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Today was the first day for ad:tech at the convention centre in Darling Harbour. It was buzzing with people from all walks of the digital media industry walking in and out of presentation and networking in the exhibition area.
From the few booths I was able to visit before going to my first presentation I was able to talk about e-mail marketing, given a demonstration for eye movement capturing software and spoke about word of mouth marketing.
Virtual Worlds & Business: What’s the ROI?
Before I knew it I was rushing to track 1 so I could see the presentation on Virtual Worlds & Business: What’s the ROI? The presenters for this were: 
The majority of the presentation was the above three talking about how to advertise in virtual worlds as they were talking about user statistics for their products.
Some of the more interesting facts: - HABBO, a virtual ‘hangout’ where you can meet and make friends, has a grand total of 300 million users globally, this is on par with the likes of Blizzards World of Warcraft
- HABBO has an average usage time of 1 hour and 7 minutes compared to Facebook’s 22 minutes or Myspace’s 24 minutes
- Second Life’s has been constantly growing in user sign ups since 2004, and is currently approaching the 17 million users mark, with a rough 75000 – 77000 users concurrently online at any one time.
- Second Life’s average hours for 1/3 of their users is 16+ hours a week.
The only real information that came out of this presentation that had anything to do with the actual title was how we can measure if an advertising was successful in a virtual world: - Someone buys a virtual form of brand
- Users share items with others
- Time spent interacting with a brand
How these 3 points are turned into ROI is anyone's guess. After this was the panel for SEO Strategies for Large & Small Business, lucky for me it was in the same conference room so I could just sit and relax while everyone was setting up. SEO Strategies for Large & Small Business
This panel was a little different to the others that were on throughout the day, this one involved us, the audience, within the discussion; interestingly most of the audience attending were marketers. The speakers on the panel were: 
David started the discussion with introducing everyone and giving a brief history of their experience in the search and digital media industry, then it was onto the questions:
Q1: Is social media marketing part of SEO?
In my opinion the answer is no, but to my surprise the majority of the audience voted for yes. Des started the discussion with his support for the affirmative. Des spoke of how branding is now a major factor in search results, he referred to Google’s latest update, the Vince update, and how the Delta Airlines is now on the first page of Google for “airline tickets” as its brand is associated with airline tickets. Des also mentioned that once an RSS feed is released then it can be picked up and passed along from blog to blog and be used as a link building strategy.
Grace followed Des response supporting the ‘no’. Grace stated that social media did not really promote the brand itself, referencing the ‘Sydney Cinderella’ marking campaign that was launched in late 2008. A model was paid to create a fake ‘looking for prince charming’ video on YouTube to promote Witchery’s release of their new menswear line. Grace showed, based on Google Insight results, that the advertising campaign got more searches then the Witchery label during the time of the advertising campaign. Grace said that before starting any social media marketing campaign you need a solid SEO base so that when people do search for your campaign they will find your website and not something like YouTube. She also rebutted Des’s comment about link building through RSS as not being very structured or even guaranteed and that a solid SEO link building strategy will bring in higher quality links.
Q2: How do you measure the ROI of SEO efforts?
My answer to this one was “loosely”, which gained a majority of audience votes (62%). A smaller percentage believed you can measure ROI from an SEO campaign rigorously (32% to be precise)
Rob got to take on the rigorous argument, stating that the measurement of ROI is incremental return over incremental costs. He listed the types of costs and returns you would have in an SEO campaign: - Incremental costs
- Product Development
- Content Generation
- Agency Fees
- Incremental Returns
- Before / After
- A / B test
- KW control Group
Grace was with the majority this time, stating that you can only measure the ROI loosely as no matter how big or small a company is the ROI needs to be based on priority. Grace stated that there are 3 measurements that are take to loosely get the ROI of an SEO campaign: - Overall site revenue excluding SEO
- SEO Revenue
- SEO targeted keyword revenue
Q3: Why Does SEO Fail?
Again the audience was one sided with this questions: - Strategy - 22%
- Implementation - 52%
- Accountability - 16%
Des was again with the majority arguing that implementation is the reason SEO campaigns fail. Des stated that in the past it was easy enough to manipulate simple HTML pages to target specific keywords, but these days they are starting to get involved during the creation process of a clients site and thus they can advice them on how to implement an SEO strategy right from the get go.
Grace argued that SEO fails as a result of accountability. Grace stated that it is a lot easier for SEO to fail for larger companies as there are a greater number of people involved in the website and a SEO top down approach is need to ensure that the SEO campaign does not fail.
Q4: Which converts higher SEO or paid search?
The response from the audience was once again one sided: - SEO - 55%
- SEM - 24%
- Same - 8%
- Don’t Know - 13%
Des backed SEO, stating that in all sizes of businesses he has proven that SEO has a higher conversion rate. He also showed that there is a significantly lower bounce rate on traffic that came from SEO.
Robert believed that both can convert at the same rate as each other. He started his rebuttal by asking the audience to question what is a conversion, what is an action, is it even on your site? Conversion is better on timing and budget for SEM, but it really comes down to user preference, saying that some people trusted the fact that clicking on a sponsored link costs the company and thus will lead to something of interest.
Q5: what will be the biggest area of change for SEO in 09?
This question was a little different as the audience was told what each topic was before we voted for our answer, so lets just have a quick review of what each one is then we can see the results of the audience poll. - Behavioural/Personal
Grace talked about how Google changes its search results based on user’s browsing history and preferences. One example is being able to vote for your favourite search results when logged into your Google account. - Local/Mobile
Rob first took a quick poll of the audience and asked how many people had a mobile phone that had internet access, about half the people in the audience raised their hands. He stated that 4 to 5 years ago that number would have been minimal, and that in 4 or 5 years that it will be the majority of the audience, so he believes that the biggest change will be in the mobile phones area - Blended/Universal
Grace talked about universal search and how personalised search can potentially affect uncials rankings down the track. - Engagement Objects
Des explained that his company has trademarked this as they believe this is what will take off in 2009. Engagement objects is a website that incorporates multiple types of media onto their website about their particular topics, and with Google being able to convert spoken word from video into text it can now index videos, mp3’s and images from a website. Once everything was explained to the audience they were asked to vote… with the following results: - Behaviroal/Personal - 9%
- Local/Mobile - 44%
- Blended/Unviersal - 15%
- Engagement Objects - 29%
- Other - 3%
With all questions answered, it was now time to let our hair down and have a few drinks at the networking party. This was held at the Watershed on Darling Harbour. Grace and I arrived a little late as we were chatting with some people after the discussion. Most of the FirstClick team was already there enjoying themselves so we just joined in. After meeting some people and having a few drinks myself I decided to call it a night.
Happy Hunting Space Cowboys. |
