, which will then be translated and returned with Bing results. Same with domainers (come on, cybersquatters, stand up and be counted!). The domain match feed mechanics should remain unchanged, only the content of the feed itself will change.

Optimizing For The Alliance

The good news is that most people who optimize for natural search don’t have to change tactics drastically, because most folks don’t differentiate too much between the engines when optimizing for natural search. When Bing launched, there was some talk in the industry about how Bing put more weight toward internal links than did the other engines. But as time has passed, the engines have generally converged in the factors they deem important, so optimizing for Bing instead of Yahoo! Search, for example, isn’t much different. The thing that’s changing is that SEOs are now having to shift more of their attention to Bing, now that it will be powering a significantly larger share of search listings than before. But rather than changing the way SEOs optimize based on this market shift, we’re seeing them simply devote more resources to the newest of the three engines.

In most cases, this means first introducing yourself to the Bing Webmaster Center. First you’ll need a Windows Live ID, so if you don’t already have one, go ahead and sign up. The tricky part about using the webmaster center, for large websites, anyway, is the authentication process. The way Bing tries to ensure that the rightful webmaster is in charge of the Bing Webmaster Center account is to require a piece of code (xml or metatag) to be placed on the website. If you’re the webmaster for a small or medium-sized site this is fairly straightforward. However, as we know, larger websites sometimes don’t have webmasters per se, so this isn’t so easy. Especially if your homepage is one of the busiest pages on the Internet, you may have some difficulty putting a line of xml in the root folder or even placing a metatag on page header. What this really means is that if you haven’t gotten started on this process yet, you need to do it , and do it now. Bing does a decent job of telling you which method to use based on your access to the code – basically go for a metatag unless you can write to the root folder.

Once you’re authenticated, the Bing toolset can help you set up sitemaps, track inlinks and indexation, crawl errors, and the rest of the standard stuff that webmaster tools are supposed to offer.  You’ll want to use the Bing tools to track these metrics separately from Google because Bing will now contribute potentially around a third of all your seo traffic, through both Microsoft and Yahoo! sites. Look at the Bing Webmaster Center Blog for updates and information.

Compare Your Data

When I talk to SEOs about the transition, the topic that always comes up is Yahoo! Site Explorer. This tool has long been regarded as an authoritative (and accurate) measure of inlinks/backlinks.  What some people don’t realize is that Bing has a similar feature called ‘Backlink tool’. My recommendation is to dig into both so you can compare data and features between the two tools.

Now For The Paid Stuff

With paid search, the Search Alliance will create a unified marketplace based off of the adCenter platform. Most advertisers I’ve talked to have much less experience using adCenter than Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM or ‘panama’), so this is a potentially significant change for many advertisers. In the unified marketplace, advertisers will manage their campaigns using the adCenter tools, and in doing so we’ll get our ads distributed on both Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as their respective affiliate sites. This is a major shift in paid search buying for most of us, who currently manage YSM separately from adCenter. As this transition takes place, all advertisers will be migrated to this model, so get used to the idea that your Yahoo traffic will be coming through your adCenter buy. I think the important thing to consider first in planning for this transition is a review of your current adCenter accounts and campaigns. If you’re like me, you probably have one or more adCenter accounts that were set up some time ago, and they’re providing decent ROI at a relatively low volume. If that’s the case, you probably haven’t put an overwhelming amount of work or attention into these accounts. That has to change immediately. It’s time to dig into those accounts and ask yourself some important questions about how you want to manage your own transition.

Self-service or Managed?

One of the first things you’ll want to clarify for yourself in the paid search transition is who is going to be managing what. The guideline is that if you currently have a YSM account manager, you will be serviced post-transition (account management, sales, invoicing) by Yahoo!. However, if you’re a self-service advertiser, you’ll be serviced by Microsoft. Now, there are a few edge cases here where you might have an adCenter rep, but not a YSM rep or vice versa. If that’s the case I recommend contacting whichever account manager you do have, with the goal of having a Yahoo! account manager in a post-transition world.

Account Transition

The key to your success in managing the transition is to understand what your accounts look like relative to the way they should look, and putting in the work early enough to be prepared once the transition takes place. If you’re going to create new accounts, you have the choice of building from scratch or trying to repurpose either your AdWords or YSM accounts. In many cases the best option will be to start from scratch. While this sounds like a lot of work, odds are it will provide the best chance of success. From what I know so far, best practices on adCenter aren’t so different from AdWords or YSM, but experience tells me to start with a clean slate. If you’re a large advertiser you’ve probably launched quite a few keywords, adgroups and campaigns on either YSM or AdWords that didn’t amount to anything, so replicating this cruft on adCenter probably isn’t the best of ideas. My recommendation is to leverage your experience in prioritizing your work.

If you’re a small or medium size advertiser this prospect isn’t so daunting. It’s much easier to start off with a tidy account structure if you only sell a few products or have a limited universe of viable keywords to consider. Start with your head keywords, and organize them in a way that suits the adCenter structure. Then move down to the body. The tail? If you’ve already optimized everything else and the volume warrants it, sure.

For large advertisers, you’ll want to rely on your own paid search experience as well as the recommendations from your YSM and Microsoft account managers as you think about account structure. I’ll give you an example of how we’re looking at the situation. In one of our larger SEM programs we promote our shopping site. We’re looking at mapping products and categories in the following way: Top-level product category, e.g. electronics, corresponds to an adCenter account. Secondary product category, e.g. television, corresponds to a campaign, and tertiary category, e.g. Samsung 3D tv at the ad group level. That’s just one way to slice it. Obviously, depending on how you advertise, you may have a different view on it.

A Thought On Keywords

Everyone who’s ever done any amount of search marketing knows that AdWords and YSM have a very different notion of what a keyword is (and is not). I won’t go on and on about this, except to say that adCenter also has its own ideas. My experience tells me that adCenter’s system of keyword normalization is closer to AdWords than it is YSM. This would lead some advertisers to simply port their AdWords accounts over to adCenter. Again, I recommend putting in the work and re-creating from scratch. But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion.

That’s Un-American

Just a quick note on geo-targeting. Just as YSM and adCenter don’t have the same notion of a keyword, they also have different definitions of North America. In YSM-ese, North America means USA and English speaking Canada. French Canada is a separate buy. AdCenter looks at it differently. My understanding is that adCenter separates the US and Canada by targeting, and doesn’t differentiate on language. So that means that in AdCenter you should have English and French keywords in your Canada account, and (American) English and maybe Spanish keywords in your US account.

Wow, that’s a lot to digest. And, there’s going to be more. If you don’t have a YSM rep, take another pass at the resources at the top of this post. Check them early and  often. Again, if you have YSM reps, send them something nice and ask for their time, assistance, and expertise. They’ve all been trained on Bing at this point so they should be able to help. There will me much more detail coming out in the next few weeks about how to set yourself up for success in the unified marketplace, and with any luck you’ll be hearing more from me on this topic in the near future. Until then, Happy Searching!

In last month’s column I talked about buying brand keywords and some of the great (somewhat) new ad products available to advertisers. All that talk about buying brand keywords brought me back to a familiar topic about which, if you read my column with any frequency, you just might be getting a tiny bit tired of hearing me rant. In spite of that, I’m back for one more round of discussion about the relationship between paid and organic search traffic, this time with some real math to show for myself. Bear with me, this one’s worth it.

I mentioned in my previous post about paid and organic search traffic that the goal in any analysis is to determine if the paid ad is a source of lift, cannibalization, or both.  At the time I was looking at isolating the traffic from the organic listing and then quantifying the incremental effect of the paid search ad. Since then, thanks to Matthias Blume, I have seen the light, statistically speaking, and have thus found a much more elegant way to conduct this analysis. Let’s put on our statistical hats and go on a journey to the heart of the issue.

Let’s reset the situation: You rank #1 organically for your brand keyword search, and you’re trying to determine if and how much you are willing to pay for a paid ad on your brand keyword search. The goal then is to understand how the clickthrough rate (CTR) of the organic listing is affected by the presence of the paid ad. You’ll do this by looking at how the CTR of the organic listing changes with and without the presence of the paid ad. The CTR rates I am referring to need to be normalized for search volume. I’ll explain what that means below, but that was the tricky part that I didn’t get before, the elusive reality about which Matthias enlightened me.

In order to calculate this normalized CTR, you’ll first need to try to figure out what the search query volume is for the keyword you’re targeting. This isn’t always explicitly defined, but if you’re clever you can find some ways to approximate it with a good deal of accuracy. Some search engines provide approximate monthly search query volume for keywords, and I believe there are third party providers of approximate search query volume data as well. Ideally you will want to have search volume by day for whichever keyword you’re testing on a particular search engine. If you can’t get to this level of resolution that’s ok, go with weekly or monthly search volume. This will just mean that it will take longer to get your results.

I’m going to explain how we did our analysis, and you can make any variations you need based on your own constraints.  First, we chose a few brand keywords to track. At Yahoo!, we have many brand terms to choose from: yahoo, yahoo mail, yahoo finance, etc. At your company you may have a similar experience, or you may have only one brand keyword that really matters to your business.

Here’s how the analysis works: On Day 1 of our research period, we had the organic listing in #1 position, with no paid search ads (at all) on the page. We began to collect referral data from the organic listing. After a week we started buying paid search ads for our brand terms, and began tracking referrals from the paid ad as well. From then until Day 30 we bought paid search at different budget levels and turned it off for periods of time as well, just to get a variety of data points.

At the end of the research period we compiled our data and began to plot it out on a chart. The metrics that we calculated were fairly simple. On any given day, Organic CTR is [referrals from the organic listing divided by search query volume], and Paid Search CTR is [referrals from the paid search ad divided by search query volume]. We calculated these two metrics for each day 1-30, and plotted them on a scatter graph.  It looked like this:

Here is the way to read this graph: On the x (horizontal) axis is the Paid Search CTR. On the y (vertical) axis is the Organic CTR. Each of the data points represents a day where we gathered data, and each point is plotted where the two CTRs meet on the graph (I’ve stripped the values out of the chart to protect the innocent). The line on the graph is a linear regression, basically a trend line that represents a summary of the scattered data points. Here’s the key: If the slope of the line is positive (the line goes up and to the right) as it is here, there is positive synergy between the organic listing and the paid ad. This means that on days where we bought the paid ad, the CTR of the organic listing actually increased. If the line had a negative slope (went down and to the right), there would be negative synergy between the organic listing and the paid ad. I referred to this as cannibalism in my previous column on this topic, and it means that your paid ad is stealing traffic from your organic listing.

So in my case I ran around the building, loudly declaring victory. I mean, what could be better than buying paid search traffic knowing that you’re driving more clicks to your organic listings?  Believe me, I’m not saying that it will turn out this way in every case. Do your own analysis and come to your own conclusions, because naturally it’s going to work differently for everyone. I’m just here to share my story with you, and mine happens to have a very, very happy ending.

A few months ago I wrote about how advertisers should think about buying their brand keywords on search engines. Since then I have been happily buying a number of brand keywords and can safely say I’m delighted by the fact that there are now several viable enhanced ad products offered by the major search engines that can bring absolute joy to the open-minded search marketer who loves traffic from brand keywords.

Let me give you a brief summary of what’s out there before I further extol the virtues of these enhanced ad products for brand keywords.

Google Ad Sitelinks

Google offers a nice new ad product for brand keywords that is an extension of its Sitelinks product. As you may know, Sitelinks appear in the algorithmic listings and are set up by Google. Websites can opt out, but presumably have no control over the links themselves. There is now a new product available for advertisers, so-called Ad Sitelinks. This product gives advertisers more control over their Adwords ads that show when their brand terms are searched.  Advertisers can add up to four links at a time with tracking URLs. Ads have to be white-listed by Google weekly for inclusion. I would assume that over time Google may expand the Ad Sitelinks program to include a richer feature set, but for now the unit exists and operates very efficiently. This is Dell’s Ad Sitelinks unit as an example:



Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) from Yahoo

RAIS was designed specifically for brand owners as a way to showcase their products to brand searchers. The RAIS unit allows advertisers to put in multiple trackable links on the ad, directing users to specific calls to action. This is great because advertisers can choose how commercial they want the ads to be. Some advertisers go completely direct-response, while others provide links for existing customers, like login links or customer service links. In addition to the links, advertisers can also include video assets such as product demos or 30-second commercials. The big bonus here is that when a user clicks on a video asset to watch it, the video expands in the unit and renders right there on the SERP, temporarily pushing all the other ads down at or below the fold. Perfect if you want to showcase your company or product via video. Another nice feature RAIS offers is the ability for an advertiser to put a drop down menu or even a search box into the RIAS unit itself, giving users the ability to drill into your site in a self-guided way. This is what our RAIS unit looks like for our Toolbar product.

What does this mean to you, the search marketer? I can tell you empirically what we, as an advertiser, are seeing as a direct result of using these products. As you can imagine, your results will vary depending on how commercial or acquisition-focused your ads are. For us, as you can see from the screenshot above, the ad headline is primarily direct-response focused (“Download Yahoo! Toolbar”), but we also mixed in more educational messaging in the ad itself (“Learn about Toolbar Apps”).  The results of using these products have been nothing short of spectacular. Because the ad units are more complex, and the links more varied and numerous, we typically see conversion rates dip in a small but noticeable way. However, the dramatic increase in clickthrough rates on these ads and the resulting increase in conversions more than compensate for this by driving additional profit to the bottom line.

Before you get started, here are a few tips for managing these new ad products:

1. Start with your main brand term. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself – these ad units don’t behave like the keywords ads you’re used to.
2. Be open-minded but cautious. Be willing to increase your bids to get traffic, even if it means paying a higher CPC than you’re used to. With some of these systems you need to outbid your previous brand term ads in order to get volume. Don’t panic, your results should still be fantastic!
3. Be ready to test different elements in your ads. Once you have a handle on performance, try altering your links and assets based on what you’re seeing. Tinker with it until you think you have the right balance, then tinker some more!
4. Add ‘other’ brand terms, but create different ads for different terms. For example, we have a different ad unit for ‘yahoo toolbar’ than we do for ‘yahoo’
5. Differentiate from your organic listings. I’ve found that we get the best results when we have a different tone and call to action between the two listings

Still not convinced you should be buying your brand keywords? Take a run at RAIS and Ad Sitelinks before you turn your back on this lucrative traffic source. Also, tune in next month when I take a deeper, data-driven look into the eternal paid vs. organic debate. Until then, Happy Searching!

“We’re losing control of our brand because of our affiliate marketing channel”

“Affiliates are cannibalizing our direct SEM/SEO efforts”

“We’re bidding against our affiliates on keywords and it’s driving up our CPCs”

Nonsense. If this is happening to you, it’s your own fault, not the fault of your affiliate channel. Marketers who think that affiliate marketing and search marketing can’t peacefully co-exist are kidding themselves and need to be stopped. Believe me. As I’m telling you this, I’m a search marketer, not an affiliate marketing manager. At Yahoo!, I have a counterpart in our group that runs the affiliate marketing channel. We maintain very close communication and we are able to cooperate to maximize value to the company by finding the right balance between affiliate and SEM programs.

Protect Your Brand

Search marketers will often say that you shouldn’t run affiliate programs because your brand will be damaged by affiliates. That’s a cop-out. Yes, you should be very concerned about protecting your brand. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. But to suggest that you will lose control of your brand by having other marketers drive sales for you is insulting to those of us who understand the business. To be sure, don’t let these guys run willy nilly with their SEM campaigns. Be smart about it and keep them in check. You control the creative, you control the messaging, you control the offers, and for paid search you control the keyword portfolio and the linking strategy.

Synergy, Not Cannibalization

In our ‘orders’ businesses for example, where we’re bringing people in to subscribe to various paid Yahoo! services, affiliate marketing helps us increase our order volume in a profitable way. In these businesses, we do need to monitor affiliates’ SEM behavior quite closely. We maintain and update our policies on a regular basis.  In some programs we allow affiliates to bid on our brand terms, and in others we prohibit it. Our decisions are driven by whichever route we think will drive the most profit to the company without sacrificing our brand value.

Increase CTR, not CPC

As stated above, direct linking is another tactic that should be managed carefully. As we know, for a given advertiser domain, most search engines will only allow one advertiser to show on a given SRP. So why not maintain a policy that prohibits affiliates from direct linking at all? Because doing so can significantly reduce affiliates’ conversion rates, in turn cutting the order volume they can drive to your business. Exceptions to this rule are the ‘comparison sites’ many affiliates maintain that promote various competitive services. In cases like this, no direct linking is required. Instead, you’ll want to negotiate terms with your affiliate that will favor placement of your offer over those of your competitors. The beauty of this scenario is that when the ‘comparison site’ affiliate is not direct linking to your site, you can essentially get multiple listings on the same SRP, thereby increasing your effective CTR across multiple sites. But what about when affiliates are direct linking? Aren’t you then bidding for the same real estate? In effect, yes. But remember that affiliate marketers are crazy about efficiency, so if they’re out bidding you for a keyword, chances are it’s worth more to them and should perform better for your company.

Policy, Policy, Policy

So what are the best practices for affiliate/SEM policies? As usual, it depends on your business. Try starting with some simple easy-to-manage policies and go from there. Don’t overthink it. Disallow brand terms and direct linking, for example, but be as aggressive as you can on your rate card to attract quality affiliates. Then, if you’re not getting the traction you need with the larger affiliates, selectively tweak your affiliates’ SEM policies as needed.  Keywords and direct links can act as currency in negotiations with affiliates. A word of caution: don’t publicly change your policies or rate card too frequently. Affiliates are human beings (as opposed to keywords), and if you jerk them around by changing policies and rate cards too often they’ll simply go away. You don’t want that.

Outside of policies and rate cards, there are also some situations where affiliate marketing can naturally complement SEM in a synergistic way. In one of our programs, for example, we have an affiliate partner that specializes in buying and optimizing traffic content networks. By contrast, our in-house SEM campaigns are mostly focused on keyword-driven search, so in this case there is no discussion of overlap, cannibalism, or other scary-sounding marketing buzzwords.

A Note On SEO

Many affiliates engage heavily in SEO to drive traffic to the offers they represent. In most cases this is fine. Where you need to be careful is where an affiliate might set up a microsite specifically to drive traffic exclusively to your offer. This can still work, because in many cases it’s going to be better to have an extra algo result on the SRP (see above), but if you’re going to allow this keep in mind a couple of guiding principles. First, you should be doing a better job of SEO than your affiliates, at least on your brand terms. If not, there is some reputation risk here – it doesn’t look good for affiliates to be outranking you in algo results. As well, you should enforce the same brand guidelines you would for paid search. It’s your brand, and it’s your job to protect it. A logical policy in this regard is to insist that all copy (and meta tags) related to your offers are subject to your approval.

So the next time you hear a marketer yammering on about how affiliates are ruining their campaigns, go ahead and set them straight. Tell them Dave from Yahoo! says you should be able to get along just fine with your affiliate brethren, and if you can’t, then you’re not doing a very good job.

Since I wrote about supporting a global brand re-launch with paid search last Fall, I have had the pleasure of working with our international teams on a broader scope of marketing initiatives, and I thought it would make sense to jot down a few thoughts in the hopes of making others’ efforts more successful.

Let me first take a step back and state for the record that the longer I work in search marketing, the more firmly I believe that as search marketers, our ultimate charter is to support the business goals of the company or entity in which we operate.

As I begin to work more with marketing teams in India, UK, France, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other markets, I am constantly reminded that everything – business objectives, marketing goals, even measures of success (not to mention language and culture, of course) – vary widely between international markets, and each market requires essentially a custom built approach to SEM.

As a result, if you’re like me and work in a resource-conscious central marketing environment, it’s paramount to build a strategy that allows you to work efficiently and effectively to deliver search marketing services to a vide variety of markets, prioritizing efforts appropriately to support a diverse set of objectives across the globe.

To that end I’ve compiled a short list of questions you should be asking your international contacts before you get started.

The first two questions will help you qualify and prioritize your regions and determine what level of effort you can afford to invest in them:

What sort of budgets do you have set aside for paid search this quarter/year? As cold as it sounds, this needs to be the first order of prioritization for your efforts. You’re a very busy person, and budgets are a good indicator of commitment to the channel. As a secondary data point, you might ask what percentage of their total or online marketing budgets they’ve set aside for paid search. This approach helps normalize for market size and gives you an additional data point to consider.

Who’s in charge of paid search in your marketing team? Again, not so nice, but your ROI on teams with a dedicated search- or direct-marketing lead will generally be much higher than regions where there is a single point of contact for all things marketing. Don’t be a hero. At best, hitting a home run with a $25,000 SEM budget in Iceland isn’t going to get you a promotion, and at worst, if it keeps you from focusing on important initiatives in the UK, for example, it’s downright irresponsible.

Once you have established your priorities as they relate to regions or countries, the next three questions will help guide you toward building a winning SEM strategy in your target markets:

What are your most important marketing initiatives this/next quarter/year? This may sound like a no-brainer, but again, our job is to support the business objectives of the region. Don’t make the mistake of trying to jam corporate marketing objectives down the throats of the regional teams. It won’t work and it will only serve to annoy your international counterparts. Once you have built a trusting business relationship you can then begin to introduce other priorities into the mix.

Do you already have a relationship with an SEM agency, or a digital agency that runs paid search programs for you? You may have an agency or in-house team that can execute on a global scope. That’s great, but it won’t matter if the region has a comfortable relationship with a somewhat capable agency. Don’t attempt to displace the local agency unless you or your shop holds a significant advantage in terms of capabilities or cost structure. Your credibility is at stake here – don’t blow it. Believe me, you’d rather work with an established agency at first than force a relationship with an unwelcomed in-house team based in the US. Be patient.

What do you consider to be marketing success? Again, a simple question, but different markets have varying objectives and thus potentially different definitions of success. Here in the US, we’re fixated on cost, revenue, conversion rate, profit, and ROI. In emerging markets, for example, these metrics may not matter. Unique visitors, cost-effective referrals, market share, these are some of the KPIs I get when interviewing international teams, and these are what we should be focusing on in such markets.

Like most topics, the key here is to start with the basics, build strong relationships, and take it one step at a time. The gaps that exist between you and the regions as far as language, culture, budgets, business objectives and success metrics dictate a measured, prioritized and open-minded approach to international SEM. Good Luck!

The first element of the show to completely disarm me came as we entered the arena. Before us stood an usher of sorts, a charlatan in disguise. A somewhat insane-looking older gentleman in a mussed tuxedo with a pile of white hair on his head. The look on his face said ‘I’d like to help you find a seat, but I’m not quite sure what I’m doing’. For better or for worse, we were approached by another usher who politely showed us to our seats. In hindsight this was good fortune, for as soon as we sat down it became clear that the charlatan usher was leading various guests around the arena on a wild goose chase, much to the amusement of the previously seated guests in the arena.

Another amusing element to the show was the ‘baby’. She came out early in the show with some of the other bizarre creatures that inevitably inhabit the stage of a Cirque performance. As part of the act she chooses an audience member in the front row as her ‘mama’. As the baby begins to play with her new mama, you can sense a level of engagement with the audience that is unique to the Cirque experience. Sure enough, as the show goes on, the baby reappears at select moments, soliciting attention and companionship from the unsuspecting ‘mama’ in the audience. There’s a very funny twist at the end of the show that I won’t spoil here.

After the introductory elements and the music set the tone for the ensuing drama, there were then a string of acts so unusual and unbelievable that they left my senses completely drained for the remainder of the evening.

The first was the aerial cube, which apparently has been a staple of the show since 1995. Visually speaking, the act is remarkable. The cube, which has no body, only a frame, spins on the various body parts of the performer with an impossible display of color that leaves the viewer nearly hallucinating before it’s over. The difficulty of this act is almost completely forgotten due to the brilliance of the visual effects it produces.

‘Hand to Hand’ is an act I’ve seen adapted into at least one other Cirque show (Le Reve, I think). In this act, two men perform an intertwined act of balance and strength atop a revolving sphere. Watching this act it’s hard to believe it’s real. The two men move impossibly slowly and precisely, hoisting each other to balance on a hand or a foot of the other, then somehow reverse positions without losing their grace of movement. Truly impressive.

The other act that really captured my imagination was the Trampoline and Korean Plank. This act epitomizes what I understand to be the Cirque experience. Several dozen acrobats weave around the stage and take turns catapulting each other into space with the planks. What makes this a true Cirque experience is that not only are the acrobats amazingly skilled and precise, but clearly much work has gone into making the procession of acrobats visually compelling. It’s hard to put this into words, but the movement of the acrobats around the stage and through the air creates intricate visual patterns that make the experience much more rewarding than the individual feats of the acrobats themselves. You can’t watch this act without feeling both the compelling skills of the performers as well as the choreography behind it. That’s the Cirque spectacle in a nutshell.

So, all in all a great time! I think I’m finally getting the hang of this whole Cirque phenomenon. Now that I’ve been to a few shows, I have a much better feel for what it’s all about. The more shows I see, the more I’m able to stop trying to figure out what’s going on, and instead to focus on and truly enjoy the performance in front of me in its entirety.

“Media-mix modeling is the key to marketing success!”

“Without an accurate attribution model you’re throwing away your marketing dollars!!”

With SMX West in town last week the halls were echoing with passionate cries about attribution analysis. It seemed as if all topics (other than the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal) had taken a back seat for a moment, and suddenly the most important thing to consider was attribution analysis, specifically whether or not you are giving too much credit to SEM and not enough to other media.

Believe me, I share people’s enthusiasm on the topic. It’s clearly one of the next big online marketing problems to solve. And despite the fact that moving away from last-click attribution toward a more elegant and accurate attribution model can really only serve to divert budget away from SEM and toward other channels, I do think it’s the right thing to do. But after talking to as many people as I could, gathering my own data and soliciting opinions, I’m convinced that we are a still a long way from being any good at this at all.

Currently there appear to be two basic types of approaches, both of which seem to me to be fatally flawed.

One approach I see in the market, offered by various otherwise credible services, has the advertiser entering percentages into boxes on a screen, assigning portions of the conversion value to different marketing channels – 25% for SEM, 35% for display, 15% for email, and so on. As a large advertiser myself, I can safely say that this approach gives someone like me entirely too much credit as a sophisticated marketer. I don’t know anyone who has a good enough grasp on their business and the implications of attribution analysis to make an intelligent decision in this type of situation. No knock on my fellow advertisers, but seriously, this is way out of our league. Even so, a Google representative stated during a panel I was moderating, that they intend only on providing attribution-related data, placing the burden of analysis on the advertiser.

The other approach I see emerging is a black-box math-based approach. This is more likely to be done in-house by large advertisers, using statistical and predictive modeling to simulate different attribution models, and mapping their outcomes to business metrics like profit, revenue or ROI. While I do think there is significant value in doing the hard math and understanding these problems from a statistical point of view, this methodology tends to be short-sighted. I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all approach to attribution analysis where you simply dump your marketing data in, and out magically pops an attribution model that maximizes profit, for example. It’s just not that generic of a problem.

It’s easy for me to sit back and criticize the status quo – so why not offer some solutions, you say? Well, here goes: I envision a three-phased approach that takes some elements of the existing practices, then combines and expands upon them to provide a more complete, appropriate solution for each advertiser.

The first phase involves smart people talking to each other. Revolutionary, no? We need an attribution specialist to lead off this effort by conducting a fairly exhaustive analysis of the advertisers’ business and online marketing programs. Starting with business goals and product adoption cycle, to conversion window analysis, on to a channel-by-channel audit of on- and off-line marketing. The purpose of this consulting and analysis is to provide the proper inputs into phase two.

Phase two is the super-math modeling I describe above. With the proper inputs as they relate to an advertiser’s business and its metrics, statistical modeling is needed to predict all possible outcomes and understand which model will best support the advertiser’s business goals.

Finally, phase three makes all of this actionable. We need a way to pluck the wisdom out of phase two and apply it directly to actual media channels the advertiser is running. Ideally we’ll find a way to automate this or at least automate the recommendations, which can then by easily implemented into the media buys themselves.

But before any of us sprint into the world of attribution analysis and media mix modeling, let’s step back and take a long look in the mirror: I don’t know of a way to realistically pull any of this off if an advertiser doesn’t have a common tracking/analytics system for all marketing channels. So before we start hiring expensive analysts, consultants and statisticians, let’s be sure to clean our own houses and get our own data in order. Standardize your analytics and measurement on a single platform so you can compare ‘apples to apples’. Then you can start to focus on the fun stuff.