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Top Ten Answers From the Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK Search Engine Marketing Panel – Part 2

Jay

5. What leading strategies and tactics can you recommend for someone with a little more experience?
Google – Spend the time to develop your content search performance. The web is 10% search and 90% websites, be patient, test and find sites that perform for you
MSN – Determine how different types fo people search. Men and women use different terms to search for the same things
ASK – Understand portfolio management, when people start a search buying cycle they are searching broad terms such as ‘ Flat screen tv’ at the end of the search they are looking for a Sharp Aquos LCD 42″ Wall Mount best price. Thei si now being called th esearch tail (a refernce to Long Tail popularized by Chris Anderson’s excellent book http://www.thelongtail.com/)
Yahoo! – Local Search and geotargetting is being under-utilized.

6. What are the major growth areas for search? Such as mobile/video/local/Second Life?
Google – I want to differentiate between user applications such as the ability to text message Google(restaurant name) and you will receive directions to the restaurant vs. a property we aquired called YouTube, it is a quality application we need to determine how to generate revenue without playing a 30 second add before the video, users won’t stand for that. We need to rationalize efficieny for users vs. efficiency for advertisers.

7. What changes and annoucements can we expect from your engine in the coming weeks, months?
Google – We are focused on marketer efficiency we purchased Dmark allowing advertisers to bid for radio ads and we are running print tests (I sense we can expect another announement in this direction)
Yahoo! – At the CES show we announced that we would provide email for iPhone (and Google will provide mapping for iPhone), we are rolling out Panama
MSN – 2007 is a year of ramping up, we just launched in 2006
ASK – In December we annuunced ASk City, following Ask Mobile in October

8. What is your company doing about click fraud & what can marketers do to help monitor click fraud ourselves?
Google – All of the major search engines joined with IAB to form a click fraud panel. Collectively and individually we are doing everything we can to block click fraud.
ASk – We don’t charge for foreign clicks
Yahoo! – We scraped out sites that are bidding on expensive phrases and showing a basic sirte redirecting clicks. We scraped these sites off the network

9. What advice can you give us for improving results after some one comes to the site (also clled ‘post click’ marketing).
Google – We launched a new product Website Optimizer that goes beyond A:B testing and lets you test different versions of sections of the landing page. And, Google Checkout is making it easier and faster for consumers to make a purchase and merchants like it because it is free until the end of the year.

10. What suggestions can you give us for ad copy.
Google – Make sure you have minimum 2-3 text ads in test.
ASK – If you are the ‘Official Site’ say this in the ad copy. Make sure the ad copy is concise
MSN – Use dyanamic keyword insertion and inset city names

Bonus – for reading to the end of this post, if you call me at 561-620-9121 I will share an ad copy trick that is increasing click through rates in 9 of 10 categories.

Thanks for reading!

Jay Berkowitz