Posts filed under 'Search Marketing'
The IAB has today launched an updated version of the IAB search marketing charter, following months of collaboration between the IAB, Search Marketing Council and the Direct Marketing Association. The new charter sees a new section dedicated to working with affiliates.
Taken from the charter the new affiliates section include:
- SEMCo will declare to the client if they carry out affiliate work on an account that they manage.
- SEMCo will encourage / facilitate client and affiliate communication.
- To ensure affiliates keep SEM messaging on brand a SEMCo must be proactive in driving communications between the client and affiliate.
- SEMCo and client must provide a clear dispute procedure.
- To create a clear process for affiliates to dispute a declined earned commission.
- To ensure a timely process for communicating any changes to keyword policy between all parties.
- To facilitate better working relationships between affiliates, SEMCos and ultimately, the client.
- SEMCo must publish a point of contact for their affiliate manager.
- Affiliate manager must provide SEMCo with landing page documents to include HTML and appropriate graphics and Flash files.
- To ensure that a SEMCo understands the structure of a landing page to fully optimise a campaign.
Search marketing companies that adhere to the charter can highlight their compliance with an IAB ‘best practise’ icon published on their website and/or additional promotional company infrastructure.
The further development of the charter appears to be another major step in the right direction. As we have discussed on here previously, surely the development of such best practise exercises can only be good for Search Marketing as a whole, but from a business perspective, given that on the whole the only thing that holds many clients back from either further expansion only is perception of online in comparison to other ATL and BTL activity.
PS - SEMCo = Search Engine Marketing Company
October 17th, 2007
If a report by complete.com is to be believed then yes. According to the report, Yahoo is the best search engine for getting users to click on their search engine results (at least for the period May to August 2007).
The figures are compiled by complete.com, which collates data from a number of ISP’s as well as some other proprietary methods of data collection. The report went on to say
“…Lower search fulfillment numbers mean that on a percentage basis fewer search queries on that engine resulted in the searcher clicking on a result link. So from this perspective one might consider Yahoo! more effective at getting consumers the results they want….”
This to a certain degree backed up a recent Websidestory report that Yahoo was indeed the most convertable search engine, however I think one has to further explore why this is
- Volume - Google in many Western European countries is the search engine of choice - in particular the UK and the USA. For this reason it receives substantially more click throughs than any other search engine, and thus is more succeptable to dilution in figures.
- Competition - Whist this varies significantly by sector, Google often has significantly more competitors in terms of rival advertisers. More competition means more choice, and thus you have to pull out all the stops in order to maximise the effectiveness of your ads, and maximise your SEO in order to raise visibility on the search engines. This would obviously be more applicable to paid search management
- Search Network - I am presuming this does not include any non-search network traffic. I have personally found Yahoo’s paid search matching to be somewhat ‘iffy’ when it comes to their search partners, with the majority of clicks on high traffic/high profit terms coming from third parties rather than the search engine results themselves
- Bounce rate - as above - what was the bounce rate from these referrals. Referrals are one thing - accountability is another
I would love to find out more about how this data has been collated for one and just howfar the research went. Ultimately what the reasons were for ’satisfaction’.
October 1st, 2007
I have read a number of posts recently which unfortuntely in my opinion do not portray Search Marketing in particularly SEO in a particularly good light.
In particular there has been a long running thread over at Joost De Valk’s blog regarding DMoz, where a number of quite respected Search Marketeers and Dmoz editors have been involved in a sometimes quite heated debate. This followed of the initial post by Jeremy Shoemaker (aka Shoemoney)’s post regarding DMoz.
Whilst this is probably not the biggest, and probably not the ugliest of such examples (lets use the recent Scoble example or Dave Pasternack (Rocket Science) as others), however it does show what a powerful medium we are working with and unfortunately one which can have knock on effects.
With traditional advertising, spats were generally kept private, with maybe a few industry commentators privy to them, perhaps leaked out ocasionally to the press (if the company was big enough), however the Internet is different.
Having such a ‘discussion’ means hundreds if not thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people can read about your discussion, which in itself is not a bad thing (lets face it as SEO’s most of the discussion forums I would suggest are optimised - and thus probably feature more highly). However using the above example (Dmoz) as an example, somebody coming across such a post is hardly likely to look favourably on Dmoz, and may alter their perceptions of SEO as a result. Perhaps that example may be slightly far fetched, however the issue still remains that many of these conversations should be kept professional at all times, and in line with other more established professions.
People like Danny Sullivan and others have always worked hard to establish SEO and Online Marketing as a respected profession (rather than the Dark Art it is/was referred to as), however surely we have to act professional at all times, in order to earn respect, particularly from other sectors, both within advertising/marketing and externally.
At the end of the day, just because we have the power to do something, doesn’t mean that we should. Just because we can linkbait, doesn’t mean the tactic should be used willy nilly. Just because we have a strong opinion, doesnt mean that opinion should be shouted about on a public forum. In any other profession such activity (dare I say) would be frowned upon, and whilst we are different from other professions, at the end of the day, maybe we can still learn something from them.
August 30th, 2007
Taken a bit longer than expected to get this story up however probably an important one for nearly all us UK search engine marketers. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have colloborated to launch the first search marketing charter in an attempt to establish best practice within the industry. This is the first time the two industry bodies have collaborated on search standards and together they reach more than 1,250 industry members.
Search marketing is still one of the fastest growing advertising/marketing sectors around, and currently equates to around 58 per cent of all online ad spend in the UK, a figure which is expected to continue growing. The IAB charter is aimed solely at search engine marketing companies and identifies four key criteria (however more are expected before the end of the year):
- For companies to become IAB compliant they must have at least two dedicated search marketing employees and have search engine accreditation (such as Google Adwords Professional). Companies wishing to be compliant must also offer official search engine optimisation (SEO) training.
- Organisations should have been trading for at least six months.
- Companies must also be a member of either IAB UK, IAB Europe, DMA, Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation (SEMPO) or the Association of Business to Business Agencies (ABBA) in order to qualify. It should be noted that all IAB and DMA members are being encouraged to comply with the current criteria over the next few months, with the aim being to achieving maximum industry coverage before the end of the year.
I would add we feel this is an important step within the sector in order to give the industry more credibility as a whole (as despite the fact that such a large % of spend is spent on search marketing in the UK - there is still widespread ‘ignorance’ of the industry as a fundamental part of a marketing mix - particularly within organisations where no previous online activity has taken place, and the focus of much activity has been offline focussed ( I can reel off a list as long as my arm on this one ).
Whilst this still stops short of ticking all boxes - it is definitely a move in the right direction, a sentiment shared by
Robert Dirskovski, head of Interactive Media, DMA, added: “As the digital element of direct marketing continues its fast paced growth, it is vital that we embrace all facets of digital marketing ‘including search’ to promote and maintain high standards.”
“Together with the IAB, we hope to create a rigorous set of best practice principles that will set the standard for search marketing while being adaptable to change within the industry.”
August 21st, 2007
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