With a lively turnout of more than 5,000 attendees and 130 exhibitors, Ad:Tech New York was officially, in the words of conference chair Susan Bratton, “the most exciting Ad:Tech show in three years,” affirming its reputation as the go-to trade show for Internet marketing. As for the vibe on the floor, the 40 panels and keynotes at the Hilton New York early last month ran the gamut, with most folks looking to improve their e-mail campaigns as customer-retention devices, optimize search engine results, and expand affiliate marketing (more on that below). In one highly touted moment, Patrick Keane, Google’s head of sales strategy, introduced the not-so-new concept of a “self-funded search campaign,” which demonstrated that for most search campaigns the immediate sales results far outstrip the costs, making them “self-funded,” or what is usually called “profitable” without even requiring metrics like lifetime value. Sadly, the much-anticipated “Blogging for Business” panel ended as the show’s nadir. What an intriguing idea — weblogs aiding marketing, community development, and “thought leadership,” and perhaps even making money — but the session was crimped by technical snafus and personal site promotion.
Spam was, of course, everywhere — but as the battlefield web marketers have to fight through to get results. Probably the most radical experiment in that department came from veteran web guru Jim Sterne, on hand to flog his new book, Advanced E-mail Marketing. Tackling reader inertia head-on, Sterne recently dumped all 5,000 recipients of his free e-mail newsletter and asked them to resubscribe to continue receiving it. Only 2% did. “What you have to realize,” as David Lewis of Digital Impact pointed out, “is that permission is not persistent. You must get ‘memorable permission.’” By this he meant an ongoing relationship with a consumer. But that’s getting trickier, as many Internet service providers now make no distinction between unsolicited marketing messages and legitimate mail that has actually been requested. If a marketing message from a company gets branded as spam, e-mails paid for by subscription from the same company won’t get through the blockade. (Some web publishers now send from two IP addresses: one for premium service and one for promotions.) The ultimate challenge to marketers is to get into the recipient’s e-mail contact list, outsmarting the likes of AOL, which now disables images and links of any e-mail from a sender not snugly in the recipient’s address book. Brush up on e-mail marketing strategies, plus get a free 11-page white paper, at www.gaspedal.net.
Other sessions revealed the booming business of affiliate marketing, which can rack up 30% of sales, according to James Crouthamel, CEO of Performics, one of the few affiliate marketing specialists. Affiliate sites typically win a bounty for delivering traffic to a marketer’s site. The burden of cutting small checks and 1099 forms to these companies, however, leads many web publishers to hire third parties to manage their affiliate programs. Check out www.affiliatemanager.net for up-to-date info on affiliate marketing tactics by an active affiliate marketer.
And for real nuts-and-bolts material, several panels discussed “natural search engine marketing,” which boils down to optimizing your web site for two critical audiences: first, the automated search engine spiders threading back keyword data that delivers your traffic when someone queries “chick lit” on Google, and second, the human eyeballs that should ideally follow. Ed Shull, CEO of Clicksquad, offered numerous tips: “Optimize your site for Google,” he said, “and it will work for the other search engines.” Shull also noted that Google can’t read Javascript, Flash, or images, so make sure your keywords are embedded elsewhere (like in the image “alt tags”). In looking at online traffic metrics, Jim Sterne reminded everyone that those search-engine spiders are doing some damage of their own: you’ve got to remove traffic generated by spiders before analyzing your site usage data. As one media company participant confirmed, his staff found that 60% of their pageview traffic was being served to robots. For more information on search engine strategies, click on www.did-it.com/news.php#articles for pithy articles on the topic by Kevin Lee, CEO of Didit.com.
We thank business writer Rich Kelley (richkelley@nyc.rr.com) for contributing this report.
