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Do you live in London and enjoy search engine marketing, but maybe not the job you currently have? Join me!

Viator is seeking a London-based Online Marketing Manager, who will be responsible for driving traffic and conversion across seven European sites, including paid and natural search, affiliate development and retail initiatives.

We are looking for an experienced online marketer with excellent analytical skills and commercial awareness. This challenging role provides fantastic opportunity for a self-motivated person seeking to further their product career in a dynamic and fast-growing online business.

Interested? Get in touch with me kelly{at}viator.com.

Industry, Tip of My Hat

If you live under a rock you might not be aware, but more than likely you have heard that Microsoft and Yahoo have come to terms on a ten year search deal. The most relevant points for paid search engine marketing managers are these:

• Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic/paid search platform for Yahoo.
• Yahoo will be the exclusive seller of both companies’ premium advertisers while self-serve advertising will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter.
• The latest timeline I’ve seen suggests that paid Microsoft/Bing results will being appearing on Yahoo in early 2011 in major markets with the goal of all results by early 2012.

While it might be tempting to forget all about Yahoo’s switch to Microsoft paid search results, after all you have until early 2011 (that’s like a year away!), I would definitely encourage search engine marketers to start laying the groundwork now to manage risk in the switchover and get ahead of the competition.

1. Start a MSN AdCenter account. If you haven’t already, get your ppc campaigns up and running on Bing/Microsoft. They are garnering more search query share (~9% in July 2009) so search engine marketers should be advertising on Bing just to get the incremental revenue from another search engine anyway at this point. And eventually, you’re going to need an account there when Yahoo stops showing your ppc ads. If there’s any hiccups in transferring over Yahoo campaigns when the switch is made, it won’t matter to you as you’ll already have all those campaigns running on MSN. Bonus, you’ll have historical MSN data to compare to before the switchover, that plus your historical Yahoo data will tell you what your new MSN with Yahoo performance should be if all is working well after the switch.
2. Start getting regular reports out of Yahoo. Data is one of the most valuable assets a search engine marketer can have and who knows what will happen to yours when Yahoo ceases to operate their sponsored search platform. Pull regular monthly reports and store them if you haven’t been doing regular reports. When the switchover occurs, you’ll be armed with historical data to compare how well your Microsoft listings on Yahoo are performing versus your old Yahoo listings. You can also identify any year over year losses or softness and focus on improving those areas. This is all about mitigating risk and keeping your paid search engine marketing campaign performance as good as ever.
3. Get familiar with MSN’s interface and reports. I am sure in the coming year changes and enhancements will be made, but MSN’s AdCenter is a different beast than Yahoo or Google’s paid search platforms. Spend some time learning how it works, you’ll have an advantage over everyone scrambling to learn when the switchover is made.
4. Try to get an account manager at MSN. If your spend is in the thousands, try to get an account manager at MSN. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a real person when issues arise. If you start now, by 2011 you will have built a rapport with your account contact and they’ll be ready to help with any transition issues that arise when Yahoo changes over.
5. Don’t procrastinate. I know, I know, 2011 seems like ages from now. But think about how busy you are with just day to day search engine marketing tasks and if you spend just a little time each week pulling some Yahoo reports and getting your account up on MSN, you’ll be happy you had a year to get it all done. Trust me, its going to suck if you wait until the last minute.

Do you have other suggestions on preparing for the Yahoo-MSN switchover? I’d love to hear them, leave a comment!

Industry microhoo, microsoft paid search, microsoft yahoo merger, yahoo paid search

I was at SMX Advanced last week and spent some time reviewing my notes and take aways from the sessions in the hopes of formulating some sort of coherent to-do list for myself. I noticed a couple of things I learned, so I thought I would share:

1. Google’s search query report just got more useful. Many less “other unique queries” and more actual queries exposed. I checked this one out myself, and its true, so thanks Google for making that better!

2. Only 5% of internet users time is spent searching, the other 95% is spent doing other things on the web. Fascinating. See, I told you content targeting was a good idea.

3. No one seems excited about bid management tools. One session has presenters explicitly talked about ways to calculate for yourself what your ideal bid should be and most people I talked to either weren’t using a system or didn’t think it was worth the money. Also with quality score’s ability to enormously impact bids, most marketers thought that was more important to optimize quality score than finely monitoring the bid itself.

4. Quality score is super important. There was a whole session on quality score and how important it is at the account, ad, keyword and landing page levels. Also general advice was given that if you have keywords with a score below 5, you should consider removing them or at least moving them to alleviate possible tainting. I knew it was important, but this really made me think much more about it.

5. Mobile is still early days. The mobile session presenters were great, but my big takeaway was that unless you’ve got a super perfect for mobile product (like a ringtone, or iphone app), then its still really early days for you to gain mobile adopters. The volume isn’t there yet.

Thanks to everyone who gave their time and expertise to making the sessions and roundtable discussions so worthwhile! I had a great time speaking and meeting lots of other search engine marketers.

Industry, Speaking Engagements search engine marketing education, smx advanced

Check out the official word on the Google Adwords trademark policy change here.

Basically if a site sells a brand name, or has information on it, its fair game to use the trademark in the ad text. This is a pretty huge change that I am sure many trademark protective brands, especially ones that sell through multiple online distribution channels, will not like. For example, its now fair game for a hotel aggregator like Expedia to bid on and display in their ad text a brand name, like Hilton hotels.

I think it is a smart move for Google to get out of arbitrating trademark issues as much as possible. Though big brand advertisers will be irritated with them, they’ve washed their hands of being the middle man. Now all those brands will have to hash out agreements with their distribution channels, which they probably should have done anyway. And of course their lawyers will have many threatening letters to send. And its likely Google will increase revenues with this move, CTRs for ads that now can use the brand name are sure to rise.

It never made sense that an advertiser could bid on a brand name keyword, but couldn’t display it in the ad text. How exactly can you say you offer Segway tours without using the word Segway? In some cases like that one, its just impossible.

Industry brand names in search, google trademark policy change

SEMcast #6 is up on geekcast.fm, or if you subscribe to the feed in iTunes or another software you’ll see it appear. Today’s podcast is all about the dilemma of inheriting a paid search account. The podcast addresses how to restructure and mitigate risk.

In other news, Viator launched their German language site, so willkommen to it. Do I speak German? Nein. Do I run German language ppc campaigns for the site? Ja! How is this miracle achieved? Check out SEMcast #4 and learn best practices for non-English campaigns.

Lastly, have you tried the new Google AdWords interface? Get a preview and provide feedback on the AdWords interface changes.

Industry, Tip of My Hat new adwords design, new adwords interface, paid search engine marketing, semcast, viator.de

I know a ton of other bloggers have blogged about this, but I was really impressed by the recent video from Google explaining their ad auction model. Very simply and clearly the components of Quality Score are explained, and their relative weight, as well as how calculations of rank and ultimate CPC paid are derived. Kudos to Hal Varian, an economist after my own heart, for doing such a nice job.

So watch it already!

Industry, Tip of My Hat google auction ad video, google quality score, hal varian google adwords video

I have officially entered the world of podcasting! You can listen and subscribe to the SEMcast on geekcast.fm, I look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions, don’t be shy!

Industry, Tip of My Hat search engine marketing podcast, sem podcast

Sadly I won’t be attending or speaking at SMX West this year. 2009 marks my mother’s 60th birthday and she is an avid dog lover, so we’re off to the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York to celebrate. Unfortunately its the same time as SMX West so this year I miss out! If you want to read a blog post about the dog show, I’m sure I’ll be posting one on the Viator Travel Blog once I return. I hope everyone has a great time, learn something new and have a cocktail at a networking event for me!

Industry, Speaking Engagements smx west 2009

As you might have seen I crossed the pond to speak at SMX London earlier this month. From talking to several UK SEOs there seems to be an impression that SMX is for more advanced search marketers, which probably explains why the boot camp track was sort of empty and the more advanced sessions packed full. The Fundamentals of Search Advertising panel was truly international consisting of me (USA! USA!), Ophir Cohen (Israel), Alan K’necht (Canada) and Richard Gregory (UK). Everybody had something a little bit different to say, but I think all the thoughts were very complimentary and I hope the audience learned a lot.

Most of the sessions I attended were fairly worthwhile, though I think it is worth noting that if you are going to attend just one search marketing event, SMX West is really where its at. SMX West is much, much bigger and more well attended and a better opportunity for networking. Also I think SMX West topics are more advanced and cutting edge. That said, I did learn things from SMX London and meet some new folks, so it was certainly worth the time.

One trend I noticed in presentations (and maybe it was just the sessions I was in) is that there’s a tendency to talk a lot about bad marketing tactics, and to do so at such a length that less time is actually spent on good ones and best practices, which I find much more actionable and useful. Telling me what not to do doesn’t really help me do anything (just helps me not do things). I concede that knowing where to draw the line is good and learning from mistakes is important, but I’d prefer to see more than half the content be about success than failure. In particular I found the Integrating Search and Display session to mainly focus on bad examples and very few actual best practices.

Enough on my opinion, I filled out my feedback form! See you all at SMX West in a few months.

Industry, Speaking Engagements, Uncategorized search marketing expo london, smx london

Google released an SEO guide today - huzzah! While the SEO guide is very basic, it does have really good advice for novices to SEO and will hopefully serve as a great primer for folks getting started with their SEO efforts. Basic, almost common sense advice about meta tags, anchor text, site maps and content is the bulk of the guide. Kudos to Google for the clear and concise explanations and for finally giving some basic advice to the little guys who need help the most.

Get the Google SEO guide here.

Industry, Tip of My Hat google seo guide, seo advice, starter seo guide