January 15, 2008
As more and more marketing dollars shift online, search is commanding ever closer scrutiny, and required to deliver ever stronger ROI. Simon van Wyk talks to Gour Lentell, SVP Global Strategic Alliances for 24/7 Real Media on the evolution of search as a critical component in any marketing campaign.
Download the search marketing podcast.
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Technorati Tags: search+marketing | podcast |
January 15, 2008
Simon van Wyk takes a look at the emerging opportunities in local search
Research from Nielsen//NetRatings and WebVisible that came out over a year ago called "I Clicked, I Contacted, I Transacted" showed that 70 percent of U.S. internet users have used a search engine to find a local service vendor.
Up until recently, helping to find local businesses was of course the tightly held territory of the Yellow Pages. Increasingly however, people intuitively use search instead of either the print or online version of Yellow Pages.
Indeed last year, TMP Directional Marketing commissioned a study with comScore Inc. to understand consumers' attitudes and behaviour toward offline and online local media sources when looking to make an upcoming purchasing decision.
According to the study, on results of 3,000 survey respondents, one out of three consumers still regarded the printed yellow pages as their preferred source for local information, but the internet in general was cited as the most prominent source referenced by over 60% of participants.
Interestingly eMarketer estimates that by 2011, 51.3 percent of U.S. local online spending will go to paid search, compared with 43.1 percent today.
Read the full article on local search
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Technorati Tags: Local+Search |
December 12, 2007
HotHouse has recently helped Salmat, Australasia's leading direct customer communications company, develop and launch an exciting new way to shop.
Tapping into the trend that Australians are increasingly turning to price comparison sites before purchasing offline, Lasoo, an innovative pre-shop search engine has been launched just ahead of the frantic Christmas shopping period.
Lasoo scans through a stack of catalogues and direct mail flyers to find all the best bargains, displaying all the current specials from participating catalogues around Australia.
The site features comparisons of automotive accessories, homeware and furniture, beauty products, electronic goods, appliances and toys and games. Items can be searched also by shopping centre or post code to find the cheapest deal near the user's home.
With six or seven thousand offers on the site at any given time, within a matter of seconds consumers can find the best deals without having to spend time on and off line hunting around for them.
Lasoo CEO Paul Marshall said that for consumers, Lasoo offers the ultimate in convenience shopping.
The site has been built using J2EE technologies from Endeca and FatWire in a load balanced web farm in a managed hosting environment. The platform scales horizontally at each tier across redundant infrastructure, and these services can be extended independently as the product is further developed.
Lasoo's platform also supports 'white box' editions of the core catalogue and guided search facilities which are hosted in the shared infrastructure. These 'editions' can be readily skinned with CSS transforms without the need for bespoke development.
The site features Endeca guided search technology providing pre-categorised search results, allowing consumers to prioritise their choices in their own personalised way, helping consumers to ask smarter questions by exposing all the choices available to them.
As of early December, two weeks after its launch, the site had recorded over 2.5 million page views and over 1 million searches had been conducted.
Check out the Lasoo site.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 12:18 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: search |
June 21, 2007
Complementing our recent story on Search, Simon chatted with search engine marketing specialist, Nic Halley, who's been in the online industry since 1995 and was one of the originators of Search Engine Marketing in Australia. He currently manages Toyota's SEM activity.
Download the Search podcast here
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 12:25 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: Search | podcast |
June 21, 2007
The art and science of search engine marketing is developing at a rapid pace. More and more customers are using the Internet as their first port of call in making a purchase decision and as a result, more and more companies are using paid and organic search to direct customers to their business.
As search engines like Google change their search algorithms daily to stop unfair manipulation of search terms, there is a growing and bewildering array of techniques that need to be mastered in order to stay ahead of competitors in the fight for relevant traffic.
Meta tags, keywords, image tags, niche directories, link building, pay-per-click, AdWords - those are just some of the simpler terms that are taking up more space in a marketer's brain.
And the amount of brain space required for search-related thinking grows every year. Search expert Greg Jarboe, one of the speakers at this year's Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York, pointed out in his column in ClickZ that this year's conference included 33% more sessions than at the 2004 SES conference. Meanwhile, only about 10 sessions had the same title as sessions in 2004.
Jarboe writes, "This means that more than 80% of what we learned in 2004 (about search engine marketing) is no longer being taught in 2007. Or, to put it another way, less than 20% of what you need to know today is something that you could have learned three years ago."
Read the full article
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 12:18 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: Search |
June 6, 2007
At last something different is happening in the world of search interfaces.
Ask.com has released a new look interface which radically changes the presentation of answers by a major search engine.
The search query answers are displayed in a three-panel screen that includes standard links to search results, lists of related searches and results from blogs, as well as video, photo, news and shopping sites.
Ask's new interface is unlikely to have a significant impact on the world of search, but kudos to them for introducing something new.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 10:57 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
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