Last week I attended my second Omniture Summit conference, and I have to say, if you are an analyst, marketer or developer that works with Omniture products and have the oppurtunity to attend, it’s a no brainer, GO. Not only is the summit a great time with good food, drinks, and entertainment, you get to network with some great peers, Omniture employees and even learn a few things. Some of the people I met included Ben Gaines, Rudi Shumpert and I also saw Adam Greco roaming the halls. Go follow them if you are an Omniture customer. Omniture knows how to put together a stellar event and is made up of good people.
The big themes this year were social and mobile, which are also themes at my day job. I personally attended sessions on landing page optimization, advanced sitecatalyst plugins, marketing attribution, offline data integration, sitecatalyst data insertion/APIs and thought I got value out of all of them. John Battelle, Seth Godin’s keynotes were enjoyable, as was Facebook’s presentation. The music act was also great this year, The Killers.
This is the first conference since Adobe’s acquisition and Adobe used the forum to try to sell the acquisition both to Omniture customers and (likely) the investment community at large. Overall I’m still not completely sold on the acquisition, but if Adobe uses their capital to invest MORE in the Omniture Business Unit than Omniture could previously afford by itself, and if Adobe doesn’t try to squeeze dollars, the acquisition might have long term potential.
Apple and Google are clearly the main threats to Adobe and Omniture now. I’m not much of an Apple fanboy and I laughed when the iPad was called the iPod Touch Gigantor. I am a bit of a Google fanboy though, so I hope Omniture realizes they need to compete with SiteCatalyst instead of pitching Discover or Insight for some of the features that Google Analytics provides for free. Maybe I’m just upset because I’m not a Discover customer at my day job. I do think SiteCatalyst is the most advanced tool for capturing data and hopefully their new idea exchange will further motivate them to add features like advanced segmentation. Whoever convinced them to create the idea exchange should get a raise.
by tom on February 2, 2010
In Rand’s recent post about SEOmoz turning into a software as a service company, he shared the following graph to illustrate why SEO is a missed opportunity in the competitive landscape.
While I do think investment in SEO often has the highest ROI of any online marketing spend and many businesses of all sizes underspend and under-utilize search optimization, the graphs used in Rand’s post (and shown below) don’t tell the whole story.
Someone once told me to always beware of pie-charts, and I have to agree. First off, lets call the search channels what they actually are natural or paid search. Not every click on an unpaid listing in a SERP is a result of SEO efforts. (Also not every paid search click is necessarily pay-per-click. CPA is now making its way making its way into paid search results.)
A study in 2008 implied that around 10% of searches are navigational, 80% are informational and another 10% are transactional. You can find definitions of these keyword types from the leaked Google Quality Rater guidelines [PDF]. Lets look at these ‘keyword spaces’ across both the paid and natural search channels.
Navigational – 10% of search clicks
If a brand isn’t ranking for its own navigational searches, they are already beyond help. The vast majority of navigational searches for a brand/website will result to that brand/website without any optimizations. Navigational SEO will likely have low incremental yields unless the website is already royally screwed up to begin with. Brands should probably run paid search ads for these terms, but only because they are cheap clicks and basically forced to defensively buy these ads by the search engines. Optimization around these paid search ads will also not create success and mostly just cannibalize natural search.
Informational – 80% of search clicks
SEO is great for information searches. It’s really fucking great. Look at About.com, Mahalo.com, Demand Media and plenty of other content portals that have a business model driven solely from aggressive SEO on informational queries. Of course, Wikipedia is the dominant player, likely getting around 2% of ALL Google downstream traffic (2007 data). Informational searches are less competitive and have more words per search which create more variation in word use and order. There are a ton of these searches! There’s still plenty of space to play in informational search.
So what’s the problem with informational search? It’s great and easy to measure if you’re selling ad space, but if you are all about customer transactions, it’s more difficult to measure success. The problem with gauging the success is not in the search tools but with the internal client analytics and CRM. Can you attribute customer acquisition and lifetime value to a informational search that occurred days, weeks or months ago? Can informational searches claim they retained a customer that would have otherwise gone inactive?
Transactional – 10% of search clicks
The search engines themselves have provided simple and effective tools to judge success of transactional searches with paid search tracking pixels and Google Analytics. Because judging success is more straightforward with these keywords, paid search spend skyrockets to the limits of what is deemed effective ROI, and the majority of paid search spend is placed on these keywords. In less competitive areas, this is where SEO is a huge win. In competitve areas, this is the space where SEO is hard and brand strength(domain authority, ‘trustrank’) matters more than your clever linkbuilding campaign and perfect on-page optimizations.
Is SEO a missed opportunity? Yes, but so is all of the informational search space. Will this change? Honestly, I’m not too optimistic, but I don’t think it’s SEO tools, training or awareness that is missing. The fundamentals of SEO are increasingly just proper website usability/architecture, viral marketing, brand building and marketing analytics- not some secret skillset that only SEO experts have.
What is needed is stronger client analytics with a more rigorous definition of success beyond the immediate event or purchase. This will help justify any ‘informational search’ spend and also the trendy social media budget.
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