“Can your customers find you on the Internet?”
I attended a workshop last night with that title at the impressive International School of The Peninsula (it made me want to send my kids there).
It was organized by Silicon French, a “network of francophile professionals”. Some of the panelists were:
Daniel Laury, co-founder, President and CEO - LSF Network
Kevin Wilk, Director of Strategic Alliances - Overture
It was moderated by Angelique Blenstrup, Principal Blendstrup and Associates
Kevin the Overture chap (the online marketing arm of Yahoo!) had some interesting statistics:
- 3 years ago paid keywords accounted for 5% of internet advertising spending, now it's 40%
- $10 billion are spent yearly on internet advertising in the USA, and it's growing at more than 10%
- about 35% of conversions (to buy) occur more than 30 days after a user's first visit, but few sites track their visitors after that period so miss out on important data
Daniel's company is a Bay area “expert in precision marketing”, and they've teamed up with a Hyderabad-based company which does Search Engine Optimization. One reason the relationship works so well is that the adword campaigns they manage can run up to tens of thousands of keywords. India's inexpensive and educated workforce can help sort through those massive numbers.
The evening's highlight for me was one of the panelists describing how they often create individual landing pages to cater for keywords. For example, a dating service catering for the “San Francisco French speaking” hopefuls would have its own page tailor made with those particular keywords. It makes sense, since the keywords are more likely to be cheap and the users who click through get exactly what they were looking for.
Towards the end of the workshop, I asked them if they ever used blogs to increase their clients' rankings, and they unanimously answered no, because “the technology is too new and we don't understand enough about its effect on Search Engine rankings.” Hmm…