Over years of conference coverage, we’ve learned that sometimes it’s best to hold onto special sessions for a bit… let the fruits of knowledge ripen… let the excitement of the expo experience tone down before unleashing the insightful splendor into the blogosphere.

That said, it’s now time to revisit one of the last sessions from the last day at SES Chicago. The crowd sitting in on Marketing to Marketers was small, quiet, but eager to learn (and begin). Without a moment’s notice, the panel up and chucked the jumbo room for an intimate round-table audience participation Q&A at Kitty O’Shea’s. Drinks included. No joke.

The revered panel included Matt McGowan, VP & Publisher of Incisive Media, Rebecca Lieb, VP U.S. Operations, Econsultancy, Crispin Sheridan, Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing and moderator Corey Perlman, President eBoot Camp Inc. Their mission: to collectively reveal how marketing to marketers is different than B2B and B2C.

Or is it?

But wait- there was more. On the way to the bar the troupe picked up a few more respected thought leaders of the community including Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair & VP, Global Content Director, Incisive Media, Anne Kennedy, founder & MP, Beyond Ink, SES Advisory Board, FP & CMO of Joblr.net and Jonathan Allen, Director, Search Engine Watch. (Super sweet bonus of panel experts for those who actually stuck it out).

Here’s a recap of the presentations conversations that transpired (on occasion in bullet form to emphasize key takeaways from each speaker):

Perlman: First off, why are we here? Well, we had sessions to fill and marketers are very sophisticated… they can sniff a sale from a mile away.

Sheridan: When I woke up, I had to ask myself: “What did I just agree to!?” I asked my constituents if they had a clear understanding of how to market to different teams.

• When marketing to marketers, understand that there are a considerably greater amount of risks than marketing B2B or B2C.
• You’re required to do stuff that’s new and innovative.
  
• You’re charged with the tremendous expectation to not fail.
• At SAP Marketing, a healthy incorporation of social media has had the most impact on marketers.

From the audience:

Tim Gorski: I heard there’s been a huge upsurge in the male demographic in Facebook. Is that because there’s middle and upper management going to social media like Facebook?

Sheridan: It’s a possibility. We’ve had our toe in the water for a while. Using social media with marketers is powerful. We directed sales from Facebook to our website and our sales have increased.

• One key element is finding out where people go online and what social media platform they are using. Profiling user behavior provides excellent insight for marketing efforts.

Grehan: I asked Lieb to be on the panel as the editor of a marketing publication. Lieb, when dealing with marketers I’ve noticed you get more feedback.

Lieb: I’m biased toward content-based marketing. Thinking about that, I heard independently from three different people in the speakers’ room: “We’re really getting into training and we’re really making money. And we’re doing training because the leads we’re getting from the courses become our best clients.”

• Look to help marketers do their job better. The bottom line is we’re giving marketers valuable actionable information. When they understand, they convert.

McGowan: From my perspective, sitting down with Omniture, or a similar company in that vein, they all talk about their new libraries of content: video, whitepaper, articles, .pdfs,  podcasts, etc.

Grehan: Your job is even more difficult than that. You have to take the creative people and sales people and teach them how to market to marketers because they can’t just throw bullshit.

McGowan: Right, with marketers you must do this to add value. Whatever you are selling must improve their bottom line, whether it’s connecting business with marketers or business to consumers.

• We’re publishers and we put on shows, but what we do is connect businesses with marketers.
• Delegates want to know how to spend their marketing dollars better.
• We like to think of it as a little playground, or supermarket. But overall we want to facilitate those interactions.

Grehan: Isn’t it easier when people have actually received something?

McGowan: Right, but I think in any business, it’s part lead-generation.

• There are two buckets: part of the budget goes to lead generation and the other part takes the leads and markets to them.
• Think non-profits:  if you sign up for a newsletter, they’re probably going to ask you for a donation.

Perlman: As marketers our BS level is up there. But when you see a good job, you know it.

From the audience:

Anthony Wrubel: But I’ve noticed marketing is leaning towards network science. “Give to get.” The expectations from marketers are that they will also get something.

Grehan: Yes, specifically Google has adopted that. When that begins to happen you move from being a broadcast medium to a listening medium.

Wrubel: Yes. You have to align your objectives by listening to the feedback. The “give to get” is just another way to make the benefit clear.

Kennedy: You can’t kid a kidder. ( )

McGowan: I think, possibly, marketers are on the top of the list of the most critical. How often do we get a response from someone in the industry that critiques what you put out there? You have to cut through the crap.

Lieb: I’ll reject a pitch if the marketing sucks; I really respect good marketing. I think you can market to marketers if you’re so kick-ass good.

McGowan: It’s not all that different than marketing to other groups; you just need to know your audience.

Grehan: In all actuality, we’re all selling to each other.

Kennedy: Is there a larger issue (aside from selling booths and tools) of how to market this new science to those who are new to it? We need to know how to get all the marketing disciplines to play nice together. How do we market to traditional marketers and get them to use the keywords we need?

Lieb: That’s one of the biggest challenges. You’re either the traditional marketers of TV and print or the data techie people segregated on a different floor. It’s exceptionally hard to integrate the two because their mindsets are totally different.

Grehan: It’s ironic: a lot of technology companies get their funding when they adopt more “traditional” techniques.

Sheridan: When you’ve got people down the funnel, you have to be sure it does really well. When I first worked at SAP they didn’t have a marketing department. I was working in HR in Canada with Excel spreadsheet. We were so busy we could hardly print enough disks. (Disks, remember those?) Only when business started to plateau did they get a marketing department.

McGowan: A distinction has to be made from marketing to marketers and B2B.

From the audience:

Wrubel (previously employed with Ocean Spray): Search is looked at as an after thought because it’s not understood. In store things are pretty easy to understand, but search is so complex.

Audience Comment

Armen Tatevosian: It comes down to what you are on the hook for.

Grehan: You could distinguish B2B and M2M but in the real world the business owner is often also the manager and marketer anyway… so it’s often the same audience.

McGowan: To get to your point- there is so much brand cache with Ocean Spray as opposed to, for example, Snapple, which was new. We are seeing a massive increase in small to medium businesses because the barriers to entry are lowered. In contraction times we often see the small businesses eat the lunch of large business. I always look at the Nielsen data. But I want to know the actual numbers. Metric based marketing, whatever it is, display search, as long as the government doesn’t intervene is here to stay and the other marketers need to understand it. Big brands don’t necessarily need to be good at search, for example: Cheerios. Their page is a .pdf. They don’t spend a lot of money there because everyone knows the brand.

Lieb: Kraft Foods is selling iPhone apps. That’s really pretty darn remarkable. The iPhone app gives you recipes, Kraft Food based of course, and store check lists.

McGowan: What’s really amazing is that they are selling it.

Kennedy: They’re getting consumers to pay for the marketing!

Grehan: Devil’s advocate. Is it easier for us online guys to market to offline guys because they don’t know?

McGowan: There are also those people who had bad experiences with bad SEOs. They gave us a bad name and now we have to prove ourselves. That’s why we must lead with education.

Lieb: That’s an essential difference. You need to have the educational component. How do you do something that’s incredibly complex and brand new?

Grehan: What do you need to be when you go online? Techie or creative?

Allen: The more signal we create, the better. If it does register, it registers hard. Like Matt was saying, the cowboys have damaged our industry. But if we take this one stand we’ll hit the right people. It’s enabling everyone to be everywhere.

Lieb: For the first conference that talked about spam, we invited the Federal Trade Commission to come and speak. Because we reached out, Clickz became a big part of shaping the legislation. That’s a form of marketing.

McGowan: Some members of the Congressional Department are in attendance this week to figure out how to package this to small businesses. Later, I’ll be meeting with them because we can use these networking connections to leverage the market. Speakers are often our best vehicles to the market.

Lieb: Digital marketers must take a stand. We’re shaping the best practices and federal record.

Allen: One problem we’ve had with B2B what is: “What’s the one message that’s going to work?”

• As marketers we have a massive BS detector and are likely to criticize.
• One great thing about search marketing is that we can manufacture content around ultra niche levels just by collaborating with and listening to everyone.

Sheridan: There is a big connection between marketing to offline people and marketing to marketers who don’t understand search yet:

• We need to educate them on something they’re unfamiliar with, just like traditional marketers would with a brand new product.
• Part of our job is to make them realize the people they’re marketing to are active in these online communities.
• The next step is letting them know what they can actually achieve by marketing with these online strategies.
• These two elements drew attendance though the roof and the feedback scores were admirably high in September- 4.6 out of 6. Marketers came anxious and left calm because they understood, plotted, and adopted a strategy.

Lieb: This all links back to education and training.

Armen: Right, they have a path now, but what I don’t see here are support and next steps.

Kennedy: Which is where search marketers come in. The more we tell, the more we get leads. We wont be able to go out of business.

McGowan: Education seems to be the key, whether it’s what can help them (strategy) or (more traditionally) what the product is.

So there you have it, folks- the ultimate conclusion from the tail-end of SES we felt honored to help pass along: education is nothing short of essential when it comes to marketing to marketers; without it, don’t expect to help break people free of the bad taste SEO may have left in their mouths, or be able to successfully converge tech and creative teams’ marketing skills to your benefit, or, well, gain any ground on the M2M front at all.

So here’s kinda what was going on with “news” at the end of 2009: the news stations and newspapers were dying continuing to have a difficult time adjusting to the fact that there is “an Internet.” Specifically, the fact that the Internet has reprogrammed consumers to expect get news updates by the second, streamed directly to their phones, all for, uh, free. Also, everyone and their mother’s cagefighting vice-barrister has an opinion on how newspapers and other media outlets should retool and monetize. And oh, it’d be great if these once unparalleled news platforms could stop being the butt of the jokes we all love to hear… and tell. Meanwhile, at SES Chicago 2009, some of the smartest and most resourceful folks in the news industry gathered for the Real Time SEO: No More Yesterday’s News session to discuss successful tactics and strategies adopted by their organizations. If you’re in any tier of the news industry and actively interested in saving your organization, this was the place to be (and if you weren’t there, then this is the coverage to read). The session was super informative and empowering… nothing like the public pity parties thrown for some news outlets lately.

Moderating this session was Tim Ruder of PerfectMarket, and speaking first was Brent D. Payne, SEO director for the Chicago Tribune.

Breaking News SEO & the Dilemma of Yesterday’s News
Consider the volume of search traffic available for breaking news events. Consider when the Tiger Woods story peaked; his name actually had more search volume than “porn” and even “sex.” At the Chicago Tribune, Brent and his team focus on these breaking stories and take the opportunity to build content around them.

Over a two week period, normal weekend traffic for the Tribune attributes a half million visits to Google. The weekend after the Tiger debacle, the site received a cool million visits from Google. It seemed they had ranked well with Google News during this time; at their best, both Google news and Google web were doing considerably well.

Google Hot Trends
The Tribune consults these figures daily to understand who’s searching for what on an hourly basis. Keep in mind that trends are not about volume, but rather percent increase. The bar indicators inside of trends tell you a little more about volume of traffic. Smaller broadcast sites focus on the “spicy” ones that are likely to have a lot of volume whereas bigger papers focus on the volcanic bars.

Don’t Assume… Research. Think Creatively.
The Tribune noticed the subject “penile fracture” appear in trends one random day; although it remained #1 for several days thereafter, Brent and his team were hesitant to build content around the trending keyword phrase. After three days, Brent decided to do some research. Turned out the only reason “penile fracture” was tipping the trend charts was thanks to a recently aired Grey’s Anatomy episode that covered the risque medical condition. The same day as this discovery the LA Times (also a Tribune company) wrote an article about the ways people ingest media today; it’s not just through TV, not just Internet, but a hybrid of multiple news platforms. Indeed, the article referenced that very Grey’s Anatomy episode and its effect on traffic. While the post ranked well, it didn’t fully capitalize on the hot part of trend.

The Majority of Results are Still Yesterday’s News
Consider the results for Tiger Woods again. Even now, the top results are from Google News, and they all address the scandal. This is totally on-point. Relevant, recent and topical.

But the rest of the web results are not helpful for the spike of users or their (morally questionable) intent. A few stories that cater to user intent (from The Huffington Post, Yahoo Sports etc.) reside at the bottom of the SERPs. But this is where we need to get Google web and news to focus, cooperate, and ultimately create a more positive user experience.

How did the Tribune combat? They took one of their older, relevant articles that was ranking well in web results and they redirected it to the new story about the Tiger Woods scandal.  It channeled page rank to the new post and helped it jump to the lead news story. Big opportunity here.

The problem: if you are constantly focusing back to one story, you won’t have enough URLs for Google to look at. Google does recrawl stories, technically. But as Brent maintains, the reality is that Google cannot physically go through all of these older stories over and over again.

In Tribune companies, they still focus on URLs. If Google news did update URLs every time, you’d notice that the updated HuffPost story would have their updates listed in Google News. The fact is, they do follow URLs, but not for a long period of time.

The goal: Aim to do well in both news and web. Don’t screw over one for the other; there needs to be mutual support. For news, look at trends, topics, data, then optimize: change your headlines (to get past duplicate content filters), change your subheadline, change your first paragraph. After that, redirect your old story to a new version. Of course, make sure your new version is listed in Google News before you try to redirect… otherwise, what’s the point?

You have to be careful with the old topics, though… editorial folks might express concern about the redirect. Play it safe- only perform this tactic for a short period of time.

The Future of Breaking News
There’s a new Google tool that shows breaking news within a particular window.

The folks over at Google literally announced this a few weeks ago. Brent promised to deliver more research in the future, but his gut feeling  is to have a lot of relevant topical information from trends.

Up next was Topher Kohan from CNN.

Future of SEO for News Sites
On September 14th, Google announced they would add support to Yahoo Search Monkey/RFDA tags and Facebook Share in their video search. Topher saw this as an interesting opportunity for CNN, a company that now has the incentive to post a lot of new video content.

Yahoo Search Monkey is a tool that lets you customize how you show up in Yahoo search. With it comes a different type of microformat: the RDFA tag. Google says you should use these tags with your videos- heck, why not?

Topher experimented with the tags on some of his test site properties. After just a month of testing, he saw a 35% increase in the number of indexed videos in Google Video Search. He also saw a 22% increase in videos showing up for targeted keywords. To be clear, they made no other changes to they way they posted or produced the videos. Just tested the tags.

In this scenario, though, you have to be aware of the multitude of RDFA options… because there are, like, 1,000. It adds a lot of code and can slow things down. (Topher said they eventually backed it off to around 150.)

Facebook Share is code you can wrap around your video to encourage distribution in the Facebook community. It’s also a great way to track your content when it leaves your site.

Topher and his team added this feature to their test sites, but also added it to a small subset to videos on CNN. They saw a 12% increase in test site videos in Google index; the videos also showed with the source link attributed as CNN.com, not from other sites that might scrape the video. His team also saw a 47% increase in videos being shared and viewed on Facebook, and traffic from a video on Facebook increased by 32%. People were coming back to the source of the content, spending more time there and hopefully doing all the other wonderful things CNN wants those users to do.

Microformats & Semantic Web Tagging
Get ready, boys and girls- this will literally change the way we do SEO, and it will happen within the next 12-18 months. Topher’s heard from both engines that they are working together to come up with a preferred set encompassing universal tags to wrap around videos. (Just watch out for the code bloat!)

XML Video Sitemaps
Tags aren’t everything, though. You still need a really nice sitemap to feed the engines. All the tags do is tell them what the content is, what it’s about, and where they should categorize it. Getting found is not the issue; making sure the content goes in the correct bucket (when someone is searching for it) is.

Speaking next was the Washington Post’s Rochelle Sanchirico.

Working the “SEO Program” Successfully Within an Enterprise Organization
Some general truths Rochelle has found about SEO:

• Most people within a large organization don’t understand SEO and/or are intimidated the the point of inaction.

• People who have a bit of knowledge (have used a search engine before… once…) think they’re experts. They are the ones sending emails with the subject header: “Why aren’t we first for this keyword in the Google??”

• There are people who have the potential to be really strong evangelists and partners, but they are difficult to find.

Attributes of Ideal SEO Partners

• Access - People who have regular and unrestricted access to the site content or code. People like senior web editors, content creators or owners.
• Accountability - People who have something to gain or lose by performing SEO. Traffic or product owners who can lose their job if they don’t get traffic to a particular section.
• Enforcement - People who can get things done – CTO’s, CIO’s, even general managers and publishers.
• Reinforcement - People who are just plain interested in this stuff. Those who have done site analytics, for example.

Some of the most important things to coordinate with these folks are definition and alignment of goals. Some metrics to consider are unique visitors, visitors in a particular segment, pageviews, time on site etc. Whatever criteria drives your business, align your goals accordingly.

Create weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual goals. This is the most effective things the Post has done to get their goals incorporated with the key stakeholders. Rochelle has shared SEO traffic goals with her tech lead and it brought about additional understanding for both parties.

Creating Accountability
There’s a single wringable neck for each process or task. Visuals can work wonders in determining who is responsible. Rochelle uses a “burn down chart” because it’s familiar to her particular staff and it successfully resonates with them. Her “burn down chart” looks like a highly organized excel sheet, assigning supporting goals along with tasks and a level of importance, among other items.

Finding Evangelists
These are others in the organization with knowledge and enthusiasm to spread the SEO gospel. These folks don’t need to be stakeholders, but it’s ideal that they have regular contact with someone on the core team.

Rallying the Masses
Rallying five people is a lot different than a newsroom of 500. Ask yourself: what do people respond to?  Would they lose their jobs if the site isn’t doing well?

Organize large group and small group training sessions. Even sitting at someone’s desks while he/she works. Reinforce the SEO message over and over again… people forget and have a lot of other people to answer to.

The impact of SEO is very visible. Visibility inside an organization hinges on the ability to execute these tactics successfully.

Finishing up the session was  Muhammad Saleem, Director of Social Media for ChicagoNow

Using Social Media for Massive Exposure and Linkbuilding
Muhammad believes we should ignore qualitative metrics and focus just on quantitative side. Use Social News sites as part of a larger social media strategy. Muhammad has seen short term and narrow strategies fall off the grid… long term plans are better for the people that stick around and for the links you build.

Mainstream Media & Social News
Mainstream media is surprisingly well-represented on social news sites. If you go deeper into these sites, you’ll see that while they have a presence, they still don’t understand the mechanics of social news. Some of the front Digg page successes weren’t promoted to develop high quality links. Also, the top 50 sites on the Internet control 41% content on Digg.

Where do I start?
The Site. Look at the category distribution of popular stories. What kind of content is being promoted? How frequently is it being promoted? Understanding this will help you work with editorial to help promote content within these categories.

Also look at the competition within each category by studying the promotion threshold. In most cases, the highest volume categories are going to have a lot of competition. However, this is not always the case with say, the Digg “Science Section.”

Once you have an idea of the popular categories, you’ll have a handle on how to gain massive exposure. Then, you have to break this down into average link acquisition by category. Make sure you’re not just getting traffic, but that you’re in the categories where you can build the links and get long term search engine play.

Drill deeper into sub-categories. Once you know what categories are popular and what their thresholds are, then make sure you’re planning your campaigns by day of the week. Mondays do very well, but often Thursday ends up doing better than, say, Tuesday or Wednesday. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily apply to breaking news.

The Content. Look at link acquisition by keywords in the title of your submission and in the description of the story. You’ll see that pictures tend to do well, as do How-To and Top 10 Lists.

Compare this data to the same keywords being listed on the page where you’re creating the content. Do yourself and your users a favor: be consistent with how you present your content on social news sites and on the actual page itself.

The Viral News Title. Lists tend to do very well- superlatives and sensationalism. Why does this appeal to such a large audience if it’s not the best greatest and latest? Any sorts of statistics do well- especially if they’re alarming; rich media, too- infographics- embedded in the content or use that as the content. The average social news consumer doesn’t want to visit a page that’s just another massive wall of text.

Example Formula : [number] [adjective] [keyphrase]

• “20 Greatest Milestones in Tiger Woods Life”
• “10 Groundbreaking Michael Jackson Music Videos”
• “15 Biggest Mistakes in the Iraq War”

You can also use a tag cloud tool for visual cues as to keyword popularity.

Also consider looking at the travel and places category in Digg for category ideas for link acquisition. This title is a great example: “16 incredible unconventional hotel rooms (pics).”

The Community. How do you actually get content seeded and promoted on the site? Muhammad likes to look at the most popular users for the last 30 days. Start with this list to get a better understanding of what kind of content they’re interested in and what kind of sources they go to.

Once you figure out the user that works best with your content, go to their profile- learn more about the categories most suited to them, their popularity ratio, and their other social media profiles (often complete with contact information). In most cases, reaching out to the members is a win-win; you get your content plugged  and community members dig the interaction. If you give these users the right content, and the exclusivity, you don’t even have to be active in the community.

Think this isn’t an influential approach? Keep this in mind: the top 50 community members are responsible for over 1/3rd of all content promoted.

Start with studying category distribution and the promotion thresholds. From there look at link acquisition broken out over categories and day of the week. Even further, look at link acquisition for keywords and description. Finally, network with the community members so your content gets to the best person who can promote it.

Selected Questions & Answers from this Session

Q: What SEO activity is the Tribune doing with their video content?

Payne: Unfortunately with our CMS, we’re wrapping our video in an iframe. Basically pointless, but we’re focusing on it in 2010. It was something I brought up in ‘08.

Q: How does the panel leverage looking at their on-site search and correlating this with what they’re doing in the broader market?

Kohan: I spend a lot time looking at on-site search. It tells you what your users are looking for. You want to give them with what they’re looking for. I don’t put that in the same bucket as Google trends and Twitter.

Sanchirico: Beyond SEO, site search gives great insight for usability.

Payne: We put this more as a usability problem, we try to give people what they need by browsing more than search.

Q: Do you do anything to SEO against user-generated content?

Kohan: All the links are NoFollow; we have the ability to make the comments invisible to the engines. The comments on all the stories are not moderated at all. We do have a profanity filter, but this could become a big issue fast if it’s a hot topic.

Sanchirico: You have to be really careful about your brand and whether you’re seen as a neutral news source. In social media, we can quickly see things devolve.

Q: There’s a lot of news swirling around Rupert Murdoch, threatening to pull out of one search engine or another. Murdoch said that the search engine traffic isn’t valuable. What are your thoughts on the value to news organizations with this traffic?

Sanchirico: We do a fairly poor job of taking advantage of people coming in from search right now. We’re doing a lot of multivariate testing with ways to interact with people. The way that media sites in general are monetized, we went down a really bad road 15 years, and unfortunately it’s hard to go back. There’s a lot to do as far as keeping people on the site and convert on areas that make sense.

Saleem: Social media traffic converts to about one-third of what Google traffic does for the same content. That’s why we we’re heavily focused on link acquisition and not just page views. The links that drive traffic from search will drive conversions, not just direct traffic from the social news sites.

Payne: It comes down to the particular user too. You have to monetize much more heavily on that first pageview or those first few pageviews. You have that huge difference between the number of pages people consume, so you have to crank up the amount of money people make from those 3-5 page views. It’s a tough question, but one we’re focused on.

Kohan: Murdoch’s bluffing. He is never going to pull his content out of the index. He’s going to saber rattle until one of the engines bows to him.

Payne: Topher is wrong on Murdoch, but anyway. In news, there definitely is this mindset where people are “we don’t need two-thirds of our traffic, just focus on the one-third,” that’s different.

Kohan: The only reason that WSJ works is because it’s niche. That’s what Murdoch is looking at. It’s niche and people’s bosses are paying for it, not my mom and dad. They would never pay for that.

Q: Regarding niche, do you think people would pay for hyper hyper local media that’s block by block and very specific to them?

Sanchirico: People will pay for stuff that makes money for them.

Payne: This has to do with what individuals are interested in. Like Facebook, I may be super interested in the town I grew up in, but what about the other places I’ve lived in my life? News organizations have to recognize it’s about “me” news, not about local, or national or video about what “I” want. It’s the me generation.

Kohan: Maybe if it’s like an iPhone app – a one-time payment thing.

Q: Don’t you think that model could be close to what Pandora’s doing now with a small subscription fee per month? Could that be brought into the news field?

Payne: I think you can charge for convenience, but not for content. There’s a point where there’s true unique and high quality content, and then there’s convenient delivery.  That’s easier to monetize. What other way can you do this?

Sanchirico: It’s just a matter of “if someone’s going to do it for free, they won’t pay a subscription for it.” Everyone has to charge for customization for it to work as a model.

Q: In regards to Digg – how important is it to promote other people’s URL’s in stories? Can you only be a self promoter?

Saleem: I would say it’s bad, because you’re not contributing to the community except when you have something to gain. It’s not going to penalize you in the engines. Well, StumbleUpon does it within StumbleUpon, but Digg doesn’t do it with the algorithm. It’s just bad social media etiquette.

I had a chance to score a couple of moments of Chris’ time, at SES Chicago 2009, to discuss what was covered in the session he moderated, “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers.” He shared his perception of hot SES buzz this time around. Topics he notes included “structured data,” personalization and the one that has grown near and dear to him recently, client communication.

Chris speaks in terms of an “evolution” in client relationships, when it comes to enterprise-level SEO projects. At this altitude longevity of the relationship bodes well for getting changes implemented. Check out the interview in detail below.

Photo Credit Flickr/toponlinemarketing

In the interview, Jonathan discusses his background in SEO and some of the topics covered in his sessions (From Search to Discovery and Tool Time: The In-House Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag).

Here’s an overview of the topics:

• The transition of the search interface to discovery.
• New signals that mobile phones and API accounts create for search engines.
• The ways search interface is changing and creating a shared desire for a serendipitous user-experience.

50 SEO’s, 1 Question

Allen uploaded a video in late July at SES London 2009 where he asked 50 SEOs 1 question: “What should we do with black hats?”

Since Jonathan was behind the camera in that video, this time around we wanted to get his opinion on the issue.

You can find Allen’s original “50 SEOs 1 Question” video here:

So you’ve paid close attention to the SES Chicago 2009 coverage of PPC sessions, you’ve cleaned up your SEO and monitored analytics. OK, but how about the session dealing with the piece at the core of your website’s performance? We’re talking about information architecture here, and without it potential customers visiting your site will be quickly lost.

Information architecture gurus Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive & Kimberly Krause Berg, Owner of UsabilityEffect.com gave some excellent advice in the session titled Successful Information Architecture, moderated by Adam Audette, President of AudetteMedia, Inc.

First to speak was Kimberly.

What is Information Architecture?
There’s a lot of differe

nt definitions but for the purpose of this session and time she will focus on content, organization and site structure. Building a website is similar to building a house. Before you build a house you need a plan. Similarly, when building a site you need to have a plan set in place accompanied by research.

In the old days (1990’s), the homepage was somewhat of an aggregation of links to damn near every page on the site. It contained all the information you could possibly need, links pointed to the deepest parts of the site, with some sort of convoluted navigation and a footer at the bottom just in case you got lost. This type of information architecture (IA) is obsolete. IA and SEO is focused on today’s web. Now there is a need to focus on context organization, findability. Why? Because 95% of all search engine referrals come from page one of the search result. In addition users understand quality in both websites and in SERPs; what appears at the top of the page, above the fold is the most important.

Important Pieces of Information Architecture to Remember
Context – Telling the search engines and your users what the site is about.
Categorize and Analyze Content – Sorting information into a manageable and intuitive hierarchy for users and SE’s. Content should also be organized by keeping in mind how individuals search for your content. Be aggressive about doing keyword research and understanding the demographic you’re targeting. Kim comes back to this point several times throughout her presentation.
Create a sitemap – Use xml sitemaps; www.sitemaps.org – Kim highly recommends a text only sitemap not only for engines but for users – simplicity is great for the user.
Links – interlinking, deciding a URL structure. A simple folder structure is much more intuitive than dynamic URL’s and easier for SE’s to follow.
Findability – Make pages easy to search – after 15 years this is really the first time site arch has been implemented into a search engine marketing conference curriculum. It most certainly has become a fundamental part of search.

Nature is an Information Architect
Kim likens information architect to the anatomy of a tree. As a whole the tree may want to communicate beauty. The leaves of the trees are your pages, the branches your navigation and the trunk your structure. Underneath however, at the roots is where all the action takes place. This is your planning, 401s, 301s, robot.txt; all the granular pieces that come together so that your message is conveyed appropriately and your user receives a seamless experience.

After Kimberly finishes speaking, Adam welcomes Shari Thurow to the podium.

Why should web owners care about information architecture?
From a business standpoint the ease with which individuals can find what they’re looking for will determine whether or not you gain or lose customers. Say somebody is searching for a particular phrase you’re optimized for and you pop up as the first result. They click on your link but are funneled to the wrong spot on your site. Potential customers will not be able to find info on your site if you don’t address site architecture appropriately and you will lose them.

Shari likes to ask people what their definition of information architecture is because everybody has different answers. SEO’s tend to have a definition that inevitably results in page rank sculpting. Shari follows Peter Morville’s definition of information architecture:

1. The structural design of shared info environments.
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search (retrieval), and navigation systems within a website.
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experience.

Shari notes that architecture, construction and design are commonly confused. Folks need to remember that information architecture precedes both design and construction.

Photo Credit Flickr/PhotoJonny

We invite SES Chicago attendees to  join us today at 12:45PM. I’ll have the pleasure of moderating the Facebook Rockstars RoundTable: Marketing For the Other Internet session.  350 million fanatically engaged users in one place means understanding Facebook’s no-search-engines-allowed community walled garden system of “organic” and paid visibility is now essential. Shell-shocked brand managers unite! We’ll share how to plan, pilot and ramp successful Facebook programs.

Join kick-ass  social marketers Addie Conner, Director of Interactive Marketing, Avenue 100 Media Solutions, Melissa Mackey, Search Marketing Manager, Fluency Media and Muhammed Saleem, Director of Social Media Strategy, ChicagoNow.

They’ve experienced groundbreaking Facebook success and will share case studies and anecdotes surrounding winning strategies, tactics, trials and (importantly) process & errors, all which led to astounding breakthroughs.

They’ll be no PowerPoint decks at this one folks, just earnest conversation amongst marketing friends who’ve been there.

Nan Dawkins, Founder and CEO of Serengeti Communication, started the Serengeti sponsored segment by introducing a few statistics:

40% of searches are for what’s going on right now. By the end of 2009 31% of SERPs will be blended.

3 out of 4 Americans use social media, but where should companies start?

Stop thinking about “Social Media.” We tend to think about destination when we should be thinking about people. We are creating the web 2.0 world in which we live. Take a step back. Don’t think about the places people are, think about how to make friends and serve the users and customers.

You’re not going to manipulate people into doing something they don’t want to do.

Reality check. You have to be measurable. But when it comes to measurement it’s not even close to perfection. Not PR, not TV/Radio, not even search.

But does social media have enough to demonstrate value? YES!

Up first was Liana Evans:

We all started off with: We need a facebook page! A Twitter account! and these too… (the slide fills up ominously with dozens of social media chicklets… dun dun duuuuunnn).

STOP. You can’t just jump in. Think about if it’s going to benefit you. A Plumber doesn’t need to be on Twitter. (They should be on YouTube, telling people how to prevent problems)

Is your strategy just a laundry list of social media applications? There are no cookie cutter solutions, every business is different.

Ask yourself: why should I be in social media? How am I going to engage? Do your research and understand where your audience is.

For example: Pizza Hut was looking for an intern Twitter-er. They wanted to engage college students on Twitter. But college students aren’t there. They’re on Facebook (for now).

Who’s in your target audience? Where are they?

Forums and message boards aren’t dead! It’s the second highest social media activity, behind visiting video sites.

What is your end goal?

Do you want to sell your product, use as customer service or lift the buzz? If you go out on twitter and you don’t know what your goal is, how do you know if you’re successful?

Go where your audience is. What you do is just as important as where you go. Look at the communities and discover the nuances. In some communities you have to soft-sell or they’ll kick you out some communies you can be a bit more brash and hard-sell.

Understand conversations.

Where do you fit into THEIR world? And how can you add value? If you can’t give them value they will reject you as spam.

Applying marketing tactics in absence of strategy is no better than doing nothing at all.

Nathan Linnell, Director of analytics next presented ways to measure social media ROI.

Yes, Virginia, it is possible!

But, there are no plug-and-play solutions. It requires some elbow grease and data aggregation.

Where can impact be observed?

Internally:

• Corporate websites
• Company blogs
• Sponsored communities

External Online From:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Yelp

External Offline: focus groups and surveys to conduct before and after.

Internal web analytics:

Corporate website

Enterprise generated media (EGM)

• Company blogs
• Company forums
• Website’s analytics package

External sites.

What to measure:

• Direct traffic brand searches (Look at the correlations between the two. It’s not an exact science, but a good indicator.)
• Visits referred by key social media sites
• Social media referred visits attributed to company’s social media efforts
• Conversions generated from social media
• Other site behavior of social media referred traffic compared to other channels (engagement metrics)

Blogs and Communities:

• Subscribers (views and clicks)
• Comments/posts
• Incoming links
• Retweets of posts
• Unique visitors
• Members

Social sites such as:

Facebook:

• Fan page / active fans
• Media consumption
• Total interactions (Likes, comments, wall posts)

Twitter:

• Followers (unique/quality)
• Retweets
• Mentions (not just from your followers) compare this to your competitors!
• Brand mentions

YouTube:

Channel

• Page views
• Subscribers
• Friends
• Comments

Videos

• Views
• Ratings
• Comments
• Favorite

Sources of Data

Monitoring Tools:

Aggregated view of buzz across web:

• Volume of mentions
• Brand, competitors and topic
• Share voice(don’t just jump in when someone talks about you)
• Share by social media type
• Top sources/locations (what are top sources that have to most mention of my brand & how big are those communities. Look at alexa data)
• Sentiment
• Influencers

Not a single source solution:

-          “total volume” of buzz not true measure. Many need passwords

-          Still need specific metrics from ind

Research:

-          Offline focus groups etc.

Build Measurement Framework

Financial impact:

• Revenue generated
• Cost savings
• Cost avoidance (call center customer service)

Non-Financial Impact:

• Brand awareness
• Purchase intent
• Willingness to recommend product

Define what constitutes success:

• Branding goals
• Direct sales or lead gen?
• Both

Think about the buying process, it will keep you focused on most important metrics.

Map metrics to goals:

• Quality, not quantity
• It’s all in the combination
• What suggests action?

Figure out:

• Do I have the right tools?
• Who? (Stakeholders & data gatekeepers)
• How? (Integration & aggregation)

Never implement what you can’t measure because you’ll never know if you were successful. ROI measures are what management wants to see, and they write your checks.

Lieb emphasized how important expertly-crafted content is to SEO:

Search engines only understand words, they don’t understand podcast, videos or graphs. It is all about words.

Byron is up first diving right in.

How to approach content and optimization: craft a content marketing plan. Master the art of learning the wants and needs and the science of delivering it to them in a meaningful way.

Your plan and what you end up writing will change with what you learn about competition, your target market and your industry. Those variables MUST be research.

Research with the latest (free!) online research tools:

• idealaunch.com
• spyfu.com
• compete.com
• quantcast.com
• seomajestic.com
• raven-seo-tools.com

Find the hot topics within social media conversations. Use TweetDeck to monitor conversations about your brand, competition and industry.

Discover Your Customers’ Wants and Needs Creatively.

Research ideas:

• web search box
• social media sphere
• talk and listen
• surveys/polls
• navigational patterns
• tradeshows
• feedback on site

Establish specific content marketing goals: ie listing position, conversion rate, sales, traffic, user acquisition.

Once you’ve developed your strategy the next objective is: choosing the right venues.

Create a tip and advice center on your website. Become a resource for searchers. They’ll love you for it.

On-demand printing is the new age of publishing.

• ISBN authority
• Authority validation
• Speaking gateway

Webinars and videos turn browsers into believers.

Mircrosites are great to test different ideas and concepts.

Utilize podcasts to:

• interview experts
• testimonials
• idea feedback
• focus groups
• employees

SEO is the science of content optimization starting with keyword research.

Look at trend report, find hot topics and create content. Develop content maps on the hot topics and keywords. Choose topics for readers first, not search engines. You’ll only make money if people go to your site and only your mom will go if your content sucks.

The Art of Content Creation

• Identify the concrete ideas to drive the business.
• Create Mantras, not missions.
• Distinguish customer needs vs. reader needs (Readers want to be introduced to new worlds) They want to be surprised and delighted.
• Add surprise to your content to engage readers (Which of these animals is more likely to kill you: Shark or Deer? *read on for the answer* )
• Add emotion to content to make readers care
• Add emotion to your headlines (Readers make decisions in milliseconds based on the visual and headlines)
• Develop stories to make people take action

Join the Content Revolution

• Listen to customers wants and need
• Deliver content to them in a compelling way
• Test
• Catch readers traveling at high speeds
• Deliver with tools they use

Next, Lloyd-Martin outlined seven steps of excellent copywriting. But first asked: Why care about content?

The best SEO is good content -Seth Godin

Quality Content + Quality Links + Keyword Research = SEO Sweet-Spot

How the text is written has a huge impact on search positions and conversions. It’s not just about sticking keywords in copy. It’s not about keyword density. It’s about writing content that connects with readers.

Your Main Advantage: Control

People think SEO is uncontrollable. It’s not just up to Google or Bing, the content helps you control your positions and conversion rates.

Step 1: Who are you? Develop Customer Persona.

You should know your audience inside and out. Find out what makes your target audience tick. Discover their pain and pleasure points.

Write for the right audience. Consider:

• Who is your target audience (it’s not everyone)
• Do you have multiple target audiences?
• How old is your typical buyer/reader?
• What level of education have they reached?
• What are their average income levels?
• What benefits are important to them?
• What are their hopes, dreams, fears and desires?

Step 2: WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)

Develop your benefit statements:

• What are the benefits of working with you? Why are they important?
• What specific objectives do you have to overcome?
• What is your competition doing and how do you position your company within your local or national marketplace?
• What tone and feel should you use to resonate with your audience?

How you say what you say is extremely important.

Step 3: Be a Content Psychic.

Keyword research helps you understand what information people are searching for and what questions they have. The more relevance, the longer they stay. The longer they stay, the more they trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they’ll buy. Cha-ching.

Build out resource pages. Prospects often have question. Don’t just be a company, be a resource. It also helps in the SERPs and makes you look more credible.

Step 4: Free Yourself From “Fake Rules.”

Party like it’s 1999, but don’t optimize your site that way. It’s not about keyword density anymore.

General SEO content “rules”

• Keywords in headlines and subheadlines
• Keywords in hyperlinks
• Keywords throughout content
• Keyword-rich title

Step 5: Make Your Titles Sizzle Off the SERPs!

Think of titles as headlines.The SERPs is your first opportunity for conversion.

Step 6: Control What You Can Control. (take SEO copywriting baby steps)

Beware of the website mullet! Check for outdated copy

Worst Outdated Offenders:

• Press pages
• Conference/events pages
• Product pages
• Old articles

Set up an editorial plan to “clean up” old content. Schedule it.

Leverage content opportunities: start a blog or rewrite old, un-optimized pages.

Step 7: Follow the SEO Copywriting Checklist:

• Who does the writing
• What pages need to be rewritten
• Where does the budget/times come from (good writing takes time)
• Why don’t you look at other opportunities (twitter/blogs)
• How will you know if it works (conversion testing)

Readers first. Bots second. If you can’t do either, don’t bother. -White

And now for the answer:

* So, what’s gonna kill you? A Deer, by 300 times. (Seriously, if you hit them with your car, you don’t always win… Please, be safe out there.)

Greetings from Chicago. The weather outside is frightful but we’re rockin’ here at Search Engine Strategies!

Setting up social media profiles is the easy part, but did you choose the right platforms for your business and how will you engage the community? Industry experts: Sean Carton, Chief Strategy Officer, idfive; Jeanniey Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer, Zinio; Heidi Cohen, President, Riverside Marketing Strategies; and Brian Boland, Performance Solutions Manager at Facebook dished out to-dos for companies eager to engage with the community on the SES Social Media Checklist panel . The session was moderated by Anna Maria Virzi, Executive Editor of ClickZ.

Regardless of which social media channels companies delve in to, developing the brand’s social strategy for genuine engagement must be the big-picture-focus. Whether selling goods, acquiring leads or providing a service– read this before you build or expand your company’s social medial profiles.

Virzi: What is Social Media?

Boland: It’s hard to define social media. It changes every year. All these different platforms make it difficult to define but it is:

1. A dramatic change in how we use the internet
2. Interactive. A shift from consuming to connecting, commenting, sharing and creating with others

Carton: personally I think social media is technologies that facilitate conversations. We’ve had social media around for a while. The question is: How can we use technology to help people talk to each other?

Cohen: It involves different levels of engagement. It’s not just the people who put content out there. It’s readers, commenters and creators. It includes photos, slides, webinars, video, .pdfs.

Social media has become so big because it has the ability to connect everyone. If something takes off it can go off quite quickly. Dialog can happen in real-time or asynchronously. We’re moving from the fact that it has to be on a computer and is now on mobile devices. Social media melts online and offline worlds. You can use social media to extend the reach of offline to online.

Mullen: Social media is something that is water-cooler worthy. It’s something that people want to talk about.

Virzi: The panel submitted their own 10 checklist items, 8 overlapped:

1. What is your overall marketing strategy?
2. What are your marketing/business goals for your social media marketing?
3. What forms of social media will you use and why?
4. How will you measure your social media marketing? (What metrics? How will you get the data? What do you do with the data?)
5. Are you currently listening to what is being said about your company, brands and products?
6. What types of supporting marketing will you use to promote and extend the reach of your program?
7. What dedicated resources will you allocate to your social media programs: financial and headcount?
8. Chose the right outlets.

Cohen: If you don’t have constant content that you’re putting out there, you don’t need to use Twitter. It’s not necessarily right for you. Use a blog. You can have .pdfs, webinars, audio, video etc. It’s not just Twitter and Facebook.

Mullen: You need to be able to measure your efforts. Understanding how you’ll evaluate social media efforts is extremely critical. Will the recent exposure from your social media presence really drive sales? In reference to #5 watch how people take the information and retweet or re-post. This will allow you to adapt your campaign and make it resonate with your audience.

Cohen: You can’t just post it and pray that they will come. Think about it holistically. It has to be a part of your marketing strategy & how are you going to integrate it. Are you putting it into your other online and offline media? Don’t overlook what you can put into packaging.

Carton: It’s kind of like the Field of Dreams syndrome. If people don’t know about it, they’re not going to get there. If you’ve ever dealt with getting a website going, it’s very much the same. It’s a real organization issue. If you don’t have dedicated people it’s not going to work. You must set aside resources for this, both financial and personnel.

Boland: There are multiple avenues to get information out there in social, both paid and unpaid. Think about the consumer: what do they want to experience?

Virzi: What about the nuances of the different elements?

Boland: With Facebook, the key thing is to be relevant. This is a very social environment; you must have a good understanding of what is relevant.

Understand the many ways you can engage with social media.

Virzi: Can you buy social media marketing?

Boland: Absolutely. The marketing strategies to drive engagement in social advertising such as: <your frined> likes this *thumbs up* does work and you see stronger engagement with this amazing aspect.

Get a sense of what is valuable to you.

Once you connect with people through social networks you will have a lot of data points: impressions, clicks, comments, fans, followers, posts, retweets. How do you value these interactions? (It depends on your strategy!)

Encourage the conversation. Create a dialog with those who respond to ads. It’s not one shot, it’s a sequence.

Carton: Don’t panic! This isn’t new.

Blogger has been around for awhile. Twitter has been around for 3 years already.

Don’t be reckless. Have a real systematic way of getting in to social media. You can go and experiment, but don’t just be throwing money at it.

Ask yourself: Why Social Media? Why will it provide better ROI? Also, what you’re going to do less of (e-mail/direct mktg)?

Are you willing to let go?

You can’t participate in social media without being able to let go of your brand a little bit. Even if you’re not engaged in the conversation, people are talking about you anyway. If you’re going to participate you have to be willing to engage in the conversation.

Cohen: I believe part of your strategy requires you to look within your orginization.

That means you have to think about your audience. When you use social media your audience expands from prospects to media, government, competitors, etc. Think about your former customers. Did they leave because they didn’t need you or because they have an ax to grind?

You have to think in terms of content. It’s not the 90’s where you put up a website and that’s it. You have to be there. Do you have a content strategy integrated with your marketing strategy? And it’s hard. You have to give people a reason to comeback and re-engage.

Set parameters for employees. Senior executives need to be on-board and policies set for employees executing. What can or can’t they say? How should they disclose themselves?

Mullen: I’m going to wrap this up with a reality check. In 23 days we’ll enter a new decade. It will be the decade of digital devices. When thinking about how to make your social media campaign successful you must be aware of the new tools.

Creative Commons License photo credit: love･janine

Apps are the new web. Users are not tied to laptops anymore. The average consumer has 6 web-enabled devices with access to 2 at any given time.

Users have access to communicate socially and easily whenever they see something great… or awful.

Measure effectiveness. Use tools that will help integrate and measure the effectiveness of digital channels, including e-mails, sms, etc Use a single platform: ie idek.net or Omniture.

I come from an e-mail background and we had about 10-15% click through rate (CTR). When we added social media the clicks we received were larger than the original list because of rebroadcasting.

Social media isn’t just about applications. It’s about being social. It’s about continuing the conversation when it’s appropriate.

Yesterday’s gone. If you’re reading any of the best practices that go back to 2008, they’re probably wrong. These things don’t exist anymore.

It’s not “send to a friend” anymore, it’s “share this on Facebook or twitter.”

The panel opened for questions:

Virzi: (Posed thought via Twitter: ) You don’t give up control of your brand by engaging in social media. The outside community has always shaped it.

Carton: I respectfully disagree; it’s so much bigger now. It’s not just about people telling their neighbor or friend, they’re telling the whole world. Social Media is a force multiplier.

Mullen: I think you gain control when you engage. It’s great because the person who cares enough to say something negative is a future advocate. A converted negative consumer will be your best advocate (if you handle it well). When you put a positive spin on these, take control and admit to your faults it will make you look better.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Sarah G...

Boland: Comcast cares has done an amazing job. They learn if service is down in an area faster through twitter.

You can either participate and steer it in the right direction or you can ignore it and it will blow up.

Virzi: What impact do you see real-time search having on marketers? Do you think companies have to monitor more aggressively?

Mullen: Gathering what people are searching for is key and leveraging that. With real-time search you can find what impulse searchers are looking for. From a social media perspective it adds to the insights and has a lot of application for impulse.

Cohen: I think marketers need to think more broadly. Not just going towards purchase. Think of the entire process. Need, initiation, collect ideas, go back to circle of friends for advice, purchase and POST purchase. If you don’t provide information after that sale.

Audience Question: Social media is a viable market, but in the real world, with small business how do you leverage it? What are the demographics of people who use social media? Is it the greater size of the market? All I’ve seen about social media is pop-culture and entertainment stuff.

Carton: Excellent point. If you have 100 people signing up to find out about a sale, and you’re a small business, that’s probably enough. We all don’t have to be Ashton Kutcher. Pew internet. In terms of the demographics, it pretty accurately represents the U.S.

Cohen: There a lot of forms of small business. You have to decide what works for you. For example, bakeries shouldn’t necessarily use Facebook or Twitter, but they could have Flickr to show off the beauty of their baked goods. Small non-profits use yahoo groups for communicating. Create meet-up groups.  Say to yourself, I have a small budget, what can I do with it?

Audience Question: (works for senior living communities) We do social media but most of our followers are in the industry not seniors or their children/grandchildren. How can we get them as followers?

Carton: As soon as my mom friended me I got really scared. (Me too.)

Carton: You have to give them a reason to use it. If they don’t care about it, they won’t go there. (Amen!)

Mullen: There are a couple things you can do. Content is the key. The world changed in October 2008 with the recession. Buying patterns changed and our sense of trust has gone down but our resiliency has gone up. People have become happier because they’re becoming self-reliant. They get great joy out of being asked to comment, make them feel like a hero. Make it look like you’re helping others. For example, when you’re parents are considering an assisted-living home, this is what you need to consider <content>.

Cohen: I would change that slightly and change the social part. Make it positive for people going forward. Go to things like meet-up and create activities. Provide a greater engagement.

Photo Credit Flickr/today is a good day

However, you can make money from your website when properly advised & optimized  by your web analytics, as Jim Sterne so correctly pointed out at SES Chicago 2009. Many of us have access to some sort of analytics for web properties we’re involved with, but how many of us really use the data effectively?  More importantly, are we making real money from analytics insight?  Is there more to life than just the conversion?

The session How To Turn Your Web Analytics Into a Money Making Machine was totally educational, not just because it provided answers, but because it proferred the types of questions we should all ask when pulling up our analytics dashboard over morning tea. 

Moderating this session was Richard Zwicky . Speaking first was Bryan Eisenberg, SES advisory board manager.

Oh My God! Bad Analysis Killed Kenny
Bryan says there aren’t enough people in the world that know what to do with analytics & on top of that, we have a data diarrhea problem. Before Google analytics, not everyone had access to good data.  This is no longer the case. The problem is what do you do with it?

The first extreme people fall into is looking at analytics (even daily reports) & then just filing them without action. The other extreme is from looking so deep into the data that they’re completely removed from revenue.

Bryan says that analytics works because of process. It’s about continuous improvement (kaizen maybe?) Most people can plan, most people can measure, but not everyone can improve. You can’t make money by just looking at reports.

Improvement comes down to:
Budget – Even it you dedicated 5 hours a month of your personal time on things you can to do optimize – you will do better.
People - You need talented people, creative resources to pool.
Culture – Adopt the policy of being a data driven company. For obvious reasons, this can be harder for large companies.

There are three steps for making real improvements based on analytics insight:
1. Every time you see reports, you need a to – do list. What marketing efforts or parts of your site have challenges? What do you think can improve these things? What sort of things do you want to test? Look at your competitor’s efforts and test. Decide what efforts you do more of & what efforts you do less of.

Then you prioritize your improvements & recommendations.  You have to prioritize based on resources and impact. If you only have 5 hours a month and you have something that will take 20 hours, don’t do it.

2. Segment your way out of sadness.  Average metrics product average results – they don’t given you any kind of valuable information. Why? If one of your goals is to improve conversion rate – break down the number of people in your audience – do you treat repeat customers different from new customers? How do you treat people different later vs sooner in the buying cycle?

What do you do with this information? Create personas to classify your potential customers. They have different preferences. If you need to, create little stories around them to relate to these people. Each one of these personas is going through a different journey through the conversion points you send them through. It’s unfair to think everyone who’s never heard of you before wants to come to your website and sleep with you.

Then, look at basic segments in Google. There’s different conversion rates based on different visitors. Maybe users need different information. After you realize this -  that each person is part of a different segment, then prioritize which personas are the most important.

3. Always be Testing! (not a plug, Bryan swears). A/B and multivariate testing is classic, but you have to do other tests. Usability tests are important. Explore new marketing efforts; play with new things to see if they have traction or not.

Consider low cost user testing tools like 5 Second Test & Feedback Army (among several others). You can have people do usability testing of your pages with attached audio commentary for peanuts basically.

If these don’t work for you – Pray!!!

Next up was Phil Mui from Google Analytics. Phil said he admired the other panelists when he was even in grammar school

Making Money with Google Analytics
Most of us have a 2% conversion rate, how do you measure the success of the rest of the 98%? Conversion is such an important KPI, that our world looks like keyword -> website -> conversion. Is optimizing for conversion the main thing you want to do?  Mui says it may not be the right KPI.

Imagine if  Sears only cared about conversion rate at their retail stores. They could give every sales person a knife & force people to buy by knifepoint. Their conversions will go up , but is that really what they want?

Look beyond keywords – do you also optimize creatives. What about landing pages? What are you doing to optimize your ROI at each of these customer touch points?

1st Suggestion: Optimize Holistically
You can use Google analytics at every touch point. Look at creative, using your favorite search tool to test different creatives, then apply unique tracking parameters.

A set of best practices to use when optimizing creatives: There needs to be a strong call to action. Special offers pique attention. Delivery details generally help clickthrough rates. Also, inserting actual prices. Dynamic keyword insertion is generally a best practice. The percentage of capitalization in creatives helps it feel more personal. In the URL word length – keep it 4-6. No exclamation points.

Landing Page & Website Optimizations: You don’t know how effective a landing page is until you test alternatives against it. Google Website optimizer allows you to do two kinds of web/landing page optimization The first type if A/B testing. Alternatively you can use multivariate testing. Break up the page into multiple variable parts and then test them in combination. You can view combination performance in Google Web Optimizer reports.

2nd Suggestion- Always test (just like Byan said)
Most sites have a few “existential KPI’s” – reasons why a site exists. These are your macro conversions.
For a video sharing website it could be # of uploads. Blogs it could be # of subscriptions. Ask “Why are people engaged with the content” “what influenced them”, & “why did they bounce?” Then start measuring successes with micro conversions – little wins at every part of the site.

3rd Suggestions – Analytics Intelligence
One new Google analytics feature is analytics “intelligence.”  These are  proactive insights & will say something like” On this particular day, please look at these particular metrics.”

4th Suggestion: Be vigilant – know the unknown unknowns

Closing the session was Jim Sterne from the Web Analytics association & the Metrics Summit.

3 Tips for turning your website into a money making machine
Tip #1  Optimize that basket - Amazon has done a great job at testing their shopping cart process. Their magic is the 1-click order button. Jim says to focus on optimizing a specific process, what about just the cart process? Users have to add to cart, review, change quantity, shipping, billing, confirming etc. just to get to the all important thank you page.

Where are the problems here? This is what Web analytics are really good at. Are people leaving at shipping page before billing? We have to do classic testing – usability testing or the survey. Analytics will tell you where the problem is and which problem is most significant at the moment. Test and measure and oh by the way – occasionally look at your page.

Tip #2  Determine Visit Value - If I’m spending a lot of money on a keyword or a banner ad or PR – how do you determine the value of a visit? Jim likes to assign a point system:

Time on Site – interesting but not terribly useful. With time on site, it might be “I’m gonna go to your website but then go eat lunch or go on the phone etc. 0-5 points
Page views – cool you went other places on the site. 1-10 points
Events – did you do some activity to prove engagement 5-20 points
Personally identifiable information – Did I get your email address or phone number. 25-50 points
Purchase – did you buy something, worth a lot but not necessarily the most? – 100 points
What’s the Cart Value – Did you spend 5$ versus $500. 200-400 points
Profitability – did you buy the most profitable thing. 400 -600 points

Ultimately, you want to invest in the sources that yield the highest values.

Tip 3#: Determine attribution:
How are these things working in concert? Assist attribution. Compare your quantity of key phrase searches vs conversion. What if you only focus on your high conversion traffic. It could drop off. Your high search volume stuff might be assisting your high converting keywords (excellent food for thought).

Jim then gave us a taste of his upcoming Social Media Metrics book due in 2010:

• Reach – How many people could hear my message. If it’s on a city street, it’s a billboard.

• Frequency – How often are people talking about me? If discussion increases, that’s good. There’s no such thing as bad publicity

• Influence – It’s great to get a blog mention until your realize only the blog owner’s mom and maybe his dog read it.  Who has the most influence? They will help you with your reach.

• Sentiment – Having a lot of people talking about you a lot is great, but you still have to monitor that &  the tools aren’t there yet.

• Outcomes – The actual conversion; did they download the whitepaper, join the discussion, did they buy the product?

Q & A Session Selected Questions:
Q: Any chance in the future that Google analytics data will pass through the rankings.

Mui: We don’t comment on future features. I can say that every year Google analytics is doing better.

Q: What tools do you like to couple with analytics to complement and augment your understanding?

Eisenberg: Usertesting.com. I’m also  a screenshot-aholic, I like grabbing screenshots from competitor’s sites. Personal surveys are great tools, there’s also really cool search tools. Look up “69 free search tools to improve your website”.

Mui: How many of you use insights for search? How many of you are using ad planner? Search based keyword tools? If you have not used these, these will help you gain search intelligence, plan your campaign & understand your search traffic over time.