Recent announcements from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Apple, among other companies point to integrating semantic, voice, and gesture technologies into search and apps for desktop and mobile devices, as well as connected TVs. Join us to explore these technologies and how each influences search engine marketing through data, metrics, attribution, social and more.

Get in on the Fun – for free!

If you’re in charge of search engine marketing for a major brand or retailer, MediaPost offers complimentary passes to SIS. To begin the application process simply send your full contact info and one or two sentences about your role to Rob McEvily at rob@mediapost.com.

Complimentary Brand Marketer pass includes:
* Summit registration ($2995 value)
* Accommodations at the South Seas Island Resort for three nights
* No Charge Activities such as golf, fishing charter, kayaking, dophin cruise, and more
* Meals, drinks and functions over three days

We hope to see you there!

Starting Out

Some roundtable guests were just getting their start with ecommerce for chain stores in Mexico. The table chipped in with tips to help them:

1. Make sure you’re able to define and track success.  If you can’t define and track success, there’s almost no point launching a paid search campaign.
2. Plan out the structure of paid search campaigns carefully. Make campaign and ad group naming conventions consistent with categories and products. Keep seasonal and event promotions in separate campaigns.
3. Bid competitively when starting out. You’ll need to break into the auction against competitors that can rely on quality score history to help their page rank.
4. Determine whether you need an agency. Will your company have the budget to support full-time SEMs?
5. Find tools and technology that can help you scale your paid search, and make sure they fit with your individual business needs.  For example, would you like to manage social campaigns through the same platform? What about display campaigns?
6. Use ad extensions and product feeds.
7. Have a mobile-friendly site and extend your search campaigns to mobile.

Further Down the Road

Whether just starting out or veterans managing existing campaigns, the retailers at SES talked about facing the same challenges: deciding which parts of their product catalog to cover with long-tail keywords and relevant ads — and dedicating the time and resources to do so — versus broad-matched keywords and more generic ads. Retailers are forced to pick their battles and prioritize due to lack of resources.

Similar to the retailers we met at eTail West’s Search Summit, the majority of retailers aren’t leveraging their existing assets to discover new keywords or create more relevant ads. Existing product catalogs, on-site search query logs, and broad match reports for AdWords and AdCenter can help retailers increase their exact match keywords to serve more relevant ads to consumers.

I’m doing what I call a mobile “smash and grab.”  And I’m not alone, by far.

Last week Internet Retailer reported that 29% of in-store mobile researchers wind up buying online. There are two hugely important takeaways from this study:

-        Retailers have an opportunity to steal customers right out from under their competitors.

-        These same retailers need to safeguard their offline sales against mobile smash and grabs.

Why is this a big deal?  In-store consumers are a brick and mortar retailer’s most prized audience. These are the consumers who are so purchase ready, they have gotten in their cars, driven to the store, parked, navigated thru the aisles, and have (almost) found what they’re looking for.  They have taken many actions to qualify their intent.  They are motivated shoppers who know what they want.

A mobile smash and grab is not just a lost sale. It’s the loss of an extremely purchase-ready customer.  And, because the sale went directly to a competitor, it’s a direct shift in market share.  As such, I believe mobile search can make or  break retailers. And the sooner you get in on the action, the better.

For retailers to increase online profits and to avoid losing brick and mortar customers, extending paid search to mobile is crucial. Consumers are armed with so much data on the products they intend to purchase, retailers must price competitively and promote those prices through phone extensions, product extensions, product listing ads, mobile search ads, and even mobile-friendly sites.

Using mobile search ads to promote competitive prices and offer free shipping could be just the motivation that a customer needs to abandon their (physical) shopping cart at a competitor’s establishment in favor of your products and services.

Get Started Now

Because conversion rates aren’t quite on par with other channels (and because there is less competition right now), try copying your existing paid search campaigns and lowering your max CPCs. You may want to experiment with tweaking ad copy, e.g., try highlighting free shipping or discounted prices.

And of course, read up on the Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter mobile offerings to make sure you’re taking full advantage of them.

Intent in search is already high.  Intent in mobile search is even higher.  Retailers who climb the learning curve sooner will reap the rewards — and steal meaningful share — from retailers who are mobile laggards.

Across all three publications, the impact of the news on advertisers wasn’t clear.

From WSJ: “It’s also unclear exactly how Google’s search ads—which appear next to search results and are handled by separate teams inside the company—would change in response to the overhaul. But people briefed on the initiative said that if the search engine better understands the meaning or intent behind people’s search queries, Google could find a way to show them more relevant ads.”

From Internet Retailer: “Google, however, expects to continue innovating new ways to present paid search ads as well as overall search results, a source familiar with the company’s plans says.”

Solving for Relevance at Scale

Interestingly enough, Adchemy is taking the same approach Google is taking — trying to better understand a user’s intent to serve better results.  However, instead of improving algorithmic search results, Adchemy is focused on improving paid search results by leveraging user intent to improve relevance at scale across millions of keywords.

The fact that Google is focusing on intent is terrific validation of Adchemy’s approach. We’re confident that the online experience can be dramatically improved — to both the benefit of consumers and advertisers — if the industry can focus more on the intent behind the query, rather than just the query per se.   And Google seems to think so too.

Some of the feedback from the retailers on hand was surprising:

• More than half of the roundtable participants were not using their product catalog to generate keywords for their paid search campaigns.
• The retailers that were leveraging their product catalog to create keywords were mostly focused on model numbers and brand names, but not the intent-rich features and attributes like colors, materials, and size, which make for great input to keywords.

With only a handful of retailers using in-house assets to their fullest extent, there are a lot of growth opportunities and gains in competitive advantage to be had by harnessing sources of consumer intent to grow campaigns.

Aurelie highlighted several sources for keyword generation:

• On-site search:  Mine your query logs to use the terms and phrases that consumers use to search for products on your site for exact match keyword coverage — chances are, other consumers are searching for them on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
• Facets:  If your site utilizes faceted search, facets can be a good source for different product, price, and feature combinations to create new long-tail keywords.
• Broad match queries: Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter both report on the queries that come through broad match. Use these reports to promote high-converting queries with exact match, or use negative match terms to block inappropriate, non-converting terms.

There is a huge opportunity to win more customers and profits with long-tail, exact match keywords. As Rahmon Coupe, chief executive officer of YourAmigo pointed out, 70% of queries on Google do not have an exact match keyword. Considering that 20% of daily queries are new to Google (or are unique within the last six months), retailers need to get out in front of this issue to use their in-house data to create more relevant and profitable campaigns.

eTail continues through March 1st — and there will no doubt be a lot of issues that retailers will want to tackle after the conference –  but many retailers still have many opportunities to maximize their paid search advertising campaigns. Paid search is crucial to eCommerce success, because it’s still one of the highest ROI channels out there — it’s still one of the only venues for advertisers to match their product catalog to a consumer’s exact expressed intent.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

What will these Google products offer consumers, outside of a new and novel experience? The more I think about it, the more I believe the first iterations on augmented reality glasses will actually be a step back for consumers, while Google’s voice-activated TV (VA-TV) will be a big step forward.  Why? To me it’s as easy as posing a single question: what’s more valuable – contextually-targeted ads, or search ads? Search ads is the no-brainer answer.

Putting Things in Context Doesn’t Mean They are Relevant

Let me explain. Contextual ads are targeted to their surroundings. The model assumes that if the products I’m advertising match the content a consumer is reading, it’s a good ad to show. But this doesn’t take into account a consumer’s intent (or lack thereof) to purchase my products, and assumes that their interest in certain content equals intent to purchase. Google goggles seem to be offering the equivalent of a “contextual ad” experience. Just because a certain storefront or restaurant may be within a consumer’s field of vision doesn’t mean the consumer intends to visit that store. Showing them ads or offers simply because their proximity but without any expressed intent reduces the ad to an annoyance or distraction.

On the other hand, VA-TV has the potential to revolutionize broadcast TV in the same way AdWords revolutionized search almost 12 years ago.  VA-TV will serve users results based consumers’ voice queries. While queries and results will obviously revolve around television programming, Google’s vast roster of advertisers and the Google Shopper and Offers interfaces could lead to a new way of shopping online and attaching “sponsored listings” to related organic VA-TV results. It might even be possible to change the way commercials on TV are targeted. Imagine if VA-TV could take a consumer’s most recent voice-expressed intents and serve relevant ads during commercial breaks based on that intent! It would be like remarketing for television!

You Will Always Win When Monetizing Expressed Intent

While I may be looking far into the future, there is one thing that can’t be denied: the closer an advertiser is to meeting a consumer’s expressed intent with products or services that fulfill that intent, the more valuable the interaction will be. The intent expressed in searches — whether typed into a search engine, spoken into a phone or TV, indicated through gestures and touches, or derived from apps through sound or location — provides advertisers the opportunity to create a more relevant experience for consumers, which in turn increases the value of that interaction for advertisers and consumers alike.

As a sponsor, we are happy to offer you 20% OFF the full registration price! Use code “20ADCH” during the registration and checkout process.

If you plan on attending the conference and would like to learn more about Adchemy, please contact our sales team to set up a time to talk.

In addition to our sponsorship, we will be hosting the “Challenges Facing Retail SEM” Meet the Experts Roundtables, which happen a couple times throughout the conference.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Fortunately, there are some easy wins. And Adchemy’s here to help you out.

Join us for our webinar: “To Grow or Not to Grow? The Top 5 Opportunities for Online Retail SEM Campaigns in 2012″

Thi Thumasathit, VP of Marketing and New Business at Adchemy, will discuss strategies SEMs can follow to win more customers and increase profitability during 2012, including:

• Fully exploiting all distribution sources
• Capturing more consumers
• Restructuring campaigns to improve relevance

When: Thursday, February 23rd 10pm PST

Register Now!

• Google has released a small business-friendly version of AdWords (AdWords Express), created free telephone support in about 70 countries, launched a Mobile Site Builder to build simple sites, partnered with American Express on a “Get Your Business Online” campaign in 20 countries, and launched click-to-call phone extensions.
• Bing and Yahoo! Search offer “extensive programs to work with local partners”
• Facebook continues to build out new ad units and placements that small businesses have started to take advantage of

Having more SMB advertisers obviously improves Revenue per Search for web-based queries on the major search engines. SMB advertisers, however, are limited by their ability to geo target their paid search campaigns.  The query either needs to have a geography stated explicitly in the query — e.g., “shoes Des Moines” — or the advertiser needs to depend on imperfect geo-targeting based on IP address.  As such, it often doesn’t make sense for a local SMB to bid on a head term like “shoes.”

Mobile changes everything for SMB advertisers.  Geography no longer needs to be queried explicitly — all queries issued from a mobile device that has location services turned on will have a precise geo associated with them.  Geo then becomes an implicit intent instead of an explicit intent — someone searching for “shoes” in Des Moines is probably much more likely to respond to ad from a shoe store in the immediate vicinity.

The result is a win-win-win situation for everyone:  the consumer benefits from a better online experience; SMBs have much larger addressable market; and publishers who are able to infer implicit geographic intents will have more advertisers and higher Revenue per Search or Revenue per Impression.

Every day, more and more queries are issued from a mobile device. As a result, SMBs who are not actively marketing themselves via paid search marketing should start — otherwise, they’ll be missing out on  consumers in their neighborhood who are looking for the exact products or services that they sell.

… And then I started to think about all the ads I play whack-a-mole to avoid on Words with Friends.

While the advent of ad supported content will not (and should not) stop, I would like to offer some advice to all the marketers (retailers especially) out there: maximize spend on mobile search and local search before making significant investments in sponsoring/advertising on mobile content. I hope this is a no-brainer, but eMarketer’s predictions could throw marketers off the trail of truly valuable interactions: those that are rich in expressions of consumer intent.

Whack-a-Mole, Elaborated

When I’m playing Words with Friends (which is more often than I’d like to admit), I don’t care to learn about healthcare, the latest Charlize Theron indie flick, or even Zynga’s other games. What I want to do is play a game. These ad-supported games and content are not offering me anything of value and are not relevant (with one exception which I will reveal later). If I’m like other consumers, these ad dollars are largely wasted. If marketers want to chalk up these ads to building brand and awareness, I guess that’s their prerogative.

However, I conduct a lot of mobile searches too:  using Bing mobile (I like the pretty pictures) or other apps, I’m always looking for something to eat, something to drink, some new music to listen to, or the best deal on a Le Creuset Dutch oven. The restaurants, bars, and retailers (Le Creuset now on sale at Bloomingdale’s!) that can serve me ads during these searches are MUCH more likely to see my business, either online or in-store.

Why? Because ads served at the time of query are more relevant and valuable to me (and consumers in general), which makes them more valuable for the advertiser. These ads are not interruptions in my experience, but a valuable provider of information. These ads help me achieve my objective; they are aligned with my intent.

Get ‘em While They’re Hot

The early adopters in advertising technology usually enjoy a lengthy amount of time where there isn’t much competition, so market share and revenue generated by new channels can be high. With the big search publishers releasing new tools for mobile and local search advertising, NOW is the time to be investing in mobile search advertising to take advantage of lighter competition.

The only exception to my suggestion depends on the answer to this question advertisers should ask themselves: “Is this sponsorship or ad placement relevant to the consumer’s expressed intent?” If the answer is yes, buy away. The best ad placement I’ve seen on my iPhone was a Bing search app ad while playing Words with Friends. The ad was an interactive memory game, which fit my mood and intent to be playing games at the time. The result? I downloaded the Bing app and use it regularly (instead of the Google mobile app).