Last week I had the pleasure of hopping on an airplane and flying 3000 miles to attend the User Interface 13 Conference.

Guess what. It was well worth it, so I wanted to write a quick post thanking Jared Spool and his exceptional team at UIE for putting on such a valuable and efficient event. All of the sessions I attended were top-notch, but I just want to call out a few.

Jeremy Keith from Clearleft gave a home run seminar on “Bulletproof Ajax”. I’ve been to all-day Ajax seminars in the past, which were good, but Jeremy is a step above the rest in his knowledge, experience and seminar structure.

Luke Wroblewski’s “Content Page Design Best Practices” and Scott Berkun’s “Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It” I found especially motivating. These guys back up what they preach with tons of experience and are very entertaining as well. If you get a chance to attend one of their sessions at a conference, take it.

Then, of course, there is Mr. Spool. I could write a book about him. Don’t worry. I won’t. Jared’s vast knowledge gleaned from research in the field of User Experience is the core reason this conference is so worth it. Any team would walk away with new ideas on how to better serve their customers/users after attending Jared’s talks.

He’s pretty damn funny too.

All in all the UIE conference was terrific. I strongly recommend you check out next year’s event.

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In the past couple of years, Closed Loop Marketing has had more and more companies contact us who were actually already running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns - some managing in-house, some outsourcing to other agencies. So if they were already active in PPC, then why were they contacting CLM? Because by-and-large, these companies were quite disappointed in their PPC campaigns, with results ranging from mediocre to downright dismal, and they were searching for SEM guidance.

CLM was hired to audit and essentially ‘make over’ these accounts, and the results across-the-board have far surpassed even our expectations. At the Web Builder 2.0 conference last week in Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of speaking to this at a session called Extreme Makeover: SEM Edition. In this session, I shared the common pitfalls that we see companies fall into time and time again, the strategies that CLM applies to successfully remedy these common PPC-killers and the final outcomes of our clients’ Extreme SEM Makeovers. In that same spirit, CLM has created ‘SEM for ROI - Top 10 SEM Inspection Checklist’. This checklist represents what we consider some of the most impactful elements to critique first within your PPC campaigns to find areas for improvement.

#1

Download a Search Query Performance Report from Google AdWords (note that such a report is not available in Yahoo or MSN - only Google). Mine this for more keywords to add, as well as more negative keywords to add.

#2

Calculate your ROI from Broad, Phrase and Exact matched iterations of your keywords to determine profitability for each and adjust your match type strategy accordingly. This can parsed from the Search Query Performance report.

#3

Download a Placement Performance Report from Google AdWords (this report is not available in Yahoo or MSN). Use this to identify which Content Network Sites are not converting well, and set up site exclusions accordingly.

(Read the full article…)

One of our clients – Ifbyphone - just announced some new functionality that will make it a LOT easier for advertisers to track phone leads by advertising campaign and pull the data into Google Analytics. We're especially excited about what this means for Search Engine Marketing campaigns, although it can be used to track calls from any kind of advertising.

We've always been frustrated when our SEM campaign ROI has been underreported because we didn't have an easy way of telling what phone calls originated from Search. Even in those cases where we had a sense for how much call volume our Search campaigns were driving, we could never attribute the calls to the originating Campaign or Ad Group so we could adjust bids and spending to ensure we were getting the most out of the campaigns.

Some advertisers have developed a basic multiplier they apply to their web leads/sales to account for the lift from phone sales we all knew was happening even though we couldn't measure it. That's better than nothing, but not very precise or actionable.

Some more advanced advertisers have set up custom 800 numbers for various campaigns so they could get more granular call data. But in most cases they had to manually marry up the web data with the phone data, usually weeks or months after the fact. This enabled some better intelligence, but still fell short of having one system tracking everything in real time.

But with Ifbyphone's new system, now we can achieve the vision of having web and phone lead data reported in ONE system. And not just any system, but the very popular Google Analytics. See Thomas Howe's review of this new capability from Ifbyphone here: Simple and Brilliant.

More on how it works on the Ifbyphone blog here: Phone Mashup for Tracking Call Data in Googe Analytics.

More detailed information will be coming out shortly.

As with many things, it will take some good planning and upfront work in order to get the most out of this new capability. But the bottom line is that this solves a big problem for a lot of advertisers. If you drive a decent amount of call volume from your campaigns, you owe it to yourself to check out this new tool. It's an easy and low-cost way to make sure you're spending your advertising dollars more intelligently. Who can argue with that?

During her crazy adventure to Finland for the Persuasive Technology conference (more on that here), CLM’s Amy Greer met a fascinating gentleman from the UK named Richard Sedley. Richard works at a UK-based agency called cScape managing the Customer Engagement group. Amy introduced me to Richard when she returned and, in an attempt to brush up on my transoceanic diplomacy skills, we’ve been conversing ever since.

Recently, Richard graciously asked CLM to participate in the Customer Engagement Survey he runs in conjunction with E-Consultancy. Having seen the people who participated in the past surveys (like Andy Beal and Avinash K), we jumped at the chance. You can see the summary report from the previous surveys here.
So I’m putting out the call to all companies (including agencies) to take the survey. It only takes a few minutes. I found it to be an eye-opening experience.

Take the survey

The Iceberg’s Tip

Since their inception, search engines have relied on the visible to locate relevant content. Visible text, to be precise. And not just any visible text, either - the text had to be accessible and readable to a web crawler. That is, it couldn’t be inside an animation, image, script, video, or a wide assortment of other file formats. It couldn’t be stored in a ‘deep web’ database such as the CDC or USGS, one that was reached only via an active user query. And it certainly couldn’t be spoken.

This meant that, for all the blow-your-mind number of visible web pages out there on the web, all this time only a tiny fraction of the available content has been indexable and searchable by search engines. In 2001 the company BrightPlanet estimated in their white paper “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” that public search engines made only 0.03% of the total web content available to searchers. That’s tiny. And this estimate wasn’t even considering content hidden in images, audio files, and video. Like a giant iceberg of data and content, the majority of the web remained - and still remains - invisible to search. But this is all changing.

Making sense out of sound

Google’s beta release of Gaudi, its audio indexing tool heralds to the wider public a profound shift in the search environment. Why? Hasn’t audio search been around for years now? Actually, no. Not this way. (Read the full article…)