• by Aaron Goldman , Op-Ed Contributor, December 6, 2008

Here's the scoop from Richard Zwicky of Enquisite:

Issues raised by the attendees

- How to measure results when dealing with lots of small customers

- Cross channel attribution

- The constant evolution of search and how it doesn't mean the same thing today as it did a year or 5 years ago: text, images, video, social, etc..... and this continues to evolve and grow into more areas of everyday life.

- The inefficiency of passing data between channels

- Not enough inventory in many verticals for relevant terms: + how to create inventory + discussion of the value of business.com, content network to broaden reach, exposure of related terms. + the challenges of marketing a category search where multiple, sometimes irrelevant, categories overlap a single key term. - Gord also raised the real world issue of the "lubricants" campaign, where the B2B market is very defined, and broadening the reach can have unwanted consequences of highly irrelevant traffic. There was a short discussion on Keyword / phrase potential. I provided, and promised to share, the following formula as a means to analyze potential traffic for terms:

Keyword Potential* = (1-Keyword Volume/Search Engine Referrals)(PV)(Time)(1-Bounce Rate)

Definitions:

* Keyword Volume = total # of referring words in the keyword group * Search Engine Referrals = total # of referrals from search for the keyword group * PV = Page Views/visit for the keyword group * Time = Time/visit for the keyword group (excel turns x:xx into a numeric value) * Bounce Rate = I’ll let you guess this one * If your site has the idea of a conversion, you would also multiply the formula by conversion rate. You might even delete Time and PV as ultimately all you care about is conversion.

This formula is care of Andrew Shotland, founder of InsiderPages.com - http://www.localseoguide.com/keyword-potential-pull-keyword-needles-out-of-analytics-haystacks/

Summary: Search is anything, it changes constantly, as do the channels.