SES Magazine March 2012 by Incisive Media

Sneak Preview

SES New York

March 19–23, 2012

SESConference.com

March 2012

Download the SES mobile app.

Search Marketing and Social Media in Regulated Industries Despite the complexity, companies can stay within the “compliance envelope” by being proactive in their marketing. 18

Is Your Site Viable for Search? 17 The Crawl, Walk, Run of Digital Creative 20 Get It Right, Before the Launch 24

contents

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COVER STORY

SEARCH MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN REGULATED INDUSTRIES Despite the complexity, companies can stay within the “compliance envelope” by being proactive in their marketing.

COLUMNS

IS YOUR SITE VIABLE FOR SEARCH? Ensure that your new site performs for SEO with these sure-fire methods.

GET IT RIGHT, BEFORE THE LAUNCH A Checklist for Your Next Redesign and Migration

THE CRAWL, WALK, RUN OF DIGITAL CREATIVE Invest effort in creative optimization to achieve the highest performance from your campaign.

4 UNIQUE APPROACHES FOR MEASURING SOCIAL MEDIA ROI A look at the creative ways to measure (or at least validate) your social media efforts.

PINTEREST—SHOULD MARKETERS CARE? What those in the emerging technology and social marketing industry think about the value of Pinterest.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

TRUE LIES: SEARCH MARKETING DATA ERRORS UNCOVERED Exclusive Announcement

MEET THE EXPERTS

SPONSORS & EXHIBITORS

NEW TOPICS AT SES

SESSIONS NEW TO SES NEW YORK

March 2012

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Keynotes SES New York Business Optimization in a Digital Age Tuesday, March 20, 9:oo–10:00am Hilton New York Register

We were promised that one day marketing would become rocket science. Well, we are almost there! Search continues to become more complicated, and more exciting. Then there’s social and email and display and video and … so many more things. It is hard to understand how to do one thing right, much less try to do all of them right. In his exciting keynote, Avinash will share his unique perspective on balancing multiple media channels, leveraging super awesome metrics, grounding your digital existence in driving economic value, and leveraging the Clear Line of Sight model to ensure you are optimizing across all four of the most important business drivers (come to the keynote to learn which four!).

staff Matt McGowan MD, North America

Mike Grehan Global VP, Content

Sharon Morabito Head of Events, Americas Program Development Senior Program Director Marilyn Crafts Conference Program manager Laura Roth Operations Operations Manager Registration Associate

Kim Kiedaisch Charisse Rosales

ClickZ & Search Engine Watch Executive Editor, ClickZ Director, SEW Managing Editor, News Senior Editor, News Staff Writer Copy Editor Asia Desk Editor

Anna Maria Virzi Jonathan Allen Zach Rodgers Kate Kaye Christopher Heine Caitlin Rossman Adaline Lau

Sales & Marketing Sales Directors

Account Executive Director, Client Services Marketing Director Marketing Manager Marketing Associate Web Designer Online Operations manager Online Operations associate

Andrew Katz Elaine Mershon Elaine Romeo Peter Westerholm Elizabeth Huston JoAnn Simonelli Angela Man Amy Xu Ploy Tangtrakul Rebecca Holz Louise Laberge Aleksey Gershin

about SES Welcome to the New York issue of SES Magazine. The SES New York Conference & Expo, to be held on March 19–23 at the Hilton New York, will provide five days of unparalleled content on every facet of integrated marketing. It will include over 70 sessions, multiple keynote presentations, the highly popular Meet the Experts Roundtable Forums, an Expo Hall featuring over 100 vendors, and nightly networking events. Here are some of the exciting sessions that will debut at SES New York: •• The Psychology of Social Commerce (Do Not Be Afraid!) •• Tablet Display Advertising: Challenges and Opportunities •• Why Doesn’t Anyone Care about the Creative Anymore? •• Anatomy of the Perfect Landing Page: Design Elements Exposed •• Viewable Impressions: The Key to Online Media Performance through Smarter Buying See pages 27-31 for the dates, times, and descriptions of new sessions. To make the most of your week in New York, be sure to download the SES New York app. The most up-to-date agenda can also be found on the conference website, SESNewYork.com. And don’t forget these upcoming events: •• SES Shanghai, April 16–18, InterContinental Shanghai Puxi (SESShanghai.com) •• SES Toronto, June 11–13, Hyatt Regency Toronto (SESToronto.com) •• SES San Francisco, August 13–17, Moscone West (SESSanFrancisco.com) SES New York will provide a singular opportunity to learn actionable strategies and mingle with over 5,000 marketing professionals. We look forward to seeing you there! Best regards, Mike Grehan, Chair SES Advisory Board Chair Global VP, Content Incisive Media

Matt McGowan Managing Director, North America Incisive Media

Magazine Editor Contributors

Dawn Cavalieri Jessica Bowman Rob Chant Augustine Fou Sarah Lockwood Krista Neher Jessica Richards

Corporate Chief Executive Group Managing Director

Tim Weller James Hanbury

SES: Volume 6, Issue 2 | March 2012 © 2012 Incisive Media plc To subscribe, contribute, or view past issues, visit www.sesconference.com/ses-magazine To advertise, contact sales at sales@sesconference.com or +1 (212) 457-4993. Comments? Want to unsubscribe? E-mail us at magazine@sesconference.com Incisive Media, U.S. 55 Broad Street, 22nd fl. New York, NY 10004-2501 tel +1 (646) 736-1888 fax +1 (646) 390-6612

Incisive Media, head office 28-29 Haymarket House London SW1Y 4RX, UK tel +44 (0)20 7316 9609 fax +44 (0)20 7930 2238

SES ADVISORY BOARD

Comprised of both industry thought leaders and real-world practitioners, the Search Engine Strategies advisory board brings together top players in the field of interactive media and search. The team works to deliver continually cutting-edge search techniques, more integrated and relevant content, and professional development resources to SES attendees. Mike Grehan, Chair Global VP Content SES/Search Engine Watch/ ClickZ

Marilyn Crafts Senior Program Director SES Advisory Board Coordinator SES Conference & Expo

Anne F. Kennedy International Search Strategist Beyond Ink USA

Jonathan Allen Director SearchEngineWatch

Bryan Eisenberg Bestselling Author bryaneisenberg.com

Jon Myers Head of Account Management Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Matthew Bailey President Site Logic Marketing

Paul Fegan Head of e-Learning Incisive Media

Lee Odden CEO TopRank Online Marketing

Chris Boggs Director, SEO, Rosetta

Andrew Goodman President Page Zero Media

Laura Roth Conference Program & Training Manager SES Conference & Expo

Mikel Chertudi Sr. Director, Online & Demand Marketing Adobe

Bill Hunt President Back Azimuth Consulting

Crispin Sheridan Sr. Director of Search Marketing Strategy SAP

Eddie Choi Managing Director Frontiers Digital

Aaron Kahlow Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing SummiT

Exclusive Announcement

True Lies: Search Marketing Data Errors Uncovered SES New York Tuesday, March 20, 8:45–9:00am Hilton New York

Information Retrieval scientist Dr. Edel Garcia will join Mike Grehan on stage to describe his latest work and the impact it will have on the online marketing industry. The Self-Weighting Model (SWM), a new weighting model for statistical analysis, exposes serious flaws in the top 2 meta analysis models. Given several x-y datasets of correlation data or any type of variability data from specific Web Analytics (#clicks vs. ROI, Google ranks vs. a given on-page or off-page factor, genetic cross-breeding, signal processing, data mining, etc.) analysis and forecasting from multiple datasets are now possible by weighting statistics. What does this mean in plain English? Find out in this short, exclusive announcement. Then join Dr. Garcia personally at the Meet the Experts session to drill down for more.

Meet the Experts at SES New York 2012

new session format is taking the SES Conference series by storm, and it’s coming to SES New York in March. The Meet the Experts Roundtable is an hour-long session within the conference agenda that allows you to meet top speakers, authors, and practitioners and have all of your questions answered. Each of ten concurrent roundtables centers on a specific topic and features two experts. You can simply move from one table to another throughout the session, meeting a wide range of specialists and coming away with solutions to your challenges. As this session takes place twice in the agenda, there is no need to rush—there is plenty of time to meet everyone. Potential topics include: Facebook Ad Formats Customer Engagement SEO, PPC, SMO: Trends for 2012 Local and Social Optimizing Landing Pages

Mobile, Search, and Social SEO Content Marketing Enterprise SEO Link Building Conversion, Testing, and Analytics

Video Optimization Analytics Driven Engagement Ad Optimization Email Marketing Information Architecture

Metrics for SEO Keyword Modeling Reputation Management Web Analytics Generating Leads from SEO and PPC

Both sessions take place immediately before a networking function (a drinks reception on day 1 and lunch on day 2), enabling you to take your conversations straight into the bar or to lunch, where you can continue to network. This roundtable has been cited by many attendees as the best session at the whole conference, so we are excited about featuring it at SES New York. We look forward to seeing you there! To see the latest list of experts and topics, download the New York SES app or visit www.SESNewYork.com.

See pages 27-31 for a list of new sessions at SES New York.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 Expo Hall Hours: Tuesday, March 20, 10:00am–7:00pm | Wednesday, March 21, 10:00am–3:00pm

PLATINUM SPONSORS Bing Booth 300 www.bing.com Search advertising with Microsoft helps you efficiently reach your next best customer—within your budget and with the support you need to get started and optimized, and measure your results.

Marin Software Booth 3 www.marinsoftware.com Marin Software is a leading provider of online advertising management solutions, offering an integrated platform for managing search, display, and social marketing. The company provides solutions for advertisers and agencies of all sizes, enabling them to improve financial performance, save time, and make better decisions. Marin Enterprise, the company’s flagship product, addresses the needs of online marketers spending at least $100,000 per month on biddable media. Marin Professional delivers the same power and ease of use as Marin Enterprise, through an application designed for marketers spending less than $100,000 per month on paid search. Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices worldwide, Marin’s technology powers marketing campaigns for over 850 customers managing more than $2.5 billion of annualized ad spend in more than 160 countries.

SILVER SPONSORS Acquisio Booth 4 www.acquisio.com The leading performance media platform for agencies, Acquisio helps agency marketers buy, track, manage, optimize, retarget, and report on media across all channels—including search, display, and social media. Acquisio provides the industry-leading technology for agencies buying ads on any online channel, allowing them to handle all tasks associated with performance advertising, from ad purchase through conversion tracking and beyond, within a single integrated platform. Unlike other solutions, Acquisio hosts its own third-party ad server and employs a single tracking functionality across channels, allowing agency marketers unparalleled conversion and revenue attribution modeling and reporting capabilities. With more than 4,000 users and 9,500 brands under its management, Acquisio is the multi-channel marketing solution preferred by the world’s leading advertising, marketing, and SEM agencies. Acquisio clients include thought leaders aimClear, Clix Marketing, Find Me Faster, Page Zero Media, and Rocketer, as well as some of the world’s most recognized performance media companies such as Amaze, Bertelsmann, Cossette, DAC Group, Guava, iProspect,

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Isobar, Media Experts, NetBooster, PhD, and Yellow Pages Group. The company is based in Montreal, Quebec, with offices in Seattle and London.

Adchemy www.adchemy.com Adchemy is an advertising technology company that helps advertisers leverage consumer intent to create more effective digital advertising experiences. Adchemy IntentMap™ technology radically simplifies advertisers’ paid search campaigns and makes them more scalable, relevant, and profitable. Listed by The Wall Street Journal as one of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. in 2010, Adchemy is a rapidly growing Silicon Valley company backed by Accenture, August Capital, Mayfield Fund, and Microsoft.

Bruce Clay, Inc. Booth 403 & Reception Sponsor www.bruceclay.com Since 1996, http://www.bruceclay.com has been one of the leading search engine optimization web destinations. Today, Bruce Clay, Inc., is a global Internet marketing company providing SEO, PPC, analytics, web design, conversion optimization, and social media marketing services. Their live SEO training courses are the industry standard, with over 2,500 students taught. Creators of the SEO ToolSet®, Search Engine Relationship Chart, and SEO Code of Ethics, the company has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Australia, Italy, India, Brazil, and Japan.

Google Analytics Sponsored Session www.google.com Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. With features that are powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use, companies large and small can analyze their traffic data in order to create more effective marketing initiatives and optimized websites. Savvy marketers can also take advantage of sophisticated conversion attribution and experimentation tools to determine the best media allocation strategy for ROI maximization. For more information, visit www.google.com/analytics.

SubmitEdge Booth 130 www.submitedge.com Located in the UK, the US, and India, SubmitEdge is one of the largest contextual link building companies in the SEO Industry. We are an ISO 9001-2008 certified company with over 200 in-house employees. Since our production house is in India, we can offer services at affordable prices. SubmitEdge has served over 18,000 customers worldwide since 2006. Our link-building effort has helped our customers achieve their SEO goals to get organic ranking, leading to

product & service guide Advertising Networks adSage............................................... 224 Bing..................................................... 300 Blogsvertise.....................................308 Blue Global Media......................... 222 eZanga.com.......................................201 LinkWorth..........................................132 Marchex............................................. 219 7Search.com......................................102 xAd....................................................... 218

Interactive Marketing Associations & Publications Full Sail University.........................401 topseos.com.....................................208 Web Marketing Association...... 329 Website Magazine..........................114

Affiliate & Performance Based Marketing Solutions Blue Global Media......................... 222 Marchex............................................. 219 7Search.com......................................102

Local Search Marketing Services & Directories AuroIN LLC........................................210 Info Cubic Japan............................. 108 Local Splash....................................206 xAd....................................................... 218

Blog Advertising Blogsvertise.....................................308 LinkVehicle....................................... 226 Content Management CheckDog.................... Texpo Pavilion Slingshot SEO.................................. 211 TagMan.............................................. 233 Textbroker......................................... 230 Web Spiders..................................... 228 WriterAccess..................................... 131 Content & News Feed Providers Brafton................................................ 311 PRWeb................................................. 112 Textbroker......................................... 230 Website Magazine..........................114 WriterAccess..................................... 131 Display Advertising Acquisio.................................................. 4 Elite Sem...........................................209 Website Magazine..........................114 E-Mail Marketing Solutions Emailvision....................................... 320 Zeta Interactive...............................331 General Search Engines Bing..................................................... 300 Interactive Marketing Agencies ConversionIQ....................................124 Covario............................................... 504 Elite Sem...........................................209 iCrossing............................................118 inceptor.............................................309 iProspect........................................... 200 Morpheus Media.............................231 Zeta Interactive...............................331

Link Building LinkWorth..........................................132 Page One Power..............................207

Marketing Optimization Solutions Acquisio.................................................. 4 Back Azimuth............. Texpo Pavilion Blogsvertise.....................................308 BoostCTR.......................................... 223 Brandtology..................................... 128 BrightEdge........................................321 CheckDog.................... Texpo Pavilion cognitiveSEO....................................212 iCrossing............................................118 Linkdex................................................227 LivePerson........................................ 202 Local Splash....................................206 Marin Software................................... 3 Market Motive Training Institute........................ 500 PRWeb................................................. 112 Raven Internet Marketing Tools.......................... 100 Searchmetrics..................................110 SubmitEdge.......................................130 TagMan.............................................. 233 Textbroker......................................... 230 topseos.com.....................................208 VisiStat.............................................. 106 Zenya...................................................214 Mobile & Rich Media Advertising Solutions iProspect........................................... 200 Marchex............................................. 219 Web Spiders..................................... 228 xAd....................................................... 218 Organic Search Marketing Analytics SEO.................................. 235 AuroIN LLC........................................210 Bing..................................................... 300 BrightEdge........................................321 CheckDog.................... Texpo Pavilion

Booth #s on right. cognitiveSEO....................................212 inceptor.............................................309 Indus Net Technologies................122 Info Cubic Japan............................. 108 Linkdex................................................227 LinkVehicle....................................... 226 LinkWorth..........................................132 Local Splash....................................206 Morpheus Media.............................231 Page One Power..............................207 PM Digital......................................... 203 PRWeb................................................. 112 Raven Internet Marketing Tools.......................... 100 SEO.in..................................................213 Slingshot SEO.................................. 211 SubmitEdge.......................................130 topseos.com.....................................208 Pay-Per Click Networks & Management Services BoostCTR.......................................... 223 eZanga.com.......................................201 NetElixir............................................. 405 SEO.in..................................................213 7Search.com......................................102 Pay-Per-Call Companies Blue Global Media......................... 222 PM Digital......................................... 203 Search Marketing Agencies Adlucent............................................. 304 adSage............................................... 224 AuroIN LLC........................................210 Bruce Clay, Inc................................. 403 Covario............................................... 504 Elite Sem...........................................209 eZanga.com.......................................201 iCrossing............................................118 inceptor.............................................309 Indus Net Technologies................122 Info Cubic Japan............................. 108 iProspect........................................... 200 Morpheus Media.............................231 NetElixir............................................. 405 Onward Search................................307 Page One Power..............................207 PM Digital......................................... 203 SEO.in..................................................213 Slingshot SEO.................................. 211 SubmitEdge.......................................130 Zeta Interactive...............................331 Search Marketing Software Acquisio.................................................. 4 Adchemy.................................................... Adlucent............................................. 304

adSage............................................... 224 Analytics SEO.................................. 235 Back Azimuth............. Texpo Pavilion BoostCTR.......................................... 223 BrightEdge........................................321 Bruce Clay, Inc................................. 403 cognitiveSEO....................................212 Covario............................................... 504 Linkdex................................................227 Majestic SEO................................... 126 Marin Software................................... 3 NetElixir............................................. 405 Raven Internet Marketing Tools.......................... 100 Searchmetrics..................................110 SyCara.......................... Texpo Pavilion Zenya...................................................214 Shopping Cart & E-Commerce Solution Providers Web Spiders..................................... 228 Staffing Solutions Full Sail University.........................401 Indus Net Technologies................122 Market Motive Training Institute........................ 500 Onward Search................................307 WriterAccess..................................... 131 Training Courses & Certification in Search Marketing Bruce Clay, Inc................................. 403 ClickZ Academy & Recruitment..............................215 Full Sail University.........................401 Market Motive Training Institute........................ 500 Online Marketing Institute..........327 Web Analytics Adlucent............................................. 304 Analytics SEO.................................. 235 Back Azimuth............. Texpo Pavilion Brandtology..................................... 128 ConversionIQ....................................124 Majestic SEO................................... 126 SyCara.......................... Texpo Pavilion TagMan.............................................. 233 VisiStat.............................................. 106 Website Search & Technologies Majestic SEO................................... 126 Searchmetrics..................................110 SyCara.......................... Texpo Pavilion Zenya...................................................214

sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 SILVER SPONSORS (Cont’d) increases in traffic and sales. SubmitEdge is the brain child of Kush Infosystems Pvt. Ltd. that specialized in SEO, content writing, and web programming.

Web Spiders Booth 228 Rich Mobile & Web Engineering www.webspiders.com www.webspiders.com Web Spiders is a specialist provider of mobile and web engineering services to ISVs and marketers of Fortune 2000 companies. The company has over 250 employees and is dual-headquartered in Singapore and India, with subsidiaries in the UK and US. Web Spiders’ core competencies include enterprise mobileenablement across iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, and large-scale enterprise content management using Ektron, Drupal, and Adobe Day CMS. Its industry leading ActiFetch platform helps in seamless integration of legacy data to mobile platforms. The company’s global clients include Mitsubishi Motors, Samsung, Motorola, Las Vegas Sands, Singtel, and many more in over 10 countries.

SPONSORS Adlucent Booth 304 www.adlucent.com Adlucent uses its roots in retail paid search to transform marketing campaigns into business results. Adlucent has developed an analytics and paid search platform focused on retailers that provides both insights to our clients and advantages over technologies that serve multiple industries. Adlucent uses this customer demand intelligence to connect marketers, merchandisers, and suppliers to consumers in real time. With its team of seasoned retail experts and proprietary Deep Search™ software, Adlucent takes data a step further, dramatically improving its clients overall marketing efforts and entire business strategy. Adlucent is headquartered in Austin, TX, and can be found at www.adlucent.com.

AdRoll Booth 313 www.adroll.com AdRoll helps ecommerce businesses generate ROI and increase conversion rates by leveraging their user’s intent data. AdRoll’s advanced retargeting solution focuses on the browsing behaviors of people who leave your store without buying. We then match relevant ads to these people when they browse other sites online, and bring them back to complete their purchase.

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adSage Booth 224 www.adsage.com Founded in 2007, adSage is a leading technologies and services company in online advertising. adSage employs 500 professionals across multiple locations in the US and China, among them over 200 software engineers. adSage develops products for search, social, mobile, and display advertising. adSage developed the world’s first Facebook advertising software, adSage for Performance (previously known as adSage for Facebook), used by over 2000 advertisers globally. adSage’s mobile ad network, mobiSage is the most influential ad network in China, covering 100 million unique users per month. adSage is the largest SEM firm in China, managing campaigns for over 200 premier advertisers on Baidu and Google, including L’Oreal, Hilton, Forex, Dangdang, and PingAn Insurance. adSage is the exclusive North America reseller for Baidu. adSage Agency, a division of adSage, offers complete advertising services for American advertisers targeting the Chinese online audience.

Analytics SEO Booth 235 www.analyticsseo.com Analytics SEO is a double-award-nominated and leading SEO SaaS platform based in the UK, who are really excited to be coming to the US! The software includes integration with Majestic SEO, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and SEMRush. As a result the platform offers massive time savings for our clients by providing all of their data in one place and automating mundane tasks, including all aspects of SEO reporting. Analytics SEO has been proven to help its clients win more new business, scale, and become more profitable. Other USPs include our lead generation tool for agencies, multilingual support, multi-site overview, and several powerful features that make the software perfect for managing large volumes of SEO campaigns.

AuroIN LLC Booth 210 www.auroin.com Since 1999, http://www.auroin.com has been one of the leading search engine optimization (SEO) web destinations. Today, AuroIN LLC is a global Internet marketing company providing SEO, PPC, SMO, analytics, reputation management, conversion optimization services, etc. Their 700-plus SEO professionals are extremely good and produce the best result. If you have worked with several SEO companies in the past, none of them fulfilled reasonably anything that they promised. If they took your money and disappeared. If they promised things, achieved a small part of their promises and then fell asleep or something, things were really sluggish. Then AuroIN comes into the picture. AuroIN’s client retention rate is very high. Many

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESNewYork.com. exhibitors clients have worked with them for over five years. You can use AuroIN for Guaranteed Result!

Back Azimuth Texpo Pavilion http://back-azimuth.com Back Azimuth is a cloud-based keyword data mining and management platform, which aggregates keyword data into a single webbased application enabling marketers to quickly identify actionable insights to eliminate inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Marketers can measure the cannibalization or collaboration of their paid and organic keywords and find the right mix of both to maximize shelfspace, exposure, and costs. Measure keyword performance against personas, interests, business units, and purchase cycles to increase conversions. The patent pending “Opportunity Miner” sifts though all your keyword data to identify keywords that will generate the greatest return on resources and precious marketing budgets.

Blogsvertise Booth 308 www.blogsvertise.com Blogsvertise is an exciting way for advertisers to begin advertising on blogs and reach the blogging community. Benefits for Internet advertisers are enormous. By advertising on blogs, advertisers generate buzz, build publicity, and promote their websites. With the Blogsvertise system, advertisers are in full control of the advertising process, deciding which blogs they wish to advertise on before starting their ad campaign. We are one of the oldest and largest blog advertising networks online. Bloggers also benefit through the blogsvertise ad network by registering their blog in the system and earning extra income and revenue by placing advertisements on their blogs. Don’t just Advertise, Blogsvertise! For more information visit us at www.blogsvertise.com.

Blue Global Media Booth 222 www.blueglobalmedia.com At Blue Global Media, success speaks for itself. We’re an affiliate network that focuses on what matters: exclusive, high-earning, highimpact offers. You’ll earn more for your traffic with our optimized campaigns, standout technology, and dedicated 24/7 affiliate support. Blue Global Media began as an affiliate and we understand your bottom line: seeing results. Earn more today with our top-performing finance, education, mortgage, insurance, dating, and other offers.

BoostCTR Booth 223 www.boostctr.com BoostCTR is an on-demand, crowdsourced network of expert PPC copywriters supported by an automated testing platform. The BoostCTR platform makes ad text optimization more effective and efficient.

Brafton Booth 311 www.brafton.com Brafton is a news content marketing agency. Our full-time journalists write exclusive content to clients’ unique editorial briefs and keyword strategies, and account management teams provide consultancy on brand-appropriate content marketing strategies. Brafton’s SEO-friendly content increases organic search listings, engages social audiences, and drives relevant traffic to conversion pages.

Brandtology Booth 128 www.brandtology.com Brandtology (a Sentia Media Company) provides online business intelligence that empowers global brands to manage actionable insights gained from consumer conversations online. Using a combination of proprietary technology, processes, and trained professionals across APAC, the Americas, and EMEA, Brandtology is able to deliver a high degree of accuracy and relevancy for millions of online conversations every month. Brandtology’s multilingual support covers languages spoken by over 90% of the world’s Internet population. As part of Sentia Media’s multiple-service offerings, Brandtology also has the capability to provide cross-media analysis, leveraging on the strengths of Sentia Media’s other business units. Brandtology has partnerships with global organizations and provides services in multi-functional areas across marketing and communications such as sales, public relations, campaign measurement, online reputation management, customer service, product development, and much more.

BrightEdge Booth 321 www.brightedge.com BrightEdge is the leading site, search, and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines, and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA, and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures.

CheckDog Texpo Pavilion www.checkdog.com CheckDog is a website proof checking platform that assists content editors in keeping their websites free from spelling errors, broken links, and broken images. CheckDog’s proprietary technology ensures that all errors identified are genuine and that reports are not cluttered with false positives. CheckDog provides extensive configuration and filtering options so the most relevant and recent content can be automatically reviewed at regular intervals.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 Clickable Booth 322 & Keynote Sponsor www.clickable.com Clickable makes marketers thrive by delivering powerful intelligence for social and search advertising. With Clickable, marketers simplify complex data into meaningful metrics and customer insights while proving ROI to help make more profitable advertising decisions across Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and more. With Clickable’s award-winning tools and services, marketers can track real-time performance and downstream engagement and purchasing behaviors to then demonstrate ROI through a beautiful reporting experience. With Clickable, marketers employ their company’s social graph to better target prospects, amplify brand advocacy, and reveal untapped revenue sources. Clickable is also part-owned by American Express and provides the YourBuzz service from American Express OPEN. Clickable continues an award-winning history of innovation in performance advertising technology with the help of more than 100 dedicated engineers and product specialists. Clickable has raised over $32 million in funding from American Express, Founders Fund, FirstMark Capital, and Union Square Ventures.

ClickZ Academy and Recruitment Booth 215 www.clickz.com ClickZ is the largest resource of interactive marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, research, and reference in the world, online or off-. From search to social, technology to trends, our coverage is expert, exclusive, and in-depth. Our mission: to help interactive marketers do their jobs better. Here’s what ClickZ offers: •• ClickZ News: More than just headlines, the seasoned ClickZ News team serves up smart, original reporting and analysis on the interactive marketing industry and the companies that make it tick. •• ClickZ Experts: From the trenches: commentary, opinion, advice, and thought leadership from the leading practitioners in interactive marketing. •• C lickZ Stats: An award-winning source for interactive and Internet research. Facts, figures, research, and data on every facet of the online industry, domestic and worldwide. •• ClickZ Job Board: The ClickZ Jobs section helps connect job seekers with new employment opportunities and provide employers access to our large audience of interactive marketing professionals.

cognitiveSEO Booth 212 www.cognitiveseo.com cognitiveSEO is the cutting-edge SEO toolkit that helps webmasters, marketers, and agencies create stronger link building strategies and outrank competitors faster and easier. cognitiveSEO was

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built to help SEO professionals reduce the time spent on SEO analysis and link prospecting. The new link building toolset allows you to analyze and comprehend large lists of backlinks in minutes and correlate that information with actual ranking positions. With the cognitiveSEO toolset, competitor analysis and tracking takes less time, allowing the seo professional to focus on link building and other important tasks. cognitiveSEO’s most important features to make SEO work as easy as possible: •• I ntegration with multiple third-party backlink providers to get the most in-depth link analysis. •• Identify the position of the inbound links on a page in a matter of seconds with a unique feature that works like a visual crawler (Link Previews). •• Filter inbound link profiles and generate graphs to see how to rank higher (Advanced Link Profile Filtering). •• Find Competitor weak spots and outrank them faster (Competitive Link Analysis). •• Track the historical evolution of any competitor’s backlink profiles and monitor your own site (Timeline). •• Daily Rank Tracking for Google/Bing & Yahoo in over 50 countries (SERP Monitoring). •• Track links daily and get notified when any issues appear (Link management). cognitiveSEO is powered by state-of-the-art technology that analyzes and monitors links and rankings on-demand. congitiveSEO delivers unparalleled competitive link intelligence that will help you outrank your competitors and secure your search engine ranking positions. You can follow cognitiveSEO on Twitter @cognitiveSEO or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cognitiveSEO. For more information, please visit: cognitiveseo.com.

ConversionIQ Booth 124 www.conversioniq.com ConversionIQ provides conversion rate optimization programs to continuously improve websites. Our programs are available directly and through our agency partners. Our conversion rate experts gain insights as to why customers are leaving a website without purchasing and work with the client on solutions to these issues. This means continuous revenue increases for the traffic the website already has. Our clients love our 30% Conversion Rate Increase Guarantee, our 30-day Money-Back Guarantee, and the no-obligation contract. “We make enterprise conversion optimization services available to small and medium size businesses who would never have been able to afford them before. We learn our client’s business inside and out, gain insights using Analytics as well as other qualitative tools, then test our solutions. We only implement changes that are tested and proven to increase a website’s revenue.”—Keith Hagen, Co-Founder

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESNewYork.com. exhibitors Covario

Emailvision

Booth 504 & Reception Sponsor www.covario.com Covario, Inc., is the leader in interactive marketing analytics (IMA) software. The Covario portfolio provides global organizations with robust interactive and search marketing analytics solutions for paid search advertising, organic search engine optimization, and display advertising across the enterprise and throughout the channel. Covario enables complex and distributed organizations to control brand integrity, ensure budget transparency, and deliver quantifiable results across business units, distribution channels and languages. Headquartered in San Diego, Covario has a growing customer list that includes some of the world’s best known brands in high tech manufacturing, financial services, electronics, media and publishing, and consumer packaged goods.

Booth 320 www.emailvision.com Emailvision is the international leader in software as a service (SaaS) for email, mobile, and social media marketing. The Emailvision mission is to provide excellence in software and services for online relationship marketing. With offices and client service teams in 19 countries, Emailvision delivers 5 billion messages per month on behalf of 4,000 clients worldwide. This unprecedented quality of service is driven by 12 years of research and development and by Emailvision’s 600 passionate employees. The company is privately owned by Francisco Partners.

Davanti Digital Media Booth 229 www.davantidigital.com Davanti Digital Media is a full-service digital marketing and design firm offering solutions for businesses large and small. They provide comprehensive social media and mobile marketing campaigns and consulting, web design and development, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, pay-per-click campaign management, and more. Davanti believes in the power of new media and emerging technologies for marketing, brand awareness, reputation management, audience engagement, and market research. Davanti offers fullycustomized digital marketing solutions for businesses of all sizes that accomplish your goals and fit into your personal marketing budget. Davanti stays ahead of the curve so you don’t have to.

Elite SEM Booth 209 www.elitesem.com Elite SEM is one of New York’s fastest growing digital marketing agencies specializing in building top-performing search engine marketing campaigns for multinational corporations and Fortune 1000 brands including ideeli, Hugo Boss, Tommy Bahama, Clarks, Bostonian, Terminix, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Rockport, Havaivanas, and Dictionary.com. The company started with only four industry game changers and now has evolved into a 30-employee agency with three offices in major cities of America—New York City, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Featured in the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2010, Elite SEM understands firsthand the complexities of the Internet community, the evolving landscape of the online marketing, and advertising space. More importantly, Elite SEM has a proven track record of growing brands in a way that’s smart, innovative, rewarding.

eZanga.com Booth 201 www.ezanga.com eZanga.com is a search engine specializing in online advertising and services. eZanga users are given a convenient and accurate web search experience with feature-rich results. Our proprietary Metasearch technology retrieves information from multiple search engines displaying only the most pertinent results without duplication or overlap. eZanga offers local, regional, and national advertising campaigns focused on generating a high ROI. Our advertisers enjoy benefits including personalized account management, expansive toolsets, and advanced fraud prevention. Recently released, Traffic Advisors 6.0 edition is our latest update to our progressive fraud filtration system, preventing fraudulent clicks in real-time to ensure clean, qualified traffic.

Full Sail University Booth 401 www.fullsail.edu Both Full Sail University’s Internet Marketing bachelor’s and master’s degrees explore the many opportunities available for utilizing the Internet to market effectively. Learn to plan, launch, and optimize marketing campaigns that build brand recognition, drive traffic, and generate conversions. These comprehensive programs cover all facets of online marketing including e-commerce, social media, pay-per-click, and SEO. You’ll explore online operating models through courses that cover affiliate marketing and e-commerce, and utilize real-world tools to gain practical experience. Our experienced teaching staff is subject-matter experts, focused on providing course materials that give you the most current information. Our innovative learning management system gives you all the tools you need to be a successful online student. With an Internet Marketing degree from Full Sail University, you will be positioned to pursue the business career you desire. Graduates start their own business, become consultants, work as marketing managers, or specialize in specific areas.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 iCrossing Booth 118 www.icrossing.com iCrossing is a global digital marketing agency that combines talent and technology to help world-class brands find and connect with their customers. The company blends best-in-class digital marketing services—including paid search, search engine optimization, Web development, social media, mobile, research and analytics—to create integrated digital marketing programs that engage consumers and drive ROI. iCrossing’s client base includes such recognized brands as The LEGO Group, Epson America, and Toyota, and 40 Fortune 500 companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, MasterCard, and FedEx. Headquartered in New York, the company has 700 employees in 13 offices globally. iCrossing is a unit of Hearst Corporation, one of the nation’s largest diversified media companies. For more information, please visit www.icrossing.com.

inceptor Booth 309 www.inceptor.com Inceptor®, a search marketing service of SuperMedia LLC What really makes Inceptor® different isn’t about us? It’s about you. When you become an Inceptor client, you aren’t just hiring a vendor. Our team becomes personally invested in your success, providing the customized strategies, open communications, and responsive service that will allow you to reach your business goals. Our active, hands-on and integrated approach to pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), comparison shopping engine (CSE), and social media programs can lead you to higher ROI, increased online visibility, and growth of revenue. The Inceptor team practices SEM at a level of expertise and success that few others have achieved. If your current agency just isn’t cutting it or you need help expanding your in-house efforts, talk to us. Call 800-307-6709 today.

Indus Net Technologies Booth 122 www.indusnet.co.in We are a 14-year-old, ISO-certified company, specializing in working with digital agencies as service delivery partners for web design and development, SEO, and smartphone apps. Our team has 450+ specialized professionals based in India alongside our UK office to deliver the highest ROI and top-notch support.

Info Cubic Japan Booth 108 www.infocubic.co.jp/en Info Cubic Japan is a search engine marketing (SEM) firm serving more than 500 businesses in the Far East. Established in 2002, we have optimized more than 5,000 keyword searches designed to drive traffic to our clients’ web pages. Info Cubic Japan, however, doesn’t stop at search engine optimisation (SEO); we also provide individualized cutting-edge global marketing strategies, advanced pay-perclick (PPC) analysis, and website localization for the market in Japan.

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In addition, our extensive experience with the Japanese Internet enables us to help our overseas customers effectively market their goods or services in Japan.

iProspect Booth 200 www.iprospect.com iProspect, part of Aegis Media, is a global digital performance agency that provides some of the world’s most sought-after brands with digital marketing strategies that maximize ROI through social media, SEO, paid search, display media, shopping feed management, mobile marketing, attribution modeling and management, and other related services. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and leaders across multiple industries, including Staples, Neiman Marcus, Gilt Groupe, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Glaxo Smith Kline, and Reliant Energy, among others. iProspect was recently awarded a 2011 Interactive Marketing Award for “Best Ecommerce Site Launch or Revamp” and has been included on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 List in 2011, 2010, and 2009. The agency is headquartered in Boston, and has 850 employees in 39 offices globally. For more information, visit www.iprospect.com or follow them on Twitter @iProspect.

Linkdex Booth 227 www.linkdex.com Linkdex is a free enterprise class SEO platform where you only pay for valuable, actionable, profitable data. Linkdex was founded by a team of seasoned search marketers. Together with a rapidly growing group of passionate business and agency users, Linkdex is developing the software to deliver on an ambitious product vision. Linkdex is also a platform that is evolving further and faster than any other, with a dedicated team of Europe’s leading developers working flat out, turning user feedback into new features as regularly as every two weeks. None of this would be possible without a £ multi-million investment from one of the world’s leading venture capital funds and Silicon Valley’s highest profile investors. So whether you’re aiming to benchmark what SEO is delivering against the competition or work more productively for your team, with Linkdex you can Seize Every Opportunity.

LinkVehicle Booth 226 www.linkvehicle.com LinkVehicle is an exciting way for advertisers to accelerate their link building efforts. They offer traditional text-link-ads that are placed in the side bar or template of their publisher websites, and blog reviews, which allow you to request written reviews that include in content links. Benefits for advertisers include: increase in organic rankings, buzz and branding, and direct traffic. LinkVehicle’s marketplace is completely private but every advertiser is assigned a dedicated SEO professional to assist with your link building campaign.

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESNewYork.com. exhibitors Website owners and bloggers benefit through LinkVehicle by including their websites into their marketplace and earn revenue by writing blog posts or placing text-links.

LinkWorth Booth 132 www.linkworth.com LinkWorth is an online advertising portal providing a unique monetization venue for publishers and innovative marketing products for advertisers. Services include text link advertising, in-content payper-click, hosted content pages, paid blog reviews, SEO consulting services, article submission, directory submission, press releases, and custom content creation.

LivePerson Booth 202 www.liveperson.com LivePerson, Inc. (NASDAQ: LPSN), offers a platform that enables businesses to intelligently connect in real-time with their customers via chat, voice, and content delivery at the right time, through the right channel. This “Intelligent Engagement” platform produces meaningful interactions on websites, social media, and mobile devices fulfilling customer needs and business objectives. More than 8,500 companies, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Verizon, Sky, Walt Disney, PNC, QVC, and Orbitz, rely on LivePerson’s solutions to increase conversions and enhance customer experience and customer satisfaction. LivePerson received the CODiEs for Best Ecommerce Solution in 2011; the company was named one of America’s 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies by Forbes in 2011 and a Company of the Year by Frost and Sullivan in 2010. LivePerson is headquartered in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Atlanta, London, and Melbourne.

Local Splash Booth 206 www.localsplash.com Local Splash puts local businesses on the first page of Google™, Yahoo!™, and Bing search results, including the map, organic, and sponsored search sections. Headquartered in Santa Ana, California, Local Splash has over 10,000 clients including both single-store location local businesses and national chains like Extra Space Storage (750+ locations). Whether the business has a website or not, Local Splash enables local businesses to be found online. The company behind Local Splash, Relevant Ads, was founded in 2004 with the mission of helping local businesses be found online. Relevant Ads offers agencies and resellers a unique partnering opportunity. For more information visit our Local SEO Reseller page.

Magnetic Track Sponsor www.magnetic.is Founded in 2008, Magnetic is the first company to focus 100% on search retargeting. Magnetic’s technology targets users with

display ads based on their search history. By leveraging search data as an indicator of user intent, marketers scale keyword-level targeting and SEM campaigns by serving display ads to consumers who have already signaled intent within the search engine. Leading agencies and advertisers rely on Magnetic’s retargeting solutions to follow-up with users outside of the search engine and re-engage them with creative messages, compared to simple text ads seen in the search campaigns. Visit http://www.magnetic.is for more information on Magnetic and search retargeting.

Majestic SEO Booth 126 www.majesticseo.com Majestic SEO provides competitor backlinks intelligence to SEO specialists. Majestic SEO is the planet’s most comprehensive backlinks information provider, and offer a number of tools to access to this valuable resource. Most recently, Majestic launched Site Explorer—offering more data than anyone else by a considerable margin. Majestic enables registered users to test its services free of charge by generating reports for sites users control. Registration is free, and highly competitive subscription plans start at low prices, with one-month minimum commitment. Subscribers have a range tools to enable link analysis of competing domains to be performed. For Enterprise users, Majestic offers an API service for internal use that enables developers to integrate the data into new or existing suites of reports and applications. •• Anchor text •• Link strength •• Crawl date •• Country source •• IP number

Marchex Booth 219 www.marchex.com Marchex is a digital call advertising and small business marketing company. Marchex’s mission is to unlock local commerce globally by helping advertisers reach customers wherever they may be—in mobile, offline, and online channels, including on our own local and category websites. Our performance-based call advertising products, the Marchex Digital Call Marketplace and Marchex Call Analytics, are reinventing how businesses acquire new customers through the phone. Our award-winning small business marketing products empower local businesses to efficiently monitor and manage their online presence, communicate with their customers, and acquire new ones. Every day, our products support tens of thousands of advertisers and partners, ranging from global enterprises to local businesses. Please visit www.marchex.com for more information.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 Market Motive Training Institute Booth 500 www.marketmotive.com What does it take to be certified in search marketing? Visit Market Motive to find out. We’ll show you our online video training library; you’ll meet our top-rated faculty and get a glimpse into the testing and endorsement system that is world-recognized and endorsed by the biggest names in search. Market Motive provides online certification courses in SEO, web analytics, PPC, social media, conversion optimization, online PR, email marketing and more. All courses are online and all students have weekly phone conferences with the faculty. And the faculty is the best part—it’s a “Who’s Who of the internet marketing world” according to Website Magazine and “the best in the business” according to Internet Marketing Pilgrim. To learn more, see us at the conference or visit www.marketmotive.com.

Morpheus Media, a CREATETHE Group Company Booth 231 www.morpheusmedia.com Founded in March 2001, Morpheus Media, a CREATETHE GROUP Company, is the leading full-service digital media and strategy agency for high-end consumer / luxury goods with relationships spanning across LVMH, Gucci Group, Richemont SA, A&E Networks, The New York Times, and Neiman Marcus / Bergdorf Goodman, among many others. Formed with a focus on media (SEM / PPC and display campaign management), as the digital marketing industry has evolved the agency has consistently expanded its service offering to include natural search engine optimization (SEO), mobile, affiliate, and social media strategies to truly surround the quantifiable elements of a brand’s online presence. Now at 100+ people in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, Morpheus has come a long way from its inception, in part by refusing to deviate from the core principles of transparency, audience expertise, excellent service, and tight focus on our clients’ success metrics. By leveraging direct response in combination with a focus on the consistent representation and promotion of our clients’ brands online, Morpheus strikes the elusive balance between customized branding initiatives and surgically executed ROI optimization. Our mission is to provide our clients with marketing strategies and programs tailored to fit their needs, accountable to their goals, and maintaining consistent brand guardianship.

NetElixir Booth 405 www.netelixir.com NetElixir, Inc., is an online customer acquisition management firm headquartered in Princeton, NJ, with offices in London, UK; Hyderabad, India; Freiburg, Germany; and Copenhagen, Denmark. The company advises clients worldwide on achieving online marketing performance maximization using its proprietary technology, the LXR core platform, and employing a global service delivery model. NetElixir’s suite of services includes paid search advertising management, search engine optimization, comparison shopping engine

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management, social media marketing management, and search engine marketing analytics. Since 2005, NetElixir has helped more than 200 US online retailers run highly profitable search and shopping engine campaigns.

Online Marketing Institute Booth 327 www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org The Online Marketing Institute (OMI) is an education-focused, career development organization offering marketers accreditation in the various fields of online marketing. OMI’s curriculum of case studies, best practices, peer validation, and trend analysis is delivered to students via workshops, webinars, seminars, and online learning channels. OMI’s education program was built in conjunction with leading universities, research firms, and associations to give marketers market-tested practical knowledge that can immediately benefit their careers. OMI’s courses are available to the general public.

Onward Search Booth 307 www.onwardsearch.com Onward Search is the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing and creative services talent. We specialize in placing search marketing, graphic design, web development, and related creative services and technology professionals to companies nationwide. We provide our customers with the ability to rapidly source the best talent in the marketplace, so they can successfully deliver against their creative services, online marketing, and technology initiatives. We offer a full range of recruiting, staffing, and talent management solutions to include temporary staffing, consulting, and permanent placement options to ensure our customers have access to the right talent to get the job done. We recruit and staff a range of internet marketing and creative services professionals to include: search marketing specialists, SEM managers, SEO consultants, PPC managers, social media experts, copywriters, web developers, project managers, production managers, graphics designers, print production managers, and more.

Page One Power Booth 207 & Session Sponsor www.pageonepower.com Page One Power does custom SEO, link Building and SEO site audits. Page One Power is an SEO firm located in Boise Idaho. It is headed by two brothers, Jon and Zach Ball. Page One Power focuses on customized, white-hat SEO. They work with a limited number of highly motivated clients who are focused on getting top search engine rankings. “We’re a small firm. We don’t have departments and account managers so our clients work directly with the leadership of the company. Because of this our clients love working with us. Of course we get results too.”—Jon Ball, Page One Power

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESNewYork.com. exhibitors PM Digital

Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Booth 203 www.pmdigital.com PM Digital is a digital marketing agency that specializes in paid search advertising, natural search optimization, social media, and shopping feed management. By developing and implementing customized Internet marketing campaigns, PM Digital drives qualified traffic to websites to surpass sales goals. Clients include The North Face, AARP, The Wall Street Journal, Spiegel, Martha Stewart Living, The Sportsman’s Guide, and Nautica, among others. For more on PM Digital’s thought leadership, please visit: http://blog.pmdigital.com/.

Booth 100 www.raventools.com Raven Internet Marketing Tools is used by thousands of marketers around the world to efficiently manage search engine optimization and social media conversations. With Raven you can conduct research and analysis, manage link building campaigns, track search engine trends, instantly produce sophisticated campaign reports for SEO and SMM campaigns, and collaborate with team members using intuitive multi-user features. Learn more at http:// raventools.com.

PRWeb

Searchmetrics

Booth 112 www.prweb.com PRWeb leads the industry in online news distribution and publicity. It takes the press release—formerly the expensive asset of large businesses—and makes it accessible to organizations of all sizes, as an inexpensive, hugely effective means of sharing news online, becoming more visible, attracting inbound media enquiries, and winning new customers. PRWeb is a service of Vocus. (NASDAQ: VOCS).

Booth 326 www.pubcon.com PubCon, the premier search and social media conference, will hold its multi-track Las Vegas event on October 15-19, 2012 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. PubCon, supported by the industry’s leading businesses, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in social media, Internet marketing, search engines, and online advertising, offers an in-depth look at the future of technology presented by over 200 of the world’s top speakers in more than 100 provocative cutting-edge sessions. Register today at www.pubcon.com.

Booth 110 www.searchmetrics.com Searchmetrics is the global expert in search analytics software, empowering marketers to increase visibility and market share on the world’s leading search engines. We create value by providing the best quality data on a global scale. Clients and partners worldwide rely on Searchmetrics to maximize return from search investments with actionable insights that help better manage, improve, and scale search marketing campaigns. Searchmetrics’ robust search marketing tool, Searchmetrics Suite, is supported by a unique server infrastructure that offers monitoring of over 100 search engines in over 30 countries worldwide. Searchmetrics Suite is also home to the Searchmetrics Essentials data modules, SEO+SEM and Social, encompassing the largest, fastest databases for search and social media available. Headquartered in Berlin, with subsidiaries and offices in New York, London, and Paris, the company delivers real web intelligence to a growing international customer base. You can follow Searchmetrics on Twitter @Searchmetrics or on Facebook at www.facebook. com/Searchmetrics. For more information, please visit: www. searchmetrics.com.

Quantcast

The Search Monitor

Booth 502 & Sponsored Session www.quantcast.com Quantcast is an audience measurement and targeting company. The pioneer of direct audience measurement, we start with the industry’s most in-depth understanding of digital audiences to help marketers and publishers buy and sell the most effective targeted advertising and drive conversions through the full funnel. Our products let publishers match their audience to the exact consumers an advertiser wants to reach with impression level targeting. Ranked Fast Company’s #3 Most Innovative Company on the Web and the Overall Winner of AlwaysOn’s Global 250 Top Private Companies, Quantcast is used by the world’s leading advertisers, the top 10 media agencies, and 100+ million web destinations. Launched in 2006, Quantcast is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Founders Fund, Polaris Venture Partners, Revolution Ventures, and Cisco Systems.

Booth 324 www.thesearchmonitor.com The Search Monitor works with SEM, SEO, brand, and affiliate marketers to monitor advertising activity across keywords on search engines, shopping engines, and social networks in real-time, worldwide. Features include: email alerts, screenshots, reports, charts, and statistics on market share, rank, ad copy, ad spend, trademark and affiliate violations, affiliate links in tweets, and link building recommendations. Uses: •• Competitive Intelligence to Optimize Campaigns •• Trademark Monitoring for Brand Protection •• Affiliate Monitoring for Compliance & Recruitment Supported Media: •• Search: Paid, Local, & Organic Universal SERPs •• Shopping Engines •• Devices: Mobile, Desktop, Tablets •• Social Media

Pubcon

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 SEMRush Badge Booklet Sponsor www.semrush.com SEMRush.com provides the comprehensive information about your competitors strategy in AdWords and Google Organic Search. We analyze domains, keywords, and competitors through our own database: over 80 mln keywords and over 41 mln for domains. Learn all your competitors, find out organic and AdWords keywords they use, find more relevant keywords for your website, compare competing domains, and more. SEMRush analyzes TOP20 of 9 Google versions: US, DE, RU, FR, UK, ES, IT, BR, and AU.

SEO.in Booth 213 www.seo.in SEO.in is an online marketing agency with an aim to create comprehensive services that provide results for our clients and partnering agencies. We provide our services to numerous small businesses, enterprises, and other agencies looking to outsource their work to another agency in the online marketing industry. We have a history of working with companies of all shapes and sizes and continue to offer our services in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India. We offer a variety of online marketing services as a part of our online marketing suite. It is our mission to make our services work for our clients.

7Search.com Booth 102 www.7search.com 7Search has been a premiere pay-per-click search network for over a decade, distinguishing itself for driving quality traffic, affordably. Known for excellent customer service—advertisers can call, email, or instant message an actual person that is an expert in training and assisting advertisers to optimize their campaign. This team is dedicated to ensuring each and every advertiser achieves the best return on investment they possibly can. Take advantage of 7Search’s network to drive traffic your way.

Slingshot SEO Booth 211 www.slingshotseo.com Founded in 2006, Slingshot SEO is a professional search engine optimization practice whose full-service strategic consulting and internet marketing services deliver unparalleled results for its enterprise SEO clients. Slingshot’s tight, business-impacting plans enable clients to conquer search with confidence. The company’s results are driven by a tireless passion to master the science of search. In May 2011, Slingshot SEO was recognized as the “IT Company of the Year” at TechPoint’s Mira Awards, the premier technology awards program in the state of Indiana. For more information about Slingshot SEO and to read customer reviews, visit www. slingshotseo.com.

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SpyderMate SEO Tools Texpo Pavilion www.spydermate.com SpyderMate is a suite of unique and powerful SEO tools structured to make managing multiple SEO campaigns easy. The Scorecard tells you how your web site is currently performing from an SEO perspective and tracks progress over time. The Auditor tells you what you need to fix by thoroughly crawling and analyzing any web site. The Low Hanging Fruit report helps you find keywords for which you could easily rank higher. The SERP Tracker keeps track of your keyword rankings over time. SEMRush tells you what keywords any domain ranks for in Google. All of our tools have “what you see is what you get” CSV and white-labeled PDF exporting capabilities.

SyCara Texpo Pavilion www.sycara.com SyCara automates SEO management tasks and delivers actionable insight to guide search marketing agencies and professionals. SyCara provides one SEO platform to simply and effectively accomplish workflow management, monitoring, and reporting for SEO. Using SyCara’s prioritized actionable plans, SEO professionals are empowered to achieve a higher level of efficiency and ROI.

TagMan Booth 233 www.tagman.com TagMan is the global leader in tag management, with the industry’s most mature and proven platform for the enterprise. Since launching the first, independent tag management platform in 2007, TagMan has been helping over 100 clients solve tagging, site performance, and attribution-related challenges. With over 2000 vendor tags currently implemented, the award-winning TagMan platform provides customers complete agility in managing existing partners and working with new technologies without the burden of costly implementation projects and resources. TagMan is the only enterprise-level tag management platform with robust solutions for improving site performance/latency, optimizing data collection, and addressing privacy at a global level.

Textbroker Booth 230 www.textbroker.com Textbroker is your marketplace for unique and exclusively-written articles created to your specifications. Our fixed rates make cost planning for projects of all sizes simple. No auctions, ho hassle: just place your order and writers find you. Create multiple orders for website localization, article marketing, and search engine optimization quickly and easily with our interface. Provide your editors and clients content without lifting a finger via our API. With more than 24,000 US authors at your disposal and rates starting around a penny, creating content has never been so easy and so fast.

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESNewYork.com. exhibitors topseos.com Booth 208 www.topseos.com The independent authority on search vendors, topseos.com evaluates and ranks the top internet marketing companies. Categories ranked by topseos include: search engine optimization, pay per click management, affiliate marketing, social media optimization, and many more. Since 2002, topseos has been a trusted resource for businesses looking to launch or improve internet marketing campaigns. The pathfinder service allows topseos to work directly with you to help find companies that best fit your business needs. Why waste time searching through thousands of sites with false promises? Go straight to the authority, gain insight into the industry, and work with the best.

VisiStat Booth 106 www.visistat.com VisiStat is a web analytics / customer intelligence platform that captures complex analytical data in real-time, and simplifies it specifically for SMB / SME enabling well-informed business decisions that increase sales opportunities and maximize online marketing effectiveness. The VisiStat solution is an integrated, single-source ecosystem providing comprehensive web analytics and campaign tracking to optimize website performance and online marketing ROI, plus an anonymous visitor identification solution that generates new sales leads directly from your website. The result is greater visibility as to how customers and prospects are engaging your business, and clear, specific steps to improve your online presence.

Web Marketing Association Booth 329 www.webmarketingassociation.org The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 to help define the standard of excellence for online marketing. Our internationally known award programs, such as WebAward Competition for Website Development, Internet Advertising Competition, and the new MobileWebAwards, recognize the people and organizations responsible for developing the most effective online marketing programs on the Internet today. Entrants benefit from assessment of their marketing efforts by a professional judging panel and the marketing opportunities presented by being recognized as an award-winning web developer. Visit www.webmarketingassociation.org for complete info.

Website Magazine Booth 114 www.websitemagazine.com Website Magazine, the Magazine for Web Success, presents expert information on how to succeed on the Internet in 12 print issues per year, in print, digital, iPhone, Android, and iPad editions. WebsiteMagazine.com offers news and blogs daily, as well as e-news-

letters on search marketing, e-commerce, website design and development, affiliate marketing, and website success. Subscribe today! http://websitemagazine.com/subscribe.

Wpromote Booth 323 www.wpromote.com Wpromote is a privately held firm that has been a leader in the search engine marketing industry since its inception in 2001. Wpromote is ranked as the #1 Integrated Search Marketing Company by TopSEOs.com and honored to be a five-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree. Wpromote is in an elite group of firms recognized as a Google Adwords Certified Partner and a Microsoft Ad Center Certified Partner, and the only firm worldwide to be a member of Google’s SEM Council and a member of Google’s Social Council. Wpromote’s objective is to help clients realize greater success through its superior search marketing service. Through its fullservice integrated search engine marketing, clients develop a more comprehensive online presence and are able to reach highly targeted clientele more effectively and efficiently. Utilizing proprietary bid management, keyword analysis software and a team of seasoned marketing and optimization specialists, Wpromote provides measurable results and helps clients maximize their advertising return on investment.

WriterAccess Booth 131 www.writeraccess.com WriterAccess is a content marketplace that connects customers directly with writers for paid assignments. The content platform makes it easy to find writers, place orders, manage workflow, and auto-publish to WordPress, HubSpot, and more. All 5,000+ writers are U.S. based, and carefully screened with software-based testing and manual portfolio reviews. Pricing is affordable with price per word and fixed rate orders. Prices vary with star rating of writers, word counts, and/or direct negotiation with writers. Best of all, if you’re not delighted with any order, you don’t pay!

xAd Booth 218 & Charging Station Lounge Sponsor www.xad.com xAd is one of the largest US mobile-local advertising networks and the only one offering both targeted search and display. Its owned and operated traffic, together with an extensive network of premium mobile sites and local apps, enables xAd to access millions of searches and over 10 billion ad impressions monthly. Across its network, xAd aggregates and manages nearly half a billion locationspecific ad requests monthly; billions of business listings; and over one million national and local advertisers, who use xAd to monetize performance by driving clicks, calls, and visits to their businesses. Learn more at xAd.com.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES New York | March 19–23, 2012 Zenya

Zeta Interactive

Booth 214 www.zenya.com Zenya (an Info.com company) affords online search agencies and large advertisers unprecedented levels of specificity in keyword generation. Maximize PPC campaigns and reduce CPC while bolstering quality score. Zenya provides over 50 million keywords algorithmically indexed into more than 125,000 keyword categories, with more added every week. Zenya’s taxonomy contains as many as 14 layers of tiered granularity for absolute advertising precision. Zenya is your premier platform for performance keywords.

Booth 331 www.zetainteractive.com Zeta Interactive is a digital marketing agency offering an integrated set of strategies and solutions including branding, web development, SEM, SEO, social, email marketing, and mobile. With a specific expertise in full service search, our team’s focus is on the measurable ROI that can be driven from both organic and paid efforts. We have been able to successfully realize returns by leveraging our team’s experience, best-of-breed tools and a unique multichannel view to identify new and innovative opportunities to drive more qualified site traffic that converts. For more information, visit: www. zetainteractive.com.

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SEO

focus

Is Your Site Viable for Search? Ensure that your new site performs for SEO with these sure-fire methods. by Rob Chant

e’ve been seeing a lot of nay saying, contradictory advice, doom, gloom, and controversy in the SEO community, especially when Google releases a major update. All of this noise can be hard for full-time SEO practitioners to follow, let alone beginners or business owners who need to understand what they are buying into. However, SEO at its core is very simple, and it starts with your website itself. So how do you make sure that your brand-new site is viable for search?

Get It Out There It is very tempting to postpone the launch until your site is “perfect.” Developers are notorious for this, constantly tweaking and never releasing. The bottom line is that something is better than nothing. Despite the uncertainty about how or whether Google gives a benefit to older domains, it’s clear that the sooner you have content in front of Google, the better. A straightforward tactic is just to run with a simple WordPress (or equivalent) install while your all-singing, all-dancing web site is under development. This way, by the time you launch properly, you will have already built traffic and a history with Google. You can even create your full website with WordPress, making the transition from your temporary site to the full one relatively painless. You can release early and keep adding to it.

Content, Content, and More Content Content is the keystone of any SEO effort— indeed, of almost any web marketing effort. Google loves lots of content, especially text, and you need content to engage with your visitors. A site with just a few pages, even for the smallest of organizations, really doesn’t cut it for search any more. There are many ways to generate content on a frequent basis, but the easiest structuring is blogging. If you’re having a new website built, ask your developer to include a blogging facility or something closely

comparable (e.g., a knowledge base or news feed). You have to be able to add new pages as often as you like. A site that remains static is not viable for search. Of course, the caveat here is that your content has to be both high quality and completely unique. Churning out puff is not the answer. Your writing needs to be clear and jargon-free.

Web sites work when you work on them. Schedule time with your site at least once per week, whether this means adding new content, improving old, testing functionality, or improving the design.

pictures of successful businesspeople shaking hands.

Be Sociable The web is no longer a closed-off collection of small communities. People expect to be able to share content and respond to it, wherever they find it, and this goes for your site, too. Make your content easy for people to share on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other networks that fit your niche. More importantly, create the kind of content that they’ll want to interact with and share in the first place. It should also go without saying—make it easy for people to contact you. Some people prefer forms, others like email, and still others tend to pick up the phone. Make all these options available and obvious on your site—and, crucially, make sure that all of your forms are easy to use and actually work! Test them frequently.

Design Matters There’s a lot of debate as to how much Google looks at a site’s design for ranking purposes, although there is little doubt that design is now a factor. Google definitely analyzes a page’s structure, looking for sites that are too spammy or advertising heavy, and their human search quality raters can’t help but take design into account, whether they mean to or not. However, regardless of how Google treats it directly, design still matters. Why? Because rankings ultimately boil down to social factors: links and shares. Who wants to link to an ugly, cluttered site that looks like it was designed in 1994? Who wants to share it with their friends? There’s no need to be intimidated. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about stunning, award-winning design. The big boys can afford that; most small businesses can’t. What we are talking about is clean, simple design, with original graphics and plenty of room for well-spaced, readable text—no tiny 11-pixel-high text in a narrow column; no jumble and clutter of advertisements and call-out boxes; and definitely no generic

Conclusion This may all sound rather daunting, but it becomes easier when you stop thinking of developing a site as a monolithic effort and start thinking in terms of having a site that can grow and develop as you need it to. Your web site isn’t a static object; it’s not like a brochure that is printed once and forgotten. Web sites work when you work on them. Schedule time with your site at least once per week, whether this means adding new content, improving old, testing functionality, or improving the design. Rob Chant has been working as a freelancer on the web in one form or another for about 10 years, first as a designer and developer and more recently in SEO. He now runs a web marketing company focused on delivering SEO and related services to small businesses. His experience with both designing and building web sites gives him extra insight into the SEO process.

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COVER STORY/ MARKETING INSIGHTS

Search Marketing and Social Media in Regulated Industries Despite the complexity, companies can stay within the “compliance envelope” by being proactive in their marketing.

by Augustine Fou

s more and more companies in heavily regulated industries search for cost savings, greater efficiencies for dollars spent, and better matches with modern sources of information, they are aggressively shifting dollars from traditional advertising to digital and social media. These industries—which include pharmaceuticals and healthcare, financial services and insurance, alcohol and tobacco, and those that service government entities—have regulations that govern their marketing and communications, especially ones aimed at large numbers of consumers. Compliance has always been a necessary extra step in doing marketing. Now, in digital and social media, where customers’ actions, conversations, and feedback are visible and recorded publicly, these companies have the additional task of figuring out which regulations apply, and how.

Some Regulations of Concern It’s not just one regulation or law that has yet to be interpreted for two-way digital channels, but many, and some are easier to apply than others. For example, sites created by companies and agencies serving government entities must be “508 compliant,” meaning that they must be accessible to people with disabilities— through the

18 SES • March 2012 {London}

use of screen readers, for example. Companies in healthcare and insurance need to ensure that their technology infrastructure, record-keeping, and privacy policies are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Public companies are subject to SarbanesOxley and the associated requirements for disclosures, internal controls, and accountability. Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies must also abide by the FDA’s requirements for “adverse event reporting” and other regulations that govern the adequate disclosure of safety and warning information, the presentation of “fair” and “balanced” information about prescription drugs and medical device, and what can or cannot be said or claimed about products (i.e., approved language only).

Issues and Challenges for Marketers

write negative comments about their drugs or mention on social networks that they got sick from the drugs (i.e., “adverse events”)? Are companies obliged to monitor the entire Internet or all social networks, blogs, and forums, and report all mentions of adverse events related to their products? And how could they possibly do so in the stipulated 72 hours? Finally, what are the rules governing the new forms of personally identifiable information (PII) disclosed in digital and social channels—for example, the history of what sites individuals visited, the “social graph” of their connected friends, and what they searched for online—and how companies can use this PII to better target customers with marketing messages? Because the FDA has not published any definitive guidelines or interpretations for these new marketing scenarios, companies are forced to assess and interpret these scenarios themselves and act according to the level of acceptable risk. However, many companies have taken the wait-and-see approach and deferred any action in these new and essential marketing channels.

Why are these regulations and requirements challenging for marketers in digital, search, and social channels? The laws themselves are not new, but the interpretation of how to apply them is. In traditional forms of advertising, the guidelines are well established—for example, in TV commercials for drugs, companies must refer customers to Ways to Stay Compliant the corresponding print ad in a magazine for Here are a few examples of ways companies further details. When advertising a product in these regulated industries can use digital, on a website, companies must link to the search, and social media marketing techprescribing information (PI), which has all niques right now, while staying within the of the required details about dosage, side “compliance envelope”: effects, adverse interactions, black-box warnings, etc. 1. Social Media Listening. Marketers can But what happens when companies run treat social media channels as venues search ads on Google or display ads on for continuous listening rather than as Facebook? How should they present warnplaces where they can push more ads. ings and side-effect information, given the Because more people are having more extreme space constraints of the ads themonline conversations more often, social selves? What should firms do when people media venues are rich sources of new

COVER STORY/ MARKETING INSIGHTS

insights that cannot be gleaned from traditional forms of market research like surveys or focus groups. Furthermore, in some cases these conversations have been archived for years, giving advertisers a historic perspective on particular topics. 2. Search as Research. Marketers can use search as a form of research rather than as just another way to drive more traffic to their websites. Insights from search volume over time, or what people are seeking from related searches, will allow marketers to use search as research to collect new insights continuously. By not pushing out more ads at people, but rather studying how users look for information online, advertisers can better tailor their marketing activities and positively impact content creation, site optimization, and updates to marketing messages.

3. Digital Analytics. The online and digital technologies are inherently two-way and also precisely measurable. As users take actions on websites, the detailed analytics can reveal what they are looking for, whether they found it, and how it impacts their purchase decision. Marketers in heavily regulated industries have many pre-approved assets and pieces of content. If they put such content on the website or repurpose it for use on mobile devices (e.g., eDetailing on iPads), then the way physicians use the information can be seen in the analytics. Dr. Augustine Fou is the founder of Marketing Science Consulting Group, Inc., and a digital strategy advisor to marketing executives and global brands. He also teaches executive courses on digital strategy and integrated marketing at Rutgers University at the Center for Management Development.

Session Track: Search in Regulated Industries SES New York, Day Two—Wednesday, March 21 Hilton New York 9:45–10:45am Search Marketing & Social Media for Regulated Industries 11:15–12:15pm Legal Considerations for Search & Social in Regulated Industries 4:00–5:00pm Search & Social Media Tactics for Regulated Industries

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The FDA’s Four Adverse Event Reporting Criteria 1. Identifiable Patient. The post contains information sufficient to believe a specific patient was involved, such as “I experienced” or “my brother experienced,” but did not contain general statements such as “many people.” 2. Identifiable Reporter. The post contains sufficient information to follow up with the reporting person, such as an email address, telephone number, or physical address. 3. Specific Medication. The post mentions a specific medication by brand or the chemical name of a medication where that compound is unique to one specific brand. 4. Adverse Event. The post describes a reaction that a “reasonable person” would consider an adverse experience such as death, hospitalization, vomiting, or swelling, or a side effect that is not known or expected with the medication.

Visit SESNewYork.com for complete information.

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MEDIA PLANNING

The Crawl, Walk, Run of Digital Creative Invest effort in creative optimization to achieve the highest performance from your campaign. by Sarah Lockwood

here is no doubt that the past several years have seen significant changes and advancements in online advertising. The creative ad unit, however, has fallen behind, still looking a lot like it did back in 1994 when the first banner for AT&T’s “You Will” campaign appeared on HotWired (Figure 1). In the display media landscape, less

convince users that the landing page will speak directly to their expressed need or search terms. The search landing page has a

The user experience for display begins with the display ad unit (the first creative) and

than 5% of companies specialize in creative optimization, according to LUMA Partners LLC (Figure 2). Yet creative is often the area where the most potential for improvement exists, and where a relatively small investment can yield enormous returns. Why is the disregard of creative optimization this pervasive? I believe that digital marketers today have become so comfortable in the safe cocoon of excel spreadsheets that they have largely or completely left what they perceive to be the scary, intuitive cre-

lot of work to do (more than the display landing page in that it has two audiences—the search engine and the site visitor). It must contain appropriate keywords and support a high quality score, and must provide relevant content based on the search event while driving conversion. When you are managing search campaigns, you should consider creating specific search landing pages for your most critical ad groups, and perhaps most of your ad groups. If you are guilty of driving a great

follows through to the display landing page (the second creative). The role of the display creative is to set an expectation with the user and draw the click; the role of the display landing page is to expound on the value propositions and drive the conversion event. When you are planning campaigns, there is a huge opportunity to build a plan for creative testing and optimization. Simple A/B tests for messaging, call to action, and imagery are things that we know we should do, but they often fall to the wayside in everyday

ative to others. Both search and display marketers consider the creative a deliverable (a banner to traffic or a URL to link to), not an element with which they should be involved. We as digital marketers should reconsider this orientation to creative and concern ourselves with the entire user experience. This means participating in creative conversations and seeking ad units and landing pages that push the audience through the consideration cycle. We should approach creative optimization with a test-and-learn attitude, create creative test plans for each of our campaigns, and follow through on them with the same diligence that we apply to other optimization efforts. In the end, we come back to our comfort zone: creative does become objectively measured, and we can drive better and better click through and conversion for ourselves and our clients.

deal of search traffic to your home page, I’d encourage you to create a test plan and find out if you can ring more conversion from your campaigns by creating specific, conversion-oriented landing pages. It should also be noted that in addition to more conversion, this effort can result in greater spend efficiency in your campaign, by improving quality score.

practice. Setting the expectation, internally or with the client, that there will be multiple display ad creative and landing page iterations rightly demonstrates a full view of optimization.

Creative in Search The user experience for search begins with the ad copy and even the URL (which we’ll call the first creative) and follows through to the search landing page (the second creative). In this case, the first creative must

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Figure 1. AT&T banner that appeared on HotWire in 1994..

Creative in Display

Where to Start Step 1: Learn to Crawl. It is important to understand that display creative must follow some basic rules, rules that have changed

Why Doesn’t Anyone Care about the Creative Anymore? SES New York, Day Two—Wednesday, March 21, 11:15-12:15pm Hilton New York The panel will debate the role that creative plays today, looking at both sides of the argument. Is campaign success dependent on a thousand versions of a banner, each optimized to the single pixel, or is the overall message still the key to success? Moderator: •• Dax Hamman, Chief Revenue Officer, Chango Speakers: •• Jon Aizen, Director of Display Initiative, Yahoo! •• Sarah Lockwood, VP, Creative, Booyah Advertising

MEDIA PLANNING

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FIgure 2..

very little since that first banner. You can’t go wrong by following the IAB’s guidelines for creative development. If you don’t conform to these standards, publishers may reject your ads, causing campaign delays or wasted media dollars. Next, understand the role the first creative has with the second. Studies have shown that if individuals click an ad and do not feel that they have arrived on the site they were expecting, the conversion rate will be much lower. Even worse, many of these clickers will simply abandon your site. Make sure there is consistency in both the message and appearance. Step 2: Begin to Walk. If the size of your campaigns allows the budget, look beyond blanket messaging and understand that each

placement on your media plan not only looks different but also speaks to an audience that has a unique intent from the other placements. Take the time to study your placements and develop a first creative that is appropriate for the environment. If it is a named site buy, take the opportunity to ensure that the first creative will stand out. If it is a behavioral buy where the placements can vary, then ensure the message is offering an appropriate behavior for that audience. Step 3: Run with It. The term “dynamic creative” is thrown around a lot but often misunderstood. The goal is to present a message that is most relevant to the individual seeing it. Dynamic creative is really multivariate testing. By combining elements of

the creative together on an impression-byimpression basis, machine learning allows the best combination of the elements to be served in the ad depending on the individual viewing it. Click-through rates for dynamic creative are significantly higher (Tumri has case studies showing dynamic creative achieving 900% increases in click-through rates over static ads). At the same time, costs per action can be significantly decreased. A number of companies (Tumri, PointRoll, Teracent, and others) provide the infrastructure to do this across a number of buys, and will facilitate very granular optimization using your own creative templates. These companies generally charge on a cost-perthousand basis. Some are taking it further, coupling search retargeting data with dynamic creative to actually populate the ad

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MEDIA PLANNING

A. In this image test, which test won? (Answer at bottom of page.)

B. In this button test, which test won? (Answer at bottom of page.)

Figure 3. Tests from whichtestwon.com.

unit with the exact search term that the visitor typed into Google. Chango provides such a service, and they include dynamic creative in their fees.

The Benefits Will Be Significant Knowing what to test and change can be hard at first, but there are some great resources to help you train your thinking, my favorite being whichtestwon.com. The site shows real A/B tests and asks you to judge the performance (see Figure 3).

Conclusion Chances are that you’ve poured hours and hours of optimization effort into the media side of your buy. Each bit of effort in the same area will have less and less impact. Only by investing effort in creative optimization will you achieve the highest performance from your campaign. Savvy digital marketers will include creative test planning and implementation in all search and display campaigns, as it is clear that thoughtful creative optimization can make top-line differences

Answers: A. The image of the older man drove 28% more form submissions. B. “Go to Payment Options” drove 87.5% more click-throughs.

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exceeding anything secondary optimization efforts focused on the media buy can achieve. Sarah Lockwood leads creative services at Booyah Online Advertising, a full-service agency that specializes in all things digital. She provides creative strategy and manages the annual creative production of thousands of innovative ad units for desktop, tablet, video, and mobile campaigns for direct response and branding initiatives.

MEDIA PLANNING

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Pinterest—Should Marketers Care? What those in the emerging technology and social marketing industry think about the value of Pinterest. by Jessica Richards

here is another new social property vying for consumer attention: Pinterest. As advertisers, we immediately start salivating when we hear about the user growth (11.7 million users as of January) and consumer engagement. It seems like it’s hard to keep track of all the new players, but Pinterest should be hard for any marketing professional to ignore.

start seeing very interesting pictures develop of consumers’ wants and needs.

If you are one of the few who have not heard of it, there has been a ton of press recently—on TechCrunch, Mashable, and The Wall Street Journal, for example. Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board or scrapbook, if you will. The technology allows users to pin links and images to boards organized against their likes, lifestyle, and interests. Think of a more advanced approach to social bookmarking, with capabilities above and beyond that of Delicious. Of note, the audience still skews very female (approxi-

to learn from content on Pinterest.

mately 80 percent). In an effort to wrap my head around the opportunity, I spoke with some of my agency contacts who focus on emerging technology and social/experiential marketing. What I was trying to understand is what it means for a marketer and if a brand should be focusing their efforts in this space, at this time. Here are some solid quotes that appropriately summarized the Pinterest opportunity: I am afraid of Pinterest but in a good way. As a consumer, I am afraid of the time that it would take me to build out my boards. The site has the uncanny ability of being able to kill time faster than Zynga.… The platform is built to allow anyone to create a montage of their digital life. I can build boards on the things that matter to me. I started collecting cars that I would love to have some day. A home theater setup that would be ideal for me and a board highlighting what my daughter has been up to lately and many more. Multiply this by lots of people and you

Consumers are telling brands what they would like to have now or someday. For savvy brands, I think that Pinterest gives them a great opportunity to listen, supply compelling content, and test the reactions. Most brands have something

—Micah Nyatsambo, director of emerging technology, Havas Digital I think Pinterest is possibly the single most important new platform to emerge in the last 12–18 months because it so obviously has such a direct impact on brands and commerce. The interesting aspect is how brands use it, which is very, very editorial, giving them a creative way of inspiring consumers. Brands need to think laterally, very creatively—it shouldn’t be a simple ‘here’s our products’ board but a contextual display of the lifestyle and inspirations that their consumers can use. —Greg James, managing director, Cake Group From what I have gathered, the untapped listening opportunity is the most appealing aspect to me as a media professional. The insights I can build about who my consumers are, what they are interested in, and even how they feel about specific products in their lives will be unmatched in the short term. I am sure that, as Twitter and Facebook before it, Pinterest will look to monetize through advertising. My personal hope is that it will not be in a way that demeans the current quality and ingenuity of the platform. The true opportunity will be in the marketer’s ability to provide meaningful content that represents the attributes of their brand and culture—in an unobtrusive manner. Some will already be doing this naturally

(without knowing it), while others will try to do so without flushing out the true essence of “who they are,” “who consumers think they,” “who they want to be,” and “what consumers want them to be.” My recommendation would be to listen first and enter second.

“The platform is built to allow anyone to create a montage of their digital life. I can build boards on the things that matter to me.… Consumers are telling brands what they would like to have now or someday. For savvy brands, I think that Pinterest gives them a great opportunity to listen, supply compelling content, and test the reactions. Most brands have something to learn from content on Pinterest.” —Micah Nyatsambo, director of emerging technology, Havas Digital Aside from very relevant retailers and communities (fashion, crafts), I think the prospect of Pinterest satisfying a direct sales or business goal immediately will be unlikely. The true opportunity is brand presence and the ever-increasing opportunity for consumers to tell you what they want. As an account director for Media Contacts in New York, the interactive division of Havas Media, Jessica Richards is responsible for strategy development and media plan execution across a variety of clients and industries.

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SEO

Get It Right, Before the Launch A Checklist for Your Next Redesign and Migration by Jessica Bowman

edesigns are challenging, especially for an SEO team at a company that has not yet done a website migration with SEO properly integrated into every facet of the project. Doing it right is worth the investment and will reap massive rewards. To help guide you through the landmines, I offer a few tips based on the misses I’ve seen when auditing SEO programs and working on redesign projects. Redesigns are not easy; the level of effort for the SEO team is underestimated by both managers and the SEO team because they do not realize how ingrained in the process SEO needs to be.

Train the Project Team Bringing in a firm to do SEO training before a redesign project is valuable because it brings SEO concepts to the forefront, and a good trainer knows how to get the team thinking about both SEO concepts and different approaches in the upcoming redesign project. Training doesn’t have to be a full day; adjust the scope to the size of the knowledge gaps. Questions to ask yourself: □□ Does the team know everything they need to know for a successful launch in terms of SEO? □□ What does the team need to learn, and can in-house staff teach it or do you need to hire someone?

Contribute to the Wireframes Invest the time with designers at the beginning of the design phase to ensure that pages are designed with SEO best practices in mind. Make sure that the designs presented to the project team are SEO approved so that no one gets married to a design that isn’t searchengine friendly. Questions: □□ Do the designs have functionality that generates special SEO requirements? □□ Is there any functionality at risk of not being seen by search engines? □□ Is there anything that SEO needs added to the design to make it optimal for SEO? □□ Is there enough body copy? □□ What notations or direction for developers should be added to the wireframes?

Make the New Information Architecture Keyword Driven (at Least a Little): Work with the person or team defining the information architecture and taxonomy. Ensure that the content is semantically defined and aligned. Questions: □□ Can the information architecture and taxonomy be improved in a way that gives better keyword alignment? □□ Has internal linking changed? Is SEO “link juice” most strategically passed?

Redefine the Keyword Strategy Overhaul (or create) your targeted keyword list before the redesign and site migration, so that the keyword strategies are consistent with the goals of the new site, and the new site has what is needed to rank high for primary keywords. Questions: □□ Will the types of audience change? □□ Will content change? □□ Will new content need to be added? □□ Will the information architecture change?

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Write the SEO Requirements Here’s one of biggest mistakes I’ve seen when auditing in-house SEO: the SEO gives a few SEO requirements verbally in a meeting, then says “make it search-engine friendly.” The problem is that most people do not know what “search-engine friendly” means. To put it into perspective, the baseline SEO requirements that we send to project teams contain over 160 items. Questions: □□ Are you writing your own SEO requirements? □□ How thorough are they?

□□ Are they working, or do you continue to have challenges on every project?

Ensure That the CMS Will Be Search-Engine Friendly Vet the platform and integration vendor thoroughly. Make sure that you understand all of the functionality and inherent SEO risks. Define specific SEO requirements for the CMS and talk with the vendor about them before you sign (many CMS systems are not searchengine friendly out of the box). In particular, ask about customizing and pattern defining title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Questions: □□ What needs to happen in the CMS? □□ Which SEO requirements are addressed in the quote price versus what will be a custom build? □□ Which SEO requirements are not feasible with this platform?

Define Search-Engine Friendly URLs Work with development to understand system URL needs, then suggest a proposed SEO-friendly version of the URL. Watch for parameters, tracking codes, and other common URL challenges Questions: □□ What technical elements need to be in the URL? □□ Will tracking codes ever be in the URL (even with cookies turned off)? □□ What is the worst-case-scenario URL (the longest and most complex)?

Define a URL Migration Plan Define the current information architecture and map that against the redesigned site. Focus on strategically passing all page values throughout the new website, with emphasis on semantic alignments. Question: □□ What are the URLs currently on the site and where would their value be best placed on the new site? continues on page 26

SOCIAL MEDIA

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4 Unique Approaches for Measuring Social Media ROI A look at the creative ways to measure (or at least validate) your social media efforts. by Krista Neher

alculating ROI in social media is a hot topic. As companies have rushed into the elusive social media marketing gold mine, many are left trying to figure out if all the time and effort are paying off. The problem is that social media is extremely difficult to measure. In a former life, I worked as a financial analyst at P&G, and a big part of my job was to measure the ROI of our different marketing efforts. In calculating the return on traditional media, we often found that we couldn’t exactly calculate everything, so we resorted to some creative approaches. There are many challenges to measuring the return from social media: •• The volume of social media activity isn’t always related to social media efforts. A provocative television spot or a new product launch can generate social media mentions that aren’t related to your specific social media efforts. •• The value of social media is more than just marketing and can involve product research, customer service, public relations, and consumer research. All of these benefits can’t easily be tied back to a sales number. •• Even what we can count isn’t always accurate. When measuring online, we often look at the last click that led someone to our website, and brands will look at traffic and possibly sales generated from social media sites. The problem is that we know in marketing that it takes up to seven touch points to build a brand impression, and only attributing the last click minimizes the role that other marketing tools played. •• Traditional metrics of reach don’t work well because the quality of impressions on social media sites can be very different. We measure traditional media

based on reach or how many people are exposed to the message, but in social media, the message can range from positive to negative and from passive to highly involved, making it difficult to determine the value of each impression. These are only a few of the challenges that you may face as a part of your social media marketing measurement.

Creative Ways to Measure (or at Least Validate) Your Social Media Efforts Measuring ROI isn’t always an exact science (unless you have a large measurement budget based on complex modeling), but there are some approaches to measurement that can at least validate your efforts. 1. The value of a customer-backward math. One approach that may help validate social media efforts is to use backward math to determine if your social media efforts are likely to be profitable. The first step is to understand the lifetime value of a customer—not what one purchase is worth, but the total profit of purchases that an average customer makes over the entire time that he or she does business with you. Costs/lifetime value of one customer = # of new customers acquired in social media for neutral ROI. For example, if a new customer is worth $1,000 in profits over his or her lifetime and I spend $5,000 in social media per month, I would need to acquire five new customers through my social media activities for it to pay out. 2. Paid value of traffic. Social media often drives traffic back to your website. One creative way to look at the value from social media is to consider what that traffic would have cost if it had been acquired by running ads. This method is based on using the pay per click market value of traffic to approximate

the value of the website traffic earned through social media. For example: A Facebook ad for your target costs $2 per click. You received 500 unique visitors to your website from your Facebook marketing. That traffic is worth 500 visitors x $2 = $1,000. Using the paid value of the traffic is a way to approximate the value of the traffic. There are many differences between the quality of traffic that comes from paid advertising versus organic social media, but it can be used as an approximation. 3. Lost customer value. Many customers who have had a bad experience with a business take to Facebook or Twitter to vent about their experiences. This provides an opportunity for businesses to seek out customer complaints and respond to them. Similar to the backward math used in the first approach, this approach looks at how many customers were not lost because of social media and is based on the lifetime value of the customer. Lifetime value of the customer x 0.5 (to account for the portion that the customer has already spent with the company) = $$ not lost because of social media. But the value doesn’t stop there. Angry customers have an amplification factor, which means that they tell others about their experience and cost you customers. Pete Blackshaw wrote the book Satisfied Customers Tell 3 Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000 about this principle. If you’re able to satisfy an angry customer, you’re probably also gaining additional new customers (or not losing additional ones) by continues on page 26

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Get It Right, Before the Launch continued from page 24

Conduct SEO Code Checks Few SEOs are technical enough to conduct proper SEO code checks; as a result, they rarely think of checks, let alone execute them. You can fix many issues during the development phase if you add code checks to the project plan. If you do not have the skills to do this in house, it’s worth outsourcing (at the very least for the most important templates on the site). Questions: □□ Do we have the technical skills to do an SEO code check? □□ Have SEO code checks been added to the project plan?

Improve the 404 Page There is a good chance that people will hit the 404 page from a search engine after a redesign, so make sure that it drives people into the site rather than to the back button. Some ideas are to link to main sections of the website; customize the content based on

content contained in the original URL; and design the page in a way to gracefully display promotions such as free shipping that would encourage the user to take the extra time to find the right page. Questions: □□ What could go on our 404 page that would cause the user to continue looking on our site? □□ What are other sites doing that we can learn from (both positive and negative examples)?

QA Test the Site before Launch, Thoroughly Too many SEOs either do not QA test a website, or do a spot-check rather than a proper and systematic check. If a site takes months to code, a proper QA test will take several hours and maybe a couple of days. It’s worth investing the time to find and fix issues before the launch. Questions: □□ Are we doing QA testing systematically?

□□ What needs to go into the QA testing checklist? □□ How can SEO get more than a few days before launch to test, so there is time to make technical changes?

Set up a Monitoring Plan Before launch, put everything in place to monitor the migration’s progress from an SEO standpoint, looking for any signals that indicate an SEO problem to fix. Questions: □□ What needs to be set up before launch? □□ Who will monitor it? □□ Do they know what to look for, how to spot red flags in the data, and what actions to take? Jessica Bowman, CEO of SEOinhouse.com, is a leading advocate for in-house SEO and is known for creating innovative, advanced, sustainable, and scalable in-house SEO programs.

4 Unique Approaches for Measuring Social Media ROI continued from page 25 limiting the angry-customer effect. Based on your type of business, you can create an estimate of what the angry customer effect could cost you. It may be two customers or 20 customers. Value of not losing customers = the number of customers not lost in the angry customer effect x the lifetime value of a customer x the number of formerly angry customers each month. 4. Probable reach. Reach is one of the oldest measures of marketing and it’s how traditional marketing is typically judged. Reach is the number of people who have been exposed to your brand. In the introduction I talked about the difficulties of using this metric for social media. That being said, understanding your reach and comparing

26 SES • March 2012 {London}

it to what you might pay for that reach can help justify your social media efforts. Many assume the reach is as simple as looking at the number of fans/friends/followers you have, but it’s much more complicated. The key to understanding reach is to first estimate your true organic reach from your fans. Many think that this is simply the number of followers they have, but it’s probably somewhere between 5 percent and 20 percent of your followers, depending on your engagement levels. Facebook shows impressions in page analytics, which is a good way to determine reach, and on Twitter it might be 20 percent or less of your followers. The value doesn’t stop there. When others interact with your brand, they are also providing brand impressions to the people that they are connected with. This means that when people interact with your brand

on a social network, their interaction gives you reach with their connections as well. Brand reach = number of followers x number of posts x 5 percent actually seeing posts. Social network amplification = number of interactions x average number of followers x 20 percent actually seeing posts. Value = total reach x cost per impression of other media. Krista Neher is the author of the bestselling Social Media Field Guide, an international speaker, and currently CEO of Boot Camp Digital, which is a leading provider of social media marketing training and consulting solutions.

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sessions

New Topics at SES

Download the app or visit www.SESNewYork.com for complete agenda and session descriptions.

Day 1—Tuesday, March 20 1:15–2:15pm

Speaker: Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!

SO/LO/MO Track The Psychology of Social Commerce (Do Not Be Afraid!)

Speaker: Marita Scarfi, CEO, Organic, Inc.

To market effectively in today’s social commerce world, you must understand how your potential customers are behaving online. How well do they see and understand your product information? Just how important are those online product reviews? How do social rules and subconscious needs figure into the mix? How do the buying habits of family and friends influence potential buyers? What explains the popularity of the discount member sites? How do you overcome the repeat “trusted brand” purchase? How do you capitalize on the consumer trend of sharing good deals within the community? It sounds like a lot to cover, but in this jam-packed session you will have all of this demystified for you by our esteemed panel of social commerce experts! Speaker: Chad Childress, Senior Consultant, Crown Partners

Speaker: Michael Mothner, Founder & CEO, Wpromote Inc.

Speaker: Dana Todd, Vice President of Performance Innovation, Performics

Day 2—Wednesday, March 21 11:15–12:15pm

SEO Track Anatomy of the Perfect Landing Page: Design Elements Exposed Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and make it a part of your landing page and optimization framework. Bryan Eisenberg, who has optimized thousands of landing pages over the years, will reveal a simple framework for understanding the ten key elements of a landing page and where and how you can use landing pages effectively and efficiently. You’ll also learn his three-step formula for making each of your key landing page elements perform the way it should. Solo presentation by: Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board; New York Times Bestselling Author, bryaneisenberg.com 11:15–12:15pm

1:15–2:15pm

Accelerator Track Tablet Display Advertising: Challenges and Opportunities With the launch of the iPad 2 and a suite of Android tablets, it is safe to say that tablet display advertising offers marketers a very unique and totally new medium of mobile engagement with consumers. Given the rapid growth in the use of tablets, advertisers would be wise to incorporate tablet advertising into their marketing plans. But tablet advertising is not without its challenges. What is the best way to deal with these new advertising platforms and networks in this post-PC medium? In this session we will address solutions to these and other challenges in this new and burgeoning marketplace. Moderator: Heidi Cohen, President, Riverside Marketing Strategies

Accelerator Track Why Doesn’t Anyone Care about the Creative Anymore? In this new world of exchange traded media, where impressions are cheap and context is forgotten, the execution of the creative messages has evolved from the central role into just another data point to be optimized. The panel will debate the role that creative plays today, looking at both sides of the argument. Is campaign success dependent on a thousand versions of a banner, each optimized to the single pixel, or is the overall message still the key to success? Moderator: Dax Hamman, Chief Revenue Officer, Chango

Speaker: Jon Aizen, Director of Display Initiative, Yahoo!

continues on page 28

sesconference.com • SES 27

sessions SES London | March 19–23, 2012 | hosted by New Topics at SES (Cont’d)

Download the app or visit www.SESNewYork.com for complete agenda and session descriptions.

Speaker: Sarah Lockwood, VP, Creative, Booyah Advertising

4:00–5:00pm

trends shifted in in-house expertise? What exposure to emerging trends and tools do in-house digital marketing employees get? Does agency statement or POV weigh more than that of an inhouse digital marketer? Finally, the panel will debate the biggest question of all: when is it better for clients to use in-house talent or an external agency?

Accelerator Track Viewable Impressions: The Key to Online Media Performance through Smarter Buying In January, comScore released a study of 12 big brands in which 31% of the 1.7 billion ad impressions sampled were never in view. Viewable media is one of the largest paradigm shifts facing the industry right now, permeating the very core of how media is planned, purchased, and optimized. New technologies are enabling real-time solutions that are moving the digital world into the reality of fully trackable and accountable media. Knowing which audiences view your ad, in which environment, and to what impact, is enabling marketers to make better decisions, validate metrics, and increase ROI. This new world order moves beyond the “opportunity” to see an ad into the actualized effect. This panel is for anyone involved in agency or publisher decision making within display, video, mobile, social, and other CPM purchased media. If you have ever wondered about the following, this panel is for you: •• What counts as a ‘viewable impression’? •• What is the right pricing model for display media? •• What viewable media technologies exist and how do I implement? •• How do I know what ads are being seen? •• Should I pay for ads that aren’t seen? •• What does this mean for me as a buyer or publisher?

Day 3—Thursday, March 22

Moderator: Simon Heseltine, Director of SEO, AOL Inc.

Speaker: Mitchell Cross, Director of Search Marketing, Communication Media, Inc.

Speaker: Ulrich Gilot, VP, Search Marketing (SEO), Citi, NA Marketing

Speaker: Jennifer Rouillard, Managing Director, Epic Search Partners

1:00–2:00pm

SO/LO/MO Track Winning! Measuring Social Media Success So you’re tweeting daily, updating your Facebook status, and blogging on your website—maybe because you feel you need to, or maybe because everyone else is doing it. But what value do these efforts bring you, and how do you measure the return you get? What’s the value of a fan or follower, and how do you know if you should continue what you’re doing or switch up your strategy? Come to this session prepared to learn meaningful social media metrics, ways to measure your efforts, and tactics to refine your strategy.

1:00–2:00pm

SEO Track Agency vs. In-House SEO: What’s a Client to Do? It’s an age-old question: should we hire an agency, or bring an expert on staff? While it varies by the company and situation, best practices do exist for all clients to find the holy grail of search success. Featuring experts from both sides, this panel discussion will tackle the stereotypes plaguing the profession, which often break down communication on both sides. Does the agency really always know best or does the client bring more to the table? Does the best ROI come from having in-house search staff or are elusive savings best found by agencies? What must the client know to get the most out of the agency’s performance? The discussion will also focus on new trends in agency relations and search staffing. How has recruiting changed? How have

28 SES • March 2012 {London}

Moderator: Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT)

Speaker: Tami Dalley, Director, Analytics and Insights, Buddy Media

Speaker: Eli Goodman, Media Evangelist, comScore, Inc.

Speaker: Daniel Lemin, Consultant & Analyst, Social Studio

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sessions

1:00-2:00pm

2:15–3:15pm

Filthy Linking Rich Track Enterprise Link Building

Spotlight Session Lords of the Links

Did you ever think that developing and executing a link building strategy for a large enterprise site is too daunting a task to even begin? Well if you break it up into your internal and external strategies, you can chunk it into bite-sized pieces. Externally, you’d be surprised by what a rich landscape of existing links you already have—all you need to do is determine what your priorities are and what links you already have, and try to fill in the key gaps. But you will need to accomplish this in a way that won’t get you into trouble with the engines and that takes advantage of social linking to get your visitors to do some of the heavy lifting for you. Internally, you probably have many links that are just not right, so you may need to spend a bit more time fixing that situation. This session will guide you along the process and will provide simple steps to get back on the right path to get the most out of what links can contribute to your site performance and the tools you can use to get there.

They are the wizards, the sorcerers, the lords of the links. These are the magicians who make link magic happen. As Mike Grehan said in his often quoted and timeless 2004 article entitled “Filthy Linking Rich,” “The richer you are with links pointing back to your site, the richer you are likely to become in search marketing terms.” In this lively panel, you will hear how these linking masters have made linking history and how you too can become a lord of the links. Find out how “the rich get richer!” Please note: This panel will be discussion format.

Moderator: Bill Hunt, SES Advisory Board; President, Back Azimuth Consulting

Speaker: Chris Bennett, President & Founder, 97th Floor

Moderator: Loren Baker, VP of Business Development, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.

Speaker: Dixon Jones, Marketing Director, MajesticSEO

Speaker: Wil Reynolds, Founder, SEER Interactive

Speaker: Marcus Tandler, CEO/Partner, Tandler.Doerje

Speaker: Doug Platts, Senior Director, SEO, iCrossing

Speaker: Lee M. Moore, Digital Marketing Program Mgr., Search, IBM

sesconference.com • SES 29

sessions SES London | March 19–23, 2012 | hosted by Sessions New to SES New York

Download the app or visit www.SESNewYork.com for complete agenda and session descriptions.

Day 1—Tuesday, March 20 Speaker: Suren Ter-Saakov, COO, SEOquake 11:00–12:00pm

SEO Track The Tools of the Trade for SEO If you are responsible for your company’s search engine optimization, then you know that you need all of the various tools of your trade close at hand. This session will describe the tools that will help you to accomplish your tasks, including indexing; competitive analysis; diagnosing and remedying problems; page and site level information; on-page optimization; and much more. Moderator: Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT)

Speaker: Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager, Bing

Speaker: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

1:15–2:15pm

Paid Search Track The Tools of the Trade for Paid Search The competition is fierce in paid search! From small in-house accounts to accounts with millions of keywords, it’s the new advances in SEM technology that could make the difference between success and failure. There are tools you could be using right now to help double your conversions, lower your costs, and save your team hours of time every week. In this panel top paid-search-tool experts will showcase the very latest in bid management; campaign workflow efficiencies; and what the future holds for the industry.

Speaker: Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Performics Moderator: Marc Poirier, Co-Founder & VP Marketing, Acquisio Speaker: T.R. Harrington, Chief Operating Officer, Darwin Marketing

Speaker: Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH

Speaker: Michael King, SEO Manager, Publicis Modem Speaker: Jeff Ferguson, CEO, Fang Digital

11:00–12:00pm

Paid Search Track Paid Search Competitive Analysis An essential component of any search marketing plan is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. This knowledge helps you comprehend what links to gain, ad prices to pay, content to offer, and customers to seek. In this session, we’ll take a close look at what tricks you can use with search engines to analyze your competitors’ game and also what free and premium tools are available to deep dive into their strategy.

2:45–3:45pm

SEO Track SEO Competitive Analysis Competitive analysis is one of the most important and informative components of an SEO strategy. Your competitors are a wealth of free information. From determining which links are providing your competitors with the most value, to deciphering what their most profitable keywords are, with the right systems in place you’ll be able to capitalize on their mistakes and learn from their successes.

Moderator: Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board; President, Page Zero Media

Moderator: Richard Zwicky, Chairman, BlueGlass

Speaker: Stephanie Bailey, Client Manager, Adlucent

Speaker: Rob Garner, Vice President, Strategy, iCrossing

30 SES • March 2012 {London}

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sessions

Speaker: Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Founder, Search & Online Comm., Nordic eMarketing

Speaker: Daren Gill, Chief Product Officer, Veveo

Speaker: Marcus Tober, CTO, SearchMetrics Inc.

Speaker: Brian Klais, Founder and Chief Strategist, Pure Oxygen Labs

2:45–3:45pm

Speaker: Adam Towvim, Vice President, Business Development, Jumptap

Accelerator Track Protecting High-Value Branded Search Terms Online marketing executives from two successful ecommerce companies will present case studies about going on the offensive to identify and stop illegal use of their companies’ brand search terms. These marketers ferreted out counterfeiters and affiliates who siphoned off traffic from PPC campaigns. In this session you will learn: •• How to reduce your PPC campaign cost by up to 40%. •• How to increase new customer traffic. •• How to eliminate hundreds of illegal competitors. Moderator: Richard Brown, Paid Search Director, iSpy Marketing

1:00–2:00pm

Paid Search Track Analytics for Paid Search In PPC, the job of an analyst is not to come up with obscure statistical nuggets, or to nitpick on small points. Rather, the analyst should be nimble, tightly aligned with business results, and capable of moving smoothly between fine details and core business drivers. Which metrics are worth your time? What new tools and reports are useful? Which will waste your time? Is it time to step up your use of campaign automation? How can you build a better dashboard to help synthesize multiple campaign efforts? Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Speaker: Alex Irvin, Online Programs Director, 1 800 PetMeds

Speaker: Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board; President, Page Zero Media

Speaker: Caroline Rolfe, Head of Online, Links of London

Speaker: Joseph Kerschbaum, Vice President, Clix Marketing

Day 3—Tuesday, March 22 10:45–11:45am

SO/LO/MO Advanced Mobile Marketing Journey into the future as we review the latest mobile tools, technology, and tactics for marketing. Get inspired from real-world case studies and Jetsons-style examples that demonstrate present-day opportunities, risks, costs, and implementation/learning curves. From HTML5 and mobile barcodes to augmented reality and location-based engagement, you’ll learn how to confidently approach and integrate advanced mobile marketing tactics to drive and support your business goals.

2:15-3:15pm

Spotlight Session Advanced Keyword Modeling Google Instant’s and Bing’s intent-based results are creating a need for a new generation of keyword research, expansion, and modeling techniques. This session will offer ways to integrate data from search, social, and traditional media to identify new opportunities and revenue streams. Solo presentation by: Bill Hunt, SES Advisory Board; President, Back Azimuth Consulting

Moderator: Angie Schottmuller, Founder, Interactive Artisan

sesconference.com • SES 31

SES Conference & Expo is the leading global event series that educates professionals in search and social marketing, putting a special focus on tactics and best practices. SES Events provide instructions from the industry’s top experts, including representatives from the Search Engines themselves.

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