• by Aaron Goldman , Op-Ed Contributor, December 4, 2008

Participants Olivier Lemaignen â€" Intuit (Table Leader) Micah Nyatsamboâ€" Media Contact (Notetaker) Heidi Jackman - Intuit Chris Wine - Marin Janel Landis - Sendtec Heather Newman -Jewelry Television Erica Forrete - Pac Sun Mark Mahaney - Citi Ashley Bingham - Overstock.com John Elsholz - Omnivore Dan Ballagher -The Booyah Agency

PPC Integration Are practitioners intergrading creative across ppc, display etc. How many marketers are optimizing across display, paid search & email? Some marketers are enjoying success with this strategy and others are only testing PPC and SEO. Cost and technology where noted as issues.

Is anyone optimizing ad copy? Testing is key however cross copy integration can fail. Reasons for this are that messaging sometimes does not speak to all searchers equally. Consideration cycle can be part of the reason for copy creative working across the board

Testing question How do marketers test ads? Some marketers use ad rotation for testing. Conversion is used rather than click throughs. Some ads are tested also for consideration as part of the upper funnel and not by strict conversions. Do marketers rely on Google’s automation or vender bid tools? Some marketers were concerned about relying on Google’s bid tools.

Best practices for creative and products Sku terms for some marketers within ad copy has been influential for product campaigns. Add Price points in the ads which can improve PPC campaigns Price points can be difficult to manage if competitors are mimicking or baiting and switching

Contextual: Best practices Not for everyone, different form and channel. Contextual provides additional venues for increasing search reach.

Landing page best practicesDo you use Multivariate testing? Some users do not have the capability and are using custom pages Some users pick product level pages to offer multiple options Some users are using the homepage or category level pages due to margins. Better to use the homepage which allows for larger purchases Oriental Trading Company: Has lots of products that are inexpensive and used custom packages in order to better their conversion rates and increase sales. Sending users to search pages with lots of inexpensive products was not effective. Use custom landing pages to narrow down choices and guide users to specific actions. Intent is key to this system. Specific pages should be used to direct users right to the product.

Metrics for landing page testing & relevancy Bounce rate: Reduce bounce rate by improving relevancy Tested product pages and category pages yielded better results when brands where displayed in search results pages. Example: Billabong search results page with the logo and associated products Landing page resulted in top products that were very expensive. By optimizing the sort order on that page improved results showing the variety of products and costs on the page

Content campaign ads Domain parking for misspellings seemed to work even though the issue is either a misspelled domain or brand. Client that did not use them was losing out to other competitors bidding on brand terms Yellow pages: Locking out categories to improve the results for advertises. Instead of run of site, brand recognition was much better KPI: conversions

Quality Scores for ad groups: If your goals are being met are turning on bidding rules a good plan? Ad groups: take low performing keywords out of the adgroups. That helps the adgroup score improve which migrates upwards. Improve landing pages as well to improve ad groups

Next Steps Improved tools for cross media attribution Google: Make it simple to audit quality score Dynamic price insertion as a capability for ad copy