SES Chicago Day 3 Recap: Lets get Political, Lets get Granular
Published December 10, 2009 by Garry Przyklenk Acquisio, Affiliate Marketing, Google Analytics, SES Tour, Social Affiliate Marketing, Social Media
After two days of intense information uptake via osmosis, I had already typed my fingers to bony stumps hacking out what seemed like an endless stream of status updates on Twitter @gprzyklenk and @marketwire and recaps of each day on this blog. Finally, day three of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009, and what would be my last day at the show. Lucky for me, I got out of Chicago on a delayed flight, several others couldn’t say the same due to a massive blizzard that struck the entire Midwest and Eastern seaboard. I’m thankful I stayed for day 3, because unlike other shows, the information didn’t stop as crowds thinned out.
Keynote by Dan Siroker, former New Media Director of the Obama Presidential Transition
Dan Siroker is an interesting character because despite a lofty position at Google, he pursued a cause in the Obama campaign. He reported that this monumental and potentially risky career change was a result of being inspired by a meet and greet Obama arranged at Google headquarters in front of a coliseum of employees. This inspiration came from Obama’s pledge to base decisions on fact and reason, something the (then) current administration had failed to do.
As an avid proponent of web analytics, he accepted a position as Director of Analytics for the Obama campaign and started putting data to work as actionable insight. According to Dan, the majority of Obama’s fund raising success came from social media initiatives derived from data-driven decisions, testing, and conversion optimization. Leading up to the election, Barack Obama had four times the Facebook Friends, video views and unique visitors compared to McCain (thanks Alex).
Gaining followers, friends and pumping the metrics weren’t the focus of the digital campaign set to put Obama in office, fund raising and votes were what won the election. Two clear goals to build a strategy. According to Siroker, Obama raised more than $500M online versus only $156M offline, more than double!
So how did they get to this level of success and eventually put a man in the White House? Testing, measuring and taking action in a virtuous cycle. They tested email newsletter tactics, landing pages, video creative, messaging, and evaluated success based on registrations, donations, repeat donations and inevitably votes. Out of the participants in the audience that voted on variables in Dan’s example, the vast majority were wrong in their assumption. Even the brightest in the industry can be wrong, it just shows how important it is to perform routine testing.
Siroker went on to note that circumstance also had a lot to do with some of their success on the campaign trail. He explained that the election committee leveraged a political attack by McCain and Palin and turned Obama supporters into evangelists – giving people a reason to love their cause (thanks Julia).
By keeping their focus on stories of change and the people that would benefit the most, they were able to raise $10M in 24 hours. By communicating their message through various channels offline and employing highly social platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, the Obama campaign was able to distribute the message rapidly and virally.
As if this wasn’t enough, Dan also introduced the highly captivated audience at SES Chicago to what he dubbed social affiliate marketing. By definition, social affiliate marketing is the practice of turning customers into evangelists. A good example of this concept is his new venture Spreadly.
A little Holiday Surprise from Search Engine Strategies
What followed the keynote address can only be described as a magic moment for an SES show. Greg Jarboe and the people at SEO-PR put together a little holiday treat featuring the best and brightest in online marketing, web analytics, social media, and PR for a little video montage dubbed “Searching for Santa at SES Chicago”. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s quite funny, especially the clips featuring Jim Sterne.
Enough silliness, let’s get back to business.
Advanced Paid Search Candy “You’re over-thinking it, Dude”
Andrew Goodman changed up the title of his solo presentation about paid search techniques at the last minute, but thankfully still shared a lot of great, detailed content. With a simple pop quiz, Andrew blew our minds and reminded us that our brains tell us to rely mostly on instinct, sometimes we need to over think problems to get outcomes. “We try to be stupid if we can get away with it,” Goodman said. Although looking back, it might not have been a fair test, this is the morning of day 3; the morning after some decent drinking the night before. (Wait, what? Marc Poirier of Acquisio said I couldn’t say that…)
The point? Rationality is bigger than us and crowd knowledge is often more accurate. Instead of focusing on the standard reporting metrics and overall snapshots, we need to focus on “what’s changed reports” which just happens to be even more convenient by using the new Google Intelligence report within Google Analytics. He goes on to state that the tools available to us today are far more sophisticated, and make the job way more easier if we stop over-thinking the problem.
Newcomers to pay per click marketing may get to skip a generation by using all the newest tools available in the new Adwords interface including CPA bidding, routine task management, and better analytics integration. Although the job of analytics isn’t as easy as Avinash might claim in his book “An hour a day,” it’s getting easier. However, a good understanding of the fundamentals goes a long way.
Andrew goes on to say that some tools, such as Google Conversion Optimizer can be too conservative at times. I’d would wholeheartedly agree and wouldn’t stop there, I would also include Google Website Optimizer for multivariate tests to be somewhat too conservative sometimes. Goodman suggests the use of third party tools to automate keyword bidding rules and conversion testing, such as Acquisio. (Shameless plug. Hey, us Canadians have to stick together, eh?)
The content network is a different matter entirely. On one hand, Goodman argues we shouldn’t let Google place our ads, opting to manually set placements we think will work and testing. On the other hand, he also thinks there is a serious trade-off using manual placements in both opportunity and cost. Google can find pretty decent placements, but also pretty terrible ones. The key is not to punish randomly bad behavior on ads or campaigns. You can have a terrible few weeks but land a huge conversion in a single day that makes up for it in spades.
The discussion then turned to ROI. Google has this weird thing called “Quality Score” which is uses to determine keyword or placement cost depending on (primarily) click through rate. As is often the problem, high click through can do dangerous things to ROI. As effective marketers, we have to find the double winner, the rare ad that pulls higher CTR without hurting ROI.
A great session with plenty of informative insight and advice from a leader in the industry.
An admission of guilt
Unfortunately, I have to cut my coverage a tad short this time. Due to the weather conditions plaguing Chicago, I hot-tailed it to the airport as soon as I possibly could to try to get on an earlier flight back to Toronto. I’m glad I did, because although I couldn’t catch an early departure because it was canceled (drat!), I also didn’t have to contend with the copious amounts of snow that started clogging the highways and byways of the windy city. Thankfully, the show organizers moved the “freeze your ass off” conference from December to October next year, which should make the show much more accessible to everyone in the midwest (and even Canada!).
Tags: Andrew Goodman, Barack Obama, Dan Siroker, John McCain, Sarah Palin, SES Chicago 2009, Social Affiliate Marketing, Social Media, Spreadly
