The company that has been out-developed in Traditional Search (yeah, I call it like I see it), has decided they don’t want to be left behind now that Social Search has come along.  At the same time, maybe they don’t want to get into developing it and competing with Google all over again.  

So instead, Yahoo has decided to get real-time search data from a social search engine startup, which will pull it from……. (drumroll) Twitter (and maybe Facebook), among others.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understnd the hesitation. Building twitter apps has proven so difficult, I think only the hardiest 400 or 500 new twitter apps appeared last month.

But it may be a good idea to just, you know, brave it, rather than leave something so important in the hands of a startup.  To be fair, Yahoo may be trying for speed here. What do you think?

You can read the full article that prompted this little rant here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/27/yahoo-to-launch-real-time-search-too

But I don’t think any of them have torn down their website and just put up an aggregated set of their social profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) . Until now. Check out skittles.com before they change it back.

Meanwhile, Google opened a twitter account, and promptly got 35,000 people following it:  http://twitter.com/google.

And nowhere is this more evident than when I want to use this cool new wordpress for iPhone app. Just when I had visions of being able to edit my blog remotely…I can’t even add some anchor text and a link to this entry.

Maybe I can add a random photo though…

OK - guess not..

https://adwords.google.com/select/sliderprimer/Overview

Leading up to Search Engine Strategies San Jose, we plan to interview a number of our search marketing colleagues speaking at or attending the show. Our first interview is with Sean Walsh, VP Online Marketing at LuxuryLink.com. LuxuryLink is the world’s leading luxury vacation and resort website. The company offers 5-star vacation rentals in both auction and fixed-price formats. Sean is scheduled to speak on Monday, August 18 as part of the Search Industry Update panel. 1. What kind of growth rate have online luxury travel-related searches seen over the last year or two? Do you see demand in this category following demand for other luxury goods and services on and off-line?That’s a tough one for me, as I’ve only been in the travel space since the end of last year. However, I have reviewed some performance reports from the old paid search agency that LuxuryLink.com used, and the data tend to suggest that search volume is up marginally since the beginning of 2007.2. What kind of rough range on CPC prices in your vertical are you seeing? How does this compare with 1 year ago (or since you started, as appropriate). 

Of course, this is highly dependent on position. That said, I’ve seen average CPC’s ranging from $0.30 to $3 for the top 7 positions. I know that’s a wide range, but I’ve got to protect LuxuryLink.com proprietary information. I wish I could protect it from Google, too, but that’s another story…
Regarding YOY comparisons, it’s a tough question to answer. I don’t think we have a single ad that is still running from a year ago. I believe that we’re improving our quality score, and therefore reducing our average CPC, which obfuscates any external market-based pricing trends. Are CPC’s keeping up with oil and milk prices? I doubt it! I’d have to hold an ad in a constant position over time to really answer the question. And, we’re pretty relentless when it comes to testing and optimization, so we haven’t done that. 

3. Do you do much paid search, SEO, or online display advertising internationally and/or in non-US languages? If so, which countries and/or languages have you found the most fertile for advertising luxury travel in?

International display – sort of. I’m sure most big US-based travel sites get international visitors, but I don’t receive those stats. International PPC – yes, but only in English, and only on Google. We are considering SEO to be pretty much intrinsically international. We are planning some foreign language/currency initiatives but haven’t launched anything yet.

In terms of International travel, there are two big forces at work here: 1)the plummeting value of the dollar (that helps us), and 2) the skyrocketing price of air travel (that hurts us). Currently, I think #1 is a much stronger force, but that could change.

There’s another aspect to the International equation for us, too. Since we offer vacation packages in over 60 countries, some couple in, say, Italy can visit LuxuryLink.com and win an auction for a resort just up the street from their house. Most auctions close WELL below retail value. Then, they can pay in $US! It’s a double benefit for them.

Empirically speaking, our international conversion rates DO suggest that people are becoming very aware of this unique opportunity. As I previously mentioned, our site is English-only, yet our bidder conversion rates in places like Germany/Italy/Switzerland/even UAE are VERY attractive. As such, we’re pursuing those buyers.
 
 

4. How are paid search and paid inclusion doing for you as an acquisition channel vs. other online formats/tactics?

PS/PI do well for customer acquisition. The ROI is better, relative to other paid tactics, like display. Furthermore, it is reasonably scalable. Our affiliate program also has a decent ROI, relative to other tactics, but it is more difficult to push on the affiliate channel. It tends to grow at it’s own rate.

5. What’s the most important thing you have learned about paid search marketing in the luxury travel space?

The most important thing in the luxury travel space, is actually the same as every other vertical market… relentless testing is crucial to success. As for vertical-specific lessons, I’m going to keep those to myself. Don’t want the competition catching-on to my secrets…
6. What are the biggest challenges you face as a search marketer? What do you think they will be a year from now?

One of the biggest challenges is staying one step ahead of the pack. I’ve found that, by pushing ahead at my own pace, as opposed to obsessing over the industry’s “best practices”, I can consistently hit my growth targets, in spite of macro-economic headwinds which we’re now facing. The fact is, once a practice is widely considered to be “best”, it loses its competitive advantage.

To observe this in action, one need look no further than the Big 3’s sales teams. I’m sorry to report that they are often LESS knowledgeable about how their own ad serving platforms work, than marketers with a few years experience in the trenches. My disappointing experience is that these teams are heavily trained in a sort of double-speak that pushes their own revenue under the guise of improving the advertiser’s campaign performance.

Frankly, I suspect that many of these sales people are too naive to see this incongruity. It’s a good news / bad news scenario. The good news is that many of their intentions are probably noble. The bad news is that paid search success requires more than noble intentions! Anyway, it’s an open market, and therefore competitive. You don’t see hedge funds sharing their best trading practices with each other on CNBC. Actually, you see a fair amount of the opposite… misinformation campaigns!

This will never change. However, a year from now, I can imagine a new challenge. It will be fighting Google’s increasingly manipulative pricing practices. As their earnings start to slip, and their market share grows, they may be tempted to cut things a little closer to the “do no evil” motto.

GR: Thanks Sean. To our readers - we’ll be following up with Sean and our other interview subjects from the show itself most likely with brief video segments.
  

So we’ve been talking to our clients for about a year now about a what we call Proactive Reputation Management (PRM), and even built out a consulting practice around it. Here are the main 4 components of Proactive Reputation Management (PRM): 1) Be Proactive:

OK, this one may seem kind of obvious. But don’t wait until there’s a problem in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for your company’s brand or products. Yes, some day, someone will get a serious mad-on about one of your products. Or customer service. Or maybe really realy dislike a particular executive. So plan ahead of time how your corporate site, blogs, friendly review sites, and non-corporate information resources can dominate the first page of the engines’ results.

2) Content: Start By Organizing Reputation Management Efforts Around How You’re Found Now

1. By Brand: Optimize your site for very specific key phrases based on how your company is found currently.  Don’t know how you’re found currently? Look in your log files, Google Analytics, or other similar traffic analysis tools.
2. By Product Line or Service Category: see above. Just make sure there’s plenty of content about each of your major product lines, not only on your main site, but on any additional domains and blogs dealing with them.
3. By Individual Product:see above, again. If you have hundreds, or even thousands of SKUs, you may need to produce hundreds, or even thousands of pages of new content on your main site, on blogs, or on product review sites.

3) Organize Your Reputation Management Efforts Around How You Will Be Found in the Future

Just because no one is finding you under Product XYZ does not mean a negative review on another site, which will be found in the future, would not affect sales.  Be proactive and generate content (and get others to generate content) around products where you don’t rank yet.

4) Link Building: Be Paranoid About Managing Your Online Reputation

Check on your rankings for the top 100 brand and product terms regularly. If you notice a significant movement upwards by a site, make sure its a friendly one. If its not, go back to Steps 1,2, and 3 - and generate more relevant, fresh content. The, start building links judiciously to the sites that could push any undesirable sites down.

Now rinse. And repeat.

Of course, the above is easier said than done. Proactive reputation management is the exact opposite of checkers. Instead of thinking about search as a 1 or 2-move series of actions and reactions, you really need to acquire a “chess” or even “go” mindset. Go, sometimes called weiqi , is a 4000 year old Chinese strategy game where players thing 10, 20, 30 moves ahead of what is actually happening on the board. Come to think of it, I may write another post on Go, Chess, and search strategy. Then again, that may be a bit too revealing.  

In the past, the Content Network was a GREAT way to waste lots of money, as it was only purchased on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) basis, and you had many more limitations about which sites you could exclude or cherry-pick.  That’s all changed, however, and a number of our clients are getting good results on the Content Network.

So if you want to know all the basics about the Google Content Network, and how you as an advertiser and/or agency can make use of it, you have 2 choices: (1) listen to me drone on for half an hour over the soothing hum of a projector and Powerpoint slides. Or (2) watch this 3+ minute video from Google.

Of course, these Google folk make it sound like its so easy to start a content network campaign. The truth is, it takes most of the same skills and experience you have to have to engage in online media planning PLUS an understanding of search marketing techniques and bid strategies PLUS someone to actually do the bid management once the Content Network Plan has been implemented.Still, its a pretty cool video to get you thinking. 

Searches on the Engines Themselves: Google has continued to increase its dominanace month over month, with more than 7 billion core searches (up 6 percent from May), distantly followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.4 billion (up 9 percent) and Microsoft with more than 1 billion searches (up 15 percent).  

Searches in the Search Networks (sites that incorporate search capabilities from 1 or more of the Big 5): In the top properties where search activity happens, Google Sites led with 9.6 billion searches, a 9-percent increase from May. Yahoo! Sites came in second with 2.6 billion searches (up 8 percent from May), followed by Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion (up 14 percent) and AOL with 792 million.

One reason Microsoft may have seen such a jump in the gross number of searches may be a results of its Live Search Cashback program, unveiled in May.  This is a new program where Live Search Cashback will offer rebates to whoever searches and purchases something from companies enrolled in the new service.

Coming from Cybergold (now MyPoints), where we used to pay consumers for their attention,  I can see how incentives could help Microsoft improve its positon. But only to a point. Google’s brand loyalty is pretty strong.

Feel free to download one of the comScore stat charts in Excel here.

2. We don’t have anything bad about us indexed too prominently so we’ll worry about Reputation Management when that happens.

3. Content development and Creative Services are a cost center, not a profit center.

4. SEO is handled by Site Services. Marketing handles paid search. 

5. Keyword Research? That’s easy…. we just go to Google’s free keyword tool……

6. We can’t constrain our copywriters and designers with SEO demands. 

7. We want our home page to come up high for the following 25 phrases.