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An Exclusive Interview with Rochelle Sanchirico of Washington Post Digital

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with Rochelle Sanchirico, Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing for Washington Post Digital. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES Chicago 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

Interview Questions:

Question #1: Can you tell our audience a little more about your role as Sr. Director of Acquisition Marketing at Washington Post Digital? What does a typical day consist of?

Answer: In my acquisition marketing role, I manage the team that is responsible for driving traffic and conversions to washingtonpost.com and its product verticals.  Methods include online paid media, e-mail marketing, social media, paid and organic search, as well as grassroots marketing and leveraging our own media properties.  The day can really vary—I enjoy thinking strategically as well as being very hands-on.  Some days I’m really heavy into our site or search data and analysis, while other days I’m brainstorming with my team on contest ideas.  Other days we’re working really closely with our editorial staff to train them on search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.  I find the variety to be one of the most rewarding parts of my job.

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Question #2:  What are the biggest challenge(s) in deploying SEO, PPC and Social Networking across such a large organization as the Washington Post?

Answer: Prioritization of resources is probably the biggest challenge when there are so many different content areas and products to cover with limited resources.  Organization is key to running a successful PPC campaign—if you do the upfront work to make sure that campaigns and ad groups are properly aligned to match your organization’s goals, it can save a lot of day-to-day work in analysis and optimization. 

SEO is an area that still requires a lot of time and ad hoc analysis from our team—one of the exciting elements (and challenges) of working in the news industry is that today’s top keyword terms may drop off the radar completely next week.  It’s important to be able to prioritize the SEO work that will provide long-lasting benefit to the company.  Social networking is something we’ve really embraced over the past year, and the biggest challenge there is determining the social channels that have the most potential for our brand and how much time and effort we should spend on integrating them with our site.
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Question #3:  With more and more consumers going online to get their news, how has the “Brick & Mortar” side of the Washington Post dealt with this migration? How has it affected your role in acquiring new customers and keeping existing ones?

Answer: While our digital and print sides of the business used to operate completely separately, now we have an integrated newsroom; several other functions within the business have also come together to provide a holistic approach to providing news in the way that people are most likely to consume it.  The Washington Post is heartily embracing the growth of online and mobile news consumption, from the senior executives to the reporters in the newsroom.  My role remains very digitally-focused, although my team works closely with the print marketing team to make sure that we’re aligning resources and making “2 plus 2 equal 5” as often as possible.  Our ideal scenario would be a customer that reads the newspaper first thing in the morning, checks the website throughout the day for updates and breaking news, and turns to our mobile site when they’re on the go.  We strive to support all of those goals.

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Question #4:  With the emergence of Social Networking, especially blogs and now with public eyewitness videos being published immediately on sites such as YouTube, how has this phenomena affected your acquisition strategies? Who do you consider your biggest competitors?

Answer: Social networks, blogs and video sharing sites have created a great, complementary information source for today’s consumers.  We leverage these destinations to further engage with our own audience as well as reach new potential consumers of our content.  Social sites and blogs can be a very powerful marketing tool, as they know a lot about their consumers and can help marketers hone their reach to the most attractive target audience.  We also look at these tools as a brand extension—our presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites allow us to speak and engage with our core audience in a different way than we do on our site.

The dynamics that are specific to our industry make it difficult to define competitors.  The newspaper industry has, in the immediate past, been very cooperative rather than competitive.  We understand that we all face challenges that will be better addressed if we work together rather than against each other.  We do benchmark our performance (on several fronts) against all the major news sites, as well as others that are smaller and growing quickly. 

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Question #5:   Since the Washington Post website is currently using Google Analytics, can you tell our audience what Metrics are considered most important (pageviews, bounce rates, etc…) and what “usability-type” steps have you taken to improve your Acquisition efforts?

Answer: We primarily use Omniture SiteCatalyst for our internal site metrics.  We look at different metrics to measure and analyze the various elements of site performance that are important to us.  Unique visitors is the best indicator of our reach, while pageviews/visit and visits/visitor are core engagement metrics.  Pageviews are important because that determines our inventory for display advertising.  Combining all of these elements with others provides a comprehensive picture of our site performance.

We have incorporated tracking codes into our marketing program elements so that optimization on site visits, pageviews, and conversions is an on-going part of our marketing process.  On-site, we have done multivariate testing on elements of the site that help us acquire more users through social media and other tactics to make sure that they are as effective as possible.

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Question #6: Since SemGeek.com is a blog that focuses a lot of attention to PPC Marketing, can you tell us how the Washington Post best utilizes Paid Search? Do you perform A/B Landing Page Testing? Text Ad Multivariate testing? Is it used as a branding tool or for prospecting?

Answer: We put PPC marketing in two general buckets:  those campaigns or ad groups that must return a positive ROI on the first visit, and those that are strategically important to the organization and pay out over a longer timeframe.  We manage all of our paid search in-house, and currently have over 11,000 ad groups across 4 search engines.  We perform A/B landing page testing where appropriate and feasible, and utilize text ad multivariate testing across all of our ad groups and keywords.  As the organization’s goals change, we keep our PPC campaigns in lock step with them. 

We use PPC as both a branding tool and for prospecting, as well as for eliciting particular actions on the site (this is usually within our classifieds verticals).  We are always taking a hard look at both to determine if they are the most effective use of our marketing dollars.  Are we paying for branded terms that are cannibalizing our natural search clicks?  Are those people who come into the site on news-related terms ever returning?  It’s a constant refinement. 

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I would like to thank Rochelle as well as the folks at Washington Post Digital for her cooperation and time to provide this exclusive online interview.

About Rochelle Sanchirico: Rochelle is responsible for growing the audience of washingtonpost.com by delivering traffic and quality leads. With a special focus on B2C marketing, Sanchirico looks to drive traffic using various channel marketing strategies including paid and organic search and direct marketing campaigns—such as e-mail, mobile marketing and social media marketing.

Sanchirico brings an extensive marketing background from her two years at Kaplan Higher Education. Just prior to joining Washington Post Digital, Sanchirico served as Executive Director of Marketing Strategy at Kaplan. In this role, she managed all strategic marketing activities for the online university as well as 70 campus locations. She was a point person for the launch of localized marketing efforts, utilizing advertising elements like television, radio, direct mail and e-mail. Prior to this, she was a Business Associate for the Leadership Development Program and worked in the publishing industry for many years.

Sanchirico received her M.B.A. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 2004. She earned her B.S. from the University of Michigan. Sanchirico resides in Arlington, VA with her husband Joe.

Classifying PPC Marketing? Is It An Art Or A Science? Part Deux

In my second and final installment  of “Classifying PPC Marketing? Is It An Art Or A Science?”, I will dig a little deeper into the “weeds” of PPC Geekdom to try and identify which tactics and techniques of PPC should and will always be a Science as well as others that are reserved for the Artist respectfully. However, we all must acknowledge one thing. Regardless of anyone's biased opinion, there is one constant that everyone can agree on and that is PPC requires both Art and Science in order to have a better chance to achieve a successful outcome. Did you notice "better chance?" Well that is because there are many other factor that are in play that go way beyond Quality Score and CTR%.

So with that said, in continuing my discussions with Craig Danuloff, President of ClickEquations and Marc Poirier CEO of Acquisio, I surrounded my next segment of Q&A around the specifics of what areas of PPC deserve more attention to Science and others which should just be left to the Artist. In response to the question "Can you tell our audience what element of PPC should always be considered a science?" Craig believes that working methodically and focusing on the key metrics of PPC are the best path. He also mentions that his company ClickEquations has developed what is called 'High Resolution PPC' which basically breaks the search management process into three phrases:

1. Targeting the right people
2. Valuing your keywords, and
3. Satisfying prospects.

According to Craig "Nearly every step in the targeting stage (selecting and organizing keywords) and the valuing stage (tuning keywords, negatives, match types, and bids) is largely measurable and repeatable.
Even the testing parts of the satisfy phase are highly scientific - working methodically to find the best ad copy and landing pages. All of these steps iterate based on all the measures search professionals rely on – clickthrough rates, impression share, quality score, ROI, etc. "

On the other hand, Marc's focus is not so much on the tactics of PPC, but more of Multivariate or A/B testing of landing pages. Marc states "Well, testing (multivariate or a-b testing) is closely related to the scientific method. You hypothesize something, then you test and measure, and the results of your test tell you whether your hypothesis was supported by the test. But the variables which we test are usually be inspired by the marketer’s gut instinct. However, performance tracking and analysis (conversions, roas, roi, etc) is also a very rigorous process, and there is simply no creative element involved here...

Now that we've touched on the Scientific side of PPC, lets now talk about the Artistic side. For this creative-minded Aquarius who enjoys thinking outside the box at all times, I have soft spot for the creative side of everything, especially PPC. Moreover, when I asked both Marc and Craig about their thoughts on the Artistic side of PPC, they were both pretty much aligned in their thoughts. Both of them highlight on the fact that writing effective Text Ads as well as effective and persuasive content for Landing Pages requires a strong creative side. For example, Marc states "I think the writing process which goes into creating text ads or landing page content is more of an Art than a science, but because it can be influenced by the results of tests, it is not necessarily a purely creative process, but it is definitely more creative than scientific."

According to Craig "Coming up with keywords can have a creative or imaginative aspect to it, although the bulk of that work can and should be done more methodically.  Attracting people and persuading them to take action - the job of ad copy and landing pages - can benefit from true creativity, but in this case the artistic merit must be tested and measured and cannot be accepted on purely subjective grounds."

In conclusion: The idea of whether PPC is more of an Art or a Science honestly depends at which level you are practicing with PPC and how you visualize the work that you do for a client or your company. Writing good text ads that generate sales/leads could be considered just words by some. On the other hand, looking at analytics data and finding potential "goldmines" could also be considered an Art. All in all, all that matters is that the PPC Advertiser is happy and there is plenty of potential for ongoing optimization and strategic thinking. 

Semgeek Quote of the day: "Getting someone at Google to give you a straight answer on their future intentions is purely Art." - Marc Poirier, CEO Acquisio.com

On that note, I want to personally thank Craig Danuloff of ClickEquations and Marc Poirer of Acquisio for their participation in this article series.

Classifying PPC Marketing? Is It An Art Or A Science? Part 1

Ok, let's be honest, we all know the answer is going to be BOTH. However, we must ask ourselves, what's the secret sauce that makes it more successful. Is it the seasoned experience and "outside the box" creativity or is it by default? Over the years, PPC has matured so quickly that it’s almost difficult to remember what it was like to simply “bid your way to the top” with Goto.com (Yahoo) or to understand or even pronounce this new search engine called Google. Now, roughly 10 years later, this once little piece of the online marketing strategy is emerging as the predominate money proving ROI machine where companies are spending billions of dollars to make it easier for people to spend their hard earned money.

With the change in the perception that these software companies are implying that PPC is just a numbers game and a matter of bid management or Analytics is a little worrisome for this SemGeek because it asks the question “Is PPC becoming more of a Science that an Art?" For many PPC Gurus, the idea of automating search marketing would traditionally leave us all feeling a little uneasy as it appears to be jeopardizes the integrity of all of the years spent “re-defining” the industry as well as downplaying the creativity of how talented search marketers make their client’s successful online.

On the other hand, using data in a more scientific approach in order to understand what is working and not working in our PPC efforts is priceless.  In this two-part series, we will get some expert insight from the top PPC Software companies on how they view Paid Search as either an Art, a Science or both.

When talking about whether PPC in this context, it can often become a double edged sword” to be able to differentiate the two. For this Search Marketer, who has been working in the “weeds” for so many years I have been trained to believe that holistically it requires both to be successful. On the one hand, there is an obvious  science behind the algorithms which power the platform, and there is also a level of smart business and creativity to reach qualified consumers and persuade them to get engaged and that make that all important conversion, hence validating the value of PPC. To reinforce and expand on this, Marc Poirer, CEO of Acquisio states that “I think it’s marketing, and as such, there is creativity involved because you need to understand human behavior; and there are hard numbers, because there is money at stake. Further, with paid search, there are literally hundreds of variables that can impact your success. If I had to decide between art or science, I would definitely say it’s more of a Science than an Art”.

On the other hand, according to Craig Danuloff, Founder and President of ClickEquations, INC, he believes that is mostly all scientific on how we should approach PPC. For example, he goes on to say “There is far more science than art in the operation of paid search campaigns, although I'm not that most people practice it that way - I think much of the folklore about PPC suggests that it's an art and so many people treat it that way. I believe it's a science because for the most part the operation and algorithms work in provable and repeatable ways - if you do 'A' then 'B' is going to happen every time. And the way to learn this is through study and investigation or experimentation. There are a few creative aspects to the process, which must be used in the experimentation, although I'd probably not glorify them as art.

The relationship between keywords and search queries, the impact of match types, the calculation of Quality Score and ROAS/ROI, and the attribution of revenue across multiple visits, are all examples of knowable repeatable elements of PPC. Writing text ads and designing landing pages are creative activities, but ones to which formal testing and measurement can be applied to calculate a quantifiable value - we don't need an artistic eye to judge good ad copy, the CTR will tell us.“

Now that we touched on the 35,000 foot view of PPC from a software company perspective, lets shift gears to focus on the area of best practices.To get this conversation started, I posed the question to Craig about his view on how they classify PPC best practices based on simple “Statistics and Words” or a more “Creative and Holistic” approach. According to Craig, he believes that “there is a truth to the way the search engines work, and there is an approach to managing paid search that aligns with this truth. It’s knowable and provable and repeatable. It seems that many of the so-called ideologies out there lack this grounding. The church of 'keyword expansion' for example tends to lack a grasp of how keyword matching really works. The church of 'position 1 or 2' fails the math test. The church of 'relevance' or 'holistic' is the most faith-based of them all.There's no substitute for sharp strategy in PPC. Which segments should you target? Which products should you promote first? Should you build out the search network or the content network first? That kind of planning is based in good data, but your own human intuition and experience still have to rule.

Search is the only advertising channel I can think of where people tend to first target super broadly and then very reluctantly pare back only when it's proven incontrovertibly that any segment or portion of a segment doesn't or won't work.

We'd suggest an approach to targeting that starts with the people most likely to convert - based on both interest and intent. In most cases this would be brand-based searchers, or other highly specific segments. Expanding from strength, establishing beachheads and then growing them, is a far more profitable approach than the spray-and-pray that's so common in the industry.

As far as search and content, there is no universal answer but regardless of which is first, they must be treated and managed as if they're entirely distinct channels which they are. There is no reason to expect any similarity between them in effort or results.”

In the upcoming article "Classifying PPC Marketing? Is It An Art Or A Science? Part 2", we will continue our discussion Marc and Craig as they will provide more interesting feedback on what specific elements of PPC should always be considered an Art as well as which ones should always be considered a Science.

I would like to personally thank Craig Danuloff of ClickEquations and Marc Poirer of Acquisio for their participation in this article.

Exclusive Interview with Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES San Jose 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

About Christine Churchill:
Christine Churchill is president of KeyRelevance.com, a full-service Dallas search engine marketing company offering search engine optimization, web analytics, social media marketing, and pay-per-click management services. KeyRelevance's clients range from small businesses to large publicly-traded companies and cover a wide range of verticals, including travel, education, e-commerce, and the automotive industry.

Churchill speaks regularly at international search conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld, Search Marketing Expo, and the Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference. She was a member of the founding board of directors of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and has served as an officer of the board for the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) since its inception. She holds a master's in business and has over 10 years of online marketing experience.

Interview Questions:

Question #1. In this economic slowdown, more and more advertisers are cutting back on their overall internet marketing budgets.  How have you adjusted to this shift?  And what types of services do these advertisers seem to be affected the most?

Answer: The  economic down turn has forced companies to be better marketers.  While many advertisers have cut their budgets, that is not universal.  Interestingly, some clients have actually shifted more dollars into their online marketing from other marketing efforts.  A big reason for the shift is it is easier to quantify the performance of online advertising than many other forms of marketing. 

A big shift we’ve seen in the bad economic times is the need for more accountability on where their dollars are spent.  Money is tighter and companies want to know that every dollar spent is being spent well.  For PPC, by using analytics we can show how individual keywords are performing.  Also, there are advanced tools to help marketers optimize their landing pages for top performance.  Armed with more information, we can make better and more informed marketing decisions so even though demand may be less, conversion numbers remain high.  It’s all about doing a better job with the dollars you have. 
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Question #2. With the emergence of Social Networking sites making its way into a typical seo strategy these days, have the traditional and proven SEO tactics and techniques being considered “secondary”?

Answer: On the contrary, traditional search engine optimization is alive and well.  It’s evolved from the early days, but anyone who thinks it’s secondary is missing out.  The combination of SEO and social media is a powerful mix for the online marketer.  The two work hand in hand for better performance.  True search engine optimization is not manipulation.  It’s taking a web site and translating what the site is about into a language a search engine can better understand. 

Done right, SEO also makes the web site easier for users to find and use.  SEO applied to social media is the same.  I suppose there are abusive tactics, but the way I view SEO and social media, it’s actually helpful for both the user and the search engine.  The first step in SEO is keyword research.  It’s all about communicating and using the keywords the target audience would use to search about something.  This applies to social media as well as videos on YouTube, press releases, images, etc.   It makes perfect sense to use common phrases when creating blog post titles as it does to creating H tags on a page. 

They help the search engine classify a page and understand what the page (or post) is about, so the engine can then rank the page and present it to the user.  So, in answer to your question, I don’t see social networking sites replacing SEO, I see SEO principles being adapted to social media to better help the user and the engines find common ground.
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Question #3. Software companies are coming out with products and services targeted to the PPC Guru to help automate and streamline the PayPerClick development process.  Do you think relying on software is a good thing?  Or should PPC continue to be more of an ART than a Science?

Answer: Large, complex PPC accounts with thousands of keywords run across multiple engines are the best candidates for PPC software.  Smaller accounts can be managed with the tools provided by the engines themselves.   For example, day parting was something we originally had to use a third party software to be able to do.  Google and other engines have now incorporated it into their standard account interface, so in many instances there is less need for software packages.

Software  products can help account managers make better decisions, but they don’t replace the thinking human in the loop.   Software is simply a tool that frees up the account manager from tedious, error prone tasks.  It allows the manager to do what they do best – be creative.  If a PPC manager spends her entire day crunching numbers and stuck down in the weeds of an account, she can’t take a step back and see the bigger picture. 

For example, one area of PPC that is extremely important is optimization of landing pages for better conversion.  Using multi-variant software like Google Website Optimizer can make the mechanics and intensive number crunching easy, you still need the creativity and insight of a human to come up with the variations to test. 

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Question #4. Are there any interesting Search Marketing trends that you have seen over the past year that our audience would like to be aware of?

Answer: Hard times have forced people to look for cheaper alternatives.  I track a lot of keyword phrases both in SEO and PPC and I’ve seen the volume of searches done on phrases change with the economic conditions.  For example, if you look at the term “coupon” in Google’s Trend tool, you’ll see a geometric increase in search popularity.  People have less money at their disposal so they are trying to stretch their dollars.  Coupons are a win-win for many companies. 

Since people are actively searching for coupons for many products or services, offering special coupons online incentivize people to buy from your company.  Smart marketing involves getting inside the consumer’s mind and providing them what they want. Companies that want to survive the economic conditions need to constantly monitor online behavior.  If you watch for trends and changes in behavior, you can adjust your online marketing to better fit the consumer.

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Question #5. Web Analytics companies provide an immense amount of data and information about an advertisers website.  In your opinion, do you think the typical company needs to have this much data?

Answer: We are a long time proponent of web analytics to better understand performance.  Without analytics you’re flying blind and wasting a lot of money. Analytics can help you refine your marketing campaigns and determine what is working and what isn’t.  It is a tool to make you a better marketer.  Analytics can help you see if certain campaigns or keywords are unprofitable.   Reducing budget waste can make the difference between surviving economic hard times or going bust. 

The key to getting the most out of Analytics is to have someone within the organization that is invested in the information that the reports tell you, and designing the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your site such that they actually measure data and generate information that you can actually ACT on to improve the site.  Analytics tools provide a wealth of information, but not all of the reports possible to generate are needed for a specific site.  For example, an e-commerce site will have dramatically different KPIs than a content site that generates revenue through ad display.  Getting someone within the organization to actively review and act on the Analytics reports is the best way to get value from the tools.

Exclusive Interview with David Roth, Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo.

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with David Roth, Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES San Jose 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

About David Roth
David guides SEM and SEO strategy across all Yahoo properties, overseeing programs, managing infrastructure teams, and establishing internal best practices and campaign management standards. He has 10 years of SEM experience, recently working with Carat Fusion, a full-service advertising agency, as the director of SEM in the San Francisco office. Previously, Roth worked with Avenue A|Razorfish, eonMedia, and Inceptor. He holds an MBA from UC San Diego and a B.A. in sociology from UC Berkeley.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

Question #1: As an employee at Yahoo, how do you objectively manage multiple search programs across business units?  Do you have an obligation to spend more of your Ad budget with Yahoo that any other search engine?

Answer: Because Yahoo! runs many different businesses with widely divergent business models, this can pose a real challenge. How do you think about prioritizing search marketing for Yahoo! Personals, where users pay for a monthly subscription, against Yahoo! Shopping, for example, where users click in, compare products and click out? The answer lies in a rigorous system of valuation. Once you understand what a SEM or SEO user (or any user) is worth to your business, it becomes very clear how much you should be willing to pay to attract such a user. From there, the math is relatively simple, or at least understood. Furthermore, we can tweak our valuation models to adjust to macroeconomic conditions. Many advertisers are doing this currently, moving, for example, from a growth strategy to a profitability strategy. Whatever valuation we’re using, we try to be consistent across businesses, and from there, the amount of money we can spend promoting any single property becomes apparent.

Speaking of ad budgets, we operate like most search marketers with regard to how we allocate our advertising spend. We invest as much money in any search engine buy or SEO program as it makes sense to, given the return that a program will provide to the business. We have very strict profitability requirements for all our programs, so this process sorts itself out fairly quickly. The only other thing I can tell you about this is that because we are Yahoo!, as you might imagine we have a certain amount of brand value that resonates on the Yahoo! network better than it does most advertisers, so our ad budgets skew more heavily toward Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) than it might for other advertisers.
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Question #2: Do you get any special treatment as a result of your close relationship with Yahoo! Search? YSM?

Answer: The short answer is ‘No’. As far as Yahoo! Search and YSM are concerned, we are either a large website or large advertiser, depending on the audience. That said, we do get to talk to product managers from time to time, who can tell us about upcoming features and enhancements. But no, we don’t get to talk to algorithm or marketplace engineers in a context that would allow us any advantage in the marketplace. Yahoo! is very aware of the perception that ‘special treatment’ would create, so we steer clear of this.
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Question #3: What’s the biggest challenge(s) in deploying SEO, as well as PPC, across a large “search engine” focused company within multiple divisions?

Answer: My biggest challenge, and my primary focus in my time here, has been to develop a consistent and standard approach to search marketing across business units. When you’re in a big, complex organization like this, the most daunting task is to bring the same approach to every opportunity. In the process of tackling this, we’ve worked on developing internal tools that allow us to standardize our approach across the company. For example, we developed an SEM campaign brief to help businesses get up and running on paid search.

We built product development checklists for SEO that allow us to evaluate SEO-friendliness within the development cycle, as well as an underlying process that allows us to highlight necessary changes when they need to happen. We lined out standard processes for forecasting and budget movement that explicitly spell out all the stakeholders and their respective roles in the decision-making process. And finally we developed a standard set of scorecards for reporting SEM and SEO results internally to upper management. All of these tools have helped make my job much more manageable.
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Question #4: With Yahoo, there are basically only (2) two keyword matches (Standard and Advanced Match) Can elaborate further about the key similarities and differences between Yahoo’s keyword matching and Google’s Keyword Matching. Can you tell us, in an “unbiased” manner, which provides better results.

Answer: I can’t say without bias which is better, because it really depends what your goals and resources are. I think the main differences between the two systems are 1) YSM uses a canonical keyword system that maps plurals and misspellings to the canonical keyword, and 2) Google’s extended broad match is a much broader target than YSM has. Both of these differences offer both advantages and drawbacks, but the bottom line is that it’s search marketing and it performs better than any other marketing channel, so you want to maximize the results of both systems given your resource constraints and business goals.
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Question #5: There are many software companies emerging into the Search Industry offering many solutions to help both streamline and automate the typical tactics of everyday PPC management. Do you or your team at Yahoo use any of these software applications? And if so, which one(s) are you willing to disclose.

Answer: Part of my job is to evaluate tools in the marketplace, so I take a lot of demos and I look at a lot of tools. What I can tell you is that right now we’re not using any off-the-shelf tools, but that some of them are getting quite good and I’m always looking for a good fit.

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Question #6: When Yahoo acquired Index tools back in April 2008, were you obligated to use Indextools as your primary Analytics software? Do you use more than one analytics package?

Answer: We have made Yahoo! Web Analytics, the technology formerly known as Indextools, available to our Yahoo! stores customers, and we are currently looking at ways we can leverage this technology internally for our Yahoo! properties.

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Question #7:  In your position at Yahoo, do you currently or in the past, provide the Yahoo R&D Department with new ideas and/or updates based on your experience working with Google Adwords platform? In other words, do you tell them what they should consider in future releases of the Yahoo Search Platform?

Answer: As I mentioned before, YSM views us as a large advertiser. So, to the extent that YSM looks for product feedback and feature requirements from their other large advertisers, we do provide similar feedback and feature requirements.

Exclusive Interview with Craig Danuloff, Founder & President of ClickEquations

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with Craig Danuloff, Founder and President of ClickEquations. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES San Jose 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

About Craig Danuloff:

Craig has been at the forefront of online commerce and marketing since 1994, when he founded iCat Corporation, one of the first ecommerce software companies. He has been profiled in Forbes, featured on CNBC, and in 1997 was named one of the ‘100 Technology Elite’ by Red Herring Magazine. Before founding ClickEquations, Craig was President and COO of eColony, an early stage venture fund formed by Internet Capital Group.

Once upon a time, Craig built one of the nation’s first desktop publishing service bureaus, and authored over two dozen computer books published by IDG, Sybex, Dow-Jones Irwin, and others. He has a degree from the University of Colorado College of Business and Administration.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

QUESTION #1. Can you explain to our audience what is the driving force behind the creation of ClickEquations? Was there a specific opportunity you wanted to capitalize on?

ANSWER: We were a search agency managing large and medium sized PPC accounts, primarily with Omniture SearchCenter. But we also had tried other tools over time, and took a pretty good look around the market to evaluate our options. We weren’t satisfied with the depth and accuracy of the data, the flexibility of reporting, and more importantly with the direction they were heading. These tools were built to help manage paid search but we didn’t find them efficient or effective. Our management team had experience building software companies, so we raised venture capital and morphed the business into a software company to build the tools we wish the market had provided.
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QUESTION #2. In all of Paid Search Marketing, there are users with many different levels of experience. Can you give us some insights into ClickEquation’s main target market? For example, your service appears to be targeted to both Search Marketing Agencies and Individual Advertisers? Which market is this platform best suited for?

ANSWER: There are many ways to break this market down – in-house or agency as you suggest, large advertiser and small, retailer vs lead gen or other verticals, etc. We tend to think of it in terms of sophistication or seriousness if you will. Some PPC managers have very little time, or perhaps little background in paid search, and they have certain needs and expectations from the paid search tools. More experienced and active managers have different needs and expectations – and this is where we aim and fit best. We’ve built a power-tool for search marketers who need a lot more than a slightly modified version of the AdWords interface or even Adwords Editor.

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QUESTION #3. For just about every PPC Guru in the world, the Google Adwords Editor is the most widely used Adwords management tool on the market. It’s also attractive because it is a FREE Desktop Tool. What makes ClickEquations more valuable than the Adwords Editor?

ANSWER: That’s a great question and one every search manager should ask of their tool. I agree that AdWords Editor is a fantastic tool. The obvious first answer is management of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in one single interface. That’s important for convenience and efficiency, and in terms of being able to copy/clone ad groups from one engine to the other, can have a big impact on results. But that’s not the real differentiation.

In terms of pure editing – just adding keywords and changing bids or match types – there isn’t much advantage. I don’t think anyone could really build a more efficient editor. The one exception is in bulk editing, where our support of Excel Import/Export enables mass changes and additions much faster than even in the Adwords Editor.

But paid search requires a lot more than just editing. In terms of reporting features we have a dedicated reporting interface which presents a lot more data than AdWords Editor (or Adwords itself) including additional Google Metrics (like Impression Share), additional Conversion Metrics (like Net Profit and ROI based on actual SKU-Margin), additional User Metrics (like search queries for all three engines and user geography reporting). We also provide our Excel-based ‘CQ Analyst’ which enables all kinds of cool one-button-update dashboards and deep analysis of Quality Score, Revenue Attribution, and much more. Finally, our Bid Rules enable much more sophisticated bidding control – automation entirely lacking in Adwords Editor.

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QUESTION #4. During this Economic down-turn, is ClickEquations concerned at with the overall decline of PPC Budgets? If so, what strategies are in place to try and make the best of the situation?

ANSWER: We haven’t seen budgets decline in our client base, but we have seen a stronger focus on results. I think this is partially the economy, and partially a natural progression as PPC budgets have grown both in absolute terms and as a percentage of overall marketing budgets. Paid Search is no longer in the ‘other’ column. Senior Management now wants to really know what’s being done and if it’s worth the investment. Many of the reporting dashboards and in-depth analysis reports in ClickEquations make it a lot easier to satisfy the desires of management and clients who are asking hard questions about PPC.

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QUESTION #5. Can you provide our PPC audience with anything new and/or exciting enhancements in ClickEquation’s Development Pipeline? Are there any announcements that you would like to make to this search marketing audience?

ANSWER: We’ve spend the first half of this year expanding our core editing and bidding features. We’ve added international support, multi-account support, robust bulk editing and cloning, new graphic analysis and much more. One very popular feature in ClickEquations has been something we call ‘Guidance’. Many of our Analyst reports highlight opportunities and risks in your account – making it easier to prioritize work that can provide quick-wins in revenue increases or cost savings. I can’t get too specific right now, but we’ll be extending our lead in that direction, making it even easier for managers to determine use their time very efficiently and make highly effective changes to their accounts.

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QUESTION #6. ClickEquations, as well as many other PPC Applications such as Omniture SearchCenter use API tokens to communicate to the Search Engine Accounts in real-time. What makes ClickEquation’s API interface any better than it's competitors?

ANSWER: We talk to all the search engines bi-directionally via their API’s. I’m not sure it’s a place where anyone can differentiate. It happens invisibly in the background, as far as users are concerned. All changes made in ClickEquations are processed in real-time, and users see confirmation only when we receive acceptance confirmation from the search engines.

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QUESTION #7. What would you say is the "secret sauce” of the ClickEquation’s Platform? Is it a specific tool or a combination of functions?

ANSWER: I think our customer base would tell you that our ‘secret sauce’ is our deep understanding and real-world experience as paid search managers. What people get excited about is how our interface and features address the real-world needs of full time PPC managers who are working hard to maximize their results. As you know, the truth is most search managers are massively constrained by the limitations of their tools. We’ve knocked down at least some of those limits, and have our sights on many more.

Already, our ability to match search query with the associated keyword and match type is one example. Or to show you all the keywords currently below the Google First Page Bid Estimate. Or to review top performing keywords on one engine and show which ones are missing or performing poorly on another engine. These have real world advantages and to me knowledge none of our competitors offer any of these capabilities.

Question #8. Can you suggest some ways to learn more about ClickEquations?

Answer: Absolutely! We would be happy to provide links to Webinars, White Papers and more. They’re great examples of the way we look at paid search, and they’ll be helpful to anyone regardless of their management tool or philosophy.

• View the ClickEquations Product Tour Video
• Download our FREE Paid Search White Papers
• View the Paid Search Videos and Webinars
• Request a ClickEquations Demo

Exclusive Interview with Larry Kim, WordStream Founder & VP of Product Development

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development for Wordstream. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES San Jose 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

About Larry Kim:

As Founder and VP of Products of WordStream, Larry is responsible for designing the next generation of Keyword Management tools for PPC & SEO.

Larry Kim has 8 years experience managing PPC and SEO campaigns both in-house and through his own agency. He's also an electrical engineer with experience with software development and product management and recently founded WordStream, a provider of keyword management solutions for PPC and SEO. For more information, or to contact Larry, check out his blog or message him on twitter (@larrykim). Larry lives in Central Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

Question #1. What's the driving force behind the creation of WordStream? What specific opportunity were you trying to capitalize on?

Answer: Many people equate SEO with keyword research and PPC with bid management, but in my experience, the key to success for both paid and organic search marketing is the work that takes place in between—the analysis, organization and prioritization that happens in the middle. These middle steps—what we call keyword management are both the most critical and the most overlooked part of search marketing.

A few years back, I had my own search marketing agency, and I was weary of all the time I spent on repetitive yet necessary tasks like scrubbing keyword lists, breaking them into smaller, more relevant groups, etc. I looked for tools to assist with this but found that these tasks were completely ignored by PPC and SEO tool vendors. Anyone doing keyword management type tasks was using Microsoft Excel, which wasn’t designed for search marketing and is less than ideal for this kind of work. So I designed my own software, initially to make my life easier, but I realized search marketers and agencies everywhere could benefit from it. The idea became WordStream, the world's first keyword management solution. WordStream is an innovative approach to discovering, analyzing, grouping, organizing and acting on large numbers of keywords to optimize PPC and SEO campaigns.

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Question #2. Google AdWords Editor is the most widely used AdWords management tool on the market. It’s also attractive because it is a FREE desktop tool. What makes WordStream more valuable than AdWords Editor?

Answer: Well, for starters, we're clearly not a replacement for AdWords Editor. Our focus is keyword management. Where WordStream and AdWords Editor overlap in functionality is PPC campaign creation and optimization, but even there, we take very different approaches. For example, to create a PPC campaign in AdWords Editor, you make an ad group, add keywords and write ad text – kind of a top-down approach.

WordStream takes a bottom-up approach. You start by developing your keyword universe – the product helps you aggregate thousands or even millions of keyword opportunities from your own Web analytics data and our keyword suggestion tools. Our powerful keyword grouping, organization and negative keyword tools help you quickly eliminate the junk, extract the keywords that are relevant to your business, and organize the data into tightly knit keyword groups, which is critical for successful PPC campaigns.

By analogy, consider a multiple-choice math test. My approach is to start from scratch – read the problem, do the calculations and come up with the answer. My wife, on the other hand, starts by realizing the fact that the answer is there – she then works "backwards" and chooses the right answer via a process of elimination. Both are valid approaches with different strengths and weaknesses – my point is, there's more going on here than a difference of features. The two products employ different methodologies.

I don't believe in a "one interface fits all" view of PPC. The WordStream approach sacrifices some up-front flexibility in exchange for far more robust campaign organization. The result is that PPC campaigns created in WordStream are better organized and easier to optimize than campaigns created manually in AdWords Editor. The keyword organization aspect is critical, since it impacts relevancy, a single point of leverage that affects just about everything going on in your PPC account, including Quality Score, minimum bids, actual CPC, impression share, click-through rate, and even conversion rates. Better organized campaigns can also lead to all sorts of additional benefits, like simplified PPC reporting, easier team collaboration if multiple contributors are working on a single account, and can enable more effective bid manipulation strategies. Another key difference is productivity – WordStream suggests the next step to do, and then helps you do it, which is a lot easier, faster and more effective than trying to figure out what to do, then doing everything manually.

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Question #3: Are there other differences in the approach between Google AdWords Editor and WordStream?

Answer: Sure. Here are a few other examples:

Task	AdWords Editor	WordStream
Campaign Organization	Tabular structures (campaign and ad groups).	Hierarchical – organize your keywords into groups, and then organize the groups into trees, going from broader, more general terms to more specific keyword groupings.
Keyword Expansion	Manually add more keyword opportunities to existing ad groups	Newly discovered keywords continuously flow directly into the most relevant existing keyword groupings. And the keywords suggestions are personalized based on actual traffic and conversion data from your own site.
Campaign Optimization	Focus on optimizing bids and budgets (using Conversion Optimizer to determine maximum bid, expanding campaign budgets to maximize impression share, etc.).	Focus is exclusively on improving campaign relevancy and Quality Score through better keyword selection, negative keyword selection, tighter keyword groupings, and more relevant ad text and lading page authoring. And as keywords pile up, you can incrementally optimize them by segmenting larger ad groups into smaller, more relevant subgroups, with more targeted ad text and landing pages.
PPC Workflow	Endless possibilities; little direction.	Analyzes keyword data to suggest where to best direct campaign creation and subsequent campaign optimization efforts.
Click & Goal Attribution	Attributes clicks and conversions to whatever keyword in your account that the AdWords ad auction matched you to.	Attributes clicks and conversions to the user’s search query (i.e., what the user actually typed in the search box); this data is then used to compute PPC workflow decisions. Also, WordStream leverages both PPC and SEO click and conversion data, whereas AdWords uses only PPC data.
Ad Text Optimization	Write whatever ad text you want, monitor the results and pick a winner.	Having created such tightly segmented keyword groups, the software can suggest headlines and URLs that are likely to be highly relevant to the intent of the searcher, and will likely be rewarded with a higher Quality Score.

Essentially, all of these differences stem from our unique approach to campaign organization. AdWords Editor is more of a blank slate, and if you're already a PPC guru, you can make it work for you. WordStream is an expert system. It's designed to learn and help you build success into your campaigns from the ground up.

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Question #4. Can you give us some insights into the level of experience of WordStream's main target market? Is it targeted to seasoned professionals or novices wanting to start a new career in PPC?

Answer: The software in its current form tends to resonate better with intermediate and expert-level search marketers, as well as agencies. WordStream helps these users do most of the work they were previously struggling to do manually in Excel, like aggregating keyword data, organizing and grouping the keyword lists, keeping keyword research up-to-date, etc. But we're working on simplifying the product to appeal to beginner search marketers too, since we've found that the software can help them better understand concepts like the long tail of search, keyword grouping, ad-text optimization, and negative keywords.

Because we're a search marketing tool, not a platform, anyone can use the product. For example, just because you're using an expensive PPC management solution, it's not like you can't still use WordStream to database your keywords, and WordStream helps you make sense of all that information to better inform and optimize your PPC and SEO efforts.

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Question #5. During this economic downturn, is WordStream concerned with the overall decline of PPC budgets? If so, what strategies are in place to try and make the best of the situation?

Answer: First of all, despite the recession, we've seen that a lot of businesses are actually increasing PPC spending. Even companies with lean budgets are willing to make a new purchase if there's clear ROI.

Much of WordStream's value is derived from increased productivity. Better software means spending less time on iterative tasks. The software is also designed to improve campaign organization, increasing relevancy and Quality Score, which lowers your cost per click and improves conversion rates. Many of our customers see significant gains in traffic and conversions without raising their PPC budget. And keep in mind that at $300 a month, we're a lot cheaper than PPC platforms or consultants that bill on a percentage of ad spending.

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Question #6. What would you say is the "secret sauce" of the WordStream platform? Is it a specific tool or a combination of functions?

Answer: The secret sauce isn't any one feature, but the design philosophy of the product being dynamic and actionable.  I believe it will be a game changer, as people catch on to the importance of keyword management for PPC and SEO.

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Question #7. WordStream also offers conversion tracking for its customers. Does that mean WordStream wants to play in the Web analytics space?

Answer: WordStream is a kind of Web analytics tool, but it's stripped down and keyword-focused. For example you can drill down and see what search queries led to what conversions on your website. The difference is, Web analytics are generally "read only." You can learn a lot about your site by running fancy reports, but you can't directly do anything with that information. Google Analytics doesn't improve your PPC ROI or search engine rankings —it's just a dashboard. Typically people run an analytics report, paste the data into a spreadsheet, and then get to work interpreting, organizing and applying it. There are several program disconnects between initially gathering the information, manipulating it in Excel and publishing new ad groups or Web pages.

WordStream, on the other hand, has a workbench orientation, meaning you can actually "do stuff" with the data. If you find junk keywords that aren't performing, you can weed them out then and there. You can analyze keyword performance, organize keywords into relevant groups and publish ad groups and ads all in one application. We’re finding that integrating workbenches and dashboards provides a big boost to both productivity and relevancy!

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Question #8. Can you suggest some ways to learn more about WordStream?

Answer: Sure! You can...

• Sign up for a free trial
• Request a demonstration
  
• Read a white paper
• Watch a 4-minute video tutorial

Exclusive Interview with Bill Mungovan, Senior Director for Omniture SearchCenter

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive online interview with Bill Mungovan, Sr. Director for Omniture SearchCenter. This interview is brought to you in cooperation with the Search Engine Strategies' Pre-SES San Jose 2009 Blog & Q&A Coverage.

About Bill Mungovan:
As Sr. Director, SearchCenter, Bill Mungovan runs day to day operations across the SearchCenter business, including functions in Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Consulting and Client Services. Previously, he helped build the search engine marketing practice at Carat, working directly with major agency clients in exceeding their ROI and branding goals through search.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Question #1. With many software companies creating more and more applications to help automate and streamline the PPC Process, how has Omniture’s SearchCenter adjusted to all of this new competition?

Answer: Omniture has built optimization applications on top of an industry-leading analytics foundation, giving us a much broader view of the PPC world than any of our point-solution competitors. It is our belief that Search Engine Marketing is about both PPC and SEO, so our solution measures both. Within the PPC world, we believe any application focused solely on one type of automated bidding, or solely on streamlining the management process, or the reporting process, or landing page optimization, or any number of other smaller pieces of the PPC world is not seeing the whole picture.

Omniture is focused on the broader world of online business optimization through the Online Marketing Suite. Although we have best-in-class reporting (thanks to our online analytics foundation through Omniture SiteCatalyst), rules based bid automation and portfolio optimization, and exceptional management reporting capabilities, we have built SearchCenter with that broader picture in mind.

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Question #2. Speaking for the majority of us in the PPC Industry, Google’s Quality Score is the tactic of choice to keep the CPC’s down and ROI on the increase. How is Omniture dealing with this, especially when SearchCenter’s core applications are Bid Management and overall PPC Management? 

Answer: In a release earlier this year we began tracking Google Quality Score for our SearchCenter customers. Although Google will only tell you so much about what goes into the QS, as an industry we’re all aware of how to optimize it.

We have many features that help advertisers optimize their QS: to name just one example, we know splitting keywords into highly targeted ad groups helps optimize QS, but those ad groups may not be optimal for bid optimization. So SearchCenter allows you to create “Custom Groups” so you can automate bidding and reporting on your keywords regardless of how they’re grouped in Google.

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Question #3. Can you describe for our audience, what does SearchCenter offer its customers that is unique and more valuable than the rest of the competition?

Answer: There are three areas where we differentiate from our competitors. 

1) Omniture SearchCenter takes a holistic view of SEM, well beyond simply PPC bid management. That includes measuring and optimizing not only across both PPC and SEO, but across Display, Email, Affiliate and other advertising channels.

2) We have flexible service offerings giving us the ability to manage campaigns for customers, train them on our tools so they can take it in-house anytime, or manage them for any period of time and then turn it over to them. We are not an agency and don’t rely heavily on services to achieve results for our SEM customers. We have the ability to manage PPC or SEO campaigns for our customers to get them up and running, but we allow our customers to bring their SEM campaigns in-house whenever they want. Unlike our black box or start-up competitors, we are a large enough organization to be able to provide any level of SEM services our clients may need.

3) We have the ability to factor in offline data sources for true “profit optimization”. Thanks to Omniture’s 140+ accredited Genesis partners, we are able to optimize across offline data sources as well. As discussed in the cover story of SES Magazine, we call this “profit optimization.” For example, for Lead Gen clients, only Omniture SearchCenter can follow leads completed on a Web site through to the CRM system in which they are closed, and tie the closed leads back to the original keyword. For retail clients, we can tie in COGS (cost of goods sold) data back to the original keyword and optimize for their most profitable products.

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Question #4. For some SearchCenter users, there has been a “love vs. hate” relationship. On the one hand, it’s an amazing software application that makes it easier to manage PPC Accounts. However, I am also hearing concerns about the slow response to communicate problems and fixing issues before a client or agency has to alert them to a problem. What is Omniture actively doing to fix this? 

Answer: In the past year, we’ve made significant investments in our SearchCenter business. I was hired out of the agency world to help run the business; Matt Belkin was promoted from within Omniture to be our SVP, General Manager; Ron Belanger was also hired at the executive level from Yahoo! to run our agency strategy as Vice President of Agency Sales; and we’ve hired more than a dozen search experts in various SEM support and consulting roles.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve built out a new “Search Specialist” team, led by recently hired Nidhi Modi (previously a Director at both Carat and Staples.com) to focus on getting quick, complete answers to our SearchCenter customers. We acknowledge that a general customer service team isn’t optimal for answering PPC questions, so we built up an entire team of search experts from the search engine and agency sides of the SEM world to provide our SearchCenter customers with improved service. We’re already seeing huge gains in customer satisfaction since this team has been put in place.

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Question #5.  In this struggling economy, many advertisers are cutting back on their PPC Budgets. Can you tell us how Omniture SearchCenter has adapted to this shift in Ad dollars?

Answer: Overall, we’ve taken advantage of the recent economic downturn by helping our advertisers measure how the performance of their other advertising channels impact their PPC campaigns. Because Omniture is able to track performance across Display, Email and any other online or offline advertising channel, we have seen some advertisers cut back on PPC budgets but we’ve also seen plenty of advertisers increase them, particularly in the last quarter.

As an independent third party, we simply provide our customers with the data they need to run their entire online business optimization efforts and let them find gaps in the market to best spend their advertising dollars.

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Question #6. For existing SearchCenter customers as well as others who are interested in trying Searchcenter, are there any new and exciting enhancements in the pipeline that you would like to tell them about?

Answer: We will be demo-ing a new version of SearchCenter at SES this year that includes a full integration with our advanced MVT and A/B landing page testing technology, Test&Target. This functionality pushes SearchCenter into a much broader space and will force Search Marketers to actively test their landing pages to increase conversion rates. LPO has long been ignored because it is complex and, previously, involved coding. But with the new version of SearchCenter marketers will be able to automate landing page optimization and take the performance of their search campaigns to a new level.

Extended Bio of Bill Mungovan:
Bill brings a broad range of skills in search marketing including strategic paid search planning and execution, SEO, and account management to his role. He previously served as Director, Client Relations at LookSmart where he was overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Account Management and Customer Service teams.

Prior to joining LookSmart, Mungovan worked for Snap/NBCi in the Search and Directory space, and also worked at CNET in San Francisco.

Mungovan has shared his search expertise as an invited panelist at several industry events, including Search Engine Strategies, WebMaster World and OMMA West. He holds an MBA from the University of San Francisco and a B.A. from the University of New Hampshire.

Blog: http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bmungovan/

Twitter: @bmungovan

Exclusive Interview with Aaron Marks, President & Founder of Three Group, LLC

SemGeek is proud to present an exclusive interview with Aaron Marks, President and Founder of Three Group, LLC, an advanced new media and political technology firm with experience in all aspects of web development. Due to the heightened temperature of all of us in this political season, Aaron has been kind enough to share some information about his products/services as well as his experiences and motivations for starting his own company specifically targeted to "online" politics. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: SemGeek is not affiliated or endorsed by any political party. The only party he's affiliated with is the Search Marketing Industry (If he can get out of the house once in a while)

1. What made you decide to start this company?

Answer: After working as a new media staffer on Rick Santorum’s Senate campaign in 2006, I was deeply disappointed with technology available to the Right.  We were recycling technology that was outdated by years, and the customer service provided by these vendors was abhorrent at best.  I knew I could do better.  Three Group provides cutting-edge, affordable Web 2.0 solutions.  Our highest priority is our clients, and we pride ourselves in our unparalleled levels of customer service.

2. Tell us a little more about your website platform?

Answer: Our website platform is one piece of our Mission Control software solution.  Mission Control is the total Web 2.0 eCampaign solution for political organizations and campaigns.  Mission Control provides organizations with everything they need to successfully wage an effective online campaign.  By using Mission Control, our clients have increased their number of contacts by as much as 500%, doubled their donor base, and saved thousands of dollars.

3. Tell us a little more about your Email Blast

Answer: Mission Control has best-in-class e-mail technology that allows you to afford ably send professional e-mail campaigns to your list – whether it consists of 100, 100,000, or 1,000,000 contacts.  You can get all of the critical statistics with the click of a button – including open rates, bounce rates, and link clicks.

4. How is your website platform perform in SEO? Architecture, ability for landing pages, etc..

Answer: We design all of our websites to be as SEO-friendly as possible.  We support fully customized landing pages, which can be enabled or disabled by the user.

5. What do you think is the most interesting trend or trends you have seen over this past election year?

Answer: I think that more than anything, this election cycle has demonstrated how important the successful use of new media is to a campaign.  Quite frankly, Barack Obama won the Democratic primary in large part due to his successful use of the Internet and technology.  He has raised an unprecedented amount of money online, and he engages online volunteers in unprecedented ways.  I really believe that campaigns and organizations across the country will be forced to realize that traditional media is no longer enough, and that new media is the future of politics.

6. In your opinion, what does the future look like for Presidential and Non-presidential races in terms of website functionality (widgets, polls, issues, donations)?

Answer: I think the future of political technology lies in crowd-powered, social network-like functionality.  Obama’s website’s functionality is groundbreaking in that it isn’t just a place for you to get information and volunteer online.  Instead, it is an entire community of friends, family, neighbors, and people just like you – and the community works together to help elect their candidate.  It really drives home the campaign’s message that Obama is the “candidate of the people.”

7. Are there certain political parties who are more likely to spend more money on a  website with bells and whistles or other which focus heavily on fund raising?

Answer: I don’t think so, no.

Exclusive Interview with Google's Peter Greenberger, Team Manager of Elections and Issue Advocacy

Semgeek is proud to present an Exclusive Interview with Google's Top Political Online Marketing GoTo Guy, Peter D. Greenberger, who's been at the forefront of Google's Online Advertising for the 2008 Presidential and Congressional Races. 

Question:  How are candidates using Display Advertising?
Answer: The candidates' use of display advertising has evolved over the different phases of the campaign. During the primaries, political advertisers targeted display ads featuring information on voting locations and procedures to specific states. Now that we are in the general election, persuasion phase of the race, the candidates are more likely to use display for educating voters on certain issues or policy stances. By placing banner or video ads on a variety of non-political websites, the campaigns can get in front of those hard-to-reach voters who may not visit news and politics sites.

Question: What do you expect to see at the local level races?
Answer: We are already seeing a trickle down effect from the high profile use of Internet advertising by the presidential campaigns. For the first time, all of the major presidential candidates used Google search, and now we are seeing an increasing number of congressional, gubernatorial and even local races enter the platform. The ability to target specific areas and even legislative districts helps down-ballot candidates efficiently reach only their voters.

Local candidates are using Google search and display ads in the same way as the presidential campaigns: to sign up supporters, encourage contributions, define their campaigns (and those of their opponents), and to persuade voters to support their campaigns. As we near Election Day, the strategies will shift towards GOTV - driving voters not to a website but to the polls.

Question: What do you think is the most interesting trend or trends you have seen over this past election year?
Answer: Overall, the rise of the Internet as a persuasion medium is the most interesting trend in 2008. It is no secret that the Internet is a great way to raise money, but now campaigns are turning online to persuade voters. This is very similar to the larger shift occurring in corporate America - direct response dollars have already moved online and now branding budgets are beginning to shift, too. This cycle will be remembered as the year in which political ad dollars began to move, albeit slowly, online. The spectacular growth of YouTube and online videos in general have a lot to do with this phenomenon.

Question: In your opinion, what does the future look like for Presidential and Non-Presidential races?
Answer: To a great extent, we are seeing the future of presidential campaigns right now. Many of
the campaigns made their candidate announcements online, Internet donations have filled the coffers of leading candidates, and social networking sites and YouTube have played decisive roles this election cycle. As a result, the digital team is emerging from the bowels of the organization to take a leading role. Smart campaigns will soon not even have a strictly "digital team;" instead the entire campaign will be Internet-savvy and fully integrated online.

Question: Will the recent Google & Yahoo relationship play a role in Yahoo's emergence as the premier advertising network for Political Candidates?
Answer: Google and Yahoo will continue to be vigorous competitors, and that competition will help fuel innovation that is good for users, advertisers, and publishers. For additional information about this deal, please see our blog post entitled "Congressional hearings on online competition and our ad agreement with Yahoo".

Question: Are you seeing an increase in Rich Media Ads vs. Traditional Static Banners?
Answer: We're seeing an increase in video ads as well as flash, though static banners and text ads still dominate. As campaigns become more comfortable in the online space, I expect that we will see more experimentation with different ad formats.

Question: Are there certain political parties who are more likely to spend more on Display or Search?
Answer: There is less of a distinction between parties than between individual campaigns and candidates. Both sides of the aisle have adapted search and display advertising with Google, and there are many savvy players in each party.

Question: Are you seeing any trends within the different Google Networks (ie. Placement, Content, Search)
Answer: Campaign strategies online correspond to the different phases of the campaign. Search is primarily a direct response mechanism and is effective at capturing the support of active voters looking for information. It is a campaign truism that your first vote is the cheapest and your last vote is the most expensive. Search helps make that first vote very, very cheap - as the campaign goes on, however, your cost per acquisition may rise as you move beyond your base of voters. When it is time to persuade undecideds, display or video ads on the content network are a great way to reach specific pockets of voters where they "live" online. Campaigns will contextually place an ad about energy policy, for example, alongside an article on a website in the Google network about higher gasoline prices. This allows the campaign to make its case directly to interested readers. For the final GOTV phase, I expect you will see a deluge of both search and display - both contextually targeted by issue and placement on specific sites.

Question: Does Google have a plan about possibly implementing a filter to stop Negative Campaigning, similar to what Newspapers with Op-ed's are doing?
Answer: In general, we permit political advertisers to advocate in favor of or in opposition to candidates for office and key public policy issues. However, we prohibit the use of personal  attacks. You can find a more complete explanation of our political advertising policies on our Google public policy blog.

 

About Peter D. Greenberger
Team Manager, Elections & Issue Advocacy, Google, Inc. 

Peter joined Google in May 2007 to build and manage a new Elections & Issue Advocacy sales team dedicated to introducing Google solutions to political campaigns, committees, and issue advocacy groups.

Previously, Peter grew the public affairs division of New Media Strategies, a Web 2.0 marketing firm, working with clients such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Discovery Networks, Ford Motor Company, the Granholm for Governor campaign, Merck, Inc., Wachovia, the Washington Redskins, and XM Satellite Radio.

Prior to joining New Media Strategies, Peter spent ten years working on presidential, gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and Congressional campaigns. Most recently, he managed Congressman Brad Carson's 2004 United States Senate campaign in Oklahoma. 

During the Clinton Administration, Peter worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs as the Director of Congressional Correspondence.  In this role, he coordinated all written communications between the White House and the Congress.      

Peter graduated from Yale University and earned a master's degree with distinction in Comparative Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science.